transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] Welcome everyone, Simon Rosenberg, Hopium Chronicles back with another of our mostly weekly, almost every week, gathering where we get together and take a step back from the day to day and try to evaluate where we are in this grand battle with Trump and MAGA. And here we are in April 22nd in the evening, 24 hours after we won in Wisconsin. I mean, won in Wisconsin, won in Virginia. We won in Wisconsin last week. This big win that this community was involved in. And I just think we have to, we talk here all the time about how we take the wins when they come, we celebrate them, we use those victories to build and go get more. And this was a big one. I mean, if the court cases go the way that we all think it will, it's four additional house seats, the way that puts us over into majority just with this move by itself. But the House is looking very promising now for us, and the Senate is looking very competitive. And I think we should be optimistic that we're on track to have the election that we all wanted to have when we began this cycle. And what I want to talk about tonight in this idea that we take a step back from the day to day and evaluate the bigger struggle here every week. Let me make sure Tug is a little bit more in the picture there. Is that I think that the war is breaking Trump and breaking the Republican Party, and that Trump is in essence and starting to, through his failed government, through his incompetence, through his buffoonery, through his idiocy, through his extremism, through his refusal to listen to anybody who knows anything about anything, that he's also doing enormous damage to MAGA, the ideological movement that he really created. I think Republicans, MAGA itself, is being heavily tarnished and damaged by what's going on. And I think that the polling that I shared today in my morning post was a little shocking. I mean, let's just go through it because I did another talk today to a group, and I talked about how I am amazed with where we are in April of the even year and the two year cycle. We're much further along in moving the national battlefield to where we wanted it to be than I thought we would be at this point. And what I mean by that is that Trump this week just had his worst set of polls. Every week it's like his worst set of polls, but it just keeps getting worse. He had a poll that had him at 32 for the first time. Another one that had him at 33, another one at 35, another one at 36. The one that he was at 33 at his disapproval was 67%. So we're talking when Biden left the race two years ago, his disapproval was 56, 57%. Trump is seeing where it was felt that he was in such bad shape that he couldn't carry his party into the election. Trump in some polls is 10 points worse than that than where Biden was. And as G. Eliot Morris showed today who asked the question about impeachment, you know, that Trump is at levels of the country wanting to impeach him equal to where Nixon was and equal to where Trump was after January 6th. And so you already have 55% of the country, including 21% of Republicans who want Trump impeached. And what that is, is it's a vote of no confidence. I mean, I think the way to think about it is, we aren't going to impeach him, the Republicans won't do that while they're still in power. But it's a sign of the level of discontent that there is in his leadership. And I once had a conversation with Stuart Stevens, who was Bush's guy, his chief strategist. He said that after Katrina, there was nothing they could do to revive Bush's favorability rating. There was just nothing. It doesn't matter what they did. It didn't matter what happened to the economy. The country had rendered judgment on him, and that he couldn't recover. And I do think that Trump is getting to this place now, where he is going to be essentially irredeemable, as he should be, by the way. Right, because not only, as he violated our civil rights and civil liberties and tried to turn America into an autocracy and not a democracy, but his economic strategy has raised prices on everything and slowed the economy and increased the deficit, put us in a far weaker fiscal condition. He's done enormous damage to our healthcare system. He's attacking science and higher education and learning and research and our public health care system, things that are critical for our future prosperity and the health of the country. He's turning the country towards fossil fuels while the rest of the world is turning towards clean energy alternatives. Reckless, dangerous, idiotic, counterproductive in every possible way. You know, he's sick. He's sicked ice on and terrorized communities across the country, illegally killed American citizens in the streets, assassinated them. You know, we can go on this list, and, you know, he deserves where he is, but he was already in a very weakened position. The economy was in a very weakened position before the war. But now we have the failed war. And the war, which is the greatest mistake by an American president in our history, you know, I used to say that the greatest abuse of power by an American president was Trump's tariffs, because it affected our economic relationship with literally every person in the world. And nothing on this, it could have been comparative to this in the scope and scale of this illegal unconstitutional act that he took to not only once pass his tariffs, but once they were rendered illegal by the Supreme Court, he then passed another set of illegal tariffs, sort of flouting the court and all of us, which was kind of extraordinary. And but this illegal unconstitutional war where he didn't consult with Congress or our allies, or even his Middle East business partners beforehand, you know, has, is essentially throwing the entire world into chaos. It's creating, it's weakening the entire global economy. The prices of everything is going up everywhere in the world because of this one man, right? Every single consumer in every country in the world is paying higher energy prices today