Raging Moderates: Trump’s Art of No Deals

26:17It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great. Not all journalism is the same. Take The Guardian. Our coverage has something unique. Fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say. So we're free to report the whole picture. We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe. Expose corruption wherever we find it. And give fresh perspective on everything. from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate, and more. Read, watch, and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com. Welcome back. Republicans finally muscled their big, beautiful bill through Congress, a sweeping legislative victory for Trump that slashes$1.7 trillion in federal spending, extends his signature tax cuts, and enacts major changes to safety net programs, including Medicaid.

27:11But now comes the harder part, selling it. Polls show most Americans either dislike the bill or don't know what's in it. And with midterms looming, GOP lawmakers are sprinting to define the law before Democrats do it for them. Jess, Republicans are touting the bill's populist pieces like eliminating taxes on tips. But how are they planning to explain the projected 12 million Americans who are likely going to lose their Medicaid coverage? Well, they're going to have an election before you lose your Medicaid coverage. So that's how they're going to do it. You know, they were very specific about the timing of everything.

27:46Like no tax on tips actually expires in twenty twenty eight tax cuts for the wealthiest that lives forever. But if you're going to get no tax on tips, which, by the way, only goes up to the first twenty five thousand dollars that you make in tips. So that's a very low cap anyway. That'll be around for the midterms. But you won't know if your Medicaid is going away until after you cast your vote. I still expect that the Democrats will do well in the midterms because historically that's what happens. But they were very, very crafty in the timing about all of this. They also told this monster lie about what would happen if we didn't pass the one big, beautiful bill.

28:26They would say your tax cuts would expire from the 2017 Trump plan. But that's not true. It's not like you would wake up the next day and suddenly you wouldn't have a tax cut anymore. Congress would actually have six months to deal with this and they could work out something in a bipartisan fashion. And they've done this before. So that was the pressure that people felt. And they thought the average American that you were going, again, to wake up on July 5th or whatever day we were going to say it is. And that suddenly you were going to have an enormous income tax bill or a huge bill for your small business.

29:02So that was one pervasive lie. And then you have the stuff about the work requirements for Medicaid. Scott Besson, again, very smug talking about able-bodied Americans that just don't want to work. They always go back to, quote, unquote, welfare queens about all of this. We know that only 8 percent of people who receive Medicaid would even fall into that category. you're not going to pay for the trillions that you're putting into the deficit with those 8%. And they just don't want to tell you the truth about what's going on in these kinds of bills. They don't want to tell you about who's getting the kickbacks.

29:36Steve Ratner created a beautiful chart of all of the evaluations and all the nonpartisan ones, all the partisan ones, and even right-wing partisan organizations have talked about this ballooning the deficit and that people will lose their health care tax foundation cato and the only group of economic advisors or economic panel that says that it's going to be a boon for the american economy overall comes right out of the white house and they obviously have a vested interest in saying that but i it just feels very much like beating a dead horse the american public hates this bill net favorables range from negative 19 to negative 29 49 say the bill is going going to hurt their family.

30:1923 % only say that it's going to help. So you start out with a baseline that the American public knows that this is a bad thing. But then you get into the issue of like, well, what are you going to do about it? How are you going to talk about a thing that may not affect people tomorrow? Like I and I know that people have made this case, but I don't think it's been made strongly enough. And I want to hear it all the time that a tax and spend bill more so than probably anything else that the government does is a moral document. It is a statement of your values and your priorities. And the GOP is very clearly saying our priorities are the rich.

30:56Our priorities are deporting millions of people who are here. I mean, the ICE funding, and I want to get your take on that, more than the IDF. Now, that's how much we're funding these guys is wearing masks that are driving around in unmarked vans picking people up. And this not anti-law enforcement. I'm thrilled that we have zero border crossings now. I think that that's a very good thing and something that the country needed and desperately wanted, which is why a lot of people held their nose and voted for Donald Trump because they didn't think the Democrats were serious about immigration. But when you look at these priorities, and I'm sure, you know, there are bits in there, cutting red tape for small businesses.

