Do you think those edges have been found there? Do you think that the American people have found a limit of what they think is reasonable, extreme anymore? Do you think we could still, is there even further, more extreme than Trump? I don't think so.

Well, good point.

Certainly on the Republican side, Americans recognized how extreme they were.

And a week ago, they said, we don't want to go that far.

I don't think they've recognized any extremism on the democratic side yet.

Remember this was not an election about the democratic party.

The democratic party got fucking lucky that Trump is who Trump is.

But what do you think?

Is he going to go quietly and maybe concede to Canada on some of this tariff stuff? Or do you think he will be petulant over the last two years and make things difficult for any number of different trade partners on tariffs, even though now that's supposed to be in the hands of Congress with his executive orders? I'm not sure that's going to be true.

I almost just dropped an F-bomb.

I was on some BBC show at 3 o'clock in the morning last night, and they asked me, will Trump learn anything from this? And I almost dropped an F-bomb there.

No, Trump's not going to read the room.

Trump's not going to learn anything from this.

He's incapable.

But here's the odd weird thing.

I was going to ask you, who has the tougher job, the Democrats deciding on who they want to be? Do they want to be social Democrats? Do they want to be traditional Democrats? Do they want to try to get rid of Trump and relitigate two years of a revenge tour? Or do they want to show that they can govern? Isn't there on both parties a two-year runway to prove to the American people who deserves the White House?

Give us a sense of what is happening in American politics that anti-Semitism is one, so much a part of the political discourse, and two, so out in the open.

The far right and the left have met.

this past year, and it's out in the open, and their anti-Semitism is out in the open.

Now, I think with the Democratic Party, it's much more of a party thing.

Like, I can't imagine the Democratic nominee for president in 2028, no way would be as pro-Israel as I am.

I can't imagine they'll be even pro-Israel.

I think they'll be very Israel critic.

I know.

How would you grade the Republican candidates that the party put forward in this midterm cycle? What kind of grade would you give to Darling Graham? and to Ken Paxton and some of these races where things might not be going so well.

Jim and Katie, good to be with you both.

Look, Jim, they all get a failing grade, but I know I'm a broken record.

Who picked them? Yeah.

Who put his arms around them? Exactly.

We always tend to just overcomplicate stuff.

This is Trump.

But do you see sort of the Republican Party reconstituting in any way as they see these huge defeats tonight thinking, well, maybe Trumpism or MAGA in general is not the way to go? Do you see them moderating at all or kind of trying to to change their stripes?

did he simply not deliver with anything that he promised?

Well, no, he didn't deliver with anything.

Um, but like this, this is an Americans every two years, you know, our heads do swivel and every two years we, we kind of raise our heads up and vote for the party.

We hate the least, but something different happened this time.

Um, I come from the Tea Party way back in the day.

I mean, the American people were pissed off and elected some people like me to Washington during the Tea Party.

The anger in this country now just dwarfs that.

Can they learn lessons quickly in two years?

Mm-hmm

... to get elected, to have an audience, you have a decision to make.

You either become a Trumper or you l- try to look the other way, or you do what I did and you oppose him publicly.

If you do what I did and oppose him publicly, your, your radio show's gone, Fox News will never have you back on, and you'll never get elected.

Um, it, it really, and it's the same thing with the think tanks.

There were the-- and, and there are a lot of true believers.

There are MAGA true believers in right-wing media and in the think tanks-

What do you, what, what's going on here?

stuff.

Two things, Brandon.

And thing number one, we don't talk about enough.

You know where I am on Trump.

I think he's an utterly horrible human being.

But I really have believed the past year and a half that he's rapidly losing his mind.

Joe Biden was way too fucking old, never should have thought about running again.

But why is it that these think tanks on the right were and these groups on the right supposedly learned people got snookered by this guy? Was it just they fell for it or was it the money and the power and the chance to have their voices at the table?

And it's all crazy.

Jim, you covered him in that first term.

And again, this is the difference.

In that first term, look, the one constant in Trump's life is the only thing he cares about is Trump.

But if the economy wasn't doing well- He gave the appearance that he cared, but it's like this term, he doesn't give a fuck about anything.

And again, to me, this goes back to what's going on in his head.

A, I think he's so fucking insecure that he's desperate to have his name everywhere.

