Transcript of Tucker Responds to the Republican Midterm Bloodbath

Down to land commissioner, railroad commissioner. It's that Mississippi, as of right now—and it could change because there's been no official winner declared—but as of right now, it looks like Mississippi could get a Democrat in the Senate. Mississippi. When was the last time Mississippi elected a Democrat to the United States Senate? Well, the last time was like a multi-term incumbent segregationist white Democrat. This is a black Democrat, right? And he is winning as of right now.

How badly did it go for Republicans last night? In Alabama, a transgendered Democrat beat a Republican incumbent in the statehouse. So the state of Alabama, which has got to be pound for pound, like the most conservative state, out of 50 just elected a transgender Democrat ousting a Republican. And it's not like there was an outcry in Alabama, "Hey, you know, the one thing we lack is we don't have enough transgender representation in the statehouse. Let's kick out the Republican and put in a student address and we'll—the state will be better.

People will want to come here." That's not what happened at all. That's not what happened in Mississippi, and it's not what happened in Ohio, and it's not what happened in Texas. It's not what happened anywhere. All of this was a response to the first two years of the Trump administration. This was kind of a collective howl of pain. This was a reaction to what the country's been going through for the last two years. And if you call around to people today, and maybe you have, to get reactions, like, "What do you think of this? This is unbelievable. This is the biggest blowout of our lifetimes," which it is, you will likely find that the more conservative the person you call, the more pro-Trump this person was two years ago, the more this person is likely to say, "Well, this is a disaster, of course, but I'm not entirely sad about it."

In other words, this may not be what we deserve, but it's definitely what the Republican Party deserves. And that is true. That is absolutely true. And if you're a fair person, if you believe in justice, if you think the guilty should be punished, it's kind of hard to look at the election results and say they're wrong. I mean, you could say they're not preferable. We don't want actually a transgender state legislator in Alabama. Like, it's probably not going to help in any way.

And at the very least, we have to read a lot of stories about breaking the transgender ceiling or whatever. It's just going to be more lecturing about transgenderism. But you can't say that the Republicans had it stolen because they didn't. They got exactly what they deserved. And what they deserved was to be humiliated because of what they did to the rest of us. They literally tried to appoint Lindsey Graham's sister, who may be a nice person or who knows, but knows nothing about anything, by her own admission, tried to give her the Senate seat.

And not just by appointment, but like, they stood her for election in South Carolina. And she lost. Well, there's another state. When was the last time a Democrat was elected to the Senate in South Carolina? We probably should have checked before the show. Didn't. It's been a while. You think of that as like core Republican. I mean, that's—that's the base. I mean, that would be like a Bethesda, Maryland going for Trump. It's just—it's not going to happen. Oh, but it just did. And again, it did because that's insulting. Like, who do you think we are?

Lindsey Graham's sister? I don't know. I mean, no one's perfect, but Lindsey Graham was, of course, the problem. It was Lindsey Graham's program, this war that destroyed the Republican Party. And he died, unfortunately, not gloating over his death or anything, but he died. And that might have been the perfect moment to say, "Well, you know, good guy. You shouldn't attack people after they're dead. You really shouldn't. Show some restraint." But like, maybe we just never talk about it again. Maybe we don't try and resurrect the failed and frankly repulsive and anti-human policies of Lindsey Graham through his sister, his hapless sister.

It did feel like—this is an overused phrase, but it's a real one—a humiliation ritual. "Let's give Lindsey Graham's sister. They'll vote for anything. I could shoot a man in Fifth Avenue and they'd still vote for me." That's the spirit that conveyed to the rest of us. We just don't care what you think. "Hey, how about some Lindsey Graham's sister? You'll eat it. How about Vivek Ramaswamy?" "No. We'd rather take the drunk lady." Which they did. You had in state after state after state Republicans voting for Democrats, not because we don't think they agree with the program.

In fact, they just voted against the program two years ago this week. But because they have some self-respect and they're not going to be treated like that. It's just so obvious the contempt. Trump and his cabinet and a bunch of consultants got together and decided, "We don't care at all about the people who elected us. We think they owe us somehow." We don't owe them anything. They owe us. And let's see how far we can push them.

Let's see if we can run Greg Abbott for a fourth term or Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas. A true mediocrity. Let's give him four terms. And by the way, the things that they argue in favor of, the policies they espouse will be super unpopular. So in the case of Greg Abbott, he was the governor of Texas for three terms. He's facing off against a Democrat. You know what the main issue, one of the main issues in that race was data centers. And across the country, when put to a vote of actual American citizens, people say resoundingly, "We're not for data centers."

And guess what? Most people agreed with her. So not surprisingly she won. That's not hard. That's called democracy. But Republicans refused to practice it. And so once again, they lost in a way that is generational. In fact, almost kind of no matter what they do, given the numbers of it, if you game it out, there's kind of no coming back for a generation. If a Republican somehow were to win in 2028, two years from now, and blow it out, like biggest—this is, of course, likely not going to happen, though who knows, but can't imagine it.

But let's just say that did happen, and the Republican who wins in 2028 wins by, say, the same margin Richard Nixon won in 1972, which is the biggest margin in American history. They still would not control the Senate. They can't. So what could they do? Could they get any of their nominees confirmed? Like, you can kind of see what a huge deal this is, assuming that the current system continues. And, you know, I wouldn't really assume anything right now because we're in a—we're in a changed moment. But we hope it continues. Anyway, the repudiation of the Republicans was complete.

That repudiation, of course, was a repudiation of Trump. And so we can say, without hyperbole or gloating, this is the end of the Trump era. Last night. We're done. It's also the end, by the way, of the Fox News era. A former White House staffer called today and described Fox News as the president's real PDB, his real presidential daily brief, the place where he gets his information. And there's some truth in that. And it's hard to imagine that we would have gone to war in Iran if Fox News hadn't broadcast specifically to the president, who they knew was watching specific shows, the Mark Levin Show, the Morning Show.

He watches those. They know that. The anchors talk to him. And they spoke directly to him. And they helped persuade him, maybe more than anybody else in this country. Of course, there was Netanyahu pushing from the outside of this country, but within the country, the main lobby for this war was Fox News. And it's been systematic. And it's not an attack made out of bitterness. It's just an observable reality. And you can check it if you want because eclipse reside forever. They're there. And Fox News anchors spoke as one, really with only one exception.

In the entire lineup, there's only one person who's even mildly skeptical of the Iran war. That person, of course, has been denounced, needless to say, as an anti-Semite, Hitler-adjacent. But everybody else, whether through fear or foolishness, got on board. And this is what they got: a total destruction of the Republican Party. So that's over. I mean, it'll continue. They've got cable subscriptions and everything. But like, this is—we're done here with Fox News. We're done here with Trump. Now, that doesn't mean Trump himself is done. He could conceivably serve out the rest of his term.

And we should just pause now and say, simply because the president and his party have been repudiated doesn't mean he's without power because the president acts outside the country completely unrestrained by the Constitution. There's no check and/or balance on what Trump does in the realm of foreign policy. And that is absolutely true until mid-January when the new Congress comes in. Even if the new Congress were to exercise its constitutional authority to demand consent before starting a war, which they haven't done in, well, probably since the Korean War 75 years ago.

But even if they were going to do that, there's no one to do that until January. So at least until January, Trump could do literally whatever he wants and nobody can stop him. It doesn't matter how unpopular he is. It doesn't matter how loudly voters have shouted their disapproval. It absolutely doesn't matter. Our system gives him total unrestrained power. And of course, the rest of the world is watching this. And now seems like a good time just to add something that is true, which is our rivals in this world, and that would include Russia and Iran, whether they should be or not is another question, but they are, in practical terms, our rivals.

We're at war with both of them. Both understand exactly what has happened. Trump is weak. He has no support domestically, but he still retains these executive powers. And they have sent very clear messages that if the president were to act with aggression in Iran at any time in the coming weeks, that they would act with no restraint at all against the United States and its allies, particularly against Ukraine, against the six Gulf states, and against Europe.

So just to be clear, the peril is not over. Just because the public has said resoundingly, "We're not into what you're doing," doesn't mean that they'll stop doing it. And in fact, there is some indication that Trump will double down. But in any case, no matter what happens outside the country or within it, this is the end of an era. You could sort of mark it on your calendar. Trumpism gone. So that raises a couple of questions. What comes next is the most obvious, and the answer is we're not exactly sure. But there'll be time to think that through. In the meantime, it might be worth thinking about two things.

