Bonus Episode: Trump is Dying. Military Occupation is Happening. What's Next?
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In this episode of Straight White American Jesus, co-hosts Brad Onishi and Dan Miller analyze the rise of fascism in the United States, discussing Trump's failing health and the regime's maneuvers to cement control before he exits the scene. They explore how ICE raids and aggressive deportation tactics are undercutting Steven Miller's totalitarian aims, and the notable resistance by Democratic governors who are increasingly emphasizing state rights. The conversation also touches on the shifting narratives around big government, with the Trump administration epitomizing invasive, socialist policies.
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Axis Mundi Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad O'Neeshi.
I am the author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism, and What Comes Next, and the founder of Axis Mundi Media.
In a minute you'll hear myself and my co-host, Dan Miller, talk about the onset of fascism in the United States, the fact that Trump's health is failing him, and what it's that the regime is trying to accomplish before Trump is no longer able to be the figurehead of the MAGA movement.
We talk about the ways that the ICE raids and the maniacal focus on deportation may actually be hurting Stephen Miller's dreams for a totalitarian state.
We discuss the Dem governors stepping up to the plate and providing some sense of local resistance.
We comment on the fact that the state's rights issue seems to have flipped parties before our eyes and Democrats are now the ones protecting states' rights by any means possible.
We also discuss how the parties are now switching in terms of messaging about big government.
The Trump regime is a big government, one-person show.
Democratic Party never wanted to be any of those things, but once again we're seeing a switch before our eyes.
After that, for subscribers, we have a bunch of question and answer that we entertained on this episode.
And with these episodes, we invite our subscribers to join us.
So there's a live audience.
And the first few minutes is our interaction with folks and some lighthearted joking around and just having a great time with people who were with us in the room as we did this episode.
So it's a little different from our normal protocol.
And if you're like, I don't want to hear your jokes, Brad, well, just skip the first five minutes and you'll hear me get into the serious business of the day.
As always, friends, we appreciate you listening.
We are especially thankful for our subscribers and all of you who support us.
in any way possible.
We hope you enjoyed this discussion, and it is helpful in some way.
Thank you.
Hello folks, great to see you all.
Come in.
Thank you for being here.
So I will tell you, Dan, I just came back from Sedona, Arizona, where I officiated the wedding of my former student.
And it was like such an honor to be asked to do that, but I want you to know that my former student.
is 30 years old.
Somebody I taught in college.
So somebody I taught in college is 30 and they got married.
And like they were doing the math.
They were like, so how old does that make you, Anishi?
And I was like, you know, I've been checking out retirement homes and I'm just really, that's mainly what I do now.
It's my hobby.
So I am almost within half a decade of being able to move into some senior communities.
Yeah.
See?
So I don't think they let you do that if you still got kids living at home.
But, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm like, I'm getting there.
So, yeah, you know, it happens.
So you're counting the days until eligibility into the...
That's what you're doing.
Well, here's the plan for today, Dan.
We're going to talk about things we often talk about.
Steven, is it like, Steven, is it 3 a.m. for you right now?
Yeah.
Okay.
Thanks for being here.
Also, just I want to point out in the chat, I'm not the only person in cargo shorts.
So, like, at least one other, you know, person willing to own that.
All right, people.
Here's the policy.
You're allowed to tell us you're in cargo shorts.
We don't want to see them.
Okay.
So don't show in the shorts.
Okay.
But you know, you can.
Yeah.
All right.
That includes Dan.
I'm going to I'm going to give Dan my thoughts about what's happening with Trump, his health, fascism and the occupation of American cities and what we might expect here in the next six months.
We will then transition to a hilarious story from Dan Miller that I have not heard.
I've only got hints of about Dan doing push-ups at church camp in order to impress.
people.
So we'll just see how that goes.
And that's the plan for today.
Yeah.
And I, if we have, I don't think we're going to do push-ups, but I mean, we can, you know, if we have time, we can do a push-up contest with everyone who's here and see how that goes.
