Bill Kristol: The Paxton Nightmare Is Costing Republicans Big Time

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For me, at least I would want somewhere where there's some vitamin D, maybe some palm trees, but who knows? For people who don't understand the jokes that are making right now, the mega right was all a flutter over the weekend. They thought they had James Taylor Eka. They thought they had impact. It was over. They had their silver bullet, their October surprise. The book has a deal right now. If you go to the board.com/surprise, we have an October surprise deal for you as well. If you want to become a board plus member, but they thought they had their October surprise. They had evidence. The James Taylor Eka had left the campaign trail and was in a padded room somewhere in Ohio. They're evidence for this that they had. It might have began even with an old friend of mine, strangely, who features in my book while we did it, Caroline Ren. She was posting a lot about this. She saw a private plane took off from Austin and flew to a tiny airport in Ohio, 20 minutes from the Lindner Center. An inpatient mental health treatment facility. The Lindner Center is the same facility that Tauriko's friend, Lena Hadalgo, at Liberal Judge in Texas, had spent seven weeks there, apparently, three years ago. That's what they had. A plane went from Texas to a small airport near the center. Then these two guys Nick Sorter and Ryan Armaker, they called the center several times. They pretended to be Tauriko's cousin. It seems like they broke some laws. I'm not a lawyer, but they seem like they broke some laws. They shared a short audio clip that seemed to show somebody saying that Tauriko had checked out earlier that evening. This was on Saturday. And this had, now everybody is on board. Rick Grinnell, the former Interim National Security Advisor, the New York Post, the turning point USA guys, everybody started saying they got them. They got them. Tauriko was in the center. The problem was that we don't really know exactly what was happening on that call, but hours later, the Lindner Center put out a statement saying Tauriko is never there. Our own will summary Andrew Ager got the full six minutes of the phone call where the woman on the other end of the line keeps saying that he's not there over and over again. And she was like, maybe she was just trying to get these weirdos off the phone. I don't know. The timeline also didn't work out. James Tauriko and Saturday could not have been released from a mental health facility in Ohio because he was on stage with Casey Musgraves in Austin. The whole thing is extremely bizarre. And I think, well, it speaks to the desperation of where the compacts in campaign is. And also just like how easy it is to move totally fake nonsense around the right media. I guess Elon Musk retweeted three times that you found this very interesting or maybe just retweeted it. I don't know what it is interesting kind of things for this. So that gives it a lot of attention. It was ridiculous. It flared up for several hours on Sunday. And I guess it's now flared away. And Andrew will have done excellent reporting on it and how that happened. For me, one question is, so it does say a lot about the right. Ecosystems has a lot about the desperation in on the mega right about what's happening in three weeks. Do we think I'm a Caroline read. It's not a nobody though. She was involved in January 6th. Do we know yet if the Pakistan campaign was it wasn't involved Republican officials in Texas Republican officials nationally? I feel like that's sort of the one additional shoe that could drop. Do we think they were just innocently viewing this little thing that was happening? No, no. I mean, they were obviously I think pushing it behind the scenes. I mean the Pakistan people. This is not the most professional crew down there. And it's a motley crew. There's a side controversy over the weekend about one of the Pakistan advisors calling corn in the sea word on Twitter. And so, you know, and this is, I guess I'll just repeat a motley crew with the Pakistan crowd. And yeah, I don't know. I mean, Caroline was a big fundraiser for Kerry Lake and for Trump for a while and is now independent. I'd have to go and look at the filings to see who's on the Pakistan payroll at this point. But this is that that's the same group. I mean, Norken L was very much around, you know, the lake and master's posse in Arizona. I mean, we could go down a huge list of Republican kind of operatives and right wing media folks who are pushing this. Basically, you know, part of this is you get a small group of these kind of mega influencer types that are trying to get attention. But as soon as that audio came out, you know, everybody piled on it and tried to push it forward as if it was real story. And it was like the whole thing was kind of ridiculous from the start. You know, it's one of these things like even if you just step back for one second, it's like, okay, well, it was a little strange. I guess I will say that Telleriko, like, was off the campaign trail for like a week and wasn't doing videos or whatever. And there's stuff you can do when you have the flu. I'm a limp when it comes to sickness. You know, I'm down. But I usually when I have, I've had some bad sicknesses since I posted the podcast. I come on here. I do the podcast for one hour and then I go lay down the rest of the day. You can do an hour's worth of work. So it wasn't a little confusing why he was so, so, but, but the idea that he had gone to Ohio was also thin. You know, it was kind of like the, it's really the Jack Smith thing over again, right? Like these guys are in their own bubbles. And they want, they want to be able to get the bad guys so badly. It's kind of like, I guess he's on Omar which we'll talk about in a little bit. You know, they're willing to grab onto anything that even feels like it might have a kernel of a truth. And, you know, I just they don't have the best people. And I was the old Watergate line. Like these guys are very smart. Like they, they just don't. And it's like, okay, I mean, if you thought about it for two seconds, it was like, who cares if Jack Smith was at the Hawks game. It's like, okay, okay. There's one playing like, what does that tell us? Like it tells us nothing. They didn't actually have anything in any of these situations. I mean, I guess maybe though they've learned that they don't pay a price or so far. Maybe this is changing. They haven't paid a price for this, right? I mean, the actual great point. An actual promoter of Fizegate is about to become the press secretary to the president of the United States. Now, we know it's, you know, we are kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel by now and back a world. And I think that's an instance of that. But still, you know, it's not as if these people are being black balls from well paying jobs. And allegedly, once we're for stages, jobs and consultancy, consult and contracts and or being booted off God knows, you know, social media or anything or being disciplined even for it anyway. So I guess that's maybe emboldened the walls to just try anything. Honestly, I forget like not having any consequence. Like being the person that creates like fake controversies has been a boom in