Transcript of Ep. #748: Peter Berg, Ali Vitali, Coleman Hughes

Start the clock.

Hi, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. Hey. How you doing? All right. Oh, look at this. I know. Thank you very much. Well, what a great, uh, what a great—thank you.

My prediction that this will be a historic thumping.

That is bold, that it'll be historic.

Okay. Well, that's what I think it will be. It's going to be a classic historical ass-whooping.

I would bet the House on that.

The midterms are going to be a blowout. I think they're going to kick ass. They're going to kill it in a minute. Your party is going to get the dogshit kicked out of you.

This election is not about them. People are like, "We'll get to them in '28." This election is about Donald Trump, and we don't like him anymore. Well. I'll tell you something. Here's something I could not have predicted, which is Trump's reaction to the election. He said, "Congrat"—did you see this? He said, "Congratulations to the Democrats. They did a good job."

Yes.

Kind of fucking awesome. The system stood. The system stood in place. And also, we found out no place is solid red. You know, we got so used to that forever, writing off four-fifths of the country, solid blue, solid red. No. Texas?

Yes.

For Rep I'll tell you, for Republicans, losing Texas is like finding out your girlfriend is dating a lesbian. You knew they were unhappy. You didn't think they'd go that far. Texas went. South Carolina? Kansas. Kansas? Mississippi? Alaska? Well, we don't know about Alaska. They're still counting Dan Sullivan's. But that probably will be Democratic.

But I looked at his ass, and it might I said, "His ass? Shit. It's like it's like a pile of muscle."

Yeah. And he lost to Sherrod Brown, a Democrat with a flabby ass. That's politics. But, no, I mean, it was every demographic group, and some of them by huge. Hispanics. 29-point flip from the last election. And they say the experts say it's because of the fuel costs, grocery prices, and, oh, yeah, they didn't like being systematically hunted like animals. That's the other thing in the mix.

A little bit, because I was just listening to your predictions about the butt-ass whooping. How are my how are my New York Giants going to do? Can you can you tell me, like, how much money.

Well, they're my New York Giants, too.

Well, how are we going to do? You're on it.

Well, they're not going to go all the way.

Okay. So don't bet the farm.

I wouldn't bet anything.

Okay.

Uh, I'll you know, you can bet they'll do better than the Jets. Uh, okay. But, um, but your resume has some of my favorite movies of this century on it. I mean, like The Kingdom and that thing you did, American Prime Evil, I thought was one of the greatest Westerns I've ever or any kind of series I've ever seen. And, you know, your stuff, including the new one, of course, it is a lot about manly men doing manly things. And I'm very okay with that.

Mm-hmm.

You know, to manly men doing manly things. But you know what? Some of us watch the History Channel and retire of apologizing for it. You know, do you feel that backlash?

I mean, I don't really feel a backlash. I like, I like to refer to myself as a trauma filmmaker. Most of my films have a lot of trauma in them. The Kingdom, Friday Night Lights didn't have a very happy ending. They lost at the end. Lone Survivor wasn't an actual entirely uplifting film. Deepwater Horizon.

Right.

Patriot's Day about the marathon bombing. I'm kind of drawn to intense events because intense events just provide a lot of drama and emotion and opportunity for character. And I like to try and find the themes of love and brotherhood and compassion, kind of, that can come up from those kind of.

Well, this new one certainly has all of that in spades. I mean, Mosquito Bowl. Why don't you just tell them briefly the story? Because it is a true story.

Right. So Mosquito Bowl is a true story written by my cousin, Buzz Bissinger, who wrote the book Friday Night Lights. And when Buzz kind of gets on one, like he did with Friday Night Lights, he writes a book that you think is about football, but if you read the book, it's really about kind of life and family and community and love and hatred and all the things that make us human. And that's why I did, you know, responded to a lot of Friday Night Lights. Mosquito Bowl is a war story. It's about four All-American football, college football players who Pearl Harbor went down.

College players.

They were college.

Yeah.

