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- [00:01]
Bloomberg Narrator
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- [00:28]
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Joanna Coles
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Joanna Coles
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- [00:58]
Steve Schmidt
I think he's on fifth for office. John Fetterman had an incapacitating stroke and John Fetterman has obviously not recovered from that stroke. We see how addled he is in the simplicity of the response and the engagements with his staff on questions, for example, about the murder of Renee Good and Alex, almost a childlike teenage like sophistry. The degree to which this man is publicly manipulated by Fox News. You read all of the things that come out of Fetterman's mouth. He's a very childlike view of the world.
- [01:49]
Joanna Coles
I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast and today we are covering John Ferrari Fetterman. Is he actually fit for office? You'd be surprised what our guest on today's podcast thinks. We cover Iran. What's happened to the Strait of Horiz? Jeff Bezos. What is he going to be actually remembered for? Similarly, Marco Rubio. And how are the plans going to celebrate Trump's 80th birthday? Yes, the President of the United States leans into his ninth decade. We have 33 weeks to count down. Before we get into it, I'm just going to ask you please to smash the subscription button wherever you get your podcast. We're nearly at 700,000 subscribers, so please help us get to our current goal. And those of you who are regular listeners and viewers will know that we've had some technical hitches when we've been doing some of our podcasts, including Inside Trump's Head due to, how can I put this? The lack of bandwidth at my parents home in Yorkshire in the uk, where I've been for the last month and the Internet, which my mum refers to or referred to as the vibes. Anyway, big thanks to my neighbours Claire and Brian, who helped us out when our connection went down midway through the podcast. So close observers will notice a dramatic dream change of background. Anyway, let's get into it with Steve Schmidt of the Warning, the former Republican. He's been in politics all his life and now of course, a co founder of the Save America movement. Steve, let's get into it. Steve Schmidt, you are fresh off your 24 hour reading of the Epstein files. This is something Save America, the Save America movement that you've co founded has pioneered this week. How did it go? And have we forgotten about the Epstein files? Did Trump win the Epstein files?
- [04:10]
Steve Schmidt
I don't think that Trump has won the Epstein files. But first off, it's good to see you, Joanna, and good to be back with you. I think that the erasure temporarily of the Epstein files from the corporate media, the failure to cover the story, is really an admission of the corruption that so many of us indict on a, on a day to day basis. And none of it is lost on the, on the American people. I said on the, this podcast some months ago that we would get into this time of year and he would be down to about 30%. And he's after.
- [04:56]
Joanna Coles
You did say that. You did say that.
- [05:00]
Steve Schmidt
And that means, that means that an enormous number of people have jumped off of the Trump ship and there's this blindness in so many people who are fiercely opposed to Trump to that reality because they are fixated by the multitude still on the ship and aghast by it, by their aggression towards all of the concepts that we all supposedly believed in, that we all stand together in salute, say, when we're gathered ecumenically at a baseball game, right, and the national anthem is played.
- [05:47]
Joanna Coles
I saw you. I saw you. You posted, Steve, you posted yourself and Dean Blundell at the Yankees this week.
- [05:56]
Steve Schmidt
Yeah, we did. We, Dean and I go to a lot of baseball games together and, and most of those games are in Toronto and you know, where I spend about six months of the year in all of the baseball season. And if you're an American in a Canadian city when the American anthem is played and you are forced to confront the dichotomy of those words if they ever had any meaning of you. The land of the free and the home of the brave, and yet our flag was still there. And that's the central question of this Trump era and the abominations in this unbridled Corruption that we're besieged by. There's a question at hand in the country for the American people about whether we're going to tolerate it or not. And the writing is on the wall for maga. I can tell you what I think is going to happen, but we're going to know for sure inside a few months. And the answer to the question is really decisive for the future of the country because indifference towards what's going on means an indifference to the loss of a way of life that people won't be indifferent towards once it's gone. I promise them that.
- [07:21]
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- [07:51]
Joanna Coles
But, Steve, can you help me with one thing, which is that, you know, you were a Republican. I understand you're no longer obviously a Trump Republican. How do Republican politicians square Trump's behavior? I mean, he has rode roughshod through all politicians, through Congress, through the Senate, through everybody. So if I were a Republican congressperson, I would be extremely anxious about what my own president is doing to my party for my voters as the midterms approaches. I mean, it really feels, I've never seen anything quite so much as a government of one, which obviously we've discussed, but it's never been so obvious as it is now. And if I were a Republican politician, I would be furious with my president. Why aren't they?
