Today I sat down with Steve Schmidt of The Warning, and we began our discussion with a concept I know literally: demolition. My work as a contractor (currently on a job pulling up a glued-down floor) serves as a perfect metaphor for the political climate, where we are witnessing the demolition of our federal agencies and the democratic norms that define our republic.
Despite our differing political backgrounds, Steve being a former high-ranking Republican consultant and me having co-founded Justice Democrats and worked for Bernie Sanders, we found profound agreement on the core problem: the political, economic, banking, and financial elite have failed the American people, creating the economic angst that allowed Donald Trump to build his coalition. Our consensus holds that the next administration must articulate a conviction to undoing a lot of what has been done over the last 10 months, but that doesn’t mean going back to the ‘normal’ that got us here.
For your weekend viewing pleasure, check out the video for the full conversation where we discuss the necessary scope of rebuilding American capacity, the shared philosophy needed to counter creeping fascism, and the fundamental economic reforms required to ensure our government actually functions for the people.
I’m also pasting the transcript below in case you’d prefer to read.
Corbin
This is a formatted transcript of the conversation between Steve Schmidt (SS) of The Warning and Corbin Trent (CT) of America’s Undoing.
SS: Good afternoon, everybody. Steve Schmidt here with The Warning and my friend Corbin Trent with America’s Undoing. He’s out on a job. Corbin’s a contractor. He is... What are you doing? You’re breaking up a floor, taking it out?
CT: Yeah, we had an engineered hardwood floor glued down to slab. And I don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with that, but let me tell you, it is a pain in the ass to get up once it’s glued down properly. So we’ve got like chisels out here. I’ve got hammer drills. But we’re done. So now we get to redo the floor here. So we’re going to put down the underlayment.
SS: What’s going in there now?
CT: Uh, luxury vinyl. So LVP, it’s a waterproof LVP good for pets and kids. Um, it’s about, uh, 1800 square feet of flooring going in. So it’ll be good. It’ll look good.
SS: Good. Um, speaking of demolition, how did you feel about the white house demolition this week?
CT: Uh, you know, I mean, I think, uh, I get that it’s such a symbolic thing, but to me, it’s more of a metaphor for everything that the Trump administration is doing for other institutions. We’re seeing so much demolition going with the way in which Congress is advocating its responsibility, demolition of our federal agencies, the demolition of our democratic norms. I think that the actual physical building of the East Wing, I find to be less offensive than the demolition of our norms in our society, I guess. But yeah, it’s like everything else he does. He says, hey, don’t worry. We’re not going to actually have to demolish anything to build this beautiful ballroom.
CT: And then they’re ripping it out. So it’s par for the course for this man.
SS: If I said to you that... to me, it is of the utmost importance with conviction that whomever the democratic nominee may be, that they be able to look in a camera with conviction and say, we’re going to restore the integrity of the white house down to the last rows in the last blade of grass. Whatever he builds there is going to be demolished and pulverized. I worry about government spending and the obscenity of a $38 trillion debt. But on the inevitable question of, you know, but, hey, how much is it going to cost? my answer to that is I don’t know. It costs what it costs. But does that resonate to you? Could you accommodate that viewpoint and get it as someone with a progressive bent in the Democratic Party, that’s something we’re going to need to be for?
CT: Yeah, I think there’s a handful of things that the Democratic Party writ large is going to have to be for. And I think definitely undoing a lot of what has been done is part of that. To the specifics that have been done at the White House, sure. But then I also think the other thing that’s going to have to happen to build that coalition of voters that you’re describing is a “come to Jesus moment”. And what that is going to look like to me is an understanding that the economic insecurities and the economic angst and anger that allowed Donald Trump to build his coalition... it takes an acceptance that this particular economic model is broken. I was listening to a New York Times interview the other day, and I believe it was David Brooks was saying that essentially one of Trump’s main assessments is that the elite have failed the American people. To me, that is an undeniable fact.
SS: We have total agreement with that, by the way.
CT: Right. That’s. And the Democratic Party doesn’t have that agreement. They don’t have that agreement yet. And I think that that’s the irritating thing to me is that it’s seen as a progressive idea to say, hey, it turns out not building our own chips is a problem. Not doing our own manufacturing to the extent that we’ve done over the last 40 or 50 years is actually a problem. It’s basically hurt our ability to build infrastructure. We can’t build high speed rail in California after 30 years and billions and billions of dollars. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is $1.2 trillion, and I’m still having to replace rims on my car because I’m hitting potholes all the time. The problem is, is that we’ve lost the capacity to do big things. Donald Trump seized on that and is just pushing all of this anger other places instead of where it actually needs to be focused, which is on the political, economic and banking and financial elite in this country that have sold us out.
