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- [00:00]
Steve Schmidt
You will have a felon, a sexual predator, being toasted by the head of the Church of England. He won't meet the Epstein survivors. It's an embarrassment all the way around. Charles is putting the crown into a position of, hey, when I'm on English soil, I condemn my brother, but when I am on American soil, I, I made clear that really what Andrew did and the issue at hand is that he got caught.
- [00:36]
Hugh Docherty
Welcome to the Daily Beast podcast. I'm Hugh Docherty, executive editor of the Daily Beast, filling the seat for just once for Joanna Coles. And I am privileged also to be talking today to an amazing guest, Steve Schmidt. He is, of course, possibly best remembered as the man who advised John McCain's presidential election campaign in 2008. But he now stands utterly opposed to Donald Trump. He has an implacable moral view and he has someone new in his sights today. It is King Charles who is going to be arriving in the United States for a state visit on Monday. But before we explain why Steve is targeting him and how, please take a moment, share this podcast with your friends, Invite them to subscribe to The Daily Beast YouTube channel. We are closing in on 700,000 followers. With your help, we can get to 1 million. We also encourage you to become a friend of the Beast on YouTube. It's just $5 a month. You get early access to select podcast videos, exclusive members only, live streams, and Q&As with Joanna. Just hit join to become a friend of the Beast. It's what helps us get great guests like Steve Schmidt. Steve Schmidt, welcome to the Daily Beast podcast. Thank you for joining us. You join us in a week of. I mean, there's so many things that we could talk about, but the big thing that is going to happen next week is why we wanted you to come on the Come on with us. And that is the arrival of King Charles iii in Washington D.C. now, he's going to get a big welcome from, from Donald Trump, but I think it's fair to say that he is not getting such a big welcome from you.
- [02:21]
Steve Schmidt
He is not. The Save America movement is going to welcome him with a 360 degree advertising campaign on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of Americans that have supported the movement by writing a check. And we have a million plus Americans that have signed up to become involved in the defense of our liberty and our democracy. And the King is coming to the United States. This is the 13th visit of a British monarch in the history of the independence of the United States. At a most inopportune Time when Donald Trump is waging an illegal war of aggression, freshly insulting the United Kingdom. His Majesty's soldiers, sailors, airmen and Royal Marines. The attacks on the Pope that Charles III recently prayed with for the first time, the head of the Church of England and the Roman pontiff in 500 years. All of this to stand with a man who tried to overthrow the people's will, a pernicious and evil force in the world. And this was a moment where the King of England was called to rise to the majesty of his throne. And he's failed utterly. He's embraced with his visit, the legacy of the Duke of Windsor, Edward viii, standing with the fascists, that needs confrontation, not appeasement. It's a despicable moment for the Crown.
- [04:08]
Hugh Docherty
For people who are watching on YouTube, they're going to be able to see in a second what some of those adverts look like. But I'm particularly drawn to your use of the first monarch to visit the United States, King Charles grandfather. And we've actually got a clip that we're able to play now.
- [04:27]
Voice Actor (King George VI Ad)
People of America, it is I, King George Virginia, and I am gravely concerned. I stood beside your forefathers in the darkest hours of the last great war. We defeated fascism together. When I came to your shores in 1939, I laid a wreath at the tomb of George Washington. I stood in silence before him and I bowed in respect. And now, 250 years after your founding, my grandson Charles crosses the Atlantic to raise a glass with the unhinged fascist Donald Trump, who called Jeffrey Epstein a terrific guy, threatened the Pope and thinks he's Jesus Christ. This is even worse than tampongate. When Charles got caught talking smut with Camilla on the phone.
- [05:16]
Steve Schmidt
I fill up your tank.
- [05:18]
Ad Narrator (Biologica and Incogni Ads)
Yes, you do.
- [05:20]
Voice Actor (King George VI Ad)
None of this bloody mess is fit for a king. Paid for by Save america movement, the saveamericamovement.org it's just brutal.
- [05:28]
Hugh Docherty
It's also really affecting.
