The Final 5: November 05, 2026

A neighbor's free-range chickens were disappearing. Now the hawk is on a weight-loss diet. They put that hawk on a GLP-1, Zepbound. Okay. The Final Five with Jim Loeys starts right now. All right, now in the Final Five, that big arch of President Trump's gets the green light. What's next? Plus, a new documentary outlining the fight to free a journalist trapped in Russia and newly elected Democrats who may not even take office. That's your Final Five. Let's do this. Here we go. Welcome into the final five on this Thursday night. We're going to start with that massive so-called triumphal arch that President Trump wants to build near Arlington National Cemetery. In the last hour, the National Capital Planning Commission voted to approve a final design. The final vote was eight to four. The commission has a majority of members appointed by President Trump himself, so it seemed like a foregone conclusion. It comes after hours and hours of public comment where most of the speaker's voiced opposition. The 250-foot-tall arch would sit in Memorial Circle between the Lincoln Memorial and the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery. There are still legal challenges aiming to block the arch, arguing the president doesn't have the authority to build it without Congress's approval. Federal Judge Tanya Chutkin has ordered the administration to let her know before they start any work on the project as she considers requests to block it, although the president seems to think that... Work would start immediately. On top of that, he signed a proclamation today meant to prevent future changes to the Oval Office and Cabinet Room over at the White House, which, by the way, I think it's fair to say he's added almost enough gold to satisfy the likes of Scrooge McDuck. The president says he's making it a national monument. If anyone ever decides to come and start knocking down walls, you'll call me wherever I may be, and I will come back here, and I will make sure it never happens, okay? Thank you very much. Time out. You heard what he said there. If anyone ever decides to start knocking down walls, you call me. And, you know, surely he doesn't mean like the East Wing, because if you forgot, he literally had it demolished last year without telling anybody. Congress didn't know. Review boards didn't know. They just knocked down the damn East Wing of the White House. But it wasn't a national monument back then, was it? By the way, a proclamation determining something as a national monument means absolutely nothing. Remember that. priorities. So the president's doing this right now, 48 hours after an election day where his party saw what Ron DeSantis called a generational extinction event. There are ballots still being counted in some states, including Alaska, where former Democratic Congressman Mary Peltola holds a slight lead over the Dan Sullivan. You heard me, I said Dan Sullivan. Of course, Republican incumbent Senator Dan S. Sullivan and retired teacher Dan Jay Sullivan running as an independent. And of course, the president had a comment on that race today as well. You have a Dan Sullivan, the real Dan. I call him the real Dan Sullivan. You have the fake Dan Sullivan. The fake Dan Sullivan got a lot of votes, meaning two percent or something, but a lot. And then they also have somebody else in there that they put. They put two people, not just Dan Sullivan. They put the fake Dan Sullivan. So they cheated on thousands of votes. Everyone knows it's a cheat. And they should be mandated to take the fake Dan Sullivan's votes and the other person they put in there and give it to the real Dan Sullivan. That's not how it works, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say moving an entire candidate's vote tally to a different candidate would prompt some legal challenges here and there, but either way, we may not have the full results for another week and a half when Alaska officially tallies the ranked choice votes. Alaska Democrats are dismissing the president's concerns, but they've had a hell of a way of putting it. I think grandpa's confused again. We already have a process to do this here. We're still counting up here. We take a kind of different approach. We treat this process more like sex. Finishing first and early is not the main goal. We prefer to take it slow, kind of do it right. And hopefully at the end, everybody involved is satisfied. I was not prepared for that analogy, I'll have to say, Eric. Well, Yeah, we think Florida finishes a little quick. Okay, that's one way to look at it. But whatever the turnout in Alaska may be, Democrats will still control both chambers of Congress come January, which means they can pass whatever they want. But President Trump doesn't have to sign it. In fact, you may have noticed he had a brand new veto ball cap on the Resolute Desk while speaking to reporters today. He suggested in recent days he won't shy away from vetoing Democratic legislation. If Donald Trump does spend the next year vetoing common sense legislation, To lower costs and end corruption, this election, this absolute Republican catastrophe on election night 2026, will look like a good day compared to what will come down on Republicans in the 2028 election. But that is what the balance of power is all about. The president has the right to veto legislation. Next week, Democrats are expected to elect Chuck Schumer back into majority leader, but there are some calling for change. If we have another option, I'm going to look at that and say, who is best placed to get us action, to get money out of politics, put money in pockets, pass Medicare for all? You know, I was very clear early on that I'm not going to say who I'm not for. I'm going to say who I am for. I am for Chris Van Hollen. If he decides he wants to be Senate Majority Leader, I think he'd be amazing at the job. Well. Luckily for you at home, Kenneth