Transcript - Simon Rosenberg 3/31/26
Welcome, everyone. Simon Rosenberg, back for our regular weekly gathering here of our proud plucky patriots in the Hopium community, where we take a step back from the day-to-day and try to assess how we’re doing in this great battle against MAGA. We’re recording this tonight on March 31st, which is the final day of the first quarter. Many of you have participated in our fundraising campaign, this sort of mad dash at the end here to raise as much money as we can. This is a very important filing deadline because this early money matters more than late money. This early money gets put to work for eight months, not for a few weeks in the final weeks of a campaign. And this early money goes to building out the infrastructure and the staff is sort of the foundation of the campaign. So it’s really important money. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar in October or September.
And, you know, what I’m proud to say is that, you know, we’ve hit our two of our main fundraising targets tonight is that we hit the 500,000 dollars for the House candidates. And we also hit $500,000 for our Audacious Expansion Fund, so thank you all for helping make that happened, we had a very good last couple days in this in this effort. And we’ve now raised about two and a half million dollars this cycle so far, which is just tremendous and just again the power of this community when all of you are called uh you answer again and again and again and I’m just so uh grateful for that I’ll have more details on that as the week unfolds and let’s see what we get we still have five more hours on east coast time to um keep raising I just sent out a great interview with David Pepper our good friend from Ohio. And sorry that I’ve kind of pounded you guys over the last couple of days, but I warned you that this was going to be a little bit of a fundraising push, but all of you have responded mightily and I’m grateful for that.
Yeah, and I also think it’s just for those of you wanting to have hope and optimism about our opportunities this year, spending time with these candidates and hearing their very honest assessment of where they are. Many of them are in Republican places that they have to flip, right? These are the hard races that we’re going through, right, where we have to flip and take stuff away from MAGA. I come away from all these interviews encouraged and excited about the quality of the people that are running, the experienced candidates that we have who have track records of winning. I always come away from these candidate interviews energized and encouraged about making this the year of opportunity that we all want it to be.
Okay, so let me get into my sense of things. I think Donald Trump is in a lot of trouble politically here in America and around the world. I think the gravity of, I think that this Iran war, this impulsive, illegal, ill thought out, Epstein desperate, as I call it, war is the greatest disaster in American history, the greatest policy or foreign policy disaster in American history. And he’s going to pay a terrible price for this, both domestically and internationally.
You know, the run up to this is that a year ago, a little bit less than a year ago, Donald Trump began his kind of huge strong man adventures and you know, Elon Musk attacked him over a three day period, emasculated him. What happened was with his polling a year ago is that, you know, he started dropping in the early days… often happens with presidents, but his tariffs, which came out in early May, hurt him politically, but then during the course of May, he started recovering and he was doing much better and he was starting to get to a place where he might come out of the tariff thing okay. And then in early June… I think I’m getting these dates right… Elon and he broke up. And Elon spent three days on Twitter just beating the crap out of Trump and emasculating him, saying that J.D. Vance should be president. And then he’s the one that introduced the Epstein files back to our debate. And he said, Donald Trump’s in the Epstein files and it’s all going to come out. And however this breakup happened, whatever happened, Elon Musk used Twitter to break into the MAGA bubble and get through and penetrate the MAGA bubble, which is not something that is easy for us to do. And Trump basically has been in political decline since that week. He’s just consistently been dropping in polling. It doesn’t matter what they’ve done. He’s been unable to reverse that decline or improve his standing.
And every time he does one of these fascistic strongman things, whether it’s the original bombing of Iran, the invasion of L.A., what happened in Minnesota, whenever he does these things, the country rejects it. It pushes him further away from the electorate and weakens his standing with the public. And this is a pattern — we’ve talked about this since the middle of last year. This is a pattern that just keeps repeating. In his delusion and his addled state and his old age and his infirmity, his dementia, whatever he has, he continually believes that when he acts like a strongman, the country will yield and we will bend the knee and that it will repair his image and will make him strong again. And it has not worked one time. There has not been a single instance where he’s manifested as a strong man and seen his standing improve. Because in part, the country wants a president. They don’t want a dictator. And that when he behaves like a dictator, it’s rejected again and again and again. And this pattern keeps pushing him further and further away from the electorate.
And I think what happened in this case with Iran is that in this desperation that he had to change the subject from Epstein, from the declining economy, from the healthcare shock that’s going to come as we get closer to the end of the year, in his need to feel strong and manly and powerful again, he started off this year by this Maduro play in Venezuela, where a broken country, a failed state… they were able to buy off the existing regime and snatch Maduro, take the oil, right? It was a very Trumpian thing. And, you know, we all thought in the early days of that, Venezuela, that he was going to then have a regime change and let Maria Machado come in as the new head of Venezuela, who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize. But Trump didn’t do this, and this is very important. Trump kept this corrupt, autocratic, pro-Russian, pro-Iranian, anti-American regime in place. And the reason he did that was he believes he can control them. And he got oil and he enriched himself out of the deal.
