This is part of what gets people mad, right? Why are there secret deals and why are there tax breaks? And why is regulation just something that's sort of suggested as opposed to in place?

And that's exactly what motivated Jessica, the character who we showed in our story.

She's in a different part of the state too, right? Hubbard is one of the 16 counties that are going to be having data center related ballot measures come up in November.

And again, Ohio is the state that has the most of these in the country.

So it's going to tell a large story, but whether it's in Hubbard or in places like Mount Orab, All across Ohio, residents are becoming aware of this because they're saying, hey, these things are popping up and nobody gave me a choice about it.

And that's one of the things that Jessica was talking about.

She said, in my county, I don't have a referendum on my ballot.

So not only are regular voters not getting consulted on this, but those people have the absolute inside track with respect to this administration.

... that has loved Donald Trump since he set foot, since he went down the gold escalator.

A- and I was there for all of those early Iowa rallies from 2015 all the way through the end of the cycle.

He really made Iowa into MAGA country, and that's why it's such a fascinating epicenter right now for the future of not just the MAGA coalition, but what role Trump can play in bringing out Republican voters in this 2026 midterms when he's not on the ballot, but he is very much setting the agenda and setting the litmus test for how Republicans orient themselves around the issues of the day.

It's affordability, yes, but within that word, you're talking about things like healthcare, reproductive access, AI and data centers.

All of those things factor into the idea of affordability.

And then on top of it, tariffs and the Iran war.

So you're looking at Iowa in large part because of the things that Alec, Alex Talbot mentioned, the fact that fertilizer is expensive, oil and gas, the way that hits farmers.

I mean, this president is giving air cover, it sounds like, to one of his favorite candidates.

Is that in simplest of terms an effort to try to avoid what would be a very challenging vote for a lot of vulnerable Republicans?

Yes, and it also helps Democrats avoid this really awkward trap around impeachment.

You know, over the last two days, I've had two Democratic members each on my show, and I've asked them the question about, well, if this vote had happened, how would you have voted? And they've done a lot to try to say, yeah, I think that there's something worth holding Hegseth accountable for.

Some have said they'd vote for it.

Some have said they would consider it.

But Democrats have some real uncomfortability with the idea of being the party of impeachment.

And yet they are also in a paradox because their voters are very much in a position where they want accountability.

How will that play?

Yeah.

And Democratic groups are taking advantage of the fact that it is a mess, and that Republicans are uncomfortable having to defend this person as one of their own in a seat that, like, kind of teeters on the edge of being purple-ish.

Like, it is red, but enough of a controversy could make this gettable, especially in a year that has a wave.

And so you go from having a seat that shouldn't be a problem and shouldn't be talked about to now, because of one person saying, "I'm not getting out of the race," the party now has a problem where, I'm not someone who thinks that this is a year that is traded of, like, 20, 30, 40 seats.

Like, you just don't have that many swing seats anymore.

Mm-hmm

... his media ecosystems as well.

Um, but I, but also, give him, let's give him the credit of a message with deeper resonance of the Epstein class and a corrupt system that doesn't work except for those at the top.

Is that brinksmanship negotiation or is it a genuine pushback from Trump and his surrounders?

I think it's the first real actual read of the Hill that he's gotten right.

Like, I don't think that he has another option yet.

And I put an asterisk here because we on the Hill talk about this group of lawmakers that aren't coming back to Washington either by choice or by Trump force as this YOLO caucus.

You only live once.

But I don't know that that L stands for live.

I think it stands for leverage.

What's going on? Why do Rand Paul and other Senate Republicans think that he is worth pursuing and still want his scalp?

[laughs]

And that is what we're hearing from people like Senator Ted Cruz, who was saying that the advisors on this were not putting the president in the best position to get the best deal.

And so when you hear the president say, "If it goes wrong, I'm gonna blame JD Vance," okay, there's a lot of implications to that.

It's a regular Trump tic that when he likes the way something's going, it's his, and when it's not, it's Biden's economy, it's JD Vance's Iran deal.

He's passing the blame around.

But at the same time, for JD Vance, that has 2028 implications.

