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It is hard to find good gluten free bread. It is fantastic. They give you step by step instructions. I really dig this. There is nothing like having an artesion bakery in your freezer. Right now, Wild Grain is offering my listeners thirty dollars off your first box plus free croissants for life. Come on when you go to wildgrain dot com slash podcast to start your subscription today. That's thirty dollars off your first box and free croissants for life when you visit wildgrain dot com slash podcast, or simply use the promo code podcast at checkout. This is a sponsor I absolutely embrace, so use that code. Hello there, welcome to another episode of the Chuck Podcast. A little programming note, this is of course our Thursday episode, and you know our rhythm here Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, three podcasts a week. Well for summer, for essentially the months of July and August, I'm gonna go down to updating two days a week. Mondays and Thursdays will be my two drops. Look, there's still going to be my weekly conversation with Crystalizza that appears in Chrystaliza's podcast, but we have some big news about that that's coming up soon. So that's still going to be happening weekly throughout the rest of the summer and I'll quickly go back to three days a week at the end of August early September, but a little bit of Frankly, you know, there's only so many people who will you can find who are willing to be booked in the middle of the summer sometimes, so you know, figure it gives you, gives everybody a little bit of time to catch up, maybe do what I like to do, a little bit of which is read I feel like. And sometimes I've been so focused on the content side of things, whether it's Chuck todcast, new sphere, dynastic, that just having one extra day just to essentially ingest is always helpful. In summer is a wonderful time to do that. LUs you know, a little confession. It gives me a little extra time with the fam. But look, it's not like things are going to be that slow this summer. One thing we've all learned in the Trump era, you never know, there's never really a slow news month, news week, or news day. It is all about not scheduling your life around the news, but essentially just scheduling this in a in an easier to digest format. So with that said, I know why you're here. You're here to understand what the hell is going on politically? Where are we going? We've had about forty eight hours to digest what is a what I'm going to call a mild earthquake political earthquake. I say mild political earthquake because it's not clear how big this is going to be Mom Donnie's success. I mean, you know, I've been sitting on this, obviously for twenty four hours, and I think a lot of political commentators, you know, have a bad habit. And I tried to say this last night, let's is this the beginning of a left wing tea party or is what happens in New York going to stay in New York? And look the extra twenty four hours, I have accumulated more evidence that says this stays in New York. And I've accumulated more evidence that indicates there's certainly going to be a pretty a pretty big fight in the Democratic Party essentially for the soul of the party in twenty seven and twenty eight, between at least two factions and possibly three factions. And we'll get to that also a little bit. And I want to talk specifically first about the evidence that indicates this this is every chance of being a very New York City phenomenon and it may not go anywhere else. And why do I say that, Well, there's been some digging in, particularly the the the race with Esplot and Chevrolet Chevalier, who is quickly going to become I think, the the face of the mam Danni congressional movement, if you will. What was interesting is Espaalot seemed to do better in precincts that had more African American and Latino voters, and Chevalier did better in the precincts that had that were less diverse, that had the younger, whier voters. So it is a very frankly similar thing that we saw that we've seen in previous primaries, where the progressive where sort of the stereotype of who's the Democratic Party, The more diverse parts of the electorate are more moderate or more sort of sticking with the establishment wing of the party, and it is younger and whiter progressives that are powering this movement, particularly in New York City. One other thing that's worth noting there's been some analysis that sort of overlaid Mamdani versus Cuomo's performance on last night and essentially the three congressional districts. I mean, Mamdani was very smart about where he spent his political capital and where he didn't. Right, you know, he didn't endorse in every congressional race it was taking place in New York City, but the three he picked were parts of the parts of New York City he did best, So it was It's an important point to note because it's not as if Mom Donnie has expanded his base or that the Democratic Socialists have expanded their influence in New York City. Uh, it's, you know, they've it's it's sort of they've concentrated on where they're already, where they already had the numbers and they already have the ability to win. So in that sense, he's being very shrewd obviously about what he's picking. He's not over extending himself. He's not wish casting there there there, He's he's being very strategic but where he's going. And so look, look, winning begets momentum and you can go from there. But it is important to note there isn't. This is because the question is are there more people that are suddenly open to socialism? And I don't think that's the case at least that's I think a second day reading of this indicates that. But so I think that that's one big sort of piece of information that I've absorbed over the last twenty four hours that at least puts me in the look this is going to be a faction of the party. The question is is it going to spread? Is it going to go beyond here? Now, when you go back to circa twenty ten, twenty eleven, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, sort of when the Tea Party movement was getting more and more traction inside the Republican Party, there were plenty of establishment Republicans who were saying, ah, this is just a small faction of the party. Yes, there are certain places that you're going to see that faction overperform in Idaho and Wyoming and parts of Texas, but this isn't going to spread more than that. Of course, that turned out to be. It turned out to me not true. And you know, the Maga coalition that began with the Tea Party movement, it's still in some ways a minority faction even of the Republican Party, but it is in charge of the Republican Party. And I think that that's the open question here, But still I do want to also make one more point that I kind of made yesterday, but I want to reinforce it, and that is sort of what got traction in twenty twenty five. In Mamdani's victory, it was clear it was his focus on affordability that truly was galvanizing. It did allow him to build a very large coalition, and it is why he won. As much as it continues to be he wants to always be seen that he has focused on these issues. He certainly tries to lead with him. That was not the case with these congressional races. Okay, this was not about affordability. These weren't campaigns that were run on affordability, because affordability doesn't explain how the actions of a small country halfway around the world became one of the defining organizing principles for a political movement here at home, and it doesn't explain why Israel has become, for some on the American left, a litmus test of belonging. And that's where I want to get to here for a few minutes, because that's something I've been personally wrestling with, something bigger than just one set of results. From a primary night. As you know you've been following this. This week, I had a terrific conversation with the mayor of Oklahoma City, David Hold on pluralism. I've been spending a lot of time over the last few months talking about pluralism because frankly, I think I think essentially the Mega movement has no idea what it means and doesn't care about it. And I'm increasingly believing that the progressive left does not accept the premise of pluralism either, which is going to just have me talking more and more about it, right, because isn't about agreement, It's the exact opposite. It's about accepting that people with different histories, religions, identities, and worldviews all belong in the same democracy. This is the fucking American experiment, people, Okay, this is what makes us different. It's this all right, America, and the American democracy hasn't lasted for two hundred and fifty years because we agreed. America's worked because generation after generation accepted the premise that we had to figure out how to live with people that we profoundly disagreed with. It's been the genius of this experiment and It's also why absolutism, whether it's on the left or the right, has made a lot of folks nervous, including myself, because once every issue becomes a morality based litmus test, disagreements stops being something to debate and it becomes something to punish. As you know, I don't spend I've I've never been comfortable publicly saying, you know, here is my religious identity. But because I don't think you know, because it you know, for a long time in this in this world of political analysis, I tried really hard to be as opaque as possible about some of my personal politics, my identities, my the political identity identities of my parents and of my spouse and all this stuff, because all of that can color analysis, and I didn't want it to. I wanted my analysis to speak for itself. I wanted as as few filters as possible. Look, this is not the world we live in, and there's no doubt there is. You know, every there are political hacks, left wing political hacks, and right wing hacks that have consistently wanted to politicize members of the press, politicize those people like myself that are in this space, and so they've they've you know, wanted to force this and you're like, okay, and I'm happy to discuss it. Right. So I'm Jewish and I've you know, not hidden from it. But it's not something I've intended to wear on my sleeve because I you know, as I've I've shared this with others. I was raised a quiet Jew. I was in a mixed family, and one side of my family was Jewish and another side of my family was not. And there are many members of my non Jewish side of the family they didn't know a lot about Judaism or Jews, and my mother might have been among the first Jews they had ever met. So there was always a little bit of eggshell walking, you know. And my I was basically raised to, hey, walk around eggshells on religion a little bit, be careful, don't you know. It's not something to be done in public. I joke all the time. I was raised with that advice that parents gave a lot in the fifties, sixties and seventies that said, hey, you know, the two things you don't talk about in public are politics and religion. That shall we say. That's a very methodist way of thinking. Sometimes on that front. My father was raised a Methodist, which his joke was, it just meant we agreed, we believed in God when you want to talk about anything else type of thing. But I'm saying this because I'm not going to sit here in bretend I experienced Tuesday simply watching through the through the lens of a political analyst. It was hard not to experience it personally. And over the last twenty four hours, I've heard from enough family and friends who are Jewish to know that I'm not alone and feeling just unsettled. And it's not because anti Semitism suddenly appeared on Tuesday. Please, I know it's existed for a long time. But it's that many Jews woke up asking themselves a different question, particularly many Jews in New York City, how much larger is this? And is this much larger than I thought? And that's a different feeling. It's the feeling that many Americans have had at different moments over the last decade, in particular, the moment when you realize an idea you considered to be on the fringe may have more political support than you believe, and you start to like, you know, it's like you move your eyes, you shift your right, start looking around, you start wondering, you look at people differently. I know there's some you know. I know, Gay Americans have had moments like this over the last decade. Latino Americans have had moments like this. African Americans. You know, I'm not going to sit here and pretend the Jews are the only marginalized group. Trust me. In some ways, I feel like we're the only the Jews are the only marginalized group that is not fully embraced, sometimes on the victim side of things. But whether you're right or wrong about the magnitude, the feeling itself does change how you see your country. And that's why I don't think Democrats should dismiss what happened in New York as just another primary that just took place in one city. You know, Republicans spent fifteen years watching a faction become the center of gravity inside their party, and at first each election looked like an isolated event, and eventually it became clear that it wasn't. And I'm not saying that's what's happening to the Democrats just yet. I think there's a few things and Matt Bennett and I get into it sort of. There's a few ways this could be different for the Democrats than it was for the Republicans as they dealt with Trump and Mega. I'm just simply saying it's a question Democrats have to ask themselves. Is this one city's moment or is this the beginning of a broader ideological realignment, because that the future of either political party depends less on persuading people and accepting the premise of pluralism that you're just looking to build a coalition of people that you agree with sixty percent of the time, right, then on deciding who no longer gets to belong in your party. Then we're moving away from pluralism. We're moving away from something that exists everywhere else on this earth, but not here in America. And once pluralism starts to disappear in this country, democracy will be incredibly hard to sustain here. And that's you know, there is a sense that the DSA right, they want to take over the Democratic Party and they're going to decide who gets to belong and if you disagree on the issue of Israel, you don't belong. Right, It's like Donald Trump, you if you cannot look at what he did to Derek Dooley. Right. If you don't accept his reality about twenty twenty versus the actual reality about twenty twenty, you don't belong in that movement. You get purged from that movement. And if you really look carefully with him, right, that's who he reserves his harshest treatment for are the people that will not humor him on the big lie of twenty twenty. And that's what's dangerous here is that you have two factions now who are are not only interested in taking over parties right mega on the Republican side, the DSA essentially wants to infiltrate the Democratic Party and take it over. But they're you know, the two political parties you know, used to be looking for more people to join. And in this case, you've got two factions that are on the march, that are filled with litmus tests and purity tests, and anybody that doesn't fit a certain that doesn't check certain boxes is out. This episode of the Check Podcast is brought to you by Fandel. It's the biggest stage in world soccer. 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In Massachusetts, you can call one eight seven seven eight Hope and Why, or you can simply text hope and Why New York in order to get some help with any gambling concerns. Finally, you can also call one eight seven seven seven seven zero seven eight six seven if you're in Louisiana. This is I think especially problematic for the Democrats, but it's potentially problematic for the Republicans, And you could argue over the last one hundred years both parties have traded places of when you know, one parties had the bigger base in the had fewer swing voters, and the other party has had the small smaller base, And this goes back and forth. Right Republicans didn't have a big enough base to sustain majorities in Congress, so they were the party that tried to attack towards the center over the last twenty five is basically since since the debacle of seventy two, the McGovern revolution inside the party, where they went through this essentially a near twenty year drought of political power. Yes, they had some legislative power, but that was it starting. So then you had the Democrats start to attack to the center. And I do think at the moment what many I think in the progressive left don't appreciate is that the success the Democrats have had is because they've they've been able to appeal to those voters sort of in the mushy middle that don't like the Trump led Republican Party, and now the DSSA is potentially going to essentially create a similar discomfort for that same set of voters about the Democratic Party, and then there's a sense of this either party even wants the support of these mushy voters in the middle now they need it in order to attain power. But how much do they want this support? How much does that compromise worth? So, look, I think that's the question you got to sit with here. Do we now have two political parties who are moving away from pluralism, moving away from the core premise of what the American experiment was supposed to be? And I know I sound like you know, old guy political sciencey, you know, historian type, trying to you. It's like, you know, it's it's it's frustrating to watch something you know that isn't going to work. And then when it's when it ends, it's going to end, it's going to be as spectacular And I don't say that as a positive word disaster. And the question is what pieces are going to be left to pick up? How many people have to get hurt in the process before you know, basically the two parties sober up. And I'm I'm not sure of that, But I want to touch on a couple other things on this one is I think the real test of whether the progressive left does have you know, is on the march, does have the momentum here is going to the next big test is Michigan. And I'll do alsa yet right if he wins that primary and not just wins the primary, but wins the general election. I think you know those that are I sort of did it myself right a little bit last night. But I think when you look at what the Democratic presidential primary, you know where the sort of energy of the presidential primary would be. The left is going to feel very emboldened and you will see a lot of presidential candidates tack further to the left. If Platner and abdel Sayet are part, are both win and it leads to a Democratic majority, Because if that happens, it erases the best talking point the establishment has over the progressives, which is, hey, you can't win in swing states and you're gonna have a hard time knocking off incumbents. Now, the progressive movement also has a lot on the line with Graham Platner and Abduel Sayet. If Democrats come up short and don't win the Senate like the Tea Party did to the Republicans in twenty ten, and in twenty twelve two times where they had the numbers were on the Republican side to be able to pick up the Senate, and they came up short. It was Tea Party nominees that were simply too extreme for those voters, and it cost them some Senate seats that it never should have cost the Republicans. That's the risk that the progressives have here with Abduallsiat and Graham Platina, Right, if they both lose, well, then that becomes sort of a different way things are absorbed. So I put all that out there to just remind folks we've got a lot, We've got a lot of elections we haven't held yet in this midterm that will, I think paint the fuller picture. And as Matt Bennett may point he made to me, he said, hey, early twenty eighteen, there was the same AOC defeats Joe Crawley. Hey, look, this is