Character Is the Only Thing
I was on The Warning with Steve Schmidt today. We talked about the end of America. Cheerfully.
Let me be straight with you: there are maybe five people left in American political life who make me feel less alone in watching this slow-motion catastrophe unfold, and Steve Schmidt is one of them.
Not because he’s optimistic. He’s not. Because he’s right.
Schmidt was one of the most trusted architects of the modern Republican Party. He ran John McCain’s presidential campaign. He was inside the machine — a tier-one operator in a party that once, however imperfectly, believed it stood for something. And he watched it eat itself alive, walked out, and has been screaming into the void about exactly this moment for years before it arrived.
He deserves credit for that. History will give it to him. The record is clear.
You can find Steve and everything he does right here:
📰 Substack: steveschmidt.substack.com 🎙️ Podcast: The Warning — Apple Podcasts | Spotify 🌐 Website: thewarningwithsteveschmidt.com
Subscribe. Paid. He’s earned it. He’s a truly great American and what’s more, an incredible principled Human Being I put my faith in every day as a colleague at The Save America Movement.
The Three Things We Talked About
1. Lindsey Graham Has Lost His Entire Mind, and Nobody Is Stopping Him
This week, Lindsey Graham went on a media tour so unhinged that even MAGA turned on him.
Let’s run through what this man said — out loud, on television, voluntarily — in a single week:
Graham called the Iran war a “good investment” and told Fox News that “when this regime goes down, we’re gonna have a new Mid-East, we’re gonna make a ton of money.” He wasn’t done. He framed the entire conflict as an oil acquisition strategy, noting that Venezuela and Iran together hold 31 percent of the world’s known oil reserves and suggesting the U.S. would “partner” with that supply once the regimes fall.
Then he went full Baghdad Bob. Graham told Sean Hannity he’d go back to South Carolina and ask constituents to “send their sons and daughters over to the Mideast,” and pledged a mutual defense treaty with Saudi Arabia on behalf of a country he does not lead and a government that didn’t authorize him to speak.
He threatened Lebanon, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, the broader Arab region, and Spain — in a single news cycle.
When asked about the estimated billion-dollar-a-day price tag for the war, Graham called it “the best money ever spent” — as Americans watched gas prices spike 27% in a week.
Even Megyn Kelly — Megyn Kelly — called Graham “a homicidal maniac with a bloodlust that is insatiable” and said Trump’s biggest problem wasn’t the war itself, it was that Trump likes Graham and is listening to him.
Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna told him flatly that if Graham wants to send people to fight in Iran, he should be first in line to volunteer.
The collapse of Lindsey Graham is a morality play about what happens when a man has no fixed centre. When you have no actual values, no conviction that isn’t negotiable, you become whatever the weather requires. And right now the weather requires warmongering for regime change and oil. So that’s what Lindsey Graham is.
He used to be better than this. He isn’t anymore. And the fact that he’s considered a voice of reason in some circles of the GOP tells you everything you need to know about where that party is.
2. The Florsheim Show: A Cult of Cowardice in $145 Shoes
Now for the part of the program that would be funny if it weren’t so perfectly, precisely symbolic.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Trump developed a strong affinity for the American shoe brand Florsheim and bought pairs for Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and a rotating cast of aides and allies — including Sean Hannity, Lindsey Graham, and Tucker Carlson.
The ritual works like this: Trump guesses your shoe size in front of you, places the order, and a week later a brown Florsheim box arrives — sometimes with the president’s signature on it. One unnamed cabinet secretary had to shelve his Louis Vuittons and put on Florsheims instead. He was overheard grumbling about it. He wore them anyway.
Photos of Marco Rubio surfaced showing the shoes appeared comically too large for his feet. He wore them anyway.
“All the boys have them,” one female White House official told the Journal. “It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them.”
Afraid not to wear them.
These are the people running the most powerful government on earth. The Secretary of State. The Secretary of Defence. The Vice President of the United States. Shuffling around in ill-fitting mall shoes because they are afraid to tell one man no.
This is precisely how authoritarian cults of personality function: you never tell the leader his idea is stupid, and you never say “no thanks” to the shoes.
Oh — and the chef’s kiss kicker? Florsheim’s parent company, Weyco Group, is currently suing the Trump administration over his tariffs. The man is forcing his cabinet to wear the shoes of a company actively fighting him in federal court.
This is the empire. This is what it looks like when it’s going.
3. Character. It’s the Only Thing That Matters.
Here’s what Steve and I kept coming back to, underneath all the noise.
This isn’t really about Graham or shoes or even the Iran war. It’s about the central moral question of this American moment: what kind of people are you?
The great American character test isn’t a speech or an election or a protest. It’s the daily accumulation of small choices — whether to say the true thing or the safe thing, whether to wear your own shoes or someone else’s, whether to send other people’s children to die for oil and call it a values-based foreign policy.
America got, in many ways, a perfect representation of itself. Not the America of its best aspirations — the founding documents, the soaring rhetoric, the Lincoln Memorial in the snow — but the America of its least examined impulses. The one that buys its own mythology wholesale. The one that mistakes volume for virtue, performance for character, and power for righteousness.
Exceptionalism has two faces. One is genuine — the extraordinary democratic experiment, imperfect and evolving, that changed the world. The other is the performative clown show version: the one that bombs schools half a world away and calls it freedom, that sends Lindsey Graham to every television in America to explain how much money we’re going to make from it.
Steve Schmidt understood which version was winning. He left before he had to participate in it. That took something. Call it what it is: courage — the rarest commodity in Washington, D.C. right now.
Character is the only thing that matters. Not power. Not polish. Not the right shoes. Character.
America is in a race against the clock to figure that out.
The clock is running.
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“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” — Marcus Aurelius
Thank you Lev Parnas, Amy Gabrielle, Eugene Ting, Stephanie Church, Karen Gordon, and many others for tuning into my live video with Steve Schmidt! Join me for my next live video in the app.