because of Donald Trump. And so he's now twice in just 15 months, he's been in office, done things that have negatively affected literally every single person in the world. I mean, it's just, it's just incredible that we're at this point. In both cases without going through Congress, which he was required to do in both cases, because there's no circum, you know, if you could sort of create a textbook example of what the founding fathers were trying to prevent in their design of our government, it would be Trump's unilateral tariffs and it would be going to war without permission, right? This is like literally the definition, you know, of mad king behavior and this is, we avoided this kind of stuff for 250 years. And, but what's happened now is that if you look at the Senate polling, we now have Democrats ahead in recent polls, just in the last few weeks, just, you know, since the war, post-war, you know, since the war has begun when Trump's numbers have come down. We're now ahead in Alaska. We're ahead in Iowa. As of today, we're ahead in Ohio. We're ahead in North Carolina. We're ahead in Georgia by high single digits. We're ahead in Maine. Both of our candidates are ahead in Maine. Both of our candidates are ahead in Iowa. And you know, that's more than enough to flip the Senate. And so part of what's happened now is that I will tell you that Republicans never in a million years thought the Senate was going to be competitive because of the states that, you know, because of the states required for us to win. I showed you data today that of the states that we're, that Hopium is investing money in, that we're investing money in, in Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, Texas and Florida. Trump won all those states by more than 10 points. And we have, we're not just competitive in those states. We're ahead in polling in those states. You know, in April. And the reason this is so significant, just for those of you who don't spend all your lives nerding out on polling data and elections, is that historically what happens in a, in a wave election like this, in a bad year that the Republicans are having, is that the incumbents will drop down to 47, 48, underneath 50. The general rule is if you're an incumbent under 50, you're in trouble because it means that a majority of the electorate is no longer with you and has moved away from you. So you, as an incumbent, you never want to be below 50 percent in polling. This is a general rule. And so usually what happens at this point is that the incumbent would be at 47, 48. The challenger would be at 43, 44. And then as you get closer to the election, that vote that has wandered from the incumbent, then migrates over to the challenger. But that happens late usually, right? So you go, you know, if you're in a camp, if you're with the DCCC or the DSCC, and you hit Labor Day and you're, the opponent is at 47 and your candidate's at 44, you're happy with that because historically, and it's not in every race, every time, every race is unique. That late breaking vote that has left the candidate breaks against them. That's not what's happening now. What's happening now is that our candidates are ahead of the Senate Republicans. They're not down by two or three points, and they're ahead in April, which means that this is why you're seeing the Republicans really hit the panic button, the political panic button. And the Senate Republicans three weeks ago announced this massive super PAC spend, $342 million, this massive spend. And it's largely in states that they didn't ever believe were going to be competitive. In Alaska, in Iowa, in Ohio, they're defending their states. They didn't put any money up into Texas or Florida, and we'll see what happens. I don't think they're going to decide about what to do in Texas until they get through their runoff election, which packs in his favor to win, and that's going to be an enormous problem for them. Talarico has been very competitive in all polling there. And he also just raised more money in the first quarter of 2026 than any Senate candidate has ever raised in the first quarter in the history of the country. And so the Republicans may indeed have another race that they haven't yet allocated money for. And I will tell you that the shock that this is presenting to them and the gravity of this is starting to destabilize the Washington Republican Party. The Washington Republican Party is kind of melting down legislatively in Congress, and it's not functioning properly anymore longer. And they have very small majorities, and they needed a lot to go right for them to be able to keep things together. They're not keeping things together anymore. And you're seeing now Trump start to lose votes, and there just be just sort of chaos and fighting between the two chambers. And this is what happens when you realize that you're in deep shit and things aren't working, and that the guy who's leading you into battle is maddled and crazy and doing insane things and posting about his apprentice show in 2004 today. For example, he was tweeting, posting about literally his television show in 2004 today. And it has also put the party in a place where this war is further eroding their standing, is driving up gas prices, which disproportionately affects Republican voters. It breaks through the MAGA bubble. We saw it today in one of the polls that I shared that Trump's approval rating on inflation was in the 20s, meaning that almost half of people who vote for him now disapprove of his handling of inflation. And that's because gas prices really are disproportionately affecting rural and parts of the country, right? Urban people don't drive as much. And gas prices are a major issue with Republican voters. Gas has spiked, diesel has spiked, fertilizer prices have spiked, the farm economy is taking a battering. So core parts of the Republican coalition are being pummeled right now by Trump's policies. And what's remarkable about this is that we're in the middle. Donald Trump has created a global economic crisis that is now, based on