Transcript - Simon Rosenberg Presentation and Q & A With Hopium Paid Subscribers (2/11/26)
Welcome everyone. Simon Rosenberg, Hopium Chronicles, back with another gathering here of our proud, plucky, patriotic paid subscribers. We get together most Wednesdays and to take a step back from the day to day news to assess where we are in this fight for our democracy and for our freedoms. And against Trump and MAGA, oligarchs and autocrats, all of these things in this battle. As I describe it often, the battle between freedom and dominion, which is this sort of huge battle that we’re all in right now here and around the world. I want to just reflect on the last sort of 24, 48 hours to sort of assess where we are in this fight. Because I think Trump has had a really bad couple of days and that’s really good for the country.
And let’s go through that. Number one is in what was a slightly remarkable and unpredicted event yesterday, three House Republicans joined with the Democrats to vote down Mike Johnson’s effort to suppress debate, discussion, and legislation around Trump’s tariffs. They had passed this twice. They had six month windows. So going back a year ago, they passed a six-month essentially prohibition from there being any discussion or legislation around the tariffs. It’s kind of incredible, right, the free speech party. They passed it again six months ago, and it expired. So they had to pass it again this week, and it failed. Three Republicans wouldn’t go along with it. And what that did is it triggered a process… so last night, Trump suffered one of his most significant legislative rebukes of his second term. And it is on his signature economic policy. So this is no small thing that Mike Johnson and Trump were unable to keep their conference together on what is arguably the single most important policy initiative of the second term.
And so that failed. And then what came next tonight, it happened a few minutes ago, the House, Gregory Meeks, who’s a congressman from New York, has been pushing hard on repealing the tariffs like we’ve done in the Senate. We’ve had now two votes where the Senate passed bills to repeal the tariffs, various tariffs of Trump’s. And tonight the House voted 209 to 211 to repeal Trump’s. The tariffs on Canada. So we’ve now had in the last few months, both the House and the Senate have voted to repeal tariffs on Canada. The Senate vote was a different vote. So what’s going to happen with this House bill tonight is that it’s going to go to the Senate. It has to based on it being a privileged resolution and the rules of the Congress and the Senate will vote on it. And it’s very likely that it will pass because it’s already passed. Which means that both chambers will have come together to have issued a vote of no confidence on Trump’s most significant domestic legislative initiative or policy initiative of his second term.
This is a big deal. And what we’ve talked about here for months is that Republicans are growing wary and weary of defending the indefensible, that Trump is just asking them to eat too much on too many things, and that you were seeing breaks from this. The little cracks were becoming big cracks. And we saw it on that day before the end of the year where he lost five votes in the House in one day. They were not huge things, but he was unable to keep the whip on five votes in the House and Senate. It was both chambers in one day. We saw it in this incredible repudiation of him on the Epstein files that happened. And this has been building, because as I’ve said, one of the central dynamics of 2026 is going to be all of these… you know, these Republicans in competitive races at whatever level of government, from city council up to governor, who now have to run on Trump’s agenda. And we know from the polling data that Trump’s agenda is much more unpopular than he is. And the thing is that they have to run on the agenda, which is really unpopular, not on him. Because they’re not him.
And so what I have been saying from having been in this town for over 30 years and knowing how this dynamic works, is that all these politicians who believe they’ve got futures way beyond Trump are, you know, spitting the bit and getting pissed that he’s given them such a difficult playing field in which to advance their careers. You’ve seen it in the special elections that we’ve been having this sort of remarkable continued electoral performance of the Democratic Party since Trump was elected, where we’ve been outperforming in special elections all across the country, our 2024 numbers, by double digits on average and races of all kinds all across the country. We had our remarkable performance in the November elections where Sherrill and Spanberger won by huge margins in Virginia and New Jersey. And we won four statewide initiatives and votes in Georgia and in Maine, and in Pennsylvania and California, by more than 20 points. Things you just don’t see in our business, winning statewide efforts by more than 20 points, some of them in battleground states, right? We won, we flipped the mayoralty of Miami, a place we hadn’t won in 28 years, and is home, we think, to the Trump Library or whatever it is he’s going to go do with the land that he’s trying to possess there and acquire. And then we just had these two elections that happened in Louisiana and Texas in the last, you know, 10 days that were elections in red districts in red states. These are not swing districts. These were not purple districts. These were red districts where Trump won by more than 10 points in each of them in 2024. And we outperformed our 2024 numbers by over 30 points in both districts.
