Ex-Insider Reveals All on the Secrets of MAGA Men, Trump Panicking as He Loses All Control

0:00All right, welcome to I've Had It Weekend. You are in for a treat. I have Steve Schmidt. He is the co-founder of the Save America Movement, which totally seems appropriate at this point in history. And he joins me. Steve, how are you today? I'm good, Jennifer. How are you? As Larry David goes, kind of like that. Let's review the pathological lying president. Play the clip. The time in Ohio, the country's doing well. The stock market's fantastic record. We have 79 records so far in a short period of time. More people are working right now in the United States than ever before. And prices are dropping fast.

0:41Iran is going fine. Going just absolutely fine. We totally control the Strait of Hormuz. We have control over it. Nobody else. Only us. Our Navy is unbelievable. And things are going great for our country. Steve. Well, I mean, so how do you look at it? I mean, at some level, there's no surprises from him, the delusion, the psychotic lying. But the constancy of it after 12 years, the press just accepting it all without challenge. fresh off their dinner with him at the White House Correspondents Association. It's how it lands for us when we receive it, however we do on our phone, on our screen, wherever we may be, versus how we perceive it lands for other Americans.

1:43But it's all insanity. I will say this about his lost war. Let me correct myself. America's lost war. John McCain understood this. talked about it. Political parties don't lose wars. Presidents don't lose wars. Nations lose wars. And this imbecile has caused the loss of a war to Iran by the United States. It's a naval war. And across 500 years of naval history, he has achieved something extraordinary. We have lost a naval war to a power whom our Navy sank their Navy, and yet they have defeated the American Navy. There is a global institution in the world that exists preeminently to guarantee the freedom of navigation in the world's seas.

2:43And that's the United States Navy. The Strait of Hormaz was an international waterway that's now an Iranian tollway. And that will have cataclysmic consequences for the economic power of the United States, for global trade. And it lays the foundation for a bigger war that will be fought later on. This is a man who was smuggled out of Turkey in a catering truck in an unequaled act of cowardice across 250 years of history. It's astounding. Not one reaction, obviously, when they said we have a security threat. OK, what's the plan? Nobody stopped and said the president of the United States of America will not be offloaded onto a Turkish catering truck and secreted across the runway.

3:56It's despicable. And Trump did that. And in the moment that he did it, he became irredeemably the greatest coward to ever grace that office, bar none. Don't you think it's wild, Steve, that he put American lives in danger? And if the roles were reversed and Obama slunk out in a catering cart and he used American citizens, AKA his fucking cabinet. Little Marco. He's a page fish. Little Marco. Stephen Miller. And I said this on a podcast earlier. I don't think he cares. I think somebody around him made the calculus. Well, if they shoot it down, we'll use it to bring up our poll numbers. That's how transactional I think he is about these things.

4:50That's how void of empathy I think he is. And I also want to talk about the Republican propaganda that they support the troops so much. I see them as supporting the military industrial complex and exploiting the troops and using the patriotism that people in flyover states really hold dear. And then they never really fund the soldier. And here is some news that is coming out that's just really devastating. Pop this up, Kylie. six soldiers on the USS Abraham Lincoln have tried to jump off the ship due to horrific conditions during the ship's extended deployment in the Middle East the crew is enduring severe supply shortages lack of basic hygiene products and poor quality rations while Trump is in his Marie Antoinette era, just$900 million he's going to be spending on his interior design obsession.

5:50These are the most powerful warships on the high seas, nuclear powered aircraft carrier. And when you read that, what that shows is a collapse of morale, a devastating loss of the integrity of the command of an American vessel at war. And it is a deterioration that we're seeing across the government. One of the things that is very, very alarming and historically antithetical was that this new chief of naval operations got caught with his hand in the cookie jar lobbying for the job. And when you look at the military tradition, most famously, George Marshall wanted to command the D-Day invasion, and he appreciated that whomever did would become a world historical figure, but he refused to lobby for it.

6:52And Roosevelt would ask him, do you want it? It's yours, and always his position was what was right for the country. And he was truly more than any person who has ever served in uniform, the indispensable man of the moment, and he could not leave Washington. And so that command fell to Eisenhower. And there's this moment where FDR Laura tells Eisenhower he's going to command the D-Day invasion, and they're on a plane flying back from Tehran over North Africa into Malta that has a famously short runway. Polish president gets killed on it at the beginning of the war, and the hydraulics on the plane are out.

