Republished with permission from Steve Schmidt

I Pray Heaven To Bestow The Best Of Blessings On This House And All that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof.

John Adams’ prayer is carved into the mantle of the state dining room in Washington, DC. During a prayer breakfast in the room, Trump talked about the quote to the audience, emphasizing how great the house was. He completely omitted the second part of the quote, obviously self-aware enough to realize he was the man about which Adams warned.

This is what I said about Donald Trump on July 23, 2020, almost four years ago:

Donald Trump has been the worst president this country has ever had. And I don’t say that hyperbolically. He is. But he is a consequential president. And he has brought this country in three short years to a place of weakness that is simply unimaginable if you were pondering where we are today from the day where Barack Obama left office. And there were a lot of us on that day who were deeply skeptical and very worried about what a Trump presidency would be. But this is a moment of unparalleled national humiliation, of weakness.

When you listen to the President, these are the musings of an imbecile. An idiot. And I don’t use those words to name call. I use them because they are the precise words of the English language to describe his behavior. His comportment. His actions. We’ve never seen a level of incompetence, a level of ineptitude so staggering on a daily basis by anybody in the history of the country whose ever been charged with substantial responsibilities.

It’s just astonishing that this man is president of the United States. The man, the con man, from New York City. Many bankruptcies, failed businesses, a reality show, that branded him as something that he never was. A successful businessman. Well, he’s the President of the United States now, and the man who said he would make the country great again. And he’s brought death, suffering, and economic collapse on truly an epic scale. And let’s be clear. This isn’t happening in every country around the world. This place. Our place. Our home. Our country. The United States. We are the epicenter. We are the place where you’re the most likely to die from this disease. We’re the ones with the most shattered economy. And we are because of the fool that sits in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk.

What is staggering is that another four years have passed, and Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for the third consecutive election. He plots his promises of revenge, retribution and punishments against the American people from a dingy Manhattan courtroom where he sleeps, drools and farts through his criminal trial.

Someday, there will be a thorough history written of this wretched and dishonest era, and how it happened. Some accounts will miss the mark, but not all. The history is fundamentally a story about corruption: political corruption, media corruption, religious corruption and business corruption.

The consequence of the corruption is a national crisis, and a world that is churning, boiling and growling at the hinge of a new era that has been wrought from American weakness. It has been triggered by Donald Trump, his incompetence and the insanity he has unleashed. For as long as there are free people on Earth, there will always be an oppositional force that seeks to strip it away and subjugate human beings under the yoke of some dogma, -ism, or cult of personality. What fuels that force is lies.

The lie is the foundation of totalitarianism. Truth is the foundation of democracy.

There is a crisis in American democracy because there is a crisis of truth and honesty. The most prolific liar in American history was elected president of the United States. Donald Trump is a degenerate and congenital liar, and that is the point of scumbag former American Media CEO and publisher of The National Enquirer David Pecker’s testimony in court.

The entire Trump enterprise—whether it be Trump University, the business, the charities, the presidency, whatever—is a fantastical fraud. It is a giant conspiracy of lies, right down to the most egregious, over-the-top and stupid ones imaginable like Ted Cruz’s father Raphael being involved in President Kennedy’s assassination.

Unsurprisingly, as it turns out, it was all made up between Trump and The National Enquirer in an unsurprising yet shocking conspiracy of lies. The worst part of it is that the American media as an institution was complicit with all of it. The right-wing media, including Fox, The Washington Examiner, Washington Free Beacon, OAN and NewsMax, is every bit as dishonest and prone to Trumpian fabulism as The National Enquirer. All of it is propaganda for a fascist movement that makes Goebbels dance a jig in the seventh circle of hell.

Democracies cannot survive in a dark night of lies, where it is impossible to know what is real or true. It’s important to grasp and understand that.

David Pecker, like Trump, is a liar. Together, they did something awful to America. They did it for power and money. Both of them betrayed their country and the American people. We should all hold them both in the deepest contempt.