Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and a CNN poll says a whopping seventy seven percent of Americans blamed President Trump for increasing the cost of living in their community. We have such a great show for you today. Notices Evan McMorris. Santoro stops by to talk about the Trump administration considering classifying
Tucker calls and as a domestic terrorist. Then we'll talk to Nebraska Senate candidate Dan Osborne about his run as an independent in the state. But for the News.
Smiley, we have an Ald timer. President Trump loves to say the quiet part out loud. This is saying, uh, the thing we all know about him, real fucking loud learned.
Negotiating with the rhymes. The president a.
Motivating to make it feel not even a little bit. The only thing that matters, we're not talking about I run. They can't have a duplear weapon. I don't think about American financial situation. I don't think about anybody. I think about what thing we could not let Iran have a duclear weapon. That's all heard.
That's the only thing about.
It look, man, again, I think it's going to be a hard sell to the American people because your gas is a dollar more gallon, and Trump is bad.
It's way more than a dollar when you go at most points.
Yes, okay, but it's it's a lot more a gallon. And he's like, but this is all about the Middle East. And you know, even when like if you think about the last Gulf War, uh, it was after nine to eleven, so there was at least like we had been hit by terrorists, we had been all these people had died. It was more than you know, it was quite a lot of people. There is a feeling that America was really under attack, and even then the war was unpopular. Here is a war where Trump barely even made a
case for doing it. It has already made life significantly more expensive. And instead of saying something the effect of like it's going to be over soon, which has been one of the things, or it's already over, which is one of his favorite things to say, he's just now pivoted to like, know it was just which it wasn't, and it isn't and it's still going on.
Yeah, just as one of those things that you could see this being in ads for the next three years because it really really says everything about him. Okay, we now have to talk to a person with a nickname that I think none of us would like to have, the human printer, Natalie Harp.
You may remember her from earlier in this season.
Yeah, yea, I have the thing with her. We hear about her so infrequently that I kind of forget her a lot. But so the point being, after this Trump truth tirade the other night, apparently the other aids are quite pissed at the way she enables these things. I will say I had to google let me she searched her to refresh my brain, and she really looks like a character out of American horror story to me.
I'm not going to say anything about how anyone looks, but I will say that she's thirty four years old. She basically spends almost all her time with Trump, and she prints things out and gives them to him. Now, this Wall Street Journal reporting says that people in Trump world, and again like the people in this administration, are feeling more and more like they had less and less control
over Trump. They never had much control. They were picked because they didn't have control but now it feels like they can't even really sort of can keep him from acting in a certain kind of crazy. Basically, she has been working these twilight hour shifts. I don't know. That seems pretty odd. We tend not to have aids working twilight hour shifts, but okay.
What about an AID who lives at your golf course.
Anyway, she has created the impression that the president never sleeps and is instead spending his should be bedtime obsessively retweeting baseless conspiracy theories and about the twenty twenty presidential election and Fox News headlines about his purported popularity among the American public. We did see a lot of tweeting, like I think it was the night before. There have been a couple nights where he has been you know, ten thirty, ten thirty two, ten thirty five, ten thirty seven,
one AM, one forty five. And so there is tension now between Harp and some of the federal employees affected by her insandiatory writings. So I guess she is either writing these tweets or helping him write these tweets, and one of them, so they're sort of set. I feel like they're setting her up to fall and saying that she is doing his social media. I have trouble believing this, but if the Wall Street Journal is reporting it, they're
pretty legit. Her work, according to whoever is a leaking to the journal, has included posts that depicted Barack and Michelle as apes, and an AI generated image of Trump as Jesus Christ. You will remember the Trump as Jesus meme was incredibly problematic and pulled it, you know, like something like seventy percent of all Catholics were horrified by it, and ultimately he did in fact take it down.
You know, I said, I have a group chat with a bunch of social media managers where we discuss how, you know, how we push these podcasts out. And I said, you know, it's very telling that the most powerful social media manager at America is also the world worst at their job.
Yeah, it's funny because it's like all of this is so siloed, so in some ways Trump is still really his own social media manager. And I have just trouble believing how much of this I think this is still a Trump you know, maybe she gets set up to evolve and just have trouble believing this.
Something I don't have trouble believing is that the White House would host a massive Christian nationalists festival.
So the White House is planning a nine hour Christian prayer festival on the National Mall. And this is reporting from the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos, who has crushed the opinion section of the Washington Post. The Trump administration is hosting an all day prayer festival on the National Mall on Sunday that organizers will reflect the country's Christian origins and they hope spark a moment of renewal in America. This is completely nuts.
