October 25, 2025 • 13 mins
Between Trump's deployment of ICE and cozying up with billionaires, the state of affairs in America is worse than its ever been before. Steve Schmidt sits down with Corbin Trent to talk immigration abuses, tax breaks for the wealthy and America's decaying infrastructure.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You and I are definitely going to have some issues
right in the in the old sense that we would
that we would disagree on it. At the same time,
I think we would agree on a lot of things.
And I want to and I want to talk about
the areas of agreement. And I think starting with a
(00:21):
recognition of what of what you said, and i'll sort
I think a lot of these labels right left, everything
that had meaning in the nineties the early aughts have
been obliterated. They don't They don't mean anything anymore. I
think Trump is a fascist. He doesn't believe in democracy.
(00:42):
In fact, the meat revised that I know that Trump
is a fascist. Trump is a fascist. Steven Miller is
a Nazi. Uh not, not every fascist is a Nazi,
but every Nazi is certainly a fascist.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Fact.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
But I want to talk about January twenty twenty nine.
I don't know who the candidate is, but I want
to talk about some things that I think have to
happen because it can't be a victory for party or personality.
It has to be a victory of meaning to do
things to change the country so that this never ever
(01:20):
happens again. And I want to talk about see if
we can get to agreement on a bunch of things
that have to be done philosophically, and if we disagree
on something right, you know, for purposes today, we can
just say pass right, move on to the next one,
and you could throw out anything you want to say.
(01:41):
So I'm going to start right. So to me, the
destruction of whatever Trump builds, like excising a tumor a
deformity that's excisable, that that has to be done. The
second thing is that literally before the twenty one gun
(02:06):
salute is over, he has to sign she asked to
sign one executive order discharging firing whatever is necessary, firing
Cash Batal is the FBI director, ceiling immediately all of
his all of his records. The number three thing is
(02:27):
wherever that Katari airplane goes is going to be seized
by the United States Air Force by by two point
thirty pm on the day of the inauguration, and it's
going to be dumped in the Atlantic Ocean by sundown
on January twenty first. And then and then if I
(02:47):
was to sit with you in a White House meeting, right,
I would say, we have two things we have to do.
We have to dismantle the national security state. One of
(03:10):
the great great mistakes of the last quarter century, a
mistake on Bush's port that rivals the invasion of Iraq,
is the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. It
needs to be broken up. ICE needs to be abolished
(03:30):
and militarized. Federal police need to be completely, absolutely, and
utterly defant. And there will need to be a review
of the conduct of every ICE agent on every mission,
on every detail of where they went, where they did.
(03:51):
And there's going to be a lot of pensions that
are disappeared, and there's gonna be a lot of badges
like all of them, and a lot of weapons like
all of them that are taken that are that are
taken away and it and at the same time you
(04:11):
have a predatory class of of rapacious Uh. I don't
know what the word for it. It's not my conception
of capitalism, but vulture capitalism, predator capitalism. And I think
(04:35):
taking power from the places it's accumulated and dissipating it
and leveling the field is of the utmost important and
that starts with the giant tech companies, the agriculture companies
that control seed production, controls, tracting houses, controls, the pharmaceuticals
(04:59):
controls companies like like Palenteer, And to me, the framework
is not ideological. It's simply about these institutions have become duchies,
they have become principalities. They have become dangers to liberty,
(05:23):
to prosperity. They choke off the ability of ordinary people
to pursue happiness. And so the disinvestment of power right
from these institutions. And then a fundamental rewroad of the
American tax code. And this is this is where I've
(05:47):
evolved the most on this. I'm prepared for to call
for a ninety percent tax on every dollar you know
north of you know, uh, you know, fifty million earned,
one hundred million earned, whatever whatever, make, but not going
to have in the United States somebody worth you know,
(06:08):
a trillion, a trillion dollars who receives billions of government
subsidies to be worth the trillion. And so anytime you
got a you got a tax code that's three thousand
pages long, with seventy five thousand pages of rules. The
person who gets fucked in that is the little little guy, right,
(06:29):
not the not the giant corporation. So all of that
needs needs to be to be fixed and reformed. How
does that? How does that sound to you?