And so if you’re one of these young strapping Republicans who have a career ahead of you, you’re looking at this and you’re like, what the f*** is the old guy doing, right? Like he’s driving the country into a ditch. He’s asking us to embrace ridiculous policies like these tariffs that are raising prices on everybody and hurting farmers and small businesses. He’s cutting health care that’s going to make it harder for people in their communities to get good, high quality care. He’s cutting food SNAP benefits which is going to make people go hungry in these districts. He’s the most corrupt political figure that we’ve ever had in American history. He’s antagonizing our allies… and his poll numbers just keep going down. It doesn’t matter what they’ve done. They’ve been unable to create a sustained revival of his poll numbers at any point since they really started dropping in May. His poll numbers really started going down in May, and it’s been this constant stream. And in FiftyPlusOne, the site that I use that has the polling aggregate that I use at Hopium, today he hit minus 19 in job approval for the first time. So, his lowest rating. In Economist YouGov, his approval rating this week… this weekly tracker that we look at every week… he was at +37 in approval, the lowest recorded. He was at -13 on immigration. 21 points lower than on his first week in office. He’s plummeted on inflation, plummeted on the economy, plummeted on healthcare, plummeted on immigration.
And then the NBC poll that came out this morning had him at 39 approved and 61 disapproved. One of the worst polls that he’s had, you know, in this term. And so, politically. he’s in bad shape, and they’re in bad shape. The Economist YouGov poll today had the Generic Ballot, which is in the midterm elections more important than it is in the presidential, [at] +8 Democrat. You know, on Election Day in 2024, it was +4 Republican. So that’s a 12-point shift of the basic battlefield, you know, which is consistent with what we’re seeing in the overperformance. It’s probably not as high as that in reality. You know, it’s probably closer to eight, nine percent [of a] shift, but [that] eight, nine percent shift puts the Senate in play and it makes the House very likely that it’s going to flip. And recognizing this shift in the basic battlefield, the DCCC announced an expansion this week of what they call districts in play. They now are targeting 44 districts to flip, which is a significant expansion from where they were a few months ago.
They’re even now going after districts that are +13 Trump because based on the way the battlefield has shifted, these now become, you know, in play. And so what we know a year out — a year into this thing for Trump, he has failed politically and electorally. Where he hasn’t failed, and we talk about this, is in the harm that he’s continuing to do. Extraordinary harm to the country. And that we have been unsuccessful in blocking that. And I want to come back to that because I skipped my little narrative about the day… because I think just drilling down on these last 24 hours is a huge window into his ebbing powers and into his weakening in American politics.
So one, two brutal votes in the House. Clear, clear, repudiation, rebuke, whatever you want to call it, of him on things that matter to him. He’s been posting on Truth today about it, screaming at everybody, and he’s really pissed off, right? The second thing is the Epstein scandal has metastasized. It’s now gone completely global. There are foreign governments now launching major investigations on what happened. You have political figures here in the U.S. and abroad falling. The U.K. government may fall over this, right, and so any effort he had… this sort of dark effort that he and Bondi and Kash Patel had… to sort of suppress and make this thing go away… remember, they announced over the summer they weren’t going to release any of the Epstein files at all. That’s how we got into all this. Their effort to contain the scandal has completely failed. It’s broken out of containment, and there’s no way they’re going to be able to put it back. And what happened just this week, the thing that sort of created dramatic escalation this week, is that based on the law that we passed last year, members of Congress were allowed to go into DOJ and look at the unredacted files. And they all have come out of those, you know, those sessions, an hour or two, you know, horrified about what they’re seeing.
And also, there’s clarity now that the FBI and DOJ had internal documents talking about the possibility of prosecution of others, of co-conspirators in these crimes, and that those were suppressed. And Kash Patel under oath lied about this. He also was exposed for another lie today under oath. The FBI director has now lied repeatedly under oath around the Epstein files. And this became far more grave today because if there is now belief that others committed crimes, there has to be independent investigations, there could be prosecution. And the scandal just keeps going and they can’t contain it. And so, you know, they may have lost control of the Epstein scandal last year, but it became far more grave for them. And the chance of Trump really escaping this without significant damage to him and his regime is far less today than it was a week ago, as we saw with his commerce secretary trying to defend… bringing his family, his four children and his wife to go have lunch with the great Jeffrey Epstein on his island. After having lied about this. He got caught in an incredible series of lies where he claimed that he cut off all contact with Epstein in 2005, and that was obviously disproven by these files. So this thing has broken containment.
The third thing that happened in the last 24 hours was the grand jury came back and did not indict the six congresspeople who made that video encouraging [and] challenging our military men and women to follow the law. This was an enormous embarrassment because not only did they not get a grand jury to indict… that in the grand jury, not a single person voted to indict them. They got a zero vote on something where the government brought something that mattered to them… an incredible rebuke.
And then finally, the polling, as I’ve mentioned, I went through this a little bit – not only are his numbers down and they’ve been losing elections, but on the issues that matter most to him, and mattered most to his election and to sort of his identity, inflation, which was the central thing that drove his election victory… he’s lost more than 30 points and he is in a dark place around the tariffs, inflation, prices, affordability, something that’s driving the election. And then immigration, which is, you know, if you really think about Trumpism from when he came down the escalator, in 2015, [he] began talking about Mexican rapists. This issue of xenophobia, anti-immigrant, just overt racism, the othering of people in America, is the fuel of Trumpism.
