Full Episode - From Teflon To Velcro: Why The Epstein Files Could Trigger Trump’s Lame Duck Presidency + The Democrats’ Roadmap To Becoming A Majority Party Again

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Soul today. Right now, Soul is offering my audience thirty percent off your entire order, So go to get sold dot Com use the promo code toodcast. Don't forget that code. That's getsold dot Com promo code podcast for thirty percent off. Hello there, Happy Thursday. Welcome to another episode of the Chuck Podcast. I got a loaded show for you today. We're gonna obviously tackle the question that I've gotten a thousand times today from various walks of life, which is

do these Epstein emails mean something more on Trump? Is this gonna? Is this problem? We're gonna tell it. We're going to dive into that fairly deep here in a minute, I'll give you We're going to debate Teflon versus Velcro, and we'll get there in a few minutes. My guest for today is Adam Gentlsen. He is a long time Senate a to the late Senate Majority Leader Senate Democratic

Leader Harry Reid. He started a new I guess he calls it an action tank, but basically it's a think tank of sorts that is called the search Light Institute, named after the town that Harry Reid was born and he came from search Light, Nevada. And the point is how, basically, how to broaden the tent, How to get Democrats to broaden to not be a stereotype of what perhaps they are perceived to be as a brand over the last decade, certainly in the post Obama era, how did they broaden out?

And we discuss how there was wasn't that long ago that Democrats could elect senators, had senators from thirty six different states at one point when they got sixty senators in two thousand and nine. Right, that wasn't in the twentieth century or the nineteenth century. That was in the twenty first century. So it's an interesting conversation. We delve

into the whole thing of the shutdown debate. You know, how do you confront Trump? Should they have cave, not cave? All of those things? I think you're going to enjoy that conversation, even if you no matter the side that you might be on on that one. Then of course after I'll do a little few more q and as, and I'll have my big college football preview going into the weekend. But I want to start, obviously with this question and look the world of independent media, the world

of content creators. Right, we are in an Epstein frenzy, and it's a deserved sort of feeding frenzy of the moment because there's new material out there, right, There's new emails, there's new shock emails, and the swearing in of Adelita Garalva, the Arizona congresswoman who's been waiting to be sworn in for over a month now because of the Speaker Johnson's

bizarre decision to keep the House out. I really think he really did a disservice to his own party and his own members here, because it's pretty indefensible, you know, the lack of the lack of action, the lack of anything from the House Republicans, and they're running. They're on the ballot before anybody else, is right, it's the House Republicans are all on the ballot come in November twenty twenty six. And I think Mike Johnson has put his

own members in a terrible situation. Obviously, he made a it feels like he made a decision that the White House has him to do, not what was in the best interests of the House Republicans, and you know these in some ways, this controversy over the Epstein file is the same thing. Mike Johnson is consistently doing what's in the best interest of the White House, which is a branch of government. He does not lead, nor is he a member of. He is actually the leader of the

legislative branch. The Speaker of the House is essentially the

de facto leader of that branch of government. The same way John Roberts as the Chief Justice, is essentially the current leader of the judiciary branch, and he is essentially outsource decision making on what Congress should do to the White House. You get it. Politically, I understand why they feel like they have to. And we live in this jerrymandered world where primary voters matter more than the rest

of us. That of course, you know, this gets into the larger conversation, which, by the way, I get into with Adam Jentlesen right the filibuster. He wrote a whole book about the filibuster and what was the founder's intent? And you know, how should this all work? And when do you have supermajorities and when don't you et cetera.

But I will tell you, I think what Mike Johnson has done with House Republicans is so damaging, and I do not think they fully appreciate how much damage he's His decisions here, again, all were only to the benefit of one person, Donald Trump. None of it to the benefit of anybody that's actually going to be on the ballot in twenty twenty six, namely every single one of those House Republicans that he is charged with leading. The

discharge position is here. It's interesting that the White House apparently was working Lauren Bobert seeing if they could talk her out of being a signer, trying to do whatever they can to stop this. And I think that, you know, the question is will this You know, this is a guy you know axis Hollywood didn't end him. January sixth didn't end him. I mean, look at the things he has done since coming into office. I mean, I'm going

to give you a quick rundown. These are just the people he pardoned on January sixth that have committed crimes since right and none of this has hit him yet. Edward Kelly pardon for January sixth, later convicted to conspiring to murder FBI agents. Daniel Charles Ball was pardoned in the January sixth pardons, and he was rearrested on federal gun charges. Kyle Colton was pardoned with his January sixth participation,

later had to be indicted for receiving child pornography. Christopher moynihan was pardoned for the January sixth pardons and in

October twenty twenty five with charge of threatening to kill the House Democratic leader Aqim Jeffreys. And then there's Robert Packer pardon another January sixth partony in September of twenty twenty five, charged in connection with a dog attack that left four people injured. So people he's pardoned have gone on to commit more crimes and have become menaces to society.

Never mind the other pardons he's done of some really questionable figures, like the one where it looks like he sold the pardon with Sheng Peng Zao, the finance founder. That guy's in business with his sons and he magically gets a pardon. I wonder how that worked. This guy apparently had billions and illicit transactions, and it was Trump's Department of Justice the first term that actually prosecuted him, But we digress. George Santos, the serial liar who defrauded voters,

defrauded Congress, did all sorts of things. He gets pardon ed Martin who handles his pardons. He gets pardoned. He got convicted of financial crimes, misusing nonprofit funds, and he gets pardoned. And of course I think works for Trump. Denesh Desuza, who is traffics and made up Propatcanada with his Mules movie and all this stuff, well, he was convicted of illegal of the straw donor scheme. He received clemency. A couple of other crypto fraud financiers that he's pardoned

ever since. So he's got and I say this, none of this stuff has mattered, right, I throw all that out there. All of this happened this year. He's you know, did the bailout of Argentina instead of bailing out US beef producers. None of this has hit him, stuck to him yet, So why should the Epstein file stick to him. Well, there's another way to look at this is that there are times in any presidency where you have Teflon as a president, and there are times in every presidency where

it feels like you're dressed in velcrow. There was you know, Richard Nixon had teflon in his first term. By the second term, it was all velcrow, and everything that was connected to Watergate or loosely connected to Watergate or any sort of presidential abuse of power seemed to stick to him and stick to him. But why did he go from a teflon guy to a velcrow guy? A simple reason? The economy sucked. Why did Bill Clinton not get essentially punished by the political system or by voters when it

came to Monica Lewinsky the economy was great. Why did the stuff in Trump's first term not stick to him? There was a perception that he oversaw a successful economy pre coronavirus. Why is this possible that this time he's in this is why could this time be different? Because

too many people in this country think this economy sucks. Because, as we've discussed, if you have money, you're doing okay. If you don't have money, you're struggling. You're barely out of you're barely above water. You're seeing your electric bill go up, You're seeing the grocery bills go up, You're

seeing everything in your life go up. In price. Trust me, even if you have some savings, you're seeing everything go up, right, The cost of everything has gone up and feels like it's going up substantially, particularly when you look at electricity. So you know, Epstein's been out there as an issue for Trump arguably for years. The question is when does

it does a you know, why would it matter this time more than before. You can say, well, there's more evidence that connects them that he knew something. I definitely think there's always going to be. But you could make the argument you kind of new, right, like, there's this great quote from JD. Vance that actually which was you know, there's always a tweet, right, This is JD Vance Sarkha two thousand and one, So you'll be forgiven. I know that way you have to go way back in his past,

right some four whole years ago. But the quote, and I just want to get it directly here. I had it up. Remember this is him. He was a tweet he made in twenty twenty one. Remember when we learned that our wealthiest and most powerful people were connected to a guy who ran a literal child sex trafficking ring, and then that guy died mysteriously in jail and now

we just don't talk about it. Of course, that was when there was a democratic administration that he did tweet this, right number one, And that was back when the right was convinced this was a cover up having to do with Bill Clinton. But of course Jeffrey Epstein's closest friend was not Bill Clinton. It was Donald Trump. And with

a the point I'm making here is do I think Trump could Jedi mind trick his way out of this? Well, he has for a long time. And why has he Well, there's been other things. There's been And again I go back to the first term, even when Jeffrey Epstein was in custody, even when this whole thing consumed a cabinet secretary of his who had to essentially drop because of his lenient sentencing that he oversaw down in South Florida, it was because the perception, well, yeah, we knew all this,

this was all baked in. We kind of knew Trump was this. And this is why in some ways people already know. Remember when we learned that our wealthiest and most powerful people were connected to a guy hard stop.

So that's problem number one for Trump is that Trump has made it clear he's been part of the establishment, part of the elite. He knows everybody. He knows all these guys, he's been there. He himself has quotes of him. Oh yeah, Jeffrey likes him young and he knows. There's that other quote that's floating around where he said, man, it was the nineties, a lot of crazy stuff was happening.

I don't remember, which is always code for I don't want to talk about what I might know, or what I might have seen, or what I might have participated in. The Point is, it isn't going to be hard for people to believe that he had a relationship with Epstein, that he was close with him. The difference is they're pissed off about he's not doing what he promised to

do as president, which is bring down the costs. They're doing anything, But if anything, his policies have hurt you, right, it is the price of coffee is up, not down. Notice the Treasury Secretary says, we're going to lower the price of coffee and we're going to lower the price of fruit. Translation, they realize these tariffs actually impacted everyday people. And when you teariff Brazil over a political obsession of yours, all you do is attack all Americans in the book

because of the price of coffee. So I'm always has it in to assume, ah, this is it. But look, every presidency comes to an end and their influence comes to an end. And the way we mark the end of a presidency as we say, oh, he's becoming a lame duck, and you're starting to hear the words lame duck. I think when you measure when does a president become every president becomes a lame duck. The question is win

does it begin. Well, trying to figure out when a presidency is an official lame duck status is like trying to guess when we're in recession. Right. There's a great line about economists with recessions. They can always tell you when it started. After the recession has started, there's not a single economist that can tell you when it's going to begin.

and the Democrats sweep the House in the Senate, which to me, you know, and you're going to hear this actually in the Adam Jenlsen interview, and I think he sets this bar correctly, which is, if Democrats don't win the Senate, they don't win the midterms.