SS: So what I thought we could do today... I’m a former Republican. I’ve been involved in political campaigns for a long time. I think you’re somebody who has been associated with the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
CT: I worked for Bernie twice. I co-founded Justice Democrats. I co-founded Brand New Congress. We recruited AOC to run for Congress. I was AOC’s chief strategist and communications director for her first campaign and for her house in her first term.
SS: You and I are definitely going to have some issues that we would disagree on. At the same time, I think we would agree on a lot of things. And I want to talk about the areas of agreement. I know that Trump is a fascist. Stephen Miller is a Nazi. I want to talk about January 2029. It has to be a victory of meaning to do things, to change the country so that this never, ever happens again. The destruction of whatever Trump builds, like excising a tumor, has to be done. Second, the new president has to sign one executive order discharging/firing Kash Patel as the FBI director. Third, wherever that Qatari airplane goes, it’s going to be seized by the United States Air Force by 2:30 p.m. on the day of the inauguration, and it’s going to be dumped in the Atlantic Ocean by sundown on January 21st. We have two things that we have to do: We have to dismantle the national security state. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security was one of the great mistakes of the last quarter century. It needs to be broken up. ICE needs to be abolished. And militarized federal police need to be completely, absolutely, and utterly defanged. There will need to be a review of the conduct of every ICE agent, and there’s going to be a lot of pensions that are disappeared, and a lot of badges and weapons that are taken away. At the same time, you have a predatory class of rapacious, vulture capitalism, predator capitalism. Taking power from the places it’s accumulated and dissipating it and leveling the field is of the utmost importance. That starts with the giant tech companies, the agriculture companies that control seed production, controls the contracting houses, controls the pharmaceuticals, controls companies like Palantir. These institutions have become duchies, principalities. They have become dangers to liberty, to prosperity. They choke off the ability of ordinary people to pursue happiness. I’m prepared to call for a 90% tax rate on every dollar north of $50 million earned, or $100 million earned. We’re not going to have somebody worth a trillion dollars who receives billions of government subsidies to be worth a trillion. How does that sound to you?
CT: So your list sounds similar to a list that I would put together. The physical dismantling of things that were built by Trump, I think is more of a cathartic exercise than a necessary exercise. The thing that’s got us here is not the lack of guardrails per se. It’s the lack of an economy and a government that functions for the people at this point. I’m from a small town in East Tennessee where people have been struggling in Appalachia. We’ve seen the slow slide into economic precarity. These problems started in the 70s with the offshoring, with the de-industrialization, with neoliberalism and over-financialization. Every time people think they’re getting something that is going to be transformative, that’s going to restore their ability to make a living, to build things again, it’s pulled out from under them. That hope turns to resentment. I wrote a thing the other day called where we’re more interested in the receipts than results. The idea of actually producing results has dissipated. Now we’re just talking about how big the bill was.
SS: Why do you think, what’s your insight to why that is, that there’s a group of people sitting in a room in Washington that think people will be excited by how big something is?
CT: Because I think that they still believe that the market is functional. We spend about $5.4 trillion a year on health care—more than anybody else on the planet. And out comes extremely rich people and sicker people than the rest of the world. It’s fundamentally broken. Washington still believes that the invisible hand of the market will fix these things. But the problem is financialization. People make more money in bullshit than they do actually delivering results anymore. I used to run a manufacturing plant; I’ve worked with my hands; I’ve built shit. So many of the people that are making decisions have never built a damn thing. When I interview people for my construction company, I call it the ratchet strap test. If they can’t figure out how to strap a thing down to a pallet, the interview is over. Our government needs more ratchet strap tests.
SS: Yeah, for sure. And I support this completely.
CT: In Tennessee, the state, counties, and municipalities used to own about 50% of the healthcare delivery—hospitals, clinics, and the health department. They competed in the market with private and nonprofit hospitals, which kept those private sector entities more honest. Now they’ve got us at a disadvantage where we don’t have any idea what it costs. You can’t say that you have a free market when nobody can know what anything costs.