It’s the fuel of the movement. It’s the thing that is the engine that makes it all work. And on this issue that is so central to everything that he represents, his white supremacy, his venal white supremacy that we all have to live with every day, and his misogyny, and just all of the ugliness of him and the othering that he does, pulling us apart rather than bringing us together, that he’s now in deeply negative territory on immigration. Just a simple question of immigration, meaning that is he managing the immigration issue well? He’s gone into deeply negative territory, falling… story after story in the polling in the last 10 days have been leading with collapse on immigration. I shared some of it today in the Hopium Post. And also on ICE, as I’ve been showing, ICE is even lower, right? I mean, they’ve completely lost the argument about their mass deportation campaign and about their terror regime that they put into place. And that should be affirming to us because that was not a given. You never know in this business how something’s going to go. You have a good sense. You make a reasonable judgment. But you don’t know… because the American people are sovereign. They get to make up their own minds. And sometimes they agree with you and sometimes they don’t, right. And you don’t know. What’s incredible is that he’s losing every major argument that matters to his party and to even to his brand identity. And so he’s in a very diminished place. He’s weakened. He’s old and addled. And at the end of his run as a political leader because of his age and his infirmities and his clear lack of sort of being there all the time.
But also politically, he’s eroding further. He’s getting further and further away from the electorate. And the way this manifests is that he loses control of Congress. This is how it actually manifests. This is what you would predict. And that’s what’s happening. He’s lost a series of votes in the Senate. He just lost, you know, this brutal set of votes around his signature domestic issue in the last 24 hours. And remember, what’s going to happen now is that every 15 days, Gregory Meeks is going to be able to bring up another privileged resolution on a different aspect of the tariffs. And so what happened tonight is that, yes, we were able to get the House of Representatives on record to repeal the tariffs. But a whole bunch of these vulnerable Republicans, an overwhelming majority of them, voted to keep the tariffs in Canada and to keep prices high, right? Imagine that them facing tough reelections… that the president’s forced them to take a vote that we can obviously run ads on because up until this point, the House Republicans had not taken an affirmative vote for the tariffs. What Johnson did… was that by allowing them to vote to suppress debate and the legislation, it prevented the Republicans from having to go on record. You know, on the tariffs. Well, they’re on record now. Dozens and dozens of these guys voted to increase prices for work for people in their districts.
So this was a big, important win. And I just want to thank all of you, as all of you know, who follow me in my work trying to repeal these tariffs. We have been for this from the day that Trump announced them on Liberation Day in May. This has been a central project. Many of you have called. I mean, we’ve generated tens of thousands of calls against these tariffs, maybe even more than that, maybe in the hundreds of thousands since this all began last May. We just had a huge win for one of the central objectives of the Hopium world, right, which is to roll back these tariffs, to force the Republicans to embrace this indefensible, illegal policy. And remember, because what the tariffs really represent, and I wrote about this today, is why is Trump so wedded to something that is so obviously doing harm to the economy, to farmers, to small businesses? To consumers, to our standing in the world, to our economic and political relationships with our allies. It’s because he’s a greedy, gluttonous mother****er who is using the tariff revenue to help offset the costs of the huge tax cuts for him and his oligarch buddies. So Donald Trump is hurting the country. He’s hurting our alliances. He’s hurting our standing in the world with every consumer in every country in the world who have [all] seen Trump go to economic war with their countries. He’s hurting the economy. He’s hurting the American people. He’s hurting farmers and small businesses. He’s doing all this illegally. Why is he doing this? Because he needed money to offset his tax cuts, his outrageous tax cuts. He’s doing it to enrich himself. He’s put this country through all of this, all of this harm and all of this damage to enrich himself and his friends. It’s an unbelievable betrayal of all of us. And this is why this tariff issue is much bigger than your prices going up in the store. He’s done structural damages to businesses, to farmers, to the American economy, to our standing in the world. For what end? To enrich himself, which is the only thing that he cares about. He doesn’t care about the national interest of the United States or our national security. Or the prosperity of the nation, right? He cares about enriching himself and making himself feel stronger and more powerful which is getting increasingly hard to do as his powers ebb. And so I think we should feel like this week something significant happened – the cracks got bigger, the circle of defiance grew, his control over Congress weakened, he’s a diminished figure today… he looks weak, he just lost votes that really matter to him in the chamber that he controls. He hasn’t controlled the Senate nearly as much. So this is a big deal and we should feel good about this. And it’s why I think as we go forward, we should view this year as a year of opportunity for us. We can have the elections that we want to have. We can win back power. We have to work as hard as we can, right? We got to put money in and help our candidates and our state parties and our national parties be strong and muscular now so they can hire staff and be out there fighting every day.