Rededicated two hundred and fifty National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise, and Thanksgiving funded by our fucking federal government, partially funded by millions in public dollars, the nation's two hundred and fiftieth birthday public dollars. That's your tax dollars paying for this crew to prey on the mall. And you know who it's run by. Oh, you are going to love this. Oh I know, yeah, Trump's favorite Reverend Paula White Cane.
Pretty problematic. She is a televangelist who is hot. I think that's pretty much it.
You can see just but I was waving my arm emphatically because that's what she loves to do.
She has the severer arms around.
She's a big evangelical. She spoke at his inauguration. She is she was involved in the nomination. She was present when Trump met with advisors to discuss the nomination of Neil gorsicch she has she is a Florida I mean, do you even want to know? I mean, like, it's like Tammy fay Baker Part two.
That's a great reading. Okay.
So one of the things we've seen is the ballroom just keeps getting more and more expensive.
But it's on budget. No, no, no, no, it's under budget. It's under budget.
Now we have the Golden Dome, which I'm going to shock you, Molly, it's going off a budget.
So first of all, I want to point out the ballroom whatever. We don't even need to talk about the billion dollars that the Republicans are trying to get through in reconciliation to fund Trump's supposed public ballroom that was supposed to be free, that was supposed to be paid for by corporations, Trump's Golden Dome missile defense plan. So this is Trump is jealous. Israel has a dome missile defense, so he wants us to have one. Here's the story.
We can't have one because we don't need one, because our country is surrounded by water. Israel is right sandwiched in the middle of the Middle East, and as enemies very nearby, we do not. And so it is a stupid idea. But it's also, like so many of Trump's stupid ideas, it is also a very very, very expensive idea. So Trump has come up with something that is both stupid and expensive. And I am just so unsurprised because stupid and expensive does seem to be the watchword of
this administructure. Hey, it's Molly john Fast here. My memoir How to Lose Your Mother is out now on paperback, arriving the head of Mother's Day. How to Lose Your Mother has garnered a lot of praise from Good Morning America, then Your Time, Book Review, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and a lot of other outlets Washington Post. The book is about what it's like to be part of the Sandwich generation,
to take care of your mother and your children. And I talk about being a mother and a daughter and the relationship I have with my mother and all of its complexities. It's funny and it's fraught, and it's sad, and it's about life. My story, This story, the Story of How to Lose Your Mother, follows a year in which my mother, Erica Johng, is diagnosed with dementia, my husband faces out life threatening illness, and what unfolds is a really honest story about what happens when the shit
hits the fan and everything goes wrong. As The Washington Post said, the book is filled with lines so good you won't just want to underline them. It's a memoir that continues to resonate, so please pick it up. Morris Santuro is a reporter for Notice Evan.
Welcome, Molly, How are you? Nice to see you?
Nice to see you. Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes have been named by a top White House official as potential targets for the Trump administration's counter terrorism strategy. I'm going to read the whole thing to you here. In an interview with Breitbart editor in chief Alex Marlowe, Sebastian Gorka, or as we call him, doctor Sebastian Gorka, Yes, he wants to be the next head of counter terrorism National
counter Terrorism Center. I guess they fired that guy was like twenty two in an intern and he has decided that we have to have an effective, accurate snapshot on everyone who are on everyone who are part of the conservative movement today, because I would say to you, I'm not sure that Nick, Nick fwent As or Tucker Carlson are conservatives.
Okay. This is one of those situations where when you think back to the past year and the past one of the main things that got Trump into power, or at least animated him among the base, was this idea, a sort of politically motivated investigations and pressure on the right from Biden administration officials. We're going to go after all of our right wing people, call us terrorists, and
you know, free speech and all of that. This is the kind of thing that sounds like what the folks who ran Trump's campaign in twenty twenty four would think that a conversation on like, I don't know, a democratic
podcast would sound like. This is interesting because lately Tucker Carlson has become an extremely vocal thorn in the side of trump Ism, but in a way that describes I think what polling shows is pretty true that, like, while Republicans are still with Trump in a lot of ways, those independence and stuff that sort of like sniffed around MAGA and sort of got on board in twenty twenty four, they're really upset about the war in Iran, which has
been sort of her Carlton's biggest problem. And then the other side of it is, you know, the Nick flente side. This guy has been bad. People have been really mad at him on the right wing for a long time, but people have watched how his numbers have grown and grown and grown. This is a guy they've tried to distance themselves from a number of times, and it just sort of doesn't seem to really happen. So I think
they're kind of two separate conversations. That the Tucker thing is sort of more of where MAGA sees itself now, which is that Trump is demanding loyalty even as he drags the movement into places that it does not want to go, like Iran, and Nick Flentays is like, all right, you cut Nick Flindays off, are you gonna lose? Who's all of these angry dudes that were such an important part of your you know, your shock Truth for twenty twenty four. They don't really know the answer to that yet.
