I'm going to examine the two rival MAGA camps here.
One saying, you know, the U.S. should get involved, the other saying we should stay out.
I'm going to argue for a middle position that I think preserves the true spirit of Trump and of MAGA.
And Mark Mitchell of Rasmussen Reports joins me.
We're going to talk about Trump's popularity, both on foreign and domestic issues, and also the case for reopening the question of who really won the 2020 election.
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I want to talk about the schism inside of the MAGA movement, inside of the Trump coalition, about American foreign policy and what that policy should be.
Now, the specific focus is obviously the Middle East.
It is Iran.
It is Israel.
And I want to kind of get into it and identify the, I think, the two somewhat extreme camps here and argue for a middle position that I think is the truest embodiment of the spirit of Trump, but also the spirit of MAGA more generally.
Before I get there, let me say a few words about the Trump bombing of the Iran nuclear facilities.
It was a far superior way to get this done.
Here's a funny post by this guy on social media.
He goes, I'm surprised it was the bunker busters that took out Iran's nuclear program and not clause 52A, part 3, version 13, subset F on page 14,762 of Appendix 71D, part two of the Obama nuclear deal.
So take that in for a moment.
It's intended sarcastically.
The point is that the Democrats and Obama operate on the idea that the way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is sign here and put your initials on every page of this 17,000 word document.
And Trump shows, actually, there's, first of all, that's not the way.
But there's a much better way.
And it's called Kabum.
And that's, in fact, the way that's pursued.
And that is what gets the job done.
Trump, of course, has been kind of social mediaing all over this.
And I got to say that this guy is going to be sorely missed when he is no longer with us because nobody else can do it this way.
I mean, there could be in the future a President Rubio, a President Vance, a President Cruz.
But whatever it is, it's not going to be Trump, right?
And what I mean by that is this.
Here's Trump.
Israel is not going to attack Iran.
Now we come to my favorite part.
All planes will turn around and head home while doing a friendly plane wave to Iran.
Nobody will be hurt.
The ceasefire is in effect.
And then my second favorite line, thank you for your attention to this matter.
Trump tweets about the most significant things happening in the world.
And then he acts as if the ordinary American basically eating his breakfast cereal has not only been on top of this, has been keeping an eye on this, but is actually partly responsible for these momentous developments, whereas in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
But I like the idea of the plane wave.
It's basically like Israel's been bombarding these Iranian targets, blowing up these nuclear scientists in their bedrooms, you know, destroying the facilities of the Revolutionary Guard.
But guess what?
On our way out, we're going to give you a nice plane wave.
We're going to shape our planes in a formation that's like a hand waving back and forth.
As Debbie and I were joking, Israel is more likely to give them the plane middle finger rather than the plane wave.
But the point is that Trump goes there.
he has, and you have to wonder: is Trump being entirely satirical?
Is he going for the laugh line?
Or is he just being Trump and we cannot help but laugh as a result?
Let me say a word about oil prices.
The Democrats, the media, they were really hoping that oil prices would go through the roof.
And when they heard that the Iranians might close the Strait of Hormuz, you could just see the excitement on MSNBC, on CNN.
It's like, wow, you know, oil prices are going to go up.
Not that they want to pay, they don't really want to pay higher prices, but let's put it this way, they would rather pay higher prices and not look stupid than pay lower prices and look like idiots.
So it's very important for them not to look like idiots.
So they pray for these Trump policies that they've been railing against to be unsuccessful.
And yet oil prices are not behaving themselves from their point of view.
And what I mean by that is that oil prices did temporarily go up, and now they've plunged below where they were before all of this even got started.
So even on the oil price front, you know, when Debbie and I have these conversations, Debbie will remind me, she's like, well, you know, people voted for grocery prices and they voted for oil prices to come down and Trump needs to.
And I think with Trump, interestingly, what he does is he doesn't directly go for the result.
He goes for the win and then he hopes that the fallout produces all these good results.
So for example, Trump is not actively trying to interfere with, let's say, the BRICS nations, which are meeting in Rio de Janeiro in a few days.