mega world. And like there's that moron, Nick Shirley, you know, that was trolling around Minnesota around the time that we're there. He's become famous. I mean, Elon, he become famous by pushing the sorts of stuff. And yeah, I mean, maybe there's some consequence of like you care about being on Susan Collins staff at center appropriations or something. Like there's gonna be a handful of like serious jobs left, but not too many think about the guy. I'm going off of memory here. So he is speech writer that then went on to DeSantis's campaign and put out the video that had the Saun and Rod, which is, you know, this kind of obscure. Right. Nazi symbol. But then was running was pushing this kind of white nationalist stuff to a bunch of kind of fake Twitter accounts. It gets fired from the DeSantis campaign ends up getting hired by Eric Schmidt, who does the Jack Smith nonsense and pushed a lot of Eric Schmidt's blood and soil messaging and his speeches. And now he's working for Marco. He's in the State Department. So like even the serious jobs like you, if you are the type of person that is like sticking your finger in the eye of the left. It's actually benefits you to be conspiratorial, controversial, a little racist. Unfortunately, I just think that's where we're at. Totally. The radicalness of the Trump second term, I feel like maybe we haven't quite done justice to that. And you know, we like you and me. I think we have. But the world, even our world hasn't quite done justice to just how far it's gone and how pervasive it is. There's another guy in the State Department, right? We got fired if I'm not mistaken for the White House speech writing office in 2018 or something because he was such a white racist, you know, great replacement theory kind of guy. And now he's got some acting assistant secretary of state thing in the State Department, like I bet he, I think his name is so. And I try not to follow these guys too closely. They both are very prominent now for Marco for the other. If you have some people on the CNN panels, they'd be like, oh, this is the reasonable one in the administration. It's like he's the one hiring them. Right. Right. No, absolutely. And these are, you know, it's a department defense department, not not stuck in some third rate agencies. somewhere that doesn't matter, right? Look, the people around Hexeth, they have real lunatex who were blackballed in the Trump first term and who are they right back in there at pretty high levels in defense, encouraging the executions, the live streaming of the execution, etc. I mean, it's bad. It's bad. And I hope there's a price to be paid. There will be a price to be paid this, however. As you see, if Tallariko, do you think this penetrated far enough in Texas to actually change the race at all to give to lock it up for Tallariko, or is it just where it was before, which is him with a pretty good lead, but not locked up? Probably where it was before. I, you know, maybe it has a motivating factor, you know, continuing like, this is the sort of thing that's silly enough that kind of breaks through a little bit in the way that typical stuff does. And I was interested in this clip wrote a weekend when you're asking the extent to the Paxton campaign pushing it. I mean, Paxton himself is pushing these on Fox. And I want to play a clip of the Fox inference host asking Paxton about Tallariko's debate challenge. Well, now, look, we've been working on that for months with him. And of course, we can never quite work out the details because you always want something we can't do. So reality is the big story is the fact that he was missing from the campaign trail. I know what he'd love to change the topic to debates. Tallariko posted that video with this statement. Here are the details literally anytime, any place, any network. So this is like Paxton is not really capable of taking advantage of this, right? I mean, he's scared of Tallariko. It doesn't want to debate him is in his safe space on Fox and Friends weekend, you know, trying to advance, you know, rumors and conspiracies about what Tallariko is doing when he had the flu. And instead, like even on Fox, he gets the tables turned on. Yeah, I guess that can't basically suck up a couple hundred million dollars of Republican money. And I think I think taxability is going to lose. And I think Abbott may lose as well. And that's another couple hundred million dollars. So that's pretty good. That worked out pretty well. I think maybe I don't want to be maturely declared any victories here, but that may have worked out pretty well. Yeah. Who had discussed this on a public week or two ago? I think it was actually Jane. So now there's been discusses and social media like like the Paxton thing might be such a nightmare that ends up costing them Kansas or Alaska or something, because like that was money that could have been spent in a state to shore up a Republican who is like not just an insane incompetent corrupt buffoon like Ken Paxton who even has longtime Republicans opposing him. So I'd look at the homeownership can be a bear. There's always something going wrong, you know, and I'm not just talking about the leaky faucets, but could be a gutter, could be a water pump. You know, we had some issues recently that are, we'll just call them New Orleans based issues. All right. When you, when you live below sea level and have this kind of humidity, sometimes the houses suffer the consequences. You know, I don't know how to fix anything. And so what, what we did was we were able to turn to our new friends at home serve, home serve is like a subscription for your house. For as little as $4.99 a month, they've got your back. Regular homeowners insurance doesn't cover a lot of the day-to-day wear and tear. Regular homeowners insurance is horrible at this sort of stuff. You know, they, they bury you in the paperwork. They want to ensure that you don't actually get recompense for any issues that happen with your house, plumbing failures, right? HVAC breakdowns, electrical issues. So at home serve, it's super simple. 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Last week I discussed Kentucky 6, Zach Dembo, which is in Lexington, and I am not going to talk about anything else that is happening in Lexington recently besides that campaign. So Zach Dembo I think looking good and the Republicans are now putting money into that race. Kentucky 6. I was announced after we discussed this last week. I also called out a five call out of the springs I mentioned. You have mentioned the Idaho Senate race where I had someone from Idaho come up to me last week. I really appreciated what you said about the Idaho Senate race making play. And I was like, to be clear, it was Bill that said. Thank you. It's getting out there. The Idaho and to saw this. South Carolina Florida Senate. You also mentioned this well last week. Okay. For this week, I want to talk about the Texas governor's race, Gina Hausa. I do still think I wouldn't call this a long shot anymore, but I think she's still the underdog as we sit here today, October 12th. The fact that a Democrat, you know, like her, all respect are we had her at our live event. She seems like a good person. I have some friends that live in the school district. She kind of got a lot of attention for, you