12/4/25: Mass Job Losses, Trump's Corrupt Pardon, New Epstein Images, Dem Special Elections

23:09Those are the allegations. He's been indicted. He has not been found guilty. This has obviously directed him. I mean, Trump has just been on this, like, pardon spree. He apparently does not think white-collar crime is actually crime. We covered earlier in the week some of the other pardons. We have some updates on that as well. But it also has direct political implications because this is a swing district at this point, a difficult one for Democrats to hold. Cuellar has, you know, strong standing in the district. People know him. He's been there a long time, et cetera. And so if you're rescuing him from his legal troubles, it makes it more likely that Democrats will be able to hold on to this seat.

23:44I don't think it's probably going to matter anyway, because it looks certainly like a midterm wave is building where Democrats are going to take control of the House pretty handily and don't necessarily need this seat in South Texas. But, you know, this is not certainly a help to Republicans. On the other hand, I guess it's possible. He's saying he's still going to run as a Democrat. I guess it's possible he flips parties. He did issue a statement thanking Trump. We can put B3 up on the screen with his reaction. He says, I want to thank President Trump for his tremendous leadership and for taking the time to look at the facts.

24:15I thank God for standing with my family and I during this difficult time. This decision clears the air, lets us move forward for South Texas. This pardon gives us a clean slate. Noise is gone. Work remains. I intend to meet it head on. Thank you, Mr. President. God bless you and God bless the United States of America. Hakeem Jeffries, we got some bipartisanship here, Sagar, everybody coming together to support the pardoning of this, you know, corrupt member of Congress who abused his position of power to take cash for him and his wife, allegedly, from foreigners in order to do their bidding. Let's put B4 up on the screen.

24:46He says this is exactly, Jeffries says this is exactly the right outcome. Listen, the reality is this indictment was very thin to begin with, in my view. Charges were eventually going to be dismissed. if not at the trial court level, then by the Supreme Court, as they've repeatedly done in instances just like this. Put B5 up on the screen as well. We've got a list here. We've got 12 members of Congress now who've been pardoned by Trump. So, you know, if you're an elite and you say things or do things or give cash to the right person, you can do insider trading. You can take money from foreign governments.

25:23You can lie to the FBI. You can obstruct. You can, you know, If you're George Santos, you could steal identities and lie about everything you could possibly imagine. Any of this is just perfectly fine if you're an elite and Trump likes you for some reason. So we have 12 members of Congress pardoned or, I guess, commuted and 10, those 10 Republicans and two Democrats. The two Democrats are now Cuellar and Rod Blagojevich, blast from the past there with that name. So anyway, there you go. Trump just letting white collar criminals go at a pace we have never seen before. And as we've covered before, Zogger, certainly Trump not the first to abuse the pardoned power.

26:03But the level, the shamelessness and the sheer scope and scale of what he has done is truly without parallel. Yeah, he just takes what is usually the quiet part and then says it out loud. Sometimes his political strength also just rubs it in your face. If you don't remember the details, just let's go over them again. Between December 2014, November 2021, Congressman Cuellar and his wife allegedly accepted 600 ,000 bribes from two foreign entities, an oil and gas company wholly owned by the government of Azerbaijan and a bank headquartered in Mexico City. The bribe payments were allegedly laundered pursuant to sham consulting contracts through a series of front companies and middlemen into shells owned by Imelda Cuellar, who performed little to no legitimate work under the contracts.

26:46In exchange for the bribes paid by Azerbaijani oil and gas, Cuellar agreed to use his office to influence U.S. policy in favor of Azerbaijan. In exchange for the bribes paid by a Mexican bank, Congressman Cuellar agreed to influence legislative activity and pressure high-ranking U.S. executive branch officials regarding measures beneficial to the bank. So that's the indictment that was actually leveled there against Mr. Cuellar. I think there should be, to me, there should be elevated sentencing if you are a public official that engages in some of this. I think there is. There's like a sentencing guideline when it comes to abusing your public trust.