7:42And it looks like the plane may crash. and you have FDR, you have Eisenhower, you have the combined chiefs all sitting on the airplane. And what does FDR do? He lights a cigarette, throws his head back, he laughs and he slaps Eisenhower on the knee and he says, I guess we're going to get to see how good these Army Air Corps pilots are, Ike. And you think about Trump slinking off in the Turkish catering truck. You think about the food and the incompetence and the carelessness, the fuck you-ism of having a Pete Hegseth as the Secretary of Defense who calls himself a Secretary of War, the mismanagement of the munitions supply.

8:38Pete Hegseth has handled this country's arsenal like he handled his Jack Daniels bottle after a Friday night out with the Fox News crew after he jumped up on the table shouting, kill all the Muslims. And so whether it is his debasement of U.S. sacrifices at military cemeteries in Europe, at Arlington National Cemetery, whether it is his incompetence in his appointments over and over and over again, he has risked the lives of America's soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines for nothing. where they have been killed. He has dismissed it. He has insulted their families. He has disrespected their service.

9:27He has disrespected their death. And over and over and over again, this country as a whole, or at least in some measure with the support that he has down to about 30 % has abided it. And as we head into an election in 83 days, we're not going to abide it anymore. And he's going to be crushed in a result that the corrupt corporate media doesn't see coming. And even if they did, they wouldn't report it to people straight. But a tsunami Arrive soon. I hope so. So now they are all MAGA has or scare tactics. And it turns out that the majority of Americans when they see immigrants separated from their kids and detained, or people they love get deported and sent to concentration camps, it turns out that Stephen Miller's policy of recreational cruelty isn't popular.

10:30So now they're returning to a failed scare tactic from the McCarthy era, the communists and the socialists. And here is a Wall Street executive on Fox News of all places, dismantling these attacks on the Democratic Party. Play the clip. Just a little. If Mayim Mandani did the following, if he put price controls on product like pharmaceuticals, if he bailed out farms, if he took private stakes in public companies, if he said to energy companies, you're making too much money, if he proposed credit card caps, You would all go apoplectic, as would your viewers. That's what President Trump's doing.

11:08You could argue he is the most powerful socialist in the country today. Steve. No question about that. I am a believer in the American free enterprise system. And the American free enterprise system has created more prosperity in this country than any other place on Earth. and has also, as it has been modeled by other countries around the earth, has lifted up every society on earth. And there's no question about that. But we don't have an American free enterprise system under Donald Trump. We have gangster capitalism. We have a twisted version of MAGA socialism, where the government is investing stakes in companies like Intel routinely, 30, 40, 50 different companies the government now controls.

12:11No small C conservative, no believer in the free enterprise system is for any of this stuff. And by the way, Mayor Mondami's not trying to take over private enterprise in New York City, as Trump is from his federal perch. So whatever you call this, this idea that Donald Trump Jr. is going to become a billionaire as a drone contractor selling to Pete Hegseth's incompetently and corruptly run Pentagon, that the government will decide who wins, who loses in the market. It'll put a thumb on the scale while billions and billions and billions of dollars circulate in a circle, pumping up a bubble that will soon explode and take out a lot of people's prosperity with it.

13:02And then we'll see Larry Ellison and all these people demanding a bailout from the federal government for the recklessness of their AI spending and their investments and everything else. And so this isn't capitalism. It's not any type of economic model that's ever existed in the United States before. It's full on banana republicanism. It's a graftocracy, a kleptocracy, whatever you want to call it. But the idea that there's a commie behind every Bush, let me tell you, one thing that like the people in the country who are the most fiscally conservative people were people like me who were moderate Republicans.

13:53because you really had no reason to be in the Republican Party on the social issues and everything else other than national security issues. You believed they were the stronger party or the more fiscally responsible party. No person can make that claim. That doesn't exist as a matter of reality. There's no political party over the last 25 years that's ever existed in the history of any party on earth that has spent money, drunken sailor-like, like the Republican Party of the George W. Bush and Donald Trump era. holy shit levels of thermobaric nuclear spending that are mind-boggling. We're$40 trillion in debt.