So a year from now, if we're in a situation where we say the Democrats swept the House in the Senate, we will then go back and say Donald Trump's lame duck presidency hit lame ducks status election Day twenty twenty five, and arguably it probably happened a bit sooner. We might say that essentially the symbolic beginning of his lame duckness

was the destruction of the East Wing when he became so consumed with his personal legacy and he stopped worrying about the American voter. Right. Look, Donald Trump's history is he wants to get everything he can out of you that benefits him. And once he drains, once you've given

him everything he can get out of you, he moves on. Right, My substeck this week is about how I think I think he has treated the Republican Party the way he treated many of the casinos that he operated or businesses that he's run, which is he essentially leveraged it for his benefit, left this entity with a huge debt. In this case, the debt he has left him as moral

and ethical bankruptcy. And then he's gonna walk away. Meanwhile, the Republican Party is going to be the pardon of shitty pardons, is going to be the party of that doesn't care about the rule of law unless it applies only to the other side, like he is gonna that they're part of that. The legacy is somehow the Republican Party is the party of crypto scammers. Like that's not a good legacy. And then you throw in Epstein here, and he's the party of protecting the Pedophiles. This episode

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opportunity to run again. So now Donald Trump's worried about Donald Trump, and because of that, does it appears to not even be worried about the voter anymore. And this is where he goes from having a teflon suit and he was teflon Don and he's been teflon Don. Right. You know, he can attack John McCain and not lose somebody. He could shoot somebody apparently on Fifth Avenue and not lose a supporter. But if this economy sucks, and if

the grocery bills, he can't Jedi mind trick away a grocery bill. And then suddenly when that happens, and they think, well, my life sucks, and this guy is worried more about

the East wing of the White House. Oh yeah, and this guy protected a pedophile for decades, and this guy's going to commute or the sentence of said pedophiles partner in crime, literal partner in crime, and Gallaine Maxwell, that's how this that's how this story matters, right, And now you've got this orchestration of a series of votes where

you know Epstein is one of these few stories. We live in this siloed information world where literally, you know, I could say, you know, I mean, I'm gonna have an interview with Clay Travis in a couple of weeks. I don't think my mother knows who Clay Travis is. And I say this with no, you know, why should she you know he is? He is in a different

media ecosystem than my mother travels in. She doesn't, you know, she watches a lot of college football, but it happens she doesn't watch anything on Fox because Miami doesn't ever play on Fox. They usually play on the ESPN or ABC,

so she might be aware of ESPN personalities, but she's not aware of any Fox Sports personalities, let alone aware of his radio show or any of those things. And Epstein's one of these stories that every every single silo has an Epstein corner. Right, Your MAGA silo has an Epstein corner, Your sort of never Trump silo has Epstein corners, your sort of center, your sort of mainstream media has an Epstein corner, Your progressive wing has an Epstein corner. Right,

there is this collective interest in Epstein. And let's be honest, why there is. It's all you know, at first, the rights interest in Epstein was all about Bill Clinton, nothing else. It was always about Bill Clint. That's how the right got fascinated by this. They were hoping to paint and it was all these you know, democratics are all part of this weird pedophilia conspiracy that QAnon launched. All this it's all sort of wrapped up in that. And then

Trump's names showed up in the Epstein files. Right then we realized. And then Trump became a cornerstone of MAGA and became sort of created somebody's created mega, right, certainly, it's always a question, you know, like anything. Trump doesn't create anything. He just sort of got in front of a parade that was that was starting to form, and

then suddenly he became their leader and their unifier. But here we are, and now everybody else is interested in it because you're like, whoa, So Trump's involved in this and this side, you know, and it's just one of those stories that everybody's got a stake in. So this is going to be a story that constantly, just like the economy is right, the economy breaks through every because you can't sort of information silo your grocery bill. You know, there isn't a Fox News version of the grocery bill

or an MSNBC version of the grocery bill. So you can't do that with the economy, and in this unique case, you can't do it with the Epstein story. And this is why this feels like a very lame that this is what lame duck. What happens to lame duck presidencies is that they can't stop feeding frenzies anymore. You know, this happened with George W.

his credibility was shot. It was already weakening due to our rock. Terry Schivo hits, then Katrina happens, and then the whole thing is over. But Katrina didn't start the lame duck period. The lame duck period actually began at the tail, at the at the beginning of five when he started messing around with the Shivo business, social security investments, et cetera. And so that's where I think this if we're if indeed we're able to in a year from now,

really in it. We have the environment that we have and it does turn into a democratic suite, we will say this lame duck period began in the fall of In the fall of this year, just like with Joe Biden's presidency. It turned out the beginning of the end of his presidency happened really early in his presidency, right with the Afghanistan withdrawal and the inability to to sort of hold anybody accountable, fix it, explain it, and he

never recovered from there. And while because he was a first term president, you'd never say lame duck, in hindsight, you know, that's when he lost. That's when he lost the plot, and it was and everything went downhill from there. You know. That's I think the situation we may be living him now, and the nightmare for the White House press shop is is, you know, Trump has not helped

them at all. You know, I argue that he actually had a you know, Trump's problem is going soft on Maxwell because by going soft on Maxwell, but he is essentially confirmed the idea that Maxwell knows some stuff, that he's friendly with her, that he knows her, and it undermines the story that he had sort of lived with for a while when it came to Epstein that I that mostly worked with his supporters, which was, yeah, I

knew Jeffrey Epstein very well. And then our relationship ended because I didn't like what he was doing to, you know, women on my at mar Alago. So we had this sort of story that was that had some credibility to it that you know, he didn't because there was it

was true he recruited apparently he recruited one of these women from mar Alago, and Trump said he kicked him out of mar Alago and said, you can't come back here. Now we now learned that that that the reason for the real breakup between Epstein and Trump wasn't that it was over a piece of property in Palm Beach. We eventually learned about that later, but he had a story that he was feeding his supporters that yeah, I knew Epstein, and then when I realized what he was doing.

supporters say they are disgusted. Then this idea of leniency on her, giving her, you know, the club fed treatment when it comes to transferring her in prison, sending your personal attorney who happens to be the Deputy Attorney General, to coax answers out of her, including the I never

saw anything untoward. Uh, it was so important to him to get that on the record. But Trump seems to be worried about something with Maxwell, when if he actually wanted to keep his con up on Epstein, and let's assume I'm gonna assume it's a con. And you know, with Trump, it's it's hard not to assume that. So let's I'm gonna assume it's a con. He'd have been better off playing he said she said with her, and

said he'd and then made life tougher on her. And and if and if she threatened to go public with stuff, let her go public. She's the one sitting in prison. She's got the credibility problem. And then if you were being tough on her and she was then pushing back, it could simply be she's squealing. But the fact he didn't do that right, whatever she he thinks she knows, he seems to be fearful enough of that. It's leveraged that she's successfully used with him and with Todd Blanche

and that's why his story falls apart. Now again, does any of this matter politically, Well, I go back to every Republican's been carrying around Trump baggage for a long time, and in some ways they're now used to it. But when the economy is as bad as it is right now for so many people, and as frustrating of an economy as this is, and that's what it is. It's a you know, it's one of these things that you can look at it statistically and say, well, this is

going well. Like I saw a stat today that said that publicly traded companies are having one of the best years earning wise that we've seen. Ninety two percent of them are reporting earnings above the normal average. And you're just like wow, And yet jobs are decreasing, not increasing, right, So that means Wall Street's being rewarded for its efficiencies in its companies. Wall Street's being as they as a company should make. Your productivity is up and your labor

costs are down. Good for you. Investors like that. But that means there's a whole bunch of people in this economy not succeeding. And so that's why it's very hard to you know, when Trump's using the stock market as a as a as proof that his economy is doing well, it's like, yeah, you're you're you're with the hat your your economy is working for the haves. Your economy is

not working for the have nots. And the irony is that he built his political coalition on the have nots very successfully and now he doesn't seem to care about the have nots anymore. And that's where what when these That's when I go back to Epstein for the longest time, it is basically run into teflon don and has slid off of him. Well, I think it's I think he is now has a suit of velcrow on. More things are sticking to him than ever before. Right, you've got

sleepy eyes Trump, Now that's sticking to him. You've got the medical issues. Huh, something's going on. If he passed his MRI. You don't pass an MRI, but congratulations, I guess you know you're not at You don't you don't do an MRI unless they're wondering what, unless they can't find the problem of something that's bothering you. So you got that he's just doesn't seem healthy, doesn't look healthy, doesn't behavior low. And you can see he's really aged

a lot in the last six months. Go look at clips from April and then look at clips in the last two weeks. His voice is thinner. Maybe there are days that you know, you could just tell he there are days where you know he's tired, and that's always a sign of aging. And of course when you're at a certain age, and this happened with Biden, just because things are fine six months ago, you know this is

one of those things. At some point in your late seventies early eighties, you can you know, you don't age at an equal rate. Okay, you sort of go. You have fits and starts, and then you know, we've seen that. I've had elderly relatives where everything's fine, and then you don't see him for six months and you're like, holy cow, what happened to uncle Joe? Or I have a real uncle Joe, So no, nothing's happened to uncle Joe. I

don't want uncle Joe. That isn't about about you. I was just using like Jane, and I'll go uncle John Doe. I don't have an uncle John, so I'll do uncle John. Oh my god, what happened to Uncle John? Or what happened at Jane? And you know that happens in these three and six months. And the point is is that you know, it's like the you know, it's like in business, your hockey stick moment, but going the wrong way. You're going along, You're going along, and all of a sudden, Yep,

it's off a cliff. It just collectively feels like he has now got a suit of valcrow. And so if we have essentially six weeks of every couple of days there's an Epstein development, which now there's going to be now that this discharge petition has happened, they're going to have this vote at some point in the next couple of weeks that will be there. Then you then it has to go to the Senate. I you know, there was a time I thought, eh, the Senate will kill it.