27:21But we never even got to trial. Like, that's ultimately the problem. And I mean, they are maybe it was going to be thrown out by the Supreme Court because they have they have basically made it so that corruption and bribery is like by and large legal. They've taken such a like narrow view of what actually constitutes crimes, you know, criminal acts of bribery and corruption that maybe it would have been thrown out. But it's so disgusting that these people just get away with this. I mean, what it's it truly is an attack on our entire system and the trust and faith that people put in you. It's so grotesque to me.

27:55And then for them all to be let off the hook on mass like this is, you know, it's it's it's beyond a slap in the face. It's really disgusting. Let's go to B6. Let's show everybody the next particular one. So we covered this previously, this Ponzi schemer. Well, the commutation issued to David Gentile actually wipes away all further fines and restitution. He had been sentenced to seven years for the$1.6 billion scheme that had defrauded investors, and prosecutors had been seeking some$15.5 million in forfeiture. So he has wiped away all of that. And so that's money that was meant to go to the over a thousand victims of this man and his Ponzi scheme.

28:39And now they get nothing. They get nothing. So he was able to rob them. And, you know, through this Ponzi scheme bullshit, found guilty. Right. So this is not alleged, found guilty. And now the victims get nothing because Trump came in and said, oh, I'm good with this guy. Go free. Enjoy your life. Nothing to see here. That's right. And actually yesterday he actually commuted or pardoned someone that his own DOJ indicted some five months ago. That's my personal favorite. Well, and you know who had prosecuted this case against Gentile? I think was that Emile Bovier. Yes. He was like his guy. Yes.

29:17And he was, you know, I think justifiably like proud of putting this guy behind bars. And now he comes in and, oh, never mind. We think this was, you know, we don't think this was correct. People were asking, okay, why this guy? And we still don't really know. You know, many of these people who have gotten pardoned, they're sort of obvious either like political or they, you know, they gave money. We covered one of them who got pardoned or had a sentence commuted where mom had given millions of dollars and raised money. And right after she goes to this dinner with Trump, lo and behold, the guy gets let free.

29:48And then I think that was the one that immediately started defrauding people again. And by the way, a number of the people that Trump has pardoned have already gone out and committed other crimes and offenses. So you are literally letting criminals loose on the streets, Mr. Law and Order. But in any case, people are like, you know, we didn't it wasn't immediately clear why this particular fraudster got off the hook. He had a partner in crime who did not get let off the hook. So it was, you know, eyebrow raising like what exactly is going on here. There's one possibility that's been raised with a B7 up on the screen.

30:22Apparently, he had a bunch of connections that were sort of like two degrees removed from Rudy Giuliani, was as close with some of the people that this guy, David Gentile, was close to. So this is Jacqueline Sweet did this reporting. She says Trump commuted the prison sentence for financial fraudsters with ties to Russian tycoon allegedly linked to organized crime. This Russian tycoon, by the way, guys, now lives in Israel and is also very close to the entire Israeli government, number of whom were at his daughter's wedding, etc., etc. So I'll just read you a little bit of this and you guys can make of it what you will.

30:58So she says, Trump inexplicably commuted the sentence of a billion dollar Ponzi schemer, Scientologist, private equity exec, and accountant from Long Island just days into a seven year sentence leading to widespread speculation about why. David Gentile is not just any financial fraudster, however. His business history is long intermingled with former Russian oligarch Michael Cherney, wanted by Interpol for alleged ties to Russian organized crime, and Cherney's family and associates' records reviewed by Disaster Girl Reveal. Michael Cherney has long worked with another allegedly Russian mafia-linked figure, Eric Kislin, whose uncle Sam Kislin is one of Rudy Giuliani's oldest friends and supporters who once reportedly helped Trump stave off bankruptcy.