31:37Some seniors will get a 6K deduction. Those are good things. You know, I'm not saying that there's nothing in the bill that's decent. But overall, it's a signal that this is a morally bankrupt party. And they all said as much on the record and then just went ahead and voted for it anyway. Yeah, a lot there. So let's go from the small to the profound. First off, this populist bullshit around no taxes on tips, what percentage of the working population would you guess get tips? I'm going to make a bad guess. It's 2%. What? Yeah, 2 % of Americans make money on tips. Oh. And it just never made any sense to me.

32:16I was a waiter. I was, growing up, I was both a dishwasher and a waiter. So when I was a dishwasher, I wouldn't get a tax cut. But when I was a waiter, I got a tax cut. And then, first off, anyone who's getting tips, especially with a$25 ,000 limit on it, it means they're not paying a lot of federal income tax to begin with. This is populist bullshit that has no impact on people or the economy. And what I find more upsetting, I'm all down for blaming the Republicans on this. I think this is both cruel and stupid, which adds up to depraved. And I think you can lay the majority of the blame at the feet of the administration and the Republicans who are scared of being primaried and pretend to give a good goddamn and say, I would never cut Medicaid and then grab their ankles when push comes to shove or decide to sell out the lower 48 to protect their folks, Senator Murkowski.

33:05You know, this is absolutely the majority of the blame lies with them. But what's more frightening, Jess, is to your point, this isn't fiscal policy. It's a reflection on our values. And I think in America, there's a dangerous trend that my dad used to say America is a terrible place to be stupid. And that was sort of an unkind way of saying it's a terrible place to be vulnerable. And essentially, I think America, not just Republicans, but America has decided that we believe in a Hunger Games-like economy, that the bottom 90 percent are effectively nutrition for the top 10 percent because people are willing to put up with that depravity because they're hoping at some point they'll be in that top 10 percent.

33:47And they're also conflating some of these really ugly ice raids and knees on heads and 14-year-olds crying as their mother is carted away and hearing about a kid who is a paraplegic not being able to afford his medication or his physical therapy. They sort of begrudgingly say, well, thoughts and prayers, but they see that as leadership. They see that as, in a weird way, masculinity and toughness. I think this goes beyond something much deeper and more upsetting about America. And to your point, let's be hopeful. It's that Americans haven't been, or Democrats haven't done a good job connecting this to people because the majority of people who will probably be thrown off Medicaid, maybe a lot of us don't come in contact with, or we don't know that our neighbor's on Medicaid.

34:35So I never like to miss an opportunity to talk about myself. I'll go through just how these cuts would literally pull up the ladder behind me. I'm sitting here in this out of control, over the top explosion and wealth in Ibiza. And, you know, the bad thing about getting older and you'll realize this, I think you're you're further along in sort of a self-awareness than I was at your age. But up until the point when I was your age, I credited my grit and my character for all my success. It was about me being a baller and me being talented and me taking risks and overcoming some hardship. And then as you get older, you realize a lot of your success is not your fault.

35:18And what I've come to recognize, and I can attach many of these things to what's under attack right now, starting when I was nine years old, I got assisted lunch. My mom made$800 a month as a secretary. And so we qualified for assisted lunch. And one of the things I remember about that, and I didn't find out, I was nine, so I didn't know what was going on. One of the things I found out a few years later, and it just shows so much dignity and so much grace on the part of California taxpayers and our government, was they purposely sent the coupons to my house. And every kid had the same coupon, so no one would know that I was on assisted lunch because they wanted to avoid the stigma.

35:57And I thought that was the most graceful thing, one of the most American things. When I was in high school, when I was 17, and I've talked openly about this, my mom who passed 20 years ago, I don't think would have a problem with this. My mom became pregnant at 47 and was able to access safe, affordable family planning. Had we lived in this era in a red state, you know, we weren't very sophisticated. We didn't have a lot of money. If my mom had been forced to carry a child in unwanted pregnancy to term, I was installing shelving, making decent money at the time. I would have not gone to UCLA. I would not have had the opportunity to start this upward spiral, courtesy of the Regency University of California.

