Vance Crumbles as Trump Allies Panic and MAGA Launches Desperate Attack

0:04All right, Donald Trump is now trotting around at what appears to be a wig, terrible makeup, and he's going to continue to commit crimes, in my opinion, every single day. But what is the opposition party doing? We have to have an opposition to fascism. And joining me today to discuss this is one of our favorite guests, Mike Nellis. He's a democratic strategist and host of Endless Urgency. God, that's so true. On Substack and YouTube, Mike. thank you for joining me how are you today i'm doing okay doing well by yourself great um for the most part given the circumstances given the circumstances yeah i want to talk to you about these maggot men uh first one is jd vance who i think is this country's top prostitute he had he has whored out to uh uh big tech he's peter thiel's boy and um he as we all know had moral clarity on Donald Trump not that long ago.

1:00And here is a video of him responding to Abdul El-Sayed's win at, and this is my favorite part, when J.D. Vance responds to this, he's at a fraud roundtable. Play the clip. With us. We don't want the next administration, whoever, you know, God forbid you're going to have President El-Sayed in three years. We don't want him to undo all the incredible work that we've been doing when we've been taking out the fraudsters and saving the American people money. I actually want it all undone. What about you? Yeah, I would like it all. I think that, you know how people used to make fun of Kamala as the border czar with that mess?

1:39It's like, that's what Trump is doing to J.D. Vance right now, like making him the corruption czar for the most corrupt president in American history is such a terrible way to kick off his 2028 presidential campaign. Do you think that it's intentional on Trump's part to troll him and to humiliate him no i guess the new reporting now is that trump is back to loving jd vance and thinks that he's the future of the movement like really loves all the weight that he's lost thinks he looks great like apparently he's obsessed with i mean trump is like secretly a gay man he's just obsessed with everyone's looks yeah yeah he completely is what do you what do you take of the fact that everybody in maga is responding to abdul al-sayed's win yeah well i think they're doing what they always do is that they're demagoguing first of all there's an incredible number of racist attacks on him.

2:21They're basically like one day away from claiming he committed 9-11 himself. And the ad that they put out where they used like his full name, I don't think they remember that Barack Hussein Obama won Michigan twice. And this is all that they have. So they're going to be racist as hell. They're going to call us all communists. They're going to like make stuff up. I mean, they're arguing that he wants to abolish the police and abolish jails, which he does not support. They're going to lie and they're going to cheat and they're going to steal because they have nothing. They have nothing on the economy.

2:46They have nothing on Trump's corruption. They have nothing on Max Miller, who literally broke a three-year-old girl's collarbone. So they don't want to talk about any of that stuff. So they're just going to go straight to the bottom of the barrel. And I don't think it's going to work. It sometimes works when they're out of power and we don't have a good message. But in this election, in every Senate race, we have good candidates with a strong message. I don't think it's going to work. What do you make of Abdul taking on in much the same way that Zoran did? Big spending, big corporate PAC money, and winning.

3:14What does that tell the base and Democratic strategists that you can win without taking on big money? What's your take on all of that? Well, I think there's a couple of things here, and it's complicated. First of all, like, Abdul ran an amazing campaign. And I was working for the McMorrow campaign, so, like, I was sad that that didn't work out, but I could admire what my opposition is doing. I think the tagline that he put together, which was, you know, get money out of politics, put money in your pocket, is really strong and smart and savvy. and then the APEC spending, the$60 million in APEC spending, now at least in Democratic primaries, I think is an albatross across the candidates who accept that money because people are so pissed off with one, just the general abuse of our campaign finance laws, but also the war in Iran and Bibi Netanyahu's right-wing government and just the hiding of the money too.

3:55I think people are like just over that. We saw that in the Illinois 9 congressional race too where I was working with Daniel Biss. APEC spent an incredible amount of money against Daniel and Kat Ebegazala to boost Laura Fine. And it was all just a huge backlash. People turned away from the campaign. So I think he's hit the nail on the head for that. I do think they need to be careful though, because this race was way closer than they thought. They won by what, about one percentage point, I think now in the most recent tally. So there is a lot of work that has to be done to rally the base. And I think I was just on X while I was taking the Uber here.