One, how do we feel about this? And I think most people who voted for Trump would concede probably that they have mixed feelings about it. They're sad to see the party they voted for a lot of their lives lose. They think justice was likely done. You can't allow them to appoint Lindsey Graham's sister, run Mike Rogers, who's like probably the only man in history who's lost two Senate seats in consecutive elections. The voters just rejected him last cycle, but the donors put him back on because he's pro-Israel. So voters are never going to go for that in the end.

If they have a choice, they're not going to vote for Mike Rogers. And why would they? So justice was done, but it's sad. But there are also some upsides which are worth remembering. One is that the happiness and the quality of your life is not exclusively determined by politics. That's one lens. It's the lens that social media encourages. It encourages you to think about your life in global terms. And if everything is not working well in the world, then I must be unhappy. But in real life, you've got a constellation of people around you and probably healthier to judge your happiness by the strength of the relationships with the people around you.

So if your wife and kids are happy and your nephews are happy and your college roommates are happy and your employees are happy, your coworkers, like, it's kind of hard to say it's a bad day. So it's good to be reminded of that once in a while, right? Don't live outside your life. Like, once in a while, pull back within it. Look around. How's it going? The second thing to think about is that with the end of Trumpism, there will be definitely some good things, but there will also, we hope and pray, be an end to the unceasing daily drama, the kind of sitcom pacing of American life for the last 10 years.

I mean, it's no surprise that the top-rated star on NBC has kind of scripted our national conversation along the lines of a hit TV show for the last decade. And there have been parts of that that are great. And those of us in TV recognize it immediately. We know what that is. Oh, that's a cliffhanger. We'll be right back. Hold on. You know, that's what we've been living through. But it's tiresome. And it's hard on you to live like that for too long. It's like following a drunk driver. You know, it's lots of stopping and starting. And is he going to go off the road? And you know what? Watching going from 75 to 25, it's like it can drive you crazy after a while.

And there's no time to think clearly. And of course, that's probably not an accident. It's by design. If you keep people totally off balance and distracted, you can do pretty much whatever you want. But it's not good for the people watching at all. Nonstop drama drains your adrenal glands and defeats your spirit. So it will be nice to have a kind of stasis for a moment, a little bit of breathing room where we can at least assess what's happening and figure out how we feel about it. Slowing the pace a little bit is good for its own sakes.

That's the other thing to remember. But above all, we should be grateful to Trump, even if you voted against him, even if you've come to despise Trump, even if you feel correctly that he sold you out for a foreign country, which he did. And there's no forgiving that. Of course, there's forgiving it, but there's no approving of it. There's always forgiving, but there is not approving. You can't approve. That is immoral. It's wrong for a leader to choose another country over you. Just like it would be wrong for a kid to take the neighbor's kids to Disney World where his own kids starved.

That's just immoral. That's exactly what Trump did. He chose Israel over the United States. People lie about it, but everyone can see it. Super, super obvious. And that's just wrong. The good news is, as noted, everybody can see it. And that is, in the end, the lasting contribution of Donald Trump. 20 years from now, we're still trying to figure out what was that? How did that guy get to be president? And how should we feel about it? I think we're going to have to be honest enough to admit that we should be thankful for the main thing he did for us, which is to reveal the subterranean architecture of power.

Trump, by his presence, by design or not, it almost doesn't matter, pulled back the curtain. And suddenly we could see how the system actually works. And it's been horrifying. And it is the main reason that you often hear people say, "Oh, the conspiracy theorists are right." How many times have you heard that? It's a meme. Well, it's a meme because there's some truth in it. Most people, especially over 40, grew up in a country where the overwhelming majority of the population accepted that the official account of things was probably roughly correct.

There was some lying and some secrecy, but the whole system wasn't based on it. And in the end, if you wanted to make a change, you would just vote. And if enough people voted, the change would happen. And if there's one thing we've learned during the last 10 years of Trumpism, it's that that's not true. And we know that because Trump's 2024 coalition was the broadest probably since Nixon, probably in 50 years. And it voted for something very, very specific.

And it got the opposite. And so that tells us everything. It tells us that the system they told us was in place may still be in place in name, but it's not actually the system that produces the meaningful decisions in our society at all. And because we've been debating this for the last year and a half, all of a sudden, we can see exactly how things work. And it's ugly and it's horrifying. It's making people paranoid and angry. It's dividing the country deeply. And all of that is bad and certainly distressing. But it's essential to know if you're going to fix it.

You have to know what the problem is. If you've got a leak in your ceiling, you have to find out where the pipe broke or else you can't fix it. And now we have a much clearer sense of where the pipes are and where they're leaking. So we should count ourselves lucky to see what previous generations have not seen, which is how things or a version, some of the truth about how things actually work. So all of this pressure being applied to our political system and to our society has revealed stuff that is absolutely worth knowing.

And so if you think about it in those terms, it's probably not surprising that the Republican Party was destroyed, which it just has been. Now, it may be rebuilt. We hope probably could use a second party just for balance in this country. But as of right now, the Republican Party has been destroyed. And that shouldn't surprise you. It didn't take long at all. In fact, it took exactly two years to the week. Now, why was it destroyed? Well, of course, it had to be. Because Donald Trump, again, unwittingly or wittingly or who knows, we can only state conclusively what we saw happen.

He built a party that was a truly nationalist party. And it was nationalist much more than it was sectarian or partisan. Which is to say Trump was never a very enthusiastic Republican. There were a lot of Democrats who voted for him. Trump, despite four years of propaganda about how he was a clansman or a racist, wasn't actually much of a racist. No more than most people. And the proof are the election results from just two years ago this week in which Trump got 30% of Black men, like the most reliably Democratic group of voters in the country, voted for Trump at 30%.

The majority of Hispanic men. Now, that's not race mongering or box checking or DEI. No, it's the antidote to that. Because actually what you don't want is that. You don't want a country where power is apportioned along ethnic lines because then you will wind up as Rwanda. That's inevitable. If you run the country on identity politics, you will have ethnic violence, obviously. I mean, it's like the story of all history.

So try not to do that. And what's the alternative to that? Well, the alternative to that is a politics that's based on things bigger than ethnicity. And there are things, believe it or not, that are bigger than tribe. Running it on ideas that actually pull people together who have other core differences, but they're united in this one thing. And Trump did it along the lines of what he called MAGA, Make America Great Again, or more precisely, America First. And it's a really simple idea. It's the core idea behind democracy, behind all government, really, which is you put your country first if you run it.

The whole point of holding power in a country is to serve the country over which you hold power. It's like not a hard concept. In fact, there's no other legitimate basis upon which to rule. Either you're serving your people or you're a criminal. It's kind of that simple. And in our system, that's literally true because that's articulated in our founding documents. The whole point is self-government. So it's not like America First was some radical theory that Hitler thought up or something. No, it's the only legitimate way to run any country, and particularly this one.

So Trump was just bringing us back to center in his kind of crazy, inarticulate way. And people understood it, even though he could never really explain it. They kind of got it. Like, why wouldn't the point of the U.S. government be to help Americans? We can debate how, but what's the other reason we would have a government? Oh, shut up, Hitler. Okay. And because they were so adamant in denouncing it, you knew that this was probably a threat to someone's income or someone's power.

And indeed, it was. In fact, it was such a threat. What was it a threat to? Well, it was a threat to the system we currently have, which is a system that doesn't recognize borders or most ethnicities or sort of any interest other than its own. It's effectively a global government run by, well, the deepest pools of capital. That's not a conspiracy theory. It's just clearly true. So the U.S. had no sovereignty, and Trump was trying to restore that. And people loved it. The majority of the Hispanic vote, I thought he hated Hispanics.

And he sort of, is it not a defensive Trump? I mean, maybe he does hate Hispanics. I mean, who knows what he really thinks? Does it really matter? What matters is he assembled the antidote to atomization and violent conflict, to disaster, the antidote to disaster, which is like a way to unite the population against its bad leadership. And that's exactly what we need. I mean, that's the main thing that we need is the recognition that most of us have more in common with each other than we do with the people looting and mismanaging the country.