- [05:32]
Steve Schmidt
King George VI was a great king and a heroic figure in history. He becomes king when his older brother David abdicates the throne to chase the twice divorced American Wallace Simpson. His father, George V, had said to the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, that he thought the boy would, quote, come to ruin within a year. And he did. He made it 11 months. And so George VI is the first king to come to the United States. And every aspect of this trip is arranged by fdr. It's curated. He appreciates that in the United States, he needs to increase the affections between our peoples. There is no special relationship. The animosity between average Americans and the crown is such that this is a state visit from Canada, not from Great Britain. When George VI arrives crossing the border at Niagara Falls, United States, a country filled with Irish Catholics. And so the very first stop is a trip up the Potomac river aboard the presidential yacht Potomac, Eleanor Roosevelt, the President, King George, Queen Elizabeth. And they descend into the crypt and they lay a wreath at the tomb of George Washington, who George III says is the greatest man of his or any era because he walks away from power. So he is coming now to stand with a man who refused to walk away from power, who sundered the peaceful transition of power began by Washington, reinforced by Adams, the first president, John Adams, to lose an election and walk away from power. And so the king now stands with the man who made up terrible lies about a stolen election that wasn't and tried to steal from the American people their liberty. And he should never be doing that in the 250th anniversary of the independence of the country. And it's a direct repudiation of the visit of his grandfather and the things he said and stood for and spoke for during that historic visit from Washington up to Hyde park through the New York World's Fair expedition in Flushing Meadows.
- [08:15]
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- [09:35]
Hugh Docherty
If, if you got a chance to rewrite the King's speech, what would you have him see?
- [09:42]
Steve Schmidt
Well, the. The birth of the United States of, of America was a. Was an act that split the world into a before and after epoch of. Of history. And that that act was committed was done by Englishmen, and it was an Englishman's hand, hypocritically though it may have been, that wrote the most important words in the history of the English language, which are, we believe that all men are created equal, endowed by a creator with inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the in the pursuit of happiness. This is a statement that can be understood politically, can be understood morally, can be understood theologically. When the white flag went up above British lines at Yorktown, the Marquis de Lafayette Gilbert Dumontier is, quote, recorded for history was that humanity has its victory, liberty has its country. And he predicts that the new world will come to save the old. And it does. And you can look at the requirements that were imposed on the citizens of the United States, of Canada, of Great Britain in a very dark time when Britain stood for more than two years alone, to appreciate that in this moment, fdr, the preeminent architect of the world, we lived in, speaking to the Canadian Prime Minister late into the night towards the end of the war, that the king's visit proceeded just by 60 days or so that FDR said it was his hope that everybody who was alive on the day the war was won would live long enough to live in the world he saw coming. The world that Trump has fundamentally taken a wrecking ball to the destruction of the multilateral institutions and America's progress preeminence, particularly as a nation steeped in the rule of law, bound by treaties, and understanding the wisdom of restraint.
- [12:23]
Hugh Docherty
And one of the things that you're rightly highlighting about Britain standing alone was this idea of FDR joined in creating this multilateral order this morning. In the last couple of days, it's been Donald Trump and those around him who've been taking that wrecking ball. We heard this morning that Pete Hegseth is drawing up plans to reconsider the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands. Those are islands in the South Atlantic that Britain actually fought a war over with the Argentinians in 1982. And it seems like a stunning insult, not just to invite the king to expect him to do homage, basically, and then say, and by the way, we think you should give away some of your territory. I mean, how do you expect people to process the full extent of what Trump is doing?
- [13:20]
Steve Schmidt
I think that Keir Starmer has had a most unfortunate approach to dealing with Trump, going all the way back to his sitting with a giant Cheshire cat grin while he handed an invitation from Buckingham palace that looked strikingly, looked like a ticket from a Willy Wonka movie. To Donald.
- [13:44]
Hugh Docherty
To Donald Trump, he's Augustus Gloop in this analogy.
- [13:49]
Steve Schmidt
Appeasing Donald Trump tends to invite more aggression. And at this point, it's now safe to say that in English, the English speaking leaders of the world, that the more corny approach is the right path to dealing with Donald Trump. Not the Keir Starmer approach and path, but the Falkland Islands and their sovereignty is a settled issue. These are British islands. These are British islands under the arrangements and signatures of the UN Charter. And it's not the role of the United States military to transfer sovereignty for British islands in the South Atlantic to the Argentinians. Particularly when we know that whatever enthusiasms that Trump has discovered around the Falkland Islands are no doubt related to some bitcoin hustle that is pow. The Argentinian President, another peculiar Orban like figure in the mix of all of these foreign leaders who are attendees with regular admission at the court of Mar a Lago in Miami.
