Now, if we're going to distill down just a few races to keep our eye on on Tuesday, which are the ones that you think are going to become the most important? Obviously, there's a few we've been talking about a lot, maybe some dark horses as well.

Yeah, I mean, if we start by just kind of bracketing off Michigan and Texas, the Tallarico-Paxton and Mike Rogers-Abdul El-Sayed races, which are obviously the ones that have taken up the most oxygen and I think the most money officially.

If not, then it certainly feels that way.

I think, I mean...

I'll go back to Maine.

I think, you know, I do personally think that Susan Collins is going to pull it out.

That's what Susan Collins does.

Do you think that Trump's efforts will turn the tide or should Republicans still be bracing for a bloodbath on Tuesday?

But, I mean, isn't it, if there is a blue tsunami and it wipes out a lot of these Republican-held Senate seats, who's going to be, who's going to take the blame for that? Who's going to take the blame and who's going to try to who's going to be

blamed? I think different things.

I think Blair takes a lot of the blame.

I think Tim Scott probably takes a lot of it because he's actually probably the best scapegoat or kind of sacrificial lamb because he can take the blame and even resign as chairman of the NRC, still be a senator.

But ultimately, I think the blame will.

I don't want to say this.

I was about to say that I ultimately think the blame lies with Trump.

Tim, do you think it's going to hurt her?

Mm

... because he can't stop, right? That part of the base that's really animated by this, the people who reelected him in a large part because of his promises on the border.

If you stop, you're gonna alienate them.

If you keep going, you're gonna alienate perhaps the people who are tiring of seeing how the sausage gets made.

In my...

I think that it's really just a matter of going from securing the border to deportations, right? One of them, it's, it's static, it's easy, pe- people can rationalize it more, right? You close the border, people can't come in.

But again, a lot of people outside that hard line base, the actual taking people-

Mm.

What does it come down to in terms of who is responsible and the personal responsibility? And where do we get to a point where college is now just a place where you go to party and you are drinking too much and doing drugs and that's just normal rather than the opposite?

Yeah, I mean, I think obviously there's a supply issue here, right? The drugs that are available are more likely to be poisoned than not.

There is, of course, colleges and parents, as you said, have a responsibility to inculcate their kids and their students against this.

But ultimately, it comes down to the students because.

There's something going on here.

And I don't know if we can blame it on Gen Z and the fact that they had a stunted beginning of their social life, or maybe it's just the way that things change.

But, you know, even as the doctor said 10 years ago, right, maybe, you know, there was alcohol, there was marijuana, maybe there were things like cocaine.

Does there need to be more regulation on these things, or does there need to be more education? Because we've been regulating drugs since the 70s.

What is he signaling and how close are we to another major escalation?

It's a great question.

And, you know, it's fascinating because the president made such a point of saying pretty much to anyone who would listen that he was not racing to wrap the war on Iran before the midterms.

Right.

He was not thinking of or not that he wasn't thinking of, but he was not going to adjudicate the war on Iran based on a domestic political calculus.

And I think that what we've seen is that he really stuck to that.

But now we're just getting to a point where.

So it doesn't appear that there is a viable diplomatic path forward.

Tim Rice, is there any lesson here to this for real people or the campaign, or is it just typical? I would say he's the only president to do it, but particularly sort of brazenly ridiculous in saying today we never considered it when he and others in the administration have said they were looking at it.

Yeah, it's typical Trump.

I think that to the extent that there's a lesson for anybody, I think it's a lesson for Republicans who are running for reelection, who are up in November, or Republicans who are planning to run at any point in the next two to four years.

And I think that this is just the latest thing that should have, in my opinion, and is likely going to have, it's going to inspire Republicans to reelect.

to run away from the president on certain things.

We already saw Mike Rogers in Michigan distancing himself from Trump on the war in Iran.

A lot of the Midwestern Republicans are coming out and criticizing the White House's failure to handle the affordability crisis and gas prices.

And we're three bottles of Merlot in at this point.

Do you feel that lyricists are underappreciated geniuses?

Of course.

[laughs] I think it's interesting that, yes, there is a difference, I think, between the public's thoughts about musicals, about the, the...

They, they have a different view of musicians to lyricists.

I mean, obviously, they might have a view and say, "Well, these words are brilliant.

These words are awful." Um, but they, they kind of think, everybody thinks that there's something about musicians or composers that is special.

