Transcript - Simon Rosenberg Presentation and Q & A With Hopium Paid Subscribers (2/18/26)
Welcome everyone, Simon Rosenberg, Hopium Chronicles, back with our weekly gathering of our proud plucky patriots here in the Hopium community. And each week on Wednesday nights, almost every week, we get together, and the goal here is to take a step back from the day-to-day, the onslaught of everything that is coming at us every day, the unending assault from Trump, the information assault that we’re under, and to take a step back to sort of assess how are we doing. Are we making progress? Is he gaining too much ground? And I try to do that each week for you. And then we get to dive into questions and have a conversation. So here are my thoughts on this February 18th, 2026, the beginning of the Year of the Fire Horse, which is, I think an appropriate and powerful symbol. It represents powerful transformation. And my God, does this country need powerful transformation from where we are right now. So this is a welcome development, the fire horse.
I have a couple observations. Number one is that I think the big thing I want to try to convey tonight to all of you is that I know that it doesn’t feel this way, and this is why… doing data and analysis… and taking a step back, because there’s a lot of emotion every day that we all have that we’re bringing. This disappointment, frustration, anger, fear, all of those things. I think that the resistance to Trump and the backlash, and the rejection and the repudiation, has become really significant, and what I mean by that is that he came in here roaring, right, the shock and awe, they were prepared, they had Project 2025, they had the hubris of this landslide victory that happened in his mind, and they just went for it, right. They’ve just gone for it on every possible domain. Whether it was vaporizing USAID within weeks of getting there, allowing Elon to run around the administration, bringing in crazy lunatics that somehow the Senate, you know, allowed to go in and serve our government, just destroying, unconstitutionally, parts of our government. Tearing down the East Wing, right, sending paramilitaries to our streets, stealing, kidnapping, seizing a foreign head of state, you know, trying to steal Greenland, right. You know, the tariffs on everybody all the time at 3:00 in the morning. Trump has been unbound, impulsive, wild, and reckless. And he’s made a lot of mistakes.
And I think what’s happened now, looking backwards, is that one, you know, I think that they believe they were just going to come in and everyone was going to bend the knee, right, it was going to be like Game of Thrones and people were going to yield, right, to him. All people all around the world, and if they didn’t, he would tariff them. And it just hasn’t happened. I mean, the state and the lower courts, they’re losing virtually every case that is being brought to the lower courts. And I know that some of them go up to the Supreme Court, and then the corrupt Supreme Court waves their magic wand and has their dark potions that they do, and somehow they come up with this stuff. But even today, the administration, the Department of Education, had to announce that they were no longer pursuing their anti-DEI initiatives, which were sort of the central battleground of the administration in the early days. After a year of litigation and fighting, what happened is the lower courts have reminded the White House and the Congress that we have a Constitution and we have laws, and they, at least until told otherwise, that they’re going to implement those laws. And even though they made a decision to act lawlessly and to act as if laws no longer applied to them, in this kind of very fascistic understanding that they were above law, that law was not applicable to them, that was for little people, which is sort of the core of fascism… if you really want to think about what fascism really is, right, which is that there’s this elite class that don’t need to be bothered by the everyday stuff, like laws and rules and, you know, democracy and all those things that get in the way of the great men that have to do their great things… that the courts held and they continue to be an incredible problem. And you can tell the administration is sort of getting worn down by it.
We’ve seen, you know, the we’ve seen the Democratic attorneys general and the states are banding together and had tremendous victories in the courts. And I think not only have the lower courts held, but federalism has been a far greater bulwark against his autocratic desires than I think that they anticipated in the states. You know, many modern democracies don’t have this kind of federal system that we have. And it’s turned out that not only did the founding fathers split our government into three pieces, the legislative branch, the judicial branch, and the executive branch, but also by creating federalism and this idea that the states are also sovereign, it became another powerful bulwark against autocracy in a way that I don’t think that Trump and Stephen Miller and Russell Voight and JD Vance all anticipated. And I think that’s been a big success for us looking backwards.
Third is that I think the growth of our movement, the No Kings movement, and the Tesla takedowns, and now the emerging opposition to ICE and to the detention centers, you’ve just seen the American people just step up — such inspiration. All of you, right, all of you are here tonight, have all been doing your part. And I think that, you know, the American people have really been the heroes of this story in many ways. I mean, there are many heroes, J.B. Pritzker, Gavin Newsom, you know, make your list… we had Delia Ramirez today, who I think has been a real hero on fighting ICE and DHS. There have been many heroes that have emerged during this time and congressional leaders, political leaders. And they’ve been amazing and inspiring. And, you know, you can feel them gaining power and stepping into their own power by defending this great country and not just being for affordability, but fighting for democracy and freedom here and everywhere. I think that when you look back at this time, the big hero is the American people. Including Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who gave their lives for their neighbors and for our democracy. You know, that this sort of outpouring of people has been just stunning and incredible.
