Weekly Roundup: A Battle of Fonts and Freedoms: Analyzing Trump's Authoritarianism and Growing Unpopularity
Brad and Dan return to unpack another week of chaos, contradictions, and creeping authoritarianism in American politics. They open with what seems like a small story but carries outsized symbolic weight: the State Department’s decision to ditch Calibri and return to Times New Roman. It’s a font change driven not by aesthetics but by politics, revealing how the Trump administration is using even bureaucratic details to signal exclusion, target accessibility, and roll back DEI efforts. What looks trivial becomes a window into the deeper logic of authoritarian control.
From there, the conversation widens to the issues shaping the country’s political landscape. Brad and Dan examine ICE’s ever expanding budget, the ongoing manipulation of the election system through voter roll purges and gerrymandering, and a string of contentious congressional hearings, including Kristi Noem’s abrupt walkout and the FBI’s admission that it cannot define Antifa as a coherent organizational threat. They also discuss Trump’s increasingly explicit racist and misogynistic rhetoric and the striking silence from GOP leaders who once claimed to stand for democratic norms.
Despite the bleak headlines, Brad and Dan highlight signs that Trump’s influence may be eroding. They point to GOP resistance emerging in places like Indiana, rumblings of discontent within the Heritage Foundation, and encouraging gains for Democrats in state legislatures and mayoral races. But they also wrestle with the central tension of the moment: does Trump’s declining popularity matter if structural control continues to consolidate beneath him. Can the MAGA movement build enduring institutions, or is it fundamentally a brittle coalition held together by grievance and spectacle.
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I'm Brad O'Nishi, founder of Axis Monday Media, author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next here today with my co-host.
I am Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Lamar College.
Glad to be with you, Brad.
You too, Dan.
This is kind of a mid-December Friday where to me, it's one of the last Fridays where I think we're going to have everybody.
A lot of folks by next week are going to be traveling, checking out, drinking eggnog, watching Die Hard, and not necessarily wanting to dial in to the weekly roundup and a deep dive into the news.
And so what we're going to ask today is something I think is a pretty important question.
We are seeing signs of Trump trying to clamp down and tighten his authoritarian control over the country from everything like the fonts that the government is going to use, whether that is Calibri or Times de Roman, whether that is the ongoing issues with Venezuelan votes and what's going on with Pete Hegseth, whether that is on any number of issues related to immigration, ICE, and so on.
We still don't have the Epstein files.
There's chaos in the election coming next year.
But there's also many signs that Trump is weakening.
And we saw that yesterday when Christy Noam walked out of a congressional hearing after being told to resign.
We saw it yesterday when an FBI representative had no answers to why Antifa was a focus of the Bureau's resources.
Indiana said no to Trump's redistricting.
I mean, the list goes on and on and on.
The question is this.
Are we seeing a weakening of Trump's MAGA authoritarianism?
Or are we seeing a moment where despite being unpopular, he will continue down this autocratic path and set up a battle next year between the American citizens and a wannabe single ruler.
We discussed that more.
Lost the cover.
go.
All right, Dan, I'm going to throw it to you, but I want to frame today using the work of Jonathan V. Lass at the Bulwark.
And he notes that his colleagues at the Bulwark and others have, as I just outlined, observed the data, the evidence, the reasons that it is not ridiculous to think that Trump is a declining, demented president who is a lame duck and is losing his grip on his party, on the country, on the economy, and so on and so forth.
But as Lass notes, many authoritarian regimes begin as popular movements.
They win a couple elections, ride waves of discontent, and seize power through legitimate or at least quasi-democratic means.
It's only later that they become authoritarian.
At some point, the regime has consolidated so much power that its popularity no longer matters.
The authoritarian shift is the process of trading popular legitimacy for structural control.
If you listen to this show, you know I talked about this five weeks ago.
They're not trying to be popular.
The Trump administration is not trying to be popular.
They do not show the signs of people trying to win elections.
So I think the question for us today, Dan, is, are we watching an autocratic ruler, a wannabe authoritarian, trying to make the authoritarian shift that Lass talks about by gaining structural control of all of our institutions such that popularity doesn't matter?
Or are we seeing his popularity decline so much that there are the signs here that the MAGA movement and Trump are in real trouble come next year?
It may be both and.
It may be both that they're entirely unpopular and that they don't, it won't matter because of the structural control.
We'll flesh this all out in a second.
In order to do that, let's start in a place that I think for many people feels absurd, but is actually quite important.
And that is the matter of what font the United States federal government will be using on its documents and so forth.
I turn it over to you.
Specifically in the State Department.
So for those who might not have seen this, and I just chuckle because, yeah, you're into the sort of theater of the absurd elements of this.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced, like, first of all, announced this.
This is not something that had to be announced.
This is like just a, you know, kind of a memo that could have been made that said, hey, we're now going to do this thing.
But he announced, and the memo was made public and all of this, that all state communication, that is communication from the State Department, will now be written in Times New Roman font rather than Calibri font.
And those of us of a certain age, Brad, who grew up with in an academic world doing academic writing, will remember Times New Roman because that was always the default font that we're, at least I was supposed to use.
Times New Roman 12 point, apparently this is Times New Roman 14 point.
So, you know, I don't know what that means about the State Department and the state of America, but that they need 14 point font.
And anybody listening to this is like, who cares?
Like, okay, they're going to do Times New Roman.
Well, here's the thing.
Times New Roman had previously been the required font, but it was changed to Calibri font under the Biden administration.
And the reason it was changed, or at least a part of why it was changed, is that Calibri was intended to aid in accessibility.
This is a thing I have some familiarity with, Brad.
I don't know if you did or not, but a number of years ago, when I would write syllabi, course syllabi, and you're starting to like make like Word was able, you could make Word like accessible or PDFs accessible and so forth.
We had a whole thing about for whatever reason, like lots of, a lot, lots of people with visual impairment issues or decoding issues have trouble with Times New Roman.
Some adaptive technologies that do like speech to text, or excuse me, text to speech.
So like students or others can like, you know, have it read a Word document or something.
They had more trouble with Times New Roman than some other fonts and specifically Calibri.
So I switched to Calibri font in my syllabi and other documents a number of years ago.
This was the kind of issue that was at work here.
And so what it said, and so Rubio comes out swinging against this, he said, quote, the switch was promised to mitigate accessibility issues for individuals with disabilities, but he said that it did not achieve that goal and it cost the department $145,000.
There's no evidence for that or clarity about what that meant.