the analysis that I've shared with you, is going to cost the world more money than the global financial crisis from 2008 to 2010. And COVID, and there has not been a single hearing in the House or Senate about the war and about the consequences of what's happening. Because they're operating with this unbelievably delusional mindset that just like with COVID, as Trump said about COVID, it's just going to go away. They believe it's just going to end. And then everything is, Kevin Hassett told us this the other day on TV, and then everything is going to snap back to the way it was. And inflation would go to zero, Kevin Hassett. And Trump's top economic advisor told us on television the other day. Meanwhile, inflation was already had been reignited because of the tariffs and was going up significantly as I've been writing about and commenting about here in our videos. Inflation was already rising significantly before the war. And they're in a place of just such profound denial and delusion about the gravity of the crisis that Trump has created, that they can't even hold hearings about it. And what you're seeing is you're seeing departures, people leaving, right? We have an infighting going on. We just lost the Navy secretary resigned today or left the building. It's a little bit unclear what happened. And we've now lost three cabinet secretaries in the last few weeks. And Kash Patel has to be on his way out after his performance over the last few days. And this definitive story in the Atlantic about his drinking and not showing up for work, and then not be able to find him from time to time. And his sort of aberrant behavior, which is evident for all to see. And I think what I'm trying to get at here, and I'm struggling to articulate this, is that I can't express to you as somebody who's a lifer here in Washington, and been around members of Congress, and been in this game for all these years, how much their thing is collapsing right now. And I think it is not a normal collapse. It's something that feels sort of epic and structural, and I just don't know how much longer they're gonna put up with it. That the Republican machine and all the Republican candidates and all the donors and everyone who's made these massive investments in keeping us out of power, how much they're going to continue to allow Trump to be president and to lead them, because he's just clearly can't any longer. Everything he's tried has failed. And this war is the greatest failure of a president in our history. You and I could make a list of seven things that should have caused him to be removed from office. But the war is breaking him. It's breaking the Republican Party. The data we got today suggests that he is really plummeting into places where discussions about getting rid of him are going to start happening quietly behind the scenes. Because the level of this, if they can't fundamentally change the trajectory of this election, as we just saw in Virginia, that we keep winning in these special elections all across the country. We won throughout November. They have political people that make a living off of this stuff. They study all this stuff. They know what's coming here. And they have to fundamentally change the trajectory of the election. I think they're going to start realizing that it doesn't matter how much money they spend. They have to, they can't bullshit their way through this, the scale. And I think that the way they rationalized all this was that it was just going to, the war was just going to end. And everything would snap back to the way it was, even though the way it was was terrible before. But that's what they, but now that's not true either. And Iran has got Trump by the cojones, and they're squeezing, and he's breaking. And I don't know what's going to happen. I think this is politically unsustainable. I think that the Republican are the fan hollow men, and are stumbling around with zombie understandings of what's happening. But the panic button has been hit, and I think that we should be heartened as Democrats with the opportunity that we have, and I'll conclude with this and we'll get to your questions. The opportunity we have to win in places that we never thought we could win this year, to take all sorts of power away from Republicans and MAGA, who deserve, there's ever been a political party in our history that deserves to get trounced in a midterm in an election, this Republican Party deserves it, and to reclaim and reconnect with parts of the country that have been difficult for us. I mean, if we could win state-wide in Iowa, in Ohio, and in Alaska, I mean, I showed today in my post that the last time we won a governor's race or a Senate race in Ohio was 2018. In those other states, the last time we won a governor's race or Senate race in Texas was 1990. The last time that we won state-wide races in places like Ohio, Iowa and Alaska was 15, 20 years ago. And so we are playing in parts of the country now that have just been really hard for us in recent elections where we have very little experience in winning and where there isn't a lot of infrastructure on the ground and not a lot of staff and candidates who've been through winning state-wide races, which is why the investments that we've made into these, you know, that what I called when we launched it six months ago, the Audacious Expansion Fund or a little bit longer than that. It was audacious because what I argued was that if there was a wave election, these were the states that were going to be in play and we needed to prepare for that. Because if you have a plan and you invest towards something, the only way something happens is that if you try to make it happen and we set out as a community last fall to make it more likely that these states, if they came into play, that we would win, not just be competitive that we would win. And we've made these far-sided strategic investments in Alaska, in Iowa, in Ohio, in Texas, in Florida, in Maine. And we've obviously invested a lot in John Ossoff in Georgia. We've invested a lot in Roy Cooper and