know, her work and some of the controversies around funding around schools there in Texas. And I have a friend there who's like a very middle of the road person, not that political, who's like really impressed with her around this, you know, education issue. So seems to impress the person, but wasn't like the top recruit for Texas Democrats to run in this race. I think that there's kind of a sense that this was going to be a really uphill battle. Now all of a sudden, she's on a really good campaign. Paxton is dragging the whole tech it down. Abbott is struggling. Paul's show heard, you know, pretty much kind of close to where Beto was in 2018 in that Senate race, you know, down one, two, three, four points. So in play. And I just got to say, like, this is very, it's winnable like the crazy things happen in, in wave years. We've discussed that a bunch over the last few months. I think that the electorate is going to be very democratic friendly in Texas this time. You've had this huge flip among Hispanic voters. We're talking about that more this week. But, you know, just kind of the makeup of the electorate who's going to turn out. I think it's going to be very beneficial to her. There's this side controversy that Andy Bashir has caught up in where the Democratic governs association has not put any money into this race, like maybe a million dollars or something like that. But more money in to the Oregon governor race and the main governor's race. And I just, I don't understand it. This is sort of this inner DC thing that I try not to usually talk about with this podcast, but I kind of bubbled up into the public. There's frustration on the Democratic side. And the DGA Bashir and his team, I put out the like, you know, basically saying, well, you know, that race has just stood out. We got it. We don't want to take resources away from these other races. So it's like, who cares about the Oregon governor's race? No offense. I've had a couple of messages from people in Oregon that wanted me to talk about this race. But like, if Tina Koteck is doing that bad of a job as governor that she's going to lose a deep blue state in a Democratic wave year, well, then maybe the Oregon Democratic party needed a little turnover. I mean, like, there's going to be huge majorities in the Oregon House and Senate. It's not like some of the Republicans are going to be able to go in there and do anything crazy. It's just, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter that much. A Democrat winning Texas would have massive policy implications, real life implications for people who live in Texas who've been like, you know, particularly low income people, marginal people that are struggling that have been screwed over about the Abbott regime that doesn't care about them at all, but have huge democracy implications as we think, look ahead to redistricting 2030 about like a bunch of other stuff, psychological implications on their Republicans to a lost Texas political. I think the Democrats should be going all in on the Texas governor's race right now. And you throw in whatever $10, $20 million in that race, and they still lose. It's still, I think, a better spent than trying to shore up Oregon. Look, anti-accompancy is part of what's happening in this wave year, and that is hurting some Democratic incumbents who may have just, you know, accumulated various grievances against them. That may be the case now again. I imagine she's going to win anyway. As you say, as she loses, and if she loses, that's the Democratic legislature, and what's going to happen. May, and she's up by 10 points to Democrats, so that's pretty ridiculous. Now, maybe they think it'll help at the Senate candidate, Jackson. I don't know. I totally agree with you, though. The implications of winning the governorship in Texas, either Texas or Florida, and if you want Texas, no higher, which I think is totally doable at this point, you're changing American politics for the next four years, right? I mean, you're changing the map, you're changing, if you hold on in 2030, you're changing redistricting, but just in terms of, as you say, you can, you can unjury, man. Right, but in terms of the actual effects that, if you took, in those states, could be in play in 2008, right? And then you've got a Democratic governor. But just the actual effects of people's lives, I agree. Texas has been such a leader, and this is why YABIT isn't doing very well as well. You're pushing every crazed Republican, you know, agenda item, you know, way down to the kind of, let's let, you know, make it difficult for women who are having, you know, a miscarriage to get medical help, but that kind of crazy this. That it would make a big difference, I think, for them to be, for that to change at that level. And so, yeah, I totally agree with you. Generally, there's still being a little too cautious, might be easy for you to say. And obviously, it could all backfired. We could be wrong. And they could end up not spending enough in some states to look okay. And then they lose them by a point. But it just doesn't feel to me where we are. And a lot of time in these situations, I look, I remember this from back in my day, when I, you know, wanted money for a candidate that we had, and we'd have some donor that would give money in ear market, so who knows, bring some rich guy in Oregon or Maine has sent this money to the DGA and they've earmarked it for those races. But even still then, it's what I would have liked to have seen from Bashir is to come out and say, yeah, we want to send more money in Texas. Bring us, you know, come on, let's do it. Send us money, paddle to the metal. - Well, it's not too late. - It's three weeks left. - It's not too late. - Hey, Bashir got on TV today. It was got on the phone today, really, honestly, until five big donors, he could raise $25 million for Texas. - I agree with that. So I think that it's worth money going into Texas governor right now, Kentucky Six, which I mentioned. I should also mention the New York 21 race, our guy Brendan Hartnet is an article today. I've mentioned this race before, but it's another race that could use some influx of cash. It's the phonics, old district. The Democratic's Blake gender being totally normal, dairy farmer, mainstream Democratic candidate, good for the district. His opponent, Anthony Constantino, said that Donald Trump and Roger Stone can control him, said that he'd be subordinate to Trump. When he is asked about the Iran where he's like, Trump knows so much about Iran that I don't know, I couldn't challenge him on that. Also has a rap album dedicated to Donald Trump. So that is what Republicans are putting up in this district in upstate New York. And anyway, we'll put a link to Brandon's article in there, but I think that's another one that could use some resources. - I've been chatting with you all about one skin for a while now. So I jumped, I was pumped. When they sent their new OS1 face rich cream to try out, and it's exactly what my skin has been craving. I was up in the Northeast and you're just whole body is chapping. Okay, I knew about chapped lips. 