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- [00:02]
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Steve Schmidt
Tap the banner to learn more and get a'@usaa.com bundle restrictions apply. Before the war started, the midterms were already a political disaster of immense dimensions. Immense dimensions for Maga, for Trump. They're gonna lose up and down the ballot all over the country. The tidal wave is coming. This war is a disaster. We're not winning this war. And that is unpardonable in the United States.
- [01:14]
Joanna Coles
I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast and today's guest is one of the most battle hardened political operatives you can think of. He worked in the Bush White House. He ran the John McCain campaign. I am talking of course about Steve Schmidt. He was a co founder of the Lincoln Project. He's now spearheading Save America and he is one of Donald Trump's most arch and articulate critics. So today we get into some specifics. First, the war and how this is a catastrophic decision for the Republican Party. And those Republicans at Doral on the off site this month where they were all talking about the midterms know that gonna be wiped out. Steve says they know there is a tidal wave coming for them. And also as the master of many political campaigns, he breaks down why Trump himself broke at the economics of Kristi Noem's $220 million campaign featuring herself. He talks about the weirdness of the Florsheim shoes, Trump doling them out to his cabinet and his cabinet wearing them. And he talks about his update on his campaign to persuade King Charles not to come to the States to celebrate America's 250th anniversary because he will be a suck up and a stooge to Donald Trump. So buckle up, it's a bumpy ride. It's full on Steve Schmidt with his warning for America. Steve Schmidt, fantastic to have you back on the Daily Beast podcast. I wanted to waste no time and get straight into it with you as the scold prophet, which is my name for you because of the warning and the ferocity. You bring on the warning with something I'm really wrestling over, which is Trump's rhetoric around the war. And I just wanted to read a line from his Truth Social post that. That he hammered out at midnight. They've been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years. And now I, as the 47th President of the United States, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so. Iran's Navy is gone. Their air force is gone. Missiles, drones and everything else are being decimated, and their leaders have been wiped from the face of the earth. Just what is this? What is this nonsense?
- [04:03]
Steve Schmidt
It's sick and it's fascism. This is how a fascist leader talks. And it was always, in the end, the place that Donald Trump was destined to arrive at. This is the sum of the journey that goes all the way back to Central park in the Central Park Five, and let's lynch them, and decades of intimations towards violence. The campaign rallies where you saw the person behind the podium with the power calling for violence by the mob against the individual over and over and over and over again. You combine that with all the elements of dehumanization which he has become an expert practitioner of, and here we are. And there is no martial leader this side of Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler who talks like this. This is not the language of a president of the United States, at least until now. This is not how a leader of a democracy thinks about war. That war is a terrible thing and you see it commodified, you see it franchised, you see it celebrated, and you see it turned into video content of the lowest common denominator form. It's appalling, morally, spiritually, and it's a terrible affront to the concepts of American patriotism and what Lincoln called when pondering the sacrifices to perpetuate the Union, the last full measure of devotion. It's appalling.
- [06:06]
Joanna Coles
Steve, I actually feel you should be in a pulpit saying this. You're getting a sort of. I'm getting a religious vibe from you now, except not really religious. More concern for America and the Republic of America. How is this playing out? You know, all sorts of Republican operatives, you were, you know, at the center of white hot Republican operations for many years. How is this playing out in the Republican Party? And then, you know, we saw them having their off site at the Trump Doral Hotel in Florida earlier this week. How is this war going to impact the Republicans, do you think, in the run up to the midterms before the
- [06:54]
Steve Schmidt
war started, the midterms were already a political disaster of immense dimensions. Immense dimensions for maga, for Trump. They're going to lose the House majority, they're likely to lose the Senate majority, they're going to lose governors races, they're going to lose up and down the ballot all over the country. For example, in Ohio, you may see a Democratic governor. If the election were tomorrow, you would, you may see a Democratic U.S. senator, you may see David Jolly win in the state of Florida. There are a lot of candidates and a lot of places who are going to win. And that's before the war.
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Joanna Coles
And we just saw a Democrat win in New Hampshire, what had been a traditionally safe Republican seat.
