Simon Rosenberg Presentation With Full Q & A - Transcript (12/17/25)

Welcome, everyone. Simon Rosenberg, Hopium Chronicles, back with our weekly gathering here of the proud plucky patriots of the Hopium community. Wherever you’re watching this, whether it’s live or you are seeing it as a recording on Substack, or Spotify and Apple Podcasts and YouTube, welcome, welcome, welcome. It’s great to have you here. If you enjoy it, please hit like and subscribe and share it with everybody you know. More the merrier in this holiday season. You know, what we try to do here every week is sort of level set, take a step back from the day to day and assess where we are in this grand battle against Trump and Trumpism and MAGA. And so let me try to look back at the year and give you some thoughts about where we are, and then we’ll get to questions. I have plenty of time for questions tonight.

So I think I see the world, I’ve often talked about it as two things that we have to keep in our head at the same time. And I’ve now expanded that to three, which is, what are we really trying to do here at Hopium and in this pro-democracy movement? And I think there really are three things that we’re attempting. Number one is to mitigate the damage he’s doing, to weaken the regime. Number two, to advance our agenda and our values and tell our story, right? And then three is to win back power. I think that we have been very successful this year, politically and electorally, while also recognizing that Trump has probably been a far more damaging and malevolent president than we could have anticipated, I think. I mean, I think that on this band of how much damage he would do to the country and how quickly he would do it, we’re sort of at the upper end of that. And because of that, to a great degree, it has helped make this a very successful electoral and political year. And both of these things can be true at the same time.

I want to talk first about the electoral and political year. I think that the fact that Trump now is in many polls is in the high 30s and low 40s in approval with very intense disapproval, with his agenda being even in worse shape than that, given that he remember he got 50 of the vote this time and he did better than he did eight years ago. And he’s in disastrous shape with the public… I think that when we look back at this year, the fact that there has been this kind of dramatic rejection of him and his politics has to be very reassuring for us because it could have been otherwise. And you’ve seen this dramatic rejection of him, of his agenda, and in elections of his party. And this is really important… that not only did we outperform expectations in special elections and local elections all across the country this year, in very encouraging ways, but in November it was a blowout election. I mean, I’ve been doing this, I’ve been in politics full-time working in national politics since the 1992 campaign, and this last November election was one of the most remarkable that we’ve had during this whole period. We won all different types of races with all sorts of different candidates all over the country. We won in California and in Maine and in Pennsylvania and in Georgia by more than 20 points in statewide votes that took place. Incredible numbers. You don’t see 20 point margins in these kinds of states oftentimes. And then Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill each won by 13 points, 15 points, complete blowout victories. And in every case, the Republicans contested these races. And we also know that we won down ballot in city council races and mayoral races and county elections all across the country where they had off-year elections.

It was a route. It was a blue wave. It was a clear, unequivocal repudiation of Trump and Trumpism in about as dramatic a fashion as you could have in an off-year election like this. And then it continued when Aftyn Behn sort of dramatically overperformed and forced the Republicans to come in and spend millions and millions and millions of dollars in a +22 Republican congressional district. And then we had the great wins last week… we won the mayoralty of Miami for the first time since the 1990s, winning by 19 points. Again, this huge margin. Our candidate for mayor in Albuquerque, Tim Keller, who was running for reelection, you know, won, I think it was by 16 points in his runoff race, 58–42. And then we also flipped that deep red state house seat in Georgia last week. So we had this continuation of this very dramatic success. And, you know… we have to, I think, recognize that as down as we were and as much as our confidence had been shaken after 2024, these wins were enormous, and they were blowouts. And we know from history that the likely scenario then is that this continues throughout 2026. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s just the likely scenario. And it reminds us that this kind of strength of the Democratic Party and these kinds of wins, we saw this in 2018. We saw it in 2020. We saw our huge overperformance in the red wave election that never came in 2022. We saw it through elections throughout 2023 and early 2024. And we saw it in many of the down ballot races in 2024 underneath the presidential election. And so we have to remind ourselves that we’ve actually been fighting and beating MAGA again and again and again and again. And that we shouldn’t be intimidated and spooked. We need to be strong and not weak. And we, a year ago, we were weak and not strong. He was strong and we were weak. It’s reversed now. He is clearly weakened and we are strong as a national party. And I know that it isn’t how people necessarily feel, but I think it’s objectively true. And we have to use this strength to have greater ambition as we head into 2026.

That gets me to the first part of my little formula, which is the mitigate the damage and weaken the regime. I think there’s more we can do here. And I think that what’s happened, that what we’ve seen through the No Kings movement, 7 million people rallying in October, which played a major role, I think, in getting the Democratic Party to wake up to the sort of big election we had in November.

We’ve now seen in just recent weeks, right? We’ve seen the Senate vote three times to repeal Trump’s terrible tariffs. We saw this historic rebuke of Trump on the Epstein files where the entire Congress voted unanimously, except one, against the sitting president. I haven’t done my research on this, but I’m willing to bet this may be the only time in American history that something like that has happened, this kind of clear, unequivocal rebuke of a sitting president by people in both parties, by this unanimous vote on something, by the way, that is so disgraceful and disgusting, which is him covering up for sex crimes and one of the greatest sex traffickers in history. It took the Congress to rebuke him, to force him to release these files. We just saw today that we now have 218 votes on a discharge petition to get to vote on the ACA subsidy, to restore the ACA subsidies. Another profound rebuke. We saw even during the fight when Schumer and Jeffries led us through this battle on the government shutdown, we saw the country, you know, his numbers went way down. And so that was another place, that was another form of rebuke by the country… what we’re learning, and I think as I wrote the other day, the big lesson of 2025 that we have to take into 2026 is that when we fight him, we can win. And so therefore we should fight him more in more places and have more ambition in the way that we’re taking the fight to him and mitigate the damage and to weaken the regime. And I think this concept of weakening the regime has got to become more important.