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After you purchase it, I'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Your long shots for this week on a turn to bill, high bar to pass after Idaho and South Carolina Senate. I set the bar so high with Idaho. I'm now picking various, you know, virtual safe races at this point. But you know, it's just one of the candidate thing. It is, I mean, this is sort of a scraping the bottom of the barrel thing from Aga World. We've had so many years of Trump that we're now getting to the third tier of Trump be candidates in a lot of these places. And conversely, I was just saying on the Democrats for all that I'm happy to criticize them. And I say this morning in morning shots that winning in 26 isn't enough, blah, blah, blah. Still, they have pretty good candidates. I got to say, if you look across the board at the Senate, the governor, the House races, you know, there are a couple I could would have preferred others and primaries and stuff. But it's really a pretty impressive group. And I think that's true in a couple of these races too. Anyway, the House races for sure. I can say you're under at least a phonic. And I've said about every bad thing that you can say about a person about her. I mean, she went to Harvard, she's read books. She knows she's talking about, I mean, the insuredification from at least a phonic down to a rapper who says that Trump can control them is pretty not worth it. - Yeah, no, absolutely. So in Virginia, well, it's my long shots, but you're not super long at this point. But so Virginia, remember there was that redistricting. It got a Spanberger pushed it through. It considered some political cost barely made it in the referendum. After Texas registered the other way, the thought in California and Virginia and other states too was you got to have a democratic redistricting to counter the Republican illegitimate midterm or at least unprecedented the decade, I guess the way to say redistricting. So Spanberger pushed that through in Virginia. Then the court somewhat weirdly, I've got to say overturned it. And we're back to the districts we had drawn by a judge with nonpartisan advisors in 2020, I believe. So we're back to the districts that are six, five, democratic over a Republican. It's a pretty evenly divided state. So we're not competing in a redistricted area, competing in the same districts. And now it looks like Democrats are going to win. I think Virginia, one in Virginia two, Virginia two is Virginia Beach, Virginia one is kind of suburban, Richmond, and Central Virginia. They were districts that Spanberger won in their big 15 point victory in 2025, polling suggests right now that the Democrats are in good shape there. They have good candidates actually. But now I'm here and I gather that Virginia five, which was mine as Spanberger lost by seven. So Spanberger won the state by 15 points. So we're already up at the 2024 levels with 2025 levels here. Spanberger lost that by seven. A lot of Democrats, I know, think Perielo can win there. Charlottesville is at the heart of that district and then a lot of Republican areas around Charlottesville, maybe huge turnout in Charlottesville I'm thinking. And then I think serious people think that Virginia six, which Spanberger lost by 17 points, isn't play as well, kind of a real Mac of Republican, Ben Klein, a good Democratic candidate. Beth Macy I think is her name. So yeah, she wrote Doepseck. Yeah, the book that turned into the TV show about, you know, kind of Appalachian, you know, fentanyl abuse prescription drug abuse. It's really TV shows great. Is it? It's good enough for me. Good to know, okay. I do recommend Doepseck if you're looking for a bench. I mean, it's, it's not really uplifting. Yeah, no, well, I should look at that. Maybe after the election. But anyway, good for Beth Macy for running. You know, that is one thing that happens when you get a Trump reelected and you see what happened those first six, nine months of 2025. A lot of people ran for Congress who might not otherwise have done so, you know, I mean, who are just like this is intolerable. And so you do get a pretty good Democratic draw. You get some weak Republican candidates. But it's interesting. So Harris, one of Virginia by about five, six points in 2024, Spanberger by 15 points in 25. If it's a 10 points swing from the Biden Harris numbers, which is what we now expect in the generic, that gets you to the Spanberger numbers. So I think Virginia wanted to say what's interesting to me is that people now think Virginia, at least, is gonna do better for the Democratic House candidates than Spanberger was able to do in a very strong showing in 2025. If that's at all replicated elsewhere, now, A, we don't know if that'll happen Virginia, but if it does happen to some degree. And B, that's suggesting a really monster wave, at least some states in maybe the purplish states that which Virginia is. I mean, Spanberger, Gratio, always replacing a Republican governor, wasn't like, and swept in a big Democratic legislature that had previously been very closely balanced. So anyway, I guess it makes me think, some of these generic numbers are concealing a little erosion in blue states, New York, Oregon, as we were mentioning. But it might be that the swing is little bigger in these swing-ish purple light red states, you know? - We're seeing that. As you mentioned, like the anti-incumbit wave is piling on to kind of the anti-Trump wave. I think that's happening. So you're seeing, you know, in red states and purplish red states, more of a swing. The other thing is, there's certain demographics about this piece was interesting. Let's solve the weekend. If you looked at, they were just looking at this one congressional district in New York. So, you know, there's gonna be some noise when you look at that, but it was a deep analysis at Tom Swazi's district in New York. If you just looked at it based on income, it was a total inverse in how big the swing towards Democrats were. Right, like the highest income had the smallest swing to Democrats and the lowest income at the largest. And I do think that kind of you add that on to, you know, the Hispanic vote swing, you know, and you kind of map that into certain locations where there is more low income or Hispanic. These were places that Trump really overperformed in 2024 among kind of the lowest income and black and brown voters. And I just think that that's going to totally flip back this time. And so I do think that that, you know, certain places you're going to see that. And there's always this kind of discussion over like how much of the Trump thing was the economic anxiety side of it. And, you know, it's always like there's a mix that there's a lot of cultural stuff. There's a lot of, you know, it's not just the economics, but the areas that are getting hit the hardest and the voters that are getting hit the hardest by inflation, I think we're going to see the biggest swings. Which is at some level kind of obvious, but it's pretty interesting to see just how stark it was if you're just pulling out just the income. - Yeah, and I think the white working class swing proudest and put it this out in the conversation I had with them yesterday, Ron did is pretty massive. It looks like from the polling in some of these key states that was Trump's base, right? Even the white evangelical working class, which is really, really Trump's base, there's some cracks, but certainly among the