And then next you have how the American people have rejected him. And this is really important. And I think that, you know, I’ve been studying polling for over 30 years. And I’ve been working full time in Democratic politics since January of 1992. And so… you know, I’ve paid for polls, I’ve studied polling, I’ve seen all the polling. Trump’s decline and his rejection and repudiation by the American people has been extraordinary. You know, he has fallen faster and further than he did in the first term now, officially, based on polling in the last few weeks. In many of these recent polls, he is below his first term. And remember, he got 46% of the vote the first time. He got 50% this time. So for him to be below where he was at this point in 2018 means that he’s fallen further and faster. And because he came in at a higher mark, and for him to be lower… it means further and faster. And he’s now below where he was at this point in 2018, an election that we won by 8.6 points and had one of the strongest midterm performances since World War II.
And we’ve had the other kind of huge, incredible, affirming event — all of our wins and overperformances all across the country…..we’re often overwhelmed by the things that we are concerned about. But the performances we’ve had in elections… the November elections were unbelievable. The fact that just a few weeks ago, within a 10-day span, we had 30-plus point overperformances and two upset victories in red districts in Louisiana and Texas, right, I mean, these weren’t swing districts where we won both of them. You know, in Trump country, right… this wasn’t in a purple state, in a purple district… these were red districts and red states. Incredible victories in Texas, Louisiana.
And then we had last week… you’ve started now seeing the Republicans in Congress really getting nervous about what’s happening. And not only have Trump’s efforts to contain the Epstein files completely failed and now metastasized and gone global… Pam Bondi looked like a ridiculous fool last week. And today, Les Wexner… like this thing is just marching on and just eroding his legitimacy and his standing with the public and with his own party, because this particularly is an issue that goes deeply into MAGA. Marjorie Taylor Greene continues to beat the living hell out of Trump over this stuff, even from outside of Congress. And so this continues to erode him. But the other thing that happened last week, I’m just going to list… I went through this list of things that happened to Trump last week that were not good in the last ten days.
Crypto has completely crashed, which was a huge source of his money and power and actually brought along a bunch of young voters for him that he may not have gotten otherwise. The jobs numbers last week were terrible. We had essentially no new jobs that were created in 2025. It was one of the worst years of job creation in modern American history that was certainly outside of a recession. He had this illicit campaign they ran to jail and imprison two senators and four congressmen, I mean, not only did the grand jury not return an indictment, there wasn’t a single vote for the indictment in the grand jury, they got zero, right, because it was such an outrageous set of charges. This was a hugely embarrassing moment for this inept, rancid administration. The tariff votes… he lost two huge votes last week in Congress on his signature economic issue. And we now, both the House and the Senate, both voted in the last few months to repeal the Canadian tariffs. What a signal to send as we were going into this Munich conference last week. I mean, over the last week, an incredible signal of repudiation, rejection sent to the whole world. The whole world doesn’t want these tariffs. And now Congress is stepping up, and the whole world saw that, right.
We saw Abrego Garcia has gone free. They did an about-face on the mRNA flu vaccine after canceling it and walking away from it. They reinstated it today. Colbert just kicked their ass so badly in the last few days, and their attempt to diminish James Talarico backfired on them just weeks before the primary happened. You’ve also seen the drawdown in Minnesota last week, right, which was a clear kind of retreat. I mean, even if they, we don’t really know what’s happening on the ground and people in Minnesota say that things haven’t changed, but it looks like he was retreating. And then yesterday the DHS spokesperson quit, right, to sense more, you know, chaos. There’s unbelievable chaos happening at HHS, CDC and NIH right now. And all of a sudden, right, this thing, this Trumpian thing just looks so unbelievably weak and wobbly. And he’s been losing and failing and getting repudiated and rejected. And the circle of defiance is growing. And it’s glorious, right, I mean, this is what we all wanted to happen. This is what had to happen.
Whatever your scenario for us getting to the other side of Trumpism, you know, these things that are happening needed to happen. And they’re happening. And he’s so weak now and so desperate and pathetic that it looks like he’s going to launch some crazy war in Iran. He tried to steal Greenland. That didn’t work. He’s declared himself the emperor of the Americas and the high lord of the Western Hemisphere. And that, you know, didn’t really give him the kind of jolt that he needed to feel strong, given how much everything is collapsing and around him. Right. And he’s now finding, and we’ve talked about this repeatedly here, that when things start going bad and he feels weak, he then escalates. This is the same pattern. He then escalates. It’s rejected by the American people. He loses further ground and then he has to find the next big thing to escalate. And he had an escalation with Greenland. The Europeans stuffed him on that and he retreated like he retreated in Minnesota. And part of what we’re learning through all of this is that there’s this incredibly powerful lesson from history that we’re seeing play out in front of our own eyes, which is that the autocrat must be challenged on everything all the time, or they view the lack of a challenge as weakness, and then they escalate. And so the lack of a challenge and the lack of the fight including the drawdown in Minnesota was us, you know, not obeying in advance and buying into their DHS funding bill, which was this huge rebellion by the House and Senate Democrats who came together to fight him. And all of a sudden, all around him, right, his cabinet officials look completely batshit crazy and inept and loony tunes. They know Robert Kennedy is a huge problem. They’re trying to rein in all the crazy he’s doing over there. Noem is clearly gone, I don’t know when she’s going to go, but you know, all of a sudden this thing looks like a dumpster fire and not you know, like the wizard, the old man behind the curtain, the emperor has no clothes, whatever it is. And so of course what he’s going to do is that he’s got to do something to change all of that.
