Transcript - Simon Rosenberg Hopium Paid Subscriber Presentation And Discussion (3/11/26)
Welcome, everyone. Simon Rosenberg, Hopium Chronicles. Great to be with all of you. This is our weekly gathering of our proud, plucky patriots of paid subscribers, the people that keep the Hopium flowing here at Hopium Chronicles. Each week we try to take a step back from the day-to-day and remove ourselves from the crush of news to sort of assess where we are in this grand battle against Trump and MAGA and for our democracy and our liberties and our freedoms.
And you know, I think that what’s new now is we’re now two weeks into the war, a war that I think came about in part because Trump was looking to change the subject. His administration is not going very well. The economy isn’t performing like he expected. The Supreme Court was mean to him and took away his tariffs, although he slapped them back on, an illegal and temporary set of tariffs that will probably be invalidated again by the courts. You know, there was a clear repudiation of his ICE terror regime and mass deportation strategy. And today we even got news accounts of the Republican House gathering down in Florida, where Republicans are now openly talking about needing to run away from their immigration agenda, which is pretty remarkable. We can talk more about that. The Epstein files have metastasized and are taking down leaders all around the world. There are now investigations happening in states like New Mexico and also in other countries. And it’s gotten much more dangerous for him personally because you’ve seen accountability now begin to kick in. Just today, the UK started releasing files relevant to Peter Mandelson. So you’re starting to see releases, by the way, that are unredacted, that are not redacted, that are not changed and altered illegally by the Justice Department.
The other thing is this testimony, or these four FBI interviews of a woman in 2019, whose name we don’t know, who said under oath and in interviews that she was raped and beaten by Trump as a 13, 14-year-old girl, something that they’re not being able to make go away. So the gravity of the scandal has gotten worse. His desire for Greenland was rebuffed. The Venezuelan thing they believe was a success, but he left the regime in place. And Maria Machado, who was the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and who challenged the regime, has been left out in the cold. She visited the White House last week and met with the president. And there was no press about it. They didn’t allow her to be photographed with him, which is pretty remarkable because he’s happy with Delcy, the interim leader who has given him Venezuela’s oil. You know, he’s stolen their oil. And so that made him happy.
But, you know, the Trump thing just simply wasn’t working well. His poll numbers are terrible. The core parts of his brand, you know, things people voted for him on about making their life better, he’s not been able to do that. They’ve rejected really what is the foundational kind of issue for him, which is immigration and and border security, not border security, but immigration and immigration enforcement in the US and Stephen Miller’s overly aggressive tactics. And so when you look at a strategy level of how to get him out of all that, if you’re in the White House and you’re having to make decisions, there isn’t really an obvious set of things to do. So I do think that… I call it “Epstein desperate” is the term that I’m using. And they needed to find something to change the subject and to shake things up and hopefully to give him some wins that would change the fundamental negative dynamic.
And I should add that we continue through this whole period to have extraordinary election victories. You know, we had a really good election last week in Texas, in North Carolina and in Arkansas. And then last night, we continued to have strong performances. The most miraculous one was what happened in New Hampshire with a candidate who had lost in a state legislative race twice before, last in 2024 by, I think, 14 points, won and flipped a seat in New Hampshire, a deep red Republican seat. A candidate who had just lost by a huge margin just a year and a half ago.
They know what this all means. They’re seeing the retirements. They’re seeing the nervousness. And I think he’s legitimately scared that if we regain one of the two chambers, that bad things will happen to him and to his allies, and his friends, that he’ll be in trouble. And so he’s desperate. And desperate men do desperate things. And so we got a war. And we got a war that was obviously in his addled, impulsive, you know, idiotic way. He does things that they didn’t clearly game out properly… they didn’t really look at what was the likely scenario of the war. They had no clear objective other than to bomb the shit out of Iran. They wanted to help Bibi and MBS. It looks like Saudi Arabia pushed him a little bit, too. And so he dove in, you know, a week ago, Friday. And it’s a disaster.
It’s a friggin’ disaster for him. I mean, the country rejected it immediately. His buffoonery and idiocy and incoherence has been thrown in our face every day.
