Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain's 2008 campaign for president, was interviewed on MSNOW. In response to a very general question regarding the Trump presidency, Mr. Schmidt spoke for two minutes and gave the most insightful and brutally honest response of what the Trump presidency has done to our great country: "Donald Trump has been the worst president this country has ever had. And, I don't say that hyperbolically. He is.
But he is a consequential president. And, he has brought this country in three short years to a place of weakness that is simply unimaginable if you were pondering where we are today from the day where Barack Obama left office. And, there were a lot of us on that day who were deeply skeptical and very worried about what a Trump presidency would be. But this is a moment of unparalleled national humiliation, of weakness.” "When you listen to the President, these are the musings of an imbecile.
An idiot. And I don't use those words to name call. I use them because they are the precise words of the English language to describe his behavior. His comportment. His actions. We've never seen a level of incompetence, a level of ineptitude so staggering on a daily basis by anybody in the history of the country whose ever been charged with substantial responsibilities.” "It's just astonishing that this man is president of the United States. The man, the con man, from New York City.
Many bankruptcies, failed businesses, a reality show, that branded him as something that he never was. A successful businessman. Well, he's the President of the United States now, and the man who said he would make the country great again. And he's brought death, suffering, and economic collapse on truly an epic scale. And, let's be clear. This isn't happening in every country around the world. This place. Our place. Our home. Our country. The United States. We are the epicenter.
We are the place where you're the most likely to die from this disease. We're the ones with the most shattered economy. And we are, because of the fool that sits in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk." @SteveSchmidtSES r/t Ron Tipton
Let me explain what just happened 👇
5 minutes before the President announced a halt to attacks on Iran… someone placed a $1.5 BILLION bet on stocks going up and dumped $192 million in oil.
5 minutes…
These trades were 4 to 6 times larger than anything else in the entire market. Whoever did this wasn’t guessing. You don’t risk $1.5 billion on a hunch.
There was zero public indication this announcement was coming. No leaks. No press. Nothing. The only people who knew were in the room when the decision was made.
Someone in that room picked up a phone.
And within minutes they made more money than most Americans will earn in a thousand lifetimes. In a single trade. On a war that cost you $4+ a gallon gas and $16 billion in tax dollars.
American citizens funded this war. Politicians are profiting from it.
This is not the first time. Every major announcement from this administration has had massive suspicious trades right before it dropped. Tariff reversals. Policy shifts. War decisions.
This is the most blatant insider trading operation in the history of American politics. It’s not even close. And it’s happening over and over in broad daylight.
You would go to federal prison for trading on a tip from your cousin. These people are front running war decisions with billion dollar bets and nobody will ever ask a single question.
Nobody will be investigated. Nobody will be charged. By tomorrow this will be buried under the next satisfying headline. Just like last time. And the time before that.
The game is rigged. And they’re not even trying to hide it anymore…
Robert Mueller died last night.
He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.
He had integrity.
And tonight the President of the United States said good!
I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.
I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.
Good.
This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.
That is what is happening. That is what has happened.
The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.
America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.
And the church said nothing.
Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.
Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.
Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.
JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.
These men are something more painful than monsters.
They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.
Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.
Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.
That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.
And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.
When Trump is gone, they will still be here.
Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.
That morning is coming.
Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.
He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.
He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.
The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.
That is all it needed to be.
A man died. His family is broken open with grief.
That is all it needed to be.
Instead the President said good.
And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸
Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
@glenn_tunes What the fuck do you expect us to do right now? The DNC has totally screwed us along with the RNC. I’ve watched our rights taken away by this regime—something put in place for several years well orchestrated by McConnell. We can VOTE!
BREAKING: Former Trump Vice President Mike Pence:
"Ukraine wants Peace. Putin doesn’t want Peace. Putin wants Ukraine. Time for America to Stand with Ukraine and Stand Firm Against Ongoing Russian Aggression"
BREAKING: I just offered an amendment on the floor to give Veterans fired in the Trump-Musk layoffs their jobs back.
Every single Republican blocked it.
Shame on them for betraying our heroes.
Don’t let the ‘Epstein files’ smokescreen distract you from the real bombshell of the day. The Tate brothers—facing rape and human trafficking charges in Romania—were brought to the U.S. with help from the Trump administration.
Here’s a video of Andrew Tate, a self-described sexist and misogynist, bragging about choking and beating women. Sickening!
Trump - with his devotion to Putin, abandonment of Ukraine, and lies about history- is the antithesis of everything Ronald Reagan stood for. He is aligning America with the enemies of the very freedom that generations have fought and died to defend. History will not be kind to those who are helping him, especially those who call themselves Reagan Republicans while they pretend not to see what’s happening.
@RpsAgainstTrump The January 6 Camp Auschwitz guy is a free man! Oh, and eggs are still gonna stay expensive. In the lyrics of "Defying Gravity" from Wicked:
I hope you're happy.
I hope you're happy now.
I hope you're happy how you've hurt your cause forever.
I hope you think you're clever.
Tulsi Gabbard on Trump:
“He’s essentially pimping out our men and women in uniform to a foreign power who's the highest bidder...He is unfit to be our commander-in-chief.”
(2019)