I don't know anymore. Right, it's going to be an interesting test. How many Republicans will there be thirty, will there be thirteen Republicans who joined forty seven Democrats to force this release and force it on is you know, for you know, have both the House and the Senate have this. That's an interesting development. Is it a moment where some Republicans decide, I need to show some independence from Trump? Is this the safest place.

or voting against him on healthcare subsidies. That suddenly what is a trickle turns into of you know, a rush of you well of water coming out of the faucet, essentially trying to get away from him. So that's how I think this story is potentially that you know, it's it's like javert, do you got him? Now? You know? It's it's the accumulation and it's the fact, because of this sour economy, he's now wearing a suit with velcrow

on it and more things. More of this other stuff is now going to start to stick to him because he he didn't handle the main thing. He was elected for one reason and one reason, only bring down costs, and he's failing massively at that, which means every other secondary issue becomes a problem for that voter because they think, wow, he can't do this well. He must be that. He

must be that, he must be that. And that's why this Epstein story could be just yet another sign that the lame duck status is now the You know, if you were to go to Trump's Facebook page, he should change. He may have to change his status to lame duck. So with that, I'll sneak in a break and we'll bring in Adam Jennilsen. There's a reason results matter more than promises, just like there's a reason Morgan and Morgan is America's

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So joining me now is Adam Gentlelsid. I've known him a long time. He was a longtime staffer for the late Senate Majority leader Harry He's author of a book about the Senate called kill Switch, The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. So we'll have a little fun about about how broken is the Senate and how to repair it? But I have them on because you just started anew and I'll be curious what you describe it, Adam. Is it a think tank?

Is it a research institute? But it's named after the hometown of Harry Reid, search Light, Nevada. It's called the search Light. May make sure I get this right? Well, you could tell me for sure, search Light Institute? Is that right? Right?

But what is it? What do you describe search Slight Institutes? The think tank? Is it something else?

is that you know, we we develop ideas, but we don't want them to sit on the shelf.

the debate. And so the part of the reason we have both a policy development arm of what we do and and appolling arm of what we do is to you know, try to get that balance right between being responsive to the public listening to the American people. I think in a democracy it's very important to actually have the policies that are developed reflect the will of the people, but then factor that in to how we develop our own policies, you know, And we don't just pull to

say what's popular. We just want to understand people think and then design people design policy in a way that sort of bridges the divide sometimes between what we think is correct on the policy and where the American people are in their own thoughts and feelings on the issue.

days in Washington. We're more head of Then and Then and Brookings, you know, more center left, I guess, or you might say very academic in comparison to the other two.

So I think a lot about social Security, right and you know, people have called social Security liberal ends by conservative means. It's the greatest anti poverty we've ever implemented. Is you know, a core part of Democrats appeal to the American people, but it also embraced conservative principles of personal responsibility people paid in FDR himself was personally would

rail against the dole and cabinet meetings. He would say, this is not a dole, this is not welfare people are going to earn what they get, they're going to pay into it through the payroll tax, and then I get something back in return. So you know, we try, we try to think about that balance as we develop policy. We're smaller, we're nimble. I think we're more action oriented than some of the folks who've been around for a

long time. And I think, but you know, it's it's the more the merrier as far as I'm concerned.

the years. Maybe they have a mar lago look now that they went to the doctor and got my joke, not years, but in the nineties they came up with essentially the healthcare plan that was the model for Mett Romney and arguably the model for Barack Obama.

was modeled You're one hundred percent correct. There was a Heritage study in the nineties that sort of provided the intellectual basis for it, and then it was put into practice first by Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney when he was governor there, and people called it Romneycare, so you know, before it was Obamacare, it was Romneycare, and it certainly reflected you know, the idea of having an individual mandate, you know, and other aspects of it were and you know,

frankly being aimed at bending the cost curve, at bringing down the deficit. These are all conservative principles that were incorporating into that development, although Heritage walked away from it.

That was that was sort of where you went. But he used to also say, he goes, you know, I want the Democrats to come up with the ideas and I want the Republicans to implement them. It was like that that was his in his mindset, you know, at the time, and that back in the seventies and eighties, the perception of the two parties was, you know, the the managerial brain was on the Republican side and the

the empathy brain was on the Democratic side, and that you know, if you had too much empathy, it would be too expensive. You needed, you know, that sort of balance. And in some ways what you're describing here was what you describe to Social Security, what we were retelling the story of Obamacare somewhere that does sort of work itself out right, that the stuff that sticks is the stuff that is more ideologically diverse when it comes to the cooks in the kitchen that create the policy.

ben Nelson, mary Landrew, Blanche Lincoln. They were four things like you know, mary Landrew was strongly in favor of the fossil fuel industry, coming from a state like Louisiana where that was critical to the economy. Ben Nelson was pro life, Blanche Lincoln was in favor of fiscal responsibility

and balanced budgets.

the foot. It's left us unable to win seats in those red states where we barely can can't even compete these days.

But for someone like Lincoln to win in a state like Arkansas, she's going to have to take different positions, positions that diverge from my own, and that impulse towards purity is going to guarantee that our caucus is smaller, that the number of Americans Democrats are able to represent is smaller that the number of Americans who look at Democrats and say that is a party I want to be a part of. Is smaller.

it's getting smaller every year. I think it's been a decade since the streams have crossed, meaning like you know, I think Mansion and Collins were like this. If I'm for those of you just listening on audio, my hands are very close together but not touching, almost in the way it was almost felt like they were being repelled. Do you think that is a bad thing or a good thing for the US c oh.

close to Republicans on ideology. I could get beat up by some of my party for saying that, but I think, you know what if that is the case, you know, there are consequences, there are trade offs to taking that approach, and that's what we have here where Democrats can only win forty seven sentence seats at best, you know, maybe scrape by to the narrowest imaginable majority, but that's you know, there's a consequence of taking that approach and narrowing your

tents simply means you can win in fewer places.

electoral votes. She'd have won right on the nose. That's only going to be worth two hundred and fifty nine electoral votes come twenty thirty two. That path, so every

state she carried, plus the three in the Midwest, the three Midwestern states, and then when you look at Senate seats, because I've done this math, if Democrats sweep the seven battlegrounds in Senate seats, right, and when every Senate seat in every blue state that she carried, the max I think is fifty two.

what a path to sixty would look like. Let's say that was your goal, you know, got to get to sixty Senate seats. What's that path look like in today's politics. Well, that is our goal. I mean's that's what Searchlight is here to do. We are trying to craft an agenda and an approach that will allow Democrats to aim at

sixty Senate seats. We talk a lot about this idea of super majority thinking here, and a supermajority mindset is not to aim at two hundred and seventy electoral votes and to try to scrape by there or aim at you know, narrow majorities in the House and Senate. It's to aim at three hundred and sixty five electoral votes, which is what Obama won in two thousand and eight, and it's to aim at sixty Senate seats and then

work backwards from there. So you know, what that looks like is much more flexibility on issues across the board. You know, I personally think that if you were to sort of devise a basic template, you know, and again I sort of am allergic to templates. I think part of what we're trying to do here is is create more flexibility. But just for the sake of argument, you know, let's let's root this in some you know, concrete idea of ideology. I think, you know, economic populism is.

vice presidential nominee in twenty twelve. He was the Speaker of the House by the time the primary was in full swing in twenty sixteen, Ryanism was considered, you know, orthodoxy among Republicans, trying which lays the stool, right, that's irresponsibility. Right. Trump just threw it all out the window, you know. I mean I remember him standing on the debate stage. You know. The Iraq War is another issue that was considered,

you know, orthodoxy. In twenty fifteen, he stood on a debate stage in South Carolina and he turned to Jeb Bush and said, I think the Iraq War that your brother started was a big, fat mistake, you know. And so it is really difficult to imagine a Democratic candidate diverging from their party and taking stances in opposition to the Democratic ideology on that level, you know, of that magnitude.

But that's what we need is we need Democrats to say, you know, we are here to break that rigidity, We are here to open up a new pathway and to bring in more voters. And you know, Trump, it is an underappreciated aspect of his appeal that he was truly heterodox. He defied his party's orthodoxy on three or four or even more very high profile issues that were considered core to the Republican ideology. And that's part of why people saw him as a different kind of Republican.

a coalition it's not going to be able to hold itself together without him in whatever you know, we you know, set aside the character issue the guy has the guy created a coalition that was unique. It was durable for him. Right, It's not really been transferable, but it's been durable for him. And and the thing is is you can see it, right,

the conversation on snap benefits the conversation on healthcare. They're not singing off the same song sheet because they're actually a coalition that that sort of got forged together and culture, and they're they're all over the place on economic policy, and I think that's where this thing starts to break apart pretty soon.

don't have Pad, this economy is horrible. Right, that's the rendous.

