The Daily Beast Podcast - This Is How Blue Wave Dems Must Humiliate Trump

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

Steve Schmidt returns to the Daily Beast Podcast to discuss the mounting political and ethical scandals surrounding Donald Trump, JD Vance, and the president’s inner circle as the midterm elections approach. Speaking with Daily Beast executive editor Hugh Dougherty, Schmidt takes aim at the alleged corruption surrounding Donald Trump Jr.’s Russian-linked wedding, the kidnapping of Ukrainian children, and the Trump administration’s handling of the war in Iran. He lays out his vision for how Democrats should use congressional power to restore checks and balances, hold officials like Pete Hegseth accountable, and investigate the administration’s actions. Schmidt also weighs in on the Democratic candidates to watch, the growing backlash against MAGA, and the economic pressures threatening to reshape the political landscape. #ad Ready to reach your goals? Visit https://hims.com/beast to get a personalized, affordable plan that gets you. #ad INCOGNI Deal: To get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to https://incogni.com/beast 🛡️ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Democrats need to use the full power of the Constitution that has given them the Article I branch of government. Every corrupt deal, every email, every correspondence between Tim Cook and someone in the West Wing, go get it. Mark Zuckerberg, time for accountability. It's important for Democrats to realize nobody is voting for them to go up there and work with Donald Trump and find bipartisan common. Brown. What we're voting for them to do is to make this stop. Make it stop. Welcome to the Daily Beast podcast. I'm Hugh Doffaty. I'm executive editor of the Daily Beast. I'm filling in for Joanna Coles. Don't worry, she will be back on the next episode of Inside Trump's Head. We have got a fantastic guest to speak to it today, Steve Schmidt. He is, of course,

John McCain's former campaign manager, but now far more significant role, I think, than that. He runs Save America and he is a voice of reason and of absolute moral clarity and opposition to Donald Trump. Before we get into that conversation, please join our community, hit that subscribe button, give us a like. The ability to bring you people like Steve Schmidt is because of the support of you, our subscribers, you keep us independent and not part of that suppine media that we see in D.C. all too often.

Steve Schmidt. Steve Schmidt, a voice of moral clarity. Thank you for joining us. There are so many topics that we could be talking about. We are in, I think, the beginnings of the final race to the midterms. We're past the 50-day mark and things are moving rapidly. But I just wanted to start with a quite remarkable story that's come out about J.D. Vance. A man who I know that you have, as part of the Save America pack, have targeted before,

and I suspect my target again. It turns out that in 2016, he was briefing the Hillary Clinton campaign on how to defeat Trump. What does that tell us about the character of J.D. Vance? He has not. He's a person of the lowest and most despicable character who seeks power and will do anything to get it. his entire public service should be understood as a corrupt act.

That you have Peter Thiel putting $40 million into this. By the way, you had one of the most exceptional Democratic candidates of a generation, Tim Ryan, who ran against J.D. Vance and was abandoned by Chuck Schumer. Republicans spent in excess of $60 million. National Democrats spent nothing on Ryan, but they spent tens of millions of dollars on Federman next door. Two years after Ryan loses by five points

when the top of the ticket goes down by 27, when he was ahead in August, Chuck Schumer spends tens of millions of dollars losing the Sherrod Brown race, as if they're disconnected from one another, as if an investment would have not had an impact two years later. So the story of J.D. Vance, the beneficence of Peter Thiel, his comfort with the extremism, his wife's comfort with the extremism,

speaks in a brokenness of our politics. And frankly, when you watch the Sunday shows, a complete inability for most every single interviewer to cut to the core of what his derangements and deformities are in his character, observe them, query them, challenge those answers, and expose him for the danger he is to this Republican. Mark by words, he is a dangerous man. He is the archetype written about by Dorothy Thompson in her who goes Nazi piece, the aggrieved