And this went so smoothly that it emboldened him. And within days of that, he did he did this interview in The New York Times where he essentially declared himself Emperor of the world, where there were no restraints on his power other than what was in his own mind. And Stephen Miller then also went on concurrently with that and did this famous interview on CNN where Stephen Miller said there are no you know, we live in the law of the jungle. Strongman rule. You know essentially both of them announcing that he had determined that American democracy no longer existed that they didn’t believe the rule of law applied to them that he was just going to take whatever he could and be the strong man and it was really… I mean I wrote about this a lot at the time in January. It was stunning the language they used and it was essentially him declaring the end of American democracy. And also asserting himself, as I joked, as High Lord of the Western Hemisphere and the Emperor of the Americas.
And he then within days of that success in his own mind, he then made a big move on Greenland, and the Europeans, you know, rebuffed him, threatened to do enormous economic harm to the United States. He then backed down. Importantly, he didn’t negotiate anything. He just ran away, you know, and he had to find his next thing that he had to go assert his manliness on the world and force himself upon all of us. And he did that in Iran. And it was ill considered, not thought through, it’s clear, he’s admitted that nobody believed that Iran would strike back at Gulf Arab partners. And of course that’s absurd, right? And that as I wrote from the very early days, there was clearly no thinking about second and third order effects.
And here we are now, with Trump having been in a place where the American economy was already slowing down five out of the last 10 months, we’ve had job loss and not job gains. The GDP in the fourth quarter was revised downward growth from just 0.7%. And GDP growth came in. In 2025, much lower than 2024, the tariffs have slowed the economy. Inflation was rising again in the early part of the year. Before the war, this was all before the war, right? Slowing economy, job loss, inflation taking off, all happening. And inflation taking off means that interest rates can’t get cut. And eventually, if it continues, mortgage rates go up and interest rates go up, further slowing the economy, further creating, you know, making the deficit, which was already exploding because of the tax cuts, you know, even higher, pushing America into sort of a vicious cycle, a vicious economic cycle, stagflation, whatever you want to call it. But the possibility that we were heading towards all of that prior to the war was significant. And the more data that we get, the more evident it is that Donald Trump’s economic and domestic policies have done enormous harm to the country and slowed growth and made it much more difficult for people to get by in America.
So because of that, his poll numbers were coming down already. We keep winning and over performing in special elections and elections of all kinds all over the country. In head-to-head battles with Republicans we just keep kicking their ass, whether it’s in Texas and and Louisiana or whether it was in Florida last week, you know, and whether it was in Miami in December or all the states that happened on Election Day, you know we just keep performing at extraordinary levels. And Trump’s poll numbers now are below where they were before the war. They were below where we were in 2018 at this point, which was an election that we won by 8.6 points, one of the best midterm performances by our party in recent decades. And so so all the political prospects here before the war were going to shit for Trump, right?
The economy was going down, the mass deportation, you know, he fought Minnesota and the amazing, the courageous, people of Minnesota prevailed in this fight with him, got rid of Kristi Noem, got rid of Bovino, you know, got a new secretary who’s a senator who they the establishment can control a little bit better. You know, they the Mike Johnson said we need to sue for peace. We have to course correct on immigration and mass deportation. There’s this effort now, also before the war, of Republicans to kind of soften the blow of this outrageous policy and the killing of Americans and cold blood on our streets. And so this was also kind of a big failure. His economic strategy was a failure. Mass deportation and ICE were a failure for him. His numbers were going down. So he needed to do something spectacular.
In this delusional place where he believed that he could replicate the Maduro experience, where they could decapitate the regime, cut a deal with the remnants of the regime. Remember, he kept saying, we have these people we want to negotiate with, but then he admitted the Israelis kept killing them. And we’ll learn more about that. And then he also wanted some of the oil. He literally told us repeatedly in every interview that I just want to do Venezuela all over again. But this was never going to be Venezuela. And here we are now with him having created a global economic and geopolitical crisis equal to or even not more dangerous and more dangerous than the global financial crisis from 2008 to 2010 and COVID. All because this vainglorious, addled, ridiculous man needed something to boost his standing with the American people and to recover his manliness and his strength. And he’s now put the country and the world into an unbelievably dangerous spiral.
And the problem he has now is that he has no way of ending this. And so because the Iranians have basically beaten him, the Iranians now control the Strait of Hormuz. And they are going to determine, which was not true prior to this vainglorious effort by our leader, and Iran has now become a regional, the dominant regional power. The Gulf Arab states are now scared that of the fragility of their economies and their energy infrastructure. And all of a sudden, the tide has turned where this where Trump. So Trump has no way out because he can’t leave. Because he’d be leaving Iran in charge and his Gulf Arab partners and investors, the two biggest investors in the Trump family are the UAE and the Saudi governments. They’re not going to let him leave. The Israelis don’t want him to leave either because they don’t want him. And so, he’s stuck.
What he’s been doing over the last 48 hours is like a stuck pig and a little child. He’s been lashing out at our Asian and European partners who were never consulted by the war, saying they needed to bail him out. You know, he was going to leave and it was up to them to go fix this incredible fucking historic mess that he’s left the entire world. And they’re not going to do it. Or anyone who’s going to now do something to bail him out is going to require an extraordinary cost for it, whether it’s the Iranians, whether it’s the Europeans, whether it’s our Gulf Arab states who were not consulted in this and lobbied against Trump doing this. The cost to him politically is and to the country now and to our global standing and to the security of the world is going to be immense. And so we are in an unbelievably dangerous position.
