So We Lost... Now What?

I thought that it was going to be, you know, like a punch in the face. And actually it was like. Being kicked directly in the crotch, repeatedly by a robot. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You, Drew. No, I think, you know, I always feel that hope is a better strategy than despair. So I thought I left open the possibility that things might go well or might go less badly than I thought. This is worse than my worst expectations. I thought we were going to get a 50, you know, this is going to be bad. We laugh so we don't cry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't that bad, was it? But also, oh. Oh, I... Yeah, I was expecting it to be bad. I'm always expecting everything to be bad. And I usually am right. So that's one way to ensure that you're usually right, is just to expect everything to not be good, because it usually isn't. But I didn't think, I mean, look, Texas flipping entirely blue was not something that I thought was going to happen. Yeah, Kansas. So it was even worse than I thought. And listen, if there's any consolation in all this, and I think you get a little desperate searching for consolation in these moments, Um, So this is, and this is consolation that cuts both ways. However, things change quickly. We do know that. And so, I mean, you look at, look at 2024. I mean, we were in this, we were here. And the jubilation that we all felt and that many people in the country felt, 2024. And you look at how quickly just... This thing just fell off of a cliff, collapsed, so what that tells you is that it could happen the other way. I mean, this moment, this blue tsunami, and it feels like the Democrats have taken a stranglehold on the country, and they have Texas and they have everything. I mean, it's possible that in 2028, we're going to look back on 2026 and be like, that feels like it was 200 years ago. Yes, it always looks darkest just before it goes pitch black. This is friendly fire. You know, I think we have to go back, though. This is a huge transitional moment, and it's going to last another 10 years at least. This is the moment, first of all, my generation is dying. You know, I'm afraid they might take me with them, but hopefully they'll leave me behind. Who knows? But I think, you know, there's going to be realignment. In moments like this, radicals show up on both sides. This is, I hate to make the comparison because I don't think we're in that situation, but this is what happened in the 30s in Europe. You know, when there's this opening in the middle. The socialists rise on one side, and the fascists rise on the other side. In our country, they're both the same people. But still, that's the thing that happens, and usually a center reforms. And how it reforms is it reforms around an individual. An individual comes along. The people are not going to give you a vision. The people cannot give you a vision. Leaders give you a vision. Leaders can only lead the people where they'll go, but it's the leaders who provide the vision. Trump's vision was too chaotic, too centered on himself, but it was urgently important. He was God sent. And as we know, God sends the weirdest people when he wants to help out. But I mean, he broke, we talked about the border that he fixed. We've talked about other things that he did, but the main thing he did, and if he did nothing else, he would still be an important. Man, in a good way, he broke the stranglehold on speech and he did it with our help. You know, he did it with the help of the new media, but he broke the stranglehold on speech. And that means that a lot of people are saying things that they couldn't say before. So you have people making jokes about retards again. I think that's a good thing. I don't think it's a bad thing. I think we should always be joking about everything. But you also have people saying, hey, socialism might be a good idea. And, you know, you have these 20 year olds who don't know. Crap from Shinola, you know, they're sitting around going like, yeah, socialism might be a good idea, you know? And so we're going to go through this stuff. It's going to go back and forth, but you hope that the center reforms around somebody that we can tolerate who loves America. I think that the biggest thing that's happening, and I think this is, you know, across all parties right now, is that President Trump was and remains and has always been a gigantic middle finger to whatever it is people were pissed off at. In 2016, it was just. We don't like Hillary Clinton. We don't like Barack Obama. We don't like what's going on. Here's a giant middle finger. He had no policies to speak of in 2016. I mean, he was literally on pretty much every side of every issue. And then he sort of formed a series of policies almost by happenstance and because of the people surrounding him and largely because of oppositionality to Democrats coming after him and him reacting to that. And then from 2020 to 2024, you got the backlash against Trump won. As the Empire Strikes Back. And then you got sort of the Return of the Jedi moment here. But, you know, the story just, it never ends that way. And so it was a rejection of the rejection of the rejection. And at no point has anyone in the last, I would say, you know, maybe 30 years in American politics provided a sort of cohesive version of what. Our politics ought to look like, how we ought to approach policy. It feels like a grab bag of policies built around a personality. And you're right, people follow, the great sadness of my life, it truly is the sadness of my life, is the recognition as I came into my 40s that people don't follow policy, they follow people. It's a very, very sad thing. They don't follow ideas, they follow humans. And that's a difficult thing to reconcile with what we do every day where we're talking about policy and ideas. But that's why I think it's easy to overread an election like this. And read it in a wide variety of ways, right? People like me, right, where I was supportive of the initial Iran war, even though I was not supportive of the MOU and the delay in the Iran war after April. I'm going to say, well, it was the tariffs. And people who hated the Iran war are going to say the tariffs were great, it was the Iran war. In reality, it was like all the things and none of the things in a certain sense. It was all the things and it was the perception that President Trump is disconnected from the American public in a way that he was not in 2015, 2016, and that he's sort of lost touch. With the public that wanted to give him the ability to do the things. And that's why, you know, what I think is that it's not so easily corrected. Because I don't think it's a matter of just you pull this lever, you change this policy, and suddenly your popularity springs back into being. I'm struggling to think of a time when a president dipped into the 30s and then rose back up into the 50s. Certainly this has not happened in the last half century. And so what does that mean? It means what we're really talking about here, which is what comes next. And that's the open question is really sort of what comes next. And part of what's going to define that is how crazy the Democrats go. If there was one silver lining here, it's that the Democratic victory was so overwhelming and so large. That I'm not sure they can talk themselves into moderation. I think they're going to go for Bernie. I'll make a prediction on what comes next. I don't think that Trump is done as the leader of the GOP. No. I think he remains the leader. I think he'll remain the leader through 2028 and even after. After I. I think that he can plausibly at least say, I wasn't on the ballot. And so don't blame me, blame these other guys. And you can say, well, he was campaigning for them. And well, it was your policies. I think he will credibly be able to say that. So I think he's the figure. He still sucks all the oxygen out of the room. I think there was this. In those early days, in the kind of inchoate crazy days of 2016, everyone said people just voted for Trump for his personality, not for his policies. But he did differ from the GOP. When the whole GOP was ideologically free trade, he was proposing protectionism. When the whole GOP was in favor of legal migration, he