But Trump will go for, let's like, you know, let's blow the legs and arms off the Iranian regime.
And we're going to get really good results at BRICS because everybody at BRICS is going to be, do I really want to be in partnership with now this guy, you know, with no arms and no legs, who all he does is debt to America, debt to America.
It's like the guy in Monty Python.
You know, his one arm gets chopped off.
I'm going to get you.
Second arm gets chopped off.
I'm going to get you.
And this is now what Iran has been reduced to.
Um...
Thank you.
Let me talk now about the issue of regime change, because regime change generally can only be accomplished in one way, and that is by taking the street by street, building by building.
You have regime change the way we had regime change in Germany.
Basically, Allied troops converged on Berlin.
And that's how you got it.
And that's normally the way you get it.
Regimes don't normally fall by themselves.
Now, there are some notable exceptions to this, and it is worth saying what they are.
I mean, the South African regime fell without being taken over street by street.
There wasn't, in fact, a civil war.
Essentially, they lost legitimacy, and the South African regime fell.
Similarly, the Soviet Union fell without troops swarming into the Politburo, into Moscow.
Essentially, they lost legitimacy, and they fell.
Now, has the Iranian regime lost legitimacy?
Yes, I think it's lost face, it's lost credibility, but it hasn't given up its revolutionary ideology.
In fact, I don't think they will, and I don't think they can.
And so, for these reasons, I think it's quite likely that this regime is not going to fall in the same way as South Africa did or as the Soviet Union did.
And that's bad news, really, for the Iranian people.
Trump has invented the phrase, he's coined the phrase, MIGA, M-I-G-A, make Iran great again.
But I think Trump's hope is that that can be done, perhaps even with the existing regime in power, if they change course, if they switch to making progress not by conquest, not by sort of violent jihad, but rather by trade.
Now, the question is, you know, can you take radical Muslims who interpret jihad in the violent way and, quote, talk them out of it?
I, for one, think you cannot.
That is not going to happen.
And to the degree that that is Trump's goal, it's going to be a very difficult goal to achieve.
The Israelis, I think, understand all of this better.
And they are pursuing a policy that can be described now as extreme scare tactics.
And by that, I mean there is the Israelis are holding back on the attacks.
I think Nedan Yahoo probably got on the phone with Trump, and there's been some kind of a agreement that after some early violations of the ceasefire, Israel needs to hold back.
And listen, holding back, I think, puts Israel in a very strong position.
If Israel is dealing domestically with Hamas, I mean, Hamas no longer has a parent, right?
Hamas is to a large degree a product of Iran.
If the Iranians can barely survive themselves, how much can they help Hamas?
And the answer is not a lot.
So, and then this remarkable recording has surfaced from the Washington Post.
And this is actually, the Post rarely has real scoops these days, but this is a real scoop because they got audio of a conversation between Israeli military commanders, Israeli Mossad, actually, not military guys, but rather the intelligence agencies, talking to their counterparts in Iran and basically saying to them, you need to bail on this regime.
You need to stop coming to work.
You need to get out of the government.
You need to speak out against the regime.
And why would you do any of these things?
Well, the short answer is to Save your life.
Now you might say, Wait a minute, these Iranians aren't going to go for that.
They don't care about their lives.
They're suicidal.
They're lunatics.
But no, all you have to do is listen to this call.
And you see that the Iranians are saying things like, oh, well, what are you really saying?
And oh, you want us to make a video denouncing the regime?
How do we send you that video?
And then the Mossad guy goes, well, send it to us with your identification on Telegram.
In other words, send it to us on this social media platform.
I'm on Telegram, by the way.
I've got 100,000 followers or so.
So the idea is send these videos to us that way.
I want to make one point about the ceasefire that I think has gotten missed.
And that is it is not in Israel's interest to have a ceasefire, right?
It's in Israel's interest to pulverize the Iranian regime, finish them off.
They are closer to being finished off than ever before.
This is not only good for the Iranian people, this is actually good for the state of Israel.
And yet Israel is not doing it.
And what does that tell you?
