Politics Chat, October 6, 2026

[0:03] Hey folks from West Virginia, thank you for the early birthday. You all know what I want for my [0:09] birthday this year. I'm not going to be more specific. That was a totally inappropriate thing [0:14] to say, of course. Moorhead, Kentucky, Prospect, Connecticut, Canyon Lake, Texas, Old City, [0:21] Philadelphia. Pretty sure I'm going to be in Philadelphia in a few days. I am going to talk [0:26] about San Diego, Cape Cod, Amory, Wisconsin. Hey, by the way, wasn't that a cool story I wrote about [0:32] the other day about the history of fish in America? I love that stuff. Long Island, New York, [0:40] East Tennessee, checking in, Toronto, Wales, the swamps of Jersey, and Nibley, Utah. I'm not going [0:52] to try and pronounce that town in Washington. I get in trouble when I mispronounce things. [0:55] And I am still not seeing Facebook here. Mobile, Alabama is on YouTube. Falmouth from Cape Cod. Oh, [1:05] speaking of, right? Falmouth causes such a problem because, of course, when the British attacked the [1:14] town of what is now Portland, Maine, it was called Falmouth at the time. And now it's Portland, [1:20] Maine, but there's a town nearby it that is Falmouth now. And both of them were in Massachusetts. [1:25] And, of course, there's another Falmouth, Massachusetts. So every time I try and write [1:30] about those, I'm like, okay, it's not that one or that one, but it's that one. And it's got a [1:36] different name. But so anyway, Glenallen, California, Florida. Where are my Facebook people here? Oh, [1:43] there we go. We got somebody here from Facebook I just saw when I went by. And Winchester, Virginia, [1:48] still the home of that fabulous pizza place that we had such a good time at. And Facebook is here. [1:52] Terrific. Okay. Hey, everybody. I am back home for a few days. And I'm going to get to your [1:58] questions now. But I think I'm going to give you a big picture to the degree that I can because there [2:03] is so much going on right now. And to that end, I want to start back with what happened in the 2024 [2:14] election. Not everything that happened in the 2024 election. There's this lot of stuff that went on. [2:19] But one of the things that Trump did really effectively and his supporters really did [2:25] effectively, especially Elon Musk, who came on board in the last few weeks of that election to [2:32] elect Trump and Republicans and poured close to $300 million into that election, which is bonkers. [2:40] And one of the first things we have to do is get rid of the Citizens United decision from the Supreme [2:45] Court that permits people to do that. But one of the things that they managed to do was to get a lot [2:52] of people who were not necessarily political animals, but were political adjacent to like the Trump [3:00] message. And this would be the people who were involved in health-related issues that made them [3:09] adjacent to the Make America Healthy Again agenda, or people who were male adjacent, so they were part of the [3:17] podcast bro world, the manosphere, if you will. Lots of places where they managed to put together a lot of [3:25] different interest groups that are in different interests that weren't necessarily firmly in the Republican camp. And they did it in a [3:37] way that if you listen to me, you know, I kept saying he's promising the opposite things to people, he'll go to one [3:43] place and make one kind of a speech, and someplace else and make the exact opposite speech. And this isn't going to play [3:49] well, because at the end of the day, somebody is going to be disappointed because you can't be wet and dry at the exact same [3:55] time, which was essentially what he was promising. But what came out of that when he won the election was was two [4:02] things. First of all, he and his loyalists insisted that he had won a mandate. Now, this is something you see a lot in [4:10] American politics, really, since the 19, maybe even the 20s, the 2000s, where so many people voted for you, you just [4:20] have that you can ram through whatever it is, because you have a mandate. And in fact, and George W. Bush talked about [4:27] having a mandate, even though he, of course, lost the popular vote. But this was true with Trump, he kept [4:33] insisting he had a mandate, when in fact, in the 2024 election, more people voted for somebody other than [4:41] him, than voted for him. Because of course, there was not only Kamala Harris on the ticket, but other people [4:46] as well, or on the on the, the up for election, but other people as well. So they, they argued that they had [4:54] this mandate to change American society really profoundly, along a number of lines, that are [5:02] actually not popular. So one of the things that they rolled out in the summer of 2024, was project 2025, [5:09] which you've all heard about at this point, but that was so unpopular that when people heard about it, [5:15] the number of people who wanted to see the measures in it enacted, were about 4% of the American people. [5:21] And this is the white Christian nationalist version of American history. That very long project, [5:27] you can still find it online. But it was extraordinarily unpopular. So Trump ran away [5:32] from it and said, I have nothing to do with it. I don't know who those people are. And so on. Of course, [5:36] we know that that was right all along that in fact, they did intend to put that into place. And that's [5:41] exactly what's happened. And it's no more popular now than it was. In fact, it's less popular now [5:46] than it was back in the summer of 2024, when he ran away from it. So that's an example of one of the [5:53] things that he did that turned out not to be popular. And another thing was that he kept talking [5:58] about how he was going to get rid of the criminals, the criminal immigrants who were in this country. [6:04] And then he often used the words rapists and murderers. But what people didn't understand, [6:12] even though folks like me were talking about it a lot, was that in Trump 1.0, the Trump administration [6:18] had redefined anybody who was in this country without documentation as being a criminal. In fact, [6:26] that's not a criminal offense. It's a misdemeanor. But they considered anybody who had come into this [6:32] country and didn't have documentation as a criminal, like a rapist or a murderer. But lots of people [6:39] didn't hear that. I remember having a conversation with somebody about this after he was elected and [6:44] said, you know, it's going to be interesting to see how this plays in your state. And he's like, [6:48] no, no, no, no, it's only criminals, which by the way, had always been deported. This was nothing new [6:53] from Trump. This was something that had always gone on, that usually you had to live out your sentence [6:59] in the U.S. and then you got deported afterward for the simple reason that you didn't want somebody [7:04] deported and then have them turn around and come back if they had been convicted of a [7:09] crime, especially a violent crime in the United States. So anyway, as soon as Trump and Stephen [7:15] Miller, who's really running the deportation program out of the Oval Office of the White House, [7:19] where he is a deputy assistant chief of staff, once they started trying to round up people in these [7:26] huge numbers, a lot of Americans who thought they were behind the idea of getting rid of the criminals, [7:32] including, by the way, a number of Latinos, turned against this policy and said, you know, [7:37] this is not what we signed up for, and this is not what we want to see. And the reason that I [7:42] emphasized that particular thing is because one of the things that came out of the 2020 election was [7:49] a lot of political pundits looking at Trump winning a second time and said, that's it. [7:56] We have a new alignment in the United States. We're a right, a far right, not only a center right, [8:02] but a far right country. And going forward, this new coalition is going to be the way things are [8:11] in the United States, which never really made sense. It was kind of a pundit thing rather than [8:16] a political scientist thing or a historian thing, because again, we could read the numbers as well [8:21] as anybody else and recognize the importance of the rhetoric that went into that election, [8:27] on the, not only on the part of Trump, but on the part of the podcasters and so on, who sanitized [8:34] Trump and made him look better than he was. And the mainstream media, by the way, which didn't really [8:39] report the really quite bonkers stuff he was already saying. It still doesn't to the degree it ought to. [8:47] But anyway, so they thought that this was going to be permanent. And a lot of Republican leaders, [8:54] lawmakers bought into the idea that this is going to be a permanent realignment and they had to get [8:58] with the program if they were going to stay in office. And one of the things that you saw based [9:04] on that, still the recognition on the part of the radical right, the MAGA Republicans, that they didn't [9:11] have the numbers, they've never had the numbers, but that they needed further to rig the system so [9:15] that Trump would win, especially in the midterms, but then going forward. And so one of the things you saw [9:21] in the summer of 2025, were these highly unusual mid-decade redistrictings. And let me unpack that [9:30] a little bit. Remember in the Constitution, the Constitution provides for us to count everybody [9:37] in the United States every 10 years. And just to be very clear, that was everybody, not just citizens. [9:47] And there's a reason for that. They had, it was everybody in the United States every 10 years. [9:52] And then based on those people, the states would redistrict their states to say how many, [10:01] before 1929, how many seats there should be in Congress that gets capped in 1929, [10:06] for reasons that I don't think I'll go into today. And how after 1935, when the New Deal really gets [10:15] underway, how federal money would be divided up. And that's done every 10 years because of the [10:20] Constitution. That's why we have the census every 10 years. And by the way, I got into an argument [10:25] years ago with a relative that I really loved. And he was, this was many years ago, and he was on the, [10:31] far on the right. It was under Obama. He didn't want to fill out his census form, because this was [10:36] government intrusion and the whole thing. And I was like, do not even go there. Because for historians, [10:44] we must have that census. This is our one snapshot every 10 years of what the country looks like. [10:49] And if you look at those old censuses, you know, in the 19th century, for example, they literally [10:56] tell you how many horses were in the country. You know, how much land people had, where they lived, [11:03] who lived next to each other. And so we can find out unbelievably cool stuff from that census. And, [11:10] you know, someday when we get more time, I can do things like show you the census, where we found [11:17] out everything about, you know, that guy who wrote that letter to the Jordan Anderson, who wrote the [11:23] letter to his former enslaver. And, and it's very famous. Every year, and during Black History Month, [11:31] the major media pulls it out and says, I've never before seen letter. Of course, we've been using it in [11:36] classrooms for literally decades. But anyway, you can go to the censuses, and you can find Jordan [11:42] Anderson, but more than just finding Jordan Anderson, and his wife, and his children, whether [11:47] or not they were literate, where they worked, and so on, you can actually see because of the ways in [11:53] which they collect the census, door to door, you can see who his neighbors were. And you realize when [12:01] you look at that census, that his neighbors overwhelmingly were German Americans, they were [12:06] German immigrants, and many of them were in the newspaper business, which is how his letter ends [12:11] up in the newspaper and became this sensation. Anyway, the censuses are incredibly important to [12:17] historians. And when you get one, and you maybe feel like they're asking too many questions, and you [12:23] don't feel like you want to fill it out or whatever, please do. Because this is the only snapshot [12:28] Americans get for how their country looks every 10 years. Anyway, summer 2025, a number of Republican [12:37] dominated states decided to redistrict in the middle of the decade, not after the census, but to do it [12:44] again, and to gerrymander such that they could pick up more seats in the House of Representatives, which [12:51] the Republicans only hold already because it is gerrymandered. So especially in a state like Texas, [12:57] but there were others as well, they carved up the state again to give themselves more seats. But [13:04] this is where I was going with this. One of the populations that has best fled from Trump in the [13:12] last two years are Latinos. And in Texas, they redivided the state according to this new Latino vote [13:21] that had swung to Trump in 2024. And now it has abandoned him even more than he had been before 2024. [13:29] So what you're seeing now is the the realization that, first of all, this is not a mega country. But [13:39] second of all, that some of the machinations that the Republicans undertook in order to get extra seats [13:45] might very well blow up in their faces, because they have done things like divided their gerrymandering [13:52] such that they didn't give themselves enough margin to keep the seats that they were