non-evangelical white working class you're seeing real movement and that's making the difference that, you know, Democrats were ready to do them pretty well with college educated and post college, you know, God knows graduate, graduate school and so forth. So in upper middle class people, I mean, one way to say it might be that when the economy was good or when people, well, people either felt Biden's economy was bad or back even in 2018 when they felt Trump's economy was decent, they could vote on their cultural grievances. But now, having done that, there, maybe they see that these grievances were a little ridiculous, but more importantly, they're actually paying a real price, right? And the gas prices really hits work in class and poorer Americans. So much more than I've gas prices are not a progressive tax, you know, everyone's paying the same. In fact, if anything, I would suspect lower middle class, you know, Americans drive more, depend on driving more for jobs and so forth, a lot of upper middle class Americans. So, so it's a real tough hit on those voters and they are peeling away from Trump. It seems. Though you mentioned your brown state conversation, I have been, you know, so locked in on the midterms and everyone's well, I'll dabble on a little 2028 presidential talk, but, you know, I haven't looked at the 2028 Senate map. You need to be a real nerd like Ron Brownstein to start doing that. And I was intrigued by your conversation about how the interplay between the Democrats kind of running up the numbers. So you can get up to 53, 54 senators this time or 52 even, what that means for 2028, whether a hypothetical Democratic president could have a Senate majority. And, you know, then obviously that has impact on confirmations and redistricting and a bunch of other stuff. Yeah, Ron makes the point that if Trump's numbers don't rally in the next two years and there's not much reason they should Republicans should be favored to lose the White House in 2028. For all the weaknesses of Democrats, there's not much historical precedent for a party to hold the White House. Even if it's not the same candidate to go to the voters at the end of the previous press in his term and hold the White House, if he's really unpopular, you look at Bush. In 2008, you know, Bob was a strong candidate, McCain, I think I should say a pretty strong candidate, wasn't that connected to Bush, didn't matter. They weren't going to re-elect the Republican after when Bush was 32%. And the same is true in many other instances before going way, way back, incidentally. So if you, you know, if you leave the White House weak at the end of two terms and Trump really is, well, it is the end of two terms, that already creates, you know, some odds for a Democratic president in 28. And winning the Senate by 52 plus, really 53 or 54, they're not going to lose the Senate if they go into 53 seats and a Democratic president wins at the top of the ticket and they're not going to lose the House either for that matter. So I think you're pretty much, if Democrats could win the Senate by more than 52 seats this time. And if they can then help keep Trump's numbers down in 2728, you are increasing the odds of a Democratic trifecta in 2029, which is awfully important for like 5 million obvious reasons, like fixing our democracy, fixing the economic distribution of income and wealth, you know, and about, you know, strengthening guardrails against authoritarianism, Supreme Court nominees getting, you know, I mean, certainly the Democrats were in the Senate this time, Trump, Thomas and Alito won't retire, which they would, it's only, did you think if Republicans hang out to the Senate, we'll leave that for sure, would retire, and then so that would get a younger replacement, where you could actually get a flip of those seats on the Supreme Court in 2029 with a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate. So this is Hopian. This is the two forehead. No one should fact on this and want to focus on the next two weeks, et cetera, et cetera. But it is just analytically, I think a pretty true statement and shows how important the Senate is. Too much talk still. I was on some call late last week. The House is where we have to focus on this bill. It's like, you're crazy. One Senate seat is worth like five houses at this point. And it's right. I mean, the House is 225 or 235. It's a little nicer for Hackeam Jeffries. It's the two 35. It really doesn't make much difference at all. The Senate is 53 or four instead of 50 or 50. Well, 50 isn't even winning a set of 51 or even 52. That is a huge difference. No, and he said it's maintaining it in 2028. So anyway, we'll keep on that. One other thing, I don't want to get to other news items. It's just another poll item, you know, like actual news, not just, you know, us pondering about the midterms. But I did, I found this poll interesting. Yeah, because there's a lot of conversation out there. If you're on the, if you're on the YouTube, you're seeing a lot of conversation about some people that are really focused on what happened in October of 2024 and what the miss was there. But like the reality is, if you just looked at polls in 2024, most people thought that Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party were too far left. Like that's just a fact. It's just what people said in polls. There's a round of points in New York times. That's interesting. And then it asked voters if they thought that the candidate was too far left. So they needed to candid at Paltola, Tara, Camelton, Jackson, Elsaid, Pappas, Cooper, et cetera. And then asked if the party was too far left. And every state except for Michigan, it was over 50% of voters said the party was too far left. And only Michigan and Texas did they say the candidate was too far left at 40%. So there's just this huge delta, you know, between, you know, in Alaska, only 36% said Paltola was too far left for 53% said the party is too far left. Even Elsaid, 43% too far left versus 48, pretty small delta bear. I just think that the way that the Democrats were able to distinguish their brand from the party is another thing that's helping them right now in the midterms. So I mean, it's just right there on the data. It's good. No, I hadn't noticed that in that poll. It really is striking when you look at the chart. And even in Texas, which is the second weakestness where we're after Michigan, it's like 40, tellurico, 40% of the election thinks telluricos too far left. 50% think the Democratic party is too far left. That's the difference between winning by three points and losing by two points, because evenly, right? I mean, for sure. And obviously in the other states, the gap is even bigger. The Brass again, Elsaid. So, yeah, no, I think it's a very striking. So they have not really succeeded in wrapping, you know, the trans ads are not working this time. It doesn't seem that right, man. And it's working at getting their base to think that they're too far left, whether that be 36% to 43% of the, of the electorate, but it was working at a broader than that in 2024. I've had it come. And that's pretty no worthy. US voters abroad. Go to votefromabroad.org and click, "Request my ballot." Ask to receive it by email. Questions? Don't delay. Votefromabroad.org. All right. Some new stuff from