The Lincoln Project Founder - Steve Schmidt | PBD Podcast | Ep. 308
On this episode of the PBD Podcast, Steve Schmidt joins the show! Steve Schmidt is an American political and corporate strategist. He has worked on Republican political campaigns, including those of President George W. Bush, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Arizona Senator John McCain during his 2008 presidential campaign. Schmidt has been extremely critical of former President Donald Trump and of the GOP for supporting him. Schmidt is a founder of The Lincoln Project, a group founded to campaign against former President Trump. It became the most financially successful Super-PAC in American history, raising almost $100 million to campaign against Trump's failed 2020 re-election bid.
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Why would you fat on Joliet when we got fed David?
Value payment, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we can't no value to hate it.
I run, homie, look what I become.
I'm the humble one.
Okay, today we have a special podcast.
I always respect anybody that is willing to go on any podcast and talk game.
I got a lot of respect for people like that.
Before we were going live, I was telling him, I said, Steve, why does everybody love you?
And he was getting ready to answer.
I said, let's just wait till the podcast starts for him to explain to us why everybody loves him.
But let me explain who he is.
In 2007, he was recognized as the campaign manager of the year.
He's done a lot of different work.
He's been the political and corporate strategist with experience in campaigns with President Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and John McCain.
He's worked as a vice chair at Edelman, advised Fortune 500 corporations, later on became MSNBC political analyst.
He gained attention for his critical stance on Donald Trump and the Republican Party, eventually renouncing the GOP.
I think as of December of 2020, you became a Democrat or 2021.
One of those two dates, you became a Democrat.
And in 2019, he co-founded the Lincoln Project, a super PAG aimed at opposing Trump's 2020 reelection.
However, he left the group in February of 2021.
He is currently the founder of Warning Newsletter, a YouTube channel and podcast.
It's actually a good YouTube channel.
We're going to put the link below for people to be able to go see.
He gives us feedback.
You may or may not agree what he has to say, but he gives his point of view.
And then last but not least, I always think about if somebody was to play a role of me in a movie, who I would want to play the guy, right?
It's a very important, like I would like John Bernthal.
I'm a big fan of John Bernthal.
But imagine in a 2012 HBO movie called Game Change, Woody Harrelson plays you.
That's exactly what happened.
And our guest today, Steve Schmidt.
Steve, thank you for being on the podcast.
It's great to be with you, guys.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah.
So why do people love you?
What is this with you, man?
I guess it's the good hair, right?
Killing the game.
Look, you know, you get into politics and you assert a conviction.
You know, for every person who cheers you, there's one out there that wants to hang you.
And that's the reality in the country today is we have a real lack of tolerance, right?
You know, for somebody hearing something they disagree with.
And really at an emotional level, at an adult level, at a pragmatic level, they just can't handle it.
I know a lot of people, a lot of people would say with you guys, when what you did with Lincoln Project, for people who don't know, maybe if you do or you don't know, Lincoln Project, many would say you guys played a big role in President Trump not getting reelected.
Okay, I think a lot of people would say that, right?
I think that's right.
I think that's what the reputation would be because you were able to get a lot of people from the Republican side to not want to vote for Trump and you were trashing him, bashing him nonstop.
And there's obviously a lot of controversy that came afterwards with Lincoln Project.
We'll talk about that.
But at first, you know, I want to talk about your background because there's only about 10 of you in America today that can talk about what it is to win a campaign, lose a campaign, mistakes you make, things you do right, things you do wrong.
I remember one time I'm in LA at Wayne Hughes' house in Malibu, and I'll never forget he brought the campaign manager at the time of Gillespie.
Am I saying, what's his name?
Something Gillespie?
Anyways, it was two people.
One was for Clinton's campaign manager, and he brought Bush's campaign manager.
Maybe he was one of the two.
And they debated for an hour and a half, friendly debate, but they debated for an hour and a half.
One of them eventually later on ended up running for governor in Virginia.
Ted Gillespie.
Ted, that's what it is.
Yeah.
And then the other one, very gentle-mannered guy.
He was Bush's guy.
And just sitting there, you're watching this.
You're thinking they're going to talk policies the entire time.
But it was all strategy on how to get the other person to win or lose.
So for you, let's go to your background, like who you were before, how you came into this business, and then we'll go into Lincoln Project.
So before you got into politics, maybe walk us through who you were in high school and 10th grade, 11th grade, foreign classmates together.
Who is Steve?
I was, you know, I was a striver, I think, of trying to please, right?
So I was on the football team, but I was also playing in the marching band for competitions.
I was vice president of the class.
I was an Eagle Scout.
I was, you know, president of the National Honor Society, all that stuff.
And then I went to college and I wound up being the scholar of my pledge class in the fraternity.
And I got a 1.9 GPA that semester.
So I rebelled in my college years, but I grew up in a middle-class town, North Plainfield, New Jersey.
There's a documentary out right now called Telemarketers about the largest telemarketing scam in American history.
All these guys were from the town I grew up in.
They were two classes ahead of me.
It was a overwhelmingly Italian-American town, but very ethnic.
I remember my mother, when I was nine or 10 years old, I asked her, why doesn't dad go to church with us?
And she took a deep sigh and she goes, you know, your dad's a Protestant.
And it was like, what's a Protestant?
There were Jews, there were Catholics, and across the Little Creek was an all-black city.
And those were the Baptist churches, right?
So it was an ethnic, melting pot, working class, suburban, bedroom, New Jersey community, kind of coming in age of Ronald Reagan's America.
I distinctly remember in 1979, really the first issue that had consciousness of that you were drawn to watching the news, what's going on, was the Iranian hostage crisis.
And so followed that race, always loved politics, and, you know, was drawn to it from a little kid, you know, working on campaigns as a volunteer, all that stuff.
Now, were mom and dad talking politics in the house?
Were they involved or they had no interest?
So this is purely you.
Yeah, purely me.
Got it.
Interesting.
Okay, so then later on, what's your, you know, how do you end up working with President Bush, Arnold, and McCain?
How does that happen?
That happens after a decade on the road as an itinerant campaign worker, right?
You know, going from campaign to campaign.
Had a Mitsubishi eclipse.
Nice.
I own as well.
I owned one.
Turbo.
It was a turbo.
I owned one big pot, one big spoon.
I had a stereo, right?
They got stolen out of that Mitsubishi eclipse.
So that was gone.
But like I had my clothes and you would go to whatever campaign and really had an opportunity to live all over the country.
So I lived in Pikeville, Kentucky, Sylacauga, Alabama, South Bend, Indiana.
And it really gave me an impression of the country.
It's kind of my career moves into national politics.
I wind up working in the White House and doing all this stuff that when I look at politics like right now, I mean, I've never been cognizant of a moment where there's more complete detachment in Washington from what's going on in real people's lives out in the out in the country.
I just drove across the country, 4,200 mile road trip, and my overwhelming impression was how little of what I ever see on the news has anything to do with these people's lives out there.
So I wasn't somebody who went to Harvard and Yale, got an internship for the federal judge, wound up in Washington and kind of wound up in the in the White House.
I came from a track of on the political campaigns.
And at the end of the day, you might have a thousand people working on a political campaign, but there's about 10, maybe less that are really calling the shots, making the decision about how to play an extremely complicated game.
That's one of the greatest just stepping back from all the policies.
Politics being diagnosed.
It is the greatest non-lethal competition in the world is the race for the presidency of the United States.
It's an intense non-stop experience.
And my experience of having lived out there in the country, I think definitely prepared me better for it.
For those three campaigns you're talking about.
So let me ask.
So you ever seen a movie Moneyball with Billy Bean, Brad Pitt?
So we've had Paul Manafort here.
We've had Roger Stone here.
We've had a lot of different kinds of people here to get perspective.
We've had Jen Jenka Uger from Young Turks.
We've had a lot of people, Cuomo.
And I ask the people that are in the space, in baseball, they finally figured out that the most important stat for a hitter is what?
On-base percentage.
That's what matters.
If you want to sell the audience, you got to hit home runs.
But if you want to win and go in the playoffs, it's on-base percentage, right?
Roger Stone talks about certain it factor that a person's got to have, right?
Just a couple nights ago, we're having dinner, and I'm talking about why some content creators do very well.
And we wrote out a bunch of different names, and we give all of them grades, okay?
And the highest grade, I think, was Rogan had the highest grade out of everybody.
And these are four things we wrote it on.
Number one is content.
He can pretty much talk on almost many different levels of content, right?
So what is the content you're providing?
Number two is entertainment.
You're entertaining to listen to.
Number three is personality.
It's an attractive personality that you have.
It's not an annoying, obnoxious personality you don't like.
And number four is storytelling.
You're good at telling stories, right?
Now, that's for content creating.
In politics, and then in sports, you know, I'll talk to Shaq or Kobe and I'll say what matters the most?
Superstar, GM, or team owner to win a championship?
Or head coach, right?
If you own it, is it the owner that makes the team win a championship because he's committed to a championship, so he spends the money?
Is it the head coach?
Is it the GM or is it the superstar you got to get like a, you know, Giannis or LeBron or Kobe or MJ, right?
What is that?
For winning elections, whether it's governor or president, for you that's been in this space your entire life, okay, and you're a killer.
You're hated by those who can't stand you because you can get as dirty as anybody else.
There was a part that, you know, I think in the interview, 60 Minutes that was doing an interview with you guys and they asked, it sounds like you're willing to get as dirty as possible to make sure this man doesn't win.
They're like, yeah, absolutely.
It wasn't like you guys were hesitating.
You're not trying to be, well, no, that's not your play.
You're just like, no, this is who we are.
We want to make sure this guy never wins and doesn't step another foot in the White House, right?
Okay.
From your experience, to get somebody to win, what things do you need from the supporting cast?
And then from the other side, what qualities does the talent of the candidate need to stand a chance at winning?
So at the beginning of the Bush campaign, it's clear that John Kerry is going to be the nominee.
And so the Bush campaign turns on.
And I was in charge of anything that had to do with John Kerry.
It was kind of the tip of the spear in the campaign.
And so as the campaign turns on, If we were a football team, our first 10 plays were three turnovers, personal foul, two offsides, and a delay of game.
And we get a call, about 10, 12 of us, and it says, be at the White House after work.
You're going to meet the president up in the residence.
He wants to talk to everybody.
And we were like, oh, fuck.
We're getting fired like a week into this.
And so we go up there and Carl Rove is sitting there.
President walks in.
He was in a really good mood.
And Bush is an intense guy.
I think you see him on TV now.
I look at him like my dad, right?
He's mellowed out a little bit.
He spent all the time painting it.
Yeah, like he said, but he was an intense guy.
And he came in.