a rise at the left. By the time you get to November, the story is about, Hey, look at all these center left candidates that won in red districts. Right, you're Abigail Spenberger Slotkins, you're Mikey Sheryl's. So that is probably the best advice here if you're if you're trying to figure out what does Tuesday mean? In short, Mam Donnie is smart and is an incredibly impressive leader of the Democratic Socialist movement. He's careful about he knows how to pick his spots. Uh. He went all in in in three congressional races where he knew his political capital was already uh worth the most. He didn't test his political capital. For instance, in the Upper West slash East Side seat there that last Yer one, the one that became all all about AI, the race that that that was that many Washington d c. Folks wanted to make about George Conway and Jack Slashburg. The voters themselves, of course, weren't that interested in that. It says a lot that Mam Donnie chose not to get involved in that one and didn't try to recruit and find a candidate there, So you know it is I will say this, I think that I've been I was extremely disappointed in how he reacted to what happened to Dan Goldman and at the coffee shop, and I do think how he handles this growing anti Semitic rhetoric that is happening with some of his supporters. Right, this is the uncomfortable question that I remember Andrew Gillen once asked Ron de Santis. But I think the same question can be asked to both parties. I'm not saying you're a racist, was the famous Andrew Gillim debate quote to rand de Santis. I'm just saying racists think you're a racist. That you know. And I don't think every Democratic Socialist is an anti semi, but they seem to be comfort if there are anti Semites in their mist just like the MEGA movement seems to be not interested in purging itself of racist elements inside the movement. And that's where this is where I get back to pluralism. The Republican Party chose not to fight Mega, they tried to co opt it, and instead Mega co opted it. The Democratic Party's instinct is not going to be to fight the Socialists. It is going to be to try to bring them in and co opt them. You sort of heard Corey book. All I would say is good luck that didn't work out well there. It doesn't usually because I will I think that the DSA is more organized, at least in New York they are, and I think you'll see in the same way. You know, MAGA was powered by the Ron Paul movement from twenty twelve because Ron Paul was sort of the DSA of the right, meaning Ron Paul was the organize one. Ron Paul's forces are the ones that took over the state party, and they basically got absorbed by the MAGA movement and they quickly left the Pauls and went to Trump. I've had this conversation with Ran Paul and he, I mean, he saw it himself. He had a big chunk of support. Trump comes in. Literally first one to lose all of his support in that Republican primary in twenty fifteen was Rand Paul. And the thing about that is the establishment didn't. I remember Ben Ginsberg telling me this back in twenty twelve how alarmed he was after Romney had basically already won the nomination, they had to make sure they elected Romney delegates and all of these different state parties, and he was telling me these stories about these Paul folks were basically had out organized the establishment wings of these state Republican parties and had basically orchestrated where they ran as Romney delegates and the Romney folks were trying to prevent them from being delegates, but basically they were trying to embed themselves into the inner workings of the Republican parties, onto the state central committees and things like this. And so by the time Trump comes along in fifteen and sixteen, he already he already has an infrastructure within the establishment in sort of the the grassroots mechanics of the Republican Party. Well, that's what Bernie's been doing. And in some ways between the DSA, which had its own organization on the outside, and what Bernie had been doing, he's got the sort of grassroots mechanics on the left. So and if you have a movement that really doesn't embrace pluralism, you can see how quickly this becomes a purification test what we've seen on the right, you either get co opted or acquiesce where you become Liz Cheney and John You sort of end up where Liz Cheney, John Kasik, Bob Gorker are Jeff Flake. And perhaps that turns into a fledgling third party and independent movement. We'll see, and we're going to get to that in a few minutes. But I think that's right now right, this is we're in the middle of the chapter on twenty twenty six, and at the moment it looks like the lefts on the march. Let's finish the chapter. Let's see what happens in Michigan. Let's see what happens in November in both Michigan in Maine, and then we can finish this story. Quick little note on Donald Trump and his meeting with Senate Republicans. Talk about a wasted political opportunity for Donald trum up in the Republican Party. Here's a party that has just had an near impossible time. Even though they have to the majorities in both the House and the Senate, they don't seem to get anything done beyond their tax cuts. Right. That was sort of the hallmark of the first term, and it was looking like the hallmark of this one. And lo and behold, there's this bipartisan housing bill. And you know, it is a bill that frankly, probably should have been a past five years ago, ten years ago, but it finally is. It's sort of like that infrastructure bill that Biden finally got passed. You know, it was a bill that should have been passed ten years earlier, but we know, Trump just completely failed at sort of politicking there in that first term, and that's why we didn't get it. So here we are, and the opportunity Donald Trump and the Republican Party had on Wednesday morning to be able to show them caring about affordability signing this housing bill, Republicans were getting ready to take credit. He could have done a little bit of of dancing on the socialist you know victory, you know, dancing on the Democrats grave by promoting the socialist victories in New York. And I think a lot of Republicans at Capitol Hill woke up on Wednesday morning thinking, hey, this is going to be a good day for them politically. And what does Trump do. He shows up to their lunch and he turns it into a Festivus meeting. I got a lot of problems with you people, and he does the airing of grievances. I mean, I had to check the calendar. It's June twenty fourth, It's not December twenty third that he chose to air his grievances. So I guess we will we will call June twenty fourth Trump Festivus Day, because he decided to go into that meeting and just talk about all of his problems. And then Bill Cassidy admitted he got his own Irish up and the two of them apparently had a screaming match about the Iran MoU But apparently this lunch did nothing right. There was no meaningful back and forth according to Thune about the Philip Buster, the save of it. It was just Trump ranting, and he decided not to do the signing ceremony in the housing bill, saying until he gets the Save America Act. The irony to this housing bill is it's got a veto proof majorities, meaning if he vetos it it could get overridden, or if he doesn't do anything, it will just become law in ten days. And maybe that's what he's going to do. But what a just dumb political move for his own party, right, And this tells you it sort of almost reinforces this point that I'm trying to make here is the leading movement inside the Republican Party is not interested in pluralism and is not interested in setting up the Republican Party for success if it is not a Trump success, and this is not what Trump wants. He thinks that's all a failure. He is not a party leader. He is just out for himself politically, we know, financially, I mean, you know, I don't know. I don't know if you need me to tell you that Donald Trump's out for himself. I think he makes it pretty obvious, and sometimes he says it out loud. But if you're a Republican who cares about the Republican Party having a future beyond Donald Trump, just like he did in his twenty twenty temper tantrum that essentially handed control of the United States Senate to the Democrats because of those Georgia runoffs where he does a rally for them, he essentially says, I don't care if they lose. He's not doing the same thing right now. I mean, he is trying. He essentially did it. Look, it's one day and Donald Trump's stepping on his own. You know what on a given day politically is It's not news, it's just a Wednesday. But my word, just a total debacle for congressional Republicans. And it's like, you know, I don't if the Democrats only get narrow, you know, narrow majorities here, that's it's they may end up having the same governing challenges and problems that the Republicans had. But my word, does Trump make it almost possible for the congressional Republican majorities to do anything that is at all remotely what the public wants, or is at all politically in tune with where the public is. It just isn't there. So it is. If you're if you're the Democrats today, you're kind of released in Washington, you're kind of relieved that, you know, Trump essentially said no, no, no, no, look at me, look at me. I'm gonna I'm going to prove, you know, instead of letting the Democrats look like they're dysfunctional and can't and is the gang that can't get along, can't shoot straight and all this stuff, Donald Trump wants to basically say, hold my non alcoholic beer, let me show you how it's really done. And that's what he pulled off. I have to tell you, I you know, John Cornyn said it last week. It's going to be a miserable couple of years for Donald Trump. And he only has him self deployed. He has created all that. He went in there to air his grievances at people that weren't loyal to him, because again, he does not see the party as a collection of people who may agree sixty to seventy percent of the time but don't agree on some stuff. But you know, for decades they accepted the premise. Donald Trump doesn't accept the premise. Donald Trump does not believe in the American experiment. Donald Trump does not believe in pluralism. And of course my fear is, I don't know if the progressive left believes in any of that either. This episode of the Chuck Todcast is brought to you by Quints. So summer always changes, certainly how I get dressed. I want pieces that feel lighter, are more breathable, things that are easy but still put together so I don't look like a schlub with you guys, right. So that's why I keep coming back to Quint's. I mean, they really are part of my wardrobe these days. They focus on high quality essentials that feel and look amazing. 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So I'm not getting ties anymore, thankfully because I'm going tieless on here, but I'm getting some nice quinch shirts, even some T shirts. I've even thrown it into the workout gear. I can't recommend it enough. So elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quints dot com slash chuck for free shipping for your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns now available in Canada too. That's q u i nce dot com slash chuck for free shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns quints dot com slash chuck use that code. One more story before we get to my interview with Matt Bennett, and wherever you fall in this fight inside the Democratic Party, all right, left center, mainstream liberal, wherever you fit, I do think you're going to be intrigued by the conversation. I want to highlight one other important story that happened this week, and it's about what's happening inside the Pentagon and what's happening to our military and what Pete Haigseth is attempting to do to the military and the overt politicization of the military. I think it's one of the harder stories that we in the press have to convey. Without giving away any of my sources, I can tell you there's quite a few soldiers that would be loving to speak out, but it is just, you know, these are people who are trained in not going outside the chain of command by following protocol, and that many of these soldiers don't want to behave like Donald Trump, Repete hag Seth and do something and sort of gain them an excuse to essentially shame them for trying to speak out, and so they've had a hard time and they've you know, I've I've talked to quite a few members of the military who have given me a lot of troubling and foe off the record, but it's been hard to verify. And it's also been it's you know, it's tough to ask them to go public, and that's a you know, that's a that's a that's what hag Seth is taking advantage of here. He's taking advantage of the fact that these soldiers are loyal to the military, and he's almost using it against them. But I like to I'm obsessed with these folks he's purging because I'm convinced that one of these generals that he is forced into retirement or fired, however you want to characterize it, might be our next president of the United States. I think we are in a moment like that, right. I think we are in a moment where there's going to be a desire. But I think the most effective anti you know, the most effective person to sell pluralism and the American democracy could very well be a retired three or four star. So let me tell you this latest story, because the person that he forced out here is quite the backstory. There's a photograph from just before midnight August thirtieth, twenty twenty one, the night that Americans were withdrawing from Afghanistan. Not a great night. And this photograph is a bit grainy, it's green, it's shot through a night vision lens, and it's a soldier in full uniform walking up the ramp of the last Sea seventeen on the tarmac at Cobble Airport. He is literally the last American boot to leave Afghanistan twenty years of war. And he was the man who essentially turned out the lights eleven to fifty nine pm, one minute before the deadline that Donald Trump agreed to that Joe Biden executed. The soldier is Chris Darnihue c D. To the people who served under him, And if you wanted it, if you wanted to design in a lab, the kind of officer Pete Hegseth says he wants. Donahue is the prototype west Point, Pennsylvania kid career Army Ranger Delta Force. He led Delta Commandos commandos against Isis, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, two decades of some of the hardest counter terrorism fighting that the military asked our soldiers to do. He commanded the eighty second Airborne and most recently, he was in charge of US Army forces in Europe and Africa. At the exact moment that that job mattered, turning the lessons of Ukraine into how the Army plans to fight the next war. He was seen as a rising star. People inside the building had penciled him as a future Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, certainly a future Army Chief of Staff. Well, Donahue was back in the news because he submitted his retirement papers basically at gunpoint at the Pentagon's request. Yeah, I'm being dramatic here. Nobody actually put a gun to his head, but he was forced into retirement. He's going to relinquish a four star command ceremony in Germany, his tour cut short in the middle of his assignment, and his old job is being downgraded four stars, knocked down to three. The warrior, the warrior ethos guy should have wanted to keep. He decides to push out. And here's the thing, Donahue's not the story. Dona Hugh is the latest story. So I'm going to be fair here for a minute before I get extra critical of Hegseth, who I think is just right. The single biggest black eye on Tom Tillis's Senate record is going to be this into his credit. I think he knows it. Every Defense Secretary reshuffles brass. Okay, that's not new, that's part of the job. A new administration is entitled to having their own commanders. Presidents fire generals. Truman fired MacArthur, Obama fired Stanley McCrystal. Firing an officer for causes not a scandal. It's a Tuesday, and the General Officer Corps is a bit bloated. You can make an honest case for thinning it, which hagg Seth has been making less generals more gis. It's not insane, and if this were a normal trimming, I wouldn't be doing this segment. But this isn't. And this is how you can tell and the way to understand this. This purge that hagg Seth is conducting of the Pentagon isn't chronologically. It's by category. Because these officers weren't removed for one reason. They were removed for a multiple reasons. And it's the third reason is the one that it should worry you the most. So reason one that some of these officers were removed was for simply for who they are. Right. The first big night was February twenty first, twenty twenty five. Folks at the Pentagon call it the Friday Night massacre. In a single evening, the Chairman of the Joint then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs C. Q. Brown, first African American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, fired, pushed out, replaced by a retired three star named Dan Kine, who had to be rushed back to four stars to take the job. Same night he had Admiral Lisa Franchetti, Chief of Naval Operations, first woman ever to run the Navy, pushed out, gone, same night General Jim Slife, the Air Force Vice chief gone. Then Admiral Linda Fagan coming down to the Coast Guard, first woman to lead any branch of the US military, relieved right after the inauguration. The reason all given was leadership deficiencies. Well, obviously there's kind of a pattern here, and who keeps getting picked off? The Senate noticed there's a pattern. Jack Reid, who is not a partisan guy. Jack reads a Democrat. Don't get me wrong, but he's not a partisan ahole. Okay. He pointed out that nearly sixty percent of the senior officers haig Seth has fired are either women or black in a corps where women and minorities are about twenty percent of all the generals and admirals, that it's clear none of those people were fired for costs. They were fired simply because of who they were. Reason two, he's been firing people for either what they knew or what they'd take. General Timothy haw he ran the National Security Agency and Cyber Command. Lieutenant General Jeffrey Cruz the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He also was pushed out after his agency's early assessment of the Iran nuclear strikes leaked out and became politically inconvenient. He's the one that said and hadn't been totally destroyed. Vice Admirals Shoshanna Chatfield, the US rep to NATO's Military Committee, removed for quote loss of confidence. Again both of them serving and perhaps just not sharing a set of beliefs that haig Seth has. And then, of course there's the third reason for how he purses people out, and it's and this is the one that should really alarm you. It's for when officers push back on an order. On the same February night that c Q. Brown and Franchetti, haig Seth also fired the top uniformed lawyers of the Army and the Air Force, the people that give the council to the generals about whether orders are illegal or not. The judge advocates general right the jag Corps. Their entire job is to interpret whether an order is legal. Now, haig Seth did an allege misconduct. He just said on the record that he didn't want lawyers to become roadblock that pesky constitution. We don't want that to get in the way. A roadblock. Think about that. A roadblock is a thing in the way of where you were already going. And then there's the cleanest case of all, and it's the one I'd build the whole segment around if I had to pick one. Dadmirll Alvin Holsey, and I've I've talked about him before. He was the head of the US Southern Command, Southcombe and that's the command that's been running the boat strikes in the Caribbean. Well Holsey raised concerns about whether these strikes were legal. He went to his JAG officer to ask there were some questions strikes that many war of law experts say may amount to war crimes. Well, haig