Americans are dying. We had 150 wounded. That’s now news information that just came out in the last 24 hours, which they’ve been hiding by the way, which they’re going to do. And he didn’t understand that the likely scenario here… they bombed Iran last year, and Iran didn’t close the Strait of Hormuz or attack our bases or attack infrastructure in the Gulf Arab states, energy infrastructure, but they did this time… because Trump says he killed their leader, and he said he was coming for them, and there was going to be regime change. And so the regime fought. And they’re fighting. They blew up two tankers in the Straits of Hormuz tonight, or in the Gulf tonight… and, you know, oil prices have gone insane.
As I’ve been writing over the last few days, the recklessness of what they did without really understanding what the likely response [would be] from Iran, that they ignored that. They ignored the intelligence reports that the regime would not fall with a set of strikes like this. So they ignored the intelligence community, blew them off. Trump knows better. Right. They blew off any kind of recommendations or warnings that they got about what might happen to the oil markets and global inflation and slowing down the global economy, the damage and carnage he would do. They just went with it. And now we’re also learning that Stephen Witkoff and Jared Kushner may have misunderstood Iran’s offer in the negotiations and dismissed it as being inconsequential when it was actually consequential because they didn’t have subject matter experts. They’re not nuclear physicists. They don’t understand how this stuff all works, these idiots and dilettantes that he’s allowed to wander the world on our behalf that have pushed him into war, it appears, two weeks ago and given him bad information about Iranian intent. And so wherever you look here, there’s buffoonery and idiocy, recklessness and impulsivity. And America is paying an extraordinary price.
I mean, as I have been writing the last few days, we’ve seen the economic data that Trump and his team were looking at before the war. Everything was trending in the wrong direction. Inflation was going up. It wasn’t going down. The job market was eroding. GDP growth had come down. You know, his tariffs have been functionally invalidated. He may be able to keep some revenue coming in for a few months, but basically he’s lost two and a half trillion dollars of revenue, which puts us in a far more dire fiscal condition. And if the economy continues to slow and inflation continues to go up, and the deficit continues to get worse, everything is going to get worse. And we get into this vicious economic cycle that it appears that Trump pushed us into now because what’s happened… there’s going to be very significant inflation, and inflation reports because gas prices have gone up so much, and gas prices are a multiplier.
They make anything that requires transportation cost more. So, food, you know, shipped goods from around the world… everything is going to cost more. So it’s not just that gas prices are up. Gas prices rising [will raise] the prices of all these other things too, creating sort of this cascading, rising inflation which will further slow the economy, further increase the deficit, and weaken the United States. That is now what’s going to happen. He can’t stop that. It doesn’t matter what kind of fixes they come up with.
Gas has risen dramatically and it will stay up for potentially a while. While inflation was already going up, today’s inflation report was not good. It got kind of cast as… inflation kind of hung out. Inflation is almost two times currently where the Fed wants it to be. We’re way above the Fed target rate when you look at the last six months. And so he took an enormous risk because his own standing was in the crapper. The economy was trending in the wrong direction. There’s going to be increasingly bad health care news during the year as the cuts in funding start to have greater reverberations and do further damage to the health care system. And so he rolled the dice with this, and it’s blowing up in his face.
It’s a huge mistake. You know, I used to talk about how the tariffs were the greatest abuse of presidential power in American history. This war is the greatest. Now he’s topped it, this war, because it’s obviously illegal and unconstitutional. And, you know, he not only didn’t get Congress’s approval. He didn’t even consult with Congress. There is no consultation even with Congress, even though Congress has, in our Constitution, war-making powers. And so the reason why the Founding Fathers put war-making powers in the Congress is because when you go to war, there has to be deliberation and discussion. This can’t be the decision of one person. What we learned from their time with corrupt monarchs, and all the multi-generational monarchies that they were dealing with all over Europe, was that one person making a decision rather than deliberation and discussion and debate… you’re far more likely to make a really bad decision. And that’s the whole theory of our government and our democracy, that one law is king, not a man, and that Congress is a place where we debate things and we come up with rough consensus on things and we move forward. None of that happened here. I mean, it’s an incredible betrayal of the United States in every possible way.
And we’ve also learned, and we haven’t spent enough time talking about this, Russia is aiding Iran in a war against the United States. And Trump has given Russia all sorts of love and kisses this week. His continued illicit relationship with Putin continues to be an extraordinarily dangerous thing for the United States and a betrayal of our European allies in Ukraine. We can get into that more.