We also, I think, Dan, if we have time, we can compare notes about which senior living communities are going to be best for us in the next.
So everyone's closest to Denny's, like that's the golden ticket.
Everyone's closest to Denny's and you're there.
So I have no problem with Denny's for the record.
All right, you're all ready?
Here we go.
Let's get serious.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Thanks for being here for our bonus episode, August 26, 2025.
And I just need to say it because I know a lot of you were thinking it.
Yes.
Taylor Swift did announce her engagement the day we're doing our special episode.
So I don't know what her deal is.
I don't know what kind of message she's trying to send.
I'm not going to call it a beef, but I don't know that we're happy about it, Dan.
She could have consulted us.
She knew the schedule.
So I'm happy for her and Travis, but I just, I don't know why that had to be today.
Yeah, exactly.
Is that a coincidence?
I don't think so.
Exactly right.
Okay.
And as a Broncos fan, I still, I still have to disapprove of the choice, but yeah, if she wants to reach out to me for recommendations of like other people to get engaged to, I've got some, but yeah.
yeah All right, here we go.
We are witnessing, we're all aware of what is happening in the country.
DC has been occupied by federal agents.
There's National Guard has been sent from Mississippi and West Virginia and other places and Trump is threatening to send the National Guard and law enforcement and military etc.
I should say federal authorities to other cities.
We've seen Dem governors come out in vehement opposition to this over the last several days.
Some of those most notably are JB Pritzker in Illinois, Wes Moore.
in Maryland and Newsom continues his social media run that he's been Bill Crystal talking about the march to dictatorship in the United States in the last couple of weeks.
Military leaders and intelligent professionals have been purged.
We've seen that.
A prominent Trump critic's home was raided.
So John Bolton's home was raided, which I think is a clear sign and just the beginning of that kind of revengeful punishment to Trump critics and opponents.
The Epstein cover-up continues.
A major corporation was extorted.
So 10% of Intel is now owned by the U.S. government.
Universities and the media remain under assault.
The attempt at mid-decade redisturing in order to keep Republican control of the House moves ahead.
Mass deportation and civic intimidation continue.
Presidential control of law enforcement in the nation's capital intensifies.
And vanishingly few Republican-elected officials objected to any of this.
Garrett Graff, writing at the doomsday scenario, puts it this way.
American fascism looks like the president using armed military units from governors loyal to his regime to see cities run by opposition political figures, and it looks like the president using federal law enforcement to target regime opponents.
American fascism looks like the would be self-proclaimed king deploying the military on US soil, not only not in response to requests from local or state officials, but over and almost specifically despite their vociferous objections.
The president's military occupation of the capital has escalated in recent days into something not seen since British troops marched the streets of colonial Boston.
Even though precisely nothing has happened to warrant it, the Pentagon is now armed.
The National Guard, patrolling DC and armored vehicles designed for the worst of combat are patrolling the capital where they're colliding with civilian vehicles because war transports are not supposed to be on civilian streets.
I could continue, but that is kind of a rundown of where we are.
We are in a place where the capital of the United States is occupied by the military.
There's no other way to put that.
We're also in a place where the right-wing socialism, the big government, and it's not even conservatism anymore, and I'm not going to use that word, but right-wing socialism is now unfolding before our very eyes.
This is the Atlantic.
It's David Graham.
Trump is attempting to force states to stop using mail and ballots, which he falsely claims are linked to fraud, and we can talk more about that.
This is a huge attempted power grab over elections.
There's other attempts to expand the federal government's reach within the public sector.
I just mentioned what happened with Intel.
Trump strong armed law firms into agreements in which they're reportedly doing free work to boost his agenda.
He threatened to revoke the broadcasting licenses for NBC and ABC.
He has, we all know, waged war on universities.
And he's even trying to tell the National Baseball Hall of Fame who it can enshrine.
Now, he's also doing something that may seem paradoxical, but I don't think it is.
