Trump’s Paranoia Spins Out Of Control as He Hunkers Down in WH

23:15It never ends. By Democrats. By Democrats are the biggest bedwetters in this. And I have sons that are of the age and all of their friends where they get their news from places like Twitch. And it is absolutely Gen Z suicide for Democrats to partake in this simply because Hassan Piker calls out Israel for war crimes as I see it. Well, I think there's a couple of things. I've never met him, but I've watched a show before. I don't hate the guy or anything. I do think he said some things that are problematic that go a little bit too far. I think you know this about me. I do a lot of going on Newsmax and trying to go fight the good fight.

23:54Oh, yes. I've seen those clips. you're great thank you you do such a good job with that thank you i'm doing two hours uh in studio with newsmax right after this oh my gosh okay we'll have to watch it it's gonna be you are i forgot about that you're phenomenal on that thank you for doing that it's important of course because i mean to me it's like i'm trying to reach that like you know 90 of them it's so important yeah i mean i'll tell you i love jessica tarlov i do too yes she's great yeah like i so i'll tell you a funny story first time i did jesse waters a show um i looked down it was like two minutes to go.

24:22And my father called me. My father is a three-time Trump voter, watches Fox News all the time, knew I was going to be on Jesse Waters. I picked up the phone. I went, yeah, dad, what's up? And he goes, just remember, you're the bad guy. You're the heel, like in pro wrestling. And that actually like mellowed me. It was like, okay, I'm the heel. Like, all right, I'm going to show up and I'm going to be myself. And I'm going to know that 90 % of the audience is going to hate me, but I want that 10 % that's going to go, I don't like that guy, but I am getting fucked right now. Like, that's not right.

24:46Like, why did Trump do that thing? you just start that conversation yeah we need more people to do that on on hassan is like you know i do think he said some things that make it hard for for democrats to communicate like when i go on newsmax that's why i brought this up is like they'll play a clip of like a son piker being like and i'm gonna misquote him so like i apologize people but i i once did a hit on newsmax where it was right after the white house correspondent or shooting um or whatever the hell happened there i don't want to call it a shooting because i don't really buy the story that they're telling us either um but they played a clip of it being like the capital the street should run red with the blood of capitalists or some shit like that.

25:18And like, it's unhelpful. Like it is unhelpful. Now, I don't think he's a bad dude or anything. I think it's equally as unhelpful for a Cory Booker, who I asked on my podcast, is Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal? It's a yes or no question. And he actually has power. He actually has the ability to go in. Are we holding a Twitch streamer who uses metaphors to an account that we don't hold our democratic politicians who actually have life-saving power. Isn't that the problem with the Democratic Party? We're bedwetting over a streamer, completely bedwetting. It was a metaphor. And here's the thing, like I said, Liz Cheney has caused real life damage.

26:00Women in America are dead because of the lies that she fed into the rabid pro-life movement. Yet she's not held to account for that. She gets rewarded by the Democratic Party as look at our trophy. Look at our big catch. Look at who we're going to trot around on the campaign trail with. While women in red states that are rape victims are like, what? It was a huge betrayal. It's a questionable strategic decision that the Harris campaign made to bring in, Liz Cheney. I know I'm a former Harris advisor, but I worked on that. I love Kamala. I do too. I want to say a lot of the politicians I pick on, I like 90 % of the stuff they do.

26:38Yeah. Well, and I think being a good Democrat, we should be able to like deal with dissent like what i hate because we're not in a cult i know i know and it's like we just watched thomas massey get killed because he doesn't think we should be covering up for pedos even though he votes with donald trump 95 of the time so like i think it's good like i think it's fine to criticize korea bookers find a court christian's kamala harris and chuck schumer we should do that without hating each other right and i agree with you i think that like hassan and other streamers and other content creators including you and i by the way like we're held to a higher standard than a lot of elected officials yeah president of the united states is up in the middle of the night for like four hours tweeting crazy conspiracy theories it's barely a blip on the radar.