But naming them as potential domestic terrorists, which is what doctor Sebastian Gorka has done here, is interesting to me because they are both people who Trump really has benefited from his association with. So Tucker was a big Trump booster over the last decade and Nick Funds went to the went to mar A Lago and had dinner with him and created quite a stir. And they're both people who have like turned on him right now, but who are as much responsible for this moment in history as anyone.
So I just wonder at what point? And again I think Gorka is doing this because he knows that Trump he can win favor with Trump, doing this right, targeting Trump's now enemies, And these are the people who are going to splinter maga, right. Both Tucker and Nick Fuentes are looking at what post Trump maga looks like and trying to find their spot in it. And they're doing it by running against a wildly unpopular incumbent. Maybe they're not running for president, but they are pushing against They
see the polls just like everyone else. They get the you know, the emails and the viewer comments, So clearly this is something that is sort of somewhat thought out. So I do wonder if Gorka is doing this to try to please the audience of one that is Trump.
Oh, I think that's definitely true. I mean, we've seen the president now really going after these people, you know, naming Tucker, naming like Hannis Owens, naming some of the people that he used to like and used to like him as sort of enemies of the state. At this point, we also have seeing him sort of amp this up. He's going after Republican staffers he wants fired. Now. He's really in his kind of paranoia about his own sort of allies, you know, stabbing him in the back era
right now. But there is this interesting thing that is a somewhat different combination. If you talk to Republicans, some of them will say, okay things about Tucker Carlson. He's obviously been around for a long time, he has some credibility, and Trump was happy to associate him, right right. Trump talked to Tucker Carlson a lot on the phone. In person. Trump would talk about it, Tucker would talk about it.
They were sort of an era of us or like, oh, well, Tucker's saying what he wants to say and Trump saying what he's gonna say, but we're still kind of getting along. The Nick Fetes think is a little bit different in the sense that like every Republican you ever talked to was like, we really wish this guy was not as powerful as he is, Which is not to say that they're doing that much to really prevent it or that
they've done that much. Right, We've seen so much reporting about what goes on in these young Republican group chats that are very Nick Fuente's coded, really, but like this stuff is sort of like it's not the person that they It's possible that could unite around the idea of hating Nick flent das it's less likely I think with Tucker Carlson, and Tucker has kind of shaken a lot of this stuff off. It's interesting to see what happens to him and what happens to his sort of branch
of Pturchism as it goes down the road. But he is now kind of carrying forward this idea that Trump was either a liar or has been manipulated on Iran, and that idea has a lot of purchase in the electorate right now. And that's why when you see I think what Gorkay is doing here is he's trying to kind of put back together what has been fractured. And the fracture is not really coming from Tucker. It's really
coming from what Trump has done. And that's what makes this moment in politics so weird, right, is that the Republicans are running for office on now higher gas prices and a war, which was not their expectation at all. And now you have some people in the sort of movement saying, well, if only Tucker wasn't giving us all these problems, things would be so much easier. But the problems really aren't coming from Tucker, They're really coming from Trump.
Right. But I also think like Trump knows that his his majority in MAGA, or his that group, his MAGA, his diehards who he has to have. You know, if he loses them, he's cooked that those that crew is it can be splintered the most effectively by Tucker Cross and Nick Flentes, because Nick Fuentes says the white supremacist stuff out loud, like he's like a full on buy in, like none of the pretend, none of the good people
on both sides, just the we like Nazis. And then Tucker is that sort of you know, he's anti war, but he's also anti war because he's anti submittic, right, I mean those two Well, he had to like.
He had what is on his show, which was a big moment of fracturing among people who supported Tucker Carlton. That's when you saw folks like Ted Cruz and stuff who have you know, had tough moments with tough or since Trump got re elected. But that's when you really saw them turn on him, right, they saw him as an enabler of Nick flint Ays and all the other stuff.
But there is an interesting thing here, which is this acknowledgment that this stuff that in twenty twenty four was like hey, so what like free speech man and people can say whatever they want, this can actually become a liability for them. And what has created it and becoming a conversation about it being a liability is that they are taking on Trump. Before they were saying that Trump's war was bad, before they were saying the other things
that they were saying. Now there was some idea that like, hey, you know you're being kind of a scold, or you're being like, you have no sense of humor if you were saying that these guys were dangerous or that they're
what they're talking about is dangerous. Now the idea is that they are dangerous, but that danger is because this movement is in a very very fragile place, and where a guy like Gorka, who I think you're probably right, is like looking to get some Trump credibility, is sort of like sounding like a truth social post that, which
is what Gorka is doing. I think that the main challenge is that the movement is fracturing because Trump has taken it in directions that a lot of people simply did not want to go in, which is essentially or mentally this war in Iran.
