Lynn Schmidt is a syndicated columnist and Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
At the risk of sounding like someone suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome or TDS, those of us in the pro-democracy coalition need to start sounding the alarm, again. Our democracy is far from being out of the woods and we are headed for a trap.
TDS is usually used by supporters of the former president or some in the media to discredit criticisms of Trump’s words or actions. It is a way of reframing the debate by suggesting that those who speak out against Trump are incapable of discerning what they just witnessed. It is used to exhaust and disparage those who speak out in defense of liberal democratic values. My fear is that these attacks are working.
Last week former president Donald Trump released a poorly lit video in which he essentially says that Russia is not our enemy, our fellow Americans are. Think about that for a moment or shall I say, discern what we are witnessing. For those of us who love our democratic republic and not only hope it survives but want to strengthen it, we need to start paying attention, again. Here are a few noteworthy lines from Trump’s video, each of which are more frightening than the next:
“The State Department, the defense bureaucracy, the intelligence services, and all of the rest need to be completely overhauled and reconstituted to fire the Deep Staters and put America first.”
“Finally, we have to finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally reevaluating NATO's (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) purpose and NATO's mission.”
“But the greatest threat to Western civilization today is not Russia. It’s probably, more than anything else, ourselves and some of the horrible USA hating people representing us.”
Most Americans may not be listening to Trump but make no mistake, Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping certainly are.
A former president of the United States and the leading candidate for the 2024 presidential race of one of our two major political parties is telling us and the world that he sides with Putin over Americans. Trump would rather we ally with the same man who the International Criminal Court just issued an arrest warrant for concerning war crimes. Earlier this week, Xi visited Putin in Moscow. A Kremlin statement announcing Xi’s visit "at the invitation" of the Russian leader to discuss "issues of further development of comprehensive partnership and strategic interaction between Russia and China."
Trump reiterated his plans to dismantle NATO. Here’s a reminder that NATO was created in 1949 to serve three purposes: “deterring Soviet expansionism, forbidding the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe through a strong North American presence on the continent, and encouraging European political integration.” While Ukraine is not a NATO member, NATO has committed both political and practical assistance to Ukraine. Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton wrote in his book “The Room Where it Happened” that he had to convince Trump not to quit NATO in the middle of a 2018 summit. “In a second Trump term, I think he may well have withdrawn from NATO,” Bolton said. “And I think Putin was waiting for that.”
Last week, former Vice President Mike Pence spoke at the annual Gridiron Club Dinner in Washington, DC. He called Jan. 6, 2021 “a tragic day” and went on to say, “President Trump was wrong. I had no right to overturn the election and his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”
Pundits have since been criticizing Pence for not testifying before the U.S. House January 6 Select Committee and for resisting Special Counsel Jack Smith’s subpoena. While those criticisms are valid, we are missing the broader point. We are skipping over his actual words. Pence is also sounding an alarm. Granted it might be more like a quiet whistle than an alarm, but it’s out there.
Now is the time for the Republican party, sans Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who is also anti-Ukraine, and all others who support democracy here and abroad, to figure out how to shut Trump down before it is too late. Of course, GOP elites have cowardly missed the multiple off ramps from Trump’s and the Republican base voter’s hold on the party. Let’s encourage them not to skip this most important one.
Trump is telling us exactly what he intends to do. It is our own fault if we don’t wake up and recognize this before it is too late. We need to reject the numbness, stop turning against one another, and turn together and repudiate Trump. Our fellow Americans are not the enemy here. Instead, let us, in a bipartisan way, champion democracy. Speak the truth and fight for our democratic values.
To quote the famous line from the 1986 film “The Fly”, if we don’t stop Trump now, we should “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.