- [15:17]
Hugh Docherty
One of the things I should say, by the way, is that the Argentinians, of course, have always claimed sovereignty over the Falklands. They come in or less Las malvinas. My Spanish is brilliant. But America essentially stayed out of that dispute and then recognized its outcome. And this seems like it's just like it's another example of Trump just throws these things up in the air. However, what I think we really want to talk about as well is the weird, strange connection that the King and Trump have, and that is, of course, Jeffrey Epstein. And that's at the absolute core of the advertising that you are putting together to target the King's trip.
- [15:59]
Steve Schmidt
Yeah, yeah, listen. And Uncle Dickie was a pedophile too. Lord. Lord Mountbatten. And here's the deal. There were no secrets in the Royal family about what Andrew was and is and has been. And the settlement to Virginia Guthrie makes that clear. But if you think about this in the Small World theory of things, how astonishing that what connects them is a woman, Virginia Giuffre, in a world where she travels into Epstein orbit from the massage room at Mar a Lago into the heart of the greatest crisis of the monarchy, likely since abdication, maybe worse, because it shows such a rot into it. And I think that it's unclear still if Charles will survive it or if he will be compelled to abdicate early. But you will have a felon, a sexual predator standing being toasted by the head of the Church of England, whose brother, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor recently dislodged from Royal Lodge, you know, banished. But he won't meet the Epstein survivors. He's standing on American soil. Both his former sister in law, Sarah Ferguson, dare not ever set foot in this country again because of the risk of subpoena. The same with Andrew, who should be here testifying. It's an embarrassment all the way around. But at the core of it, Andrew, what he did was evil. And what Trump has done is also evil. And the allegations against both of them are real, they're legitimate. And Charles is putting the Crown on into a position of, hey, when I'm on English soil, I condemn my brother, but when I am on American soil, I make clear that really what Andrew did in the issue at hand is that he got caught.
- [18:29]
Hugh Docherty
And being caught is what this is all about, right?
- [18:33]
Steve Schmidt
Right. Not about the wrong of it, not about the evil of it, not about any of it. And you know, Charles should have hidden behind his cancer diagnosis. He could have sent the Princess Royal here. There were a number of things he could have done to recognize, as would be appropriate, the 250th anniversary of the country without lifting up Trump, giving him a propaganda victory, working against the American people and the Canadian people and embarrassing the British people.
- [19:10]
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- [20:19]
Hugh Docherty
I was going to say that the King, of course, is King not just of the United Kingdom, he's also the King of Canada. So he's actually got two prime ministers in, Keir Starmer and Mark Carney, as you said, taking completely different approaches to this. So you might rightly analyse that. He's kind of undermining Mark Carney by going on this trip as well.
- [20:40]
Steve Schmidt
Of course he is. Look, the Canadian Prime Minister has given three really important addresses over the last, over the last six months about the relationship of the United States to the world and the world to the United States. And Mark Carney sits as the Prime Minister with a broad mandate in Canada, the second largest land area country in the world, the longest undefended peaceful border in world history through which a trillion dollars of trade flows every year. And what Mark Carney has made clear is he's not getting on his knees and genuflecting to the insanity of Donald Trump ever. And he has confronted what needs confronting and has spoken plain truths. He's a deeply serious man in a fatuous age. And frankly, he is on a Compass dial. He's 180 degrees opposite Keir Starmer, who's silly more than anything else is the appropriate word to describe him in this, in this moment. And shockingly, in a country that produced Neville Chamberlain, that you would have no historic perspective, it seems, on the dignity of your office. And the one thing is a British Prime Minister that no British prime can ever do again, which is to be aloof or indifferent to the bearing fangs of the fascist menace staring you in the face, which is what Donald Trump is.