All of these things he’s done in the last six, seven weeks to distract from Epstein and all of his failures, it’s all hasn’t worked. And this is what I mean. The guy keeps taking these huge swings at things and keeps whiffing and keeps getting rejected. And his poll numbers keep going further down in the panic because here’s what’s happening in Washington, right. There are people like me, you know, younger than I am, who are running the campaigns in the Republican party and are looking at all the polling and they’re at the Senate campaign committee and the House campaign committee and they’re seeing armageddon, right, like the political class who study this stuff are seeing armageddon in the election. And they’re seeing the Senate actually being in play, which none of them thought was even remotely possible. But frankly, Chuck Schumer has had a really good recruitment cycle, and it’s given us a chance to, if things all go right, it’s not likely that the Senate flips, but it’s not impossible. The House certainly looks like it’s drifting away from them.
And so what’s happening in Washington is that the political people, the people that have to deal with reality of polling and data and fundraising and winning and losing, they’re all freaking out right now… they’re all freaking out. And you know, I showed you this poll this week from this group called… which Republican poll was it… it was Quantus, right, Quantus, which is one of the most pro-Trump polls, always fluffing him up, right. His numbers have plummeted in one of the polls that they all read because, you know, they have their own polling that have been telling them that everything is better than the polling that we see, right, the independent polling, the averages that we all see. Their polling shows things six, seven, eight points better. And, you know, their fake polling that they had in New Jersey that claimed that that race was close with Sherrill. She ends up winning by double digits. Their fake polling has been telling them that everything was fine. And the fake polling has been instrumental in keeping his coalition together on the Hill.
And the problem is — that we get closer and closer to the election and they’re doing more polling and the candidates are seeing Trump’s numbers in their own districts and realizing they can’t win, or they’re going to have a competitive race that they didn’t think they were going to have before. Or all of a sudden, like the Ohio race looks, it’s going to be real and the Alaska race looks like it’s going to be real. You know, Iowa is not a slam dunk. And all of a sudden they’re getting scared about James Talarico, right. This is how scared they are. Trump won Texas by 13 points in 2024. And they’re worried about losing the Senate race in Texas. That’s why they stuffed James Talarico in the last couple of days. This is all, I mean, look, I’ve been on the other side of this. I know what this is like. They know they’re in deep shit. And they know they got a crazy guy, you know, in charge, who’s equally capable of crashing their thing as he is to sort of getting steering them back to safety. And so, you know, their thing isn’t working and we should take credit for having put him into this place where he’s really struggling and failing and flailing. All the things that he is.
But we also have to really thank the people of Minnesota, right. I think that when we look back at this time, there have been a lot of these critical moments, the Texas Democrats fighting on the redistricting. Oh, by the way, the redistricting thing is going to **** for him, too. The truth is he’s in a weaker position right now than I ever thought he was going to be at this point. And particularly because on the two things that were foundational to his victory and to the brand, the 2024 Trump brand, not the 2016 or 2018, but the 2024 brand, the promise that he made, the two things that he really were sort of definitional to him were making people’s lives better, which he has completely betrayed that promise in every possible way, and immigration. And I showed this poll today from Reuters/Ipsos, where he’s now -18 on immigration, -18 on the issue that is the defining issue of Trumpism and the Trump brand. He came down the escalator in 2015, talked about Mexican rapists, right. This kind of rancid white supremacy and xenophobia is the core… it’s the foundation of his brand. Right. Everything is built on top of it. And that’s collapsing right now. And so congratulations, everybody, right. We can’t take anything for granted. We all know that. We all know like even saying it is ridiculous. We’ve all been through brutal elections and we know that you have to run through the tape. But, you know, they are in a form of panic.
And if he ends up attacking Iran over the weekend or whatever it is he’s going to do, huff and puff and hope the Ayatollah falls down or whatever he thinks is going to happen, this is obviously a sign of his desperation. Why… because the Greenland thing didn’t work and he didn’t really get out of the Venezuela thing that he needed. And he’s looking around for ways to make him feel powerful and strong again, while everything is kind of melting away and his powers are ebbing at home. And so he’s now come up with this. As we head into this weekend where who knows what’s going to happen, and we have a great interview tomorrow with a historian and a Substacker named Professor Phillips O’Brien, who is going to be live Thursday at 2:30 Eastern time tomorrow. Strongly recommend all of you come to that tomorrow. A commentator who I’m now reading on a daily basis who’s really helping me learn about this current moment. I’m really pleased he’s coming tomorrow. I watched a podcast he did today with a former senior CIA person talking a lot about Iran. And there’s no plan, right, I mean, there may be a military plan, but who knows what we’re doing, I mean, what’s the goal, are we going for regime change, are we getting rid of the nuclear, you know, what’s left of the nuclear program… is he just going to start shooting people and killing people? I think they’ve now shot down three boats in the various seas in the last 24 hours, as a sign of his mania, right, that he just needs to kill people and to feel strong, right, and because the Epstein stuff is obviously I think really getting to him. You know, the Epstein files have broken containment. The videos coming from and the protests against, I mean, look, how do you think Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are taking the fact that now there have been multiple instances where people who were going to sell property to ICE have withdrawn it out of protest. Think about think about that for them. They can’t even buy a building in a rural area with Republican local elected officials. The rebellion is coming in red areas, in some blue states, but in red states, and it’s coming from Republicans, Republican voters, Republican politicians. Roger Wicker, Senator Wicker, one of the most important Republican senators, publicly told DHS to get out of Mississippi and leave them alone. They were going to build a massive facility there.