Well, it tells you that all the people who say that the Israeli tail is wagging the American dog, or to put it somewhat differently, that the little Satan, namely Israel, is in control of the big Satan, namely us, the United States, is false.
Because if Israel were really controlling the United States, Netanyahu would be giving Trump orders and not the other way around.
Netanyahu would be making the U.S. to do things that are in the Israeli interest and not the U.S. interest, instead of Trump prevailing on Netanyahu to do things that may be in the U.S. interest, but are certainly not in the Israeli interest.
Namely, now that you've got your opponent against the ropes, I'm asking you to quit.
And that's basically what Trump is asking Netanyahu to do, and that is what Netanyahu is doing.
So the net effect may well be that the Iranian regime stays in power.
And this gives prophetic force to my social media post of several days ago where I say the following.
We have undone Obama.
We have not yet undone Jimmy Carter.
Now, on the face of it, you might read that and go, what's Janesh talking about?
Well, what I'm talking about, which will be clear to many of you, is this.
Jimmy Carter gave us the regime.
He didn't give it to us all by himself.
In fact, the Iranian people are partly responsible for that.
And it may be worth me spending a moment on this because this is an affirmation really of conservative age-old wisdom.
Conservative age-old wisdom is that revolutions in general are very bad.
There might be rare exceptions.
And in fact, I can think of off the top of my head really only one, the American Revolution.
Pretty much every other revolution sucks.
The French Revolution was horrible.
The Russian Revolution was worse.
The Chinese Revolution was as bad as the Russian Revolution.
Revolutions in general deliver negative results.
But the Iranian people didn't know that.
And in 1979, there were hordes of them.
And by the way, this wasn't just the mullahs.
This was the middle class.
This was the Bazaris.
This was the entrepreneurs.
This was the students.
They all banded together and they helped to push the Shah out.
Jimmy Carter helped them, but they did it.
And they got, it's now a bitter memory, but they got Khomeini.
They got what they, in a sense, they didn't want Khomeini.
But this is the problem with revolutions.
They take a course you didn't predict.
You might have thought that you would come out on top.
You might have thought the students would come out on top.
But in fact, the mullahs came out on top.
And so essentially, you went from something bad to something worse.
And look how hard it is to undo that.
Look how hard it is to untie the knot that you made.
So Jimmy Carter gave us the regime.
And Obama, I think, was trying to give us nuclear weapons for Iran.
He gave them money.
He cleared the way.
He browbeat everybody who stood in his way.
He cajoled the Europeans.
He got the Democrats to go along.
He was so, so close to achieving his goal.
And he is one of the big losers from this Trump operation.
I mean, Xi is a loser.
Putin is a loser.
But Obama is also in the top rank of the big losers from all this.
Now, let's talk a little bit about MAGA, because in some ways, I think what we're dealing with here is the lessons of the Iraq war.
And those are valuable lessons, and those lessons do need to be taken to heart.
But what are those lessons, really?
I was on the Piers Morgan program a couple of days ago, three days ago, I guess it was, and they had John Bolton on.
And I thought that was very interesting because, of course, Bolton is this hated neocon figure.
I knew Bolton, knew him pretty well, actually, from my days at the American Enterprise Institute.
He wasn't my immediate neighbor, but he was like right down the hall.
So I see the guy like every day and had pleasant conversations with him.
And of course, in those days, we were dealing with a different set of problems.
This was in the 1990s.
But Bolton has now become this kind of bogeyman of the neocons.
And in many ways, he has also become a big Trump critic and backstabber.
Although he's very enthusiastic, maybe not surprisingly, over Trump's obliteration of Iran's nukes.
But interestingly, from that interview, it turned out that Bolton has learned a lesson.
Why?
Because Bolton said something very interesting that people haven't really focused on.
He said, okay, well, he goes, I'm really happy that Trump blew up those facilities.
And he also said, I hope that we get regime change, which, by the way, I agree with.
I hope we get regime change.
He also agreed, however, that we should not be the ones to do it.
That's a big change, Because, of course, in Iraq, we were the ones to do it.
And then, even more significant, he said that if there is regime change, the Iranian people should take it from here.
