209. Netanyahu Vs Zelensky: Who Has Trump’s Ear?

It was a big week in Washington for two wars, Iran and Ukraine, but the power balance isn't what you'd expect. The winner was clearly Zelensky, who's learned to speak both Trump and DC. The loser was the vice president who's got saddled with the one war that's going wrong. It could Gavin Newsom's decades-old affair with the staffer derail his presidential ambitions. Welcome to the rest is politics US, I'm Cady K. With me today, Sam Stein, Sam and I share the pleasure of White House coverage, having reported for the Daily Beast the Huffington Post, "Politico, is there any job you haven't done in Washington, Sam?" "There's a few, but I'm trying to get to all of them." "You're trying to get to all the media out there, as you are now, of course, with the Bullwalk. It's great to have you back on the program. Thank you for doing this again." Anthony is somewhere off in Hawaii, selling himself. Nice. I know. Nice, right? I am in London where it is so hot that I should be selling myself, but I'm sitting, trying to find any fan I can in the house. Okay, so I wanted to talk about this week. I think it is worth us talking about all the visits that have been going on in town. And I thought it was so striking. You had BB Netanyahu and Vladimir Zelensky visiting Washington. And just to watch the power balance between these two men in terms of presidential favors, having shifted, and you could almost feel it in Washington for a start, the president who loves to have meetings with cameras and subject his visiting heads of states to all sorts of undignified displays of power in the Oval Office, decided to have both of these meetings behind closed doors, interesting who was and who wasn't at those meetings. But you could just tell that Vladimir Zelensky came into Washington on a totally different kind of wave of popularity even within the White House than he did certainly back in February of last year. And that Benjamin Netanyahu is the one who's come into town with nobody really wanting to meet him and everybody blaming him for having dragged America, whether it's fair or not, into a war against Iran. And I'm watching that power balance. I thought was interesting. What did you make of it? Well, first of all, I have some insider knowledge as to why the cameras were not there. They just have too many gold fixtures now in the Oval. They can't fit the cameras in there at all. Or the gold kind of reflects off the cameras and blows the lightbulbs or something. Yeah. Yeah. I can see that. It's tricky. I can see that. It's tricky. Best to not bring cameras in there. It did, obviously. I mean, like you, the first thing that came to my mind was the infamous Zelensky Oval Office meeting that you have no cards meeting where JD Vance was kind of pugilistically put in that place to basically embarrass Elensky and then punish him and go after him. And this is not the case. This go around. JD wasn't even in on the meeting as far as we can tell from the one photo that the White House released. JD was not in the meeting with Zelensky, but he was in the meeting with Netanyahu, interesting in and of itself, I think. Yeah. I think, you know, you kind of try to read the tea leaves a little bit with these things about why suddenly Zelensky seems to have some favor in the administration and why Netanyahu is seemingly out of favor or has less so. And you know, maybe sometimes the Occam's razor explanation is the right one and usually is, which is that things are going well for the Ukrainians and they're not for the Israelis. And Donald Trump likes to be associated with more positive campaigns, the negative ones. And I do think on the Netanyahu front, and we can get to Zelensky front a little bit. But in the Netanyahu front, I do think there's a real frustration, not just with the president, but his AIDS, over what's happening in Iran that they blame on Netanyahu. It's been reported and seems corroborated that Netanyahu talked him into doing a lot of this and has continuously talked him into up in the anti with respect to Iran. And Trump very evidently is just so tired of the war and is desperate for some sort of off ramp. He did a appearance on Fox News prior to the meetings where he kind of outrageously said that Lindsey Graham's dying wish was to like get a peace deal, which doesn't strike me as something Lindsey Graham would say on his deathbed. But he also openly said, you know, Netanyahu wants me to just keep bombing. Look, JD Vance was on Joe Rogan, right, a couple of weeks ago. Yes. And actually accusing people within their system. He didn't say he was accusing Benjamin Netanyahu who didn't go quite that far. But he did say that he was accusing people within the Israeli, Israeli system of running a paid campaign to keep the war going indefinitely. I mean, we all know that JD Vance was less hawkish, perhaps than the president was and the reporting has been that the president was actually more hawkish than we might think. But it was interesting to hear him come out and be that critical of the Israelis in public, I thought. Oh, incredibly interesting. He might be bright. I have to be honest, no, we have a reporter here at the, the baller, well, summer who covers that right wing internet culture pretty well. And oftentimes there is a kind of subterranean influence peddling operation that happens with MAGA influencers where they're on the take, frankly. But in this case, I think the sort of larger impetus, the bigger factor here is that Trump is just