Seth, according to reporting, thought he wasn't being aggressive enough. The relationship came apart in a Pentagon meeting late last year. Two months later, Holsey retired two plus years early combatant commanders normally serve three years. He got one. Holsey didn't fail. Holsey objected, and that was his firing offense. He questioned an order that his own lawyer JAG officer wasn't sure could pass legal muster. And that's the biggest category that scare you here, not the culture war firings, the conscious firings. A military where the price of saying I'm not sure that's legal is your career. Is a military that will eventually stop worrying about whether something is legal and will simply follow orders whatever order is given. And then, of course you've had a wartime wave of officers relieved of duty this past spring. Country's at warworth Iran. And what does haig Seth do? He fires the Army stop officer General Randy George. George apparently had balked at an order to strike four officers, two black men, and two women off of a promotion list. Same day, he took out General David Hodney, running the Army's Modernization Command, and the Army's Chief of Chaplain's Major General William Green. Hexas has some weird religious beliefs, and he's trying to force those beliefs on an entire military. George's deputy General James Mingus had already taken a sudden retirement. It sounds like I'm describing the Kremlin, doesn't it. One official's reaction to firing a four star during a shooting war was one word insane and to keep the tally running. While I say all this because the number is the argument by the guardians count to roughly two dozen generals and senior commanders that have been fired or forced out since January of twenty twenty five. A retired four star, the kind of person who'd normally never say a word, put it like this, This isn't a war on woke, It's a war on warriors. So I've been digging in to see have we ever had a comparable moment like this? As the Secretary of Defense ever rearranged the top of the US military dramatically, Well, hag saith, they answered in himself. Under Oath, right in April, in front of the House Armed Services Committee, he got pressed on exactly this question, and he had a comeback ready. He said, under Barack Obama, one hundred ninety seven general officers were removed. So this is nothing new. One hundred ninety seven specific number. It sounds authoritative, right, It's fake. It's been traced. The number comes from a twenty eighteen newspaper editorial which got it from a Facebook page. There's no real list. He made the case for precedent by inventing a precedent. By the way, the Pentagon would have had the facts if he chose to actually use Pentagon resources. Instead, he did some Google search looking for some bullshit crap ass editorial who didn't do any fact checking, which tells you something, because if there were a real example the Secretary of Defense under Oath, with that huge research staff Pentagon, they would have used it. They didn't have it. So in my own research here, the closest thing history offers is nineteen forty nine, The Revolt of the Admirals, Truman's Defense secretary cancels the Navy new supercarrier to fund the Air Force's bombers. The admirals go to war publicly in front of Congress, and the chief of Naval Operations, an Admiral Lewis Denfield, got up and testified against his own civilian bosses. For that, Denfield was removed as the chief Naval officer. The re applisal was plain and simple. Congress said so in writing, called it a challenge to representative government. And that's the great precedent. That's the one the history books we'd reach for and look at how small it is next to what Haig Seth has done. What Haig Seth has done spans every single service it is. It has no single issue, its identity, in some cases intelligence, in some cases lawyers who might stand in his way of illegal orders, and commanders who might have raised their hand because they actually care about the Constitution. Two dozen. It's been done quietly on Friday nights by social media post no explanation offered, no hearing held. That's why they got rid of a of a press corps at the Pentagon, right. They don't want any reporters nosing around on this. They don't want staff at the Pentagon talking to the press. So instead, right, they've they've got their sort of propaganda propagandas that they've that they call their press corps. This is this is. This should be as big of a scandal as any that has happened in this administration. This should be extraordinarily alarming. And I'm really interested in meeting C. D. Donahue. I think one of these twenty four people, I don't know who. I don't know which one it is, one, two, three, But I think I know all I know when you have spent multiple decades and you've worked your way up for these promotions, you love this country, and you love public service, and you certainly believe in the Constitution. If I were looking for the next leaders of America, I'd be looking at the folks that whoever Pete Hegseth has decided shouldn't be in his Pentagon is who I'd be interested in seeing elected the public office in my country. All right. I just I really get frustrated with what we're seeing at the Pentagon because I think this is a this is a five alarm fire, and this is a case where the systematic purging of the press, systematic purging of the officer Corps. Everything that has been done inside the Pentagon could leave us. Imagine two terms of this, and the military could get turned into some sort of political force that should scare the Jesus out of every single American. Our military is the best, it's the least political of any major military in the world. And what Pete Hegseth is doing is right out of the authoritarian playbook, trying to purge the military of anybody that puts the country ahead of politics and replacing those folks with the most partisan or the most pliant people that he can find. This dish between what's happening at the Pentagon and what's happening at the Justice Department are the two biggest things that have that are that that Trump is damaged that will not get fixed in one term, and the after action report in both places is going to be necessary if we're going to get them both back on track. Ass Chuck Matt from Florida writes, Hey, I really enjoyed your recent episode on the baby fee Boomer generation. My dad, a boomer, watches Fox News every night and often acknowledges Trump's flaws but still see them as less significant than those of the Democrats. How much do you think outlets like Fox News have shaped political attitudes among boomers versus broader generational or cultural factors. Thanks Matt and Florida. Well, look, I think that honestly. You know, I've got family members who, you know, sort of over index on MS and I've got family members that over index on Fox. And I can tell that they both over index, you know, over indexing on political content is what I would argue in them and and what it is, it's it's you know, this gets it to this, the larger point I was making about how OJ created the conditions for Donald Trump, and I think, let we will say for Zoon, Mom, Donnie and Donald Trump in that it you know it, it's sort of made the algorithm. You know, the algorithms of today were sort of created by cable news in the nineties in the serialization of the news business. Way do you come back tomorrow? We're going to see what happens tomorrow on the Lewinsky scandal, What happened tomorrow on the Florida vote, Watch what happens tomorrow on the war in Iraq? Right when as we took this sort of taking what was the daytime soap opera mindset and layering it over the information consumption world. I guess you know, it's like, first it was just what keeps you interested, you know, and then you know, what the Internet was able to do was refine it even further than cable news did. Right. It took what cable news was doing and refined it further. So then you got sort of political agreement, but you also got other cultural agreement. You had these different sort of silos, right, some of the silos overlap. But we see this and so look, I think both MS and Fox and CNN, frankly, I think it is certainly they both have this habit of but let me tell you how bad the other side is. You know, there's always an acknowledgement that the that that the side that they may have more sympathy for is flawed. Right, Fox is regularly you know, Brett Behar will be real defensive about this, and he's not wrong. Brett Behar will you know, you know, do the to be sure paragraph. But then it'll also you know, spend five minutes on the Save America Act claiming it's just a voter ID bill when it's not a voter ide bill. Right, it's something much more dramatic, drastic than that. It's essentially make make it nearly impossible for married women to vote bill, you know, with with sort of it's not a voter ID, it's a it goes to another level that that frankly is intentionally disruptive to the voting system. And and it's sort of the point being is that it's it's not it's not a nobody's the rights not selling this honestly, and and you know Fox isn't going to portray that honestly. But then they'll acknowledge, yes, there is some support, for instance, for regular actual voter ID. Right, if this were, for instance, voter idea, it would it would pass. But it's not a voter ide though, you know, even though it's being portrayed as that, it is not that. And so but that's how you know this is. And then you'll have an MS. They'll you know, acknowledge the flaws you know, maybe of a Biden or something like this, but then say, but look at how awful and outrageousness is on the other side, which is why you get the conversation that you get with your father, And it's a conversation I get with whether it's I'm talking with my MS relatives or my Fox relatives, which they will, and some of this I always feel like, and you, I would ask you to ask yourself this question. Maybe your father understands where your politics is and certainly doesn't want who alienate you, and so is a bit more common, and you're being a bit more ac comminating of him, and vice versa. I think you know, some of my loved ones, you know no where, know where I come down on this because they see it all the time. And I certainly don't want to be alienated from any wing of my family. I love my left wing relatives and my right wing relatives. And so the good news is we've all figured out how to talk about the things that we have in common about what we don't like about politics, like yeah, this is you know, and and you know what I'll get from a Fox relative watching relative will say, look, I'm no fan of Trump's behavior. I think that guy's got terrible character, but my god, look at what they're doing over here. And then I'll hear, you know, on the mside, I know the Democrats aren't very good at this, but my god, you've got to stand up to this crazy man in the oval office. And so I just think it's the way it's the way the incentive structure works in media that has created this formula for broadcasting because it's all about just keeping your core viewer coming back. Right, If this were a political campaign, it's like all they're doing is tending to the base voter. And if they can get the base voter to come back, then there's always money in the banana stan, right, there's enough money to be made. And I do fear that what cable news figured out, what OJ taught cable news in the nineties got sort of perfected by the Internet algorithms of the early oughts and then social media, and then this is how we've got this broken information ecosystem where where even though there really is individually and we see it all the time, we have a lot of agreement that, yeah, characters should be you know, emphasized again in politics, and you know, we have these agreements, but we don't really have a shared information eco where we can acknowledge you know, I mean, trust me. I'd like to and you know some of you may disagree with this. I'd like to think I did my best to try to like point out the flaws left and right, and I got simultaneously accused of both ciderisms and for being either a closet liberal or a closet conservative and because that. But now that was an intentional attack, because what what the wings don't with these professional sort of activist media people. They don't want to screw up their audience, right, and so anybody that is telling them, hey, those businesses are misleading you the voter, well, you know, people like me and anybody else that's sort of in this sort of rational I don't like even calling it the middle. It's just sort of the rational. But where most of us live, we're a threat to that business model a little bit. And certainly, you know it is it is not you know, this style of political content is not something the algorithms have been programmed to celebrate. And I think that that's sort of a bit chicken and egg here that I did there. And I know I went off a bit on a tangent there, but I think some of this is, you know, we want to simply say, oh, this is Murdoch, or this is MS, or you know, this is the comcat. This is a business model that was learned from oj that was not done through a political lens. It is ended up doing serious damage to our politics, but it didn't begin intentionally as a way to polarize us politically. But it has all right, Ben right spend from Colorado's fourth district. Thank you for giving me your fourth district tells me generally where you are, which I believe means Greeley, Colorado. If I'm not mistaken. Appreciate all the work you put into the podcast. I'm curious, do you think there's a future where large pack spending could burn itself out due to voter backlash? Could outside spending from big groups actually becoming negative for candidates, reducing the incentive to invest. So heavily appreciate the show. Thanks Ben Boy. I was very curious if that would happen on Tuesday, And in fact, I have a friend in New York who told me that the more the AI folks were doing attack ads on Boris, the ores the candidate that came in second in the in the Upper west Side Upper east Side Congressional District, the west Side, I guess we call it now just the west Side, the Upper Upper Manhattan Congressional District. That's both Upper West and Upper East, the old Jerry Nadler district. She told me that's what drove her into voting for the guy that was being attacked, which I thought was was interesting. I do think there's a point where you're too associated, and this is where you know, we're not there yet. As I've said multiple times, it's hard to find a campaign where the issue of money was what was used to defeat somebody. But there's now a growing mountain of evidence this cycle that candidates with the most financial backing aren't automatic. Right. It's making some voters ask more questions. Whether it's Tom Steyer trying to buy a place and he couldn't buy a place in that fractured gubernatorial feel no matter how much money he threw at it. And it almost was like the more money he threw at it, there was a point where it became actually a non you know, that became more of a non starter for people. I think locally in DC, we had a congressional race with the founder of Total Beverage, David Tron and he just threw an enormous amount of money at trying to win his old Congression seatback and he gets rejected. So I think that there is a growing, at least in primaries, a voter skepticism. I think it's more likely to show up in a primary than it is a general. Right general, you have more casual voters who are not paying attention to who's funding one primary voters, you have a better shot at having an elector that's paying a slightly bit more attention and might be a little bit more. But I don't think we're quite there. But like I said, there's there's some green shoots of evidence that say that, you know, as we become more skeptical of the wealthy in this country collectively as a political electorate, well that will translate itself into anybody that's financially associating with them in politics. So I think this is the cycle where we're seeing put it this way, APAC is learning to diversify its investments and not put it all in one superpack. And I think that the smarter entities that are trying to certainly use their ability to influence on pieces of legislation are going to be more are going to be smarter to diversify their investments in political persuasion rather than pilot into one big super pac. It is you know, the super pacification of campaigns has really sort of warped. You know, if you wonder why, you know what, why take the conversation I had with David Holt about how he said that the gubernatorial race. He said, the actual issues that face the next Oklahoma governor were not discussed once in the Republican primary for governor. Instead, they were arguing over things that are not really part of the job, whether it's trands that Oklahoma governor is not really going to have anything about. And so, you know, I do think you see these super PACs can hijack the conversation in a campaign, which then can steer it in directions that that are pretty anti voter. But I don't think we're fully at the backlash there. But I think you're starting to see in certain places, and it's where you have the most you know, sort of attentive electorate if you will. Hey, Eric from Austin, Right, I hope you're having a good week. Could you talk a bit about Keir Starmer and Labour's recent struggles. Are they more of a result of his decisions or broader global conditions and are there any lessons here for the Democratic Party. Thanks for your work. Well, that's interesting. I mean, look, I view what's been happening in the UK is less about one party or the other, although right like you know, I then what you have is a frustration with the the larger political establishment. Well, in the UK, the political establishment were both the Tories and Labor right, both Tony Blair and David Cameron, you know, to be to just pick two former prime ministers as avatars here, right one a Tory one or Gordon Brown, you know, another Labor prime minister. But the fact is that Tony Blair wing of the Labor Party, which also produced Gordon Brown and arguably kir Starmer is more probably is more and more more in line with the Tony Blair than say Jeremy Corbyn, who could not win by the way right when he was the standard bear for labor. Is Jeremy Corbyn the Bernie Sanders of the UK labor movement. You can there's certainly some parallels there. And then you see what's happening with the Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, which is essentially on the verge of replacing the Tories as the Conservative party, uh or the right wing party of the UK. So I look I've been obsessed with this because I I, you know, it feels like the UK has been slightly ahead of where but you know, is Starmar Biden and unlike and unlike Biden because there actually was a special election for the person and for Burnham who actually ended up replacing him, you know, but he actually had to win a seat in Parliament first, So there was summat some vetting that happened. It was almost like they had a bit of a you know, a primary and one one district. But you know, and so you know, I think that's a that's an open question. But I do think what is similar. I think there are more things that we have in common with what's been happening in the UK. They just have a political system that can express it the outr age easier. Right, We've had two impeachments, they've had seven prime ministers. Right, They've had these these essentially no confidence votes within their party. You could argue we've kind of have the same thing. We just didn't have the system to allow for the easy replacement of the party leaders, right, be it Trump, be it Pelosi, be it McCarthy, be it you know, but look, I mean we had we've had multiple speakers, it took all the you know, so in our system we've had the same level of disruption that their system just simply allows for more. Now, you could argue that our