But I think the other thing that is really important, and it’s consistent with what I’ve been saying to you, is that in 2026, we need to not only have a good year politically and electorally. We need to have a good year in stopping the harms that he’s doing. And we saw significant movement in that regard in the last two weeks with the Democrats saying they were not going to support the DHS appropriations bill, putting out a comprehensive and thoughtful 10 part plan that would significantly rein in ICE. And we’re now having a fight about the things that we at Hopium have wanted our party to fight, that we have said that it’s critical that we not just fight on affordability and healthcare, but that we become, you know, that we can be warriors for the middle class and muscular patriots defending our democracy and our freedoms and our liberties. And we’re doing that now. We’re in the fight that we all wanted to have. And Schumer and Jeffries have made the right call on this. What is likely to happen… there are no negotiations happening. What the Republicans are going to do tomorrow, we think, in the Senate, is they’re going to just offer what’s called a clean CR to extend the funding of DHS for another couple weeks so we can continue the negotiations, which haven’t even begun, by the way.
So this idea that they’re actually in good faith negotiations is not true. And that because they’ve just rejected the 10 part plan, they have no interest in negotiating with us, and they don’t think we’re going to fight. And this is why it’s important in your calls to Congress… that we need to keep reminding our leaders and our side that we have to keep fighting for this, because this really matters. What ICE is doing is wrong. What Trump and Miller are trying to do by building this gulag archipelago in the United States is wrong. This is a fight worth having, and we’re having the fight. And this is not just a fight about freedom and democracy. It’s not a fight just about ICE and due process. It’s not a fight to stop the building of these detention centers that could be used not only for immigrants, but for Trump’s domestic political enemies, which is why we have to work so hard to prevent them from getting built. But it’s a fight about learning this new muscle, which is we have to stop the harms that he’s doing. We were not successful in that in 2025. And we just watched the Europeans organize themselves. One of their countries was attacked. They organized. They stood Trump down. He backed off the Greenland thing. And we have to learn how to come together, as Schumer and Jeffries have done, because this is now a joint project by the House and Senate Democrats. They’ve come together. They’ve aggregated more power
And they are now fighting Trump, not just electorally and politically, but in stopping the harms of things that he’s doing. This is a significant development, in my view, in terms of us understanding what’s required of us now and this process that I call “coming together,” which is about our leaders learning how to work together to aggregate more power, to gain more power, to not be isolated, but to be stronger together in order to stop the harms of what Trump is doing. And what I’ve called on, as you know, here, if you’re a close Hopium follower, is that the House and Senate Democrats need to be working with the governors and the Democratic attorneys general, as the Europeans did, to come together to aggregate more power to stop the harms. Look what we just did. We just voted to roll back the tariffs. That’s stopping the harms. We’ve made this principled stand against ICE and their lawlessness and their violence. That’s stopping the harms. This is a significant development, in my view, of our movement meeting the moment and understanding after the first year of shock and awe that the country is behind us and therefore we must be more ambitious and aggressive in defending the country, in defending the American people, in defending our democracy and our freedoms and our liberties.
And so my report to you every week… this is my job, to report to you about how I think we’re doing. I’m pleased with the progress that we’ve made. I’m pleased at the erosion of Trump. I’m pleased that our leaders are learning how to fight the harms because I do think, and I’m going to write a longer essay about this in the next few weeks, in the next few days, hopefully, is that we have to understand that part of our job now and Congress’s job is not to just legislate. But it’s to degrade and delegitimize him. We have to weaken the regime. And through this ICE fight, we’re weakening the regime through, you know, getting his own members to split off from him on his signature economic issues, weakening the regime.
We have to weaken the regime so he’s less capable of doing harm to us and to the world. And I think we’ve made significant strides in that regard in the last few weeks. I’m grateful. I’m encouraged. I’m not getting ahead of my skis here. We still have a long way to go. But our movement is stronger than it was two weeks ago, and his is much weaker. You know, that’s the goal, isn’t it, everybody? So thank you for your extraordinarily hard work. Thank you for staying in the game. Thank you for fighting as hard as you can. We have some wins to celebrate here tonight, everybody. Rolling back the tariffs in the House has been an objective of this community since May 4th of last year, and we just got it done tonight. So congratulations, everyone. Now let’s go win this fight on immigration and ICE. Because what we have to think about is we need to get wins, build on them and get more. Well, we just had a really big set of wins here in the last couple of days. Let’s use that energy and that confidence and that strength and that power to go get some more. Thanks, everybody. That’s my report to you. Let’s get to questions. And thank you for all that you do for our candidates and for our country every day.
Yeah, the SAVE Act has come up. The SAVE Act cannot pass the Senate, and it is going to probably pass the House, but there aren’t 60 votes for it in the Senate.