boxed in. He sees the polls. He knows how difficult it is to get an off ramp with respect to Iran. And then, in fact, last night we saw a re-engagement. The Iranians attacking American positions in Jordan, again, suddenly this brief ceasefire is no longer in place. And so I think the Netanyahu stuff is fascinating, the cooling of this relationship. And then, of course, the question is about whether Bibbi really screwed it all up by putting so much of his eggs in the Trump basket by, you know, openly agitating Democrats by, you know, just pushing the U.S. position in the Middle East to an extreme. And now we're in this spot and Trump is even waffling on his own relationship with Bibbi. There was a comment by his pro-Israel donors suggesting that they are voting with their wallets already and that it's very hard to find any support for Netanyahu and even for vans as a potential political candidate in 2028, unless vans breaks more firmly with some of those people on the right. It means he's caught between, he needs the funding from the kind of pro-Israel Republican group, but he also realizes where the polls are going and needs to make sure that he is on the right side of where the kind of anti-war faction is in the Republican Party at the moment. And I think that's the dance he's trying to do and I don't know that he's managing to pull it off. As Kareem Sahjapur at Carnegie Endowment has says his fate rests more with the IRGC probably than it does with mega voters on this. In a way, yeah. And it's interesting how the, you know, obviously on both sides of the equation, Democrats and Republicans, you have base voters who have really sired on Israel. So there is some sort of horseshoe theory at the politics there. But it is, and to tie back to Zelensky in a weird way, you know, there's like this kind of, I don't want to overstate it. But there is definitely something happening on the MAGA, right, with respect to Ukraine as well. So I thought the most interesting thing in the past week and politically was Laura Lumer. Fascinating. I mean, talking questions about whether who was funding her and why she was, and why she said what she said. But there is Laura Lumer, a far right influencer who turns up in Ukraine a week or so ago, having been so opposed to the war and much more in the kind of America first camp. And suddenly gets a kind of one-on-one meeting in a rather dreamy garden with Vladimir Zelensky and is saying, yeah, this is the, this is the fight we should be having with these brave Ukrainians. Like she's only just discovered actually that Ukraine is up against Russia and it was Russia who invaded. It was a bit of conspicuous timing. I had a bit of witplash over that one, but she reflect, I think what you're, you're right that she reflect something that is happening on Ukraine at the same time that something is happening on Israel in the MAGA right. Right. And so she had that weird dreamy garden over the Zelensky. She also did some sort of photo op, I don't know if you saw this one where she's eating from McDonald's and some burnt out neighborhood in Kiev and there's like just like absolutely bombed buildings in the backroom, but she's got this quarter pounder with cheese that she's just but. Rule of thumb, nobody can resist being a war correspondent for a day ever. Given the opportunity to eat your McDonald's in front of a bombed out building in Kiev or on a street on M street in downtown Washington, which would you choose Sam? I don't know. That's a tough one. I don't know if I need McDonald's anywhere. Yeah. That was quite the photo op and I felt like, you know, she couldn't resist. And then I guess the other question about is, you know, Zelensky deciding to do it, which I think is quite smart actually because he knows where his bread's buttered, right? Like put aside the insane stuff that she has said and done and how unethical sometimes her journalism is. And she's definitely been on the take like there's there's a weird episode where she started like pushing some weird Venezuelan oil cause out of nowhere. And it was pretty obvious that this was like, you know, something something was happening under the table. Zelensky understands that she has influence and she does. She has influence in this administration and sure enough, who retweets her interview with Zelensky, Donald Trump. He reposts the video. He says, good. And then because we're getting super meta, she retweets that Donald Trump has retweeted her interview with Zelensky. Welcome to 2026. This is diplomacy right now. So I do think there's something happening with respect to Ukraine. And then you add to the further tip. the elements, which is the news that the Ukrainians had attacked an Iranian ship that was sending us out to the Russians, which then ties everything back together. And it's like, okay, now we have some strange bed fellow alliances happening here. And maybe the Magarites re-awakening to the Ukrainian cause. And Trump clearly has decided that, you know, it's okay to send Patriot Interceptor missiles apparently to the Ukrainians. And now, you know, Whitcoff and Kushner are going to go to Kiev and things are happening in a way that during that early all-of-office meeting, where the know you have no cards meeting, you could not fathom that we would be in this place. Is that what we're calling it now that you have no cards meeting? Well, what would you call it? I think that was good. That's pretty good. I've always wondered what we'd call that one, the kind of, a momentably shameful