He then offered a scathing and pretty ridiculous rebuke of the use of Calibri.
And this is what I mean, where like he could have just issued a memo that said, hey, we're going back to Times New Roman, problem solved.
But here's what he said.
He said, typography shapes how official documents are perceived in terms of cohesion, professionalism, and formality.
Although switching to Calibri was not among the department's most illegal, immoral, radical, or wasteful instances of DEI, it was nonetheless cosmetic.
And he said switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department's correspondence.
So Calibri is woke.
It's a bad font.
And so the State Department, in keeping in line with Trump's, you know, eradicating all DEI things is switching back to Times New Roman.
Why does it matter?
I think it matters to me for two points.
I'll throw it over to you.
One is, as you talk about this one, what, wing, or if you think of sort of a, I don't know, a two-pronged element of thinking about the Trump administration right now.
One is this consolidation of this, as you say, this authoritarian Christian nationalist kind of model, including all things anti-DEI to the point that we're not just going to switch the font that we use.
We're going to have to have an angrily worded like memo that goes out and talks about it being woke and so forth.
So down to the minutia of these kinds of things.
And also, this is about like sort of, in this case, actively targeting people with disabilities.
I think that stands out.
That number, $145,000, I have no idea if that's like, I don't know, the people whose salaries went to like having to change templates for documents.
I don't know if that's over the entire time.
I don't know what that number is.
And I'm not here to justify government spending, but $145,000 in the State Department budget is like a minuscule amount of money.
I'm not being funny here.
$145,000 is what it costs us as taxpayers for Trump to play like three holes of golf every weekend.
Like, what it costs Trump to go play a round of golf on our taxpayer dime, it's going to be $70 million this year.
So $145,000 is like tee off and then hole two and three.
So it's just nothing.
Yeah.
And I think that perspective matters.
You're talking about a government infrastructure with massive budgets.
And it doesn't hurt anybody to keep it in Calibri.
And I challenge people.
I think it was maybe it was CNN that I was looking at.
Maybe it was something else.
I don't remember.
But if people want to pull up a word processor, they can do the same thing.
It had like a side-by-side visual comparison of like Calibri and Times New Roman.
Brad, I think the U.S. is a laughing stock internationally at this point.
People are terrified of what is happening here.
We're probably going to talk about this later, but now you've got this thing of, you know, a lot of different countries having to give like five years worth of social media background to enter the country.
Do we really think what denigrates the U.S. is the font that's used in State Department cables, right?
No.
But this matters because of that.
It's just targeting people with disabilities at this point, right?
This is not overreach.
This is not anything.
This is, I think, the vision of what kind of country do we live in?
Straight white, properly abled, right?
As they would see it.
If you need a different font, if you need assistive technology, if you have trouble with visual reading or something like that, then well, you know what?
I guess you're just not a real American either, and we ought not to be doing anything to help you.
It shows, I think, the ongoing cruelty and targeting of Americans that just don't meet the standard of the straight white, Christian abled, Christian nationalist model of America.
And it shows that minutiae.
So it's a story that on one hand is absurd, but the absurdity is what matters, if that makes any sense.
So I want to reiterate your point that this is hurting people who have difficulties reading certain fonts.
Just needlessly.
There's no point.
Like it's just to target them.
And I'm sorry to cut you off just real quick.
Whatever it costs to make this switch, it's going to cost at least that much to switch back to Times New Roman.
But isn't it worth it?
Isn't it worth it?
Isn't 100, like if I said $145,000 so that American citizens can access the information on government websites and government documents, the answer is yes.
That seems to me a very good use of fair fonts.
And again, less than, I don't know, the equivalent for maybe our budgets.
What would you spend on a night out, like to eat a meal at a restaurant or something?
It's probably less than that percentage-wise.
It's a minuscule cost to just help people.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, in terms of a government budget, this is like what somebody would spend getting a Subway sandwich or, you know, whatever.
So I think that's one.
I just, I want to go back.
I think big picture, this does seem absurd, but scholars and experts on authoritarianism, fascism will tell you that, you know, these kind of regimes focus on minute details about appearance and about, this is about control.
This is about having control over how things look.
Fascism is about order.
Christian nationalism is about order.
And this is part of it.
The MAGA hat, the famous MAGA hat is in Times New Roman.
And there's a piece from 10 years ago by Ben Hirsch at Wired, how fonts are fueling the culture wars.
And Hirsch, I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but Hirsch does a really fine job of explaining how certain fonts, when we see them now, we're like, oh, that's not good.
Like when you see black letter font, you know, and some of you can't picture that right now, but it's the kind of font that if you see it, you're like, oh, that looks like somebody who's a white nationalist.
Like if you have that dat too and that font, that what feels like to some people, old English font, and it used to be super, super popular.
Okay.
But it's now, it used to be the Calibri of the day.
It is now a font that you're like, oh, that looks like Nazi stuff or white nationalist stuff.
And there's a reason for that.
And that's because Adolf Hitler standardized and normalized that font for his use in the Nazi regime and propaganda, then goes and talks about the ways that, you know, the various campaigns from 2016, the Clinton campaign, the Trump campaign and so on, used different fonts.
And it was very clear that Clinton wanted to use a font that was modern and open.
And Trump's choice for the MAGA hat was one that was not.
It was one that was based on order.
It was one that was based on standing out.
It was not based on aesthetic appeal as much as it was just being bold and identifiable and that kind of thing.
So some of you might have signed on today and been like, come on, Dan, come on, Brad.
Like you're going to spend the first segment talking about this.
But it shows you the kind of minute control that the regime wants over appearance, over aesthetics.
And Trump has always been obsessed with this in terms of his hair and his makeup and his look and how he appears on TV, how people who represent him look on TV.
Why do we have Mar-a-Lago face phenomenon?
It's because of care about appearance and aesthetics.
Last point I think would be, you may think it doesn't matter, but if they are willing to go to this extent to control the font, what extent do you think they will go to to control your body, your bedroom, your family, who you love, who can come here, who can't come here, who they will try to denaturalize, on and on and on.
You know, people listening who are familiar with patterns of abuse will know that this kind of minute control over a household or a relationship is really stunning revelatory behavior about the kind of person that you're dealing with.
So I don't think this is nothing, even though it feels like it's nothing.
And even though it is one more sign of how Marco Rubio has gone from this sort of corporate centrist Christian senator from Florida once upon a day to A, not a serious person, and B, just someone who's fully an important cog in the authoritarian MAGA machine.