Yes, there is some idea that they may change the filibuster to get it through out of their desperation. But as of right now, that’s not a likely scenario. So, yes, all of you who are working on the SAVE Act and have been calling Congress should continue to do that. It is not likely to become law. And I have I just recorded an interview today with Michael Waldman from the Brennan Center, which will come out Thursday or Friday of this week. Because I promised to you that after the election, we would start focusing on not just the elections, but Trump’s efforts, and this interview is the first of a series of interviews I’m going to be doing and discussions around what is it that Trump can do and what is it that we can do. And one of the things that Michael said today in the interview, and you’ll see it when it comes out, is Trump cannot cancel the elections. That’s not something that can happen. The elections are run by the states. The president actually has no constitutional legal role in the elections in 2026. And so one of the things I’m going to try to help everybody do is get to an understanding of the people that are working on this, what they think could actually really happen, and then what it is that we can do to make it less likely. I’ve told you that I feel like our job is is to go out and win the elections. And that’s what we’re focused on here, because we can’t for one moment allow any fear we have about the election meddling to do anything to suppress our ardor in our work.
Because if we pull back and we don’t do all the work, then we won’t have the election that we want. What Trump wants you to do, and that’s why Steve Bannon threw this stuff out last week, is they want you to think there’s not going to be elections, so there’s no reason to do any work to go beat them. So they’re going to continue to play mind games with all of us. It’s called cognitive warfare, right, is the new term that is being used by everybody. They want you to obey in advance. They want you to roll up in a ball and go in the corner and not to do the work that we do here every day for candidates and for our party committees. But you’re not going to do that, right? Because you’re here at Hopium and we get up every day and we do. That’s our job. And we keep moving the ball down the playing field a little bit. And I’m really proud of that. And we’ve had a lot of wins.
So, two tracks. We’ve got to keep working on winning the elections by the biggest margin we possibly can. And we’ve got to do more to protect our democracy. And we’re going to be going through that process over the next few months about what it is that we can do… also to sort of get out of the place of freak out and paranoia about Trump’s ability to disrupt the elections. He was unable to do it in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024. He hasn’t been able to do it in any of the elections in 2025 and 2026 that we have. And so he’s been unsuccessful. And we have to remember that, you know, he is addled and desperate and wild… [and] what we’re learning is that our federal system makes it very hard for a centralized power in Washington to disrupt state based elections. We can’t be naive about this, but we also can’t be histrionic about it either. And so what I’m going to try to do is to give everybody clarity on what people believe is the range of things that could happen and to start helping this community do more to ensure that we have the free and fair elections that we all want to have. I’m not freaked out about the SAVE Act, because I don’t think it can pass the Senate. Lisa Murkowski came out for it today. It doesn’t mean that they don’t try to do something crazy, right? But I think we have to keep lobbying, keep working, and I know a lot of you are working on that, and thank you for that.
Yeah, the DNC working with grassroots organizations — questions, concerns about it. I haven’t seen the exact question about that, but I think that, you know, one of the things that is important is that for the grassroots groups that are on the ground that are state-based, that are state and local based, they are integrated, I think, into many of the elections and campaigns around the country. Can the DNC do more to reach out to national grassroots groups as they build their voter registration campaigns, as they do this local listening program? I mean, Ken Martin is starting to roll out really meaningful programs that will matter for 2026. And I’ll have someone come from the DNC and brief us on all this in the next few weeks. I just spent time down in San Juan, Puerto Rico with state party leaders from all over the country. A few weeks ago… I met with Ken while I was there. They’re doing more than people realize, and I’ve got to do more to help promote what they’re doing, because in part, we’ve made a major investment in the DNC here. We’re up to $140,000 that we’ve raised for the DNC. You should know that in the last two plus years, this community has raised $3 million for the DNC and for state parties around the country. We are one of the largest investors in party infrastructure of any set of organizations in the entire country. And I’m really proud of that. And thank you all for being part of that. But I don’t have anything really important to say about that other than I will work to get back to you on that.
The Gallup poll discontinuing. I don’t know. I mean, there’s so [much] other polling. Yes, it’s a tragedy, but we have a lot of very high quality independent public polling… I’m not getting too wound up about it. Is it another sign of capitulation by an independent organization to Trump’s will? Yeah, but we understand that, and this is happening now, and it’s tragic, but know there is a lot of high quality polling and the truth is, you know, I’m not going to mourn if Gallup decides to get out of the political polling business that creates opportunities for others to go ahead… I think that we talk about a lot of the really high quality good independent polling at Hopium all the time… the ones that I like because I write about them a lot… I also want to encourage you, if you’re a polling nerd, to follow G. Elliott Morris’ site called Strength In Numbers and also the companion site they have called FiftyPlusOne, which is sort of where I go to get a lot of my data and polling to do my own analysis.
