END GERRYMANDERING

“The thing that's extraordinary about this Gallup poll is people feel worse about the economy today than they did during COVID, than they did during the great recession. And so we have to pull apart why that is because, usually, like, a president gets blamed for for the economy that that he's presiding over, but it's usually not the president's fault. In this case, all of the almost all of the negative things happening to us from an economic perspective are direct policy decisions made by Donald Trump.”

“Business people I speak to are still like, it's working for me. They they don't like him. They don't like lots and lots of policies. They see all the risks involved, but they contort themselves into pretzels to make excuses for him Because they love the access they have. This is what happened in Russia. Look what happened to all the oligarchs. Right? They chummed up to Putin. They made lots of money, and then he turned around and stabbed them in the back.”

“He's always lived that way. That's why when the Iran War starts, most of what we've heard from Donald Trump especially early on and even throughout the past month or so, is little bits of pieces that he tells reporters on the phone. There was a period where he must have called a dozen or two dozen reporters over a week period. Oftentimes, saying things that conflict from one call to the next, but each one is treated as a headline, it's treated as big news.”

“In District 7, forty 5,000 people are now without health insurance period because of the ACA subsidies expiring. And over a 150,000 people just in this district will see their premiums go two times, three times, or even four times. So a family of four that was paying, you know, dollars 2,500 a month is now paying upwards of, you know, dollars 5,500, dollars 6,000 a month. That's not sustainable.”

“What if you were a military parent? Okay? So what has Pete Hegseth done this week? Made some videos, spent some time with Kid Rock with Kid Rock. What is he doing today? Sending out a a funny, a cartoon of him as Franklin you know, with Franklin the turtle before he goes into this hearing. We've got men and women serving our country. How would you feel if you were a military parent watching this?”

“It's not inviting a Republican president. It's inviting a president who has attacked the press mercilessly throughout the last 15 months and whose administration has clamped down on press access, has threatened news organizations, and Trump personally has sued news organizations. So you're gonna have the guest of honor, a guy giving a speech, sitting up on this platform, who has undermined the press, you know, throughout his second term. That's why it's not normal.”

“Look, when we talk about the gerontocracy, I think in a lot of ways, what we're doing is using a technocratic word for out of touch. And for some members, I think the issue is not that they are old, it is that they're completely out of touch with the lived experience on the ground for the people that they are supposed to represent. And paying attention to these issues, understanding them fully, it's not necessarily a function of age.”

“Right after the president won, I called someone very, very, very close to him. And I said, look. America just showed us the pendulum has swung to an extent. This is Trump's opportunity as in his early days, in his inauguration speech, really, to say let's come together. And when I tell you this person screamed, yelled, and cackled at me, like, come together, come to the middle. I mean, this person spiked a ball in my face, you know, punched me in the teeth, laughed their head off, and basically said, absolutely not. Every single naysayer out there should get on their knees and beg him for mercy and forgiveness.”

“Is the Spirit CEO making a donation to... If we look at Trump World and we look at MAGA, we know that there's something rotten in the state of Denmark. So what is it? Is it that the Trump administration has some kind of relationship with Spirit? Why is Donald Trump using our tax dollars to bail out Spirit Airlines? Earlier in this season of Donald Trump Destroys America, we saw him use some of that money to bail out Latin American countries. We've seen him use our tax dollars for any number of sordid things.”

“So the Trump administration put together Supreme Court, three Supreme Court justices, all of them super MAGA. They did it for things like this decision that came down this week. Conservative six three just gutted the Voting Rights Act. What they said was you no longer need to have majority minority seats, and that was all Louisiana needed to redraw the map. They already had voting. Louisiana is already voting in primary elections. And what did Jeff Landry do? He called a state of emergency. The emergency is fixing the primaries so that Republicans can pick some seats up so that maybe they don't lose the house. They are going to suspend the primary process even though they're already voting.”

“A Florida judge issued a restraining order on behalf of a Florida woman, another woman, not also not his wife because Cory Mills was deemed to be, a danger to her and had, blackmailed her, with revenge porn, basically trying to share, you know, pictures and videos of of intimate moments that they had had with people that she wanted to go on and date. And she had to ask congressman Mills 11 different times to stop contacting her. And he he refused to listen, and that's what landed him in court and got the, got the restraining order against them.”