embittered striver at an Ivy League school who's never quite accepted. Always the guy who, you know, with his couch, the weirdo looking from the outside in and he's angry about it. This is a dangerous unprincipled guy should never, ever hold the position that he holds, but unfortunately for the country, he was picked by the president's corrupt son whose wedding was just paid for by a Russian oligarch, right, to bring it full circle. Well, and I wanted to talk to you about this incredible situation

where a Russian oligarch is, on the one hand, getting the order of friendship from Vladimir Putin and on the other bestowing his own order of friendship on Donald Trump Jr. and Bettina Anderson, this Umar Kremlin

is a remarkable character in his own right. But here we have Donald Trump Jr. I'm partying with Russians. He was surrounded by his own secret service. I mean, you've been around the secret service in your time in politics. The security implications seem crazy. The moral implications seem absolutely unspeakable.

I'm old enough to remember when I was a little kid, the ethical screams, my first ethical screams, right, that I can remember in American politics around Billy Beer. Right, Jimmy Carter's brother's beer brand. Right, we've come a long way. We have Russians close into the war criminal Vladimir Putin paying for the war profiteer, drone contractor, Bitcoin magnate, Donald Trump Jr.'s Bahamas wedding, while his ex-fiancee is off desecrating the country in Greece.

it is incredible and it's intolerable. And he's running around like his name is Uday, not Donald Jr. And it's unacceptable in the United States. And this has to be investigated. There has to be oversight. And now we know, I mean, I think, why it is that Donald didn't want to go there. It's more than just laziness and does.

just like for his wife there, the social climber in Palm Beach. She's like a character out of Palm Royale, Bettina. And like I just look at Pernalison Janney musical number. But, right, it's that you see somebody went to the president and said, you can't be there. He didn't want to be there, right? I mean, so he got a free pass. And he's like, well, if you're going to have this guy pay for the wedding, I can't go. so I can't go. Right? I'm going to play golf, I'll hang out with Natalie, I'll do whatever.

And so it was a win-win for everybody. But what a family is scumbags, right? There's no, there's no, there's no, they are, they are scumbags without parallel across 250 years of history. It's unbelievable. If weight loss has felt like a losing battle, this summer can be different. Skip the guesswork and try weight loss by Hymns. Hymns now offers access to an affordable range of FDA-approved GLP-1 medications, including the Wagovi pill and Wagovy Pen. With Wagovi at Hymns, you can lose up to 20% of your body weight when combined with diet and exercise. It helps regulate your appetite, eat less and keep weight off. And Wagovi is the first ever GLP1 pill for weight loss, so there's no needles needed. Everything happens online

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We know nothing. And the Russian guy's sister-in-law, he's married, he is 43, he's married to a 23-year-old. And the 23-year-old's twin is allegedly, or at least according to the Ukrainians, is running the kidnapping of these, you know, poor Ukrainian children who are taken in the territories stolen from Ukraine by Vladimir Putin and brainwashed into being Russian. It's an incredible circular economy. I've written about the kidnapping of Ukrainian children by. the tens of thousands, and I've written about it a couple of times over the last couple of years. And what's so sad to me is that as somebody writes every day of the thousands of things I've written among the lowest performers or the stories about the kidnapped Ukrainian children,

it's important for people to appreciate the depravity and the evil of this. The Nazis did this. They kidnapped children that had the racial characteristics of the pure Aryan in their estimation, and they took them into the Reich and raised them as Germans. You have, this is a crime unparalleled in our lifetimes in a European country, where you have tens of thousands of children who have been stolen and have been repurposed as Russians. And this is an act of obliteration, not just of those children's lives, but of the culture of the Ukrainian people. It is an evil act.

And this is the son of the president of the United States who is suborning behaviors that were architected within the span of living memory by men who held the names Hydrick and Himmler and Eichmann and Putin, the architects of this evil. and this guy's paying for the wedding. The level of depravity of corruption, it is unacceptable. And this is what Democrats have to appreciate is they have this tremendous victory

that's coming. It's going to give them control of the Senate and the House that they have not received this mandate because the American people have confidence in them but for any reason other than to make this stop. Make it stop. We're looking, this week, the latest, you know, at Times Siena poll has a 5143 generic ballot number.