27:10Like, what are we doing? He talked about committing a genocide. Yes. I'm going to annihilate the people of Iran. It's like a thing that he said. Fox News, the pro-life channel, rolls out. Literally, I went to a basketball game with Hassan the other night, and he said every... The Knicks? No. Oklahoma City Thunder versus the Lakers. Hassan was cheering for the Lakers. War LeBron jersey. I'm a diehard Oklahoma City fan. Oklahoma City swept them. It was beautiful. It was a beautiful event but I just wanted to get in the the Knicks having a point zero one percent chance of winning yesterday's game and coming back last night oh they did such a good job there were people like chanting in the streets it was like we'd want a war but Hassan said every at the top of the hour on Fox at the top it was him yeah and so here's my thing people tend to find somebody who is actually a really good messenger.

28:00And I know this because my children who are college-aged and their friends, when they'd all come over and hang out, they are talking about things like wage inequality. They are talking about things like corporations buying politicians. These are things they're not going to hear on corporate news. And having a smarter electorate is better. And so I think there's been a lot of false equivalencies and i understand maga because hassan packard's like catnip for them he's good looking he says provocative things so that's going to be the top of the hour he's not white so they're going to turn him into a right like although he he identifies as white hassan does yeah oh well they treat him like he's not no yeah he knows that but he identifies as white because when they talk about him they're like he's a muslim yeah um but uh i do think the component of the Democrats that go after him, like third way, and a lot of them bedwetting about that instead of saying, look, we need to partner with him and build a big tent here.

29:03And the thing that I think causes them to beat up on him is because he has absolute moral clarity, and a lot of the Democrats don't on Israel's genocide in Gaza, displacing millions of people in Lebanon and dog walking Donald Trump. Our own state department said this, by the way, this is not - Marco Rubio said it. Yeah. Marco Rubio said it, the secretary of state, that Trump did this for Israel and we're killing little kids. Yeah. I mean, I think that's right. And I also think it extends beyond that too, Okay. Which is most of the Democratic candidates that I've worked for, not all of them, but most of them don't really know what they stand for and don't really know what they believe in.

29:49Oh, that's devastating. It sucks. It sucks. So devastating, Mike. Right. And you bring up like the – it's depressing. But you bring up the consulting class. Like I am – for better or for worse, I'm a card-carrying member of the Democratic Party's consulting class. You are. You're a good one. You're the good one. Well, I don't think – I don't know that I'm a good one. Like I don't want to like overstate it. I think you're good. Oh, okay. But like thank you. I mean I write a lot of fundraising emails. It's like what I do in my day job. but it's so I apologize if you've gotten a fundraising email and you liked it I wrote it didn't like it um but it's a lot of them just don't quite know and maybe they have like a couple of things that they believe in but it's tough and like do you remember during the shutdown towards the end of last year um Hakeem Jeffries kept having like every democratic member of the house stay in DC and they kept doing these unity events where like they were all together and they were posting like a video being like we're all here and we're working and like we're ready to go and the Republicans scattered all across the country to go talk to voters and stuff now it didn't work because people were mad at the Republican party.

30:40But I kept saying, you know what I want? I want all, you know, 200 members of the democratic party to be out there on podcasts and, and local news shows and cable news and go out there and doing it. And like half of them can't do it. And the half of them that can do it, who can articulate a vision, maybe only like five or 10 of them are even good at TV and good at TV is such a relative thing. Like they can't have conversations like this because they don't know what they're about. And if you drop me or you in the middle of any room, even if it's an uncomfortable room with like people who I don't agree with, Like I did Bar Fight with Michael Knowles.

31:10It's a Daily Wire show in Nashville where you're at a bar, you're drinking, you're chatting. And I cornered Michael Knowles on Epstein. And like afterwards, I stayed for like two hours and talked to everybody in the bar. Could not have been a more conservative crowd who hated me, but I won some of those people over. And like, you can't do that with a lot of Democratic politicians because they don't know what they believe in. And you can tell when you watch them on TV. You can just see it. It oozes out of them. Oh, that's so devastating to hear. But I think we know that. So the way I see the Democratic Party right now is there are two camps.

