Rick Wilson. Molly Jongfast. How are you, my friend? I want to read you a statistic, okay?
I'm here for your statistics. It's always fun when I come in with things I want to read.
Adding to our new data, our estimated turnout for the No Kings Day protest yesterday has risen
to 5.5 million with an upper bound of 8.7 million, making it the largest single-day political protest
in U.S. history, this excludes the first Earth Day.
I've been to two No Kings protests
in my little town of Tallahassee, Florida.
The first one had about 5,000 people,
and this one was much, much, much larger
in a town with 300,000 people, which is significant.
And it was replicating across the country.
And it's interesting because in every single one
of these places you saw yesterday,
everybody just absolutely,
just like they're doing in Portland now and in Chicago,
They absolutely refuse to play to the bullshit MAGA narrative.
They just, they absolutely refuse.
They're like, okay, we're going to have fun.
We're going to bring American flags.
We're going to be cheerful and singing and happy.
And then we're not going to let them play the game of the communists are trying to take
over with their pro Hamas, blah, blah, blah.
They just wouldn't do it.
It struck me yesterday when I was walking through all these people, this was a younger crowd
than the first No Kings rally.
That's actually really important.
And it struck me that the edginess and the humor of this one was much more front and center than the first one.
The first one, people seemed very scared.
This one, there was also an edge of like, ha ha, fuck you.
I was walking up and I see the de rigueur inflatable frogs.
And it turned out a friend of mine who I had no clue about her politics was in Baby Shark.
I had no clue about her politics at all.
And I was like, wait, what?
I think it was a bad day for them.
And they had to resort to Donald Trump posting really crap AI slop memes of him pooping on
Yesterday was a high stakes day.
There had been no turnouts.
We would have been in a lot of trouble, right?
If there hadn't been millions of people, it would have meant talk us through that.
I
think if yesterday had been a flop, if yesterday had been a wheeze, we
would have the MAGA media and MAGA influencer space would be absolutely
running rings around everybody today, jumping up in victory, saying
Donald Trump is the most beloved president ever.
But instead, you have Breitbart leading with a story about Trump posting the poop video.
And you have Fox talking about, oh, the Democrats shut down all day today.
So
I think it's telling that they did not get what – the Republicans did
not get what they were hoping for out of this weekend, which was
violence, anti-American images, arrests, et cetera.
From my understanding, the only – and I was actually looking in this rabbit hole earlier.
The only arrest I could find was of a MAGA guy who showed up at a rally.
I think it was in Buffalo.
But he was a MAGA guy because he'd been told that Hamas was there.
Well, because the White House press secretary said that all Democrats were Hamas.
Yeah, they're Hamas, pro-terrorist, whatever.
Radical, violent, pro-terrorist.
Radical leftist, the usual jibber-jabber out of her pie hole.
So, you know, Molly, I got to say this.
I think Carolyn Levitt, you know, it is one thing for me to make a your mom joke on Twitter.
But at some point, even the MAGA's are like, is the White House reduced to being like a D-grade trolling shop?
That's what J.D. Vance is.
The reason J.D. Vance came out to defend the Young Nazi Youth League, e.g. the YRs, this weekend.
So basically, the Young Republican chat, this was a big piece in Politico.
They said things like, I love Hitler.
Can't wait to put so-and-so in the gas chamber.
And I think one of the things that I'm struck by with J.D. Vance is he will defend any bad behavior on the right.
It's because he's running for president in 2028 and he follows the Steve Bannon rule.
There are no enemies to my right flank.
So he is willing to defend Nazis, Molly.
I got to tell you, the Republican Party I was a part of for a long time had many, many, many, many flaws.
But any person in the party who was like, I love Hitler.
Brown people are monkeys.
all that crap, they would have been fired.
They would have been cast out.
These people, and by the way, folks, for those of you listening,
if you think that's the only racist group chat among the YRs,
I have a bridge to sell you.
This is what they are now.
The screeching, don't call us Nazis.
All right, well, stop saying Nazi shit and believing Nazi things
and thinking about Nazi outcomes for your political enemies.
So you have this No King's Day, you have millions of people.
Then you have this poor polling. You have Trump not polling well in all sorts of underwater or on the economy and migration.
Does Trump not see these polls? Do people not show them to him?
Tony Fabrizio, who has been his pollster now for a long time, Tony the pollster, is not a stupid guy.
He's not a stupid guy. He is also known to be a pretty good pollster.
Right. That's what I'm getting to. He is a credible and qualified pollster.
He's not generating numbers that are just made up fantasy numbers.