system is designed in such a way that it actually prevents total disruption from like paralyzing the government versus the UK has these paralysis moments from their disruption. But there's no doubt this is the same large forces are sort of creating this. You know, they had massive migration, We had massive migration. This is fear of globalization. They've had fear of globalization. So in that sense, the larger sort of you know, identity crisis that both political parties in this country have had. So of the two major parties of the UK who are no longer argued might not be the two major parties a year from now after their next election. So I think there's a ton to learn here. You know, David Cameron, I was recently with him and we had this discussion and he thinks that the number one thing Democrats, and you know, he sort of politically is probably closer to being Bill Clinton, a Bill Clinton Democrat, than he essay a Mett Romney Republican. That's kind of the politics of the UK. You know, I think Cameron was definitely Cameron and Obama were really tight, and I think their politics are actually pretty similar, even though one was from the Conservative Party of their country and one was from the Liberal Party of the other country. But Cameron, you know, the one thing he will say is, you know, tighten up your borders. Just tighten up your borders. This is universal. Do that first, and then everything else is persuadable after that. But that, the migration, the fear of the other ing and all of that is really that's what he would say, has been the sort of the tipping point of this. And so he's been a big advot of getting Democrats to be a bit more conscious of the border, a bit tougher on the border. And you've seen there are more Democrats opening open to having a you know, they're saying, no, no, no, no, we got to have a we got to have a functioning border here, and we've got to manage immigration better. It doesn't mean you don't have to be an anti immigrant party, but you've got to be a sort of you got to be a law and order party, reasonable law and order mindset on that. So but look and then there's then there's the charisma part. Right. You know Corbin was kind of mealy mouth. Starmer wasn't great at this. You know, would Labor have been in better? I mean they won this huge victory, right, it's very similar to Starmer feels like Biden. Right, Biden has this huge victory, most votes that any Democratic president ever got. You know, it starts out and even swings the Senate, which nobody expected and so he had a huge opportunity in it. But it was a reminder that you know, Biden won because of who he was, it not because of who he was, And Labor Party won because of who they weren't, not because of who they were, And Labor's discovering that the hard way right now. And it's it's likely. I think if you see a UK election that has Reform and Green as the top two vote getters over the Tories and Labor, I would read that as a tea leaf that says take a third party or independent candidacy in this country more seriously than folks want to take it, because I do think in that sense, the frustration is similar the and we don't have another part, right. I think that's why some on the left are gravitating towards this DSA. Well, they're fighting, they're doing something, and that's why I think the establishment wings of both parties, I think they need to get pressure from the outside before they sort of get religion on this. But we'll say, I'm thinking, look, David Hole is the official mayor of the Czech podcast. You know he went to GW Big Revolutionaries guy, so you know we're going to I will give him that title. But the next is probably the official mayor of Aschuk. It's our friend John IPII Ali. Here Harvey Seedars, the mayor of Harvey Seedars, New Jersey. He has his third question that he has asked me. So he's not he's getting closer to the five timers club. And and here's this question. I enjoyed your take on presidential blunders, but I'm more curious about the opposite. What would you consider the top five presidential actions? It simply worked moments where leadership decisions paid off in a big way. And so you know it's a this is not I spent a little bit of research time on this. So the first things that came to mind, you know, I was thinking of decisions that weren't easy for their own political party. Bill Clinton and NAFTA. Now we can debate whether that was a success or not. Right, I think NAFTA financially was an enormous success. What it did for Mexico's economy was incredible, and it really did financially benefit a lot of Americans. But it really blew up our politics and arguably is still blown up our politics. So I don't know if I but you know, there is a case for NAFTA in Bill Clinton. I'll give you another one, George HW. Bush's decision to back the nineteen ninety budget agreement that essentially was the beginning of the sort of the Bush Clinton era of getting our fiscal house in order. We got to a balanced budget by the late nineties thanks to a decision by a Republican president to accept raising taxes with the Democratic Congress. Then a Democratic president with a Republican Congress did a bit more tightening, a little bit on spending and a little bit more in taxes, and lo and behold, we had a budget surplus going into the turn of the century. So, you know, I think that whether it was Bill Clinton's decision to back another tax hike in nineteen ninety three, George HW. Bushes. So both of those turned out to be really good for the American economy and really supercharged the economy arguably going in and certainly put us on a path. Now, those were positive decisions that some of the decisions on China less. So I'll give you another one in the Reagan era, Reagan's decision to sign the amnesty for the undocumented immigrants that were in this country in eighty six. That also was not the easiest bill for a Republican to sign, and it worked. It was Now there will be some on the right that say it is why the next wave of immigrants still kept coming because they knew that we had a history of amnesty in this country. Yes, we're a nation of immigrants. Every immigrant knows that eventually there is room for them here. That just may take a generation. But that at the time was a brave decision and it certainly helped solve an immigration problem that sort of was created in the sixties, and we can I'm not going to go deep into that, but that was trying to right or wrong there. I think Harry Truman recognizing Israel wasn't an easy call that he was getting a lot of pushback to saying if you do this, it could it could be a permanent split with the Arab world have a huge impact. We were at the time really relying on Middle East oil in the late forties, and it wasn't an easy political decision. It turned out that those fears we were wrong now on that in the air world was going to learn to live with a Jewish state in their neighborhood, and that turned out the Keiban missile crisis. It was a huge test for Kennedy. It was a huge gamble and it paid off. You know, you could argue that we were able to you know, basically from there we create the Red Phone and we start some arms negotiations that essentially, over time allows us to win the spending fight of the Cold War and sort of sucker the Soviets into bankrupting themselves. But I think Kennedy's decision to sort of call the bluff of the Soviets there in Cuba and doing the quarantine or the blockade, however you want to describe it was a big one too. So it is right Nixon to China. Was that good or bad. It was a good strategy at the time, it made a lot of sense. It was risky, probably has been a net benefit for the globe, even if it hasn't been a net you know, and even arguably for the financial power of the United States. But that was so that's how I defined it, So Mayor I'm curious whether you see those So that that's how I was trying to find it what I would call political close calls that aged really well. But I love the question and I want to keep I want to keep diving in on that. I think there's more more to do there, and who knows, we may It's possible the Iran nuclear deal will suddenly age really well for Barack Obama and we may someday put that on the list. All right. Bill s in Newburg, Oregon a frequent emailer. I wonder Bill, if you've made it to five yet. I've heard you to refer to some voters as being trumpy. What characteristics to find a Trumpet voter? In your view, it's not what I mean. Trumpy is basically being supportive of not just Donald Trump because he's the Republican nominee, but supportive of the cause, supportive of the you know, sort of the isolationists policy, supportive of a little bit of it, is supporting the culture of maga sort of almost it's my shorthand for being this person isn't just a Trump supporter. They're culturally mega you know. This is where they're comfortable type of thing, you know. And I think of Trumpy, right, I think of Eric Schmidt, the senator from Missouri, or I think of Jim Banks of Indiana, Bernie Marino, Right, I think that they Rick Scott. I don't think they got into politics being but they have become comfortably. I think they're more comfortable there. Mike Lee, right, based I guess you would say based Mike Lee, not twenty sixteen Mike Lee, which I guess he himself by creating an account that says based Mike Lee sort of admits that he's was politically bipolar there for a time. I guess so. But that's what I mean, right, that it's that uh that you know, sort of a true believer versus where i'd put your John Thunees, your David McCormick's, which are Look, he's the president, he's the leader. That they're not comfortable in that wing of the party, but they're not going to fight it right. I wouldn't refer McCormick as trumpy, but I would refer to like an richmid ass. I hope that helps uh in telling you sort of how I distinc how the shorthand I've created here, but that that's that's the that's how I'm defining that short. Ye. My last question for the Hey Scott from p A ten again. All right again, man, I got two of you. Keep them coming. Tell me your congressional district. Right, this is how how we how we all want to learn where everybody's coming from. I love this Pennsylvania ten. I love York County. Had a good friend from college from York, and it always blew me away that they said it was closer to flat out of Baltimore than it was to flat to Philadelphia. I'm curious how often you choose Baltimore versus Philadelphia. I guess if you're on the Harrisburg side of things, that may that may be the case. But anyway, Scott, let me get your question. You said, after a recent discussion on Democratic party divisions, I'm wondering, do you think there's a simple messaging strategy establishment Democrats could use to align more closely with the left without fully embracing the label. Is framing it around shared policy goals an effective way to walk that line. Thanks as always, Scott. I don't know anymore. I think that has been what has worked. I do think the credibility of the establishment is in tatters because of Joe Biden and the return of Donald Trump. I go back to the conversation you just heard me have with Matt Bennett, where I've got a bit animated about. You know, I think why Joe Biden's presidency to me will always be a failed presidency is he had one job. His job wasn't just to defeat Donald Trump. It was to lead the country away from Donald Trump his presidency. A better leader would have made the lot the idea of returning to Donald Trump and anapatha and an amatha sorry. And that for me is you know that. I that that's the prison with which I judge. I think his his the campaign promise he was essentially making to the skeptical voter that may have decided to vote for Biden because they saw Trump is you know, a health threat because of COVID or whatever. I think the deal the voter thought they were getting is this guy is a transitional guy. He's just going to manage us out of this Trump math so we can get to the next generation of politicians to lead this country. And he failed that. Okay, so so you're the and the establishment let him fail, right, They didn't fight him hard enough. They sort of let it be because again it was always turned into well if you you know, you're you're only helping Trump if you somehow push back at what Biden was up to. And of course Biden made this what I think was a bad attempt at co opting the left, allowing the left to sort of give them a little power, and it really shifted him to the left. So I guess what I would say is, I think that strategy was the twenty twenty strategy and the twenty twenty four strategy, and I think it's I don't think the left's going to accept the strategy. If if I were advising a more you know, the Corey Bookers of the world, I think I think I would take on you know, I would sort of borrow what Chris Murphy's been saying without becoming a progressive like Chris Murphy has been speaking. Hey, the Democratic Party failed at the job. It said it was going to do, which was to turn the page on the Trump rad I think until the establishment accepts that they failed here, I think it's been a mistake that it's the left that's leading the charge to get rid of Schumer, that it hasn't come from the center left, when ultimately you know they should be acknowledging the failure and want new leadership. And yet it's the left that is the one that has more credibility on this. So I feel like that's the issue, is that the establishment had its chance to co opt the left with that kind of messaging. It worked in twenty it didn't work in twenty four. And I certainly don't think the left is going to allow capitulate to the quote electable ability wing of the party again, because they view it as it's sort of not dissimilar to what turned into the Maga movement. How they were like, we're not compromising again like we did with Mitt Romney. We're not looking for the most electable conservative, We're just looking for the craziest so bit. And I think the left is going we're not looking for the most electable democrat, We're looking for the most activist movement lefty progressive, and so I don't know if just if this is a messaging thing. I know, if I were Corey Booker, I wouldn't I wouldn't be just trying to can't we all just get a long message? You know, I'd be fighting a bit harder here or the main the quote unquote mainstream, and I'd fight harder for it, and I'd be angrier about it. I'd become the angry moderate, if you know, I'm mad as hell and I am I going to take it anymore. Get these I'm tired of these MF snakes on this MF plane. And you don't see that coming from that wing of the party. You see the emotion and anger coming from the base. And I think sometimes the temperament, the moderate in temperament, which is something that a person like me is looking for. But I'm not here to move people right that in some ways that's the wrong You know, you need to make a better case for why this is the right way and a proactive case for what democratic pluralism is without how and to use the political sciences science y term like that, why this is? You know, essentially the Democratic Party is a coalition, right, it is not a litmus test party. And yet the irony is that the rise of the left is turning it into a litmus test party. And somehow Donald Trump became the non litmus test even though there's a huge litmus test on the on the Republican side too. Just ask John Corn or Bill Cassick. I'm waiting. I'm waiting for the for the angry, the angry pragmatist to show up on the center left. You kind of see it showing up on the center right, but it's in the form of Tom Tillis, right, or a John Kasik. Who have who have you know who have bowed out or who sort of lost the battle? I think some. But he needs to get caught fighting before a battle's been lost. All right, I'm really excited for AJ Debonsa. This is going to be interesting. I am hopeful on the tray Young signing. I am willing to let's see, you know, if a more mature Tray Young surrounded by more talent than he's ever been surrounded by in Atlanta, if it's a healthy Anthony Davis, AJ Debonsa, you got an interesting young team there. The best thing I heard, you know, the sicko and me after our Election night live stream. You know what I did, I went back to watch this is the best ESPN sort of. I watched a replay of the draft, at least the first thirty minutes, because I wanted to get my fill of Wizards conversations. Here. It's rare that the Wizards ever get national attention. Then to pick the We're going to get some And one of the experts on the ESPN panel said something that I think was quite fair, which is, the Wizards have all this talent, do they know how to win? And that's the hardest thing for a team that's been a loser team for a long time, right when you're in, when you're it's and I remember feeling that with the Wizards in twenty eighteen when they forced a game seven on Boston and then they just got blown out. It was like, do they know how to win? And it's funny how a culture there's never been a winning culture in two generations of basketball here in DC. Who's going to be that culture changer? You know, for a brief period at Gilbert Arenas was that guy for a brief period. We thought John Wall was that guy for a brief period there was hope that Michael Jordan's owner could be that guy really hasn't been there since west Unsel and most of you are going, who's west Unseld And that's part of the problem. But there hasn't been this much. I mean, this is the amount of hoping that DC sports fans are smoking right now. Right there's hoping them about the Commanders, there's hopingum about the Wizards. There's hoping im always about the Caps, but they've actually been the best performer of the major sports franchises over the last decade. And boy is there is some hopium right now with the Nats. You know. It's Ah, I'm very nervous that the Nats are not are not going to be buyers at the trade to I understand. I hope they just aren't heavy sellers. I'd rather see more youth be brought up, Don't get me wrong, but hey, let's get a little play you know, so what, let's make the make the run. A young team needs to get some playoff experience before it has a chance to actually win. You don't want to, uh, you kind of you know, if you've got a shot, getting a little bit of experience for a bunch of these twenty two and twenty three year olds, it's worth the effort just to get there, so they get a taste and they again learn how to win. To my friends at the Wizards, go make the winning the NBA Cup your priority next year, early on. Get this young team, get them to win something. I think it mattered for the nixt I know it's a silly little the NBA Cup, not you know. I think it's sort of like it gave them confidence, and it gave them something and it made them helped form that team. I hope the Wizards take the NBA Cup stuff. Seriously. I think it's a chance for a young team with a couple of veterans to sort of clamp down and do those Tuesday Friday games and build something here. But man, I have to tell you the hope me I've Three years ago, the sports world in DC was just the dumps, the Wizards, dumps, the Commanders, Dan Snyder's Commanders, the Dumps. The Gnats were continuing to sell off and sell off and sell off, and we were waiting to see if James Wood was going to be worth it all. How things have changed in about eighteen months, which is the beauty of sports. Right. It's also the same thing why we love and hate politics right. A lot can change in a short period of time, but it's fun to smoke the sports opium of the DMV these days. So with that, I hope you enjoy your weekend. Please check out what I got. I've got fascinating interview on newsphere this week, so be sure to check it out on Sunday. Susan delby the head of the D Triple C. We have seen. How hard will the D Triple C fight the left in these primaries or are they going to try to co opt the left? This is a taste of how leadership plans to respond to the rise of the Mamdami lefts In with that, I'll see in seventy two apps