- [07:48]
Steve Schmidt
Right state rep district in Carroll county, out towards the border of Maine, Republican territory, if there ever was any. And you have 28 districts and all sorts of different elections that have flipped over the last, over the last year and a half since Trump has been in office. So the tidal wave is coming. This war is a disaster. We talked about some of the moral dimensions of it, some of the mistakes, if you want to call them that, that have been made, the obliteration of a school of young girls in it. But we're not winning this war. And that is unpardonable. In the United States,
- [08:37]
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- [09:06]
Joanna Coles
when you say we're not winning it, do you understand why we're at war? I mean, I think one of the complicated things is there's been no explanation of why we did this other than there was clearly military intelligence, probably from the Israelis, that there was the opportunity to take out the leadership in Iran.
- [09:27]
Steve Schmidt
You know, I think from a couple of data points that you have American forces essentially functioning as Hessians for the Israelis and the Saudis.
- [09:40]
Joanna Coles
Can you explain what, what Hessians are?
- [09:42]
Steve Schmidt
Hessians were the mercenaries employed by the British against the Continental army, against the Colonial army during the American Revolution. They were mercenaries. And so you see the role of the United States military servicing the strategic interests of the Saudis. A lot of talk about how Israelis manipulated the United States into this, that Netanyahu manipulated Trump, that the Netanyahu cabinet that people like Mike Huckabee are enthralled to, which is filled with the Israeli version of Pete Hegsetz and all the religious nutters that we have here. And so when you look at the totality of it all, what's the war about? Well, there's so many contradictions. So we obliterated, according to Trump, the nuclear program, which apparently obliteration has different meanings to different people that we need to re obliterate it now and re obliterate it and re obliterate it. What Donald Trump started talking about at the inception of the war was that, and it is a war, that its goal was regime change. And we have destroyed a lot of physical assets, but we have hardened, it seems, the regime. And it's important to remember this is an apocalyptic, theocratic, religious regime. When you have some of the nutters like Pete Hegseth talking about Armageddon and the return of Christ. Well, this is a big part of the theology around the ayatollahs, the return of the Mahdi. They, too, believe in the end times and the apocalypse. So it's a wonderful combination to see come together. But this is incoherent. There's no plan. And at the end of the day, strategically, you cannot and there never has been an example of taking and holding territory with air power. And this choke point in the Straits of Hormuz, it's very narrow. You can see across it from side to side, from Oman to Iran. And the Iranians control that territory, and they control what ships can flow through it. So the United States is in the early days of experiencing a very, very, very severe economic shock as we see oil move past the $5, $6, probably into the $7 gallon territory overnight. It's the most severe disruption of oil in the history of the global energy market right now, today, not 1973, 1979. We just haven't experienced it yet in the United States, but we certainly will.
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Joanna Coles
Okay, so, Steve, I want you to explain something to me. You have been incredibly close to power. You've seen power in the White House. You've spent your life working with people who want to run things. You also know. We also know that the American military is incredibly well run. It's a group of highly dedicated, very thoughtful people. How is it possible that we have yet again, or we appear to have yet again put America in a situation where it has underestimated the reaction from other countries that we may well be bombing the Hell out of this feels like America's template, that we assume that America's power from the skies equals victory, equals a country being conquered. And yet time and again, we understand that's not what happens. How do we get into this position?
- [13:59]
Steve Schmidt
Arrogance. I always ask candidates, particularly those that are running for president. I said, what's the most important quality of leadership? When we're sitting around, no cameras on, and there's been no person who has ever gotten the answer right. My view, because I come at that with a point of view, and I think the answer to it is restraint. Restraint is the most important quality of a great leader. And it was something that was understood by Lincoln, something that was understood by fdr, and it is something that is rarely understood in the world of politics. I, and I want to be precise about what I'm saying here, but I don't think that the leadership of the American military necessarily is entitled to the broad dispensation that you gave it in the qualification up front, the version of. For the very senior leadership of. Would you like to board the Delta flight first? General Kaine? General Kaine has some options. He has some prerogatives. General is not in Pete Hegseth's chain of command legally. The general, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is the President's principal military advisor. And 1. I find him mediocre and unimpressive as he stands up there, having remembered the combination of Schwarzkopf and Cheney when they had to communicate serious business to the country back in the first Gulf War, for instance. But putting that aside, he doesn't have to stand up there and listen to Pete Hegseth's insanity. That's a choice. He has every right to say, I'm Senate confirmed, I'm the President's principal military adviser, and Mr. President, I'm not going to debase my uniform by standing up there and listening to this fucking idiot talk about death the way that he talks about it. And I use the word fucking idiot precisely, and I use it in the spirit of Mark Milley, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When Stephen Miller in the first term asked about obliterating boats with Mexican migrants in them off the coast of San Diego, General Milley turned to him in the Oval Office and said what was appropriate to be said, which is, shut the fuck up, Stephen.