And what’s going to happen in the next few weeks is we’re going to start getting March economic data. We’re getting the jobs data on Friday. We’re going to get two inflation reports. And what it’s going to show is that the economy is now being further damaged by his reckless efforts in Iran. The OECD has predicted that inflation is going to go up to 4.2% this year. Mortgage rates are rising. The bond yields are rising, meaning that money costs more, borrowing costs more. Inflation is rising, which is going to further slow the economy, further push up the deficit, further push America into a disastrous economic place. And while we have been humiliated around the world and are in a very dangerous both economic and geopolitical situation because of this war.
And Congress, what is Congress doing about it? Congress went home for two weeks. And Congress can’t even reopen up DHS. And the recklessness and the just absurdity of Mike Johnson in particular. I mean, Thune on Thursday night last week did sort of a Hail Mary and decided to try to pass by universal voice vote the refunding of DHS with the exception of ICE and CPP like we wanted. And Mike Johnson then blew that to pieces on Friday morning, leaving them with this incredible mess where the TSA agents are being paid, but that’s illegal. They’re basically stealing money from other places. And DHS and all the things that it does, cybersecurity, all the things it does to protect the nation, counterterrorism and so on, is still not funded and not operating at 100 percent while we’re at war with the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism, by the way.
And so when you when you look at all of this, I mean, I have been writing about this, that I think that Trump is on, you know, and then I showed today in my post that Trump’s poll numbers were starting to see a significant damage being done to his standing because of the war and because of higher prices. That had not really happened yet. The American people were kind of reserving judgment about whether this was going to work out, whether it was going to be quick and dirty, which is what he keeps saying. And but you started seeing at the end of last week in the first poll that sort of showed dramatic movement was that Ipsos Reuters poll, which showed him at 36 percent approved, 62 percent and sort of this huge, you know, lines going up and lines going down, dramatic movement in the last week. It was the first national poll that we had that started showing not a point or two movement but significant movement against him we had a UMass poll out today that showed Trump at 33 so we had a 33 poll an ARG poll last week it had him at 35 he was at 36 in the Reuters Ipsos poll the Economist YouGov poll today, which is a very kind of sturdy poll that doesn’t move around very much. Trump dropped five points since last week and was at 35.58. So another poll with him now in the mid-30s, not in the high 30s or low 40s, in the mid-30s. In my post today, the aggregate numbers from Qantas Insights, which is like an in-house pollster for Trump, it’s like super friendly to Trump. They showed him dropping significantly in their new poll. And so that’s the polling they’re seeing. And so Trump is starting, you’re starting to see structural decline for Trump, which is going to show up.
You’re starting to see in recent polling in the battleground, right, for the House and Senate, I showed you that we’re now ahead in polling. Both of our candidates are ahead in Maine in recent polling. Roy Cooper had his biggest lead of any poll taken in North Carolina, meaning those two states now are likely to flip in the Senate. Mary Peltola had a new poll out, an independent, high quality, high sample poll showing her winning Alaska 52-48. And that would be three pickups getting us to 50. Jon Ossoff is in strong command of his race, still needs money, still going to be hard. They’re going to come after him. They’re having a very contentious primary on their side. But which means that if we flip Ohio or we flip Iowa, if those three states flip for us, we’re one seat away from majority. And Sherrod Brown’s ahead in Ohio in all public polling, including in a poll I shared today by a Republican pollster, by the way. Um you know that he’s ahead and in Iowa you know if you’ve listened to the interview we did with Rita Hart recently with Christina Bohannan we have been overperforming like crazy in Iowa we’ve been overperforming in six state legislative races in Ohio this I mean in Iowa this cycle by 22 points and the governor there is the most unpopular governor in America we have a primary there we don’t have a. And James Talarico is even or ahead in every poll taken in the last few weeks. And it certainly looks like Ken Paxton, who’s the candidate who we want, is going to emerge in the runoff against John Cornyn.
So all of a sudden, right, when you look at all this stuff objectively, you know, the Republican Party is in a world of hurt right now. And everything’s about to get a lot worse for them, because the economic data is gonna start flowing, the scale of Trump’s incredible fuck up, the greatest fuck up in American history, this Iran ridiculous war. Today I showed data in the Economist YouGov poll that the approval of the Iran war was 28% in the country and 25% of Republicans were against the war. I showed that the approval for ground troops was 14%. And among Republican voters, a plurality, 37% said no to ground troops. Only 30% said yes to ground troops. Only 30% of Republicans. And so this fissure that we’ve seen with the Republicans who believe that Donald Trump was not for new wars and not for regime change. We’ve seen these people on TV. We’ve heard of them. This is now starting to show up in the poll data. Donald Trump’s coalition is starting to crack up over his tariffs and higher prices, over and killing Americans on the streets and over-amping on mass deportation and ICE and on the war. And his coalition is cracking up. They’re in a lot of trouble. We’re in a lot of trouble as a country. The economy is almost certainly going to get far, far worse. And Donald Trump has no way to turn this off now.
Without some kind of enormous, humiliating, world-changing defeat and sort of surrender to the Iranians. Why does that matter? Well, not only does it put our energy infrastructure and fertilizer and all the things that are being hindered by the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, but Iran is Russia’s ally. Russia’s in the war against the United States with Iran. And this is going to have potentially enormous implications for what happens in Europe and all of geopolitics.