31:39There are the pro-people Democratic Party, the Zoran Mamdani's, the Abdul Al-Sayed, the Graham Plattner's, the people who are not taking corporate money, period. They're not doing it. They're calling, as Alyssa Slotkin likes to say, I call balls and strikes, but she can't call it a genocide, which is a ball and a strike. And so it's that double speak bullshit that Democrats do that the electorate is done with. And then you have the Cory Bookers, the Alyssa Slotkins, the Mallory McMorros, the Hakeem Jeffries, the Chuck Schumers, who play patty cake with the same pimps that buy off, like the vice president who bought off Donald Trump.

32:23So the way I see it is you have pimps and hoes. And I think the pimps are the packs and the corporations and the prostitutes are the politicians that are willing to be bought. So Donald Trump is a big prostitute. J.D. Vance, in my opinion, is the country's biggest prostitute. And I know a lot of y 'all probably thought I was going to say Melania, but that's not what we're talking about right now. J.D. Vance might be the skankiest with the eyeliner again. He is the skankiest. I want to know how he does it because I'm like a J.D. Vance type in the face. I want to know how to get that smug out. Maybe we'll put some money before you go on Newsmax.

32:54That'd be good. We'll do like a TikTok collide one. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I also think there's some hoes in the Democratic Party. They get purchased and they get bought. When you find out, like as I weaned off of corporate media and I find out that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are taking money from fucking Palantir, right? It's devastating. It's like, no, I am so sorry. That is just not how it works. You do not get to say, oh, I'm an opposition party when you have the same pimp that MAGA has. And so I see this as an existential issue right now. And there can be degrees of progressivism, degrees of liberalism, degrees of being a Democrat and independent or whatever.

33:36But I see that there are two things that will get people elected that would make the Democratic Party favorability rise up. And it is fighting, which goes to your believing in something, not being a nihilist. And number two, not being a prostitute. What do you think? I think I broadly agree with that. I maybe disagree on some of the candidate choices and stuff like that. And that's maybe a separate fight for another time. But I think that the two people that I see talk about this, I always articulate this, right now in the country, the problem is it's the Epstein class versus everybody else. That's just the way that I think about it because there's a powerful wealthy influential group of people who are abusing our campaign finance laws who are abusing little kids and getting away within the criminal justice system who are spending so much money to rig it and it goes beyond partisan politics like there are see i think that still frames it in the trump era so because there are hakeem jeffries isn't a part of the epstein class well but and chuck schumer isn't a part of the epstein class but my god are they compromised but my god are they a contributing factor to the democrats abysmal approval rating Can I make this point?

34:39Is that the people in the Epstein class are playing both sides. To them, partisan politics is a game. And Thomas Massey's actually talked about this as Miriam Adelson and Paul Singer are the two who spent so much money through AIPAC, through these shell organizations, to spend$35 million to unseat him yesterday in Kentucky. They're also spending a ton of money on Democratic campaigns all across the country. They're propping up state legislative organizations there. They start, they get them all the way down here, right, in state Senate and state House, and they work their way up. So they're polluting our politics at every level.

35:06So the answer is Like there's style questions that we can argue about. There's, you know, do you care about Medicare for all a public option? Like those are legit conversations we can have. But until we break this very small class of people like Peter Thiel, who does play both sides, like Paul Singer and Mary Madelison, who play both sides, we have to break them. And right now the problem is our campaign finance laws are a joke. They're an absolute joke. They're not enforceable. The ones that are enforceable are ridiculous. The FCC is an absurd organization that never accomplishes anything. And it just doesn't matter.

35:33And then on top of that, you have a foreign government problem, which is that there are influencers that are being paid by foreign governments through corporations to act as mouthpieces. They're basically foreign agents. We know Benny Johnson and Tim Pool were taking money from Russia. We know that Viktor Orban, likely through Russia, would be my guess, was paying for CPAC. I believe there are influencers on the left. They're taking money from China just based on the way that they're talking. Laura Loomer is rumored to be like an Israeli influencer. they're like, if there's all these rumors and innuendo, we have to get to the bottom of that too, because those things are polluting our politics.