In other words, the Iranian people should form a government, they should organize their own society, they should ideally be friendly and trade with the United States, but it's their country and they should organize it their way.
The point here, of course, being that the mullahs don't represent the real interests of the Iranian people.
So I think this represents, I think for me, to the degree that Bolton is being honest, that even this kind of quintessential neocon is now changing his spots, is changing his stance, is conceding that he too has maybe belatedly, but he nevertheless is learning the lesson of the Iraq war.
But there are some false lessons from Iraq that also need to be highlighted.
And this is what I was referring to when I talked about the extremes.
On the one extreme, you have, of course, this sort of neo-Khan interventionism.
But on the other hand, you have this idea that the United States should just stay out of it.
If there's something going on, something flaring up, something that's happening, even if those people over there are pointing at us, right?
Think about it.
The Iranians are, what are they shouting in parliament?
They're shouting death to America.
It's like they're calling out to America, death to you.
And then they're going about trying to get these nukes.
Who can deny that they have the intention?
Who can deny that they have the knowledge?
Who can deny that they can get the uranium?
Who can deny that they know how to enrich the uranium?
It's kind of like saying, listen, we're trying to investigate a murder.
We found a guy.
He has the motive.
He shouts death to that guy every day.
And then he is building, he's putting a shotgun together and he knows how to use it.
He's a hunter by profession.
So all the elements are coming together.
And yet there's a certain kind of wing of MAGA that's like, well, that's, you know, don't pay any attention to what they're saying.
Don't pay any attention to what they're doing.
Literally, unless you see a missile flying over your head, like, don't do anything.
This to me is like utter madness.
And look, some of it is no surprise.
I mean, some of the people saying this have, you know, never paid attention to foreign policy.
They don't have a good knowledge of anything above and beyond the kind of obvious lessons of Iraq.
They've spent no time studying anything that happened before that.
You know, they're so you've got a kind of entertaining amateurism, which is understandable.
It's fun.
It's part of the nature of social media.
It's part of the democratization of information.
I enjoy like skirmishing, crossing swords.
I'll go on shows with these people.
Even on the Piers Morgan show I mentioned, I mean, half of that show was Anna Kasparian just shouting.
Not shouting at me, shouting mainly at Jonathan Conrquez, who was the Israeli spokesman, and then shouting a little bit at Piers Morgan.
But this normally, you know, this would be inconceivable on television in like the 80s and the 90s.
But guess what?
I'm actually glad that the social media has opened up this kind of free-for-all.
I'm okay with it.
But it doesn't mean that that free-for-all is always right.
In fact, I want to say that in this case, in some ways, it's short-sighted.
In some ways, it's naive.
And so Trump here has been showing us, I think, pretty effectively that some of these MAGA voices haven't thought hard enough about what MAGA means, but he, Trump, has thought about it, and he, Trump, does best represent it.
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Guys, I'm always happy to welcome back to the podcast our friend Mark Mitchell.
He is the COO and head of polling at Erasmus Reports.
He got his Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy.
Then he went off to get an MBA in entrepreneurship from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
You can follow him on X at mark underscore R underscore Mitchell.
And the website, of course, ErasmusonReports.com.
Mark, welcome.
Thanks for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Seems like a really good time with all this stuff going on to pull back a little bit and get a little overall picture of how Trump is doing in relation to the things that he campaigned on.
As you know, there are people who are, you know, they're kind of grumbling on social media.
This is not what I voted for.
Trump campaigned on a foreign policy agenda and on a domestic agenda.
Let's talk about the foreign policy part of it first, just because we're dealing with bombing nuclear facilities, ceasefires, real or broken.
And talk a little bit about your take on Trump's leadership in this area and how it is or is not being well received by the American people.
Yeah, so I think back in the fall, everybody said, wow, great, Donald Trump got elected and now what?
And I don't think anybody was prepared for the amount of just competing forces that are driving what's happening on a daily basis.
I mean, we saw him come out of inauguration with all of this Doge stuff, then the judges undermining him every step of the way, then the whole debt crisis battle, then Liberation Day.
Then you had all of these riots in LA and the Democrats imploding on a national stage.