trying to keep. [13:58] So as part of this movement to create this new right wing, to tell you more about this new right [14:05] wing America and a right wing world, the mega Republicans, especially under Trump, have been [14:12] supporting the right wing in Europe, places like Germany, the AFD party, which is a far right party, [14:20] they have they have supported, they certainly turned out, as you know, to support Viktor Orban [14:26] in Hungary, he did lose his election. And Trump has been supporting Vladimir Putin in Russia with [14:33] this idea of dividing up the world along these right wing, you know, get rid of the old post World War [14:40] Two world where people tried to support democracy and equal rights and replace it with something that [14:46] looks much older, where you have strong men who command not only their own countries, but also the [14:50] countries around them. And there was a fascinating article within the last couple of days in the New [14:56] York Times with a key cryptocurrency guy, the guy who is responsible primarily for starting Bitcoin, [15:06] talking about how, you know, democracy is inefficient, that, you know, everybody for 200 years has said [15:11] democracy was great, he says, but in fact, it's really inefficient. And you're much better off with the [15:16] benevolent dictator, because you get stuff done much more quickly. And what really jumps out to me about [15:21] that, and I did write about that in one context yesterday, but what jumps out to me about that is [15:26] that, that is literally what Xi Jinping of China had been saying to, to, to Joe Biden, and Joe Biden quoted [15:39] that a lot and said, No, we have to, we have to maintain democracy. And certainly, the people that [15:46] Vladimir Putin listens to say the same thing, the democracy is washed up, it's all gone. And, and [15:52] it's, it's never been as efficient as dictatorships. And we need to go to these dictatorships. And, and [15:58] of course, FDR was all over this. And you'll hear more from me about FDR going forward, where he said, [16:03] you know, if fascism and dictatorships are also great, how come the allies are winning World War Two, [16:09] and when we get to countries like Italy and Germany, the people are starving to death. And the reason for that, [16:14] of course, is that all of the things that they have produced have gone into the whatever the latest [16:20] project of the dictator is, and you see the same thing now in Russia, you saw it in Hungary, which [16:25] now you're if you follow Hungarian news, you will see that, which is kind of cool, by the way, you'll [16:31] see that the person who is now in charge of Hungary, is going through the palaces and stuff that hit that [16:39] the Viktor Orban and his cronies had and the places where they have concentrated the wealth of the [16:44] Hungarian people for their own use. And of course, we can see that in in other places where this has [16:50] happened as well. So anyway, part of all of that, and you're probably all asleep now, but it's, it's, [16:59] I'm really interested in how these big thoughts go and how these how societies are constructed around [17:05] these different thoughts. So in the United States, one of the pieces of creating this idea of a [17:12] concentrated power and wealth is highly informed by the white Christian nationalist movement that goes [17:22] through white evangelical thought. And by the way, white evangelicals split in the 1970s, with one of [17:31] them going toward people like Jimmy Carter, and the other going toward Jerry Falwell, and black evangelicals [17:37] are a different kettle of fish altogether. But the white evangelicals have been moving into [17:42] American politics beginning in the late 1970s and continuing so that they are now the MAGA based. [17:49] I'm going somewhere with this, by the way. And by 2013, a number of them had embraced something [17:56] called the Seven Mountain Mandate. It comes from an earlier period. But what the Seven Mountain Mandate [18:04] said was that if you accepted the premise of a certain branch of white evangelical thought from [18:10] the 1970s, that the United States of America had replaced its belief in having a God-centered society, [18:19] had replaced it with a human-centered society, which is what they argued, that human-centered society, [18:26] which by which they largely meant the New Deal and equal rights and, and the idea of regulation of [18:31] business and all that, in order to destroy that, you had to take over all the seven pillars of [18:40] society, family, church, education, media, entertainment, economics, and government. All right, so, so what they [18:53] set out to do first under Trump 2.0, and now again, is to take over those pillars. And one of the reasons [19:03] that those MAGA, religious MAGA figures didn't want Trump to be turned out of office in 2020 was because [19:14] they literally thought he was a mountain king, that is, he would be able to oversee all of those [19:20] mountains even though he himself was a leaky vessel, so that they would put other people in all of those [19:26] places. Well, where we are now is that the American people are figuring all this out, and they never [19:35] wanted it. They, I mean, some did, but as I say, Project 2025 only had about a four, four percent [19:41] approval rating when people learned about it in the summer of 2025, but Trump, with the help of all these [19:47] different media outlets, managed to run away from that. Well, now we see what that looks like, and it not only [19:53] means, you know, the purging of Black and brown Americans from the military and from public office, and the, the [20:01] purging of white women and Black women and brown women from the military and from, uh, from public [20:09] service. It means the loss of health care. It means the loss of science. It means the, the loss of the [20:17] food inspections that are, you know, I don't know about you, but I am beside myself when it comes time [20:23] to buy food, because you just don't know what's been, what's in trouble now. You know, all the things that [20:29] created a modern society that many of us expected would continue are gone or are going, and Americans [20:37] do not like it. But what this means is that Trump's approval rating is god-awful. It's at new lows, [20:47] not just for him, but for any president in American history. And what this means is that there has been [20:54] enormous momentum toward Democratic candidates. And I need to be really clear here because [21:00] we still talk about Democrats, independents, and Republicans in this country, and that's still the [21:06] way polls are done, and that's still the way that, that when people talk about it, even like I just did, [21:11] we tend to use those, those pieces. But this is not partisan any