If you participate in this, what do you, I mean, what do you think about this, Joe? I know people have different ideas, but

I think the question then becomes, why do you think this electability thing- ... is so dominant in Democratic politics when it's belied by history and so non-present in Republican politics?

I, I think there's a, there's an innate fear in the Democratic Party that I never saw in the Republican Party, um, a, a fear of not winning.

Uh, and again, I just gotta say, having been a Republican and a populist Republican my whole life, that fear is ne- uh, is nowhere to be found in the Republican Party.

There's also, David, an elitism in the Democratic Party, a, a kind of an out-of-touchness that I have always thought is more pronounced in the Democratic Party than the Republican Party.

Yeah, when you and I look at it, there are probably right as many Ivy League grads and Republicans in the Senate as there are Democrats.

But Republicans generally, like, look askance at elitists and, uh, people who live in wealthy gated communities who look down on Americans who are fucking concerned about street crime.

That...

... sort of rhetorically and in the public square? Like, are you gonna go back to being, like, smash-mouth bomb thrower guy? Like, like how do, how do, h- how do you think about that?

I'm not doing this any longer," that other people didn't follow you?

Abso-freaking-lutely.

I did it twice.

So when I publicly stood up against Trump eight years ago, I did look behind me, and I thought a bunch of Republicans [laughs] were gonna follow.

They didn't.

Then when I ran against Trump for president in 2020, I thought a lot of conservative Republicans who had privately been telling me, "Trump's a piece of you know what," would get behind me.

They didn't.

So is there anything, any hope that you have for Canadians who want our economy to get back to normal and want our trade with our old best, well, still our, probably our best friend, to be fair, uh, to get back to where it was pre-Trump 2.0? What does it look like if the Democrats win the Senate and win the House for tariffs and just trade, not even with Canada, with the rest of the world?

Mm-hmm.

Because Donald Trump is loved by the base of the party.

It's not just Trump.

The base of the party is his.

Um, if he loses and he wanted to be the nominee in '28, he would be the nominee.

I don't think he will or will want to, but yes, I think Trumpism lives.

I think MAGA is this party.

Yeah.

Has the ship already sailed?

Gone.

Omar, that ship is, you can no longer see that ship.

And part of Trump's problem is he lies as he breathes.

So people are no longer listening to him.

Look, I'm older than you two.

I'm not a kid.

Joe, were you surprised to see the move?

But it's the exact opposite of what he just said there.

You know, and you and I have said this before, Jim, he can lie about the stolen election and people will believe him.

He can lie about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs and people will believe him.

But when he lies about the economy, even his base won't believe him because they live the economy.

They know how much stuff costs.

Jim, I had a conversation two days ago with a Republican member of the House, and he was beside himself.

He said to me, like, if all Trump had done was just play golf these first 18 or 19 months, we'd be sailing smoothly.

The

What would you advise a Democratic freshman next year to do about the lack of trust in institutions, which means the lack of trust in congressional leadership?

To not do what we did.

We were an anti-establishment thing.

We got there and we should have put more energetic Tea Party people in leadership.

We accepted John Boehner as our speaker and that became a source of angst for years.

I'm hoping the Democratic Party does the opposite.

That when this energy gets to DC, if they take back the Senate, tell Chuck Schumer, see you later, bud.

But you're seeing some indication they could move on leadership based on what? Based on how they carry themselves on the campaign trail, their messages?

He's a- he's actually censoring someone's right to free speech, isn't he?

He's exercising his freedom.

He owns this, the venue.

Look, Piers, Macklemore has a f- right to say whatever he wanted to say, and people have a right to be offended by what he said and protest what he said.

And then the promoters have a right to say, "Macklemore, you're gone." And Robert Kraft, the venue owner, has a right to say, "I don't want him playing." And by the way, Ed Sheeran's o- all of hi- the rest of his opening acts, they have every right to say, "Well, shame on you, Ed Sheeran.

We're not gonna be your opening act anymore." This is a hot emotional issue.

I, I hope nobody on this panel would deny any of those people the right to say and do what they all did.

I'm hanging.

Bingo.

And it's like, it's like, again, You two wouldn't have liked my prior political life, but no one's ever not called me a fighter.