36:03So forget like Democrat Republican labels for a second, just for a second. I'm not saying they're not important, but that class, they're ripping us off and we're all busy fighting with each other about whatever's going on in social media that day about Assam Piker versus Third Way or whatever, which is dumb. It is so dumb. I mean, oh my God, I was like done with it after 70. I thought it would end. They're still going at it. And all he did is he's bigger now. Like that's all that it is. Like Third Way made him big. so much more popular well i mean and they also and like look no again no insult to a sign i think what he's built is impressive they also talk about him like he has the influence of joe rogan like he has 30 000 people who watch him on twitch rogan has like 50 million people who watch him it's not even remotely the same it's just well i think he has 30 000 that watch watch him live and then he does really well on youtube millions and millions yeah i'm just saying that there's like there's a difference no totally there is no they they elevated him to that okay they did last question So there's this vote blue, no matter who.

36:55Sure. Mantra. And generally, I'm a harm reduction voter. I lived in Oklahoma City and I typically would always vote blue. All my candidates always lost. I'm so excited to register and vote New York because I'm actually going to vote for people that win for the first time in my life. New York politics is an absolute cesspool though. Good luck. Yeah. It's much better than Oklahoma politics. Well, for sure. Oklahoma politics, these people are depraved. Yeah. But every now and again, you got to look at the eye of an Andrew Cuomo. So, or an Anthony Weiner. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what, the Oklahoma politicians are, they think the earth is 6 ,000 years old.

37:31I mean, yeah, 100%. I worked in Kansas for a year. Yeah. There was - So you get it. Chris Kobach, you got to look, I'll tell you about him off street, but he was a crazy person. He was the attorney general. So, Graham Plattner. Yeah. A lot of people are bedwetting over him. Sure. And obviously he had this tattoo. Yep. And he covered it up. And I think, okay, that's unfortunate. Like that fucking sucks because this guy speaks to people. He gets big crowds out. He's put himself out there, his PTSD, his problems, his struggles. It's been somewhat refreshing to see that. And then you have this big pushback from the establishment.

38:06Chuck Schumer, despite Graham Plattner pulling 20, 30 points higher than Janet Mills, he endorses Janet Mills. so obviously Graham Plattner is going to be the Democratic nominee yes and a lot of people do I'm wondering the vote blue no matter who lecturers are they going to endorse and vote blue no matter who because they didn't do that with Zoran yeah well the thing I mean and you and I talked about this briefly before we got started give me your take on that closing thought so like so like with with Zoran like I was pissed about this because and like look I'm I'm not quite like movement progressive or I'd probably straddle the line a little bit.

38:45I work with a lot of establishment politicians. I work with a lot of like, I've worked with Ilhan Omar and Michelle Wu and a bunch of great progressives. And I'm probably like a normie dem is what I would say. I don't know what that really means anymore because the party's moving around. Yeah. But the number of times I've worked on a race and I've been really excited about the progressive candidate that I was working on and I was in love with them. I thought they were going to be amazing. And then we lose the primary and I got lectured or you got lectured or the folks watching at home got lectured about, well, the primary's over, the voters decided you have to rally around the candidate.

39:11And we did. I mean, the progressive wing of the party rallies around the centrist when they need to, or there might be a little like, you know, hurt feelings and stuff like that. And, but they didn't do that with Zoran. And I think that's a problem because there's going to be a time when there's a big fight. Maybe it comes in 2028 where a centrist wins or a more established candidate wins and you need the left to rally. They didn't rally around Zoran and left Cuomo with an opportunity to win that race. Right. I mean, it was closer than I think a lot of us thought it was going to be. And I think that's a problem with Plattner.