the North Carolina Democratic Party. But I'm very proud of the fact that we saw this possibility. And as I used to say to you when we began this, that things that are possible only happen if you make them so. And we have been, you know, we have been in some of these state parties, we are the largest outside investor in the country other than the DNC. And Ken Martin's plan to lift up and strengthen and create a floor underneath all state parties across the country, which has been, you know, I think more successful than people really understand. And then we can talk more about that in the Q&A. So I'm very pleased with where we are right now. We have a ways to go. We're not where we need to be. We saw in the Virginia race last night that it was probably closer than everyone expected, but we won, right? It happened, it's done, we got it done. And that's what's all that matters. None of this is going to be easy. I mean, we could lose every one of these races. We could lose Alaska and Iowa and Ohio and Texas and Florida. But we also could win them all. And so our job now is, and what I want to challenge everyone here, for the networks that you're part of, whatever communities you're part of, job one now is to bolster our candidates and our state parties, to make it more likely that we seize this opportunity that's in front of us, and take back power in the heart of MAGA land, and do everything we can to degrade this political party that deserves to lose this election. And it means that putting this quarter, we need to have a big quarter in terms of giving and fundraising, because the money that we're giving now goes to building out the teams that actually run everything starting this summer. This is a very critical foundational thing. The stronger the basis, the more money they have now, the stronger the campaigns will be. When the late money comes in, it's mostly for paid communication and advertising. But the field operations, the communication staff and all the stuff is being hired now. And that's why this money that we're giving now matters so much because it's structural. It creates a stronger foundation for the general election campaign. And also that the general election is going to begin in just a few weeks. The Trump Super PAC is going to start spending its hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars that it has in May and start attacking our candidates and running ads for him. In May, they're not going to wait because they're in so much trouble. They're going up early. They have to. And then the House and Senate Super PACs for the Republicans are going to go up in the fall. They've divvied it up, right? Trump's going up over the summer. They're going to go up over the fall. And the truth is, our candidates are out raising their candidates by dramatic amounts. So thank you, everybody. We have a hard dollar advantage. But they have more money than we do in the aggregate. Some of that, we can't get too freaked out about that because you have to remember that hard dollars, the candidate money, spends on TV anyway, what's called the lowest unit rate. And so a one dollar of a candidate dollar usually takes two or three dollars of a super PAC dollar. So it's not a one to one thing, right? So they have to often spend. So they have more money in their super PACs. We have more money in our hard dollar side. You'd rather have more money in the hard dollar side. But they have so much money and they're going to go so negative. And they're going to, as we saw in Virginia, they're going to say and do anything to try to win. I mean, part of the reason Virginia was so close was the scale of the lying and the misrepresentation and the bullshit that they were peddling was out, you know, was on the edge of how we play politics in America. Not a big surprise. We're up against a political party that doesn't believe in democracy. And so we have to be prepared for them to do whatever it takes in this election to win. And we've discussed that, we can talk about that more. But I just want to, my assessment for you, as I try to do here every week, is that they're in serious trouble. Trump is a failed president. His numbers are plummeting, and he's getting to levels of polling that I didn't think we would possibly see. I didn't think he would ever fall below 35 percent in the cycle. I just didn't think it was possible for him to get that low. The polling we're seeing in the Senate races, it's just shocking how weak they are and how strong we are right now. But all of this is just an opportunity. It's not a done deal. And we're just going to have to fight as hard as we possibly can, because we have the possibility of delivering a really serious blow to MAGA, one that will be significant to weakening this horrible ideological movement in the United States. We just saw this remarkable victory we had in Hungary, and which was a huge blow to greater MAGA. It's our turn now. They did their job in Hungary. We have to do our job here. And so part of what I'm going to be doing with Hopium, staying very, very focused in introducing to you the candidates and the state parties that are on the front lines that we need to support to have the election that we all want to have. And I'm a lot more optimistic about that today than I was a few weeks ago. But I also want to end by saying that I think that our discourse in this country is dramatically downplaying the significance of what's happening because of Trump's failed war. We are in a severe global crisis. That in our daily media is not representing it that way in any way. And that we, there's an urgency for our leaders to continue to confront Trump, to push the Republicans, to take responsibility for the extraordinary mess that they've created here and everywhere in the world. And that's why what I talk about is that, yes, we have to plan for what we're going to do when we're back in power in January. But in some ways, they are demonstrating that they're no longer capable of governing. That in essence, they've cracked, their thing is crashing. And it may mean that, as