That's just objectively true. Sorry. They don't like it when you say that, but it's not hate. What they're doing is hate. So don't be intimidated. And Trump wasn't intimidated. But the second he did that, you kind of thought to yourself, can this continue? Can they allow this? I mean, this is really a threat. Now we're getting toward the actual red line. They're always like, oh, racism is the red line. Racism? I mean, they don't care at all about racism. Read the Jeffrey Epstein emails. Everyone's a Schwartz. They don't care about racism. Trust me. What they care about are threats to their own power, obviously.

And what Trump managed to pull off two years ago this week was an actual threat. And so like somebody had to destroy this coalition. And the people who had the greatest interest in doing this were the neocons. Who are the neocons? Well, they're people who reject outright the core belief of the Trump campaign of 2020 and 2016 and 2020 and every Trump campaign, which is why they always hated him. And the core claim was, no, we're doing this for us first. Like, why wouldn't we? We have to. Can't take the neighbor's kids to Disney World if ours are starving. And they hated that because, of course, they don't think that our people should come first.

They think that Israel should come first. And they just say that at this point. So they had to kind of destroy it. And they absolutely did. In about 18 months, they took a coalition which had all kinds of components to it. People who didn't even know that they had similar views or could be united were united. And 18 months later, it's just like Mark Levin. Like a couple other people, like, who's for this? Well, we found out yesterday, no one is for it. Why laugh? Because it's just so obvious and kind of hilarious.

And of course, it can't be allowed to stand. I mean, these people have no right to the Republican Party. They just got there. I mean, by the way, these are all people who like reject the entire Republican Party platform. They have no interest in anything that happens in this country. Certainly not in the condition of the family or jobs. I mean, these are the same people who lectured you about your whining about prices. It was outrageous. You're not patriotic. It's like, you are calling me unpatriotic? When you spend your entire life serving a foreign government, I don't think I'm the unpatriotic one here, actually.

And by the way, the Mississippi race, you may be wondering, like, how did a Black Democrat in a state that's not majority Black, it's got the highest Black population, but nowhere near a big enough population to get a statewide victory, like not even close. So a lot of white people voted for the Democrat in Mississippi. How did that happen? Well, because the incumbent Republican senator was doing a television interview and she was asked, like, meat prices are kind of high. People are concerned about beef prices. And she goes, looks right in the camera and you can look it up. It's amazing. And she goes, yeah, find another protein.

Find another protein? Oh, lentils? Like, who do you think you're talking to? Who do you think you are? You're like some senator and you're lecturing me about how I should just find another protein. You're back of the handing me. I mean, it'll enrage you to watch it. And it enraged the voters of Mississippi to the point where white Republicans voted for the Black Democrat, which is sort of a weird kind of inverse of the Trump coalition of 2024. It's people coming together across partisan lines, across racial lines, in solidarity with each other, in the insistence, the very simple, not for Medicare for all or whatever the actual program is, but for the theme behind the program, which is like, why don't they care about us?

They should. You see what's happening here. So in this very specific case, which is the case of the last two years of the Trump administration, we know exactly how this coalition got destroyed and the Republican Party was taken with it. We know exactly how, because Donald Trump, who made the party all about him, was only about him. Donald Trump chose a foreign country, Israel, its interests over his own country's interests.

And like, there's no debating that. And exit polling shows it. And I mean, there's really no other interpretation of it. I mean, that's just factually true. But that doesn't mean that your grandchildren will learn that in school, assuming there still are schools then. Why? Because history is so often rewritten in real time. So you imagine, as you look back and try to understand what happened in ancient Carthage or even, I don't know, during the French Revolution, you imagine that we just don't have the right documents or we don't really know.

You can't interview anyone involved, which you never imagine, but you should know. And anyone in the news business can tell you this because they watch it in real time, that events the second they cease occurring are very often, maybe most of the time, distorted in news accounts, in popular histories, and ultimately in textbooks into something that does not even resemble what actually happened. Like, people can lie right at you almost as something is happening.

And if they keep doing it long enough, no one remembers that they're lying. Now, why is this bad? Well, it's bad for a couple of reasons. One, it's an offense against the truth, which is a virtue in itself. We become strong when we tell the truth. We are weakened when we lie. That's just a fact. But also because it's impossible to make wise decisions down the road if you don't even know what happened in the past. One of the reasons, with some exceptions, including recently, that planes don't crash very often in the United States and commercial planes very rarely crash.

Why is that? It's not just because of technological advances. It's because the rigor that the regulatory agencies, the one thing they do very well, apply to analyzing why planes go down. So when a plane crashes, a team of investigators rolls in and they kind of spare no expense trying to figure out exactly what went wrong. And then they broadcast it everywhere. It's transparent. It's probably the most functional thing the U.S. government does. And they tell every pilot in the world, this is exactly why the plane went down. And here's our conclusion. You can draw your own conclusions, by the way.

Here's the data. And like, don't do this or you could crash too. And that system really works because they don't try and rewrite history. The plane doesn't go down and then they like make up some lie about why it went down because planes would keep going down if they did that. Obviously. Well, if your country keeps starting pointless wars in the Middle East on behalf of Israel, and every single time you lose, you diminish your power, you get your own citizens killed, and you incrementally go bankrupt, maybe at some point someone would be like, this is a bad idea.

We can't follow Israel into any more wars. Well, that hasn't happened because no one has been brave enough to say what's really going on. We did this in the Iraq War over 20 years ago, 23 years ago. We followed Israel's demands into a war. But that's been like basically erased from history. Ask anyone who's involved in it, they'll tell you, oh, that's absolutely what happened. And it was Netanyahu, by the way, same guy. But you're not going to find that in any textbook. It's like, oh, George W. Bush believed that there were weapons of mass destruction. Well, who knows what he actually believed, but he was led to that by the Israeli government and the Israeli intel agencies for their benefit.

So because we weren't honest about that, because we allowed liars to distort reality right in front of us, we kept doing it again and again and again. That's how Joe Kent's wife died in Syria. Why were we in Syria? Same thing. Same guy. Bibi Netanyahu. You need to be in Syria. Okay. Gas attacks. Gas attacks. Or whatever the lie was. And then Iran, the big one, the one that actually ends American empire, that actually does bankrupt us and really does threaten the dollar and a lot of other things.

So the point is obvious. It's really important to insist that history not be rewritten by the same liars, the same people who always lie about history. Okay. No, you're not doing that. You can't steal my memory from me. I know what happened. But already it's starting. And you see this whenever there's an event. You certainly see when there's like a school shooting. Everyone jumps up on television. Actually, the real lesson here is, you know, we need to get Coca-Cola out of high schools or whatever.

Like everybody sort of puts their pet issue onto this tragedy and tries to leverage the tragedy to get their issue moved. You're seeing the same thing happen in the hours after this election. So here, I can't resist throwing this in there, but this is tape from a guy called Mark Short, who most people have never heard of. He was at one time a big deal in Washington, a mocker in Washington. He was Mike Pence's chief of staff. Seems like a small thing now. It's kind of a hilarious thing, actually. He followed Pence into whatever Pence went on to do, take money from neocon donors to have some think tank nobody cares about.

Whatever. But anyway, this guy used to be a big deal in DC, and he was invited on Bloomberg to explain as a kind of graybeard. And like Mark Short knows what's going on. Mark Short, why did the Republicans lose? Watch this. I think this was pretty much a political Armageddon for Republicans. I think it's a complete not just geographic location, but not just federal offices, but state offices. And I think it's a repudiation of the last two years. And I think there's no doubt that, you know, when you're a party that has advanced a trade agenda that the far left promotes, when you're a Republican party that is taking over private sector companies, when you're a Republican party that no longer stands for life, and when you're a Republican party that is siding with ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin against the country fighting for its freedom, I think voters become disenfranchised.

Like what? We're not getting more Ukraine war. There are people trying to end the Ukraine war. We want more war. And they were so mad they just voted for Democrats in the hope they would get more war. I mean, it's like insane. Are there any data to prove that? Well, of course not. But trust us, if you keep repeating something long enough, like Russia's our main enemy, they hacked the DNC, which by the way, spoiler, they didn't. But if you keep repeating that enough, like you wind up at war with Russia, which we are, you can speak reality into existence.