36:38that, quite frankly, and I'm bragging now, has produced tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue and thousands of jobs. I just would have, I would have never had the opportunity to go to college had it been my mom and a newborn. And then when I got to UCLA, I got Pell Grants. That's the only way I could afford to be at UCLA. And a third of Pell Grant recipients under this big, beautiful bill are either going to have their grants reduced or eliminated. When I got out of college, I was able to raise a shit ton of money. Why? Because foreign investors loved investing in U.S. startups because they saw rule of law, because they saw all types of technology that had been funded by the U.S.

37:20government, which didn't have to pay a trillion dollars in interest payments so they could invest in these crazy things called GPS and the Internet. All of my companies were built on the backbone of technologies financed with these extraordinary, irrational investments from the U.S. government because they had the capital to make these forward-leaning investments. Literally, my company has been built on the back of immigrants and an America that said, if you are really fucking talented and want to work hard, come here and we will put you to work. I mean, all of these things that have built this life and this prosperity and these millions in tax revenue, every one of them is under attack.

37:57and it is so disappointing that more people with my blessings of my generation can't do the math and reverse engineer this to one thing and that is we are torching, we are burning the ships behind us, we are pulling up the ladders. It's so disappointing beyond the moral argument. It's like you don't want your kids to have the same opportunities we had. And I'll even go more meta than this and be more dramatic and more hysterical. Oh, good. My mom was a four-year-old Jew sleeping in the tube stations at night because her house had been bombed during the blitzkrieg. And America was so alarmed, they decided to convert factories from producing Buicks to producing tanks.

38:42and they decided that 400 ,000 households should have a gold star in the window and lose their sons because it was worth it to push back on fascism. They were not pushing back on anti-Semitism. They were pushing back on fascism. And what's fascism? Demonization of immigrants, a refusal to condemn violence against your political enemies, and extreme nationalism. Sound familiar? And had America not had a gag reflex on emerging fascism in Europe, but my mom's life would have ended with a train ride. I wouldn't even be here. So all of these things, a gag reflex on fascism, providing opportunities for young people, safe, affordable family planning and rights for women, deep pools of capital such that people could start business, a culture that invites the best and brightest to help people build businesses and leverage that capital.

39:33All that shit is under attack. It's literally under attack. I find it so deeply rattling and disturbing, and I'm pissed off that Democrats just scream and get angry and talk about Medicare. I get it. Medicare, that's one part of the story. But show me anybody in my generation who has made their wealth, not inherited, but made their wealth. In about two fucking minutes, I can show you why this bill is attacking the reason that you are in Ibiza or in the Hamptons or in Aspen and that you have decided, no, no one else gets to come here except my kids. Speech over. I'm overwhelmed by it and moved.

40:16It's a great American story. and it's not often that people are telling it in such honest terms. The details are what matter and what create connective tissue amongst Americans. And right now, when we talk about this a lot, that Americans feel completely disconnected from one another. You live in your bubbles. And I wish more people would speak up like that and would be telling those kinds of stories. And I know that it is difficult if you also have a business to protect. And there are a lot of people, even immigrants, that there are heads at these big companies that feel like they can't do it, that they have to show up at inauguration and they have to kiss the ring because they have to make sure that they continue to make their bottom line.

40:57But it does feel like the very fabric of America is being torn apart. And I think that's important to emphasize. But I also, you know, put on a strategist cap. And I think about, you know, how much we talked about January 6th or the death of democracy and, you know, fascism is coming and people didn't want to vote for that. They wanted to vote for better grocery prices, right? Or they wanted to vote for a closed border. And so you have to be really strategic and smart about how you do this. You know, the reality is that nearly half of Americans haven't heard anything about the Big Beautiful Bill.

