Transcript - Simon Rosenberg And Stuart Stevens Conversation (December 1, 2025)
This rough transcript was generated by ChatGPT from the original Substack live transcript.
STUART STEVENS:
Um, everybody, happy Thanksgiving. Hope everybody had a great weekend. This is a special pleasure for me that I always look forward to, which is huddling up with Simon Rosenberg. And let me just say up front, if you don’t subscribe to Hopium’s Substack, you should stop whatever else you’re doing in your life and add meaning to it by subscribing to Hopium. There’s so much out there that we all have to go through, sort of a triage of what is really worth reading. And I have a short list, and Hopium is at the top.
One of the things that I enjoy and appreciate about Hopium is that I never really know what Simon’s gonna write. And I say that as someone who, in the past, when I’ve had a column for various publications, I realized I had about a month of columns in me—and after that, they were all going to be repeats of what went before. But Simon really brings a depth of experience. And also, I think he understands the gravity of the moment better than most.
So Simon, thank you, brother, for joining us.
SIMON ROSENBERG:
It’s great to be with you, and I really look forward to our monthly chats. It’s always a great place to air things out. And back right at you—I mean, I’ve enjoyed your commentary; it’s been very important to me.
And particularly, can I just raise this last piece that you just did about the Republican Party and Russia? Do you want to spend a few minutes reflecting on that? Because you’re in Alaska now, right? You’re not too far away from, you know—
STUART:
I’m in Alaska and I can see Russia. You know, I just don’t understand why we don’t talk about this more, Simon. I mean, what do we know? We know that the Russians wanted to elect Donald Trump in ’16. Marco Rubio’s Senate Intelligence Committee came to that conclusion.
We know that he won. We can argue about whether or not he would have won without the Russian help, because causality is always, as you know better than anybody, the hardest thing to argue in politics. We know they wanted him to win, and he won. So what did they get? More than you could imagine.
And I just sort of step back from this, because Republican senators—I would say 80%—do not agree with Trump’s position on Ukraine, which is really the Putin position. And we know now that the Trump administration is actively working with the Russians to undermine Ukrainians. We saw that from that leaked phone call with Witkoff. And yet Republican senators do nothing.
So in a classic sense, if you go along with someone who is compromised and not putting America’s interests first—I don’t think anybody could argue with that—if you go along with that, you are compromised.
And, you know, the history of double agents, of people like Kim Philby—there’s always a group of people who aid and abet. They think they’re doing it for good reasons. They don’t understand what the Philbys of the world are doing. The difference here is this is much worse, because these Republican senators know what Donald Trump is doing, and yet they still won’t speak up.
I call this piece “None Dare Call It Treason,” from the old quote: if everyone’s doing it, it’s not treason. So it brings me to a larger point you’ve raised, Simon: how are we going to hold this wide spectrum of illegality and criminal behavior to account? What structure will do that? And will there be a stomach to do it?
SIMON:
Stuart, I think about this all the time. And I think about the lack of a stomach to really pursue Trump adequately after 2021—after his attempt to overturn an American election, his attempt to violently assault members of Congress, to lead that effort. There was no real accountability. All the efforts to create accountability around that failed.
And it’s why I think it’s so critical now for Democrats to be operating, as I say, with three legs to the stool. We have to be talking about affordability and prices, and we have to be talking about healthcare. And then this basket of issues around his abandonment of our democracy and democracies all around the world—the unprecedented levels of corruption we’re seeing, his selling of pardons, the tearing down of the East Wing to build himself a gilded ballroom that keeps getting bigger and bigger. He may have to tear down the rest of the White House to build the ballroom at the current rate he’s going.
We need to develop a very robust conversation with the American people about what he’s doing to the country. Because in order to create the predicate for accountability, we need people to understand the threat. Staying disciplined solely on “kitchen table issues” is preventing us from having a conversation the American people actually want to have.
I’ve shown in my writing that threats to democracy are equal to or greater than concerns about healthcare in many polls. People know their rights and freedoms are being trampled in unprecedented ways. So we have an obligation as leaders to be having this robust conversation—with all these issues rolled into “threats to democracy,” including him selling out Ukraine, Europe, and America to Russia.
It certainly looks like Russia upped the ante—how much money the Americans (Witkoff, Kushner, Trump) were going to get—and remember, Witkoff’s son runs Liberty, the huge corrupt crypto play. The Witkoff family and the Trump family are in business together, and part of that business extends to them shaking down the Ukrainians. The level of betrayal of America, of democracy, of our alliances, of the world we built after WWII—it’s so overwhelming, dangerous, jaw-dropping. So part of my answer to you is: we need to operate in a far more aggressive posture now. They are weakened. His powers are ebbing. They are wildly unpopular. They got their ass kicked in the November elections. We won by 20 points in places no one expected. Mike Johnson is down in Tennessee defending a +22 Republican district. They are bleeding out.
We have an obligation to be more ambitious, creative, and aggressive. And what we’re learning is: when we fight him, we win—and he loses.
STUART:
Yeah. I think the scope of illegality is so extraordinary that it has a numbing effect. I go back to 2015 when there was a robust debate about Trump releasing his income tax returns. Think how far we’ve gone. Of course he lied about that. Just like his lie during the 2016 campaign that he was paying for his own campaign while the biggest thing on his website was a giant “Donate” button. And we’ve gone from that to the leaked phone call with Witkoff—the sleazy New York real estate crypto creep negotiating the Western Alliance. It’s unbelievable. A prosecutor would use that call as Exhibit A: corruption, selling out American interests, selling out Western alliance interests. It’s illegal on all kinds of levels.