- [08:52]
Steve Schmidt
Well, I think they. I think they are right. And I think a lot of that fury is steeped in the self loathing of cowards. They are abuse victims who tolerate the abuse that are complicit in their, in their own abuse. It's a form of self abuse and debasement that they have submitted to. And the evidence of what they used to believe is carved in granite. We have it, we know it. We know that every one of them was opposed to Trump when he came down and the escalator. And they have submitted to him out of cowardice. And they've made the calculation politically that they cannot survive disobedience and make it through a Republican primary. And so you'll see some cohort of them now trying to Having made it through a primary is jump off the bullet train, so to speak, and it's going to be tough to dismount the train at 200 miles an hour from the side door, so to speak. And then they're doomed. They've lashed themselves. They've lashed themselves to it. But it is an extraordinary. Everyone is fascinated by different things, right, that provoke them into careers and everything else. I don't know what young Joanna Coles Some of the things that kind of pulls you into. Into journalism and wanting to ask questions of people. But I was always fascinated by things such as growing up by Jonestown, which occurred when I was 9 years old. Why would 900 people drink the Kool Aid? Why the heaven's gay culture? I'm rereading the William Shire book, the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. And Shirer, the foreign correspondent with cbs, was there for all of it. He was there in Germany from 1932 forward. And what you are seeing is not unprecedented in history. What you're seeing is the submission of principle for the opportunities that present themselves from the obedience that rewards the ambition of people who will align themselves towards the wrong to get ahead. And this, this is a great drama, right? This is. This is what Shakespeare wrote about.
- [11:56]
Joanna Coles
This is right.
- [11:58]
Steve Schmidt
This is the. This is. This is what the Stoics meditated about. And we have to, as a society, decide some very, very big things through an election process that we're actually going to have, despite all of Trump's threats and vituperations and rhetoric against it.
- [12:20]
Joanna Coles
Okay. Close observers of this podcast will notice we've had a sudden change of background. That's because I had technical difficulties here in crazy Yorkshire, so I've had to run to my neighbor's house where their Wi Fi, or the Vibes, as my mum used to call it, are now happily working. So, Steve, I'm sorry about that interruption. Thank you for your patience. We were discussing how the Republicans are now in this sort of Shakespearean bizarre, mirror madness world with Trump riding roughshod across them, and apparently there's nothing they can do about it as they face the midterms.
- [13:03]
Steve Schmidt
No, they should read some of the Stoics, read some of the classics, read their Shakespeare. They have lashed themselves to the mast and the. In the, in the die is. Is. Is cast, and they're, they're going to face it and it's going to be a brutal, brutal reckoning. I'm a, I'm a huge John. John F. Kennedy fan and I, I think for Democrats, I would if, if I had, if I had my way, I would, I would pull all of their members into mandatory retreats where they were forced to listen to FDR speeches and John Kennedy speeches. But when it comes to understanding the Republicans, John Kennedy had this great line in his inaugural address which is, beware the foolish men who seek power by trying to ride the back of the tiger, only to wind up inside. Right? And that is what we are witnessing, the hollowness of ambition, the concept that there is nothing that has greater value than more, more stuff, more power. Me, me, me. And I think it will be repudiated with disgusting contempt by a majority of Americans who don't necessarily like each other very much, but have the shared common interest of putting a check on Donald Trump's power and an appreciation that whatever contempt they may feel for each other inside a vast coalition, there's nobody who feels more contempt for anybody than does Donald Trump towards them and all of us.
- [15:08]
Fox News Announcer
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- [15:37]
Joanna Coles
I know it's really remarkable that they haven't been able to somehow bandy together and form some kind of resistance to him within the party. Do you think there would ever be a sort of breakaway group of the Republicans? I mean, I'm still in the UK where I've been for the last month, and what we've witnessed here is the breaking apart of the two party system. And there's now really four or five parties who are really viable in an election, not for overall power necessarily, but we've certainly seen the breaking up of the equivalent, the British equivalent of the Republicans and the Democrats. You've been a student of American politics all your life. Do you think this might be a tipping point where, where we see, because we've got essentially the Trump Party or the Democrats and there's nothing in between.
