It is the fifteenth of July, the day after Bestile Day, one hundred and twelve days to go until the election, thirty five until the Democratic National Convention. The Republican National Convention is convening today in Milwaukee, the weekend after the assassination attempt on former President Trump. This is the warning. President Biden has called for a lowering of the temperature, a cooling of the rhetoric, and Donald Trump has called for unity. President Biden said, violence has no place in
American politics. Let's stop there, and let's stay there for a minute. Certainly, that is the world that we should live in, but that is never the country that we have lived in. Violence has always been a part of America's life. Violence has stained, as my friend David from said, every page of American history with blood. Violence is something to be overcome, and there is something that is essential to understand. Violence begets violence, begets more violence, begets more violence.
There is one thing that I have said over and over and over again for two years at the warning, and it's this. The path to defeating Donald Trump is deeply connected to being able to articulate and offer something that is better evil against violence is never better. Violence that begets more violence. Insanity that begets more insanity must be condemned. But this is an age of incitement, and the inciter in chief is the man who was shot. Donald Trump is a man of violence and menace and cruelty.
He has incited violence over and over again. When he called on his crowds to punch protesters in the face. When he told the Proud Boys to stand back and be ready, the Proud Boys, by that time had already marauded through America's streets, beating people. Donald Trump laughed and joked about Paul Pelosi, an eighty year old man beaten in his home, the husband of the Speaker of the House. Over and over again, the Maga fascist cause has incited violence.
Donald Trump, in the immediate aftermath of surviving an assassin's bullet by an inch, rose to his feet, not reborn, not chastened, not ready to preach a message of love and reconciliation, but rather, with a clinched fist, he said, fight, Fight, Fight. It is an iconic moment, perhaps among the most in the nation's history. But who is it that this man calling for unity is exhorting to fight. Who is supposed to fight whom? And how do we know when the fight is over? How do we know when the fight
is started? Why do we want to fight each other? We must not. Shortly before the United States was to suffer an apocalypse of death six to eight hundred thousand killed in a nation of thirty four million in Civil War. Shortly before it began, Abraham Lincoln said to the country, we must be friends, and we must What happened in Pennsylvania was an unconscionable criminal act, and heads must roll
at the Secret Service. This is one of the greatest security failings in American history by a federal law enforcement agency. How did a twenty year old gunman wind up with a rifle pointed at the head of the Republican nominee and a former president of the United States from a
rooftop one hundred and fifty yards away. And let's be clear, people died a fire chief an American citizen, I don't know why so many of my fellow Americans are enamored by a despotic bully with authoritarian tendencies like Donald Trump, who long ago crossed the line into fascism. I don't know. As somebody who grew up in New Jersey. How they couldn conceivably be hoodwinked by this con man. But many are.
The American people alone have the right to decide who leads this nation, and it must never be cheated or taken from them, not by a bullet, not by a foreign power, not by anybody, because to be an American is to be part of something. We are citizens of the greatest republic in all of world history. I'm going to leave this message with a final warning. It's the true face of MAGA. It's the words of JD. Vance.
Read them, appreciate them. The retribution that Donald Trump is talking about that he is promised he will now feel justified in delivering unless he is ready and prepared to repent openly and publicly of all of his malice and all of his intimations of violence. But he won't. There
is something, though, that deserves serious consideration. If Donald Trump were the president and this happened, If Donald Trump had a Republican Congress and this happened, what would have happened in the country, Judging by the rhetoric of a Marjorie Taylor Green, would there have been mass arrests, retaliatory violence? The military deployed to the streets. Donald Trump's given us
a lot of clues. None of this is speculation. These are dramatic moments and events, but it plays out on a stage that we have watched unchanged for nine years. And now the bill is coming due, and now we must make a choice. The crisis in the Biden campaign is fundamentally because President Biden can't speak and articulate a vision that is better. And now the politics of the race have cemented even harder. Donald Trump's candidacy has been built upon two rocks. The first is that he's a victim.
His persecution complex is unreal, but he has made grievance and victimization or virtue. And now he's been bloodied in a sense, almost martyred, but having survived, he will claim as he has, like Marco Rubio, has God's protection and dominion. And the second thing that Trump talks about, his second
rock a foundation, is strength, strong leader. And he's run relentlessly against Joe Biden as a feeble old man, a caricature of a declining elderly man, a man who can't walk up the steps on Air Force one all the way, so he has to use the short ladder. But Donald Trump, when he shot within seconds, rises to his feet, pumps his fists in the air and says fight, fight, fight, And there you have it. That contrast is not politically survivable for Joe Biden and for the Democratic Party with
much at stake. Jd Vance said that Joe Biden was at fault for the assassin's bullet because he has said that this election is existential. It is existential. Jd Vance said that Joe Biden was to blame because he has said that Donald Trump is a fascist. The president called him a fascist because Donald Trump is a fascist. Jd Vance said this happened because democracy is on the line. But jd Vance has said democracy is something that it's
time to move past. Jd Vance like, Donald Trump is a fascist and now this attack will be used as a smoke screen in the name of unity to further quash dissent, and that scam never be bought into by any good American because the stakes of this election have not changed an iota. What has changed is the leading purveyor of division and violence was attacked by violence. And that reality one hundred and twelve days from the election
is very volatile and let's be clear. The Republican Convention is not a gathering of good hearted Americans yearning for reconciliation. It is a convocation of fascists yearning for political power, that want to strip rights away from Black Americans, gay Americans, female Americans. And we must say no. And nobody should be lectured that this moment demands submission in the face of the worst cause since Jim Crow in the Confederacy.
What this moment requires is defiance against Hape, defiance against trump Ism. And it's time to start talking about this country aspirationally again, to start looking to the future boldly, because that is where we move beyond this wretched, rancid, vile time. This is the warning. I'm Steve Schmidt. This is the warning, and I invite you to join. Subscribe on our substack, on our YouTube channel, follow us. Welcome to the community.