The second thing is that the Senate is competitive. I mean, we’ve had polling in Alaska, and Ohio and in Iowa, Texas. We just had a Talarico poll this week showing him up in Texas. We’ve had polls showing, you know, Platner ahead by a little bit in Maine and Mills competitive in Maine. So, the Senate is now competitive, too. And I think that if you project forward, here are some pieces that we move on the chessboard. Right. They’re going to have more money than us, which is why I’m pressing everybody to give now to help our campaigns, our party committees get strong, because for the first time in a long time, the Republicans are going to outspend us in the election. And that has not been true in recent years. And that’s a combination of Trump’s corruption and their pressuring of corporations and their relationship to oligarchs. But they’re going to have more money… but what’s not going to be in their favor… and one of the reasons… I’m going to be talking about this much more…
Something that has become evident in these races. That we’ve been winning all around the country, that they can’t run on Trump’s agenda. They can’t run and win on Trump’s agenda. The incumbent House [members] and senators, almost every single one of them have voted for the war and to raise gas prices and to slow the economy. They voted for the tariffs. To raise prices and to slow the economy. They voted to do enormous damage to our healthcare system so millions lose health insurance and care itself gets harder to access. They voted for ICE, the terror regime and the mass deportations, the killing, assassinations of Americans on the ground in Minnesota. And those things are all going to be incredibly damaging. I mean, Democrats have so much to work with to push Republican incumbents because these are votes they took. This isn’t a position they’ve taken. These are votes they’ve taken. So when we run ads…
And then, oh, the fifth one is, and rather than helping the middle class, they cut taxes for wealthy people and shifted the tax burden on to all of us. I will tell you that we have an enormous amount of material to work with to denigrate them, to degrade them as we go forward into this race. And I think that’s incredibly advantageous for us. I also think the Epstein files [will] continue to get worse for him and for everyone involved. And that’s also going to be something that will advantage us. And also, it looks like today that this war is going to be an anchor around him and dragging down his whole party which was also something we didn’t know two weeks ago. So I think that if we do the work we have to do, if we put our head down and raise the money and do the work we have to do and go to work and volunteer for our campaigns, you know, we can have the election that we want to have.
I think there are two things that we have to continue to stay focused on. Money has been sluggish because of just the general malaise after the election loss, the sort of concerns about the party. People need to start giving. We need to start getting serious. The election is soon and they’re going to have more money than we will. And I worry that the general kind of discontent with the establishment party is going to starve us of needed resources. And that’s why in your communities, you know, yes, people may be angry… but it’s time now to go to work. And I think that particularly I’m going to be pushing all of you to help by the end of the March filing deadline. Certainly for those of you heavily involved in No Kings, and I hope all of you are involved in No Kings, really focusing on the elections after March 28th is going to be really important.
The second thing I would just say is that we know that Trump is operating outside the Constitution. Outside rule of law, domestic international law in Iran. He’s just disregarded any requirement to behave, you know, to follow the Constitution, the law. So we have to anticipate that he’s going to do that in the elections as well. And we’re going to continue to bring people on to help educate us. We had Michael Waldman a few weeks ago. I met with Mark Elias today. Mark’s going to come visit with us soon. We’ll have others who are working to imagine what it is that Trump could do in 2026. Everyone was surprised that he attacked the Capitol in 2021, launched an insurrection against our electoral system when he lost last time. We can’t be surprised by this. And I can tell you there is a lot of work being done on this… the legal folks are getting ready. The secretaries of state and the attorneys general are holding work sessions now all across the country. The Democratic Party committees. And I’m working on a project with the DNC right now to help bolster our imagination about what could happen and also prepare everybody for it. And so I do think that we have to anticipate this is not going to be like a normal midterm.
They’re going to have more money. He’s going to do whatever it takes to win. Mark Elias’ argument that he makes is that we have to assume that Trump and the Republicans in the House are just not going to turn over power in January. And the point is, we can’t be freaked out about any of this. This can’t make us worry. It’s like any problem you have in life. You have to study it and come up with a plan… I mean, there are serious people all over town and across the country working on this now. But our job is to win the election by as big a margin as possible so that whatever it is they’re going to do becomes much harder.
And it’s why, you know, just in my recommendation to all of you about your time and your energy, your money, things that you think about, don’t let [Trump’s] screwing with the election become something that is central to your day. What should be central to your day is the offense. Helping our candidates and our party committees. Going to No Kings.