Very young, incredible players. And it's the story of their experience in World War II in the Pacific Theater. Um, it's really meant to be a very strong anti-war film. Uh, I believe that you can admire and support troops. My dad was a Marine in Korea. I know your father was in the military.

Yeah, World War II.

And you can, in the case of Mosquito Bowl, you can very much support the men and women who served this country and at the same time really question our leaders and think about why we're asking them to go, where we're asking them to go, how the fuck we're going to deal with it when it's over. These are kind of important questions that the Mosquito Bowl sort of has on its mind underneath this pretty sad story of these young men.

Well, I mean. They made anti-war movies before Saving Private Ryan.

Right.

That was the first one I thought was a really effective one because it actually showed what war looks like. This one does, too, in the same way. There's a Storming the Beach scene. Any movie that is an anti-war movie should have a Storming the Beach scene because you just see this.

Carnage.

This the terror, how anyone could think under those conditions. And you have to.

People have asked me, you know, like, "Why would you do another war movie? Why a World War II film?" There have been some really fucking good war movies. And my answer was, "Yeah, but I never got to try one." And when I was researching the film, I went to Okinawa, which is where the final battle.

Yeah.

Of our film takes place. And the Marine Corps gave me some historians, and they toured me the entire island from where it started to where it ended, to where those suicide cliffs were that women were throwing themselves off of and their children. And it was harrowing. And then the Marines took me back to their current base. And I didn't realize that we have hundreds of thousands of military on Okinawa right now. We have warships and attack aircraft and tens of thousands of Marines. And I met with the general of the base that they were touring me, and I said, "Sir, can I ask you a question?"

Well.

So that was part of my kind of.

The other thing that really resonated with me with what's going on now is there is a little brief conversation that two of the guys have when they're over there.

Yes.

And it's about oil. One of them is like, "Why are we here? Why did this war start?" And the other guy kind of hips him, "Well, you know what? We cut off Japan's oil."

Correct.

It's always about oil.

Isn't that crazy?

It's always about oil and Jews. Everything. Those are the two things that always keep coming up. I don't know how I mean, I had to be honest with myself when I started researching it. And I'd be curious how many people in this room are really clear on why what happened that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor. And I'm like, "Well, the Japs attacked us. The Japanese, you know, dry-goached us. They blindsided us." I'm like, in my research, well, why? What was happening? And then I realized, well, Japan didn't have any oil.

Horrible, horrible things.

Japanese were as brutal as anybody. I mean, I've heard people say.

Hitler got his playbook.

You know, wars happen because, you know, men just like to fight. That's not true. I mean, sometimes they do, and men do like to fight. But wars happen because men have to fight.

Yes.

And this war had to be fought.

Yes, it did.

It must be a little easier making a war with this kind of carnage when you know it was a just war.

I can't say it's easier. I mean, when I really looked at the carnage, I looked at the fact that and I don't mean to get too heavy on a show that's so funny, and you're one of the funniest people I know.

Oh, I'll make up for it later.

All right. Good.

I'll get them back. Don't worry.

So, sorry. Can you guys indulge me a little bit?

Yeah.

Indulge me a little bit, right? 75 million people were killed globally in World War II on this planet. Right? 75 million people were killed globally. Then you look at World War I, 18 million people were killed. So you go 18 million, 75 million. I don't want there to be a World War III. I truly do not want that for my children, for everybody's children. And, um, so, you know, yes, World War II, we needed to fight that war, but we really need diplomats.

Yeah, but when all that.

You need peacemakers.

But some yeah, I know, but.

We do. No, but we do. We do.

Yeah. Okay, but nobody knows better than you. That's kind of bullshit because it doesn't work when one side of the table doesn't want peace. And there are plenty of people who have taken over countries in this world, and they don't want peace. And then all that list of things you said that are lovely.

Correct.

It doesn't work. And that's when you call in the Marines.

Well, we need yes, it is. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

Yes.

We 100% need Marines.