humiliation of America's closest ally in Europe that's taking on Russia meeting. You can't put that on a bumper sticker, so I'm going to go and mind. Zelensky's smart, right? As you say, he invites Laura Luma. Yesterday, after the over-office meeting, our nice little closed doors over this over-office meeting, before the White House has put out anything, Zelensky has put out four photographs, all of which include Donald Trump looking kind of, you know, beaming in the over-office. So he gets that you get to Trump by giving him lots of publicity. And this is the Trump show. He puts that out very quickly. He makes an illusion to the fact that they've still talking about getting this deal, that it would allow them to license the Patriot missiles. And then hours after Lindsey Graham's funeral, Vladimir Zelensky was in the Senate as the Senate advanced Graham's Russia Iran sanctions bill, which passed by a staggering number 86 to 12. And a lot of that is credit to Zelensky, who has learned how to handle Washington. He'd come in beforehand and made the case to a bunch of Democrats, actually, who were wavering on this bill because they don't like tariffs in any form. And this had a tariffs component to it. And he made the case to them, look, Putin has learned how to get round sanctions. If we're really going to hit Russia when they seem to be vulnerable, we also have to tariff China and India for buying Russian oil. And it seems to have worked because there had been about 20 Democrats who had been wavering and half of them voted in favor of this bill. It now, of course, has to pass the full Senate. And then it has to go to the House after the August recess. To your point, I think Trump does like the visuals. And we know this because back in the first term, his daily briefing was, you know, people weren't very quickly put visuals in the daily briefing and bullet points. Don't make it long. And so I think probably these images of, you know, the drone attacks successfully getting into St. Petersburg and, you know, blowing up these Russian landmarks and things like that, I think probably have gotten to Trump, where he can sort of signify, oh my god, they actually are succeeding. And this is not a lost cause. I do think Zelensky has figured out Washington's speak. I think the lunar visit is evident of that. And it's like, you know, I think a lot of countries have, frankly, I don't know if you saw the the story out of Morocco where they're renaming a major roadway, like the Trump highway. I saw that smart. That's the price to pay to get goodwill from the president. You're going to name some roadways after him. I'm shocked the key. The airport in Kiev is not renamed after Trump, too. On the sanctions, you know, I understand what you're saying. I still think ultimately, there's just a distinct calculus on the hill. And there is always, in their, you know, fortunately, I suppose there's, oh, there has remained kind of bedrock support for Ukraine on the hill, even amidst all this stuff. You know, it's like we mentioned Lindsey Graham and Lindsey did everything he could to appreciate himself to Trump and, you know, call them all the time and talk about how great a president he was and, you know, really contorted himself. But Graham consistently was supportive of Ukraine. And even when Trump was at his low point, the Ebb of Trump's anger towards Ukraine, Graham was there. And I think that signifies that on the hill, at least, Republicans and Democrats have consistently said, no, this is a cause we do need to support. Now, I will say, you know, there are moments where it kind of teeter is a little bit here and there. And there were a number of Democrats who voted against this bill precisely because they didn't want to give Trump more terror, you know, codify Trump's use of terror authority in that way. And more recently, the talking point is that we are current munitions stockpiles is low precisely because we gave so much to the Ukrainians. And that's like a nice talking point in the right now. But I think by and large, there's been a lot of support for Zelensky on the hill. And that's not the place that he's had to worry about. It is interesting that he felt like he wanted to, or he showed up for the vote on the sanctions terrorist bill. But I never really thought that that was in much doubt. Yeah. And the bill passed 86 to 12. And whether that was because it was Graham's dying wish or whether it was because of the sea change that is taking place on the battlefield in Ukraine and the success that Ukrainians are having us, but you're right, that place quite a lot into it. There was one Republican Senator Senator Ryshu said of this bill that this bill, and he had spoken to Zelensky about it, he said this bill could have more impact on the tide of the war in Ukraine than anything that takes place on the battlefield. And he said he felt that Zelensky agreed with him. I actually texted a Democratic Senator before we started taping this to ask whether he thought that was the case. And he said, yes, probably could be the case if the bill actually gets signed off on by Donald Trump because it has to pull the past the full Senate after August recess. And it's still there away for a month that has to pass through the house. And then, of course, the, the president has to sign off on it. But yeah, Trump has seen a, seen a winner and he likes it. Let's do this. By the next time I come on this podcast and who knows when that will be. Yes. What's the status of the war in Ukraine? Very good question. I