In some ways, I d- I don't know how they, how they square that circle.

So it goes back to that tension we talked about earlier, does- doesn't it? Like, in the sense that, you know, if their problem is basically that Trump voters aren't gonna turn out without him on the ballot, the last thing they can do is actively separate themselves from Trump, given that they need these people.

Here's the thing that I think maybe a lot of people don't get about the Republican Party's fealty to Trump.

It's actually understandable, right? Because Donald Trump was, w- uh, you know, he cracked a code that Republicans were unable to crack.

And this is, this goes back to, to the sort of the larger context for all of this.

But you'll recall that Barack Obama, after he won in 20- 2012, right, there was a fair amount of dismay among Republicans who thought that they were on the losing end of, of demographic evolution.

There was calls for s- serious moderation on immigration because they were losing the non-white vote, especially the Latino vote.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What part would you say was for the GOP and what was for Trump?

At the center of that entire event and sort of at the center of MAGA psychology right now is this enormous contradiction.

The festival is designed to push the storyline that Trump has been this smashing world historical success on every front.

Yet, as every person who's at that thing knows, and every reporter covering it knows, and anyone, the few people who watch that on TV know, the very reason that they put the damn thing on is because he hasn't been a success, right? The very reason they put it on is to come up with some way, any way at all, of motivating voters who picked Donald Trump in the last election, because they face a major problem in the midterms, right? Which is that, you know, it's not just that in midterms, turnoff falls off for the president's party because the president isn't on the ballot, though that's important.

It's also that in unique ways, Donald Trump's agenda has directly hurt his own base in any number of ways.

And so they're absolutely desperate to come up with some way to get these people to come out in the midterms.

And this Trump-palooza is all about that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Does Trump still have the juice?

So I just want to go back to that original point I made, which is about the three pillars of Trumpism, because like I don't think about it as sort of a as juice in some, you know.

kind of holistic sense, like there's one thing called juice.

You know what I mean? When he won in 2024, there was a certain pundit interpretation which held that his right-wing nationalism tapped some sort of authentic sentiment in the country, right? Like on some level, I mean, remember when, you know, pundits were essentially talking about how People were doing the Trump dance in the end zone.

Athletes were doing it.

Pop stars were, you know, saying nice things about him.

You know, it looked right after the 2024 election as if the whole culture had moved toward Trumpism in some sense that, you know, that there was this kind of right wing populist nationalist spirit in the country that he had brought to the surface.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

much here, but like you compare him to any of the current crop of Republicans and like there was a real, like I said, a real moral character there, right? A real family man, someone who kind of like lived out his values and like he has made a lot of compromises, but it just seems on a completely different level to the party that we see today.

Yes, I think that's absolutely right.

And so Republicans were kind of understandably mystified.

I mean, Barack Obama, they were never able to acknowledge his extraordinary abilities and talents for obvious reasons.

And so that's, you know, one of the reasons he was able to win, you know, popular majorities for the first time twice since Ronald Reagan.

Like, we should remember that, right? Obama won popular majorities twice.

OK, the only other person in the modern era to do that is Ronald Reagan, who is widely seen as having created a realignment of his own.

You got any last words for the viewer, Greg?

So like all of these people are totally receptive to the idea that like, I cannot afford somebody who's just going to let these tariffs go on.

It really is in the Democratic sweet spot for another reason as well.

They really want to talk about affordability as the main issue in this election.

And at times it's a bit difficult to connect affordability to a case for electing Democrats.

But here it lays out the case with extraordinary clarity because people can directly perceive the president's actions impacting their economic prospects and impacting their economic communities and so forth and local industries and things like that.

You layer that on top of the tariffs, which are also an unusually clear example of a presidential action screwing people over directly.

And it starts to really add up to the point where voters really can recognize how destructive Trump is to their pocketbooks and to their jobs and to their local industries.

Well, I

If you would discuss this with me and my listeners.

Yeah.

I mean, one thing that I think is a really, really alarming development is that Republicans who actually vouched for the integrity of the outcome of the election now have the crosshairs on them all over the country.

Now, you know, people often say things like, oh, Trump is just a symptom of a deeper rot and so forth in the Republican Party.

And I think that that's largely true.

But ask yourself this and your listeners could ask themselves this, too.

In 2012, did any Republicans who stood up for the who vouched for the integrity of Mitt Romney's loss and Barack Obama's win face primaries? I can't think of any, can you? I cannot.

What specifically is the replacement narrative and why is it dangerous as a mode of thinking?

Run us through that divide.

Right.

I think the split is...