- [16:58]
Joanna Coles
He literally said that. Mark Milley actually said that to him.
- [17:00]
Steve Schmidt
He did say that, right? And the difference between that term and this term is the little Eichmann. Now, Stephen, right? He's the one who Says shut the fuck up. To anyone who dared dissent against the insanity. You know, it's a very important thing to, I think, appreciate is the sinking of this submarine, which will, mark my
- [17:24]
Joanna Coles
words, the sinking of the submarine off the coast of Sri Lanka.
- [17:27]
Steve Schmidt
The sinking by the submarine of the Iranian frigate off the coast of Sri Lanka. Ship was unarmed. The order went out. We did not pick up survivors. This is the first sinking of a ship by US submarine since World War II. Why didn't we take the ship prisoner? We certainly could have surfaced behind it and commanded it to be surrendered. It was unarmed. So the bloodlust at hand in the proposition that the US Armed forces are a moral force in a force that fights the nation's wars when necessary, with restraint, that's appropriate under international law and the laws of war. This is a very important concept. And Pete Hegseth has been at war with this concept since the second he was confirmed. And we're seeing some of the consequences of it. We're seeing cannot delink that from the 168 young girls who were killed in an incompetent act by the world's most powerful military. The targeting was wrong. It's unacceptable.
- [18:53]
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- [19:21]
Joanna Coles
screen and what did you think of the messaging around that? The sort of refusal by Donald Trump to accept blame when the investigation came back and said it was a US Tomahawk missile that attacked the school, obviously by accident. No one's suggesting that it was anything other than that, but it's a huge casual toll.
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Steve Schmidt
I mean, it's a version of Alex Preddy and Renee Goode are domestic terrorists, isn't it? Is that there's an absolute incapability of acknowledging a mistake, acknowledging an error, acknowledging a tragedy. And this is the dichotomy that we have to focus on, is that on the one hand, you cannot sincerely talk about war as a tragedy when you're the person who's talking about how honored you are to kill Iranians. This is the language of a Nazi. This is the law of the jungle.
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Joanna Coles
If you're a Republican congressman or woman or Republican senator and you're up for reelection in November, how are you? Well, first of all, how do you think, how panicked are you about everything that's going on? And what mechanism do they have, if any, to indicate that this war is not a good thing for the party?
- [21:01]
Steve Schmidt
Well, I mean, you can tell through the collapse of his polling numbers and their further deterioration and the split within the MAGA party on this issue that this is terrible for Trump. And again, Trump has, though it's hard for me to acknowledge and accept this, the truth is that he has been perceived by the determinative voter to be the strong candidate against weak candidates. And so he doesn't look strong here. He looks incompetent, he looks weak, and he's going to look weaker as this all unfurls out. Now, Republicans who are sitting around the bar at Doral, all meeting together know that they are going to be wiped out. The people who run the campaigns know that they're going to lose. In the words of Trump, they're going to lose bigly. You're going to lose catastrophically. It's going to be an immense. An immense loss. Now, the psychology of it, right? Think about a shipwreck and imagine us out on a big floating board that's sinking, right? But we're still floating, and there's like 50 people on it, and that's all these House members. And every time one of them falls off into the ocean, they're like, oh, look, I made it. That person's gone. They didn't. They're in the water. They're in a drown. Now. That's the fate of all of them. But the drowning won't be in this moment or the next. And so hope springs eternal in March for an election in November. Though they see the writing on the wall, the inherent narcissism in so many of these people is that, though if I run fast enough uphill, the tsunami wave, the waters won't get me. And that will be true for a couple of them who will be the narrowest winners in an election where the water is high and looking at the backs of all their shoes as they're running uphill. But they all know. They know what's coming.
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Joanna Coles
They do know what's coming. That's interesting.
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Steve Schmidt
And there's really nothing they can. There's really nothing they can do about it. They've. The die is cast.