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It is hard to find good gluten free bread. It is fantastic. They give you step by step instructions. I really dig this. There is nothing like having an artesion bakery in your freezer. Right now, Wild Grain is offering my listeners thirty dollars off your first box plus free croissants for life. Come on when you go to wildgrain dot com slash podcast to start your subscription today. That's thirty dollars off your first box and free croissants for life when you visit wildgrain dot com slash podcast, or simply use the promo code podcast at checkout. This is a sponsor I absolutely embrace, so use that code. Hello there, welcome to another episode of the Chuck Podcast. A little programming note, this is of course our Thursday episode, and you know our rhythm here Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, three podcasts a week. Well for summer, for essentially the months of July and August, I'm gonna go down to updating two days a week. Mondays and Thursdays will be my two drops. Look, there's still going to be my weekly conversation with Crystalizza that appears in Chrystaliza's podcast, but we have some big news about that that's coming up soon. So that's still going to be happening weekly throughout the rest of the summer and I'll quickly go back to three days a week at the end of August early September, but a little bit of Frankly, you know, there's only so many people who will you can find who are willing to be booked in the middle of the summer sometimes, so you know, figure it gives you, gives everybody a little bit of time to catch up, maybe do what I like to do, a little bit of which is read I feel like. And sometimes I've been so focused on the content side of things, whether it's Chuck todcast, new sphere, dynastic, that just having one extra day just to essentially ingest is always helpful. In summer is a wonderful time to do that. LUs you know, a little confession. It gives me a little extra time with the fam. But look, it's not like things are going to be that slow this summer. One thing we've all learned in the Trump era, you never know, there's never really a slow news month, news week, or news day. It is all about not scheduling your life around the news, but essentially just scheduling this in a in an easier to digest format. So with that said, I know why you're here. You're here to understand what the hell is going on politically? Where are we going? We've had about forty eight hours to digest what is a what I'm going to call a mild earthquake political earthquake. I say mild political earthquake because it's not clear how big this is going to be Mom Donnie's success. I mean, you know, I've been sitting on this, obviously for twenty four hours, and I think a lot of political commentators, you know, have a bad habit. And I tried to say this last night, let's is this the beginning of a left wing tea party or is what happens in New York going to stay in New York? And look the extra twenty four hours, I have accumulated more evidence that says this stays in New York. And I've accumulated more evidence that indicates there's certainly going to be a pretty a pretty big fight in the Democratic Party essentially for the soul of the party in twenty seven and twenty eight, between at least two factions and possibly three factions. And we'll get to that also a little bit. And I want to talk specifically first about the evidence that indicates this this is every chance of being a very New York City phenomenon and it may not go anywhere else. And why do I say that, Well, there's been some digging in, particularly the the the race with Esplot and Chevrolet Chevalier, who is quickly going to become I think, the the face of the mam Danni congressional movement, if you will. What was interesting is Espaalot seemed to do better in precincts that had more African American and Latino voters, and Chevalier did better in the precincts that had that were less diverse, that had the younger, whier voters. So it is a very frankly similar thing that we saw that we've seen in previous primaries, where the progressive where sort of the stereotype of who's the Democratic Party, The more diverse parts of the electorate are more moderate or more sort of sticking with the establishment wing of the party, and it is younger and whiter progressives that are powering this movement, particularly in New York City. One other thing that's worth noting there's been some analysis that sort of overlaid Mamdani versus Cuomo's performance on last night and essentially the three congressional districts. I mean, Mamdani was very smart about where he spent his political capital and where he didn't. Right, you know, he didn't endorse in every congressional race it was taking place in New York City, but the three he picked were parts of the parts of New York City he did best, So it was It's an important point to note because it's not as if Mom Donnie has expanded his base or that the Democratic Socialists have expanded their influence in New York City. Uh, it's, you know, they've it's it's sort of they've concentrated on where they're already, where they already had the numbers and they already have the ability to win. So in that sense, he's being very shrewd obviously about what he's picking. He's not over extending himself. He's not wish casting there there there, He's he's being very strategic but where he's going. And so look, look, winning begets momentum and you can go from there. But it is important to note there isn't. This is because the question is are there more people that are suddenly open to socialism? And I don't think that's the case at least that's I think a second day reading of this indicates that. But so I think that that's one big sort of piece of information that I've absorbed over the last twenty four hours that at least puts me in the look this is going to be a faction of the party. The question is is it going to spread? Is it going to go beyond here? Now, when you go back to circa twenty ten, twenty eleven, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, sort of when the Tea Party movement was getting more and more traction inside the Republican Party, there were plenty of establishment Republicans who were saying, ah, this is just a small faction of the party. Yes, there are certain places that you're going to see that faction overperform in Idaho and Wyoming and parts of Texas, but this isn't going to spread more than that. Of course, that turned out to be. It turned out to me not true. And you know, the Maga coalition that began with the Tea Party movement, it's still in some ways a minority faction even of the Republican Party, but it is in charge of the Republican Party. And I think that that's the open question here, But still I do want to also make one more point that I kind of made yesterday, but I want to reinforce it, and that is sort of what got traction in twenty twenty five. In Mamdani's victory, it was clear it was his focus on affordability that truly was galvanizing. It did allow him to build a very large coalition, and it is why he won. As much as it continues to be he wants to always be seen that he has focused on these issues. He certainly tries to lead with him. That was not the case with these congressional races. Okay, this was not about affordability. These weren't campaigns that were run on affordability, because affordability doesn't explain how the actions of a small country halfway around the world became one of the defining organizing principles for a political movement here at home, and it doesn't explain why Israel has become, for some on the American left, a litmus test of belonging. And that's where I want to get to here for a few minutes, because that's something I've been personally wrestling with, something bigger than just one set of results. From a primary night. As you know you've been following this. This week, I had a terrific conversation with the mayor of Oklahoma City, David Hold on pluralism. I've been spending a lot of time over the last few months talking about pluralism because frankly, I think I think essentially the Mega movement has no idea what it means and doesn't care about it. And I'm increasingly believing that the progressive left does not accept the premise of pluralism either, which is going to just have me talking more and more about it, right, because isn't about agreement, It's the exact opposite. It's about accepting that people with different histories, religions, identities, and worldviews all belong in the same democracy. This is the fucking American experiment, people, Okay, this is what makes us different. It's this all right, America, and the American democracy hasn't lasted for two hundred and fifty years because we agreed. America's worked because generation after generation accepted the premise that we had to figure out how to live with people that we profoundly disagreed with. It's been the genius of this experiment and It's also why absolutism, whether it's on the left or the right, has made a lot of folks nervous, including myself, because once every issue becomes a morality based litmus test, disagreements stops being something to debate and it becomes something to punish. As you know, I don't spend I've I've never been comfortable publicly saying, you know, here is my religious identity. But because I don't think you know, because it you know, for a long time in this in this world of political analysis, I tried really hard to be as opaque as possible about some of my personal politics, my identities, my the political identity identities of my parents and of my spouse and all this stuff, because all of that can color analysis, and I didn't want it to. I wanted my analysis to speak for itself. I wanted as as few filters as possible. Look, this is not the world we live in, and there's no doubt there is. You know, every there are political hacks, left wing political hacks, and right wing hacks that have consistently wanted to politicize members of the press, politicize those people like myself that are in this space, and so they've they've you know, wanted to force this and you're like, okay, and I'm happy to discuss it. Right. So I'm Jewish and I've you know, not hidden from it. But it's not something I've intended to wear on my sleeve because I you know, as I've I've shared this with others. I was raised a quiet Jew. I was in a mixed family, and one side of my family was Jewish and another side of my family was not. And there are many members of my non Jewish side of the family they didn't know a lot about Judaism or Jews, and my mother might have been among the first Jews they had ever met. So there was always a little bit of eggshell walking, you know. And my I was basically raised to, hey, walk around eggshells on religion a little bit, be careful, don't you know. It's not something to be done in public. I joke all the time. I was raised with that advice that parents gave a lot in the fifties, sixties and seventies that said, hey, you know, the two things you don't talk about in public are politics and religion. That shall we say. That's a very methodist way of thinking. Sometimes on that front. My father was raised a Methodist, which his joke was, it just meant we agreed, we believed in God when you want to talk about anything else type of thing. But I'm saying this because I'm not going to sit here in bretend I experienced Tuesday simply watching through the through the lens of a political analyst. It was hard not to experience it personally. And over the last twenty four hours, I've heard from enough family and friends who are Jewish to know that I'm not alone and feeling just unsettled. And it's not because anti Semitism suddenly appeared on Tuesday. Please, I know it's existed for a long time. But it's that many Jews woke up asking themselves a different question, particularly many Jews in New York City, how much larger is this? And is this much larger than I thought? And that's a different feeling. It's the feeling that many Americans have had at different moments over the last decade, in particular, the moment when you realize an idea you considered to be on the fringe may have more political support than you believe, and you start to like, you know, it's like you move your eyes, you shift your right, start looking around, you start wondering, you look at people differently. I know there's some you know. I know, Gay Americans have had moments like this over the last decade. Latino Americans have had moments like this. African Americans. You know, I'm not going to sit here and pretend the Jews are the only marginalized group. Trust me. In some ways, I feel like we're the only the Jews are the only marginalized group that is not fully embraced, sometimes on the victim side of things. But whether you're right or wrong about the magnitude, the feeling itself does change how you see your country. And that's why I don't think Democrats should dismiss what happened in New York as just another primary that just took place in one city. You know, Republicans spent fifteen years watching a faction become the center of gravity inside their party, and at first each election looked like an isolated event, and eventually it became clear that it wasn't. And I'm not saying that's what's happening to the Democrats just yet. I think there's a few things and Matt Bennett and I get into it sort of. There's a few ways this could be different for the Democrats than it was for the Republicans as they dealt with Trump and Mega. I'm just simply saying it's a question Democrats have to ask themselves. Is this one city's moment or is this the beginning of a broader ideological realignment, because that the future of either political party depends less on persuading people and accepting the premise of pluralism that you're just looking to build a coalition of people that you agree with sixty percent of the time, right, then on deciding who no longer gets to belong in your party. Then we're moving away from pluralism. We're moving away from something that exists everywhere else on this earth, but not here in America. And once pluralism starts to disappear in this country, democracy will be incredibly hard to sustain here. And that's you know, there is a sense that the DSA right, they want to take over the Democratic Party and they're going to decide who gets to belong and if you disagree on the issue of Israel, you don't belong. Right, It's like Donald Trump, you if you cannot look at what he did to Derek Dooley. Right. If you don't accept his reality about twenty twenty versus the actual reality about twenty twenty, you don't belong in that movement. You get purged from that movement. And if you really look carefully with him, right, that's who he reserves his harshest treatment for are the people that will not humor him on the big lie of twenty twenty. And that's what's dangerous here is that you have two factions now who are are not only interested in taking over parties right mega on the Republican side, the DSA essentially wants to infiltrate the Democratic Party and take it over. But they're you know, the two political parties you know, used to be looking for more people to join. And in this case, you've got two factions that are on the march, that are filled with litmus tests and purity tests, and anybody that doesn't fit a certain that doesn't check certain boxes is out. This episode of the Check Podcast is brought to you by Fandel. It's the biggest stage in world soccer. 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In Massachusetts, you can call one eight seven seven eight Hope and Why, or you can simply text hope and Why New York in order to get some help with any gambling concerns. Finally, you can also call one eight seven seven seven seven zero seven eight six seven if you're in Louisiana. This is I think especially problematic for the Democrats, but it's potentially problematic for the Republicans, And you could argue over the last one hundred years both parties have traded places of when you know, one parties had the bigger base in the had fewer swing voters, and the other party has had the small smaller base, And this goes back and forth. Right Republicans didn't have a big enough base to sustain majorities in Congress, so they were the party that tried to attack towards the center over the last twenty five is basically since since the debacle of seventy two, the McGovern revolution inside the party, where they went through this essentially a near twenty year drought of political power. Yes, they had some legislative power, but that was it starting. So then you had the Democrats start to attack to the center. And I do think at the moment what many I think in the progressive left don't appreciate is that the success the Democrats have had is because they've they've been able to appeal to those voters sort of in the mushy middle that don't like the Trump led Republican Party, and now the DSSA is potentially going to essentially create a similar discomfort for that same set of voters about the Democratic Party, and then there's a sense of this either party even wants the support of these mushy voters in the middle now they need it in order to attain power. But how much do they want this support? How much does that compromise worth? So, look, I think that's the question you got to sit with here. Do we now have two political parties who are moving away from pluralism, moving away from the core premise of what the American experiment was supposed to be? And I know I sound like you know, old guy political sciencey, you know, historian type, trying to you. It's like, you know, it's it's it's frustrating to watch something you know that isn't going to work. And then when it's when it ends, it's going to end, it's going to be as spectacular And I don't say that as a positive word disaster. And the question is what pieces are going to be left to pick up? How many people have to get hurt in the process before you know, basically the two parties sober up. And I'm I'm not sure of that, But I want to touch on a couple other things on this one is I think the real test of whether the progressive left does have you know, is on the march, does have the momentum here is going to the next big test is Michigan. And I'll do alsa yet right if he wins that primary and not just wins the primary, but wins the general election. I think you know those that are I sort of did it myself right a little bit last night. But I think when you look at what the Democratic presidential primary, you know where the sort of energy of the presidential primary would be. The left is going to feel very emboldened and you will see a lot of presidential candidates tack further to the left. If Platner and abdel Sayet are part, are both win and it leads to a Democratic majority, Because if that happens, it erases the best talking point the establishment has over the progressives, which is, hey, you can't win in swing states and you're gonna have a hard time knocking off incumbents. Now, the progressive movement also has a lot on the line with Graham Platner and Abduel Sayet. If Democrats come up short and don't win the Senate like the Tea Party did to the Republicans in twenty ten, and in twenty twelve two times where they had the numbers were on the Republican side to be able to pick up the Senate, and they came up short. It was Tea Party nominees that were simply too extreme for those voters, and it cost them some Senate seats that it never should have cost the Republicans. That's the risk that the progressives have here with Abduallsiat and Graham Platina, Right, if they both lose, well, then that becomes sort of a different way things are absorbed. So I put all that out there to just remind folks we've got a lot, We've got a lot of elections we haven't held yet in this midterm that will, I think paint the fuller picture. And as Matt Bennett may point he made to me, he said, hey, early twenty eighteen, there was the same AOC defeats Joe Crawley. Hey, look, this is