Who just literally make up like, how may we please the king?
He's also not going to bring Donald bad news because that's a quick way in Trump world to
get sent out into the ether, to get fired, to get dismissed, to get ignored.
They know how bad Trump's numbers are.
But like so much of what goes on in Trump world now, the reason Trump says my approval
rating is 97% is because they will now go out and say, well, Mr. President, our numbers have some
issues here and there, but we found this poll from Red Eagle Palin polling or whatever that says
you're so popular and he will seize on the inaccurate bait and ignore the unpalatable truth.
So yeah, but his polling has continued to slip, continued to drop, continued to get into worse
and worse and worse areas.
Let's talk about what happens now.
We have Trump world bombing little ships in the Caribbean, repatriating survivors because
Explain to us what's happening here in American international diplomacy.
Killing it, right, is the hashtag.
Just with the emphasis on the killing part.
With the emphasis on the killing.
So what they've done is declared an undeclared war on Venezuela.
Because Donald Trump is in the Epstein files.
Donald Trump is in the Epstein files.
And that's why they're going to war with Venezuela?
Well, there's another reason they're doing this.
There is a philosophical construct among the modern authoritarians where Russia should own Europe.
uh china should own asia and america should own america north and south and that is sort of the
the tripartite vision of the world that a lot of these maga populace really love maduro is sitting
on a gigantic amount of oil and natural gas off the coast of venezuela they are it is essentially
saudi arabia with jungles now look maduro there are no maduro fans or defenders in america nobody
wakes up and goes, man, that Maduro is a great guy. But what Trump has done is under the disguise
of saying, oh, well, these are drug smuggling boats, which we have never seen evidence of,
by the way. This government has never produced a single shred of information or evidence or
documents that say that these drug boats are drug boats. Their entire amount of evidence is,
trust me, bro. So a lot of them seem to be fishing boats. We are not using the traditional
targeting and intelligence process to identify these boats. We are not using standard intelligence
vetting processes to identify these boats. And that is why the four-star general who runs Southern
Command, which is, that's the area of operation that Venezuela falls under. Just resigned. Yeah.
He said, I can't do this. We're not, this is not, we're not behaving legally or ethically.
If you know how to read military code language, he was basically saying, I'm not going to be a part
of a goddamn war crime. And that's what we're doing. We're probably shooting up a bunch of
fishermen. A lot of these boats are of a design that is not meant to cross almost a thousand miles
of ocean between Venezuela and Florida. They're fishing boats. But Stephen Miller and P.D. Hegseth
and Donald Trump have decided this is a great distraction. We're going to have a triumph when
we depose Maduro and we install a pro-MAGA, pro-Western government in Caracas.
I will tell you that, you know, I don't...
We've done really well in South America.
My Spanish isn't great, but I don't think we're going to be greeted as liberators.
Speaking of problems in the world and ethical lapses, Donald Trump has freed the political
prisoner known as George Santos.
George Santos will soon be named as the viceroy of the newly conquered American colony of Venezuela.
Which we call Miami South.
What are we doing here, man?
Listen, Santos is a great MAGA.
He's not doing restitution now, by the way, because he decided he didn't want to.
MAGA wants to hear and needs to hear one message.
We're immune from consequence.
We're immune from accountability.
We can commit any crime we want and Trump will pardon us.
get out of jail free in a lot of ways and i somebody said this to me the other night and
i thought it was really smart in a lot of ways george santos being freed was a lot was a message
to a lot of these ice agents on the street oh interesting you can commit crimes he's going to
take care of you you can commit crimes as long as you stay loyal he'll take care of you or
there's something else i don't know what santos would have on trump god god god god knows or
somebody's doing someone a favor right or it's roger stone like cashing a shit i i don't know
but look in terms of like the least sympathetic figures and trump has pardoned seven i think it's
seven now ex-republican members of congress who all were in jail or going to jail for criming
yes not not political questions not not like were they supporting jan six like stealing money or
taking bribes. And that message is to say to people on Trump's side, we don't play by their
rules. We don't have to be accountable. You can cash in. You can abuse your power. Do what you
want to do. Go buck wild. We're here for you. I feel like the Santos thing bites him in the ass
because he's a guy who will not shut up. He's everywhere. You have all of these MAGA Republicans
who voted to throw them out of Congress,
now they have to say they were kidding?
And the New York delegation,
including a lot of very reliable Trump allies
like Mike Lawler and Elise Stefanik,
were like, no, bro, this ain't it.
This ain't the right way.
And Stefanik is running for governor.
In her, like, Trump-adjacent,
I call it just the tip Trumpism.