They're doing something that most people can't do, or they're wrong, 'cause anybody can write a tune, just like anybody can write a word or wr- or write...

So your friend John Black says you can say more in three lines of a good lyric than you can say in any novel or film.

What's behind all this?

Yeah.

So I think there are a couple of things that are important to note.

The first is and you sort of alluded to this in your in your opening there, Tony, that the president sees this pretty solely in terms of beating China or if not solely in terms of beating China, then beating China and making America the technological leader of the world or protecting its status as the technological leader in the world.

Right.

He sees AI as something to commodify, something to profit off of, something a tool to be used, which, of course, in many ways it is.

That puts him at crosshairs occasionally with many folks in his own party who feel like some odd 80% of the American people that AI has accelerated too fast and is a danger to civilization.

I I think there's a way to thread the needle here to not slow down, as the president said, he doesn't want China to overtake us in the development of AI, a way to slow it down, but to put in some guardrails to keep it from going over the edge.

But then I said to myself, how many people saw it?

Right.

Yeah, so it's a great point, and I'm going to answer the actual substantive question that you're getting at.

But first, just to give credit to my reporters, I did have folks there who were not having fun with us.

I didn't do any real reporting, but there were folks on the ground reporting.

And we also made the decision to have our folks in DC cover from abroad, right? So we did have a live blog going.

But I understand that's not really what you're asking.

Are the Republican candidates making a compelling case?

right the head of anthropic is currently live on cnn so we'll monitor that and see what he says tim i'll tell you one of my dad's favorite jokes one of his best jokes and it's applicable here there are only two people who understand how the international economic system work and unfortunately they disagree it's the same with this like almost nobody understands this and and when you listen to their solutions they're in the ballpark but as we say here often uh the devil's in the pudding uh trying to figure out what to actually do so how would you summarize where we are tim

then Matt's exactly right.

And I think that we're going to, I don't think it's possible to overstate the impact of Amaday's essay and the kind of follow-on effects.

I do think that this has sort of been bubbling at the surface, but again, we saw, you know, it's one of these issues that people would freak out and then someone would kind of mollify or, you know, it was getting conflated with data centers, which were then getting conflated with flock cameras, which are are three distinct things, one more related than the other.

But so I think this is like, finally, we're going to have the conversation of, is this good? Is this an existential threat? Akin to the way that we had the conversation about nuclear weapons.

the free market guy in me is incapable of not seeing this a little bit as an attempt at regulatory capture, right? These guys say, well, now we have, we're the big three or four and we've got the market cap.

And so let's please regulate us, Washington, please come regulate us.

president, he needs to figure that

Tim Rice, how big a deal is it going to be that some Democrats will end up opposing him, elite Democrats and grassroots Democrats?

I think it'll...

It might turn the election, but I don't think it'll be that big of a deal beyond it.

I think that this is sort of the direction that the party is headed in one way or the other.

Um, and I don't think that f- at this point, for instance, uh, you know, I think grassroots voters jumping ship or not voting, uh, especially Mark, as you alluded to earlier, if they just stay home instead of voting for Mike Rogers, I think that's, you know, can get written off as a turnout issue in Michigan, you know, uh, all the platitudes.

Uh, and I think that at this point, you know, the, the, the, um, criticisms of folks like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, uh, are not carrying water.

Um, and that they're a little bit in a kind of come along to get along mode.

Yeah, yeah

uh you know the cover-up is always worse than the original sin you know the old beginning you know the rat the the the bugging the bribing this was a different age right where you know jfk was you know arguably elected on false premises uh in for what was going on in chicago vote stuffing vote validating affecting both sides and now with the benefit of 50 years of hindsight actually it looked us look

On a small front.

Yeah, what the vice president said was that if Watergate happened today, it would have been a 12-minute news cycle.

I actually think he's wrong.

I think what you said is more correct, which is that if Watergate happened today, we never would have stopped talking about it in the same way the Democrats are still talking about the Russia collusion or, you know, any of the other... things that they frequently rag on Trump about that have sort of lost gas or been disproven.

But I think you're right that had it happened today, Nixon, like Trump does, would have been able to withstand it.

Because to your point, right, Nixon, and I think there's an argument to be made that Nixon wasn't even as culpable in the cover-up or in the break-in as the official narrative painted him.

I discounted the stories in the press that appeared to implicate members of my administration or other officials of the campaign committee.

Jim?

I, I agree completely, uh, with, with, with both of you.

And Mark, you know, a- as I s- as you said earlier, as, and I was...