Moten spoke with Senator Van Hollen tonight on The Six about the concept of leading the Senate. He has some different ideas. I've made clear that I'm not looking to be the next Democratic leader. I've been kicking the tires on a 2028 presidential election. And I do think, to Abdul El-Sayed's point, I'm glad to have him and others as new colleagues. I think it's important that the Senate Democratic Caucus. Have a full and open debate before we select the next leader, whoever that may be. Van Hollen might be kicking the tires on a 2028 run, but ballots in the 2026 midterms aren't even totally in yet. So let's look ahead about what we know about the 120th Congress and more with my first guest tonight. Scott McFarlane, chief Washington correspondent for Midas Touch, up late with me tonight here on The Final Five. Welcome back, my friend. Good to be here. OK, what a night it was. First of all, for you and your cohorts, you got like three and a half million views. With your streaming coverage, but now you're back here in the house with us, so let's talk about it. Big surprises. Any big surprises now that we're past Tuesday here? It's a range of surprises. It's hard to measure which is the most shocking of all. But before I say that, Chris Van Hollen is going to become more powerful. All the local Democrats, Virginia and Maryland, are going to become more powerful. They become chairman. They have gavels. They have the ability to, through the force of legislation, to make things happen locally. So he's got some good time coming ahead. So do the other Maryland and Virginia Democrats. No surprises here. We knew those two Virginia seats were prone to be flipped, not because there's anything peculiar to Virginia. It's just the national wave is going to shift things towards Democrats everywhere, here included. Biggest shocks, we've talked about being in Texas and South Carolina. Those things didn't even pause at purple when they went from red to blue. They just shifted. I'm really taken with North Carolina, where six house seats are about to flip. Six in North Carolina. Is crazy and respectfully, that's overcoming a gerrymander that was supposed to prevent that from happening in North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio, Nebraska, Kansas. These are places Democrats were out in the wilderness for a long time and they suddenly have a North Star. One of those maps I saw, Indiana, where they wanted to redistrict there and the Republicans, the Republicans stepped up and said, we're not going to go through with that. The map, the way it came out, had they gone with the Republican gerrymander, Republicans would have lost every seat but one. They were lucky they didn't. In Tennessee, they barely escaped problems with the redraw. Florida and Texas did them no good despite that very controversial mid-decade redistricting. So Maryland passes the ballot measure. Maryland voters say we can do this next time if we need to. They've got to be having second thoughts at the state level in Maryland about whether it's a wise decision because these things can backfire if you're not certain about how the lines are going. And in North Carolina, it backfired. Texas, Florida, didn't go the way they hoped. Well, in California, though, too, they put that on the ballot. The voters had their say, which they did in Virginia, got struck down in Maryland. But I want to talk about what's outstanding right now. Mary Peltola, neck and neck with Daniel J. Sullivan. Daniel S. Sullivan. Daniel S. Sullivan. Darn it, Scott. You're so close. I was so close there. That's happening. But Mississippi, that is the shocker of the night there, where you have Cindy Hyde-Smith down now by 1,300 votes of Scott Colom. We knew something was up when President Trump and the surrogates went to Mississippi in the last week. You know, the polls weren't great out of Mississippi. I mean, in terms of volume of them or quality of them, not that the numbers had any indication. There wasn't a lot of polling there. Scott Colom has a roughly 1,200 to 1,300 vote lead. As the night ends tonight, that's a lot when there's very little left to count. And it's a lot if you're thinking about a recount. It seems like a tiny amount when there's hundreds of thousands of votes. But I'm not sure how Cindy Hyde-Smith, the Republican incumbent, makes up that ground. Democrats think they're going to win that. And remember, that's a six-year hold they have on Mississippi. And also an indication, Jim, that as they move forward towards 2028, maybe time to start investing more in the South, giving up on always clinging to those Midwest battleground states of old. Are you surprised at this point that we've not heard, because it's predictable at this point in the cycle, in the era of Trump, where everything's rigged, it was fixed, there were irregularities, voter fraud. We have not heard that from people of consequence in the Republican Party all the way to the president right now. It's hard to make an argument broadly that there be any rigging when there was an historic election that had an unequivocal message of we want change. This ain't working for us. There's going to be an isolated case the president makes about Alaska. He is going to keep fighting about having those two, Dan Sullivan, on the ballot. That's not going to impact balance of power in any way. It's certainly going to impact a few years of Alaska leadership. That's going nowhere. And I think the most telling thing on that point, Jim, was as the day concluded here, They got rid of the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harmeet Dhillon. That was the big story today. She was the one pushing these election insecurity arguments, trying to get voter rolls. It didn't work. She couldn't stop any of this. She couldn't prove her case. She's gone. All right. In our last minute here, we always see changes on the cabinet level after a midterm. It