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Joanna Coles
So, speaking at the Doral off site, Mike Johnson acknowledged that there had been a hiccup with Latino and Hispanic voters, with obviously with ice. Kristi Noem is now gone. I wanted you to take us inside those enormous campaigns that operatives run. And in particular, can you explain to us this, I mean, I am astonished that she was able to spend a quarter of a billion dollars or $220 million on this ad campaign telling people, don't come here illegally. She's riding around on a horse looking very glamorous. We've got Mount Rushmore in the background. She's full cosplay, full ice Barbie. And then of course, there's the brilliant moment in the hearings where Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana leads her like a horse to drink and then says, and I've watched your warnings, I went down a spiral of your videos on this where he leads her to drink and basically says, and the President knew about this, did he? And of course she says, yes. And it then transpires that perhaps he didn't. But in terms of understanding how these campaigns work from an operative's point of view, can you explain it?
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Steve Schmidt
Well, sure, I think I can explain what it is that they, what they did with the caveat that there's no precedent for it. There's no precedent for a cabinet secretary taking a quarter billion dollars and awarding that quarter billion dollars through a note bid contracting process to your political cronies who then split up. If the amount of money is $220 million, you're talking about a maximum fee, potentially of $34 million. So the question around this, so wait
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Joanna Coles
a minute, where does the fee come from? When you say maximum fee, what is that fee?
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Steve Schmidt
If you, if you remember, if you remember the television show Mad Men with Don, with Don Drake, of course, of
- [26:01]
Joanna Coles
course, with the heavenly John Howe, the
- [26:04]
Steve Schmidt
way, the way that advertising companies made money and the way that money is made in a political campaign is as a, is by commission, if you're making the ads, and that commission is a percentage of the media buy. So in old school advertising, the industry standard remains the industry standard. California initiative campaigns largely still charge 15%. So if you're buying time, which is you're buying television advertising time from ABC, NBC, whatever that is, you have a million dollars. 15% of that is reserved typically for fees. Now on a presidential campaign, say it's a billion dollars, and let's imagine I'm running a presidential campaign and the media guy says, well, I want to charge 15%, so I'll make $150 million because we're going to spend a billion on TV, that's when you laugh at that person. And that person may get paid a couple million dollars for the placement. But the question around Kristi Noem that no one has quite hit the bullseye on, Joe Negus, the congressman from Colorado, came very, very close. He skimmed it. But here's the question is under the agreement that was signed by the Department of Homeland Security, what is the fee structure for the advertisers for the, for the, for the ad makers, how much did they get in fees? And under that amount, you're going to find out on a subcontractor basis. And there was that question in the hearing. She goes, well, I don't know about the subcontractors, but if you remember, she knew at fine detail all of the metrics about the advertising campaign, but no idea whatsoever about who was placing any of it. But at any rate, you have upwards of $33 million of fees that could be associated with that campaign. And Democrats with subpoena power will be able to determine where did those fees go? Was there a discount below 15%? But there's some number in the amount of millions of dollars that I suspect flowed back to, maybe even to Kristi Noem. Last thing I'll say about this, none of this was a secret. I read about this for months in the Daily Beast. All of the dress up, all of the ads, all of this was out there. It was astonishing. I wrote about it. I've written about it at least half a dozen times, astonished by it. But I suppose there are just moments where everyone focuses and pays attention to something, even though it's out there, even though it's vivid, this was the moment where people in both sides looking to take her out used what was front and center and it all came together. Between the plane, between her abuses of US Citizens, between her corruption, between her arrogance, between her dead eye stupidity. It was the moment where enough was enough. And so she's gone and now she lives outside the MAGA walls and we'll see how she enjoys that, that experience. But the days of living on the military base, flying around in the bedroom, on the plane, the days of the $250 million ad campaign, it's all over.
- [30:11]
Joanna Coles
So, Steve, I mean, totally interesting to hear that breakdown. If you're Donald Trump and you haven't fired anybody yet from your cabinet and the reason that they're there is because they're giving him great loyalty and you've watched Kristi Noem begin to tip over into what could be a problem, you're beginning to See, the poll numbers are beginning to crater, especially among Hispanic and Latino voters. And she's been in charge of ice, which has been scooping up brown people from our streets with, you know, masked people. You've witnessed two American citizens shot in cold blood in daylight. Why is it the ad campaign and the $220 million, the thing that is her fatal flaw? What is it that Trump responds to that means that's the moment she's done?