- [16:29]
Steve Schmidt
Well, I think what's going on in Great Britain is really, is a precursor to what we could see in the United States. And I could talk on a 60, 70 year basis about how US and British politics have orbited one another and how labor and Conservative prime ministers have set the stages or been reactionary from the election of various American presidents and movements. But certainly what goes on in the UK has had a gravitational pull A tidal pull, if you will, on what happens in the politics here. And you're seeing a disintegration of old institutions. The Democratic Party is the oldest political party in the world. The Republican Party is third, and the Tory Party is number two. And so the disintegration of some of the oldest political parties in the world in the font of where Western democracy emerged from. Parliamentary democracy is a big thing, not a small thing. And the forces that are driving it are the same forces that are disintegrating the bonds of affection between Americans and disintegrating the institutions of the republic. So, look, we're going to have a very disruptive election cycle in 2028. I. Democrats are going to have a big election victory. And I think that they have a lot of delusional leaders like Chuck Schumer. And I'm counting down for the moment when Chuck Schumer does his Sally Fields speech after the election, right? When he's like, they like me. They like me. It was a victory for me, for Schumer. And I think that what a lot of the geriatric Democratic leaders don't appreciate is the contempt by which they're held, right, that the people are held who lost two elections to Donald Trump. And so I think there's going to be a lot of Americans in that proverbial lifeboat, like the people who got off the Titanic, that they're in the North Atlantic. No one wanted to be in a wooden lifeboat in the North Atlantic Ocean on a moonless night at three in the morning on April 15th. But it beat all the alternatives, right? It beat all the alternatives. And that's what the Democratic Party represents in this election. It's going to be a wipeout. People are gonna revolt against all of this insanity, and they're gonna put their hopes into a Democratic Party that will have one clear mandate, which is to make all this bullshit stop. Bring it to heel.
- [19:31]
Joanna Coles
Interesting. So what is Save America, the Save America movement, doing to remind people that Donald Trump will be 80 in three weeks? How are you planning? You have the most creative and amusing of illuminating something. Here is a moment where it's possible to remind people this is the oldest president in American history. And perhaps some of what he's doing is because he's effectively too old for the job. So what is Save America up to? I know you've got plans.
- [20:13]
Steve Schmidt
We are debating what to do about his birthday. I'll be honest, if I had my way about it, we would. We would burn him in effigy for his. For his birthday. And maybe we'll, we'll call on people to do that digitally. Nobody should just go out and burn anything in their, their community without, without calling and coordinating with the fire department first. But I, but I mean, it, it's an, it's an, it's a, it's a, it's a free speech act that is appropriate in this moment towards a wannabe American tyrant. The American, the American Nero, who has taken a day. Flag Day, June 14th. And Flag Day is really a commemoration of the day that George Washington took command of the continental army in 1775. And I can't imagine a more vulgar and desecrative event than the South Lawn being turned into a bread and circuses mixed martial art arena, a spectacle for the privileged who will pay obscene fees to sit under corporate sponsorship at the People's House, which he knocked down half of it. And it's an exhausting event. But there is, when you think about this fight, in the nature of fighting, we are in a fight. There are only two ways to win a fight. You either bring your opponent to submission or they bring you to exhaustion. And the danger in terms of losing a political fight to Trump has never been fueled by popular sentiment, by the idea that there would be some super majority that would get in line or support through affections with all this filth. Right. The danger has always presented itself in that there would be enough people who became apathetic and indifferent enough to this as the consequences came due, as the misjudgment of trusting this man came due, that they would turn off as opposed to be engaged. And that's why the Democratic Party's greatest mistake could be to embrace a reciprocal cynicism. This is a moment where the cynicism has to be met by the light of a new idealism that's of the most paramount. Right. Paramount importance coming into this election and coming into 2028.