And so what I want to report to you tonight is that I cannot believe what an unbelievable world historic fuck up our leader is. And he is being punished by voters for his ridiculous regime. And it’s why I think we have to be continually pushing this idea that where we may be headed, not now, not tomorrow, but in May or June, when sort of everyone realizes what he’s done to all of us and to the world, that this idea of a national unity government of some kind where the Republicans and the Democrats and Thune, by the way, you know, have we seen examples of Republicans working with Democrats? Yeah, we had this unanimous vote on the Epstein files. Republicans worked with us to over to repeal the tariffs in both the House and the Senate. You’ve seen other smaller areas of cooperation. And John Thune, you could argue, sort of acted like a national unity government on Thursday night, rejecting Trump’s pleas about funding ICE and funding CPB and decided to throw his lot in with the Democrats to give a double-fisted middle finger to Trump last Thursday night for his extremism.
And I just think there comes a point where if Trump now starts dropping, he’s now in the mid 30s. And here’s the dynamic that everyone has to understand is that because people say Trump doesn’t care about polling data. That’s just complete horseshit. And anyone who says that doesn’t understand the dynamic of what’s going on here. And it’s actually kind of shocking to me, given that this guy’s introduction to us as president in 2017 was him fighting over the size of his crowds to believe that he doesn’t actually deeply care about people bending the knee and loving him and that these poll numbers are obviously freaking him out. But one of the reasons that he’s not as freaked out as he could be is because they keep giving him these fake polls and these super Republican polls.
You want an example of how freaked out he is about polling right now? Is this ridiculous executive order that he dropped this afternoon, which we’ll talk about in the Q&A. It’s a sign of just pure panic, right? It’s obviously wildly unconstitutional, illegal, and also impractical and unworkable on the ground, right? The idea that he’s going to give the voter list of the country to the post office and they’re going to pre-approve every ballot sent to every home. It’s just fucking ridiculous, right? And so, have you been in a post office recently? Right. And and so the take that as a sign of weakness. Don’t make that him. He’s not being strong when he’s doing this. He’s being weak and pathetic and Epstein desperate. Right.
But just to conclude all this is that I think we are headed towards what could be a collapse of the regime because the economy is going to get much worse. And he can’t stop it now. He’s created a dynamic. We’re going to be humiliated in front of the entire world. We already have been, basically, in Iran. This is just a gargantuan, world-altering, historic fuck-up. And he can’t stop it any longer. And what you’re seeing in his posting is this kind of childish, puerile desperation of like, mommy, come clean up my mess, fold my clothes, mommy, right, to the world. And it’s just making him look pathetic and ridiculous every global leader, which of course, by the way, makes us vulnerable as a country. This creates unbelievably huge national security challenges for us because our leader is seen as a pathetic moron and the country can’t rub two sticks together any longer. Our military is being humiliated. We weren’t ready for these drone attacks. What the fuck have they been doing? Not studying and watching what’s been happening in Ukraine for the last four years. We look like an old, tired bloated, corrupt country, because under Trump we are.
And so I think that the collapse of the regime, the polling that we’ve started seeing in the last few days, because what happens now is there are thousands of candidates, Republicans, running in swing districts all across the country, who have their doing their polling. They have ambitions beyond Trump. They have their careers ahead of them. Right. And they’re watching all this and they’re freaking out and their consultants are freaking out and they’re calling the RNC in Washington and they’re freaking out and they’re calling John Thune and the senators are up for reelection who are now trailing in polls. They’re freaking out. Right. So, yeah, there’s going to be an election and Republicans who are running, who have careers and futures ahead of them. Now we’re going to be blaming Trump for doing damage to their career and making it harder for them to win and get ahead.
And there’s going to be tremendous pressure on Trump to course correct. We already saw this on what happened with ICE and mass deportations. There was a structural course correction, which Trump has undone because he’s crazy and addled, right? And he can’t help himself. He has to always hit the strongman button when he gets freaked out. But he doesn’t have any strongman buttons to really push anymore, other than what he’s now going to try to do, which is to do everything he can to make sure this election is not free or fair. They’re going to continue to raise additional money to try to overwhelm us with spend and ads, which is something we have to be worried about.
But I think when it comes to all these additional things, I interviewed Marc Elias today, and that interview will be out either late tomorrow or on Thursday. What we talked about is that all of this stuff, what Trump is doing with his additional money and his super PACs and the Russian government coming in here, whatever it’s going to do, this is all part of a new battlefield that we have to study and master and develop a plan to win in that battlefield the way that we’re winning in a traditional battlefield. We’re winning in a traditional battlefield, but the battlefield of this election is going to change. And we have to look, and this is part of what I’m doing with this series of events I’ve been hosting about democracy in the elections, which is we can’t be scared by it. We can’t be freaked out about it. We can’t make Trump the wizard again, because what we’ve seen about Trump is he’s the old man behind the curtain. He’s not the wizard. And what happens is when anybody in our family starts talking about elections and stealing elections, we make him big and strong again instead of pathetic and weak. And we got to stop doing that.