was calling for immigration restriction and calling migrants, you know, rapists and murderers, and that resonated. So I still, I do think he offered this. policy alternative in a way that was more coherent than people give him credit for. So I think he continues to hold that. I just wonder if there's a structural problem now that you see it in the UK too. How many prime ministers does the UK have? That's like so many. Like a billion in the last 20 years. You think in the United States, we had a Democrat House of Representatives for 40 years. Now, it seems to switch back and forth all the time. We had Ronald Reagan win two terms, followed by a third term for George H.W. Bush. Now, we go from the end of Obama to Trump for a term, then Biden for a term, then Trump for a term. And right now, it's not looking very good for the Republican in 28. I wonder if there's just this deeper structural issue where we're not getting what we want. What we want is cohesive societies that are high trust with economic flourishing that we got used to at the end of the 20th century. And that just isn't happening anymore, anywhere in the Anglosphere, really anywhere in the West. And I just wonder if political instability is the inevitable consequence for the foreseeable future. I think, first of all, Trump, by default, will remain the leader of the Republican Party for now. But if that remains the case into 2028 and beyond, as you said, then the Republican Party has no future. You know, the leader of the Republican Party cannot be... In the future, an 80-year-old, lame duck, unpopular president. It just can't be. So the process now has to be finding who the new leader is going to be. And as I said in the other show, I mean, even if we had performed well during the midterms, that would still be the case. But as to people follow ideas and not people, I think the answer is kind of both. I think people follow people who have ideas they believe in. But the ideas are part of it. It's not just the person. And so Trump, in 2016, people were rallying around, yeah, there was the personality, there was Trump himself, the blustery personality, and all of that. He was funny and all these things, and he could speak extemporaneously, and the rallies were really entertaining. But he did have very simple, understandable, intuitive ideas, drain the swamp, build the wall. Those are probably the two big ideas people rallied behind. And so it was this guy with these simple, understandable, kind of eloquent in their simplicity, good ideas that people were rallying around. I totally agree with that, but I think that the problem is trying to abstract Trump. So you're right, it's a combination of the person, but the person is a combination with their own ideas, which is why Trump is sort of a one of one. And any attempt to either abstract a philosophy from him and then map it onto another candidate is likely to fail. And, and, and so that's going to be the question for the next person who is the leader of the Republican party or of a conservative movement in not only what policies are Americans likely to believe, but what are, who is the person who best reflects that in his own personage? Trump was, because he was a throbbing middle finger, the ones that tended to reflect were the things you weren't allowed to say. Right? Don't open the borders wide and just let tons of people in here. That's bad. You shouldn't do that. Or maybe we shouldn't trans the kids. All those things where you would say sort of the obvious thing that was transgressive, that united with Trump as a human. And I don't know if there's anyone in the Republican Party who's sort of capable of capturing that in the same way. And so I think that what you're getting is a bunch of kind of nerds in the back room trying to recreate fake Trump from a bunch of like spare parts. And I just don't, I don't know that that's going to work. But you know, there's an expression in England, the cometh the hour, cometh the man. And I think, you know, it's really Tolstoyan. It's really about Leo Tolstoy. You know, like Tolstoy said that men do nothing. It's the age that raises the man. That's not true. There's a... The way that both things happen at once, a Napoleon comes along when a Napoleon is called for. And I used to tell Andrew Breitbart, he used to say, I would be nobody if the internet hadn't been invented. And I'd say Fred Astaire would be nobody if the American musical hadn't hit that point when he was dancing. And so I think that that's the thing you're looking for. You can never see it coming. Nobody saw Trump coming. Nobody saw him coming. And the one thing I disagree with you about though, Trump has been saying a lot of the things he's saying now for 50 years. I mean, you know, that we're getting bad deals, we need to make better deals, we need to get rid of NAFTA, we, you know, all this. I'm not disagreeing with that. The only point that I've made about his policies is that when you try to, say, look at tonight, which was a disaster area, and you say, okay, let's look at the things that made him unpopular. Everybody is now going to pick and choose the thing they like. Of course. That made him, it wasn't that, it wasn't that. I agree with that point. I personally don't like this thing. It must have been that thing that made it happen. And that's why I say, like, in the end. The way that voters think about things is, I just don't like this, like all of this, like I just don't like all of this. And so sitting there and sort of, you know, pulling strand out by strand and being like, okay, I'm going to pull out this piece of the Jenga tower and I'm going to put this piece back in. That's not the way that actual politics works, which is something that Trump always understood, right? Like that is something that Trump understood maybe better than any politician in my lifetime is that you can't, that politics is not the art of stacking Jenga blocks. It's the art of just being all of the things at once. Yeah, you know, I do wonder, because we've talked about the Iran war, obviously, a lot tonight. One part we haven't touched on, yes, okay, the Iran war raised oil prices and diesel prices, and it has all these downstream effects. But there's this kind of semiotic aspect to it, which is, I wonder if voters saw in the very fact of the Iran war, An image of the Iraq war, which America spells as political trauma. Like, to what degree did that just flip something? And Afghanistan, you know, you forget, like, 20 years in Afghanistan, and then it ends in this disaster. I mean, when I went over to Afghanistan, I came back and said, this is terrible. We've got to get out of here. There's no country here to save and all this. The Iraq war was overstepping, even though I thought many good things actually came out of that, weirdly enough. But I still thought. You know, we got hit really badly, and it was traumatic, and I think we overreacted. I think we thought we could do more. You know, the W idea that we were going to go over and turn, you know, the Middle East into a flowering democracy was just absurd, you know, and we were so upset and we were so angry with what had happened. You know, I guess it made sense to follow that, but these are the sorts of things that do have to turn back. If America first means isolationism. You can forget it. You can forget it. We're an empire. We're never going to be isolationists ever again. That's not happening ever again until we're not an empire anymore. And I think, so you've got to forget that. But really, we need strategic alliances where people do the things we need them to do. We need to be a new kind of empire. We've never wanted to conquer people. We've never taken over their countries. But we need to at least know that they will go out and fight for the things that we care about. And one of the things that is truly dangerous right now, I think we're losing Europe. I think Europe is dead, and I think really it's just being devoured by the creatures that come and devour the dead. But then we have to know who is going to stand for us against Russia in Europe, against China in the China Seas, and against Iran in the Middle East. I think all of that's true. I also think that there's a fundamental disconnect in the American mind. As to what we