mean, the patriots that the Americans are saying they can license that's going to take a long time for them to get and they need the patriots now. So I think you're still going to see the Russians launching these attacks. I don't think it's all done and dusted, which is what many Democrats would like to think. This sanctions bill is important. But as this Democratic Senator pointed out to me this morning, it's still got to get through the White House. I think the trajectory is the same as it is now in a year's time. Ukraine is doing better. Putin is doing worse, but I don't think it's over. All right. By the election, are we still in an open conflict with Iran? I think it has to be resolved by 2028. Yeah, but we're in the cycle where it's like, how do you resolve it? Yeah. The oil markets have used up their buffer is what I am told. I'm sure you've been told the same thing. And although there was, yes, everyone was going a hyperbolic oil is going to go to $150 a barrel, go $200 a barrel and never did it. And so now the kind of hawks are saying, see, we can handle this, we can handle this, but actually the smart oil people that I've spoken to recently said that's just we've opened the cupboard and there's just not much in there. Yeah. And I think that's going to be that will end up being the problem that eventually drives some sort of a resolution here. So he'll end up cutting a deal where the straight actually is told more or less. Yes. And people work as hard as they can to build those alternative pipelines and alternative routes. Which I agree with that. And not going to happen very fast, but will happen eventually. Just before we go to a break, Sam, where does this all leave JD Vance? Where do you think the power shifting balances on international affairs with the MOU that he was response put in charge with? And Trump having famously said in Evian, look, if it fails, that's Vance's fault. Well, I think it's failed by now. So what gave it away? Trump must be believing Vance, I suppose. That's what he said he was going to do because, you know, Trump he sticks to his words. So if he says something, that's what's going to happen. But where is Vance is standing at the moment? So I've never been as bullish on Vance as a lot of people are. You're not team JD. Yeah. I just think part of it's just that there's, you know, I don't want to sound cruel and I'm not like Mr. Karrismatic, but I do think he has a sort of a deficit of charisma. And even on the Rogan show, it felt stilted and stuff like that. But then on the politics and the policy stuff, you know, I think the issue he's going to run into is that the stuff that he really does care about or pushes the most aggressively, you know, remanufacturing, you know, focusing on the American workers, the immigration crackdown a little bit, but also this non-interventionist foreign policy stuff. I mean, those are like tenants of Vance. And I don't think the Trump record ultimately is going particularly well with that. Yes, they have dramatically reduced immigration, you know, it says in the deportation regime is really ramping up, but it's polling very poorly, right? That was a strength that turned into weakness. Jobs in America bringing back manufacturing statistically not going well. The tariffs have been a bust, honestly. And then on, because we're talking about it on the foreign policy front, I mean, it kind of boggles the mind to a degree how little blowback he has gotten so far for the MOU. The MOU was a huge diplomatic failure. I mean, a huge diplomatic failure. It was rushed. It was badly worded. They didn't get experts in, they didn't get lawyers in. It opened the daughter resumption of tensions, yeah. Not only did it open the door, it kind of sparked the resumption tensions because there was a lack of clarity, specifically around for instance, the Strait of Armours and what was going to happen there. You had this document that if you read it, it seemed fairly evident that the Iranians and Oman were going to decide what the channel would look like, how they could levee payments for ships that are going through of the straight, they were going to control it. And yet, at the same time, the Trump administration was insistent that it was going to remain open. And if you have that type of ambiguity on just that one front, then you've crafted a really portal. And precisely because there's that ambiguity, it led to an accelerating amount of conflicts between the countries, which then led us to this current mess that we are in. And I just think if you own a diplomatic agreement like that, and it blows up so spectacularly, and now we have a resumption of conflict, we have additional deaths of U.S. service members, and we have really no off-ramp. It does kind of take a little bit of shine off of you, and it puzzles me that Vance hasn't actually gotten more blame for where we are right now. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I expected him, I expected to have more senior Republican voices and actually more Trump-aligned voices, and Trump himself having signaled that he would give the blame to JD Vance. But I think it is having an impact with the voters or with Republican primary voters because the latest Emerson poll that has just come out on the primary ballot for 2028 has Vance and Rubio essentially tied 39 to 38 a year ago that same poll had Vance at 52 and Rubio at 9. So something is tanking Vance's favorability ratings. Talking of favorability ratings, we're going to take a quick break and talk about Gavin Newsom, who has a little bit of a similar problem to JD Vance. Hello, perhaps better hair. Welcome back to the rest of the politics US, and before we dive into the latest on Gavin Newsom, don't forget that you can buy tickets for our live tour of America and Canada coming up in October just ahead of the midterms. We're super excited to meet you all and take your questions live on stage. You can buy the tickets at the rest is politicsus.com or in the link in the episode description or by scanning the QR code on your screen. So news came out through an article written by Ruby Rippy, who is a former aide to Gavin Newsom, who says that she had an affair with him, which actually he has already fessed to 20 years ago when she was a married woman, but he was single at the time, much to do about nothing Sam Stein or a bigger problem for the governor who would like to be president. I don't think it's going to be that bigger problem, but I reserve the right to be totally wrong. In this world, you never quite know. Yeah, well, it's like if you look at the actual details, go on, spill the details, go on, give us the story. Well, he was single for sure, but also she worked for him, probably. Yeah, although 20 years ago, that kind of thing happened a bit more than it does. It was less frowned on 20 years ago than it is today, Sam. But we don't live in the world of 20 years ago. We live in the world of today, right? That's true. I don't want to go too far, I feel, but like, you know, if you ever think back to the Monica Lewinsky affair, you know, I was young when it happened, and obviously our lens and viewing it is is totally different now. And for me, like, what really stands out about that narrow days is just how young she was and the obvious power dynamics, obviously, is president. You're right. It was not written about, even I was young when the Lewinsky affair happened. And it was very much focused on Bill Clinton was this going to tank his presidency and his marriage. There was not nearly as much focus back then in the late 90s as there would be today on how unbelievably inappropriate it was that the president of the United States was having sex. However, he likes to describe it with somebody who worked for him and was what she was 19, 20 Monica Lewinsky age of scandal was 21. She was 20 and lasted a couple years. Yeah. 22 when the relationship began at the White House. Now this is not that. I don't want the people to like conflate that and clip us and say, oh my god, because this was, you know, there was a consensual element to this. Well, there was consensual element with Lewinsky too, but how consensual is it when somebody is so powerful. She said it was consensual, but she was 22, right. So there's that. And then, of course, the other element is that she was married to the deputy chief of staff and the manager of his mayoral reelection campaign. So there's like a sort of deceitfulness to it and a nasty relationship move there that like, you know, they will boggle a lot of minds. And she also struggled with alcoholism and substance abuse at the time. I mean, it's actually kind of a very sad story. It's a very sad story. Now, as you mentioned, Newsom talked about it 20 years ago, kind of a famous press conference where he got up and he sort of acknowledged what had happened, asked for repentance. You know, he kind of addressed it very head on. And for 20 years, people have known about this and people have still voted for him. And he's now governor and he's a presidential frontrunner. And so I think it's it's factored into a lot of decisions already. And yet her coming out and running the SSA for vanity fair and then the possibility that this gets kind of re-scrutinized and re-investigated if he'd were to run obviously is out there. But Newsom now is, you know, settled into a relationship. And it seems like it's stabilized. You just don't know with these things, right? Like, obviously, people are going to pick at this and talk about it. And the fact that she wrote this essay suggests she's open to talking about it as well. And yet, like, also come back to the fact that like, you know, we're living in a world of where Donald Trump is the president. We're talking about, you know, issues around, you know, affairs and whether you're treating your wife or the person in your relationship with the utmost respect like this man is president. All the person that you meet in a changing room in a department store in New York City. Right. I mean, like, what are we talking about here? Yeah. I keep hearing that argument. I still hear it, by the way, from male voters in Maine who say to me, I get it. Why platinum had to go. But we do have Donald Trump. I'm not sure that that is a defensive platinum. Oh, let me tell you about that. We do these focus groups here. And we did focus groups in Maine right during the heart of the Platinum scandal. And, you know, they were like, screw that. He shouldn't resign. Well, he shouldn't step down. I mean, they Republicans all rally around Trump and no one seems to demand that they, you know, change their tune. Why should we? So there is a little bit of moral equivalency here going on. I've heard exactly the same thing. And why do the Democrats keep caving? And the Republicans let Trump get away with it. And the Democrats need to have, you know, a bit more of a thick skin about this kind of thing. I'm very much in two minds there. I think if you're going to run for public office, you probably have to be a person of good standing. And the