I've discussed, some kind of national unity government may have to emerge in the months to come, where we sort of start taking responsibility for governing, not just opposing, because I think that it's just clear that they've shown that they can't actually govern America or be a responsible actor in the world any longer. And so we have to be prepared not just to play politics and to win elections, but to get ready to inherit what is going to be an incredibly another failed Republican president inheriting us unbelievably difficult circumstances. And so as hard as the work is that we're doing now, some of the most important work we're going to do is in the years to come, when we get America back on track from this failed and terrible era of Trump. So folks, I just want to say by saying congratulations on the big win last night. We just keep winning, they keep losing, we keep being strong, they keep being weak, we keep being successful, they keep failing. And we have to use that sense of accomplishment, and keep going. And that's what we do here at Hopium. Thanks everybody so much for being here, for being part of this amazing community, for being part of this big win in Virginia, for contributing and helping our candidates and our state parties all across the country. And let's get to some questions. Lincoln, I know that you often summarize things for me and of the big themes of the night. Let me see of what is on people's minds. Lots of questions tonight. Let me try to stick to the ones that are. Yeah, look, I think we, there's questions about, generally, you know, their ongoing malevolence. This administration is committed to doing things that continue to be shocking. And the harm they're doing. Kennedy's testimony over the last few days was, you know, he's a malevolent, vile figure, lying about everything, misrepresenting, misinforming, purposely, you know, bullshitting his way through this. He's a guy who seems intent on doing remarkable harm to people into the country, right? We're having further cuts on scientific funding that money that was allocated by Congress is not being spent. The forest service is being dismantled, right? Which is just completely idiotic and dangerous. And particularly given that in the western part of the US., we had very little rain and we had very little snow. The snowpack was reduced significantly this winter. And so there's going to be drought and difficult conditions ahead. And we're getting rid of the firefighting capacities of disrupting all that right before what could be one of the worst fire seasons that America's ever seen. There's a malevolence underneath all this. I mean, we're going to be talking a lot about what Joe Genova is doing down in Florida. I don't want to spend my time going down sort of the dark rabbit holes of the day-to-day shit that they do. I mean, it is because we can spend all of our time chasing all that stuff. And I think it, but it's going to continue. And it's why what I often say here is that we have to keep fighting them. When we fight them, we win. So we must do more of it along more fronts. And I think that Democrats are learning, and I think they got a big boost last night in Virginia. This was a tough fight. This was not an easy thing. And this was a high risk thing that Hakeem Jeffries led in Virginia. But he was very successful. And I think the House Democrats come out of this with a lot more confidence that we can fight Trump and the Republicans on other matters. And we're going to need to do that. And you're going to need to continue on the issues that matter to you, calling your congressional representatives and demanding that they block these terrible things that Republicans are attempting to do. There is something when we look back in this time, when we get to the other side of this, and we will, that I think the thing that is hardest to understand is the malevolence and the willingness to do things that are harming people. Kennedy was asked today, over the last few days repeatedly about the measles outbreak. And he kept saying, well, that started before I came into office, without them saying what he was going to do to mitigate it. So his answer wasn't, yeah, it's a big problem and let's go work on it and fix it. It was like, hey, that happened before I came in here. Sorry. And with no sense of obligation or responsibility to protecting people, which is literally his job. That's the thing he's supposed to be doing. And I think that the general awfulness of the people around Trump, the malevolence, the maliciousness. I think that part of the reason you've been seeing Kennedy testify so much is that I think the Senate Republicans want to get rid of him, that they're tired of him and they're terrified about what he's actually doing. Because these measles outbreaks and stuff, this is affecting their voters more than it is our voters. I mean, these things are, this kind of breakdown in public health is going to have significant impact on their communities. I think Republicans in the Senate are going to have to make some decisions about how many of these guys they try to push out. I think they were instrumental in getting rid of Noam. I don't know what happened with Pam Bondi. My guess is we're going to learn someday that there were things she just was unwilling to do and that she just became untenable for her to stay there. We just saw this incredible scandal engulf and take out the labor secretary. Just astonishing stuff that is the kind of stuff that is like even beyond the kind of crazy shit that happens here in Washington year in and year out. Kash Patel seems to be near the end of his run. Kennedy, I think, is in a dangerous, I think there's a huge effort to get rid of him in the Republican side. I don't know how Hickseth survives this unbelievably failed war. And so there is just incredible, just chaos in the internal machine of Trump world. And there's always chaos, but people are starting to fall. The Navy secretary fell today. Bovino fell and is gone. Stephen Miller has largely disappeared from public