4:24There are still a lot of people that are spending a lot of time relitigating the primary fight. And what I'm begging is get over it. The time is to lock the fuck in right now because we need to go beat the republicans i need that and so like they've got this unity rally tomorrow where abdul is going to be there with mallory mcmorrow i imagine haley stevens will be there i know people judge is going to be there i think the whole party needs to show up and rally behind our candidate because we have to win and even with the fractional disagreements we have in the party right now any democrat is better than any republican i completely agree and I think our goal has to be defeating Republicans across the board.

4:59Okay, let's talk about AIPAC. So they spent to the tune of$60 million on Haley Stevens. And almost won, which is wild. And I feel like the Republicans are always going to get more money than the Democrats moving forward. In a post-Citizens United world, in a post-Maga world, they're just going to out-raise us. because Republicans service corporations much better than they do human beings. They're much better at servicing. Well, they believe corporations are people. They do. And so I knew when AIPAC spent$60 million on Haley Stevens that they would immediately prefer if she would have won the primary.

5:39They would immediately prefer the MAGA politician just in the same way that Benjamin Netanyahu preferred Donald Trump to Kamala Harris because Republicans, and this is my opinion, I believe the Republican Party is a death cult. All of their policies lead to death. They are not about safety regulations. They are about making the world less safe. Climate change, they ignore all of the big problems of our time. So pop this up, Kylie. AIPAC is considering a major campaign expected to be in the tens of millions to boost Mike Rogers over Abdul El-Sayed. So just like that, they're funding a Democrat and just on a dime, they immediately switch to funding a Republican.

6:24You're a Democratic strategist. I feel like we need to message that if you're taking AIPAC money, you might as well be eating a human being. You might as well be a cannibal. It should be that disqualifying. We have to have something massive to go against this money. So when all of the attack ads happen. And of course, it's going to be, as you mentioned, Islamophobia out the wazoo towards Abdul. So what is your take on how we message moving forward? Because AIPAC is going to get their claws into some Democratic candidates. What do you think, how do you think we mitigate that as a party? Yeah, well, I think the first thing is making sure that we don't lose sight of the fact we have another primary next week because Peggy Flanagan is running against Angie Craig.

7:07Angie Craig is getting a ton of money from AIPAC right now. And Peggy Flanagan is in the lead, but a lot of people have been sleeping on that. So like there's another race where APEC is going to want to try to rebound and win that. I think fundamentally like look APEC has clearly the right to spend this money in the current system but the system's broken and I think if you talk to the actually let me take a step back from that the best politicians in America right now are the ones that have a genuine critique of the system and why things are not working. Even Donald Trump. Donald Trump has a critique of the system and his whole thing was I'm a class trader and I'm going to break this system for you and instead he was just going to hijack the system for himself.

7:38And you and I knew that, but a lot of people believed him because Democrats were not providing their own view of what the system was because at the time we were the system. Like when you have the White House, you are the system, whether you like it or not. I think that we have to come up with a very clear set of actionable policies that can solve this problem and be willing to do the very difficult things that are necessary for us to change it. I've said this a thousand times. We cannot elect a technocratic democratic president in 2028. We can't. I love Joe Biden, I think Joe Biden did a lot of really good things, but a lot of what Joe Biden did when he won in 2020 was to rebuild the world order the way that it was before.

8:12And Trump breaking everything right now and being so brazen in his corruption exposes everything that's broken in American politics. That's an opportunity to fix it. So the next Democratic president needs to show me, and that's what endless urgency, my substack title is about, is you have to show me you're going to be endlessly urgent to bend the rules and push forward the boundaries the way that Donald Trump does to put money in his pocket. So I want Democratic candidates that are going to to get there that will, yeah, eliminate the filibuster and pack the Supreme Court to reestablish the balance and get rid of Citizens United and make D.C.

8:40a state and Puerto Rico a state and Guam a state and, frankly, merge the Dakotas. That's where I'm at at this point. And to that point, too, all that, too, is term limits, age limits, radical financial transparency to weed out corruption in the government, radical health transparency so the stuff with Mitch McConnell can't happen anymore. I want that. There's a boldness to it that needs to happen. I don't think it all has to be left or right or DSA or not DSA because one can't exist without the other. like the left wing of this party cannot win without the middle and the middle cannot win without the left and so we're going to have to understand that there's a coalition where mary peltola in alaska who i do think is going to win that race there's going to be times where she makes you pull your hair out because she's got to take a vote because she's the senator from alaska that's fine but if we're all rowing in the same direction on the use of power and the intention of that power to help people i think we'll be in a better spot opposed to it just serving the same you know four billionaires who seem to own everything has trump's what trump has done?