a rise at the left. By the time you get to November, the story is about, Hey, look at all these center left candidates that won in red districts. Right, you're Abigail Spenberger Slotkins, you're Mikey Sheryl's. So that is probably the best advice here if you're if you're trying to figure out what does Tuesday mean? In short, Mam Donnie is smart and is an incredibly impressive leader of the Democratic Socialist movement. He's careful about he knows how to pick his spots. Uh. He went all in in in three congressional races where he knew his political capital was already uh worth the most. He didn't test his political capital. For instance, in the Upper West slash East Side seat there that last Yer one, the one that became all all about AI, the race that that that was that many Washington d c. Folks wanted to make about George Conway and Jack Slashburg. The voters themselves, of course, weren't that interested in that. It says a lot that Mam Donnie chose not to get involved in that one and didn't try to recruit and find a candidate there, So you know it is I will say this, I think that I've been I was extremely disappointed in how he reacted to what happened to Dan Goldman and at the coffee shop, and I do think how he handles this growing anti Semitic rhetoric that is happening with some of his supporters. Right, this is the uncomfortable question that I remember Andrew Gillen once asked Ron de Santis. But I think the same question can be asked to both parties. I'm not saying you're a racist, was the famous Andrew Gillim debate quote to rand de Santis. I'm just saying racists think you're a racist. That you know. And I don't think every Democratic Socialist is an anti semi, but they seem to be comfort if there are anti Semites in their mist just like the MEGA movement seems to be not interested in purging itself of racist elements inside the movement. And that's where this is where I get back to pluralism. The Republican Party chose not to fight Mega, they tried to co opt it, and instead Mega co opted it. The Democratic Party's instinct is not going to be to fight the Socialists. It is going to be to try to bring them in and co opt them. You sort of heard Corey book. All I would say is good luck that didn't work out well there. It doesn't usually because I will I think that the DSA is more organized, at least in New York they are, and I think you'll see in the same way. You know, MAGA was powered by the Ron Paul movement from twenty twelve because Ron Paul was sort of the DSA of the right, meaning Ron Paul was the organize one. Ron Paul's forces are the ones that took over the state party, and they basically got absorbed by the MAGA movement and they quickly left the Pauls and went to Trump. I've had this conversation with Ran Paul and he, I mean, he saw it himself. He had a big chunk of support. Trump comes in. Literally first one to lose all of his support in that Republican primary in twenty fifteen was Rand Paul. And the thing about that is the establishment didn't. I remember Ben Ginsberg telling me this back in twenty twelve how alarmed he was after Romney had basically already won the nomination, they had to make sure they elected Romney delegates and all of these different state parties, and he was telling me these stories about these Paul folks were basically had out organized the establishment wings of these state Republican parties and had basically orchestrated where they ran as Romney delegates and the Romney folks were trying to prevent them from being delegates, but basically they were trying to embed themselves into the inner workings of the Republican parties, onto the state central committees and things like this. And so by the time Trump comes along in fifteen and sixteen, he already he already has an infrastructure within the establishment in sort of the the grassroots mechanics of the Republican Party. Well, that's what Bernie's been doing. And in some ways between the DSA, which had its own organization on the outside, and what Bernie had been doing, he's got the sort of grassroots mechanics on the left. So and if you have a movement that really doesn't embrace pluralism, you can see how quickly this becomes a purification test what we've seen on the right, you either get co opted or acquiesce where you become Liz Cheney and John You sort of end up where Liz Cheney, John Kasik, Bob Gorker are Jeff Flake. And perhaps that turns into a fledgling third party and independent movement. We'll see, and we're going to get to that in a few minutes. But I think that's right now right, this is we're in the middle of the chapter on twenty twenty six, and at the moment it looks like the lefts on the march. Let's finish the chapter. Let's see what happens in Michigan. Let's see what happens in November in both Michigan in Maine, and then we can finish this story. Quick little note on Donald Trump and his meeting with Senate Republicans. Talk about a wasted political opportunity for Donald trum up in the Republican Party. Here's a party that has just had an near impossible time. Even though they have to the majorities in both the House and the Senate, they don't seem to get anything done beyond their tax cuts. Right. That was sort of the hallmark of the first term, and it was looking like the hallmark of this one. And lo and behold, there's this bipartisan housing bill. And you know, it is a bill that frankly, probably should have been a past five years ago, ten years ago, but it finally is. It's sort of like that infrastructure bill that Biden finally got passed. You know, it was a bill that should have been passed ten years earlier, but we know, Trump just completely failed at sort of politicking there in that first term, and that's why we didn't get it. So here we are, and the opportunity Donald Trump and the Republican Party had on Wednesday morning to be able to show them caring about affordability signing this housing bill, Republicans were getting ready to take credit. He could have done a little bit of of dancing on the socialist you know victory, you know, dancing on the Democrats grave by promoting the socialist victories in New York. And I think a lot of Republicans at Capitol Hill woke up on Wednesday morning thinking, hey, this is going to be a good day for them politically. And what does Trump do. He shows up to their lunch and he turns it into a Festivus meeting. I got a lot of problems with you people, and he does the airing of grievances. I mean, I had to check the calendar. It's June twenty fourth, It's not December twenty third that he chose to air his grievances. So I guess we will we will call June twenty fourth Trump Festivus Day, because he decided to go into that meeting and just talk about all of his problems. And then Bill Cassidy admitted he got his own Irish up and the two of them apparently had a screaming match about the Iran MoU But apparently this lunch did nothing right. There was no meaningful back and forth according to Thune about the Philip Buster, the save of it. It was just Trump ranting, and he decided not to do the signing ceremony in the housing bill, saying until he gets the Save America Act. The irony to this housing bill is it's got a veto proof majorities, meaning if he vetos it it could get overridden, or if he doesn't do anything, it will just become law in ten days. And maybe that's what he's going to do. But what a just dumb political move for his own party, right, And this tells you it sort of almost reinforces this point that I'm trying to make here is the leading movement inside the Republican Party is not interested in pluralism and is not interested in setting up the Republican Party for success if it is not a Trump success, and this is not what Trump wants. He thinks that's all a failure. He is not a party leader. He is just out for himself politically, we know, financially, I mean, you know, I don't know. I don't know if you need me to tell you that Donald Trump's out for himself. I think he makes it pretty obvious, and sometimes he says it out loud. But if you're a Republican who cares about the Republican Party having a future beyond Donald Trump, just like he did in his twenty twenty temper tantrum that essentially handed control of the United States Senate to the Democrats because of those Georgia runoffs where he does a rally for them, he essentially says, I don't care if they lose. He's not doing the same thing right now. I mean, he is trying. He essentially did it. Look, it's one day and Donald Trump's stepping on his own. You know what on a given day politically is It's not news, it's just a Wednesday. But my word, just a total debacle for congressional Republicans. And it's like, you know, I don't if the Democrats only get narrow, you know, narrow majorities here, that's it's they may end up having the same governing challenges and problems that the Republicans had. But my word, does Trump make it almost possible for the congressional Republican majorities to do anything that is at all remotely what the public wants, or is at all politically in tune with where the public is. It just isn't there. So it is. If you're if you're the Democrats today, you're kind of released in Washington, you're kind of relieved that, you know, Trump essentially said no, no, no, no, look at me, look at me. I'm gonna I'm going to prove, you know, instead of letting the Democrats look like they're dysfunctional and can't and is the gang that can't get along, can't shoot straight and all this stuff, Donald Trump wants to basically say, hold my non alcoholic beer, let me show you how it's really done. And that's what he pulled off. I have to tell you, I you know, John Cornyn said it last week. It's going to be a miserable couple of years for Donald Trump. And he only has him self deployed. He has created all that. He went in there to air his grievances at people that weren't loyal to him, because again, he does not see the party as a collection of people who may agree sixty to seventy percent of the time but don't agree on some stuff. But you know, for decades they accepted the premise. Donald Trump doesn't accept the premise. Donald Trump does not believe in the American experiment. Donald Trump does not believe in pluralism. And of course my fear is, I don't know if the progressive left believes in any of that either. This episode of the Chuck Todcast is brought to you by Quints. So summer always changes, certainly how I get dressed. I want pieces that feel lighter, are more breathable, things that are easy but still put together so I don't look like a schlub with you guys, right. So that's why I keep coming back to Quint's. I mean, they really are part of my wardrobe these days. They focus on high quality essentials that feel and look amazing. 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So I'm not getting ties anymore, thankfully because I'm going tieless on here, but I'm getting some nice quinch shirts, even some T shirts. I've even thrown it into the workout gear. I can't recommend it enough. So elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quints dot com slash chuck for free shipping for your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns now available in Canada too. That's q u i nce dot com slash chuck for free shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns quints dot com slash chuck use that code. One more story before we get to my interview with Matt Bennett, and wherever you fall in this fight inside the Democratic Party, all right, left center, mainstream liberal, wherever you fit, I do think you're going to be intrigued by the conversation. I want to highlight one other important story that happened this week, and it's about what's happening inside the Pentagon and what's happening to our military and what Pete Haigseth is attempting to do to the military and the overt politicization of the military. I think it's one of the harder stories that we in the press have to convey. Without giving away any of my sources, I can tell you there's quite a few soldiers that would be loving to speak out, but it is just, you know, these are people who are trained in not going outside the chain of command by following protocol, and that many of these soldiers don't want to behave like Donald Trump, Repete hag Seth and do something and sort of gain them an excuse to essentially shame them for trying to speak out, and so they've had a hard time and they've you know, I've I've talked to quite a few members of the military who have given me a lot of troubling and foe off the record, but it's been hard to verify. And it's also been it's you know, it's tough to ask them to go public, and that's a you know, that's a that's a that's what hag Seth is taking advantage of here. He's taking advantage of the fact that these soldiers are loyal to the military, and he's almost using it against them. But I like to I'm obsessed with these folks he's purging because I'm convinced that one of these generals that he is forced into retirement or fired, however you want to characterize it, might be our next president of the United States. I think we are in a moment like that, right. I think we are in a moment where there's going to be a desire. But I think the most effective anti you know, the most effective person to sell pluralism and the American democracy could very well be a retired three or four star. So let me tell you this latest story, because the person that he forced out here is quite the backstory. There's a photograph from just before midnight August thirtieth, twenty twenty one, the night that Americans were withdrawing from Afghanistan. Not a great night. And this photograph is a bit grainy, it's green, it's shot through a night vision lens, and it's a soldier in full uniform walking up the ramp of the last Sea seventeen on the tarmac at Cobble Airport. He is literally the last American boot to leave Afghanistan twenty years of war. And he was the man who essentially turned out the lights eleven to fifty nine pm, one minute before the deadline that Donald Trump agreed to that Joe Biden executed. The soldier is Chris Darnihue c D. To the people who served under him, And if you wanted it, if you wanted to design in a lab, the kind of officer Pete Hegseth says he wants. Donahue is the prototype west Point, Pennsylvania kid career Army Ranger Delta Force. He led Delta Commandos commandos against Isis, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, two decades of some of the hardest counter terrorism fighting that the military asked our soldiers to do. He commanded the eighty second Airborne and most recently, he was in charge of US Army forces in Europe and Africa. At the exact moment that that job mattered, turning the lessons of Ukraine into how the Army plans to fight the next war. He was seen as a rising star. People inside the building had penciled him as a future Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, certainly a future Army Chief of Staff. Well, Donahue was back in the news because he submitted his retirement papers basically at gunpoint at the Pentagon's request. Yeah, I'm being dramatic here. Nobody actually put a gun to his head, but he was forced into retirement. He's going to relinquish a four star command ceremony in Germany, his tour cut short in the middle of his assignment, and his old job is being downgraded four stars, knocked down to three. The warrior, the warrior ethos guy should have wanted to keep. He decides to push out. And here's the thing, Donahue's not the story. Dona Hugh is the latest story. So I'm going to be fair here for a minute before I get extra critical of Hegseth, who I think is just right. The single biggest black eye on Tom Tillis's Senate record is going to be this into his credit. I think he knows it. Every Defense Secretary reshuffles brass. Okay, that's not new, that's part of the job. A new administration is entitled to having their own commanders. Presidents fire generals. Truman fired MacArthur, Obama fired Stanley McCrystal. Firing an officer for causes not a scandal. It's a Tuesday, and the General Officer Corps is a bit bloated. You can make an honest case for thinning it, which hagg Seth has been making less generals more gis. It's not insane, and if this were a normal trimming, I wouldn't be doing this segment. But this isn't. And this is how you can tell and the way to understand this. This purge that hagg Seth is conducting of the Pentagon isn't chronologically. It's by category. Because these officers weren't removed for one reason. They were removed for a multiple reasons. And it's the third reason is the one that it should worry you the most. So reason one that some of these officers were removed was for simply for who they are. Right. The first big night was February twenty first, twenty twenty five. Folks at the Pentagon call it the Friday Night massacre. In a single evening, the Chairman of the Joint then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs C. Q. Brown, first African American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, fired, pushed out, replaced by a retired three star named Dan Kine, who had to be rushed back to four stars to take the job. Same night he had Admiral Lisa Franchetti, Chief of Naval Operations, first woman ever to run the Navy, pushed out, gone, same night General Jim Slife, the Air Force Vice chief gone. Then Admiral Linda Fagan coming down to the Coast Guard, first woman to lead any branch of the US military, relieved right after the inauguration. The reason all given was leadership deficiencies. Well, obviously there's kind of a pattern here, and who keeps getting picked off? The Senate noticed there's a pattern. Jack Reid, who is not a partisan guy. Jack reads a Democrat. Don't get me wrong, but he's not a partisan ahole. Okay. He pointed out that nearly sixty percent of the senior officers haig Seth has fired are either women or black in a corps where women and minorities are about twenty percent of all the generals and admirals, that it's clear none of those people were fired for costs. They were fired simply because of who they were. Reason two, he's been firing people for either what they knew or what they'd take. General Timothy haw he ran the National Security Agency and Cyber Command. Lieutenant General Jeffrey Cruz the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He also was pushed out after his agency's early assessment of the Iran nuclear strikes leaked out and became politically inconvenient. He's the one that said and hadn't been totally destroyed. Vice Admirals Shoshanna Chatfield, the US rep to NATO's Military Committee, removed for quote loss of confidence. Again both of them serving and perhaps just not sharing a set of beliefs that haig Seth has. And then, of course there's the third reason for how he purses people out, and it's and this is the one that should really alarm you. It's for when officers push back on an order. On the same February night that c Q. Brown and Franchetti, haig Seth also fired the top uniformed lawyers of the Army and the Air Force, the people that give the council to the generals about whether orders are illegal or not. The judge advocates general right the jag Corps. Their entire job is to interpret whether an order is legal. Now, haig Seth did an allege misconduct. He just said on the record that he didn't want lawyers to become roadblock that pesky constitution. We don't want that to get in the way. A roadblock. Think about that. A roadblock is a thing in the way of where you were already going. And then there's the cleanest case of all, and it's the one I'd build the whole segment around if I had to pick one. Dadmirll Alvin Holsey, and I've I've talked about him before. He was the head of the US Southern Command, Southcombe and that's the command that's been running the boat strikes in the Caribbean. Well Holsey raised concerns about whether these strikes were legal. He went to his JAG officer to ask there were some questions strikes that many war of law experts say may amount to war crimes. Well, haig