He's shrinking the federal government's footprint if you think about agencies.
So that's USAID, the Education Department, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and so on.
So in one sense, he's overreaching, and in another sense, he's reducing.
But I don't think those are paradoxical or contradictory.
He's enlarging the executive's power while by consolidating that power through the elimination of these agencies and these other institutions.
You get rid of institutions so that you, the executive, can consolidate your power within the executive branch.
Graham says the result is a government that is less effective at providing services.
Remember what I always say, they want to rule they don't want to govern and you have a government that is more expensive and more intrusive this is just the nightmare that right-wing politicians and thinkers have been warning about for a century and now their party has made it a reality Dan I want to say two more things but I'm going to throw it to you on this on this prompt I think if among many other things that we're going to get to today including fascism and totalitarianism and what to do about it and
what is being done about it and so on.
I want to gander that we are watching the two parties flip when it comes to states' rights and the federal government before our eyes.
So everybody who is listening and watching right now, think about for however old you are and however long you've been politically aware, 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s, state's rights.
This was the cry of the Tea Party against Obama.
This has always been the defense of the Civil War.
This has always been the way that the supposedly small government Republicans have sold their platform.
We want state's rights.
We want less federal government.
DC should shrink.
The federal government should go away.
We are watching these Democratic governors.
We're watching Pritzker and Moore and Hochul and Newsom and others, Bashir in Kentucky.
We're watching them start to organize in ways, and I'll get to this, and I'll have more details here after I throw it to you, organize in a way that is building defenses and even ways of softly not participating.
Right?
We could, the word that's going around this week is a soft secession.
We're seeing that from the Democrats on the state level, and we're seeing people who are center left and, and.
and actual progressives organize on the local level that is more noticeable than it's been in decades.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want to overlook anyone who has been organizing on the hyper-local level for a long, long time.
And that includes many, and especially folks who are people of color, black people, women, and queer folks.
Like the hyper-local organization has been happening for a long, long time.
I'm not overlooking that.
But there's something that's happening that I've talked about for a long time, which is the right invests in every tendon and ligament and muscle of the American political body.
And now everyone else is, oh, I guess we should do that too if we don't want the federal government taking over our lives, which is what the right-wingers said was going to happen to them for the last 75 years.
So we're watching in real time the switch of the state's rights discourse.
And it's a way that's probably going to orient the next year of American politics.
So I got more thoughts on this, but Dan, you want to jump in here?
I think you're right about the rhetoric.
That's what it's been.
And for a long time, I think those of us who are cynical.
would say that there's always been a sort of real politic piece to that.
So yeah, people on the left have always emphasized the government more.
And they've always emphasized people's rights.
But for a long time, critics of the left, including lots of people on the left, said that they were over.-reliant on, for example, the courts, that they were over-reliant on the courts to force certain things through that weren't popular, right?
That they weren't good enough at building in the grassroots and, you know, winning over voters and so forth.
And so you had people on the right who were, you know, always championing, championing states' rights.
You would know more, you know, probably than most people here, right, about that discourse going all the way back to the Civil War.
rhetoric and things like this, right?
This notion of a kind of federal or intrusive government imposition on the states and so forth.
But I think there was always the sense that, you know, anybody who's in politics, who's politicians, we're always looking for.
for what is going to give them the leverage to oppose whomever they oppose and whatever.
And so while the courts were further to the left and while you had like landmark legislation and court decisions about everything from Roe v.
Wade to voting rights things to different kinds of things like this, that was the leverage point that people on the right would push is states' rights and so forth.
Well, of course, once they've got the mechanisms of power, which as you say, they've spent decades.
trying to get, right?
They could talk all they wanted about states' rights, but they've been trying to consolidate authority in these big federal agencies, including the Supreme Court for decades.
And then as soon as they had it, yeah, they're all about big government.
I think there have been lots of voices for decades that have recognized that.