“Pete Hageeht is in congress at a hearing today, and one of the things we learned is how much, this Iranian war has cost us so far, which is $25,000,000,000. I have a really amazing statistic from friend of the show, Spencer Ackerman here, Molly. That's how much the surge cost.”

“The one thing the right is very good at. They're not very good at governing. They're not very good at telling the truth, but they're very good at message discipline. And so once the line goes out, they all say and, obviously, we've now seen revelations from, Elon Musk's ex girlfriend, mother of his child, now switching away from the she's been revealing about what happens in some of these WhatsApp groups and mess, you know, chat group chats where they all have the talking points go out, the ballroom talking point goes out. So I think it's really interesting to look and see at how they've managed to persuade the American public. You look at the polling now. Americans are actually more concerned about left wing violence than right wing violence despite the opposite being the case for the last ten years, which again is testimony to the power of the media machine because we don't talk about all the right wing violence that is still happening, nor do we talk about the fact that every single empirical study, every single academic study, every single government study shows that right wing political violence is the biggest threat in this country, much bigger than left wing violence going back five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, thirty years, forty years.”

“And then on the politicization piece of the military, you know, I've been really impressed with the military, resisting being politicized. I do think Hegseth and Trump are trying to do that when they called all the general officers and flag officers back to Virginia to talk to him, I think the military did a good job of being fairly stoic. They didn't say a lot. They didn't nod. They didn't smile. They didn't clap. You know? They listened to what the president said, but they stayed apolitical, and it's good to see that even amongst calls and desires to politicize the military.”

“So as it relates to the nuclear question, you know, the the codes are always with the president. And so there are a bunch of people who several people do the job at a time so they can get rest and things like that. But you're there with the president all of the time, and and that job is a big job. So when you carry the nuclear football, you are in charge of emergency response for the president. And so it's kind of everything from, say, an assassination attempt all the way to nuclear war. And then you are the point person for all the assets at the White House, which are like Air Force One and the helicopters and the drivers and Camp David and the food guys. It's a very big job. There's a lot of people there. So you are coordinating with that group of people with the Secret Service and the White House staff to make sure the president can do their job every day.”

“Republicans have been gerrymandering these maps. They've been trying to have mid-cycle redraws of maps for a very, very long time. One of the things that they banked on was that Democrats were going to be so committed to the rules and democracy and looking like they were above it, that they would continue to take state houses across the country, that they would continue to redraw house maps to shape the power in the United States Congress. And what you're seeing, I think, in Virginia, is a recognition from the electorate that that no longer serves us.”

“We saw Paramount negotiate this multi-million dollar settlement with Donald Trump over his lawsuit in minutes. We've seen this before. Disney also settled with Donald Trump just as he won the presidency over him suing because of something George Stephanopoulos said. Donald Trump has sued a lot of news organizations, and usually these news organizations fight back. The Wall Street Journal has, the New York Times is, the BBC is. But we saw Paramount settle as they were trying to complete this merger.”

“Look. I'm glad you brought Michigan because especially for a liberal audience. It's a little bit nuanced. Let me unpack it very quickly. Yes. Some Muslim Americans did defect to Trump in big numbers in some of these parts, including prominent figures who got jobs out of it. And then some of them believed the bullshit that Trump would be anti war. And by the way, the anti war lane was left empty by Kamala Harris who decided to campaign with Liz Cheney warmonger. So when Trump said, Liz Cheney's gonna send your kids to die in The Middle East or gonna kill your families in Lebanon, they believed him.”

“The leaks that are coming out of the Pentagon, these are career department officials. Okay? These are people from the military, and the reason they're blowing a whistle is because they're panicked about our national security. That's a different kind of leaking, and the reporting that we're getting is extraordinary. When those people are sounding the alarm, that's a lot more than Jared versus Bannon versus Mnuchin versus John Kelly. That's a totally different game.”

“The Republicans here in Tallahassee are are truly breaking our constitutional, requirement, to to not gerrymander districts because they're unable to create the policies to keep in office, so they have to pick their districts in a way that the voters get, disenfranchised.”

“I have never been anti-vaccine. It's like when Sean Hannity says he's not a reporter, he's a talk host. He has been anti-vaccine. And later in the hearing, he denied things he said. He has spread lies. He is trying to get them to not use the, no one's going on here. This guy is a total liar. Yeah. And this is what he does every time, is he denies things he said on podcasts that we have tape of every time. This is just what he does because he doesn't want to actually have to answer for these things because I'll shock you here.”