31:35Although it's unknown exactly who advocated for Gentile's release, his business ties bring him within two degrees of some of Trump's oldest backers in the Ukrainian and Russian-American business world and the highest levels of the Israeli government. So could be, could be something going on with that. That kind of fits with everything I know about some of these. Yeah. So for example, the Honduran president, I was finally reading into it. The case was - It's like a Roger Stone guy, right? It was, no, but it's also Matt Gaetz. So it was Matt Gaetz, Roger Stone. They kind of bubble up the case. Then it gets intertwined with the elections and the State Department starts to see.

32:09It's just like a Byzantine network to basically get up to the favor of Trump. I mean, for example, this entertainment lawyer who he just pardoned a couple days ago. It's really crazy. Like this guy was indicted by Trump's DOJ five months ago. And then he was just pardoned. And nobody really knows why. Like he was the CEO of this entertainment group, quote, for orchestrating a conspiracy to rig bidding process for an arena at a public university in Austin, Texas. Nobody really understands how he got to Trump. They do know that he was represented by Trey Gowdy. So that's kind of the only, you know, the only like connection really that anybody knows.

32:48Trey Gowdy is the former Republican congressman, the guy who did Benghazi. And now he's on Fox News every once in a while. Like that seems to basically be the way that this all came about. But yeah, I mean, it's totally nuts, right? I mean, this is somebody who was literally indicted by Trump's own DOJ. So to throw out and say the politicization just seems, I mean, it's a bit crazy. It's, but that's how things are working right now. Yeah. And then lastly, just to give you a sense of the, how different this is on a, you know, in terms of the scale versus what other presidents have done, put B8 up on the screen.

33:22CNN compiled this data. So here's the number of pardons by presidents in recent years. So George W. Bush, 189. And that was over his two terms. Obama, 212, also over his two terms. Trump in the first administration, 144. So sort of in line with what others were doing. Biden, 80. And now Trump 2025, 1 ,500 plus. So, you know, I mean, this is really kind of, I guess, typical of Trump and especially Trump 2.0, where every president has abused this pardon power. It really needs to go away. It has to be reformed. It needs to go away. President should not have the powers of kings. But in any case, bipartisan affair to abuse the pardon power.

34:10And yet somehow Trump takes it and puts it on steroids. And it's like, okay, well, we're just going to do this to an insane degree. It's going to be brazenly obvious the corrupt ties that these people had to me. It's going to be, you know, it's just going to be in your face and constant so that you can't even keep track of all the criminals that we're just setting free. Yeah, I mean, like this one, he was in the sports thing. Again, why I think it's so extraordinary is these are some people in the antitrust division who spearheaded this indictment that went through. And then somehow through Trey Gowdy or whatever, you can just get a full pardon from the United States.

34:50It's just like outright corruption. It's totally crazy. But yeah, I guess that's how the government works right now. Apparently. All right, let's get to Epstein. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated. And Black America is at a breaking point. rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L.

35:27Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Going now to Epstein, some new images of Epstein's island villa that were released by the House Oversight Committee. Let's go and put these up here on the screen. Let's just keep this one up here for a while.

36:11I just want everybody to sit with this. It's like a dental chair and weird, creepy masks that are all around. There are some videos and images of the bedroom, but I mean. It's like faces of old men. You know. There's no explanation for that. Who doesn't have a room like that? There's no innocent explanation. Also, yeah, Larry Sell. Hmm, interesting. I wonder who Larry is there. in terms of his speed dial on his phone. These are some images. This is like a bathhouse or it looks like a steam room maybe. No, not exactly sure. That was being used for storage purposes that was on the island. We can continue a little bit here in terms of what we have from the island itself.

36:51Let's go to C2. Just a walkthrough, video walkthrough. I'd watched a little bit of this previously. It's nothing explicitly groundbreaking, but I guess really what it comes down to is these images and others been released by the House Oversight Committee. Some of these are inside of these. So, you know, the Epstein files, the Epstein estate. And I really just think we should all sit with like the image themselves of, let's say, that that creepy mask stuff that was there. You have the famous Bill Clinton painting. You have, you know, all of the insane, like weird sexual artwork throughout the East 71st Street Villa.