Right, you know, we have people who are ready, who are going to be confronting, who are going to be helping us master this new battlefield. But as Marc and I talked about today, the single most important thing you can do if you are worried about the integrity of our elections is help us win by as big a margin as possible in order for all this other bullshit not to matter. What Marc explains in our interview is the elections where this stuff matters are elections that are close. If we win by 30 or 40 seats in the House, it’s not going to matter. If we win by 53 seats in the Senate, it’s not going to matter. And so our job number one is to do what we do here at Hopium, which is to help our candidates and our party committees have the resources and the capacities they need to have the election we all want to have.
So as one final thing tonight, for those of you who are watching live, is if you haven’t contributed to any of our party committees and our candidates, please do so tonight before the filing deadline. We’ve hit our two major goals. I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t think we’d hit either of them tonight, but we’ve hit two of them, which I’m really proud and grateful for all of you. But we have to keep focused on winning the election that’s in front of us and learning and expanding our understanding of this new battlefield and then winning in that battlefield too, because they are weak and we are strong. They are losing and we are winning. They’re pathetic and desperate and we’re kicking their ass. And we can’t for one minute think of this election in any other way. Donald Trump is the greatest failure in American history, the worst leader that we’ve ever had. And all of that is becoming clear to an overwhelming majority of the country. He’s losing his base. He’s destroying the economy. He’s doing enormous damage to the country. But his political decline in the last few days has been profound. And it means that we’re in an even stronger position than we were.
And the polling that I showed you today, ahead in Maine, ahead in North Carolina, ahead in Ohio, ahead in Alaska, competitive in Texas, will be competitive in Iowa. If you had said to me that that was the case six months ago, nine months ago, or if I had said that to you, no one would have believed me. But the investments we’ve been making in the state parties and in these campaigns was anticipating that things would break our way. And we made these early investments in these expansion states, as we’ve called them, to make it far more likely that we could take advantage of the opportunity and win. So I’m grateful for all of you being part of this effort. We are doing our part this cycle, but obviously our most important work is ahead of us. Thank you all for being part of this incredibly powerful community of patriots across the country. You know, he’s in decline. The country is being severely wounded and damaged, and we have to stay focused and keep working as hard as we can to make sure that because we have a country to save and an election to win together. Thanks, everybody. Let me get to your questions. That was long, but we had a lot to cover.
Yeah, I mean, I know there’s going to be a lot of talk because it happened right before we got on here about executive order. I mean, look, he’s gonna throw a lot of shit at us right like there and we just have to keep beating it and fighting it down and battering it down I’m not a lawyer my initial read on this executive order is that it’s it’s wild and impulsive and unworkable. And obviously illegal and unconstitutional. Jeffries already has a very powerful statement out. Marc Elias emailed me that they’re already readying a lawsuit from his firm. And, you know, we’ll be fighting this. It’s not anything to freak out over. It’s obviously just ridiculous.
He just voted by mail himself in the election in Florida of voting in the Florida election and tries to make it impossible for the rest of us to vote. It’s similar to him, you know, trying to shift the tax burden of the United States away from wealthy people to everyday people. Right. This is… he’s got one play here, which is that he’s for the oligarchs and we’re for the people. And everything he does reinforces that. And I think that we should take this in stride and realize this is just another hill we have to climb and we keep fighting. But the momentum is with us, and I would view this when you talk to your friends is just start with, wow, isn’t he desperate and pathetic, right, the Epstein stuff the declining economy, the failed war. He’s a raging old crazy mad king and he’s going to continue to do this stuff. It doesn’t mean they’re going to work, right. It’s really important that it doesn’t mean that it’s going to work and and have confidence in our team to go fight this. And let’s stay focused on continuing to take more ground and win more elections and raise the money and get ready to go kick their ass in these elections.
They’re obviously I part of what I’m saying to you is that I think that the freak out on the Republican side is going to start getting much more significant. I think the Thune move last week was sort of a form of freak out. And I think next week, if we see spiraling inflation numbers and bad job numbers, and then the understanding now that we have no way out of this war that he began, I think there’s going to start to be not just buyer’s remorse, but there’s going to, I think, I don’t know what happens. My own belief is that I’m not sold in the idea that in January of 2027, Donald Trump is still going to be the president. Whether it’s going to be his health, or whether it’s just the sense that he’s failed and crazy and old and that we need a new leadership team, whatever it is, I’m just not convinced that he’s going to be able to recover from all of this. And he’s really old. And he’s clearly suffering from dementia. And he’s sick, right? I mean, he has physical problems. And he’s an old man. He’s going to turn 80 years old in a few weeks. And this is an incredibly high-stress job.
And so I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I think that we have to anticipate what I talk about with Marc is that we have to start our leaders. Part of what we all have to do is we have to talk about this election stuff more and make it part of our general conversation so we normalize it so it doesn’t become scary. I think I just want to encourage all of you. And this is the most important thing I’m going to say to all of you tonight. When people talk about Trump messing with the elections, Democrats go into fight or flight. Like it leaves the rational part of our brains and we go into like just pure panic. And you see it on the Hopium chat almost every day. People are like, oh, my God, but, you know, he’s going to there aren’t going to be elections. Right. I mean, you’ve got to cut it out, everybody. Right. Like people got to calm down and do their homework and understand. And I’ve now held four events with the Marc Elias event, just as I promised I would. Right. To help educate all of us about what is possible in in what Trump can do and what he can’t do. And as Marc Elias begins, is like, of course, they’re going to be elections. You know that the idea can cancel the elections. He can’t cancel the elections.