14:53No one knows what a trillion is, right? Just to put it in perspective, if I'm like, hey, Jennifer, I'll see you in a million seconds. That's 12 days from now. A billion seconds, 38 years. A trillion is 32 ,000 years from now. That's what a trillion is. So these people can't stop spending money, can't stop running up to debt, can't stop stealing money. And it's not capitalism. It's not the free enterprise system. It's gangsterism. And so anybody who opposes it is going to get called a name by these people, maybe socialist, maybe communist, maybe fascist, maybe whatever. You may be called deranged.

15:40You may be called whatever, but you're going to be called something. Because there's no words to describe what they're doing to the country, which is basically raping and pillaging it. They are practitioners of the philosophy of the locust, and they are stripping the country bare, is what they're doing. So you mentioned FDR earlier and FDR had oversaw some of the most productive economic eras, stable economic eras in our history. and he was so popular and the policies were so popular because he believed in a highly regulated form of capitalism that provided a strong social safety net because he knew if capitalism was left to its worst impulses that we would be what you just described earlier with this banana republic pay to play dumb and dumber the sons of trump making billions of dollars all of this stuff And so we also just spoke about Mamdani.

16:41And you're seeing on the left, you're seeing Zoran Mamdani, who has come in and he is raising the social safety net in New York. He's also getting rid of regulations. Too many hoops that people had to go through that Mamdani's eliminating. And FDR is a hero of his. And there's all this bedwetting going on in the Democratic Party right now. And I'm a Democrat. I've been a Democrat forever. that the establishment Democrats are saying, oh, the DSA and the progressive wing are trying to take our party over. And I think they have it all wrong. I think a lot of the establishment Democrats, I'm talking about like Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer and others, they've turned into corporatists.

17:23They've turned into politicians that are servicing corporations that make sure that corporations never have to face bankruptcy, AKA the airlines, the banks in 2008, et cetera. and are helping in a more passive way shift that burden to the people. And then you have this new flank of progressives, which I would say are kind of the old flank that are trying to take the party back to being a party that is of the people, by the people, for the people, where MAGA is for of the billionaires, by the billionaires, for the billionaires in an overt way. And then like the Hakeem Jeffries, Cory Booker are kind of like in a covert, thinly veiled way.

18:05They're always, you know, they're kind of bought and paid for as well. What is your take on this civil war that's happening a little bit online right now within the Democratic Party? Because it happened to your party. It led you to leave your party. I liken what's happening with the Democratic Party right now with what happened with Trump in 2016. In 2016, the establishment hated him. Fox News hated him. But online, the right-wing media ecosystem was registering that people were very dissatisfied with the status quo. Similarly, right now in the space that we're in, my audience is very dissatisfied with the status quo.

18:47They're very dissatisfied with their establishment democratic leaders. They want fighters. They want people that stand up for people, not corporations. And we're starting to see with Abdul El-Sayed's victory and Peggy Flanagan's victory, Zoran Mondani, that these candidates can take on millions and millions of dollars in the establishment and win. So you're at your nature, a political strategist. And I just want to get your opinion on what's happening in the Democratic Party right now and the evolution that it's going through. So, Madani has a 69 % approval level in New York City right now. You go back in New York City history, there's a lot of colorful people who have been mayor of New York City, and there's a lot of colorful people who have run for that office, have been involved in New York politics.

19:45The greatest mayor in the history of the city, Fiorella LaGuardia, was a Republican who ran on the socialist line. Bella Abzug is a battling Bella, a figure who lost the New York City mayor's race, was certainly a socialist who would not have had broad national appeal, but was a quintessential New Yorker. At the end of the day, there was a guy named Ed Koch. And Ed Koch used to stand on the subway platforms, and he would ask a question as people would walk by New York. He'd ask, how am I doing? How am I doing? And, you know, some people would, like, look at him and be like, fuck you, Ed. Right?