37:26You have cameras. You have the design of the mansion. Now we have the emails. And we have personally read like thousands of the man's emails. The level of psychotic disposition this guy had in terms of his arranging massages and constantly requesting photos from his assistants of girls and just constantly be like, she's too fat or something like that. It's gross, right? So you put all this stuff together and, yeah, I mean, I don't know. And by the way, like I said, having read through a lot of the guy's emails, he micromanaged this estate to a way you can barely imagine. Like he was constantly asking for updates while the compound and the island was being built.

38:06And he'd be like rejecting this and rejecting that. And so like everything there is his own aesthetic design and taste as executed by Ghislaine Maxwell. And it's like this empire basically like from his own mind that was created combined with the birthday book. It's just pretty disgusting. Yeah. It's really, I mean, again, I just, I think we all have to sit with like eyes wide shut was real. like weird masks of old men on the walls. Like there's no instant explanation for that. I'm sorry, there's not. Especially when you put in the totality of everything else that was going on, all the houses and the book and the emails and the underage girls, like it's open and shut, okay?

38:46There was also another photo that had a blackboard. Put that up there, you can see. Yeah, there's the blackboard. And it's hard to read those words, but it says power, truth, music, deception, intellectual political and then there's presumably names here that are redacted yeah by the committee um so you know who among us doesn't have this sort of thing on a blackboard somewhere in our house i guess it's around the corner from the weird old guy mask and dentist chair room yeah just just normal stuff really nothing to see plants deception uh yeah so and and here's the it is like, you know, if this was just if that's it, that's all we knew about Epstein.

39:27I mean, OK, he's a little he's a little weird. Right. OK. But, you know, this is part of a larger portrait that we have at this point based on, you know, based on the investigations into him, based on what the survivors have said, based on the records that have been released, based on things like what Donald Trump said about how much he likes him young and based on certainly the recent email revelations that have been dug into in particular by Ryan, Maz and Sagar and other journalists out there like Jason Leopold that, you know, gives you starting to emerge a more complete picture of what's going on here.

40:02And the other the other thing with this is this continues to put pressure on the government and basically signal, look, we're not going to this is we're not going to let this go. We pass a law now. You have to release what you have. You have 30 days to do that. And, you know, as you're preparing these files, whatever you're going to release, we are continuing to get information from various subpoenas that we've used our power in Congress in order to provide some level of transparency to the American public. Yeah. So the files thing is very interesting from the NBC News tear sheet about asking for the status update.

40:39Because remember, the law requires them to release it within 30 days. And this was on November 19th that it was enacted. So we really only have 15 more days before this is all supposed to come out. They say that the Justice Department announced their investigation, quote, into numerous figures, including Bill Clinton and Larry Summers, in response to that request. Quote, in the interest of transparency and clarity, we request a briefing in a classified or an unclassified setting to discuss the full contents of this new information, but no later than Friday, December 5th. So that's tomorrow as of the day that we're all recording this.

41:13The new law, remember, though, could be thwarted if they are able to say that they can cite an ongoing investigation and redaction and overall, like, just, you know, the process that they've got about doing this, which is extremely clunky and it makes it seem as if there's a cover up. I also want to say, like, with the so-called Epstein files, like, everyone needs to be careful. Like even what Ryan and I and Maz, like what we've all gone through, this is a tiny fraction of what's in the Epstein estate. Okay. That's not – we're just looking at emails from one particular Gmail and Yahoo account from like 05 to 08.

41:48By the way, again, as I reiterated in our segment, the 05 email was created after the feds or after the police started looking into him. So what's in the pre-05 emails, right? Like what happened to that? And there's a lot of them that have been deleted even inside of this inbox. Yeah. And so then what about after, you know, his conviction, his jail sentence, right? So there's a lot of stuff that still hasn't come out. Well, the email you reported on where he's coming up with legal strategies and like, you know, drafting this email. And he says, I have to assume the feds know about probably 20 underage girls.