Because if we don’t work at 100% doing that, then the election will be closer than we want. Then, more becomes possible for him, right? So if you’re worried about the election, the most important thing you can do is help us win by as much as we possibly can. That’s the most important thing, right, that we can possibly do together. So that’s number one. And number two is that I will be working with all of you to continue to educate you about what’s possible. Because I will tell you that what is true in the discourse, in the daily discourse, is there’s a lot of doomerism in our discourse around this. This kind of like, well, he’s going to cancel the elections. Well, he can’t do that. He’s going to do this and that. He can’t do that. He can’t do that. What can he do? And that’s the thing I’m going to help everybody understand. So we go from a place of fear and worry and scared to like, okay, we understand now we have to have a plan to go tackle that. So we take it out of the fear and worry place, and we put it into the do place. Which I think is really important because I think that what Trump wants you to do is he wants you to believe that your work in the elections doesn’t matter, that he’s just going to overturn the election, steal the elections. So all this work we’re about to go do doesn’t matter. So there’s no reason to do it. And if that happens, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? If we don’t do the work, then we don’t win the elections that he does, which is what happened in 2024. He won the election, and so he didn’t have to do any of these shenanigans. We need to win this election, right? By big margins, and we’re on track to do that. And that still is going to be job one for this community while we begin to come to a place of greater understanding about what I call his f***ery may be in 2026.
I will say this, that when I was at the DCCC in 2018, I was part of a team that led the first countering disinformation operation and also the first kind of really super robust cybersecurity operation. This is because the Russians not only attacked the DNC in 2016, they attacked the DCCC in 2016. It’s not as well known, but they also got attacked and infiltrated by the Russian government in 2016. And so I worked there as a strategist, not full-time, but as a strategist to help us win, and I was very involved in the broad strategy in 2018 when we flipped the House. But one of the things we had to build… we had to build a countering disinformation operation and also this robust cybersecurity operation. When I used to do my presentations, I would always say the number one rule of how you counter disinformation is you be loud, and go on offense, and don’t allow them to control the information environment. They become much more effective at negative ads, at disinformation and misinformation if we’re not on offense going out and defining the terms of the debate. And that’s why it’s so critical that we have to give our party committees and our candidates as much money now so they can build their campaigns higher up, get strong and muscular and be communicating every day out and out around the country.
So those are some thoughts. I want to just wrap by saying, you know, I’m grateful for the warm wishes we got for our third anniversary this weekend. I’m grateful. Grateful for some of you who’ve been here since the very beginning, March 7th, 2023. And I also just want to say that, as a professional, when I get together with my buddies who’ve been doing this a long time like me, I think we’re all kind of stunned at the margins that we’re winning by in these special elections. I mean, this hasn’t happened very often in our careers in this business. And so there’s enormous reason to be optimistic that the country has really rejected them and knows that they’re rotten and that they want something better.
I have this belief, and I’m just going to throw this out there and we should discuss this together, that one of the ways people talk about… well, Simon, Democrats have to not just be against Trump. They have to be for something, right… by the way, as if that’s some huge insight, right… but of course you have to be for something, right? Everybody has to be. You have to tell people where you’re going and take them along with you. And as I’ve argued, I think we’ve already done much more of that. I mean, for example, in shutting down DHS, we have an agenda that we’re fighting for. You know, we want the tariffs to end. We want to restore the ACA subsidy cuts. I mean, in our opposition to him. We are communicating about our agenda and our values, I think, far more than people understand. And remember, people are voting for us in extraordinary numbers, you know, and by big margins. So we should be optimistic about that. But I think as we talked earlier today about how we strengthen our position and how we move the chess pieces on the board, one of the things that I’m growing kind of intrigued by, excited by, is this notion that one of the things that’s holding us back a little bit is this perception, this lingering hangover from the Biden, the last year of the Biden presidency, that the Democrats are kind of old and tired. And I think this is, you know, and also weak, which is connected to this, right. We’ve written and discussed the weak and strong thing quite a bit here. But this issue of us sort of seeming like we’ve got leaders who are hanging on too long… I think the Biden debate event was a searing event for a lot of people about us being feckless and weak and not being strong enough to have removed him and to have put in a better candidate because of his age. And I think this did a lot of damage to us as a party. And I think it’s lingering. It’s hanging out as a brand attribute. So how do we fix that?