- [31:13]
Steve Schmidt
I think he has a very subjective point of view about when it's bad for Trump. So if you go back to the Apprentice days and you look at the circus that Donald Trump's presiding over, it doesn't particularly matter to Trump if Gary Busey and Meat Loaf are fighting with each other in one episode or Best of Friends in the next episode. He just kind of floats above it. Now, in this instance, nobody, nobody can go in there and tell him, hey, your approval numbers are at 30%. There's no upside to that. There's no person who walks in there to take the bullet. Right. This is the full Fuhrer dynamic playing out. There's no incentive for any of these people to go tell him the truth, just like there's no incentive for anyone around Putin to go tell him the truth about anything. So what the best you can do on the margins? And remember, when it comes to Kristi Noem, her package was with Corey Lewandowski, who offends people by the thousands. So at the moment, when there's opportunity to pay back Cory, to pay back her, and people can go say, she could hurt Trump or she is hurting Trump, or she took advantage of Trump and what was premised. And you can go back to Brad Parscale. I remember this from the Lincoln Project in 2020, when Brad Parscale was fired after ads that the Lincoln Project ran that talked about how he had gone out on Trump's dimensions and bought a couple townhouses, a Ferrari, a boat, and that drives Trump crazy. Trump, psychologically, is the guy who wants his boys in their Florsheim shoes.
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Joanna Coles
Mm.
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Steve Schmidt
Let's talk about obedient, capitulant, not predatory Trump. Trump is the gangster. They work for the gangster. They don't get to do their own con. They don't get to take $220 million in Trump's name and glorify themselves. So that's what that was about.
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Joanna Coles
Okay, that's fascinating. So he's only. He is allowed to do that, but he felt he was being taken advantage of.
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Steve Schmidt
Absolutely.
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Joanna Coles
Okay. Riveting. A riveting analysis.
- [34:08]
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- [35:08]
Joanna Coles
so let's discuss, please, the Florsheim shoes. As a man, can you explain that? Because obviously, if it were a woman president, she would not be buying members of her cabinet shoes and expecting everybody to wear them. That's an insane, insane idea. So why does Donald Trump a. Why does he love these $148 black shiny Florsheim shoes? And why is he buying them in bulk for his cabinet? And why are they wearing them? Why are they wearing them? I mean, poor Marco Rubio didn't even get the right size.
- [35:47]
Steve Schmidt
The madness of all of this has to start with talking about how Trump will look at you. Imagine your shoe size, and that's your size. That's why Marco Rubio is walking around in these cheap pleather shoes, pre shined like marching band shoes. This is, and I just, like, I just want to say is an old Italian proverb where you tell much about the man from the shoes and without going down into the rabbit hole here,
- [36:32]
Joanna Coles
but I think we should go to the rabbit hole. We should go into the rabbit hole
- [36:36]
Steve Schmidt
for the Porsche, where it's always John Fetterman has always driven me batshit crazy with the brown sweatsuit. He's a United States senator. Comport yourself with some fucking dignity. With some dignity. And not only should you be in a suit, you should be in a suit that's tailored properly. And one of the first things you do, and I say this to young men, I say this to my son. I say this to my son's friends. I said, grown men should wear shine shoes. They should be laced up. That's what a dress shoe is. And these are children's shoes. These are marching band shoes. There's no man, the chief American diplomat is wearing these shoes to go meet with his European counterparts. It is shocking.
- [37:38]
Joanna Coles
Well, it's going to look like a child dressing up in his mother's shoes.
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Steve Schmidt
It is that these are grown men being dressed in these cheap, shitty shoes that they're afraid to take off by Trump, who then sends them out into the world wearing the shoes where they do the business of the nation in front of serious men and women.
- [38:07]
Joanna Coles
But, Steve, it's shocking. But why has he settled on these shoes? And actually, I will say $148 is not that cheap for a pair of shoes. I mean, you can get shoes cheaper than that. But why has he settled on these particular shoes? What is it that they represent that Trump so loves for his people?
- [38:29]
Steve Schmidt
I have no idea. Right? I have no idea. Is he. Is it sadism that I can make all of these men wear these Florsheim shoes there? I mean, part of the story is that, you know, Trump was looking down at. At the shoes. I've always done this in interviews. You know, I, you know, someone came in for an interview, I look at their shoes. Are the shoes shined? Are they squared away? Are they attentive to. Are they attentive to detail? And so he looks down at Marco Rubio and J.D. vance's shoes, and they got holes in them. And apparently Trump is in the Oval Office, and he does some version of, Jesus Christ, I have to buy you guys shoes. And he bought them these Florsheim shoes. And those are Trump shoes. And now Trump likes to give away the shoes. I know people who've met Trump back in the day when Trump had the ties, the Trump ties. Trump would always hand out ties, 3, 4 ties to anyone he was. To anybody he was meeting. He is the quintessential queen's hustler. He's the New York realtor guy. He's given away stakes, he's given away ties. He's. He's giving away shoes. Right? It's all part of the shtick. It's all part of the. Part of the charisma. Right? He's, hey, he's a good guy. He's giving you these. He's giving you these trinkets. And as people get in on it, too, there's this story about, you know, Usha and JD Vance go out to dinner. And Usha left little coins. Vice presidential Second lady coins for the tip for all the waitresses. Right. So everyone gets their trinkets from the top of the maggot pyramid.