So other thoughts here before we go to other points of evidence of Trump trying to maintain and deepen authoritarian control over the country.
I think just the other point that you're touching on with the thing about the fonts is the nostalgia element, the nostalgic sort of kind of thing.
I remember, and again, this sounds maybe silly, but like in academia, I remember I would talk to like, you know, old-time professors who would talk about when I wrote my dissertation on a typewriter, you know, whatever, and would talk longingly about the fonts and, you know, this and that.
And like there is, even if people don't know it, when somebody sees a script and it looks a little bit kind of old-fashioned or classic or like whatever, like they wouldn't have the words oftentimes, but there'd be that sense that it feels older or it feels more established.
I think that can't be ignored either.
This is all part of that mythological construction of what America once was and how to make America great again by returning to that.
And I think everything from the way that the TypeScript looks to just other aspects of aesthetics and so forth, as you're highlighting, is really important.
I mean, if people don't think that fonts matter, try making a go try to make a YouTube thumbnail.
As somebody who, you know, who has had to learn very quickly on how to make YouTube thumbnails, fonts will make or break whether or not people will engage with your stuff.
Same with logos, you know, and graphics.
You know, it doesn't matter.
Anyway, all right, Den, let me give you a kind of a list of other ways Trump is trying to deepen control over the country.
And you can jump in and take any of these you'd like.
So we still don't have the Epstein files.
So Congress voted to release those and they're nowhere to be found.
Trump personally stepped in to block the release of J6 documents.
And so just one other instance of like not allowing any discussion of J6 outside of whatever Trump wants people to say about it.
In about two weeks, three weeks, ICE is about to get a billion dollars.
It's going to, they're already buying planes.
There's going to be more money for ICE than you can imagine.
If you have any kind of budget you're doing right now for the end of the year, if you have a situation where your budget next year will be less for your business, for your family, ICE is going to get a billion dollars.
It is going to have more money than most countries do for their entire military.
That will be given to ICE.
That is terrifying.
And I think people just need to remember that.
There is chaos in the election system coming.
It feels like a slow drip.
It may not feel like it's the top of mind right now, but David Graham at the Atlantic and others have done great work.
We have tried to highlight every chance we can that voting next year is they're already trying to stop you from voting how you should.
They're taking people off voter rolls.
They're trying to get access to state data on voters.
The list goes on and on and on.
So that's all there.
Not to mention the Venezuelan boats and the fact that the double tap controversy, Pete Hegseth still has a job.
He's still in, he's still in place and nothing has really happened there.
Including, just to jump in, including the release of the video.
Remember, Trump said there's no problem with releasing the video or whatever.
And now he says he's going to defer to Hegseth, who obviously doesn't want to defer the release of the video.
Well, I think that brings up another point, which is there was a reporter this week who asked him about that.
And she said, and it was a woman, said, oh, you said you would release the video.
And Trump snapped at her and said, I've never said I would do that.
I know what you said that.
Who are you?
And he called her stupid.
And I think one more thing that we have to bring up here that we have not done a good job bringing up to this point is that Trump continues to denigrate and name call female reporters in the White House press pool.
He calls them stupid.
He called somebody Miss Piggy.
I mean, it is getting to the point of abuse.
Like it is not like you are generally fake news at your outlet.
It is you, woman, standing in front of me are ugly and stupid and this and that and this.
That is not where we were 10 years ago.
It just wasn't.
I'll give you one more.
And Greg Sargent did a good job on his pod this week and other people did too bringing this up is Trump called Somali folks, Somali Americans, trash.
And no Republican of any note at any national profile said anything about it.
When Trump said we're not going to allow Muslims in the country 10 years ago, Mike Pence and Paul Ryan and many others were like, that is un-American.
That is not who we are.
We are at a point now where the GOP congressional caucus in the House and the Senate is like, oh, you called an entire people group trash?
You called a sitting congressperson trash?
You said that those countries are shitholes?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I remember when he denied that about shithole countries in the first term.
And now he just said it.
He said it in a press conference.
Right.
Sorry.
Thank you.
Said that they're shithole countries and did all the stuff that were still the quiet parts, the stuff he would say, you know, sort of among advisors or behind closed doors in the first term that we would hear sort of rumors about.
And then they would try to deny that they ever happened.
Now at a rally, he said that he did, you know, he lists all the countries, said that they're filthy and they're dirty and they're crime ridden and just a bunch of other generally racist stuff about these countries.
And also, again, decried the fact that we don't have a bunch of Scandinavians trying to come to see the United States.
So to your point that I think you're making, this stuff is just more out in, it's just out in the open now, these views, and the GOP is just completely silent on it.
There's no outrage, you know, coming from any GOP moderates who are willing to say anything or possibly contest these views.
So some of these things that I've listed are policy and budget, like ICE getting a billion dollars.
Some of them are institutional, like the chaos in the election system.
Some of them are procedural, like the J6 documents and the Epstein files.
Some of them are cultural, like just calling people names or calling people groups trash.
Others are related to the military and crimes and other things.
So just real quick, I can tell you a lot of Scandinavians online have expressed the fact that they consider the U.S. a shithole country and they have no interest in coming here.
So I can just tell you, that's their words, not mine.
And that's what they are saying.
All right.
A couple minutes here before a break.
What do you want to say about anything on that list in terms of Trump trying to tighten his control over the nation?
I think just to briefly get into it, maybe we could pick it back up.
The Venezuelan boats, this story continues to deepen.
But one of the things that you and I have talked about this, I think we've talked about it for a long time, but we talked about it in preparation for today.
And it's worth pointing is that in many ways, Trump in this consolidation, he's continuing a pattern that the GOP has been doing for a long time.
And there were legal memos that are still not made public that have been sort of leaked about the legal rationale for the attacks on the Venezuelan boats.
But the parallel people have is to things that happened in the Bush administration.
Dubious legal memos at that time, the so-called torture memos.
But I can't help but think we talk about this authoritarianism.
You have the unified executive theory, which is all about consolidating that power, the almost exclusive use of executive orders as opposed to forms of legislation.
And I think it's worth remembering that we're talking about a GOP that the prior administration was the Bush-Cheney administration.
Everybody was just eulogizing Dick Cheney, who did a tremendous amount in the Bush administration to advocate the use of executive order, of executive privilege, of consolidating executive power.
At the time, I'd invite people to just go back and recall those of us who can, or go back and look at the extensive use of executive orders in the Bush administration, how outside of the political norm that was.