think is possible in war, how it's fought and how you win. And so in the same way, I think this is also happening. And this is sort of your question about systems and the fact that we keep bouncing party to party. The case I've been making for a long time on the show and elsewhere is that the reason we're bouncing party to party is because you've got a bunch of politicians who are running their mouth about and delivering promises that no human can keep in the system that is built to not keep those promises. Right. Meaning, we created a system of checks and balances to prevent, specifically, Fast-moving action. I'll go even further, though, because this is a very important point. The politicians are promising they're going to fix the migration problem, but you can't fix the migration problem when you have a welfare state with zillions of dollars of entitlements and a blown replacement... Correct, which is what's happening in France. Yeah, so you just can't have all the things at once. And so I feel like the same thing happens with regard to the Iran war. And I thought that President Trump had a fundamental... A different understanding because of his opposition to the Iraq war, which is, as you say, a major factor in why he won in 2016, which was at the time a very taboo position, was that this is why when he went in and we did in Iran. And he said, like, I'm going to move fast, I'm going to break things, and then I'm going to get out, which is essentially what he did with Midnight Hammer the year before. I was figuring that it was going to be a campaign that was much along those lines. And I think that, you know, the reality is that if you're trying to deliver an outcome, like, say, for example, the toppling of a regime, which was always, I think, the sort of sotto voce thing you're not supposed to say that we were trying to do, but we weren't really trying to do, but we were kind of trying to do. Like, if you're going to do that, then you have to be actually respectful of the way that certain events come about and what your actual goal is. The American people are not wrong to be disappointed in you for not achieving all of that. And so, to me, that's the mistake of the, if you're gonna do it, win. Move fast and win. By the way, I apply that critique to literally every ally of the United States as well. This is my critique, actually, of Netanyahu and Israel, is if you're gonna go, go hard, go fast, and win, and don't take two years to drag it out. But the same thing is true with regard to this, and so. So there's a question on the consequences here, our pals at Kalshi have. Will Trump be impeached? And removed from office. 31% yes. To me- Yes to the first part, no to the second. Yeah, so I mean, that seems like easy money. The only way that you could possibly see something like that happening is if they really have a major corruption scandal and you get a bunch of Republicans who are now scared to death that they're about to lose their seats in a swing state. But who are you going to get? Yes, there aren't that many swing states. Right, and if Susan Collins goes down, I don't know if we've had an update on- Murkowski, so you could probably pick up Murkowski. Yes. Now you're at 56. You know, Cornyn, had Cornyn held on in Texas- You could see him being swayed on something like that. But he's out. You know, a lot of these guys are out. So Johnson's not going to do it. No chance. Yeah. So I just think. Not to mention they removed Trump. They're putting Vance in office. Yeah. They're giving the presidency to Vance. Yeah, right. So I don't think they'd be thrilled about that. Other one from Kalshi. Will Trump resign during this term? No. 27% chance. That feels like easy money. Let's run that prediction market and take the under on that. No way. So we've got Decision Desk HQ has called the Minnesota race. For Peggy Flanagan, the Democrat, defeating Michelle Tafoya. So just a reminder for people who forget Peggy Flanagan, she was the one who wore the t-shirt threatening transgender terrorism against all normal people. We are talking about actual Antifa levels of now elected. Yeah. Again, I think the biggest thing here is that Democrats will undoubtedly overreach. And so all of the pessimism of today is based on the fact that tonight was just Porsche. It was just terrible. Yeah. But like, I've been, we've all been around long enough to remember several, as you said earlier, Matt, to remember several cycles of this. I remember in 2004, I thought Republicans would never lose again. And by 2006, Nancy Pelosi was speaker. And then I remember that Barack Obama in 2012 wins. Yeah. And by 2016, Donald Trump is president. No. And so like, it feels like we're never going to win again. And that's not true. We will win It's just going to take the Democrats completely going off the reservation. Well, here's the problem with that. The problem, and it's true, they'll definitely overstep. The hope then is that they will face a political consequence for it. But I'm not sure if that's true, because the really dark reality here is that, look, what have Democrats and what has the left done for the last year? I mean, they have been more extreme than we've ever seen them. They have been openly celebrating the death of One particular conservative, Charlie Kirk, the murder, yes, the murder of Charlie Kirk and calling for the deaths of many more conservatives. And they've been doing that. And apparently there is. So far, no political consequence for that whatsoever. They've been awarded with this. I think we're missing, though. I do think we're missing this bigger movement. The West is moving to the right. The West is moving to the right. Could have fooled me tonight. Yeah, I get it. But they're not voting. I don't believe that they are voting for leftist policies. I believe they're voting against what we have in this moment. And if you look at, you know, Glenn Beck was the guy who brought it up, which is what happened in Poland. Yeah. The reason that happened in Poland, what happened in France, I haven't heard anybody else say this, but I know it's true, that what happened in France was a reaction to the visit of Pope Leo. He came and 800,000 people said mass in the symbol of the revolution, the Place de la Concorde. And the left moved in on these minor demonstrations and turned them into a riot because they saw that there is a movement moving to the right, moving toward religion, moving toward tradition. And I think that... That's what's happening in Poland. This was basically a coup in Poland, which is not like Guatemala. It's like Poland. And they know that the people are moving to the right. They're doing everything they can to shut down the AFD in Germany, to shut down Marine Le Pen in France. Is that happening here in the United States? What's that? It's about to. Is the United States moving to the right? Yes. Yes. Yes. What are the indicators of that? Yes. Yes. It's moving to the right in terms of the populist right. Oh yes. The populist right. I was talking- But what are the indicators that we're moving to the right? Because- The indicators I see is everything's pointing to the left. No, I don't- Not everything, but mostly. I think this is an interregnum. And I think the best historical analog right now is the recent history of Great Britain. So I think that what you watched in Great Britain was the conservatives were in power. They got for a long time. And then they got sclerotic and not particularly good at their jobs. And then labor- Radical labor wiped them out, wiped them out. And within a year, labor was radically unpopular. And now the conservatives and Nigel Farage are on the rise again. And I think that that is very likely to happen here. The real reason why Democrats won tonight is because they don't have power. That's the reason they won tonight, because none of their policies are being implemented. Right now, whoever is in power gets shellacked. If people are pissed off, they punish the party in power. And so this couldn't have happened, I think, in a non-midterm election. In fact, it didn't happen in a non-midterm election. That was two years ago. But a midterm election is always a referendum on the party in power. And because this is a referendum on the Republicans and people are pissed