- [22:30]
Hugh Docherty
Now, I want to talk about Donald Trump at home and literally at home, in fact, and about what are obviously very genuine questions about his mental state. He, as I'm sure you know, he was truthing last night into this morning. He posted 18 times between midnight and 3am he went to sleep or I don't know if he went to sleep, but he disappeared from Truth Social for just short, just over 4 hours, 4 hours and 40 minutes. And then he was back. And what he's posting is there are demands for Obama and Hillary Clinton to be locked up. There's screeds against the Southern Poverty Law center, which has been accused of, and this is slightly bizarre and Fantastical, paying the KK funding, the KKK. There's praise for RFK Jr. There's just a tirade of whatever is in his unconscious seems to be slipping out. I'm sort of stating the obvious here, but that doesn't sound healthy for a man in any position but a man in the Oval Office.
- [23:42]
Steve Schmidt
It's not healthy. And there shouldn't be a reluctance to identify the obvious that's staring all of us in our face. If that was the principal of the local elementary school, he'd be relieved. If that was the captain of the airplane. She would be relieved if it was an ambassador, if it was a CEO, if it was the coach of the NCAA team gone, the NFL team gone, the major league baseball team, soccer team, whatever. Wherever anyone has and holds a position of responsibility, they would be relieved of the responsibility because that behavior and that behavior has now played out over an extended period of time and has worsened, has escalated, would be, would be as plainly and as clearly unhinged. And so the story isn't, unfortunately, about whether it's unhinged. It's about whether anybody's going to do anything or can do anything about the unhinged behavior of the commander in chief, who is at the tip of the decision making pyramid with regard to the release of nuclear weapons. So it is an issue that should be talked about more seriously, more openly and more directly, and in particular with an eye on, to make sure that there's never again a situation where the collision of insanity and the nuclear launch codes come near each other again.
- [25:38]
Hugh Docherty
So practically, can we do anything about this right now?
- [25:42]
Steve Schmidt
If by right now do you mean today? No. The mechanisms in place to tell Donald Trump no are thin and far between. You know, if he were to launch a nuclear strike against someone aggressively, you would hope that military officers would refuse to comply because it would be an illegal order. And he can't accomplish it alone. After this election in November, he will have a check on him. There will be a Democratic House, there's going to be a Democratic Senate. Donald Trump's coalition has fallen apart. It won't recover. There's no amount of money that can be spent that will save him. The American people have seen it, they've made a judgment about it, and they're going to deliver a harsh rebuke in this election. There will be elections. Donald Trump cannot stop those elections. Donald Trump cannot seize all the voting machines and try to engineer a result that wasn't, in fact, the result that was voted. And so there's going to be Democratic governor of Iowa, Democratic governor of Ohio, Democratic senator in Iowa, Democratic senator in Ohio, I believe a Democratic governor of Florida. And you're going to see a tidal wave wipe out MAGA and the nut job and whack jobs at a level that is still, I think, at, at the margins of their imaginations. It's going to be a night of political devastation for these people.
- [27:28]
Hugh Docherty
How do you think he'll react? I mean, the confrontation of a narcissist and reality is well known, whether we accept he's just a narcissist, I'll leave that to others. But the idea of the confrontation of reality and somebody who has deliberately engineered their own reality is always dangerous. It's got to be even worse, right?
- [27:51]
Steve Schmidt
I think he's going to react very, very badly, but there's nothing he's going to be able to do about it. And at the end of the day, the great failure, the great moral failure of this era is the inability of anyone at any time to deliver the word no, no, no to Donald Trump. Right? It's the words he never hears that no one ever says to him. And unfortunately, we are in a season of national catastrophe and decline. But sooner or later, everybody's got to hear those words. And he's in a hearing. He's going to hear it because he's going to have a Democratic Congress that has leadership, I believe, at least in the House, that appreciates that no compromise is the mood of the coalition of people that are coming together to give him power. And the mandate is to make it stop.
- [28:57]
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- [29:20]
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- [29:25]
Hugh Docherty
See full terms@mintmobile.com who so I'm interested in two predictions from you. One is who's going to be the fall guy for that defeat, Because I'm just stating the obvious here. There's no way that Donald Trump is going to, first of all accept defeat. He's already calling it rigged. And we saw what he did in Virginia just on Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, he was declaring that a certified vote, which was obviously on the up and up, was rigged. So we can absolutely predict that's going to happen. But then he's going to look for people to blame. Who's top of your list.