One of the things you hear all the time when you talk to people who are like and I'm sure you can attest to this, who are very sourced in the Trump White House. I'm not. I know it'll be shocked to hear that. But none of them talk, none of them leak to me even a little.
That's a stupid on their part. You'd be a great person to talk to, you know, everybody they should totally.
Yeah, well you can tell them, but that crew. What everybody says is that it is an audience of one and that there was actually that this was the James o'keeith thing. James o'keith, this crazy guy who is always
recording people. Had a staffer say something similar, which is basically that the whole house is just like Stafford's trying to figure out what Trump wants or doing, or trying to interpret what Trump wants without going back to him or trying to you know, just like that there's not any kind of cost benefit analysis anymore, that there's not any sort of no bid contracts, you know that it's just like a sort of what will the King want
kind of world in the admin? Is this true? Do you think from what you understand, well, it's.
One hundred percent true. I mean my colleague Jasmine Wright, who I do the Notice newsletter with every morning, you know, she is a way of supporter. She's very well throsed up on those people. She talks to them all the time and routinely will be saying, you know, we'll have a conversation, hey do you see this? What's going on with this? And she will fire off, y'all, she'ld call her people and they will say, well, we're just seeing what Trump wants to do about it. We'll just see
what let's see what happens. I mean, this ballroom issue is exactly the perfect example of this, which is that if you talk to any Republican strategists senior all the way down to the ground that I talked to a lot of them, you know, they will tell you that if the conversation is about a ballroom, that of course ninety nine point nine nimes that of Americans will never set foot in, right. That's like a huge part of the conversation. And also, you know, these gas prices are
higher all summer. But this is exactly a bad idea for them. This is this is exactly what they don't want. It's exactly bad in every way. They're not running around being like, man, we love this, we really want to talk about this ballroom. But because Trump wants to talk about it, that's what people are going to talk about.
And that's why you saw, for example, you know, after the you know, attempted shooting at the White House Correspondence Center, everybody lined up and said, okay, this is actually a ballary conversation now even though it really isn't a ballroom conversation, and it took away from a moment that was you know about many many many different things, you know, security around the president, the safety of these events, you know, just sort of genuinely like the feeling that people can't
gather anymore and what that means for politics, and it'd become discommination. But no, no, it's Trump's pet project that comes directly from the president. Like I mean, if you talk to people who around him, they sort of like this, this is what they have to do now. And this is the problem that is getting into is that that was all really really funny games when this president was the guy driving this party into popular directions, right, I
don't forget it actually was doing. There was a time when establishment Republicans were like, this guy is so dumb, we can't go anywhere near this stuff. And as soon as he would take him there, they would win and it was very exciting and very thrilling. But now the places that he is taking them are not helpful for them in the midterms, and so they are looking at this and they're kind of shrugging. He has such command over a large part of the electorate, particularly those older voters, and.
We saw this in Indiana. We saw this in Indiana two weeks ago where the incumbents who support who didn't support redistricting, almost all of them lost.
You absolutely thought, like we had great reporting of notice about this, who absolutely thought that was not gonna happen. This was not a thing where they thought, oh, we're all gonna lose. They thought, Okay, a couple of us are going to lose, but we're going to hold furniar, We're gonna we're gonna win. And they didn't at all. We're now reporting on how the Thomas Massey race that
primary in Kentucky. Of course, you know Massey, the guy who helped get the fteam files out, that is looking like he's going to lose that U primary to his mega sort of funded candidate, whose entire opponent, whose entire campaign messages Thomas Massey does not stand with Trump. I'm gonna stand with Trump. That's what I'm doing. This is the kind of thing that, like, you know, it works on those voters we're going to turn out in that primary.
But everybody will tell you who was involved in the long term planning of this that like it is a huge challenge for the mid term general election voter. I had one Republican strategy just talking the other day about how their plan is to go and find the low propensity voters and we're talking about the ones who may not even know, oh, there's a mid term going on. This is a very very low information behind This is like one of the hardest kind of voters to find
and pull out. And the fact that that is part of their victory strategy just shows that they know they're in a tough spot, you know, and Trump is not helping them anymore. Trump is not guiding them in a direction that that that helps them. This is this is this is a guy who's now saying to them, no,
we don't care about americans financial situation. Iran is more important. Also, this ballroom must be built, and maybe I need some taxpayer money for it after all, and everyone needs to say that that's what we need to do and we need to fight for that. This is just the kind of stuff that like, yes, this is Trump, It's it's Trump's show, and everybody else is just sort of living in it. The problem is the show is not that popular.