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your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos dot com slash chuck. So again, that's Ethos dot com slash chuck. Application times very and the rates themselves may vary as well, but trust me, life insurance is something you should really think about, especially if you've got a growing family. Boy, that speech would be really resident today. I agree more so. I mean, you know, Edwards, he was a blast being there is a ton and I sort of I have not to go off on

a tangent here I have. I think there's more empathy that that the Edwards family deserves. You never get over

losing a child, and and I've always thought that their life, so, you know, and it threw him into politics, I get in some ways it did, But you know that that I think that you can't judge Edwards without understanding that. So I'm always a little more empathetic, I think than the average person on him. But boy, his you know, and what he was was it's old Southern populace and it's no different Zell Miller, Bill Clinton, Dick Riley. I

think about all everything you're describing here. I think about what Trump is doing. This is what the Southern Democrats were, Those Southern Democratic governors were. They would they were like, hey, government can be a good thing for you, and we want to help you. But they were also culturally somewhat conservative, right,

your Zell Millers, your Bill Clinton's, your Dick Riley's. But those Southern governors of the eighties, in some ways, the economic policies they were pushing are exactly what's popular.

was the foundation of lbj's coalition too. You know, as you mentioned your father, I mean, you know, some of the cultural stuff, that's that's the you know, on the Republican side, it's it's can you hold people together on cultural issues while you pass economic policies that primarily benefit the wealthiest and the big corporations, and the Democratic side, it's can you hold people together on economic populism issues, you know, while you often take stances on cultural issues

that the American people don't agree with. And I think when Democrats and liberals succeed, it's when they're able to center their message on those core economic populist ideas and provide some flexibility on cultural issues in a way that will allow us to win in more states.

you know, win on cultural issues past policies that benefit the top one percent and often you know, run up huge deficits, despite their you know, their claim to care about this corresponsibility, and then that leads to a crash and Democrats have to come in and you know, and refocuses the public's attention on how unbalanced and tilted towards the one percent Republicans policies, where I don't think it's a necessary precondition, but you know, it certainly focuses voters'

minds on the unfairness and gross inequity of Republicans economic policies. For sure.

the work that we've done here at Searchlights has shown is that, you know, it's not just that we are out of step with the public on a lot of these cultural issues purely on the merits, it's also that focusing on them distracts the public's attention from the economic issues.

It's it's what we call a crowding out effect. Where you know, simply, you know, you listen to the average Democrats stump speech today, it's a laundry list, and they go down and they acknowledge every issue under the sun, you know, and.

words like affordable rent, freeze, billionaires like all those words were huge in the cloud. You literally could not find the words climate change or LGBTQ issues didn't appear in the cloud because didn't appear in the cloud either. He chose not to talk about it, you know, and and so he became sort of almost like, you know, a joke by the end of the campaign that he could take any conversation and steer it back towards affordability. Right, So that kind of message. And of course Zorn cares

about climate change. Of course he cares about LGBTQ rights. You know, He's not throwing those causes under the bus. He's making a conscious decision to focus his campaign relentlessly on kitchen table issues. So you know, I wouldn't take all of his ideological positions and try to apply them in other states, but I certainly would take that discipline practice and avoiding crowding out that he demonstrated as a lesson that can be universalizable in other places.

I I'll just be I think a better messenger. You know, I think you and I both know Bill Clinton would have been able to say, we're going to feed people, We're going to let you get to grandma, and we're going to make sure grandma comes home to you to this holidays. We haven't given We're we're not giving up this fight on healthcare. And in fact, we've got more people focused on it than ever. We've got them super

nervous about it. But yeah, we're going to reopen the government, and this is why we're going to reopen the government. But it's only for the next and they they're on

the clock and they have sixty five days. Why was that not an effective way to sell the reopening of this government.

the Republicans policy choices, they're going to. So I think, look, you know, I mean the problem with being a congressional leader is that the skills that help you get that job aren't always the same skills that make you good

at communicating with the public, you know, And so it is a very inside baseball job. It is about. You know, you worked for.

the case. I mean, Nancy Pelosi was an incredible leader, but was also you know, a huge target of Republican attacks, right, so he wasn't the best communicator. That's that's right, And it's it's a difficult combination of skills, you know, and especially today in a medium vironment that prioritizes or that you know, where the ability to communicate across mediums, to be natural on camera, to be quick with the quip,

you know. It's so that's just something that is evolving and we're going to have to figure that out as as the caucus decides, you know, what's the right mix they want to see in the next leader.

you know it. You know, part of the reason the east wing conversation was so salient was that we're in the middle of a shutdown and he's out here building a ballroom. You know. So they really did a great job driving a message, setting them on their terms. You know, I think a lot. I think a lot about the fall of twenty eleven, where Democrats came off a really tough summer, you know, coming off bad intermin in the first place, the whole debt ceiling, you know, debate in

twenty eleven got our butts handed to us. But then we were able to fall to shift the conversation more towards our terms by shifting the focus to what we call the Jobs Act at the time, you know, which was just a bill we put together out of the

most popular policies, was never really going to pass. But you know, President Obama did a speech to the Joint Session of Congress, you know, and we put that bill on the floor and made Republicans vote on it again and again and We didn't pass it, but it got us back on our front foot going into twenty twelve, and we were able to sort of take that momentum going into twenty twelve. So I hope that you know, the legitimate anger the Democrats are feeling right now because

I think they were fed some false expectations. You know, we should be able to move on and say, look, we take the good here, which was driving the conversation about healthcare, getting the conversation back on our terms, and play that forward into the midterms.

mom Dannie. You probably could have applied that to Spamburger and and Cheryl right and and they both you know, as far as messaging, we're talking about the same issues they may have, they may have leaned in different ways, they may have talked to different constituencies, but they were always on the affordability message. So like, this is one of those cases where it's like democat, you guys are all rowing in the same direction and you still want to.

the line Jurassic Park? You know life, Life finds a way, right, Disarray finds a way with Democrats.

where the hell are the good trial lawyers around? Like, you know, ultimately I expect the courts to be doing that, right, I expect the elected officials to be thinking about, Okay, what's next? Right where I have a feeling I know where you are, but I assume you're on the side of it's about thinking of the post Trump.

mid term election and a presidential election. And so for me, my formative elections were two thousand and six in two thousand and eight, and Democrats did a good enough job in two thousand and six of putting forward a positive vision. They had this six roh six agenda that focused on you know, we were the original drain the swamp. I mean, we wanted after Mark Foley was a really salient issue that year, hugely salient. I mean, you know, so every

opportunity to make corruption salient again. This year, we had ideas about you know, getting out of iraqs, minimum wage

and ethics reform, and then you know that was and that was solid, right, I mean, because you have to have something that every Democrat in every corner of the country can can run on.

the the antenna that was Tester. Tester wins in six, mccaskell is in O six. You have Casey winning in Pennsylvania. You had Shared Brown in Ohio, Jim Webb. Look at all the people I'm describing all of them in the economic populist category.

a lot of issues, but was was was a committed economic populist, you know, and John Tester, Claire mccaskell, you know the same. And I remember that was you know when when mccaskell won, you know, at his watch party, read got down and kissed, kissed the television because I think she was the one who put us over. Although actually think the Virginia election, I think.

back the Senate? Because you have to push yourself through there? Yeah, because look in the cycles where the you know, the cycles are, you know, a lot of it is determined by the fundamentals. The Senate is a gnarly beast because you only it's resistant to big swings because you only have a third of the chamber up for reelection at any election, whereas you know, everybody in the House is

every seat in the House is up. So what you've got to do is you really got to maximize your gains in the cycles where the fundamentals are in your favor, and for us, that maximizing our gains would would look like, you know, winning holding all the seats where we have incumbents up and then winning you know, all of the swing states and then throwing in someones that are reaches for us, like.

I mean, you know, North Carolina, Maine or quick and then you start going, oh boy, okay, you need Ohio to come in again, you probably need one of the following and then you need one of the following three Alaska, Iowa, Texas, right, and then you don't want to be you know, then you got to sort of probably throwing a couple others like you did that six for oh six. There were two other races that were top tier races in that

last month of the campaign. One was Harold Fords Tennessee race against that that was a Ford corker, was a competitive race. And then you had I think Jim Peterson in Arizona. If I remember that, Kyle, that's.

last ten years, we should be able to win there again. And then yeah, you've got it. You've got to reach in a place like Texas. That's how you put together Senate majorities, you know. And what's crazy is that even.

that the entire party has to shift its position on some of these cultural issues. It just means we have to embrace people who are going to have different views than us because they're the only ones who can win in states like that.

he's winning on tactics. It's not as if there's some great policy proposal that is just taking the world by storm. So I'm a skeptic that this holds for him right that, because this is a process moment. Let's a policy moment. But in general, how would you you know I had Bashir, I've done, interviewed Pher, I've seen we've got the rom stump speech. I've got to be interviewing by the time this hits well, I've interviewed Wes Moore at Texas the

Texas Tribune Festival. What what do you think so far of the of the field and how they've tried to communicate about twenty.

in someone like Gavin Newsom, that's why he's he's sort of risen to the top of the conversation in a lot of places. But you're gonna have to marry that pugnacity with an issue mix that can appeal to a broad swath of Americans. And so right now, you know, I think there's some more of sort of tinkering around the edges there. You know, you look at at a Josh Shapiro, who is who's sort of you know, defying

the left wing of the party on some issues. But I think I think we're gonna need somebody to go further, you know, if we're going to talk about a supermajority, and I you know, look, you could eke buy. You know, in a polarized nation, every election's a coin flip, right, you could you could get to seventy. You may even get to fifty in the Senate. But but that is a recipe for you know, whiplash.

your accomplishments are extremely fragile. They don't last, they're quickly repealed, and then the other side comes in and does the same thing, and then we're stuck in this this back and forth. So I think that the time is right right now for one side or the other to craft the supermajority appeal that can actually build a governing coalition that can sustain you in power. You know, beyond just one one two year period.

