Is the left locking itself into minority status for decades to come? Mark Halperin explains how the Democrats have trapped in a prison of their own making, as they find themselves defending riots, opposing deportations, and alienating the mainstream. Alex Marlow discusses how this week's riots highlight the decline and fall of the LA so many conservatives grew up in. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at Charliekirkstore.com! Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here, live from the Bitcoin.com studio.
Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, Alex Marlowe and Mark Halperin join us to discuss the riots, the politics, Elon, Trump, and Big Beautiful Bill.
Two of my favorite guests on this program, thoughtful analytical analysis.
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One of my favorite guests is here.
He's such a smart thinker.
And a great analytical mind, Alex Marlowe.
I saw one of his tweets the other day, and I said to Andrew, get him on the show immediately.
And I just loved it.
Let me read it to you.
It's Alex Marlowe, Breitbart.com, phenomenal Alex Marlowe show.
Alex, great to see you.
Let me read your tweet, Alex, and I'll let you riff on it.
Quote, the invasion of Los Angeles happened decades ago.
I know.
I've lived here most of my life.
The Democrats who run this place and the establishment media put illegal alien criminals over law-abiding citizens every single time.
It destroyed our schools, overwhelmed our healthcare system, and balkanized us to the point where we have no real culture.
We should have stopped it a long time ago.
Donald Trump is stopping it now.
Get out of his way.
Free LA from this madness.
Alex, I love it.
As an Angeleno yourself, please speak about this.
Yeah, thank you, Charlie.
This is one of these things where I'm watching all these libs on social media yell at us and these celebrities yell at us like we're monsters if we're intolerant of Trump enforcing the law.
This city was ruined decades ago.
It was my really education in politics was understanding that my city was getting overrun and it was causing a lot of downstream effects.
It wasn't just that people are unpleasant or they're all bad people.
No, it's not about that.
It's the effects of illegal immigration.
And what dawned on me is when I was an intern for Larry Elder about 20 years ago, and he was going through how expensive it costs to educate people and how actually public schools in LA are more expensive than private schools per pupil.
It's just the cost is deferred to taxpayers.
Why is that?
Because there's so much administration that's necessary.
There's so many people who don't speak the language.
There's so many things that need to be put into place, not just the bureaucracies and the unions and all that stuff, but to educate people where English is a second language and to put that entirely on the state, and they're coming from homes where the parents And we don't just tolerate it, Charlie.
We embrace it.
We love it.
That's just the school system.
So that's why a public school student costs more than a typical Catholic school student in the L.A. area.
And the schools are not usable.
Our test scores keep going down.
There are more dangerous places to be.
They're completely unpleasant parts of life here.
That's just one example.
But health care is another massive one.
My wife worked at a community hospital serving a largely Hispanic population, and they don't ask you for your papers when you go in to get a service.
And if you need something, like let's say a bone marrow transplant, it costs $700,000.
And if you're an illegal alien and you showed up at her county hospital in L.A. that she worked at, they don't turn you away.
Who is paying for that, Charlie?
I'm paying for it.
The taxpayers are paying for it.
And so how can you run a city like this?
And yet we just accepted it, that this is what we're going to have in this city.
Illegal aliens are going to make everything expensive.
There's going to be more crime.
And my point about the culture is very big.
L.A. used to be the cultural hub of the world.
We're totally balkanized now.
There's areas where certain groups of people go and areas where other groups of people go, and they don't always cross over.
That is bizarre.
That's not America.
That's not a melting pot.
That's like the prison tray that you get your meals on, where everything's sectioned off.
You don't run a city that way.
And that's been our life here for decades.
And Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and Tom Homan, and Kristi Noem are saying, why?
Why, Charlie?
Why are we doing this?
We're not doing it anymore.
Honestly, you know, my whole life I've heard people complain about traffic on the 405.
Mass deportations will help solve that.
Really well.
I'm being honest.
I mean, you can't bring in millions of people and act as if they have the public infrastructure for it.
And look, as a nation, we have a big heart.
I think that if someone's in this country and they need immediate health care, you save their life.
But you cannot simultaneously have domestic generosity with unruly invasion.