41:35So those who have heard about it have a very negative view of it. Only 8 % have said that the Medicaid cuts are a detail of a bill that they know about. That's going to come for a lot of these people after the midterms, like I said. So it's emotional to think about this and to think about the impact on the young people, like you said, of pulling up the ladder. You know, what's going to happen with your student loans, for instance? I mean, people just are not going to be able to go to graduate school or college for that matter. It's just not going to be happening anymore. We're going to become less educated.

42:06We're also going to be able to import less educated people because why would you want to come here? I don't know what America looks like when this is over, but I do know that millions of Americans were not happy with the way that it's going. And Democrats have got to thread that needle better. And I don't want to I don't want to turn every session into like a shitting on Democrat session. Like there's not a lot that you can do when you don't have the numbers, but people don't feel inspired and they don't feel like they have a good alternative to this. A friend of mine who's a great democratic strategist was talking about it and he said essentially we're on trend for 2017 when they tried to do the ACA repeal and we had a very good midterms there in 2018 but it's going to take a lot of work over the next 18 months to impress upon people just exactly what has happened to the country and we know that it's not that effective to be telling people like, well, this is what your lived reality is, right?

43:08This is what your experience is. People know what their experiences are. And if we don't seem like a decent alternative, then maybe they sit at home. Maybe they don't care, but more so maybe they just become completely or even further disenchanted with the American project. What Democrats do you think are doing a decent job of attaching this bill to real life who you think that is actually showing some of that fire and ability to connect this to everyday Americans who other Democrats can model? I mean, all of the swing Democrats, I think, do a great job of this because sometimes they're not as good on social or whatever.

43:48We don't pay a lot of attention to it. But like the Jared Goldens of the world, Pat Ryan, you know, when you win races like that, you know something about how to talk to people and how to make those connections. If you look at Mallory McMorrow, who we're going to have on the podcast running for Senate in Michigan, outraised her primary opponent who has a lot more institutional support because she's talking about this like a normal person. And she's also saying to the Mom Donnie question, like business as usual, it's not working for us. Yeah, it's over. I mean, people, they want change if they're not going to get, and we're going to talk about the third party thing with Elon.

44:29If these are going to be your options, you have to find a way to turn into an outsider party while still being on the inside. And one of my colleagues at Fox, I think it was Kellyanne, said that Donald Trump reformed the Republican Party from within. He essentially created a third party from within the Republican infrastructure. And Democrats need some of that. They need an internal revolution at this point to inspire people and to make you think that the status quo is not good enough for any of us. And I wanted to ask you this because it's been weighing on me. Like, I love my job, but I don't love my job.

45:11And I can't imagine loving a job enough that I would vote for something that I admitted would strip health care from hundreds of thousands of people that I represent. What is the point of staying in office if you can't help the people that you allegedly signed up to improve the lives of? It's such a profound question. And I ask myself the same question all the time, that at what point if I mean, literally, if if the president said we have to stop all funding for premature birth wards, would they do it at this point? Like, where would they draw the line? Where would they say we won't do it? Because the only people who didn't vote for this thing were people who basically said, I'm not running again, especially in the Senate.

45:59So I don't I struggle with this, too. And I don't have a good answer other than they're too fucking old and they literally think if I leave here, I'm just going to go home and start to die. And I lose all relevance and all importance. Do you have any additional thoughts on why these folks just refuse to be the kind of the leaders we ask them to be? power corrupts yeah these are very important jobs and we treat them like many kings and queens to some degree right especially with the way the media apparatus works now but i can't i can't come up with what the line would be except for the very few that actually did find their line whether it was the deficit or medicaid cuts for tom tillis but you know the ball is rolling there's It's already a rural hospital in Nebraska that's closed.