- [40:26]
Joanna Coles
I was laughing at that story. We covered that story in the Beast today. And then there was a wonderful aside that the coins that Karen Pence had as second lady were now available on ebay from anywhere between 49 to $350.
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Steve Schmidt
Beautiful coin.
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Joanna Coles
Yeah. I was just thinking, who on earth would want Mother Pence coins as part of their collect? What on earth would you do with them? How would you display them?
- [40:52]
Steve Schmidt
You know your family member has a shopping problem, right. On ebay when the mother pants coin. Your wives in the mail, in the FedEx box.
- [41:01]
Joanna Coles
But explain to me as a man, because I just can't believe that this would happen with women. But explain to me as a man how you would feel if your boss gave you a pair of shoes and wanted you and your male colleagues to all wear the same shoes.
- [41:19]
Steve Schmidt
I feel like, get the fucking out of here. I'm not going to wear that shoe. Right. There's no. There's no chance I would wear that shoe. Right? Like, at a personal. At a personal level. I'm. I'm incapable of wearing that shoe. I would never. I would never. I would never do it. And. And I have a judgment about the people who would go on and what that. What that judgment is, is that they're deeply unserious people. They lack a spine. They lack conviction. They lack auton. They lack the ability. They can't look at Donald Trump and be like, great shoe, Mr. President, but I like these.
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Joanna Coles
Well, also, where does it stop? What if he turns up one day and he's got suits for all of them? Are they all expected to wear the suits that he wants them to wear?
- [42:11]
Steve Schmidt
A lot of them have the gold pen on. Now, I always like this story about General Marshall is FDR famously addressed everybody by their first name, including King George. The first person who ever addressed him by his first name in his life outside of childhood was Franklin Roosevelt. And General Marshall asked him to stop calling him George and asked that he be addressed by his rank, which was General. He was Chief of Staff of the United States Army. He was a formal man. And so it's not an act of generosity. It's not a quirky act of generosity. It is an act of control. The demand for obedience, for submission. And it's a real window into the culture. There's the famous Solzhenitsyn story that he tells about Stalin at the party meeting and how that the submissive sycophantic Politburo was afraid to stop clapping. And as the story goes, the first man who ultimately does stop clapping is later arrested. And the lesson important to him is never be the first to stop clapping, right? And when you live in a country, we have to think about the consequences of being the first to stop clapping. That means you're not living in a free country anymore. And when you look at Marco Rubio, you know a couple of things about him, right, as a human being. And what you know about him is that he knows that Trump is what we know Trump to be, because he has condemned Trump in his own words on many occasions. But step by step, he went down a path for ambition's sake, where every principle, every duty, every aspect of his oath was subordinated until he became a man standing in Trump's shadow, so committed to the lies that he stands there in shoes given to him by that man three sizes too big, without complaint, detestable. Every father in this country, right, all of them hope that our sons don't wind up to be like a Marco Rubio. So he's a quizzling.
- [45:25]
Joanna Coles
He's a quizzling. He's a quizzling. So, Steve, last time we talked, you were busy preparing a campaign to send to the UK to warn King Charles, talking of King George, his descendant, to warn him not to come here to attend Trump's 250th celebrations of. Of the Republic. Where are you with that campaign? And, of course, since we last talked, also, I should point out, Andrew, formerly known as Prince Andrew, King Charles's younger brother, was arrested over and questioned for 11 hours by the police over his connections with the Epstein affair.