And do you worry that? You know, I look at it as somebody who's always dabbled, And my first professional year covering politics was the year of rouss Perrot, So you know, when you get introduced to politics that way, and how crazy it shook up the map and it shook up ideologies and it really I've always thought that the Paro Paro's third party candidacy was extraordinarily successful because he made both parties change who they were, you know,

he made the Democrats a bit more sensitive on fiscal issues, made the Republicans a bit more sensitive on trade issues. Hey, that's that's to me, that's an accomplishment, right. That was

in theory originally why ross Pero got it right, he was trying. He thought, Hey, these guys don't know what any in those two issues. He accomplished a lot. We're in a moment. There is a vacuum, right, you see, sometimes it's simply a vacuum in a place like Nebraska, South Dakota, or Idaho. And I single those guys out

because I've interviewed all of them. There. There are a bunch of really strong candidates running as economic populists who've chosen to run as independence instead of Democrats, and they just simply all. I had two of them on together and they said, it's simply so they can have a conversation with local voters, like they agree with the agenda. But if the minute they find out they're a Democrat,

then they don't want to like they won't. It's like they close their ears, so they're trying to open their ears. Do you worry that there's a vacuum out there that can be filled by a non democratic entity?

Nineteen sixty eight, George Wallace, You know, he did, and that caused you Nixon was sort of running on a light southern strategy in sixty eight and.

But then he know, decided to close off that that.

they can certainly, you know, cause Democrats to lose. And so it really is incumbent on Democrats to take it upon themselves to craft a broader appeal to sort of pre the possibility of getting, you know, having an end run around them by an independent candidate.

its Senate rules, right, that's right. There is the mythology that you know I grew up with, certainly was mister Smith, right, the famous Jimmy Stewart movie of the fifties, and it sort of celebrated the idea that one senator can sort of stand up. So give me the ideal. What's your ideal of I assume you still embrace the ideal that a a senator should feel as if that they can do that if they so choose to. How should that work and how should we be using it as a governing tool in your mind.

it's become a sort of a quiet, you know, passive filibuster, where any veto it's pocket veto. I mean you literally have your staff call the cloak room and say I object. You know, that's it, and nobody has to do to show up to the floor. They don't have to say a word. And then that automatically raises the threshold for procedural reasons that will borrow your readers to tears to

sixty votes. And I think what's important to understand is that you know, according for the first two hundred years of its existence, from the from the time it was conceived of the Framers until you know, about century in the twentieth century, the Senate was a majority rule institution. It was it was intended to be that way, and the Framers, it wasn't an accident. They thought very hard about whether there should be a super majority requirement in

Senate rules, and they decided against it. And the reason they decided against it was because they had just had experience with the Articles of Confederation, where there was a super majority threshold in the legislature, and they put it there, you know, on the theory that it would promote compromising consensus, when what happened in reality was that it empowered a minority to be obstructionist and to grind things to the

halt when they didn't get their way. And so the Framers saw that happen and said, okay, well, we're not doing that, you know, And so they designed the Senate to be different from the House in lots of other ways, by giving every state equal representation, by having senators serve for six year terms so they can be a little bit less responsive to the whims of the moment staggering those elections, like we talked about, you know, basically sort

of building in things that made it a more deliberate institution. But they were, and they wrote about it in the Federals papers. They debated the Concerts Convention. They said, we

are not putting in a majority a super majority threshold, because that would allow and they said explicitly, because that would allow a minority to obstruct, you know, when they didn't get their way. And so that's the that's the difference in the filibuster is that there should be unlimited debate. You should have the opportunity to stand and say your piece, to join with other colleagues to keep a filibuster going indefinitely if you want to. But you should have to

put in the work. You know, you should not be able to do it passively. Why is it so hard to sell, to sell that bipartisanly? That to me seems the proper use of the filibuster. I agree, you know, it's it's it's it's just the sort of the proverb of the frog being boiled in water, where you know, the Senate never decided to have it be the way

it is. It was a passive accumulation of one norm being laid on another in layered form over several decades, where basically when you're in the minority, you find this thing to be useful. But came up with the filibuster happened what sometime after direct election of senators. Yeah, well so in nineteen seventeen they when seventy of the amendment, right, So when direct election happened, it was around the same time during the progressive era. You know, there was this idea.

But what's really interesting about it is that the rule that today gets used to cause the super majority threshold was originally put in place to end filibusters.

So the seniority system was actually a reform that's right, to improve representation.

Now it's three fits. But they said, look, if three fitts of the Senate can decide that, you know, mister Smith has talked too long, you know, presumably that's bringing people together from both sides of the whatever issues being debated, you can sort of say, okay, that's enough guy. Even then you still have like thirty hours, so you know,

in true Senate fashion, it wasn't moving that precipitously. But but that was supposed to be able to say, okay, that's gone on long enough, let's let's let's end it. Let's move to a vote. Now what happens is because of the ease of implementing the filibuster, because you don't have to go to the floor and you can just have your staff call the cloakroom. That's all it takes to do a filibuster. So there's no there's no you're not putting any onus on the person blocking, but that

simple act of calling the cloakroom triggers that super majority requirement. Now, so every time the Senate votes on the super majority, they're technically still ending a filibuster, even though there's nobody

on the four filibuster. So it's completely a mutation of what the original rule was decided to do, and it's just accumulated in this sort of like you know, accretion of layers of norms and made the sound of completely dysfunctional, just like the Framers predicted it would be if a supermajority requirement was put in place.

And you know, if Congress gets you know, stuck on budget, that's an advoication of their powers. It shifts more powers to the executive because Congress hasn't told the executive how to spend the money. So they wanted to make sure that budgets could not get stuck or blocked by a minority. So they created a separate pathway for anything related to the budget, and they put in place strict rules where it said, you know, it has to meet these standards.

But if it meets these standards and applies to the budget, it has its own pathway where there's no supermajority requirement. It's a straight fifty vote threshold all the way through.

But there is sort of almost a talking filibuster built in of this thing called voterama, where you know, anybody can bring an amendment, and so before passage you'll have these night you know, sessions that go all night where everybody's so you know, kind of they sort of tried to recreate the original Senate, but only for issues related

to the budget. Those those criteria that determine what can pass along that pathway that's been expanded steadily over the since the seventy when this was enacted to sort of, you know, expand the definition of what's allowed to pass through it. But even so, you know, anything that's not economic and nature definitely can't pass through that pathway, and even a lot of things that are economic and nature, you know, still get kicked out.

think of as the greatest by partisan accomplishments generally happened during the period when the Senate was majority rule, and what would happen is people would fight it tooth and nail. But then as soon as it was clear that the majority had the votes, a bunch of people who were holding out for something would would then come on and say, okay, I'm going to join on board anyways, on the way on the right.

threshold from sixty to seventy five. And the reason I have come down on this idea is looking at I got to know somebody who worked in the Bush White House Counsel's office in the first Bush forty three and they were the last Republican presidency under the sixty vote threshold right until Trump came in, and then it got lowered. He got to lower it, all got lowered, and he said they'd have nominated completely different people for federal judge ships if the threshold was fifty and not sixty. Much

more ideological, much less you know. That to me was that is why I'm like, Yeah, this is why we shouldn't have lowered the threshold, because ultimately I want the least partisan people as my judge. I don't want partisan people as my judge. I know we're a long way away from us from a situation going back to that, but why is that so difficult? How did we allow the judicial? Why did we decide to politicize the judicial.

you know, a lot of judges did used to be pretty part of it. I mean, you know, the nineteen said, look, the nineteenth century judiciary general was corrupt.

And I think that you know, you know, I'm not a conservative by nature, so I feel, you know, slightly incoorporable saying this. But when you go back to the framer's design, you know, I think I am an originalist when it comes to the system designed, you know, and this the system was designed to just not have a super majority threshold anywhere in the path from beginning to end.

I think, you know, sort of a return to the basic features of our system that allow things to move and allow our system to I think if you went to seventy five, which you'd probably have is just massive judicial backlogs and seats not getting filled.

diversity in the two parties. When we had ideological diversity in the two parties, we regularly had these sixty and seventy vote confirmations because there was this ideological diversity as we polarized ourselves right as you know, the embedding of red and blue right, which you know, we could make an argument it began in two thousand. I sort of think now in hindsight, it began with the fallow of the Berlin Wall. That that's when both parties bases, you know,

got reanimated again. We're like, okay, cold War's over. We can't be told to sit sit quietly in the corner anymore. We're coming right. But you know, that's the I guess it is the better solution than open primaries, getting rid of all partisan primaries, and that then you then you just get a different type of nominee.

sixteen campaign was that he was more moderate on cultural issues than Hillary, and he was actually sort of presenting much more of that classic point. Remember how Hillary talking about attacked him, kept attacking him in sense, Yeah, attacking him from the left, not the right, that's right.

So our advice to candidates would be decide to be heterodox. You know, if you look through your issue positions, and every single position on that page on your website, you know is a rigidly ideological left wing position, then you know, if you're running in a competitive race, then you're probably doing it wrong. So and listen, look and look in, Look to your beliefs, look to the people that you're seeking a represent.

what you're advising people to be.

People are looking for authenticity. They're looking for that that desire to fight that, that authenticity being imperfect, having made mistakes, all that stuff. I think it's it's very powerful. And so far, the way voters in Maine are reacting to those stories is to dismiss them or even to say that's making me back him even stronger. So I think that's a very powerful phenomenon that's going on right now. And his level of heterodoxy could win a state like Maine,

which is, you know, pretty blue. If you're going to be running in a state like Iowa, Ohio or Nebraska. You know, you got to be even more heterodox. And that's the that's the advice I would give to candidates.

But I think, you know, it would be smart for the groups to get a little bit smarter in what they're asking people to do and make their asks more about you know, can you beat the Republican then than you know, going through a purity test. But I think candidates should, you know, if they're being asked to take crazy positions, they should just say no, and they should make they should be clear of the voters that they're saying no.

decision super majorities. I think if you're going to be an originalist, you got to pay attention.