The Bondi hearing today, I think we talked about it a little bit. I mean, she embarrassed herself. She disrespected the survivors today in a way that I think was something that is going to haunt this administration for a long time. Pam Bondi made, I think, a really big error today in the way that she publicly disrespected the survivors. The questions were very tough on her, and she sounded like, you know, just a bad person, and unresponsive and illiberal. I don’t think she did herself any favors today. They have this belief in there that they have to fight and attack all the time. And, you know, that’s Trump’s kind of MO, but it isn’t the most effective strategy for them. They’re in a weakened place. They need to be making friends and they didn’t do that today in any way.
I sent a picture out tonight. There’s going to be an image that will probably become sort of a defining image of this time, the Epstein files, where Congresswoman Jayapal asked the survivors who had reached out to DOJ and had been ignored by the DOJ, to stand up and raise their hand. And many… there were apparently a lot in the audience. I don’t know the exact number, 10, 15, 20. And Pam Bondi refused. So they were being asked if they were being ignored by DOJ. They said they were, and then Pam Bondi refused to look at them and stayed and kept her head down looking at the paper. I mean, these are people who are survivors of sexual assault and of a predator that was the best friend of her boss, and whose many members of the administration, by the way, when she was Attorney General of Florida, she did nothing to prosecute or pursue any of this, the eight years she was there. And she had a moment today to honor the suffering and the tragedy of the survivors, and she chose to ignore them and to basically give them the back of her hand. I think that was a big mistake. I think that was inhumane. It was just beyond what was the moment called for. And I think this is what everybody’s sick of… this is just too much. Trump, they’ve gone too far. They’re high in their own supply, whatever you want to call it. They are extremists, and they are continuing to act that way every day. And I think the country has let it be known that they don’t consider that to be a legitimate answer to the moment any longer. The consent of the government has been withdrawn from this administration. If we were in a parliamentary democracy, this administration would have fallen by now. The government would have fallen. And, you know, they are in a far more precarious position because the thing that was holding Trump up was his control of Congress.
And that’s not clearly there anymore… will there be three to five Republicans that are open to working with the Democrats to try to restore the ACA subsidies and other things to sort of repair the damage that he’s done? It sure looks that way… you know, the circle of defiance has grown now in a way that is deeply meaningful for everything that we’ve all wanted over the last year.
Jane Hastings asked, what’s the Supreme Court delay on the tariff ruling? You know, we don’t know. I mean, they’re capable of making very quick rulings. This one, from a legal standpoint, seems pretty cut and dry. Everyone who listened to the hearing, the Supreme Court hearing, felt that there was a clear majority against the tariffs. The speculation is they’re trying to figure out a way. There’s negotiations, illicit negotiations going on with the White House to try to soften the blow if they do come out against the tariffs. What I talked about today in another briefing I did for a group… and this is actually a good question and let me let me dive into this a little bit because it’s important. So if the tariffs are determined to be illegal which they clearly are, right, and unconstitutional, then what happens? And there is one school of thought that Trump, the federal government, would have to rebate the tariffs to every single entity that paid them from the beginning because they were illegally collected, which is hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars and would be a complicated and difficult process.
The second idea is that the Supreme Court… would come up with some crazy ruling that they didn’t have to pay backwards, but they could no longer continue them, which is a way of lessening the pain to Trump. Because here’s what happens. If the tariffs are determined to be illegal, and he can’t collect them anymore, then what starts to happen is that his entire kind of economic plan starts to unravel because the deficits will get much bigger. And the deficits getting bigger will prevent the Fed from lowering interest rates. And borrowing costs will go up for all of us across the country, and if that happens, the costs will go up of everything — mortgages, credit cards, businesses, small business loans, everything will go up. And the economy will slow. And the second thing that will happen is that there will be enormous pressure to roll back the large tax cuts for wealthy people. His greed, his gluttony, the thing that he wants more than anything else. Because the government will all of a sudden have this spiraling deficit that will be bigger. And there will be pressure. We will be able to put pressure on him and the Republicans to unravel the tax cuts? Which is, you know, another part of his kind of central strategy, that he wants more for him and less for all of us. And once you start raising questions about the legitimacy of the tax cuts and the spiraling deficit, his whole thing starts to unravel.
The whole project, the whole Trumpian project… these tariffs [were] so fundamentally insane and reckless. And I’ve written about this at Hopium, that if the tariffs are declared to be illegal, the very first thing that we should do is we should demand his resignation. Because it will be the single most reckless act by a president in all of our history. And he can no longer continue to be president any longer. And so the Supreme Court is being left with trying to figure out how to soften the blow here. I think they’re struggling because I don’t think there is a way to soften the blow. I mean, there’s just a dip. There’s like a range of bad outcomes here. If they declare the tariffs to be legal, it would, I think, do enormous damage to the Court, which is already damaged and already losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the public.