off, you get this. And maybe that referendum lasts on for another couple of years and sweeps into Democratic term number one But I have no faith, right now if I had to put money on 28, I'd put money on the Democrats. If I had to put money on 32, I'm not sure that I'd put money on the Democrats. And it won't be worth anything at that point. What you said before is really important. What people were voting for in Britain, again and again, was stop bringing in the immigrants. They can't stop bringing in the immigrants because they need them to support the welfare state. Nobody wants to give up the welfare state. So what we need is a vision of what we do with the welfare state. And I think I was talking again to Henry Olsen, who by the way, really needs to be talked to more. I think we should hire him, frankly, but he's a brilliant guy. And one of the things, he invented Donald Trump before there was Donald Trump. He said that the Republicans have forgotten that Ronald Reagan was a man of the people. That he was a man who actually supported a welfare state that would keep people from falling through the cracks. And I asked him, so what does that look like now? And he said, well, it looks like reforming the welfare state so it takes care of the truly needy and lets the rich take care of themselves. Right. I mean, I'm collecting Social Security. I deserve it. I paid into it. But that's not the way it should work. I mean, I don't need Social Security. And I love it because it's just somebody sending me money. But, you know, that's not right. We need to reform. We need to stop talking about this ideal world where we get rid of the welfare state because it's not going to happen. We need to reform it. I spoke to a billionaire about 10 years ago, and he was complaining about the same problem. He said, every single month. The government sends me a check for $700 because I'm a parent. He had younger kids. It was, you know, he was an active guy. He sends me a check for $700. I'm a billionaire. I spend $700 a month on tennis shoes. I do not need the government to send me $700. Now, of course, the left never wanted that. The entitlements will be means tested because then it would make it a welfare program and then it would be easier to cut rather than one that we've all paid into. So yes, look, all of these things are going to be on the table. President Trump just spoke to Fox News, said. First line, a part of it was Iran. So this is Trump acknowledging, to my knowledge, for the first time that Iran would play a role. Well, he said he didn't care that it was going to do this, but he said it was going to do it. A part of it was Iran, he says. I don't think it was the war. So he says a part of it was Iran. Next sentence, I don't think it was the war. I think it was the gas prices, meaning the consequences of the war. I can work with them on a lot of things. The Democrats or the Iranians. What's the difference? Immigration is a big deal. This is President Trump saying about the Democrats. A lot of Democrats have called me in the last 20 minutes. Actually, I've already spoken to certain leaders in the Democrat Party. We will work with the Democrats. I will consider doing whatever is good and appropriate for the country. Interesting. He always makes this overture. So he made this overture after he won in 2016 that he would actually. Work with the Democrats, and then they proceeded to slap him directly in the face. Yes, yes. Like idiots, by the way. But it was great for us. It was great for us. No, they've learned nothing. Yeah. And their base demands, they did not learn anything. And so it'll get bad again. By the way, that analysis is not wrong. I mean, like, the truth is, when he says it's the war in Iran, but it's not the war in Iran, it's the gas prices. Yeah. He's correct. I mean, the gas prices were at $2.50. No one would give a crap, right? Right. I mean, like, that's. That's the reality, just be a thing happening far away that we don't really care very much about. And it is a big deal in rural areas with gas prices, and that's where our strength is. Of course. And so, you know, again, when you look for the really true, this would be like a normal evening, except for the fact that a bunch of truly red states that should not be in play now have to be considered in play. And the map for Democrats in 2028 becomes a very, very wide map, right? That's the problem, is that for the Republicans. They basically had to run it inside straight in the last several elections, right? You got to win Arizona, Georgia, we all know the map, and win Wisconsin, and Michigan, and two of the three, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania. That's a very narrow map, and there weren't a lot of other states that were opening up. Now, Democrats have about 8,000 ways that they can win in 2020. If Texas is open. If North Carolina is solidly Democrat, if Ohio is open again, and Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania are all open, Democrats have combos there that are just extraordinary. They have an extraordinary number of combos there. And that's the real danger for whoever decides to run for the president. And then this puts, listen. I don't envy J.D. his position. I really don't. I mean, that is- I was just going to ask, what is your advice now for any of the guys, whatever it is, four or five guys? I mean, so I think that there are certain guys where it's like they're only going to be able to get the nomination if they run this time. And there, you're thinking about Governor DeSantis in Florida, who already ran once. If he waits another four years, then he's been out of office for too long, and it's not really relevant. So, Ron is going to run. The vice president, I just don't see. I think that there is a not unintelligent play where he says, listen, you know, this is, I've got a young family. He makes an excuse. I've got a young family. And he's so young. I'm bringing up little kids. He's a kid. He's a year older than I am. You're younger than I am. He's a baby. He's a kid. And so he could easily... Again, we have the Cal sheet numbers here saying that JD is the favorite at 30% Rubio at 23% and DeSantis at 12%. You should absolutely short sell Rubio. Marco is not going to run. He's not going to run. He's not going to run. Why do you say that? Because, number one, 2028 is likely a poison chalice. Number two, if he runs against JD and JD runs and he loses to JD, he's toast. Number three, if JD wins the nomination, you can still pick him as his VP. JD could lose and he would still be the heir apparent. Number four, if JD runs. loses and doesn't pick him, he could still be the heir apparent. So if you're Rubio, every math ends with, I'm not going to run. But if you're J.D., that's a very hard call, because you look at that map, you say, I'm running on the back of a president whose endorsement makes me the guy. But the only way I become the guy is with his endorsement, and he has a 32% approval rating. And he's got a bunch of policies I don't necessarily agree with that I'm going to have to quasi-own but also quasi-separate from. And the minute I separate from him, President Trump is going to bop me on the head with a stick. That is a rough road. And so I wish I had an easy solution for the vice president, but I just don't. And the issue is we can sit here all day and say, well, actually, here's the reason why J.D. should wait for four years or eight years. But you know, the thing is- He's this close to the president. If I were the vice president. I'm running. Yeah, of course. You can't do it up. Now or never for him. Yeah. Look, he's young. He's very talented. He's very intelligent. His rise in politics is astounding, actually. And so I don't know that it's now or never. But it's kind of now, you know, I mean, it is. I think the president actually just spoke to the Wall Street Journal, but they took the quote away from me. There it is. President Trump just spoke with the Wall Street Journal. And hold on. Stop scrolling so much. I want to read the report. He says the president said he had no plans to make personnel changes inside his administration. And he expressed support for Defense Secretary Pete Hagseth, who has led the war effort. I think he's terrific, actually, President Trump