They are a contradiction.
So then all of a sudden your generosity is taken advantage of and we are naively then subsidizing our own demise.
And this is a very, very important point.
Good intentions.
Everyone has good intentions.
They mean nothing.
They don't translate to good public policy.
And in Los Angeles, it is a cluttered city.
And again, the media is going to take this out of context.
I don't care.
It's a dirty city.
I'm not saying it's all because of immigrants.
It's just dirty.
Graffiti is everywhere.
There's trash on the streets.
There's homeless everywhere.
It's a filthy place.
And it never used to be that way, right Alex?
It doesn't need to be this way.
You're exactly right.
It's become a filthy place.
I've got a video at the top of my Instagram page where I go down to the La Brea Tarpa, which was supposed to be a family place to go.
There's a National History Museum.
You learn about history.
It's a homeless encampment now, basically.
Why is that something we want?
Why is that something that's a given, that's a guarantee?
I was just noticing a mural of Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gigi, who died in a helicopter crash, defaced by these protesters, essentially protesting against ICE.
Why is that helping your cause?
The city's become a lawless place.
And this is the fundamental thing, Charlie.
Democrats do not view law and order as a value.
They don't like it.
They don't think that they want chaos.
And so law and order is an antidote to chaos.
So they don't like that.
So they don't like the concept of we can set a law and we can enforce it.
They would rather have things be enforceable based off of their will and their political impetus at the time.
And so this has been toxic in this city.
It is not working.
I'll tell you that my wife, for example, worked as a trainee, so not making a lot of money, treating illegal aliens, and she would do it with a smile on her face, give them the best care she possibly could.
And why?
Because to your point, we are humanitarian.
I don't want illegal alien kids running around.
They're probably better off in the schools, as expensive as it is.
What are they supposed to do?
Like run around the neighborhoods all day?
That doesn't make any sense.
We're going to be humanitarian if you're here.
So why leave the border open and why not crack down on the people who we know are illegal and should leave?
You can have welfare and closed borders or open borders and no welfare.
You cannot have both.
They cannot coexist.
The entire system collapses.
It falls apart.
And let's kind of go deeper into the whole California thing, which is – We cannot show it enough.
And a lot of normal, non-political people in my life are shocked and horrified by this, Alex.
And it's not that we're horrified necessarily by the sight of a Mexican flag.
My favorite taco place in downtown Phoenix, which they're all Mexican, Mexican flag.
No, no, no.
It's the symbol.
While you are doing destruction, that is obviously a defiance that we have more loyalty to this nation than the one that we're currently domiciled in.
Over the smoke and over the ashes.
Alex, we have not seen this sort of, let's just say, stunning aesthetic as a gut punch to the Democrat Party since Floydapalooza.
Am I right?
No, and it's amazing how quickly they went for it because they're trying to do this narrative of the gaslighting for Maxine Waters and some people in the media that this is mostly peaceful.
It wasn't peaceful for a second.
They immediately said, where's the first electric car?
Let's torch it.
I mean, they didn't wait five minutes.
And with the Mexican flags out there, I got to say, I listen to a lot of Spanish music and I listen to, it's the Mexican food is my favorite type of food.
It's a, if I'm ever relaxing, which is very rare, it's probably going to be a tequila or a mezcal that's in my glass.
It's like, I'm fine with Mexican culture.
That's not what this is.
This isn't even Mexican culture.
This is an invasion of our cities and are trying to torch things and destroy things.
It's all the destructiveness of it all and the entitlement of it all, that you're allowed to be here even though you broke our rules.
And that is something that is national Democrats are looking in horror right now.
This is what the sources are telling me right now, and I've spoken to a lot of them in the last couple days.
They're horrified about what's going on.
Big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big.
LA Democrats like it though, Charlie.
Yeah, go ahead.
I'm telling you right now, the non-political, I was telling this to, you know, look, I'm going to just say this, I've said it before.
Please.
Non-political person, just, you know, muscular class, she helps us out, whatever, great person.
Non-political, voted for Trump, but like, out of nowhere, she's like, these riots?
This is what Democrats do.
She's like, I feel like every couple summers they try to burn down our cities.