20:32Other people would be like, you're doing great. And he would stand out there, right? And so Mondami's got, like, a lot of Ed Koch in him. Right? Which is, you know, how am I doing? He's got a great smile and he's effective at running the city seven months in to his tenure. It's a very big job for any young guy or woman. And he's a young guy to be to be mayor of New York City. He's doing he's doing a he's doing a good job. When you see the head of the DSA on television, the National Party, we're against the police and all the things they're for You look at the David Remnick interview with the New Yorker That is a political philosophy that does not have any national appeal in these United States

21:28Socialism falls outside of the national character and it will never, ever, ever come to pass in America. Sadly, fascism does not fall outside the national character. And what will fuel fascism is a reciprocal extremism of the left that hollows out the American middle. And what I say is the American middle is a shared belief that can unify most Americans that what we believe in is the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, the freedom of assembly. We believe in the right to jury trials. We believe in liberty. And we believe in a free country that is fair, that's prosperous. And that there's a lot of elasticity inside that coalition.

22:38You look at Michigan. I don't think that Dr. Syed won that race because of his progressivism. I think he won that race in spite of it. He won that race because one candidate was an apologist and he was a dissident, a fighter, saying we have to stand up and oppose this. What he seems to me to be for is something that I'm for and I think is something that you're for, which is the maximum use of political power to stop the maximum abuses of political power that are happening right now in front of us. by a man who would be king, who's stealing billions of dollars, who's lost a war to Iran, that's as immoral and amoral as the day is long.

23:40And the reality is, is for 18 months, you had Democrats vote to fund ice, vote to empower him, gave him the cabinet he wanted, talked foolishness about working together. Chuck Schumer goes out and tells the American people were winning. And all along, they became complicit in the building national catastrophe that we're sitting in. And all of those people, in my estimation, are deeply unfit for service. I've completely lost confidence in them. Totally. I do think it's unfair. I have a lot of criticisms of Hakeem Jeffries, but he's going to be speaker. And the House Democrats are going to have subpoena power.

24:35What's gone on on the Democratic Senate side makes me want to jump off a bridge on any given day. I mean, if this was a sports team, it's the worst managed team. Totally. They're the New York Jets times 10. And Democrats have to reckon with this. As an institution, the party has lost two out of three elections to the most prolific liar since Hitler and Goebbels last breathed. because the American people, by slim pluralities, thought he was the more honest candidate in the race about the economy, about the border, about Biden's fundamental fitness. And the Democratic Party's got to be the honest party.

25:25It has to be the party that fights for ordinary people. And you're entirely right that a party that is yoked to the interests of Meta against the guy who runs the plumbing business, the person who has the decorating business in Oklahoma City, that that party is going to lose. And this is what FDR talked about when he talked about confronting the new economic royalists. And FDR, by the way, in that last speech in 1936, and this is the key election that validates going backwards or forwards, he says something that's incredibly powerful. And every Democrat who's running needs to meet this test. This is the test.

26:16FDR in Madison Square Garden, last speech of that election, he says, never before in American history, and I'm paraphrasing, has every interest group, every powerful interest aligned against one person, me. And I welcome their hatred. See, that's what we want. And that's how you win. Yes, I completely agree. I mean, it's the fact that, as you mentioned, I'm a former interior designer, I still do interior design work from Oklahoma City. And I have this big of a platform. It's because I believe in something and I don't bend the knee. And I will say, I want a breed of fuck you politics, but fuck you for good.

26:59Like I want to tell all of the fascist collaborators, whether they have an R or D next to their name, that this is a time where you show who you are. What's been so devastating during Trump 2.0 is seeing the most powerful people with all kinds of fuck you money be the first to capitulate. And they don't have in their mind a bank account big enough that they could say, fuck you. And then you and I, with our bank accounts, which will never, ever, ever be to the degree that Trump's cabinet is, are saying, fuck you. And it's just been disappointing to see so many people in this country that are capitulating to just such a, I mean, to me, MAGA is a death cult.

27:43It is a pro-pedophilia, anti-family, crime and disorder death cult. All of their policies lead to that, which I just want to, but we're almost out of time, but I just have to ask you. So I had, I was on your podcast about a month ago and we gossiped a little bit about these MAGA men. And then I had Hunter Biden on my podcast a couple of weeks ago. And Hunter called it the closetocracy in D.C. about all of these Republican men that are closeted. And you used to work inside the Death Star and in Republican circles. And I just want you to tell my audience that this is an actual real thing. Oh, my God.