over the weekend. Trump is, like, getting pretty desperate on the diesel front in particular in the cost of diesel. Obviously he's hearing it, trying to think what can he do. And he turned to a couple of things. One at Trump does a deal with Putin, talks to Putin, where America will import Russian diesel. This is interesting because they just signed the Lindsey Graham bill that said that they were going to sanction and tear off other countries that purchased energy from Russia. And now we're doing it. So it shows you how seriously Donald Trump took that bill that passed both houses of Congress and that the remaining seven Russia hawks in the Republican Party were trying to use to demonstrate the like sea. We're still tough on Russia. We passed the Lindsey Graham bill. It's like, okay, well, Trump is going around it to now import Russian diesel to try to get the diesel price down 10 more cents before the midterms. And then on top of doing the deal with Putin, Trump also called Mark Carney, apparently, begged him like a dog for diesel from Canada, report this morning that Canada is going to maximize their diesel exports to America. You know, I don't want to understate like there is this trade war has caused some economic suffering in Canada, but there was some views that maybe Carney was cutting off his nose despite his face a little bit by going so hard at Trump. And here we have another example of it working. A Carney goes to the max in fighting Trump on the trade war. Trump gets us into a stupid Iran war and does other things that was rising in the cost of diesel. Our biggest import from Canada is energy. And now Trump wants us to maximize that to try to get prices down another big win from Mark Carney. No, that's what's good to see. Yeah, and Trump and also a lot of this is just about narrative. There's not enough Russian diesel that could come if he's going to come, honestly, which is very unclear about the markets and trying to manipulate American public opinion. And thus the claim, which is also false that Zelensky's attacks, the Ukraine's attacks on Russian energy sources, is fundamentally changing world oil prices. What's changing world energy prices is the war in Iran. There's no question of how bad it just look at the charts. This could be affecting it at the margin, but we're really talking a incredibly smaller delta than the war. So it's all an attempt to kind of shift blame. It also gets to intelligent as true views about Russia and Ukraine, which are totally propudent and totally anti-Solensky. Yeah, he does indeed. Let's talk about that later. There's some other stuff with Russian Ukraine over the weekend. Trump made his fourth try at an energy ceasefire. So it's after doing the diesel deal Putin. So it gets that done. And then he declares a ceasefire, energy ceasefire. It seems like that ceasefire existed only in his mind. Right. A lot of the Ukrainians were like, I don't know what he's talking about. Maybe Steve Whitkoff called his buddies in Russia and they said, okay, and pulled the wool over his head for the 107th time since he was the point man on this. But Russia continued their attacks on a heating and power plant in Kharkiv and infrastructure in Zapparija after Trump said that there was an energy ceasefire. There's a blackout in Kiev last night. And more just horrifying images of, you know, innocence in Ukraine dying at the end of the year. to Russian attacks. There was Ukrainian counter attacks. They took out two or five data centers belonging to Russian tech giant Yandex, which is like the Russian Google, which is going to have an interesting side plot there. It seems like it might have impacted the Russian bot farms, because a lot of the traffic, like pro-Russia propaganda traffic, was down over the weekend. Analysts were looking at, but the whole thing is exceedingly depressing. And there's a little bit of a groundhog day element to this, which is like Trump pretending like he's doing something with a ceasefire while Russia escalates. And the sucking up to Putin, we've sort of died now taking for granted. Obviously, welcome Putin was a red carpet a year ago in Alaska. I was with some Europe speaking of the conference a lot of younger Europeans Friday, and I chance to talk to a fair number of them after the panel and all this. And I've forgotten. So, I mean, they are really horrified. Like, this is the news of broken pretty recently about Trump and Putin and all that. Like, in Europe, what reason they've gotten tougher and behaved pretty well, I've got to say over the last several years, is they took seriously the notion that we can't let Putin get away with this aggression. And they've also experienced, obviously, his attacking Russian dissidents and exiles in their countries, and they've paid more of a price than we have actually for the energy cut-offs after 2020. They're serious about the sanctions. They're serious about Putin. They're serious about what a world looks like in which Putin wins. And they still are kind of appalled by what Trump is doing, where it's in a way, we're now, I mean, criticizing anyone here, I'm dissuade, we're all taking so much taken for granted that Trump's in the tank for Putin that we don't even get, you know, we make fun of it a little bit about, but we don't really get indignant. They were actually angry and indignant, which I give them, which is a good sign for them, and I give them credit for that, you know. Well, I was aligned with the young Europeans that you met at a conference on Friday because I got indignant over Tom Cotton. I figured it was something that I follow was like trolling cotton and retweeted something that he sent in 2023 that I want to read. If Russia laid down its arms, there would be peace. If Ukraine laid down its arms, there would be no Ukraine. The fastest way to achieve peace is for Biden to stop pussy-footing around and give Ukraine the weapons it needs to take back its territory, then Putin will negotiate. That was Republican Senator Tom Cotton in 2023. Not a lot to disagree with there. I mean, maybe a little harsher on Biden than I would have been, but the point about who is to blame for all this and how the war could end was exactly right, Russia's point to blame, and if Russia laid down their arms, we'd have peace. That was right, the Tom Cotton said. So I saw that, and I was like, I wonder what's Tom Cotton saying lately about Ukraine? Because I know he's been wimpier on it, but I just, I was like, maybe I've missed some stuff, he puts out little press releases I don't see. And so I went to look, I didn't see much. I went to his Twitter feed, searched the word Ukraine. He hasn't sent a tweet about Ukraine since last September, like over a year. And so, you know, these guys just fucking pisses me off so much. These fake hawks, like during the Biden administration, talking like trying to take the moral high ground. And here we are, and so this, this horrifying picture, this image, this woman, like holding her daughter's hand, they've been killed by a Russian drone attack. And she was like holding under child's hand. And I like saw this picture of her in the rubble over the weekend. It's like, Russia continues to kill people in Ukraine. They continue to do an offensive. The current president is, essentially on their side, occasionally