This is now becoming a meta-narrative.
It is being tattooed into the consciousness of the American people, which is that non-political people, because look, if it burns, it goes to the front lines and people look at it.
And can we just show that one B-roll, guys, of the one after the other, the cars burning, just in flames?
And by the way, just so we're clear, If you're burning an electric car, do you understand the pollution that you are putting into that community?
I mean, yes, burning a car is bad.
The cobalt that you, I mean, just that alone is like really bad, okay?
And these are the environmentalists, right?
These are the green people that think the way that you effectuate change is the smell of cobalt in the morning.
And so the, and by the way, the seats, Anyway, that's a whole other separation.
Of course, they never cared about that.
But the more important component is the Democrats, they seem completely incapable or unwilling to try to rein this in.
To me, I just kind of shrug my shoulders.
We should not let L.A. burn, though.
Some people on the right say, oh, let L.A. burn.
No, no, no, this is America.
That is National Guard.
Force must be met with force.
1807 Insurrection Act.
We must defend our country.
This is our land.
It's not Mazito.
This is not La Raza.
This is not some sort of, you know, Mexican project.
This is America, and we will defend it.
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Alex, you had a thought.
Please chime in.
Yeah, Charlie, I think your point, here's the point that you were set up, which I think is really crucial.
What is this all about in California?
The main thing that's happening right now in the state is that there is a referendum on 30 years of governance or more.
Where the entire fabric of the Democrat Party, even the Republican establishment, you saw Rick Caruso out there who was pretty heroic in his response to the LA fires out here.
But he's someone who had his businesses at stake and they almost went up in flames because the LA fires, the incompetence of the governance.
But now, all of a sudden, he's a big wimp when it comes to standing up for the people against the illegally alien criminals.
I bet he regrets that tweet.
I bet he does.
Big time.
Unbelievably bad tweet.
Second worst tweet of the weekend behind the Simone Biles tweet, which is still worse somehow.
But here's what's going on.
It's a referendum on 30 years of governance.
For Gavin Newsom to admit Trump's right, for Karen Bass to admit Trump's right, and we're actually going to help him, that is saying that everything I've stood for, which has been the fundamental issue in California, is we believe in open borders.
That is the society that they've crafted.
Yes.
Is it that this is wrong?
And they can't do that.
Gavin Newsom can't run for president now after 30 years in politics, all of a sudden saying, yeah, you know what, we like ICE enforcement.
He cannot do that.
It's never going to happen.
So he has to act like Trump is wrong, Miller's wrong, Holman's wrong, and he's going to stand on behalf of the rioters.
Trump has set another trap.
This is the proverbial 97-3 issue, and we don't know who the three is.
Apparently the three is, I guess, the guys who are out there protesting.
But they're completely stuck because they cannot.
They are held captive by this ideology.
And Alex, the fear that many of us had is, hey, once these deportations happen, you know, we're going to lose public support.
Turns out not the case.
We're going up in approval.
Americans support it.
And these riots only pour gasoline on the fire of us getting even more approval.
Because now, if you're against us, you're on the side of the rioters.
If you're against us, you're on the side of the people flying Mexican flags in our face while they're trying to kill police officers.
Let me repeat that.
This was not just like, oh, you know, they're just burning cars, which is bad.
Let me be very clear.
Burning private property is bad.
It's criminal.
It is against the Ten Commandments.
You shall not do it.
It is stealing somebody else's property.
It should not be tolerated.
But they'll say, oh, it's just stuff.
No, no, no.
They were trying to kill police officers.
Okay?
This guy just got indicted for throwing a brick at a police officer's car while it was driving.
This is violence against their livelihood, Alex.
Yeah, I've got a report from the Department of Homeland Security this morning.
Molotov cocktails hurled at officers during the riots.
We're going to go around and act like these people are peaceful.
There's not a peaceful bone in any of these protesters' bodies.
And we're going to see this over the weekend in all likelihood.
We're going to see violence break out.
They cannot control themselves.
They love to riot.
They love violence.
They love the chaos.
And they think that they can just bully us into silence like they did in 2020.
It's not happening this time.