I'm glad you can always get the sort of most offensive way to take it.
You know, Molly, I appreciate the lack of gentility.
Yes, but at least I'm not sending out videos of people pooping on other people like Trump did.
Do you think his staff is trolling him?
Do you think that's the comp you want?
I want you to get back to Stefania because I want to talk about the New
Jersey governor's race for a minute.
So two 2025 races happening in 16 days.
One is this Virginia race where,
where Spamberger is probably going to win against Sears.
Winsome Sears sounds like a cowboy name.
But when she talks, she just sounds like a lunatic.
She sounds like somebody who's wandering the streets talking about how somebody put a chip in her head.
You know, it's like you hear her talk.
You're like, are the voices in the room with you right now?
So I think Spanberger's got that locked up.
Look, I won't say locked up.
They had a little speed bump with this AG guy, which the Republicans tried to convert on.
But I don't think it's going to change the outcome.
So the AG sent a text to someone in 2022.
Basically saying we should kill a candidate because that's the only way they'll learn.
And also, when you read the text, it's worse.
Because his way of explaining it is stupid, too.
But they run on different tickets.
Like, you know, don't vote for him, okay?
Which, and I think she's navigated that, Spanberger's navigated that pretty well.
But that, look, in Virginia, I know from our polling in Virginia, that has not really changed the Spanberger equation.
Sears is in the classic trap.
Trump's not on the ballot.
The negative outcomes of Trump in Virginia from Doge and Project 2025 cuts and everything else are on the ballot.
And
it's hard for Sears to say, I'm going to bring back a great economic
revival to Virginia when Donald Trump has taken 120,000 jobs out of
Virginia.
So, you know, that is a state where the externalities of Trump are hurting.
I
think it's also, to go back to New Jersey for a second, I think
Cittarelli now has to ride with Trump canceling a gigantic
infrastructure project that would have directly benefited New Jersey and
was responsible for a lot of high-paying jobs in New Jersey.
And Trump just killed it because President Russell Vaught decided he was going to kill it.
This
is one of the interesting things about the shutdown. You talk to
reporters who talk to this White House and they'll say these guys are
thrilled with the shutdown. This is what they'll say. They feel they're
winning the shutdown. They feel emboldened. They feel powerful. And I
say to these people, shut the fuck up. I don't want to hear how they're
spinning you. Number one.
and also this shutdown is now becoming about russ vaught canceling programs that were already
in you know some of them are being built some of these things are already done or already i mean
the contracts are done they're halfway built these things are being built yeah exactly and and none of
it, none of it when you get down to it, Molly, has the uplift of like, we're cutting corruption.
We're cutting fraud, waste, and abuse. Because it's not about that. Because none of that's about
this. Trump is deliberately saying, I'm going out to cut democratic programs. Right. I'm going to
cut the things you like. I'm going to bring you pain. I'm going to use the federal government to
punish states that didn't vote for me. He's now, and especially on now that we're in the,
now that we're in Mike Johnson's new phase of BSing why the shutdown is here. Oh no,
we would come back anytime as long as the Democrats agree to endorse everything we want
above and beyond just the budget. So you have these pocket recisions. He was going to do this anyway.
Signed off on a budget and then the Trump administration rescinded $5 billion in foreign
aid because of vibes. And even you have Republicans saying, like, why would they trust?
Right. The Republicans are hearing from their own pollsters. OK, not from the White House,
not from, you know, smoke up your ass Rasmussen polls or Trafalgar polls. They're hearing from
their own pollsters. You're taking the blame. You're the ones who won't come back. You're
taking the blame. I don't think that that the House candidates have a lot longer to run
before the pressure on them politically reaches the point where one or two of them go to Mike
Johnson. And if one or two of them go to Mike Johnson and say, boss, you're killing me,
it will start a cascade. They understand that America, the broad question across the country,
we have now had 10 surveys since the shutdown among likely voters where they blame the Republicans
by somewhere between six and 18 points. This is bad, bad, bad for the Republicans. And no matter
how MAGA they are on paper, no candidate in the end is going to burn himself down over
a shutdown that is going to brand them as somebody who was willing to burn their own constituents.
It's not going to do it in the end.
You see Trump trying to redistrict.
There is a world where they hit themselves in the head with this.
There is a world where the collapses in various national real estate markets, the terrible
outlook, the terrible economic picture, the continued damage of the tariffs, the shutdown,
they've become the party causing the problem. They become the people causing the problem.
And I think that's a bad place for them to be in the fall of the year before a big
consequential election where the picture's not going to get any prettier.
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