Mm.

Uh, I am writing a profile right now on one of these Republican members who voted for that discharge petition, and having covered this cohort, I think what's really interesting is that they still do back Trump on a lot of the not very popular things.

They still mostly play for the home team, but they bought some credibility when it came to standing out on the Epstein files and saying like, "Hey, we're gonna call your bluff on this.

We need these out now." In terms of this far out to the election, no, I don't think so.

But it is definitely a sign that, like, the, the, the internals that I've heard about are so bad, even in Trump plus 15, Trump pl- plus 20 districts, that, you know, for people who thought they might've been a little safe, it's worth maybe that little bit of shave down of like, "Hey, if I'm gonna risk the Truth Social post, maybe now is the time to get anything in return for it."

Do you think we'll see more of that in the next like week or two?

I think we're probably gonna see more of the basic cost of living, like, "I feel your pain, I'm at the pump." But then we also have guys like Jackson who are talking about going to the gas store, and like, we can tell, like, the-

Um, is, is the Trump show losing steam?

So the one thing that is consistent if you've been to a lot of Trump rallies is Trump rally goers hate traffic.

They do leave early very consistently.

That's been happening the whole time.

Now, aside from that, we certainly see a lot of enthusiasm issues with the base.

In terms of why upstate New York, I mean, Trump does have kind of his origin story starting to get into conservative politics in Western and Central New York.

But what was weird was, like, Syracuse is actually the city with the number one rate of childhood poverty of any city in the country from over a thou- 100,000 people.

I mean, what are you gonna do?

Mm-hmm

... what's their investment in all these candidates? You see that disconnect with the way Trump talks about these races as if like, "This isn't really my thing.

I just kinda ha- I'm obligated to come out here and, you know, do my song and dance." And then on the Democratic side, you know, there's certainly the issue of persuasion.

Never rule that out.

I think, you know, I'm sure Liz will have really great thoughts on that.

But also At what marginal point are we looking at maybe flipping some Republican votes here, some for the first time? And we've heard anecdotal reporting about it in the field.

I've encountered some voters like this.

[laughs]

... statewide official?

And the Talarico campaign has been making a lot of hay out of his property portfolio and all that.

But I think that, look, I mean, what did Ken Paxton sign up for here? If you're gonna get the Trump endorsement in a high-profile race like this, you know, you're gonna have to follow the shots of Trump World, the Senate Leadership Fund when it comes to what John Thune wants.

So, you know, the, putting aside the context of that remark, the trend for Republicans in Texas is really notable.

I mean, going into the 20-teens, people on the Republican side were winning statewide by almost 60%.

And now with the Democrats, keeps creeping up and up and up.

The high watermark was Beto in 2018 with about 48% of the vote.

[laughs]

... statewide official?

And the Ted Cruz campaign has been making a lot of hay out of his property portfolio and all that.

But I think that, look, I mean, what did Ken Paxton sign up for here? If you're gonna get the Trump endorsement in a high-profile race like this, you know, you're gonna have to follow the shots of Trump World, the Senate Leadership Fund when it comes to what John Thune wants.

So, you know, the, putting aside the context of that remark, the trend for Republicans in Texas is really notable.

I mean, going into the 20-teens, people on the Republican side were winning statewide by almost 60%.

And now with the Democrats keeps creeping up and up and up.

The high watermark was Beto in 2018 with about 48% of the vote.

[laughs]

Do you think they actually had an exchange on this?

The one thing that's tricky with following President Trump on this is just how much does he know about this issue from the basics to the, you know, outside of the trillion dollars.

Right.

Outside of the money that it could make for himself and his family.

For President Xi, I think it wouldn't necessarily be in his interest to want to discuss some sort of detente.

The kind of international coordination that would be needed for a true like nuclear arms type situation.

treaty and regulation level on this is not easy to achieve.

Anything substantive you expect to come out of that?

Unfortunately for Cruz, has-beens polling at 1% won't be part of that conversation."

Yeah.

I mean, certainly some, some bad blood there.

That was a great Shelby Talcott story in Semafor.

But, you know, th- there are these kind of dynamics floating around in many different places when it comes to this looming power vacuum in Trump world.

And I will remind you and your viewers, once we get to January 20th, 2027, if something were to happen to President Trump and he would either, uh, die in office or resign, be incapacitated, whatever-

No

... two different, uh, points of view, a newer one I heard today actually, after the story went up, which is that, uh, a Republican strategist who does some big Senate races said, "I think Rubio will run contrary to a lot of the conventional wisdom in Trump world," which is mainly around the fact that why would he want to? He could actually make some money.

Might that force the White House to actually push to, as David said, get people to the table, do something here?

Not yet.