said. It's just the way the ball bounces sometimes, Trump said, of Tuesday night's primary results. Or, sorry, the midterm results. So far, I don't think the same is true. Yes, there's... Can you toss me the lighter? It would be... This is an important issue, is getting you that lighter. I mean, it's just the way the ball bounces sometimes is not... The ball's not supposed to bounce in this direction. The ball's not supposed to bounce and make Texas blue. But to Trump's point, I think this is a good point. You cannot blame Pete Hegseth because you don't like the Iran war. I mean, I actually think it would be wrong of him to fire Pete Hegseth. I mean, I agree. Pete Hegseth works for him. I mean, and there is a case to be made that let's assume for a second, since the Iran war is obviously the big subject that everybody is talking about tonight. I think, again, that the big underplayed subject will be the tariffs, which dramatically increased prices across the board. And everyone pretends don't exist, even though they are wildly unpopular. We'll put that aside because nobody wants to talk about that. They were largely struck down, so it became kind of a dead end. Yeah, but it didn't really. The exit polls show 64% of Americans didn't like the tariffs, and 63% said it affected their business. So, like, not great, but. Let's talk about the Iran war since it's more interesting and people like talking about it. So the tariffs did kind of affect Mayflower cigars too. We were able to eat the prices and maintain very low prices for the consumers. So, but, but they're a problem for people for sure. But, but like, but with regards to the Iran war, the question, let's say you're JD or let's say you're the president is what you do now, right? Because nobody has a time machine. We can do recriminations all day long and it's fine. I mean, like it's totally deserved and you know, like what happened happened and we can now analyze where we are now. Maybe we You know, maybe we reverse the recriminations if things go well over the course of the next two days or something. But if you're the president and or you're the vice president, you have to start from the presumption that the Iranians are not going to sign any sort of deal because they because they clearly are not. I mean, they clearly are not interested in signing some sort of deal. And so the question becomes, how do you get to a quasi successful conclusion as fast as humanly possible? Yeah, right. That really is what it is. And because the faster, the better, obviously, and the more successful, the better, because Americans don't like losing wars. Something that we tend to forget, and again, a lot of people who are sort of in the America First movement, so to speak, will say that, you know, just ending the war is sufficient. Just ending a war is not sufficient. If you end it and you lose, you become Joe Biden with Afghanistan. It doesn't actually, like ending it, you don't get credit for ending it. You just get credit for winning. You know, General Patton during World War II gave this great speech to the Third Army, where he says, America never can and never has lost a war. And the funny thing is, Immediately after he said that, immediately after that war, with the exception of Desert Storm, we lost like every war that we've engaged in. I mean, imperial wars are like that, unfortunately. You have to remember, even ending World War II took atom bombs. And we're not dropping atom bombs on Iran. It's not happening. And I think... The definition of loss in a war changed, or when a war changed, because no one will surrender anymore. Right. There are no regimes who are willing to get on the deck of an aircraft carrier and just be like, okay, you know what, I'm giving up the ghost right here. Because we're not fighting nations in the Middle East. We're fighting, like, weird movements. Tribal constellations. Yeah, for sure that's true. And the truth is that, you know, in Korea, basically, we... We won to the extent that there is a South Korea. Yeah, right. I mean, you can't call that a loss in the sense that there actually is a nation called South Korea. It was a tie. It was a draw. It wasn't a tie for the South Koreans. It was a win for the South Koreans. There was a loss for the Norcs. But, you know, the reality is that the thing that we got out of World War II, in the same way that we have a unique and weird view of how the 1950s worked, we're like, oh, that should be the normal. And actually, that's very, very abnormal. People look at World War II like, oh, that's how a war should end. And let me explain. Almost no wars in human history have ended the way World War II ended with the full scale surrender of your opposition. And they just give up the ghost and you actually just sort of manage their transition into the next thing. That is not what happened at the end of World War I. There's an armistice at the end of World War I, and then total hell broke loose in all of the various countries, ranging from Germany to Russia. There was World War II at the end of World War I. Yeah, that's exactly right. And before that, there was a war in 1870 between the French and the Germans. And before that, there was a gigantic war at the beginning of that century with Napoleon running rampant across the continent. And so I think that. We have models in our head of how things should work that are based on absolute outliers. That's true of World War II. It's true of the 1950s economy, which is not real. It is not a real economy because in order for that to happen, we have to destroy the rest of the world. We have to destroy the rest of the world. We can't have a 1950s-style economy where the union worker gets paid a day's wage at $90 bajillion. But there is a question. There is a question about imperial America. It really troubles me. I mean, in the old days, you went and you fought a war with the country, and then you installed the people you wanted to run it. This is correct. We never do this. This is correct. And that's one of the wonderful things about us. I think it's a beautiful thing that the only thing we left, the only thing we left in Europe, we are dead. You know, that's what we left there. But at some point, at some point, we're now dealing with a Europe that is really. Not Europe. It's not, you know, I mean, the speech that Vance made and the speech that Rubio followed it with were right. You know, they're not, I mean, they're arresting more people for speaking in the UK than they are in Russia. And I think that that's like. How do we deal with that? This is our mother country. It's still our greatest Anglosphere ally, but it's not a recognizable country in terms of its values. So, I mean, we stand alone at this moment, and we have to look to Asia, and we have to keep the territory of Europe. Really, Poland... And Hungary and, you know, all of those eastern countries are the only people who are aligned with our values at all. And look what's happened there. Yeah, exactly. You know, I mean, obviously Hungary fell last year. And so it's kind of bleak. And he's arresting his enemies too. Of course. Totally as predicted. As predicted. You know what? You're absolutely right. You said it at the time. I hate to say I told you so. No. But all to say, it's a rather bleak picture for the West. And now, you know, it's come here in a very acute form. But again, I just don't, I also don't think that anyone on either side has made a robust argument for Americanism as an argument, as a fully fleshed out argument. President Trump makes an extraordinary emotional appeal to Americanism, right? Just the love for flag, the love for country, just to kind of root patriotism, that for sure. But what are the actual values that make America America? President Trump can't do a paragraph on that. I agree. And you've seen it. You're one of the best spokesmen for it. And everybody hates you. Well, because the Except for me, I like it. Note to self, do not issue paragraphs. But I think there's a reason for that. And the reason for that is the minute you try to define a thing, you create controversy. And until the American people are willing to get serious about defining the things that they actually are willing to do and want, they're not going to get those things. And they're going