In twenty oh six they needed six and they got the six. So it's not like you know, this is four is not an unreasonable number. So if you're truly winning the argument, you win the four seats. And you know, which is why if you're going to mess around with the with the prediction markets, now's the time to buy shares in Democrats win the Senate because and then, to be frank, then you sell them sometime in mid October and cash in your profits. So with that, let's take

a few questions ask Chuck. First one comes from Max w from Alexandria here in the DMV sains. I've been a fan since before you hosted Meet the Press. Thank you, and I particularly enjoy your political analysis and how you use American history. Explain what we are going through towards that end. Have you watched Death by Lightning? On Netflix. I am in the middle of it or not finished

Part one. It's four part series telling the story of James Garfield's rise to the presidency after winning the nomination on the thirty six ballot at the Republican National Convention in eighteen eighty and his assassination after only three months in office. It's filled with political intrigu corruption, spoils, and patronage near the end of the nineteenth century. Right up your ally, Max, You're right, and I will sort of give you a little insight here. I've been obsessed with

the Garfield story for a long time. Have a writing partner off and On by the name of Adam Pearlman, who has done some terrific work billions in particulars, and he and I have and I have a pilot script actually that we had once been working with a major production company and the Game of Throne guys bennyoffen Weisse got the Netflix deal and they ended up pitching a Netflix Garfield series. And let's just say they had a longer track record than my Adam and I did on this.

I have watched episode one, I've enjoyed it. It is not the take I would have done, and I'm not This is not to be critical. I think they've made an interest, They've made some interesting decisions. I'm looking forward to where they go, and that is the beauty of this story. I'm I'm obsessed with the period itself. Right, this was we were so close to getting reconstruction back.

And I'm somebody who thinks a Garfield presidency. You know, the Garfield presidency got a civil service reform, which was

not a small thing. Trump's actually trying to the Trump now is trying to undo some of the civil service reform that that Chester Arthur, who ends up the you know, a forced vice president on by the political machine in New York, ends up after the death of Garfield, sort of sees the light and stops being a cog in the Roscoe Conkling New York political machine and actually pledges

to fulfill a Garfield presidency. But I think Garfield himself, had he lived, I think you might have seen reconstruction come back. I think, you know, he he was. He's the closest thing we've had to sort of the out of nowhere president. Right. It's the you know, I've always said the mythology. I was telling this to my wife when we were watching and I said, you know, the the mythology that you know, the out of nowhere candidate

can get the nomination with a speech. The reason the mythology existed with conventions is because that had happened once, right, James Garfield, right, his speech moved enough people to suddenly start considering him because of this sort of deadlock when it came to the grant side and the machines and all of this stuff. So, you know, Getteau and I

think there I like how they're portraying Getteau because I think he was mentally ill and sort of a guy with delusions of grandeur who clearly had a trouble upbring had a troubled relationship with his father. I mean, there's a lot of you know, not to play spoiler here, but you know, Gato ends up trying to defend defends himself when the first real sort of feeding frenzied trial of the century that the media was obsessed with was actually the trial and the Gettou trial, which began before

Garfield died. Because Garfield's you know, Gettoau Getau, you could argue didn't kill Garfield. The doctors who didn't know what they were doing killed Garfield, right, they stuck there. There's a kind named doctor doctor and I haven't I don't know if they're going to portray him or not. But the guy's name really was doctor doctor. Like sometimes you just can't make it up right, it's going to sound like it's been fictionalized. But he didn't believe that you

had to wash your hands before you I mean, this was still like debated medical science. Do you do you do you do?

new medical practices that was coming out of Europe, and it was a guy named doctor Lister, which if you're wondering if doctor Lister invented listerine, he did not, But doctor Lister was sort of the godfather of this sort of idea that you wash your hands and you need a sterile environment before as a doctor, before you give medical care. So Lister Reene was though named after you know Lister, is that part? But no, the treatment, the attempt to save Garfield's life killed him. It's possible if

nobody touched him. That he that he might have that the bullet wouldn't have killed him, and he might have lived and recovered with the bullet in him, but the attempt to get the bullet out actually killed him. So but that's obviously stuff that you've scientifically figure out later, which in the moment we didn't have. But I am

obsessed with the entire period. Again, it's interesting how they chose to sell it, which is, here's two guys you've never heard of or you've forgotten, who have been forgotten to history. One was the twentieth President of United States. It was It's an interesting choice. I get it. They're trying to mass appeal it, and I'm enjoying it. I fully will confess I would have had a slightly different way. I would have done it different way. I would have started.

Nothing wrong with what they did. And here's my goal. I want this to be successful enough that there is more appetite for more. I think Roscoe Conkling if you want to go and read about one of the most you know, the Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi of their day, and I say both right. He was a congressional leader. Congressional leaders are both lionized and backroom transactionalists at the same time. And don't let anybody tell you that you

got to have the mix of both of them. Conkling was an interesting cat, and he's going to be portrayed sort of, I think a bit simply here. It's less simple than it is. But boy is he is he a character that if there really was a demand for more about this era, he could get his own mini series, Like you could really develop something just on him. He's that colorful of a character. And yes, the way they have him dressing, he was always for the day, dressing

in brighter colors than everybody else. He was flamboyant man about town. I don't think he ever spent a night alone. So there's a it is. You are right, Max that it is up my alley. It was so up my alley. I wanted to make my own version of it, so there, all right, But kudos to those guys, and thank you Netflix for for green lighting a period piece like that. There's great history to be told through incredible storytelling, and I'd love to see more production companies support stuff like that.

Next question comes from Stafford from downtown la Hey. I've been a fan since your days of Meet the Press, and I'm loving the new podcast. Before my question, I wanted to say that you appear to have done the impossible. You've gotten me interested in both professional and college football. Having grown up a Chargers fan, I had largely washed my hands of the sport after nineteen ninety five. My question is this, can anything be done in the short

to medium term about electricity costs? I'm a school teacher and my partner is a grad student at USC fight On. We live in a one bedroom apartment in LA and while our incomes are enough to get by, it's starting to pinch. I just opened our electric bill for a single month and it's easily fifty percent more than we were paying a couple of years ago. I know data centers are affecting energy prices, but is there more to it? Thanks for all the wonderful analysis and for making your

episodes lengthy. I really get a lot of detail I can't get elsewhere. Sincerely, Stafford from downtown LA. How about that somebody thanking me for the length. I'm not going to go Joe Rogan on you. I must no three hour podcasts right. Simmons pushes the envelope in the two hour plus range. I'm going to still try to keep a one in front of that number on that front. So it's interesting with electricity, it's such a complicated thing.

I was digging into this, and in fact, I'm going to be when you hear this, I'm going to be down in Austin, Texas, interviewing the governor of Maryland, Wes Moore, And I was talking with his staff about a few issues, and we were talking about electricity, and I said, you know, I was asking about the data center issue in Maryland and Maryland, doesn't you know Virginia is a data center state. And he was noting how you know, he says, Maryland's

a transmission state. You know, a lot of electricity goes through our state and we pass it through. And you know, some states are elect energy producing and they add to the grid. Others only take from the grid, Others help, you know, sort of the grid itself is a complicated thing. California has its own set of rules that only add to it. And it's it's one of those things that

I think that you know, we're we're in this. You know, elect elect electric companies are are private companies, but they're but they have to get public approval for what they do and how they do it. And I think that we're about to see, especially with the data center, you know, obsession and drain, and it's a real issue in the state I live in Virginia because it is like Virginia is a huge got a bunch of data centers, and

we have some of the highest spikes in electricity. So I think there's going to have to be some federal legislation here because I do think that you know, every state is set up to try to regulate itself, right You're you're in a you're in a state where where they're using a lot of air conditioning and there's always a high an a little more usage of energy, particularly in the southern part where you know, they're constantly having to regulate it, and it is done on a state basis,

based on state usage. But if we're going to have more of these sort of drags on the grid coming from other states, and all of this is interconnected, so look, I think this is going to be I think the electric bill issue is going to be what the price of eggs were, right, and grocery bills were in twenty twenty four. You know that this is going to be the thing that everybody comes back to. We saw it in the New Jersey race. Because this is happening across

the board. Everybody's electric bills are going up. There's just a more and there, you know. And what people do is they cherry pick the thing that they don't like to say this is the reason it's going up. It's

just everything is the reason. And I think that there's some argument that what Trump has done with canceling some of these all of the above energy strategies, that he actually limiting new energy getting onto the grid, like we need more diversified sources of energy in order to keep everything going that we're going and him sort of you know, essentially torpedoing the Biden Energy Bill mandates when it came to wind and solar and things like that. It's going

to directly impact the cost of electric bills. So I don't think there's anything short term that's going to get done.

But I will say this, I think you're going to have more political rhetoric about it. You know, we're all going to have to start to recalibrate what's warm and cold in order to save a few dollars. I can tell you what I'm looking into is trying to figure out is there's some solar alternatives, you know, to at least minimizing the cost on some things. Right, is there and it may be tough in an apartment situation to

the benefit of that. But will you start to see landlords who maybe maybe you know, I don't know how you're building a set up and sometimes you everybody sort of splits the utility costs. It's part of a larger fee, and in that sense, the landlord is incentivized to want to maybe put you know, solar panels and come up with a different way. But I think you're going to see a lot of people looking for alternative ways to

minimize their drag on the grid. But they're still going to want need energy to power their electronics or power their car or power whatever. So but I I you know, I'm not gonna I'm going to keep researching this more and more to give you a better answer to this question, Stafford.