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, my father, who I love very much most of the time, he's my father's buried in Arlington. And during the making of this film, I would go down there and have these conversations with him, which were great conversations because he had to shut up and listen to me. And I could tell him about, you know, "Dad, the world is really fucked up, right? There are some real problems, and there are some horrible actors out there. And we do need Marines, and we do need Delta and Special Forces."

Yeah, we just don't want to use them when we don't have to.

No, no.

Okay. Well.

That's my point.

All right. Well, we agree. And I think you the next movie, I think you should make a romantic comedy.

I'll try.

Would you do that?

I'll try.

Okay. All right.

Thank you very much.

You're a part of it.

It's a terrific movie.

Thank you.

Everybody should see it.

Thank you.

All right. Let's meet our panel.

Hey, how are you? Okay, she is in us now, senior political reporter and the host of Way Too Early, Ali Vitali. Great to have you here with us for the first time. And he's the host of the Conversations with Coleman podcast and a contributor to The Free Press. Coleman Hughes, back with us. All right. Oh, my gosh. I want to get everybody's takeaways. Is this such a fun show always after an election? Because the deck gets shuffled. Things are new. New cast of characters.

So look, I think we all have a little bit of recency bias, right? Because when you say these places have been solid red, since when, right? For a couple decades. Okay, that's a good amount of time, but like.

Kansas?

Let's like zoom out.

All the plain states.

Let's actually zoom out a little bit more and like look at this historically. Basically, all Black people used to vote Republican, like in the 1930s.

Correct.

That was a pretty big change. It happened in a couple decades.

That was, yes.

As late as the 1980s and '90s, you could be a Southern American Democrat. There were Southern conservative Democrats that would never dream of voting Republican.

And Northern Republican Liberals.

In my lifetime, when I was a baby.

Yeah.

So, you know, it's not quite as, you know, we're living through a historic moment, right? Historians are going to write about this as a major tectonic shift in the geopolitical structure of our party, two-party system. It's going to be similar to, you know, talking about how Black people used to vote Republican, now we vote Democrat. It's going to be one of those things. Republicans are going to get a signal. They're either going to respond to it and shift, pivot towards the center, pivot away from extremely corrupt candidates, pivot away from whatever candidate is loyal to Trump is the one we're running, pivot away from all this nonsense.

I mean, you're right, I think, to talk to the fact that some of these places that ended up flipping, the Rio Grande Valley, for example, in Texas, so crucial to Talarico and Inocosa being able to flip it together, right? There is Democratic DNA in some of these places. I do think other of these places, though, a place like Kansas, a place like Mississippi, I mean, even my most optimistic Democratic sources were never trying to sell me on the idea that these were going to flip and that Chuck Schumer and Democrats would have a 54, 55, potentially 56-seat majority.

And they had consequences. It was a total backfire because they gerrymandered it, thinking they were going to get 10 to 4, Republican to Democrat, and they got the exact opposite.

Yeah.

To me, this is another great thing about what happened this week. Trust restored. People think, "Oh, voting does matter."

Yeah.

They do count it.

Yeah.

And it does make it I mean, we almost lost that. And when you think about all the things that people were so worried about that were going to fuck up this election, the Musk money, fucking with mail-in votings, gerrymandering, closing polling places, the intimidation outside polling places, the Republicans did all that. Democrats found one other guy named Dan Sullivan. That was their cheat. But all that didn't make any difference.

Yeah.

I mean, you got a little shout-out to the Founding Fathers. I know they're terrible, awful Caucasians, but I mean, they somehow this system, which I had much less faith in 10 years ago when Trump was first there.

Well, not only a shout-out to the Founding Fathers, but also a bit of a poo-poo on the media that is constantly trying to terrify us in order to get us to click on whatever the latest yes, threat to democracy. Okay, challenge, right? But when you see that there's a challenge to democracy, that doesn't mean democracy's over. That doesn't mean it's Weimar Germany, right? And a lot of us have been taken in by this over the past few years. And what's good about this election is that actually the system works.

