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On the 80th anniversary of VE Day, the dire state of affairs in America has never been more clear. Steve Schmidt reflects on the legacy of VE Day and compares FDR's vision of human dignity and rights to what's happening today in Trump's America.
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0:00
It is May the 8th, 2025
0:03
This is The Warning. Eighty years ago today, there was jubilation in every corner of the United States
0:13
From every small town square to New York City. From Piccadilly in London and Paris
0:21
Wherever people had endured through the night, They danced into the night for freedom, liberty, that had been won at great cost
0:33
This day marks, within still the span of a single human lifetime, the end of history's greatest cataclysm, the Second World War, that Winston Churchill described in his memoirs as an unnecessary war
0:52
It was a war that began by appeasing madness over and over and over again until it was too late
1:04
Adolf Hitler had a mountain and at the top there was a tea house, a gift from the Nazi party
1:11
The road to the top cost many lives in its engineering and manufacture
1:17
There was a hole, a boring drilled into the mountain. You can walk into it to this day to the golden elevator
1:25
The SS men, the Adolf Hitler Legion, would have lined the rock inside holding torches
1:33
All of it a theater meant to intimidate anybody walking into that mountain, into the Fuhrer's lair
1:40
And up the golden elevator they went. And Adolf Hitler at the top shook down, intimidated, sought to rule the world
1:49
What he did to the Austrian prime minister is precisely what Donald Trump did in the Oval Office to President Zelensky
1:58
The Oval Office is where Winston Churchill would sit by the side of the desk next to Franklin Roosevelt
2:06
and in the evening, they would drink cocktails and talk about the world
2:11
FDR is the most important visionary of the 20th century. The man who envisioned what would come after catastrophe
2:20
And it began with his fundamental belief in the value and dignity of human liberty and human rights
2:29
The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is an American-authored document. It was put forward ultimately by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt after the death of the president
2:42
It is amongst his greatest legacies. The entire architecture of an interconnected world where the value of human dignity has
2:52
been asserted is rooted in the titanic vision of Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt had a dream that the world that would emerge from the night from the darkness from the slavery that would be better would endure for as long as everybody on the day this war was won was still alive
3:16
He shared that one evening at the White House with the Canadian Prime Minister
3:22
Today, the Canadian Prime Minister is the leader of the free people of North America
3:28
When we look at who is the person who embodies the spirit of John Kennedy, of Franklin Roosevelt, of Ronald Reagan, of people who believe deeply in the Constitution
3:42
It's Mark Carney, who embodies not an American fidelity to an American document, but to the principles that inform that document
3:51
Grand principles, important and noble ideas about human dignity and human liberty
3:57
Now, in this moment, some say, well, the issue is the economy
4:02
And they're right, because it is the oligarch that is a fundamental threat to liberty
4:07
It is the oligarch that is a fundamental threat to capitalism. It is the oligarch that is a fundamental threat to opportunity, to upper mobility, to the pursuit of happiness
4:18
so that they may have more and more and more and more, so that their rapaciousness may be sated with more power, with more money, with more access
4:28
everybody else will be reduced to serfdom. It's an unacceptable proposition and one the American
4:35
people cannot tolerate. So yes, there is an economic crisis, but that economic crisis
4:41
is steeped in fundamental questions of right and wrong at the core. This crisis that Donald Trump
4:47
has sent into the homes of every American family that will get much worse is a moral crisis
4:55
There is a security crisis in the world. The flames of war are growing, and this is directly
5:03
related to the weakness of Donald Trump, to his shallowness, to his imbecilities, to his idiocy
5:12
Now, Jesse Waters and Stephen Miller, they may see a strategic genius, a grand chess master
5:21
But what the rest of the world sees is a clown who is easily manipulated
5:27
What Xi Jinping takes away from the encounter between Donald Trump and Prime Minister Mark Carney
5:34
is that all you need to do to win a negotiation with Donald Trump
5:39
is perhaps offer him an extra slice of chocolate cake after dinner
5:43
Donald Trump is the living proof of the wisdom of the old Turkish proverb
5:48
If a clown goes to the palace, he does not become a sultan
5:53
The palace becomes a circus. And look at this place. What would you call this from a decorative style, a decor
6:01