And people warned this was going to change the nature of the executive.
It was going to unleash unified executive power.
And I think we see Trump riding that wave.
And I think perhaps the way that that feels the most pertinent to me right now is the ongoing revelations about the Venezuelan boats.
But we can take a break and maybe we can pick that up.
Well, I would just say that like one of the through lines from the Bush Cheney years to now is that the torturers were not punished and there was no consequences.
And I really think that if you're waiting for Pete Hegseth to get fired, that's only going to happen if he doesn't live up to Trump's expectations based on appearance, based on ridding the military of everything Trump sees as woke, you know, from fonts to women to trans people to gay people to black people with beards.
If you followed that story, it doesn't matter.
I really think if you're waiting for Trump to ever come out and say, yeah, Hegseth really blew it with this boat strike, he's just really messed up.
They are not in a place of like saying sorry or admitting like, oh, we went too far.
This regime is not doing that this time.
You saw it a little bit last time and the first Trump go-round, not now.
So I don't think waiting for Hegseth to get fired because of this is something that we should be doing.
So, all right, so that's our list.
Let's take a break and we'll come back and we'll jump into the other side.
All of the ways that it appears Trump and the MAGA movement are losing their grip and their popularity in the United States.
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All right, Dan, I got a whole list here.
I've got like eight things, okay?
Seven things, something like that.
I'm going to start with this.
Christy Noam was in Congress yesterday, congressional hearing, and this was the same day that DHS admitted that it provided erroneous information on text from Nome and DHS about following the law when it came to deportations, when it came to following judges' orders.
So DHS has had to admit that they provided erroneous information about whether or not those text messages were kept, were not kept, et cetera.
In a very striking exchange between Noam and the committee, Noam was asked, how many American citizens and veterans have you deported?
And she said, we have deported no American citizens or veterans.
And then, well, amazingly, I'll let you listen to the clip, but amazingly, the next response is, we are now joined on Zoom by a veteran you deported who is now in Korea.
Take a listen.
Madam Secretary, how many United States military veterans have you deported?
Sir, we have not deported U.S. citizens or military veterans.
I don't believe you served in the military.
I haven't either.
But I think you and I can agree that as Americans, we owe everything to those who have served our country in uniform, particularly those who have served in combat.
Do you agree with that?
Sir, I believe that people that are in this United States that are citizens have legal status here.
Madam Secretary, we are joined on Zoom by a gentleman named Sejun Park.
He is a United States Army combat veteran who was shot twice while serving our country in Panama in 1989.
Like many veterans, he struggled with PTSD and substance abuse after his service.
He was arrested in the 1990s for some minor drug offenses, nothing serious.
He never hurt anyone besides himself, and he's been clean and sober for 14 years.
He is a combat veteran, a Purple Heart recipient.
He has sacrificed more for this country than most people ever have.
Earlier this year, you deported him to Korea, a country he hasn't lived in since he was seven years old.
Will you join me in thanking Mr. Park for his service to our country?
Sir, I'm grateful for every single person that has served our country and follows in the law.
Can you please tell Mr. Park why you deported him?
Every one of them needs to be enforced.
But you understand that many veterans struggle with PTSD.
Many veterans struggle with substance abuse challenges.
This man took two bullets for our country.
Will you, you have broad authority, by the way, as secretary to issue humanitarian parole, to do deferred action.
Will you commit to at least looking at Mr. Park's case to see if you can help him find a pathway back to this country that he sacrificed so much for?
I will absolutely look at his case, but I want you to remember that.
Madam Secretary, the man behind you, please stand up, sir.
His name is Jim Brown from Troy, Missouri.
He is a Navy combat veteran who served our country in the Gulf War.
He's married to a woman named Donna, who came to our country legally from Ireland when she was 11 years old.
She has lived here for 48 years.
Because of you, Jim's wife, Donna, has been in prison for the last four months.
She did not come here illegally, and she has never committed any crime other than writing two bad checks totaling $80 10 years ago.
She is currently in prison and facing deportation.
Ms. Noam, will you thank Mr. Brown for his service to our country?
Thank you, Mr. Brown, for your service to her.
Now, what possible explanation can there be for locking up his wife for four months when she has committed no crime other than writing a couple of bad checks for $80?
It was one of those moments where she walked right into it.
And the only response she had, if you watch the entire tape and you spend time with the extended cut, is to filibuster over it.
Talks about Biden, talks about how we had to do this, things were so bad, blah, blah, blah.
And then, you know, has real no answer, no real answers.
Later on, she is being questioned and then just decides to get up and leave.
She leaves early.
Now, her excuse for this was that she had to attend.
That's what she said.
She said, I have to go to a FEMA meeting, and representative representatives on the committee said, that meeting is canceled.
We know that.
You're lying.
We know that that meeting is canceled, but nonetheless, here's the moment that she got up.
I was just going to say, and if the meeting's not canceled, you're the secretary.
You get to walk into the meeting when and if you want.
She could, like, you know, if she was in, if you're testifying before Congress, I think for most people, that's a high priority.
You tell your aide, tell them I'm going to be late, or we're going to reschedule or whatever.
You're the bell of the ball, as Chrissy No one would like to be, showing up for a FEMA meeting.
It's not going to happen without you.
You're not going to miss it.
Nobody's going to be like, oh, you weren't here.
You don't get to be a part of us anymore.
Like, there's zero consequences to missing the meeting.
It's the dumbest, flimsiest excuse ever for stepping out of a congressional hearing when things get hard.
I apologize.
The gentleman's time is expired.
the secretary has to leave and I would now recognize the gentlelady from Texas, Miss Johnson, for five minutes of questions.
I'm just going to take the position that she was scared of my questions.
Mr. Chairman, if we could stop the clock and the clerk will suspend if we could reset the time.
We'll reset the clock.
Gentle lady, prepared.
So, you know, to me, this is a sign of where we are.
Like, if you want to really zero in on what does this mean, we talked about this last week.
Democracy is about dialogue, negotiation.
You have to talk.
You have to examine facts and data and decide what they mean together.
You have to share power.
Christy Noam sat through a congressional hearing yesterday where she was told to resign, where she was told that she was a disgrace to the country, where she said, we have not deported any veterans.
And a veteran who has been deported joined on Zoom.
She got up and left.
Part of that, to me, shows weakness.
She didn't have anything to say.
She didn't have answers.
She didn't have the gusto to just keep filibustering, keep yelling, keep screaming, keep putting up a fight like we've seen Kash Patel and Pam Bondi do and so on.