42:22Well, guess what would be in the government files? What did they actually know? You know, how much information did they have at the time when they were convinced by, you know, Epstein and his legal team, including Alan Dershowitz, that like, you know, guys, this is really not where they're going to handle at the state level. You guys really don't need to worry about this. Like, how much information did the government have at that time when they did kick it to the state level and say, OK, you guys down there, Alex Acosta, do your sweetheart deal, do your thing. just as one example of the sort of things that would be contained in the government records.

42:56There's a lot there, and we've only gotten a glimpse of a tiny, tiny fraction. Yes, absolutely correct. And I do want to put C4 up here on the screen just to reiterate this. This is, look, I'm not a financial professional. I have gone through a lot of his stuff, like the financial stuff inside of the deals. I will say none of it seemed all that sophisticated to me. Like, you know, all the claims are about all these sophisticated hedge fund transactions. Maybe there's a different email. I'm just saying from what I saw, it was very standard. Like, hi, Jeffrey, I'm raising money for X, Y, and Z, and I could use a few million.

43:31Or somebody trying to buy some shitty movie studio. A lot of it also was like directing Les Wexner charities. Like nothing was very, like nothing explained becoming a billionaire is really what I'm saying. And that's kind of the mystery, right? And so what the Epstein survivors have said is that they are supporting this Ron Wyden bill, which would force Treasury to turn over Epstein bank records. And I do want to give credit to Ron Wyden because he's actually been beating this drum now for a while. The banks and the Treasury departments are sitting on over a billion dollars of suspicious activity reports that they updated after Epstein's death.

44:08All of those, like that is the real stuff here. the wire transfers, because we have a very small slice, which I've cited before. The New York Financial Services Department put out a fine of Deutsche Bank years ago, I think back in 2020. And I did several monologues about it at the time. You can go watch. But it details the exact scheme through which he was wiring money to the Eastern Europeans. But again, this is just one bank. And he had bank accounts at JPMorgan Chase and all of these other high finance institutions where he was moving millions, billions of dollars, that's literally 1.1 billion or so, around in ways that should have triggered like investigations by the federal government.

44:48So then you're like, okay, well, why'd the banks not do anything about this? Like, you know, you or I, I mean, as anyone, recently I had to send a wire transfer from our bank account for business purposes. It takes forever. Yeah, they're like, are you sure you author? You know, it's like, that's us, like a small business. You can't just move money around the world. It doesn't work like that. When I try to ride in an Uber in a town I haven't been in for a while, I get fraud alert. Yeah, you're like, fraud alert. You know what I'm saying? Exactly. Like, when you interact with the world and the financial system, like, I can't send a wire transfer without having to call the bank and be like, yes, I authorized this purchase.

45:25And they're like, well, what's the, have you been contacted by fraud? And this guy just gets to wire billions. Now, maybe that's just par for the course for billionaires. It probably is, if we're being honest. But at the very least, like when you're moving all this money through these banks, like they have KYC, know your customer laws and stuff. They have to determine. They're like, well, where did this money come from? It's a legitimate purpose, right? Are you money laundering? And so they clearly violated in many cases because they've been fined for it and they've been sued for it a lot of their own internal guardrails.

45:55So like that, again, I know everybody wants to talk about the black book and, you know, this client list. There's no client list, any of that. The nexus of it all, it's all in the money. That's the whole story from the intel. That's what made him useful. That's what made him powerful is the money enabled everything else. Get access to that. And that's when I think you're actually going to you'll take down some real people. Well, and we may we may get some progress on that just in the coming days. So in addition to these photos and videos, Robert Garcia, who's the Democratic, the ranking member on the oversight committee, says they're going to be releasing financial more financial records in the days ahead.