He's gonna have to defend a deal that reportedly he was against starting a war to even make in the first place.

Because they roll over for him.

You say, "Maybe it's as simple as reminding voters anyone is electable if you vote for them."

[laughs] Which, like, sounds novel, but I feel like in writing my book, that was the thing that I kept coming up against, is, like, you do the 2020 election cycle where it's all about voters relitigating 2016, and the shadow of Hillary Clinton, and oh my God, Trump won.

And, you know, how much of that was gender? And it's hard, because this is an unquantifiable thing.

Like, even when we think about the role that it played in 2024, all of us are sitting here saying, "Well, it meant something, but it also meant nothing." And there's no way to quantify it, but it's always swirling there.

And for 2028, it is both understandable that voters on the Democratic side who wanna win are questioning who can.

But then you can't have that conversation without allowing for the fact that we just give a lot more leeway, and we are able to lean more into the potential of white male candidates, straight white male candidates.

We give them way more leeway and more potential to win.

Right, right, right.

Yes.

Ex- it's exactly right.

A- and unfortunately, the cat's out of the bag now, and it's never going back in.

And I think that's actually the concern that I hear the most from lawmakers when they are in private and not having to do the partisan dance that they all have to do on both sides.

I don't know anyone who's, like, truly comfortable with this, but both of them have deluded themselves into thinking that the other side started it, and so they have to be the ones to finish it.

The only people who lose here are truly the voters, because I don't know how voters are going to understand if maps are changing until the last minute when their ballots go out, am I still voting in the same district for the same person that I thought I was v- I mean, it is a mess already.

So that's just one piece of it as you look ahead to November.

Who's calling him to do that?

Yeah.

And I think that's the part that is still staying with me, that I'm still grappling with, is how something can go from loud, raucous, joyful, to, "Oh, my God, we are on the floor," and is the sound of a man holding a gun over me a good guy or a bad guy?

Yeah.

Carol Leonnig said that the assailant just walked down 10 flights of stairs, popped right out outside the magnetometers before he ran through at nine miles an hour.

That don't seem secure to me.

In what universe is there a shooting outside the ballroom where the president, the vice president, members of the cabinet, like, lots of people are, and then you just let everybody out?

... did you learn from the former vice president?

Yeah, Joe, I was really interested to hear the former vice president weigh in on a number of different issues currently facing President Trump and an administration that Pence was, for four years, a large part of.

But one of the things that I asked him, as someone who's covered Pence for a decade and heard him say on the campaign trail hundreds of times that he is a Christian, conservative, and Republican in that order, I asked him directly about President Trump's ongoing feud with the Pope, which seems to have died down at least briefly.

But then, of course, those AI images, specifically that one that the president posted that depicted him as a Jesus-like figure, this is what the former Vice President Mike Pence told me about that.

And speaking of JD Vance, I know you talked to Vice President Pence about the current vice president and the relationship, or perhaps I should say the lack thereof between the two.

The lack thereof between the two, and we aired a portion of the interview on my show this morning about the fact that they've actually never spoken, which I think might be shocking.

And I even said to the former vice president at one point, "You've never spoken to the only other person who knows what it's like to be Donald Trump's vice president." And yet Pence had criticism for JD Vance, really through the lens of Vance espousing an isolationist view of how America should comport itself on the world stage.

And it was in that, that window of global dynamics and the role that the US plays right now, that I thought this exchange that I had with Pence was really fascinating.

Mm-hmm

...

while for people who ascribe to a Democratic faith or a Republican faith, it's hard to see people within the party argue with each other, but it is actually the sign that there is a healthy exchange of ideas.

And in the Republican Party right now, having any idea that is opposite of what Trump wants you to have is considered disloyal, is considered reason to be primaried, and is considered to be reason to be cleaned out of the House, and he's shown that he's willing to do that.

And so for these members, whether the White House were to greenlight this or not, and of course they never would, for these members, they have to stay in line even though Trump is not on the ticket and Trump is only providing them problems politically in some of these tougher swing districts.

We're really talking about, like, 30 seats here.

Right

... and pass it on through.

Why does he seem hesitant or so unwilling to just get out at this point?