And question he asked, he goes, who's the most experienced political consultant in the room?
And everyone looks at Rove and he goes, it's me, right?
He goes, he goes, he goes, my dad's 80, 84, 88, 92 campaign.
He goes through this whole thing.
And he says, American presidential campaign has an accidental genius to it in that it never ends.
In Canada, they have an election.
They call it.
It's going to be in 90 days or in Britain, 120 days.
This goes on for years.
And what he says is, this is a character test.
He goes, all my flaws, you guys will try to cover them up, mitigate them.
He goes, it never work.
Never work.
You go, he goes, you are seen for who you are.
Now, David Axelrod, he expressed this by saying, it's like an MRI for the soul.
That's what a presidential campaign is.
And so Bush at the end of this meeting goes, he goes, we're going to win.
He goes, because John Kerry's an asshole.
Bush says this at the meeting, right?
But I've always had that frame, right?
It's a character test.
So in the campaign, what do you need?
You need harmony, right?
As an organization, you need vision to communicate to the country.
Typically, and what will happen again is a frame and a lens of what we share in common.
What unites the American people, a vision for moving the country forward with a recognition that at the end of the election, right, we're all living here together and all of our kids are going to be living here together.
And I think some of the people you talked about, you know, I served in the White House and I've run big campaigns.
Lincoln Project hit as hard as it could hit.
There was not one ad that was an untruthful ad, not one that was ever called out.
Every ad was an assertion of opinion and it was an assertion of belief.
Some people may not like that, but one of the things we have in the country that's gone off the rails is an expectation that everyone who does this is a serial liar who's going to lie to you 35,000 times.
And that is a huge problem in this country right now.
But go back to it.
So this is very interesting to say, and we're going to come back to the credibility of Lincoln Project in a few minutes, but I want to stay on this.
So what an interesting thing.
I've had President Bush at an event before, the same event we had Kobe, we had President Bush there as well.
I had a 45-minute conversation back with him, and then he hit the stage.
It was very interesting watching how he is.
And a lot of people that couldn't stand him afterwards, they were, you know, hey, you know, I like his approach because he talked about his flaws, mistakes he made, alcohol.
It was very interesting on how he is today.
You're saying he was intense back then.
But go back.
I want to know what matters more.
Is it the best campaign manager I heard, a shitty candidate with the best campaign manager, is that person going to win?
Or is it you need a candidate that has this, this, this, this, and this?
For example, the reason why many people liked what President Trump did, he was the best anti-establishment guy that we've seen in a long time.
And many would say you're 100% establishment guy, right?
From your background and who you work with, the guys you represent, a lot of people put those guys as establishment.
Many would.
Let me ask the question and you can rebuttal, say whatever you want to say.
So, but what I want to know, like when I watched him, a lot of people would say, dude, this guy's never going to, a 15-year show he has on TV, right?
And then he's a billionaire in New York.
He's loved by everybody.
Tupac talks about him.
Rappers talk about him.
But to be a president, there's no way.
This is just a publicity stunt.
And by the way, most of us thought it was just a publicity stunt.
He's a marketer.
All he's trying to do is make himself relevant and put himself out there.
And then all of a sudden, when he wins, you're like, what the hell?
Hillary Clinton with the resume that she had, everybody thought it's done.
This is her job.
She's going to be the first female president.
She was devastated.
The rumors and stories about her being upset, screaming, hollering, even though she made a phone call.
And then you go look at Biden and you say, how did this guy win?
You know, boring, can't keep him, but maybe because they hated the other guy.
So is campaign different on every year because it varies based on who wins.
And then Obama, you look at a one-term senator ends up doing this.
And then you look at President Bush, you know, and then you look at.
So is there a correlation for you to say, Pat, these are five things you got to look at that somebody stands a chance at winning?
Is there something like that in your world?
I think that it's not so much five, but here's the test.
Here's the question you're asking.
So during McCain's campaign, I used to have to go and have secret meetings with Roger Ailes.
You'd go up and you'd see Roger.
And they'd bring you up, which you found out later, in the elevator that emptied right into his office that he would bring the women up in right later.
And so I've been in the Roger Ailes secret elevator.
You'd go in there.
Full disclosure, he never made a pass.
He never made a pass.
He didn't have to do any twirling.
He never made a pass.
There was nothing going on.
There was always a huge cheeseburger waiting.
Oh, wow.
Right.
So you'd have lunch with him.
Never had a meeting with him where he didn't unlock the gun that he kept under his safe, wave the gun around the room, talk about, honest to God.
I believe it.
Right.
Talk about he would pull the gun out from the gun safe.
He would talk about some rapid response team that was 10 minutes from his house because the terrorists were going to get him.
I mean, he was as big a whack job as I've ever encountered in my life sitting there, but brilliant, right?
Media-wise.
And what he said was, and he pulls out a frame of a Time magazine, but it's just empty.
And he says, this is what you got to do.
He goes, you got to put the guy's picture or the woman on the Time magazine with the word president.
Just look at the picture.
Oh, wow.
Right.
And he goes, if you look at the picture, right, and you start laughing, right?
You're like, the fuck, right?
You know, that person's not going to make it.
It's as simple as that.
So you know, right?
There are people, right?
Like when you see Tom Brady, right?
When you see an Aaron Rodgers, right, they come along once a generation.
There is a John Kennedy.
There is a Barack Obama.
There is a Bill Clinton.
There's a Ronald Reagan.
People that are skilled.
And then there are people that are practitioners of politics that have a genius of sort.
Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln.
When you can combine that talent for politics, extroversion, comfort with people, that you understand, and most people in politics don't understand this.
Culture is at the headwaters.
Politics is below the culture.
Politics is not the headwaters where culture flows out of.
Most politicians, right, think it's politics up here.
They also think the race is about them as opposed to the American people who think it's about them.
So the skill, the endurance, the character test, you just know looking at that person if they can play ball.
Great example, Scott Walker.
So Scott Walker, governor of Governor of Wisconsin, you just looked at him as a guy, people talking about who run campaigns.
It was like, this guy's a one AA quarterback.
He's not playing in the league, right?
He's not going to be.
This guy could be the next president.
And it's the same with DeSantis, right?
And, you know, DeSantis is just a guy, right, who is not going to make it at the presidential level.
And the difference, and I say this to people all the time.
I just said this to somebody who's thinking about doing this someday.
And I said, the difference between running for governor and senate is the difference between being a commercial pilot, running for presidents, being an astronaut.
These two things have nothing to do with each other.
And so it's a brutal test.
In what way?
So you're saying Senate and governor is different than president.
In what way?
Because some would say DeSantis was one of the most successful governors during COVID, even though you guys made a video saying he's the worst governor.
But I'm in Florida because of him.
But why would you say governor Senate is different than president?
Because a governor in a Senate race can compensate with television advertising that can make a difference.
In a presidential race, none of the advertising really particularly matters, right?
It is about an accumulation of information that sets a narrative and a frame nationally that in the end falls into a frame of a choice, right?
So some people look at a presidential election incorrectly.
It'll say it's a referendum on the incumbent.
It's never a referendum.
It's a choice, right?
Typically between A and B.
And in this election, it may be between A, B, C, D, and E, right?
You may have five known candidates ultimately, ultimately on a ballot.
But typically, right, the race is a choice.
And that's what it all devolves to.
So, okay, so to me, what I took away from what you said is culture over politics.
Some guys think about politics because that's the world they're in.
So all they talk about is politics, like a DeSantis.
Policies, he can outschool anybody because JAG, military, Congress, he's been around, so that's his world.
But the average person doesn't relate to that.
Kind of like how you said 4,300 miles, you went across to see what for 4,200 miles, what people are thinking or talking.
That's not their language.
Their language is a different language.
Do you think that's why Trump did so well in he won 2016?
What Trump is at its core is a philosopher of fuck youism.
Okay.
So you have 60% of the country that's living paycheck to paycheck.
40% don't have $400 cash available.
So one of the things, right, just in this moment that we're constantly told in the country by the media, and I don't like the phrase the media because it is fragmented, it's not monolithic.
But the thing that we're told over and over again as a construct is that the country is A, hopelessly divided and B, evenly divided.
It's not true.
75% of the country politically does not want the Biden-Trump rematch.
We agree on that.
75% is a big number.
You have three out of four people in the country.
So that includes people who like Trump, don't like Trump, like Biden, don't like Biden, don't want the matchup.
When you have trust that collapses to the degree that it is collapsed across the board, every institution, Catholic Church, Boy Scouts, in the culture, now the military is going over the cliff as well, right?
Collapse of trust.
When you lower the expectations to zero, which is that people have no expectation that government's going to do anything for them, when you take away all expectation, you get a guy like Trump who says, well, I'll deliver a fuck you to the people that you blame for the loss of the American dream, the loss of your home eight years ago,
the pressure that you feel.
And so Trump delivers every day.
He never fails.
He has all the people that condescend to everyone in the country.
We had an opioid epidemic and still do in America that was invisible, had a million people that were killed.
And it was invisible as a national issue to 2016.
So Trump is their vessel, right?
People saying, fuck you, right?
To some of the largest wealth inequality in American history.
People by a broad economic category more stressed and stretched in some key metrics than they were on the eve of the Great Depression.
So it is a tale of two Americas.
And there's an absence of anybody's ability to communicate the inherent morality of the American free enterprise system to lift people up from their economic circumstances to something better in life and our politics.
So that's why Trump took off.
I was the first person on television when everyone said he was a clown and a joke.
According to Trump, I was the first person to say, no, we can win because he was saying out loud things that no one else says, but millions of people scream at their television set.
And though Trump lied 35,000 times, at some level, he's the most honest president we've had, because there's an inherent truth in Trump's observations that he offers in a dialect of plain English that resonates with normal people who don't trust what they see out of.
Washington, D.C., what they see out of Wall Street.
And so he is, in my estimation, a world-class demagogue that has risen in a time of corruption and collapsed trust,
who has put forward a proposition that is extremely dangerous, which has to do with who gets to lead the country because our entire society is constructed around the person who does is the person who wins the election.
And you talked about at the beginning my range of experiences, one of the 10 guys.
The thing I think that's unique about me on a very small list is I'm the guy who placed a concession phone call for a defeated presidential candidate.
And I've been on both sides of winning campaign, losing campaign, winning is more fun.
But you have a duty as an American that supersedes everything in that moment.
And in that moment when John lost and it was clear in that evening, it was not a time for bullshit.
The first black American had just been elected president of the United States said to him, we've fallen short, polls have closed, so you don't want to depress turnout for other Republican candidates out there.
I was the person who picked up the phone.
And the first person who addressed Barack Obama as Mr. President-elect in this country who mattered was John McCain.
