Do you think it's about the company he keeps?

Well, uh, listen, it would be smart for Trump and Republicans to tie every Democrat running to DSA candidates.

W- paint them with the same brush, use their own words against them.

Instead, he's doing this, and I just don't think there are a lot of voters who still have this connection to the post-9/11, you know, radical Islamist boogeyman that he's, he's, he's using.

It didn't even work against Obama, um, all, all this many years ago.

Um, I think he's trying to scare the wrong voters.

Instead of scaring Republicans who are probably gonna vote for Republicans, scare the Democrats that voted for Haley Stevens, the Black Democrats, the moderate Democrats, the working class Democrats.

I mean, it plays to the, you know, labeling somebody as jihadist, it plays to sort of the war stereotypes of-

SE, how much do you anticipate, uh, their advocacy will actually influence Todd Blanche's fate?

I think it's part and parcel of the whole thing.

Look, I think, uh, earlier this week, I was on, uh, the Anderson show, and I think the latest we were hearing from Cornyn made it sound like he really wanted to get to a yes on Todd Blanche.

He really believed that he would get to a yes on Todd Blanche, and I think Thom Tillis did, too.

And up until last night in that meeting with Chuck Grassley, I think he thought we'd get there.

Now, hearing John Cornyn, um, and Thom Tillis talk to Manu this morning, and, and, and Manu's reporting, it sounds like they think this is gonna be a no, that, that the White House is gonna stonewall on this, um, and that they can't back down now from this gauntlet they've thrown down with this request in writing.

They can't just abandon it and say, "Okay, forget it.

I just don't understand why we don't have like 75% turnout when we're threatened by this kind of stuff.

Let me tease.

I have a long think piece coming out soon that I spent a considerable amount of time writing about.

Do you remember a group in the early 2000s called the Club for Growth? Yes.

It was a pro-growth, anti-tax, limited government group.

It was founded by Stephen Moore, who you may know.

And this young fiscal conservative was enamored of this, right? Oh my God, there's a club for me.

And I

S.E., let me, let me turn to you first.

Sure.

Well, thank you both, and, uh, for having me again.

It's always a pleasure to talk to, to Carnegie Connects, and great to be here with, with two colleagues.

Um- Right.

So I've been covering, uh, I've been covering politics for twenty years from a center-right position, so I, I can, Aaron, when we get there, talk to what's become of sort of the Republican Party and their complicated relationship, more complicated now than it has been in the past, relationship with Israel.

But I think some of the, the top lines for me, the things that have caught my attention just in recent history, I think would start with, with Charlottesville.

So how is the Republican dynamic changing?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But, but, I think this is a slice of a...

This is a political slice.

And that's okay.

That doesn't make it untrue.

And it's really important.

Or if Israel all of a sudden changed a lot of what they're doing, how would it change about the perception of what, like how much is just basically a cloak for just, we don't like Jews.

S.E., I mean, do you think, uh, throwing Haitians or Syrians out of the country polit- is at all politically problematic for the president? It doesn't feel like it.

Yeah.

Let m- let me say Karine makes all the right points, and they're, they're good points, and I'm, I'm incredibly, incredibly sensitive and sympathetic to this population of people, from Haitians to Syrians.

I covered the Syrian war for all of its years, and, uh, returning home for them would've meant certain death.

And so w- they were very, very lucky, uh, to have this program in place.

On the raw politics of it, though, this is not the loser that I think a lot of Democrats think it is, and that's because when Biden ended Trump's Remain in Mexico policy right when he came into office, a lot of people around the country felt the immediate effects of that.

A lot of them were positive.

the essay, does it make sense to you that he's dismissing it?

Mm-hmm.

But learning to live without anxiety has been really hard, and so I wanted to write this book so that people could catch this earlier than I did.

'Cause there were signs, and I ignored them completely, um, and pushed through, which is what a lot of folks like me do.

Um, and had I spotted some of these signs earlier, I could have kind of dismantled this, the, the scaffolding I had created around myself.

I could have done that earlier and easier, and I don't want someone to get to 40, you know, mid-40s, and have to undo 20, 25, 30 years of awful habits, um, 'cause it's much harder, you know-

Right

... everything.

You've handled everything, and you're doing a thousand things," and yep.

We, we do have audit trails.

We do, and actually, um, you know, contrary to what he's saying, contrary to what, um, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has said, election fraud is very easy to prove, and we've proven it before.

It's exceedingly rare.

It generally happens in local elections, not at the federal level, but it does happen, and we've proven it.

Where you can't prove it is where it doesn't exist, and it, uh, thus far has not existed in the California mayoral race.

Um, it didn't exist in 2020.

It didn't ...

What's your reaction to that, that they, if, that they could possibly have the votes to do that symbolically?

Mm.

And so I, uh, I went away to c- to, to summer college one year, uh, my, the summer before my junior and senior year in high school.

And it was at Cornell, where I would eventually go.

Um, and I met a boy there named Tim.

And he was from Ohio.

And we, you know, it was pu- young puppy love.

We were only there for six weeks.

Hm.

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Got it.

Prioritize us.

He was doing everything else.

Um, what are you expecting from him tomorrow night? Because obviously there's a lot of controversy because, let's just say, he- this is not the friendliest president when it comes to the Fourth Estate.

Yes.

Well, according to reporting, he's gonna dip in and out.

He just wants to come yell at us a bit and then leave, and he doesn't wanna sit for any of the awards celebrating journalists or the scholarship awards celebrating would, you know, uh, to-be journalists, um, or any of our finger-wagging, which is, which is nice.

But I think it's interesting that he wants to attend at all.

And you know him like I know him.

I think he really wants to be liked, and there's a part of him that is, like, annoyed that we don't love him, which isn't our job, of course.

What do you think?

Yeah.

For all of Trump's talk, we are becoming a weaker force and presence on the world stage, and that is shockingly by design it, it seems like.

What they would call America first, I would call a w- a weakening of American exceptionalism and might and power and influence and preparedness.

It's in the way he talks about the economy as well.

There's this economic warfare.

It's not boots on the ground, but it is warfare nonetheless, just to get back to the tariffs.

M- mucking about in other people's economies, which is what, what he's doing with threats and real tariffs, is an economic warfare.

... decided no, bringing Andrew Tate and Tristan Tate back to the States was an important negotiating thing that they needed to do with Romania, and, uh, now they're all kind of bro-ing out in Vegas.

Mm

... was interested in the news, um, at a very early age.

And so I don't think I would've put together that, uh, it would've led me here to a career in journalism and, and definitely not to a, a career on television.

But I think if I, if I looked back, there were inklings of who I would become.

I didn't know that I'd be a mother.

That's something that came to me much later in life.

I didn't know that I'd love being a mother.

Mm