Some of it was just that was a breakdown of democracy.
Like if you want to know what it looks like when democracy breaks down, you have somebody who's in the presidential cabinet get up and just say, I'm not going to talk to Congress anymore.
I'm done.
Ostensibly, I have another meeting, but in reality, I'm just, I'm done.
I don't see the point in talking.
Think about if you're in a relationship, a friendship, a marriage, business partnership.
It doesn't matter if you, if you tell the person across the table from you, there's no more point in us talking.
What you're saying is the relationship is in a place where we are not going to understand each other.
And all that's left to do is to take action.
Legal action, physical action, so on.
Christy Noam leaving that hearing was democracy crumbling in front of us.
That's what that was.
I have another example.
Do you want to say anything here else here about Noam?
It shows like the multiple poles of this.
On one hand, disdain for oversight.
The disdain, the idea that one has to answer for one's actions.
But I agree with you.
It also shows weakness because what she does is she runs, she runs away.
I'm going to take my toys and go home.
Like, I think one thing that we're seeing is Trump, for all kinds of reasons that people could analyze, is just sort of, I think, constitutionally incapable of feeling things like embarrassment, of feeling things like chagrin.
I don't think that we could probably find an example ever of him actually apologizing for anything.
We talked about the first Trump administration, might have had to admit culpability and things, but Trump, Trump as an individual, never does.
We see that no matter how much they try, most of his cabinet members and others, they're just not cut of the same cloth.
And eventually it wears them down.
And so we see Chrissy Noam not just showing disdain, but having to flee, like sort of lobbying her own things back, but then having to run away.
And I think that that is significant for showing the weakening of those under Trump, as well as an awareness that I think is settling in on people that, you know what, the Supreme Court might have handed Trump immunity everywhere and said that like he's not answerable for anything that he does.
That's not going to apply to everybody.
And we've talked about this before with Heg Seth.
I think these are realities that are setting in for others and beginning to create a sense of fear with all the speculation that keeps coming out that Noam's on the way out, that they're looking at somebody to replace her, whether that's true or not.
But those rumors are there.
I think we see the effect on the administration that that's beginning to have.
Well, somehow it's not clear if she had the worst day of anyone from the Trump administration testifying before the congressional committee.
So Michael Glasheen was in front of the House Committee on Homeland Security, and he is the FBI's branch and operations director.
He was asked by Benny Thompson.
Now, I think Benny Thompson is, I want to remind everybody, again, I want to notice details that I think can get lost in these moments.
Benny Thompson was the face of the J6 committee.
Okay.
So I want you to think about Benny Thompson.
Benny Thompson spending hundreds of hours with Liz Cheney and many others working to document what happened at J6, all of the ways that that was a day of infamy in the United States, that it was instigated by the president.
It was taken.
The actions were taken in support of overthrowing an election.
So here's a man who oversaw that, Dan.
I mean, I want you to think about it.
If you're looking at this history book or you're reading in a novel, you're like, oh, the same guy, the same congressperson who did that, he's now in front of us again.
And he's talking to Michael Glashen, who's representing the FBI.
And he's asking Glashen about this.
The idea that Antifa is the primary concern of the FBI in terms of domestic terrorism.
That is what Michael Glashen said.
I'll let you listen to the rest of the exchange because it was incredibly striking.
Where in the United States does Antifa exist?
If it's a terrorist organization and you've identified it as number one?
We are building out the infrastructure right now.
So what does that mean?
I'm just, we're trying to get the information.
You say Antifa is a terrorist organization.
Tell us as a committee, how did you come to that?
Where do it exist?
How many members do they have in the United States as of right now?
Well, that's very fluid.
It's ongoing for us to understand that.
The same, no different than Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
No, no, I don't want you.
I've asked one question, sir.
I just want you to tell us, if you said Antifa is the number one domestic terrorist organization operating in the United States, I just need to know where they are, how many people.
I don't want a name.
I don't want anything like that.
Just how many people have you identified with the FBI that Antifa is made of?
Well, the investigations are active.
So Glashen is like, yeah, Antifa.
Most immediately violent threat we're facing.
And Thompson's like, where's the headquarters?
How many people are in the organization?
Where do they primarily work out of?
Is this going on in like Worcester, Mass or Baton Rouge, Louisiana?
Are they out of Lincoln, Nebraska, or maybe Albuquerque?
I don't know.
Tell me about where these guys really like get together.
Do they have satellite campuses?
And, you know, the Proud Boys and the Yath Keepers, they kind of came out of this part of the country, but they expanded.
Just let us know.
Like, have you like, what are the artifacts of Antifa's existence?
And if you could watch, you know, if you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see it.
If you've not watched the video, you should.
It is one of the worst moments I've seen of a Trump administration official basically looking like an idiot with nothing to say.
He doesn't try to filibuster.
He doesn't try to, he doesn't try to bluster.
He doesn't try to do anything.
He's just like, yeah, we're trying to build that out right now.
I mean, this is, Dan, Dan, you have kids.
You have like, you have kids who are older than mine.
I imagine this is what it's like when sometimes when you ask your son, like, hey, you got that like big project due, you know, for your seventh grade science class.
What have you done so far?
And he's like, well, I'm really building it out.
And you're like, okay, what does that mean?
And he's like, I mean, I'm really just, we're working on, like, it's a very fluid.
And you're like, okay.
Yeah.
You're like, son, show me what you've done so far.
And he's like, I've done nothing.
That's what this was.
What are your thoughts on this whole exchange?
It's, it's like, so, so rewind a bit.
So first of all, let's go back to the J6 thing.
Who did the right blame for J6?
What's their whole argument?
It was Antifa.
It's like a false flag, Antifa thing to like make the right look bad.
Okay.
Then Trump makes his big thing about declaring Antifa a domestic terrorist organization, all of this kind of stuff.
We've said Antifa's not an organization.
It's like, it's like a, you know, if anything, a kind of movement.
It's a broad sort of description.
It's maybe it's an ethos you could describe it as.
And there are real organizations that could fit under a description of being anti-fascist.
That's, of course, what Antifa is short for and so on.
But the Trump administration has said that this is their focus.
And as you say, the dude walks in and can't even pretend to have like a definition of what that is or where it is or what shape it has or why it's dangerous.
It's so incredibly dangerous that we don't, we don't know who's in it or where they're going or like what they do or anything.
But really, it's dangerous.
It's just like rhetoric.