And that continuity is a sacred trust, a miracle in this country that has gone on for almost 250 years, unbloodied until the day that it wasn't.
So what's your point of saying that?
The last part?
Are you saying that to say that Trump didn't do that, that he didn't make the call?
Are you saying that?
I'm saying that Donald Trump has refused to recognize the validity of an American election.
Got it.
Okay.
So let's stay on.
That was a very interesting take on Trump on what he did.
Now, do you think for yourself on locking onto a candidate to help him become a president?
Do you think you need to be a person that fully believes in that candidate?
Or are you such a good campaign manager that you don't even have to like the guy?
You can help the guy win.
No, it's too intimate a space to hate the person, right?
It wouldn't work at all.
But I've never worked for somebody that I've been down the line agreement on on any issue, right?
If you agree with someone on 80% of issues or even 75%, and you work in politics, that's where you are.
And I grew up in New Jersey.
I was from the moderate wing of the Republican Party.
I was one of the first Republicans of, I guess, any prominence to give a speech in favor of gay marriage.
So I was always outside, whether it was on abortion issues, on this from the majority of the Republican Party.
But there was room in the Republican Party for moderates during that period of time when I was up and coming in when I was up and coming in politics.
I asked this because I know I read somewhere that you didn't actually vote for McCain, even though you were his campaign manager.
So that's what I'm asking.
So is there, and is that true, by the way, that you didn't actually vote?
I did not.
Yeah.
So how does that work?
So I'm going to be a campaign for a guy that I don't believe should be the president.
How am I going to help that guy win?
Well, I started out very deeply believing he should be the president.
And John, and I've written about this, was a complicated guy.
There was a lot of chaos in the campaign.
And it was a very disillusioning experience in a lot of ways.
But by the time I got to the end, having seen everything that I saw, I just couldn't do it.
And so I was a volunteer.
John called me when he was belly up, bankrupt, falling to last place, campaign had collapsed.
I never got paid.
You never got paid?
Never got paid.
I believed in him.
No.
I think at the end, I got a $25,000 reimbursement check, but I got no income.
How much should you have made to run a campaign for the United States?
A couple million.
The McCain campaign.
I shut down my business completely and stepped off boards, resigned a TV contract to start the Lincoln project.
So politics for me is about conviction.
I have made a living giving advice.
Fundamentally, when you talk about politics and campaigns, Vice President Cheney said this to me once, right?
He says, listen, you come in here anytime.
I'm in the decision-making business.
You're in the advice-giving business.
And that's, you know, and I've made a career giving advice, you know, to people in a, you know, under constant fire, right?
It's like, so you're, you're just, you are, when you think about a company that has a bad story, right?
Think about Bug Light, right?
With Dylan Mulvaney and all, and all that.
Presidential campaign is that story times 100, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for two years.
Right.
And so how you navigate through that, you know, is a is a unique kind of skill set, I suppose.
So let's let's go back to this last thing.
Personally, this is purely selfish questions I'm asking.
I'm not asking this for you guys.
I'm asking it for me.
Campaign manager, okay, representing somebody and, you know, helping that person out.
What is a quality of a great campaign manager?
Your job, right?
Not the player.
We've talked about the player already.
I love what Bush said.
He says, listen, who's the biggest political strategist in this room?
Is it Carl Rowe?
No, it's me, right?
My family, my dad, Prescott, my brother, all this stuff.
He's right.
What a great perspective to give.
He's going to lose because he's an asshole, right?
And I'm going to win.
He knows what he's talking about, right?
Okay.
And Kerry was also a flip-flop a little bit, and that kind of hurt him.
But from the campaign, what makes a great campaign manager?
Like if you were to, in your world, there are names that you would say, these are the top five campaign managers of all time, right?
What do they all have in common?
What's the strength of a campaign manager?
Well, data and technology have fundamentally transformed campaigns even over my career.
What it would have been is somebody who can do three things simultaneously.
Help distill a message that's understandable and comprehensible.
James Carville, it's the economy stupid, 1992.
Two, technically, you have 50 states, you have 3,000-something counties, some 10,000 number of precincts beyond that.
What is the mathematical proposition that you have to kind of lay out, stake out, project, be right about, get the votes to win?
How do you raise the money?
And how do you spend the money without going bankrupt, which is easier said than done when you're trying to balance out cash flows to giant expenditures?
I mean, there were days in the Schwarzenegger campaign in 2006 where we would make a media buy on a Friday afternoon for $3.5 million and have $6,000 left in the checking account of the campaign, right, for the next week.
So you have to stay steady.
You have to stay calm.
You have to be able to keep your elevation, stay on the picture, not to get sucked under the tide on any day.
Because there's a lot of stuff going on.
And then I think there's like three types of people in the world.
And let me, before I do that, because I think most campaign managers are the type three, but almost all the really good at presidential level campaign managers typically in my career have shared in common.
A lot of us were short of credits on our college degree.
We were all C students.
We all went to state universities, came up from middle-class background.
So one of the things you said before, right, like on the, you know, on the establishment, like your establishment, Trump's outside, Donald Trump grew up in immense privilege and wealth, went to University of Pennsylvania, and his daddy stroked him checks that he built a real estate empire on and filed bankruptcy running casinos, right?
If one of us is in the establishment, it's not me.
It's him.
And the three types of people, right, I would say are this, is that, you know, first group, right, you see some type of crazy scene going on, right?
Like the Caddyshack pool party, right?
First type of person sees that, right?
And says, like, fuck yeah, right.
And jumps right in.
Second type of person sees that and it's like, I'm getting out of here, right?
Third type of person walks in there and says, stop it, right?
And tries to bring order.
And, you know, I think the dumbest type of person in the human realm is the type three, but most campaign managers are type threes, right?
You have every day, you have a giant production of planes, buses, shows, live events.
Just that element of it is an enormous, complicated, logistical enterprise before you have the first aspect of politics on it.
It's an interesting, it's an interesting ecology of organizations in a modern campaign.
So, Steve, from a campaign manager perspective, Ron DeSantis' whole campaign, what do you think went wrong?
I mean, we have our opinions.
What do you think went wrong, Steve?
And if it was you in there, regardless, like you said, you like him, hate him, whatever, what would you have done different to try to save this ship?
So this is what he should have done wrong.
I'll tell you what he did wrong.
So first off, it helps in a presidential campaign to have a sense of history, right?
You have so few people working in campaigns today, right, around these campaigns know anything about presidential campaigns, right?
The history of them, campaigns in general.
And really, Ron DeSantis had an opportunity to do what Bush did in 2000, which was a model of the William McKinley campaign.
It used to be in American politics that it was unseemly for a candidate to seek the office, right?
So they didn't campaign.
The first modern campaign was really the turn of the 20th century with William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt ultimately started asking for the vote.
But before then, people would come to the front porch and be like, you're the guy.
You should run for president.
Person might go give some speeches, write some letters.
But with Ron DeSantis in the immediate aftermath of the election, he literally didn't need to leave the governor's mansion.
All he had to say at a moment where Trump's numbers were pointing down, DeSantis was ahead in the race, is to do what Bush did in 2000.
Every wealthy MAGA contributor would have been made to literally cross the threshold of the property line, right, of the Florida governor's mansion, right, to come across literally an act of crossing from Trump to DeSantis.
And then when they walked out, there would have been press there and a camera and they would have said what a genius the guy was and how they're totally for him.
That's fundamentally what Bush did in 2000.
And DeSantis had that moment to take control, but he didn't do it.
Instead, he did what he did and he just fell flat.
And there's no, you asked something before.
There's a picture of DeSantis.
It's the pavement is dry.
He's wearing white rubber boots, right?
He's got a vest on.
And I'm like, hey, man, right?
Like, I didn't pick out the outfit, but I know for sure whoever wears that outfit is never going to be president, right?
Like, that's just the way.
That's just the way it is.
It's like you're not.
Look, that's not presidential.
That's not the effect.
That's not going to be on the cover of Time Magazine anytime soon?
I can't, I mean, I just, like, I think, yeah, right.
I mean.
Can I ask you about Trump specifically?
I actually respect how you kind of frame the whole situation.
It doesn't sound like you are one of those blindfully ignorant people.
They're like, I just hate him and I don't like what.
You actually gave him credit.
You said he's a world-class demagogue, right?
So there's sort of like a humble brag right there.
But you know who he is and you respect your enemy.
Know Pat's newest book, Choose Your Enemies Wisely.
You've chosen Trump as your enemy, whether that's vocal or not.
You kind of laid out the top three caricatures of the type of person to run a campaign.
I want to talk about the Trump voter.
As Bill Maher famously said, it's okay for you to hate Trump, but you can't hate the people that vote for him.
So, in my opinion, there's three types of voters that vote for Trump.
There's the, I love my poorly educated people, you know, like the Trump base, you know, millions of people that just, whether it's tribalism, whether it's instinctual, they're just like, that's my guy.
You know, he said he's the middle finger to America, and rightfully so for some people, right?
They've been screwed over manufacturing.
We talked about personal finance issues, paycheck to paycheck, all that.
So that's number one.
On the other side of the spectrum, you have maybe the donor class, the millionaires, the small business owners in some capacity that are, look, I'm just voting for tax reasons.
You know, it's the economy stupid.
So let's put those two on the separate wings.
But then you have the majority of people.
Let's say it's 60% of the people of the 80 million votes or whatever to 76 million votes who are like, just look, no, I don't like what's going on the left.
I'm more, I'm a conservative, I'm a Christian.
I'm, you know, I want to raise my children in the right way.
At the end of the day, Trump could say whatever heavy wants to say.
Those people are going with him.
And these are hardworking Americans.
These are people who love America.
They love freedom.
They love democracy.
So at what point are those people like they have a voice too?
It's not like they are being gunned to their head.
You have to vote for Trump.
You know, you've been with the Lincoln Project very adamantly against Trump.
What would you say to those people who essentially you're trying to convince those types of people not to vote for Trump, but they're going to vote for him anyway?
How do you handle that?
I don't, I mean, these people at some level are my parents.
Okay.
Right, right.
So this is family.
This is, I mean, I was on the Trump bomber target list.
I didn't get a bomb, but apparently when the FBI came to the House, I was at the top of the next batch.
My parents still voted for him.
You're a parent.
Professor Levin.
Right, right.
So I don't hate Trump voters.
You know, I love some of them very much.
Here's what I would say to the many millions of people that are watching this that vote for Trump.
I get it.
I get the disdain, the corruption within the system.
There's a painting in the Capitol of the United States.
It's a painting of George Washington.
And this is the moment that America functionally comes to life.
In the painting, George Washington is in uniform.
There's a chair there.
And the chair is bigger than the others in the room.
It's the throne that he will not sit on.