By the way, I forgot to mention this. A judge today rules that his he can’t he has to stop building the ballroom. A judge ruled today that NPR and PBS have to be funded. The ballroom ruling was incredible because of the language that was used by the judge. I’ll be sharing that in the next couple of days. If you have time, go research it. I mean, the judge was just openly mocking Trump for being just a fucking lunatic and having no actual statutory authority to have torn down the East Wing or to have built the ballroom. And he just sort of mocks Trump for how absurd all this is. And so I do think he’s in further and more significant decline. And the circle of defiance is growing. Thune defied him last week in a very powerful way, right? And I think that we’re going to, you know, we’re going to have to.
So I think I think we have to really try collectively to when we talk about all the stuff he’s trying to do with the elections is to talk about it the way that we talk about everything else, which is with reason, with with data and facts, without getting hysterical and panicking. Right. And going into fight or fight place. And we have a this is a collective project for all of us, because I don’t I’m kind of I will be honest with you. It is. I don’t know how we got here as a family where when we talk about this stuff, everybody just freaks out. You know, he tried this in 2020 and it didn’t work, right? And, you know, they actually haven’t been successful in any of this. They didn’t, you know, Marc talks about today about them picking locks, but when have they actually been successful at any of these things in recent years? And pulled off any of this stuff. Yes, they have the DOJ. Yes, they’re being more ambitious. Yes, we’re up against a political party that doesn’t believe in rule of law anymore, which is something that no one’s ever had to do. But they’ve been far more, all of these efforts of Trump to do all this, he’s had a million losses and virtually no successes. And so why get to a place immediately where you believe this is going to work? As opposed to believing that, like so many other things that he tries, he fails. Right. And this is what I mean. Like he only becomes powerful if we allow him to be powerful. And we have to be disciplined about not putting the clothes on the naked emperor or to be pulling the curtain back. And sort of treating him like the wizard and not the old man behind the curtain, him becoming powerful is something that we have control over in our own lives. And we have to take responsibility for our own participation in all of this and to be responsible in how we engage others in our communities about this conversation, right?
I think we have to, Marc and I, I don’t think had enough time today to really try to talk about how we have to reframe all this. But, you know, if you assess his performance in trying to cheat, steal, blah, blah, blah, he’s like, you know, like, zero for a million, right? Since 2020. And so it doesn’t mean he won’t be successful. But it also means that this could look a lot like the Iran war or the American economy or the tariffs or Minnesota, then it does like something that he’s able to pull off. And so let’s be disciplined about that.
Other questions… the California Governors race. Yeah, my assumption is that soon some of the candidates who are not performing well may start endorsing. Certainly, I assume that the candidates are candidates who are higher up are working hard to win those endorsements and those conversations are happening. Everyone understands what’s going on here. Right. There’s, you know, part of the reason the California Democratic Party released that poll is they wanted there to be a conversation while there was still time to guarantee that we have one Democrat in in that, you know, in the top two so that a Republican doesn’t win. What is likely to happen, just so you understand, is that we get closer to the election and people have to start really thinking about it. Then people will start drifting away from the candidates at the bottom towards the candidates at the top. It’s just sort of a natural thing that happens. It doesn’t mean it will happen. It’s the likely thing. There’s no guarantee. I’m not as worried about this as others are.
I think the fact that the White House is now talking about targeting Swalwell and pulling up these old files from these investigations that happened is a sign of how worried they are. And remember what happened in Texas, right? They, just a few weeks before the primary, they targeted Talarico and tried to prevent him, you know, they prevented him from going on Colbert, right? And the backlash to that basically propelled Talarico in to be the leader they may they may end up losing because of their maniacal crazy stuff that they do right that they may end up you know Trump thought he was going to have this big win by stealing all these congressional seats all around the country and it’s going to turn out probably to be a net loss for them and it’s also the thing that kind of got the Democratic party off the mat last summer so that turned out to be so let’s go through it right. You know, ICE mass deportation, failure. Economic strategy, failure. Iran war, failure. The Republican Trump’s redistricting, failure, right?
You know, we’re going to be focusing, we’re going to be announcing in the next few days a huge commitment to make sure that we win in Virginia on April 21st. And as all of you are looking for the next thing to do after no kings, the obvious next thing is winning Virginia, which is on April 21st. And I’m going to be certainly directing people towards concrete activity there to make sure that we win in Virginia that’s five congressional seats potentially it’s the most important thing it’s way more important than this Mayday thing that’s coming up which we can talk about um it’s where our focus needs to be now um after after after tonight I wanted to get through this fundraising period um and um.
And yeah, I mean, I think there are other questions here about how now, because of the collapse of Trump with Latino voters and how, you know, we’re going to have greater opportunities in Texas. And you’re now even seeing our success in Florida last week. You know, the Republicans in Florida were going to redistrict the way they did a mid-decade redistricting the way they did in Texas. And you notice they haven’t actually pulled the trigger on that because there is concern that this may actually end up because they can’t count on the Latino vote in any of these places anymore, because their support for Republicans and Latinos and Hispanics has collapsed, that they don’t really have a way to draw new lines that are gonna be safe for them anymore. And so this whole redistricting play, as an example, right, of Trump trying to manipulate things and it blowing up on them and failing, that’s sort of what’s happening here.