It's no deeper than rhetoric.
It's just rhetoric masquerading as FBI policy.
But the guy whose job should have been to like try to give some shape around it, because that's what an authoritarian regime like Trump does.
You define something you don't like and then you go create the rationale for it.
That's what they've done with the drug boats.
Like they went to the office of legal counsel and basically said, find a way to make this legal.
Find a way to say that it's legal.
Hey, FBI person that we're going to put in and this is your whole job.
You need to create Antifa.
You need to construct Antifa as a concrete organization that could be targeted and so forth that we can sell to Congress to like at least tell them we're doing something.
And he couldn't do it.
And I'm just going to also highlight like, what are they actually doing?
They're busy like harassing congresspeople who said that it's illegal to follow illegal orders in the military, that you can not follow those, which is what the legal code in the military says.
They're busy investigating them.
They don't have anything on this amorphous sort of thing.
And it was sort of breathtaking how ill-prepared they were to even pretend to be doing something.
It's the same with healthcare.
We could spend the next half an hour in healthcare and like having zero plan on that either after 15 years of railing against Obamacare.
So I think that's there as well.
Let me get to one more here, and that is Indiana.
The state of Indiana was a place that the Trump administration targeted for redistricting in order to pick up more seats in the 2026 midterms.
All of you listening know that this, of course, played out in Texas and then it played out in California.
And Indiana was another place that GOP and the Trump administration were envisioning would give them a couple of more seats by way of a gerrymander that would that would really boost their chances in the next year.
Heritage, so I'm going to do a little Faberge AG segment here.
So just hang with me.
So Heritage Action, which is like the 501c4 version of the Heritage Foundation, put this out yesterday or the day before.
President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders, if the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state.
Roads will not be paved.
Guard bases will close.
Major projects will stop.
These are the stakes, and every no vote will be to blame.
Let's unpack that.
First of all, Dan, this is a sitting president extorting a state.
If anyone out, I mean, we've been clear on this show, but if anyone out there is new to this show and you're not sure where we stand, we've been saying this for months, like since Elon Musk took big balls to the treasury.
You are living under what is increasingly a fascist organization or fascist regime at the head of this country.
Dan, I don't know how to talk about this country anymore when the president is openly extorting lawmakers in one of the states.
Hey, unless you do this, we're not going to give you money, American citizens, American taxpayers, for your roads, for your guard base, for your schools, for your disaster relief.
So you make a decision.
Do you want to support me or not?
Because if you don't, next time there is a flood or next time there is an issue with your roads or with your infrastructure or anything else, well, sorry, you didn't pass the loyalty test.
Now, Indiana, the senators in the upper house of the Indiana legislature, they voted no overwhelmingly.
This did not pass.
Indiana will not be gerrymandering its districts for 2026.
It was a resounding rebuttal coming from GOP elected officials, which has been the most rare bird of them all.
You know, the older I get, Dan, the more I'm like, maybe I should take up bird watching.
Sounds more and more appealing.
The rarest bird of them all has been the horned Trump rejector.
And we found it in the Hoosier state.
I did not know that they were populating the Hoosier state this time of year, but here we are.
So not only does Indiana say no, is that a sign of weakening of Trump's power?
I think it is.
Here's my Faberge egg.
Heritage action slash Heritage Foundation tweets this whole thing.
And a former executive of that organization came out and said, look, I'm really proud of working for the Heritage Foundation.
I'm proud of being a conservative and all this stuff.
Conservatism is not about the president of the United States extorting one of the 50 members of the union.
This is not conservatism and it's not the Heritage Foundation.
That is one more sign of the Heritage Foundation splitting.
There have been so many resignations over there about the Nick Funtis Tucker Carlson thing.
There have been so many splinters at Heritage, which, if you remember, basically wrote the playbook for the Trump administration's policy in the form of Project 2025.
Heritage Foundation is not untouchable.
If you go back to the 2010, 2013 years, it was sort of vanishing as a conservative influence.
People were wondering if it was like going to go away.
It was seen as kind of a dinosaur.
This is not a situation where heritage just survives because it's heritage.
Kevin Roberts looks like he's increasingly like really facing mutiny within his ranks.
So the Indiana Senate saying no, the Heritage Foundation cracking, these are more signs of the weakening.
I got other examples throughout the day.
I agree with the weakening.
And it also, and I'm not the only one to say this, a couple other things.
This reads like Trump overplaying his hand.
So I mean, he's been threatening states since before he was president, but it's usually blue states.
It's always the blue states.
We're going to defund the blue states, California, New York, Massachusetts, what have you.
The same model of extortion, but here's a red state.
And like when you play that kind of authoritarian card of like, it's my way of highway, period, you get into that, that moment that happens.
And we've seen it.
You can just study the history of places like China or the Soviet Union or other authoritarian regimes where they become sort of cannibalistic or even fundamentalist organizations in like American religion.
The Southern Baptist Convention was like this, where you start finding all the enemies within.
It's not enough to consolidate power, but then you start finding the enemies within and sort of eating your own.
And that's what this was.
This was Trump targeting a red state.
Everybody else sees it.
All those other red states, all those other Republicans who have been towing the MAGA line, who have been rewarded for it, who've been promised that they'll be rewarded for it, who've just taken joy in watching him stick it to the libs and stick it to the blue states and their money and their wealth and their whatever kind of stuff.
All of a sudden, you're targeting their fonts.
Sorry.
All of a sudden, you're targeting a red state and you get this pushback.
I think that that's significant.
I think it is a sign of, as you say, the sort of the cracking of this.
And I think all the things we brought up before, when is Trump going to start feeling like a lame duck to a lot of, to some people in the GOP?
I think this, this, we mentioned healthcare.
This is coming up right now where you have, you know, not a majority, but a lot of people in Congress who are like, hey, guess what?
Trump's not running for reelection, but we are.
And this affordability thing is real.
And he doesn't know how to talk about it.
And he keeps saying that it's fake.
And he goes to the polka nose of all places to pitch affordability and to try to tell Americans that actually things are great and they don't think that they are.
That sounds like some lame duck recognition there.
And I think that that's the kind of thing that we're seeing on a state level with Indiana.
And so the last thing I'll say is within like the red political world, you don't get any more American than Midwestern, you know, Indiana, kind of like their vision of the real Americans.
It's that.
It's that kind of that kind of state and that region and farms and agriculture and white majority populations and all the stuff that for them is this mythological vision of like real America.
All of it.