Well, the good news is that people are going to be voting for candidates in their races, not the Democratic Party. And one of the things you’ve seen in polling is that [for] a named candidate in a House race, [when] you ask the generic, are you going to vote Democrat, Republican? When you name the candidates, you name them, so there’s a person, our numbers go up, meaning that when it becomes a human and not the generic Democrat, our candidates do better. We’ve seen this in the Navigator polling. But in every one of these races around the country, that matters. They’re going to be voting for, for the most part, younger, kind of dynamic candidates. And so what people are going to be seeing is a younger Democratic Party… but the other thing that I think is going to happen that gives me optimism as a chess piece is that when you put together Jon Ossoff and James Talarico, and Mary Peltola and Paige Cognetti, and three or four other candidates that will emerge as deeply talented next generation people that feel like they’re part of tomorrow and not yesterday, we’re going to have enough of those candidates that I think it can create a national brand for us. That we are moving forward as a party and not looking backwards. And that’s why I think whether Crockett had won last week or Talarico… she would have contributed to that as well. I think they both would have brought that fresh, new, aggressive, dynamic party that I think many of us are looking for, particularly young people. Because what people want more than anything else is they want to believe that we’re going to fight for them and that we’re strong enough to get things done on their behalf.
And I think that this idea of there being kind of a national set of candidates that if you’re a young person and you’re wondering, like, if I go vote Democrat, who am I voting for? Well, you’re going to be voting for the candidate in your district, but you’re also voting for a Democratic Party that’s promoting James Talarico and Jon Ossoff, who are in their mid-30s, and Anderson Clayton, and Kendall Scudder, and Paige Cognetti, and Mary Peltola. And this all of a sudden looks like an attractive, dynamic, young, energetic next generation. And I think we have the ability to take that and repair some of the broken brand of ours through the power of the candidates that are emerging. And I’m more confident of that happening now than I was even a few weeks ago just based on the way things are working. And I’m not talking about AOC and Maxwell Frost. I’m talking about the candidates on the ballot. That’s different, right?
So I end by saying there’s a part of me that is incredibly optimistic about what’s going to happen this year. Trump is just a titanic fuck up and things are gonna get much worse for him. But they’re also gonna fight really hard and they’re going to have foreign allies helping them. And so this is going to be a brutal election. And, you know, whatever-it-takes election. And it means that, you know, I need everybody here 100% in every day, right. We got to keep fighting every day because, you know, they know where they are and they’re going to do whatever it takes to maintain power. I think we will overcome that. I think we can. But only if we fight as hard as we can and support the great candidates and party committees and political leaders that are leading us into battle this year. So those are my thoughts.
I went a little long today. And let me get to questions. And Lincoln sent me a whole bunch. You guys have been active in suggesting stuff. Yeah, I mean, we talked about all the various ways that… you know, we’re going to be talking more… in terms of this election stuff, I want everyone to remember that Trump is just going to be throwing bullshit out every day to try to spook you. And you have to be smart about that. When you send your email to your friends, when you gather with your peeps, don’t talk about the election stuff. Don’t scare people, right? Talk about, hey, that poll, you know… people have been asking about polling.
Sherrod Brown had a poll today that showed him ahead in Ohio. We had two good polls in Maine this week. I talked to somebody who’s done a private poll in Alaska. I don’t know if it’s going to get released… that showed the race dead even in Alaska, which is great, by the way. That’s what we want, right? The incumbent under 50. And so the polling. We got a new California poll today that showed Swalwell at 17%. You know, we have this crazy thing in California where the two top candidates go on. And we just have to make sure that one of those are Democrats. And, you know, this latest poll from Emerson today… Swellwell’s ahead. He’s at 17. The two Republicans are at like 14, 15. Steyer’s in the mix there. And then Katie Porter is down in single digits and everybody else is in single digits.