consciousness. They've buried him. And so I think these are all signs of a regime that is crumbling, cracking, unraveling. They've lost control of the floor. They've been unable to fund DHS. I wrote about this on Blue Sky over the last few days. I haven't written it at Hopium. But imagine that the way they're dealing with DHS funding is rather than working with Democrats to institutionalize reasonable reforms on a clearly out of control and dangerous ICE, that they are, that their solution is to give ICE funding for 10 years without reforming them. I mean, I can't wait to see polling on that. I mean, my guess is that polls at like 30 percent. So this is like their big innovation, their big idea about how to get DHS funded is to shower, to reward ICE with more money for killing Americans, for acting like an out of control, illegal domestic terror force. And they're going to get more money and they're going to be walled off and given special funding for 10 years. I mean, how fucking crazy is that? And this is what I mean, like this thing is breaking down. They're breaking down because Trump, they can't work. Trump is not, I've talked about this a lot. Hopium is that Trump can no longer negotiate with anybody. Because in January in that New York Times article, he declared himself God Emperor of the world. He said there were no limits on his power. And so because he's now God Emperor, and there is no one equal to him, and therefore the only relationship he has with anybody is to dictate and to demand and to direct. He doesn't negotiate with anybody because there's no one is equal any longer. And this is a serious problem. And what happens is that when he gets into negotiations or into settings where he can't win like what happened with Greenland, where Europe put all this financial pressure on the United States, he just walks away. And the problem is he can't walk away in Iran. He can't walk away. He can't negotiate, right? You know what's happened in these negotiations? They're just making demands. I mean, what he did last Friday, where he announced the deal, where Iran had given up all their nuclear materials, that had not happened, that Iran promised that they would never close the strait again, that didn't happen, right? He can't actually enter into good faith negotiation because it would require him relinquishing his God Emperor status. And so therefore, he just makes demands. And when people don't go along, he just kind of moves on to other things. He can't do that here because Iran would be in control of the Strait of Hormuz and would be in control basically of the Middle East and frankly our economy and the global economy. And so he has to enter into some kind of negotiation that would require him to make concessions or to pay large amounts of money to the Iranians to repair their country that he has broke, that he's attempted to break. And he can't then sell that back into the US because it will look like he made mistakes in that he capitulated and that he gave nice things to Iran. And he can't then turn around and sell that back because it's going to be so humiliating for him. And it's going to be such a narcissistic, the narcissistic injury is going to be too great. And so we're in this really like dangerous place where there's no way, there's no easy way to resolve the war. He, yes, there's something that appears to be similar to what Obama negotiated on the table, but how can the Iranians agree to anything? He was negotiating with them when he attacked them, right? And so he's already abrogated the way that we negotiate deals. What I'm saying is that, and I'm going on too long about this, but I think we are in a place where the only reasonable way we get through all of this and to relieve the crisis is for him to leave, because he is the crisis. The crisis is in Iran and it's not the Strait of Hormuz, and it's not the Middle East, it's him. He's the crisis. He created this global crisis. And I don't know how we're going to resolve the crisis without him leaving, because he can't actually agree to anything because of his God-Emperor status, anything that would be reasonable or that would be constructive or productive. He certainly hasn't done it so far. All he does is threaten and bellow and shake his fists at the world. While the Iranians keep flooding the internet with all these humiliating videos of him, and the Epstein files and everything else, right? So I think we're in, I think that what I'll say to you is that I think that we are in a more dangerous place as a country than is sort of the conventional wisdom. And I think that I sit here as a strategist about sort of like, what's the way through? How do you get to where you need to go? And I think the only way that the countries of the world and even people in the Republican Party are going to be satisfied with the future having some chance of not being disrupted again by this crazy person is for him to leave. And I know that sounds insane, but I don't know that it's insane. I mean, Nixon got forced out, Biden was pushed out of the presidential run two years ago. I don't know. I don't know what happens. I think that there are going to be hundreds and hundreds of Republican politicians and their donors who feel like they're about to get wiped out. I mean, you just had a whole bunch of Republicans lose their seats in Virginia because of Donald Trump just the way that the Republican candidates in California who lost and their careers are over because of Donald Trump. Everyone around these candidates that have to run now with Trump being the errant leader for them in the midterms, is going to be really angry and pushing back on them. And their answer can't be as well, we're going to spend $350 million and everything's going to be fine. While Trump then talks about his ballroom and posting crazy shit. So I think we're on an unsustainable path now. I don't know how we get back on, or even the Republican Party gets on a sustainable path. But I think it's hard to imagine that anything good can happen to the country, to the world, or to the