- [23:38]
Joanna Coles
Right. It does feel like there is a generation of new Democratic politicians, many of them who've served in the military, many of them who are now in Congress. People like Mark Kelly. I'm thinking of Congressman Seth Moulton. You see Graham Platner challenging and winning in terms of getting the primary for the Democrats in Maine as the senator there to go up against Susan Collins. So it does feel like there is a new generation of Democrats who are energetic, obviously James Talarico, who won the primary in Texas. So as you say, we're in a sort of transition moment for the Democrats. You know, one of those people that seems to be bang in the middle Although a lot of Democrats are saying he's erring towards the Republican side. Now, is John Fetterman strange leaks in New York magazine this week about him at one point claiming he wasn't sure what affordability was. What do you make of John Fetterman?
- [24:44]
Steve Schmidt
I think he's unfit for office.
- [24:47]
Joanna Coles
You think he's unfit for office? Go on.
- [24:51]
Steve Schmidt
Well, I think. I think that we live in an age where, you know, sometimes. Right. It's uncomfortable to directly hit the nail on the proverbial head. John Fetterman had an incapacitating stroke. And, and John Fetterman has obviously not recovered from that stroke. And we know that from the testimonies, so to speak, from so many people that work for him. And we see how addled he is in the simplicity of the response and the engagements with his staff on questions, for example, about the murder of Renee Good and Alex Predd, almost a childlike teenage, like sophistry, the compound. But what about Kyle Rittenhouse?
- [25:57]
Joanna Coles
Right.
- [25:58]
Steve Schmidt
And I. And I. And I think you have to look at that psychologically.
- [26:02]
Joanna Coles
Let me just remind people. So John Fetterman had a big stroke. When was this? 2022. It was before he was elected to the Senate for Pennsylvania. Right. So he'd been lieutenant governor of the state. He has an enormous stroke. He then gets elected. Nonetheless, he has a bit of time to recover, gets elected as senator, I think several months after. He talks about his depression from that stroke and the difficulty of the recovery from the stroke. So sorry to interrupt your flow, but I just want to put it in context for people because it's so easy to forget.
- [26:45]
Steve Schmidt
He narrowly wins an election against Dr. Oz that Oprah is really decisive in, because she comes out in the last week of that election and is basically like thumbs down on Dr. Oz. And that's a huge moment. Fetterman has had this debate, and Fetterman is incoherent in this debate. Fetterman comes into the, to the, to the Senate, and he's. He's very disabled from the, from the stroke. And Fetterman announces, as you, as you just pointed out, that he's suffering from a depression, and he's hospitalized for that, for that depression. And he comes out of that hospitalization. And John Fetterman, over time, begins this transformation. There's been a lot written about how he behaves around people, the changes at estrangements with his wife, with his family. It's all been documented. But you see also in real time, the degree to which this man is publicly manipulated by Fox News, Right. That he's welcomed, that he's given a safe harbor, that he's given us safe space to come on and to be venerated, to be made to feel important. And again, psychologically, all of the political campaigns I've been involved in, particularly at a presidential level, require at some degree to put these people on a couch and you sit around in a room and you have a lot of conversations about it. And in the case of John Fetterman, I think that this is a person whose self esteem is so broken, so shattered that he suffers from this disease of depression, that what validates him is not love, is not the affection of people that brought him to where he is, but rather the faux affections of his enemies, of people who mock him and disdain him and he seeks their approval. And you read all of the things that come out of Fetterman's mouth. He's a very childlike view of the world and he's approved person and he should never have been celebrated for dressing like a, like a child in a, in a grownup's job. He's the United States Senator from, from Pennsylvania. And his, and his attire and his demeanor and his comportment was always a disqualification. The notion that Conor Lamb was disqualified by, by progressives, right, against this guy shows the rottenness of some, some aspects of all of that. But, but, but John Fetterman is going to be, be a senator who's defeated in the primary should he choose to run election for, for election. If he switches parties and, and he's a good fit for maga, then he should switch parties and he'll be defeated in, in Pennsylvania. But one of the big mistakes that Chuck Schumer made was the amount of money he spent electing John fetterman while spending $0 electing Tim Ryan against the $60 million that Republicans spent electing J.D. vance because maybe J.D. vance wouldn't be vice president and we could have Tim Ryan in the Senate if it wasn't for a really stupid decision made by Chuck Schumer.