You know, I've been grappling with this, right? Because Republican strategists that I talk to, including as recently as on my show this morning, say that no one wants a shorter conflict on the ground than the Trump administration, and for a lot of reasons that's probably true.

But getting out is difficult when, A, you've done a pretty poor job of being specific about why you got in when you did.

Secondly, they've not done a great job of selling why this conflict matters to a very skeptical American public.

And finally, they've not really detailed what goals or metrics they need to hit on the ground to declare success and then find an exit ramp.

And so I think that's where a lot of the concern and frustration comes from, yes, from an American public that's been polled on this question, but then also from a DC chattering class, both in the foreign policy apparatuses and then also on Capitol Hill, where I spend a lot of my time.

There's just a lot of consternation around those a- unanswered questions, and I think the White House has been keen to say, "Well, this is just Democrats with Trump Derangement Syndrome wanting to cheer against the president." And in fact, no, Democrats are threading a really interesting needle on this, where they're saying they actually supported the killing of the Ayatollah.

Right, right.

And also, this is the same conversation where he told them he wants them to nuke the filibuster, right?

Exactly.

And so then if we're layering in on top of our election dynamics the fact that there was a shutdown, I think......

the impact of the election is that Democrats I've spoken to on The Hill this morning are saying, "Okay, yeah, there's bipartisan talks happening," and those are really starting to catch steam, they're starting to make some key decisions that they need to make to actually make moves to reopen the government.

We're not there yet, but, you know, hope springs eternal.

The other side of it though is progressives are saying, "Yeah, but if Republicans are now feeling that much more pressure, why are we gonna make any deal at all?" And then Republicans, I think, instead of feeling that pressure and seali- saying, "Well, we should be pressured to go to the negotiating table," Trump is trying to say, "No, no, no, the pressure should be to go it alone and break the filibuster."

Right.

That would be bonkers.

It's a mystery, yes.

And for, and for folks who are, like, not nerds about congressional procedure, a discharge petition is something that members have to do in bipartisan fashion, or they can do it in partisan fashion, but the numbers are so s- slim in the margins that you need members of both parties to sign on to stuff like this.

It's basically a way to make an end run around leadership.

If you've got something you wanna vote on, but leadership doesn't wanna bring it to the floor, you have to get to 218 votes and then have a lot of patience, because there's a lot of time that's baked into waiting in this process.

Yeah.

...

but I think, you know, if I think about the last few weeks here in Washington, it seems like nothing has changed, but I actually think there's one big thing that has changed, and it dawned on me as I was doing my interview with the Speaker.

It's that Democrats, by holding their votes right now, have managed to make this a conversation that's no longer about if ACA subsidies or healthcare generally should be up for negotiation.

Yeah.

... saying, "Wow, they really are voicing their concern with what RFK Junior is doing." And that's Bill Cassidy, who ultimately got behind RFK Junior's nomination.

And he could've been crucial not just because he needed the votes to get to the full Senate, but because his vote got him to the full Senate.

He wasn't making it out of the HELP Committee without doing that.

And so, he was such a critical vote.

And the fact that he was critical yesterday, okay, sure, pressure is important.

It's also important when you hear people like John Barrasso, who's not just a senator, he is the number two Senate Republican.

For what purpose?

Right.

"... into the pot." What was weird about this rescissions package and why it matters so much going forward is because rescissions is a partisan mechanism, you can do it with just one party as Republicans did, to take back funds that both parties agreed to fund and appropriate in the first place.

And so the reason that rescissions at this juncture is so important is because they did it in partisan fashion.

Republicans, for the first time ever, midstream of a fiscal year, clawed back funds that Congress had already appropriated, but they did it during budget season, mere weeks before both parties are supposed to come back together and bipartisanly negotiate another fiscal year package.

So Democrats are now left in the position of saying, "All right, we negotiated in bipartisan fashion as we always do in good faith to keep the government open, to fund various government programs, and then y'all did an end run."...

that took out-

Right.

... as the motivation for CBS settling a lawsuit with Trump that, had it gone to trial, I mean, eh, the First Amendment right to edit an interview where the meaning wasn't fundamentally (laughs) changed anyway i- is, is so central.