Words create reality. Something that Trump understands, but very few seem to understand that outside of politics. Words create reality. If you keep saying something, it becomes real. It is a spell. It's an incantation. Words are the most powerful force that human beings possess, including arms. Russia did it. Putin, former KGB. If you allow people to talk like that unchallenged, your grandkids will be like, yeah, you remember the Putin KGB election when the Republican Party got destroyed?

But the one thing they want you to know above all is that the Iran war had nothing to do with this. And by the way, just a little rule of thumb. If everyone in DC or everyone on television or everyone on the social media channels is telling you one thing and they're saying it fervently, whatever it is, Putin is our enemy, diversity is our strength. Like you don't know what's true exactly, but you know for certain the thing they're saying is the opposite of the truth. Like that we know. If I'm insistent to the point of being angry at you in making my case, you don't believe me.

Diversity is our strength. You're Hitler if you don't agree with me. I can be pretty sure diversity is not our strength. I mean, I don't know if I'm against it or not, but I'm pretty sure it's not our strength. In fact, I'm positive. Because it was our strength, you would just say, you know, I kind of think diversity may be our strength. And you'd be like, oh, that's interesting. Let me think about that. I think Putin may be our main enemy. Maybe he is. Let me think about that. But if you begin the conversation with Putin is Hitler, if you don't agree, you're Hitler too. It's fair to say that Hitler and Putin have nothing to do with each other.

In fact, it was the Russians who defeated Hitler, I think. And that Putin is probably not our main enemy. In any case, they are telling you the Iran war had nothing to do with this. Now, this is an amazing clip from our old friends, people you always promise not to go back to, but can't resist somehow, week after week. This would be Mark Shapiro. Mark Shapiro? Bench, whatever. Shapiro and Levin. People will probably never hear from after this week. Oh, we hope. And this is them a month, a month and three days or something.

This is at the end of September, before the election, when everybody who was following this at all, even like on the level of Instagram, everybody knew there was going to be a Republican wipeout because of the war in Iran. Everybody knew that. And they just wanted you to know that's not true at all. Watch.

That might get a different response, but whatever. No matter what their source, whatever the data was, whatever the Wikipedia citation that they throw at you, it's the fakest thing ever. And why is it important to say that? It's important to say that because the people on the screen you just saw destroyed not simply the Republican Party, but gravely damaged this country. And not for the first time. This is not the first war that those people argued us into. It's not even the third war that they argued us into.

And the United States is bankrupt because of those wars. And that's not an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. It's math. Trillions of dollars that we had to borrow and on which the interest payments are now like overwhelming our federal budget. So it's actually destroyed the country. You know, it's not 4 billion a year, whatever stupid number they throw out there. Like, oh, really, 4 billion a year. No, it's your kids' future. And that's totally real as a question of math. That's real and provably real. So, you know, only God can decide like what happens to people like that in the end.

That's definitely not our place. We're not even going to speculate. But we can say as a matter of self-preservation and of course of justice, but certainly just to just like preserve our country, people like that cannot make any decisions anymore ever. They cannot participate meaningfully in the Republican Party ever again. And that's all of them. It's not just like the florid, obvious, grotesque ones with spittle on their ties on Fox News. Those people are going away. They never meant anything in the first place. There's the mouthpieces for those who are paying them and for the people with actual power in the Congress, the Republicans who didn't lose yesterday and a lot of the Democrats for that matter.

So it's got to be the end. They cannot continue to run this country because they're running it into the ground. Now you could say, you know, it's undemocratic to have a small group, you know, people whose views are different from the rest of the population run the country. But the truth is there are countries where you've got like a ruling class that doesn't have that much in common with the rest of the country and still does a pretty good job. I mean, Jordan, which is under the circumstance of very well-run countries, run by people who are not Jordanian. They're, well, they're really Saudi.

They're the Hashimites. They do a great job. Would you want them to leave? No. Who else is going to run Jordan? I mean, it doesn't, it could work, but these people not only have no interest in the United States, they're openly hostile to the United States, like to its core interest, to its people. Its people are not thriving and they think that's fine. Just import more people. So they actually hate you. I mean, it just couldn't be clearer. Like don't lie to yourself. They don't like you. And so they can't have any more power, period. Like under any circumstances.

Like that's the non-negotiable point. So if you're a Republican, you're probably not as mad at J.D. Vance as you were at Donald Trump, but you're probably pretty mad because like why didn't he speak up? Fair. Totally fair. And this is not in any way like an attempt to resurrect J.D. Vance or argue that he should be the nominee in 2028. Who knows what's going to happen? If someone had asked you 18 months ago, will the Republicans lose every statewide race in Texas? Like you never would have called that. I wouldn't either. So we can't see the future. This has nothing to do with that. Sincerely, it's not shilling for J.D.

Vance. It is appreciating the truth when it's told, which all people should do. It is a virtue to appreciate the truth for its own sake on its own terms. When someone says something true, it doesn't matter who it is. If it's true, you should nod in reverent appreciation and say, thank you for telling the truth. Because the truth is what matters. And J.D. Vance in a lengthy Twitter post, which you probably read if you hadn't, you ought to, basically just says it out loud. Here, I checked with the pollsters. He's got skin in the game. Of course, he's the Vice President of the United States. Like this matters to him and to his reputation and his future job prospects.

And like he's involved in this. And we want to know why we didn't just lose, but we got totally humiliated and destroyed. Like it destroyed our party. He says this in the post. And here's why. And let me just read you what he said, because it's true. The top four answers from pollsters, accounting for nearly all of the responses that we got to the question, why are you voting the way you are? Were, one, end the war. Two, focus on cost of living slash inflation. Three, put America first. Four, change our relationship to Israel.

Our vote, continuing the quote, our voters showed up. Republican voters went to the polls yesterday. And for the four above reasons, many of them voted for Democrats. Imagine admitting that. That's why you know it's true and virtuous. Here's a guy admitting that people voted for him two years ago, voted against him yesterday. I mean, you should always admit the truth, but it's hard and most people don't. They're like, oh, voters are stupid. No, he's saying, no, actually, they had good reason. And here are the reasons. And number one was the war.

And then inflation. They're not putting America first. And what is this bizarre relationship we have with Israel? Why is everyone worshiping Israel? Like, what is that? Shut up, anti-Semite. No, not anti-Semite. Like, but that's weird and creepy and wrong. And by the way, Israel is committing genocide. So of all countries to worship, why are we worshiping the genocide people? Like, that's very weird. But if you think about it, all four of those reasons, which are undoubtedly true, and if you are a Trump voter who didn't vote for Republicans yesterday or voted against them, and we know a bunch of those, and it's not because they're liberal at all, it's because they're not liberal and they're mad and they know that they've been abandoned to what?

Status to authoritarianism. That's what's coming next. This is a total setup. Trump shows up, collects all people who want just like sensible nationalism, America first. Why wouldn't you want that? Rug pulls, and the next thing you know, you're getting status authoritarianism. Like, everyone feels that. So they're mad. And that's why they're mad. Those four issues. But you could sum up those four issues. You could condense the four into one by saying what? What do they all add up to? They all add up to the perception, which is real. They don't care about me.

And if they cared about me, why would they act like this? They clearly don't care. We're suffering and they're focused on another country, another people. So there's not only lack of love, there's contempt. And why wouldn't they resent that deeply? Why wouldn't they feel betrayed? Why wouldn't they feel emotional about that? Well, they would. And they do. And they have every right and every reason to. And anyone who tells them they don't have a reason to is a liar. But there's been no effort in DC at all, other than this tweet, to reckon with this.

And instead, what there has been is an effort to browbeat people into not saying these things, into somehow pretending it's not true. I don't feel betrayed. I'm not mad that you're treating another country better than you're treating me. A country with universal healthcare is getting, you know, $50 billion or something in the last couple of years from the United States. Like, what? One more broke? And this is not even, you know, the costs of our relationship with Israel are like, anyone tells you it's $4 billion a year, it's just lying. I mean, we're in the region.

And a bunch of our guys have died as a result of that relationship. So the costs are like enormous. They're enormous. They're genuinely enormous. And if you care about this country, you would admit that. It's not anti-Semitism to admit that it's costing you a lot. Why is that hatred? It's not hatred. It's math. Anyway, there's just been a huge effort to lie about this, and people have caught on to it thanks to Trump's magical ability to reveal what's actually going on beneath the surface. And so we would say that the single most resonant ad, and there were a couple of them, this entire cycle, unfortunately, was not a Republican ad.