Right now, right if you're a Republican candidate, you must hit your wagon to Trump in order to win MAGA. But you will then lose normal voters, including as according to this falling including Republican leaning indeed, and that you can't win. There is no math where you can win. I mean, that's why you can win in these primaries if you go full MAGA. But there's no math unless you're in a in like a Mississippi, where you can win as a MAGA but without Republican independent voters.
And I'll tell you those places are getting harder too. I mean a place everybody should look at this week is Texas thirty five. Okay, this this is a congressional district that was redrawn by the Republicans, specifically as part of their jerrymander. Okay, we're gonna do this thing. It's gonna be really really hard for Democrats to win it. We're gonna win this. We don't need to bother this anymore. We're gonna draw out opposition. This is a place that
on paper is a Trump plus twelve district. And there's reporting this morning that Republican money operations are having to dump funds into the Democratic primary in that race where there's kind of a candidate that Democrats think is sort of a kook and has no chance of winning, and there's another candidate who they think could maybe win, and the Republicans are coming in and trying to sort of
bolster the cook you know, as sometimes happens. But the fact that they are spending money in Texas thirty five there's suppostable to to be handoff. It's Trump plus twelve, so it should not matter at all, right, like we can just walk away from this. But they're spending real money, hundreds of thousands of dollars more on trying to get the candidate that they think they can actually beat, because which signals an idea that actually even that level of
district in Texas could be competitive. That's how unpopular Trump is with those indies that you're talking about.
Is that a Latino district, Yes, it's real grand Yeah.
Yeah, it's one that has picked up some of those voters that they're relying on that they were twenty twenty four. They might not now, but it just speaks to the fact that, like the entire plan here was that Trump would be popular among his base among you know a lot of people the Democrats would be very unpopular, which of course they are.
Uh.
And then also we were going to draw these lines to make it so like we can emphasize the Trump popularity stuff and really make it impopuble for Democrats about how unpopular they are. And that conversation is sort of like flipped in away that Democrats are still very unpopular, people don't like them. But in Texas thirty five, rebel Remarlicans think that Trump isn't popular enough to drag them over the line and let them putting some sort of
thumb on the scale. That is a big deal. If it plays out in other red places across the country like that, it just speaks to how much trouble Trump has put them in.
And lay Book had this insane story this morning where they had James Blair talking about how he's very optimistic for the midterms, which he will be the only person ever to be optimistic of the Republican side. But perhaps there's a smidget of smidget of spin in that, but he he says that like the redistricting is going to
just they're just going to win on the redistricting. But this what your point with Texas thirty five which I think is relevant, is like, if you are redistricting with twenty twenty four numbers that have Trump way up with voting groups that we now see he's just completely underwater with now like Latino voters, like young voters, if you're using those numbers, like it's anybody's guess what this map is going to look like?
I known't. James Blair is a perfect person to talk about this because he is like really smart and actually very much knows what he's doing. And he's a guy that after the twenty twenty five elections in Virginia and New Jersey where the Democrats vastly overperformed their polling and did really really well just to lacked the Republicans up and down the line, he said, look, we're going to pivot to affordability. Now, We're going to focus like this
is this was an affordability election. We're going to pivot to that. We're going to do that.
When does that happen?
Well, this is the thing is that, like this goes back to what you're talking about with Trump, is that like this is what a very smart and intelligence strategist said out loud in an interview about what they're gonna do and you even see it. You've seen some stuff lately, right Trump is talking about, oh, let's suspend the national gas text. He's pushing this housing bill. This is stuff that like, again, if it was the only thing that they were talking about, this is what a guy like
James Blair would be wanting the president to do. Like we're going to talk about making stuff cheaper. We're going to talk about, you know, making building houses all that kind of stuff. But the problem has been that Trump is on his own sort of flights of fancy with there's other stuff the ballroom and it's ex amazing cost and a really gaudy type of thing. That's a huge part of the conversation that Trump keeps talking about the
war in Iran. You know that they got into the kind of can't get out of back ends up being a huge part of the conversation, and it does require now a change in tone on gas price is now it's like good that they're going up because it means that we're spreading freedom or something like that, which voters are not buying. But Blair's a perfect example of this because they had a whole map here that was kind of interesting map but it does. It speaks to where
they thought their heads were at. Like I talked to I did just from reporting earlier this week talking to Republican strategist who told me this idea that they had America two fifty, this big two and fifty anniversary of America in July fourth, would be a great opportunity for the Republicans because, of course they would predict that the
Democrats and sort of like fracture over patriotism. As you expect, they would along the traditional lines and Republicans mean while going to stand there and say, hey, we love America just like you. We love the flag right a great time. This is the thing that like last year, had they said it last year, you'd be like, yeah, that actually makes sense. Actually, I think that might actually really work. I mean, the Democrats are really bad, but now it
looks like maybe, I guess. But aren't you also going to have to talk about the fact that it costs more to drive around either to a protest of a two and or fifteth animated reverse event or to a celebration of it than it did last year? Are you going to have to talk about how groceries are still up and you can't afford things, and your healthcare costs have gone up, and maybe you've had to quit your coverage that you had through Obamacare because those premiums went up.
