Republished with permission from Steve Schmidt
The president of the United States of America released this video on Truth Social Wednesday night:
Where are the Palestinians?
Where did they go?
It goes without saying that this is all madness, but what cannot be ignored is that it is sinister madness, but not as sinister as the United States standing with Russia against the nation that Russia criminally invaded.
The American people must not stand for this.
The American people will not stand for this.
We will not.
My friends, you know this.
Deep down, you know it.
You must know it, feel it and believe it.
There are five things in the main to understand:
- The United States Constitution is being vandalized right now. Next, the burning begins. What Trump is doing is unconstitutional, despotic, aggressive and deliberate. Believe your eyes and ears.
- Elon Musk fired the first shot, literally. This was not a cannon blast at Fort Sumter, but rather the DIGITAL SHOT HEARD AROUND THE WORLD. It was aimed at us by a man who delivered the Hitler salute four hours after the inauguration.
- There will be a great deal of suffering unleashed in the United States and around the world by Donald Trump and his henchman.
- The suffering caused by Trump can only be stopped by stopping Trump. The only force in the universe that can stop Donald Trump is the might of the American people by removing his MAGA extremists from ALL public offices.
- The American people will rebel against this assault on our ideals, values, history and sacrifices. The American people will recriminate and repudiate Donald Trump.
- Elon Musk will never go to Mars.
- The world’s richest men who run the world’s most powerful tech platforms are existential threats to American liberty. They have grown far too powerful. Their companies have become predators hunting freedom. Their empires will be broken up, and there will never again be such a concentration of economic and technological power that manifest itself in so few hands with so much control over the lives of ordinary Americans.
- Donald Trump will fail.
- Government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from Earth, and the last best hope of humankind will be preserved.
- The only political movement that will stand as a peer with MAGA is the Confederacy. Like the Confederacy, MAGA will be destroyed by the forces of freedom in this country. MAGA shall be smashed upon the rocks.
Americans are an unconquerable and indomitable people. They will not surrender their birthright of freedom at an altar of Mammon, filled with gold and built by selfish princes for a mad king.
This moment demands a rebirth of idealism and a commitment to the work of perfecting the Union.
Let me be clear about something. Dejected cries that claim Donald Trump is all powerful and cannot be stopped are as pathetic as what Trump and Musk are doing.
Defeatism, appeasement and moral surrender are an unholy trinity that must be rejected in favor of a fighting faith that revels in the idealism of an opposition that rises for the cause of saving what must endure.
We must also reject the premise of false peace that is the gateway to slavery. The mathematician and philosopher Albert Whitehead understood this:
The experience of Peace is largely beyond the control of purpose. It comes as a gift. The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anaesthesia. In other words, in the place of a quality of ‘life and motion’, there is substituted their destruction. Thus Peace is the removal of inhibition and not its introduction.
Have no doubt that there will be very hard days in America ahead, but also good ones. Life will not stop in the United States while the American people rise to stop Trump, who is everything and more than his worst critics ever surmised.
Yet, for those of us who have been proven correct, we should take no joy for those who see the situation clearly for the first time this morning. They should not feel reproachment from those who saw it first.
We must gather together and grow into a majority bound together by a simple inclusive declaration which is this: I am an America, and one word: no.
This is the platform of the opposition.
It is a demand to STOP what will grow from a seed of defiance into a great cause of reform and renewal that will break MAGA’s back, by offering the American people an American vision that is the antidote for the sickness in our land.
There have been seasons of doubt and despair before. There have been many, and there will be more, but have faith in the dawn that will break.
Heed these words. Slow them down. Let them linger.
O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bomb bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Do not be afraid.
Fight back.
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.