Should have been. It wasn't. It was an ad by Abdul Al-Sayyed, whose program Speaking for Myself, I'm not in favor of a lot of it at all. He was like some weird COVID doctor. That's something that he needs to apologize for. And a lot of other people do too. So it's not an endorsement of the guy, but on this question, who cares about you? He made the case that he did, and he did a really good job. Now, an outside group run by Jenk Ugar of the Young Turks wrote this ad and put it up in Michigan, and it got a great deal of attention.

It became the focus of this controversy. This was anti-Semitic. So if it was anti-Semitic in real life, we probably wouldn't play it because, you know, there's no reason to engender like ethnic hatred. There's not one thing that's anti-Semitic about this ad. It's actually true. It's real. And watch it. Here's the ad.

We're paying for them. You're paying for them. And this war has driven up costs because it has constricted the flow of commodities. And I don't know if you understand like how supply and demand works, but that results in higher prices in every country, including ours. So like that's just a fact. Those are facts. And if you watch CNN, just because the Republicans are bad, does not mean CNN tells the truth, just so you know.

Kind of counterproductive as a strategy. But you also drive people crazy and make them hate you. There was a famous line throughout the whole liberal era, which we hope never returns because it's the most tiresome, destructive period, really, until this period. But the Republicans would often say to each other, conservatives would often say, shut up, racist. Because that was the response from liberals to everything. Shut up, racist. That was the kind of BLM. Shut up, racist. And they'd be like, you'd be like, Black Lives Matter. And you'd say, well, don't all lives matter. Shut up. That's racist. All lives don't matter.

Just Black Lives. It'd be like, can you hear yourself? That was called identity politics. And you really hoped, and I think there probably is polling on this from two years ago, but you really hoped the election of Trump would get rid of nothing else, identity politics. They would say DEI. DEI. That was really just another word for identity politics. It was the idea that you governed with the idea that some groups are more important than other groups. You can attack some people, but not other people. All people are not equal, actually.

Some people are worth more than others. You can offend some, but not others. Well, there's nothing more anti-American, anti-Christian, more disgusting than that attitude. That attitude is actually the enemy of Western civilization. That's the attitude that gets you genocide and slavery. And lots of people throughout history have had that attitude, but you have to fight against it if you can. And it certainly will not work in America because there's no working majority of any group. So unless you find a way to unite people around something that is not their ethnic or religious identity, the whole country will devolve into civil war.

Obviously, like what's the end game for identity politics in 2026 America? There isn't one. So the whole idea of Trump was, and this was reflected in his coalition, like we're going to rise above that crap. But they almost immediately, almost day one, started engaging in it. But instead of BLM, it was JLM, was Jewish Lives Matter. Well, yeah, they do. Just as Black Lives do and White Lives and Muslim Lives and Chinese Lives. Shut up. Just Jewish Lives. Muslim Lives are bad. It's like, wait a second. How is that different from what we just lived through?

I mean, the groups are different. And you could say, well, I like Jews better than I like Muslims or better than I like Black people. Okay, that's your preference. But as a matter of government policy, the U.S. government has to treat every citizen the same, with the same rights, the same presumption of innocence. You cannot single people out on the basis of their ethnicity or religion in the United States if you're the U.S. government. Maybe if you're a country club, okay, it's your private association. They'll, of course, give you an FBI rate if it's the wrong kind of discrimination.

But the point is, the federal government can never discriminate. And we thought this was established, but all of a sudden, the Trump people get in there, they defeat DEI and then start the JLM movement. And by the end of it, which was yesterday, you've got Mike Rogers in interviews the last day of the campaign saying, if I'm elected, I'm going to do something about anti-Semitism. As if the Trump administration hasn't spent two full years making the fight against anti-Semitism its main cause for being there.

And by the way, don't vote for the other guy because he's a Muslim. It's like, can you hear yourself? Is hating someone because he's Muslim better than hating for someone because he's Jewish? And if so, tell me how. How is that better? Well, of course, it's not better. It's exactly the same. But of course, the one kind of hate, and this gets to yesterday's results in a precise way that no one ever really criticizes, least of all the Trump administration, this may be the greatest betrayal of all, for which they should be ashamed, but they're not.

The most obvious kind of discrimination in the United States is anti-White discrimination, which is like ubiquitous and still in place, encoded at the universities, in federal hiring, in corporate hiring, and in federal contracting. It's still the law of the land. Jim Crow is still in place. It has not been dismantled. Don't let them lie to you. The Civil Rights Division is like, no, we're here to fight anti-Semitism at Harvard. Really? And there should never be anti-Semitism anywhere. But anti-Semitism is no worse than anti-White discrimination or anti-Muslim discrimination or anti-anybody else discrimination.

It's all the same. And if it's not all the same, then none of it's bad. It's just a preference. This is a universal principle or it doesn't mean anything. That's really clear. And this is the point that all of us, regardless of party, have to insist on going forward because everything is at stake. All kinds of official government discrimination against people are wrong or none of them are wrong. So we have to say they're wrong. We cannot allow them. We have to have zero tolerance. But the Trump administration has had enormous tolerance for this.

They've had enormous tolerance for this. And it's reflected, among many other places, in the job numbers. What's the unemployment rate for young white men? Well, it's almost twice the national average. Why is that? Because they're the dumbest people? There was an ad from Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the disgraceful governor of Arkansas, the other day that was like attacking young white men for being welfare queens. Okay. Maybe that's true. I'd love to see the numbers on that.

But maybe don't do that. Maybe don't do that. Maybe don't pick on people on the basis of their ethnicity just because it's socially allowed. No, that's called bigotry and it's disgusting. Don't attack people for being Muslim. Doesn't make you a Muslim lover to say something like that. It just makes you an upholder of the standard that separates the West from the rest of the uncivilized world, which is universal standards applied to the individual and not the group. Identity politics is always wrong.

Why are you only focused on one? Oh, because that's the one your donors care about? And by the way, why is it that a lot of people complaining about anti-Semitism have been the leaders in anti-White discrimination? The ADL, for example. The ADL has abetted anti-White discrimination, has demanded anti-White discrimination, oh, for just like 50 years. And then at the same time, has the gall to lecture the rest of us about anti-Semitism? And it's like, yeah, anti-Semitism is terrible. It's every bit as terrible as anti-White racism. But you're only against one of them. So get off the stage.

Get away. You're not for real. You're pushing a group interest in a country with many groups. And that cannot be allowed. But they did allow it. And by the way, because they did allow it, it's going to continue. Because they didn't draw a line in the sand and say, this is the country that we claimed cared about race-blind judgment of the individual and not the group. They didn't do that. And so the Democratic Party, which has no qualms at all about discriminating on the basis of race, in fact, that's kind of the basis of the modern party, is discriminating against white men.

Why? Because white men don't vote Democrat. That's why. And they know that. And so there has already been, like within an hour of the election results yesterday, already been, like, signs that people are blaming the loss in various races on the race of the candidate. Well, they ran white guys. Here's the instant TV analysis of Mike Rogers' loss last night. Watch.

The employment rate goes down. I mean, these are the results of government policies. Of course. There's no free market in the United States. When you see the unemployment rate for young white men is twice the national average, a little less, but almost twice, it's not an accident. That's the result of policies meant to hurt that group. Period. So if you think it's bad now, so the rest of us, regardless of party, have to just draw the line that the Trump administration didn't draw and just say, no mosque.

The other thing that any party looking to win the votes of young men, and not just young white men, but just young men, Black, Hispanic, anybody, Asian, is remember that, you know, there's a gender element to politics. Always. Especially in a binary system. You've got two parties. So inevitably, one's going to be the male party and one's going to be the female party. You're going to have the dad party and the mom party. Like, why wouldn't there be? That. And the Republican Party in the last few years has really scrambled that binary, as they say.

I mean, it's got to become non-binary in a weird way. And so there are a whole bunch of different races where you look at the people in the races. And of course, of course, the Republicans are going to be more masculine. The Republican Party is the party of restraint and vigor and, you know, fair play and the individual over the group. Like, it's the dad party, obviously. Always has been. But you look at some of these races and you're like, wait a second. Who's the dad exactly? That Abdul Al-Sayed guy, now the senator from Michigan.