And my assumption is that soon some of those other candidates are down at two, three, four percent will start dropping out and endorsing, which will then get us out of the danger zone of there being two Republicans that get into the general election. I mean, it is a concern, but it’s also something we can deal with. And usually what happens in races like this is we get closer, more people start deciding. There’s a huge undecided number, and the undecideds are largely Democrats, meaning that as those Democrats check in, one of our Democrats will get up into the mid-20s, and then we will be in the runoff in California. It’s not a runoff, but they have a jungle primary, it’s called, in June, where the two top vote-getters go on in the general. And I know there’s been some worry about that, but the Emerson poll today was encouraging, that we’re starting to see this… and you know, look, Swalwell is a good friend. I mean, he’s been on Hopium a lot. I haven’t endorsed in that race. One of my favorite Californians is a good friend of Tom Steyer. So I’m going to hold my powder for a while and let’s see what happens. I don’t know Tom Steyer, but Swalwell’s been on Hopium many times. He’s a good guy. It would be a comfortable endorsement for us if that were to happen. I don’t know how much [my endorsement] in California really matters, though, to be honest. As strong as we are and as muscular as we are, you know, it’s a big state. But, you know, I’m open to it.
I’ll also be looking at the Georgia race last night. You know, that is a very difficult race for us. And I’m not diving in there. I want to see polling. That’s one of those districts where Trump coming to campaign can be very significant. I know there’s a lot of enthusiasm about the race and our great candidate there, but we’re going to go slow here because I don’t impulsively make quick decisions. I want to make sure this is something that’s worth our time and money. We’re very conservative in that regard. You guys are free to go do whatever you want, and if you want to dive into that race, go for it.
I also want to say the other thing I forgot to mention is that I want to thank everybody who was part of the Stand Up for Science events over in March last weekend. I got to meet a bunch of Hopium people. I haven’t shared photographs and any writing because there’s just been so much going on, and there’s a limit to how much stuff I can put into Hopium every day. Those were great events, you know, over fifty cities. Stand Up for Science is only a year old. It’s becoming a serious organization. Colette, who you’ve met several times, is doing a phenomenal job. This is really important work. And I feel I got to speak at the event, which was an honor for me. I spoke right after Senator Van Hollen and right after Jamie Raskin. And a couple, you know, Nobel Prize scientists or, you know, like crazy people. But it was great to be there. And I don’t get to do too many in-person events. So that was also nice to be with people. So it was great for those of you who were there, and I don’t know where I’m going to be on March 28th. There’s a possibility I’m going to be in California just for some family stuff but I’m going to let you know soon about whether there’s going to be a Hopium thing in DC for us to kind of gather around so people can plan around that.
Yeah, there’s a question about the off ramp from the war. I don’t think that Trump is going to soon declare victory, but it won’t be one. And nor will the country believe it is. And I think the country has rendered judgment on the war. And like they do all of his kind of fascistic, autocratic things that almost immediately become deeply unpopular. I think to their incredible confusion, if you saw that data that I showed you yesterday… you know, there’s conventional wisdom, we go to war, seventy percent of the country rallies around, maybe a little bit more, and over time it dissipates… that just hasn’t happened for Trump, right, he’s at, you know, [in] his approval rating on the war the mid 30s to low 40s depending on how the questions are asked. And so, you know, a majority of the country was against it from the very first day. So he didn’t get that kind of rally around the flag thing because Donald Trump doesn’t deserve a rally around the flag because he’s never rallying around America and doing things for us. He’s doing it for himself. And so he doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt. That his intentions are pure in this regard. People have figured him out. A majority of the country has figured him out, right. Fifty five percent of the country. I mean, he is polling… his ceiling right now feels like it’s in the low 40s. And, you know, he’s dropping down in some polls even further. But what’s happening is that any major initiative he does, 55 percent of the country is immediately against it. And it’s a huge problem for him and for the Republicans because it’s not just that he’s unpopular. It’s that the intensity of the opposition is incredible.
And so I don’t know what the off ramp is. You know, I have been arguing all week that he just needed to get out and for his own good. The longer this goes on, the more and more it’s going to look like Iran bested him. So here’s one of the most interesting things about this, and I haven’t really written about this a lot, is that we all follow people that teach us things, and I’ve been following this historian who is an expert on aerial campaigns, war campaigns. And he said, there is basically in the history of warfare, no example of a regime change being brought about through aerial bombardment. And that what happens in these cases is that the country who’s led, the aggressor, hits a fork in the road. And because basically it isn’t going the way that they hoped and promised. So they have two options. They either declare victory and get out or they escalate. And ground troops, whatever, right? And that the escalation then becomes Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan and where, you know, they don’t prevail. The likelihood is, yes, they can prevail, but they also can get into a quagmire because they haven’t achieved their objectives… and we have seen this movie, right? Like we’ve all seen this movie in our lifetime. We’ve seen it a few times, right? Depending how old you are. And Trump is at this point where he either has to get out or he’s going to have to escalate. Because what’s starting to happen on the ground, I mean, with Iran now blowing up two tankers tonight, you know, incredible humiliation for Trump.