Except for the fact that it's beautiful that the system works. I cover campaigns for a living because there is something so amazing about watching democracy in action, and I love when voters teach us something. And also, after January 6, 2021, I do not think that we can take our democracy for granted. It's not fearmongering. It's listening to what the then-outgoing, now-current president of the United States said and did and reacting to that in a serious way that doesn't tell people, "Be afraid to vote."

The problem is, when you go too far with that, it's always been a Republic if you can keep it. So vigilance has always been necessary. But when you go too far and people lose faith in the system, they get seduced by the extremists. And there's certain extremists on the left, especially the DSA, that if you go to their website, they say, "We need to abolish the Senate. Democracy has failed."

There are people on the left.

They're opposing the Constitution, right?

There are people on the left, I agree with you, who are threatened by progress. You'd think they would they're progressives. You'd think they would like it. No, because it's like, no, they have to be there's always more work to be done. And there is always more work to be done. But they don't acknowledge the work that is. They don't acknowledge where we are. Let me tell you where we are. First Black woman governor.

Yes.

First.

Anywhere.

Anywhere. First Black Republican governor, first Muslim senator, first gay male senator, openly. Plainly, openly. I'm not naming names. I'm just saying openly. The 10 most populous states, not one of them has a governor who's a white Christian man.

It's money.

And you took it out of my pocket. Bye-bye.

It's called they let them eat cake, right? And I think this public, every time I go out and talk to voters, they are talking about on data centers. The reporting that I did there was, "Why hasn't anyone checked in with me? Asked if they could put this in my community?" There was a deep feeling that these systems don't work. And so I think that's also part of why this wave was so big. Yes, it was completely a referendum on Trump. This is consequences of your actions. Tariffs hitting Michigan, the anti-Canada sentiment in New York and Michigan as well. Diesel costs for farmers everywhere from Iowa to Kansas.

People used to say all the time, you know, I don't like his policy, Donald Trump. I mean, his personality. But I like his policies. Nobody says that now.

Well, what was the policy?

Nobody says that now.

Right. Like, what was the crowning policy of the last two years for Republicans who controlled both sides of Congress and the White House? I covered it, and the big takeaway was getting rid of healthcare subsidies that people needed to stay on healthcare, cutting SNAP, and making it more difficult for Americans to receive things that help them with safety nets in this country.

So we would agree that more Trump 2028 is not a winning slogan, right? More MAGA. Okay, so if the Republicans I think they already know that. We're only three days after. I think they already know that. So are they liberated now from MAGA? Because to me, the litmus test for them is, are you going to go back to conceding elections?

Right.

I see Ron DeSantis is out there. I said some nice things about Ron DeSantis. I thought he did something good. I thought he handled the COVID thing better than they did in lots of places. He's not an idiot at all.

No.

But he did campaign for election deniers a few years ago. Okay, to me, that's my red line.

Yeah.

Trump used to say about immigration, "If we don't fix this, we don't have a country." Me, my we don't have a country is this, elections. We don't have to go back to 2020, but you can't be the guy who is always how they always were with Trump. We know he's watching, and we have to pretend 2020 is at best, well, we don't know. They got to get over that or else my vote is not in play for them.

MAGA has always been held together simply by Trump's, you know, if you want to call it charisma, you can. To his base, it's charisma, certainly.

Sure.

And when he's gone, when he look, there's a reason he won twice, right? I'm just trying to explain it. When he's gone, there is no actual philosophy there outside of Trump's hold over these people. So what are the what are Republicans going to do, right? JD Vance, I think he's trying to take a lifeboat off of this Titanic by appealing to the anti-Semitic wing of the party. And I don't know if that lifeboat is big enough to sustain him. I don't think it is. But this is a it's going to be a remarkable election because both sides are up for grabs.

I think Vance is toast.

I think the only person.

All right.