longer. This is those of us who care [21:21] about democracy, and who like education, and who like healthcare, and who like schools, and who like [21:28] to be able to eat food, and who like to have clean air and clean water, who like that world that we have [21:36] created since World War II to keep us safe through things like the rules-based international order, to [21:41] keep products getting better and cheaper, to keep, to have jobs. You know, all of those things are now [21:49] what's at stake. And what that means is you're seeing a really, really big change in both political [21:57] parties. So the Republican Party, which has this long, grand history, is now the mega party, if it's [22:06] even a party. It's really more a Trump personality cult. And they are openly calling for getting rid of [22:12] democracy. They are openly calling for, you know, just surrounding Trump and people like him, and [22:19] putting in place Christian nationalism, and, and so on. Everybody else right now is pulling together [22:27] to say, listen, we can sort it out on the other side, what society is going to look like. But right [22:34] now, we can't have that. And this is one of the reasons that I'm finding this moment so fascinating, [22:39] is we have done this three times before in our history. And the 1890s is probably the place that is [22:45] most close to where we are right now. But I love the 1850s in this moment. Because in the 1850s, [22:53] you would never have thought in 1850, that the Whigs and the Democrats were going to, anything was going [22:59] to happen. And yet, after it became clear that elite Southern enslavers were going to be able to move [23:06] enslavement into the American West, where the new states there could work with the Southern states to [23:11] take over the entire country and make the entire country a slave country, which was the plan. All [23:17] across the North, people literally went to a meeting in right after the there's a big law that [23:24] passes that makes this clear. There's a meeting in Washington and 30 lawmakers go to it and they say, [23:29] listen, we don't agree about education, we don't agree about immigration, we don't agree about funding. [23:39] But we can agree that we can't have this small oligarchy take over our democracy because there's [23:45] going to be nothing left. And that was the birthplace of the Republican Party. That's where it comes from. [23:51] They don't have a name yet. They don't have any platform yet. All they have is not that. And what [23:56] came from that is where we are now with a whole bunch of new ideas about how to run a government and [24:03] what a government should do. And the coming together of people was at the time was just really [24:10] fascinating. And I think you're seeing the same thing now in that a lot of people who end up working [24:17] together in the 1850s, couldn't stand each other in the 1840s. And going into the 1860s, and you look [24:27] at this new coalition to create a new government. And of course, all kinds of new relationships, new [24:35] coalitions and all that. But you cannot predict in 1859, people going into that coalition, you cannot [24:44] predict who's going to stay with it on the other side of the Civil War. The meaning of things changes, [24:54] the issues change, and some of the people who were the most fervent about getting rid of the slave [24:59] power end up joining the Democrats at the end of the war. I mean, there's just all these really funny [25:05] changes that go on. And that feels to me like what we are doing now, where you have, you know, people [25:12] who used to be Republicans now running as Democrats, as fervent Democrats, and people who used to be [25:17] Republicans and then switched to becoming never Trumpers suddenly being, you know, really on the left [25:24] side of the Democrats. And you're seeing all these really dramatic changes in this moment. So you've [25:30] got this, this change and this real momentum moving toward the Democrats. And again, not just people D's [25:40] after their names. When I say moving toward the Democrats, that's an umbrella term for all the, [25:46] this entire pushback to the MAGA movement, really. Again, something very similar to what we saw in the [25:52] 1850s and the 1890s and the 19, late 1920s, early 1930s. But what has that done? That has meant [26:00] that Trump is desperate. And Trump is desperate, not only because he can't stand ever to back down or [26:07] ever to lose anything, but also because it is increasingly clear, although increasingly, I mean, [26:14] what does that mean? The man's broken laws. And, and I don't say that lightly, but oh my god, [26:21] you know, there's a new report out today about, you know, a diamond ring that he accepted from some [26:26] country. And of course we got the plane and we got the cryptocurrency and we got the, we got the fact [26:31] that the Trump phones have all been hacked and the Trump company says there's nothing they can do about [26:37] it. I mean, he's a, he is a walking problem for the legal system because clearly he never expected to [26:45] run up against any kind of pushback. And so as that happens, and as people in his administration [26:52] appear to be concerned about things like, for example, the continuing strikes on the small boats [26:59] in east, the eastern Pacific and in the Caribbean, likely most of them out of Venezuela, we don't know, [27:06] for all that you see people saying things about them in the news, we really don't know anything about [27:11] those boats. But one of the things we don't know about them is the legal justification for striking [27:17] them. And within the last week, a report from the UN, the United Nations, suggests that those strikes [27:26] have been war crimes. And that's, or crimes against humanity. And that's, you know, that's clearly [27:35] something that that is likely to be of concern to members of that administration who have been part [27:41] of those strikes. So the more desperate he gets, not only because of the money that he's got coming [27:47] in, thanks to being in the administration, but also because of potential crossing of the line legally, [27:54] and the fact, by the way, that once he's not in office, the cases that Jack Smith, the indictments [28:02] that Jack's, that grand juries charged by, the grand juries charged him with under special counsel Jack [28:08] Smith, those aren't, those did not go away. Those are put on hold while he is president. They can come [28:14] back after he's no longer president. So anyway, as this momentum goes toward the Democrats, Trump is now, [28:22] first of all, he's not okay. The man is just not okay. He can't put a sentence together. And if you, [28:28] I am not a speech therapist, I'm none of those things. But all you have to do is call up on [28:35] YouTube, call up an interview he did in the 80s, or the 90s. And then call up one of the things that [28:42] he has said today or yesterday. And you can just see he's not the same man that he was. In any case, [28:48] he is now hitting the road in the belief that he alone can turn people out for this midterm election. [28:55] He keeps saying to people at the rallies, you know, pretend I'm on the ballot. But he is so [29:00] unpopular, first of all, that the rallies are not filling. And second of all, that Republican [29:04] candidates don't want to be seen with him, or with JD Vance. And you will see this if you are looking [29:10] on social media, when they go to one place or another, they will say, Oh, so and so had another [29:15] place to be or whatever. Well, you do that when you don't want to be seen with someone. And there are [29:21] many reasons to do that in politics, you know, maybe somebody has said something that you don't [29:25] want to be associated with or whatever. But usually when the president shows up, and he's a member of [29:31] your party, you want to be seen with him, because it shows that you're important, and you have this [29:35] friendship and all that. But no, they're they're literally not, they don't want to be seen with him. [29:39] And Ken Paxton, who is running for senator in Texas has been, was taped saying, you know, [29:44] you know, his midterm convention hurt me here. And I, you know, we I have no control over this [29:53] campaign. And it's being run from Washington. And it's a real problem. Mind you, that's Ken Paxton [29:58] trying to get out ahead of the fact that he's not looking good for winning in that race. And he wants [30:03] somebody to blame. Always keep that in mind, too, when you listen to politicians. But so anyway, [30:08] as Trump is out there in these rallies, they're sending him to places where he has won, he won by [30:15] double digits in 2024. Two reasons for that. First of all, they're hoping he can't do any damage, [30:21] that he can turn out the base, but that he won't do any damage when he's out there. Because, [30:26] you know, if he's, he's somewhere where people are trying to decide whether or not to vote for a [30:30] Republican or not, he could do real damage there. But if he's in a deep, deep red district, they should be [30:35] okay. And they want him to turn out the base, which is where the base is going to be. And he likes the [30:40] idea of getting people to cheer for him. So he likes being there. But it's not necessarily going terribly [30:46] well. So what I mean by that is that last night in Nebraska, he said, and I'm going to read this [30:54] exactly as he said it. He's talking about how expensive diesel is, and gasoline is. And he's trying [31:04] to argue that it's okay, because the war in Iran is going to be brief. And it's going to make sure [31:10] there isn't a nuclear weapon in Iran, he said. And again, remember, with the war, it's just artificial. [31:20] It's a little bit high. It's a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. [31:28] They can take out a city, let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. And at that, [31:36] the crowd broke out into cheers. That's, this is a very small price to pay, and it's going to be over [31:45] in very soon. It's essentially almost over with, and they might keep going a little long, you know. [31:53] They always say they have a big threshold for pain. They need it. Let me tell you, they need it. [32:00] But it's gonna end very soon. While the White House immediately said he didn't say what it sounded [32:07] like he said, that he was trying simply to say that if Iran had a nuclear weapon, they could [32:14] take out LA or San Diego. But I read that exact, believe me, I listened to that tape at least seven [32:21] times to get every word down exactly as he said it. And you can see that where he started, he played to [32:31] the crowd with, let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego, and the crowd responded. [32:41] And then he went back to, that's a very small price to pay. And of course, people have been outraged [32:45] today, both Democrats and Republicans. For a president to suggest an attack on the United States in any [32:54] context is not only unprecedented, it is a fundamental attack on what a president should do and what a [33:06] president should be. And it's, it's not surprisingly been the major story of the day. People are outraged by [33:15] that. And that's out there. At the same time, you also asked about the determination of the administration [33:27] to stay in power, despite the its waning popularity. And part of that, I think you have to look at [33:36] Secretary of Defense, it is still Secretary of Defense, there has been no name change, except for the cost of [33:42] taxpayer dollars on changing all the signs outside of buildings and stationary and things like that. [33:50] But Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is pulling as much power as he can to himself. And Pete Hegseth, [33:59] of course, is not good at what he does. And he was very much behind this Iran war. And the Iran war has, [34:09] from every calculation left the United States significantly less safe than it was before the [34:15] Iran war, not only because of the, the pinching of the Strait of Hormuz, and the pinching of the Bab [34:23] al-Mandeb Strait on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula. Both sides of the Arabian Peninsula now have [34:30] Iranian pinch points, controlled pinch points at the outlets of them. But also because of the [34:39] Iranians willingness now to attack American bases in the Middle East, which it has done and create caused [34:46] enormous damage, and probably will force the United States at least to back away from them, because we can [34:53] no longer defend those against drones, for example. But also within the last couple of days, the United States [35:00] has pulled its aircraft out of the, the UK, again, because it couldn't protect against the drones that [35:09] might be there, because the Iranians are much more powerful with drones now than they were before and [35:15] are willing to use them. But also, of course, because the Iranians have now know that they can control [35:25] world trade by pinching off the Strait of Hormuz. And the issue with that nowadays, you're seeing the, [35:31] the Trump administration say, but there's the oil is flowing through the Strait of Hormuz again, [35:36] sort of, that is, the amount of oil coming through the Strait of Hormuz has increased in the last few [35:43] days or a week or weeks. But it has only done so with the United States pouring in extraordinary amounts [35:51] of money and being willing to risk cargoes and the people on those cargoes, people on those ships. [35:59] And traders, I