- [30:04]
Steve Schmidt
It's tough to predict how that will go. He certainly won't have any sympathy or empathy for all the careers that he ended. And when I say he ended, I don't mean to make it seem like that it was a passive thing for the people, the people that tied themselves to him. They, they, there's a reason that their political careers were ended. But, but Trump is not, is not going to See it that way. He's going to talk about that they didn't explain MAGA well enough, that they didn't do what they needed to do, that they were, that they were losers. Too many losers, need too many, you know, better, better candidates. And he'll make some changes. People like Howard Lutnick, anybody who's the low hanging fruit, Pete Hagseth. By the time we get to November, there's going to be no denying that we've lost this war. We've lost a war. There's a bad outcome in Iran and the cost of the war, it will only go up. You're seeing bailouts, for example, on the table for the uae and the country will react terribly to this. When, when you have somebody at a 30 to 30% approval level, you've only been there a couple times in history and he can only get down to it about 26, that's his floor, right. He could, he could attack California and he's going to have a 26% approval level. Right. He's, it's, he's at the, he's nearing the floor. Right. He's, he's hovering above the bottom of the Marianas Trench or he's going down.
- [31:52]
Hugh Docherty
And the other prediction that I was wanting to get into, because I know you've made your own prediction here, is who's out first immediately, because it is, as you've observed and just say to people, you should check out Steve Schmidt on substack at the warning. And also your Twitter account is unfiltered, I think is the best way I can put it. But you're suggesting RFK Jr. Is the person that should be watching over his back right now.
- [32:19]
Steve Schmidt
Well, I think the person who's, who's going to be out is Kash Patel, but he's not a cabinet secretary. Right. So that's one of the technicalities. You can win a little bit of
- [32:29]
Hugh Docherty
money on Cash Patel's probably put the money on himself already.
- [32:32]
Steve Schmidt
Trump, Trump doesn't, Trump doesn't like the drinking. Yeah, right. Every, everybody knows that about Trump. Who knows anything about Trump. So when, when you saw Cash Patel obviously shit faced in the locker room, slugging the beer down. He's on the speaker phone said that at the moment. Oh, Trump's not going to like that. And Trump did not like that. And we find out from the story that Trump calls him, chews him out. Trump won't tolerate this. And you look at this suit, you look at any possibility of discovery going forward. It's not something that Trump is going to allow to happen. So I think Patel is on, is on a short leash. And Hagseth I don't think makes it to November either. And Kennedy at the end of the day probably doesn't make it much past November though. Makes it to November despite there being a little bit of, I don't know, civil war is the right word, but let's call it first skirmishing at the joinery between Maga and, and Maha. There is some unhappiness in the valley there with the Maha folks with RFK who they think has sold them out a little bit.
- [33:54]
Hugh Docherty
And is that a fair critique? I mean the idea that first of all the idea of a Kennedy being over the shoulder of Donald Trump in the Oval Office is absurd, but he did. I'm not offering any defense by the way here of Kennedy's particularly crazy ideas, but he seemed to have a group of people that he resonated with and he brought them along and it just seems he's given them nothing really of what they wanted.
- [34:24]
Steve Schmidt
I think the problem at the end of the day with all the whack jobs in the galaxy that they exist in is that all conspiracies at the end of the day devour themselves. Right. It, it's, they always catch the tail. And, and, and that at some level is what we're seeing with rfk. You, you can't make things happen in reality that are at the end of the day the figment of your imagination at the input level that are, that are fantasy. So you see his position on some of these vaccines, you see some of the, hey, you betrayed us. You did this. So there's, you know, this is a community of conspiracy theorists that's on a high twitch alert, you know, in every fiber of their being looking for a conspiracy, looking for the betrayal. And that's, you know, where you see right now one of the things, if you had a more competent Democratic Party, they would be chiseling at that all the time. Breaking up that coalition, trying to create all the conditions for it's fracture and unfortunately they're not competent to that type of work or task.
- [36:02]
Hugh Docherty
You painted a pretty optimistic picture for the Democrats. But you also call them incompetent.
- [36:09]
Steve Schmidt
Yeah.