to be perennially disappointed. If you refuse to define what you want from a war, you're not going to get it. And if you refuse to define what sacrifices you're willing to undergo, you're not going to be able to make those sacrifices. And if you're not willing to acknowledge what economic system you wish to live under and whether it is good or not, then you're not going to get it. If you want to say that you want to cut spending, but you also want an endless welfare Pour gushers of money at you. And then we fund that by bringing a bunch of illegal immigrants to work at low rent wages. That's exactly right. But isn't that the issue? You know, when it comes to even the idea of Americanism as an ideology, that creates a big problem. Because the big anxiety that we felt throughout not only the Anglosphere, but Western Europe as well, well, all of Europe actually, is mass migration. That the actual, like, people of our country have just changed radically. And we don't have kids anymore, which ties into the welfare problem. And so I would say, look, I want to preserve the American nation. You know, I love my country. I love our way of life. Not just the values, though I like those too, but I like hot dogs on the 4th of July. I like fireworks. I don't know. That's important. The ineffable kind of stuff that we just do. And because of mass migration, that is changing in our country and elsewhere. People have a deep anxiety about that. And they're right to have that anxiety. So then, You try to distill the nation down to a set of ideas or some ideology. But the problem is, one, I don't think nations can be reduced to that, and two, Our opponents aren't signing on board. So even that doesn't quite work. That's the key thing. You know, I'm sure you know Hilaire Belloc's theory that the Germans came, that Rome didn't fall. It simply became the Catholic Church. And the Germans came in and everybody said, oh, no, the Germans are here. But the Germans wanted to be Romans. We're letting in people who don't want to be Americans, which is just a real big mistake. But I think the huge problem here that we're just ignoring is a lot of Americans just don't want to be Americans. Yes. I mean, it's not just the problem of immigration, it's the problem of we've educated several generations of people not to believe in America and to hate America. But because nobody in authority, nobody in power is doing what you just said. Nobody's defining what it is America is, that socialism is antithetical to. By the way, this is what the founders meant in the Declaration of Independence. When they said, we hold these truths to be self-evident, they were not saying that the truths were themselves self-evident. They're saying we hold these truths to be self-evident meaning. This is not up for debate. This right here is the stuff that's not up for debate. And if you don't agree, you should get out. You don't belong here. And so, yes, obviously, a nation is the people that live in it. But that's not enough. And it's also not the idea. I'll agree. The ideas aren't enough. It has to be combined with the people who are willing to live by those ideas and join in the tradition and all those things. But the ideas are the fundamental because people change. People, people. Their kids turn into socialists. They can be good Americans, and their kids turn into little jackass socialists who vote for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and James Talerico in Texas. Gen Z voted, plus 48 for Democrats in this cycle. The vast majority of the people who voted in that cycle, I promise you, are children of Americans. And so what we've got right now, the Republican Party needs to, someone needs to articulate. What exactly are the principles that are supposed to bind us and do so in muscular fashion and without the kind of like, what if we just soft sell what the Democrats are selling, but a little bit less? Yes, that's the problem. That is exactly. Well, you know, there's also the Boris Johnson version. We define things negatively all the time is what we're against. We know what the conservatives are against, but they never really come out and say, you know, our our intrepid Brecka from Michigan. Yes. She was reporting in Michigan at Abdul's campaign headquarters. She's interviewed a Muslim couple on the street today and that you can check it out on our social media channels. And they said, who'd you vote for? We vote for Abdul El-Sayed. Okay. And what do you make of his view that men can become women and women can become men? The Muslims said, what do you talk about, that men can be men? No, no, no. He supports transgenderism. He said, no, no, it cannot, no. He does not, he cannot believe that. He's Muslim. He cannot believe that. And it was this beautiful video. I mean, so hilarious, but so dark. And you say, well, you know what? It's going to be very easy to blame Muslims in Dearborn or whatever for Abdul Al-Sayed. That you can actually, because his deepest base is like college educated whites. Yeah, of course. It actually doesn't quite work. It's both, and also the Dearborn Muslim is totally right. Abdul El-Sayed does not believe in transing the children. Yeah, that's true. He's a religious Muslim who is lying to make common cause with people who want to trans the kids to destroy the civilization. Well, this is the other thing. They're both right, in other words. People want to be a leftist who's pretending to be a religious Muslim. Yeah, and actually... For him, he's a religious Muslim. If he's a Muslim pretending to be a leftist or a leftist pretending to be a Muslim, I actually don't know which is worse. We do, unfortunately, have more bad news. Some more calls to report. CNN has called the main Senate race, as I feared and predicted. Uh, for Democrat Troy Jackson, uh, who has defeated Susan Collins. Wow. Susan Collins, an amazing political survivor. We all got irritated with a lot of her votes because she was playing a game. Brett Kavanaugh would not be on the Supreme Court if it were not for him. Yes. No, no, no. So I'm, I'm like a Susan Collins enjoyer and defender. She played a game very, very well. And even she, a total pro, like the varsity superstar athlete of playing politics, went down to Troy Jackson, who has two kids with his cousin. NBC News also calls Pennsylvania's first district for Democrat Bob Harvey, defeating Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick. I don't like Brian Fitzpatrick, but he was a huge squish and everything. It seems hard to dismiss this as As a sort of fleeting. Well, this is just how midterms go. It feels like something far more significant than that. And maybe it won't be. But, I mean, as you pointed out, you know, there's a generational problem here. Gen Z is falling to the siren song of socialism. And so how does that play out in the long term? I'd like to think, as I said at the beginning, you know, things change quickly. And so... Trump was the most popular thing in the world in 2024, and now look at it, and maybe it'll swing back the other way, pendulum swing. But the far more pessimistic view is that what we are seeing is the beginning of a generational shift that is only just beginning. Thank And you hardly even want to consider what that means. The reason I'm hopeful is simply because of things I've seen. Direction is all important. The way the country is going is all important. Reagan turned the country around. you. He didn't actually succeed at a lot of what he wanted to do, but he gave us 25 years of prosperity. That entire Clinton administration was just riding the wave of Reagan's prosperity. And in New York, I lived in New York when I had to run. To get a cab to go to work so I wasn't killed. You know, that's how bad the crime was. And I'm not even exaggerating about that. I couldn't go out for a pack of cigarettes without worrying that I was not going to come home. And Giuliani turned it around simply by coming into office. It started. And that's just the beginning. But the way the country is going means everything. If the country is going left. Leftism doesn't work. It's the only thing we have going for us is that leftism doesn't work. And so I think that if someone came into office who was a free trade person, who was a capitalist, who was a freedom