9:33Has it radicalized you more? Has it driven you personally further to the left? Because it asked me. I don't think it's moved me personally towards the left. Like, I don't think I'm more of a leftist than I am before. If anything, it's gotten me to care less about the bullshit. There's just a lot of like, as a democratic strategist, I talk to a lot of other people in this space, like candidates or chiefs of staff, and they care about some of the dumbest things. And they're like, we can't talk about that because so-and-so is going to be mad. Oh my God, that's too, that's too ambitious or that's too salacious for us.

9:59And it's like, we get our clock cleans because we keep showing up to a a a gunfight with a knife you know i know that's the the improper way to say that phrase but like that that's what i'm just i i want to fight i want to get in the mud like abdul's quote where he's like you know we don't go you know when they go low we get in the mud and we choke them out like yeah you know i probably wouldn't have said it that way if i was running for office but like i'm kind of with him on that at this point he's like i want to fight here's a clip of abdul responding to the islamophobic attacks that are already within 48 hours being hurled at him.

10:31He's like, well, he's different. That's the best you got. You can't actually talk about what you want to do. My name is not raising your gas prices. My name is not taking us to war. My name is not the reason you can't afford your groceries. You know what it is? They're BS policies. So you can point to my name all he wants. But I'll also tell you this. I've been in Abdul in Michigan my whole life. This is like the best place in the world to be Abdul. You know why? Because Michiganders are, they're big hearted. They're open-minded. They're earnest. So as you can see, I like, I like the style of politics.

11:08I like that he's addressing it. And I think we should speak candidly because I come from Oklahoma and a name like Abdul Al-Sayed is immediately a problem for him in white rural areas and in red states. They immediately think, And we just have to say this because Republican propaganda and Israeli propaganda for decades has been wildly successful. And a lot of Americans hear the name Abdul Al-Sayed and they immediately think terrorists, jihad, etc. Yeah. And because they have been that successful with the propaganda. How do you think him addressing it just like that about his name? I think that's the right way to do it.

11:50I think you've got to lean in and kind of talk about the absurdity of it. But I think you also need to do what, frankly, like what Barack Obama did, which was like, one, make it a bit of part of your stump. You make that part of your story. He used to talk about having a funny name all the time. And he would talk about, I think he would say some line that was, I just remember from his stump speech, it was, got a funny name from my father and then I got my accent from my mother, you know, from Kansas, right? Like, so there was a way to like sort of diffuse that. And Abdul's lived in Michigan basically his entire life, right?

12:14I mean, I think he met his wife at the University of, I think he went to Michigan, right? I think so, yeah. That sounds right. So I went to Notre Dame, so I hate Michigan. sorry to my friends in Michigan out there but it um I think that the other thing he's got to do is like if you just look at the primary results and it was way closer and frankly like if you're on the left you should be really excited about this win but you should also be scared to death of what the win meant because it was so close and some of that's the apex betting some of that's though is he did very poorly with black voters and he did very poorly in rural areas and so he's got to go to all of those places and he's got to disarm them and he's a charming enough guy once they see him and hear from him.

12:48He's fantastic. He's good. He's a good candidate. I think that he'll do okay, but he's going to have to put in a lot of work to win those people back. And he's going to need a lot of other people to help him, but they're going to come at him with everything that they've got. But again, it's because they have nothing. The Republicans are scared to death that if the election is a referendum on Trump or the economy, they're going to get wiped out by 10 points. If it's a referendum on Abdul having a funny name relative to like white rural people in Michigan, then they've got a shot to win. But again, I don't, I don't think it will be like, I think people care about their finances.

13:15This is just the same problem the Democrats had in 2024, where they were like, okay, the economy's bad, so Joe Biden and Kamala Harris can't really talk about the economy, so we're going to make this a referendum on American democracy, and we're going to make this a referendum on abortion, which are important issues. But your economic situation is a daily indignity that you feel that every time you go to the gas pump right now. You feel that every time you pay your grocery bill. I just think that people will care a lot more about that than this if Abdul runs a great campaign. Same thing that Mamdani did.