The people see it.
This weekend, they have this thing called the No Kings protest, which is funded by Walmart and the Walton, at least one of the Walton heirs, Christy Walton.
And they say it's going to be all peaceful.
They can't help themselves, though.
And I've intentionally not talked about the No Kings thing because I don't want to make it bigger than that, but everyone's emailing us about it.
It's fine.
It's already out.
And it's going to be everywhere.
And I hope everyone remains peaceful.
You have the opportunity to be totally wrong and to go against Trump.
I don't think it's in their DNA.
I don't think it's in their DNA.
To be able to stay peaceful.
And also, we already seen last night in Atlanta, they were burning cop cars or attempting to.
They were launching fireworks at police helicopters.
And so all of this, the politics of this is super perplexing.
Alex, I wish I could keep you for a full hour, but we have Mark Halperin next.
Just really quick, Alex, I want you to comment.
We were told when you and I were getting our start 10 years ago, you must be for amnesty or we're going to lose the country.
How much things have changed?
Final thoughts, Alex Marlow.
Completely different, and it's just amazing.
And any of you who are going to get confronted by friends saying that we're demonizing illegal aliens, I will tell you, the people who just want to sell mangoes on the side of the road, they want to stay in the shadows.
They don't want any of this stuff.
Ask them how many families, American families, should have their lives ruined by illegally alien criminals, drunk drivers, fentanyl that comes over our border, murders that go on, rapes that go on.
How many families, American families, should have their lives ruined by illegally alien criminals?
If that answer is above zero, you and I have nothing to talk about.
That number is zero, Charlie.
And here's the thing.
A lot of Hispanics that are going to get deported or their family will be deported, you know who they're going to blame?
They're going to blame the rioters because it now justifies an equal and opposite reaction.
It justifies force.
And so the people that then get deported, they'll be like, those stupid morons that started burning cars.
You know, of course they're going to respond, and they being the U.S. government.
And we will.
Final thoughts, Alex?
Yeah, legal immigrants are moving to Trump faster than any other group.
They hate this stuff.
I will tell you, they despise it.
If you fail to assimilate to our culture, then you will no longer have a country.
Multiculturalism has been a failure.
Uniculturalism is actually what the founders wanted.
E pluribus unum.
As Andrew Breitbart would say all the time, he would say he educated America on e pluribus unum with Dennis Prager and Andrew Breitbart.
E pluribus unum out of many one.
You could keep your traditions and you could keep your food, but you're coming here to assimilate to our culture.
Alex, thanks so much.
Beautifully put.
Thanks, Charlie.
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We have a phenomenal guest and a regular of the show, Mark Halperin, editor-in-chief of Two Way and host of Next Up on the Megyn Kelly Network.
Mark, great to see you.
I'm coming on your show a lot, so you had to reciprocate.
Great to have you back on the program.
Delighted to be here, and you've inspired me.
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Yes, you got it.
Come on, Mark.
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You got to name every...
So, Mark, there's a question I've been meaning to ask you.
Which is, how from the outside are Democrats, how were they viewing the Elon-Trump situation last week, and then how is it settling in their mind today?
At least from my outsider perspective, it seemed as if there was some sort of joy and delight in the kind of schism, but it looks as if that is being healed.
From the Democrats that you talked to, walk us through the inside.
I think there are two groups of Democrats who I've talked to about this, so I'd break them down.
And the larger group tends to respond to things always leading with Trump derangement syndrome.
And so for them, anything that's chaos with Donald Trump's world or anything that suggests a negative storyline that the press is going to cover, they like.
They just kind of have a visceral reaction to it.
So they're just...
And they always want to then plug that into their sustaining now decade-long narrative of he's the chaos candidate, he's the chaos president.
All this is going to come a cropper because he doesn't have any idea what he's doing and he's so mercurial.
There's a smaller, more thoughtful group that recognizes that the party has a problem.
From a practical point of view on fundraising and a relationship to the future with Silicon Valley, because the Silicon Valley wing of America used to be much more aligned with the Democrats, ideologically, practically, in terms of helping with campaigns, etc.
And that's shifted now.