always have a problem with that word, not traders, but traders, traders say it's [36:06] not sustainable to continue to do that. There is going to have to be some kind of a settlement with [36:12] the, the Iranians so that the vessels can once again traverse the Strait of Hormuz without worrying [36:19] about, about attacks. And what that has done in addition to risking the oil and the crews and the [36:26] ships is it's made insurance incredibly expensive. One of the ways to that, that is really interesting [36:33] about his history is that we don't talk enough about and I know it sounds boring. I know car [36:38] insurance is boring. I'm sorry, I'm with you on that one. Looking at who is bearing the risk for things [36:44] that are happening around the world. So who is insuring things and how much you have to pay for that [36:48] insurance is fundamental to understanding the way the economy works. So, um, you know, what, what [36:59] insurance does is it spreads out the risk so that people can take, people can do things that they [37:05] couldn't afford to do on their own. That's actually where we get the idea of insurance. It actually comes [37:10] out of a coffee house in London when people were really starting to trade in a big way, um, especially [37:17] across the Atlantic. You, if you lost a ship, you would be ruined. And what people figured out was [37:24] that if you underwrote each other's voyages, that you could lose a ship and everybody would pay in a [37:32] little bit and, and that person wouldn't go under, and then they would do the same thing for you. [37:37] That's all insurance is. And the reason that under, that insurers are called underwriters [37:43] is because literally on those old contracts, they would write their names under each other. They were [37:50] underwriters. And that's where we got Lloyd's of London and Lloyd's of London remains, not just Lloyd's, [37:56] remains, uh, the, the major insurer in the world. Um, insurance is, is so cool that, um, it's killing me [38:08] not to tell you more about it, but I, but I think I'm going to save my other cool inch. No, I got, [38:14] I got too many cool insurance stories. All right. I'll leave it with that. So Hegseth, um, is pretty [38:22] clearly a white nationalist, a Christian nationalist, white Christian nationalist. And, um, he has been [38:30] firing generals. You asked me about this. He's fired a lot of generals. Now the people I read in the [38:35] military suggests there was some room to fire some generals in that they were, they'd become top [38:41] heavy, but he is pretty clearly trying to get rid of the generals and admirals who would stand for the [38:48] constitution rather than standing for him, because he, of course, subscribing to this idea of taking [38:55] over the country for his version of militant Christianity, um, means he doesn't want anybody [39:02] to stand in his way. He sees himself as taking over one of those mountains where he can move this [39:08] military in a way that serves his version of what the world should look like. And it's a white [39:15] nationalist version. So one of the things that he did on September 30th was he gave this state of the [39:22] force speech, which is new. The generals don't usually do that. They do go, I'm sorry, the secretary of [39:28] defense doesn't usually do that. They do talk to the forces, of course, and talk to generals. But [39:32] this idea that he's got to have this big rah-rah thing, this is the second time that he has done [39:37] it. And this one is the one he called the first annual. The other one he did right after they began [39:44] the bombing of the small boats in the Caribbean. And there had been apparently real pushback from [39:51] that within the military. And that when he was haranguing the military leaders about that, [39:57] people have interpreted that as his way to say, get on board with this, because I'm going to move [40:01] forward with it. Because remember, he fired all the jags when he came in, the judge advocate generals [40:05] from the military who take care of the legal angles of things. Anyway, he announced Project Meridian, [40:16] which is going to be, in his mind, a group that is overseen by Newt Gingrich, which is, [40:25] Newt Gingrich is not one of our great thinkers, but he is the man who engineered the 1994 takeover [40:32] of the House of Representatives by the Republican Party and who subsequently really, really turned it [40:38] over to business. The other person on it is the man who started up a defense contractor named Anduril. [40:47] It's a defense startup. His name is Palmer Luckey. And the third person on it is Elon Musk. And Elon Musk, [40:55] of course, has been busily trying to make everything run by AI. And part of the things that Hegs have [41:02] talked about doing was building a giant plant, a giant base, military base in the United States. [41:13] And this reflects the administration's determination to back away from Europe and really to start putting [41:20] our military muscle into Latin America to take over the Western Hemisphere, which is what they keep [41:26] talking about. And of course, the idea of putting Gingrich and Lucky and Musk together to decide what [41:35] the future should look like sure looks like it's going to have a lot to say about AI and putting AI in [41:41] charge of things. And the US and Russia were the two members of a UN task force that was supposed to be [41:49] looking at making AI respond to the needs of humanity. And one of the things that they were talking about [41:57] doing the task force was to make sure that it responded to moral questions. And the US and Russia [42:04] killed that. So that's not a good thing. So we've got Hegseth out there really trying to set himself [42:13] up as this new kind of defense secretary running the military. And I would suggest perhaps thinking [42:20] of himself as a candidate for a higher office. The fact that he is out giving speeches around the [42:26] country right now looks an awful lot like all those other people who are out giving speeches around the [42:31] country because they are expecting themselves to become candidates in 2028. Although I am, [42:38] I haven't seen anybody else say that but me. So that might be entirely stupid. Don't take that to the [42:43] bank. But I do think it looks a little bit like everybody else. Okay, in any case, where are we now? [42:50] So one of the questions you asked about a lot when you asked for questions was, what are we going to [42:56] do about this election? Because what I have just outlined is an American public that is clearly [43:02] against the Trump administration, and yet, an administration that is determined not to lose [43:08] power. And a couple of things happened today, no, were reported on today that didn't happen today. [43:13] One is