- [36:09]
Hugh Docherty
You're obviously thinking this could still go wrong in 2028.
- [36:15]
Steve Schmidt
Yeah, well, I like a lot of the candidates in, in 2028. But listen, I wrote in 2022 that no, this was not a victory for Chuck Schumer and it certainly won't be in 2026. And the best way to explain. It is that April 15 was the 114th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. And there was nobody who was on the Titanic at 10pm Having a drink that looked forward to being in a lifeboat by 3am on the North Atlantic. Yet by 3am they were all delighted to be in that boat because it beat the shit out of all the other alternatives. And that is the American voter in this election cycle is that there is no other place to go. And I think it's possible that Lindsey Graham can lose in this election cycle. I think that this is going to be a historic rebuke of MAGA that will accrue enormously to the benefit of the Democratic Party. But it will not in any way, shape or form be an affirmation of the Democratic Party. And it will be a message with only one clear mandate to the Democratic Party. And it is this. It is. Make it stop. Make the corruption stop. Make the abuses of power stop. Make the excesses stop. Make it stop. That's the mandate.
- [38:08]
Hugh Docherty
If you're. You've advised Republicans, obviously in the past, what would your advice right now be to a sort of, let's say, middle of the table Democratic House candidate, somebody who's having a go at a seat that maybe even is held by MAGA, but seems like a likely prospect of getting. Of switching. How would you advise them to speak to people? What would you advise them to tell people that their message is?
- [38:38]
Steve Schmidt
I think that when people, when people are speaking to voters, it is a conversation that is bound by the reality that trust has collapsed between every institution you can think to name and that person. And so there's two types of elections. There's change elections and there's more of the same. And so what is it that you are running to do? Why are you running? To make it clear. And I think more than anything else, when I go out and I talk to groups, one of the points I make is that I don't view the divisions in American politics to be between. Between right and left in this moment, but between right and wrong. And that in the Democratic Party, the great divide is not between progressives and centrists or conservatives, but between people who are willing to appease this and people who demand that it stop and that it leads to an era of reform and renewal. And there's a lot of things that are going to have to happen. For example, the Department of Homeland Security, there were nine senators when it was created who had the wisdom to vote against its creation. It needs to be broken up. It's a Threat to the liberty of the American people. There needs to be real reorganizations of government. There needs to be a crackdown on the corruption. There needs to be ethics laws. Net. The Democratic Party can't be a reciprocal image of the MAGA party. That's a little bit less corrupt though. Does the wink and nod a little bit less ostentatiously. Can't have that. And so the, you know, the Democratic Party and what it's going to become in 28 I think is wide open. And I think we need to see some new candidates, new blood. Not a repeat and certainly not another campaign run by the same folks who lost two out of three elections to Donald Trump and set off one of the great catastrophes in American history.
- [41:19]
Hugh Docherty
And it's unlikely that they would ask, but what would you tell a Republican candidate right now? Resign?
- [41:27]
Steve Schmidt
Yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, prepare for the end, you know, and good fucking riddance. There's nothing they can do. They're lashed to the mast. It is too late. And what they did, the choices they made will likely not be remembered by history. We won't know the rank and file Republican congressmen, but. Shameful, Shameful, right. They're the people who are spitting on black people in the schoolhouse door. They abdicated their oaths. I think it's very important that we remember that for every one of these people there is a mountain of quotes that exist of them denouncing Donald Trump before they got online and appeased it. So when Trump came down the escalator, they all laid out what it was that they knew about Trump. It's one of the great surrenders, one of the great acts of cowardice that did so much damage to the country. And I, I promise you, I'm 55 years old, hopefully everything goes the way it's supposed to go and I'm still here 20 years from now. 20 years from now.
- [42:56]
Hugh Docherty
I hope so.
- [42:58]
Steve Schmidt
Right? You, you won't meet anyone who is for this. It'll be like Trump, who maga? What? Not me. I ain't vote for it. Right. You will never meet anybody who voted for this in 20 years time.
- [43:14]
Hugh Docherty
It's a very good opportunity to ask you about somebody specifically that is well known to you. Meghan McCain of all people revealed this week how she had forgiven Donald Trump because she got invited to the White House for an event. I think it was the swearing in of Tulsi Gabbard and said that this settled it for her, that the score was over. You obviously know her, but you obviously much more Importantly, advised her father, I just wondered what your thoughts were on her because you just spoke about people surrendering. And we seem in a very late stage for somebody to now change sides.