Latter-day pimp? It is appalling, tacky, desecrative of a sacred American space
6:09
Donald Trump has turned it into Nero lair And while America economy is burning global security is burning a moral disaster is unfolding that is fundamental to who we are as a people
6:25
And the feckless Democratic Party does not seem to appreciate outside of a small minority of its elected members that some fights are imposed not on your timeline, but your opponents
6:40
or in this case, the fascists, the domestic enemies who wish to end the bedrock principles of American society
6:51
all of which are invested in the idea that liberty and rights are bestowed by a higher power than the government of men
7:01
We believe that all men are created equal, endowed by a creator with inalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
7:11
And this requires us as Americans to hold ourselves to a higher standard and to a higher faith
7:20
And to say, though that there is evil in the world, and even if that evil is directed at Americans, that we will treat the most evil human being with a fundamental level of dignity, even if they do not reciprocate it
7:38
Because in the end, Americanism is superior to the evil. We are better than that
7:45
We are more moral than that. John McCain understood this. It was, in the essence, fundamentally an aspect of what you can look back on as a public ministry around torture and the degradation of human beings' rights, of which he was a foremost champion of, of human freedom, for prisoners of war, prisoners of conscience, prisoners everywhere
8:12
And what John McCain understood was that the American people have a right to know what is being done in their name because we are a government of the people, by the people, for the people
8:25
And so we must face together an urgent reality. And that urgent reality is that the Homeland Security Department, which has always carried a sinister name, has turned sinister
8:40
There is an American Gestapo on the loose, and they are being used and abused and directed to abuse by immoral men and women like Tom Homan and Kristi Noem, guided by Corey Lewandowski and by Stephen Miller
8:59
And what these people are is little Eichmann's. And do not mistake what it is that you are seeing
9:06
The man who interrogated Eichmann understood when he was asked 20 years after Eichmann swung from the rope what the core lesson was
9:15
He said it gave him his faith in democracy because in democracies little Eichmanns are harmless and they are everywhere he said It is in a dictatorship of the left or right that they turn deadly in an instant It is unacceptable for federal law enforcement to be used as a weapon to instill fear in ordinary Americans
9:37
and innocent people who travel to this country for whatever reason, who do not deserve the inhumanity directed at them
9:47
And even if it is the case that it is decided lawfully that somebody is to be deported, their deportation should be carried out with a dignity deserving of every human life
10:00
America is better than the lowest amongst us. And that is a fundamental proposition because it is anchored in our faith, the cornerstones of our society, that the human being and their rights come from God, not from man
10:18
And if they are protected for the worst of the worst, they are protected for everybody
10:26
And that is what keeps us safe in a democracy. And so when Donald Trump sends jackbooted thugs into a Washington restaurant owned by the husband of the CBS Evening News anchor two days after a 60 Minutes investigation, I have doubts
10:45
And I have doubts because of the record that's clearly at hand, a record of lying and dishonesty and abuses of power that is growing every day
10:54
And every day, Donald issues decrees. And these decrees are lawless. They have no force of law, no power
11:02
They are testaments to his psychiatric condition, not his authority. We do not have kings
11:09
And the feeble and feckless American media that compares Donald Trump's first 100 days to FDRs
11:17
is complicit in the gaslighting and abuse of the American people. because in FDR's first 100 days, he passed and signed into law 76 pieces of legislation
11:29
He did not issue 76 decrees. And those decrees are arrows dipped in a poison of malice
11:38
On this, the 80th anniversary of America's defeat of Nazi Germany, as an American general led the European war effort as supreme commander of the Allied
11:50
Expeditionary Force, made up of the United Nations, countries that stood together in the
11:57
moment of supreme testing. 80 years on, we must consider what we have become, which is very
12:03
different from what we have been and what we must be. And so it is a time for standing up again
12:09
because what's happening all about and all around us is deeply wrong
12:14
This is The Warning. I'm Steve Schmidt. This is The Warning. I invite you to join this community where I promise to be honest, blunt, and direct
12:25
about what is happening in this country. America is in crisis. Follow and subscribe to this channel and on Substack
12:33
Thank you
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