And Washington lays his cloak over it.
He will not be Caesar.
And he bows to the Congress.
He walks away from power twice.
Our American civilization, our way of life is constructed around the assignment of power through the result of an election where lawfully people raise their hand,
take an oath, and they're given limited power for a limited period of time and never have the power to interfere with some basic rights.
The first time Donald Trump said in 2015, the election results are only legitimate if I win, should have been a moment of a national timeout.
I don't care if you're on the far left, you're on the far right.
In this country, that's not how it works.
And so over these years, we've seen the escalation of that to a moment where I think it's in real danger.
If I was running that Fox debate, my first question would have been, let's talk about how we're going to execute General Milley.
We're going to shoot him, we're going to hang him, poison him, gas him.
What do you think?
How are we going to shut down Comcast and MSNBC and NBC?
I think, and I don't understand why not, because I have a very basic premise.
I take everything that everyone says literally and seriously.
Period.
If you say you're running to seek retribution, to kill the Joint Chiefs of Staff, okay, we got a problem.
What we share in common in this country is a lineage of defiance, of entrepreneurship, of pioneer spirit, of a defense of an idea, served in the 101st airborne.
These are sacred things in this country.
And there's no man who is above them.
And so in a choice between two flawed parties, two flawed people, I get it.
But at this moment, as we come into the third decade of the 21st century, country's got real problems.
It's got real opportunities.
I personally think if you had a dollar to invest anywhere in the world, you're a moron if this is the place you don't put the dollar.
This is the most competitive society on earth, but man, is our politics broken.
Broken.
And when you got a guy like Menendez, right, who comes out and you're like, okay, let's hear it, right?
Let's hear it.
Right.
And he's like, no, you see, I don't understand, right?
I had to sew the money into the jackets because of the old country.
I got to be ready.
A country he wasn't born in.
He's never been into.
So it's like it's constant.
And I get it.
Joe Scarborough said this on Morning Joe the other week, and this is totally true.
He said, every single Democrat who comes on the air, 100% of them say on the air something completely different from what they say off the air regarding Biden.
And here's the deal.
It was exactly the same way with the Republicans about Trump in 2015 and 2016.
And either way, both sides, the American people get this.
They completely intuitively understand it's all bullshit.
Whether it's Menendez in the old country, Dianne Feinstein passed away right before we came on air.
I was actually talking to someone about this yesterday, right?
Like the notion, this person who's a legitimately important figure, right, in American political history for women, how she came to how to power, completely stripped of her dignity in the last five years of her service, that this is what she'll be remembered for, is sitting up there with no faculties,
no personal agency.
So we have a massive problem.
You have a belligerence in the media that you see assert itself every time someone says, well, 80% of the country doesn't want Trump or Biden.
So there's a lot of brokenness.
I understand it.
The issue with Trump that's front and center, it has to be, are the intimations towards violence, towards chaos, and the assassination baiting of a guy who spent his entire career wearing the cloth of the— Quick follow-up.
It would seem to me your biggest issue would be people clinging to power.
Let me explain.
Trump, first and foremost, but you name names.
You named Diane Feinstein clinging to power.
She was clearly a vegetable, but she wouldn't step down.
Bob Menendez, clearly corrupt, clinging to power, right?
Mitch McConnell, 80 years old, can't even function clinging to power.
Your biggest fear is Donald Trump clinging to power.
You used the George Washington example.
He's not King George.
He's not Julius Caesar.
Go deep, go dark here for a second.
He clings to power.
Let's say he actually wins or even doesn't win this next election, but clings to power, assumes he wins.
How dark could it possibly get?
What's your biggest fear?
There's a plan that's on the table by elements at the Claremont Institute that seek to really dissolve the functioning of the government, the deep state, as they call it, within six months.
There is no deep state.
There's dysfunction.
There's bureaucracy.
There's inefficiency.
Steve, there's no deep state.
No.
Come on, Steve.
No.
There's no deep state.
What is the deep state?
Okay, so what do you think when you think about what World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab is doing and his campaign Build Back Better being the same campaign, identical ward as Biden's?
What do you think about when you see what some of these ESG guys are doing?
You know, you got these, you know, State Street, you know, Vanguard, you know, Larry Fink, BlackRock.
They own all these stocks and these 88% of S ⁇ P 500, top three shareholders, it's their institutional money.
And they're imposing their power over these CEOs to do what they need to do for, you know, dot, dot, dot.
And now recently they're stepping away from it.
There's a lot of people today that I know when you're sitting here going through some of this stuff, and I want to listen to you because I want to know where your motive is.
I want to know where your frustration lies.
And, you know, I want to comment on a few of these things and then, you know, give a question back to you.
You said Trump being, he was raised with a father with money.
His father bailed him out, gave him money and all this other stuff, right?
I saw kids who grew up poor and I saw kids who grew up with money.
The kids that grew up with money had more temptations to do stupid things than the kids who grew up poor.
Now, what do I mean by this?
They're spoiled brats.
They're annoying.
They're obnoxious.
They're always getting bailed out.
They never get suspended.
If they do, the dad comes in and buys it out.
You're not going to see a kid with a rich dad getting, what's the word, not suspended when you're getting kicked out of school, expelled.
It's just not going to happen, right?
You're going to get these things.
So the way I see it with Trump is, here's a guy that had access to all the drugs, anything he ever wanted to do.
He had access to all the alcohol, anything he wanted to do.
He had access to all of it.
And you mean to tell me this guy never did drugs?
He never did alcohol.
And with all the temptations of the money that his dad had, he takes whatever the dad gave him, whether it's nothing, a million or $40 million.
I've heard all these three numbers, right?
Even if it's the $40 million that his dad gave him, you take that $40 million and you turn it into $2 billion, $3 billion, whatever the number is.
Democrats will say it's closer, $2 billion.
Some will say it's $3 billion.
Let's say $2 billion, okay?
Do you do that?
How many kids do that?
Not a lot of them.
It's not easy to do.
So for me, I understand the establishment thing.
And then to come to today when you said something about, this guy got up on stage and he said, the only way the election will be accurate is if I win, right?
Not if I lose.
If I lose, the election is a fraud and da-da-da-da.
Okay, fine.
Cool.
Then the hypocrisy comes out is if he only said it and that was the issue, okay, what are you doing?
Can't be saying something like this.
Do you know how many videos were taken down for repeating what Hillary Clinton said in 2016 that the election was rigged?
You know how many videos were taken down?
Zero.
YouTube didn't take down any videos that they said 2016 election was rigged and Russia collusion?
Zero videos.
They all stayed up.
Why?
So think about the voter who, you know, you're like, this voter, right?
This voter is kind of like, you know what, F you.
Okay?
You want to do this?
I don't like seeing people being taken advantage of.
That voter is sitting there and saying, I'm sorry, dude.
I voted for, let's just say a person says that they voted for Hillary, okay?
But she said the same thing Trump said.
Three and a half years later, she funded it, and now we're supposed to sit there and say he's the bad character, not her.
You want me to believe that?
I think there's a big community as well.
I guess what I want to bring back to you is, you know how typically it's like Republican versus Democrat?
Okay, great.
Then sometimes it's liberal policies versus conservative policies.
Great.
And then sometimes it's, you know, anti-establishment versus establishment, right?
And you said earlier when Trump was running, what Trump was able to do is bring a public issues that nobody was talking about, you know, the drug issue or the border issue.
Nobody was thinking about that.
Boom.
He put a front in the center.
Oh, damn, this is really an issue, right?
He made a non-talked about issue, a talked about issue.
Then we're all looking at it saying, this guy's right.
Let's build a wall.
No one ever talked about building a wall.
Let's build a wall.
Why shouldn't we build a wall?
We never thought about this.
We should do this.
Everyone should do that.
So the part that gets me to question, I'm listening to you and I'm like, this guy sounds like a reasonable guy that he can reason.
You can reason.
You're sharp.
There's a reason why all these guys have hired you over the years.
And you say your parents voted Trump.
They supported Trump even with the bomber.
You got that list, whatever.
Even your parents still voted for him.
There has to be something deeper to get you guys, when I say you guys, you, Weaver, your partners, who at that time, you're no longer with them.
I know 2021, you resigned, but there has to be something where it got you guys to team up against this guy that's deeper than just what he's talking about.
There was a real, even the documentary, the five, what do you call it, the five-part documentary series that you guys, you feel hate.
You guys hate this guy.
You know, you guys were not, you know, you want to do whatever you could to destroy this guy from winning.
Where did that come from?
Did you watch the documentary?
I watched the first episode, not all five.
So, first off, what the documentary shows when you watch the whole thing is that just because you are against Trump does not mean you are better than Trump.
Because most of the people in that documentary are exactly the same people as Trump.
In this moment, we see a vast Trump industrial complex.
Lincoln Project, as it exists today, is part of it.
It's a grift.
When I founded it, did it, 85 cents of every dollar went into the program.
Today, 93 cents on the dollar goes into the pockets of three people.
With lawyers, the lawyer, Rick Wilson, and Reed Galen, right?
In the name of democracy, right?
So it's all.
He hasn't old friends anymore.
You're not.
I walked away from it as it blew up because of all of the integrity issues.
I was the strategist.
When you watch the whole documentary, really, it was funny.
When that documentary came out, there was this enthusiasm because the number one thing that people want, and it wasn't, you know, the Lincoln Project people weren't outliers.
All these people want to be famous.
Everyone wants to be famous, right?
So the Lincoln Project in 11 months built a followership that was larger than the national parties, right, on social media, raises $100 million.
Now, when this documentary comes out, none of the people who wanted to be famous want to talk about it.
I don't want to make a peep at it.
What I said, right, when they were doing it, I said, I'm not going to kibosh it.
If you guys want to do it, you can do it.
All I'm saying is, you want to get famous?
Careful.
You don't get what you wish for.
And that's exactly what happened.
With Donald Trump, my entire life, Trump has been there.
I feel like I know who he is.
He's the guy who stiffs the working guy in Atlantic City.
He's the guy who fucks the little guy over and over and over and over and over again.
If you grew up in New Jersey, you follow Donald Trump's career.
Trump is a con man and a grifter in my estimation.
I reject completely the notion that he's a successful businessman.
He's a fraud.
He was a TV character, a cultural figure who was able to, in an alignment of events, capture very narrowly the presidency running against another flawed character.
I don't hate Donald Trump.
I hate what Donald Trump stands for.
I believe he is a threat to my country and to the American Constitution.
He incited an insurrection that ended the peaceful transition of power.
He called for violence and violence broke out.
He has sustained for years now a lie about this stolen election.
He's lied 35,000 times as president.
And in the end, his lies are lies of authority that demand submission, that demand obedience.