Seth, according to reporting, thought he wasn't being aggressive enough. The relationship came apart in a Pentagon meeting late last year. Two months later, Holsey retired two plus years early combatant commanders normally serve three years. He got one. Holsey didn't fail. Holsey objected, and that was his firing offense. He questioned an order that his own lawyer JAG officer wasn't sure could pass legal muster. And that's the biggest category that scare you here, not the culture war firings, the conscious firings. A military where the price of saying I'm not sure that's legal is your career. Is a military that will eventually stop worrying about whether something is legal and will simply follow orders whatever order is given. And then, of course you've had a wartime wave of officers relieved of duty this past spring. Country's at warworth Iran. And what does haig Seth do? He fires the Army stop officer General Randy George. George apparently had balked at an order to strike four officers, two black men, and two women off of a promotion list. Same day, he took out General David Hodney, running the Army's Modernization Command, and the Army's Chief of Chaplain's Major General William Green. Hexas has some weird religious beliefs, and he's trying to force those beliefs on an entire military. George's deputy General James Mingus had already taken a sudden retirement. It sounds like I'm describing the Kremlin, doesn't it. One official's reaction to firing a four star during a shooting war was one word insane and to keep the tally running. While I say all this because the number is the argument by the guardians count to roughly two dozen generals and senior commanders that have been fired or forced out since January of twenty twenty five. A retired four star, the kind of person who'd normally never say a word, put it like this, This isn't a war on woke, It's a war on warriors. So I've been digging in to see have we ever had a comparable moment like this? As the Secretary of Defense ever rearranged the top of the US military dramatically, Well, hag saith, they answered in himself. Under Oath, right in April, in front of the House Armed Services Committee, he got pressed on exactly this question, and he had a comeback ready. He said, under Barack Obama, one hundred ninety seven general officers were removed. So this is nothing new. One hundred ninety seven specific number. It sounds authoritative, right, It's fake. It's been traced. The number comes from a twenty eighteen newspaper editorial which got it from a Facebook page. There's no real list. He made the case for precedent by inventing a precedent. By the way, the Pentagon would have had the facts if he chose to actually use Pentagon resources. Instead, he did some Google search looking for some bullshit crap ass editorial who didn't do any fact checking, which tells you something, because if there were a real example the Secretary of Defense under Oath, with that huge research staff Pentagon, they would have used it. They didn't have it. So in my own research here, the closest thing history offers is nineteen forty nine, The Revolt of the Admirals, Truman's Defense secretary cancels the Navy new supercarrier to fund the Air Force's bombers. The admirals go to war publicly in front of Congress, and the chief of Naval Operations, an Admiral Lewis Denfield, got up and testified against his own civilian bosses. For that, Denfield was removed as the chief Naval officer. The re applisal was plain and simple. Congress said so in writing, called it a challenge to representative government. And that's the great precedent. That's the one the history books we'd reach for and look at how small it is next to what Haig Seth has done. What Haig Seth has done spans every single service it is. It has no single issue, its identity, in some cases intelligence, in some cases lawyers who might stand in his way of illegal orders, and commanders who might have raised their hand because they actually care about the Constitution. Two dozen. It's been done quietly on Friday nights by social media post no explanation offered, no hearing held. That's why they got rid of a of a press corps at the Pentagon, right. They don't want any reporters nosing around on this. They don't want staff at the Pentagon talking to the press. So instead, right, they've they've got their sort of propaganda propagandas that they've that they call their press corps. This is this is. This should be as big of a scandal as any that has happened in this administration. This should be extraordinarily alarming. And I'm really interested in meeting C. D. Donahue. I think one of these twenty four people, I don't know who. I don't know which one it is, one, two, three, But I think I know all I know when you have spent multiple decades and you've worked your way up for these promotions, you love this country, and you love public service, and you certainly believe in the Constitution. If I were looking for the next leaders of America, I'd be looking at the folks that whoever Pete Hegseth has decided shouldn't be in his Pentagon is who I'd be interested in seeing elected the public office in my country. All right. I just I really get frustrated with what we're seeing at the Pentagon because I think this is a this is a five alarm fire, and this is a case where the systematic purging of the press, systematic purging of the officer Corps. Everything that has been done inside the Pentagon could leave us. Imagine two terms of this, and the military could get turned into some sort of political force that should scare the Jesus out of every single American. Our military is the best, it's the least political of any major military in the world. And what Pete Hegseth is doing is right out of the authoritarian playbook, trying to purge the military of anybody that puts the country ahead of politics and replacing those folks with the most partisan or the most pliant people that he can find. This dish between what's happening at the Pentagon and what's happening at the Justice Department are the two biggest things that have that are that that Trump is damaged that will not get fixed in one term, and the after action report in both places is going to be necessary if we're going to get them both back on track. Ass Chuck Matt from Florida writes, Hey, I really enjoyed your recent episode on the baby fee Boomer generation. My dad, a boomer, watches Fox News every night and often acknowledges Trump's flaws but still see them as less significant than those of the Democrats. How much do you think outlets like Fox News have shaped political attitudes among boomers versus broader generational or cultural factors. Thanks Matt and Florida. Well, look, I think that honestly. You know, I've got family members who, you know, sort of over index on MS and I've got family members that over index on Fox. And I can tell that they both over index, you know, over indexing on political content is what I would argue in them and and what it is, it's it's you know, this gets it to this, the larger point I was making about how OJ created the conditions for Donald Trump, and I think, let we will say for Zoon, Mom, Donnie and Donald Trump in that it you know it, it's sort of made the algorithm. You know, the algorithms of today were sort of created by cable news in the nineties in the serialization of the news business. Way do you come back tomorrow? We're going to see what happens tomorrow on the Lewinsky scandal, What happened tomorrow on the Florida vote, Watch what happens tomorrow on the war in Iraq? Right when as we took this sort of taking what was the daytime soap opera mindset and layering it over the information consumption world. I guess you know, it's like, first it was just what keeps you interested, you know, and then you know, what the Internet was able to do was refine it even further than cable news did. Right. It took what cable news was doing and refined it further. So then you got sort of political agreement, but you also got other cultural agreement. You had these different sort of silos, right, some of the silos overlap. But we see this and so look, I think both MS and Fox and CNN, frankly, I think it is certainly they both have this habit of but let me tell you how bad the other side is. You know, there's always an acknowledgement that the that that the side that they may have more sympathy for is flawed. Right, Fox is regularly you know, Brett Behar will be real defensive about this, and he's not wrong. Brett Behar will you know, you know, do the to be sure paragraph. But then it'll also you know, spend five minutes on the Save America Act claiming it's just a voter ID bill when it's not a voter ide bill. Right, it's something much more dramatic, drastic than that. It's essentially make make it nearly impossible for married women to vote bill, you know, with with sort of it's not a voter ID, it's a it goes to another level that that frankly is intentionally disruptive to the voting system. And and it's sort of the point being is that it's it's not it's not a nobody's the rights not selling this honestly, and and you know Fox isn't going to portray that honestly. But then they'll acknowledge, yes, there is some support, for instance, for regular actual voter ID. Right, if this were, for instance, voter idea, it would it would pass. But it's not a voter ide though, you know, even though it's being portrayed as that, it is not that. And so but that's how you know this is. And then you'll have an MS. They'll you know, acknowledge the flaws you know, maybe of a Biden or something like this, but then say, but look at how awful and outrageousness is on the other side, which is why you get the conversation that you get with your father, And it's a conversation I get with whether it's I'm talking with my MS relatives or my Fox relatives, which they will, and some of this I always feel like, and you, I would ask you to ask yourself this question. Maybe your father understands where your politics is and certainly doesn't want who alienate you, and so is a bit more common, and you're being a bit more ac comminating of him, and vice versa. I think you know, some of my loved ones, you know no where, know where I come down on this because they see it all the time. And I certainly don't want to be alienated from any wing of my family. I love my left wing relatives and my right wing relatives. And so the good news is we've all figured out how to talk about the things that we have in common about what we don't like about politics, like yeah, this is you know, and and you know what I'll get from a Fox relative watching relative will say, look, I'm no fan of Trump's behavior. I think that guy's got terrible character, but my god, look at what they're doing over here. And then I'll hear, you know, on the mside, I know the Democrats aren't very good at this, but my god, you've got to stand up to this crazy man in the oval office. And so I just think it's the way it's the way the incentive structure works in media that has created this formula for broadcasting because it's all about just keeping your core viewer coming back. Right, If this were a political campaign, it's like all they're doing is tending to the base voter. And if they can get the base voter to come back, then there's always money in the banana stan, right, there's enough money to be made. And I do fear that what cable news figured out, what OJ taught cable news in the nineties got sort of perfected by the Internet algorithms of the early oughts and then social media, and then this is how we've got this broken information ecosystem where where even though there really is individually and we see it all the time, we have a lot of agreement that, yeah, characters should be you know, emphasized again in politics, and you know, we have these agreements, but we don't really have a shared information eco where we can acknowledge you know, I mean, trust me. I'd like to and you know some of you may disagree with this. I'd like to think I did my best to try to like point out the flaws left and right, and I got simultaneously accused of both ciderisms and for being either a closet liberal or a closet conservative and because that. But now that was an intentional attack, because what what the wings don't with these professional sort of activist media people. They don't want to screw up their audience, right, and so anybody that is telling them, hey, those businesses are misleading you the voter, well, you know, people like me and anybody else that's sort of in this sort of rational I don't like even calling it the middle. It's just sort of the rational. But where most of us live, we're a threat to that business model a little bit. And certainly, you know it is it is not you know, this style of political content is not something the algorithms have been programmed to celebrate. And I think that that's sort of a bit chicken and egg here that I did there. And I know I went off a bit on a tangent there, but I think some of this is, you know, we want to simply say, oh, this is Murdoch, or this is MS, or you know, this is the comcat. This is a business model that was learned from oj that was not done through a political lens. It is ended up doing serious damage to our politics, but it didn't begin intentionally as a way to polarize us politically. But it has all right, Ben right spend from Colorado's fourth district. Thank you for giving me your fourth district tells me generally where you are, which I believe means Greeley, Colorado. If I'm not mistaken. Appreciate all the work you put into the podcast. I'm curious, do you think there's a future where large pack spending could burn itself out due to voter backlash? Could outside spending from big groups actually becoming negative for candidates, reducing the incentive to invest. So heavily appreciate the show. Thanks Ben Boy. I was very curious if that would happen on Tuesday, And in fact, I have a friend in New York who told me that the more the AI folks were doing attack ads on Boris, the ores the candidate that came in second in the in the Upper west Side Upper east Side Congressional District, the west Side, I guess we call it now just the west Side, the Upper Upper Manhattan Congressional District. That's both Upper West and Upper East, the old Jerry Nadler district. She told me that's what drove her into voting for the guy that was being attacked, which I thought was was interesting. I do think there's a point where you're too associated, and this is where you know, we're not there yet. As I've said multiple times, it's hard to find a campaign where the issue of money was what was used to defeat somebody. But there's now a growing mountain of evidence this cycle that candidates with the most financial backing aren't automatic. Right. It's making some voters ask more questions. Whether it's Tom Steyer trying to buy a place and he couldn't buy a place in that fractured gubernatorial feel no matter how much money he threw at it. And it almost was like the more money he threw at it, there was a point where it became actually a non you know, that became more of a non starter for people. I think locally in DC, we had a congressional race with the founder of Total Beverage, David Tron and he just threw an enormous amount of money at trying to win his old Congression seatback and he gets rejected. So I think that there is a growing, at least in primaries, a voter skepticism. I think it's more likely to show up in a primary than it is a general. Right general, you have more casual voters who are not paying attention to who's funding one primary voters, you have a better shot at having an elector that's paying a slightly bit more attention and might be a little bit more. But I don't think we're quite there. But like I said, there's there's some green shoots of evidence that say that, you know, as we become more skeptical of the wealthy in this country collectively as a political electorate, well that will translate itself into anybody that's financially associating with them in politics. So I think this is the cycle where we're seeing put it this way, APAC is learning to diversify its investments and not put it all in one superpack. And I think that the smarter entities that are trying to certainly use their ability to influence on pieces of legislation are going to be more are going to be smarter to diversify their investments in political persuasion rather than pilot into one big super pac. It is you know, the super pacification of campaigns has really sort of warped. You know, if you wonder why, you know what, why take the conversation I had with David Holt about how he said that the gubernatorial race. He said, the actual issues that face the next Oklahoma governor were not discussed once in the Republican primary for governor. Instead, they were arguing over things that are not really part of the job, whether it's trands that Oklahoma governor is not really going to have anything about. And so, you know, I do think you see these super PACs can hijack the conversation in a campaign, which then can steer it in directions that that are pretty anti voter. But I don't think we're fully at the backlash there. But I think you're starting to see in certain places, and it's where you have the most you know, sort of attentive electorate if you will. Hey, Eric from Austin, Right, I hope you're having a good week. Could you talk a bit about Keir Starmer and Labour's recent struggles. Are they more of a result of his decisions or broader global conditions and are there any lessons here for the Democratic Party. Thanks for your work. Well, that's interesting. I mean, look, I view what's been happening in the UK is less about one party or the other, although right like you know, I then what you have is a frustration with the the larger political establishment. Well, in the UK, the political establishment were both the Tories and Labor right, both Tony Blair and David Cameron, you know, to be to just pick two former prime ministers as avatars here, right one a Tory one or Gordon Brown, you know, another Labor prime minister. But the fact is that Tony Blair wing of the Labor Party, which also produced Gordon Brown and arguably kir Starmer is more probably is more and more more in line with the Tony Blair than say Jeremy Corbyn, who could not win by the way right when he was the standard bear for labor. Is Jeremy Corbyn the Bernie Sanders of the UK labor movement. You can there's certainly some parallels there. And then you see what's happening with the Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, which is essentially on the verge of replacing the Tories as the Conservative party, uh or the right wing party of the UK. So I look I've been obsessed with this because I I, you know, it feels like the UK has been slightly ahead of where but you know, is Starmar Biden and unlike and unlike Biden because there actually was a special election for the person and for Burnham who actually ended up replacing him, you know, but he actually had to win a seat in Parliament first, So there was summat some vetting that happened. It was almost like they had a bit of a you know, a primary and one one district. But you know, and so you know, I think that's a that's an open question. But I do think what is similar. I think there are more things that we have in common with what's been happening in the UK. They just have a political system that can express it the outr age easier. Right, We've had two impeachments, they've had seven prime ministers. Right, They've had these these essentially no confidence votes within their party. You could argue we've kind of have the same thing. We just didn't have the system to allow for the easy replacement of the party leaders, right, be it Trump, be it Pelosi, be it McCarthy, be it you know, but look, I mean we had we've had multiple speakers, it took all the you know, so in our system we've had the same level of disruption that their system just simply allows for more. Now, you could argue that our