Steve Schmidt's issues stark warning: Trump is laughing at us

President Donald Trump is trying to become an American Caesar, argued one of President George W. Bush’s advisers in a recent Substack post — but returning to America’s core ideals can stop him.In his Sunday argument, Steve Schmidt ventured back 90 years to 1936, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt was running for his second term and the Nazis under Adolf Hitler were ascendant in the burgeoning German empire. After describing how the Nazis’ persecution of Jews in Europe was matched by America’s persecution of African Americans across the Atlantic, Schmidt quoted a Roosevelt speech that summed up the fundamentally American qualities that he believes can ultimately take down Trump.“Faith — in the soundness of democracy in the midst of dictatorships,” Schmidt quoted Roosevelt. “Hope — renewed because we know so well the progress we have made. Charity — in the true spirit of that grand old word. For charity literally translated from the original means love, the love that understands, that does not merely share the wealth of the giver, but in true sympathy and wisdom helps men to help themselves.”Schmidt then connected Roosevelt’s rhetoric to modern American politics.“What Franklin Roosevelt laid out is an indictment of our age of selfishness in which an accumulation of factors has arisen in perfect symmetry with the most dangerous man in American history,” Schmidt argued. “Donald Trump is a liar, a cheat, a narcissistic sociopath, a convicted sex abuser and conman.”He concluded, “He is well on his way to becoming an American Caesar, unequal in stature, above the law and in absolute control over vast institutions that can yield power through control. The American citizen is becoming a leashed dog tethered to the state, which grants favors to some, and punishment to others. This must be opposed. It must be defeated — or we will lose America, and there is nowhere left to go.”Last week Schmidt explicitly connected his ongoing argument that Trump is becoming a dictator with the president’s $1.776 billion slush fund to Jan. 6ers and other political supporters (as well as possibly institutions directly connected with himself).“It is remarkable,” Schmidt argued. “Donald Trump has just been given more than $1.8 billion by his lawyer's signature, who is now the Attorney General, creating a slush fund for extremists that Donald Trump can reward them, give them recompense, give them reparations. Donald Trump didn't invent corruption, but he has perfected it. He has created a vicious cult of personality.”After pointing out that in 2020 there was a massive breach of IRS data that impacted more than 400,000 people, none of whom has received a settlement, Schmidt concluded that “millions of Americans work hard and they pay half of what they make to the IRS — to taxes — to fund the schools, the roads, the military. What's happening with Trump isn't just not right. It is an insult, a mockery of every hardworking person who plays by the rules. Donald Trump is laughing at us.”He added, “And so is his family. They are the greatest collection of takers in all of whole history of the United States. There are no examples of corruption that are even in the same galaxy as this. It is truly, truly incredible. Mind-boggling. And yet it rolls on, and it will continue to do so until there's a Democratic Congress that makes it stop.”