that the United States has not invited the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, [43:21] the OSCE, to observe US elections, as it has every year since 2002. And the OSCE, [43:33] the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has 57 member nations, obviously not just [43:39] in Europe, because we're a member of it. And of those organizations, of those 57 organizations, there [43:45] are two who don't permit their elections to be observed, Russia and Belarus. Now there's a third, [43:56] the US. That's not good. There's also the news now that Tina Peters, the election denier that [44:08] messed with voting machines in Colorado, and that Trump pardoned for that, or put pressure, I'm sorry, [44:16] he did not pardon her, it was a state crime, put pressure on the Colorado governor to pardon, [44:20] and he did. She is back at it. And she has reportedly met with Trump at the White House, [44:28] and is putting a scheme that is also being pushed by Cleta Mitchell, who was the lawyer who was [44:33] instrumental in trying to come up with a legal rationale for overturning the 2020 election. [44:40] And their argument, as it was reported today in democracy docket, is, and Media Matters, by the [44:46] way, is all over this as well. Media Matters is great. You really, if you're ever confused about [44:54] stuff, they're a good place to go. And by the way, ProPublica too, has been knocking it out of [45:00] the freaking park day after day after day after day. Read ProPublica. Sometimes the articles are a [45:08] little bit more than you wanted to know about something, and they're kind of in the weeds. [45:12] But boy, their investigative journalism is just off the charts. Anyway, digression there. Apparently, [45:19] Peters and Mitchell are pushing the idea that the Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, can seize voting [45:26] machines because they have foreign-made parts in them. Now, anybody who does this sort of election [45:33] law says there's absolutely no way they have the power to do that. But that's kind of the way that [45:38] they are trying to push Trump right now, because quite clearly, he does not want to give up power [45:44] under any circumstances. All right, so where does that leave us in this about 30 days out from the next [45:51] election? It's from the midterm elections. It's going to be really bad, folks. It's going to be [45:57] really rocky. And by that, what I mean is that here you have two immovable forces, [46:03] and on the one hand are the American people, and on the other hand are Trump and his cronies. [46:09] Now, I've talked to you about what J. Michael Ludig said about ways in which Mike Johnson, [46:19] the Speaker of the House, could change the clerk of the House, and the House wouldn't read the names [46:26] of the Democrats and so on. There's all kinds of things like that. And Ludig was saying, well, [46:29] there's no legal way to change that. But what I keep saying to you and to all of us is that Trump has [46:40] acted from the beginning as if the Constitution doesn't exist. He's not just breaking laws. He's not [46:49] just challenging the Constitution. He's pretending like the Constitution doesn't exist. And this is [46:55] part of a theory, a political theory of how one overturns a democracy that was articulated earliest [47:04] on by a guy named Carl Schmitt, who became a political theorist who became beloved of the Nazis, [47:11] because he said the way that you get rid of democracy, and mind you, he was looking at the [47:17] Weimar Constitution, but the theory applies even to the United States Constitution, although they're [47:23] very different constitutions, is that you declare emergencies, that you say things are sort of outside [47:31] the realm of normalcy. And because of that, the person who can claim the emergencies and grab power [47:38] because of that becomes the power in the country and becomes the dictator. And that's the theory that [47:45] the Trump 2.0 has been operating under. That's why we have all these emergency things. But in the United [47:52] States, the power in the United States comes from the people. Literally, our Constitution says, [48:01] we the people, and that's not just rhetoric, it says the right to have a country and to have a government [48:10] is inherent in the people. It's not imposed from outside. We have that power to create a government. [48:19] And in order to do that, we give our power to those that we elect to create laws under which we live. [48:27] If they do not do what we want, we can reclaim that power. If Trump's going to go before the Constitution, [48:33] so are we. And so between now and the election, and then afterward, because it's not going to be over [48:42] on the 4th of November, the thing to remember is, first of all, to stop being afraid of what Trump is [48:50] going to do. Because Trump is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. And the people around him are largely incompetent. [48:57] We have given them our power. In 2024, the American people gave them our power. But now, [49:05] in the next month, we cannot behave as if we are afraid of them. You know, no more, [49:13] am I going to be allowed to vote? No, no, you have the right to vote. And one of the things about [49:20] the people who are currently in power in the United States is that they're cowards. Trump backs down [49:27] if there is enough pressure against him to begin with. And so the way to face going forward, [49:35] when you're, you know, I keep saying, can we impeach him? What are we going to do and all that? [49:39] We have legal systems for getting rid of a president like Trump. The problem here is that [49:45] the Republicans that we have put in power have completely abdicated their jobs. This man should [49:52] have been impeached from day one. He should have been impeached and convicted. He was impeached, [49:57] but he should have been impeached and convicted in Trump 1.0. And the reason he wasn't the second [50:03] time around is because Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell really appeared to believe that the [50:10] courts would hold him responsible. And then, of course, the courts decided that Trump, the Supreme [50:16] Court decided that Trump could not be held responsible for anything he did as part of his [50:21] duties as the president. And by the time Jack Smith came forward with another set of indictments [50:28] that did not involve any of those duties, Trump had already, it was already too close to the election [50:33] for that to go forward. So the senators, the Republican senators who have walked away from all this [50:41] need to be held to account. And what I'm pointing out to here is that often, if you look about what's [50:48] happening around the country, the Democrats are out there holding town