system is designed in such a way that it actually prevents total disruption from like paralyzing the government versus the UK has these paralysis moments from their disruption. But there's no doubt this is the same large forces are sort of creating this. You know, they had massive migration, We had massive migration. This is fear of globalization. They've had fear of globalization. So in that sense, the larger sort of you know, identity crisis that both political parties in this country have had. So of the two major parties of the UK who are no longer argued might not be the two major parties a year from now after their next election. So I think there's a ton to learn here. You know, David Cameron, I was recently with him and we had this discussion and he thinks that the number one thing Democrats, and you know, he sort of politically is probably closer to being Bill Clinton, a Bill Clinton Democrat, than he essay a Mett Romney Republican. That's kind of the politics of the UK. You know, I think Cameron was definitely Cameron and Obama were really tight, and I think their politics are actually pretty similar, even though one was from the Conservative Party of their country and one was from the Liberal Party of the other country. But Cameron, you know, the one thing he will say is, you know, tighten up your borders. Just tighten up your borders. This is universal. Do that first, and then everything else is persuadable after that. But that, the migration, the fear of the other ing and all of that is really that's what he would say, has been the sort of the tipping point of this. And so he's been a big advot of getting Democrats to be a bit more conscious of the border, a bit tougher on the border. And you've seen there are more Democrats opening open to having a you know, they're saying, no, no, no, no, we got to have a we got to have a functioning border here, and we've got to manage immigration better. It doesn't mean you don't have to be an anti immigrant party, but you've got to be a sort of you got to be a law and order party, reasonable law and order mindset on that. So but look and then there's then there's the charisma part. Right. You know Corbin was kind of mealy mouth. Starmer wasn't great at this. You know, would Labor have been in better? I mean they won this huge victory, right, it's very similar to Starmer feels like Biden. Right, Biden has this huge victory, most votes that any Democratic president ever got. You know, it starts out and even swings the Senate, which nobody expected and so he had a huge opportunity in it. But it was a reminder that you know, Biden won because of who he was, it not because of who he was, And Labor Party won because of who they weren't, not because of who they were, And Labor's discovering that the hard way right now. And it's it's likely. I think if you see a UK election that has Reform and Green as the top two vote getters over the Tories and Labor, I would read that as a tea leaf that says take a third party or independent candidacy in this country more seriously than folks want to take it, because I do think in that sense, the frustration is similar the and we don't have another part, right. I think that's why some on the left are gravitating towards this DSA. Well, they're fighting, they're doing something, and that's why I think the establishment wings of both parties, I think they need to get pressure from the outside before they sort of get religion on this. But we'll say, I'm thinking, look, David Hole is the official mayor of the Czech podcast. You know he went to GW Big Revolutionaries guy, so you know we're going to I will give him that title. But the next is probably the official mayor of Aschuk. It's our friend John IPII Ali. Here Harvey Seedars, the mayor of Harvey Seedars, New Jersey. He has his third question that he has asked me. So he's not he's getting closer to the five timers club. And and here's this question. I enjoyed your take on presidential blunders, but I'm more curious about the opposite. What would you consider the top five presidential actions? It simply worked moments where leadership decisions paid off in a big way. And so you know it's a this is not I spent a little bit of research time on this. So the first things that came to mind, you know, I was thinking of decisions that weren't easy for their own political party. Bill Clinton and NAFTA. Now we can debate whether that was a success or not. Right, I think NAFTA financially was an enormous success. What it did for Mexico's economy was incredible, and it really did financially benefit a lot of Americans. But it really blew up our politics and arguably is still blown up our politics. So I don't know if I but you know, there is a case for NAFTA in Bill Clinton. I'll give you another one, George HW. Bush's decision to back the nineteen ninety budget agreement that essentially was the beginning of the sort of the Bush Clinton era of getting our fiscal house in order. We got to a balanced budget by the late nineties thanks to a decision by a Republican president to accept raising taxes with the Democratic Congress. Then a Democratic president with a Republican Congress did a bit more tightening, a little bit on spending and a little bit more in taxes, and lo and behold, we had a budget surplus going into the turn of the century. So, you know, I think that whether it was Bill Clinton's decision to back another tax hike in nineteen ninety three, George HW. Bushes. So both of those turned out to be really good for the American economy and really supercharged the economy arguably going in and certainly put us on a path. Now, those were positive decisions that some of the decisions on China less. So I'll give you another one in the Reagan era, Reagan's decision to sign the amnesty for the undocumented immigrants that were in this country in eighty six. That also was not the easiest bill for a Republican to sign, and it worked. It was Now there will be some on the right that say it is why the next wave of immigrants still kept coming because they knew that we had a history of amnesty in this country. Yes, we're a nation of immigrants. Every immigrant knows that eventually there is room for them here. That just may take a generation. But that at the time was a brave decision and it certainly helped solve an immigration problem that sort of was created in the sixties, and we can I'm not going to go deep into that, but that was trying to right or wrong there. I think Harry Truman recognizing Israel wasn't an easy call that he was getting a lot of pushback to saying if you do this, it could it could be a permanent split with the Arab world have a huge impact. We were at the time really relying on Middle East oil in the late forties, and it wasn't an easy political decision. It turned out that those fears we were wrong now on that in the air world was going to learn to live with a Jewish state in their neighborhood, and that turned out the Keiban missile crisis. It was a huge test for Kennedy. It was a huge gamble and it paid off. You know, you could argue that we were able to you know, basically from there we create the Red Phone and we start some arms negotiations that essentially, over time allows us to win the spending fight of the Cold War and sort of sucker the Soviets into bankrupting themselves. But I think Kennedy's decision to sort of call the bluff of the Soviets there in Cuba and doing the quarantine or the blockade, however you want to describe it was a big one too. So it is right Nixon to China. Was that good or bad. It was a good strategy at the time, it made a lot of sense. It was risky, probably has been a net benefit for the globe, even if it hasn't been a net you know, and even arguably for the financial power of the United States. But that was so that's how I defined it, So Mayor I'm curious whether you see those So that that's how I was trying to find it what I would call political close calls that aged really well. But I love the question and I want to keep I want to keep diving in on that. I think there's more more to do there, and who knows, we may It's possible the Iran nuclear deal will suddenly age really well for Barack Obama and we may someday put that on the list. All right. Bill s in Newburg, Oregon a frequent emailer. I wonder Bill, if you've made it to five yet. I've heard you to refer to some voters as being trumpy. What characteristics to find a Trumpet voter? In your view, it's not what I mean. Trumpy is basically being supportive of not just Donald Trump because he's the Republican nominee, but supportive of the cause, supportive of the you know, sort of the isolationists policy, supportive of a little bit of it, is supporting the culture of maga sort of almost it's my shorthand for being this person isn't just a Trump supporter. They're culturally mega you know. This is where they're comfortable type of thing, you know. And I think of Trumpy, right, I think of Eric Schmidt, the senator from Missouri, or I think of Jim Banks of Indiana, Bernie Marino, Right, I think that they Rick Scott. I don't think they got into politics being but they have become comfortably. I think they're more comfortable there. Mike Lee, right, based I guess you would say based Mike Lee, not twenty sixteen Mike Lee, which I guess he himself by creating an account that says based Mike Lee sort of admits that he's was politically bipolar there for a time. I guess so. But that's what I mean, right, that it's that uh that you know, sort of a true believer versus where i'd put your John Thunees, your David McCormick's, which are Look, he's the president, he's the leader. That they're not comfortable in that wing of the party, but they're not going to fight it right. I wouldn't refer McCormick as trumpy, but I would refer to like an richmid ass. I hope that helps uh in telling you sort of how I distinc how the shorthand I've created here, but that that's that's the that's how I'm defining that short. Ye. My last question for the Hey Scott from p A ten again. All right again, man, I got two of you. Keep them coming. Tell me your congressional district. Right, this is how how we how we all want to learn where everybody's coming from. I love this Pennsylvania ten. I love York County. Had a good friend from college from York, and it always blew me away that they said it was closer to flat out of Baltimore than it was to flat to Philadelphia. I'm curious how often you choose Baltimore versus Philadelphia. I guess if you're on the Harrisburg side of things, that may that may be the case. But anyway, Scott, let me get your question. You said, after a recent discussion on Democratic party divisions, I'm wondering, do you think there's a simple messaging strategy establishment Democrats could use to align more closely with the left without fully embracing the label. Is framing it around shared policy goals an effective way to walk that line. Thanks as always, Scott. I don't know anymore. I think that has been what has worked. I do think the credibility of the establishment is in tatters because of Joe Biden and the return of Donald Trump. I go back to the conversation you just heard me have with Matt Bennett, where I've got a bit animated about. You know, I think why Joe Biden's presidency to me will always be a failed presidency is he had one job. His job wasn't just to defeat Donald Trump. It was to lead the country away from Donald Trump his presidency. A better leader would have made the lot the idea of returning to Donald Trump and anapatha and an amatha sorry. And that for me is you know that. I that that's the prison with which I judge. I think his his the campaign promise he was essentially making to the skeptical voter that may have decided to vote for Biden because they saw Trump is you know, a health threat because of COVID or whatever. I think the deal the voter thought they were getting is this guy is a transitional guy. He's just going to manage us out of this Trump math so we can get to the next generation of politicians to lead this country. And he failed that. Okay, so so you're the and the establishment let him fail, right, They didn't fight him hard enough. They sort of let it be because again it was always turned into well if you you know, you're you're only helping Trump if you somehow push back at what Biden was up to. And of course Biden made this what I think was a bad attempt at co opting the left, allowing the left to sort of give them a little power, and it really shifted him to the left. So I guess what I would say is, I think that strategy was the twenty twenty strategy and the twenty twenty four strategy, and I think it's I don't think the left's going to accept the strategy. If if I were advising a more you know, the Corey Bookers of the world, I think I think I would take on you know, I would sort of borrow what Chris Murphy's been saying without becoming a progressive like Chris Murphy has been speaking. Hey, the Democratic Party failed at the job. It said it was going to do, which was to turn the page on the Trump rad I think until the establishment accepts that they failed here, I think it's been a mistake that it's the left that's leading the charge to get rid of Schumer, that it hasn't come from the center left, when ultimately you know they should be acknowledging the failure and want new leadership. And yet it's the left that is the one that has more credibility on this. So I feel like that's the issue, is that the establishment had its chance to co opt the left with that kind of messaging. It worked in twenty it didn't work in twenty four. And I certainly don't think the left is going to allow capitulate to the quote electable ability wing of the party again, because they view it as it's sort of not dissimilar to what turned into the Maga movement. How they were like, we're not compromising again like we did with Mitt Romney. We're not looking for the most electable conservative, We're just looking for the craziest so bit. And I think the left is going we're not looking for the most electable democrat, We're looking for the most activist movement lefty progressive, and so I don't know if just if this is a messaging thing. I know, if I were Corey Booker, I wouldn't I wouldn't be just trying to can't we all just get a long message? You know, I'd be fighting a bit harder here or the main the quote unquote mainstream, and I'd fight harder for it, and I'd be angrier about it. I'd become the angry moderate, if you know, I'm mad as hell and I am I going to take it anymore. Get these I'm tired of these MF snakes on this MF plane. And you don't see that coming from that wing of the party. You see the emotion and anger coming from the base. And I think sometimes the temperament, the moderate in temperament, which is something that a person like me is looking for. But I'm not here to move people right that in some ways that's the wrong You know, you need to make a better case for why this is the right way and a proactive case for what democratic pluralism is without how and to use the political sciences science y term like that, why this is? You know, essentially the Democratic Party is a coalition, right, it is not a litmus test party. And yet the irony is that the rise of the left is turning it into a litmus test party. And somehow Donald Trump became the non litmus test even though there's a huge litmus test on the on the Republican side too. Just ask John Corn or Bill Cassick. I'm waiting. I'm waiting for the for the angry, the angry pragmatist to show up on the center left. You kind of see it showing up on the center right, but it's in the form of Tom Tillis, right, or a John Kasik. Who have who have you know who have bowed out or who sort of lost the battle? I think some. But he needs to get caught fighting before a battle's been lost. All right, I'm really excited for AJ Debonsa. This is going to be interesting. I am hopeful on the tray Young signing. I am willing to let's see, you know, if a more mature Tray Young surrounded by more talent than he's ever been surrounded by in Atlanta, if it's a healthy Anthony Davis, AJ Debonsa, you got an interesting young team there. The best thing I heard, you know, the sicko and me after our Election night live stream. You know what I did, I went back to watch this is the best ESPN sort of. I watched a replay of the draft, at least the first thirty minutes, because I wanted to get my fill of Wizards conversations. Here. It's rare that the Wizards ever get national attention. Then to pick the We're going to get some And one of the experts on the ESPN panel said something that I think was quite fair, which is, the Wizards have all this talent, do they know how to win? And that's the hardest thing for a team that's been a loser team for a long time, right when you're in, when you're it's and I remember feeling that with the Wizards in twenty eighteen when they forced a game seven on Boston and then they just got blown out. It was like, do they know how to win? And it's funny how a culture there's never been a winning culture in two generations of basketball here in DC. Who's going to be that culture changer? You know, for a brief period at Gilbert Arenas was that guy for a brief period. We thought John Wall was that guy for a brief period there was hope that Michael Jordan's owner could be that guy really hasn't been there since west Unsel and most of you are going, who's west Unseld And that's part of the problem. But there hasn't been this much. I mean, this is the amount of hoping that DC sports fans are smoking right now. Right there's hoping them about the Commanders, there's hopingum about the Wizards. There's hoping im always about the Caps, but they've actually been the best performer of the major sports franchises over the last decade. And boy is there is some hopium right now with the Nats. You know. It's Ah, I'm very nervous that the Nats are not are not going to be buyers at the trade to I understand. I hope they just aren't heavy sellers. I'd rather see more youth be brought up, Don't get me wrong, but hey, let's get a little play you know, so what, let's make the make the run. A young team needs to get some playoff experience before it has a chance to actually win. You don't want to, uh, you kind of you know, if you've got a shot, getting a little bit of experience for a bunch of these twenty two and twenty three year olds, it's worth the effort just to get there, so they get a taste and they again learn how to win. To my friends at the Wizards, go make the winning the NBA Cup your priority next year, early on. Get this young team, get them to win something. I think it mattered for the nixt I know it's a silly little the NBA Cup, not you know. I think it's sort of like it gave them confidence, and it gave them something and it made them helped form that team. I hope the Wizards take the NBA Cup stuff. Seriously. I think it's a chance for a young team with a couple of veterans to sort of clamp down and do those Tuesday Friday games and build something here. But man, I have to tell you the hope me I've Three years ago, the sports world in DC was just the dumps, the Wizards, dumps, the Commanders, Dan Snyder's Commanders, the Dumps. The Gnats were continuing to sell off and sell off and sell off, and we were waiting to see if James Wood was going to be worth it all. How things have changed in about eighteen months, which is the beauty of sports. Right. It's also the same thing why we love and hate politics right. A lot can change in a short period of time, but it's fun to smoke the sports opium of the DMV these days. So with that, I hope you enjoy your weekend. Please check out what I got. I've got fascinating interview on newsphere this week, so be sure to check it out on Sunday. Susan delby the head of the D Triple C. We have seen. How hard will the D Triple C fight the left in these primaries or are they going to try to co opt the left? This is a taste of how leadership plans to respond to the rise of the Mamdami lefts In with that, I'll see in seventy two apps