Compare him to Mike Rogers. Like, who's the man in that scenario? Seriously, who's the man? Well, obviously, again, saying this to someone who does not agree with Al-Sayed on a whole bunch of things, never endorsed him despite the lies, it's obviously him. I mean, Mike Rogers is just like another classic beta who loves war because he feels weak. And so it became really clear that it's not just Mike Rogers, who is a particularly disgraceful example, but he's hardly alone.

I mean, it really is the party of closeted gay men who are like unhappy with themselves and sort of only feel strong and alive when they're killing villagers in the Middle East. I mean, there's some truth in that, actually. And the closer you get to it, particularly the U.S. Senate, the more time you spend with these people, the more you're like, actually, that's not just a slur. Like, that's kind of real. But you don't have to be close to it to see it. And that's kind of the point. So like young men are not going to vote for that.

And I think a lot of men who voted for Trump two years ago imagined that this was a masculine, vigorous leader. But then, you know, you spend some time watching him and what do you see here? Here's a guy who's vain and venal and indecisive. He's dancing to YMCA. Like, wait a second. He kind of seems a little bit more like a bitchy old woman than an alpha male.

I mean, actually constantly talking about himself. Every slight he catalogs. Well, I remember the time that you said, it's like, wait a second. This is the man? By the way, let's dance to YMCA with Lindsey Graham. Not calling him gay or anything, but like, what is that? I'll tell you what it is. It's not appealing to men because it's not masculine. It's not masculine. We'll just say that. At all. And so you're thinking like, are we imagining this? Has the dad party gone a little trans on us here?

Maybe a little bit? And then you see the guy they trot out. And they meaning like the whole apparatus from, you know, TPUSA to Fox News, like the whole get out the vote apparatus on the Republican side, which is nothing to do with the RNC, like they barely even exist. The get out the vote is Fox News and TPUSA. And so who's the face of this campaign? Now, this is real. It was this guy. Watch.

No? Like, no. No. Meanwhile, Graham Platner, who we've been reliably informed was a Nazi from Maine, was not allowed to compete because he's a Nazi rapist. Okay. Graham Platner is like out there caught on video the other day by the New York Post. Whatever happened to Graham Platner? So they send this like highly effeminate kind of bitchy New York Post reporter, the conservative. And he catches Graham Platner coming in from actual oyster farming, like alone, wearing boots. And Graham Platner is like, get out of my face. Graham Platner is like, you're going to kill him.

That's what everything to Graham Platner. Like, you don't have to agree. I don't agree with everything Graham Platner says. But like, who's dad there? Is it the right-wing New York Post? Is it the guy who just came from Pennsylvania because I'm so excited about New Hampshire? Woohoo! I'm going to come to your house. Get the hell out of my house. Or is it Graham Platner? It's like tossing an unfiltered camel into the other. Get out of my face. Right? So like people experience politics as they experience life, like on a pre-verbal level. Like, who's in charge? Who's dad? Who's decisive?

Who's not making everything about himself? Men don't make everything about themselves. They don't whine all the time. Oh, he was mean to me once. Shut up, woman. Stop. Stop. Someone needs to stop the Republican Party from acting like that. Okay? Mitch McConnell is gone. You don't have to act like a nasty old woman anymore. And if you continue to, no men are going to vote for you. I mean, a year ago, if you'd done a survey, it's like people you know, like what married man, like straight man is voting for the Democratic Party?

Like, actually. Like, how much do you hate yourself? If you're voting for the Democrat, you're a man. Like, wake up, son. You don't have to vote Republican. Maybe you disagree with the Republican. You're not going to vote for the party of like angry women. Are you really? And most didn't. But you start doing stuff like this, doing the YMCA, talking about yourself all the time, being a bitchy old woman. Yeah, of course. People are going to vote for the other side. Regardless of the policies. Duh. And the last point to make, just to sort of wrap up, because it's important to say it out loud, why did the Republicans lose yesterday?

Why was the party just decimated yesterday? Because corruption. Because corruption is a species of the syndrome. It's part of the problem we've been describing, which is a series of double standards that put you below the people in charge. It's another way of saying we don't care about you. Like, you have to follow the rules. And if you disagree, of course, there's a flock camera watching to make sure that you follow all the rules, but we can do whatever we want. And that's been just incredibly obvious. And the Democrats, of course, are going to be like, oh, we're against corruption.

They don't want to talk about the war because they were for the war. Chuck Schumer was every bit as much for regime change in Iran as Donald Trump. In fact, probably more. Trump did it, not Schumer. But Schumer didn't constrain him and hasn't constrained him. Democrats have not constrained Trump. So they don't want to talk about the war, obviously. Not in a meaningful way. At all. Their voters may. Their voters probably do, but the leaders don't. So they're going to talk about corruption. So what are they going to do about it? What are they going to do about it? Well, you know exactly what they're going to do.

They're going to have tons of hearings. They're going to make lots of noises with Trump and the Trump family. Then they're going to wreck the lives of some pretty junior people. But how do you think Jared Kushner is going to do at the end of that process? Jared Kushner, who, I don't know, remember when he got into the White House in 2017? Basically, effectively the chief of staff and his family had this building at 666 Fifth Avenue because, like, you can't make any of this up. It was literally 666 Fifth Avenue. And they were like $1.8 billion underwater in this building. Couldn't sell it.

And then, like, you know, a year in, with the help of our Middle Eastern allies, like, they offload the building. And then he begins the peace process, the Abraham Accords, which you may not have heard, but brought peace to the Middle East. Are you aware of that? We've got peace in the Middle East because of the Abraham Accords. But during the course of negotiating those accords, he somehow raised billions of dollars for his own fund and then didn't deploy it for a long time. Just kind of taking the fees on it. Totally up and up. So he's like the head U.S. negotiator trying to, like, avert nuclear war and represent American interests in the region.

And not just that region, but also Eastern Europe, the Russia-Ukraine war. But he's also raising money for his own fund. Not saying that's corruption, but should we take a close look at that? I mean, has anything like that ever happened? And do you think he'll be punished for that? What do you think the chance is that Howard Lutnick is going to be punished? Would you put them at zero or below zero? Probably in that range, right? Same with Jared Kushner. But what you can be certain of is that some guy who showed up in DC, or more likely some girl who showed up in DC, like, I love Donald Trump.

I want to work at the White House. And they do. And next thing you know, you watch this happen in the next year. They're going to be on the front page of the Washington Post five days in a row. And they've turned on the administration. Their lives will be completely destroyed. Completely destroyed. Some of them go to jail. But like Jared Kushner? Howard Lutnick? Both of them are Democrats, by the way. Actually. How are they going to do? I think they'll be fine. Just to guess. Just to guess. So the moment at which the rest of us realize that, and some of us took a long, long time to realize this, I'll admit it, that there was like actual corruption going on in this administration was last summer.

It was in July. And it was when the Epstein files resurfaced as an issue. And this is kind of underrated, I think, as one of the causes for yesterday's disaster. The Epstein files revealed not simply that there was, you know, clearly something very, very dark going on with this group of people who have a ton of power, but that the people currently in power who elected to expose those people who had power were also part of the same group. That they were actually members in good standing of the Epstein class.

And if they weren't, then why didn't they declassify the files? So a lot of us were a little slow to pick up on this. Really slow, because it was so shocking. But it began to become clear that hidden architecture began to surface. This moment is during a cabinet meeting last summer. Watch.

Like, answer some questions there. No one's ever even asked that. But how dare you whip around and try and make me feel guilty for asking a question about a justice system that we own, that you administer at our request, with our permission and our votes. Like, how dare you? Shut up, old man, and answer the question. And it's like, that didn't occur to anybody. Because people are so cowed and cucked and pathetic. They're like, okay, sorry. Didn't mean to ask about the molestation of children.

Like, who would put up with that? Well, all of us, actually. And the Democrats, do you think? They're apparently 2 million at least. We don't know. I don't know. But that is the number that I've been told, and I think it's been reported, about 2 million remaining Epstein files, including the ones that bookend 9/11, which would be really interesting to see. We have a right to see, and they belong to us. They're public property. Will the Democrats compel their release? That'd be really interesting. Let's just make it really clear.

This is not an attack. Look, the Republicans deserve to lose. So this is not a defense of the Republicans in any way. But if you demand something from the Republicans, you are under moral obligation to demand exactly the same thing from the Democrats. That's corruption. Hiding that is corruption. Corruption is a set of standards that do not apply equally to people. There's one standard for you because you have power. You're in the right group. You're the right ethnicity or whatever.