So even in this kind of this, you know, the Stephen Miller view of building this gulag archipelago and all these detention centers, they’re getting their ass kicked politically on this. And part of what I wrote today, just to finish, is that I really do think that what’s happened with immigration, that they went so far overboard and they were so arrogant and crazy and the sort of racial anger that, you know, flowing out of Stephen Miller and Trump and Vance and all these guys. This was just wild and insane. And giving ICE all this money was insane. But they’ve now committed to it, right? They’ve committed to it and the country has utterly rejected it. They’ve rejected the ICE tactics, the lawlessness, the violence. They’ve rejected mass deportation. They’ve rejected the detention centers. And what happens now is there are going to be nine months of more stories of violence, you know, two-month-old kids being starved in detention centers, people, pictures of people in their feces, you know, stories of protests when ICE goes into other areas and moms in bathrobes are coming out with their cameras and more and more of these horrific videos that I think really turned the tide. And all this… how do they turn all that off.
And so just like the Epstein files escaped containment, the other thing that’s escaped containment is their ability to hide what they’re doing with ICE, and that has become now a huge problem for them. The nation has rendered a decision on this. And yes, what Trump is going to do, and in their arrogance, they believe everything is going to be okay because he has this belief that they’re going to have more money than us. They’re going to spend a lot of money. And that basically they’re going to bullshit their way through all this, the crisis, right. They’re going to spend all this money, beat up our candidates. They beat us in 2024. The same team is coming back to lead Trump’s efforts in 2026. They’re going to have a lot of money. They view the current team, Schumer and Jeffries, as weaker than our presidential team in 2024. So they think they can take us on those grounds. The second thing is they’re taking over more and more legacy media. And so they feel like they’re going to take away these independent spaces where we do all of our our work. That’s another way they think they’re going to win, right, so things don’t have to get better. But if they control the media, they can lie, or, you know, something out of 1984. Big Brother can tell his fake and false stories. The third thing is that I think that there’s already been a deal with Russia… Russia is going to come in and use all the tactics they’ve used already here in the United States and use all throughout Europe to help throw the election to Trump… that we should anticipate a massive intervention from hostile foreign powers in this election, or formerly hostile, allied now, powers to help Trump. And then they’re going to continue to try to degrade and erode the ability for the elections to be free and fair.
But they’re doing all of this because they’re losing and getting their ass kicked and he’s failing as a president. And I think that we have to recognize that what they’re not doing, really, is they’re not changing ICE policy. They’re not revoking the tariffs. They’re not reinstating the ACA subsidies. They’re not reinstating SNAP or rebuilding USAID. They’re not making any substantive changes to their agenda. They think in their arrogance and in his delusion, and in his old age and his addled state, that he’s just going to be able to bullshit his way through all this. And the reason that’s not going to happen is because we’re not going to let it happen, right. We have this opportunity now to have the election we all want to have. We need to go fight like hell to make it so. We can’t let him in our minds be powerful. We have to see him as weak and decrepit and decaying and rotting. I’m going to start using this word more, rotting. I think he’s rotting. His administration is rotten. It’s like an organic thing, like a stump that’s rotting outside in your backyard. He’s rotting away, literally, physically and politically, electorally and every other way, and that his agenda has been rejected by the American people. We need to go into this period feeling strong and powerful like we’re winning and that we’re strong and he’s weak, and we’re winning, and he’s losing and we’re succeeding, and he’s failing, which is not how we always feel. But we need to… in order to win the elections. Because for people to vote for us, they have to think, and I’ve written about this a lot, they don’t have to only think that our heart’s in the right place and that we want to do the right thing… they have to think that we are strong enough to overcome all of this, to be able to not just advocate for them, but to fight for them, to bring needed change that will make their lives better.
And so this idea of us being strong and gaining strength through fighting and winning is really important. It’s something that our family has to focus on as much as getting the issues right. We have to become strong enough in the eyes of voters to be able to execute on our promises and our agenda and get things done. All the data that’s out there showing that voters think that our party is weak is a huge problem that has to be addressed. I think it’s being addressed right now. We’ve made a principled stand. Our leaders have on ICE. We are doing the right thing. And through this fight, we will get stronger. We will show the American people that we just don’t want to do the right thing, but that we’re strong enough to organize ourselves, to come together, to gather our power, and to make their lives better. And that’s what this fight over ICE is about now on the Hill, which is why we have to see it through and win this battle with Trump in the coming days. So I want to close by saying it’s possible that more is going right for us than it feels. I want you to live with that feeling tonight, that sense of accomplishment and achievement in a time of enormous crisis for the country.