Those things still exist, and so you see a guy like Blair who had a plan and has continued to talk about the plan, just how that plan has been completely overturned by a person by Trump basically, and what Trump is actually doing and they're having to sort of scramble to fix that. And then maybe you have this covers now on the other side of it. Actually it's these far right wingers that we liked before, maybe they're
actually doing this to us. And really it's all kind of like everyone's looking around for who did this, when like it's Trump who did it, And like that makes things really hard because he's a guy who does not allow you to run against him.
Evan will come back, of course, at any time. You know. Dan Osborne is an independent candidate in the Nebraska Senate pace. Welcome, Welcome, Dan, Thank you. So you are running for Senate in Nebraska and the primary contest is over. I want you to talk about what Nebraska looks like right now. It is a historically very complicated state, but we are in a very historically complicated moment.
Yeah, no, we absolutely are.
And so you know, in twenty twenty four, I ran unopposed to deb Fisher. You know, I'm still pretty proud of what we did. We were just able to take the message that working class people deserve a seat of the table at the United States Senate. We took that all around Nebraska and we ended up getting forty seven percent of the vote. So this time my opponent now is Pete Ricketts, and so it's noteworthy to know who he is before we begin this story because he's the
son of billionaire Joe Ricketts. The family has a net worth of eight point five billion dollars. So these are the type of people that feel like they have no accountability in their life and they can do anything they want. So, you know, he has made a living in Nebraska over the last twenty years trying to ruin people's lives and taking power using his money and bringing other people down. So what he did is he put in this guy,
William Forbes into the Nebraska Democratic primary. This guy, he's this pro life preacher out in Scott's Bluff that's in western Nebraska who preaches hate. He puts his sermons online and we have a lot of them, so he preaches a lot of hate and discrimination. He's a three time Trump voter. And he also just as early as January attended a Nebraska GOP training session for candidates. Pretty obvious who he was and what Ricketts is trying to do,
because he knows. Ricketts knows if we get this down to a one on one, he is in significant trouble.
He's underwater.
And so incomes the other Democrat in the race, Cindy Burbank. And Cindy's a free spirit biker lady who chose to run to basically keep Forbes off the ballot.
So talk us through what happened.
Well, the Nebraska state Democrats supported Cindy, and Cindy moved through the primary.
And I mean it's really as simple as that.
When I interviewed you two years ago, the idea that you could be a candidate that was I almost feel like you ran on your work as working as a working person more than you ran on your partisan affiliation. And I think that that has been now we're seeing a lot of people do that. I've interviewed, I've interviewed Senate candidates from other sort of more purplish states who
are doing that. It feels like you were sort of the first of that trend now and we're seeing it in all different places, and we're even seeing you have on the ground experience in your state in a way that journalists don't. So I'm curious what input and your experiences with the people you.
Talk to on the ground.
Yeah, I talked to two thousands. I try to talk to as many as possible. We did over two hundred public publicly advertised events in twenty four We've done probably close to seventy this time. Will probably shoot for way over that two hundred mark, because that's what's important to me, right, getting out and talking to the people every day that make it happen, that run their small towns, that run their large cities, and just really try to understand their life.
Because I'm a first and foremost, I'm a pipefitter, right, I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican. I'm a pipefitter. That's who I am. It's who I've always been. And son going out and learning people people's industries like in agriculture or education or nursing, healthcare, administrators.
I mean, you name it.
I've talked to them and try to learn from them. And you know, to answer your original question is why it seems obvious to me, right, and what we did in twenty twenty four, it seems very obvious because you know, I look at Washington, DC. I see a country club, right, I see a country club of millionaires that work for billionaires. And I'm like, well, these people don't get me why. You know, I'm just looking for for decent representation in my own government, like most of us are.
So my campaign really is for the.
You know, the nurses, the teachers, the carpenters, the plumbers, bus drivers, and lunch ladies. And that's who I talk to. If you're a billionaire, I don't got time for you. You know, this is and I'm sick and tired of this pay to play world. Everything is pay to play, and so I'm not interested in those the people that are, you know, carving up the United States like they're on a little monopoly board that they have ricked.
So the sentiment with people I'm.
