Political strategist Steve Schmidt, a Republican turned Democrat, is blasting President Donald Trump as “despised,” “decrepit,” “bitter,” “angry,” “old,” “lonely,” and “hated” — while warning that “this week of desecration is only going to get worse from here.”

The co-founder of The Lincoln Project, Schmidt declared Trump’s White House — complete with a UFC cage match “Octagon” constructed to celebrate his 80th birthday and the start of the nation’s 250th birthday celebrations — a “symbol for the destruction of this era.”

That destruction, Schmidt says, includes “red hot” inflation and a lost Iran war.

Trump “isn’t just mistrusted. And disliked,” says Schmidt, “Donald Trump is genuinely despised. He’s hated.”

“He has earned this hatred, well and fully,” Schmidt declares, before calling Trump a “decrepit man” who is “the leader of a cult in America.”

“Consider his decrepitude,” Schmidt urges. “He cannot walk in a straight line.”

Offering examples, Schmidt points to Trump’s ankles, his sleeping in meetings, his “slurring of the words.” Trump “is physically and mentally incontinent,” says Schmidt, in words similar to those he used on Monday when he declared the president “psychologically incontinent.”

“And yet, the cynical men, the vandals, who have assaulted the Republic, lit the Constitution on fire, and have curated this fascism from day one, insist, by the time we get to 2028, Trump will just be getting started,” he warned, before playing video of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon declaring he believes Trump will run for president again in 2028, despite the current constitutional ban.

“Donald Trump is the worst president in American history,” Schmidt continued. “He is a human malignancy. A pancreatic cancer on the American Republic, a lethal terminal cancer,” a “MAGA cancer” that “must be excised, fully from our politics.”

“Despite what men like Steve Bannon and Donald Trump promise and threaten,” Schmidt observes, “and then abuse and break, we will always have a vote. And the American people will vote these people out of office with an extreme prejudice come November. We will vote them out from coast to coast. From the top of the ballot to the bottom of the ballot.”

“Donald Trump,” Schmidt continues, “is unfit, physically. Emotionally. In every conceivable way. But especially morally. And because of that, all of us, the American people, all the people of the world are in danger. Make no mistake about that.”

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Senate Republican Majority Leader John Thune was noticeably absent from Wednesday’s Oval Office bill signing ceremony — but top House and Senate leaders — including Speaker Mike Johnson — were present, cheering on the president. Thune did take time to talk with reporters, where he tied Wednesday’s surging inflation numbers to Trump’s Iran war.

The Washington Examiner’s David Sivak asked Thune directly why he wasn’t present at the president’s signing of the $70 billion reconciliation bill to fund ICE and the Border Patrol, or to talk about FISA legislation with Trump.

Thune noted that Speaker Johnson is “down there anyway” and that he and Johnson “talk regularly,” Sivak reported.

Thune appeared to suggest that there might not have been an invitation, adding, “I don’t know that we got asked, but I’ve got stuff going on here, as you know.”

Thune spelled out the inflation connection to reporters, as Punchbowl News’ Andrew Desiderio reported.

“The sooner we get the situation in Iran stabilized, the Strait [of Hormuz] opened up, those [inflation] numbers will trend in a better direction,” he said. “But obviously right now there are important national security objectives we’re trying to achieve.”

“The American people realize that if we’re heading in the right direction and the trendlines are good and the confidence is good long-term — which I [think] it will be because of all the other things we’ve done on the economy — then obviously people will start to see improvement,” he also said. “It may not happen overnight, but it will. But at least for now, we’ve got to do everything we can to keep the pressure on [in] getting the situation in the Middle East resolved.”

Getting the situation in Iran resolved was not how President Trump appeared to approach Iran on Wednesday.

“Iran’s Military is a complete and total mess,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Much of it, like their Navy and Air Force, doesn’t even exist anymore – They have been completely defeated. Iran is all talk and no action. The Bully of the Middle East is dead!!! They’ve taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price!!!”

In that Oval Office meeting, Trump also slammed Iran, saying that the U.S. would hit Iran hard again on Wednesday, and insisted the Iranian government is “playing us for suckers.”

Thune has distanced himself from the president over time, refusing his repeated demands to pass the controversial SAVE America Act — legislation some call voter suppression — to kill the filibuster, and to fire the Senate parliamentarian. He has also opposed Trump’s intelligence nominee. Thune tried to persuade Trump to back Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), but the president endorsed Ken Paxton instead — and Paxton went on to defeat Cornyn in the May primary runoff.

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President Donald Trump has “destroyed” the 77-year-old NATO alliance, “without tearing up the treaty or even firing a shot,” argues former Trump Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor at Defiance.News.

At the heart of NATO sits Article 5: the principle that an attack on one member is an attack on all, and the commitment that every member will come to the attacked nation’s defense.

Taylor, who served in the first Trump administration, points to a survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations that finds majorities in every country polled doubt the United States would come to their aid if they were attacked.

“That’s a stake in the heart of the NATO alliance,” writes Taylor. That core Article 5 promise is “no longer believed by the very people it was written to protect. You can’t deter an adversary with a ‘guarantee’ your allies now think is hollow.”

“Even if Trump doesn’t care about this or is too inept to understand these numbers, Vladimir Putin is paying close attention,” warns Taylor.

“Alliances aren’t built on paper,” he explains. “Like a marriage, that’s just where they get documented. America’s most important alliances are built around shared belief, i.e. a conviction that when the worst comes, your friends will come for you. The genius of the postwar order that American diplomats Dean Acheson and George Marshall built was that it made that belief credible enough to deter the Soviet Union for forty years without a shot fired across the Fulda Gap.”

“Deterrence,” he notes, “lived in the minds of our enemies. And it’s in the mind that Trump has done his damage.”

Taylor also points to another “truly terrible” part of that poll he says found that “just 11 percent of Europeans across fifteen countries now regard the United States as an ally. That’s a record low.”

He calls it a “gut punch” that Trump will be headed to France to attend a G7 meeting in mid-June, and later to Turkey for a NATO summit in early July.

“Trump will go into those meetings as the most diminished American president in the history of the transatlantic alliance,” Taylor observes.

Europeans are now doing “what frightened nations have always done”: arming themselves because they don’t believe friendship with America is something they can rely on.

Taylor notes that European nations used to buy American-made weapons in part because they believed they would at some point be fighting alongside America. Now they are buying weapons from other countries because they fear at some point they may not.

He offers one note of optimism: that poll also found that in every nation polled but one, “majorities of Europeans believe relations will improve the moment Trump leaves office.”

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