happened with Obama. It happened with Trump. I mean, when are we going to start seeing this? Harmeet, that seems to be the first domino right now, but will there be more to fall? Not the last. I mean, there's an open question about... Impeachment hearings against Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, you can ward that off by quitting or getting moved to a new job. There's an inevitability to an impeachment vote in the House against Pete Hegseth next week if things don't change and they think it's going to pass, which pushes it to the Senate for hearings and a trial. It gets messy. There's an argument to be made if he quits, he averts that, or if they move him to a new job. There should be more to come. But in the meantime. The House speaker just demoted himself. Mike Johnson's not going to be the House Republican leader anymore. He had his fingerprints all over that loss. There are more consequences to come. Does Mike Johnson, quickly, is he going to be comfortable being just the congressman from Louisiana at this point? Is he long for the world? Nancy Pelosi's done that for the last few years. She's been the congresswoman from California. She retires in January, but she's no longer the speaker. It can be done. It has been done in the minority. There's very little to fight for other than a message, communicating, and trying to win the majority back. Mike Johnson's comfortable at least communicating and getting out a message. All right. Scott McFarlane, as always, we appreciate you, my man. Thank you. Back after this here on The Final Five. Welcome back. A new documentary detailing the story of a man who paid the price for speaking out against the war in Ukraine by Russian authorities, his eventual release, and the love between he and his wife that led to his eventual release from prison. Steven Leichardt is the director of An Unknown Substance. He's up late with me tonight here on The Final Five. Steven, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having us, Jim. We really appreciate it. We should point out that you are going to be in DC screening your film at the Double Exposure Film Festival over at the MLK Library this weekend. But let's talk about the project itself because this details a man Vladimir Kara-Murza, you started this. Project before he was in prison. So when you set out to start this, what was what was the focus? And more importantly, who is this man that became the central focus of an unknown substance? Yeah. So Vladimir has been a opposition politician based in Moscow, you know, for many, many years. That's where he's from. Originally, he's also a British citizen. He has dual British and Russian citizenship. But in 2015 and 2017, he was poisoned. And that's pretty much when he got on the radar of for sure our government and also on my radar as well. And despite the fact that he'd been poisoned twice traveling back from the United States where he moved with his family to Russia, he just never stopped, right? So having been poisoned twice. And that made me very interested. I was very interested not just in the politics but on the personal side. What keeps a person alive? engaged in doing this work when they know not only will it harm themselves, but how could it impact their family? You know, he's got three children. They live just outside D.C. in Virginia. And that's really where it went. I met him at the end of 2021 with this idea of let me film and follow you as you endeavor to do this work and hopscotch between these two very different worlds. And of course, the war in Ukraine broke out in early 2022. And by April, he spoke out very publicly while being on the news when he was in Moscow. And within hours, he was arrested. So obviously, we're talking a lot about him and he set out to focus on him, but we learned more about his wife, Eugenia, and she became really a central focus of the film here. That's right. So, you know, I had promised Vladimir I would make a film about him and his work and also his family. And when he was put in prison, the question wasn't how do you make the movie? It was where do you make the movie? Because obviously I'm not going to travel to Russia and be able to interview him in his prison cell. And so at that point, it was just a question of, well, where do we go and who do we follow and what's the story, which has now changed in many The core essential story we wanted to tell was looking at this work and how it impacts your family. And the second I saw a film online of Evgenia speaking out on his behalf, I just had an idea that maybe you could film and follow her. She's a very striking person, very well spoken, fluent in multiple languages, including English. And she's also somebody who's reluctantly out there. She shares his politics and has always supported him. But she really has always been at home, you know, taking care of their three kids and really focused on the family. And so my my film ultimately turned into following this person living through both the nightmare of trying to get their husband back, but also straddling these two worlds that he does all the time. How much does that release? How did that change? What you set out to document, because clearly this happened before his imprisonment, now he's out. And how did this affect the vision of an unknown substance? Well, you know, first of all, there are at least documented over 2,000 political prisoners in Russia, and that's just what's documented. It's believed to be the number is significantly higher, right? And so if you were to embed with any of those families, they all live with this pain, and they all live with this question mark of what's going to happen. So statistically, it felt completely unlikely that this would happen. When it did happen, it changed the film in the sense that it showed that the advocacy work that she'd been doing actually does, it can work, right? If you don't stay at home. If you make