And the degree of Trump family involvement—my God. The fate of the Middle East being decided in part by who Ivanka Trump is sleeping with? Really? That’s the qualification? Jared Kushner slept his way to Henry Kissinger status. It’s crazy.
And then you look at Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, the ICE agents, the Doge crypto illegality. Elon Musk broke more laws in six months than any American in history. And then the other South African creep, David Sacks—who wrote The Diversity Myth comparing campus rape disclosures to “belated regret.”
And you’re absolutely right: Democrats take the House, and suddenly accountability processes can begin—even without the Senate and White House.
SIMON:
Yeah. I think we need to be making criminal referrals to DOJ—not because they’ll be acted upon right now, but because we need to go on record. We need to document the lawbreaking, keep it salient, keep it in front of the American people. These six Democrats—the two senators and four House members—who raised concerns at the Pentagon clearly hit a nerve. The regime squealed. Loudly. Because someone reminded them that rule of law still exists.
We need “criminal referral cannons,” constantly raising these issues. We haven’t been attaching corruption and criminality to these activities, and it’s critical. His tearing down of the East Wing was illegal. The ballroom construction is illegal. Democrats should be raising these things in negotiations. We need to weaken the regime—not just fight on healthcare or affordability, but disable pieces of the enterprise itself.
STUART:
And what’s so striking is: they admit what they’re doing. Kristi Noem saying she only obeys judges she likes. That’s what a narco-terrorist says. The scale of corruption paralyzes the discussion. But corruption and self-enrichment are potent political arguments.
SIMON:
Exactly. There’s a through line: They’re for the oligarchs; we’re for the people. They’re more-for-me, less-for-you. We need a narrative frame—big, structural, moral. And we need to make December a good month for democracy.
We can win Tennessee. We can win the Miami mayor’s race. We can fight their agenda and not let it go uncontested. And third, we must degrade his advisors—expose their criminality and lawlessness. Open up new fronts. Force them to defend the indefensible.
Most of his senior advisors are doing things that are illegal or malevolent—Voight, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Robert Kennedy, and others. We need to make them defend these people. When the other side stumbles is when you hit them harder. And right now, they’re stumbling. Trump dropped 11 points in Gallup in one month.
STUART:
Should there be a framework for accountability? Like Truth and Reconciliation, Nuremberg—something? We need a name. Watergate was nothing compared to this. Whitewater was quaint. Taking $10,000 was quaint. The Witkoff–Kushner selling out of Ukraine to Russia is bigger than the next 100 scandals combined.
SIMON:
House Democrats already have a starting structure—the litigation task force. Led by Neguse, with Jamie Raskin involved. Needs more staff, more ambition. Robert Garcia has also emerged as a powerful leader—his subpoena freed the Epstein emails and directly implicated Trump. We need the Senate to match the structure. We need to frame things clearly.
STUART:
And framing matters. You cannot support Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense and call yourself a patriot. Roger Wicker ushered him in—that is not patriotism. We ended up with Pete Hegseth running the largest military in history? It’s indefensible.
Kash Patel using SWAT teams to protect his 26-year-old girlfriend? Kristi Noem buying jets to fly around with her boyfriend? Sleazy, creepy stuff. And it’s mystifying—because in 2000, Bush’s “restore honor and dignity” theme moved numbers. And that was after Clinton—a successful president with 4% GDP growth. What we’re facing now is incomparable.
SIMON:
We don’t have a conservative party anymore. The GOP has been captured by a far-right extremist movement. That’s why I don’t use “conservative.” It’s not conservatism. It’s some mix of fascism, oligarchy, neo-royalism—something uniquely American.
Vocabulary matters. The Declaration of Independence was a sternly worded letter. We need new language to explain what’s happening. Our political vocabulary wasn’t built for Bond-villain figures in American politics.
I call Trump’s agenda: sabotage, plunder, betrayal. And the ballroom was a turning point. People were like—come on. Cut our healthcare to build yourself a gilded ballroom? It’s too much. Let’s talk about the rebukes:
— Senate repealed his tariffs three times.
— We won by 20+ in multiple states.
— The Epstein rebuke was the most significant legislative loss by a sitting president in American history.
— Tennessee could be a rebuke; Miami too.
— Armed Services committees are opening investigations.
— House Republicans launching discharge petitions.
Republicans are breaking. Publicly. We must encourage it. Trump is old, addled, in ill health. They know it. And when the other side is stumbling, that’s when you hit hardest. We need to work every day. December matters enormously.
STUART:
Exactly. Autocrats try to convince people it’s impossible to fight. That it’s inevitable. That you should focus on your personal life and give up the larger fight.
We cannot surrender. Please subscribe to Hopium on Substack. And to Lincoln Square. We have to fight this stuff. Media is failing us—Bezos behaving bizarrely, Barry Weiss on CBS—absurdity. We have to save ourselves.
Thank you to everyone listening, and thank you, Simon.
SIMON:
Stuart, thank you for your leadership, and for helping build Lincoln Square into such a powerful part of this family. And thank you for your commentary on Russia and the Republican Party. It remains a topic we still struggle to talk about, and it may be the single most important issue in the country. You’ve done an amazing job articulating it, and I’m grateful for your leadership.