39:38I want to believe him. This is the way I would put it is like one. And I say, this is like one of the founders of white dudes for Harris. Like if we're going to bring in more white men, well, guess what white men in the last 20 years have done said some really problematic things. And obviously there's a line that shouldn't be crossed, particularly on like sexual assault and racism and stuff like that. I want to believe though, that Graham's story is true, right? He went into the military. He got this tattoo. He didn't know what it was. He said some stupid things on the internet and then grew over time.

40:04My guess is if you found stupid stuff that I said when I was 18 and 20, I'd probably say some things that I would regret now as an adult and a dad and a husband and an activist. So I want to believe that. And I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt. I mean, he won the primary, right? He went into, you know, restaurants and community halls all across Maine, won people over. Janet Mills, I think, was a strategic mistake by the establishment. Like Janet Mills is actually a super badass governor. Like she's a really good governor. She's done some really amazing things, but she's also, you know, 70 something years old and at a time when people are pretty frustrated with that.

40:32So I think Plattner also got lucky that that was the candidate that they coalesced around. I'd be curious what would have happened if they had gotten around like a Troy Jackson or something for Senate, who's running for governor right now, and I think it's phenomenal. So I don't know, but I do have a little bit of that worry. And I know this will get me, like people in your comment section will be mad at me. I'm a little bit worried that he could be a Fetterman type. And I say that because I worked against Fetterman in that primary. A very similar group of people screamed at us when we had concerns about Fetterman, and then Fetterman turned out to be who he is.

41:02Now, maybe Plattner's gonna come in and be amazing, and that'll be great. And we just don't have a voting record to rely on for him. We don't have something. He just kind of came out of nowhere. Candidates who come out of nowhere make me nervous because they say all the right things, but I don't have anything to back it up. So again, if I was a main voter, I would vote for Graham Plattner because he's better than Susan Collins and I want Democrats to win. But I have those concerns and it's going to be incumbent on him and his campaign to win people over. That's just ultimately what it is. I think it's a very fair assessment that when you don't have a voting record, like Donald Trump came out of nowhere, politically speaking, was he famous?

41:36Yes. I, I, I like him. I think if he were, you know, like this horrible person that they claim he is, I don't think he would be so morally clear about genocide and the killing of children that, you know, that really, that to me right now becomes, I think Denise Coates said this for the Democratic Party. And I think this is a true assessment. If you cannot draw the line at genocide, you're not going to be able to draw it anywhere. I agree with that. And I think that's a very, the people who cannot say that still to the state, the genocide deniers, history is not going to be kind to them. And then you see they have moral breakage, not just from that, but that just kind of like trickle down breakage.

42:24Right. You know, and you see it and sadly, but I do believe this. I want to leave people with some hope. I do believe that generally the Democratic Party, if you're fighting for LGBTQ plus people and you're fighting for equality and the biggest thing that we haven't talked about is the anti-black racism is on the rise more than anything in the United States right now. It is the biggest form of bigotry constantly, consistently, and now they're removing black voices from Congress. And the mask is fully off now. Totally. The Jake Langs of the world. Did you see Jake Lang is now banned from National Stadium after putting up a white supremacist banner in a baseball game?

42:59Yeah. And so, you know, I believe that the Democratic Party is the best place to get people to a place where we can all support universal human rights, that all of the forms of bigotry are connected, whether it's misogyny, transphobia, homophobia. And I'm just very, my biggest litmus test is for any democratic politician that concedes and capitulates to right wing framing. Like Rahm Emanuel was on my podcast and he threw trans people under the bus. Yeah, he did. And you torched him for it. That is the biggest red flag to me because if somebody will throw less than 1 % of the population under the bus, who doesn't want anything except for to be able to vote, have a job, have healthcare, the same thing that everybody else wants.

43:48If a Democratic politician is willing to do that, then they will continue moving the goalposts. And at some point you will be on their list of people. And so that's my biggest litmus test is Democrats who capitulate to right wing framing. Yeah. Well, and there's a ton to unpack there. Like I want to respond to like so many different things. Like the transgender attacks inside the party really pissed me off, particularly after 2024 because they ran that ad against Kamala Harris that she's for they, them, not us. And it was a really powerful and effective ad. So I understand the reaction that the Democratic establishment had to that.