That’s not about winning elections. It’s about weakening their ability to execute on their agenda. It’s going after their cabinet officials like Pete Hegseth. They’re the ones that have committed crimes. Pete Hegseth has committed war crimes. Kristi Noem has clearly broken the law serially on many things. We saw the Democrats last week have an amazing… one of the probably the most inspiring hearings that we’ve had so far this year where Kristi Noem got taken to the woodshed and she ran out of the hearing screaming basically and ran away because she’d been getting beat up so much because they were throwing her illegality, her crimes in her face and they weren’t backing off. You are seeing Democrats now having greater ambition. And I want to give, you know, Robert Garcia, the ranking member on the Oversight Committee in the House, a lot of credit for having orchestrated all of the Epstein stuff that’s happened. That was, you know, that thing was dead in the water and they revived it and it’s a way to weaken the regime. It’s a way to weaken Trump, right? To make it less likely that he’s effective at carrying out his agenda and driving down his poll numbers, splitting his coalition. We’ve also seen, I should have mentioned, the other kind of extraordinary ongoing rebuke of him has come from Marjorie Taylor Greene. I think that part of what’s happened is that she’s going through the equivalent of deprogramming from a cult, where she’s trying to extricate herself and restore her sense of self, having given that over to Trump and the MAGA cult… the reason why this is so important is that she’s creating an example of somebody who can now create distance between her and Trump and the cult and to criticize it and to be open about it and to expose its… core corruption and betrayal. I mean, she seems like a person who’s been personally betrayed, right? She feels betrayed. And I think she’s become a very powerful opposition figure in recent weeks. And it’s encouraging because she will encourage others to join her and is an example for others to join her. Remember, we’ve just had really important victories in Georgia in the last few weeks. And certainly, I think her beating up on Trump and the Republican Party contributed to these significant wins that we had. And so I think that we need to figure out, I think, how to continue to do what we did today, which is to split off the Republicans from Trump.

The only way that we can really mitigate the damage before the elections next year is if we get a group of Republicans to structurally break from Trump and to start blocking his agenda. Well, that’s happened, right? We had it on the tariffs. We had it on Epstein. We had it on the ACA subsidies today. And as I’ve tried to explain to you, one of the things that’s driving all of this is that there are thousands of Republicans all across the country who are running in 2026 in competitive races for state house, for city council, governor, for attorney general, for Senate, for Congress. And they are now facing much tougher elections, and there is now a high likelihood that people who thought they were in safe seats may lose, or people that believed they were going to win and make the jump to the next level in their careers now are going to have a much harder time and may lose. And what’s happening is they’re becoming disquiet and a sense… is emerging… that Trump has let them down and has forced them into very difficult circumstances. And they’re pissed. And you saw that pissed thing explode in the House today where four of these most vulnerable House members flipped over in protest against Mike Johnson today. And I cannot tell you as somebody who’s been here and worked with politicians for all these years how significant… this dynamic is now, that you’ve got these ambitious, powerful Republicans all across the country who no longer believe that they can run with Trump and they can be connected to him and that being with him is dangerous for them. And what starts happening is this is another way the regime gets weakened, as we saw today in the House. This is a very significant development, and we have to be open in understanding this. And I think it’s something that’s going to become far worse, as I’ve talked about, because just starting in a few weeks, every city council, every county council, every state legislature in the country is going to be coming back together to now have to budget and govern against the harms that Trump has done to the country.

The slowing economy means that they have less government revenue to spend. Their own people have been damaged by the weakening of the social safety net and by job loss and by higher prices brought about through the tariffs. We’re going to have all the carnage that’s going to come due to this assault on our health care system, the combination of the Medicaid cuts and the ACA subsidy reductions. We’ve taken hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars out of health care. They’re going to have to start legislating and governing against that now, not next year. This is a now thing. The higher electricity prices that, you know, I sent out an email tonight, an interview with Jay Inslee about this, the higher electricity prices, which is also something that’s creating destabilization in communities all across the country. And then also, obviously, the attacks on communities all across the country from DHS and ICE, and what that’s doing to the sense of security that people have and the way that our rights and liberties are being trampled. All of these things now… every single Republican politician in the country, at every level of government, is now going to have to legislate and govern against the harms that Trump has brought to the country. There is no way to retreat back into a Fox News bubble and pretend that these things are happening. When you hear Trump tonight tell us that inflation has gone away and the economy is booming and people are doing better and all these things. That’s not true. And it won’t be true. They won’t be able to make it true in every one of these jurisdictions. And so the likelihood is that the anger at Trump and the frustration of the political hand that he’s dealt all these politicians around the country is going to get far worse for him. And it also is going to give Democrats and all of you who work with groups that work with Democratic politicians in your communities, you need to be contacting them now and getting them ready to take these legislative sessions, these hearings. We should be having hearings all over the country in January and February at every level of government about the harms the tariffs have done, the attack on our health care. We need to help bring the electricity price increases, the gutting of our clean energy subsidies, and the attack on our citizens and the people of America through DHS and ICE. Every government can be holding days and days of hearings about this, bringing people and experts in to explain to their communities about what Trump has done to all of them. It was the impetus behind our resolutions project about how we should be bringing the usurpations and injuries and abuses of Trump and his abandonment of the constitutional order to every community in the country. But now that process is going to become universal. And you should be encouraging your local electeds to seize this opportunity to communicate powerfully about his agenda of sabotage, plunder and betrayal, about the corruption, about his absolute contempt for working people, his politics that I call “more for me and less for all of you,” or that “he’s for the oligarchs and we’re for the people.”