And then you have Israel bringing up the situation with Iran and forcing it to front and center.
Now, I can tell you that people support Donald Trump still.
His numbers are doing great, but he won because of his domestic policy agenda, not because of his foreign policy agenda.
And so I don't think that what's happening right now is a political loser for him, but I don't think he's necessarily going to win people over that much either.
But where we're at is that this strike is actually popular.
It's not something that people are against.
And that might seem a little bit different than the dialogue happening on Twitter right now, at least among some on the right.
But 84% agreed that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
57% supported a strike by the U.S., not Israel.
And then Israel did the strike.
Then we went ahead and did the strike too.
And that has a majority support as well.
But they also do not want boots on the ground.
That's only a 33% position.
Only in the teens strongly support that.
So there is a red line here.
And I think that when looking back at this and understanding that we still have this major sword of Damocles hanging over our head with Russia and Ukraine, this situation that has not been resolved, a complicated proxy situation with a strategic nuclear foe.
And we're not talking about their nukes, which are way, way, way worse than the tactical nuke that hasn't even been created yet in Iran.
But I think looking at what happened, we've seen all of the hallmarks of Trump.
We've seen trial balloons get put out.
We've seen him make intuitive leadership decisions based on limited information.
And we've seen him come out and very firmly state what his opinion is.
And right now, that is, we did the strike.
There's no more nuclear capability.
We're not interested in regime change, trying to work something out with Iran and Israel.
And I think that's people are going to like that.
The polling hasn't changed.
His approval rating is doing well.
And right direction is still incredibly elevated considering all the time that it was in the high 20s and low 30s under Biden.
So things are going in the right direction, but he needs to get back to his domestic policy agenda.
Yeah, I certainly agree with that.
Let's stay on foreign policy for just a minute, though, because I think what you're saying is that because the American people are not focused on that, their priorities are different.
They're on the domestic side, it actually gives Trump some room to maneuver, right?
Because the American people don't have clear-eyed sense of what Trump should be doing precisely.
Obviously, they have general views like we support Israel.
We don't want Iran to get a nuclear weapon.
We certainly don't want to be committed to fighting some big protracted war.
We don't want to be organizing tribal meetings in Iran to figure out the future of Iran.
But beyond that, you know, if you get, sometimes I think on social media, we get a vocal sense about where the Trump base is that misses the fact that the real Trump base is the mainstream of the Republican Party.
And what I mean by this, Mark, is just this.
I mean, by and large, a Republican candidate, whoever it is, it could even be, it can be Mitt Romney, it can be McCain, they're going to get about 40% of the vote, right?
Or 45% of the vote.
That's just a solid Republican will vote for anybody who's a Republican.
So you need to get to 51, but you can't claim that that 6% that gets you to 51 is the base.
It's not the base.
It is the Addition that takes you across the finishing line.
And I think that's where people get a little bit confused.
The mainstream of the Republican Party is behind Trump, even though there's a kind of vociferous vocal minority that makes points that should be considered.
The yes, and the normie Republican base is not necessarily completely, they say they're MAGA, like 75% of them, but they're not necessarily 100% adopting of all of Trump's positions.
For instance, there was a lot more pushback on the vaccine than Trump was saying publicly back when he was doing rallies, right?
And then on this one, they are more neoconservative than Trump is.
They just are.
73% of Republicans say, yeah, sure, like we should just strike Iran.
And I think part of it is because old habits die hard.
Some of this stuff's been desensitized.
And also, I very, you're right.
There is the marginal voter, and that's the one that gets the president over the finish line, gives him the mandate in this particular situation.
I think most of those people were voting against a horrible four years of Biden than necessarily voting for Trump, if you know what I mean.
And then also there's this issue of this discussion that's happening, which I think is a very new paradigm.
Like, obviously, there's always been a marketplace of ideals, but we're looking at Twitter in a very salient way right now where that is the discussion.
And I think it's probably healthy dialogue between people who are trying to figure out the truth now, very different than what Twitter has been.
And sometimes that gets ugly.