I think the only person potentially who had a worse night than Trump on Tuesday was JD Vance because he is the guy who will always be the second part of the bumper sticker that says Trump Vance. And you can never get enough distance if you're trying to run for president on your own from that space. And so I think, yes, pay attention to DeSantis. You pay attention to someone like Senator Ted Cruz, who when I interviewed him a few months ago, I knew you just had him here as well.

Yeah.

He's clearly running for president. And it's clear that there is going to be a robust discussion for what it means to be a Republican in the post-Trump era. And I put an asterisk on post-Trump, right? Because I don't know that the party is there. Because I watched the time after January 6 where all of them were done and they were disgusted. And then all of a sudden, a few weeks later, Kevin McCarthy was down at Mar-a-Lago with a thumbs up. And so I was even talking to a Republican in the Senate recently who said, "I'm done. I'm not listening to anything he says anymore." And I said, "Is that true?" And they said, "Yeah, fine."

No, you're going to have to tap dance like they did with Reagan for a while. You know, he was the great forefather of the party, the great patriarch that we and, you know, now does anybody give a shit about Reagan? No. Over time, it goes away. But yes, you're going to have to do that little dance. He did great things. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But let's.

Okay, he closed the border. Yes, he did. You know, he did some accomplishments.

Let's remember how Trump got his mojo back the first time, too, because the crucial piece of the story is he was losing in the polls to Ron DeSantis until when? Until the first indictment came and the second indictment came.

Oh, yeah.

And then he started going up and up and up as the Republican Party rallied around the candidate they viewed as persecuted. That's a very important lesson for Democrats to learn right now. Just you have a mandate for something, for sure, but it's not for political prosecutions. It's for non-crazy politicians.

All right, let's talk about that in a minute. But first off, there is other news, other important news that happens not all about politics. Disney has been in the news this year. I take no joy in this just because they fired me once. I could not have now, this twice this has happened. In May, 27 cruise ship workers of the Disney line were arrested for child porn. Yeah, I know.

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the danger for Democrats is that they take this massive success as a sign that they can just go all the way. They can run hyper-progressive candidates. The country is so much on their side that they can go as extreme as they want. But actually, if you look at the results here, the moderate Democrats did better than the DSA-backed progressive candidates across the board, right? Al-Sayed in Michigan did significantly worse than most of the moderate Democrats in that state, right? And that's just one example. This was a pattern we saw.

And he's a guy who says, "I'm not a Democratic socialist." He's endorsed by them, but he says he's not. And on most issues, he's not as far left as they are. His main issue is Israel.

Right.

And of course, that to me is going to be the fly in the white mid for the Democrats. I mean, a lot of their candidates, prospective candidates are Jewish. It's funny. I was out last night briefly playing a little hooky for somebody's birthday party before a night before the show. But people wanted to talk about the election. And what do you think? It's interesting, the name that was on everybody's lips, this is only two days after the election, Jon Ossoff. See a murmur went through the crowd.

Yeah.

That's a pretty big number for a Democrat. And the other guy we just had here, Andy Beshear, he's the other guy who wins big in a red state. This is not good news for somebody like Gavin Newsom.

We'll see.

Who has the California baggage, right?

But we don't know, right? I think about everyone looks at the field as being open. We haven't had a truly open field on both sides in 10 years. It is going to be fascinating to see how these parties sort through themselves for someone like me who is just a total nerd for how all of this plays out. I think for Democrats, though, what I have heard from Democrats in Washington who are parsing through this, everyone is looking for a tea leaf for the kind of candidate that they want to see. They sound a bit Oprah-esque at this point. Electability in every paradigm that you can find it. They look at an Al-Sayed and they say, "See, a progressive can win in a swing state."

Yeah. I like what Rahm Emanuel said. What Rahm Emanuel said is we don't need impeachment 2.0. We need ethics investigations, right?

Yes.

And I think that's a responsible way to go.

Well, of course, because impeachment, they tried it twice. If you're talking about with Trump, even with how many senators are they going to have at best? 56?

Yes.

How many do you need to convict?

60.

67? No, to convict.

Oh, you're right. Two-thirds.