Now, it's not 100 percent shift and Elon, but Elon is just one of many who many of whom you know well, who now think of themselves as being part of Team Trump and more Republican, more conservative.
And that group of Democrats says, well, is this an opening either explicitly with Elon, which I doubt it will be, or more generally, can we use this as an opportunity to to say where that where the disagreements are?
For instance, Elon seems very concerned all of a sudden, some Trump people would tell you about deficit reduction.
Maybe this is an opportunity for the Democrats to to glom onto that and become the deficit reduction party.
The day that all this happened, and I was mocked, I said, before Christmas, Elon Musk will be at Mar-a-Lago with two scoops of ice cream next to President Donald Trump on the patio, and all will be right in the world.
And people said, no way!
I said, I think I know these two guys.
I said, and even a week from now, it's going to be a little bit simmered down, and looks like that prediction might be right.
We'll see what happens.
It might be as early as July 4th in Bedman Street.
I'll just say, I think Elon's going to have to pony up some cash for the midterms in order to make this fully right.
Which he might have done anyway.
I'll just say, I thought they'd stay together longer.
And there's really nothing in it for Elon Musk to be at war with the president.
There's lots of negatives to it, but there's nothing positive about it.
And so I think you're right that this is kind of some sort of rapprochement was inexorable.
And Donald Trump, contrary to what people think about him, is the ultimate forgiver.
He just is happy to move on if he thinks it's in his interest.
And it's in his interest to have rapprochement as well.
So now back to the main news that's been dominating the last couple of days, which is the riots that started in Los Angeles.
And there was some unrest in Atlanta, and it's been spreading to other cities.
What are Democrats saying about this internally?
Externally, some are still calling it peaceful protests.
In fact, L.A. was so peaceful that Karen Bass had to do a curfew.
It's amazing.
She had to contain the peacefulness.
By issuing a curfew.
Now, to Senator John Fetterman's credit, he said, look, this is not peaceful.
This is a riot.
What are we doing here?
This is violent.
Explain to me, because is that a little bit of a divide in the Democrat Party, like one that's living in reality and one that's living in fantasy land?
Please, Mark.
It is.
It's another divide where the larger group is the group that's wedded to the past.
There's some important issues here.
I don't think anyone should be cavalier about putting National Guard or active duty military on the streets of the United States, whatever they're going to be doing, that should be done with thoughtfulness and care and fidelity to the law and the Constitution.
And I think the debate about what to do with the tens of millions or maybe millions, well, it's hard to say, but certainly millions of people who came to this country illegally and since then, as far as we know, have committed no crimes and have contributed to society and are woven into the fabric of a lot of communities.
Those are two really important debates to have.
But Democrats can't move to those debates.
For two reasons.
One is their positions on those two issues are, for the most part, out of the mainstream, and confronting that is something they don't want to do.
And second, again, back to Trump derangement syndrome, they just want to talk about Donald Trump having a secret plan to declare a military junta in the United States and have active duty military shooting civilians all over the country.
Most Democrats now look at Gavin Newsom with new enthusiasm and excitement because they just want there to be a big fight between Trump.
That's where most Democrats are.
Some, like John Fetterman, and he's not the only one, David Ignatius, columnist in the Washington Post today, said quite plainly, this is a 10-year failure on the part of the Democrats.
Like, we can't be in the debate about use of the military.
We can't be in the debate about who should be deported if the Democratic Party doesn't have a clear point of view about some of these issues where they are on the wrong side of things.
That position is smaller than the Trump derangement syndrome one, and it's not dominant.
They can barely get the words out of their mouth to say there's no problem, or there is a problem.
And you pointed out the strangeness of the mayor saying everything's fine, but we need a curfew.
The reality is, there's a lot of issues here, but this is quite simple to me.
Federal law enforcement was doing something that...
And state and local officials could not protect either them or civic order and private property.
Pretty basic.
The president of the United States is responsible for protecting ICE officers.
The president of the United States has got to have to ensure domestic tranquility if state and local officials can't or won't.
And there's no local police force in the country, with the possible exception of Gotham City, who has the capacity to put in the physical infrastructure to make sure there is order restored and civic unrest deterred and property destruction unmolested.