46:51And they said that this is because of the bill, that they're not going to be able to stay in business moving forward as a result. And you're going to see a lot of that in people getting asked tough questions. And I think the answer is going to be, you know, what caliber of candidate on the Democratic side is going to show up to run races against these vulnerable Republicans? Because the map, there are already a lot of them on it, and they just put even bigger targets on their back. You know, there are going to be some very interesting races, hard-fought races in all of this. And we got to find the way to be inspirational and different and revolutionary within the system that we're working in.

47:36Because people look at Washington and they just say, I don't see anything for me. Yeah. And one of the bright spots about Mom Dami's win is, and I want to be clear, I would not have voted for the guy. A lot of his positions are very troubling to me and a lot of his current, his public policy ideas make no fucking sense to me, like sponsored bread lines in the form of state-sponsored or state-controlled grocery stores. But having said that, along the lines of what you're saying, we need a revolution within the Democratic Party to remake the party. And it's got to start with young people who understand these new technologies, these new mediums, are unafraid, new ideas, and are willing to just sort of step up and say, all right, it is time to shed a new layer of skin.

48:19Any ideas? Who do you think, if looking at the positive side of Donald Trump, who was sort of the, you know, the William Wallace of that revolution, if you had to bet on one or two or three people who you think could be that that William Wallace of reshaping the Democratic Party, do you see any likely candidates or is it still kind of TBD? I mean, it's a little TBD, but I think on the more centrist, you know, moderate Dem side of things, I think Alisa Slotkin is offering people a lot. And she was the one who came out there and said, you know, this is my plan, right? This is what I think the future of the Democratic Party looks like.

48:59You know, she does the cursing in the right places. She has the resume to back all of it up. I just think that there's so much that we can learn from people that have won these difficult races and that oftentimes we just go back to the folks who have the loudest voices or who give the best interviews, etc. But they obviously don't know the same things as the folks that went out there and connected with people that have supported Republicans their whole life or who split ticket for Donald Trump and for them. You know, it's happening all over the country and there are people out there that are worth your time, even if their politics aren't exactly aligned with ours.

49:36Like we had Greg Kassar from Texas on the podcast. He's way to the left of where I am. But, you know, you have a lot of people in the middle who are saying that they like AOC the best because AOC seems like she's got the fight in her and that she's on the right side of history. Unafraid. You know. Agreed. Yeah. The problem I have with the far left, and I think they're as guilty or more guilty of this in the far right, and I've been subject to it, is if you're a moderate and occasionally see merit in Republican ideas, you're treated like an apostate. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, the right calls me a libtard.

50:13They just write me off, but they'll bring me on Fox and they're actually quite polite to me as I think they're mostly polite to you and appreciate you. On the far left, I can't tell you how many mean, angry emails I got from people I know and like and consider me a friend and I consider them a friend when I started saying Biden's too fucking old. Yeah. It's like you either sign up for the cult and the narrative or you are the enemy. And the far left is as guilty of it as anybody. And I the Democratic Party needs to do a better job of embracing imperfect allies. And when I'm at conferences and I see people, Democrats playing identity politics and talking about the patriarchy, and if you don't sign up for every right word for the orthodoxy, you're the problem.

50:59And it's like, just as the settlers figured out a way to get Native Americans fighting amongst each other, kill each other first, and then we'll come in for cleanup, up. The Democrats are just the level of interesting warfare is so unproductive. It's like, I absolutely think AOC's policies, many of them don't make any fucking sense. I will give money to her. I think she's wonderful. I retweet her shit. I think she's fantastic. But what I find on the left is if you don't sign up for the right narrative, basically people attack you and say, OK, maybe we're allies, but you're holding the gun wrong.

51:38This is the narrative. This demand for ideological consistency is so ridiculous. Purity tests. No actual human being is totally in lockstep with a party platform. And that's what Trump did for the right. It works and it connects. Yeah. I mean, we're going to need a bigger boat, but I also think the identity politics of the left has gotten out of control. It doesn't do us any good to begin assigning values and identifying or immediately prescribing validity or a lack thereof based on who's saying it as opposed to what they're saying. And I feel like the Democrats don't even recognize how biased they are against statements solely based on who's saying it.