And I want to close by saying thank you to the people of Minnesota who have shown us the way. It’s their grit, their resilience, their bravery, their courage, their patriotism that has inspired all of us and lifted us all up. And made it clear about what’s possible and what we need to do now. I just want to thank all of you who are watching, however you’re seeing this, if you’re from Minnesota, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. As a fellow patriot, you guys have shown us the way and given us a great gift, and now we have to be as good as you’ve been in the battles ahead. Thanks everybody. Let me get to questions.
Wow, lots of questions tonight. Yeah, I mean, there are a bunch of questions around messaging and how do we talk about all this. I have a very simple kind of way of thinking about this, and I want to also talk about the whole idea of messaging. Because I think that there’s a lot of just kind of BS in our family about all this stuff. And I think it’s very simple in some ways about where we are. I think our frame, the basic story that we’re telling, the narrative, is some version of, you know, he’s for the oligarchs and we are for the people, right, his whole administration… his whole regime is about taking care of a couple hundred people and saying F*** all to everybody else, you know, and that he wants more for him and less for all of us. And let’s not wordsmith this, it’s just getting the concept right, right, the language, the sort of the framing, and people can go their own way on wording and how they interpret that. And then we have to be both warriors for the middle class and great and powerful champions of democracy and freedom here and everywhere.
And I think that the issue of corruption, which has been raised here a few times, fits into all of this, that he is betraying the country by enriching himself, that he’s taking care of himself and of his rich buddies and leaving us all behind. You know, I call it an agenda of sabotage, plunder, and betrayal. Like, we’re in the right place. We’ve been winning elections. Our candidates are kicking ass. I mean, one of the things that everyone needs to put aside, because this is very much in the chatter, is that you’ll hear, well, Simon, you know, Democrats, our popularity is down. Well, I mean, what you’re learning is that that doesn’t really matter very much, that what matters more is the fear that everybody has. YouGov just released data today showing that 94% of Harris voters are voting for Democrats for Congress. And only 86% of Trump voters are voting for Republicans for Congress. And so our coalition is engaged, excited, working, kicking ass, winning elections all over the country. And if there is some concern about Democratic leaders not fighting hard enough, that isn’t translating into any other manifestation of this data, because if people were really down on the party, we wouldn’t be winning in Texas and in Louisiana by 30+ points.
And so you can be disappointed in your leader and your party for having lost an election to this guy, and feeling like they’re not fighting hard enough… that doesn’t mean you’re not going to leave it all on the playing field for your country. And we have to stop believing that there’s been some kind of massive rejection of the Democratic Party by our voters or by the public. That just isn’t true. And those that continue to make that argument are, I think, at this point misleading people. I think this is all doable stuff. I do believe G. Elliot Morris has a big piece today about how, you know, swing voters are often sort of anti-establishment voters. I mean, you may remember that in February of 2024, I wrote a big piece about how I thought Biden should win the election in the New Republic. It was running on an anti-corruption agenda and distancing ourselves from sort of the ways of Washington and looking like we were running against, you know, the corruption in Washington. I called it a big reform agenda. We need to be for that.
But I just want people to not always approach the party with the glass half empty, right, because the thing is, if our message is that we are weak and ineffective, then nobody should vote for us. And if that’s our message that we’re taking to voters and you’re taking to your communities, then you’re working against us, right, you’re doing MAGA’s work for them. Because if your argument is the party is weak, then what you’re saying is that nobody should vote for us. And so the party isn’t weak. We’ve been winning elections all across the country. You know, Trump’s numbers are way down, right, The Economist today and The Economist YouGov weekly track, the generic ballot was +7, you know, today, which is the highest in their polling. And so, you know, what will happen… we have to make it clear about what we’re for. We want a better life for everybody and we want our democracy to stay intact… which is what we’ve always been for as Democrats, by the way. But I think we need to be for all that and we need to be strong and principled. And Chuck Schumer said something last week that I was critical of in my writing, which is that he said the demands that the House and Senate Democrats were making of Trump were reasonable on ICE. I don’t want Chuck Schumer to be reasonable. I don’t want our demands to be reasonable. I want our demands to be powerful and audacious. And when you’re fighting for your country, it’s not time to be reasonable. I think we have to get beyond this idea that what voters are looking for is for us to be reasonable. Not now. They want us to be fighting for them as hard as we can.
And so I think this issue of strength and power is a really critical dimension that is not often part of our polling conversations, and I think that we’re still operating off of kind of an old model of this. One of the big lessons of 2024 is that Trump was strong and we were weak. Well, there needs to be a strategy in the party to fix that, just like we need a better message on the economy or on health care or immigration, whatever you think we need. We have to be focusing on strong and weak. And I think we gain our power and our strength through the fight — looking like we’re principled and passionate patriots who are putting the country first and not our own pocketbook and all the things that we do. And that’s why I think this fight is so important that we’re having over ICE and over all the other things. I think I went down this list. Trump and the administration have been caving all over the place. Their defenses are kind of collapsing. They’ve made huge concessions and lost huge fights. I went through the list just in the last few days. And at a time when the other side is stumbling and falling is when you fight harder because you have opportunity.