28:22Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's so I was one, I gave a speech in 2009 in favor of gay marriage, which was very early. It's when I got my first death threats. When I ran John McCain's campaign in 2008, I was on the other side of this issue. And when you go to a Republican, Democratic convention, if you're running the campaign, I mean, this is you're treated very well at these events and you have all sorts of speaking invitations and everything. And I only accepted one and it was to go speak to the gay Republican group. And I made clear my dissent on this issue inside the party. And what's amazing to me is how many people were closeted gay men who remained closeted gay men for many years after I gave that speech, climbing the ranks of Republican politics.

29:21And it is an astounding number that served inside the George W. Bush White House, but also around Speaker Dennis Hastert. Oh, yeah. around some of the top House leaders. 20 years ago, you had a congressman named Mark Foley, who was the final nail in the coffin for Republicans in 2006 when they caught him drunk at two in the morning, scratching on the door of the Page residents in Washington, D.C. And so there has been a long history of this. This is all, we all know this, right? The evangelical pastor, the Jim and Tammy phase, right? We all know the hypocrisy. It's the comedy of all of it. I will say the one great thing that Trump has done, he has done one great thing for all of us for all time.

30:27I'm deeply grateful for. We don't have to pretend that Pastor Paul and Franklin Graham or any of these people are entitled to any dignity, any respect, any consideration that they're a religious figure of some type. They're holy. Get the fuck out of here. Right. Each one of them is a bigger grifter than the next one, a bigot. And all of these people are practitioners of a type of cruelty that punches down. And so many of them, because they're bullies at the core or tortured souls, they're weak men punching down. And so much of it is built on that foundation of self-loathing, of self-denial, because they can't be who they are.

31:17It's broken them inside. And you have people who escaped it, who as the country became freer, as gay people understood over the course of our lifetimes, they didn't have to live in a closet. A lot of them freed themselves and were able to escape and have happy lives. But of course, this is a real thing. When Lindsey Graham, I give us this is this is an important point, I think. There's this documentary with Lindsey Graham and this guy film Lindsey Graham secretly talking to world leaders for years. And what we're going to see is sometime when we were kids, we'd be in the old health classes and they would show the sperm in the egg.

32:05Right. And they'd be like, wow, conception. There was a moment when you could render that on film for the first time. Never in human history have we gotten to see the moment of conception where a war starts, let alone a losing war. But you're going to get to see it in the Lindsey Graham documentary. And in the case of Lindsey Graham, it's not what he did behind the bedroom door. It's the impact of his secret life on all of our lives. The brokenness inside combined with the shallowness and the ignorance and the corruption of the media elevated a man into a position to do profound damage in the world who was psychologically disordered because he couldn't deal with this sexuality, which is innate to him.

32:51And over and over and over again, this story repeats on automatic pilot in Washington, D.C., and nothing good comes from it. Trust me on that. See, I agree with you. My mother agrees with you about Trump. she says, Well, darling, finally, somebody's exposed these evangelicals for being the hypocrites. I always knew they were. My mother had lived in the Bible Belt as an atheist her whole life. And she'd always say, the louder the Christian, the bigger the secret. And that was always kind of true anecdotally in my life. But as it pertains to the closetocracy, as Hunter calls it, and then with your corroborating evidence, I think if the Democrats really grew a pair and really fought, they would say these are national security issues if sitting u.s senators are married but living a double life and we know this or there's rumors about it here then certainly our adversaries do and a lot of people have argued that you know perhaps the reason why lindsey was so uh um uh such a war hawk was because somebody did have some compliment on him i mean like you said we'll know when the documentary is written but it's really really fascinating stuff and i just want to leave my listeners with that i think this episode with you is really important i'm further left than you are a lot of my listeners are probably further left than you are but our fundamental number one thing is we have to defeat fascism we have to form a coalition by addition centrists and moderates are going to have to join with progressives and self-identified democratic uh socialists we're going to have to realize that our enemy and defeating that enemy has to be our shared value, I think.

34:33Last word, Steve. Got to win. Got to win. Have to win. Have to win. Yep. Winning and losing is a moral proposition.

34:45We have to win to get a check on these people. And if you look at where the Senate races are right now, everybody who is invested in the future of the country, and that must take precedence over any specific policy preference, over everything, we must win. I agree. And so the coalition you're talking about requires pragmatism, requires good faith in a recognition that it doesn't require Chuck Schumer's permission, it doesn't require their blessing, is that American citizens practicing the civic religion of their liberty are going to have to defend their country from pernicious interests that are against them.