The New Tactic Trump Thinks Will Rally Voters

All right. Starting us off, I have a quick question. What were your first associations with communism growing up? Jamel, I mean, you're really too young to remember the Cold War, so how did it come up for you? Reading the marks and angles reader when I was in high school. That's going to the public library, picking up a copy of the marks and angles reader and reading the communist manifesto. That is my association with communism. Okay. David, my fellow Gen Xer. You know, Michelle, I bet we encountered communism in a very similar way that you heard about it so much. You can't remember the first time you heard about it. Thank you. Yes. Absolutely. This was the dominant confrontation of our childhoods. Was the confrontation between American and Western democracy and Soviet communism. And so, you know, when I was thinking this through, I thought it's very similar in a reverse sort of way to someone asking me, "When's the first time you heard about Jesus?" Well, I don't know. Exactly. I grew up in a Christian home. I don't remember not hearing about it. For me, I was the child of a Navy veteran. My dad was in the Navy during Vietnam, but it's just, it was always out there. You know, I was Reagan era, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall. The whole, you know, the Cold War ended when I was in college, so it was just always there until it wasn't. So, and so, I ask this because the communist threat is part of what we're going to talk about this week, but not looking back to the 80s or before. We're going to dig into a recent piece, Jamal, that you wrote, about how President Trump has resurrected the specter of communism as a scare tactic heading into the November midterms. But first, we're going to take a look at the on-again, off-again war in Iran and whether the US is headed into a new phase of escalation or even dare I say it a quagmire. So maybe the theme of the week is, everything old is new again. I'm Michelle Cotto. I cover national politics for New York Times' opinion. And this week, I'm back with my usual co-conspirators, columnist David French and Jamal Bowie. So, David, back in June, you predicted that, quote, "We might cycle through several more stages of almost war and almost peace." My God, it's like you're psychic. So, where are we now in that cycle and how close do you think we are to full-scale war with the usual caveat that we are taping on Thursday morning and it can go anywhere? You know, I want to begin by paraphrasing Darth Sidious from Star Wars. All is unfolding as we have foreseen that this is a very predictable outcome. And it's been very predictable ever since. And I really want to commend our colleagues on the news side. They did this really, I thought, insightful analysis in the middle of one of the rounds of negotiations, because we've been through a few rounds of negotiations. And essentially, what they were saying was how do you negotiate a resolution to a war when both sides are zealously committed to declaring victory? And one of the things that you have seen here is one of the reasons why we keep cycling into not fully war, not fully peace, not fully war, not fully peace is that both sides have this, well, Trump in particular has an aversion to a longer war and he also has an aversion to having been seen as losing a war. So he's got both of these things going on at once. The one thing he does not want by any stretch of the imagination is for somebody to be able to credibly say you cut a worse deal than Obama. You were taken for a ride by the nation of Iran. That is the absolute last thing that he wants. At the same time, the Iranian regime also has a desire to be seen as having triumphed over the United States. That's a very important thing, both domestically and internationally, for Iran to be seen as having triumphed over the United States. So you you don't just have strategic long term strategic thinking going on here. And in fact, on the US side, I would say that an awful lot of people on the US side are not engaging in long term strategic thinking at all, but some are, but many are not. But don't look at this conflict as sort of too coldly rational parties engaging in negotiation, escalation, etc. according to deliberately thought out strategically valid strategies. Think of it instead as their elements of strategy here, their elements of essentially posturing here. And they're adding together into a situation where both sides tend to have their foot on the gas, as I've used this analogy before, more much more than their foot on the brake when it comes to escalation. So now we're beyond just the Persian Gulf. We've escalated into the Red Sea. You are seeing very precise and devastating strikes on American facilities that have killed American service members. There is widening amount of damage in the Persian Gulf region. Iran is obviously suffering as well. But the one thing that I will say is I do think even as Iran is posturing obviously, it does have a strategy. And I'm not sure that we do. And its strategy is it wants to emerge from this