- [46:11]
Steve Schmidt
That, you know, speaking of Prince Andrew, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. It's really. We talk about this age of artificial intelligence and deep fakes and all the slop, but it really speaks to the power of photojournalism, right, to capture this indelible moment of the defenestrated Andrew in the back of a police car, the shock of the loss of his privileges and his entitlements and justice coming due, even for the son of Queen Elizabeth. And if you were Kristi Noem and Pete Agseth and Pam Bondi, that's a picture worth studying, worth thinking about, worth contemplating, because for them, they all have a future that looks a lot like Sarah Ferguson's to me when you consider their prospects in the medium to long term. And as they say, the Days are long and the years are short. And we're going to get there really fast. And they're all going to have a lot of time to think about the things that they did, like Andrew and Fergie. Now, we're prepared. And you have communicated publicly that it would be best for the king not to come to the United States and be involved in this. And there's been no announcement from Buckingham palace of April visit to coincide with what would be the 250th anniversary of the independence of the country. We start, you know, in the spring here. There's a lot of events, a lot of things happening. We have Donald Trump's birthday on June 19, which is flag Day. And the point, again, is a really serious one. The first king, who was a great king, by the way, George Virginia, who came to American soil, came at the invitation of the president as the world was spiraling into the abyss, as fascism had drawn its knife and held it to the throat of the democracies. And Franklin Roosevelt knew what was coming, and he wanted to build affinity between the British and American peoples. There was not a lot of affinity. There was not a special relationship. The United States was a country filled with Catholics, country filled with Irishmen who had no affections for the British crown. The king comes to George Washington's tomb. That's the first place he goes aboard the presidential yacht, the Potomac, and he goes into the crypt to pay his respects to a man that George III said was the greatest of this or any age, because of his humility, because he could have been a Caesar, he could have been a tyrant, he could have been a king. And he chose instead to retire, to set in motion a peaceful transition of power that endured until Donald Trump broke it. And so this is a moment of world crisis. This is a moment of American crisis. And the king of England, given the sacrifices of so many Americans within living lifetime, should be very cognizant of his obligations and the crown's obligations to the American people, not to the leadership of a party, not to the leadership of a faction. So the king, who is not naive about politics and the men and women around him who are not naive about either politics or diplomacy, you have to appreciate that in this moment, there is no neutral position.
- [50:35]
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- [51:04]
Joanna Coles
So what would you do if you're the King, if you're advising the king, who's under enormous pressure to keep up relations, even if they are just public relations with the states, because he's such an important ally, even given Donald Trump, Donald Trump's presidency, how do you think he should handle this? Have you had a sense that they know what you're planning if he were to come?
- [51:28]
Steve Schmidt
Well, I mean, it's been, it's been in the media. There's been, there's. There's been enough, I think, talk about it. And I think that more broadly, the Buckingham palace should have a keen appreciation, including that His Majesty's ambassador is Peter Mendelsohn, is that given the extraordinary circumstances and the connections to Epstein and the connections to his brother and the connections to Trump, is that discretion is the better part of valor here, is that there are 10 things that could go wrong for everything that could conceivably go right. And again, the endurance of the relationship is with the American people. And 70% of the American people are opposed to this. And so if you come and stand in a moment in time, when Donald Trump is doing the many things that he's doing, it will tarnish the crown and it will tarnish the relationship. This is not a place for the British sovereign to be. There's a lot of different ways the King can show his respect to the American people, to the United States, and again, we the people. There's a lot of ways for him to show his respect and his affection to the country without coming and appearing as a Donald Trump stooge in a fascist pageantry that follows what Donald Trump communicated last night about his enthrallment to killing. So at a moment in time, when you look at Charles and the totality of his life, the difficulties in his life, the strangeness of it, this is it. He's a man who's dealt with cancer, who's in his 70s. These are big moments. There are questions that are fundamental to the endurance of the Crown itself that are not my place to talk about as an American. But his brother has put him into a difficult position. Donald Trump has put him into a difficult position. And like I said, the Save America movement doesn't want to be in a fight with the Crown, but will defend, will defend the proposition of the United States in this anniversary year, from the grotesquery of all of the submissions, all of the appeasements to Donald Trump. The King should understand something about his grandfather and about his uncle. His grandfather was the King because his uncle didn't have the fortitude and he was a fascist and he was an appeaser, but his grandfather was not. And at a moment in history, the King of England should not be standing with an American fascist. What he should be doing is standing for the rights of, of English men and women, which means holding the line against an American fascist.