I mean, also a lot of working Americans, tens of thousands who work for companies like Walmart, McDonald's.

Uh, my colleague, David Gilbert, had a great story on Wired today about all this misinformation going on online about essentially the replay of the welfare queen playbook, which, just on David's point real quick, I mean, look, I think that the, the mood inside the White House is that we own the Senate Republicans.

We jump, they say how high? However, I think if we look at Trump's approval rating, we're, we're approaching a point where he's going to become less popular than your replacement rate Senate Republican, House Republican.

And at that point, especially with the shutdown and the pressure they're gonna get from their constituents with SNAP, this is kind of like the relationship between someone who, you know, may have put on 20, 30 pounds and those old skinny jeans they wanna get in.

Like it's ...

Yeah.

What's your plan, dude?

Well, for one, I think the f- the framing of, well, what's the plan from the Congressional Republicans gonna be, that, that's irrelevant all of a sudden because from the White House's point of view, they just...

they own these guys.

Like, they're, uh, like, I was talking to someone in the White House today, and they're basically like, "Look, no movement, no worries to see here, everyone's in line." And they're just gonna kinda be comfortable watching John Thune squirm a little bit, and they're not really too worried about it.

I think the other thing and maybe a mini lesson learned from the first term is that if we do try to offer some semblance of a solution, we might end up just embarrassing ourselves here, and we might as well just try to shift-

What could the midterms look like with actual election deniers in serious jobs?

So, look, I mean, going to the, the way the administration staffed up during the transition, and even if you wanna go back before that to who ended up on the Trump campaign, who got the plush jobs with the PACs.

In this case, being pro January 6th and being a election denier helps you on the resume, doesn't hurt you.

This is putting together everyone who has been laid off and those who have accepted the buyout package offered by the Trump Administration earlier this year, which you and I reported on a lot of federal employees have actually taken.

Yeah, and these are layoffs in a whole host of roles across the CDC, but it's pretty concerning that there are very few left in just leadership positions at the CDC at the moment.

A former staffer told Emily that, quote, "At the highest level of leadership at the CDC, there are no public health or medical professionals left to help guide CDC recommendations," unquote.

And that's kind of a recurring theme that what we're seeing across the shutdown is basically this gutting with a handful of people left in charge of really important teams or units or verticals with very few people left underneath them now, or in this case, the CDC, we're just talking about essentially a decapitation of leadership.

So the senior staff resignations at the CDC happened en masse after Robert F. Kennedy, the Health Secretary, fired CDC Director, Susan Linares.

So she told a senate committee in September that Kennedy demanded she sign off on this new anti-vaccine recommendations that basically were in h- her words, quote, "Regardless of the scientific evidence to be used to dismiss career officials without cause." So basically if you're not with the program of this sort of anti-vax stuff, you're gone.

And she would not abide.

Jake, what has been going on here?

So, how did he go from that to being this uber MAGA guy?

Yeah, this is not as neat of an explanation as you will encounter with a lot of the other Silicon Valley billionaires on my beat who have gotten on the Trump train.

For most of them, it often has to do with the very specific moment we were in around COVID and various forms of political correctness or speech policing.

For Ellison, this is more of an international affairs kind of trajectory.

So, my understanding is that Larry Ellison didn't hate Barack Obama or anything when he came into office.

However, Israel became a more important issue for him as the years went along.

As Barack Obama's relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu starts to deteriorate, so too does Larry Ellison's with the Democratic Party.

Yeah, their security issues-

Yeah.

... voice of the people mainlined right into Speaker Mike Johnson.

That's great.

But look, I think that they're gonna try to find these little nip and tuck measures to say, "We're looking out for people," when clearly the strategy hasn't worked.

The questions over Epstein and Grijalva swearing in are not gonna go away.

And, you know, Mike Johnson is clearly not a Nancy Pelosi level floor master on this stuff.

But also, you gotta remember the tight margins he's dealing with.

I mean, most people do.

What exactly is Oracle, Jake?

Software for hosting various, you know, websites, data sets on servers.

So, uh, I would describe it as the fundamental infrastructure of the internet.

I, I was just actually talking to... a- and NPR host who used the term digital plumbing, and I think I'm gonna steal that now, where whatever your cool startup or product is or, you know, whatever your innovation on Wall Street might be with some big fancy model, ultimately, that data needs to be stored somewhere, it needs to be stored reliably.

And Oracle ends up developing a real advantage on this front.

They're also just really good at marketing.

They're really, they're really good at selling other companies these very expensive software products to m- to make them, uh, even more money.

Is Larry Ellison a modern-day robber baron, like a kind of a Carnegie or a Rockefeller?

But why? Tell us what it is.