thing, made whole financially and in control of the straight-of-war mues. And when you see that and when you see that strategy, at least some of what they're doing makes sense. At the same time, they continue to provoke and to stretch and to extend beyond, really, I think they're military reach and military capacity. So I don't know that they're. I think we have two sides that are miscalculating here. Is it a shorter way of saying it? Jamal? I am reminded not of, excuse me, very pretentious. I reminded not of Star Wars, but of Cost-wits. Who, who, who stays. - Strictly come up to come. - Well, yeah, that is-- - Well, this is so on brand here. - I know, it's really, I mean, that's why it's pretentious. It's like, I can't help myself, who states, the first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make, is to establish the kind of war on which they are embarking. You remember staking it forward and turning it into something that is alien to its nature. First thing they must do, when embarking upon and I'm conflict because in classhood's famous dictum, war is politics by other means. It is done to achieve a specific political objective. And I think the distinguishing fact about this war in Iran is that what, that's not the case. What is the specific political objective this war has begun to achieve? They could not articulate it at the beginning of the war. They had to search for answers. We know, right from observation, from the great reporting of our colleagues in the newsroom, that this war was embarked upon kind of because Donald Trump wanted something to do. He had gotten, he was, he felt confident after the incursion into Venezuela believed that he could solve the Iranian problem with a few airstrikes and then there'd be regime change, and they'd read us as liberators and et cetera, et cetera. And when that didn't happen, they were lost and they've been lost ever since. When essentially the fantasy that they had did not come to pass, they found themselves in a conflict that first they began and way as it basically guaranteed that Iran was not going to back down, right? When you, you know, watched the capitation strikes, when you do all this stuff, your opponent is, (laughs) they're gonna, they're not gonna want to back down. That's losing too much face. And as you said, David, Trump is incapable of losing face. And neither he nor Pete Heggsef, it really seems anyone in the administration is even grappling with the larger strategic picture whatsoever. And they are also consumed of a fantasy that, you know, helped contribute to America's defeat and Vietnam, which is that you can do everything you want with air power. You just drop some bombs, drop some bombs and you'll fix the problem. And that's just not the case. And so there's stuck in a situation where they don't have a clear political objective anymore. Or at least now that they have one, it's sort of like the results of the war, right? It's like maintain freedom of navigation through the straight of Hormuz, which was the case in the status quo antebellum, right? Like before the war, we already had that. And now you're trying to restore that. So, you know. - Well played. - Well played. - That's their objective, such as they have one. But they don't know how, they don't, they cut, they fundamentally don't understand the nature of the war that they're fighting. And as such, their tactics, such as they are, are inadequate to the task. And doing anything more that might be adequate to the task, not only is it heavy domestic political lift, but also cuts against Donald Trump's own fears and instincts. And so here we are. We're just like dropping bombs, targeting civilian infrastructure, as if, as if, you know, war is a game of how many, how many war crimes you can commit. Maybe you don't want to use their war crime. But I do think that attacking civilian infrastructure is bad. (laughing) Doing it essentially to punish someone into submission is bad. as if you got into a school year. fight and then grab the person's younger sister and like beat them up instead. Right? Like, you know, and they're wasting American munitions. I mean, this is, this is one of the things that's happening if the US is like literally running out of, out of missiles and, and, and leaving the US unable to deal with its other strategic goals and other, uh, theaters of the world. I want to pause and walk through a few more of the data points that we've got on the war so far. So 18 US service members have died so far and many more have been injured. I think just just since July 6th, 100 troops have been injured. Gas prices are back up to around $4 a gallon. Straight of hormones, the rains of flashpoint. Now the hooties have started blockading and firing on ships traveling to and from Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea. That threatens to drive oil prices even higher. So David, how nervous are you about this escalating into a wider regional conflict with all of this going on? Like how nervous should we be? I think we should be, uh, is this a technical term pretty darn nervous? That is the