Two-thirds. You're never going to get that. They're not going to do that. He is still the patriarch of the party. He's still the Abraham of this desert. Okay, that's not going to can I quote just apropos of this, the new Texas governor, and I'm still learning to pronounce her name? And it's not Hinojosa?

Hinojosa. You were right.

Hinojosa.

Yeah.

No H.

Yeah, silent H.

Okay. Two days before the election, she said, "My pronouns are mom, Texan, and soon-to-be-governor." More of that.

Yeah.

We need more of that. And also, Josh Turick, is he the first openly gay senator?

That's Chris Pappas.

Okay. Sorry, Josh. Or if you like it, Josh. It's wonderful. Whatever you want to do, Josh. He said, "He opposes males competing in female sports. I am against taxpayers paying for sex changes, too." And I think this is so important. Democratic special interest groups. And of course, he's already gotten criticism from the LGBT community and other people. Democratic special interest groups, they're the biggest Karens in the world. They're just always complaining to management.

Even worse than that. And no one's been talking about this is Adam Hamowe from my home state of New Jersey. I'm from District 11. He just won District 12. And there's a great piece in The Atlantic about how he was hanging out with the blind Sheikh in the '90s. He was in the blind Sheikh's posse who was convicted of attempting to blow up the World Trade Center, the Holland Tunnel, Lincoln Tunnel, UN building, and was a jihadist preacher. And he was driving around with this guy on cross-country trips for 12 hours. And he's never really given a good account of what he believed then.

It's interesting that it's only three days after and we're hardly talking about Trump already. I mean, it's a little weird that he's still there. He just had this giant rebuke. Now he's literally a lame duck. It's like trying to cancel your subscription, but you're still on the plan for another year. But, you know, he's been amazingly humble, I thought.

You're tired of winning.

You know? And he just but here's he said, "When you say my legacy, I'll be a block. I'll end up being a blocker. I'll block all their bad stuff for two years. It won't be the same, but I'll be a blocker." He said block four times in two sentences. I think he wants to block. But he also said, "We're going to work with the Democrats. They have already called." And they well, we all know that that's probably not true. But even if he thinks it, they have already called and they want to work with me.

But it tells us everything about both the challenge for Democrats, certainly, in having the authentic reactions that, frankly, their base very much wants them to have. The idea of compromise, I think, is going to be really difficult to sell a base that only wants to hear about fight and accountability. I do think that's a central tension point. But this to me, in Trump's very uncharacteristic quiet after such a shellacking in an election for a man who never wants to be called a loser ever, the idea that he's sticking by some of these candidates, I mean, it's all very atypical from the man that I've covered up close for a decade.

Yes.

And he's also the architect of the immigration and deportation plan that was maybe not the top issue because that was affordability. But you look at these voter polls and it's right up there in the top three. When I was texting Republicans before I came on this show, many of them who used to work for Trump said to me, "What are we thinking putting in the guy who was the central cause of the thing we got repudiated over at the polls in as the guy who's running the show now?" But if that's what the president's doing, it tells us everything about where we're going in the lame duck.

Well, I think your point, I think, is so right about their base liking the conflict.

Yeah.

I think secretly, not the politicians in the Republican Party, but the people on the podcast and so forth, they love this. They like being out of power. It's so much more fun. You can bitch about everything. Everything now is the Democrats' fault. Every conspiracy theory takes on new life because you're not in power. They secretly kind of love. All right, thank you, guys. It is time for new rules, everybody. Okay.

We want deal.

Exactly, Tarzan. We want deal. But that's hard to get if your political philosophy is also.

Shove it up their ass.

Yeah. Well, you know, after this week, I think the shove it up your ass option is off the table. And wait a second. While the Democratic politicians are generally too polite to ever say out loud, shove it up your ass, the way America has been governed in recent decades is exactly that. One party wins, the other gets drunk with power, kowtows to their fringe, and shoves their ideological agenda up our asses when all we want is to be governed effectively.

Thank you, guys. That was fun.