SS: I believe the left should embrace federalism. A giant, arrogant, all-powerful federal government could be a fascistic government in America. However, the notion that moving decision-making locally results in greater wisdom than Washington has never been true in my experience. Many times, the biggest nuts are the people in local politics. I have never met a person who interacts with government at any level who thinks, “God, that was a great experience”. If you’re going to deliver promises about outcomes, you have to deliver on that. The notion that we’ll win an election and everything goes back to normal is crazy and delusional. Since all this stuff is gone, Democrats have the opportunity to think about how to deliver necessary services from new institutions to replace what was gone.
CT: Yes. The hard work of destruction is already being done. Federal agencies are being dismantled and gutted. This gives you an opportunity to then put out a vision for something different, something better, something more effective. My life has been shaped by the tail end of the New Deal era, Reaganism, Bill Clinton’s third-way centrism, and the hope and disappointment of Obama. This represents an opportunity to get back to an FDR style government that is positive. We can no longer build things like the Golden Gate Bridge because of the deindustrialization of this country. The know-how and knowledge base you lose means it’s hard to do the big stuff. It would take us like 600 years to redo the interstate highway system at our current pace. By letting China build all the shit, it teaches them how to think and build. You need an ecosystem of an economy that knows how to build.
SS: There’s a massive American military buildup underway in the Southern Caribbean that would suggest soon we will be at war with Venezuela. Donald Trump ran on “no more stupid wars”. How do you see his base and MAGA reacting to a military adventure in South America?
CT: On any of these things, like the Epstein files, I felt like that was such a huge opportunity for the Democrats to really hammer the administration. The Democrats have such a bad instinct on how to weaponize ideas. Epstein is huge. They are literally not swearing in Grijalva’s daughter, a new representative, in order to block a discharge petition that needs one more vote to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files. The Democrats aren’t ready to lead. My read is that Democratic Party leadership is in a holding pattern for the midterms. They are washing their hands of 2026 as a moment to set a vision, or to restore trust in the Democratic Party by admitting it made mistakes over the past 30 years. It takes admitting that you screwed things up.
SS: What do you think the impediment is to that?
CT: I think the impediment is that they are fundamentally committed to protecting the system. Healthcare, which is almost 20% of our GDP, results in poor health care outcomes, even though we are number one in spending. Democrats are committed to defending Wall Street, financialization, and the tech industry. My economic theory is that socialism, communism, and capitalism don’t work by themselves; they need to be competing. It’s the friction between the two that keeps them honest.
SS: Trump’s the greatest market manipulator in world history. Trump’s a criminal mastermind, but the one thing that Trump is not is a capitalist. We’ve never had a president that is more of a socialist, in the classical Soviet sense, than this guy. He’s not actually investing in rebuilding American capacity. The tariffs are not used to rebuild industries; they are used to build his own wealth and influence.
CT: We agree that he’s a fascist, and there are Nazi-esque people in the government. Fortunately for us, they are only enriching their friends and cronies. The Nazis were actually making life better for a specific part of the German populace by injecting capital and jobs and building things. I thank God that we’re seeing life get harder for people, not better. If Trump had figured out that he should do Medicare for all and rebuild industry, we’d be in trouble.
SS: On health care, who in the Democratic Party can talk about health care in a way that doesn’t make the centrist head explode?
CT: I think Ro Khanna is getting there. He talks about it in terms of the great burden it places on businesses. One of the things still missing from discussions is supply side. We have 120 million Americans living in some healthcare desert. The problem we have with health care isn’t spending, it’s supply. We don’t have enough doctors, nurses, PAs, or facilities to cover America. We need to rapidly train millions of health care professionals. We need to rapidly build more; just like we have post offices in every zip code, we need clinics and hospitals in every zip code.
SS: Should government, in your view, try to provide the service or try to pay for the service?
CT: I think it has to provide some of the service. Some places won’t be profitable for a hospital, so you’ll need a non-profit entity, and that may as well be the government. We need enough government provided health care, with government employed doctors and x-ray techs, so we can compete in the market, bring the price down, and provide health care to the whole country.
SS: Perfect. Perfect place to leave it. Let’s talk more healthcare next time you’re on. Corbin Trent, America’s Undoing on Substack. Good luck with the job today.
CT: Thank you, Steve. Talk to you soon.
SS: All right. Corbin. Pleasure. Bye-bye.