That's a huge blue wave. what's your very specific advice, Democrats, about where to start tackling this? They're clearly going to the gavel in the House. There is a lot to believe that they're going to get the gavel in the Senate. And when everything's a priority, nothing's a priority, so where would you start? Where do you start cleaning house? Yeah. You know, it's funny.

I had discussions, talks, jokes, whatever you want to call with a lot of people about, like, if you can only stop one of these Trump cabinet secretaries two years ago, who would it have been? There's really no wrong answer, right? Whether it was Christy Nome, Pam Bondi, Matt Gates, but I was always a Hagseth guy. And I think that's where you have to start. So first off, what Hakeem Jeffries did with this secret meeting with Jared Kushner, who is the architect of the world in flames with his Abraham. Accords, which were often celebrated but never really understood, that Jared Kushner

secret meetings with Hakeem Jeffries are unacceptable, unacceptable. You know, for the man who wishes to be the Speaker of the House in the whole constitutional office, and I hope he got the message from his, from his base, and it's wrong. to describe that as as progressive outrage there's opposition outrage to that the first requirement for Democrats is to ditch Chuck Schumer right that that's the first thing that that has to be done the second thing after that is to appreciate that what they have to do is to bring the checks and balances back to life that the Congress is a co-equal branch of government,

co-equal to the president, and they're going to rein in the out-of-control executive branch. And the first thing for the Senate Democrats under new leadership to assert is that there will not be one Trump federal judge nominated who's approved through the two years remaining in his term, not one. and that they're going to open impeachment inquiries immediately and gather the evidence. The public record supports this on Pete Hegsafe, on Robert Kennedy, on Howard Lutnik,

on Janine Piro, on Emil Beauvais, and that they're going to stay on that. The answer to the question about impeaching Trump is that there are not enough jurors in the Senate who would take their oath seriously. There needs to be legislation passed that restrains everything by law that he will veto, which is fine, but the architecture of what will tragic. be described as Project 2029, right, but is not that can be meted out, so to speak, with legislative priorities, right, that are voted into law.

Because I think it's important, because this will be a fast-starting presidential campaign to make clear exactly and precisely what the plan from day one is going to be. but the long and short of it is. Democrats need to use the full power of the Constitution that has given them the Article 1

branch of government. So, for example, Leon Black, Leon Black, who is now suing the Congress, defying a subpoena, should be arrested by the House Sergeant of Arms and locked up in the basement under the Congress's inherent contempt authority. Be a powerful message for the billionaire class.

This is a bad man who is defying something he has no right to defy. And so the president's children, the president's thugs from Greg Bovino, investigations into the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, oversight at every level. We have obliterated military bases across the Middle East that just now are we seeing pictures of.

The country has been lied to since February about this war. 66 times Donald Trump has declared victory. Pete Hegseth is a fascist puppet, a buffoon, Canada, Denmark. or countries that Trump, our allies, he's antagonized. Every corrupt deal, every email, every correspondence between Tim Cook and someone in the West Wing, go get it. Mark Zuckerberg, time for accountability.

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information sitting out there, the better. To get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to incogny.com slash beast or click the link in the episode description. Again, that's incogny.com forward slash beast for 60% of an annual plan. On Hexeth specifically, those pictures that you just mentioned, which we're showing on screen now, they're devastating. We see there's sites of an E3 century. It probably costs $500 million to replace this. We were not told.