In a campaign or an election or in politics, you can undershoot and overshoot. Trump has overshot. Shame on us if we undershoot here and we don’t have the level of ambition that the moment requires. And this is why I’m proud that Schumer and Jeffries have taken on this fight on ICE. But now we’ve got to see it through because the country is really with us. And as we discussed in all the interviews I’ve been doing for the last few weeks, we cannot allow these detention centers to be built. We cannot allow them to continue to deport law-abiding immigrants in this country. They have to narrow the targets, focus on criminals, leave the rest of us alone. And we have to do everything we can to block these detention centers and eventually claw back on the illicit money that was given to ICE for dark reasons earlier this year. So we still have a lot to do. And I am grateful for all of you being in this fight. I think this fight over the detention centers is going to broaden and strengthen the No Kings movement and make it even more powerful, renew it, bring more people in and more places. Most of these detention centers are in Republican areas. And that’s why they were chosen, by the way, because they believe there wouldn’t be the level of opposition that they’re getting. And I think they’ve been really surprised by that. We’re making progress on that. But we have a lot of work to do here. And by the way, what’s going to happen once one of these things get opened up, I mean, there are going to be protesters coming in from all over the country to disrupt these things. It’s going to be wild. I think that they’ve made an enormous error here. And as I wrote today, I think the immigration issue is becoming Trump’s domestic Vietnam. It’s just gonna continue to drain him. It’s wildly unpopular, but they can’t walk away from it because it’ll make him look like he’s retreating on a signature issue. And so it’s just going to continue. We’re gonna continue fighting. He’s gonna continue bleeding on it politically. And we’re gonna continue to rack up wins. And that’s what I hope anyway. I mean, that’s certainly what we need to try to make happen.
Someone asked… did DOGE eliminate our computer security folks at the federal level? No, what’s happened is that the administration has turned off all of the systems and organizations and people that we had that prevented foreign interference in our daily discourse, in our elections, they’ve powered down cyber things to protect cybersecurity programs that are in place. It’s incredible….. it hasn’t gotten as much press as it needs to. It’s deeply alarming because what he’s doing is he’s telling the Russians that it’s open season on us as Democrats. Remember… because what the Russians did in 2016 is they hacked into the Democratic Party, they attacked the Democratic Party, they didn’t just attack the country, they attacked the Democratic Party. And you know, through this hack and dump that they did, they ended up dramatically weakening the party as an entity in the 2016 elections. It’s my belief, and I have been saying this since 2017, that what Russia did in 2016… I don’t know that Trump would have won the election without their intervention.
And that’s one of the reasons why Trump seems so wedded to Putin — that he helped, you know, deliver the election to Trump in 2016. And Trump, I think, was grateful. And he also was compromised in the process. Because Putin can go public with their conversations about him thanking him and all these things. You know, they got Trump over a barrel. There’s no other kind of explanation for how, you know, we’ve essentially in the last few weeks, and we’re going to be talking about this with Phillips O’Brien tomorrow, is we’ve essentially switched sides in the Ukraine war. We’re now firmly on Russia’s side. You know, Trump doesn’t talk about this and they’re hiding it because Putin has 5% approval rating in the United States. And Zelensky, there was a poll I just read from YouGov today where they tested in the U.S. foreign leaders, domestic leaders. The single most popular foreign or domestic political leader in America is Zelensky, right. You know, he’s at +14. And Putin’s at 5% approval rating. Putin is the single most unpopular political leader in the United States. There’s no support. And Trump is aware that he doesn’t have support on the Hill for his Russian policy. I don’t know what they think they’re doing, but our leaders need to be… if you look at our list of our agenda, the number one issue is about pushing back on what he’s doing in Europe and in Ukraine. It’s still, to me, one of the central issues.
Yes, somebody asked about ICE showing up at polling locations. I want to just really challenge our community in the coming months to not allow your imagination to run wild about the way that Trump is going to disrupt the election. And one of the things that I promised you we were going to do — we will bring in experts who can talk about what are the things that could happen versus the things that can’t happen. And in order for us to have a strategy to make it more likely for us to repel the actual things that could happen and prevent them from happening. Michael Waldman, if you haven’t watched that interview, one of the leading experts in this in the country, [and] we’re going to have others come on soon, talked about how we’re going to have elections. [Trump] has no ability to cancel the elections. [Waldman] goes through a whole bunch of things that aren’t going to happen. ICE can’t go to every polling location in the United States, right, there are tens of thousands of polling locations. I think we have to be very careful to not allow sort of the darkness that we feel to sort of run wild in our imagination around things that matter.