Whatever your structure, frame, narrative, story, message is, right? We have an incredible opportunity to talk to the American people in the coming months through our governments, not through our campaigns. And this is a really important evolution in this step. In the interview that I just released with Wes Moore, Governor Wes Moore of Maryland, we had a direct conversation about this. And I talked to him about how he’s prepping for the legislative session in January of next year when Maryland… arguably Maryland has taken more hits from this administration than any state in the country because of the loss of federal jobs that have taken place, the sort of the gutting of the NIH and other huge research institutions that exist and sit in Montgomery County. It’s a very thoughtful conversation about how one of our leading governors is going to be approaching this in just a few weeks. I can tell you that it means that we have this incredible opportunity to further weaken the regime, to mitigate the damage they’re doing together. And I think that we have to really continue to, as we do every day, to contact our electeds and to encourage them to act with greater courage, confidence, and ambition in fighting Trump. Because when we fight Trump, we can beat him. We’ve seen that. We’ve learned that lesson.

And then finally, I guess my last thing I’d like to say tonight is that I do think one of the things that I’ll be working on a lot is something I’ve been writing about sort of directly, indirectly, which is the national security strategy and Trump’s foreign policy and his seeming desire now to want to carve the world up into spheres of influence of China and Russia and the Gulf Arab states, and America, and have it be that there are these four great, you know, these great powers that are running the world and plundering along the way, right… which is a rejection of the American-led global order for the last 80 years, an abandonment of America’s historic role as a champion of democracy and freedom here and around the world. The gravity of what’s happening with these negotiations in Europe, I think with Witkoff and Kushner, selling out America, our democracy, our European allies in Ukraine to Putin, it’s a serious matter. And while we’ve been able to sort of surface a lot of other parts of the harms that he’s done, the affordability agenda and healthcare, we have a whole basket of issues around his threat to democracy here and around the world and his corruption, his unprecedented corruption that I think are inadequately surfaced in our daily discourse, that we have an opportunity together to lead in what is necessary. I think we’ve gotten to a place of tremendous comfort and success on affordability, tariffs and on health care. We need to build this third leg of the messaging stool, as I call it, around threats to democracy here and abroad and corruption, because it’s all connected. At the end of the day, Donald Trump is no longer governing for America. He’s no longer governing even for the white tribe and for his voters. He’s governing for a couple hundred oligarchs in the United States and the allied oligarchs in other countries.

And I think the level of betrayal that he is exhibiting, not only domestically, but what he’s doing to America abroad is… and to our national security is… something that we have to develop our voice on. It’s inadequate. I think that what’s going to happen with Venezuela, whatever it is, and the illegitimacy of it, the illegality of it, the ridiculousness in some ways of it, is going to be a tool for us to get into that conversation. But we have to recognize that the real game here isn’t what’s happening today in Venezuela, the Caribbean, or even the Pacific. It’s about what’s happening with his relationship with Russia and China, and whether his, intentional or not, set of strategies that appear to be doing everything he can to embolden, and empower and strengthen China and Russia at our expense. And this is where, to me, the great core of the betrayal is, that he betrayed the American people by not lowering prices and doing all the things that he promised during the campaign. He’s betrayed our democracy in the way that he’s governed, but he’s betraying us as a nation in ways that I don’t think we have adequately articulated and that I’m going to be spending time with all of you, I hope, in really bringing this to light. I mean, imagine that we’re now in a place, and I think that part of the reason why the American people have engaged on these issues is they’re seeing the videos of other people in this country having their windows smashed in and assaulted. We saw a video today of a pregnant Somali woman in Minneapolis getting dragged through the streets and having cops lay, put their knee on top of her back when she’s on the ground. A pregnant woman who was telling them that she was pregnant was treated like cattle today. And this is unacceptable. And we need to be doing more as Democrats. We have to, yes, lean into affordability and health care, but we need to be great defenders of America too. And we have to defend America at home and abroad. And we have to really lean in to the corruption, which is itself this ongoing, extraordinary betrayal of all of us.

So I want to conclude by saying two things. One is that I think that Trump… when I got asked in a press interview today to assess the year… I think that Trump has done far more harm to us than, domestically and abroad, than I would have expected. And that I think we have to recognize that this president, he is an incredible threat to our way of life, to our security, to our opportunities, to our future. And that it’s why we have to fight with incredible vigor and intensity every day. Because the harms that he’s doing are extraordinary and historic. And he’s weakening this great country profoundly. But we’ve also learned that when we fight him, we can win, and that he is weakened, and he’s in decline, and that he’s struggling, and he’s in ill health. And in his addled state, he’s making terrible decisions about the future of the country and his own politics. But we should not expect that they’re going to take all this laying down.