52:21And I feel that the Democrats are actually probably more guilty of this than Republicans that, OK, if you're an old white dude, I have to take everything you say with a grain of salt and I am ready to weigh in and get my Guardians of Gacha pen. I am going so far off script here. Jess, let's bring it home. Our producer is trying to rein me in. Let's take a quick break. Stay with us. We're going to talk about this guy who's in technology, who's actually from South Africa. His name is Elon Musk. Oh, haven't heard of him. Yeah.

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54:47Welcome back. Before we go, Elon Musk says he's launching a third political party. Oh, God, Jess, save me. Literally save me. Called the America Party. Okay, yeah. A South African immigrant who went to school in Canada, who disowns his daughter on Joe Rogan's podcast and is being sued concurrently by two women for sole custody of their child because he spends no time with them. Yeah, that's the guy to start a third party. He says it's meant to challenge what he He calls a one-party system that's driving the country into debt. And he timed the announcement just days after Trump signed his massive domestic policy bill into law.

55:24Bill Musk once backed and blasted and now calls the final straw. He's had it, Jess. He's had it. Anyways, Musk insists the new party will focus on a handful of swing districts in the midterms. But Trump allies weren't it could fracture the right at a time when margins are razor thin. That's fair. And then there's the Epstein factor. after months of teasing bombshell revelations, the Justice Department just announced there isn't a client list, isn't a cover-up, and no more new documents are coming. Well, that's a 180. That hasn't stopped Musk from fanning the flames or from accusing Trump of being part of some kind of cover-up.

55:59Jess, what's going on here? What's he trying to accomplish? A third party isn't exactly, I don't know. We've been to this movie before. How much trouble do you think he can actually cause for Trump and the GOP? not very much like on the fringes it's possible to have an effect with a third party candidate like actually in an ohio district marcy captor who's the democrat there i think this is her 22nd term been there a long time the democrats funneled money into a libertarian candidates campaign i think about 400k to shave off support from the republican candidate that was challenging her and she ended up winning her race so those are ways that you can use third parties to to play around and make a difference.

56:41But in terms of what's going to happen at the presidential level, it makes no difference. And if you want to have a government that's more representative to the public, then you need to have proportional representation. And we can't have winner take all anymore. And there are a lot of people that would get on board with that, but would obviously never be able to pass and get through. So, you know, Musk is throwing his toys out of the proverbial stroller. He's pissed off. This happened before. And he essentially came back groveling to Trump. And I imagine that that's what's going to happen because, you know, money matters, of course, and being the richest man on the planet is a very big deal.

57:21But Donald Trump has shown himself to be more powerful than Musk. And I think even the way that he's treating him on social media about this, you know, talking down to him, it's very paternalistic, actually, how he's dealing with him. Like baby Elon is mad. Give him his space. And, you know, they toss around stuff like I'm going to look into your immigration status or whatever. But in general, I feel like he's going to get over it and he has to get back to Tesla and, you know, try managing that. And I think, you know, he's mad about the debt, but he's mostly mad about the EV credits. Right. That's what this is.

57:57Everyone is always just actually concerned with themselves and their personal bottom line. So I think it's going to end up being a big nothing burger. Yeah. I mean, there's a few things here. There's the motivation for doing it and the effectiveness. The motivation is all of a sudden he's decided the president is a pedophile and that this bill is fiscally irresponsible. There is no new information from when he loved the president. Correct. There are no new revelations about Trump and Epstein. The end of the EV subsidies, the massive increase in the deficit were all present when he was showing up to the White House in a Hot Topic uniform high on ketamine.

58:35This is about Elon Musk being angry he's no longer the first friend. So that is not the basis or the substance or the heft to start a third political party. And then the question is, will a third political party, does it have any viability? And it doesn't in America. We have a two-party system because of gerrymandering, because of a winner-take-all environment. when we have proportional representation in places like Sweden and Germany, a third, a fourth, and a fifth party can have a lot of influence because they get proportionate representative based on if they get 18 percent of the vote, they get 18 percent of the representatives.