13:41right and mom thought he was able to get to affordability from any topic like that he's maybe the best politician i've seen in 20 years he's phenomenal and if he was born in the united states it would be he would be the front runner for 2028 hands down new york is still new york so yeah i think you guys forget the rest of us hate you i don't hate you but no it is but i just know that like kylie the producer of our show her mother lives in stillwater oklahoma which is a pretty much rural town in oklahoma and she's a huge zoron fan yeah and this is a woman who four years ago was a republican yeah and so there's something that is happening across the uh country and of course new york is different but i'm telling you anecdotally a lot of women that i know from oklahoma city that were moderate democrats or moderate republicans are full tilt left.

14:34Yeah. Well, I buy that too, because I do think this is the same thing with Trump. Like we all discounted Trump in 2016 and we were like, Oh, he's too far out there. He's very incompetent. He doesn't seem like he should be able to do the job. He was, you know, the access Hollywood tape should have killed him along with a million other things, but the system's so broken that people are just going to gravitate towards anybody that seems new and fresh and likes they give a damn to you. And so I do think I could believe that like, you know, a conservative woman who voted for Donald Trump is still water Oklahoma is like, all right, that mom Donnie guy seems okay by the way they're claiming that he's like a radical communist and then everything that he does is like i'm removing regulations to make it easier to open ice cream shops right um and i chuckle every time but i will say though and i just think this is a fundamental reality of the broader american electorate democrats in particular pay a penalty for candidates that come from the coasts and we've just seen that consistently at least over the course of my 20-year career doing this like a candidate from california pays a cost a california for a candidate from the east coast pays a cost.

15:26So that's why like historically Democrats have done well with like a good Midwesterner or a good Southerner. But again, who knows? I think that's more a testament to the success of Republican propaganda and the Democrats have such a layup, have such a layup. Like I just played a clip in an earlier episode I filmed of Stephen Miller talking about blue cities and just annihilating them. And Fox News does this all the time. Oh, of course.

15:56Democrats need to point out every single day, all day, every day, that little Moses Mike, his state is a bottom 10 state. Oklahoma, where I come from, is a bottom 10 state. All of the states that have Republican super majorities, every single one of them are bottom states, just like the United States right now. We have Republican super majority and they're still mad because their policies suck. Their policies suck so bad. But here's something that I think that this... Can I push back on one thing before? Yeah. Which is, I think that that is correct. And I think Democrats should be aggressive in pointing those things out.

16:31Like every time they talk about these shit on Chicago, every time I go on like Newsmax or something, and I'm like, okay, well, I'm not gonna move to Arkansas, which is the teen pregnancy capital of America right now, or Mississippi, which has the highest poverty rate in the nation. But I do think Democratic mayors, and this is not about mom donning, but I do think Democratic mayors need to do a better job of handling like certain issues in their state, particularly like homelessness, cleanliness, crime, and having better answers for that stuff. Because they're going to claim that Chicago is a hellscape no matter what, but we also hand them a lot when we elevate bad candidates for mayor.

16:59And I just think people need to be more mindful that like my mayor, Brendan Johnson's really unpopular right now, and it's basically going to run out in the next election, most likely. Yeah, but see, always the burden is always on the Democrats. Yeah, well, we're the adults in the room. It's not fair. Right, but I'm saying we need to talk constantly about Governor Kevin Stitt, the governor of Oklahoma, who dedicated every square inch of the state to Jesus Christ when he won his second term. And despite that dedication, Oklahoma's ranked the 50th dead last for women to live. Kevin Stitt talks about how much he loves Jesus Christ, yet he banned abortion, giving rapists more rights than a rape victim.

17:37He manipulates and uses Christianity to tell the electorate, go vote for me because he Christian signals, which brings me to tying all of this in. The Islamophobia is going to be out the wazoo on this. And you're going to hear all of this Sharia law stuff, which Oklahoma, the state legislature there is just so stupid. It's really low IQ people. They constantly want to ban Sharia law, despite that not being an issue whatsoever. But I think the Democrats need to message here and need to address the crazy Christian problem that this country has. And And when you look at evangelical Christianity, 90 percent went and voted for Trump.

18:18These people are morally duplicitous. All of their policies, everything they believe in is an anti-woman, anti-gay death cult. And I think it's a really good opportunity for Democrats to message because the Republican Party has had its claws in this very manipulated part of the electorate. By the way, Vladimir Putin has also entered the United States via the national prayer breakfast because these people are the easiest to manipulate. Democrats have a chance if they were to have a 50 state strategy to go back in to states like my home state of Oklahoma and say. The crazy religious problem is not the Muslim.