If you look objectively at the things Trump says, it is fascistic.
It's fascism, not according to some liberal pundit, but according to what Benito Mussolini defines fascism as.
What Donald Trump is very specifically calling for is a consolidation of power around him as an individual and an expression of him as an individual as also being the state.
What he does not seem to understand is the idea of the country, a pluralistic representative democracy.
He doesn't seem to understand the virtue in the separation of powers, the dignity of the system of human rights over and over again.
He has fetishized autocratic leaders from Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping and so on and so forth.
So over and over again, the rhetoric, the actions.
Jared Kushner walked out of the White House and within six months took $2 billion in investment from the Saudi Investment Fund.
One of the most corrupt administrations, if not the most corrupt in American history.
A shattering of norms.
Talking to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about deploying the military against the American people in peaceful protests.
The list goes on and on and on.
In the end, we have somebody who's been indicted facing 92 criminal counts for mishandling of classified information, a conspiracy in an election in Georgia.
There are very, very serious charges.
Democracy is threatened by this man.
And it's threatened by cowardice by people who didn't oppose him.
I think this is important to understand.
Every Republican, all of them, 100%, had my position on Trump.
All of them.
Every one of them got in line, except for like six of us.
There's no way in the world.
All of them had the same position as you did.
You go back to 2015 inside the Republican Party.
The dominant position is Lindsey Graham saying accurately then, we get in line behind this guy, it'll destroy the Republican Party, which is what's going to happen one way or another at the end of the day.
People got in line supporting something that they had viscerally and adamantly opposed because they were moral cowards, because they did not put their convictions ahead of their ambitions.
And that's a moment, right?
Like in politics.
You know, at the end of the day, say what you will about me, but I believe what I believe.
And you're not going to find contradictions, right, in the things I've said, right, over the last 10, 12 years on any of this stuff.
You know, it's crazy when I'm listening to you.
And by the way, you said, I believe, can you pull that up?
I think you said January 6th was worse than 9-11.
Awards, right?
Yeah.
Lincoln Project co-founder, can you go back to the tweet?
Let me see.
Yeah, you can play this clip if you want to play it.
It was.
Yeah, so if you can play this clip.
My friend Matthew Dowd, our friend, you know, talked about this.
He couldn't be more right.
The 1-6 attack for the future of the country is a profoundly more dangerous event than the 9-11 attacks.
How could you say that?
And in the end, the 1.6 attacks are likely to kill a lot more Americans than were killed on the 9-11 attacks, which will include the casualties of the wars that lasted 20 years following it.
You know how the average person listens to it and says, how many people died during J-6 and how much did they exaggerate?
And by the way, to be fair, maybe your position has changed.
This is a little over two years ago when you said this.
Maybe today it's a different position.
Do you still hold the position as J-6 was worse than 9-11?
I do.
How is that possible?
Because the January 6th attack was an attack incited by a president of the United States of America on the country and the constitutional, peaceful transfer of power.
The 9-11 attack was never an existential threat to the United States.
Abraham Lincoln talked about this in 1860.
He said the most powerful European army could march, land, it will never take a sip of water from the Ohio River.
That if we're to destroy ourselves, it'll be through an act of national suicide.
That was the preface to the act of national suicide.
The Capitol building of the United States is the citadel of our democracy.
These people shit on the floors.
They desecrated the building.
A Confederate flag was carried through the rotunda.
And two years later, the extremist movement in the country is bigger, better funded.
And the amount of people who have walked away from the elemental idea of the country, which is elections, has grown.
That's why I say that.
The bloodiest war this country's fought was the sectional war between each other.
And that was prefaced by 10 years of political violence in the 1850s.
It is impossible to look at the rhetoric and not conclude that we are barreling towards violence, political violence.
And when the history of the era will be written, it will land squarely on the shoulders of Donald Trump.
And let me just say on 9-11, my father spent months as a 9-11 recovery worker.
I grew up in northern New Jersey.
It was an appalling, horrific event, but the killers who attacked us that day really underestimated the country and thought that you could damage the country by damaging our buildings and killing our people.
America's enemies have killed a lot of Americans, but they have never come close to killing the idea, the idea of the country.
The birth of the United States is the most important event that happens after the birth of Christ and Muhammad to human civilization.
The expression of an idea that all men are created equal, endowed by a creator with inalienable rights, include life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.
At the Battle of Yorktown, the Marquis de Lafayette is in command of American troops.
And when the British raised the white flag, Lafayette says something remarkable.
He says, humanity has its victory.
Liberty has its country.
And what he believed was inexorably slavery would be abolished, though he accurately predicted its last holdout would be in the deep south.
He predicted that the United States would save Europe, which it did in the next century, that the idea was transcendent, incandescent, and would spread all over the world.
That's why the attack on January 6th was worse than the attack on September 11th.
Do you really believe what you're saying right now?
100%.
2,977 people died during the time.
And one person died in J-6.
Some say five, but it's one person.
It's actually bad that she was shot.
That's not how I measure.
That's not how I measure the severity of those attacks.
And what do you say with a Ray Epps that's in there saying, get in there, you know, get into insiders, encouraging people to go in.
And he comes afterwards and it's being talked about.
And, you know, he is let go free, even though he was the one that is also doing it.
But he gets a small load of misdemeanor.
Other guys are still doing it.
You realize, like, the average person watches.
So here's what the average person does.
Forget about me and you.
The average person watches this and has to decide between you and maybe my position, right?
They're going to say, okay, I hate.
Let's just say they hate Trump.
Okay.
All right.
So they're going to try to do whatever they can to side with you.
Then they hear you say J6 was worse than 9-11.
One person died.
2977 died.
The difference for me between J6 and 9-11 was the following.
9-11, the enemy was external and we were united.
A day after 9-11, nobody cared if you're Republican or Democrat.
We were all Americans.
A day after J6, we were divided because it's like, you voted for Trump, you're this, you're a fascist, you're that, dude.
What are you talking about?
What are you talking about?
It was so divisive, starting with the media doing whatever they could to destroy one guy, his reputation, his life, not what they're doing.
They're saying Mar-Lago is worth only $18 million.
It's not the proper evaluation of Mar-a-Lago's $18 million.
Tom Marlau was $18 million.
Marla was a $300, $500 million property.
It's only worth $18 million.
So the more and more and more they do stuff like this, you know what makes the average person think about, makes me think about they're targeting this guy.
They hate this guy.
They envy this guy.
They're upset at this guy.
Maybe they hate the fact that he's loved in ways that they'll never be loved.
Maybe they hate the fact that he gets the kind of from his followers because I don't know if anybody on the left, aside from Obama, I think Obama's followers love him.
There's people even on his side that voted for Obama that's after I thought he was going to be Obama, you know, he didn't do as much for my community as I thought he was going to do.
There's a lot of people on the left that have said that about Obama.
But Obama has people that loved him.
And Trump has people that loved him.
And a part of me makes me think, you know, there's a level of envy for how much support this guy gets.
And then your side, you're sitting there and you're okay with Hillary saying there's going to be fraud in the 2024 election.
Or, you know, we probably lost in 2016 because there was a Russia collusion.
There wasn't.
You know, maybe they tamper here and there, but it's not like the dossier she wrote, $35 million.
And what does everybody do?
No, it's okay.
Let's just move on to the next thing.
This isn't that important.
Credibility is lost.
Then with Lincoln Project, it's interesting where you are right now with Lincoln Project.
So Lincoln Project comes out and says, Trump is this and Trump is that and Trump is this.
I think you guys won.
Okay.
What your mission was, you won.
So credit to you guys.
You had a mission.
You accomplished your mission.
Respect.
You did your mission.
You could be an enemy.
You could be a formidable enemy.
But kudos to you for preventing him from getting reelected.
And you, you can use the word gaslight, you know, whatever you want to put, you drove a lot of people from not voting for him.
Worked effectively.
Yet at the same time, here's John Weaver, one of the founders, is up there saying, we have to go back as the Republicans to respect men of character because Trump's not a man of character.
I was like, wow, man of character.
Then what?
A year later, two years later, this guy's getting accused of 21 young boys under the age of 18 and one 14-year-old that he's exchanging messages with saying, I want to see private parts or private pictures.
And he says, I thought it was consensual.
What do you mean it's consensual with a 14-year-old boy?
You're talking about character with a Trump and then you're doing this.
Do you realize how hypocritical?
By the way, you resigned.
You came out and you said some words about it.
Do you realize how hypocritical that is of a project like that?
That I'm supposed to sit there and think Trump's got character issues, yet Weaver's got that kind of character issues.
That's confusing to a person.
I'm going to settle your confusion.
Tell me.
I'm not defending that piece of shit.
Okay.
Number one.
Two, though, New York Times writes a story about his secret life.
The 14-year-old that he was texting, he didn't do that on the Lincoln Project.
He did that when he was working for John Kasich in 2015.
Now, I don't blame John Kasich for that, and I don't blame the Lincoln Project for it.
Had a fucked up guy.
The incredible thing about it is the lead correspondent for the New York Times in writing acknowledges she knew about the guy having a secret closeted life.
It wasn't kids.
It was adult men.
And I didn't know.
I'm not a closeted gay guy.
So I had no idea.
Never saw him physically at all during the course of the Lincoln project.
He was never physically with any person.
There's a lot of people that said for decades.
You guys all knew how dirty of a guy that is.
I just told you, right, that I have no idea.
No idea what any of your sexual orientations are.
John Weaver, though, wasn't the president of the United States.
John Weaver is a political consultant who held no position of public responsibility.
I want to come back to what you said about 9-11, though, for a second, because it's the bigger thing.
The passengers and crew of United Flight 93 were the first Americans to fight back on that day.
They took the plane back from the terrorists and they crashed it into a field in Pennsylvania to save the United States Capitol from destruction.
The attack on the Capitol on January 6th was a desecration of that sacrifice.
It was a desecration of the sacrifice of every American.
And it was specifically a desecration of the sacrifice of the men of the 1st Minnesota at Gettysburg who prevented the Confederate Army and the Confederate flag from entering the Capitol of the United States through basically a suicide charge.
We have in this country a violence in our politics now, a rising anti-Semitism, a mainstreaming of white supremacist extremist groups that are an over and open part of the Trump coalition, and it's unacceptable.
There's a whataboutism that comes up with Hillary Clinton and any one of a number of other people that I don't get.
I'm not a Hillary Clinton supporter politically.
Wouldn't have been my first choice.
I voted for against Donald Trump, but I mean, what type of crackpipe are people sucking on if they think that the country would have been where it is today if Hillary Clinton had been elected president of the United States?
Wait, you're saying it would have been better if Hillary would have been president?
Than Trump?
Yeah.