Yeah, all of it.
And I'm not saying any of this to be critical of Indiana.
I'm just saying there's this mythology about where the real America is.
States like Indiana are it with that mythology.
And that's what Trump is targeting.
And I think it backfired very significantly for him.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll dig more into this state level analysis of how Trump is losing popularity and some more examples.
And then we'll zoom out and talk about what all this means.
Be right back.
Okay, Dan, a couple more examples before we run out of time today.
The Dems flipped a state seat in Georgia, and that's a state seat that was heavily, heavily, heavily Trump in 2024.
It was plus 12 for Trump in 2024.
That follows a long analysis from Boltz that shows that Demograt, excuse me, Democrats have gained 25 state Senate and House seats over the last year that were controlled by the GOP.
They have flipped something like one-fifth of the seats that were held by the GOP.
a 20% dip in GOP elected officials and state legislatures and other places.
That's stronger than in 2017.
So in 2017, Democrats flipped 20%.
We're now at something like 25%.
They have the large Democrats have the largest majority in the Virginia House since the 1980s.
They expanded their control in New Jersey.
They broke Republican supermajorities in places like Iowa and Mississippi.
And they flipped state Senate seats, not only in Georgia, but also in Pennsylvania.
I was just going to say, yeah.
So that's, I think that's the next place to go is there has not been a Democratic mayor in Miami for 30 years.
Eileen Higgins is now going to be the mayor of that city.
And that follows along something else that is really important.
Trump in February was minus two with Latino voters.
He is now minus 16 or no, excuse me, minus 38, I believe.
I need to look that up.
And if you're quoting me, I got to go look that up.
But it is in that ballpark.
That is huge.
His overall approval rating, going back just a few months, has gone from 42% to 36%.
Only 31% of Americans believe that he is doing a good job with the economy.
I've seen many legacy media headlines say that Trump's rating has dipped slightly.
42% to 36% is something like a 14% or 15% decline.
Dan, if I just said, hey, to somebody who worked at any business, we're going to have to cut your pay next year by 15%.
I don't think that person would be like, yeah, no big deal.
That's slight.
15% is a lot.
That is a big deal.
Dan, he has lost something like 60% percentage points among young people.
So the numbers are staggering when it comes to Latino voters, black voters, when it comes to what we're seeing in state houses in Georgia or in Iowa or Pennsylvania.
The numbers are staggering on the economy.
It is clear he is not changing the affordability numbers for people.
That's not happening.
We saw what we saw out of Miami, okay?
A couple of other things that have happened, and then I think we should zoom out.
Judge ruled that the troops got to get out of LA.
That's just not going to happen anymore.
There's also just been great reporting, and we don't have time to jump into it today, about the like rapid response, neighborhood, hyper-local networks that are popping up to protect people from ICE.
And there is a galvanizing sense of solidarity growing in those places where ICE presence is most staggering and formidable.
All of that put together, if you just said, take Trump out of it, just tell me about the numbers, the 25% drop in GOP seats, the 6% decline in like two weeks, the overwhelming switch of Latino and black voters from what was supposed to be this realignment of American politics in 2024 to just vehement disapproval of Donald Trump at the end of 2025.
If I just put this in a vacuum, you would say that is a lame duck president who is leading his party into an absolute red wedding when it comes to midterms 2026.
Do we need to change it to blue wedding?
To modify the George R.R. Martin metaphor for the politics.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't know what we need to do with it.
Catastrophic catastrophic event potentially on the horizon.
What are your thoughts on that?
And then I think we need to zoom out and ask, does it matter?
Because if he has structural control of American Democratic institutions, popularity may not be a metric that has any effect on Trump and the GOP.
So I agree.
Think as you say, if you sort of, I don't know, put the black box over Trump's head and you didn't know who you were talking about, all of this looks like that.
And I think it may be that.
Again, I've obviously, like most people, been looking at healthcare stuff a lot over the next the last few weeks.
And there were some articles we're pointing out that, you know, Trump has wanted to sideline Congress.
And a few months ago, they were just happy to be sidelined all the time.
They were going to do anything.
But they're starting to feel restless and starting to push back on this as well.
And so you see that.
I think here.
So on one hand, it doesn't matter in the sense that Trump, Trump just doesn't care.
And I think, I think honestly, it may just be in some weird form of denial, like not just doesn't care, but really does not understand what the polls are saying and that people aren't clicking with where he is.
We've seen this when, you know, there was all the stuff about Epstein and people thought about the end of the MAGA movement.
And he was like, I started the MAGMA movement.
I know what it is.
And, you know, just that kind of, you know, uh-uh, it's my movement and not recognizing that.
So there's, I think there's real peril for him here.
And I think on one hand, we see that this is real because I think what he's actually afraid of, what I think, is he's afraid of being impeached again.
I think he doesn't want to lose Congress because he doesn't want to be impeached a third time.
They're not going to be able to remove him from office.
It's a whole separate thing I was thinking about today.
Maybe we'll pick it up at some point in the supplemental, but I also think people who oppose Trump need to get past what I call the day of the Lord reckoning model that someday there's going to be to come up and some we're going to get justice will be done to Trump.
It won't.
We have to mitigate the damage.
It's the best we can do.
He's not going to be removed from office, but I think he's terrified of the embarrassment of once again being challenged in that way, of having, you know, not having a majority in Congress and so forth.
So I think all of that still matters to him.
So he doesn't think he has absolute power, even though he tries to project it.
I also think that Trump doesn't care about the U.S. government.
He doesn't care about setting up any kind of long-lasting legacy kind of authoritarianism.
This is just about Trump and Trump's power.
And the reason that I highlight that is I think you're right.
I think he's going to seize as many of those mechanisms of control as he can.
But we're already seeing that he's not doing it in a lasting way.
He's not doing it in a way that can post, you know, survive after Trump.
And so that's for me where the real ambiguity is.
I think he wants to consolidate that power, but at the same time, he doesn't want to do it in a way that gives it any lasting force.
And so I think he remains vulnerable in that way because he just doesn't recognize that there's a real threat there, despite the fact that at the same time, he always talks about the real threats there.
So I think it's a really complex time.
And I think he's at significant risk.
And I think if he doesn't start winning the GOP back over in the next few months, I think we could see that accelerate against him.
Well, and I think for me, the question at this point is, is not like, what is Trump doing to cement control of those institutions?
Because the more and more you watch Trump talk, the more and more you listen to him.
