Ex-Bush advisor: Trump's Iran war is a 'catastrophe' built on lies

President Donald Trump talking to reporter aboard Air Force One on December 9, 2025 (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley/Flickr)

Steve Schmidt, a Republican political strategist who famously advised President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), warned on his Tuesday Substack that President Donald Trump’s war against Iran is a “catastrophe.”

“The lies never, ever stop,” Schmidt wrote. He played clips of Trump saying America is more respected in the world than ever before and that the Iran war has been “one of the most stunning operations ever conducted.” He also showed Trump claiming that the economy in his first term was “the greatest economy in the history of our country” and that the next one “is going to blow it away.”

Schmidt contested these assumptions.

“We're always told there isn't enough money for schools, for health care, or for our veterans — but there's always enough money to bomb people on the other side of the world,” Schmidt pointed out. “We can support the democracy movement in Iran. We can prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon — all without bombing innocent schoolchildren or sending American troops off to die on the other side of the world.”

He concluded, “The American people understand, and are seeing more clearly every day, that everything Donald Trump promised was a lie — and that what they've been given is a catastrophe. What we have to do is vote these people out and take away the political power they have abused so badly.”

This is not the first time that Schmidt, despite his Republican roots, has blasted the current president. Earlier in March he called out Trump for trying to suppress documents in which a woman alleged the president sexually assaulted her in the 1980s when she was a 13-year-old girl.

“A woman told FBI investigators that Epstein had trafficked her to Donald Trump,” Schmidt wrote. “The rot is otherworldly.”

Earlier in March, he also criticized Trump for invading Iran without a coherent plan.

“There has been no debate, no plan, and no thought given by Donald, his stooges and politicized generals about the second-and third-order effects of their decisions,” Schmidt wrote. “This is escalating.”

He also pointed out that we now “have war, chaos, economic crisis, corruption and insanity served up non-stop, extolling the wrong against the right, while abusing American citizens with violence, including murder.”

As he put it up earlier in the same article, “We had peace, and we chose Trump.”

Last month, meanwhile, Schmidt laid the blame for Trump’s abuses of power at the feet of the pro-Republican Supreme Court.

“The Roberts court has destabilized our American society through partisan rulings,” Schmidt argued. “We have a corrupt Supreme Court with [Judge Samuel] Alito’s misconduct, Clarence Thomas’s misconduct, flying around with all these billionaire extremist doners from here to there and everywhere.”

“The court has lost its reputation for a reason,” he continued, “and now we have Trump’s visage looming down at the American people from the Department of Justice, which is a corrupt institution that can’t be trusted, filled with corrupt prosecutor who abuse their oath, abuse the Constitution, and abuse the American people in the name of power.”

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