We were told it was damaged, and that picture tells you that it clearly wasn't. But more importantly, some of the other images show just how dangerous the conditions are in which U.S. troops in the Middle East are being kept. How exactly did Democrats now hold Hegsa's feet to the fire? I mean, just talk through the practicalities of impeaching, because people followed the impeachment of Donald Trump. they probably haven't followed the power, the sheer power that that gives to the house and what they can do with it. Yeah. There's an urgent moral necessity to impeach Pete Hagseth, who's a liar, who's incompetent,

who's deranged, who has proselytized to the force, who has politicized the force. This is very important. So the very first thing, if you're running for president, you best understand the difference between a Coast Guard and a Navy and an Air Force and a Marine Corps in an Army uniform. You ought to be able to understand the badges, an air assault badge, the airborne badge, the rank, the branch of service, artillery, or infantry. Familiarity with the military is going to be important.

Before the president speaks on January 20th, the 20th, it's going to be a Democratic president. Cash Patel is fired. General Kane is fired. The chief of naval operations is fired in full investigations. The Army Chief of Staff is fired. And full investigations into how they got their jobs. They're politicking, which has been documented.

and reported. And it may be that they retire at reduced ranks. General Donahue, one of the preeminent officers, this generation should be immediately recalled to active duty. It made the Army Chief of Staff. And there will be other officers who need to be recalled to active duty, who don't have the stain of the Trump era to begin reforming the military. The American people idiotized, for many decades, it seems, chanting USA, USA at flyovers. We got an undisciplined Kid Rock military, doing flybys in his mansion, without discipline, blue angels off of the beach, a trillion-plus dollars a year.

And there's a very simple concept here. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it, and the Pentagon can't pass an audit. If you read the words of Eisenhower's farewell, warning about the military industrial complex, nobody should be surprised in a country where the president's corrupt son can be a war profiteer and go into the drone business, that we lost the war to Iran. But the idea that unlimited spending and having bases in 100 countries,

All it's proven is imperial overreach. And the U.S. military clearly cannot do the things that it was expected to do that we thought it could do. It has been mismanaged. It has been run into the ground. Its credibility has been reduced to zero. And the line that's coming out of the Pentagon now makes the Saigon five o'clock follies look like child's play. It's full Baghdad bomb 24-7. Abuse of the force, abuse of the equipment. It's a disaster.

We've lost a war, a naval war, to a country whose navy we sank. It's an achievement unprecedented across 10,000 years of human history. It takes a certain level of incompetence to do that. Trump has met it. But we have lost control of freedom of navigation of the seas in the Strait of Hormuz against Iran, which sends a very clear message to China about the South China Sea and about their nine dash line and about their sovereignty claims to Taiwan. We can't meet our treaty obligations in the Pacific.

We won't meet them in the Atlantic. We have abandoned them in Europe, and the Middle East is on fire. This president has broken the military, he's broken the economy, he's broken the rule of law, he's broken the checks and balances, he's broken the peaceful transition of power, and he has set the world in motion towards World War III. years ago, on the edge of victory in the Second World War, the Canadian Prime Minister, McKenzie King and Franklin Roosevelt's good friend were dining in the White House. And King recorded the conversation. He said FDR said his vision for peace.

He hoped it would endure for as long as everyone who was alive on the day the war was one was still alive. The youngest of those people are 82 years old. So here we are. And Donald Trump, on the following year after that dinner, seems to have set it all on fire. But to what end? To what purpose? There's the corruption. There's the incompetence. You've been a master of messaging as well.

What message should the Democrats take out of this? And if you are running as a Democrat in a swing district or even in what we thought was a Ruby Red State might not be, how do you parse that? How do you get that across to voter? this, it seems almost impossible to process. It's so big. There's so many things. How do you, how do you just get that so that people who are sitting, you know, see the ads between the, between the breaks on Jeopardy or during the local news or on their phones? What's the simple message that just encapsulates it? I think overwhelmingly they should understand a couple things.