46:31so we could be getting some more information there today, tomorrow, over the coming week. So that is something to keep an eye on. And again, I think it's important to keep the pressure on. Listen, none of us, you know, we're not Pollyanna here. We're not actually expecting the government to completely come clean and release everything. And we know that they've spent lots of time and close to a million dollars, taxpayer dollars, going through these things to redact them and scrub them. I mean, I don't think anyone expects them to release anything that's going to be incriminating to the president of the United States because they, you know, they'll be out of a job if they do so.

47:04But still, like whatever comes out, whatever additional pieces of the puzzle, if they're not about Trump and they're about other people, that's, you know, it's a step forward. And so every time the House Oversight Committee releases more tranches of documents, it keeps the story alive, it keeps the pressure on, and it keeps the public focused on putting pressure on the government to follow the law that has now been passed by Congress and signed into law by the president. Exactly right. And yeah, everyone's like, oh, why did they release this? It doesn't show anything new. I don't know. More the better.

47:38Okay. The more you keep it alive, the more that people take an interest in this. That's the one thing I have been very heartened by is that even though Trump and MAGA and all of them want to move on, you know, we came, many of us came to this long before Trump was ever in the picture. It was never about Trump. Long before the Democrats were super focused on it. Yeah, by the way. We've been here the whole time, okay? When the Dems were all like, it's a conspiracy, it's anti-Semitic to say he was connected to, never cared then, didn't care now. We're just gonna keep on keeping on. And there, by the way, shout out to Pablo Torre, our friend.

48:08He's been doing some sports angles in the Epstein story. Oh, really? Yeah, he just did a segment on it yesterday. It was fascinating, actually. And so he will, actually, I've been speaking to him a little bit. He should have more stories, potentially soon, on the sports angle. And so this is the fun part. It's like as this goes out, people with different niche areas can look into their own spheres of influence. Hollywood, for example, I pointed out, this isn't my area of expertise, but I'm reading through and I'm like, yo, Epstein's getting all these invites, all these Hollywood premieres, like Michael Clayton and The Sopranos and all this stuff.

48:43I'm not a variety reporter, but some Hollywood person should probably go dig into that. So I'm just looking at Israel and Israel intelligence and the actual case. Whoever is the poblatory of the Hollywood world. Yeah, whoever that person is. Yeah, although I feel like Hollywood media is probably more compromised than anybody else. That's just my opinion. Very possible. Okay, let's get to 2026. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated. And Black America was out of breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale.

49:16In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

50:03So some interesting numbers here from CNN and Harry Enten talking about how it looks very much like a massive blue wave is coming. And based in part on the election results from this week in Tennessee, let's go ahead and take a listen to that. Republicans should be running for the hills this morning because the blue wave is building, my dear friend, Mr. Berman. What are we talking about here? Well, Van Epps, Matt Van Epps, the Republican candidate, he won it by nine, but this is a district that Donald Trump won by 22 points, 15 points, 17 points. This is a 13-point gain for the Democrats in terms of the margin.

50:40And excuse time for Republicans is over because I hear all about these special elections. Oh, the turnout's so low, it's not representative of what happened in the midterm election. The turnout last night in Tennessee's 7th District was equal to the turnout in the 2022 midterm election. I love the people in central Tennessee, but central Tennessee is nothing special compared to the rest of the country. But what we see happening is, take a look here, okay, 2025 U.S. House special elections, Dems outrunning Kamala Harris, a lot of blue here, a lot of blue, which is what I think the nation might look like a year from now if these results hold.

51:17Arizona 7, you see a 17 outperformance of Kamala Harris. 23 points in Florida 1, 16 points in Florida 6, 13 points in Tennessee 7, 28 points in Texas 28, and then 17 points in Virginia 11. So we've seen it throughout the nation, whether you go from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., all the way to the southwest in Arizona, whether you're looking at Texas, whether you're looking at Tennessee, whether you go down to Florida, we have seen the Democratic outperformance of Kamala Harris happening across the political map. We actually have history to show that what happens in special elections doesn't just stay in special elections.