In 2016?
Of course.
Because, because, because the democracy would not be threatened.
The democracy would not be threatened.
You have a guy.
You mean the establishment would have been not threatened?
Are you troubled by the fact that he just called for the execution of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?
Does that bother you?
You're saying Hillary Clinton.
Does it bother you that Donald Trump just called for the execution of a four-star general, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?
He just called for him to be killed.
Do you think he doesn't mean it?
Steve, you lose credibility when you say 2,977 people died is less of an event than one person dying on June 6th.
You're manipulating what I said, twisting it.
What I said was January 6th was a more severe attack on the United States.
September 11th, September 11th, had more casualties.
There's a difference.
How do you measure worse?
There's got to be data.
You said you're a data guy.
Data says one event, we lost nearly 3,000 people.
One event, we lost one.
We lost.
We lost the average person.
They're going to say, of course, 3,000 people.
Because I guess I'm counting the 600,000 that died in the American Civil War.
And I'm counting the 405,000 that died in the Second World War.
And I'm counting the 50,000 that died in the Korean War.
And I'm counting the 58,000 that died in the Vietnam War.
And I'm counting the acts of sacrifice that go back to 1776 that were desecrated on that day, incited by a single man who assaulted the Constitution of the United States.
We were attacked by a foreign enemy on September 11th, 2001.
The casualties were horrendous, as they were on December 7th, 1941.
But the attack on January 6th was more severe also than the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Well, some would call it an attack, but from the videos that we saw, Steve, from Twitter and just undercover cameras, it didn't look like an attack.
What are you talking about?
I'm just talking about all the videos that we've seen on the cover.
What do you mean all the videos?
All the videos on Twitter.
All the videos.
All the guys on Twitter?
Yeah, hold on.
Are you guys going to really sit here and fucking tell me that the attack on January 6th didn't happen?
That the violence, the bludgeoning of the police officers didn't happen.
Hold on, hold on.
Because of some bullshit.
Hold on, hold on.
Hold on.
Here we go.
Cut the fuck out.
Steve, I'll give you my Steve.
I'll give you my opinion and then you could talk.
First of all, you comparing.
It's not an opinion.
Hold on.
It's not an opinion.
You comparing.
I'm not only a fucking New Yorker.
I'm a veteran.
For you, time out.
My sister's a veteran.
My brother's a veteran.
He's a veteran.
For you to fuck, listen to me.
For you to say that January 6th compared to 9-11 is that's absolutely the dumbest shit I've ever heard.
Hold on, let me finish.
Number one, it wasn't an attack.
It looked like a guided tour.
Okay?
That's what it.
You're a fucking nut.
Are you?
Yeah, you fucking ain't right.
I am.
It was a guided fucking tour.
A guided tour.
You think the guy beating the cops?
What?
With all the votes.
Who died?
Who died?
Ashley Babbitt, a veteran they fucking shot.
The Capitol Police shot her ass.
Where the fuck is that guy getting in trouble?
You're just upset because Donald Trump said, you know what?
They probably cheated.
You don't think he has a leg to stand on?
That they fucking did it in 2016?
Hillary, Russia, FBI, colluded.
Are you like, how are we fucking crazy, Steve?
How are we crazy?
I mean, this is going to be on video.
So, I mean, you're going to speak for yourself.
No, I'm going to speak for myself.
Four, four, okay, 19 terrorists took four commercial flights, crashed them in the World Trade, crashed them in the Pentagon, did all that.
Okay, and you're saying that, and we've lost, and by the way, how many decades of wars?
We've lost over a million people from the Iraq war, which is all bullshit.
All a lie.
A million people.
We lost a million Americans in the Iraq war.
No, we lost.
We killed people because we said there was weapons of mass destruction.
We lied.
Bush lied.
Oh, yeah, there's weapons of mass destruction there.
There was no weapons of mass destruction, but we were like, oh, we changed the name.
Since we're here, enduring freedom, which is bullshit.
Okay.
So as a veteran, as an American, as a New Yorker, for you to say that, that one day compared to that is absolutely absurd, Steve.
I understand that you love this country.
I'm not questioning your patriotism, but the hate for one guy because he loves this country so much.
He loves the country.
He doesn't.
God, you're a fool.
How am I a fool?
How am I a fool?
You have to have a Uganda Ranger syndrome.
You just hate him.
You just hate the guy.
You are an American.
No, I'm not.
I guess he loves.
Trump loves the country.
You damn right he does.
He's been saying it since the 80s, 90s, on Letterman and all these.
He's a guy on September 11th who went down, said he was down there.
He wasn't.
He's a guy who called in on a radio.
He said, now I got the tallest building in lower Manhattan.
He's a guy who lied about Muslims cheering it in New Jersey from Jersey City.
He is a con man.
He is a liar.
And that you have fallen for this bullshit.
I'm not falling for anything, Steve, please.
Steve, Steve, it didn't have to be Trump.
What I love is that this dude sacrificed everything to pull back the curtain and tell regular Americans.
What did Donald Trump sacrifice?
Time out.
That's right.
What did Donald Trump sacrifice?
His career.
He could go to prison.
He could go to prison for what you guys want for the rest of this.
He couldn't have broken the law.
No, Steve, you know what it was?
Steve, don't leave this breaking the law bullshit.
He pulled open a curtain and let all of us see.
The regular, regular people, look at what these assholes are doing.
Fake news, fake dissipation.
Are you talking about the shower curtain where he had the country's most sensitive secrets?
Oh, you mean?
No, what about the Biden shut the mouth?
But Biden doesn't bother you.
They all take documents home.
They all take, hey, hold on.
Were we in better shape now than when Trump was in?
Are you happy with what's going on?
You and your Lincoln project, but mind you, the biggest hypocrites, you guys were going after him for Russian collusion and tax evading.
That's what you guys were doing.
All your people, you were the only one that was innocent.
The rest of them were perverted.
One of them was a Russian agent.
One of them was a Russian agent.
One of them owes $390,000 in a taxi in his house.
And the other guy went to court from American Express for not paying his $30,000 tax bill.
You guys are the biggest hypocrites.
The biggest hypocrites.
You guys hate the man.
You guys just hate the man.
But the policies and what he did for this country, I'm happy.
Listen, it didn't have to be him, Steve.
It could have been a fucking turtle.
He woke us up.
He told people, hey, look, look at this curtain.
Look at what these assholes are doing.
Fake news and it's all bullshit.
And he sacrificed it all for us.
Plain and simple, Steve.
Say what you want.
Say what you want.
You're talking to a veteran that whole family fought for this country.
And my parents are immigrants.
And I'm a New Yorker.
For you to compare those two is fucking asinine.
The only girl that died was a veteran.
The Capitol Police shot her.
You said bludgeoning?
Who died on January 6th?
Who died?
Who died?
Well, we have multiple suicides.
Give me a fucking break.
Give me a break.
On January 6th in the Capitol.
Who died?
Yeah, I'm passionate because I'm telling the truth.
I'm telling the truth, Steve.
You're the one.
You were cussing and talking shit.
You're not going to do that shit with me.
I'm sorry.
Let me tell you something.
Yeah, go ahead.
You are sitting here lying to millions of people about what happened on January 6th.
I'm lying.
Which was an attack on the country incited by the president.
Watch the fucking.
Is he in jail for inciting violence?
He will be soon.
Is that the video?
Is that the real way?
He's like, go peaceful.
He's like, go in there, be peaceful.
That's what happened.
I don't know.
You guys don't seem to be a whack job like this.
Yeah, I'm a whack job.
But you know what it is, though, Steve?
You know what it is.
So for me, I want to respect the voter.
And I think there are millions, if not tens, who feel like he does.
I don't give a fuck how he feels.
And this is what this feels.
And this is important because you can watch the video.
You can watch the video.
You can watch the actual video of the insurrectionists attacking the Capitol.
That's real.
It happened.
They attacked the Capitol.
Okay, can I just weigh in on one thing?
You guys are both wrong, and you're both right.
Let me explain.
Both days are horrible days in American history.
We're comparing what's worse of a tragedy when they're both horrible tragedies.
So who's right?
Who's wrong?
You're right, more symbolically.
Correct.
This is an attack on our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power.
He's saying it didn't happen.
No, no, which is wrong.
He's saying it.
What is saying what he said?
No, no, no.
What are you being like denied this?
Here's a question for you.
Here we go.
No, no, hang on.
Hang on a second.
Listen to me.
No, no, hang on a second.
You're the judge of this?
Can I?
You're the judge of this to say he's wrong.
Did I say it didn't happen?
I said people weren't there.
You said attack.
I said they were there.
They were protesting.
You said it was a.
I didn't say it was attack.
No, no.
You said it was a tour.
No, no.
I said it looked like a guiding tour.
I said it looked like a guided tour to win.
What channel were you watching?
CNN, MSNBC.
I was watching shit undercover cameras.
You are a five-star rack job.
Our video is right and wrong.
He's completely wrong.
Where I agree with what people say is, by definition, a lot of people would say that it wasn't literally an insurrection.
Was it a riot?
Was it a violent protest?
It was an insurrection aimed at stopping the certification of the election constitutionally prescribed on January 6th.
That's the purpose of it.
You can argue over semantics.
That's what I think.
I do not hope that it's not.
No, no, no, what point are you making it?
It's not semantics.
I would love to make my fucking point.
Go ahead.
Let's see what it is.
I can finish my point.
For once, make your point.
Hurry up.
For once.
So the point is, both days were a piece of shit, fucking horrible days.
You know it was not just a guided tour.
You know that it was a violent, violent act of complete absurdity.
It wasn't a guided tour.
But at the same time, I don't think many people think that it was an actual insurrection.
It was a horrible day in American history.
Horrible day.
It was not a tour through the Capitol.
It was horrible.
But at the same time, you have to understand that millions, millions of Americans are going to see what you said about 9-11 and be shell-shocked by the ramifications of what you're saying.
So this is what I'm saying, that you're both right and wrong in your assessment.
I think millions of Americans will understand perfectly what I'm saying.
I think millions of Americans sadly are abused by people like you to have a platform and communicate misinformation like you just did that this was a guided tour as opposed to a violent attack.
You are one of the people through your conspiracies who is poisoning the discourse and the ability of people to tell reality.
I want to say for the record, you're completely, absolutely, totally full of fucking shit when you say what.
When you say we'll use a microphone.
Guess what?
I can say whatever I want because I know I'm part of it.
A question for you.
Reasonable question for you.
What was, and Adam, here's a question for you.
You said violent protest.
You used those words.
Twice.
I said violent twice.
You said J6 is violent.
Yes.
Was BLM protest violent?
So we're going to go to a second.
No, no, I'm not sure what I'm saying.