- [30:58]
Joanna Coles
Right? So, I mean, one of the reports on Fetterman has him saying he's responding to an article about how annual health care costs are now about 4,000 per American family. And he goes, how should it cost Free, he wrote. Which still sounds to your point, like he's got some kind of language issue post stroke, which often people do. I don't understand what affordability it is. Leaving aside the grammar of the sentence, how damaging is it for the Democrats to have someone saying, I don't understand what affordability is. I mean, I mean, what is going on that he would say that even
- [31:40]
Steve Schmidt
I don't think he's associated with the Democratic Party. I think he's associated with Maga and I think he's a character in the Star Wars Creature Cantina, right. Of MAGA characters. And I think that's doomed for him in Pennsylvania. Again, John Fetterman's a rich kid, right, who plays a working class, working class guy. So that is par for the, for the course, right. Like, yeah, he doesn't, he, he in fact. Right. He does. He doesn't know. He doesn't know. Right. He's never not had a safety net right below him. His wife has. Right. She knows. He doesn't know. Right. So that's again, right. That's a very honest, unfiltered expression, right? A Chauncey Gardner like expression that in this instance cuts, cuts against him. But yeah, I mean he's never struggled. He doesn't know. He's a person of incredible privilege. You had this cynical shtick that got him elected that is out the door for a lot of the reasons. I suspect that we just talked about that he has this emptiness inside that can't be craved by praise. Right. So like what fills this hollowness, I think is the affections of people who disdain him, people that were his enemies. Like for some reason, right. He feels nurtured by Fox News. And you gotta have a specialty in the human psyche that's deeper than my, you know, to get deeper than that on it, but that's what it is.
- [33:44]
Joanna Coles
I wish that I had been on some of your fly on the wall sessions when you were with John McCain or George W. Bush and you were putting them on the psychologist's couch. So we're recording this on Friday afternoon. It's Memorial Day weekend. Obviously people are going to be in their cars, they're going to be seeing the price of gas again. Reporting this from my end in Europe, people can't believe that the Iran war on the Strait of Hormuz seems to have left the front page amid Donald Trump's, you know, equally attention grabbing slush fund. What has happened to where are we in terms of the war? And do you think people will standing by the gas pump this weekend as they drive off to the beach or to the lake or to the mountains. Do you think people will be like, wait a minute, what's going on here?
- [34:49]
Steve Schmidt
Well, the last 10 days I've been in California, I've been in Iowa, I've been in New York and gas is really expensive everywhere. And when you, when you go to fill up, you're well past the holy shit point of wow. And you know exactly who's responsible for it. Now here, here is what I think is there's two issues, and you can go down either road, because this is a media corruption story, and this is also a losing a war story. And the amount of American losses by terms of planes, material bases is staggering and unreported. There's no coverage of it. There's no images of it. There's no. It's blacked out. No transparency. There's no reporting right around.
- [36:01]
Joanna Coles
Wait a minute, what do you mean American losses?
- [36:05]
Steve Schmidt
What do you mean the damage across the, across the Middle east to American facilities, to American pieces, the damage to American aircraft, to American drones that have been shot down? The reality of naval engagements against Iranian drones and forces, none of it is reported. And the reality is, is we are losing a war en route to having lost a war. And the clearest evidence of that is that in the real world, countries like South Korea and Japan are negotiating fees to transit the Strait of Hormuz, that before this was an international waterway, it is now an Iranian tollway. The reason it was an international waterway was because of the United States Navy. And the reality that this is an international waterway and the right to navigate was preserved by the U.S. navy. But the U.S. navy can't preserve the right to navigate through the Strait of HORMUZ because the U.S. navy can't defend the Strait of Hormuz from Iranian attack. And that means that a balance of power is shifted. Iran has defeated Israel and the United States and has made it a country that every powerful nation in the world has to deal with directly to get the raw materials and resources it needs to sustain their high functioning GDPs in the modern economy. That includes the helium and the hydrogen and the oil and the natural gas that transit through 20% of it through the Straits of Hormuz. And Donald Trump's going to capitulate to that. He's going to move on to an adventure in Cuba, which won't be America's first Go round America round in terms of military adventurism in Cuba. But Cuba has a potent military. It is a large island, it is a jungle island, and it is a mountainous island. And Cubans have long periods of political instability. And what Donald Trump has every ability to do is set off a refugee crisis of unequal measure towards South Florida. And again at the height of 1944, at the height of American military Power. In the industrial age, we produced almost 10,000 airplanes, 8,900 that year. The Ukrainians produced 8 million drones last year. How many drones do the Cubans have? Is Miami susceptible to this drone? It's 90 miles away. We should appreciate that what has been made clear in the Straits of Hormuz is that the new age of warfare made clear in Ukraine has equalized America's advantages. Because our offensive platform, such as an offensive aircraft carrier, the range of the planes is exceeded by the range of the drones from land that can sink the aircraft carrier if enough of them were to swarm.
