Steve Schmidt, a former GOP strategist, marked Memorial Day with a brutally worded attack against President Donald Trump and MAGA, describing them as “America’s most despicable” and warning readers and viewers against Trump’s alleged attempts to turn the US military into what Schmidt views as his “personal praetorian guard” as a “national obscenity.”

Schmidt, who served as a strategist for former President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain, co-founded The Lincoln Project in 2019 to oppose Trump and his administration. This Memorial Day, on May 25, Schmidt published a scorching condemnation of the POTUS on his Substack and YouTube channel, “The Warning with Steve Schmidt.”

Schmidt spoke about Memorial Day and honored the sacrifices made by Americans while serving the country across the world, and cautioned that certain forces were trying to infiltrate and disgrace the US military.

 

Schmidt said the issue was neither abstract nor part of distant history for the families of Americans killed in Iran, or for those whose loved ones are buried in Section 60 of the Arlington National Cemetery.

“The grief never abates — 26 years of war and the United States has been transformed by it,” Schmidt said, adding, “What it has produced is a soft tyranny, an autocratic man in freedom’s chair who desecrates in word, and deed and action, with every breath, the sacrifice we honor and celebrate.”

Schmidt continues with his attack on Trump, labelling him a “contemptuous” and “contemptible” man.

“He is a low-down, no good man, a liar, a felon, an abuser of women and children, a man who dishonors and disgraces the American military and whose attempts to transform it into a personal pretorian guard are a national obscenity,” Schmidt said.

 

Schmidt argued that the military belongs to the country and its people, not to Trump or any individual leader. He described the military as one of the nation’s most valuable yet “fragile” institutions. “And it is being broken in half by America’s most despicable men and women. We should not tolerate it,” he said.

“Are we to kneel in fear of power?” Schmidt asked viewers, referring to the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to cities, and dissenters turning into “victims of government-sponsored murder.”

Schmidt argued against the idea that Memorial Day is not “political,” adding that politics and war are deeply connected, and that separating the occasion from politics strips it of its meaning.

Sharing his video on X, formerly Twitter, Schmidt wrote that the US now faces “its greatest existential test” and urged people to “choose the freedom our heroes fought for over Trump’s autocratic vision.”

 

In February 2025, Trump fired Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. CQ Brown Jr. and nominated retired Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine as the new chairman. The 79-year-old President also fired Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti, Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. Jim Slife, and the judge advocates general (the top lawyers) of the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

The news followed an NBC News report that said that the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, had circulated a memo to Republican Congress members, listing names of officers to fire.

Sources told the news outlet that most of the officers on the list were closely associated with former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and had worked on DEI initiatives and voiced opinions that did not align with Trump’s agenda.

Lawfare analysts identified the purge as ‘coup-proofing’ — a tactic used in non-democracies to neutralize military resistance.

In one of his Substack essays, Schmidt warned that Trump is turning into an “American Caesar,” who, he said, is “unequal in stature, above the law, and in absolute control over institutions that can yield power through control.”

“It must be defeated, or we will lose America,” Schmidt wrote.