First off, I think the polling almost uniformly overstates Trump and Republican strength. right now. What I see coming into shape is a collapse of mega turnout and a surge of independent and democratic turnout. It's going to be one of the great decisive political events ever. Right? The reckoning is coming due. A powerful mandate will be delivered, but that is a mandate that should not be understood as victory for Chuck Schumer. It is a rebuke to Donald Trump, and it is an opportunity for the Democrats who lost two out of three elections to Donald Trump,

the most prolific liar in the world. No joke, no exaggeration, since Goebbels and Hitler by Lie Count. And incredibly, in two out of three American elections, he was viewed as the more honest candidate. On the border, on Biden's fitness,

on the economy, you have a Democratic Party that explicitly said during the Obama era they didn't need white working class voters anymore because of the rising Obama coalition. There are not enough college education, voters in that coalition to discard the majority of the country. Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt understood how important it was,

that there be no forgotten people, that everybody needs to be seen, everyone needs to be heard, that the Democratic Party, the party of the common man, turned away from that common person. And people want to be seen and they want to be heard. And there are a huge swast of the country where the Democratic Party doesn't really have a claim, a standing to say we're a national party, regional party, leadership in Congress from California and Brooklyn.

But you're seeing a rising Democratic Party, James Telerica, John Ossoff, you're seeing candidates do very well in Kansas. But you have to remember is Bob Dole. His surgeries after his war wounds came in the form of donations tossed into a cigar box in Russell, Kansas. You read Bob Dole's farewell letter. Roger Marshall is the antithesis of Dole and Eisenhower. He's an illusion the state of Kansas.

He's a whack job, part of the radical tradition that's come out of the state, but that has always been put down within the state. you have a moment in time right now where every Democrat ought to when they hear words like being imposed on them by their Democratic pollsters, right, that sound jargony, don't say them, speak English, tell the truth, be honest. This is a immense crisis we're facing in this country. Tell the truth about it. And don't blame the voters for it. They're not stupid. And a choice between two corrupt institutions, voters picked the MAGAs because they were more honest than the eyes of the voters, incredibly.

Right? And so what Democrats have to have is humility. What Democrats have to have is, hey, this guy lied to you. And we have to make this stop together. It's bad for your kids. And we don't have to compromise with the 20s. 25% of the country that's bad shit crazy and wants to burn the constitution to be in a version of the Jonestown cult. We need to run them over at the polls. You mentioned Ossov and Talariko. Who else should we be watching?

And I should say, by the way, Daily Beast readers are fascinated by Osloff. They're fascinated by Taloriko. They obviously see that these are rising stars. There's obviously there's more out. You mentioned Kansas. We haven't talked about Iowa. We haven't talked about Ohio, actually, whereas there are significant candidates. You're going to have Democratic Senator in the state of Ohio. You're going to have Annie Andrews is going to be, is going to win the election. I think the Iowa is going to have Democratic Governor, Democratic Senate. I think that there's a real chance for a Democrat to win the Texas, governor's race.

I think that as you look around into the south, you have Jamie Davis in Louisiana. You have Scott Collum in Mississippi. Democratic Party needs to be all in. When you have black candidates running in states like Louisiana and Mississippi, when you have a black prosecutor in the state of Mississippi, the Megger Evers is from, when Elvis Presley's nephew lost by three points,

for governor four years ago, you roll in, right? You crack the ceiling and you keep hitting it until you win a race down there. And so all over the country, you're going to see the waters come up on these MAGA candidates. You have some independent candidates in Nebraska, in South Dakota, without Democrats who may win also. But the country is going to reject this. The economy, the fuse is lit. I can't tell you what day it's going to blow up, but I know that I've had the experience on a presidential campaign

when that happened, when Lehman Brothers imploded and the economy went down. And that's what you're seeing. That's what you're seeing happen right now. The country is enraged over this. Trump, any person who believe this, I'll withhold my opinion for a second, but you were conned. But by a person who history will record is a great con man. As the demagogue, the founders worried about.

Right. And the issue is that my anger at those people for falling for it, that's my issue, not their issue. The bad guy in this story isn't the voters, it's Trump. And so the judgmental wing of the opposition, including the Democratic Party that's pissed off at those voters who voted for this guy, time to let it go. We need these people back in our boat. And about 80% of the country right now is opposed on an issue-to-issue basis on nearly everything that he's doing. And at a personal level, he's under 30% now.

