Transcript of Trump is Gone as White House Faces Republican Wrath!

One week after a blue tsunami swept across America, the White House is effectively paralyzed. The Speaker of the House is blaming voters, Trump is questioning an election he said he'd accept, his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing an impeachment vote in just 2 days. Republican leaders don't have a plan to stop it. Some Republicans are even begging Trump to fire Hegseth before Democrats ever get the chance. The party that ran Washington one week ago now can't agree on what happened, who to blame, or what to do next. And while the future is even worse for Republicans on Capitol Hill right now, because Democrats say full steam ahead for redistricting heading into 2027, to pick up even more seats in the House of Representatives in their effort to get a veto-proof majority.

Mr. Speaker, should the president course correct after Tuesday?

Course correct?

You mean—

Yeah, I mean, change—change course. You know, he named Stephen Miller, he's sticking by Pete Hegseth, should he change his approach in any way?

I'm not going to tell the president how to do his job. We have an incredible record of the first two years of his term, and I expect more success in the days ahead. I'm sorry that the voters made the wrong choice. I really do believe that this next two years is going to be a bit of a circus. It's going to be chaos, and I hate to say that, but I think that's where the Democrats are going to lead the House.

I'm sorry the voters made the wrong choice. That's Speaker Mike Johnson. The Republican Party just suffered one of the worst defeats in modern history. Democrats are headed for a majority of more than 250 seats, and instead of asking what went wrong, the Speaker is blaming the people who voted. Now, this afternoon, Republican Thomas Massie walked onto the House floor, read eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Impeachment resolutions are privileged, which means that the House now has two legislative days to act, putting the vote at Wednesday at the latest.

We saw the Secretary of State scheduled his own press conference that they're going to let him deliver a rebuttal. And to that point, I hope he addresses the eight articles and doesn't get up and misquote the Bible in Quentin Tarantino fashion and do some pull-ups and, you know, call everybody fat and gay, like, for being for this impeachment. Like, I may have just given you half his speech. I don't know. But I would like to see him go through the eight articles of impeachment and just make the argument from a podium.

We'll see if that's what he does. I was surmised I will cover that press conference for you tomorrow morning. I don't think that's what he'll do. But several House Republicans have now told Fox News that absences from members who lost reelection, along with frustration over Hegseth himself, could very well be enough to push this over the edge. Hegseth is digging in, Trump is digging in. And if you want to know what the president is up to, he's holding a weird press conference with none other than his almost-future press secretary, Dana White.

He's a very, very powerful—

So let me ask—wait, wait, wait. So let me ask you the big question. Dana, would you like to be press secretary of the United States of America? Look at the sign. You'd have this behind you all the time. The White House, Washington. Would you like that? Or do you just want to stay with this ridiculous UFC? Huh?

Thank you for the offer, sir. For the offer, I have no—no, I do not want to be in politics now.

I am devastated.

That's the ending of an impromptu press conference inside the White House, and it came after this race was called. Lauren Boebert has been defeated by Eileen Lawbacker, another flip for Democrats in Colorado's 4th Congressional District. And we're about to see potentially even more flips like this, because at least four states could now redraw their congressional maps before 2028. Maryland, Mississippi, New York, Wisconsin are all considering new maps. Three of those four are Democratic-led. In Texas, remember, they tried to gerrymander; it didn't work.

Because you've been tracking specifically young voters for a very long time.

Yeah. Well, thanks, Aaron, for having me. I always love chatting. I would say my biggest takeaway when it comes to young voters is the historically high margin with which young voters supported Democrats, 35 points, which is one of the highest that's ever been seen in a midterm election.

Let's take—let's talk about kind of like you wrote a piece just a few days ago titled Boomerang, which talks about how Gen Z became the swingiest voting block.

Yeah.

What do you mean by that?

So we saw in 2024 young voters move more towards Republicans, and young men in particular moving towards President Trump. And at the time, I cautioned that this did not mean that young people were Republican voters. They felt frustrated by the economy then. They certainly still feel frustrated by the economy now. And they were fed up. They wanted something new and different. They developed this anti-authority posture during COVID, and that manifested in the results of the 2024 election.

When young people turned out, specifically young men, for Donald Trump back in 2024, I was not necessarily surprised, given where we were just as an electorate.

Yeah.

Two years later, have we seen those same young people, and specifically young men, turn out for Democrats, or are they just not turning out at all?

So it's hard to tell with the insights that we have back from the data, because a lot of what I'm relying on is exit polling data, and so that's polling people who actually showed up to vote. So we don't know so much yet about the people who didn't vote. There were some signs in the Harvard IOP Youth poll that came out before the election showing that non-MAGA young people were less likely to vote or say they were less likely to vote. Again, it's not entirely clear how that manifested.

I will say something interesting. A lot of the candidates that got elected last week were young themselves. I mean, some of the older ones, Abdullah Al-Sayed is 42 years old. That's pretty young when you think about who's in the United States Senate. Was that a factor?

Totally. I mean, I posted last week the ages of some of the most buzzy candidates this cycle, and they ranged from 29 years old to Annie Andrews, 46 years old. And so I think just the energy and the new blood and fresh vibes that these candidates offer is certainly really compelling. That being said, we also saw candidates like Ed Markey win reelection. And so age is not the full puzzle here, but it is certainly a part of it.

Something that I'm particularly worried about moving forward is the Democrats' ability to keep these young voters on their side and not taking them for granted. What do you—and this kind of looking forward into the future—do you anticipate a situation where, for example, Democrats in Congress now have majorities, they pass a ton of legislation, but none of it actually gets through because you still have a Republican president in the White House, and then young voters blame Democrats for those failures?

Yeah. I mean, that's certainly a challenge. And I think that it's something that the Democrats will have to contend with, because we know that young people are looking for results. And I asked in the same focus group I did last week, what are you looking for, you know, from Democrats now? What are you hoping for? And they said they want to see an end to the war in Iran. They want to see regulation around data centers. And first and foremost, they want to see the cost of living come down. And yeah, these things are not entirely in Democrats' control.

So if you were advising Democratic leadership in the House and the Senate, what would you tell them to do?

I think that, again, it has to come back to this forward-looking image. And, you know, the reality is that in 2028, when candidates are going to—I mean, when, sorry, in 2028, when voters are going to the polls, President Trump will still be president. And so they—Democrats need, you know, in order to be successful, should message around the fact that, yeah, they tried and they passed these bills in, but it got held up, you know, on the desk of the president. I think also when if I were, you know, looking to Republicans and what they might be asking for from Trump, like he should sign legislation that comes to his desk.

Now, before I let you go, I do—because when you—something you posted on election night, which I amplified on my page, was just what a young voter, like the first-time voter, was in the 2026 election. Looking ahead to 2028, the first-time voter will not have even been alive when Barack Obama was first elected back in 2008. What do you say to Democrats who often say, well, we're just going to go back to the Obama era?

There needs to be an Obama for our generation. And I don't think we know who that person is yet, but it's very clear that young people are ready for that. And, you know, I was thinking on the weekend leading into the midterms, the fact that Obama was the closing messenger for Democrats, like he certainly has so much clout and he actually polls super well, if not the best, with young people. But it is time to think about who these next generation leaders and messengers are, because for a first-time voter in 2028, that might not resonate as much.

Rachel Genfasa, where can people find you if they want to support your work?

Yeah. Thanks, Aaron. You can subscribe to The Up and Up on Substack or just go to theupanoff.us. And I'm Rachel Genfasa across all social media.

Appreciate you. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks, Aaron.

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