18:59Look at Zoran when he was at the gay pride parade. He's marching for women. and he's marching for marginalized people. The biggest threat to anybody's freedom is America's crazy Christian problem and Democrats won't touch it. And the evangelicals are never, ever, ever, ever going to vote for a Democrat because they see zero difference, zero daylight between a Bill Clinton and a Zoran Mamdani. In their mind, they're both commie libtards. There's no nuance in positioning. I'll push back a little bit on that. But the first thing I'll say is that the modern conservative movement has a lot more in common with Al Qaeda and the Taliban than anybody in DSA or anything like that.

19:46I was on Newsmax yesterday and they were comparing Abdul El-Sayed to Fidel Castro. I was like, Donald Trump is more like Fidel Castro than Abdul is. You can't sit there and be like, Abdul is going to eliminate the police. Also, he's Fidel Castro and he wants to create a police state. It doesn't make any sense. It's so stupid. And by the way, Donald Trump himself is a tremendous fascist. There's no bigger fascist and socialist in the world than Donald Trump is right now. He's literally taking public stakes in companies from the federal government, which I'm told is really bad. And we shouldn't do that in a capitalist society, but they're fine with that.

20:16It's just it's it's really stupid on the religious stuff. Like I'm a I'm a practicing Catholic. And I think what has always bothered me about the Democratic Party is we acquiesce and we see these things to the Republican Party. Well, they're hyper patriotic and their patriotism is often fake and phony and stupid. but then we get afraid to wear the American flag on a patch somewhere, fly the flag or something like that. Then they pigeonhole us into being anti-American, right? They do the same thing with religion. They become so – I mean most of them are fake Christians. Like Ken Paxton in Texas is the perfect example of this.

20:46Mike Johnson. Mike Johnson. These guys are – Josh Hawley. Right. None of them, by the way, will speak out about Max Miller right now. Again, broke his three-year-old daughter's collarbone and threw boiling hot water on his ex-wife's chest. And he was the daughter, by the way, of a sitting United States senator. None of them will say anything. What is Christian about that? And Democrats have been afraid to talk about our faith. Democrats have been afraid to elevate candidates like James Tallarico in Texas, by the way, who actively talks about his faith in a very different way. And because of that, the reason that evangelicals, my wife is a recovering evangelical, by the way, is, and I hate to say that because I want her to be close to her faith if she wants to be, but it's gotten so out of control.

21:22But we have not gone and talked to those people. That 90 % that you're talking about, when was the last time that they actually sat down and had a conversation with a Democrat? When was the last time that we flew down there to the South? Because we abandoned the 50-state strategy. And the 50-state strategy only existed for like a year and a half. Right. We didn't really have it. But I think Democrats should bring that back. We should be organizing everywhere all the time, especially because in this election coming up, the bottom is falling out for the Republicans right now. And it could get worse.

21:49Like Trump's approval is at 32%, 35%, depending upon what poll you look at. It's too high. Well, maybe. But like what happens if the stock market tanks? Because that's the last thing that's still kind of going well for Donald Trump right now because they're propping it up and manipulating it. But if there's a run on money in the final 100 days here and suddenly Trump's approval goes from 32 to 22 percent, like George W. Bush at the end of his second term, there's a lot of races that become up and we probably don't have good candidates running in them. And we don't have any infrastructure for that.

22:15And there's local races that we could be winning across the board. So we don't build infrastructure the way that we should. And this is why I have great admiration for Run for Something and Amanda Lipman. I don't know if you've ever met her before. I haven't, but I'm familiar. You should have her on the show. I will. She's really smart. I will. Yeah. But like they've been recruiting candidates all across the country and building that next generation focused on folks under 40. There's now a new bench of candidates. We're actually going to start having those candidates become members of Congress and senators now, which I'm really excited about because of the work she's done over the last 10 years.

22:42More of that. That's what I want the Democratic Party to be doing. Instead, we're just trying to win the battle that's right in front of us, which we've got to be able to do both. It's the same thing in D.C. right now is that there's this push between, well, I can either solve some problems right now or I can fight and I can advocate for Medicare for all. And the answer is both. We should be tinkering around the edges and fixing the Affordable Care Act. And we should be creating the conditions for the American people to embrace Medicare for all and pass that stuff so that we can deliver for folks.

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