Because what they want you to do, and we’ve talked about this here, is they want you to believe that going out and winning the election is futile, that there’s no reason to do it because they’re just gonna cheat and win. And so what they want more than anything else is for all of you to spend all of your time talking to all of your friends about how there aren’t going to be elections in 2026. And when you do that, you are working for Trump. You’re just working for Trump at that point. You are doing his business for him. And you need to act responsibly about this because people believing there are no elections… it is a way of turning off activity. It turns people off from doing work. And what I often say, you need to take responsibility for the sentiment you’re putting out in the world. And, you know, ICE, yes, one of the reasons we have to block ICE now is we can’t let ICE metastasize into what is not the Gestapo. And I think that people are not reading history, right, it’s really the S.S., Gestapo is a part of the S.S. But we can’t let, through you know, the next eight months, for them to continue to practice and get stronger and more sophisticated in order for them to become something that becomes threatening at the election in some way, and whether it is they all descend, you know, on a certain state or in certain cities, right… but our electoral system is so distributed and so decentralized that it’s incredibly difficult to disrupt it, which is I think another reason why Trump is, you know, railing about mail voting and all this stuff — because he wants everyone to vote on Election Day. It gets much easier to disrupt the election. The mail balloting and the early voting makes it much, much harder for there to be any disruption in the election. And that’s why one of the things we’ll be talking about is that it’s very, very important if you’re part of a grassroots group to be focusing on the early vote, right, people need to vote early for a whole bunch of different reasons and we’ll be talking about that.
And so, look, as I said earlier, they’re going to do everything they possibly can to prevent us from winning the election. They’ve already tried to overturn an election. They already collaborated with Russia to illicitly throw the election in 2016. These are all things that have already happened. So of course, they’re going to try it all over again. Remember, though, that in most of the battleground states, they’re controlled by Democrats and we control the electoral systems. That’s not true in every state, but in most of the states that matter in this election, we control the elections. And the ability for them to come in and do anything malevolent is hard. It doesn’t mean it’s not possible, right, but we have a lot of people working on this from the DNC to the state parties. Your money you’re putting into the state parties is creating more resilience. I’m working with Jane Kleeb on a plan that I hope I can talk about soon that will create a national program to bring election monitors into our elections to help it make it harder for them to do any kind of the shenanigans. So there’s work being done on this. It’s not something we’ve really focused on here because I’ve really wanted our focus, our job in the family [to be on winning] these elections. There are other people that are going to be working more on how to protect the elections. But one of the things, if we win, if we’re up in the polls by 10 to 15 points and we have crazy early votes, the ability for Donald Trump to somehow claim that he actually won the election is going to be a lot harder.
And so, job one is we got to win these elections, get our candidates early money, strengthen the state parties, you know, go out and win these things now. And then we also need to have a parallel path on the election protection stuff. We’re going to be spending more time talking about this. But there is a level of panic in the family about this that is I think becoming corrosive and dangerous, and I would just encourage all of you to not participate in that.
Like anything in life, right, you gotta look at it with reason, develop a plan, right, you know, to make things better, and then go execute against that plan. Hopium… we’re hope with a plan, we don’t just hope hope tomorrow will be better than yesterday, we do the work to make it so. And there will be more attention put on the election protection stuff. But we’re already raising tons of money to help with election protection by helping fund the state parties. We had the victory in California where Gavin Newsom and those guys made it less likely they could screw the election by the reapportionment. You know, that we had the success in the ballot initiative… a ballot initiative success in Maine that the state party ran that prevented them from changing the electoral system in a way that would have been harder for us to win. We’ve already been doing this work. But I don’t focus on it because I actually believe it is less important than the work of winning the elections. And that’s where our focus and attention are always going to be. You know, there’s a lot of fear mongering going on, and the thing is, what I want you to understand is that one of the ways… what’s going to happen in this election… if we can just start talking about this more directly, there is going to be an unbelievable amount of inauthentic accounts on social media spreading all sorts of crazy lies, TikTok, Threads, wherever you are, wherever you live, to pit us against each other, to make us feel that Trump has won the election, to make him strong and us weak. Everyone has to be aware that you’re operating in a manipulated and poisoned information environment and not be naive about this and not jump on things and not spread.
One of the things that happened, I think, in 2016, one of the things they’re going to do, for example, is all of you have been on the receiving end of emails from friends of yours saying, did you see this, and it’s some kind of wild and cockamamie thing that never happened, right. You know, you need to put pressure on your friends not to do that, to not spread rumors, to not send that email to your list group that you’re on, your book club group about, OMG, did you see all this crazy stuff that Trump did that never happened, or spread fake videos, right. We have to create greater information resilience in our communities. And the answer can’t be, well, Simon, you know, we’re a little bit older, that’s a little bit harder. F*** that. I mean, everyone’s got to take responsibility for, you know, for their engagement with other people. Whatever happens in your own mind, in your own world, that’s yours. But when you start spreading stuff to other people, you’re taking actions that could either help us or hurt us. And we have to raise the level of consciousness about this and to recognize that we are in an information war. We are in a manipulated information environment. And that to not be naive about this, this has been going on for too long for people to pretend that they don’t really understand that. And so the emails, you know, what’s going to happen is they’re going to flood the zone with all sorts of false information about our candidates and everything else, and just don’t hit send to anything unless it’s verified, validated. You know, I work very hard here to make sure that everything I’m sharing with you is backed up by data, has sources attached to it. You need to do the same thing and you need to encourage your communities to recognize that there’s going to be an impulse to say that people are going to start spreading stuff. And if you have people in your communities that continually are spreading harmful or malevolent information or false information, you need to cut them out of your communities, right, because it becomes corrosive. It’s part of how I moderate the Hopium chat. You know, I probably remove one or two people a month. No more than that. Some months, none at all. But it’s when somebody has clearly demonstrated ill will towards our community and there just isn’t any reason, they’ve become a troll in essence, right.