vacillates. And Tom Cotton, who's like a supposed, Ukraine, who's like his whole brand, was that he was this hawk. It's tough hawk. And you did tough talk on Joe Biden when he, like, didn't give quite the right amount of weapons. Like, there's nothing, nothing. He doesn't have any courage. No, you know, no courage of his convictions. No hutspin, no willingness to stand up to Trump. It's just like nothing. You know, it's fake tough guy stuff when some woke professor shows up in front of a Senate panel. But besides that, he's just a total pussy. And it's like, really, anyway, I was indignant. It really tests me off. So there's no question there. But that's just those are my thoughts about Tom Cotton. Feel free to give the same energy, give to Biden, to Donald Trump. And by the way, Hayley Schofner, Bill hasn't shouted her out. It's a long shot yet in the Senate Arkansas Senate. But she's a candidate, good candidate, people should check her out. Well, we have public polling. I mean, there was a cotton, this is the cotton campaign released to poll. It was cotton 50, I think, Schofner 39, that some libertarian or something getting to a 3%. That's the actual Republican candidate incumbent in a race where everyone expected to win by 30 points, releasing a poll to show, don't worry, I'm ahead. But he's ahead by 10 points. He's right at 50. Yeah. I mean, probably won't, yeah, most likely won't lose. I don't think it's 100% though. It's 90%. Probably they'll win. If Arkansas is really, let's just normalize the race to 55, 45, let's see, a 10 point margin, 56, 44, what is that? I mean, Cotton won, I'd like to, I think it was unopposed almost in 2020 or something. He won by much more than that in 2014. I remember that race where he defeated an incumbent Democrat. So if that's happening in Arkansas, what's happening in other states that aren't that far away? Cotton was unoppressed. He won 66, 33 over a libertarian. It didn't even happen anybody. 2020. Yeah. 2020. Yeah. Halley Schofner. Shout out. All right. I want to talk about what's happening in Saudi too. I get my bad JVL, you know, my bad wolf starts to appear anytime bad news happens in Saudi Arabia. And so I do want to, I don't want to modulate this. I'm not, I'm not rooting for the hoodies. Okay. Okay. So anyone accuses me of this. I want to have this on tape. I'm not rooting for them. But here's what's been happening in Saudi Arabia. Several people were killed or wounded in another little likelihood, the attack on Riyadh's King College International Airport on Saturday. So third strike in a week on the Gateway to Saudi Arabia's capital. Earlier attacks killed four people. Flights were canceled and diverted. Airport operations were suspended. Our Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent out a strongly worded letter where he strongly condemned the attack, which I'm sure Saudi appreciated. Trump is considering a response. He said, Riyadh hosts the World Petroleum Congress this week with CEOs from American companies. Some of them are reconsidering whether they it's safe to go. The US Embassy in Saudi Arabia and Monday urged American citizens to exercise extreme caution when using all major airports in the country. And this has spied on totally out of control on Saudi Arabia. And it is all due to the war of choice that we started in Iran. Into the Saudis, rather idiotic, you know, attacks on the and Yemen and other Houthis for the last budget years and not too much to be with the Houthis. I'm with you on that. God, we're going to end up being driven to be Finkrow Houthis. Let's try to resist. We'll try to stop short of that. No, I'm saying, I feel this way that I see that there is kind of a sense of tough titties. Right. And also a sense of, you know, you've done everything wrong the last decade. Right. Right. And killing obviously people in the industry. And then I see Rubio. He can't be bothered to condemn unbelievably bloodthirsty attacks on civilians in Ukraine to say nothing of the war as a whole for the last two years since he became part of the Trump cabinet. But he condemns one attack on the airport and react fine if you want to pretend that attack. I don't care. But maybe you can say a word, a word about the people who've been suffering in Ukraine. As Rubio, I know he's your man. You know, as he said a lot of it, as he said a lot about Ukraine recently, you should do the search for him that you did for cotton, you know. Okay. Yeah, we'll get on that. I'll report back next week. See what Mark has been saying about Ukraine. He did give a big speech in Athens. Very thoughtful. Really moving to see the of a crop list of the background. He's down to see western civilization, Athens and Jerusalem, blah, blah, blah. He brought up about Europe's being invaded. They're culturally being invaded as well, not by Russia, but by the migrants, the migrants of the enemy. He's really focused on not the people like doing drone attacks in Germany. Not the fucking fascist doing drone attacks in Germany. Anyway, part of the reason one of the Saudi Arabia thing is delicious, though, is like, you know, one thing I was just pondering over the weekend was whether MBS made a worse investment when he bought Phil Nicholson and the golf league or when he bought Jared Kushner. Because the purchase of Trump's son-in-law doesn't seem to pay it off that much. I mean, you would think that you'd get something more than a strong kind of nation after you've bought off the son-in-law. That doesn't seem to be working out for MBS. That's tough to see. It's hard to say. And who could have predicted that coming before? The Trump family has been so reliable with business partners throughout their history, you know. We'll keep an eye on that one. Good luck, MBS. I want to end with the news this morning, so this is developing. But I guess there's an immigration raid on Ilan Omar's house. This is from the Daily Mail. Daily Mail just keeps happening to be there every time the FBI raids and own the Trump. How does that happen? How does the Daily Mail on the New York Post just always happen to know the right place to be? They have great sources to them. They really work. They work at hard. You know, this is shoe leather reporting. You shouldn't make fun of that. They have people really calling their sources in the FBI non-stop and really digging that stuff up, you know. Federal agents looped on the Washington home of Ilan Omar early on Monday in a criminal fraud probe into how the Congresswoman got into America. Had a DHS Mullin said that the probe reached beyond her disputed 2009 marriage. There's been you know, accusations and claims on the right that she married her brother to get him into the country. This is not about that. This is about other stuff. Any warn that removal actions could follow if wrongdoing is proven. Will Summer, the falsified newsletter had written about a month ago about this, about how there was pressure in the MAGA internet. You know, the same people advancing the conspiracy theories about James Calarico and a padded room. Also, like wanted to see Ilhan Omar arrested. This was his article in September 14th. Yeah, there was a revolting and smart coin mulling over this. So it seems like the secretary of Homeland Security is very responsive to what right wing weirdos on Twitter want him