And so there's a wipeout coming. The cost of gasoline, the implications from this war, the loss of America's standing in the world. This is going to start to weigh very heavily over these next 48 days. You just mentioned that you were in a campaign when Lehman Brothers went down. Everybody around Trump must have a moment, right, where this becomes clear. Just explain, I mean, explain maybe for their benefit. What happens in that moment when something, when this trigger happens, when there's some moment that you realize the economy is against us so catastrophically that we can't win?

Only the stupidest people amongst them don't understand by now that this is going down. There was a story that was out in last week, and I was literally reading it from southern Bavaria at the Oberstalsburg, near the bunker complex underneath the Nazis' final readout. And it's a story about how nobody will tell them no. right and what's the point and so what i've said for a long time is that maga hierarchically is a line and in the people in that line have two features that are unique they all have eyes in the back of their head for the knife and the hand behind them because that's the way you advance right you want to

get one seat closer to the furor table so all these people are plotting against one another they're jumping off the ship. They don't want to be seen at Dallas. Oh, we're trying to run away from Trump. They're all tied to them. They're married to them. There is no running from Trump. Go to Dallas.

Don't go to Dallas. You're all one uniform block of fucking crazy. They tried to light the Constitution on fire by denying an election result in setting a standard where the American people who are the recipients of a 250-year inheritance of elections and have the freest and fairest elections in the world, right, that this is now suspect. And this insanity is spread everywhere because we were the foundation, the stability in the world

for an order, though not perfect, was much more perfect than anything that has ever come before. And so Donald Trump began this presidency with the repudiation of the Atlantic Charter. He is meddling, for example, in fragile Irish politics out of ignorance. Everywhere he goes, he lights something on fire. And this era of American politics in the decades that preceded it, that produced it, will long be studied. But we're in a moment of real catastrophe in the world that's getting worse, that we ought to have an appreciation for,

that enough evidence is accumulated. I think that the American people are going to put a stop to it. But that's going to cause chaos in government for two years, but I think it's important for Democrats to realize nobody is voting for them to go up there and work with Donald Trump

and find bipartisan common ground. What we're voting for them to do is to make this stop. Make it stop. Steve America has had some of the most brilliant attacks on Trump and most brilliant, I think, nailings of his character. What are your plans for the next six weeks? Team is at it, right? So we'll be, we're involved in a vote safe initiative with the, with Reverend Sharpton, with faith leaders all over the country,

National Action Network. We're involved in that space. We're going to be communicating about various campaigns and candidates, and we'll be trying to frame what the choice is for the American people to help people understand they've been lied to, that we've lost the war, that there's consequences for that, right? That, you know, for a long time, we had an argument in the country about, we vote for this guy, some bad things might happen. Well, we voted for them, and there's no evasion now of those bad things.

they are happening. And some of those things are going to become catastrophic things. And I spent a lot of time in Europe over the last couple of weeks, and I did some mountain climbing on the border of Austria and Italy and the Dolomites. And you're on the frontier of fighting in the First World War. And we don't really talk about the First World War. We don't write about it, right, what happened, right? If you went out and asked an average member of Congress, hey, what happened in the First World War? People would be like, hmm. I mean, what happened was four empires fell apart, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the German Empire, and the Australian Empire. And it set the stage for the deadliest war in history. And one of the

great achievements in the aftermath of a Holocaust, is the European Union, the 80 years, that Donald Trump lit a fire to for no other reason than his ignorance and his power and his prejudices and his vanities and the weakness of the people around them who couldn't be told no, the greed of media executives who lapped up every lick of nonsense and tried to profit from it. And what we got in a serious world is a version of the Abby Phillips show. And here we are. Here we are. And I have to say, I've been to those dolomites, those battlefields and dolomites as well. They're tremendously moving because you see in these incredibly beautiful mountains that men were facing each other,