technical term. Yes. Pretty darn nervous, but not panicked. Uh, is the way that I would put it. And I think there's also this other element that is overlaying all of this. And that is, if, until you encounter MAGA up close, it's hard to describe how arrogant it is. And that there is an enormous amount of hubris. If you go back, JD Vance, you remember, was being asked about this because, you know, the administration had said that Kamala Harris would drive us into war with Iran. And if you don't want to go to war with Iran, then vote for Donald Trump. Well, and here we are at war with Iran. And JD Vance is confronted with this. And one of the things he says is, well, prior presidents were dumb. They were dumb and we're not. And there just seems to be, when you are around MAGA, this view that we know obviously true and correct things. And the reason why these obviously true and correct things have not been done before is because of cowardice or stupidity or you name it. And it's that level of arrogance that they've brought into this almost impossibly complex situation that is contributing immensely to our problem and to our challenge. You know, it's, it's very interesting whenever you see something unfold where you can say it wasn't just predictable how this would unfold. It was predicted. It had been predicted that this is how this would unfold. And so I think that is hovering in the background, Michelle here, that make this arrogance, this hubris, that we cannot be possibly be wrong, that other political politicians and political movements were all idiots before us. They just needed more chaos doctrine, right? Just needed more high T-man. Yeah. And how deeply embedded that level of arrogance is within that MAGA world. And that makes me more nervous. Now, tempering that is also the fact that I think Trump very much does not want a ground war. He very much does not want that. And I think that that is one of the few things preventing escalation and out of control escalation right now. All right. So with domestically speaking, it feels like the trickiest position is the one that congressional Republicans are in, who they have to own a war. They didn't really want. They never voted to approve. And yet are now having to publicly defend as they're going into high stakes midterm elections, which are generally a referendum on the president. Is this going to bite them? Do we think? Just on gas prices alone? I think it will bite them. I think that that is a pretty safe prediction. What is the perilous prediction is how deep of a bite will it be? That is the question. I do think that you're looking at some form of your rebuke. We just don't know to what extent we're going to see the rebuke. In the right-wing world that is sort of right-wing infotainment, remember there's generally two kinds of stories. Trump is triumphant and Trump is being unfairly attacked. And you're still seeing an enormous amount of Republican loyalty. I was looking at some polling data from this last week and it was saying that Trump amongst Republicans is more popular right now at this point in a second term than George W. Bush was with Republicans. And then Barack Obama was with Democrats. In other words, that with the partisan Republicans, Trump still has an enormous amount of support. And we're still sort of Lucy with the football with the thing that says this is the thing that will break that. This is finally the thing. So a question. Just a question. So that's happening at the same time that his approval within dependence has dropped precipitously, right? Right. To what extent are we looking at a function of people disidentifying as Republicans, right? So they're saying, I don't think I'm Republican anymore. Or I'm, and they're not saying that. They're saying I'm an independent, right? And so they leave the pool of people and as an independent, they disagree, they disapprove with the president. But because by leaving the pool, it creates the appearance that is approval hasn't actually declined much from the Republicans. All you're seeing is a shrinking number of Republicans. Those are still on board. I think that's a super fair observation. And in fact, it's buttressed by some data from Gallup that shows that the identifiers of independence is at a generational or more high. So I do think that that is happening. There's a shrinking, but the shrinking is also occurring with Democrats as well. They're shrinking as well. So I do think there is a intense loyalty that remains within a shrinking pool. But there is definitely still that intense loyalty. But as you note, Jamil, I do think that overall pool is shrinking. Yeah, I think you're seeing that with both sides. And it feeds into the overall distrust of institutions. And if you talk to younger folks, younger voters in particular, are just suspicious of the parties. But this brings us back to our red scare that we mentioned earlier. Jamil, you just wrote a piece about how Trump is bringing back the classical American political tactic of red baiting so much fun. And so rather than focusing on his own record, he's going to spend