51:57It spills over to the midterm results. Special elections and midterm results. I just keep going to this. When a party outperformed in special elections since 2005, five out of five times they went on to win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. So pretty interesting to see those numbers there. Let's put the next element up on the screen. You can see some aggregate and comparisons to prior years. So this is overperformance in special elections. You got 17 and 18 Democrats plus six, 19 and 20 Democrats plus two, 21 and 22 Republicans plus four, 23, 24 Democrats plus two. This time, so far, Democrats plus 11.

52:33I'd like to see the pre-T party numbers. I bet you it was similar, right? Somewhere around 09. Yeah. If you think back to that time, it was very similar to the plus 11. Yeah, that would be interesting to see. But I think Enten points out what is the most sort of critical component of the Tennessee results, which is, you know, the cope from Republicans. Yeah, these special elections. You know, you've got your Democrats have these high propensity voters now. It's not emblematic. It's going to be different when we come to the midterms. And no, it's not a presidential year. but midterm turnout is going to be a lot higher.

53:06Well, the turnout in Tennessee was really high and still they moved the margin by 13 points. If you manage to do that across the country, I mean, it's a bloodbath that, you know, is I think beyond even what we saw in the 2010, you know, Tea Party wave election. If you truly had that result across the country, it would be an extraordinary political reckoning. Now, can they pull off 13 points? That's a very tall order. But that's the reason why Republicans should be freaking out here, is because you didn't have some sort of like Republicans aren't paying attention and only the white college educated liberals showed up.

53:46No, this was a high turnout, midterm level turnout election. You had a literal socialist as the Democrat, by the way, and you still had a 13 point shift towards the Democrats. I mean, that really is a red alarm. Yeah, it totally is an alarm. And the reason why is that, as you said with that sample, is if it was low turnout, you can cope yourself away. But also, though, even with midterm level turnout, if the midterm turnout is going to be still so heavily Democratic and indicate some swing. That's a big problem. Now, obviously, it is Tennessee and it is a single election, but these are basically, midterms always are about enthusiasm when it comes to voters.

54:31Most people don't, at least a lot of voters, don't pay as much attention to the midterms, and it's usually an opposition party. Now, let's give the caveat case is Glenn Youngkin wins in Virginia, right? There's a clear view of a red wave that's coming. Then Roe versus Wade happens and it changes everything. So like a lot could still change. It's a whole year, right? I mean, we have no idea. It could be a major international incident. There could be a war in Venezuela. So things could potentially go more south. Or maybe he would ride some commander in chief wave. Nobody knows, all right? But a lot of shit can happen in the next 11 months.

55:09But as things stand right now, where things also I think are trending, We can only live in the moment that we are right now. It doesn't look particularly promising. And I also think there will be a lot of accountability at the Republican level for everybody but Trump. No Republican can admit that it's Trump's fault. But already the knife fighting, like we're about to show with Stefanik, people already know. Like they, like everybody knows. And Mike Johnson, he's not long for this world. Yeah, we'll put D3 up on the screen. So at least Stefanik has taken the knives out pretty aggressively against Mike Johnson.

55:41Now, she is running. She's a New York representative. She's running for governor. She is down an extraordinarily large amount in the polls. And Trump really screwed her over by embracing Zoran and taking any sort of heat out of the case she was making against Hochul, being close to Zoran and trying to make something of that. Not that I thought that was that great of an attack to begin with, but she was really betting a lot on that. And that was sort of undercut by Trump. Anyway, it says here, Trump ally Elise Stefanik attacks Speaker Johnson's leadership. She called him an ineffective leader who is losing control over the GOP conference headed into the midterm elections.