entrenched as dug into the rock in winter, in horrible conditions. And as you say, there's a very moving reality that you're there and realize that there is peace as far as the eye can see metaphorically from, you know, from those dolomites for hundreds and hundreds of miles. And one of the things that I think captures you when you're there is what progress we have made. And yet, here we are. We're talking about the possibility of that, but not even the possibility, the reality of that progress having been halted. We've got not a lot of days to the election. people are already beginning to vote

among those people around Trump because you know some of these people you know them by character what are they going to do when they lose I mean we all saw that the downfall movie about Adolf Hitler and that scene that's become a meme of him

going crazy and you know that you're stuck in this in this world around Trump you might get impeached if you're Pete Heggseth you want to run as president What are they going to do? It's going to be a catastrophic impulsion, isn't it? I think that you should look forward to disgrace and misery.

And it will only ever get worse. You made a choice. You raised your hand against your country. You tried to light the Constitution of the United States of America on fire. You're an American fascist, and you're going to lose. What you did was an obscenity and a sin, and no coming back from it. And so you're going to have careers wiped out, reputations wiped out, and in misery. People will go bankrupt with the lawyers, some will go to prison.

What I would say is, I think Christy Nome's a great example. of this, right? So she got to bang Corey on AirFuck 1, right, six or seven times flying around the land on the taxpayer dime. And according to reports, allegedly, of course. Yes, he does deny that they have a relationship. Was it worth it? She doesn't seem to me to be enjoying life very much right now. Right? How about Corey Lewandowski? Right, he went for it, right, trying to pretend to be Mr. Kingpin, right, head pimp at the HHS department? I think he's going to go to prison.

Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, I'm 55, by the time I'm 65, Todd Blanche will be disbarred. These ICE agents, every one of these sons of bitches. There are 47 days of training, right? Set the countdown clock, right? And it's up to the Democrats to lay the track. Deposit your badge in the box to the left and your weapon in the one to the right. You drew your weapon on someone, you might go to prison. The Justice Department in two years' time will be cooperating in the murder or investigations of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

And there's no statute of limitations on murder. The assault on the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the boat strikes, the war crimes, the sinking of an unarmed Iranian frigate may be, maybe a naval melee. The United States did not go to the aid of those sailors in the sea. Precedent for that out of Nuremberg. famous war crimes trials so the people who stole the people who lied

the people who tried to profit from a war we're going to find out and I don't think that anyone running for president is going to be in a position to appoint America Garland as Attorney General and this isn't revenge

this is justice most fundamental American concept is we get to pick our leaders, one, and two, no one is above or below the law. Grant talked about this. Whether I agree with the law or whether I disagree with the law, my job as president is to faithfully execute the laws. The law must be executed faithfully. Steve Schmidt, you could not end on a better note than an appeal to Justin. It's 48 days. We are going to be checking in with you on the run up. We are looking forward to exactly what Save America gets up to because I'm assuming that you are plotting an October surprise. We'd all be disappointed if you're not. There should be surprise about what you're predicting, but quite how, quite what a scale this blue wave is going to be. It's common. We will be with you to check in on its progress. Steve Schmidt, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you here. We are going to be covering the race to the election in-depth every day on The Daily Beast. You can find us at www.the-dailybeast.com. We're also on Substack. And on the subject of Substack, we put up a link during the show to those extraordinarily moving substack pieces that Steve Schmidt wrote about the kidnapped Ukrainian children. I could not recommend them more highly. We've got the link up again on the screen. One small note, the Likon Black has denied.

validations of sex abuse and involvement with Epstein. Thank you to everybody who's joined us for being part of our community. As I said, Joanna is back with Michael Wolfe on the next episode of Inside Trump's Head. And a big thank you to our production team, Ryan Murray, John Romero, Heather Bissaro, Rachel Passer, and Neil Rosenhaus. So the good news is we have so many Bee Beast tier members now. There are too many names to read out. And we really appreciate your support.