- [40:08]
Joanna Coles
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- [40:13]
Joanna Coles
Was she brave?
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- [40:20]
Steve Schmidt
Did you have to fight a dragon?
- [40:22]
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- [40:25]
Joanna Coles
Was it scary?
- [40:26]
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- [40:29]
Joanna Coles
Did the car have a sunroof?
- [40:30]
Carvana Advertiser
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- [40:39]
Joanna Coles
Wow. So you actually think there's a scenario where Cuba could send drones to Miami? Who.
- [40:47]
Steve Schmidt
Who knows, right? Does Cuba have drone capability? Is there an element of the Cuban military that would. That would. That would. That would fight back? What I said at the beginning of the. Of the. Of this adventure disaster in Iran was that if there. If there was one thing that all of us should be able to agree on, right? Of any person of common sense, after 25 years, it's a lot easier to start these wars than to end one. We just watched them start a war after the loss of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Iran that we've lost, and now on to Cuba, again with no plan. How much. How much money are we going to be into rebuilding Cuba for. On top of rebuilding Gaza for. What about Wisconsin? What about. What about Michigan? What about Alabama? You drive across Louisiana, it's like driving in a third world country. You know, it's antithetical to what he ran on, and it's not lost on huge, huge cohorts of his voters.
- [42:09]
Joanna Coles
Right? And that's what's so sort of puzzling and peculiar, and yet so many leaders do it in their second term. They try to sort of, you know, strut on the world stage because they're getting less love at home, and they end up tripping over their own feet, don't they? It also seems for Marco Rubio, too. Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, whatever else you can throw that this would be a mistake right now to go after Cuba when the American plate seems well and truly full with all sorts of unresolved issues. Do you think that he is in a position to persuade Trump not to do this, or do you think he wants him to do it because his parents came from Cuba and this is his own personal. Well, it's a personal mission for him?
- [43:07]
Steve Schmidt
I don't know the answer to that. All, all arrows would point towards Marco Rubio fancies himself as the great liberator of Cuba. He's a person. If you were to analyze him against his conduct. Right. Which is, which is to, let's say, let's take all the things that Marco Rubio once said he was for, then let's add on the Bible verses that he began tweeting during the Trump era. And as he grew closer to Trump, that tweeting increased. Right. It became holier as he became more maga, right. Through the destruction of the diplomatic corps, the dissolution of usaid, the cessation of food aid, medicine, all these vital humanitarian aid packages across the world that save millions, millions of lives. This is a person whose ambition to do things that he came to power decrying seems rather boundless.
- [44:37]
Joanna Coles
Right.
- [44:38]
Steve Schmidt
So is Marco Rubio the type of guy who looks himself in the mirror and sees those green fatigues on, right, that like maybe Proconsul of Cuba, right. Is. Is the next. Is the next title there. I don't, I don't doubt it, doubt it for a second that he's not a restraining influence on, on Trump. And I, and I also think he's wholly ignorant. Right. You know, just, just because someone's from England doesn't make them a student of English history. Right. I don't. There, there doesn't seem to be a lot of connection, you know, between Marco Rubio and the realities of what a guerrilla war on Cuba could potentially look like.
- [45:25]
Joanna Coles
Right. Although he might think that it would be easier to be in Cuba trying to rebuild it than it is sitting in Donald Trump's cabinet next to him. As Trump swivels his eyes around the cabinet table looking for who to blame next, for sure.