And I think people, again, some people were probably a little too histrionic, but it's perfectly legitimate, in my opinion, to raise these concerns, not because necessarily Trump should be doubted, but because all of Washington, D.C. and its ulterior motives should be doubted.
And, you know, I went down to Capitol Hill a month ago, and I tell you, it's not the real world.
And Twitter is not the real world either.
We just measured, we asked one random question, like, how important is it for the Epstein docs to be released?
We got about a 70% number who said at least somewhat important, 35%, very important.
So people want it out.
But then we asked Republicans, what's your opinion of Pam Bondi?
And only 8% strongly disapprove when she gets ratioed on Twitter because she hasn't released the Epstein files yet.
So it's an interesting marketplace of ideas.
I think it in some ways sets the core and the cadence of MAGA's body of knowledge, but it is not what the normies think.
Let's pivot to the broad range of domestic policy issues, Trump's priority, the reason he got elected.
And I think we kind of all agree that this needs to be where this is the bread and butter of the Trump presidency.
And yet you now have this kind of interception going on by a battery of Democratic nominee judges.
And these judges have, I mean, they really appear to have like thrown out the Constitution and the law books generally.
And it's kind of like if Trump did it, you know, we're going to block and tackle him as long as we can.
We might get eventually overruled, but who cares?
In the meantime, we put a spoke in his wheel.
And it doesn't look like our system has any like easy remedy for this, right?
The Trump people are reluctant to say we're going to go ahead anyway.
They've got to go through the process.
And it looks like, even though people say Trump should be giving this a priority, what is the way to, other than just to appeal these decisions, to move these things forward?
It looks like the Democrats have at least got, I won't say an effective block and tackle, but an effective delay and tackle.
Right.
In my opinion, this election was more existential than prior ones, and I can measure that with numbers.
And we look at right direction, wrong track.
Right direction is always kind of low in prior political, I mean, up until Trump 2.0.
It was elevated during Trump 1 as well, but it's been horrifyingly low.
And so that's not necessarily the best way to measure it.
There's other questions like, are you better off than you were four years ago?
That number has routinely been in the 50s until Joe Biden's administration and it flipped.
Now it's underwater, 35%.
Only 30% trust the federal government.
Only 22% say today's children will be better off than their parents.
And one of the major questions we ask is, what do we need more of in Washington, D.C.?
Business as usual or massive change?
And guess what?
Massive change wins by a huge margin, like 60 points or something like that.
And so everybody acknowledges that there's an existential problem.
I think the Biden administration really squeezed people with oppression and undermining the rule of law and making things unaffordable.
And the middle class has been hollowed out for 10, 20 years.
And so basically, like that, in my opinion, is the domestic policy agenda.
And Trump came in and he signaled that he acknowledged that and started taking the wrecking ball to Washington, D.C. that I think everybody wanted.
And a lot of this was all economic signals as well.
So now the problem is, okay, well, you have a lot of things that have been filling the vacuum, a lot of laser pointers being used by the media, a lot of big flashy things going on, but grinding away in the background is Congress, which quite frankly is doing nothing.
And so I think that that's going to be a problem.
It's going to catch up to people.
And Republicans have a brand disadvantage, but they won.
They're picking up registrations.
I think that's probably due to no fault of their own, basically.
And we're going to get a bill.
Is it going to be great?
No.
Is it going to move public opinion?
Probably not that much.
But at the end of the day, there's very little legislation coming out.
And when you look down at Washington, D.C., it looks like business as usual.
We measured a month ago.
We asked voters, are Republicans in Congress acting on the mandate that they've been given?
60% of Republicans say they aren't.
And that was like over a month ago.
So here we are.
Voters supported shutting down the government.
They want to take a hatchet to this thing.
Donald Trump is signaling that that's the kind of administration that he's going to have.
And I went down to Capitol Hill and everybody's leaving at four o'clock and going a happy hour and walking around D.C. It's super sunny.
You know, they're just talking to the lobbyists that float around Capitol Hill.
They have their things that they talk about.
They go on and do their press junkets and go and subpoena people and have what's, I mean, what's the plan?
What's the plan to resolve the issues that the voters had because This was existential after the Biden administration, and Republicans seem to be failing.