If you wanted to talk about social policies, the social safety net, and so forth, yes, the right was opposed to big government.
But if you want to talk about intrusive legislating or regulating sexuality, regulating gender, what we would now call maybe culture war issues, The right had always been sort of big government or advocates of big government.
They just didn't have those mechanisms.
So I think we've seen it switch, but I think there's always a sense in which the appeal to either a strong federal government or a strong judiciary versus states' rights was always to a certain extent driven by which party based on their ideology could benefit the most from the federal government or the judiciary or which ones could benefit from the states.
So I do think there's a flip and it's a radical reorientation.
I think it's also interesting that it feels like, I could be wrong, but you talk about the left trying to effectively insulate states from a lot of these federal things that are going on.
And it feels like in some ways.
partly because of the moves on the right, that they've actually, it feels like they've had a great deal of success in that relatively, like relatively quickly.
And it feels like in some ways.
They've operationalized the states' rights thing, I think more or maybe more effectively.
It feels more effective, actually, than oftentimes it was on the right.
The right often felt like you talk about the lost cause ideology around the Civil War and the aftermath of that.
A lot of that states' rights discourse always felt like that to me, like this kind of, you know, we're fighting valiantly or whatever, but we know the cards are stacked against us and we're not really going to win.
Whereas the left has, you know, I think very effectively been able to start mobilizing that more.
So for example, this is maybe even local more than state, but the refusal to have local law enforcement or state law enforcement participate in ICE raids and so forth.
That's a really concrete thing that has proven incredibly frustrating to the Trump administration, to right-wing administrations before.
So I think that they've had some real success at that.
I think you're right that it's a reorientation.
And I think if I'm trying to be more analytic and less, I don't know, not being able to sleep at night because everything terrifies me.
It's really interesting to watch and it will be interesting to see, you know, how significant is this and for how long and, you know, how does it kind of work?
I guess the last point about this is that as you said and as other people observing this said, you know, you have the shrinking of the federal government's footprint together with let's call it executive overreach right now federal overreach so you still have those who can on the right who can kind of cloak themselves in that and be like see we're draining the swamp small government we're getting rid of agencies we're defunding things and they can they can try to have their cake and eat it too, right?
Have a strong executive that is exercising federal powers, let's say, and exerting that everywhere, but also somehow claim a mantle of being on the right and being in favor of small government, even if the state's right stuff has just completely disappeared.
from most of the lexicon.
So this is making the rounds this week.
It's from Chris Armitage.
The substack is the existential republic.
And he talks about Dem governors and soft secession.
And I think this might actually feel hopeful to some of you, and I hope it does.
But let me read a little bit, Dan, because it goes to exactly what you just talked about.
For many state attorney generals and governors, the legal briefs are already drafted.
The strategy sessions have been running since December.
This is what American federalism looks like in 2025.
Democratic governors holding emergency sessions on encrypted apps.
attorney generals filing lawsuits within hours of executive orders and state legislatures quietly passing laws that amount to nullification of federal mandates Oregon is stockpiling abortion medication in secret warehouses, Illinois exploring digital sovereignty, California has $76 billion in reserves and is deciding how to deploy it.
Three sources on those daily Zoom calls between Democratic AGs say the same phrase keeps coming up, though nobody wants to say it publicly, soft secession.
Not the violent rupture of 1861, but something else entirely.
Blue states building parallel systems with holding cooperation.
and creating facts on the ground that render federal authority meaningless within their borders.
Just a couple of quick comments on this, Dan.
I think that this is the kind of state's rights rallying that I'm talking about.
And there's something here that governors in quote unquote red states never had, which is most of these states provide way more per capita and tax money to the federal government than they take.
So that's one, right?
Whether that is Illinois, whether that is California, whether that is Washington, whether that is Massachusetts.
So that's there.
There's a sense that if there is a soft secession, that will hurt a federal government that is trying to become more expensive and more expansive.
The National Guard deployments being a really good example.