Part of what happened in 2023 and 2024 is Donald Trump ended 2022 in a similar place in polling to where he is now. He was down on average about minus 20. He’s now minus 15, 16. He had gone through an incredible decline in his approval rating. But between December of 2022 and the election last year, he went from minus 20 in his approval to minus 7. That all the ads that we ran, all the campaigns that we ran, all the messaging that we did… Donald Trump was able to restore his standing with the public during that period and make an election that shouldn’t have been competitive, competitive. They’re going to try to do the exact same thing in 2026. I know there’s a lot of fear about him rigging elections. I’m much more, frankly, today fearful of how he’s going to spend unprecedented amounts of money working with his foreign allies to try to dominate the information space in order to memory hole all the negative things that he’s done, the harms that he’s done, and to restore his standing so they can be competitive in the elections in 2026, and to denigrate our candidates. Trump has access to unprecedented amounts of money. We’ve never been up against a money machine like we’re going to be up against next year, which is why our money and our work is not something that has to happen in the summer and the fall. It has to happen now. This early money really matters. It strengthens our candidates and our campaigns and makes it more likely that we’re going to be successful. But I think that… for all the good that we’ve done… I think we can’t in any way take our eye off the ball here in that there are going to be a lot of very powerful forces that are going to do everything possible to ensure that the Republicans stay in power. And I don’t think they’re solely limited to domestic forces. I think there are going to be foreign governments that will also be. Remember, I mean, Russia intervened in our election in 2016 successfully. This has already happened in America, right? There’s a precedent for this. And so I think it’s why we have to take time off during the holidays, hang with family, rest and restore, regenerate, get our groove back, read books, take long walks, drink good wine… whatever it is that you need to do to sort of restore your strength and to check out and get away from the ugliness of the day-to-day.

Because next year is a year of opportunity for us, but opportunities only become success when we seize them. And together, we need to rest up and get ready to go seize this big opportunity we have on behalf of our kids and our grandkids and the American people next year. I think we can have a great election next year. I think we can win back power. I think we can continue to mitigate the damage and beat him in these fights. But we need to recognize that we’re going to have to work our asses off. And that next year may be the hardest year of all the work, the amazing work we’ve all done together over these years since Trump came down the escalator, next year may be the most important of all. And so rest up everybody.

And I just want to say thank you for all that you’ve done to have made this year electorally and politically wildly successful for us. It sets us up for what comes next. But what comes next is a big one. And I look forward to being in this fight with all of you every day. Thank you so much. Those are my thoughts. Let me get to questions.

Q&A Transcript - Simon Rosenberg Gathering With Hopium Paid Subscribers (December 17, 2025)

So, lots of questions. Wow. A lot of great questions tonight. So here are the main themes. Just let me put them out there and I’ll try to work my way through them. Rundown of the ASDC DNC meetings that I’ve been writing about. The Susie WilesVanity Fair interview. Update from Texas. You know, you saw my great interview with Chair Kendall Scudder the other day, who gives a sort of an initial take on where things are in Texas. What’s going to happen in Venezuela? The discharge petition. What happens next? And then the Anne Applebaum article today that I shared. Those are some of the main things that came up.

Number one is my report on the ASDC DNC meeting. You know, look, I led a panel there of six of the state parties that had big wins in 2025, in November 2025. And I think in general, there was a sense of… as I wrote to you, I think the word that I came away as sort of the summary word was determination. People were determined to win. And the victories were an affirmation that we can win. And also what we learned… many of you know that Ken Martin is investing unprecedented amounts of money in state parties. It’s allowing state parties to do much more than they’ve been able to do. They have much more capacity to operate at a high level in all the ways that parties operate. Communications, voter registration, running elections, candidate recruitment. I mean, all the things that parties do. And you heard a lot in my panel about parties learning how to do more with the additional resources they had and the beginning of this process of building a party that has 50… you know… 50 strong state parties, right? And you’re hearing from the state party leaders and you’re hearing in our interviews, I mean, I just shared with you an interview with Kendall Scudder from Texas, who talked about the money that we’ve raised for them and how it went to allowing them the resources they had to recruit, and have a Democrat running now in every major race in Texas for the first time in over 50 years. It’s a huge party-wide achievement. Again, nobody could have done that except the party, right? The party has this unique role to play. And that’s why we saw that. If you listen to the interview that we did with Charlie Dingman, the Maine Chair, we put a lot of money into their success on Question 1… a ballot initiative Republicans had put on and spent a lot of money on that would have made it much harder for older people to, you know, our voters to vote next year. It was a way to rig the election, in essence. We won that by more than 30 points, a huge victory… watch the interview that I shared the other day. It’s on the site, of Charlie talking about how the investment we made and how only, the only way we could have had the success that we had in that ballot initiative was with a strong party.

And so what I’m very excited about is this community is part of, in my view, one of the great experiments of this time and sort of learnings from what happened in 2024 in recent years, which is that, you know, we’ve had a hole in the donut, as I’ve called it. I mean, we have this whole Democratic ecosystem out there and everybody doing, you know, Indivisible groups and labor and Emily’s List and everybody else. But the core of it is the Democratic Party itself. And the Democratic Party has atrophied… there are a whole bunch of reasons. We don’t have time to get into it tonight. But it’s atrophied as an entity. And the truth is, in this moment of crisis for the country, we need every part of our infrastructure operating at the highest level of their capability. We need everybody in. We need all the people rowing in the boat together. Right? And the party, though, was probably the greatest underperforming part of our ecosystem. And that was a central reason Ken Martin ran. He had run one of the most successful state parties for 14 years and been the leader of the state party organization called the ASDC, had enormous knowledge about what a good state party looks like and how to build one. And he and his team are taking that sensibility out across the country, and we’re seeing far greater ambition from the state parties, and we’re seeing greater results. And this is something we learned at Hopium in 2024, right… our major project in 2024 was investing in North Carolina. We raised over a million dollars for Anderson Clayton and the North Carolina Democratic Party. And we had greater success down ballot in North Carolina than in any other battleground state. Anderson has come and spoken to you and talked about how that would not have happened without our investment, without the money that we spent and the ability for her to build a separate field operation that was specific to the needs of North Carolina. And, you know, down-ballot races. And so we’ve already seen here, Jane Kleeb, same thing. We had tremendous success in Nebraska in 2024, another place we made major investment. We’ve made huge investments in the Wisconsin party both in the Susan Crawford race earlier this year, where we had this big 10-point win in the Supreme Court race. And I’m really proud of what we’ve been doing to help these state parties… I still believe that the best return on the dollar today in the pro-democracy movement is to give to state parties, because they’re going from a place of very low… and so they can double or triple in capacity if we invest.