The Democrats just can't talk about these issues because they don't want to come clean with their being on the wrong side of so many of the underlying factors.
And until that happens, you know, my friend John Pedoritz tweeted this morning that he's watching the Democratic Party lock in their minority status for 20 years because of their failure to just speak the truth about what's going on.
That might be a little bit of an overstatement, but it's certainly a minority of Democrats now I talk to who seem to get what's happening.
I don't want to cavalierly throw the National Guard on the street.
My opinion was always I would rather be on the side of not necessarily being wrong, but a little bit overreacting early than late after 2020, where I feel as if there was widespread destruction.
So at least that's my temperament angling in that direction.
And I'm willing to hear a counter to that.
I will say, though, someone that is nonpolitical in my life, just a working class person, she's great.
She voted for Trump, but she can go either way.
So funny.
Ran into her, and she's like, Charlie, what is up with these riots?
She comes out of nowhere.
She says, this is what the Democrats do, right?
I feel like every couple years, they just burn down our cities.
And for me, it was as if this is just a meta-narrative.
Again, she does not know about the big, beautiful bill.
She doesn't know about, you know, any of this stuff.
It's just like the one thing that for her, it's pattern recognition.
She's like, I feel like every couple years, they're just burning stuff down.
And I don't like that.
And for her, that is just a tattooed impression, more so than Trump impeachments, more so than all the stuff that they're throwing at Donald Trump.
You know, he's an insurrectionist.
There's something about chaos in the streets that politically is very unpopular.
Who would have ever thought so, Mark?
And then connected also to the Democrats back in the 70s.
Isn't there a connection to how the Democrats played a little bit of footsie with these guys back in the 60s or 70s and they were not rewarded very much?
Yeah.
Being the party of weakness and tolerance for violence, it's not a winning place.
And we've always had, in the modern era, we've had this notion of the Democrats as the mommy party and Republicans as the daddy party.
You hear Democrats denouncing the violence, and it's the most pro forma thing possible.
It's like watching a third-ranked local TV anchor read a teleprompter.
They just know they have to say, we all decry violence of any sort, da-da-da.
If I were the mayor or the governor of a state with that kind of violence, I wouldn't be saying how limited it is.
It's only in a few neighborhoods.
I'd be expressing moral indignation and focused determination to put a stop to it.
And again, I've said this before, they should be thanking the president.
They could say we have disagreements with the president and he shouldn't be deporting people who sell papaya in the park.
And we don't think, you know, we should be cavalier about the use of military.
But thank you, Mr. President, for making the National Guard available and for making Marines available so we can restore order to our city.
Because our first obligation to our constituents as mayor and governor is to keep people safe and to not allow the wanton destruction of property.
and instead...
They're claiming the president is trying to impose a military hunt on the whole country.
And your friend's point of view about the Democrats, and I think this dovetails with what John Podoretz thinks he's seeing, it's like, You want to be in a discussion about what our national immigration policy should be?
You've got to denounce people who are destroying property or threatening federal law enforcement.
How could we expect people to want to serve in federal law enforcement, in complicated and dangerous jobs, if we are cavalier about threats to them?
I mean, the mayor and the governor should be as outraged as the president about it, and instead, they're reserving their outrage to the president.
It's just remarkable.
From just a purely political strategist standpoint, there was just kind of a lot of just annoying right-wing infighting last week all across the place, right?
And it's just that the Democrats solved that issue for us.
So thank you guys, I guess.
I mean, I hate to see it.
I don't like disorder.
I don't like seeing arson.
But, I mean, the right has never been more unified.
And it seems as if this might be spreading in other cities.
Atlanta wasn't nearly as bad as what L.A. was, but it was certainly bubbling up.
And you're right.
It is kind of this pro forma, like check the box, as if they don't really believe it.
And I said this for quite some time, that people say, well, do the Democrats stand a chance in 2028?
Who knows?
Maybe.
Maybe the economy will be terrible or whatever.
But I could tell you this, that at least ideologically, if the left does not change its appearance quickly on trans stuff, immigration, and crime, I mean, that'll be a tough, that'll be a tough, tough mountain to climb.
