Can I break your resistance, and convince you to subscribe to The Warning? In order to continue as an independent political commentator, I need the support of paid subscribers like James. I hope you’ll consider upgrading to a paid subscription too. All you need to do is click here:

---

What was latent has been triggered

Steve Schmidt Apr 6

Donald Trump’s tariffs are a jumble of incoherence wrapped in nonsense, but nonetheless, very real.

The economic vandalism that we are witnessing has been a long time in the making. It will crush working-class people in the United States.

MAGA shills and sycophants have been reduced to sputtering inanities in their defense.

Here are Fox News’ Harris Faulkner and Kayleigh McEnany, who are reduced to incoherence on the matter.

McEnany: “He can read the road ahead and make a deal — “Art of the Deal.” So part of that deal is to make sure your shareholders — the actual people, not by money, but by vote — understand what’s coming. And those 401(k) people who are depending, those retirees, all of that — just talking plain-speak with them.

Faulkner: Look, when this nation used to go to war, people in this country would support the war effort with their materials at home and making things for weaponry and all of that. We gotta do 100 percent buy-in over this bumpy period.

The idea that Trump was a businessman who was making deals all over the world is preposterous.

It is another lie.

“Art of the Deal” was a cheap board game and a ghost-written book.

Trump is a dealmaker like George Santos was a congressman.

One has made deals, and the other was in Congress. What connects them is the fraudulence of the enterprise. Whatever Santos’ reputation may be, it is not for his congressional service. For Trump, it is most certainly not his luster as a global economic genius and international man of mystery.

Every single time that Trump announces a new billion-dollar factory investment somewhere, everywhere, anywhere, it is a lie.

There are no factories coming back.

It is all lies.

It is all pretend.

There is nothing, but nothingness.

Some of you are old enough to remember the Wendy’s commercial “Where’s the beef?”

Now we know.

Howard Lutnick had the answer all along:

Let Donald Trump run the global economy. He knows what he’s doing. He’s been talking about it for 35 years. You got to trust Donald Trump in the White House.

I do not.

You should not.

There is no economic revolution. There is only wanton economic vandalism and premeditated destruction of wealth for the purposes of creating chaos. Why? To assert control and restore order from the madness set loose from the man who started it — by giving more political power to that man.

Appeasement is an action and a philosophy.

The action speaks for itself. The philosophy is about feeding the crocodile first so that when it comes your turn to be eaten, your place shall be last in line.

Truly, there are no words.

Senator Chris Murphy and Congressman Jim Himes of the Nutmeg State, are rising to the occasion in this hour of American crisis.

Senator Murphy has something important to say that you need to hear:

The tariffs don’t make sense as economic policy because they aren’t economic policy. They are a tool to undermine our democracy. A means to force every major company and industry in America to pledge loyalty to Trump in return for tariff relief.

Yesterday, April 5th, was a great day in America, and for billions of people around the world who needed to see millions of Americans behave like Americans.

A message has been delivered.

The American people shall not go gently into that good night and fall to sleep contentedly under a Trumpian sky dimmed of liberty, hope and justice.

We will fight back.

The stakes will go up from here.

The formula is simple.

Donald’s belligerence will increase as his failures mount.

Donald’s certitude about his genius will rise as the evidence of the disaster that he caused becomes unavoidable and undeniable.

Donald’s team of Lutnicks, Musks, Hegseths, Rubios, Gabbards and Millers will turn up the sycophancy as the cost of Trump’s failures grow.

Donald’s propagandists will scream louder and more shrilly about winning and making America great.

The defiance of the American people will explode.

Donald’s belligerence and the defiance of the American people are now opposed and moving towards each other on the same track.

The velocity of everything will increase.

Trump, substantially cornered by his disordered personality and idiocy, will escalate the conflict by asserting power to suppress dissent as the chaos of his manufactured crisis grows. What we are witnessing is a rolling Reichstag fire.