59:09What a third party ends up being is spoilers, right? So Ross Perot got 18 percent. Ross Perot is the reason Bill Clinton won presidency. George Herbert Walker Bush was the first incumbent to lose an election when there wasn't a recession because Perot took 18 percent, about 11 percent. was drawn from Bush's voter base, seven from Clinton. So a swing of four percent, which swung it from being a landslide for Bush to a decided victory for Clinton. The same thing happened to Gore because of Nader. Jill Stein played a role. So these third parties are not viable. The last time a third party won a state was Wallace, I think, in 68.

59:49But they can be spoilers. I think this is over before it starts. I think it's going to get no traction. what he can have is enormous influence because there's a decent argument that he's the guy that got Trump elected with a quarter of a billion dollars and a huge platform in seven swing states and a small number of counties in those seven swing states. You can make an argument that in, you know, two or three of those states, Musk may have swung the election for Trump. If he is able to focus on four or six senatorial and 12 or 15 House races, he could have a huge impact because those people are very loyal to whoever puts them in office.

1:00:26One thing that Peter Thiel will never hear from J.D. Vance is the word no, because Peter Thiel put J.D. Vance in office. So he could have enormous influence. But this third-party nonsense is over before it begins. And be clear, folks, Elon Musk isn't worried about the deficit. He isn't worried about America's future. He's just, quite frankly, he's really butthurt, and he's angry, and he's looking for revenge. Your thoughts? I agree. And you saw also how quickly Elon Musk faded from favor of the Republican Party. Once he started opposing the bill, he was persona non grata. I understand that this coincided with him also leaving the White House, but he's not walking around with Trump and Dana White anymore.

1:01:08So no one really cares that much. You're right about the money, like the example I was giving in Ohio. But he is on to something that's really important. You know, we have the highest number of Americans that identify as a political independent. That doesn't mean that they don't have right or left leanings, but it means that they don't want to be part of this two party system that pushes you into boxes where you don't feel like you belong. And there was a massive study of almost 20 ,000 people that looked at how independents feel about the major parties. Sixty four percent have an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party and 71 percent have an unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party.

1:01:45We need to do better. We need parties that look more like America, that are more responsive to America and their concerns. It's a huge branding challenge, you know, something that you're great at assessing. But when Musk says we need another option, we need an alternative, almost everybody says that's objectively true. We just need to find a way to make that feasible or possible for folks or to at least give them some inkling that we understand how badly they want things to change. So just before we wrap up here, Jess, I need you to get under the president's skin again. We popped to the fourth biggest news podcast in the world last week solely because.

1:02:30You didn't text me about that? I didn't know that. Probably because the president is pissed off at you and name checked you. So I need you to continue to get under his skin because daddy wants to come back to Ibiza. He wants to come back to Ibiza. The people are so young. It'll be my great pleasure. So hot here and it is so expensive. It all reverse engineers to the president getting angry at you. Can you do that for me? I will do my best. I'll say it again. I can't say it enough. I am so proud of you. I think that is so impressive. You literally want to tell your grandkids, you want to be like, yeah, remember that fascist back at the beginning of the 21st century that we literally vomited out?

1:03:09Yeah, he went after me publicly. I think that is going to be, I think you're going to have that on your tombstone as a point of pride. It's a long truth social for a tombstone. All right, Jess, that's all for this episode. Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates. Our producers are David Toledo and Eric Jenikas. Our technical director is Drew Burroughs. Going forward, you'll find Raging Moderates every Wednesday and Friday. That's right. Every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to Raging Moderates on its own feed to hear exclusive interviews with sharp political minds. This week, Jess is speaking with Congressman Seth Moulton.

1:03:40Make sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss an episode. Jess, have a great rest of the week. It's so good to see you. Great to see you.

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