And so very proud of all of you for being part of that. If you haven’t learned about… if you’re new to our Audacious Expansion Project, as I call it, check it out, learn more about it. It’s a very ambitious project to win in more red places and red states to help put… to expand the map in this year of opportunity for us so that we have a legitimate chance at not just flipping the House, but also making the Senate competitive, which will be hard, but it’s doable. And so take a look at that.

So… I came back fortified. And also, it was a confirmation for me, as somebody who’s been around party activity now for over three decades, that this plan that Ken Martin has and Jane Kleeb has is the right plan and it’s working. It’s working. And so we need to keep investing towards it… it was a confirmation for me that we’ve made smart decisions here about our allocation of resources, but also that we’re fixing one of the things in the party that we needed to fix. And that’s really important and in a way that’s going to be deeply consequential.

And so in Texas, yeah, I mean, I would just say we’re going to learn a lot more about what happens in Texas. Texas is now a state that we have to consider to be a battleground state. We’ve seen competitive polling for our statewide candidates there. We are going to have a primary there. It’s one of the reasons we’re investing in the Democratic Party. And we’re going to learn more about the House races too. But if you’re interested in Texas, watch the interview with Kendall Scudder. It’s on the site, the new dynamic chair of the Texas Party. He’s a remarkable guy, and I’m really proud. We’ve raised these state parties now almost 50,000 bucks together, all of us. I mean, we’re about to hit our initial goal, but we need to keep going next year. This early money really matters because it allows them to hire staff that will be with them the whole election, as opposed to hiring staff in June or July and coming in late, when it’s a lot harder for them to be successful if they’re coming in so late in the cycle.

I talked about the war in Venezuela. I think that, as I was saying, and I’ll combine this with the Anne Applebaum article, is that we have to recognize that Trump is operating now completely outside of any understanding of how a leader of a democracy would operate. That he has abandoned not only the American constitutional order, but he’s abandoned the system that was put into place after World War II. Because at the core of the post-World War II global order was the UN Charter. And the UN Charter, at its core, was about one central thing, which is that no country could invade another country. That we, nations who were sovereign, we needed to end this idea that great powers could just go take stuff from others. And so the entire global system that America built, imagined and built, by our party, and we built together. I think it’s the greatest achievement of the Democratic Party in our history, in my view. It’s had the greatest consequence. It created a golden age in human history. Up until recently, you know, we saw incredible poverty reduction, huge increases in literacy, the health of people all around the world, you know, life expectancy exploded. We’ve seen wealth and opportunity that are unprecedented in all of human history. There’s never been a better time to be alive in all of human history than during this period of Pax Americana and the period of what I call the era of the Four Freedoms and the American-led global order.

And Trump, despite the success of this global order, despite how it’s made America the most powerful nation in the history of the world, the most prosperous, he’s walking away from all that. And the gravity… the new rationales… and drugs, you notice they’ve walked away from that. It’s not about cocaine or fentanyl. It’s now about the story that they’re telling that in 1976, the Venezuelan government nationalized the oil industry in Venezuela and took away what he’s now claiming as American property from American corporations, not from America, by the way, but from American oil companies. So Trump has basically, in the last 24 hours, made it clear that we’re going to war to go seize the oil fields, which is the biggest oil reserves in the world, by the way, bigger than Saudi Arabia, bigger than America, bigger than anywhere else, because we own it. And they took it away from us. That’s literally his argument, right? And that somehow we own all that oil, that it’s ours, it’s not theirs, and that we’re fighting this war to go get back something that’s rightfully ours. Stephen Miller wrote an incredible statement about this today that’s all over the internet. And by doing that, by just disregarding the UN Charter, what he’s doing is that he’s saying it’s now open season for all great powers to do this in their own domain. So for example, it creates a logic for Russia just taking Ukraine and Crimea, or Crimea as part of Ukraine and Ukraine itself. It creates a logic for China to take Taiwan. It basically is a way of torching and burning the entire rules-based global order that has kept the world peaceful and prosperous for 80 years. That’s all ending now. That’s what Anne Applebaum wrote about in this piece (see gift link in my post yesterday), is that the gravity of what’s happening here is that we’re leaving a rules-based global order. And what I have said, and I haven’t yet figured out how to articulate this in a way that I’m comfortable with, but my rough shot on it is that Donald Trump is an idiot, and he’s corrupt, and he’s in decline, and he’s delusional, and somehow he’s convinced himself that by us eliminating this global order, this rules-based order that we imagined and built, that made us unprecedentedly powerful and prosperous, that we’ll be in a place where we and China and Russia and the Gulf Arab states will be running the world, and that somehow this will be better for us than what we have. As opposed to making it more us, you know, sacrificing our, for example NATO, right? NATO disappears in all of this, and we’re now alone. We’re not with our European allies. And what Trump is doing is, in the process of doing, is I think that China and Russia are laughing every fucking day, because what he’s doing is that he believes that he can work with Putin and work with China, that they can cooperate as great powers, like the great real estate families in New York, right, who would do business together. And they’re going to gut him like a ******* fish, and they’re going to gut this country like a ******* fish.