the midterm run up, accusing Democrats of being communists and of aiming to turn America into a communist country. So like now, this like so much of what he does, this really feels stuck in the past. But kind of how does what's happening now compare with say the 1950s and McCarthyism? I mean, the big difference. And let me say real quick, you know, other Republicans are getting in on this as well. And like Steve Scalise referred to, you know, stopping Bolsheviks, which is always very funny, you know, sort of calling, calling down that Bolsheviks. It's like, we're, you know, 1917. Yeah. Wow. Doesn't he seem hip and modern? But you know, in the 1950s, the Soviet Union existed. It didn't just exist. It was a rival superpower. It wasn't just a rival superpower. It was, in the moment, a viable alternative to American style capitalism and liberal democracy, right? In the United States at the time, there was a not huge, but like significant actual communist party that was active in American politics. There was still a socialist party in the American in American politics, not as active, but still there. In the American left was not quite at the high water mark of its power, but like still quite influential. And so in the 1950s, when Soviet Union has detonated a hydrogen bomb, when the nuclear arms race is taking off, when again, Soviet communism is spreading as a geopolitical force and is a viable alternative, then warning about the red menace makes a bunch of sense, right? Like it actually, there are plenty of Americans who will hear about the red menace, but yeah, I'm worried about that, that's scary to me. Hollywood always, always a great barometer of these sorts of things. And there are plenty of movies in the '40s and '50s about communist infiltrators. I mean, quite famous ones, like invasion of the body snatchers. So that's very much a part of the pop culture and a very kind of salient fear. In 2026, there's no Soviet Union. China is nominally communist, I mean, the CCP obviously is an authoritarian formation, but like in terms of its economy, that's capitalism, baby. And or at least state capitalism, right? So it's like, what are we warning about? It's not really a threat. What I think it's supposed to do is take the success of candidates associated with the Democratic Socialists of America and say, look, socialist communist, it's the same thing, really. But I think this loses two things. The first, I mean, the first public opinion one is that the American public, which has not become pro-socialism, but like, I think like 39% of Americans have a favorable view, right? The second thing is that in an interesting way, DSA seems to connote anti-establishment, not socialism. Right? Like for the public, for voters, it seems to say, oh, this is a person who isn't an ordinary Democrat and doesn't seem to have the same kind of ideological veil. It's interesting. It's interesting the way the DSA functions for voters. And then this is just an aside from my part. It's like funny to accuse DSA candidate to being communist because DSA, well, it's a famously for nerd nerds know this. DSA is formed from at least one organization led by Michael Herrington in 1970s that was explicitly left anti-communism. These were American leftists who were anti-stoleness back in the 40s and 50s and were hostile to communism. That's where the democratic, the democratic part of that is supposed to connote we're not authoritarians. So I think that's the strategy, you know, look at Zoran, look at the other nerd candidates who get a handful of people. They're DSA members, they're socialists, they're communists, they're scary, but I just don't think it doesn't land with anyone, especially not when, you know, you came to office promising to lower gas and food prices and housing prices and you haven't done it. And not only that, you've made them worse. Okay, so I take the differences in the reality that you're talking about. I get all those. Trump's great gift politically has always been, however, to take this germ of a fact or a reality or something and just spin it into some kind of insane, broke, dark fantasy, whether you're talking about government corruption or immigration or crime or whatever he has the ability to take something and turn it into something entirely fantastical almost. But in this case, for people who don't pay that much attention to what exactly the DSA stands for or how it differs from, you know, regular socialism, you know, much less communism. David, do you think that he will have much success making this link in people's minds and turning this into, you know, not a referendum on him, so much as a referendum on democratic extremism? Yeah, so, you know, look, I take fully Jamel's points that he just raised as you just said. I mean, like one of the differences between the McCarthy era and now is in the McCarthy era, there was a red menace, like the Soviet Union was an expansionist genocidal power that, you know, by the 1980s, you had millions of troops poised in Eastern Europe, poised for an invasion of NATO, tens of thousands of nuclear weapons on both