to do. - Yeah, I'm not pro Ilhan Omar either. I think I set a kind of vision to some Democratic primary or a part of reverse tour a cycle or two ago, which didn't quite work out. It was a respectable race, but this is, you know, let's just have a rate three weeks for an election and the person has become the kind of totem of, that's the right word of democratic leftism and problematic Democratic member of Congress, I guess, at one of the five, 10 most left wing certainly. Also, a Muslim and also wears the headscarf and all that. So that's good for playing that card if they want to do it. Well, I'd say if they want to do that, they are doing that literally. As I understand it, and again, I'm only just resuming about it because this broke this morning. Well, the charge would be that her father, her late father, I don't know, said something false about her, I guess, or about himself in 1995, what he brought her here. So 30 years ago, there may or may not have been bad paperwork or misleading paperwork filed. She's lived here, she's alive, she went to school here, obviously she got elected to Congress here. And now that's urgent, urgent DHS deportation. You have to have a rate too, you couldn't just, you know, look at the paperwork, right? You have to really get into the, look at her, I don't know. Call the lawyer, have a DHS lawyer. Literally, what are they finding in this rate? I mean, does she have papers that don't exist otherwise? From 1995, I kind of doubt it. Did anyone ask her if she's a member of Congress, would you, does so beyond the pale and so beyond belief? Well, the rate is four of the mega-chuds. Like they're doing the raid. That's the Comey and the She Shells again. You know, it's just like if they can't actually, you know, use the courts to jail and prison or deport their foes, then they at least want to give the tabloids fodder to make it seem like they're doing it. And what's depressing about this is, I guess what shouldn't be that surprised about this, is the DHS, but the Straits Rage was not done personally by Mark Wayne Mullin. I mean, they've got a whole bunch of people who feel, I guess I'm just, well, some of them like doing it, of course, especially at ICE, but nonetheless, they feel they're obeying orders and they were told there was a raid and they got some compliant, I suppose, judged to issue a warrant or something and or grand jury, perhaps. And here they are. And so the degree to which they are using the levers of the federal government and have loyalists in there or people who just feel like they don't have any choice, but to go along and they're being told it's legal by the local, by the, you know, whatever attorney they're consulting at that department, whatever Trump appoints is, or intimidated attorney, they're consulting. So this is the danger, right? I mean, it's desperate, it's pathetic. It's not gonna ultimately stand up, but the degree to which they're using the levers of power to do this kind of thing is so stupid even to be saying it's this any more, but if this were happening in another country and we would know exactly what's going on, right? Let's go, let's go raid the home of a member of the opposition party, the controversial member of the opposition party. - Based on their dad's paperwork from 30 years ago, and the whole thing is preposterous. - Yeah, but it is, it's ongoing. It's just the story that I've been writing about a bunch about Mariam Thomas-Abby and her family. I continue to get emails from her. They're still in the internment camp in Texas. Like a child, like we're coming up on seven months now that we have a teenager and in internment camp in Texas, forget his, that his dad wrote bad paperwork. This is about his grandmother's actions in a run. Like, it's not even about immigration. It's not even about like the paperwork being wrong or anything like that. It is totally fabricated, like, trumped up bullshit that we're jailing a family over because, you know, Marco wanted the, like, Aronnie and Wrightists like to feel like he was, like, on their side doing their bidding. Like, it's a less famous version of this same thing, right? Like, DHS is trying to appeal to the, you know, MAGA Chudson Twitter that want to see Elan Omar and Jail because they hate Muslims. And like Marco wants to, you know, appeal to, you know, the advocates of Imran Khan and like that crowd that want him to do stuff. Like this is just using the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security weaponizing it to appeal to political allies and go after an intimidate and, you know, imprison political folks. Like, that is what they're doing. And we would know exactly what to call it in another country because that's what it is. It's authoritarian. That's something they've been, like, pretty hackneyed at it. It's part of the reason why that it hasn't, like, quite broken through to everybody. Like, it's been pretty clownish, but it's another authoritarian country that's clownish. A lot of people suffering under clownish authoritarian attacks, right? I mean, you know, the fact that it's hand-handed, some of our friends take a little too much comfort, and it is better than it's hand-handed than it is not. But they take a little too much comfort in that. And awful lot of people have suffered and died, honestly, and very hand-handed authoritarian regimes. And, yeah. - Well, we gave you too much help being at the top. - Yeah, we were talking about the democratic-- - The start of an office, a very cheerful conversation with, you know, sweeping Virginia congressional districts and Texas governorships and-- - Democratic type trifecta in 2029. - Exactly, you know, well, there is this, but that's, if I could just be serious for 12 seconds. I mean, that is the reality, right? It's on the one hand, there's a lot of hope because the public has, you know, seen what's happening and Trump is screwing up in various ways. And the other hand, there's a lot of danger. And it is, I mean, I hate to be terrible what's happening with Ilan Omar, but it's a good reminder of what they can do not just for the next three weeks with for two years when they're in power in the executive branch. And democratic Congress can stop some of it, but executive branch is very, very powerful. So it's gonna be a hell of a two years. - Indeed it is, that's Bill Crystal. We see him every Monday here on the board daily. Thanks for being with us, we try to give you everything, we give you a little uplift, we give you some fear, we give you some rage, okay? 'Cause that's the world we're living in. We'll be back tomorrow. I don't know who we got tomorrow yet, we're gonna find somebody good. 'Cause it's always, it's bangers only from here until the election, all right? Everybody, so stick around, to tell your friends, we'll see you soon. Bye. ♪ You can put your clothes back on, she's leaving you ♪ ♪ No time to apologize for the things you do ♪ ♪ No winter for our youth and sing the blues ♪ ♪ Believe that Clapton was the second comment ♪ ♪ For the heart we all got a word to do ♪ ♪ It gets dark we all got a word to do ♪ ♪ She's leaving you ♪ ♪ She's leaving me ♪ The Bullwork Daily is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Anzaly Skipper, and with video editing by Dante DeCicco and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.