You're special. And the rest of us have a whole separate set of rules that apply only to us. That is corruption. That's the definition of corruption. And the Epstein files are the clearest window into it. And it's not maybe strictly speaking financial corruption, but all corruption is the same thematically. So if you're against corruption in one administration, you have to be against it in the next. Will the Democrats compel the release of all the Epstein files, no matter what they say? I mean, that's the acid test. We'll find out.

But I just wonder if that effort was reflected in yesterday's vote totals. Like, tell us about that.

That's how much damage was done to Republicans' prospects of saving the country in the name of this agenda. And it's funny because, again, I'm looking at the exit polls, going over the exit polls. It looks just like our pre-election polling, which we were attacked for for nine months, you know, and we came on your show after Massey was defeated. They clipped all these little clips of me, and we talked about the Epstein class. That is what they ran on. It was literally called the Epstein class. And it was this idea that Republicans promised to hold the rich accountable and to not forget about the little guy and never start a new war in the Middle East.

But what did they do? They covered for the Epstein class. They started a new war in the Middle East, and they forgot about the forgotten man. And how much did, how much of doing all of that, how much gain did they make with the Jewish vote? Nationally, they gained about eight points from 2024. That's it. Eight points of 2%. So congratulations. And in return for that, you blew up all your young men. You slid all the way back to the Obama era with Hispanic voters.

You backslid even more than that in Texas. Talarico stomped Paxton into the ground, you know, worse than Hillary Clinton did in some of these counties, which Trump later flipped. This will take, this is generational damage. And by the way, the census is coming up in 2030, which should have been used by the right to ask the citizenship question, which would have locked Democrats out of the House and the Electoral College for roughly 30 years. But that's not going to happen now. The Democrats are going to, because of the stump, it's kind of a half son, you know, with redistricting, that redistricting war that they barely won.

They'll get payback for that. And now they're going to do it to the right. And this is what happens all the time. The right plays this game of chicken, Tucker. They prioritize these stupid things. The left is happy to play it because they know it's not really a game of chicken. The right's going to swerve. And that's what happened here. And, you know, all these governorships, there's real consequences for that in 2028. Real consequences. A governor in a battleground state could make sure you don't win that battleground state. That's just the practical reality.

That's how I read it.

But that is a warning, the warnings are over. That is what Republicans need to come to understand to really be able to grasp the depth of this setback. Look at what happened to the country between 1984 and 2024. How much more damage in the demographic clock do you think will run up by the time you get your next shot? Right? It's going to be that much harder. It was the absolute worst time to blow the coalition up because he got it right as a Hail Mary. We're at a point where we're reaching a tipping point.

And if Republicans didn't start to win more of the Hispanic vote, do a little bit better with the Black vote, you know, and clawback some of the suburban white vote, then they weren't even going to be a serious national political party. And that's where Trump found the Republican Party, right? You got to give him credit for that. He resurrected it like Jesus resurrected Lazarus from the tomb, and he brought it back to life. But at the other hand of that, last night was the most, it is the destruction of the Republican Party, as we know, has to be completely rebuilt. It's the worst defeat for an incumbent party since Watergate.

We should probably take a second and reflect on how that could have happened.

I mean, this is another level.

So it was a movement of eight points. What percentage of Jewish voters, according to exit polling, voted Republican yesterday?

More. Not Catholics, not Protestants, mainline Protestants, evangelical Protestants, none. They were the most opposed to the Iran war. They don't particularly like Benjamin Netanyahu. This is another thing. We have this faction on the right.

This is a longstanding vote pattern, not just for American Jews in Michigan, but elsewhere. I mean, they are left wing. They would, if there weren't the other questions about El-Sayyed, his policy platform is right up their alley. They would love it. They voted for Barack Obama overwhelmingly, even though Sean Hannity and Fox News and everybody else, Mark Levin and the rest of them tried painting Barack Obama as a Muslim for eight years, right? And Muslim socialist, by the way, for eight years. And he won Michigan by 12 once and 6 the next time.

If you look, though, at how much, how many votes did that even net, Rogers, to do this, to blow all of this up? It's statistically insignificant. So you have to look by precincts. Okay, I'm serious. You can't go through the exit polls because it's not a big enough sample. But if you look at the 70-plus precincts, it's actually a little bit misleading. Basically, there was a 1.2% shift towards Mike Rogers from Melissa Slotkin in 2024.

That's it. And in exchange for that, of course, El-Sayyed, he had a great ad, actually, about his faith. He didn't make it about being a Muslim. He crushed it in Dearborn, which more than, more than overwhelmed whatever little, you know, puny little gain he made among Rogers made among American Jews in Dearborn, which Trump won just two years ago. He won about 45, 38, and the rest, again, through their votes, the lower ballot people, they weren't ready to vote Republican. But it was still a feat, nonetheless, for Donald Trump.

This time, however, they voted over 80% for El-Sayyed, and Mike Rogers got, I think it's, Tucker, I think it's like 17%. It's like, yeah, I mean, it's nothing. It's absolutely nothing. So was it worth it? Because that's not the only group that you gave up for this. And it's also, again, worth noting that we've been lectured over and over again by the faction, the neocon faction, about anti-Semitism when in truth, we can all stop now pretending with these numbers that I just rattled off, we can all stop pretending that they speak for American Jews.

They do not. The Mark Levins, the Ben Shapiro's, and I'm not picking on anybody. It's just a fact. They're a small faction, a small minority. They're the fringe when you compare them and their views against other American Jews. They are not the majority. Their viewpoints do not represent the majority of American Jews. They're not even popular among them. So to sit up there and pretend you're the arbiter of who is and who isn't anti-Semitic based on whether or not you support foreign aid to a country or a war, the whole thing is ludicrous.

And in exchange for this silly little debate, you blew up your reputation, your brand with these millennial and Gen Z voters. And that really is the danger here because we're entering a new place in politics. A lot of people didn't believe me that this wave would be this big, which I've been calling for a while. And they didn't because they believed, well, Trump just won these states by 13 plus, you know, Ohio, Iowa, and the rest of them. They can't possibly swing that much. But they can when you realize that we're outside of the era of partisanship and we're outside of the era of ideology.

We're now in a transactional age here. When voters vote for you, they're going to demand something. The era of performative politics is over. And people just didn't let that sink in. They just couldn't grasp that. Including Republicans, Democrats will probably wind up learning that lesson too. If they don't deliver here, then they're going to be held to account. The problem is, you know, it's like you said, what does that even mean? If a Republican candidate was to go on and win 400-plus electoral votes in 2028 because Democrats overreact so bad, my response to that is, so what?

The Senate will still be in Democratic control. The clock keeps ticking. You really blew it here. I mean, you gave up a golden opportunity that people who do what I do kind of saw as a God wink. You know, like God is giving you one more chance. Fix it. Right the ship. And it's funny because I didn't even appreciate it until later, speaking to all of these young men and all these voters who were just so depressed, Tucker. As a pollster, I've never heard suicidal ideations before. You know, people, I mean, these people were, they were in despair.

And when you give people hope, desperate people hope, and then you rug pull it from them, you just take it from them and you say, you know what? I never meant it. Because that's what you say when you go to social media and you say, if you care about this, I don't want your support anymore. If you don't like the bombing of Iran, well, get this. MIGA. When you do that and then you're twisting the knife, you already stripped them of their hope, you took it from them, and then you twisted the knife on them. They were going to punish you and they punished you bad.

Like, who came up with that plan? Whose idea was that?

But the right is different because with MAGA and all new movements come new people, and a lot of these people were, you know, noobs, right, for lack of a better word. They're not really experienced in the political field. So it was easy to kind of mark some of these people and make them bad faith actors. And then I really think we can't step over this without the, you know, without addressing the loss of Charlie. There were people on their way out of this thing. Donald Trump, the America First movement, had pushed out the old guard and then neoconservatism never really had a new constituency down the barrel ready to fire off so they could replenish their numbers when these boomers go.

But there are some voices that were, you know, dying, waning in influence and their influence was dying and their audiences were dropping off. I'm just being remiss if I didn't say this. They took Charlie's death as an opportunity to, they exploited his death as an opportunity to resurrect their failing careers and their waning influence. And they got the microphone. And that was a brand switch on the American voter. And we were put, all of a sudden, we saw all of these faces that represented the right, that made being Republican cool again in 2024.