sides pointed at each other. Like, the order, the differences here are such an order of magnitude between that and a few DSA politicians hyper concentrated in New York City that it is, it's, there's just no comparison, but anyone who underestimates the ability of Donald Trump and the entire sort of right-wing infotainment universe to turn at least in the minds of millions and millions and millions of Americans, this contest as to one between whatever you want to say about the MAGA people, they, whatever flaws you want to say, they're American patriots who like capitalism and they like the American system. And then you've got these Marxists over there. I don't know if you guys have noticed this, but AOC is sort of the focus of evil in the democratic world is moved over more to like a Rashida Tlaib or Ilyan Omar, the right-wing infotainment world absolutely has the ability to take individual fringe individuals and elevate them and say this is who the Democrats are. And the interesting thing about that conundrum is if I'm a Democrat, I'm not necessarily loving the DSA that much, because it will often feel as if the DSA is not so much focused on defeating Republicans as it is focused on defeating establishment Democrats, which is a very similar dynamic that you saw unfold in the Tea Party side of the Republican Party, where really, you know, if you wanted to get a hardcore Tea Party person like agitated, absolutely you say the name Barack Obama. They did not like Barack Obama, but I tell you, you would see almost equal anger when you'd use the name Mitch McConnell. And so when you have these factional fights in a larger, bigger movement and one faction seems to be concerned primarily with taking control of the movement more so than essentially defeating the actual political opposition, I think that's a real issue for Democrats right now. There is some real extremism within the DSA, like some real extremism that is in some way cases very ugly extremism. And so I think I take completely the point, completely the point that a actual red scare is ludicrous ludicrous. It is also true that there are actual real extremists who actually are not all that excited about defeating Republicans compared to destroying the democratic establishment. And I think that's a problem. So two, I think I have two thoughts. The first is just on the ability of the conservative media, conservative media apparatus to sort of like create a message. That's the case, right? I think my view is that discourse actually doesn't move everything, right? Discourse is most effective when it dovetails with things people are actually experiencing, right? And so the president's immigration fear mongering dovetails with the sense from at least a lot of Americans, right, that the border is at a control, that kind of thing. First of all, there's no sense in which Americans are threatened by communism. It's just like it's not, it's not a thing. In second, this would be different if the president and the Republican Congress has fulfilled the promises on which they use to get elected. But they haven't. The conditions that got them elected don't just remain, but their policies have worsened them. And so the reason I'm very skeptical of this is that you can scream about communism. You can show, you know, darkens pictures of Tel Aviv and Omar as much as you want. And it doesn't change the fact that when someone goes to fill up their car, they're spending $60, right? And so you can, again, you can scream what you want about about a sort of threats about the red menace. But I do think that there is a hard limit to what that can do to persuade voters when you haven't done anything to alleviate their concerns. And critically, the one piece of legislation you pass, the big beautiful bill, is resulting in massive cuts to food assistance, massive cuts to health care, right? And I'm just, I myself am exceedingly skeptical of the ability of messaging to overcome actual material conditions, especially for those voters who aren't plugged in to conservative media. Those voters who are not in the middle ideologically, but like are loosely attached to the electorate and who are going to be voting if they vote on the basis of their vibe about the world, about their pocketbook and their sense of where they are in terms of their pocketbook. The other really quick point is just that I think it's important to see that a lot of the success of DSA candidates, there aren't enough self-identified socialists or progressives to help a DSA candidate win in the typical Democratic primary. They just aren't. Even in New York, right? The success of these candidates has, I think, been about the fact that DSA candidates seem to want to fight Republicans in a way that establishment Democrats do not. Like the complaint with the Salishman Democrats isn't ideological, it isn't that they aren't going far enough on a set of policies. The complaint is that, well, Donald Trump is running rough shut over American democracy, a Chuck Schumer or a Hawking Jeffries is talking about their friends in the Republican side. And DSA candidates