Republished with permission from Steve Schmidt
We are at the edge of an abyss.
Last night in Ohio, Donald Trump said that Republicans were on the cusp of defeating “communists, socialists, radicalized lunatics and villains once and for all.”
Read those words again. The president of the United States is speaking about Americans. His fellow citizens. People whose constitutional rights are equal to his own. People whose votes count exactly as much as the votes of the crowd gathered to applaud him.
He is describing their continued political existence as a threat that he intends to resolve permanently.
These are the words of a demented fascist.
I use that description precisely, accurately and purposefully. I am describing the political meaning of his words, the enemies he manufactures, and the submission he demands. The speech would be familiar to Joseph Goebbels. So would the propaganda advertisements glorifying the leader and presenting his struggle for power as the salvation of the nation.
The comparison has a specific foundation. Nazi propaganda cultivated devotion to a supposedly indispensable leader, while depicting designated enemies as existential dangers. It helped make persecution acceptable and indifference possible. The point of studying that machinery is to recognize its operation before its consequences become irreversible.
This is why there are monuments documenting Nazi crimes. This is why there are museums, preserved camps, names carved into stone and testimonies recorded before the last witnesses die.
They are a warning.
They preserve the humanity of people whom a state stripped of protection and marked for destruction. They also confront us with the choices of people who watched: those who joined, those who profited, those who accommodated, those who looked away.
The warning requires us to listen when a powerful man declares that the people who oppose him must be put down.
“Once and for all” is the promise that should stop America cold.
Democracy requires accepting that your opponents will remain your fellow citizens after an election. They retain their rights when they lose. They acquire the authority to govern when they win. You can despise their arguments, and spend your life trying to defeat them. You cannot claim ownership of the country, and revoke their place in it.
Donald Trump speaks as though the nation belongs to him and the people who applaud him. Everyone else occupies it on sufferance.
His language turns political disagreement into an accusation of national betrayal. It makes a rival party into a conspiracy against America. It offers his followers the exhilaration of imagining that the ordinary restraints of citizenship can finally be discarded.
During the same speech, he promised: “We’re going to shove it up their a**.”
There is the president, offering humiliation as an electoral objective. There is the audience, being invited to understand victory as permission to degrade other Americans.
The vulgarity is obvious. The appetite behind it matters more.
He wants a politics in which domination supplies the pleasure, cruelty establishes the bond, and the leader proves his strength through the abasement of his enemies. A crowd can become accustomed to that bargain. It can learn to demand more.
America has its own history of crowds cheering persecution. We should understand the danger with particular clarity. Our citizenship has never protected us from the temptations of hatred. Our institutions have survived because people fought to make their promises real.
Now the government itself is financing advertisements that glorify Donald Trump. One spot presents a “final battle,” and ends with a declaration that it was paid for by the United States government. The White House calls these “public service announcements.”
What public service is performed by teaching Americans to associate their country with the grandeur of one man?
The distinction between the state and the leader is a fundamental democratic boundary. Taxpayer money belongs to a public that includes the president’s critics. Making those citizens finance his political glorification expresses contempt for that boundary.
Goebbels would recognize the ambition: saturate public life with the leader, invest him with national destiny, make opposition feel like desecration.
I believe Donald Trump is foreshadowing a titanic crisis. He will seek to poison the election results while simultaneously threatening a crackdown on dissent.
That is my warning about what comes next.
A man who describes his opponents as lunatics and villains is preparing an explanation for why their victory cannot be legitimate. If they win, his followers have already been told that something monstrous has happened. If citizens protest his response, they can be folded into the same category of enemies.
The election becomes a test of loyalty to the leader. The count becomes suspect whenever it disappoints him. Resistance becomes evidence of the conspiracy he announced in advance.
Americans have already endured his refusal to accept electoral defeat. We have already seen what happens when he persuades people that the lawful transfer of power is an act of theft.
We have no excuse for treating his next threat as an inexplicable surprise.
Yet these chilling words are still too easily absorbed into stories about campaign tactics, polling and colorful exchanges with a crowd. Editors should ask whether their headlines convey the most consequential thing the president said.
The threat deserves the lead.
A president promises to put his domestic opponents down permanently. That statement bears directly on the security of their rights and the survival of legitimate opposition. It warrants sustained attention, direct questions and an insistence that everyone seeking public office answer for it.
Journalists should ask Republican candidates whether Americans who vote against them are entitled to govern if they win. Ask whether dissent is protected even when Donald Trump hates it. Ask what they will do if he demands that lawful results be rejected.
Publish their answers. Publish their evasions.
This country has millions of people who disagree profoundly, and still accept each other’s right to participate. They deserve leadership that protects that compact. A president who threatens it should face a united demand for accountability from everyone entrusted with power, regardless of party allegiance.
The politicians who know better and remain silent are making a decision. So are the executives who calculate that appeasement will protect their businesses. So are the officials who imagine they can serve an authoritarian project, while privately disapproving of its excesses.
Each accommodation makes the next demand easier.
We need election workers protected, lawful counts defended, courts capable of enforcing their judgments and public officials prepared to honor their oaths when honoring them becomes costly. We need citizens who understand that the rights of their adversaries are inseparable from their own.
Above all, we need to recover the capacity to be shocked by things that are shocking.
Exhaustion serves him. Familiarity serves him. The shrug that follows another threat serves him. He has spent years teaching the country to lower its expectations until conduct once disqualifying becomes something to endure before breakfast.
The abyss opens through that surrender.
The people commemorated in those monuments had names, families, ambitions and ordinary lives. Their memorials place an obligation upon ours: defend human dignity while there is still time, and recognize the danger while resistance can still prevent catastrophe.
Donald Trump has told us how he speaks about Americans who oppose him. We should believe the contempt. We should take the threat seriously.
The answer must come through votes, public courage and institutions that refuse to bend. Every American who understands the danger has a responsibility to defend the republic now.
“Never again” must mean something before the next monument is built.
Steve Schmidt
Steve Schmidt is a political analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. He served as a political strategist for George W. Bush and the John McCain presidential campaign. 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. He left the group in 2021.