And in his idiocy and his naivete and his corruption, they’re lining his pockets and bribing him… because what’s happening right now in Ukraine is Trump and his family are taking a massive bribe from Putin in order to hand over Ukraine and move the America away from the alliance that we have in Europe. The gravity of this stuff is incredible. And I will be honest with you, I think our leaders in the Democratic Party have not stepped up adequately on this, and that, in order to explain to us what’s happening, because this is about our ability to be an independent nation and free, and not just to be a democracy, but not to be a vassal state to Russia. And what I wrote, my very first piece about Venezuela that I wrote, is that we have to understand what this war is, is not a war, it’s a surrender to Russia and China. And that Trump is in the process of surrendering this country and our sovereignty and our future to two countries that have sought our destruction for much of the last generation of politics, or certainly our weakening.

And so there’s a lot of gravity to what’s happening now. And as all of you try to assess and make sense of what’s happening in Venezuela, what is the rush, right, to rush this out right before Christmas, it’s happening simultaneously with these negotiations in Europe, try to spend time thinking about why, what’s the rush, why is this so important to do now, what’s, you know, he lied about why we were assembling this armada off of Venezuela. They’ve now created an entirely new rationale in the last 24 hours because he just wants to go take and invade another country and be big and powerful, because he doesn’t feel big and powerful, because the American people have rejected him. So… we’re entering a period of, I think, enormous danger for the country. And I don’t think we have adequately explained the level of betrayal to our national interest that all of this represents and how Donald Trump is the most dangerous American that there’s ever been for the American people, not for the rest of the world, but for us. And it’s not clear, and what I’ve begun to wonder in my writing on Blue Sky is, is he ignorant of all this, does he not care, is he so far gone and delusional that he doesn’t understand, because he gets up every day and tells us that inflation has been eliminated and that the economy is booming. And he talks to us as if he doesn’t actually understand what is happening around him. Whether he actually understands the consequences of everything he’s doing, I think this is an area that we have to dive into more, that it’s not really clear that Trump knows what he’s doing any longer. And he’s unaware of the harms that he’s doing to the national interest and to the American people. He’s unaware of it.

You know, because he was given an opportunity by his own party to course correct on tariffs. The Senate Republicans worked with us, Senate Republicans, to repeal the tariffs. He could have decided and said, you know, you’re right, these things are hurting us, I don’t want to do it anymore, I tried, it was a mistake, let’s move on. He had the opportunity in the last few weeks to restore the ACA subsidies and to restore the Medicaid cuts. He passed on that. He actually literally threatened to starve people during the government shutdown, which is a central reason that Democrats ended up cutting a deal with him prematurely, I think, because they were scared about the harms that were going to happen to people in this country. People were going to starve because of Donald Trump. We know that his cuts to USAID, the estimates are that 14 million people will die in the coming years because of those cuts, and that includes 5 million children. Donald Trump knowingly has put 14 million people to death. He is a mass murderer, and he will always be known as a mass murderer. And I think we have to take this decline in his health and his cognitive state. We have to take it up another level and to start raising questions about whether he can continue to lead us, if he’s unaware of the harms that he’s actually doing, because he’s not acknowledging the harm. He’s not acknowledging that prices are going up. He’s not acknowledging that the healthcare cuts are going to cause tens of millions of people to have their health premiums increased dramatically. He’s not acknowledging the cuts to USAID are going to cause all the deaths. He’s not acknowledging that giving away Ukraine and Europe to Putin will make us less safe. He’s not acknowledging any of these things. So does he actually know that they’re happening? I know this sounds insane. And Simon, like, you know, it’s Christmas season, you should be more generous in your heart, and Hanukkah, right, to be the Festival of Lights… but I’m now really wondering whether he actually is aware of the gravity of the harms that he’s doing to the country, as opposed to being heartless. And it’s obviously a combination of both, right?

Let me get to a few more questions. I went on for a long time about this. By the way, the bubble that you’re talking, that somebody has wrote about is being penetrated by Fox News in the polling. It’s being penetrated by Marjorie Taylor Greene. It was penetrated by Elon Musk. It’s penetrated by the Epstein files. It’s getting hard, as I have said repeatedly, it is getting harder and harder for even Susie Wiles to defend the indefensible. That this is just too much, he’s gone too far, it’s too fucking crazy, there’s too much harm being done, he’s asking too much out of all of us to accept his lawlessness, his abandonment of the Constitution. And I think that what you’re seeing is various stages of the circle of defiance growing, right, of Republicans not being able to defend the indefensible. And I think that, you know, they’re not going to be able to defend this war. I mean if you watch the videos of the people who went to the briefing yesterday with Hegseth in the House and Senate… they’re not providing any kind of rationale for why we’re doing this… there are explanations that Rubio wants to do this because we, you know, flip the regime in Caracas, and then we can go to Havana, and this is going to long settle his, you know, the battle of the Cubans down, to get back and finally get rid of all the communists, you know… that ruined their great country of Cuba. That can’t be the rationale for this. I mean, it’s just too wild. And I think it’s obviously wag the dog. It’s obviously, you know, what I talk about is that they aren’t, again, they’re not course correcting. They’re not course correcting. They’re not doing things that are making things better for us. They think they’re just going to be able to spend a billion dollars and memory hole and bullshit their way through all this.

People have asked… how could Susie Wiles have done this interview? I mean, obviously, in that interview, implicitly, is this arrogance and belief that there’s never going to be consequences for their actions. That’s why I thought, and I shared the speech today, from Congresswoman Ramirez last week that she gave at the end of the hearing with Kristi Noem. She said, I am going to guarantee accountability for what you’ve done. And I love that, because they need to believe that there is some chance that either legally or reputationally, the things that they’ve done, sending people to foreign gulags illegally, the terror regime that Kristi Noem is overseeing all over the country, that there will be consequences for this.