And it’s an example of how you can have unintended consequences. And I think that, you know, them going after Swalwell almost guarantees that he becomes the governor, you know, in the state and in the way that they attack Gavin Newsom. And Gavin Newsom is now, you know, in most presidential Democratic primaries is leading in the Democratic primary, not every one of them, but in most of them, he’s the strongest candidate. Why did that happen? Because Trump attacked him. And he responded forcefully in these attacks and they built up Gavin. By going after the Texas redistricting because of James Talarico and the Texas House Democrats and J.B. Pritzker and Gavin Newsom, we responded and showed that in this fight with him, we can get stronger. And so don’t go to the place where any kind of fight we have with him, he’s starting from a place of strength and we’re starting from a place of weakness. That’s just not true anymore. When we fight him, as we just did on DHS, ICE, and mass deportation, we win.
I mean, this is a humiliating loss that six months, you all realize that what’s happening with DHS right now is that by law, DHS, the funding for fiscal year 2026 was supposed to be in place on September 30th, 2025. We are now six months into the fiscal year. Six months, half a year, and they still haven’t figured out how to fund DHS. The place sort of his home base, right? The place that his is, you know, and it’s absurd and ridiculous. It makes him look, by the way, to his peers in Washington, to the legislators, this has weakened the White House. It makes them look ridiculous.
And so I think that, you know, the Virginia race, we just have to go all in there and we should win. I mean, the fact that Abigail Spanberger has cut ads and has made herself the face of that redistricting effort shows you how much confidence she has. Imagine that she won this huge victory in Virginia. And the very sort of most high profile thing she’s doing now is to fight this fight over our democracy. She only would have cut those ads if there is a strong belief that we are going to win this thing. If she was worried about whether we were going to win this thing, she would not have been so enthusiastic about putting her face as the front of it. And so I think, again, like so many other things, if we do the work, we can have the election we want to have in Virginia.
The main primary. Yeah, ads are flying now. And I haven’t shown those ads. I am going to Maine speaking at the Maine Democratic Convention in May, early May, for any of you are in Maine I’ll be there and a panel. On May 1… we’re staying neutral in the primary, I do think that Janet Mills is introducing information about Platner that will be introduced by the Republicans in the general election. And we’re going to see how Maine voters react to it. You know, he’s not a perfect candidate. I mean, neither of them are. Right. But she is. I want to remind everybody and I don’t I don’t have we’re not taking a position on the race. She’s the single most successful Democratic politician in Maine in the last 30 years. And to sort of the way that the family has kind of written her off as kind of this crazy old person who shouldn’t be running. I mean, it’s just not practical. I mean, what’s practical is that, you know, she’s been the most successful statewide Democrat that we’ve had in a generation. And it’s good that she’s running. And let’s see what Platner can do.
I’m not a big fan of inexperienced candidates running for major office like this because for two reasons. Oftentimes there are things in their background, people who are unvetted, there are things in their background that are more serious that they may not have understood. And that’s certainly true with Platner. This guy has got a wild set of things that he has to now defend and deal with. And the second reason I don’t love first-time candidates running for offices like this that are so critical for us to win is that they don’t know how to win elections because they haven’t done it before. Janet Mills knows how to win statewide elections in Maine. And so I just would be, my advice to everybody here is that we have to be open-minded to whoever wins there that we are going to rally behind them. But I think it’s really important that Platner is being tested now by Mills to see what happens when the negative information is that will be inevitably introduced by Republicans is whether how he can respond to it and handle it and or whether it ends up knocking him out of the race. We’ll see.
I don’t really believe these polls that he’s up by 30, 40 points in the primary. I just don’t buy that. I’m sure it’s much closer than this. There are some polls that have it much closer. But the good news is that in most of the polling, either one of them wins in the general election. Um and neither of them are perfect and we’ll see what happens there um if you haven’t watched the ads that Mills is running against Platner I would encourage you to do so I haven’t shared them on the site just because we’ve had so many other things and I also know people will go bananas about equal time and everything else but you know he’s these ads are rough and he’s not had a good response to them um and and this is important that he’s getting vetted now I mean this is what has to happen because Republicans are gonna run are gonna run you know the most scorched earth campaign against whoever our nominee is there.
And I want to remind people that the sort of romance of these outsiders is romance because, you know, winning elections is really fucking hard. Winning a statewide race against an incumbent U.S. senator who’s won again and again and again is really fucking hard. Winning a race when you’ve never been in politics before is really, really hard. Right. And, you know, winning a race when you’ve got a lot of really like iffy stuff in your background, regardless of your charm and your mustache and everything else is really hard and so you know I I I’m thinking what’s happening there is healthy and necessary for us to get the best candidate whoever that is right now um let me just see other questions here uh.
Yeah, I think I’ve covered a lot of the main things. Let me just look and see if there’s anything else here in the Q&A. Let me just end. We covered a lot of ground. Yeah, politics is, friends, I mean, I want to say, let me say two things to end. There are election operatives in our party. There are two types of election operatives in our party. One is the people that run and compete against Republicans, and then the ones who run and compete against Democrats. Because of one way to power and getting elected is winning Democratic primaries in blue states or in blue districts. And so there’s an entire kind of political operative class that works inside of Democratic primaries. And then there are the people that I work with and I’ve been working with since I got here in the 1990s who run races against Republicans. If you have not had a lot of experience in understanding what Republicans do and how they go scorched earth and what they can use to knock our candidates out, you are at a disadvantage in this business because there are many people that you watch on television and who you admire and respect have never had a Republican ad run against them ever in their entire careers. And there is a difference between those people and the people that have had a $50 million ad campaign calling you all sorts of names run against you and understanding how any kind of vulnerability that you have gets exploited.