- [43:58]
Steve Schmidt
What an embarrassment she is to his legacy. And he, of course, would be appalled if he were here, which he's not. When I kicked her off the campaign plane many years ago, point of pride, I think I'm the first campaign manager to kick off one of the kids from the campaign plane for misbehavior. But her mother grew a little bit weepy and she, she said it. I, I just want to say I raised two good sons.
- [44:36]
Hugh Docherty
And.
- [44:39]
Steve Schmidt
And she did. She did. No, listen. Megan is a person who is a cheerleader, an apologist, an erratic, volatile voice for all of this depravity and decent indecency that swirls around. Maga long time had one foot in, one foot out. Her father despised bullies. Would have been a fearless and outspoken defender of the Constitution in this moment in time. And would have. There'd be no safe place for Lindsey Graham to hide up around the US Senate if the old man was still around.
- [45:38]
Hugh Docherty
Well, Steve Schmidt, there's no safe place. Well, there's no safe place for King Charles to hide because of your advertising campaign. Where will people see those? I should have asked you that.
- [45:48]
Steve Schmidt
So it's a 360 advertising campaign. We'll have a robust digital presence, television presence, radio presence. Wherever you buy advertisements, we will be there. And we aim to be seen. And for him to see it and for the people around him to see it and to know that if you come and you stand with Donald Trump, you will be called out for it. And what the, what the king is doing here is wrong. The special relationship is not a relationship that exists at the Epstein class level. It exists between the peoples of the United Kingdom and the United States. And what Charles is doing here is he is standing against ordinary Americans in a time of great crisis for this country. And he is coming to celebrate one of the great achievements in world history, the United States of America, what Winston Churchill called the great republic at a time where it's under a real threat. And that threat is Donald Trump. And the reality is that the king is the grandson of a man who is a great king. And he was a serious man. He said important things. And Charles is obviously estranged from the words, from the life, from the deeds, from the majesty of his grandfather, George vi, who never, ever, ever would have come to the United States in a moment, moment like this to stand for the cause of fascism. Ever.
- [47:33]
Hugh Docherty
Well, Steve, thank you for joining us. Thank you for letting us play your adverts. And we are going to finish by playing out one of the other adverts because they are both morally profound and they're very moving. And I'll say somebody, obviously, I should have disclosed this at the beginning. I was brought up in the uk, I believe a subject or a citizen, whichever it is these days, thanks to where I'm coming from. But they say something that I think has been needed to be said about, about the current state of the monarchy. And for people who admire the monarchy, they will see, I think, a message of something of hope as well, if the King can learn from them. Steve, thank you for joining us. You bet.
- [48:19]
Steve Schmidt
My pleasure. Thank you.
- [48:20]
Hugh Docherty
Thank you,
- [48:26]
Steve Schmidt
Mr. President.
- [48:26]
Hugh Docherty
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I cannot help but wonder what our forebears from 1776 would make of this friendship.
- [48:40]
Steve Schmidt
Today.
- [48:55]
Hugh Docherty
You can find Steve Schmidt writing the warning on Substack. He is, I said, unfiltered. He is utterly morally unafraid. He is a voice of clear moral certainty. And that was a fascinating conversation. If you enjoyed it, please share it with your friends. If you haven't hit the subscribe button on YouTube, help us to get to 1 million subscribers. It means more people can hear from more great guests like Steve Schmidt, Jen Welch, Timothy Snyder, Anna Navarro. Just some of the great guests we've had in the last few days. A reminder, you can also become a friend of the beast for just $5 a month. There are lots of benefits, early access to selected episodes, and best of all, a crown on your comments. We love your comments, so please get in there. I love reading them. I hope to be able to read them out in a future episode at the Daily Beast. We will be covering every minute of this amazing scene where the King and Trump are together. Find us@thedailybeast.com Finally. Thank you to our production team, Ryan Murray, Devin Rogerino, Rachel Passer, Heather Passaro, and of course, our legal mastermind, Neil Rosenhaus.
- [50:03]
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