And I think this is why this is taking so long… are they willing to slap him down? Look, they did on the deployment of the National Guard in the cities. They took that away from him in December. It was a huge blow to him and his terror regime that he wants out there. And so, you know, we don’t know what’s going to happen with the Supreme Court decision. But I will tell you to have the Supreme Court deliberating this right now and to see the Republicans now vote twice against the tariffs is also a really deep blow to Trump because it means that the Supreme Court is more likely to rule more aggressively against him now, seeing the House, you know, that we’ve now passed efforts to roll back the tariffs in both chambers. And both chambers are now on record for rolling back the tariffs. So the Supreme Court would be going against the will of Congress by keeping the tariffs in place. That’s not a small thing when it’s a Republican controlled Congress, right? So we’ll see. I think the tariff thing is about to become super interesting.
I’m going to try to get Greg Meeks on, who’s been spearheading this in the House. Greg is an old friend from NY and who’s had a huge win here for all of us — I’ve known Greg for 25, 30 years, a long time, and I’m excited to bring him on and he’s done a good thing for all of us here. Yeah, the recording of this will be out tomorrow. And I’m interviewing Congressman Houlahan tomorrow from Pennsylvania… Ron, I don’t know what’s going on in North Carolina. I’ll look into it. You said Anderson’s involved in a dustup. These things happen in states, right? You know, we are a big, happy, complicated family.
So Diane asked, why did the President Biden’s DOJ do nothing with the Epstein files? Well, that’s not true, Diane, right. The reason that the files weren’t released was because there was an active appeal of that successful [Ghislaine Maxwell] trial. We brought her to trial. She was convicted. She went to jail. And that was being appealed. Will we be debating for a long time about whether or not they should have brought charges against other people? Yeah. And at some point, the people who were responsible for those decisions will have to become, you know… Merrick Garland has an obligation, I think, at some point to come forward and talk about his tenure and about decisions that he made that have enormous consequence. But it’s not true that we did nothing. We actually prosecuted Maxwell. And what I’ve heard from people who worked at DOJ is that they couldn’t release any of the documents because there was an appeal going on and it would have undermined the case and potentially allowed her to go free. And so there was a legal process in place — was it ambitious enough, significant enough given what we now know? Obviously not, but it’s not true that nothing was done.
The detention centers and immigration… let me go on the record again about my feeling about this. And obviously, you know, I’ve been writing about this a lot the last couple of weeks. And many of you have heard me talk about how central the issue of immigration has been to my own political journey and my work over the last two decades. It’s been something that’s been defining for me and critical for me, important to me as a you know, grandchild of immigrants and growing up in the New York area. I think everyone who was from New York, you know, we all… the common story whenever you met people was, where is your family from and what part of the world are they from? And there was this deep sense that we were all from other places in New York growing up. And so this matters to me. And it’s a way of also honoring my grandparents and my family who made the journey from far flung places and gave me these extraordinary opportunities that I had. And how lucky I feel about that, and so this is this matters to me. These issues. I’ve been advocating for very aggressively that we need to rein in ICE, we need to end the violence and the lawlessness, but we have this other thing we have to do which is that we have to narrow the targets of ICE.
We [need] to have them focus on criminals. And to leave the rest of us alone, including the undocumented population in the United States. And we have to block the building of these detention centers. And the blocking of the building of these detention centers now has to become a major undertaking of the pro-democracy movement writ large. It’s not going to be easy to do. But we know from history that when these kinds of things get built, they get filled. And we’ve already seen that Trump has been willing to jail his political opponents. They arrested five Black journalists two weeks ago. That crossed a huge line. And so the problem is, if they build these detention centers, they’re not going to just get filled with immigrants. They’re going to get filled with his political opponents. And it creates something that’s deeply dangerous for the country. So this is a new moment. As we evolve and grow and come to understand what we need to do now as a movement, I think blocking the building of these detention centers is now a major priority for all of us. I had a great interview that I released today with one of the leading immigration experts in the country who happens to have an area of specialty around the detention process of immigration. And I encourage you to watch the interview with Aaron. He was terrific. Because one of the things he explains is that the sort of the terrible conditions, the moving people around and taking them from Minnesota down to Texas is all part of a strategy to have the undocumented immigrants choose to leave the country voluntarily and get out of here because they don’t want to be put into prison. They don’t want to eat bad food. They don’t want to be separated from their families. And so this is part of the terror regime, the detention, which is why they need to build more of it so they can throw more people in to create more terror. And, you know, we just can’t allow it to happen. We can’t allow it to happen.