are presenting themselves as candidates who will actually show the level of aggression that Democratic voters want to see against Republicans. I mean, that defeating the Salishman Democrats then becomes a means to an end and not an end in itself. So speaking to your point, Jamal, can the DSA mobilize people with their kind of fighting spirit with Trump? At the same time, as my inbox will attest, the Republicans are going all in on turning this into what has become known as the hate election, which is how much can you get not just your voters, but you know, people who might be anxious about the idea of more extremist democratic candidates turning the country into something they don't recognize. How much can you mobilize them? Certainly, they are working this with, on the fundraising side just incessantly. And I always, there's the issue of, you know, the balance between a candidate that excites their own voters versus the candidate who also is exciting the other side's voters. And I think that's what's making a lot of democratic. Democrats nervous in places outside of New York. Like obviously if you're a safe, blue district in New York, whoever you nominate is going to get it that just like as the Democratic nominee. This is not the same for say, you know, like Colorado eight, big swing district, Republican incumbent, very vulnerable, the more liberal, progressive candidate one, and that makes a lot of people nervous about whether or not they can pull it off. Same thing with the same thing with a lot of what we're seeing in Michigan. So that's my question. I mean, we don't know the answer. I don't know. There's, there's been a bunch of generic ballot polls the past couple days. Fox News has the generic ballot, D plus seven. Emerson has a D plus 11, which is wild, but like there's the spread is like D plus four to D plus 11. And you look at individual Senate races, you know, the candidate, the Democratic candidate and Iowa, whose name I cannot recall at the moment is like even in race, are you talking about the Senate candidate? Yeah. The Senate candidate. John Assof is likely going to win his Senate election, his reelection by like at close to double digits. It's looking like if current trend has been a freak show on the Republican side from the beginning. Yeah. But this is, this is, this is my point, right? When you're looking at individual races, the picture, it doesn't look like a picture where Republicans are on the offensive. It looks like a picture when they're very much on the defensive, where they're, they're having to focus much more on races that in a, in an environment where things were much more in their favor, they wouldn't have to. Right? The Senate, the Senate is in play in a way that it simply wasn't a year ago. And I just don't think that screaming about communism is going to, is going to change that because the Senate's in play because people are responding to conditions. This is where, this is where I'm, I'm really going to double down on this like actual material conditions. I respect that. I respect that. It's not all discourse. We are a lot, our jobs are discourse and I think it's very tempting to sort of imagine that everything is shaped by discourse, but like it is not nothing. The fundamentals are against the Republicans in every, in every way this time. So it's, so it will be, let me, let me, let me use an analogy that my friend Sarah Isger came up with, which I think is just brilliant when it comes to politics and the discourse or politics and even campaign consultants and campaign strategies. She's the analogy of curling. In curling, what do you do? You throw a, a big, big rock where you don't throw it. You slide it. I think that maybe that's how I thought curling tape. Yeah, I don't, I don't. I think throw it. They're definitely qualified. Yeah, yeah. No, they slide it. Okay. So I'm obviously not a curling a fishy-notto here. I got it. And then you have the sweepers, right? And the sweepers, they vigorously work and if they do their job perfectly, they can slightly adjust the trajectory of the rock, slightly, right? And that can, slight, can make all the difference, you know, in a very close Olympic match. But the bottom line is if you have a bad, you know, if that initial slide throw, whatever you want to call it, is bad. And it goes off in a wrong direction or a bad direction. You can have the world's best sweepers and they're not going to move, they're not going to move the needle in any meaningful way. And I think what Jamel is talking about is the underlying conditions of the country are the rock here. That is the thing that is the, the fundamental unyielding reality of this election is that Donald Trump walked into office with a mandate to do, to mainly to repair the economy and fix inflation and provide sort of a degree of normalcy, like, et cetera, at the border. And he created an enormous amount of chaos. He flipped inflation back in the wrong way. And that's all the rock and all of these fundraising emails that, you know, in text, I, a friend of mine sent me one and I will, I will read it to you. Very, very