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Yeah? So your you know that your list sounds similar
to a list that I would put together. I guess
the idea of clearing out and the physical dismantling of
things that were built by Trump, I think is for
me that would be more of a cathartic exercise than
(07:01):
I think than a necessary exercise. I mean, I think
the Katari plane is a is probably a danger. You know,
at least there's at least some concerns with that. But
you know, for me, even the idea of putting up
guardrails to protect against this happening again is I think
that the thing that God is here is not the
(07:23):
lack of guardrails per se. It's the lack of a
economy and a government that functions for the people. At
this point and when you have and you know, I
look a lot into the economic straits of people, and
I'm from a small town in East Tennessee where people have,
you know, been struggling in Appalachia's entire region, people have
(07:45):
been struggling for a long time. And you've got eighty
percent of America that is living one type of way
in twenty percent of America that's living another type of way.
And that has been going on for quite some time.
And we've seen the the slow slide into economic precarity
getting more and more dangerous in the way it represents
(08:10):
itself being the electorate, and I think, you know, people
have been looking for basically since Reagan, for somebody to
transition this country, take us in a different direction. And
because I think a lot of these problems started happening
in the seventies, with the offshoring, with the de industrialization,
with the way that we started into I guess neoliberalism,
(08:31):
and how that the over financialization, the extractive models that
we've come into. And then I think that we kept
looking as voters for you know, Ross Perot came up boom.
You know, then you see people like Howard Dean or
John Edwards or Bernie Sanders or Barack Obama. He ran
on this idea of transformation twice. You know, I would
(08:55):
say that it's very much lucy in the football for
the voters, right. And that's the problem is that every
time people think they're getting something that is going to
be transformative, every time they think they're getting back to
a government that's working to restore their ability to make
a living, to restore their ability to have pride in
their country, and to have a country that can function again,
(09:16):
build things again, whether it's infrastructure and high speed rail
or energy grid of the future, and then it's pulled
out from under them. I think then that hope turns
to resentment, that hope turns to more extremism. And so
you got people that said, fuck it, let's go to Trump,
and they did that twice. Now they said, okay, this
(09:37):
is so much. They went to Biden, and Biden passed
all these huge bills, right. And I wrote a thing
the other day called We're more interested in the receipts
than the results, And everybody crowed about how big these
bills were. Trillion here, a trillionaire, a trillionaire. We're just
making it rain everywhere, except it doesn't produce a damn
thing like deer in the you know, dear, you look
(10:00):
at the New Deal or the Space Race or any
of these things. We got excited about building, you know,
tens of thousands of miles of high voltage electric lines.
When we built the Interstate Highway system. Nobody was like, oh,
we spent one hundred billion dollars. No, we built forty
one thousand miles of highway. That was what was exciting.
We built tunnels, we built bridges. You know, the idea
(10:23):
of actually producing results is something that's dissipated. Now we're
just talking about the bill. How big the bill was,
you know, it was one hundred trillion or a hundred
billion or two trillion or whatever.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Why Why do you think? Why? What's your insight to
why that is that there's a group of people sitting
in a room in washing tent that think it's important
(10:54):
and even more importantly, think people will be excited by
how big.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Something because I think that they still believe that the
market is functional and they believe that if they pump
enough money into the market that it will work. And
you can see this. I think the easiest way to
see the dysfunction of the market is in healthcare. Right now.
We spend about five point four trillion dollars a year
(11:20):
on healthcare. You know, we spend more than anybody else
on the planet. And we pump tons of money into
the healthcare machine and outcomes extremely rich people and sicker
people than the rest of the country or the rest
of the world. The crazy thing is is that it's
fundamentally broken. Just government spending on healthcare is like two
(11:40):
point five trillion dollars a year. If we were on
par with the per capita expense of say Italy, we'd
have seven hundred billion dollars left over after covering the
whole country, you know, just on what we spend as
a government. Not then that would say, okay, are all
the money that the companies are paying for healthcare? It's gone.
(12:02):
Now that bill is gone. All the out of pocket expendit,
there's gone. And so the fact is is that Washington
still believes that the invisible hand of the market will
fix these things for us if we just pump enough
cash into the system. But the problem is the you know,
is the financialization. People make more money with stock buybacks,
(12:25):
they make more money in crypto, They make more money
in bullshit than they do actually delivering results anymore. So,
you know, I think that's one of the things that
is such a hard concept for people to accept in
leadership business in all these places.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
I'm Steve Schmidt. This is the warning. I invite you
to join this community, where I promise to be honest,
blunt and direct about what is happening in this country.