And they have obviously good reason to believe there won’t be, given that we failed to create consequences for Trump for what he did in attacking our Congress in 2021, or for him continuing to evade responsibility for all of his various lawlessness of his entire life, right. But we have to raise the specter that there will be someday accountability and judgment, reputationally and legally, for them in order to make it, for them to be more reticent about following this errant leader of theirs… I thought this hearing with Noem, one of the reasons she ran out is that Democrats were so forceful in bringing her crimes to her and explaining these were illegal and that she was breaking the law. And I think she ran out of there because I think she got scared. I honestly believe that to some degree, this issue of her potentially going to jail or living in infamy through the treatment of people is something that they’ve been able to sort of pretend was never going to happen to them, that this was righteous things that they were doing. And that righteousness was debunked and rebuked and attacked, and successfully, by us in that hearing. And she couldn’t handle it. Because in a democracy, that woman should spend the rest of her life in jail. And everyone around her should spend the rest of their life in jail. And they should be, and it should be mean, for what we do to them, because they have been, they’ve acted with such impunity and such inhumanity towards others here.

Let me go see a few more questions. We’ve got a few more minutes here. You guys have been… lots of really powerful questions and insights tonight from all of you.

Let me say something about impeachment. I don’t believe impeachment is something we should discuss because it’s never going to happen. But what can happen is that he can resign and he can step away. And he has a really good reason to do that, which is his health. And so… I think the way that we should be socializing this to our community is about him departing and leaving voluntarily or through the pressure of others the way that Nixon did. I think that’s a far more realistic scenario than going through it because we’re not going to have the vote. Nixon never went through impeachment, right. I mean, he resigned before it happened. And what happened is that he was told that he was going to be impeached and then he left. But there’s no possibility that Republicans in Congress in the next 12 months are going to impeach him and remove him. There’s no possibility of that. And I think it’s creating false hope and it’s wasted action and activity. But what is possible is this old, rancid, declining man is no longer capable of doing the job, that he’s unfit and unwell, and that we need to have a national conversation about this. And I think that that is doable because I think it’s actually… we’re already there. And I know that everyone’s like, he’s never going to leave. You know, anything is possible in this world. And we have to, you know, I think that’s a far more realistic way of saying that, of what is something that could happen. And then people, of course, because we’re Democrats, we turn a win into a loss immediately, and it becomes, well, what about J.D. Vance, right. Well, J.D. Vance is not Donald Trump. And, you know, I, and we have to take one day at a time. Donald Trump is a, is a sui generis, unique figure. And having him depart and leave under any circumstances would be an extraordinary achievement… the only reason that’s even conceivable now is because of how far he’s fallen in the polls, their election victories, which is why what I still am arguing to you is that my assumption is that in January, they’re going to start running a general election level campaign, running national advertising, communicating about his successes. He’s going to begin that process tonight and their “successes,” in quotes, right, and they’re going to start attacking our candidates and denigrating our candidates. This is what they do. They’re really good at it, right.

I mean, remember that the chief political advisor to Trump, you know, sort of cut his teeth and became famous through swift boats in 2004, where they invented attacks against a war hero in the United States that were false. And so we have to recognize that I think we’re operating in a political environment that is not going to be like any other midterm that we’ve been part of, and we need to be fully engaged. And it’s why I’m continuing to advocate for our candidates and to give them the resources they need to be able to operate in this, to take advantage of the opportunities that we have next cycle.

I don’t think there is a formal rebuttal to the speech tonight because it’s not a State of the Union, but I’m sure that we’re going to see tons of videos from senators and congressmen and governors. I’m sure the Newsom, the crack Newsom social media team will be out there doing their thing tonight. I’m sure we’re going to see a lot of engagement on it tonight. It’ll be interesting to see how he does and performs, right, because his performances, will he fall asleep in the middle of his speech?

So let me just see. I think I covered a lot of the main questions here tonight. I’m just scanning through. So let me conclude by this. So first of all, I just want to say thanks, everybody. I love this community. I love the work that we do. I love the vigor of our debate and discourse every day. I love the way that all of you bring your experiences in other organizations and in your states and your communities into our community to enrich us and help us learn and get stronger and better together. I love the learning that we’re doing together. And I can tell you that when I meet with politicians and elected officials and party leaders, I say to them that I feel like I’m very connected to the Democratic Party, and I’m aware of what’s happening in our debates and our discussions because of our daily chat that we have, right. I read almost every comment. I mean, there are times when if we get a whole bunch, I’ll miss one or two, but I try to read every comment. I can’t respond to everyone, obviously. I wish I could. But the stories that you tell, the articles that you bring in, people, some of you send me post stuff that I then use in Hopium the next day. I learn about it through all of you. I just want to say that I think the chat that we have is very, very powerful. And it helps ground all of us because we’re learning from each other. It’s a learning community, that we’re learning from one another, and I’m just really grateful for that.