(laughs)

But Wyden is actually, uh, there are Republicans who, in some fairness, are like, "Well, where have Democrats been on this?" But for Ron Wyden, he has actually, over the course of the last several years, been trying to do a literal follow-the-money trail.

And he's been looking at thousands of, whether it was wire transfers or other financial blueprints basically, related to Epstein and the people who were paying him.

And so for Wyden, who got access to these records I think in the last year of the Biden administration, he's now coming back, and I think he quietly this week on the Hill was like, "Hey, by the way, we actually know where the threads for a client list could come from.

Whether or not this is written somewhere already or not, we could just write it on down if we look more into these records." And so when you talk about the tangible things that could actually come out, yes, the Journal reporting is obviously a salacious new piece of this puzzle, but the Wyden banking stuff, I think, is one of the most tangible pieces.

And then the other way that Congress, and this is a long shot, which is why I underscore the Wyden piece first, but they're trying to do what would be a bipartisan discharge petition that would basically compel Republican leadership, and it probably wouldn't happen before September because of how long everything has to age.

But it would compel Republican leadership to bring to the floor some kind of bill that compels the Justice Department to release and be transparent on the Jeffrey Epstein case files.

Mm-hmm.

What do people on the Hill actually believe?

So I think that the Taco piece is baked in from the market perspective now.

And frankly, and I know you have more conversations with business leaders than I do, but there are some who even say that they see upside to the idea of tariffs and sort of re-equalizing the economic playing field for the US on the world stage.

Okay.

For Congress, I think that what both of our other guests have said is right, but the idea that this is going to be the moment that they stand in front of the moving policy train is sort of devoid of what we've seen over the course of the last six months because they were willing to defend even the more politically problematic pieces, like Elon Musk standing on stage at CPAC with a chainsaw and hacking the federal government to bits, including parts of it that some of them had created legislation to start in the first place.

I'm talking about things like USAID.

And so the idea that they're gonna suddenly find a backbone now I think is a misreading of the landscape, especially when you consider that they are in the midst right now in the Senate of considering that rescissions package, basically clawbacks of money that Congress already funneled and okayed to go out the door.

What in the world do you think is going on?

Get the job done."

Yeah, I think it's less reading the bill and more reading the political tea leaves here.

The fact that Republican leadership, as Julie mentioned, were regularly warning about the fact that they wouldn't want to be the ones left in the White House's crosshairs if they were to vote against this bill.

And I think momentum has a real role to play here.

The idea of this July 4th deadline, Brendan has talked about how powerful and how steadfast Johnson was in sticking to it, but it's amazing that it stuck because it's fake.

It's not a deadline unlike the debt ceiling, for example, that would have had a hard X date in the middle of August and thusly really put pressure on members to do it to avoid financial catastrophe for the country.

This is a fake deadline that they were able to hold to regardless and they were able to flip members not by giving them anything.

But a 20% tariff, and we're not even talking about transshipments right now, that's a very high tariff rate and it's gonna show up in higher prices for a lot of things that Americans really like to buy.

Yes.

And you're watching some of these senators show the pain.

I mean, just a few hours ago, we saw Senator Chuck Grassley sitting in the well of the Senate, where the Senate pages usually sit, looking dejected.

But at that point, they had been going since 9:45 in the morning yesterday, working now throughout the night.

And look, this is both part of the process, but then also a stalling tactic for Senate leadership, who are still actively cobbling together the votes here.

On the one hand, vote-a-ramas are meant to be lengthy.

It's an amendment process.

Um, does this matter at all, this pressure from Elon Musk matter if he says he's gonna primary anyone who votes for it?

It blows up, it doesn't just blow up, it blows up spectacularly.

But that's always how it was (laughs) going to go, right? I mean, I know you and I talked to people close to the administration on Capitol Hill and many of them were forecasting that this was not a question of if the breakup would happen, it was when.

And of course now we see that we're at that moment.

The idea that it's so public, that it's literally playing out on their dueling social media platforms, it almost feels like if you wrote it, it would be too cute, but that's exactly how it's going.