America is in crisis. Follow and subscribe to this channel
and on substack.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Thank you.
You and I are definitely going to have some issues
right in the in the old sense that we would
that we would disagree on it. At the same time,
I think we would agree on a lot of things.
And I want to and I want to talk about
the areas of agreement. And I think starting with a
(00:21):
recognition of what of what you said, and i'll sort
I think a lot of these labels right left, everything
that had meaning in the nineties the early aughts have
been obliterated. They don't They don't mean anything anymore. I
think Trump is a fascist. He doesn't believe in democracy.
(00:42):
In fact, the meat revised that I know that Trump
is a fascist. Trump is a fascist. Steven Miller is
a Nazi. Uh not, not every fascist is a Nazi,
but every Nazi is certainly a fascist.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Fact.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
But I want to talk about January twenty twenty nine.
I don't know who the candidate is, but I want
to talk about some things that I think have to
happen because it can't be a victory for party or personality.
It has to be a victory of meaning to do
things to change the country so that this never ever
(01:20):
happens again. And I want to talk about see if
we can get to agreement on a bunch of things
that have to be done philosophically, and if we disagree
on something right, you know, for purposes today, we can
just say pass right, move on to the next one,
and you could throw out anything you want to say.
(01:41):
So I'm going to start right. So to me, the
destruction of whatever Trump builds, like excising a tumor a
deformity that's excisable, that that has to be done. The
second thing is that literally before the twenty one gun
(02:06):
salute is over, he has to sign she asked to
sign one executive order discharging firing whatever is necessary, firing
Cash Batal is the FBI director, ceiling immediately all of
his all of his records. The number three thing is
(02:27):
wherever that Katari airplane goes is going to be seized
by the United States Air Force by by two point
thirty pm on the day of the inauguration, and it's
going to be dumped in the Atlantic Ocean by sundown
on January twenty first. And then and then if I
(02:47):
was to sit with you in a White House meeting, right,
I would say, we have two things we have to do.
We have to dismantle the national security state. One of
(03:10):
the great great mistakes of the last quarter century, a
mistake on Bush's port that rivals the invasion of Iraq,
is the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. It
needs to be broken up. ICE needs to be abolished
(03:30):
and militarized. Federal police need to be completely, absolutely, and
utterly defant. And there will need to be a review
of the conduct of every ICE agent on every mission,
on every detail of where they went, where they did.
(03:51):
And there's going to be a lot of pensions that
are disappeared, and there's gonna be a lot of badges
like all of them, and a lot of weapons like
all of them that are taken that are that are
taken away and it and at the same time you
(04:11):
have a predatory class of of rapacious Uh. I don't
know what the word for it. It's not my conception
of capitalism, but vulture capitalism, predator capitalism. And I think
(04:35):
taking power from the places it's accumulated and dissipating it
and leveling the field is of the utmost important and
that starts with the giant tech companies, the agriculture companies
that control seed production, controls, tracting houses, controls, the pharmaceuticals
(04:59):
controls companies like like Palenteer, And to me, the framework
is not ideological. It's simply about these institutions have become duchies,
they have become principalities. They have become dangers to liberty,
(05:23):
to prosperity. They choke off the ability of ordinary people
to pursue happiness. And so the disinvestment of power right
from these institutions. And then a fundamental rewroad of the
American tax code. And this is this is where I've
(05:47):
evolved the most on this. I'm prepared for to call
for a ninety percent tax on every dollar you know
north of you know, uh, you know, fifty million earned,
one hundred million earned, whatever whatever, make, but not going
to have in the United States somebody worth you know,
(06:08):
a trillion, a trillion dollars who receives billions of government
subsidies to be worth the trillion. And so anytime you
got a you got a tax code that's three thousand
pages long, with seventy five thousand pages of rules. The
person who gets fucked in that is the little little guy, right,
(06:29):
not the not the giant corporation. So all of that
needs needs to be to be fixed and reformed. How
does that? How does that sound to you?