You know, he told tankers to go through the Straits of Hormuz. Man up. He said some version of man up today, right, go for it. So two did and they got blown up. You know, hundreds of millions of dollars out the window. Right. Oil prices will probably go up tomorrow. And so he’s not just in a place where he has to get out and declare victory. He’s in a place where he could be defeated and where this could look like a loss and where he got bested by Iran. And unlike what happened when he went in last year. I think that the arrogance of that bombing campaign that happened last year, where he claimed he had wiped out all the nuclear facilities, of course, which was a lie… and then in his head, even though the country was against it, he believed it was a victory. And then what happened in Venezuela, and I just want to repeat that, and I feel very good about the commentary I’ve provided for you since this war began, by the way. I really do think that what I have been writing has been true in a very complex circumstance. And that one of the things that I wrote about last week and we talked about last week was that Trump continually was talking about how he was following the Venezuela model. And I will tell you that every time he said this, I just… my jaw hit the floor, because Venezuela… Venezuela is a failed tiny country compared to Iran, right, they don’t have a nuclear program, they’re not an ancient civilization going back thousands of years, you know. And they were able to get Maduro out in this operation with 50 people and no casualties in part because the regime… he cut a deal with the regime to stay in place. And they gave him a bunch of oil. So he cut this deal that enriched him. Kept the bad guys in place, which is not what everybody thought he was going to do. And yeah, Maduro went down. And who knows if they gave Maduro $100 million to go take a fall, you know, for this. And so for him, it was easy peasy, chop, chop. And, you know, he got the oil and made himself rich and became an oil baron, right, in the way that his buddies in the Middle East… he can say to MBS, you got your oil, I got my oil, too.
Now he’s just like, well, those guys, right? And so there was a part of him that believed that he was going to go in and bomb, the regime would fall, even though the intelligence community said that was not going to happen. He believed he’d bomb and Iran wouldn’t strike back like that because they didn’t last time, and they did. And so, you know, we have hundreds of thousands of Americans stranded in the region. They had no plans to get them out. And, you know, he has no fucking idea what he’s doing. He’s a crazy old man. And he’s really f***** up. And so the chance not just he declares victory that nobody really believes, and he saves face and everybody gets him out and the Saudis praise him for being manly and, you know, strong, and there’s this effort to sort of puff him up… there’s also a reality that, you know, it could look like he’s getting his ass kicked here. And I don’t know what happens at that point, right? I don’t, I don’t, the global economy and our economy cannot handle a month, six weeks, eight weeks of the Strait of Hormuz being closed. The damage this is going to do to the global economy is going to be so enormous. And Trump won’t survive that either, by the way, because of what’s going to happen with inflation here, and we’ll go into recession and so on here. And investors are going to be angry, and all of his business buddies are going to be pissed, and the Saudis are going to be pissed. And so he can’t really do that.
So he has really fucked up here, like in a profound way. I mean, this Iran war may not only be the greatest abuse of presidential power in history, it may be the biggest F-up in American history. And he's the biggest F-up in American history. He is a titanic f*** up. I mean, everything that he's done, the only thing that he's done since he's been reelected, that's worked, is to enrich himself. Nothing else that he's attempted to do has been successful. And they're now rehiring government employees all over the government, and they're acknowledging openly they laid off and fired and got rid of too many people, and the government isn't functioning properly. And so he is a titanic F-up. And tragically, for all of us, right? Because he's leaving us less prosperous, less safe, and less free. And it's why we have to keep fighting really hard.