And I think one person asked me yesterday as, as I was texting my sources, "What could get worse than this?" And I think we know that there's always a deeper floor here.

I don't think that we've hit rock bottom, though certainly the allegations that are being cast about are absolutely jaw-dropping and stunning.

But at the same time, there's also an open question legislatively here of what does this mean for a massive bill that is going to have big impacts on Americans? So we're talking about healthcare, we're talking about food assistance programs.

Show us the demography of your state, show us w- how the funding of your opponents might be, and we can probably nine times out of 10, 9.8 times out of 10, find out where you're gonna land because of that.

And that may be the problem for Speaker Johnson.

Yeah, because Johnson is always in the position of herding cats within the Republican Conference, and he's doing so with the slim margins that we often talk about.

The idea that they're holding this Budget Committee vote when right now it doesn't appear that they actually have the Republican votes to pass it, is sort of an open question of whether or not that holds as we get deeper into the morning.

That committee hearing is supposed to start at about 9:00 AM, so it might come into clearer focus as lawmakers start actually heading up to the Hill.

But the problems that they're having right now is, first, one member on that committee is actually on paternity leave.

His wife had just given birth to their child this week.

The second piece of it too is that some key members of that committee, like Ralph Norman and Chip Roy, these conservative hardliners that we talk about, they've got some big problems with the ways that the committees on ways and means and others wrote parts of this bill.

Come from a place of willingness and openness instead of a place from combativeness.

He's got a, basically a year, and if the economy continues to shrink, he's not gonna be able to do that.

I have two thoughts on this.

The first is when we're considering the 100 Days media tour, part of me really expected him to go back on Joe Rogan and speak to that really essential part of his base.

They're there.

The polling shows they're not eroding.

It's not like he needs to shore them up or anything.

The long story of the Trump candidacy, presidency, candidacy, presidency was the fact that he always had that 30 some odd percent, right? Right there in his back pocket.

We're mixing the Quaaludes with the tequila.

What, where does this come from, first of all, from the president's side of the street? And how might Speaker Johnson, uh, try to fold this into a larger bill he's trying to get through?

Well, look, the name of the game here on Capitol Hill for Republicans is figuring out how to pay for all of the different policy priorities that they're trying to achieve in this tax package.

And so yes, they are extending the Trump tax cuts, though as I was reminded on Way Too Early this morning, just 'cause we're talking about tax cuts doesn't mean that Americans are getting new cuts.

They're just extending the cuts that were made back in 2017.

So, that's an important piece of it as the president and the White House try to say, "Don't worry, relief is coming on tariffs and other cost-raising measures, because they're going to see their taxes get cut." In the instance now of high earners, watching them try to mull over whether or not the highest paid Americans are going to be paying more in taxes, I think some people might have whiplash if they follow conservative ideology when it comes to, uh, to financial policy and to tax policy here.

Certainly one Republican strategist that I was talking to this morning on my show definitely said that.

And I think that the way that you can look at it is that this is now a schism between the more MAGA wing of the party on taxes, the way that Trump is trying to potentially find a new pay-for here, and then also the more traditional conservative parts of the party.

I mean, Ali, why not provide some reassurance?

Tough year for Barbie, but we'll move forward.

I, I, I think, look, this is an administration that above all does not want to look weak, they do not wanna look like external factors impact them.

That's sort of fundamentally Trump, right, for as long as all of us have been covering him, since 2015.

And so it makes sense that they are not trying to be moved by the markets or by others in the party.

And I think that it's actually fascinating to see the way that the Hill has gone along with him on almost everything, pardoning everyone involved with January 6th, all of the actions that he's taken both in legal institutions, educational institutions.

But on tariffs, that's where they start to draw the line, and it tells the larger story that this is the thing that they cannot defend to their voters in the midterms even if it's just a year and a half away because pocketbook issues were the thing that Trump really ran and won on, and they haven't seen the kind of price decreases that the president frankly promised and hasn't yet delivered on.

Our nation has seen times like this before, especially during the Red Scare." Lastly, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said, "Administration," said, "This administration's threats and harassments are attacks on our democracy that are undermining our Constitution and the rule of law." Ali, what's the significance of this pushback from judges?