I think that this is one of the ways where she is underrated.

She is a killer on the campaign trail.

She will, like, ele- electioneering or campaigning, politicking, whatever you wanna call it, is an area where, again, p- partially because of the ways in which, you know, people kind of overplay her as this moderate or, you know, whatever they see in her, what they want to criticize about the Republican Party, uh, but then when it gets down to it, she can pull it out.

I think she was gonna pull it out over Grand Platner, but it would've been closer.

Right.

... home country to be tried, or they're gonna, they're gonna say, "Yeah, go ahead and try him."

Or even think about it in, like, a less grandiose way.

Like, if, you know, if, if a, if a, you know, some of the soccer hooligans who have been over for the World Cup, if they, you know, beat someone to death in a bar after, right? We're not gonna...

That, we're gonna throw them in jail.

Or to your point, we're gonna send them back to the United Kingdom to, to face extradition.

But in that sense, right, subject to the jurisdiction thereof means you don't get to break our laws 'cause you're not a citizen.

It means that we're gonna throw you in jail and then send you back to your country.

SCOTUS is protecting the Democratic Party explicitly.

Alito's like... our enemies can freaking use this and

abuse us what the hell are you talking about i think the striking thing for thomas too and like why i mean because again and he really based it on i mean again it is factually correct but he really leaned in on this sort of original intent of this amendment and i think again as the grandson of freed slaves right like our great-grandson whatever it was your grandfather was a sharecropper for sure like this is much like his views on affirmative action right like he's It's not just that this is bad for the country, but it's that as the person who's kind of, as the one, or I guess now the one of two black justices, I was the one that this was for.

This wasn't for the Guatemalan anchor babies.

in

grand historical terms, right? When he makes these decisions, he's not thinking about the decision.

He's thinking about the John Roberts legacy, the legacy of the Roberts court.

John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh and probably Neil Gorsuch are going to be on the court longer than John Roberts, longer than Clarence Thomas, longer than Sam Alito.

So I like that they are Not so immediately partisan.

How much do you credit that theory that the losers in the Supreme Court are the winners politically in the midterms?

I think that's probably right.

I think with all big cases like this, especially, again, coming on the heels of a midterm election cycle, that we can definitely expect that.

The birthright citizenship case, absolutely.

I take that point hands down, although it's kind of funny that This is it's funny to me that this has become this tentpole issue for the Republican Party, because as the majority, as the court's ruling says, and as I think even conservative defenders of birthright citizenship have pointed out, this has been the pretty standard ruling.

or a reading of that line in the Constitution since the amendment was ratified.

And with due respect to my buddies at the Claremont Institute, who were the ones who really kind of pushed this novel reading of birthright citizenship, it's amazing how quickly the president and his team have picked that up and how far it's gotten so quickly.

What do they like? I think it's

... say goodbye to the people over 50 and bring in the people under 35?

I mean, look, with all due respect, it's the people of all age groups, right? I think that sometimes that, that is important.

And I, I think though in this instance, you really see, um, the benefit of youth.

Not just youth as youth, right, or young people because they're young and because they're hip.

But in this instance, right, the fact that these guys are young, they're all under 35, and they have this knowledge of social media and this familiarity with Gen Z, that, that was not-- That really actually allowed them to make connections that people might otherwise not have thought.

And again, it's not to blame them, right? I mean, who, who before this would've thought that presidential libraries could become online phenomena, right? They pretty much exist for, you know, history, history nerds and, and, and, and dads.

You know, uh, both of, both of which things I am, so I don't say that with judgment.

And a bunch of the people that were in on getting Nixon are out there-- They're very panicked by this 'cause they reali- they kinda lost the long game, haven't they, Tim?

Mm.

Like, really? You're gonna turn around now after all the support that we've gi- co- have given and continue to give, you know, this alliance.

Obviously, President Trump, throughout this term, post-October 7th with Iran, but even going back to his first term, right? Moving the embassy to Jerusalem, he was a very, you know, pro- Israel president, one of the most pro-Israel presidents that we've ever had.

But this is all sort of in the context of this fascinating turn that the White House is taking, and has started to take in the past couple of days, which is not diverging from Israel, but really asserting the fact that the United States has its own interest in this.

Yeah.

I think, again, it's, it's very...

They're, they're walking a narrow line, but I think they're threading the needle right of saying, "We're still your strongest ally, and we're still here for you.

But, like, just as they want to eliminate you, they also want to eliminate us.