Finding is very similar to mine, and I'm able to connect with those people. I call it paycheck populism, right, I've always gotten a paycheck every week. I know how much comes in, I know how much goes out, and I know if I don't, if I miss work, I fall behind.
You know, just the other day, I had to stop the pump short.
I haven't had to do that long time because my mortgage is coming out. So you know, these are the decisions that people are being forced to make because of just I mean, I don't know if I can cuss on this podcast.
I feel like, but just.
I mean, just a shitty policy, right, it is.
It is shitty policy. It's it's killing our ag sector. It's it's hurting consumers left and right. And and you got I always ask myself who's winning, who's winning? And all this and certainly the military, the military industrial complex is always.
Going to win.
Uh, they're winning, you know, the Ricketts family, the people who are getting a lie and share the tax cuts with this big beautiful bill.
They're winning.
And I don't know if they think the rest of us are just stupid, but we're not.
We're on to the scheme.
And I think it takes it takes working people coming together. That's why they're freaking out, Pete rick It's spent three million in the state so far since May. Nobody's ever spent that money in Nebraska that early because they know we're getting organized and we're organizing everybody. And I don't care what letter you have next to your name, it didn't matter to me. We've all been sold to bill of goods by both the parties throughout the years, starting
with Clinton and NAFTA, hurting our industries. So you know, just no matter where the pendulum swings, it feels like where can.
People get left behind?
And you know, that's a lot of what we talk about in my town halls.
Let's talk about this sort of indictment of neoliberalism, which farm mers are really getting screwed right now. And I'd love you you're in Nebraska, I'd love you to talk about what that looks like on the ground and what you're seeing.
Yeah, well, I'd be remiss to not say that Nebraska is first in the country in beef. We're second, I believe in corn production and more fifth than soy bean production. And tariff policy, bad tariff sweeping terra policy ISFiC, specifically with China in the ag sector, has cut off fifty two percent of our exports and you know, so now what we have is we have farmers with bins full
of rotting, sooey beans. And I was talking to a roe crop farmer the other day and I asked him, I said, Hey, is this belout actually gonna bail you out? And he said, well, a little bit, right, I mean every bit, a little bit helps, But at the end of the day, it does nothing for me. In twenty twenty five, I'm just out. And so they didn't they didn't make it. Well, they're losing money in twenty twenty five, and then for twenty twenty six, it's supposed to help
me with my inputs. Well, now the war in Iran have jacked up the cost of their inputs, which is, you know, seed and diesel fuel for their tractors and then fertilizer. The guy I was talking to, he farms nineteen hundred acres, so he's a small farmer, family farmer. His fertilizer cost is up fifty thousand dollars then it would have been pre war. So this is really digging into our ag sector. And we're in the midst of
a farm crisis right Our lands are dry. We've had the seventh largest the nation's largest fire in Nebraska that just recently got put out. It destroyed pasture, it destroyed crops, it destroyed fences. And you know, we have an aging farmer population. In about thirteen fourteen years, the majority of them are going to be aged out and the young
people aren't staying on the farm. So why would you you know, with issues like right to repair that takes their profits and now bad policy and now bad foreign policy cutting into their profits.
Two percent of the population feed the rest of us.
And oh, I got to backtrack a little bit with cutting, you know, taking a chainsaw to USAID. And you know, this is the first time in this country that we import more of our food than we export, and that's a direct result of cutting USAID. You know, we've we've always taken pride in feeding the hungary around the world, and now all of a sudden, you know, this America First agenda, which is turning out to be America only agenda,
is hurting people. It's definitely hurting my family directly, you know, talking about tariff policy, not just in agriculture, but in my industry. A domestic water heater has gone up six hundred dollars since Trump's tariffs. So what does that mean?
Right?
The company that I work for, Grundwald Mechanical, they're not going to eat that six hundred dollars because if they do, they go out of business.
So it gets passed on to us the consumer who asked, who has a need for that?
Or if you're building a home, that's why parents of home homes are skyrocketing because of building materials, because of tariffs with Mexico and Canada. Like this just doesn't make any economic sense, but people are definitely seeing it, and they're definitely Pete Ricketts, my opponent, is he's complacent and all this. He just rubber stamps this stuff because he's the one when I ask who's winning, he's winning.
Yeah, And I think that's a really good and important message. I'm wondering if you could talk about the Medicaid. There's Medicaid cuts that are going to happen after the midterms. You're in a rural state, so you must see some rural hospital closure, right or talk to me about the downstream of effects of that.
So there's been two that I can point to. One in Curtis, Nebraska.
Uh, that's out by McCook and that's southwest Nebraska.
They shut down there.
They announced they're shutting down a satellite hospital and in its place, not like directly in its place, but in the same town, they've opened up what's called what they dubbed Cornhusker Clink, which is a migrant detention center. So we're shutting down hospitals and we're opening up privatized detention centers where people are profiting off of, you know, arresting migrants.