person, things would turn around. All those guys who were in the bonfire of the vanities in that Tom Wolfe book who went into the stock market and started making a billion dollars. Five years before that, there were long-haired hippies at Woodstock. Same people. Same people. So things really do turn around, and they turn around because of prosperity and peace. You know, that's what makes me glad. I also think that, you know, they turn around in some cases faster than you would think. Yes, Nixon Nixon gets impeached in 75, or it was about to be, and he's out of office. And you have Gerald Ford, and then he loses to Jimmy Carter, and it feels like the end of the world for Republicans. And four years later, they're so bad that they're back. You get Reagan, who is effectively three terms plus Clinton. CNN is also releasing some of their exit polling. It shows Democrats winning young white men by 17 points tonight. Trump won young white men by 28 points just two years ago. Also from the exit poll. It's true that the Iran war is the economy. Yeah. I think that shift with white men is astounding, I think, male. Because God forbid you ever specifically support white men as a group. Thank If you're not willing to speak to white men and acknowledge them specifically as a group, the way that politicians on both sides have no problem talking to specifically any other group, women, black people, anyone else, Asians, whatever. Um, but with, with white men, they don't want to do that. you. So I defended Sarah on that ad because the policy was good and she felt that it was expedient to scapegoat white men, that that was the only way to sell it politically, even to white people. And so I defended her tactically on it. And I think she's doing a good job. Uh, however, there's this Pew research, uh, survey that came out that shows you this problem. Every racial group has majority racial identity. So if you look at black people, those who say that race is a very, or at least somewhat important part of their identity, it's over 70%. If you look at Hispanics and Asians, it's over 50%. For white people, it's 15%. Right. Now, those numbers are a little out of date now. I think they're eight or nine years old, maybe older, probably. White racial consciousness has increased as the inevitable consequence of the racial identity politics of every other group. So to your point, Matt, it remains to this day taboo to speak to the young white men who just totally flipped over to the Democrat side, to speak to them as an identity group. Do you think that will change as a result of the midterms? I don't think that that will change as the result of the midterms. I think that there's another factor there, which is that There's a downside risk to speaking because that poll, no matter how much it's moved, would still, I would assume, show a minority of white people not identifying as white identitarian. So even on just a raw political, put aside the morality of all groups identifying on the basis of ethnic identity as opposed to religious identity or ideological identity or political or anything like that. Put that aside, just in raw political terms. What you do by doing the white identitarianism is the Beau French thing. You alienate everybody else, including white people, including most white people. So that turns out to be a mistake. That's not what's happening here. I think what happened with young white men is that there was a misread by Republicans that because they voted for Trump and they shifted from kind of Bernie Sanders land to Trump land, like the Joe Rogan, Theo Von guys, and they moved into Trump's camp, that these were now like A core part of the constituency that would not go away. And I've been saying for a while, that's not true. Like these are, this is a very, this is a variable group of people. White people overall voted for Trump. They voted for Republicans in this election. The exit poll shows the only racial group that voted in favor of Republicans in this election cycle, which was, which was dire. Young white men are incredibly variable. They are incredibly reactive to whatever is sort of the transgressive narrative of the day. And so, I mean, Joe Rogan was basically endorsing James Tallarico in the middle of the race. Treating Joe Rogan as though he's sort of a fellow traveler on the right and just an erstwhile Republican voter is a category error. And the same thing is true for Theo Vaughn, who's been doing the same thing with Democratic candidates. So, again, those were very much up for grabs. By the way, again, you do have stats in that exit poll. Oh, yeah. Points from my memory, even though it's late at night. I did say cost of living was the number one issue with a bullet at 89%. That was right. 58% of those voters voted Democrat. Iran is part of that, too, but it's not the whole thing. Iran is part of that, but interest rates are part of that. And, you know, the dysfunction in the housing market, which President Trump has talked about and inveighed against for quite a while, that's very important, too. The other issue on the white people voting Republican, the only racial group that did, white people voted Republican, whatever, 52-48. 51-47. 51-40, yeah, okay, 51-47. All right. The other racial groups voted... Democrat in a much more decisive way, it's 88 to 9 for black people. But the one that shifted and this is where Republicans again, if you're going to do what Trump wanted to do, which was build a multiracial coalition of blue collar and working class people, right? This was the Henry Olsen goal. If you're going to do that. I'm sorry, but you can't put out Studio Ghibli of ICE officers handcuffing fat Hispanic ladies out to the bus. You can't. Like, that's just bad politics. You may want those people, meaning, like, that lady was a criminal in real life. But optics matter in politics. Trump should know this better than anybody because he actually isn't optically intelligent. But the fact that the ICE operations, and this is why Greg Lombardo was terrible at his job and Tom Homan is good at his job. Like, you do the thing quietly without bothering people. That's the way you actually do policy. You do things quietly without bothering people. And when you just yell from the rooftops that you're being mean to people, it turns out that people who are Hispanic go, oh, God, that's not what I meant. It would be nice, though, you know the famous line about Churchill that he mobilized the English language and sent it to war? It would be nice if we could elect somebody who could speak. You know, it's not a small thing. Though I've long defended Trump as having actual poetic diction. He does have poetic diction, but he doesn't have political diction. Something happened with Trump. I don't know what it is exactly, but it seems like in this term, he totally lost touch with the base completely in a way that, I mean, like you were saying earlier that it seemed like with Trump in 2016 that He kind of would figure out the policies as he went, and there was a little bit, it's also true what Drew said, that many of the things he talked about, he'd been talking about for decades. I think what actually happened was this like dialogue he was in with the base where he would. He would say something that was a little bit wild and kind of out there, and then the base through Twitter would come out and say, well, I think what he really means is this. Yeah. And then he would read that and go, yeah, I meant that. And so there was this back and forth. And through that dialogue, he actually constructed a really good set of policies. And in 2024, it's been completely severed. And I thought, and I brought this up on the other show, that to me, The, the, the, the, the giant red flag that something major had changed was with Epstein because no matter how we feel about Epstein, that was really important with the base. I agree with you on that. I agree with you too. It was a disaster. It was the first time, Epstein was the first time when Trump seemed to be totally wildly in a baffling way out of step with his own base. And it seemed like he didn't even know it. Yeah. And so I don't know what that is exactly. Maybe a lot of it is truth social rather than just being on Twitter. I mean, I think that might be part of