And so, I mean, I guess when we look back, they're not going to want to hear Mike Johnson talk about how rules were standing in the way and how, oh, geez, well, the Democrats didn't play by the rules and we did.
And sorry, you know, our country imploded.
Voters wanted Boesberg impeached, 49% to like something in the 20s.
Like they saw what's happening.
And I think that we can all acknowledge that if the Democrats get a Senate majority again, that filibuster rule is probably in the crosshairs.
So let's get that MAGA agenda codified.
It's the agenda that people want.
What do you think, Mark, is the obstacle?
Is the obstacle the fact that Republicans are skittishly saying, listen, we've got to be very cautious because we cannot afford to risk the midterms?
Could it be that the Republicans just don't know how to organize a slim majority?
By that, I mean that Nancy Pelosi managed with very slim majorities to get to whip her troops into line.
She counts the votes in advance.
She gets it through by one vote if she has to, but she gets it done.
Mike Johnson just is no Nancy Pelosi to that degree.
Could it be that Republicans, unfortunately, voters are partly to blame because they vote for rhinos even in very conservative districts?
In other words, if you don't vote for transformational representatives, you're going to get guys who kind of go along to get along, guys who essentially pacify business interests and they say the right things on the cultural and the moral front, but they don't really do anything.
I mean, this seems to be the profile of so many of our elected representatives.
What I'm trying to get at is what needs to change to break this dynamic?
Why aren't they listening to this mandate from the voters?
This is what I spend every second of my day trying to wrap my head around.
It's why I try to go down in DC.
I don't spend a lot of time there at all, and I'm an outsider.
And I'm just trying to, you know, I speak for the voters.
I want them to get more of what they want.
And the question is, why don't they over and over again?
And I think it comes down to, in my opinion, this is just pulling on my personal experience, organizational asymmetry.
And so if you look at how Republicans behave, they probably behave like you would expect elected representatives in a federal system.
They represent their constituents.
They spend time talking to them.
They become the experts of their state.
They go to Washington, D.C., right?
And then they just do their thing.
And Democrats don't.
They have massive organizational hierarchy systems where it's like, no, you do this or you don't get funding.
You better toe the line where Arabella is or whoever is coming after you.
And I don't know all of the mechanisms that they do it, but you have to admire the fact that they vote basically as blocs all of the time.
And the core radical left ideologies are ubiquitous among Democrats.
There are no moderates.
There's just people that talk like moderates on the left in their elections.
And then they get and they vote down there just like complete radical leftists.
So your audience is sophisticated enough to know topics like the Overton window.
And this is just like one thought exercise that I try and use to illustrate this.
Take the right and say, okay, what is the core principle that for Republicans who ostensibly represent the right on any topic, what is the core principle for something like abortion?
Okay.
And a lot of people would say, well, Republicans should stand for complete abortion bans or total pro-life.
And we can argue about whether we should or not.
That's fine.
But if that's the position, name me how many dollars were spent last year trying to move the country towards that position.
And the answer is going to be zero.
There's no organizations focused on it.
No money's getting spent.
There's nobody on Capitol Hill pushing for that.
There isn't any like caucus or meeting or group or plans.
And so that's the problem.
Ubiquitously, everywhere in America, massive amounts of organizations and funding are used to shift the overtime window left and never right.
And Fox News, Newsmax, those kind of things, people like me, we don't move the overtime window right necessarily.
We just stop it from moving farther left.
They say, hey, here's a super radical left position.
And we say, no, that's stupid.
That's a bad position.
We don't say, no, like, here's the right position and let's compete.
So that's the problem, I think.
And that's why it's hurting cats every time.
And that's why, you know, it's all pork for people's different representative districts.
And that's why it's complete fair game for any interest to walk around Capitol Hill and knock on a representative's door.
And all of a sudden, oh, yeah, that makes sense.
I should do that because you want it to happen.
Oh, you fund me too.
You fund my campaign.
I mean, a really good example, I think, Mark, of what you're saying would be the way in which the left has approached the trans issue, right?
You take a position that is on the face of it so preposterous and so absurd.