And I want to encourage all of you who are watching, who are Hopium paid subscribers, to be more engaged in the chat next year, to share, to engage, to have the courage to share and be in this debate and to do it in a way that’s consistent with our values, to be respectful, to be data-driven, to bring links, to not come in and dump, but to add value and to respect your colleagues and peers in the Hopium community. You know, I will tell you that I often, you know, you hear when you hear the people that I interview, you often hear people say like, you know, the Hopium is like really kind of an amazing thing. You should hear what they tell me privately right before we go on air or afterwards about how the money we’ve raised and the activism and the sort of the can-do spirit, it’s like so inspiring. We have a reputation, right, us little proud plucky patriots of Hopium, as being warriors and fighters. And I love that. I love that because that’s what we need. We’re leading through our grit and our fight and our resilience and our stick-to-it-ness and to getting up every day. Hopium is published this year every single day, by the way. I’m pretty sure. I don’t think I’ve missed a day. And I do that in part because I’m asking you to leave it all on the playing field. So I got to do it too. Hopefully next year I can publish some weeks six times a week, right. I won’t be publishing over the Christmas holiday unless something crazy happens. But I’ve worked seven days a week this whole year… at Hopium… at least it seems that way. But the reason I say that is that we’re leading through our example. We’re helping. And the other thing that I want to share with you before we go is the, I spoke to a leader of one of the large grassroots groups recently in a call, who told me that one of the things that has been very important to them about Hopium has been this spirit that we have of not denigrating others in our family and showing respect at all times to people in the movement and recognizing that we will be disappointed by our leaders because they’re human during the course.

But our responsibility is to lift people up and not tear them down, and to not seek factional war, but to seek to embrace the rainbow, and to express and to acknowledge our differences and to learn from each other, and to not be perpetually disappointed and not allow ourselves to get to a place of what I call perpetual disappointment, meaning which is that we’re perpetually frustrated and angry, as opposed to anticipating that we will be disappointed. That’s normal in any environment. It’s not a straight line up, right. It’s two steps forward, one step back. We get wins. We have losses. We have good days. We have bad days. And that our energy has to be about beating them and not beating each other, and beating each other up. And that we have to push, and at all times be disciplined, as hard as it can be sometimes.

Am I wildly disappointed sometimes in our political leaders? Yeah. Do you hear me spending a lot of time talking about that? No. What I’m trying to figure out is how do we make it better, how do we keep moving the ball down the playing field, how do we take the next hill? And I have heard from leaders in our movement that our sensibility has been very powerful for them, that they’ve adopted that strategy in their communities, and that they are encouraging people not to spend all their time whining and complaining, but doing, and recognizing that we all know we’re in the shit together, the question is, what do we do about it? The sensibility of Hopium is also something I’m really proud of. And again, gang, like when I started this thing, you know, I had no idea what I was doing, and I had no idea what was really going to happen. And I’m just really… I want to tell you how fulfilled I am in this work. I don’t have any other income or any other, I mean, I advise politicians and talk to people, but I’m not a consultant. I don’t consult formally. I consult through Hopium. And I have the luxury of going out to Los Angeles and hanging out and talking to people because of all of you and the opportunity you’ve given me. And so the paid subscribers of Hopium, this stuff really matters. And so thank you all for having made Hopium possible.

I mean, without our paid subscribers, there is no other money funding all this. I don’t have a corporation that is, you know, raising outside money or outside investors. We’ve had a couple people step up and give us a little bit more money, but there isn’t, you know, a nonprofit or any kind of company. This is it. It’s all of you. I mean, we’re all in this together, right. And so this is your place too. You’ve helped build this place. And that’s what I love. I mean, yes, it’s a lot of Simon every day, I know that. The other thing… I’ll send out an email to the paid subscribers before in the next few days. I want to hear from you guys about things we should be doing next year. And we can talk about that when we get back in January, about things we can do, improvements we can make, people you want to hear from. I hope you see the quality and frequency of the interviews I’ve been doing. I think they’ve been wonderful. I want to thank Lincoln for really helping grow that part of Hopium, making that a very meaningful thing. I think it fits. I talked to you about how I wanted to make sure these interviews fit with our zeitgeist in our way, and I think they have.

And also, I will tell you that I hope my last point here is that if you watch the Jay Inslee interview today, I want some of you who watch a lot of the interviews to reflect upon how often and frequent it is that when someone comes and speaks to us, that they actually address the concept of Hopium in the interview and how important optimism and hope is, is to them in their own careers and how much they enjoy it. It’s one of the reasons that I think our interviews are so joyous and joyful oftentimes, is because people love the orientation.

And this has been an interesting thing for me, you know, and I’ll conclude by saying my, you know, the person that really, the reason I’m really here today to a great degree is Bill Clinton, and my experience of working for him in the campaign and afterwards is, and, you know, he was the man from Hope. He literally was from Hope, Arkansas. It’s hard to believe, right. But he always believed that in the power of optimism and that what we have done is we have taken the whole concept of hope and optimism and Hopium and connected it to good works. So our version of Hopium isn’t irrational hope. It’s hope with a plan. That we don’t hope that tomorrow’s going to be better, we do the work to make it so. And I love that thing that we’ve settled on as sort of our core guiding principle, because it isn’t enough to hope. We have to do the work, you know, to make it so. And that’s what we do here, right… we have this belief that if we do the work, we can make things better. And we’ve shown that. We’ve had unbelievable electoral victories here. We’ve had incredible successes here at Hopium in the last two and a half years. And so this isn’t pie in the sky, you know, wishful thinking, right. This is, you know, we know that we can go take that next hill if we’ve got a good plan and we go work and get the work done and go get it done together.

Now we have a really big thing we need to do next year, which is we need to mitigate the damage, continue to weaken the regime, advance our agenda and express our values and love of country. Our sense of optimism and hope… and the sense of opportunity that is core to who we are. And then we need to win back as much power as we possibly can. These are doable things. We’ve shown that when we fight him, we can win. So rest up everybody over the holidays. Do whatever you’re going to do tonight at nine o’clock. Ignore it, watch it, be in horror of it, right, and, you know, let’s keep fighting everybody because I’m just so proud to be in this fight with all of you and grateful to the paid subscribers for making this Hopium project possible. Take care, everybody.