Like the National Guard is almost out of money, basically.
And not that Trump won't go find it somewhere else.
I don't know, say FEMA, but it is almost out of money.
So that's, I think, that's something that I'm thinking about.
Now, this is all going to come to a head soon if and when Trump does try to deploy the National Guard to somewhere like Baltimore or somewhere like Chicago.
This will all come to a head.
And I think that what happened in LA was the first strike in that sense.
And now the question is, well, what is Pritzker actually going to do?
What is Westmore actually going to do?
And are you going to see actual resistance on the ground to that kind of occupation?
What kind of confrontations will there be, whether it's in the streets, whether it is with other agencies.
I think most of you who are watching or listening are going to think that local law enforcement is not going to do anything to kind of combat ICE or the National Guard as they try to take over these cities, that most of the folks in law enforcement are going to be sympathetic to those deployments.
But we're going to have to see how this shapes up because you're starting to see, as I said, a kind of states' rights.
movement build among the Democratic Party that has not been seen in a long, long time.
Let me give you one more thing, Dan, and then we can transition here.
Is Zach Beauchamp, writing at MOX, I think has a pretty good set of points here, and this will lead to my last comments on this for the day.
He wrote a book, excuse me, about how democracies become autocracies.
And here's what he says.
One of my central findings is that for would be autocrats, it is exceptionally important to maintain democratic appearances.
Let me say that again.
If you want to be an autocrat who takes a democracy from a will of the people to a one-man show, you have to maintain democratic appearances.
Dan, that is what I was trying to signal when they gerrymander Texas openly, is you took the veil off.
The appearance went away.
Okay.
And you have to approach your autocratic takeover with a certain cadence is what Beauchamp is talking about.
So like in South Korea, the Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, tried to basically institute martial law.
And the parliament was like, not today, Uncle Rong.
I don't think so.
And they turned him right.
And it went really, really bad.
But Victor Orban has been slowly consolidating power in Hungary since 2010 for 15 years.
And he now has basically control of the parliament, the media.
And it doesn't matter how popular anyone is against him.
There's almost no way for them to win an election against Victor Orban.
What Beauchamp argues is that ISIS' takeover of cities, its presence in Washington, D.C., this actually undermines the attempt to gain autocratic control of the country the way that Trump wants.
Because what it does is it dispels the appearance of democracy and it creates local resentment.
You may not be somebody who loves the Democratic Party or wants to vote for Democrats, but you probably, there's a chance at least, you hate the fact that the guy who lived next door to you for 20 years, who was a grandfather, got taken away violently and thrown on the ground, even though he was a mechanic and didn't bother anybody ever.
If you have a modern day fugitive slave act where people are showing up in your community and kidnapping people, you're creating local resentment.
And it does not help with popular opinion.
And so Beauchamp's argument is that when Trump attacks universities or he shakes down CBS, he gets Colbert fired, he does this, some of this stuff, it's actually that Orban cadence of autocratic takeover.
But Stephen Miller's obsession with deportation and getting rid of people of color is actually moving too fast for the appearance of democracy such that it's going to hurt the popularity of the regime and build popular resistance that I think will link up with the kind of states' rights governor stuff we're seeing.
And that may be a small reason for hope amidst all of the destruction and tragedy we're seeing around us that if they move too fast and Stephen Miller is monomaniacal about mass deportation, you're actually going to end up more with the South Korea kind of sediment rather than the Hungarian sediment or situation, I should say.
And that may lead to just the lack of popularity.
among Trump.
So give me one more minute, Dan.
I know you're like, Brad, shut up.
Here's the takeaway.
I think Trump may die in the next year.
I'm just going to go on record and say it.
Like, I think he's going to die soon.
I don't know.
He could be with, like, my grandmother was a mean, mean woman, like a really mean lady, like, really mean.
Like, not, I mean, I'm not going to talk about how mean, but like, really mean.
And my mom was always like, she's too mean to die.
And she lived to 104.