Republican Party with him still being there. Because he's the crisis. Let me get to a few more questions. Yeah, I've covered a bunch of these things. Let me go through into the Q&A and see what I can dig up there. Yeah, I mean, the judge ruled against the ballot initiative, but I think I talked to the folks at the TCCC today, they anticipated that, they knew that was gonna happen. By the way, when you say something like, he's a malignant narcissist, he'll never leave. I mean, can I just say something? You have no fucking idea whether that's true or not, right? Like, why foreclose any possible future? I mean, how could anybody know the future? None of us know the future. And so, nobody thought that Orban could ever be defeated. No one thought that Assad would ever be defeated in Syria. No one go down in history about Mussolini, right? Hitler. I mean, these guys all fall. And so, the idea that he's just going to be there forever, I mean, that's insane doomerism. And it's also just not something that is knowable. And it's also not how history has worked, by the way, either. And what we have to be, I think our position should be, is that we think he should leave. We think he is, we don't, I don't think he should be the leader of the country any longer. I'm going to start saying this far more often, far more frequently, in far more public settings, that I think that we're at a point where we don't have to accept the idea that he's our leader any longer. I think he's lost his legitimacy to govern. That's what polling is showing us, that the consent of the government has been withdrawn. And the thing is, for all of you, I can't say this enough, and I'm sorry for jumping on this. It's not up to him whether he stays. It's up to the Republican Party. And if there is open demands, I mean, part of the reason that Biden left is that he was told that there was going to start to be people saying that he needed to leave, that there were going to be prominent leaders of the Democratic Party demanding that he step down from the election. And imagine if that starts happening all across the country, if Republicans start demanding that he leave. And he's already at war with MAGA. MAGA's already, you know, he's already fighting with Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and everything. This thing is crumbling and falling down. And part of what I'm just reflecting to you based on my years of experience is that he's passed now a point where I think it is reasonable to believe that he can fix his political standing or the country, that he has the capacity. And at some point, the Republicans are gonna stop, are gonna, the delusion that the war is just gonna end and everything's gonna snap back and is going to start going away. And they're gonna start realizing that something dramatic has to happen in order to save their asses, because there's gonna be an election. And right now, that election is gonna wipe them out. And so they've got seven months to change that. And they only have a few tools to do it. And the truth is, their bluster around the spending may have been appropriate three weeks ago. I think the gravity of what we're seeing and the likelihood that they can bullshit their way through this, through paid advertising, is becoming far less real for them. And I do think the gravity of the problem they have is sinking in. And I think that they are aware that Democrats have gotten off the mat and are fighting and are winning and are stronger and more capable than we were a year ago. And that our party is getting its shit together in a time when it really matters. And so I don't know what's gonna happen. I can't predict the future and neither can anybody here. And but, you know, he's in a very, he is in a extraordinarily bad place. And I do think that this war is breaking the presidency, it's breaking Trump, it's breaking the Republican Party, and it's breaking MAGA. And we haven't yet come to understand the gravity of what's breaking right now, in my view. And we will in the coming weeks, I think. Susanna asks about prioritizing where to give money. Well, I make recommendations to you that are where I think money should go. You know, I have been promoting the investing in these red states that we need to win. We've raised a lot of money for these red states. I've also given you candidates that are most likely to flip. Remember that set of 12 house candidates that we're raising money for, and I appreciate all of you, the sort of pace of giving has increased in the last few weeks, and I'm grateful for that. If those 12 candidates win, we win the House. Just I mean, yes, we're going to endorse other candidates, and there'll be more, and we can, yes, we can win 40 seats, but let's just be clear about the strategic objective. We want to flip the House, we want to flip the Senate. If those 12 candidates win, the House flips. So you already have in front of you the roadmap for how to win the House. It's sitting there on the Hopium site every day, right? Then the question is, how do we flip the Senate? Well, the roadmap for flipping the Senate is on our site too, every day. It's there, investing in the state parties that we've been investing in that make it more likely we win in these tough places, getting great return on the dollar for the state party investments that we're making, and also the Senate candidates that we've endorsed that are the ones that we need to flip. We will have, the primaries will be over soon in both Maine and in Iowa. And one of the things that this community will be involved in is encouraging people in both states to work with whoever the losing candidate is to rally for the winner and to come together because we need to, in every place where we have primaries. In Michigan, there's a primary as well in the Senate. We're gonna need to encourage, this community should be encouraging people to come together afterwards because we have to keep our eye on the prize. But the roadmap for how we win the Senate is sitting on the Hopium site every day. And it's already there. And so the other thing