it. I think a large part of it was he convinced himself, because he has a unique capacity to convince himself of things, which is why he's authentic. He believes the thing he's saying in the moment. When he says 2024 was a great historic victory that has never been paralleled, and every Republican is still with me. He actually believes that thing. And so when he said the vast majority of Republicans are still with me after the whole Epstein thing, which was true, statistically, it was true. But you're right. The rollout was out of touch and he didn't bother to kind of go out. And there were people in the administration, including apparently Dan Bongino, telling him, like, you need to go out and explain exactly what it is. You know, I was just about to bring Dan up because. Hold on. Before we get into Dan, we do have a few more updates on the bright side. There's a bright side. Oh, good. There's a bright side before we go to bed. The AP calls the Louisiana Senate race for- Save Louisiana, great. We save Louisiana. The Republican wins Louisiana by two points currently. Yeah, my God. Currently by two. But okay, so Republicans win Louisiana. Back to bad news. No, not as good. It's actually not bad. Democrats are currently leading by a solid margin at this point. All four contested Texas Supreme Court races. Wipeout in Texas. Wipeout. But Dan Bongino, I think, is a real straight arrow guy, as far as I can tell. I agree. And he left the administration. And the minute that happened, I thought, what did he see that he could not bear? There was something he saw that he couldn't bear. And he's been loyal enough not to come out really... Well, go ahead. I won't speak on behalf of Dan, but I kind of think that you don't have to read the tea leaves. very well to understand that there was significant conflict inside the administration about the level of transparency that was being provided around the investigation. And, you know, Pam Bondi did a horrible job. I mean, she did a horrible job. I mean, like everyone knows she did a horrible job. And so there was this disconnect. It kept emerging. Listen, the first time it truly emerged for me was You know, Liberation Day, I think, I will maintain, and the polls show, was a disaster. It was a terrible, terrible idea. It was the most, I know that everybody is rolling their eyes. Yeah, no, I don't know that it was, it could have been a bad, I just don't think that really. It is when the streams crossed. You can look on, it is that day. You can look where he went from net approval positive to net approval negative, and then he never stopped. And when you walk out and you start tariffing penguins, because it's just stuff that you can do. If you wanted to do tariffs, again, I'm not arguing against all tariffs, I'm saying that you can't declare a trade war on the entire world in the middle of an affordability inflation spiral and then claim that your top priority is quashing inflation. But I think it was a structural thing that Matt was getting at that was really true, that this dialogue that Trump was in with his base, that I was at a cigar night in Virginia. They have this, the Republicans gather once a month for the cigar night. And my friend Sebastian Gorka was there. And somebody said to him, you know, what went wrong, basically, with the Trump one? And Sebastian then spoke for an unbroken 45 minutes about how the Republican Party set about. Peopling the administration with people who hated Trump and were working against him and that when he and others sat down and thought well Who can we enlist who will join us and actually they came up with like five names and they had nobody else Trump solved that problem during those four years and surrounded himself with people who agreed with them and who were Pretty good, I think. You know, I mean, you say what you will about Pete Hicks. You know, he brought the military back so that people were actually listening. No, I will say this. I think that some of this... But it cut him off. Just to finish the thought, it cut him off from that dialogue. He was surrounded with people, with yes men, but also supporters. But it cut him off from that dialogue with the people who could disagree with him and also move him. I certainly think that it is true that he created a bubble around himself in this White House. And I think that there's no one in the... It went from, let's talk with the president about what should be done. And maybe, in most cases, obviously, we're going to always defer to him. He's the president. But we'll push back. And it went to, how do we effectuate the thing that he says he wants to do right now? Right. And how is it, and let's race to do it. Let's like, let's run to do it. And so the sort of, you know, by the end of the administration, I'll just take as an example, William Barr. Yes. There is no question that William Barr, who is the Attorney General, was a far superior Attorney General to Pam Bondi. William Barr was great, okay? And William Barr was doing many of the things that Trump wanted, but he would always, he would also say, like, you know, Mr. President, this is a bad idea, you probably just shouldn't do this thing. And he was abiding by the law in doing that. And Pam Bondi was kind of running around like a chicken with her head cut off to just effectuate the will of the President. You do need people, I mean, this is true in everybody's life, forget about politics, you need people in your life who you trust and want the best for you, but who are also capable I'm capable of saying to you, you know, This one is not a win. Well, you know, it's curious in this administration, in the second Trump administration, I'm basing this just on reporting. But a lot of the reporting comes out and says, especially on the Iran war, that you had figures who were urging caution in Iran. Probably the most prominent is J.D. Vance. So it's helpful when the guy who is Providing some alternative views is in a position where he can't get fired and he's elected by the American people. He's in a good state. But there were other figures in the administration too. There was some reporting about John Ratcliffe and Marco Rubio and other people pushing back on some of these ideas. So you do have some of that disagreement, but probably the rest of the staffing of the administration. You have less- They're so thinly staffed. Also, they are just unbelievably thinly staffed. And if you go below the top level, there's almost no one. Right. And at the top, they're very, very good people. Two more updates for tonight. The votes are coming in from Alaska, showing a very tight race with only 21% reporting so far, Democrat Mary Peltola is leading with 54% over Dan Sullivan at 45%. Dan Sullivan. There are two of them. This is, yeah, right. Yeah. On the bright side, CBS is now calling the Tennessee- Thank God for you, Michael. We finally take that cabot all night. Cabot. Well, you know, the Tennessee governor. I said, buddy, if Marsha Blackburn's not the next governor, we got to move. I don't know. There's no place to move. Down to Florida. Right. You guys are going to be in your own country. All right, so that's good news. Isn't that much closer than you thought, though? Yes. 45, 45. Oh, my God. Where do we have? I can't see the... 45, 43. Wow. That's totally insane. Yes. By the way, that is insane. Byron Donalds won by two points against David Jolly. Yeah. Ashley Moody won against a psychotic Democratic Socialist of America candidate named Angie Nixon in that Senate race by two points. Yeah. Just nuts. No, this is a tsunami. There's no question about it. It's as bad as, you know, it's as bad as it can be. Okay. Does anyone want to say anything happy before we go home? No. It's the end of the night, yeah. I'm happy about that. I enjoyed your cigar. Thank you. Thank you there. One silver lining. Wonderful to be with all of you. Who was it who earlier said, I guess it was Glenn Beck, who said, you know, God is sovereign over history. He's not up for re-election. He knows the hairs of our head, you know, a sparrow doesn't fall without His knowledge. So that is the consolation and the comfort we take for tonight, and probably the only one. Thank you for watching Friendly Fire and our election night coverage. We'll see you tomorrow.