- [54:59]
Joanna Coles
Well, Steve, you have to promise to keep us up to date. We will be waiting for the announcement of whether or not the King is coming in April, and you'll be the first person we're calling to get a comment, I'm sure. I remember after you came on and did the interview and said that you were planning to unleash holy hell with a campaign in the UK it felt if the king were to announce he was coming, that it got an enormous amount of coverage in the uk. So you will be the first person that we call to find out more. And as ever, you have an incredibly unique turn of phrase. You are wasted not in a pulpit. I don't care if you don't even have a religion. The religion of the doom prophet Steve Schmidt and the warning. You're your own kind of secular religion, I think. But, but thank you for spending time with us this morning. So interesting. I guess my final question to you, actually, we've talked a lot about Marco Rubio and him swimming in Daddy's shoes. J.D. vance has been silent as far as we can tell on this wall. He's very much taken a backseat. Is that strategic, do you think, on his behalf?
- [56:12]
Steve Schmidt
I think that one of the most important things, if you want to understand what's coming down the road, is to really pay careful attention to the Tucker Carlson interview with Mike Huckabee. And you see in that all of the strains of this twisted modern maga movement and what the fault lines are. And you can see how Tucker Carlson intends to run for president and you can see how that differentiates him from both Marco Rubio and from J.D. vance. So Rubio, when it comes to the war, Rubio cannot escape the war any more than Rumsfeld can.
- [57:09]
Joanna Coles
Right.
- [57:09]
Steve Schmidt
But J.D. vance is not seen as central to it and has some space to say, well, depending on what grace Trump gives him. And Rubio and Vance will be competing for this claim to who gets to author the revisionist history. So six months from now, everything that they said in the first week of this war will be buried under 150ft of bullshit as Pompeii was buried in ash. And it's going to be very difficult. Archaeologically right for the MAGA mind to dig back through all of it to what everybody was saying at the beginning. So however it ends, we know that Marco Rubio is identified completely with the bombing and the regime change. But how does JD Vance come out of this in the end? And how does he bring Trump out with him? Is it in Trump's interest to break JD Vance's way? Is it in Trump's interest to break Marco Rubio's way in the end of the day? For the man who can make other men wear his shoes, we know that he can bend them to whatever version of truth it is that he's selling on that day. We're at war with East Asia. We're not at war with East Asia. We've always been at war with East Asia. We've never been at war with East Asia. It's all at the whim of Donald Trump. So we'll see in this psychodrama that plays out over the next couple of years, where what happens tomorrow has no attachment to what was said today or yesterday or the day before, where it can all be made up again like a new reality show episode, not in the real world, but inside that MAGA primary, 100%.
- [59:21]
Joanna Coles
Well, I'm confident that you will do your very best to hold truce to account, Steve Schmidt.
- [59:27]
Steve Schmidt
We'll do it. Good to see you.
- [59:29]
Joanna Coles
Thank you. So I think my favorite part of the conversation was really the stuff about the shoes. I mean, come on, you can take the girl out of fashion. You can't take fashion out of the girl. I'm obsessed by the idea that a row of men would sit there all wearing the same shoes. That would never happen with women. And it's just a so strange. Why would Marco Rubio proud? Marco Rubio? Well, not that proud because he has done a 180 about Trump, but nevertheless, why would he be photographed in shoes which were clearly three sizes too big? And do you think. And I should have asked this to Steve Schmidt, but now I'm thinking about it, it's kind of obvious. Of course Trump knew that the shoes were too big for Marco and he ordered them anyway. I can't believe that Marco Rubio was. Was wearing them. It was sort of insane. Anyway, that was my favorite part of the conversation, but I'm very intrigued to know what your favorite part is. So feel free to comment on YouTube. Don't forget to join the Daily Beast. Subscribe to the podcast. You get tons of extra content once you become a subscriber. Become a beebeast tier member and you get tons of extra content. I and don't forget, as our first lady would have us bee beast, bibist, bibeast. Otherwise bibist. Very strange. I'm sorry to hear that she felt she needed to tell us it was lonely at the top. At the top of what? The Tower of Mar? A Lago. I don't know. But for those of you who missed it, the first lady was talking at the White House to celebrate International Women's Day and she was a couple of days late actually. But no matter. She talked about how lonely lonely it is at top. Very lonely. Top is lonely. We'll see you tomorrow. Have a good rest of your weekend. So the good news is we have so many bee beast tier members now there are too many names to read out. And we really appreciate your support. Thanks to our production team. Definitely. Rogerino, Ryan Murray, Rachel Passer, Heather Passaro,
- [61:38]
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