Let me dive into the questions a little bit more. And thank you for the vigorous chat. Yeah, I mean, Susan, the war is costing a lot more than a billion dollars a day. I showed everybody that the war has cost the world, you know, close to $10 trillion already. $10 trillion in 10 days. It's not a billion dollars a day. It's the loss of our stock market, the prices that we are paying on goods and gas, the damage this is costing the world. I mean, a reasonable estimate that Claude did for me today was that the costs so far are $10 trillion… 8% of global GDP has been lost because of Donald Trump. And this is why we don't allow Mad Kings to go to war without Congress, right? Because he's blowing up the economy of the entire world with no consultation other than his mirror and, Jared Kushner and Witkoff, these idiots, traitorous idiots that they are. Traitorous, corrupt, greedy, gluttonous idiots that they are. And so he's put the world at peril. I mean, we're in a global economic crisis right now. One of the things that I showed in my data two days ago is we've lost more wealth in the last 10 days than we did during the global financial crisis in 2007/2008. This is now a more damaging economic event than the global financial crisis in 2007, 2008. And this guy did this without really having really any plan for how to make it successful or having any sense of the blowback that was going to happen, or what was going to happen to the Americans in the region.
I mean, he was so totally unprepared. And it's like, f*** that. You know, this is why we don't have mad kings. This is why we built an entire political system that for 250 years prevented something like this from happening because nothing like this has ever happened before in American history. No American president has taken us to war of this magnitude, not Panama, not Grenada, not these little things that are war of this magnitude in American history because it's illegal and unconstitutional. Of course, he should be removed from office for this, right? It's a given that he has to be removed for this at some point and that there needs to be consequences. I mean, when we impeach him next year, we're going to be impeaching him for like 87 things… the trial is going to go on for 10 years… you know… potentially the impeachment trial.
Did I speak to Ezra about the value of Democratic primaries and their decision to endorse in primaries? I didn't. And the reason why is that, you know, I wanted to talk about the areas where we agree, not the areas where we disagree. And I wasn't there to challenge Ezra. I was there to honor Ezra and Leah and the people at Indivisible who built something magical and powerful and amazing. And it's a great interview. I strongly recommend it. I want everyone to know I have never spoken to Ezra before in my life until that interview. We've never met. I've never been in a room with him. I've never been on a Zoom with him. And so it was also us getting to know each other a little bit for the first time. I think it was really good, and I strongly recommend it when you get to it, but Iam thanks for that question. I know you brought it up last week.
The SAVE Act is dead. John Thune pronounced it dead. It is dead. People have to stop freaking out about it. They made a huge error by promoting the SAVE Act. It was just too much even for Republicans. They should have done something much more narrow and tailored. They didn't do that because Trump is an impulsive idiot in the way that he also screwed up this mid-decade redistricting. But the SAVE Act is dead. It is not going to pass Congress. John Thune made that very, very clear yesterday. Trump may continue to rail, and continue to threaten and continue to get all blustery and buffoonish, but the SAVE Act is is gone which means that he's going to move on to other things. Let me see other questions.
And I just want to say that, as I said last week in this gathering, that you know, I'm very grateful not only for your support that has created this amazing community and that we're all part of, but that I'm grateful because I think what we all want right now is to feel like we are being put to our highest and best use in this time of crisis for the country and for our kids and our grandkids. And you've allowed me to do that. And I just, you know, it's a hard work and I work really hard every day, but it is good work and it's good trouble that we're making, right? And I just can't express how profoundly grateful I am that I am doing this work with all of you as opposed to all the other things that I could be doing. I believe I am at my highest and best use.
One of the things that, you know, you don't necessarily get to see, it's amazing to me when I'll be on a call with a senator or a congressman and they will refer to something that I've written that day or two days earlier and say, you know, you wrote about that. I mean, I read that the other day. Or, you know, when I talked to Chris Van Hollen, who I've known for a long time, he talked about Hopium and how amazing it was. What you don't see is that Hopium is read by a lot of people in influence and power in Washington and all around the country. And it is amazing the gratitude that I get from them back to me, the gratitude that the candidates give us. When the camera goes off and we're just talking after the interview, people will say things like, Simon, it's so amazing what you guys are doing. We had one of those happen today in an interview that will come out in a few days. The candidate was so just stunned with how much money we had raised and how much we had done to help them. And also loved the kind of Hopium spirit.
And so I want you to know that we've built something really powerful that I think is really [leading] us forward in a time of crisis. It just wouldn't have happened without all of you, so thank you, you know, we have a lot of work to do. These next eight months are going to be really important for the future of the country. We need to be all in. Things are going our way but they're not going to roll over and play dead here. And, you know, they know how to fight. And Trump's won two presidential elections. So we have a lot of work to do, but I'd rather be us than them. I haven't said that very often in this cycle. And I'm also just really grateful for all of you. I'll see you guys.