measured, a communist plot unearthed four miles from your home. Trump begged the Pentagon for $350 billion to respond. And I don't think it's going to really work. So yeah, I totally agree with Jamel, the core of this election, the core of it is going to be rejection of Donald Trump and the economy in the world that he's created. And I think it will be so comprehensive that multiple factions within the Democratic Party will be able to say, see, it worked. You'll have some DSA candidates, everybody will have mainstream candidates win. And so they're all going to have a case for how, you know, that they can be the standard bear going forward. Okay. That's going to be 2028. Fun. Oh, yeah. But at the margins, this stuff still does matter. Okay. I can't resist drawing this to a close on a curling analogy with how often, how often do we get to do that? So let's just take that and move right on into recommendations. Who wants to go first? Tell me what you got. Jamel, you go. Sure. My favorite director, Sydney Lumet, not an author, so it doesn't necessarily have a big reputation outside of nerds, but if you watch a lot of movies, you've seen a Sydney Lumet film, 12 Angry Men, as a famous one, Serpico Network, I mean, the guy did a lot. Worked a lot. Made a lot of great movies. I've seen most Lumet movies, so I recently watched The Pond Broker, which is about Holocaust Survivor, who works as a pond broker, he's a titular pond broker, and an East Harlem pawnshop. And it is marvelous. A marvelous film, Stuyger's performance is incredible, and it is this look at how trauma is something that may be impossible to get by. Like, I'll say, this is not a happy movie, it's not a happy picture. It's actually quite weak. And it's a character study, version form, there's not much of a plot to it, and it's simply examining this person who is so deeply affected by their trauma that they really cannot get past it. And all the way is that kind of renders them lonely in their life, and it's very reminiscent of the work of The Safty Brothers. Uncut Gems is like a very different movie, but there's like some DNA Lumet, who is a great New York director. There's like some clear Lumet DNA in The Safty Brothers work, and you can kind of see that if you watch these two back to back. And now, Jamel, the film critic turns off, watch the pawn broker, it's great. And moving on to David, the film critic. Okay. So, the easy thing to say is go see the Odyssey, but it just requires more conversation than this. I saw it over the weekend. I'm going to see it again this weekend. But here is my actual recommendation. Okay. Apple TV's Cape Fear. Now, this is a, it's based on a book called The Executioners. I think there's a 1962 movie that I have not seen. That's amazing. There's a 1990. Yeah. I've heard this. There's a 1991 movie with Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte that I have seen. That was really good and also great. But imagine this, y'all, imagine you have the writer's room and in walks the showrunner, the director, whatever, and he distributes scripts to the 1991 Cape Fear. And he says, okay, I want you to use this as a basis. But before you start writing, I'm going to distribute you crack pipes laced with LSD. And I'm going to ask you to just go ahead and puff up and then start writing because this story takes an already wild story and turns it into something that is just a carnival fun house of horrors and it's a spectacular ride. Okay. Well, there we go. I wanted to be on theme. I just, I felt the need. So I went back and re-watched the death of Stalin, the 2018 Armando Ayanduchi kind of dark comedy political satire. And it's all about what happens after Stalin dropstead in 1953. And the ensuing power struggle between, you know, you've got Khrushchev and Zukov and Malinkov and Molotov. And the sniveling secrecy combined with the cutthroat ambition and just like, it's brilliant. I'm an Ayanduchi fan, although I tend to like the stuff he did, you know, back in the UK with like the thick of it even better than Veepe. So I was primed to like this, but that said, it feels a little too on point at certain moments in our current political situation. So just, just go in with that warning. It's very funny, but at some point you're likely to go, "Oh, okay, okay, that feels a little too real." Can I say too that I love in that movie that they, you know, no one attempts to rush an accent. They all have their particular UK accents. And I think that actually really works because it gives you a sense of how the actual guys were from different parts of the Soviet Union. They would have had different accents, spoke Russian in different ways. And so you kind of get, you kind of get this sense of like, "Yeah, this is roughly," you know. Well, there we go. Jamal has elevated this. I hadn't even thought of that. So there you go. I'm a big movie nerd, folks. There you go. What? Really? And that, we're gonna land this plane, guys, as always. Thank you. I feel we've solved the world's problems this week. Let's do it again soon. Looking forward to it. Thank you, Michelle.