So you've got the TikTok deal where he has basically been seen in Trump world as, you know, this is his deal to lose since the beginning.

You also have Oracle already providing the data, uh, at least for the American users on their servers that then they're gonna get this new imported algorithm and all the retraining of that and the content serving will be hosted on their servers.

So it's kind of like the, the digital plumbing, if you will, of like this whole system.

And then you've got his son, David, running this paramount media behemoth.

They may acquire Warner Brothers Discovery.

So if all this goes through and with the entertainment side of it, and you know, that's really like the attention economy part of Ellison, this takes some steps.

But tell us, we, we understand now what they could control-What are they interested in, right? Who is Larry Ellison?

Mm-hmm.

...

but you're all, there's also much more of a back and forth because with talk radio, you get a couple call-ins during the hour or whatever.

With Fuentes, this is the thing to understand about a lo- a lot of the craziest stuff he said, is he's reading this chat on his screen the whole time, and, and the velocity of people commenting all sorts of messed up stuff is crazy.

But he is constantly in dialogue with his sort of edge lord supporters, and that's where there's this weird communal aspect that he has that I think a Tucker Carlson or other far right figures who maybe our folks listening are more familiar with, they don't quite have that.

Like, it's more than just a parasocial relationship with Fuentes' followers.

And that's where D- David's piece is really interesting because it also gets into how Fuentes' vision is for the groypers to sort of be this invisible network where they could be anywhere, it could be any guy around you who's, who's one of them and is willing to, you know, ride or die for the cause.

Mm-hmm.

I'm curious what you make of that, and what you'll be keeping an eye out for in the next few weeks.

Yeah, actually, Hasan was gonna appear with Charlie Kirk at that event at Dartmouth, and, uh, this is where things, I think, could start to...

I'm using the term spiral here, in, in the sense of heightened security postures in a way that would effectively lead to less back and forth between voters and politicians, between reporters and politicians, and this is actually something that I'd reported on for us a, a couple of months back, when the Speaker of the Minnesota House was assassinated, and I talked to Democratic lawmakers and candidates who said that unfortunately, they were looking at spending a lot more money on security and probably either holding none or fewer of the more accessible events at, like, you know, a county fair or somewhere where just, you know, regular voters can come up and just chat to him.

Up, and I think that we've already seen this trend, and now what I'm wondering is kind of a twofold thing, of a, a continuation of that trend, and then also an early talking point we're seeing from some conservatives that would effectively designate the Democratic Party as a terrorist organization, and the ramifications of that and what that could have for freedom of elections and what actions that could justify from the administration? I, I really think it's hard to fathom just how, you know, how far that could go when we're, when we're really only 24 hours out from this, as of recording.

Talk to me about that- that imprint that he might have left.

Yeah.

I think that the- the- the imprint has some contradictions that we're seeing in the aftermath of this horrific incident.

There's certainly this almost kind of saintly way that he's being painted after his death, and I think part of that is that he was an organizer and not a candidate, so he never got the kind of scrutiny or had to really make, like, hard choices on, like, policy.

But even just the optics here are pretty suspect.

Yeah, and, uh, like, uh, in a little side item we had in my Innerloop newsletter this week, we had some new data on the somewhat stunning lack of enforcement from the Trump administration across the tech sector, but crypto in particular, had pretty much everyone who had been facing any kind of legal action from the Biden administration having their enforcement actions either dropped completely or paused.

And in one instance, we're looking at the maybe first ever pardoning of a company from one of these things.

So you don't need to just pony up the money for these things and expect a legislative win.

You can just get, you know, the heat pulled off of you on the regulatory front.

But then you, like, just have complete power users who are like, "This is part of my minute-by-minute life." Like, "What have you done? You didn't warn me."

Yeah, and this is where, like, the introspective aspect of these tools, the kind of desire for self-understanding, the people who are, not advisably, uh, from any medical perspective, but they are trying to use these bots, you know, for something akin to therapy, and what it made me think of when I saw this rolling out was, is this maybe the beginning of something bigger where there's kind of a departure between th- the quote-unquote "regular" consumer experience and demand for AI versus the business application? We may not all have the same definition of intelligence when it comes-

What is going on?

So, the weird thing about reporting this one compared to the last time I had been calling around on Epstein with the White House and, and people around Trump World maybe three weeks or a month ago, was that people were much more scared t- to talk this time, but also, like, no one really had any updates about what the plan is, and th- that's where I think this piece became more interesting is like we just really zoomed into the expectations getting set out of whack here.

And when you set these great expectations for the base where one of my sources in this wh- who's in Trump World, they also, uh, work in conservative media, so they had kind of an interesting perspective on this from, like, an audience capture, you know, kind of the cart leading the horse perspective.