He tried to talk about what 5G technology is the other day and then got into, he got into 6G, which he thought was like 6K camera resolution.
And it was just like, grandpa, stop.
Like, you don't just stop.
He admitted he doesn't really know much about the Honduran president that he pardoned.
It really seems that was like a big tech ramrod that happened.
I think the questions for me are, what can Stephen Miller and Russell Vogt and JD Vance and others do to create a right-wing permanent machine that will control the structures of American democracy or at least our institutions?
It's up to them.
They're the ones that really are going for this.
And so to me, what 2026 looks like, just if we do a kind of like looking forward is if you want, if you wanted to make me bet, here's what I'm going to bet.
Trump's popularity is going to continue to crater unless he creates a crisis that bumps up national unity, which very well could happen.
A war, a crisis, a catastrophe.
If he does that, he could bump up those numbers because then all of a sudden people are like, well, yeah, milk's expensive, but at least we're getting those people that attacked us.
And we saw what happened when Charlie Kirk died.
Yeah.
So there's that.
But I think generally, if you continue down the ice path you're going, if you give ICE a billion dollars and you continue to attack neighborhoods, your numbers with brown, black and brown communities, your numbers with Latinos, your numbers with black folks, your numbers with Asian folks in some locales, it's going to go down.
And it's even going to go down with like Nashville soccer moms and Columbus, Ohio suburban housewives and others.
Because this is not a good look on the ground if you're there.
I think he's going to get less and less popular.
I think people's lives are going to get worse and worse.
More people are going to lose jobs.
More people are not going to be able to afford health care.
More people are going to get hurt.
More National Guard troops are going to get injured or killed.
The question is, will that unpopularity matter when we go to the polls in 2026?
Are we going to be able to vote how we should?
That's the question.
That's the question I've been raising forever.
It's the question that Jonathan last raised in his bulwark piece that I started with today.
It's the question that David Graham has raised at the Atlantic.
It's the question that the Brennan Center is doing a really good job asking, what do the midterms look like in terms of, is there going to be a blue tsunami that means that maybe there is just ridiculous numbers in the House and a majority in the Senate that makes Trump's last two years really, really, really, really miserable.
Last thing I'll say is authoritarians like him and narcissists don't want era parents because an era parent would threaten their charisma and their dominance and their attention.
So by design, there is nobody standing behind Trump that you're like, oh, it's probably that guy.
Like Ron DeSantis doesn't have the juice.
Pete Hegseth looks like kind of like a used car salesman the longer he's front of the camera.
And JD Vance has about as much aura as a Denny's parking lot.
You ever been to a Denny's parking lot?
There's nothing there that you're like record, Brad.
Every Friday.
This might be where I propose to my girlfriend someday.
You know, like there's nothing there that you're like, well, let's just hang out here for a minute.
That's JD Vance.
There's no one standing behind him other than the rumors of Baron Trump that also seem whatever.
That's for another day.
Like anyone has any juice.
All right.
Final thoughts.
Yeah, so just a couple on this, the theme about the lasting institutions.
I think one of the things I agree with everything you're saying about trying to build those last consolidating power in those institutions sort of post-Trump.
One thing that I think weighs against that in concrete terms is they've sidelined Congress.
If everything's done through executive orders, if everything's done through an executive model of putting the people in and so forth, it means that if and when there isn't that executive there, and I know that brings back the questions of voting and elections and so forth, but if and when that happens, all those executive orders can be undone.
The same thing they're doing to unwind the government now can be redone.
And I think if they had involved Congress and gone through the work of getting congressional support to make legal changes to these institutions, they would be much more successful.
But we've talked about this for months.
That's not how Trump works.
And I think also that I agree with what you're saying about a potential national crisis and all of that.
But I think one of the things that they run up against, and this is what's, you know, is another part of the fissures that are forming, is the MAGA base was also built on that non-intervention.
That's what America first meant.
It meant no, no foreign entanglements, no boots on the ground anywhere, no whatever.
And so I wonder on some of these what it will do to some of that MAGA base.
If what in the past could have been a unifying, you know, sort of rally around the flag sort of event, would they still rally in the same way?
I just, I don't know the answer to that.
I don't know that they wouldn't.
But I think that these are complicated tensions within the MAGA movement and within the edifice that Trump has built that are sort of circulating against themselves right now.
So I think that there's some counterproductive currents in the MAGA world.
I'm going to just say right now, any Democratic candidate who runs on reinstating Calibri, I'm sending you money right now.
Okay.
So, all right.
Reason for hope for me is Kilmar Obrego Garcia is out of custody and is free once again.
Kilmar Obrego-Garcia has become a kind of emblem of the attempts to run roughshod over the judiciary and the rule of law, and it's not happening now.
There are many other examples where that has happened, but it is good news that he is not in custody and the judges continue to not allow that in this case.
So, yeah, what's yours?
Mine, we were reflecting all of this this week, getting ready, and mine is really, it was the Democrats continuing to kind of win in these red, you know, the flipping the state house in Georgia, winning the electoral vote, or excuse me, the mayoral vote in Miami.
But I think for me, what it does is we talk about the cracks in this, but I think what it's doing is it's a kind of, as it were, a regression to the mean.
There was a lot of talk after the election about this, this unstoppable new Republican coalition that Trump had built and a mandate.
The dude won 49% of the vote.
And people can go back and listen.
And, you know, I said I was never convinced that like, okay, you squeaked in.
You didn't win the popular vote.
You won more votes than Kamala Harris, but you don't win a majority of people who voted is what I mean by that.
Okay.
This was not a lasting coalition.
This was a very episodic sort of, you know, confluence of forces.
And I think we're seeing that.
And I think that that's, you know, we talk about the numbers cratering.
In many ways, they're returning back to what they've been toward the GOP for a long time.
And I take hope.
I take hope in that.
And I realize that there's nothing automatic about that.
Doesn't mean that's going to, how it's going to stay.
It's a long time until next November, but I take hope in sort of those transitions back to really what I think was the mean before Trump's election.
You think you can do more pull-ups than RFK?
Probably not, because I don't even want to know what RFK has in his system.
That's fair.
I mean, I think he has anifreeze in his veins and lives in a cryogenic chamber and all that other stuff.
Well, most people who watched him do the pull-ups, though, at the airport were like, none of those even count.
So I think if you can even do one, you can beat him because he was not doing pull-ups.
It's like in movies when they show him doing pull-ups.
And if you were to zoom out, they're like standing on a box and they're like, you know, going up and down.
So yeah.
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