And so that's like you need to understand and meet the moment.

That's why when I first heard that he was breaking ground on a ballroom, I said, well, F that.

He can't do that.

That's got to come down.

And so I've been saying this every week and every month for the last year.

He's always been

Tell me about what November is looking like to you based on all of these things we're talking about.

Well, it's it's looking like a huge wave.

And Ellie, there's one other big factor here that you talk a lot about.

And Jim talks a lot about the cruelty of what ICE is doing.

For over a year, the American people have been bombarded with videos.

I mean, average Americans who don't pay attention to politics like the three of us, they've been bombarded by videos of just abject cruelty on our streets.

Mass federal agents just grabbing 82-year-old Latino women out of daycare centers and grabbing contractors out of 7-Eleven parking lots.

You don't have to be a constitutional scholar to understand that if you want to do something in the White House, you actually have to go through Congress first.

where they're at their wit's end.

Yeah, and you know I love being with you.

You're my favorite talk radio personality host because you ask wonderful questions and you engage people.

I didn't think you'd have me on for this Lake Ontario crap because, like, I can't be funny about it.

Like, I want to tell Canada three things.

The guy in the White House is an utter madman, and this is only going to get worse.

Thing number two, most, most, most Americans completely disagree with him on his trade war with Canada and changing the name of Lake Ontario.

Have you been surprised how many Americans have had Canada put on the map for them in the daily news cycle conversation? Because, as I said earlier, usually something that's not a big deal but has seemed to be propelled to the front page.

I mean, I think you just really have to sit down, like you said, and just be like, this is it.

This is it, folks.

Yeah.

Yeah, Michael, and I think they'll do a lot of that in their ads, but I'd like to see Biden do that.

Now, I give Biden credit, Michael, in that he's right in leaning into this whole threat to democracy thing.

He leaned into it in 22, and it succeeded.

You know me, there's nothing more important than the shape of our democracy right now, and Biden should lean into that.

What's it been like personally for you?

Oh, God, yeah.

That right there, Eli, that was the most animating force in the Tea Party twelve, fourteen years ago.

I decided to run for Congress as a Tea Party guy because then I was so fucking pissed off at the debt then, and it was eleven trillion.

When, when I was sworn in as a member of Congress in January twenty thirteen, the debt was only thirteen trillion.

Now it's forty.

So generally, the Tea Party generally was about, "Oh my God, government's too big.

We're bankrupting future generations." That was it for most of us.

So what do you think about that as someone who-

So what has surprised you about this second term? I know it's been sort of a carnival of nightmares, but are there things that Trump has done or not done that really still have the capacity to shock you?

No.

And I get angry at people who do get shocked and surprised.

The one difference I see, though, from Trump 1 that I didn't expect to see, he doesn't give a you-know-what about anything.

Like he always cared about the economy.

He always cared about the jobs numbers.

He he doesn't give a damn about the economy.

What do you make of this big fight that's breaking out in the party between centrist groups like Third Way and progressives and Democratic socialists who are really starting to win some upset races like in Michigan and Maine?

But to me, it speaks to we kind of have an absentee landlord as president of the United States right now.

Hey, Jim, you covered him better than damn near anybody in his first term.

Thank you.

And he's you and I have talked about this before.

He's obviously older and different and messed up in the head.

But, like, he, like, openly doesn't give a flying fuck about anybody or anything but himself.

He's always been that way.

Trump can

Yeah.

But, like, he's like...

He, like, openly doesn't give a flying fuck about anybody or anything but himself.

He's always been that way.

But Jim, even, like, in the first term of- back in 2016 after he got elected, when you covered him, he seemed to, to, to be more cognizant and aware of things going on around him.

And even just politically he'd show he cares.

Yeah

...

Joe, if Trump is just going to ignore the blaring alarm bells on all of this polling on the economy, is he a liability for Republicans in November?

Yeah, but they have to go down with him.

He's the Titanic, and every single Republican has to go down with him.

Look, can we just lay out the broad context here? Donald Trump lies as he breathes.

I mean, every president spins the economy.

Trump out-and-out lies.

He lies about everything.

He can't think that this is a good, a good thing.

I'm sure

...

Stephanie Grisham dated him.

We don't know the timeline with the wife or anything, but-

I mean it.

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