I'm a question for you.
Yes, it was violent.
What's more violent?
J6 or BLM riots?
How many businesses went out of business or how many businesses were trash during J6?
But now I have to defend BLM.
You do because you used the word violent.
They were both violent.
No, no.
Just like 9-11 was also a horrible day.
That's not how it was.
Just like January 6th.
No, that's not how it works.
So only one can be violent when the other one can't.
It's not.
No, no.
Why can't you?
January 6th was peaceful and only BLM was violent.
I got it.
What is the difficulty in understanding that one of them was an attack on a very specific place on a very specific day with a very specific function taking place on that day that had everything to do with the peaceful transition?
of power, which is foundational to how the country functions?
That's why.
Now we're talking different issues.
So if there's a riot in Cleveland and 500 businesses are burned down, that is a threat to the economy in Cleveland, but not American democracy.
If you assault the Capitol on the day that the Congress is certifying an election to begin the process that will culminate on the 20th with the transfer, they have nothing to do with each other.
The attack on the 6th was incited by one of the 44 people in the history of the country who's raised his hand and swore the 35-word oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Period.
It was the most grotesque betrayal and abdication of presidential responsibility in American history.
It constitutionally disqualifies him, in my estimation, from holding office ever again.
How could anybody look at what happened?
Look at what happened.
It was a tour?
How fucking dare you?
You didn't see the shaman getting guided around?
The guy that was supposed to be this crazy wild man.
Okay, here's my question.
Steve, how do you explain the countless FBI agents in plain uniform that Congress won't even tell us how many?
Because it didn't happen.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, no, no.
And it didn't happen.
The violent insurrection.
Oh, yeah.
By the way, let me see this.
Go back to that video.
Could you show this video?
People are fucking rotting in jail for 30 years.
Okay, they're criminalizing this shit.
What the hell does that look like?
What does that look like to you?
One day.
Look at the violence.
I don't give a shit.
Just because you're yelling doesn't mean you're not.
That's one piece of video.
Yeah, one piece of it.
Why don't we show the hours of footage of that?
Tucker, Tucker, Tucker Craig.
What do we got here?
We got Tucker Carlson here.
We got a guy.
We got Tucker Carlson.
We got a guy who's got his own show on Russia.
Ashley Madman, God rest her soul.
We got the king of reflection.
Domestic terrorists.
Oh, my God.
Look at this violence.
Oh, my goodness.
Oh, my God.
They're checking it out.
Let's roll the tape of the violence.
Okay, that's like saying there's a war going on over here with your video of outside getting a lot of people.
Here's my question.
There's other videos, Binny.
Hold on, let's go back.
So you mean to tell me, Donald Trump, 2016, we found this is a fact.
This isn't BS.
I made this up.
2016, fact, all right?
The Dorm Report.
Hillary Clinton, DNC, FBI, they all colluded to say he cheated.
None of that's true.
Oh, yeah.
None of that's true.
So you're full of shit right now.
Number one.
100% true.
She paid for the dossier and did all that shit.
100%.
So wait.
So Donald Trump is crazy to think that they would cheat again?
Are you kidding me?
You mean having an FBI?
There's no evidence of voter fraud of any type whatsoever.
Damn full of shit.
Yeah, but that's a separate conversation.
Hold on.
By the way, and the hypocrisy for you guys to talk shit, the Lincoln Project was comprised of all the same shit that you guys accused Trump of.
That's the fucking funny part.
You guys are all full of shit.
You, your whole crew was tax evading, Russian foreign agent, money scandaling fucking people, and we're supposed to, what?
Believe you guys were making money.
Where's all that money?
Where's all the money?
And we're, I'm fucking crazy.
You didn't vet none of those people?
You didn't vet none of them?
None of these people.
And it's always the ones that point are the biggest pieces of shit.
The ones that go, hey, look at Trump, tax guy, Russia guy.
It was you guys.
It wasn't me.
It's you.
Oh, you're innocent.
You're 100%.
I'm going to pay my taxes.
Okay.
Okay.
You want to find some fucking guy.
You know what you are?
An American patriot.
You're a whack job.
Yeah, I'm a whack job.
You're a whack job.
Come to guess.
Oh, yeah.
Right, yeah.
Dismiss, dismiss conspiracy.
No, the truth fucking hurts and doesn't care about your feelings.
Period.
I'm sorry.
I'm not delusional at all.
What are you saying about the peaceful tour of the Capitol, which I fully disagree with?
But it's not as opinion.
It's not wrong.
It's not an opinion.
It's not an opinion.
He's a liar.
He's a liar.
He's lying into the camera about a violent event saying it was peaceful, spouting conspiracy theories and using a Tucker Carlson thing.
I didn't play this.
I don't know what to say other than to say it's why the country, right, I mean.
It's why Trump is leading in the polls because there's so many crazy whack jobs like me that are tired of your bullshit, period.
America first.
Look where the fuck America is right now.
Where are we?
Are you happy with what's happening right now in this country?
Are you genuinely happy with what's happening in the country?
Border wide open, inflation, all the bullshit that's happening, all the violence, all the smash, all the shit.
You're happy?
I think three things.
I genuinely think you're a whack job.
God bless you, too.
Thank you.
I think you're ignorant.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you.
And I think you have nothing to say because you know that I'm right.
And guess what?
I hope to God Trump's win again.
Trump wins again so at night he just leaves.
You kill me your head.
He'll kill me.
No, kill the chairman of the joint.
No, because I want you to wake up every day.
Shut down NBC.
I want you to wake up every morning and go, oh, I want you to cry like all the people that cried, but he made America dope.
It's people like you that are dividing us.
All right.
I don't give a shit about personality.
I want policy.
I want to live in a safe fucking country.
All right.
I want the border to be secure.
I want the economy to be killing.
All right.
I don't want people like you.
I don't know why you see it.
He's a boogeyman.
You gave a little rattle to me.
Not at all, bro.
I'm on point all day.
I don't vote.
It's vein in your head.
Yeah, it's called passion.
It's vein in your head.
Yeah, I have passion.
What do you think about what he's asking about killing the joint chiefs of staff?
As a value, he's for it.
No, what?
For it.
Kill him, right?
What do you call it?
When Trump wants to kill Millie.
Maybe you'll shoot it up.
You didn't have that conversation.
He just said it.
I said it.
Trump just said he wanted to kill Millie.
When did that happen?
Yeah, that happened three days ago.
Okay, I didn't see it.
That's one question he's asking.
He's asking a question about how do you feel America's doing today?
We'll get to this here in a minute as well.
How do you think America's doing today?
I think the country is got a bad economy right now.
And I think the country is, when you look at the polls right now, the country is having a choice put on it that it doesn't want.
And so right now, when you have 80% of the country saying we don't want the Trump-Biden rematch, we'll see if we even get the Trump-Biden rematch, right?
Johnson didn't get out of the race until March of 1968.
We'll see.
We'll see what happens.
We'll see what happens if Glenn Young gets in to the race from Virginia.
We'll see what happens if Nikki Haley pops in New Hampshire.
You know, Trump isn't going to go down in a national election.
He'll lose in Iowa first, and then he'll lose in New Hampshire.
And the candidate that could beat him in Iowa hasn't revealed themselves yet.
But Nikki Haley can beat him in New Hampshire.
And we'll see, like over the months ahead.
But I wouldn't bet my right arm that we're going to see a Trump-Biden contest at all.
More because Trump's not going to make it or Biden's not going to make it.
I think that there's a scenario where they both don't make it.
Who do you think is going to make it on the left?
I think the Democratic race is still very, very fluid.
I think, look, the reality of the campaign is you had a guy go on MSNBC named Cornell Belcher.
He's a pollster, and what he said was that Biden's age is an asset because of his wisdom.
And so when you run a presidential campaign, you got to start, and you have to be grounded in reality.
And reality is, if you're going out, and I think objectively, this is what the Biden campaign is saying.
It's saying that this is the best economy ever.
I think that's what their message is.
And two, his age is an asset and he's the wisest guy in the land.
No one believes that.
So I think that's a very difficult proposition.
And so when you look at numbers in November, in December that consistently show him losing to Trump, there will be a different discussion.
Right now, when you see the numbers coming out that show a very close race, that show how much dissatisfaction there is with him on the economy, mostly in Washington, what they say is don't believe the polls.
Don't read the polls.
But those polls are real.
And so I don't think they've caught it up.
Now, it's interesting because the Democratic Party historically was always the more chaotic party.
But they're in line right now behind Biden.
But if this Minnesota congressman, for example, Dean Phillips, if he were to go up and run against Biden in New Hampshire, I think he would do very well.
You know, James Carville is shouting from the rooftops about people better wake the fuck up because three quarters is a big number.
When you look at gas prices, when you look at interest rates, when you look at real wages, all of these things, the economy is in tough shape for most people.
Regarding California yesterday, gas prices were $6.50 in California.
Going back to your question, what are your thoughts on Newsom?
I think he'd be a very formidable candidate.
We're on the same page.
Let me answer the question for you guys with this Trump thing.
Can you pull this up so we can, because he asked a question, I want to answer his question.
So Trump said what?
Trump lost the idea of executing.
How did he say it?
Can you pull up the quote on what he said?
What did Trump said exact words, if he can find it?
Go a little lower and yet not exactly.
Well, I see it suggests what?
Execution.
But what is it?
Where are the exact words?
And who said it?
Was it on camera?
Do you know where he said that?
I don't know.
I'm trying to look at the phone call.
Is this one of those like heard someone, heard somebody say?
Steve, do you know where he said this?
It's in the.
He says the punishment would have been death regarding the phone call that he made to China.
Yeah.
Well, these are some combination of Trump's tweets, statements.
Oh, okay.
So he didn't actually say it.
No, he actually absolutely said.
No, I'm looking for the actual quote of what you said that he said.
He ordered death.
Number one, bullshit.
Number one, it's treason to talk to China behind the president's back.
That's number one.
But number two, no, it's not.
But can I give you my number two?
Number two is I don't support those words.
Here's what you have to realize.
I don't sit there and support every word a candidate's going to say, left or right.
I'm not sitting there saying, oh, I 100% agree with 100% of what this guy says.
No, I don't.
I've never been like that ever with a person that's been a president.
Is this the one?
So let's read.
I'm not literally a little embarrassing moment in American history with his gross income and pulling attention on Afghanistan coastal lives in Russia, handing over billions of dollars of the finest military equipment over the United States.
Next week, this will be a time for all citizens of the U.S. Celebrate.
This guy turned out to be a woke train wreck who, if the fake news reported is correct, was actually dealing with China to give them a heads up on thinking of the president of the United States.
This is an act of egregious that in times gone by, the punishment would have been death.