phone calls, if you try to get meetings with government officials, if you go on the news, if you do whatever you can to publicize and to speak out, it's very hard to continue to disappear somebody at that level. And not everybody has the access that she does. Obviously, her husband's well known enough. You know, he's a Washington Post columnist that was continuing to publish. But had she not to sort of done what she did, I'm not so sure his status would have been in the news. I mean, as you know, if it's not being talked about every day, if it's not being covered, it can drift away. And so I think for me as a filmmaker, ultimately, not only did we have what looks like a happy ending, more than anything, we were able to show the film to both of them together at the same time. And that was by far one of the most incredibly rewarding experiences because he got to see exactly what his wife was doing while he was in prison. And so I really like to describe that this film, although it's political and it's about advocacy work and it's about free speech, it is also very much just a love story. That's great. It is called An Unknown Substance. Again, the screening will be Saturday, 1 p.m. over at the MLK Library in D.C. as part of the Double Exposure Film Festival. Stephen Leckhart, thanks for joining us tonight. We really appreciate it. By the way, website for the film if people want more information about it? We don't have a website, but you can go to my website, which is stephenleckhart.com. Easy. Thank you so much. We appreciate it. Thanks, Jim. We're back after this. Welcome back. Let's get to the third block. And everybody's talking about the balance of power in Washington, but Election Day brought some major state-level changes as well. In Idaho, guns. We're on the ballot, and I don't mean gun control or some sort of new Second Amendment-related legislation. There were literally six guns on the ballot, two Winchesters, including the so-called gun that won the West, an M1 rifle, a Remington 700 bolt-action rifle, a Colt .45, and even a Colt Peacemaker, you know, like the one from Back to the Future. The guns were listed under a ballot question reading, quote, which of the following guns should be designated as the state gun of Idaho The Winchester 1873 won with 31% of the votes. But the main issue this week has been all of the people who were on the ballot in the midterms. And, yes, that includes dumb criminals. In North Carolina, Democrat LaKeisha Womack won her election to represent the state's 14th congressional district. This despite a surprising legal battle in the final weeks of the election. Less than a month ago, she was served with a criminal summons at a campaign event detailing, quote, felony charges related to failure to pay for a rental car in 2019. If convicted, she would not be ineligible for Congress, but she would be barred from accepting things like committee assignments But remember, I said dumb criminals with an S, as in plural, because the next one takes us to Texas, where a Democrat named Erica Lomac won the election for Texas State House District 93. The problem is she suspended her campaign in September after questions about her eligibility. That came after a political action committee supporting her opponent revealed she had, quote, pleaded guilty in January of 2011 to conspiracy to commit mortgage fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Despite suspending the campaign, she remained on the ballot and won. Still not clear if Texas law will allow her to serve. Now, Texas officials called that case, quote, uncharted territory. But hopefully somebody's writing all this down because next we're in Iowa, folks. No criminal activity here. But back in September, Democrat Eric Armstrong stopped campaigning altogether. At the time, he told his supporters he was suspending his campaign, citing undisclosed health issues. How did his constituents respond? They gave him 55% of the vote anyway and let him cruise to an easy victory in deep red Iowa. Yesterday, Armstrong told the New York Times he would do his best to represent the district. Hopefully, he gets better soon. Coming up next in the final five, we'll tell you who's slipping soundly and who's tossing and turning. Credit where credit is due tonight to the unlikeliest of diplomats, First Lady Melania Trump. She helped broker an actual ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. Limited, localized, and temporary, but real. Humanitarian aid got in, hundreds of civilians got out, and today she brought Russian and some Ukrainian representatives together at the White House. Meanwhile, her husband, who once promised he could end the war on day one of the second term, is still trying to do that. So maybe the president should ask his wife for a few negotiating tips on her art of the deal. Because on this one, Melania got something done. Meanwhile, here's a question out of North Carolina tonight. Did a nasty letter to a 10-year-old and his teacher cost Virginia Fox her longtime North Carolina congressional seat? Now, this race has not been called yet, but the 83-year-old Republican is now down by 99 votes, and it's possible one particular letter didn't help. A 10-year-old wrote Fox asking her to get more electric vehicles on the road as part of a school project. So, you know, instead of disagreeing and telling the kid that dissent is the cornerstone of healthy democracy, She lectured him about propaganda and suggested his teachers were too busy, quote, indoctrinating him to give him a good education. That letter went viral. Did it cost her 100 votes? We'll never know. But here's the lesson. When you're an elected official, maybe don't pick a fight with a fourth grader. Because he can't vote, but his parents and his teachers certainly can. That's your Final Five. We're back at it again tomorrow at 1130. The Morning Crusade is here at 4 a.m. Have a great night. Go to bed.