Steve Schmidt, the Republican strategist who ran John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign before becoming one of Donald Trump’s most vocal critics, published a sweeping assessment Friday arguing that the president’s political grip is slipping and that what follows could be more dangerous than what came before.
“Donald Trump is losing control,” Schmidt wrote in his weekend Substack newsletter. “This is the most important political fact in America today, and it explains the mounting rage, escalating recklessness and frantic aggression pouring out of the White House.”
Schmidt argued that Trump’s political power was never rooted in ideology, conservatism, or patriotism. “It’s always been fear,” he wrote, listing fear of retaliation, humiliation, exile from the cult, the mob, the tweet and the primary as the foundation of Trump’s hold on the Republican Party.
That foundation, Schmidt argues, is now cracking. He cited a federal judge blocking Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund, tariff schemes unraveling in courts, resistance to the White House ballroom project, and the Kennedy Center fight as evidence. He also pointed to Sen. Thom Tillis publicly humiliating Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Sen. John Cornyn losing his Texas primary as signs that GOP senators are beginning to calculate that Trump can no longer protect them.
“Strongmen must appear invincible,” Schmidt wrote. “Donald Trump suddenly doesn’t.”
“This is what collapse looks like at the beginning,” Schmidt wrote, drawing explicit parallels to the political unravelings of Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy, both of whom appeared untouchable until they suddenly weren’t.
“Cornered strongmen are dangerous strongmen,” Schmidt wrote. “Underneath the screaming, the threats, the vulgarity and the spectacle sits a frightened old man watching the thing he values most in the world begin to slip from his grasp: the perception of power. Once that goes, everything goes.”
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