And I think that just one part of what I’m excited about in some of the candidates that we’ve been interviewing the house in particular is that we have a lot of experienced candidates running who are going to be able to withstand who’ve been through this before who’ve been attacked by Republicans who’ve overcome those attacks and won elections and I you know I’m being you know a lot of these candidates that we just endorsed in the house I didn’t know very well and I’ve been impressed by the people that we’re putting into these districts that are gonna have unprecedented amounts of money spent against them by Republicans who have to withstand all that. They have to withstand it politically, they have to withstand it emotionally, they have to withstand it in every way that you have to withstand these kinds of attacks. And what we’re doing in this campaign to raise money is we’re giving our party committees and our candidates more tools and resources to be able to go on offense, to tell their story, to be able to withstand the attacks. The earlier that we’re communicating, the more that we can control the information environment, the harder it is for them to define.
But this cycle, and one of the reasons the money matters so much, is Republicans are going to outspend us in this election cycle for the first time since 2014. They’re going to have more money than we will for the first time in a long time. And we just have to recognize that that’s a reality. And it’s why, you know, candidates who have not been vetted and are risky in this kind of environment, right? Because you just don’t know how they’re gonna respond to these kinds of onslaughts that are gonna come. And look, I’ve been around this business for a long time. I’ve talked to candidates, first time candidates, know there’s a general rule in our business the first time candidates almost always lose because they just don’t they can’t become good candidates fast enough to be able to navigate hard tough remember we’re having to win power we have to go take stuff away from them we’re not operating in blue areas here right we’re operating in hostile terrain and we need tough candidates and tough operatives right to be able to win in these places against the first time in American history that one of the two political parties won’t be operating within rule of law and where everything, as I call it, this sort of whatever it takes election that they’re going to have to try to stay in power. And so this is going to be a very hostile political information and ad environment.
And so far, I will tell you the candidates that we’ve been interviewing, I’ve been impressed with, I think, people have won elections. They’ve been, they’re experienced. They have the ability to navigate these tough circumstances. And so I’ve been heartened by that. But it also means, just to close, that the money that you’ve given the candidate, job number one for all of us is to win these elections, period. Everything else is secondary. General strikes, no kings, the issue lobbying. The job number one is to win these elections. That’s where our focus has to be. And just don’t get distracted by the other things that can happen. I mean, they’re important. And I was a big backer of No Kings. And I love Ezra and Leah. And they’ve done a phenomenal service to all of us. But Job, as Marc Elias says, you’re worried about Trump cheating the election. The number one thing you can do is to help us win by the biggest margin possible, when then it won’t matter.
And I think that that’s where, as we come out of No Kings, as we enter this next phase of our politics together, I am gonna stay, remain relentlessly focused on our number one mission, which is to help our candidates and our party committees be as strong as they possibly can to withstand the stuff that’s going to come at them and to prevail in this election. Because the worst possible outcome for all of us is if Trump wins this free and fair election, as he did in 2024, and fascism is once again validated and chosen by the American people. I don’t think that’s going to happen. But I don’t think what we can do is for one moment take our eye off the ball on what the main job is in front of us, which is to go bolster our campaigns and our party committees to continue to push our leaders to be ambitious and aggressive in fighting Trump. Because the other lesson, you know, Marc talked about this today, the other lesson is that when we fight Trump, we win. So we need to be fighting him more on more fronts more frequently.
And so I want to close by saying, I’m deeply encouraged by what’s happening politically for us right now. I’m deeply discouraged by what’s happening to the country and to our standing in the world and by the stability of the world itself right now. I think we’re entering a very dangerous and precarious position, crisis in the world. And what would happen in moments like this is that America would bring everybody together and resolve the crisis or at least come up with a plan. Well, in this case, we caused it. One guy caused it. One guy illegally, impulsively, Epstein desperate, caused this global crisis. And he has no idea how to get out of it. And that’s what worries me about that.
I wish I could come to you tonight to say, that Trump can just withdraw our troops and everything’s going to snap back to the way it was, but that’s not going to happen. And that option has been eliminated for us. And so we’re in for a tough period here with a guy that has no idea what he’s fucking doing and is not capable of doing the job any longer. So we’re entering a dangerous period for the world and for America, for our economy, for all of us. And that’s why we have to keep being loud and keep fighting as hard as we can, because America deserves so much better than what we have right now. And our job is to make that happen.
Remember, Hopium is hope with a plan. We just don’t hope that tomorrow will be better. We do the work to make it so. And this community of proud, plucky patriots gets up every day and you dust yourself off and we go to work, which is how we’re going to have the election we all want to have in November. Thanks everybody so much. Keep fighting. To all of you who’ve given to this campaign in recent days, thank you. And for those of you who are about to, thank you as well. Love you guys. Take care.
The rough transcript has been edited and formatted with the assistance of Claude AI.