It switched from that to the old again. And I think it confused, just as marketing tactic, it just confused the American voter. And as they're watching all these policies play out that they didn't vote for, and they're looking at all their spokesmen lecturing everybody about things you can or cannot say, policies you can or cannot support, which, by the way, they just rejected that worldview in 2024 that they thought came from Democrats. And it was more than confusing. They thought they got hoodwinked and they just vomited it out.

They just regurgitated it. And every day, you know, in the polling, we hear the same thing over and over again. It's not hard. You know, this was the biggest rug pull of all time, modern history at least.

And it's just because of his policy positions and his, it's just an attitudinal appeal that you need for that region of the country. And Republicans absolutely suck at doing it. They can't do it. I don't know why anyone thought Mike Rogers was going to win Michigan is a great example of what I'm talking about. They haven't won that state for U.S. Senate since 1994, which was the Republican revolution, basically the reverse of what we witnessed last night when all of America's a battleground and you're getting wiped out all up and down the mat. It was favorable to Republicans that year.

They lost it the very next cycle anyway in 2000 when George W. Bush actually won the presidency. They still lost it to Debbie Stabinau, who retired not too long ago. She held that seat the entire time. Before that, you had to go back to 1972 to find a year when Republicans won a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan. It's very, very difficult. And Republicans, in their infinite hubris, looked at what Trump did, the Trump-Vance ticket, and thought, oh, this is always going to be ours. And they squandered it. They took it for granted.

They took the voters themselves for granted. And then they tried to use the word, it is the perfect word. They tried to browbeat everybody else who didn't agree with this little switch, this little switcheroo. The problem is you can't browbeat a majority. You had a 1.5% national popular vote victory. You did not have some 8 to 12 point, you know, kind of, you know, Barack Obama or Richard Nixon level margin. It's like they acted as if they had coalition as squander.

And they didn't. And now they just found out the hard way. They just got boned. And again, like somebody like a Marco Rubio or something, I just find that absolutely laughable. Marco Rubio has zero chance to win the U.S. presidency. He can't win Michigan. He can't win Pennsylvania. He can't win Wisconsin. And that's what all of this is about, which is what you just, you know, we're talking about. So that's the end of that. I have doubts he could even win Ohio.

Get into the question of who did it and the people responsible for this. So it was the ideologues, obviously, the donors, clearly, you know, Levin and Miriam Adelson and Paul Singer and, you know, the usuals. But also the people within the political staff at the White House, like, are their careers over? I mean, can the Republican Party say enough? Like, you already wrecked everything. You can't participate going forward?

And this goes all the way back to, you know, I know there's some stuff there that's obviously personal with the president, but, you know, going after Massey, there's a revenge of Massey all over the ticket, all over the country, guys. Go look at the maps. You'll see it. This libertarian getting 3 to 5% here, the independent candidate getting, you know, a point or two points here. You manage a billion-dollar fund and you don't know that going after a Lega year coalition is going to cost you a significant chunk of the vote. And speaking of Charlie, I was never a huge fan of Thomas Massey.

And I only recently, very recently, ever got a chance to even speak to the man. He seemed like a nice enough man. But I wasn't a fan of his. And Charlie used to say, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. We need Massey. He's a vital part of the coalition. And Charlie was right. Look at the map. Look at the map. If you don't keep these factions together, that's what happens. I mean, there's significant shares all over the place. By the way, Massey's own district, Ed Galrin put up the worst performance for any Republican since I believe 2006.

I was tracking that last night. It was a pathetic, you know, performance for that district. And this is something Massey used to routinely win with 60 plus percent of the vote, 70% of the vote. And the guy was in the 50s last night, Tucker. It was humiliating.

Do you understand? Like, the right, wake up. Let me open your eyes. It's time. In case you're still asleep. You're done. You're finished. I've been trying to be gentle with you today, but Talarico just won that and won it overwhelmingly because, not to do a shameless plug of the book or anything, this was the warning. The millennials and Hispanics in the electorate that Donald Trump appealed to had to become your voters because the boomers that watch Fox News aren't going to live forever and they're going to be replaced every year two to one by younger voters.

Millennials are the largest voting cohort. And the minute they and Hispanics decide, you know what, I think this year I'll flex my political muscles. You're smoked. And that's what happened. And it happened despite all of the warnings, despite the simple mathematics. It's, this is not difficult math. It's basic arithmetic. And if you're going to manage a fund that big, if you're going to manage a pack that big, you better understand that. And by the way, they went after Paxton, who's flawed. Sure. You want to say that?

That's fine. The voters wanted him. A 22-year Senate incumbent should not need $100 million to defend him against somebody like Ken Paxton. If you can't survive that without $100 million, you should probably hang up your boots and call it a day. It's been the honor of my life to serve the people of Texas, but apparently I suck and they don't want me anymore. It's $100 million, Tucker, to destroy Ken Paxton to the point where it was not even repairable. In truth, they didn't just defeat Ken Paxton. They defeated every Republican in the statewide, running for statewide office on that ticket.

They pulled Greg Abbott down. And I know the president's frustrated and he was, you know, attacking Greg Abbott on True Social last night. And I believe me, I could, I'm sure I could feel his frustration. You know, he shouldn't have run this long. He had $135 million cash on hand. Democrats didn't even come into that race until way late. They thought it was too late because they didn't believe they could beat, they could beat Abbott with Hannah Sutt. And they did. And they did because of the damage that was really already done well before. Paxton's a victim.

He was a victim here. All right, everyone's looking at him like he's a terrible candidate and we're supposed to blame Pat Paxton for what happened in Texas. Paxton had no way to run against those headwinds. And by the way, Darlene Graham, who went down in South Carolina, we saw that a mile away because she had 30% disaffection. The same thing Cornyn had. That's the kind of number we were looking at when we were, disaffection is basically folks that base didn't want to vote for them. They just were over these people. And we saw it with her brother too before he passed and then just injecting her and then putting all of that money behind her and basically, again, a browbeat.

You're going to, you're going to back this woman. You're going to support this woman. Even though she went into a debate and when asked about a simple question about Taiwan, her response was, you have to excuse me, foreign policy is not my strong suit. Or national security is not my strong suit. That was her brother's bread and butter. He spent his entire career trying to bomb people and being brushed up on national security. Whether you agreed with him or not, he knew his stuff, right? I couldn't imagine a scenario where a U.S. senator couldn't answer a question like that and then admits an open admission that I don't know anything about national security.

What were you expecting? You just, the amount of contempt or disregard you have for voters and their intelligence, strike. It just absolutely strike.

And the clip you played before, Mark Short, saying that it's the, it was all the tariffs. It was all the tariffs. We've pulled tariffs in the Midwest for 10 years. They actually like tariffs when they're used appropriately. The problem is you slapped tariffs on people and started a war. And then that drove up the price of energy and gas and diesel. So come on, give me a break. It's just, it's a cowardly way out. They would have taken that war, you know, any day of the week, twice on Sunday. The tariffs were their problem? Come on. I mean, I don't know who did it, but.

We're not even headed towards anywhere near self-actualization when you don't have shelter or, you know, food. You know, these are, these are very, very simple ideas and simple concepts. And we just completely lost sight of it. But all of that was compounded on the fact that this was supposed to be different. This was supposed to, I mean, Republicans really did run as the party who would not forget about the little guy, the party that would not let the war lobby disrupt, you know, their administration.

And that's what it was sold to them as. This is your turn. We're going to focus on you. We're going to put you first. We're going to put the country first. And it stuns me that anybody, you know, just couldn't see how deep of a wound that could cut and how much, you know, how potentially devastating it could be at the ballot box. And that's what it ended up being. I don't think anybody alive right now has seen anything like this.

And I was just trying to hold confidence on things that I already did know. So I already knew they knew and had just waited for election day eventually. But no, nobody who actively misled people and did what they did. And I'm not alone here. So I don't want to just, you know, sit over here like, oh, why was me kind of thing, but they did it to a lot of people. And these people really were just trying to help the president. They were really just trying to help. He wanted to see him succeed. They, you know, they liked the president. They were trying to steer him in the right direction.

And they were unleashed on. You know, it was morbid.