Everything will explode as the Social Security system collapses over the next weeks to months, as trillions of dollars of wealth is incinerated, and the economy begins to implode.

Donald Trump will be egged on and instigated to deploy the US military against the American people in police actions using 18th and early 19th century insurrection laws as the basis.

The people in the streets will be called terrorists.

They will be dehumanized. When the first Americans are shot and killed their murders will be celebrated on Fox News.

Mark my words.

Most people get in line, and most people will stay in line, but since this is America there are enough of us who remain in a permanently feral state when it comes to the maintenance of our liberties.

There is an epic wildness in the American character that flows in the blood of many of our people across race, creed, ethnicity or faith.

There is an indomitability that is ever-present, and always at the ready.

Thirteen days from now marks the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution.

We are at the edge of both danger and a great re-awakening of national purpose and vigor.

Right now, there are two simultaneous challenges. They require the use of imagination, which is the gateway for political vision.

The first is about destruction.

Imagine the destruction of the MAGA political movement. It will soon be at hand. Sooner than you think.

The second is about renewal.

Imagine the future and picture better. The choice is simple. Stagnation leads to the abyss as surely as does leaping into it. Americans will either build the city on a hill, or reduce the progress towards its completion to rubble.

If we cannot see the progress and hear the approval of our ancestors and the hopes of our children then we have become a people too unworthy to sustain the greatest idea and inheritance ever handed down to one group of people by others.

It would be an astonishing betrayal and repudiation of something great and beautiful for something terrible and ugly, but it has happened many times, and we are not immune.

More than anything else, April 5, 2025, was a day where Americans showed no fear of Trump. This too is a dynamic aspect of this moment. Fear of Trump is not a constant. It is either growing or shrinking.

Yesterday, it shrank.

This means that Trump will react, and try to scare people.

Be ready.

Do not be afraid.

Every person who marched and assembled yesterday has been nourished and fortified.

What they — and you — felt, maybe for the first time ever, maybe through unexplained tears or moistened eyes, was a surge of American patriotism.

What was latent has been triggered. Now, it will grow and help harden you to lead others and toughen you to face what is coming.

There can be no backing down.

There can be no standing still.

We must move forward and face this unnecessary crisis with the determination to end it now — before it ends everything good and decent in America.

We must say, “No.”

We will.

There is something becoming clear about the capitulators.

Can you see it?

Do you see the through line, the thread connecting moral cowardice, appeasement, delusion and self-interest?

America’s elites are decadent, weak and corrupt. They stand for nothing, and will kneel for anything that threatens their status.

There are exceptions of course, but in the main, the more prosperous the proprietor, the weaker their roar.

Once again, ordinary Americans will rise to the occasion.

Once again, American elites have misjudged their country and its people.

They were out-of-touch enough that, by the bushel, they surrendered to Trump’s thuggery and called it smart.

It wasn’t.

But as the saying goes, stupid can’t be fixed.

When conviction was required appeasement reigned supreme.

The American people won’t tolerate it. When Mark Zuckerberg looks around on the day his company — a threat to global freedom — is broken up, he can be contended to know two things:

1. He will always be a billionaire and have all the time in the world to play Palo Alto jiu-jitsu.

2. Like his fellow defenestrated oligarchs he will have lost his empire for using it to attack the mightiest Republic in world history.

A great season of trust-busting and a release of competition by removing the hand of the monopolists and oligarchs from the throat of the economy will soon arrive in America.

This disaster will not be soon repeated.

The outcome of this fight is not in doubt, but the cost of it is.

Some losses will not be recovered, and that is what makes all of this so sad.

The only remedy now is better.

We must stand for better, and that starts by rejecting what has been.

America needs an opposition, and now it has one.

It was not brought to you by the DNC.

It happened in spite of it.

There will be chaos next week in America and around the world.

Millions of Americans are better disposed to deal with it than they were last week. That is bad news for Trump, which is great news for America and the world.