And this source basically said that if the base doesn't get not just the list, but, like, if there's not a smoking gun for Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, you know, abusing, like, a baby over a fire, like, this isn't gonna count.

And, you know, clearly it didn't help to staff the FBI with Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, but the- there is an element that kind of goes deeper to it that makes this a very American thing.

Um, you know, one thing a lot of people have asked me, and something I was asking myself reporting this is, like, have a lot of Trump supporters in the base just, like, not heard of his associations with Jeffrey Epstein before?

Like, he is such a politician, and this is something you hear from everyone close to him, but I'm curious if it'll work because unlike Elon Musk, like, Sam and Trump just seem like very different people, almost like oil and water in a way.

I was gonna say oli- oil and water also.

(laughs)

...

he gets real worked up about the de-banking.

And th- you know, this is, from my sourcing perspective, I remember being at the Republican Convention last summer in Milwaukee, and I remember like, the second day there, I'm bumping into some people I recognize and like, every time I'm like, "Hey," like, "What are you doing here? Like, you're not on the Trump 2024 campaign." And maybe they were on it in 2016 or 2020.

And it's like, "No dude, I'm here with crypto." Like, "Yeah, check out this party later," like, every time.

And I'm like, "Did all of you guys, like when did all of you end up working for these crypto companies?" But you gotta think of the, in the context of after January 6th, if you were a Trump, you know, former White House official, or you were on those campaigns, your cash out options by usual DC swamp standards were very different.

It's like, you weren't gonna be going to K Street and doing lobbying in the traditional sense, you know, you weren't gonna be getting those cush jobs on some Wall Street legislative affairs team or whatever.

So, what the heck has changed?

Right.

But then, at the staffer level is where it gets really unconventional and weird, because they're doing battle with randos in the comments on, you know, take your pick of social media sites.

And, I mean, the Reddit one especially struck me as, like, quite a deep cut and wild.

But I think, you know, this is the recurring theme when we talked about Mace, is she does have, she has this kind of unadulterated, rather pure insight into h- what drives attention now and kind of how the fractured media ecosystem means you gotta be everywhere, you gotta try everything.

I mean, obviously.

Why not? Anyway.

I think what's really innovative about her is that she's introduced this third pillar, which is the attention economy.

And it's like, hey, what if we just go all in on this? And her staff will say, you know, sh- she did int- reintroduce a bill on tech this year.

Does it have value aside from providing access to the President of the United States? How does it work?

No.

Uh, and what's actually interesting is when you look at the top 25 holders of the Trump coin coming into this event, 18 of them have already cashed out.

They're coming in with $0 in Trump coin, and they're going to enjoy whatever will be offered at this dinner.

But no, it is of no immediate, uh, economic value.

It is the equivalent to, you know, owning an asset like a piece of art or, you know, again, a physical asset, only in this case, it is not physical nor really an asset.

So, uh, it's really effective, honestly, in simply having a kind of, uh, one-sided mirror type way to get influence with Trump where, you know, other than the identifiers in these wallets, we don't know much about who owns these coins.

By last year, more than half of all illegal crypto activity, some $26 billion, took place on the network." Can you talk to us about Justin Sun and these other attendees? Who are they?

Yeah.

... uh, in some capacity. But this, I don't think was previously known. Um, I also learned that, one, there's kind of a two-way, uh, street, if you will, with, with her role on the comm side of Doge. And it is, it is... I think the relationship between Stephen and Elon was understood to be at least, you know, chummy beforehand, but this is a little different when it comes to Katy. Um, so she not only is relaying the Doge, you know, message of the day, and to the extent that can provide accurate updates on what they're doing, but she's also, uh, channeling requests, traffic, issues, back to Musk when necessary. And you know, that would involve more sensitive conversations than having to give the guy bad news. Um, I don't know really what it looks like beyond that, or what their social situation is, but we do have, uh, a source in the story who knows the couple personally, and he said, "If you can learn any..." Sorry, he said, "If you can find out anything about Stephen Miller's social life, I don't want to know the answer."

And, and, and my guess is that he's probably sensitive about that.

And that's something to look at, look for in the story also, uh, in show, you know, Wi- Wired.com, at le- at least, you know, the, the Trump people who are, are concerned that this is an optics issue and that there's still an off-ramp to maybe, you know, throw Elon under the bus and have him take the flak for it. There's this tension we get at end of story, which is basically that Steven Miller is sort of, you know, convene, even though he's done appearances in the press and stuff, the, a lo- a number of Trump advisors would prefer Elon to stay getting the majority of this heat because, uh, you know, in their view, even though he's not as smooth as, on, as Trump on camera, to your point, he's better at grabbing attention. He clearly is able to set the attentional agenda-