Yeah, okay, that's not saying that's nice.
Well, I was waiting for the money.
China and the United States could have been the result of a treasonous act.
He's right.
I mean, I agree with that.
And he didn't say he's got to die.
So that's the response.
So it was fake news.
So you just did.
Basically, what the media is.
He's calling for the assassination of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff right now.
His words are the fuck out of it.
That's fake news.
His words saying this is an act so egregious that in times gone by in the past.
Well, first off, the act was normal, standard.
He was talking as the chairman does to his counterpart in the Chinese military to deconfliction reasons, which are normal, appropriate, and standard conversation.
To each is on at this point, right, with this area.
Somebody can say, this is a little bit of an exaggeration.
He's not saying he should die.
No, no.
Listen, he's Donald Trump has made intimations of violence towards many people, judges, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
This tweet, other statements, and it is what it is.
What are your thoughts?
This is disgusting.
How do you read it?
I'm curious.
By the way, my mic keeps cutting out every once in a while.
No, I've one short thought.
I'm going to say this, and then I'm going to ask a question before we wrap up.
But this is the whole thing, is that it's not literally him calling for death, but the whole premise with Trump and where it gets complicated is that it is a lot of dog whistling.
I'm not going to come out and say it other than Russia, Russia, Russia, 30,000 emails.
But he dances around, hey, typically this is death.
He did capitalize death.
This is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
This was his general handpicked.
So again, it's not literal, but there is some sort of hyperbolic nature about Trump where you can kind of interpret it this way.
But if this were a red flag, yellow flag football.
You don't know.
That's the whole thing with Trump, is he didn't come out and say it, but he said it.
Can you guys hear my voice or no?
Yeah, I can hear you.
Okay, go for it.
Well, here's my question.
But let's go back to the strategy thing.
Because if we parse through all the nonsense, at the end of the day, whether 75% of people want to see Trump Biden, it's looking like we're heading for this train wreck.
If you're the campaign manager, if and when you might even get this call, based on your strategic abilities, you're the campaign manager for 80-year-old Joe Biden.
You know that the economy is weak.
You know that people are fed up.
You know that Trump is also a weak candidate numerically.
How would you go about winning against Trump if you're Joe Biden's candidate?
Well, the extremism is the issue.
And each time you have a Carrie Lake-style whack job running for office, they tend to lose over and over again.
So he needs to put the extremism at the front and center of the campaign.
And then they also need to get an economic message that's reality-based.
Because right now it's not reality-based.
So I believe, this is my opinion, that they're going to take the footage of January 6th, the not-so-peaceful stuff, the stuff where it's actually violence, and they're just going to pump $100 million into that and simply say, is this what you want more of?
Whether it was an insurrection or not is irrelevant.
They're going to take the worst of the worst images and say, is this what you're voting for?
And where are they going to play that?
They're going to play that in Pennsylvania.
They're going to play that in Detroit.
They're going to play that in Iowa.
They're going to play that in Ohio.
They're going to play it in the 100,000 swing votes that basically vote for Obama or Trump back to Biden.
And how's that going to work?
Well, I mean, first off, let me just say, we're sitting here talking about it.
I honestly don't know what the no labels people are going to do.
They either have the $100 million they need to get ballot access or they don't.
But if they have it and Joe Manchin and John Huntsman or Joe Manchin and someone else are running and Bobby Kennedy is running on the Libertarian ticket and Cornell West is running on the green ticket, it's not a two-person race.
Just like from a strategic perspective, it's the race is the race that is, not the one.
It's not a two-person race.
So the first thing that happens in a three-person race with Joe Manchin, you could have 40 competitive states, right?
It lowers the threshold to the 30s.
A lot of people say that it automatically re-elects Trump.
I'm not sure that I buy that.
But there's going to be a lot of volatility ahead in politics because we're barreling down the road at a choice that three-quarters of the country says it doesn't want.
And that never works out well in the United States.
Steve, let's wrap it up with one conversation here.
One thing you spot.
I can't hear myself.
You guys can hear me.
I'm fine.
I can't hear myself.
Okay.
So you said America would have been different if Hillary Clinton was, we wouldn't be where we are today.
So a lot of people would say, of course it wouldn't be because she is like the face of establishment.
So she would have protected all the establishment people and they would have been fine.
Trump wouldn't have an anti-establishment.
Let me just give you my question.
And then Trump, the face of the anti-establishment, of course is going to ruin it for everybody else because he's not part of their camp.
He's not part of their group.
He's not kicking it with, you know, a McConnell or Schumer or Pelosi or Hillary.
He's not part of their camp.
He's not part of that.
But they hate this guy.
They can't stand this guy, even though over the years he gave them all the money.
What would America look like with a Hillary Clinton as a president?
Because she probably would have been a two-time president.
What would America look like with Hillary Clinton as a president?
It would have looked like it would have looked like what America looked like before Donald Trump was president.
We would have had a moderate Democratic president, internationalist that believed in American military power, probably more interventionist than where the country is, where the party is, where the Republican Party is.
We would not have left Afghanistan in the chaotic manner that we would have left.
You would not have had the complete societal chaos and lying, and you wouldn't have had a president who lied to the American people 35,000 times.
You're saying Hillary Clinton hasn't lied.
Hillary Clinton has lied, but she doesn't lie like Donald Trump lies.
35,000 documented lies.
No person has ever done that.
And so I guess when you sit and you talk about the establishment and the anti-I get the construct, right?
And the us and the them and the puppet strings and the they and everything.
But here's the deal.
Donald Trump and everyone who worked for him, these are immensely powerful people.
Are you going to tell me Wilbur Ross isn't part of the establishment?
That the hedge fund Titan, Ken Griffin, isn't part of the establishment?
Steve Schwartzman, right, of Blackstone, who funded Trump isn't part of the establishment.
Come on.
Yeah, I don't put him on the Larry Fink and Soros level at all.
If you're talking deep state, you know, you're talking Soros, you're talking Fink, you talk to some of those guys.
I just want to let you know.
I have a big problem.
And I have to push back on it.
Totally fine.
Go for it.
You should think carefully about using Jewish names and alleging global conspiracies.
Right?
I don't think you're insinuating.
What are you saying?
What I'm saying is when Elon Musk goes and he says it's the fault of the Jews that he fucked up Twitter and the anti-defamation league, there is a virus of anti-Semitism in the air.
And inimical to anti-Semitism is the con, well, a deep part of anti-Semitism, as it's expressed, is always the conspiracy.
Yeah.
Right?
And Soros conspiracy, Fink conspiracy, it's all bullshit.
It's all nonsense.
Lay out the conspiracy in detail or don't, but the assertion of some powerful flowing conspiracy against Trump.
Soros a lot of money.
Open society, $32 billion.
Yeah, he's DEI, CEI, all that stuff is through them.
That's the corporate equity index, you know, diversity, equity, inclusive, ESG, environmental, social governance, and they're giving Philip Morris the highest score and they're giving Tesla the lowest because Elon Musk is against them.
You have to realize this isn't conspiracy.
This is weird.
What does that have to do with politics?
No, you brought up Elon Musk.
I didn't bring up Elon Musk.
How does a Philip Morris gate get a higher score for the environment than Tesla?
You don't think that's conspiracy to you?
To me, it's conspiracy on what ESG is doing.
That's not the word.
That's not the word I would use.
I just think it's mostly fucking stupid.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, it doesn't make sense.
As a Jew, I think we got a little off track here because I don't think that's what he was insinuating at ever.
I think he was just saying the more globalist establishment names who just happen to be whatever religion.
I don't really give a shit.
I don't think it's.
The word historically, globalist, code for Jew.
I didn't know that.
This is the first time.
I've never heard of them.
Is that why you say internationalist?
That's how you describe Hillary Clinton.
I've never heard that word.
I've heard globalist a billion times.
Yeah.
Know.
I mean, globalist is very much part of the vocabulary and architecture of a lot of white supremacy, a lot of anti-Semitism.
I think you have to be careful with no doubt.
But to hone in on what you were saying, you were saying that he's basically saying, listen, Trump is anti-establishment.
I think we can all acknowledge, at least on the surface, the establishment don't like him.
What you're basically saying is that everyone that worked for him, from Wilbert Ross to Mnuchin to everyone, they're all part of the establishment, whether it's Wall Street.
It's a scam, right?
You don't think that he in himself is anti-establishment.
But the people who were.
If you want to look for a model of a president who was anti-establishment, truly, on the opposite side, in every conceivable way, of the class that he grew up in, right?
The party that he led, it was Franklin Roosevelt, right?
That's an example of somebody or Teddy Roosevelt, right, who was against the establishment powers of the government.
What about in the last 50 years?
Donald Trump is very much in the middle of whatever it is you define as the American establishment, right?
You have two institutions in the country.
The leaders of the Democratic Party and the leaders of the Republican Party are both part of the establishment by definition.
Correct.
If you're running a hedge fund, you're in the establishment.
If you're in the top 1% of income, you're in the establishment, period.
So you have two political parties that we're told over and over again never agree on anything.
But what they agree on is we're going to get the choice that they give us, whether you like it or not.
And that's the establishment.
I don't know about that because you're saying if you're in the top 1% of the 0.01%, you're the establishment socioeconomically.
I wouldn't say that someone like Elon Musk is the establishment.
That guy is trying to fucking put a sledgehammer to it.
I wouldn't say that someone like Joe Rogan, who's made it into the mainstream media nomenclature, is establishment at all.
So I don't know if I agree with your assessment just because you're at the top of the list.
I don't think Joe Rogan is corporate.
Correct.
But Joe Rogan's in the establishment.
How so?
Joe Rogan is his establishment.
Joe Rogan is a multi-millionaire who millions of people listen to.
The idea that he's somehow outside of the mainstream fighting the mainstream.
I just, I don't.
What about Elon?
I think Elon Musk is an American oligarch.
I think that Elon Musk is, and I come from a place, I'm delighted by this FTC action against Google.
I'm for breaking up these companies.
I'm for breaking up the concentrations of power that have run amok, right?
That's anti-establishment, right?
When you're talking about breaking up Facebook and Google and all of these giant out-of-control companies that have stifled competition and growth in the country, that's anti-establishment.
Fixing the tax code is anti-establishment.
Reform and renewal is anti-establishment.
But I just reject, I think, the definition as laid out.
Okay, got it.
Steve, thanks for being on.
This was fiery.
It was crazy, but the audience won today, as usual.
That's the goal.
You guys want to get some beers after this?
Ron, if you want to put the link below to his podcast that we have so people can go find it as well.
If you want to hear a different perspective, the warning with Steve Schmidt, again, don't expect to like everything he has to say, but it's going to be a different perspective.