fact that Donald Trump has all these, not just allegations, but convictions against him when it comes to the way that he's treated women and sexual assault is not a justification for other candidates doing the same. Otherwise, you may as well say, you know, anyone can run who's done anything to anybody. And I just think that's a very slippery slope. I suppose, I think to me, the line is like, you know, if people, what people do in their own homes, if it's not illegal, I can kind of get my head around like that shouldn't matter as much. But Sam, the problem was that he was accused of sort of rape plan and now I never went to trial. But I guess, you know, that is a different instance. Yeah, but that's the line. That's the line. It's like, if you do an illegal act like that, then yeah, you should not, you shouldn't be in office. Yes, consensual. And I think that's why the rippy thing doesn't have an impact on him. I think the bigger problem, and this is what I wanted to ask you about Gavin Newsom, the bigger problem is that there's been a bunch of polling that has just come out in the last week or two that shows Gavin Newsom down from sort of a 25% chance of being the Democrats presidential nominee in 2028 to in back in January. So he was 25% in January and he's gone now at the end of July to 15%. Peter Buttigieg is now ahead of him in that same polling. Nate Silver, who obviously is the legendary pollster and analyzer, an analyst. Analyzer. Analyzer. Analyzer sounds better. And I'm just going to make that up of polls has said that the problem that Gavin has is that he had a lot of good numbers early on and that largely reflected name recognition as much as anything else. It wasn't necessarily demand as much as it was familiarity. And Gavin's problem is that he is a kind of seen as an establishment candidate at a time when Democratic voters don't like the establishment. Do you think he's got a bigger problem than this affair? I don't know. I think Nate might be right and wrong. And I have nothing to base it on other than instinct but your instincts are pretty good. Thank you. There was a lot of name recognition for Gavin that was owed to the fact that he had among all basically any other Democrat push back on the redistricting push by Republicans. So Texas went first and Newsom was like we'll go in response to Texas and in California did succeed. He fought at a time when Democrats wanted fighter. Correct. And he did it successfully. And I think there's a lot of goodwill national name ID people finally were like oh my god we have a Democrat who can stand up to Trump and succeed and they attached some higher ambitions to him for that or higher office. And so I think that helped him and then obviously is that receded in the conversation so to what is number. So I think that is true. On the establishment stuff though it's like I suppose but like you know P. Buttigieg was a cabinet secretary I know I know that he's not as establishment T as Gavin Newsom is but like there's some establishment is snissed to him and I think the same with Kamala Harris who probably has a fair number of supporters there. Kamala Harris by the way is currently leading. in a couple of national polls, Quantice and Ashland, but who knows? She hasn't even sort of said she's going to run yet. But I think the issue here is, well, first of all, we're so far out there. You just don't know what you don't know. But secondly, if we look at what the primaries are like right now for Democrats, there's, you know, there's kind of three lanes. One is the sort of Bernie Sanders DSA. I'm a liberal burn it all down lane. There's the more establishment lane, which is, hey, like let's be realists here. Let's, you know, not fear too far left. Let's try to win over some moderates and incremental progress is actually good. And then there's the kind of, can we do both lane, which is, hey, like I like this liberal stuff. I also don't like the establishment. But like I'm not going to go so far to like offend everyone. I don't know where new some fits in that, right? I feel like I suppose you can kind of almost peg him in a couple of different of those buckets, right? Like he can be in a stabs from a figure to a lot of people. And then he can also come out and say, you know, California was at the leading edge of, you know, liberal reforms on x, y and z. And then he could also say, you know what? I'm like straddling both parts of the party divide. So I don't know what lane he's going to occupy here. Whereas it's a little bit easier to project and some other folks. I think the lane at the moment, and he's going to have to fill this out in the way that Rama manual has been writing white papers on everything down to, you know, what color bus stop should be in New York City. But he's literally kind of come out with policy positions on everything. I don't think he's going to be the presidential nominee. But I think that new som's lane is going to be I'm the guy that can fight and take on Trump. And by the way, he is also more than any other potential candidate already raised a ton of money. He's got tens of millions in his war chest, which nobody else as far as I know has yet. And he has already built out an infrastructure. So I think, you know, that helps him. That is the advantage of being the establishment favorite at the moment is that you get the benefits that come with some of the establishment, I guess. Thank you, Sam. Always a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks very much for joining me, of course.