But I can tell you I think this is this is an issue that isn't is only going to get more in the mainstream in the conversation because it's the type of issue that everybody feels, right, everybody sees the cost of that, and we're seeing these giant spikes throw in extreme weather where in some places you're using your air conditioner longer than you normally do, or in some places you're using heat maybe at a time you never

used it before. That also does weird things to the grid and ups the costs of what you're doing on it. So I think there never definitely needs to be a little more federal involvement with how this grid, with how the electric grid is operating, because it's it definitely feels and you know, who knows Texas is not on the grid. They sort of created their own system. That thing it, you know, feels like it's it could trigger a bigger

problem if they have a tough winner. It's always the winners that really put a lot of stress on that Texas grid, And if that collapses and it's come close a couple of times, it could really sort of sober up everybody and realize that we have a federal problem here. This isn't going to be solved in one state. I don't think states have this have the ability to do this. Now you may get some states try to find financial help for people, but I'm not sure. There's only only

so much money that might be available for that. But I do think this is going to become the most symbolic issue that's talked about when it comes to cost of living challenges. Next question comes from Jim Philadelphia's It's Big Fans in c NBC Days. Congrats on a great start to the new chapter. One been wondering, what do you think Trump's real motivation is for intervening in Venezuela under the narco terrorism label. He's never shown much interest

in preserving democracy. Is this really about removing Maduro? Or is it just another self serving move, maybe even a play for a Nobel Peace Prize. Jim, I'll tell you what my thesis is on this. So Marco Rubio, you know, after starting off his relationship with Trump making Dick jokes about him right at a debate talking about his hands, right, Why is the hands part of the thing? Right? It is Rubio that made that meme famous. Rubio has since

done a one ad ent Trump right. We saw it sometime during the first term, and he has gone out of his way to endear him endear the Latin American political activist community that is on the side of ousting some of these guys, but that diaspora that has a lot of political and financial power in South Florida who've

been very supportive of Rubio's politics over the years. He essentially, because Trump is such an important figure now in South Florida, he essentially helped Trump cement whatever you know, cement this, or you could argue Rubio had to catch up to where all these folks, they all were going, they were going to gravitate towards Trump anyway, but this began where Trump, where Trump started. Basically doesn't make any decision in Latin

America without Marco Rubio. And that was true in sort of the last year or two of the Trump era, the first Trump term. And it is and then you know, Rubio really ingratiated himself during Trump's exile at mar A Lago. He'd constantly go there. He'd bring these Latin American figures to meet with them. He'd be So this is a long way of me making the case that this is not a Donald Trump obsession. This is a Marco Rubio obsession. And I think that Rubio has you know, there is

there is a demand. Look go see the I hope you heard my conversation with Billy Corbin and he did a documentary called Men of War about a failed sort of bizarre coup, a you know, group of US mercenaries working with a former bodyguard of Trump's to somehow get on the get into Venezuela and overthrow Maduro. Kind of a bay of pigs, Venezuelan style type of story. It's one of those you can't believe this is true, but

you know, Billy always has the receipts. There is a group of folks in South Florida that that are, you know, frustrated with Maduro, and this is Rubio cares about this. Rubio believes in this, and I think Rubio has got enough stature and status in Trump's world He's both Secretary State National Security Advisor that it is Rubio that is

helping to steer him in this direction. And I think that there's no doubt in my mind that this is a Rubio project that Trump has adopted and he's you you know, this narco terrorism thing is you know, if you had to prove it, I don't know how they would, right, you know, where do you prove that the drug money is being used to fund terrorism. That's number one. Number two, what fentanyl. You know, this is not where our fentyl problem comes from. It's not in Venezuela. It comes from

Mexico and China. So this is a pretext that's sort of been created. Look, I would feel better about this if the argument were we're trying to enforce democratic norms, then we can debate whether we should be using the military to do that. That should be the debate we should be having as a country about this Venezuela move.

But instead they're essentially lying to us about the rationale for what they're doing, saying this is not about regime change, it's not about the democracy. This is about a specific thing. And yet what are we doing. It looks like we're

on the verge of of overthrowing a government. So it feels like we're you know, it feels like we're doing this all the wrong way, Which is why a couple of weeks ago, in my toodcast time machine, I wanted to make the Panama Canal Anniversary the Liberation of Panama, if you will, an important story because anytime, you know, whenever we're involved and we lie about why we're involved, we do not help our long term ability to have

influenced the right way in Latin America. And I just, you know, I am I want to see Maduro go. I am, you know, sort of like it's like it's like Saddam. I'm glad Saddam left. But was that the way to do it? I don't know if this is the right way to get rid of Adua. Next question comes from Dan, and then I'm going to get into my college football preview for the weekend. We'll do it through the prism of the college football playoff. He goes,

I've been enjoying the podcast is always. Something I noticed is that the election coverage shows that Andrew Cuomo outperforms on Mam Donnie among voters without a college degree. NBC reports that Mam Donnie won only twenty six percent of white non college graduates, and similar trends appeared in the gubernatorial races. Despite overall wins, Democrats still seem to underperform among non college educated voters, raising concerns about their strengthen

states like Michigan and Nebraska. Is it fair to interpret these results as evidence that Democrats have not yet repaired their image with working class white voters. If so, what steps should the party take to become more competitive with this group? Thanks Dan, Well, look, I hopefully you're listening to the answer this question after you've heard the interview

with Adam Gentilsen. It's exactly what he's trying to do, which is, how do you get you know, the irony is you know, I think Democrats have struggled culturally to

connect to this group of voters for some time. They used to be sort of Democrats and they were just sort of Democrats, and it was they were culturally Democrats that and the Democrats they thought economically were looking out for him as is That explains why there were two US senators in Nebraska for you know, not an insignificant period of time, and almost always one a state that you know, is the birthplace of the the perhaps the

original Prairie populace William Jennings. Bryan, Right, So I think

you're right to point out those things. I think this is to me the great danger of the midterms on the Democrats, which is they don't need they could do as mediocre as they did with non college educated whites in the midterms because they won't turn out in the same numbers that they'll turn out in a presidential election, giving Democrats an opportunity because they'll they'll sort of over index on their more frequent voters and college education voters,

and they will be a bigger share of the electorate in a midterm than they will be in a general. It's why, you know, have they been a presidential like turnout in say Virginia, Maybe she only wins by eight instead of fifteen, and maybe if you got although you know, to me, the New Jersey thing is why I why

I believe this was a Trump referendum. When you have the Republican candidate actually getting more raw vote than he got four years earlier, but he lost by ten percentage points more than when he lost before, shows you a whole bunch of voters that didn't show up four years ago that decided to show up. Well, you didn't have an equal basically, a whole bunch of presidential only voters decided to show up in a governor's race on the

Democratic side. You didn't get the presidential only voters to suddenly show up in a governor's race on the Republican side. And then you can see how lopsided things can get. I think the biggest, the potential worst outcome for the

Democrats hopes in twenty twenty eight. Weirdly will be thinking that if they win the House in the Senate, that they've solved their problems and it's just a it's you know, there going to just coast to the presidency like what happened in six going into eight, and I would just say it's very possible they could have a midterm revival. Eighty six midterms were terrific midterms for the Democrats, and then they after getting clobbered in eighty four, and then

they go and get clobbered in eighty eight. So I do think the Democratic makeup of their more likely voter automatically puts them at advantage to overperform in the midterms. It's why even in a bad midterm year like twenty two was, they didn't get clobberd the way they that an out party gets clobbered or an inn party gets clobbered, simply because more of their voters are just are more

regular voters. No, I think that the party still has a problem and until it you know, in fairness to the party on this one, neither Virginia nor New Jersey is a huge It had a rural vote that the candidate had to make an effort. That's not going to be the case in trying to win an election in North Carolina. That's not going to be the case. In trying to win in Ohio. That's not going to be the case in trying to win in Iowa or Alaska, or Kansas or Mississippi or even Texas. You know, you

can't win Texas just by winning the cities that a Roar came close, but he couldn't do it. He want all the he won all the cities, and he won all the the big media markets, but he couldn't. He got killed in the ex serbs and the world voters. So uh yeah, I don't think they've solved any other problems on that front. And I still think they the Democrats are you know, they have to be seen as a stronger party. Strength And I know that's an elusive word, but I think strength's a big, a big thing with

this with with this voting group. If they're going to try to reconnect back with them, and you know, the economy will be an entree. It's not lost on me. If you think about it. The last four Democratic presidents in my lifetime who've won all one during an economic downturn. You know, it's possible that Democrats are just you know, in my lifetime have culturally been on the wrong side of where the country is, and Republicans have culturally been on the right side where the country is. But that

Democrats when the economy's in the tank. It was true in seventy six, it's true in ninety two, and although the economy was recovering by the time Trump Clinton won, but the perception was it was in the tank. It was true in eight, it's true in twenty right, it was certainly virus related, but still it was an economic downturn. Sadly, it may be that there's an economic downturn in twenty

eight and that powers everything. And let me just tell you this, when you have an election that's all about the economy, it suddenly papers over all of your different interestscript problems, right because everything becomes about that. So for Miami, it's their last home game. I know you're on pins

and needles. The College Football Playoff Committee is getting a little better at giving some respect to the University of Miami, though not A. Ton, the guy who runs the committee, who was the spokesperson, basically said Miami is the only team in the ACC that has won a decent non conference game, like completely forgetting that Ala Fingbama lost to Florida State in Week one and so what you see as you see. And this is why I do not

trust the ESPN Invitational Committee. I think all of these athletic directors and they're all I mean, my god, they've all realized they work for ESPN and the SEC and nobody else. Apparently. It is it is, it is why we have to get rid of this committee. They are not you know, I and if yous me, you know, you could say I'm being you know, yeah, I'm being biased towards the ACC. My bias is I want the ACC to get treated fairly. I'm just asking for fair treatment.