- [45:40]
Steve Schmidt
Right. And, you know, I, you know, there's no shortage of South Florida Cuban Americans, right, that, that'll make a lot of money, right. That the military owns, owns all the real estate in Cuba, so who knows what's going on? But the idea that we're going to be able to, because little Marco says, take over the country without casualties, without difficulty, without cost, without pain is not something I think these have. These people have any credibility to, To. To predict. And I don't trust them, and nobody should trust them. And the, again, the taste for adventurism is, Is escalating at a, At a, At a level and at a level of disregard for the lives of American forces, let alone of the human beings on the other end of the power of American forces, that they should disturb anyone.
- [46:54]
Joanna Coles
Right. Well, that's a somber note on which to enter Memorial Day weekend. But you have to promise, Steve that you will come back and unveil your plans to note that day.
- [47:07]
Steve Schmidt
Absolutely, we will.
- [47:08]
Joanna Coles
Of our 80th. Our 80th birthday for Donald Trump leaning into his ninth decade.
- [47:15]
Steve Schmidt
Yeah. I just want to say, like, last thing you mentioned, the Epstein reading room, where people got together and they read for 24 hours. It was Eliza Orleans, who's a public defender by career in New York and as a big social media presence and is an activist on all the political issues of the day. She. It's her idea to do it. She said, you know, somebody should do this, and the facility is down there. And so we did it. And that's a good thing about being part of a group like this, is that when someone has a good idea, you can execute it. And there's a lot of people invested in wanting to push back and resist this with as much ferocity as some of the richest and most powerful people in the world, like Jeff Bezos, want to get on their knees and submit to it. And again, I think for a generation, people are gonna be writing books that are less about the politics and more about the drama, the psychology of this moment. Right.
- [48:19]
Joanna Coles
I wanted to read one of the posts that you'd actually made about Jeff Bezos this week. You say today's oligarchs build panic rooms and bend the knee. Jeff Bezos has made a deliberate choice. He's chosen accommodation over resistance, and he exposes the emptiness of the elite rhetoric. If you're on the side of America, which is what he said he was, you don't normalize authoritarianism. What made you decide to focus on Bezos?
- [48:54]
Steve Schmidt
He's an important figure in the collapse of the American republic. He is one of the supreme cowards of the age, addition to culturally being the supreme vulgarian of the United States, with his only real peer being Donald Trump.
- [49:17]
Joanna Coles
His only real peer being Donald Trump
- [49:22]
Steve Schmidt
as a vulgarian. He's a figure of the frivolousness of the excess of the elite. And I Don't. America's never been a country that punishes success. But the constant in your face from the wedding, the cost, and the deluded arrogance that anyone wants to hear from him about anything as some type of sage. He's a person who history is going to remember brutally. He's carving a legacy that's more Henry Ford than Thomas Edison. And what he's going to be remembered for is destroying the public reputation of the Washington Post. What we should be remembered for is breaking his word to Katherine Graham was going to be remembered for all the tawdriness of his escapades with his misses and what he's going to be remembered for is Donald Trump.
- [50:51]
Joanna Coles
Right. What he's going to be remembered for is Donald Trump. Okay, I will try and bear that in mind when I reach for Amazon to order something because it's so convenient. It's hard to give up. But, Steve, you are hard to give up, too. So we're gonna have you back soon, all right, Joanna, we're gonna have you back soon before Trump's birthday.
- [51:15]
Steve Schmidt
Before his birthday.
- [51:16]
Joanna Coles
Before his birthday.
- [51:17]
Steve Schmidt
Eight years old. Four score.
- [51:19]
Joanna Coles
Four score. Four score. Steve, thank you for bearing with us through our technical difficulties. And hopefully next time I see you, I will be in the studio and things will move more smoothly.
- [51:30]
Steve Schmidt
Take care, Joanna.
- [51:35]
Joanna Coles
So wherever you are, a very happy Memorial Day to you. And just don't look at the gas as you put it, in your car. It's the one day you should give yourself a break. Big thanks to our production team, who withstood the technical difficulties with great patience. Ryan Murray, Rachel Passer. Heather. Heather Passaro. And Neil Rosenhaus. So the good news is we have so many Beast Tier members now, there are too many names to read out. And we really appreciate your support.