I just wanna encourage all of you to do is to share the Hopium candidate recommendations to your communities, share these videos that I think have been very uplifting to me. I mean, I think the candidates we've been meeting together over the last few months, you know, they lift my spirits. When I do these interviews with them, I can't tell you how encouraged I am by how grounded they are, how they don't sound at all like they're full of shit. They sound like they're connected with voters. What you're hearing from these candidates, let me explain this, is the confidence of a politician running an election who feel that they're connecting with their voters. That's what you're hearing. The quiet confidence that you're hearing in all of these interviews is a group of people on the ground feeling that what they're saying is resonating and that they're winning. And that's why these interviews in some ways are so uplifting, because what you don't hear is anxiety. You don't hear fear and dread. You don't feel, you don't, you're not hearing candidates who are questioning their path. They're confident in their path. They feel like they're winning. They're not, and they don't necessarily say that, by the way, but it comes out through the language and through their confidence and through their fluency in what's happening to people on the ground, because right now our party is very connected to the struggle of working people in America who've been abandoned by this, by MAGA. And so I think these interviews are also, if you've got friends who are worried and nervous, who don't understand what's happening, share these interviews with your friends, encourage them to watch them, because I promise that anyone who watches three or four of these interviews that we've done recently will come out saying, I can see victory now for us. I can visualize it in a way that I couldn't before. Because we have great candidates, and I'm saying that because I believe it, and because I have spent time with candidates who are not great, in cycles where our candidates were not in touch and where they were struggling to connect. And that's not what's happening this time, and it makes me really excited about our opportunities here. Eden asked a great question, which is, how do we, I think this question about what are we going to do when we have power is going to be something that we talk about here a lot. I mean, it's in my agenda every day. I've laid out with your input, you know, an agenda for Democrats that I think is, you know, reasonable, you know, smart and pragmatic. And I, and I, and is popular, will be popular. And I think that my advice to everyone here, about how to think about the years ahead, is that this has to be seen as a five to 10 year kind of process. We can't have unreasonable expectations about the, you know, because there's still going to be a Republican president in 2027, even if we take back both chambers. And we still are going to have the issue of the filibuster, you know, unless we get to 60 in the Senate, which is a little bit hard to see in 2029. And what I mean by that is that we have to be both ambitious, but also pragmatic because we have to put points on the board. We actually have to get things done. We have to make people's lives better. That's the thing that matters the most. You know, and I was in a conversation the other day with somebody, and we were talking about what should Democrats be doing, and I said, you know, the first and most important thing, if you care about affordability, the first and most important thing is getting rid of the tariffs, right? And the person I was speaking to said, well, Simon, we have to do so much more than that. You know, people were struggling before the tariffs were put into place. I said, yeah, but. I don't know what happened, but let me close with this. Sorry about that. I have no idea. And I should have put the light on behind me. No, my Zoom crashed completely. It just turned off. It was kind of crazy. I don't think that's happened before. Let me close with this, which is that, and I didn't really talk about this much tonight, is that on the question that Eden just asked, and it's a great one. What I believe has to be the overarching, you know how strategy and tactics and mission, you know, all this stuff we get taught, right, about how to build PowerPoints and direct your teams and all this. The big goal, the big goal. You know, we have an agenda. That's a tactical thing, but what's the mission? What are we trying to do together? And what we're trying to do together is to birth, is to create a new birth of freedom here and everywhere in the world. That is our most important work. And it is the thing that we have to be committed to, because as our founders told us, they wanted for all of us to have life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Pursuit of happiness, which is, you know, was third. Life and liberty were one and two. And the reason they did that is because they understood that without freedom, there was no pursuit of happiness. And so without freedom, there is no affordability agenda. There is no better life agenda without freedom. Freedom comes first. And we, as Americans, it is understandable why we would not totally, intuitively understand that, because we've been so free for so long, at least the majority white population in the United States has been. And that we, somehow, I think that you can't have a better life, you can't have an economic agenda, and you can't have a health care agenda unless there's democracy and freedom. And so I think that we have to be, in our work together, we have to be for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that's what we're shooting for. Love you guys. Congratulations on an amazing week. We got a lot of battles ahead of us. Appreciate this community so much, all that you do, so grateful for all of you. And as good as it has been, we all know that our most important work still lies ahead of us. So rest up, enjoy the win. Let's come back tomorrow and go fight another day. Take care.