This is a committee, and this is a network that has already punished the ACC two years ago with denying an undefeated ACC champion access to the playoff of Florida State. This is a ESPN Invitational committee that denied the number one ranked offense in the country with ten wins and

two losses, the Dederus from Miami. They did not put him in the playoff simply because they were in ACC school the exact same resume, but an SEC school, and I promise you they would have made it when you're literally the top ranked offense in the country, because supposedly those outside metrics matter. No, their metrics matter only when it is about getting the matchups that they want for the television show. And now it is a head scratcher to me that they didn't think cam Ward was good

for their television show. I would argue cam Ward would have been great for their television show last year in the exhibition that is the ESPN Invitational. But the fact that the committee is literally lying about the ACC's resume on national television with Rhys Davis or misinformed, okay, lying

and inquires motive, But there is a motive here. They're going out of their way to make the case against the ACC because apparently, if you're if you're in the ACC and you have a competitive conference, your conference must suck. If you're in the SEC and have a competitive conference, it's proof that your conference is great. I mean, I'm just sorry, it's subjective bullshit on this, Okay, Yes, is it true that the SEC program spend more money collectively

than the ACC does. So you assume you have more talent, yes, but you know is produced like something I like if you want to sit here and play that game. The ACC has I think produced the second most amount of first round draft picks over the last ten years, right behind the SEC and ahead of the Big ten in the Big twelve. But again we can you can find little things like that all the time to slice and dice things. But they went out of their way to punish to and it would have been some other ACC

school and they've done it. And again this goes back to the where the hell is the commissioner Jim Phillips is way too meek uh in this conversation he lets Greg Sankei go move around with them up and down. I told you last week about my source that that told me how much that every week Greg Greg Sanki must have had a hissy fit. That that Herbstreet and Fowler were out doing a Texas Tech game. That must have freaked them out. But that every week he lobbies that you must be in the SEC. You must be

in the SEC. And again I get it. ESPN's in business with the SEC, but they're also in business with the ACC, and I think the ACC could be suing ESPN for breach of contract. This is a network that has gone out of their way to diminish the value of the ACC. The ACC is increased its value, and ESPN tries to diminish the value of the ACC, and they're your biggest business partner. The ACEC should be in court. Don't sue each other. Sue ESPN for essentially for diminishing

the value of ACC sports in general and ACC football in particular. I'm sorry the lack of pushback, and again it's you know, ESPN controls the college football playoff, a mistake, which is why you got to get rid of this committee.

We ultimately got get rid of this committee. There is a way to make all of this and on the field issue, you can you know, if you basically say, you know, if a conference, i'd love to see sort of actually an eighteen playoff that essentially had each conference have their own sort of six team round robin of some sort that decided who their representative was in the eight and you'd have your four conference champions, your group

of five champions after they had a little tournament. But again, you had to win on the field to get in, and then you might have and you might have three wildcards which Notre Dame would be eligible for, and the next two highest winning percentages in the power for just like the NFL wildcard works. And yes, sometimes you might have somebody left out, but it was done on the field with metrics. Everybody understands at the beginning. You know

what nobody says from this committee. They can't tell you to this day. What matters more your wins are your losses. It's a win right. If they want to make the case that Miami is in, they will make a big deal out of their wins. If you want to make the case that Miami is out, you will make a big deal about their losses. Dinno. With Notre Dame, what's the case to put them in? They lost? Two of their losses were by a collective of four points against

two of the most talented teams in the country. What's the case not to put Notre Dame in? The two times they faced talented teams in the country that belong in the playoffs, they couldn't beat them. But Notre Dame is a brand. Look, Miami has been a brand. Miami is the number one rated ACC school as far as television audience is concerned. It has been the last couple of years. You know, for the most part, Miami's been a brand and that usually helps them in situations like this.

I do believe when college football continues this what they've done to the conference with the SEC and the Big Ten have done everybody else, Miami will probably be a half And unfortunately, my friends at NC State, Miami's opponent this week may end up being a poor have not. Now. I don't think that's healthy for college football. I think we could be doing this a better way. But anyway, here we are, so college football playoff rant over. It does look like Miami's path is not crazy anymore. They

finally have them. They're still a bit under ranked. You know, are you're really ranking Miami behind Utah? No offense? To my producer, Lauren is a big Utah guy, and you know they do the you the wrong way. It's not this way, guys, It's like this, but that's okay. That said, do you think I have a lot of confidence in this coaching staff to be ready to put a licking on NC State on Senior Day at Miami? You know, I got a sixty five percent confidence level, but I

don't have a ninety percent confidence level. You know, Miami should be able to put a number up on NC State. A forty five to ten victory should be what they do if they want to make the playoff. They kind of need a forty five to ten. But if you told me this was a thirty one, twenty four to twenty seven game that Miami eked out or somehow screwed it up at the end due to poor coaching decisions, I let's just say I fear it a little bit now. I don't think NC State has the defense and I

think Miami's defense. You know, again, we're I'm going to learn a lot about how much these players want to play for these coaches, because if they do. I did not like the first half of what I saw in the Miami Syracuse game. It looked like it didn't look like I mean, it does feel like the offensive coordinator,

Shannon Dawson is just out of ideas they continue. They are clearly not comfortable with Carson Beck making some decisions because they seem to fear putting him in positions to uh win it, you know, to either make a big player potentially, you know, put him in a precarious position. It's a shame how they coach it, how they do this. So we'll see. I'm nervous. I'm very nervous. I'm not

gonna lie to you. I'm very nervous about this game because I actually think coach Crystal Ball is feeling the pressure. I think Shannon Dawson's feeling the pressure. And sometimes pressure is good on people respond to the pressure and they give you their best work, and sometimes the pressure puts them and they get parallel La. We'll see. The biggest game on the board as far as Miami's playoff rankings are concerned, is actually at the sight of where game

Day decided to go, which is an interesting decision. They're in Pittsburgh and they're for the Notre Dame pit game. This is arguably Notre Dame's toughest game left, which is really so they're there because you know, Notre Dame has they can't lose in order to have a shot at the playoff. They went out, They're going to get in because a ten and two Notre Dame team will always make the playoff no matter who their two losses are. To and no matter if the ten wins are against

the entire MAC conference, it's Notre Dame. You know, it's TV show people, So as long as it's an invitational, they'll always get the invite. Pitt's been an interesting team ever since they put in this freshman quarterback. He's been on He's lit it up. A patent our doozy team. Usually, isn't this free flowing on offense?

for Miami Notre Dame winning. I think I want Notre Dame to win by a field goal and then Miami to beat Pit by thirty. That's probably the best outcome because this will be if Miami and Notre Dame are both ten and two the Pit game will be the most recent comparative they'll both have played at PIT, So I have a feeling Pit and by the way, Pit seven to two, they're not out of this, all right, I'm not, you know. I don't know if they can make get all the way through their schedule and finish

it off right. The two of their two of their next three games or Notre Dame and Miami, and the other one is Georgia Tech. So pitt literally might be facing three playoff teams at the end of their season. But they certainly are going to have an impact on Notre dames chances, Miami's chances, and Georgia Tech's chances. And they it's their last three games. So look, Pitt's had

kind of an easy schedule. We still don't know how they lost to West Virginia, and I think they're trying to figure out how they lost to West Virginia and then their only other losses Louisville, which is a loss that Miami also has, but they've not They've not had the toughest of schedules. They opened with Duquine and Central Michigan and then West Virginia was their third game of

the year. Which because it's a it's a regional rivalry, you throw the records out, right, But it's it's easily the single most important game as far as the playoff is concerned. That's on the board. A few other game games. Uh, do you buy that Wisconsin can play two good games in a row and give Indiana and Indiana plays two bad games in a row? Hard hard to see that one. This one's at Indiana. Boy, after this, Indiana only has Purdue,

you know, the end of the season. And that's that could be fun, right, even though Produe is winless, they're gonna they care about this game. It's do you have to throw the records out? We shall see South Carolina, Texas A and M. I was not going to pay

attention to this game. And one of my favorite betting podcasts made the point that South Carolina is coming off of bye after firing their offensive coordinator, a guy named Shula, one of the grandson of Don Shula, And uh that they're gonna make you know, and they already know that. Miami and other schools are already sniffing around Leonora Sellers

for the for their portal QB for next season. I have a feeling that South Carolina offense is going to be a bit different showcasing Sellers, let him do his thing a lot more. It's going to be an open offense. So either it works and we see an exciting game and Lenora's sellers is the is the quarterback we all thought he was at the beginning of this season, or an m just rolls and they win by three touchdowns. Anyway, it's certainly worth turning on that game. Don't sleep on

South Florida Navy South. You know, this is just the type of game that could turn into a weird shootout. The way Navy now can score, South Florida can score, it will this This shouldn't be close, but it is at the Naval Academy. It will be a little chilly in Annapolis. You know, this is just the type of game that USF could blow. Do you believe in Oklahoma? I don't so I think Alabama pays them, But it is worth noting Alabama is not the best favorite all

the time. Is Caleb de Borera so far? But I just I just you know, I just don't buy that that Oklahoma can score much on them. And do you how do you think they have a good I know they statistically have a good defense. Do you believe they have a good defense? Have they really played anybody? Just something to think about it. I guess their Tennessee win that was that was a pretty good performance. You got

to give them that. But obviously still has playoff implications right now, Oklahoma has to win, and I guess Alabama doesn't because it would only be their second loss, and and you know they and apparently their first loss doesn't even count anymore as far as the College Football Committee is concerned. Other than that, Iowa USC. You know, USC still has the outside chance. Iowa's lost. Iowa had it all, it was there for the taken. If they beat Oregon. This game is a whole, but it's a big a

lot different. It suddenly becomes a playoff game. Now does Iowa know it's over? And if they do know it's over, USC could pace them. The only other game that might be intriguing to keep an eye on, of course, is Georgia and Texas. Texas can't lose, they have to keep winning. This game's at Georgia. There's been a part of me that's wondered, what does all the arch manning commentary of the last two months. What happens to all of it?

If suddenly Texas beach Georgia this week, beach Texas A and M in the last game of the year, and is sitting there at ten and two, and suddenly, with wins over Georgia and Texas A and M, they're probably a top ten team if that's what happens. Oh, by the way, so that's anyway. Let's see what arch Manning looks like. Let's see if the Georgia defense. You know, I think Georgia can score on anybody. They've proven that that offense has turned out to be pretty good this year.

This Texas defense show up and slow down Georgia. Obviously. The good news is this is the primetime game and we'll all have a lot of time.