Biological men in women's bathrooms playing winds, women's sports.
And if you took an equivalent issue on the right and you raised it, Republicans would laugh you out of the room.
They'd run away.
They would never dream of taking...
Let's at least push it out there.
Let's see.
Let's put some trial balloons.
Let's have some legislation.
Let's file some lawsuits.
Let's get some liberal billionaires behind this.
And I think what you're saying is there's no equivalent mobilization on the right that takes our issues and let's just say, okay, we've sealed the border.
Good news, right?
But Biden brought in 8 million people, or you probably know the exact number.
It's probably 10 million.
Maybe it's more than that.
So what is the scheme to get 10 million people back out of the United States?
And I think what you're saying is there is none.
If Donald Trump hadn't come along, correct.
There's nobody.
Republican big business interests love their slave labor.
I mean, E-Verify is overwhelmingly important.
I talk to people in DC.
I'm like, why can't we just have, you know, a single-page bill to get E-Verify mandated?
Because states are doing it.
We could do it today.
It would massively increase self-deportations in a way that would allow us to not have to spend all of this money that we're doing for increased ice.
They're not going to do it.
They want their slave labor.
And still, the window is moving left.
And if you look around at another topic like sanctuary states, you could say, oh, well, maybe America is the most against sanctuary cities and states Than they've ever been because Donald Trump won on the issue of illegal immigration because people overwhelmingly want deportations.
But actually, no.
We just asked: do you approve or disapprove of sanctuary policies that restrict state and local officials from cooperating with federal immigration authorities?
And a plurality agree, 47% to only 44%.
So even though Trump won on rebuilding the middle class, fixing the border crisis, getting all the legals out, at the same time, the country has moved left on this.
And that's because every single Democrat elected representative is normalizing.
Interesting.
Say a word before we close out, Mark, about the issue of investigating, and in particular, investigating the 2020 election, because that's now in the rearview mirror.
Of course, we made 2,000 mules on that topic.
And there's going to be a certain Republican view that, you know, Dinesh, you're probably right.
Probably the election was stolen.
But what's the point of like revisiting that now?
Trump's in office.
Let's look forward.
Let's leave all that behind.
What's the case for like, you know, digging the body out of the grave and doing a post-mortem to see that this was not a suicide, that in fact, you know, you've got somebody put the knife in the guy?
Voters have not forgotten the 2020 election.
I can tell you that now.
And the reason I know, and as you well know, is that we're the only pollster that was asking these questions.
We asked a ton of them a lot, many times, and found all kinds of ridiculous stuff, including basically half America agrees with the statement that there's no way Joe Biden got 81 million votes.
66% going into this election, at least somewhat agreed that the outcome would be affected by cheating.
You can't have a constitutional republic when basically two-thirds of the country thinks that elections are absolutely cooked.
And I just referred to that Epstein question we asked.
How important is it for the public files to be released for Epstein?
67% said at least someone important, 36% very important.
The next question we asked is how important is it to get evidence into the public domain of widespread coordinated 2020 election fraud?
And when people hear that, the number is a lot higher.
That's 47% very important, 71% at least somewhat important.
There are not many 90% issues in the United States.
Preventing cheating in elections is one of them.
We've asked that question.
Everybody, even Democrats, thinks it's important to prevent cheating in elections.
So this is like a core belief of the U.S. that has been destroyed and needs to be rebuilt.
On the end of this, somehow we have to get to a higher trust society where our institutions work again.
People in leadership positions have principles.
We can trust our elected representatives or our republic's going to die.
So, I mean, we can take our choice.
And that's where we have to get to.
And I think the election is the number one thing.
And on Friday, the other bomb that dropped was that Trump's calling for a special prosecutor.
So there is that.
Awesome.
Yeah, good stuff, Mark.
Guys, I've been talking to Mark Mitchell, head pollster at the Rasmussen Reports.
The website is rasmussenreports.com.
Follow him on X at Mark underscore R underscore Mitchell.
Mark, great stuff.
Thank you very much for joining us.
Thanks, Pierre.
Thanks, Dinesh.
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