It’s inconsistent with who we are as Americans. It’s a deeply dangerous evolution of Trump’s dark imaginings of his power and Stephen Miller’s ridiculous dark fantasies. And we just have to… this is why the debate around immigration is so important. There’s a lot more happening here. And then finally, I’ve been writing about this every day, is that one of the things that I’m just really pleased with is how much you’ve seen the public withdraw any kind of support for mass deportations. The public repeatedly, in question after question, you know, do you want the undocumented population to stay or go? It’s overwhelmingly stay. The number of people that want the undocumented population in this country to leave is now in the 20s. And so there’s no support for mass deportation in the United States. There’s no support for removing legal immigrants who came here legally, which is what they’re doing. And for terrorizing the 10 to 15 million undocumented immigrants in the country and forcing them out of the country and physically removing them, but also scaring them so they self deport. I’m very pleased with the polling on this. I’ve worked on this issue for 21 years, and I just didn’t know where people would go on this and where people’s heads are at. And what’s happening is the American people are doing what the brave and courageous people in Minnesota are doing, is they want to defend their neighbors. This is really important that this is where we are now in this fight because it didn’t have to be otherwise. I think the bravery and courage of the people of Minnesota was a pivotal moment in our fight and inspired us to all do more and to have more bravery and courage. What were they doing? They were defending their neighbors. And some people have lost their lives defending their neighbors. And stood down masked men with guns, high powered weapons pointed at them. They’ve been willing to do that to defend their neighbors.
And I think that if I can leave you with a couple thoughts tonight, one is that I get asked about how do you keep going every day? What’s the motivation? And I’m going to be honest with you. I mean, I think every day about what the people of Ukraine are going through and how they get up every day and they keep fighting. And if they can do it, then I can do it. The second thing is I am incredibly motivated by and challenged by what the people of Minnesota have done over these last few weeks. And I hope that both of those things can be energy sources that you draw from in keeping in the game because it’s so easy to want to disengage from all the ugliness that we’re dealing with every day. In this political movement that we’re part of, but we need to stay engaged because the thing they want more than anything else is for us to disengage.
And then finally I want to close with these two lessons from history that I talk about all the time. One we know from Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat and all the other great teachers we’ve had about fascism and authoritarianism — is that we need to counter and challenge the autocrat every day across all fronts. Because if we don’t, then the autocrat reads that as weakness and then they escalate. And so this power game of strong and weak… and fighting… it’s why we have to be pushing our leaders to fight on multiple fronts. We can’t have issue discipline. We have to be fighting on affordability, on health care, on immigration, on corruption. We have to be fighting against all these areas and we need to do a better job. And encouraging our leaders to open up multiple fronts against Trump because it’s also how we delegitimize and degrade and weaken him.
But the second lesson we’ve learned from history, from people who’ve gone through this, is that what they want more than anything else is to divide us and to split us apart. And have us be fighting with each other rather than with them. I know there are big conversations in the family right now about where to put our energy and how. What I just want to encourage you is that I think devoting a lot of energy right now… given where we are and given the success that we’re having and given the struggle that Trump is having… to divert large amounts of our work to fighting with each other [rather] than fighting with him is a mistake. It’s a mistake. And we shouldn’t do it. It doesn’t mean that there can’t be a race in your district or your area where you get involved in a primary, right? But it is not where our energy needs to be. It’s not where the bulk of our work needs to be. The bulk of our work needs to be about taking power away from them, and beating them, degrading them and delegitimizing them. And so we have to hang together or hang separately. We are stronger together than apart.
We need to come together and not allow them to do what they’re going to try to do to us. Which is to pit us against each other. We know this from history and what every historian and political leader who’s been through something like this will tell you — that when they lost is when the opposition movement split and factionalized. And so we’re going to not always agree on everything. You guys heard stuff tonight that you may not agree with from me. But the impulse… and what I hope from all of you, when you go back out into your organizations and the places that you do your work, is the impulse should be to keep us together and to not descend into factionalism. It doesn’t mean we can’t disagree, but there’s a difference between disagreeing and fighting, right? And we can’t fight with one another. And I try to exhibit that every day at Hopium where we try to honor and respect people on our side and keep the focus on them. And I know this is a raging debate in our family. And this is where I come down from having been doing this a long time and been a student of history and been through all of this, which is we’re going to hang together or hang separately.
And I hope that you, as a Hopium member of our community, bring that sensibility when you’re in meetings where people want to push a community to fight internally and against other Democrats — try to resist that. It doesn’t mean it won’t happen. But our focus [needs to be] on him and them. Everybody, thank you for all that you do. Get ready for a lot of amazing content coming your way. Keep the questions coming. Keep the chat lively. I can’t stress to you how important the chat is to me. I use it as a place to see what’s on people’s minds. I learn. I read things that I wouldn’t have read otherwise. I learn about things that are happening all over the country. So keep yourself reporting every day. It really matters. I really read things. Almost every comment every day. I really do. Lincoln knows this. I spend way too much time reading all the comments, but I do it because I learn from all of you, and I think you learn from each other. And so let’s stick together, everybody. Let’s keep our heads down. Let’s keep working hard. This has been a good week for us, but we need to have a good week every week if we’re going to have the election and the kind of politics that we need to have in America. Thank you for your hard work. Keep fighting everybody.