So who knows?
She's and she was.
She was too mean to die.
Just too mad at everybody, including God.
So she just wouldn't die.
Maybe that's Trump, maybe not though.
And like, he seems not well and I'm not going to sit here pretend.
I am not a doctor, psychologist.
I am not a heart physician.
I'm none of that.
I do think though, Dan, if they're going to deploy the National Guard to 19 cities, they're trying to create a situation where they can control this country without winning an election.
JD Vance is not the guy, but he's going to be the guy.
Peter Thiel and everyone else are going to make sure that JD Vance is the guy.
You're not going to see JD kicked out of the seat without a huge, massive fight.
So if JD is the guy, he's not going to win.
All the charisma gets sucked out of the room.
They're banking on controlling this country in ways that you do not need a majority, you do not need votes, you do not need Congress, you do not need anything.
And part of that is through martial law, part of that.
And JD is, if you watch him, he's getting ready to play that role.
And that's my hot take for today.
I think Trump.
There's a chance by August 2026, 2026, he may be dead.
And JD Vance is going to do nothing else than to try to control this country by way of a right-wing.
wing set of mechanisms including Palantir and ICE and the military, and by the time we go to vote, a year and two months from now, so much of what we think of as free and fair elections will be shaved away that we will, we could be in that Orban situation that doesn't matter how unpopular Vance and the Republicans are, there's no way to kind of get a majority.
So that's my, that's not my, that's not, that's, yeah.
So somebody, Jane just said, Trump being dead is your reason for hope.
That, first of all, good one, Jane.
Second of all, that's not reason, my reason for hope.
What I was trying to gesture towards before that was everything I was talking about was states' rights and other things.
I'm not predicting Trump will die.
I'm just saying if you ask me to tell you the truth about, you know, what's happening here, Stephen Miller, Pete Hexeth, and JD Vance are trying to get ready to control this country without their charismatic figurehead.
And they want to figure out how to do that.
The big overarching thing you're talking about is legitimacy, right?
Or the appearance of legitimacy is that.
Those autocratic regimes need a veneer of legitimacy so that they can say, look, I won the election.
Putin does this, right?
We all know Putin for.
forever.
I won 80 something percent of the election, you know, whatever it is.
And I said in a weekly roundup that I think the speed is both the strength and the Achilles.
heel of Trump and the administration, right?
The way that if you're talking about maybe a slow burn or a sort of smoldering conflagration with somebody like Orbán, Trump is Blitzkrieg.
And there's a sense, I mean, I'm going to mix all kinds of metaphors here.
There's a sense of which he outruns his coverage, right?
Like, he just gets out front.
And they've done things, like, this is where the shrinking of the federal footprint is a problem for them.
Somebody can look it up and put it in the chat if you want, but the Supreme Court decision was a really wonky one that basically said that like agencies can't just sort of define like how policies work and and how they're applied and that it requires legislation from the government and things like this this was something that went to the Supreme Court from Republicans against the Biden administration when they were trying to say that federal agencies were overreaching by applying policies and so forth that Congress had not passed as legislation and that policy isn't law and so
forth well guess what that's going to help now it's all of those blue states that will say, fine, sign your executive orders, send what's left of the Department of Education after us, do those things because they don't have binding force.
Here's this SCOTUS decision, you need to get Congress to sign off on these things.
And that takes time.
And there's the lag.
We've talked about that as well, the courts lagging.
But there is the sense in which by doing away with that notion of legitimacy, by not being willing to move slowly enough to put the kind of lasting stamp on these kinds of things, that this is unraveling.
I talked about this in the weekly roundup last week with the detention center in Florida.
What's undermining it is that they cut corners on environmental law and public hearings and things like this.
It's Al Capone or somebody being caught on tax evasion, right?
You just didn't dot all your i's and cross your Ts.
And so that's the kind of thing that's doing this, I think, is as you're saying, stripping away that legitimacy.
And there's all kinds of like psychological reasons with Trump.