These are the guys that have been lying for 47 years.

No, that's – so two very good points there.

One, I should clarify.

When I say consistent, I didn't mean consistent in that sense because, of course, you're right.

I do mean the president has consistently beaten the drum of – from before he was even president, he's been saying the one thing we cannot afford is a nuclear Iran.

Now, yes, obviously then in the interim he's sort of changed what's that look like and what other things are we going to tack on, whether, again, carrots or sticks.

But he has he does always return to that central message.

hitting their

Describe it in the context so far as you can of what it is like and why it is significant that Graham Plattner may have been on this particular site.

Sure, yeah, and thanks for having me.

Really, really glad to be here.

So Kik is...

It describes itself as an anonymous messaging app, right? The idea is you can go on, you put in, you know, either an alias or I, I, I suppose, you know, however much information you want, and you can find other people, message other people.

I think it-- E- essentially, think of it like a chat room, right? Like an old AOL chat room.

Uh, you know, you can, you can message people whose contacts you have and you know are on there, but you can also just go on and join live streams or groups or kind of, you know, connect with random people based on common interests or, you know, whatever you're looking for.

Do we have any idea how recently he might have used that profile and/or whether we think the people that he was sexting with were likely to have come from this profile? What is the story there so far as we can tell?

Describe it in the context so far as you can of what it is like and why it is significant that Graham Plattner may have been on this particular site.

Sure.

Yeah.

And thanks for having me.

Really, really glad to be here.

So Kik is...

It describes itself as an anonymous messaging app, right? The idea is you can go on, you put in, you know, either an alias or I, I, I suppose, you know, however much information you want, and you can find other people, message other people.

Do we have any idea how recently he might have used that profile and/or whether we think the people that he was sexting with were likely to have come from this profile? What is the story there so far as we can tell?

Yeah.

Um, that came with my store that I purchased in 1995, '6.

Um, I bought a, I bought a camera store, and like most camera stores of the time, there's a window sill in the front and there's some old cameras to get your attention.

So when I bought the store, I said, "Well, what about the old cameras?" They go, "Please, just take them.

We're done." The family didn't wanna have the store anymore, "Just leave them." Like, that's really cool.

There's a Yashica there.

There was, there's a...

[laughs]

[laughs]

The project came from 2020... 2016 is the first time I came up with this project, and, um, it, it came out of politics.

It, it originally was the whole base of me going on a rant, um, with just some choices that my country has made and, and I said, "You know what? There's gotta be a middle.

You know, we, we have too much left and we have too much right.

I wanna live in the middle.

I wanna find more people in the middle.

Where's the middle?" And I literally, where's the middle? And then Google, where's the middle? And I find out the middle is a place called Kingsley, Kansas.

Mm

What are we hearing on that front? And do you expect President Trump to make that the main thrust of, "Hey, we had to go do this, or else we were going to get hit," beyond just saying, "Well, it's good for the Iranian people to topple this regime"?

I think there's, there's a good chance, I mean, you know, one, one never really knows what the President's gonna say.

I, I think if I were the President's advisors, if I'm g- Caroline Levin or Marco Rubio or Susie Wiles, uh, I would be telling the President to actually take a different tact.

Because again, that, as you mentioned at the top of the show, that does sort of...

People are immediately gonna start thinking about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bush administration.

All of a sudden, disentanglement becomes 2003, and everyone's minds are made up.

What I think the President could do instead, and what I, I do think he will likely do, is go back to the same posture that he usually takes after foreign entanglements, particularly successful ones, which is talking and describing himself as the president of peace.

How does that change things?

What are we hearing on that front? And do you expect President Trump to make that the main thrust of, "Hey, we had to go do this, or else we were going to get hit," beyond just saying, "Well, it's good for the Iranian people to topple this regime"?

I think there's, there's a good chance of it.

You know, one, one never really knows what the president's gonna say.

I, I think if I were the president's advisors, if I'm g- Caroline Levin or Marco Rubio or Susie Wiles, uh, I would be telling the president to actually take a different tact because, again, that, as you mentioned at the top of the show, that does sort of...

People are immediately gonna start thinking about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bush administration.

All of a sudden, disentanglement becomes 2003, and everyone's minds are made up.

What I think the president could do instead, and what I, I do think he will likely do, is go back to the same posture that he usually takes after foreign entanglements, particularly successful ones, which is talking and describing himself as the president of peace.

How does that change things?