Former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt warned Sunday that President Donald Trump will become more dangerous as the midterm elections approach.
“Judgement day is coming for MAGA,” Schmidt wrote in his Substack newsletter, The Warning. “When it arrives the national danger will deepen. Trump will become more unhinged and erratic in the days and weeks ahead.”
“Though it may not seem like it because it has gone on for so long the truth of the matter is the crisis is just beginning,” he added.
Schmidt, who worked on George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign and ran John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, framed the final stretch of Trump’s presidency as a test of how much damage he is willing to do.
“The last chapter in the sickest reality show of them all is whether Nero from Mar-a-Lago augurs the full bloom of catastrophe he is capable of causing with the power he tragically holds,” Schmidt wrote. “In other words, will Trump reach his psychotic potential?”
He pointed to Trump’s record, writing that Trump “led a coup against the US Constitution nearly six years ago.” He also wrote that Trump’s inaugural address “repudiated the Atlantic Charter and 80 years of American fidelity to the ideas that saved the world before anyone seemed to notice.”
Schmidt invoked journalist Dorothy Thompson, who warned in the 1930s that “no people ever recognize their dictator in advance.” Americans, he argued, should by now be able to see “whom it is that wishes to be a dictator rather than a president.”
He called Trump “the domestic enemy the words are written to describe,” “the demagogue the founders feared” and “the tyrant who Americans thought was not possible.”
“He is the man who knocked down the White House,” Schmidt wrote.
He ended with a warning about where things could go.
“This is what we purchased by making Trump president, and now the world is on fire,” Schmidt wrote. “Only an American would be naive enough to believe these flames won’t light here.”