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Yeah? So your you know that your list sounds similar
to a list that I would put together. I guess
the idea of clearing out and the physical dismantling of
things that were built by Trump, I think is for
me that would be more of a cathartic exercise than
(07:01):
I think than a necessary exercise. I mean, I think
the Katari plane is a is probably a danger. You know,
at least there's at least some concerns with that. But
you know, for me, even the idea of putting up
guardrails to protect against this happening again is I think
that the thing that God is here is not the
(07:23):
lack of guardrails per se. It's the lack of a
economy and a government that functions for the people. At
this point and when you have and you know, I
look a lot into the economic straits of people, and
I'm from a small town in East Tennessee where people have,
you know, been struggling in Appalachia's entire region, people have
(07:45):
been struggling for a long time. And you've got eighty
percent of America that is living one type of way
in twenty percent of America that's living another type of way.
And that has been going on for quite some time.
And we've seen the the slow slide into economic precarity
getting more and more dangerous in the way it represents
(08:10):
itself being the electorate, and I think, you know, people
have been looking for basically since Reagan, for somebody to
transition this country, take us in a different direction. And
because I think a lot of these problems started happening
in the seventies, with the offshoring, with the de industrialization,
with the way that we started into I guess neoliberalism,
(08:31):
and how that the over financialization, the extractive models that
we've come into. And then I think that we kept
looking as voters for you know, Ross Perot came up boom.
You know, then you see people like Howard Dean or
John Edwards or Bernie Sanders or Barack Obama. He ran
on this idea of transformation twice. You know, I would
(08:55):
say that it's very much lucy in the football for
the voters, right. And that's the problem is that every
time people think they're getting something that is going to
be transformative, every time they think they're getting back to
a government that's working to restore their ability to make
a living, to restore their ability to have pride in
their country, and to have a country that can function again,
(09:16):
build things again, whether it's infrastructure and high speed rail
or energy grid of the future, and then it's pulled
out from under them. I think then that hope turns
to resentment, that hope turns to more extremism. And so
you got people that said, fuck it, let's go to Trump,
and they did that twice. Now they said, okay, this
(09:37):
is so much. They went to Biden, and Biden passed
all these huge bills, right. And I wrote a thing
the other day called We're more interested in the receipts
than the results, And everybody crowed about how big these
bills were. Trillion here, a trillionaire, a trillionaire. We're just
making it rain everywhere, except it doesn't produce a damn
thing like deer in the you know, dear, you look
(10:00):
at the New Deal or the Space Race or any
of these things. We got excited about building, you know,
tens of thousands of miles of high voltage electric lines.
When we built the Interstate Highway system. Nobody was like, oh,
we spent one hundred billion dollars. No, we built forty
one thousand miles of highway. That was what was exciting.
We built tunnels, we built bridges. You know, the idea
(10:23):
of actually producing results is something that's dissipated. Now we're
just talking about the bill. How big the bill was,
you know, it was one hundred trillion or a hundred
billion or two trillion or whatever.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Why Why do you think? Why? What's your insight to
why that is that there's a group of people sitting
in a room in washing tent that think it's important
(10:54):
and even more importantly, think people will be excited by
how big.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Something because I think that they still believe that the
market is functional and they believe that if they pump
enough money into the market that it will work. And
you can see this. I think the easiest way to
see the dysfunction of the market is in healthcare. Right now.
We spend about five point four trillion dollars a year
(11:20):
on healthcare. You know, we spend more than anybody else
on the planet. And we pump tons of money into
the healthcare machine and outcomes extremely rich people and sicker
people than the rest of the country or the rest
of the world. The crazy thing is is that it's
fundamentally broken. Just government spending on healthcare is like two
(11:40):
point five trillion dollars a year. If we were on
par with the per capita expense of say Italy, we'd
have seven hundred billion dollars left over after covering the
whole country, you know, just on what we spend as
a government. Not then that would say, okay, are all
the money that the companies are paying for healthcare? It's gone.
(12:02):
Now that bill is gone. All the out of pocket expendit,
there's gone. And so the fact is is that Washington
still believes that the invisible hand of the market will
fix these things for us if we just pump enough
cash into the system. But the problem is the you know,
is the financialization. People make more money with stock buybacks,
(12:25):
they make more money in crypto, They make more money
in bullshit than they do actually delivering results anymore. So,
you know, I think that's one of the things that
is such a hard concept for people to accept in
leadership business in all these places.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
I'm Steve Schmidt. This is the warning. I invite you
to join this community, where I promise to be honest,
blunt and direct about what is happening in this country.
America is in crisis. Follow and subscribe to this channel
and on substack.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Thank you.
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