There's all the stuff that, you know, he really, I think, just, you know, he, I think, just as a person cannot not do that.
He can't be the center of attention.
We've said for a decade now, he always says the quiet part out loud, right?
And so this week, he's talking about, you know, I don't want to be a dictator, but maybe some people like dictators.
A lot of people say they love dictators, right?
So it's as that comes off and you lump that in with, as you say, the state's rights thing and all of these these points that I think are really, really true about left-leaning states, the more money.
I think increasingly, you're also going to start seeing brain drain stuff happening, right?
We've got this in the medical community, people not going to states like Texas and so forth, and people in the queer communities actively moving to other parts of the country.
I mean, so you've got some of these realignments that I think are going to continue to strengthen those states.
Together with the fact that all you have are these autocratic dictations of the president.
Yeah, it scares everybody, but you're starting to get people on the left standing up being like, well, hold on.
Okay, cool.
Like you did that demon scrawl name signature you have.
But so what?
You're the same party that that basically neutralized federal agencies and said that they can't apply policy anymore.
So, okay, cool.
Yeah, put your policies out and we'll go to court.
Yeah, there's a lag, but we'll go to court.
And now you have to go try to get legislatures to do it, you know, the legislature to do it.
And then we're back full circle to governing versus ruling, right?
And so I think that that's those are the dynamics that we're seeing.
And I think we're starting to see, you know, it's, it's, again, me and my metaphors and it's almost football season and whatever, but.
you know, the kind of been but don't break defense.
There was this onslaught for months and we're beginning to see the rebound from that in some ways.
And it doesn't mean that there's not more push from the federal government.
It's not saying that it's not sort of terrifying and real and scary and like I don't want to minimize that but we're beginning to see the real pushback we're beginning to see the Trump administration saying all they want about sending ICE into all these jurisdictions and so forth but guess what even with their 100,000 applicants they don't have enough ICE agents to enforce federal immigration policy the way that they want to And eventually, they will run out of funding.
And eventually, they're going to have to get it from Congress.
They're going to have to do those things.
And even if Congress does it, it takes time.
So I think we're seeing all of those dynamics playing out.
And I think you're right that there is a certain effort to sort of beat the clock.
I don't know if I think Trump's going to die in the next year.
I think a lot of Republicans are afraid he will.
I think a lot of Republicans are, they watch what happened to Biden and they know that Trump is older when he's inaugurated than Biden was.
They see those things.
And I think they're worried about that.
I think they are trying to put pieces in place to try to basically, you declare a state of emergency of some sort and you use that as your legitimation for not doing things.
I can hear Vance now.
the same one who chides Ukraine for not having elections and says that basically a war is no excuse not to have elections.
I can just see him now.
Well, you know, Baltimore is a little wild.
We need to just suspend elections.
It's not a time to have a presidential election.
So we can see all those pieces.
So I think there's just a lot of dynamic flows going on right now.
And we're really seeing the sort of the maelstrom start to take shape around that.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I just, I'm going to be talking about this over the next couple of months.
I'll just say it here and then we'll go, we'll shift is, you know, friends, if, if, if you think about all the ways they've overrun norms and laws, you know, Trump signs an executive order saying, if you burn an American flag, you get this punishment.
Well, that's, it's not his job, right?
That Congress is supposed to make laws.
Exorcito, like you don't get to sign a paper and make something a crime.
That's autocracy, right?
So if you think about every way that they have overrun norms and process and law going back to Doge and February, okay, just imagine what they're going to do to these midterms.
I mean, come on, come on.
It is August.
We have 15 months.
What are they going to do by the time, one year from now, what are they going to have already done to make it so hard to vote?
for getting into, you know, your local precinct to be afraid of ICE, be afraid of the military, be afraid of anything.
anything so i'm just i want to put that out there because i'm gonna not stop on that that beat All right, y'all.
Thanks for listening today.
Hope you enjoyed our conversation.
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