halls, they're talking to people, [50:53] you can see them all over social media, at events showing up for things. Are you seeing Republicans? [50:59] They're all in hiding. They're all living in their bubbles, where they don't have to deal with the [51:04] anger of the American people. And in the next month, they need they, you know, and again, it's really [51:10] easy to complain about things you don't like about the Democrats. And, and, you know, that's the point, [51:16] like, nobody in office is perfect. You know, we all have complaints about all these people. [51:21] But they are trying to restore democracy. It's the Republicans who are hiding from us [51:26] who are trying to destroy it. And so making sure that those people hear from us at their offices, [51:34] phone calls, letters, and so on, nonviolent, always nonviolent under every circumstance, [51:41] not just because that's morally right, as it is, but also and safer and legal, but also because [51:49] that's what changes politics in the United States violence does not. But making sure that they hear [51:56] from us, and make it clear that we will not support somebody trying to steal this election, [52:03] will make the difference between Trump being willing to do it, and not. So if you think about 2020, [52:11] when he desperately wanted to steal that election, at the end of the day, he chickened out. And he [52:16] chickened out because he couldn't quite push it through. And then he backed off, and he gave the [52:21] video and all that. We need to make sure that happens before this election, so that people in the [52:27] Senate, for example, continue to say to him, as they did over the SAVE Act, as they have done over [52:34] the, some of the other stuff he's tried to do with elections, that they will not support him, because [52:42] they, they, it is not in their interest to support him. Because we, you know, this, this idea that we [52:48] have to wait till he does something awful and protest afterward, the time to make it clear we are not [52:53] going to put up with this crap is now. And part of that, I'm going to add on here is, now is also the [53:04] time to make sure that people you know, are going to vote, and that they know how to vote, and they [53:11] literally, like how it is done. A lot of the people you think vote don't, because they're afraid to go in, [53:17] because they're afraid of the ballots, the ballots are too extensive, they don't know what to, what they're [53:22] looking for. And they don't know how to get to the polls. Those are things that if you are anxious [53:28] about this election, you can do now, you can make sure gets taken care of now. And one of the, the [53:34] people I say, well, my vote doesn't matter. And you know, there's this great guy running in Iowa, [53:38] named Josh Turek, he's running for Senate in Iowa, neck and neck, by the way, with his opponent. And he [53:44] won his first election, not to the Senate, to a, to a state Senate seat, by six votes. So when you think [53:53] your vote doesn't matter, or your friend's vote doesn't matter, Josh Turek's career came down to [53:58] six votes. And those getting those marginal votes out, getting people out, that really will, A, [54:07] relieve your anxiety, but B, make it less likely that Trump, I mean, Trump's going to try to pull [54:15] something. But the question is how many people in office will continue to support him when his numbers [54:21] are in the toilet, the economy is in trouble. He's gotten us into this war, he's put incompetent [54:26] people in office, including Peter Exeth, and we've just had and cash Patel over there at the FBI, [54:32] we've just had the largest hacking of FBI agents and associates, personal information in American [54:42] history. I mean, how long are they going to stand up for this, they're going to stay, they're going to, [54:47] they're going to stay behind it so long as we make it easy for them to do it. We stop making it easy, [54:54] they stop supporting him, and they're on the cusp of doing that. So run through the tape here for the [55:00] midterms, because this is where we finally get the opportunity to check Trump's administration, [55:07] he will still be in office, the Democrats are not going to be able to put into law things that they [55:13] really want to do and that we all want. But the the more pressure we put on them, and then the [55:17] pressure that we keep up saying that we want universal health care, that we want to stop [55:24] partisan gerrymandering, both of which are popular with over 80% of the American people, Republican, [55:30] Independent and Democratic. These are not wild proposals. The more pressure that we keep up for [55:37] those things, and the more pressure we keep up for accountability for hearings at first from the [55:44] Democrats, if they get control of either the House or the Senate, and then those hearings might of [55:49] course turn up things that then go into the courts. The more, you know, we are not done on November 4th, [55:55] we are just starting now. And this movement needs to continue not only through this election and the [56:04] next election and the next, which is when we will have the new census and the gerrymandering problem. [56:11] That's how you change the nature of a country. And if we do that, we might very well end up where [56:18] people ended up during the progressive era, which was that when things really, really went badly, [56:24] Americans started to look internally and because the the of the first Gilded Age and the robber barons [56:31] are getting everything. They began to look at their neighbors and say, you know, we actually don't [56:36] want cities that are teeming with with offal from the the butchering of hogs that draw flies and disease [56:48] and so people are dying of cholera. You know, we want to clean that up regardless of which party we voted [56:53] for. And and you know, we'd like kids to go to kindergarten rather than working. And and we think [56:58] that workers should have decent pay. Those are not partisan issues. And we got those the first time [57:04] around coming out of a moment looks very much like this one. So maybe next time I'll be able to talk [57:09] more about the people who are working on that. But I kind of wanted to talk a lot of you off the ledge [57:14] today and say, yeah, things look pretty bad in a lot of ways. But never forget that it is the American [57:21] people who call the shots in this government. And and the that our moment to make that very clear [57:30] is now before the midterms rather than after. Anyway, I hope that made some sense. And I I'll be back. [57:41] I'm here. I don't I'm I'm I'm back here for a while. So I'll let you know when I'm up and doing this again. [57:49] Anyway, thank you for being here. And I will talk to you soon.