44:26It goes to your point. They don't believe in anything. They don't believe in anything. But also it was like the reason that ad worked was not because it was about transgender stuff. It was a very clever framing to make Kamala seem like they were othering Kamala. She doesn't care about you. The biggest knock on the Democratic Party in every, you mentioned polling and focus groups earlier. So I'm going to be the consultant that mentions polling. They say, oh, the Democratic Party, they're really well-meaning. We kind of agree with a lot of what they say, but they're fighting for other people, not for me.

44:50So that was what that ad was doing. It was reinforcing the narrative that Kamala Harris was going to come into office. She was going to fight for everybody else and not you. And Kamala's campaign didn't have a good answer for that. And in fact, they outright ignored it, which I think was a mistake. Again, Monday morning quarterbacking. But I want to on the Democratic Party for a second. Okay. Because I get asked this all the time. Okay. Like, Mike, why are you a Democrat? Like, Democratic Party sucks. Like, why are you a Democrat? And the truth is, like, if I quit doing what I did right now, I might become an independent, like a lot of other people do.

45:14Yeah, that's enticing. But I do think we need people who stay and fight in the parties because there's so many independent voters now that both parties are just kind of left to their own devices of like whoever stays. And the people who stay are the ones who win. And to me, the Democratic Party remains, as imperfect as it is, the best case scenario to save democracy, to save decency in this country. And it's the only group of people in this country who give a shit about whether or not you have a good paying job, can afford to buy a house, retire with dignity, take a vacation, etc. It's basically the core tenets of what I believe the American dream are.

45:42So like, I'm going to stay and fight. And I'd rather stand side by side with people that I don't fully agree with on everything like Zoran Mondani or, or Grant Plattner, right, who I have some concerns about, I think are legitimate, but I know that they're at least trying. Now, the one thing I'll add on Plattner, just to get back to that for one second is, because again, is you talk about the consulting class. And I think the framing of this is often a bit off, is that Grant Plattner also has a ton of consultants who work for him. And they're very good. Like, I know a lot of them, they work really hard.

46:08They're very smart and clever and creative. So like, again, the thing that I worry about is that the consultants are doing a really good job creating a brand and then don't know what they have in their product. That's what I worry about without that record. But again, he's the nominee. Like, let's move forward with it. But I think that sometimes it's we should just always like take a deep breath and be more discerning when somebody shows up and says the right thing, you know, and sometimes they turn out to be amazing because like AOC came out of nowhere. Nobody knew who the hell she was. She was a bartender.

46:31So and sometimes it works out, but sometimes it doesn't because that's Fetterman. So like I get I get nervous. Yeah, I really I think he's the real deal. that's my take on it i want to believe he has never shied away from any question he's been on my podcast you know this you'll i'll invite politicians on yeah and they want to destroy some of them that rahm emmanuel interview was they'll ask what are we going to talk about they want the whole thing like pre-scripted graham plattner zorn mom donnie the people who genuinely believe in something there's no script beforehand bernie sanders i had on last week can Bernie come on?

47:06Sure. And Bernie can talk about anything. And that's it because he believes in something. And I put Graham in that camp right now. Does he have to prove himself? Yes. A hundred percent he does, but everybody does. And so I think this is really fascinating stuff. And I just, on a personal note, I think that people like you and Jessica Tarloff that go on right-wing media, I think it is so important because so many of those people live in these crazy cult-like bubbles. And for them to hear just a little seed of a fact here and here and here, I think is such an incredible public service that you do that.

47:40So thank you for doing that. That's incredible. We're going to watch later on today. Loved having you in person. I think that these conversations about the Democratic Party are so important and so healthy. Thank you. And thank you for having me on. I mean, you guys have built something really special here and the setup is amazing and I'm very excited to get to know you. Yeah. Thank you.

47:59Thank you.