And you know, this is uh.
This, this is this is backwards, right, And so we're cutting three hundred billion dollars from Medicaid and but it's okay because we're at I.
Mean, fifty billion for rural hospitals.
I'm not a mathematician, but I know that number that doesn't add up. That's bad math. And there was another article that just came out. It was about a guy on dialysis. I forget the location, we can double check, I suppose for the sake of the podcast. But he now has to drive ninety miles for dialysis every other day versus the ten miles he was driving because his clinic closed. And this story is going to be put
on repeat. And what that means, it means people are going to die, right, it means people are going to die, and so they basically stripped Medicaid to give themselves at tax cuts and by themselves. I'm talking about the billionaire class, the Pete Ricketts family of the world, who sees the lion's share of this man, I don't know how if you're that guy, I don't know how you sleep at night. Yeah, well he probably sleeps in a ten thousand dollars I get to Cotten sheets, I guess, but I don't know.
But I think that's a really good point. And I think that I think that's a really good point. And I also think that it it's really it's really important, important to the part of this. It's not just populistic, right, it's helping people who government who have not been rich enough. I mean, like this government has been so paid for play after the fall of citizens United that working people have gotten screwed. And that is what this is about, right, It's about about it.
So talk us through that, Yeah, you know, I mean, it's it's about you know the history of the United States and us being capitalists and free market and enterprise and building amazing things.
Which we have done. But you know, we have.
Gotten to this point where you know, we're right deb smack in the middle of a gilded age again. But instead of the Vanderbilts and the Carnegie and the JP Morgan's, you can just replace it with Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos.
You might as well include Rickets and that as.
Well, where you know, point half of point one percent control more than ninety percent of the wealth in this country.
And you know, everybody's like, oh, why do you hate rich people? Blah blah blah blah blah. I don't. I want everybody to be millionaires. But here's a difference.
There's a there's a big difference between a millionaire and somebody who has twenty billion dollars, right, That is a that is a vast, vast difference. And I want to arguably one of the most, if not the most abundant country on the planet. There is enough here for all of us to live extremely well. And the fact that people are hoarding it is certainly a question of morality. And you know it's how they accumulate their well too.
They do it off of our backs.
I know, because I'm the one punching a clock and wrenching my employer, and as long as I'm getting a decent wage and decent benefits, I don't care. Right, that's my choice to go to work and punch a clock. I like working with my hands. But the problem is is they still want to continue to break the unions, and they want to pay people less and less and less so they can keep getting richer and richer and richer, which I don't really understand that. That's not what being
Americans about. I think forming a union is just as American as apple, buie and baseball. But they've spent billions of dollars and anti union rhetoric at you know these companies like Amazon.
So you will now be there. It will be you versus Rickets. Cindy Burbank gets dropping out. What when you when voters come to you, it must be such a stark contrast between you and records.
It is.
Yeah, you know, I always tell people Robin Williams, I love that guy, the late comedian. He said it best when he said our politicians should be wearing patches, Nascar style jackets with patches of their sponsors so.
We know how they're going to vote.
And that's the difference. I don't take corporate money. That is my dig on citizens. You know, my little dig I'm playing my little part in fighting Citizens United is.
I don't take their money because I'm not going to do their bidding. I want to do this the.
Way two hundred and fifty years ago the Founders intended it to be.
And that's a government buying for people.
And right now it's pretty obvious it's a government for the corporations and the one percent. So that that is the fundamental difference between me and my opponent.
Thank you Dan for joining us. Really appreciate you.
Oh, thank you too. I appreciate you being honest. Good to talk to you again.
Yeah, I'm I am so. I hope you win no more perfectly, Jesse Cannon.
So, Mollie, what's been going on in Tennessee is just despicable. The state House is run worse than any state house I can think of, whenever there's any any contention in it. When you watch the video footage, it is unbelievable the way they talk to one another. And now we have even more evidence of this as the Democrats have been stripped of their committee assignments.
Yeah, I mean so, this is just a completely fucked thing where he removed every Democrat from committees. All members of the Democratic Caucus have been removed from their committees and subcommittees, according to a letter. And this is he's mad because they during a special session over redistricting across Tennessee. He felt that they were disrupting the democratic and legislative
process and creating disorder on the House floor. He went on to cite specific examples as Democrats interlocking arms and blocking aisles on the House floor. Again, this is like Republicans. You know, Democrats do something and Republicans do something that's like ten times more insane and anti democratic.
I think the phrase you used to like to bring was the teddy bear to the gun.
Train, right exactly, Teddy bear into a knife fight. And so here we are. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.