56:16Quote, he certainly would not have the votes to be speaker if there was a roll call vote tomorrow, the New York lawmaker said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. I believe the majority of Republicans would vote for new leadership. It is that widespread. And your read of it, Sagar, is exactly my read of it. She can see things are going south. They're going sideways. ways she wants to separate herself from the Republican Party and say, I'm not like them. I'm critical of them. I have my own way that I would do things. I'm not like these people that you hate right now. But she can't point the finger at Trump, who is the one who's really to blame.

56:52I mean, Mike Johnson is nothing more than Trump's puppet. Like he's sort of irrelevant to the whole equation. But so she decides that the person that it's safe for her to go after is Speaker Mike Johnson. And I think you will see other people certainly following in her footsteps and pulling out the knives from Mike Johnson because it's a similar way. I mean, you saw this thinking back to 2010 with Democrats when things were going well. They're like, OK, let me go after Pelosi because that will signal that I'm not like the rest of this Democratic Party that you hate. I'm different from them. And they also went after Obama, too, at certain times as well.

57:24But Trump has this stronghold. He's very, the retribution from him. You don't want to be on his bad side. You don't want him coming in and messaging against you, et cetera, or screwing you over in your, you know, whatever you're trying to do in your state. So that's the place where she's trained her fire. And what it will mean is that the race for Republican leader will be fascinating. Like if they lose. Who would want? Oh yeah, first of all, who would want? I think Steve Scalise would probably get it because he's already the number two. Trump likes him. He's, you know, I mean, he's a little bit different from Mike Johnson, but not all that.

57:58But I mean, there should be enough holdouts. Some people could credibly say like, Like, hey, you guys were a disaster. Like, you were really bad at your jobs. Like, why would we reward you? And there's enough shit stirs that somebody might actually do something about it. I really don't know actually what's going to happen. But the point I think that stands really with Stefanik and the attack is that this is a preemptive ability to distance yourself from very unpopular Republican Congress. And in some ways, like, look, fundamentally, yeah, they should attack Trump. But they're not wrong. Like, the health care thing is a huge problem.

58:32It's not even just people like me saying it. Steve Bannon, I was just reading this morning, Matt Boyle, like the Breitbart guys, they're like, yo, we need to do something before December is over. And these premiums are locked. I mean, we have what, 20 something days? Most of that's a holiday. Everybody knows the House of Representatives. By January 1, we're all in it. Like we're in it together. Premiums go up and that's it. Like that is enough. That's 7 million people just on Obamacare. So yeah, that's not that many people, but compounded to the private market with overall 25 % increase. By the way, that's the other funny thing about our Byzantine health insurance system.

59:10How many people even know whether their insurance is connected to Obamacare or not? If it goes up because of the headlines, they're gonna be like, this is Trump's fault, right? Of course. Yeah, exactly. Regardless of whether it's employer sponsored or not, because of the cycle, they're just gonna blame the administration. It's kind of fair though. I mean, we had a whole shutdown fight over this. they refused to cave. Trump said, remember when he was, oh, we were on the verge of announcing some healthcare plan from what happened with that. That's just gone. We're not talking about that anymore.

59:39So it does, I mean, that's fair to blame him for these specific increases that are coming because you could do something to stop it. I'm just saying like in terms of it, the point though is just, yes, shit goes uphill whenever you're the president and you are going to suffer the consequence. So nothing right now looks all that good. I do want to say Representative Nancy Mace, let's put D5 on the screen here, is considering, quote, this is from the New York Times, Nancy Mace has told people she is so frustrated with the Louisiana Republican and sick of the way he's run the House, particularly how women are treated there, that she is planning to huddle with MTG next week to discuss following her lead and retiring early from Congress.

1:00:22And so it could mean another early retirement there for the GOP, even further screwing over Mike Johnson, but also just showing how dysfunctional and insane the entire thing is. So I don't think things are going that well there for Mike Johnson. And I think he will be one of the shorter-lived speakers in history. I don't think he's going to be long for this world.

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