It's not exactly between progressives on the Democratic Party and the Democratic mainstream.

I think a number of mainstream Democrats are not in the cautious centrist camp, actually.

I think at the most fundamental level, the difference within the center left is rooted in differing interpretations of what the 2024 election meant.

There's a certain type of pundit who holds that when Trump won the immigration argument in 2024, which he did, what happened was that a majority of voters in some sense agreed with Trump.

So tell me about, from your writing and reporting about the Democratic Party, who are the politicians, and you've mentioned Talarico already, who are the politicians who get the connection between immigration and authoritarianism and are willing to make the immigration issue salient Because of its implication for our liberal polity.

Yeah, yeah.

Hang on.

Just bear with me, guys.

So this cousin's name is Elissa Kazmer, and I'm gonna read what she said, uh, for this piece, because it's so good.

Quote, "We're Jewish.

We grew up knowing how hated we were for just existing.

Now, he's trying to take away the exact thing that his own family benefited from, that ability to create a life for themselves, to prosper, to build community, to have successful businesses, to live a rewarding life." That's Elissa Kazmer, who is Stephen Miller's cousin, talking about the fact that Stephen Miller's own ancestors immigrated here at the turn of the-

Rocketmoney.com/cancel.

And you say that two Democrats really have calibrated a response.

J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, has been very good on this.

He recognizes that Democrats are in the middle of what's functionally an information war.

So has Gavin Newsom.

The two of them realize that they need to be incredibly clear and blunt in warning of the threat that Trump poses and what Trump is trying to do.

Senator Chris Murphy has been really, really good on this as well.

He's gone out into every conceivable forum he can get himself into to talk about the threat, but not enough Democrats are speaking the way these three are.

Pritzker has used, you say, urgent moral language.

Is that legal?

So it's a really good question.

Nobody's really gotten to the bottom of that yet, but what I can tell you is that I talked to multiple experts in government and experts in mortgage law and mortgage governance, and what they say is that the way he's using this process to scrutinize these particular mortgages of Trump foes is highly irregular at best and probably very corrupt.

I mean, here's the way to understand just how corrupt it is.

What are the chances that if he were, if, if the agency were scrutinizing mortgages in an aboveboard way, what are the chances that he would somehow end up the t- head of this agency with three mortgages or mortgage packages that just happened to be possessed by three of the highest profile enemies of Trump? It's an absurdity.

And so, I think a big question about this is, what exactly is going on behind the scenes? Is the White House essentially calling up William Pulte and saying, "We want you to scrutinize the mortgages of Adam Schiff, Letitia James, and Lisa Cook in order to find some sort of something or other in there, just search them to create a pretext for a referral to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution"? I think it's very possible that that is actually what's going on.

And that should come out as part of this process.

We talked about the Pritzker thing where he was like, "No, you don't," so but talk us through the rest of the response.

Maybe give a little bit more background on what the administration is claiming, uh, with regard, uh, to this, to this guy's record, um, what we already knew, you know, kind of before yesterday, and then what you have, have, uh, uh, dug up yourself.

So we have to go back to 2019 for this, which is when Kilimar Abrego Garcia was picked up the first time.

He was ultimately detained by ICE, but i- in the process of getting to ICE, he was detained by the Prince George's County Police Department.

Prince George's County is a suburb of Washington D.C., just northeast and, and southeast of D.C.

This was in the northern part.

This is in Hyattsville, is where he was picked up at a Home Depot in Hyattsville.

So what happened was the detective then, uh, questioned him, detectives questioned him, and asked him if he had ties to MS-13.

I'm, I'm just curious what you make of that as kind of a, a counter-messaging strategy from Democrats here to, to kind of, like, personally participate in this, in this process to a greater degree than before.

Um, so why don't you tell viewers a little bit about what Russia is doing, and then we can talk about what we were trying to do here, uh, before Trump got involved.

So Russia has been transferring, uh, thousands of Ukrainian children to their own indoctrination camps.

Uh, many of these children are from orphanages in Ukraine, but many are in a situation where their parents actually want them back.

And you're right that the Russian description is Orwellian.

They call it a humanitarian move, but human rights groups and The New York Times and others have really investigated this very closely and have found that it's potentially a war crime that's actually happening.

What we were doing was that the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab had been contracted, uh, by the State Department to track these kids, and this is a very big thing that this group at Yale is doing.

Um, when they were able to track the whereabouts and locations and names of 314 kids, it was front-page news in The New York Times, it was discussed at the United Nations.

Tell me more about kind of his role in all of this.