And Gavin might be, you know, resurrecting his appearance with Democrats, but I could tell you with moderates and people across middle America, he's now being associated with riots in addition to a failed state.
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We have Mark Halperin here from TwoWay.TV.
So, Mark, big, beautiful Bill.
Last week, some people were wondering if Elon's salvos against it would kill the bill based on everyone I'm talking to.
It seems as if there is an agreement that they're going to figure this out.
We had Rand Paul on the program who has a demand to remove the debt ceiling from the bill.
I don't think that is going to happen.
But he still sounded willing in some ways.
What is your reporting showing specifically with the fiscal hawks, the Ron Johns, who are saying no, but you and I both know that they want to get to a yes, right?
It's kind of like a workable no, which I love.
I think it's great.
I think it's admirable.
What is your reporting bearing out behind the scenes of how they're working, what concessions we can expect and how that will work with the moderates of the House that might not like everything that's agreed to?
Right.
So first on the Senate, there's there's very few there's very few reports.
Republicans, even in play, to be no votes.
The coverage gives the impression there's all these people up for grabs in the Senate.
Maybe there's five, and they can lose some of them.
So people like Ron Johnson, I'm not sure they'll get Rand Paul in the end, but people like Ron Johnson, if you're a student of Ron Johnson's rhetoric, as you are and I am, he's clearly warming towards it.
They'll give him something that he can say, look, I've worked hard for my constituents in the country and made it better.
I can't guarantee it'll pass the Senate, but it's certainly, the base case, it's certainly almost close to 90%, I'd say, that it passes the Senate.
The House is going to be a little bit more complicated, but particularly now because immigration is so front and center and there's money in this bill for the border, it's going to be, it's going to be, we've seen this presence of both parties do this.
On the front end of the votes, in the committee, and then an initial vote in the House, they say, well, this isn't final passage.
Just give us the ability to go forward.
There'll always be a chance to make the bill better.
And then what I think is going to happen is they'll make the same argument they always make at the last phase, which is, well, we've gotten this far.
You can't kill the presidency now.
This is his whole agenda.
It's not a perfect bill, but this is the last step.
I could predict with some confidence that they'll use that argument if the bill, when the bill gets back to the House.
There's one escape hatch plan that some people are whispering about, which is if that doesn't happen that way, which is they get a majority in the Senate, they pass it, the House comes back, they pressure the House, they get the vote.
And in the House, there's not that many people who could possibly vote either under those circumstances.
So this is not a whipping operation where they need to round up 30 members.
It's a very small number, possible, I'm told, that the Senate can't get it together.
And realizes that if they do make enough changes to pass a version of the bill, it can't pass the House.
There's an escape hatch, which is the Senate passes the House bill, and it doesn't have to go back to the House.
It's not likely, but it's possible, and it is an escape hatch.
It allows the president to get a version of the bill signed into law without having to have to have the House revote.
And so the fiscal hawks, I think they're going to come to the table, and I think we're going to have some sort of an agreement.
Are there any primary elements of the bill that you think might be in jeopardy in order to get those votes in the Senate?
Well, it's a great question because, as you know, cross-cutting pressures.
There's some pressure to produce more savings, either by changing the tax cuts or finding more spending cuts.
And there's some pressure to not eliminate or reduce certain programs because of political or constituency concerns.
That's why the notion of just passing the House bill is gaining a little bit of traction, a little bit of currency.
I think that there's a reality here.
And this is where I think true fiscal hawks need to be realistic.
The only path to serious deficit reduction under those circumstances is And as you know, the administration's big beef with some of these outside and congressional scorings of the House bill is that they factor in economic growth that's way too low compared to what's historically occurred and what the administration says their policies will usher in.
What's threatened is maybe some of the tax cuts, whether they're permanent or not, maybe some of the things that are threatened are the degree and nature of Medicare and Medicaid attempts to find savings.
But I think in the end, the cross-currents are going to be more powerful than any single argument.
And I don't know that they'll change it very much.
And as I said, it's possible they won't change it at all because, uh, the, Mark, excellent work.
Thank you so much.
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