No trolling in 2026. We’re the pro-integrity, pro-smart discourse party. And I’ll bring people in to talk about all this, about information resilience and how to be approaching this cycle, particularly because many of us are using new people who are new to Substack. They’re new to Blue Sky. TikTok has emerged. There’s all sorts of new things. But I would encourage all of you who are leaders of grassroots groups to take the idea of information integrity and have it be something that’s openly discussed.
And also the thing that I talk about here a lot, which is taking responsibility of the sentiment people put out into the world, this fundamental foundational understanding of Hopium is that one of the central strategies of MAGA — they put negative sentiment into the world. They want us to feel bad about our country, our leaders, our institutions, our democracy, each other, everything. And part of the way that we overcome that is by putting positive sentiment out into the world, by talking up America instead of talking it down, by building up our leaders instead of tearing them down, by lifting up our friends and allies instead of tearing them down. That we not put negative sentiment out into the world, and I’m not talking about constructive criticism, I’m not talking about having spirited debate, I’m talking about dumping negative **** about people in our family, which is what they do every day, and they’re really good at it. So when you do it, you’re not adding any value. It may make you feel good, but it doesn’t add any value to the debate. And we have to recognize that if we’re fighting with each other and with MAGA, they’re going to win. We need to be fighting with MAGA, right, that’s who we’re fighting against in this election. And these inter-party fights, they should be debates. You know, look, I don’t agree, for example, I don’t agree with Indivisible’s strategy on the primaries. I’ve made that very clear. Ezra from Indivisible is coming to talk to us in the early part of March. Some of you have asked me to do that. I wanted him to come on to pitch No Kings. He’s coming on March 10th, I think. We’ll talk about all this. Look, I don’t agree with Ezra and Leah, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t view them as valuable allies and partners and that we have a disagreement. So what… we have a lot we agree on and we can work together. And I have a strong disagreement about what they’re doing with primaries because I think we need to keep the focus on MAGA and not each other. But I also understand what they’re doing and I respect them. I don’t agree with them, but I respect them. It’s one of the reasons I wanted Ezra to come in and talk to us about what they’re doing. And that will happen in March.
Okay. I just, that was a long answer to a couple of short questions. I’m going to wrap up and say that I love you guys. I decided tonight that, you know, I really didn’t know what I was going to say. I told my wife before I came on here, I was like, some nights I have a really good feeling about what I’m going to say… tonight, what I really believe is what I said tonight… that we have come further in this fight than we feel. And that part of our goal is to keep our eye on the prize that I talk about… what’s the goal of this work we’re doing, what are we trying to achieve together? And this is probably how I should start all these presentations from now on, which is that what we’re trying to achieve is a new birth of freedom here and everywhere. That over the next ten years, we’re in this fight between dominion and freedom. And that up until very recently, this feeling was that oligarchs and autocrats were going to consolidate power. Democracy was in retreat. Freedom was in retreat.
But what happens if that’s not true? What happens if the global ugliness of Trump is an enormous setback for the global autocratic movement all around the world? That Russia’s genocidal activities and Trump’s ugliness create sort of a reaction to that… that perhaps creates greater interest in democracy rather than moving down the pro-Russian, pro-Trump, MAGA path, right? What happens if Russia fails. And we’re going to be talking about this with Professor O’Brien tomorrow. What happens if the Iranian government, which has been in power for decades, falls and Cuba falls and the Venezuelan regime falls? What happens? Let’s just imagine in ten years that the story of this time isn’t consolidation of autocracy and oligarchy, but that somehow through this fight that we’re all in, that people became convinced and their faith in democracy and freedom became renewed. And like Lincoln said, that we here in America and all around the world… that there was a new birth of freedom. And that is our job. Our job is to try to create, to make that possible future more likely through the work that we do. And that we start our specific mission in that — to win these midterm elections. Which right now we’re on track to go do.
I also want our family to learn that by fighting him and stopping the harms that he’s doing makes us stronger and makes it more likely that we win the midterms. These are things that we have to connect the dots on for our leaders. But I come away tonight pleased with how far we’ve come. Recognizing we have a long way to go. I’m unbelievably grateful to be in this community with all of you and for all the amazing work that all of you are doing for our country. And I want to just close by, again, thanking the people of Minnesota who I think have been such an inspiration.
–– Thanks everyone.