Transcript - Simon Rosenberg In Conversation With Stuart Stevens (January 9, 2026)

Simon Rosenberg:
Welcome, everyone. Simon Rosenberg, Hopium Chronicles, back with one of my favorite things that I get to do in this crazy job… I get to talk to Stuart Stevens from time to time. And welcome, Stuart. Thank you for joining us today.

Stuart Stevens:
Good to see you, Simon.

Simon Rosenberg:
There’s a lot to talk about, but perhaps the most important thing is something that happened last night, Stuart.

Stuart Stevens:
[Laughs.] All right. I assume you’re referring to the tragic loss of Ole Miss… you know, I grew up with Ole Miss football as a big part of my life, and really how in a lot of ways I bonded with my dad going to these games. And after the 2012 Romney campaign, we lost, by the way, that following season, my dad turned 95, and we spent the 2013 Ole Miss season going to all the Ole Miss games together. And I wrote a book about it called The Last Season. And that was a great experience. Really obviously glad I did it. But one of the things I wrote in that book was that sports will always break our hearts, but at least it reminds us that we have one. So that’s kind of where I am today.

Simon Rosenberg:
It’s a great way to start. And also, I just want to thank you for acknowledging that you lost the election in 2012. [Laughs.] It shows also that you not only have a heart, but you have a brain, and I’m sorry… I knew you had written that book and I didn’t realize what it was about, but what a great story. You know, I grew up going to Mets games with my dad. We went to as many as 10 games a year. I went to the 1973 World Series, the fifth game. I didn’t go in 1986. I went to the famous Bill Buckner game… I wasn’t with my dad. Yeah, that was an incredible game… I got to see Yankees/Red Sox games where there were fights… but a lot of my connection with my dad was through baseball. And I’ve been lucky enough that I coached both of my boys in Little League to carry that on. And soccer too, a little bit, although I’m kind of a pretend soccer coach and not a real one. So I’m with you on that.

It’s a good way to start, given that this has been a little bit of a dark week in American politics. And so… I know you were in Ukraine recently. You visited. We’ve seen a dramatic escalation this week. I mean, just any reflections?

Stuart Stevens:
I mean, yeah, I was in Kiev in October. And you know, the first thing that struck me as it has many people, and Kiev at that time did not seem like a besieged city. It was a thriving European city, you know, several million people. You go on the outskirts particularly, I go for these long runs and you would be running along in a neighborhood and there would be two houses that weren’t there anymore. And that wasn’t urban renewal. It’s because they were hit by a drone.

We visited an extraordinary Supreme Court justice who has organized with other justices and lawyers, a series of anti-drone machine gun positions on the Dnipro River. So the one we visited was on top of a houseboat. So literally this guy would do Supreme Court cases, take off his robe, get in his car, drive there and spend the night freezing his ass off, waiting for drones to come down the Dnipro River and trying to shoot them down. His house had been blown up a couple of weeks before. But still, Kiev did not seem under siege. You know, we stayed at the Hyatt, which, you know, I can say the spa was next to the bomb shelter. So this was not Stalingrad. But I think what has happened is inevitable… that Russians have a history of engaging in scorched earth warfare and how cruelty is a deliberate tactic of the military. And with no opposing force, when you have the United States with the president who can’t decide who invaded who, who was elected by the Russians, I think this is inevitable and it will only escalate until Europe intervenes.

And I think that NATO should have a no-fly zone. I think we should definitely take all of the funds that have been seized from Russians and use those funds to fund Ukraine. Right now, they’re only using the interest from those funds. And, you know, I just say to anybody out there that, you know, you and I, Simon, we knew a world in which you could get in the car in Paris and drive to Warsaw and not get shot at. And that world is going to end pretty soon if Ukraine is not supported more by Europe. And I’m almost giving up on the United States. The Republicans are basically a functional arm, a functional asset of the Russian Federation. They’re compromised. We know Trump is compromised, and if you go along with someone who is compromised, you’re compromised. So I say to all my old friends, John Cornyn, Roger Wicker, John Thune, how does it feel to wake up in the morning and know that you are doing the bidding of the Russian Federation, which is what you are. So, it’s no different than… where would you have been in 1942? Well, you would have been on the side of the Nazis. It’s extraordinary, but it’s a reality.

Instead, we’re using the US military to blow up fishing boats. This is just one of these moments that I think we’ll look back on as sort of a hinge of history… what if the United States hadn’t entered the war in World War II? What if Lincoln had said, okay, go ahead. Have a separate country. We’re not going to fight. What would the consequences of this be? And that’s what we’re playing. I also recently was in Greenland this spring. I spent a couple of weeks in Greenland. The idea, you know, we’re going to invade Greenland. [Laughs.] I mean, we have everything we want in Greenland. We have military positions there. And I love that the Danes have said, we will fight, which means the United States will be in a conflict with NATO, which will trigger Article 5. And so you’re going to have the United States in a military conflict with NATO, which in the wildest dreams of the most lunatic person in the Kremlin, they couldn’t come up with a better scenario to support Russia. So it’s a very trying time that I think, you know, I’ve often asked myself what would have happened in the 1930s when there was a huge fascist movement in America if we didn’t become fascist. Why? Probably because FDR was president. Lindbergh been president, we probably would have. And there probably wouldn’t have been a Pearl Harbor. And that’s what we’re living now. But it’s not going to change… the only way it’s going to change is to defeat these Republicans.

You know Simon, not to go on, but I really think we did something in the Republican Party. I mean, I’ve thought about this a lot. How did this happen? That, I mean, you know, you’ve worked with a lot of candidates. Getting elected to the Senate is a real pain in the ass. You have to do all these kind of boring, degrading things. You have to meet with a lot of people you don’t really want to meet and pretend you really like doing it. You know, you probably are going to be tired. Your family’s going to be under tension. Probably your kid’s going to be like what are you doing, you know? So then you get elected to the Senate… and what do you do? You go there to do whatever Donald Trump tells you. Really? That was worth it?

You know, I worked for Senator Mel Martinez from Florida, who, as he would say, unlike Marco Rubio, I am a Cuban, because he was born in Cuba, came over in the federal ban airlift. And he resigned in his fifth year. And I worked on his campaign, a very tough campaign, we were very lucky to win. He called me up one day. I’ll never forget this. He goes, Stuart, I’m resigning. And I’m like, what happened? He goes, nothing happened. I just can’t get up in the morning as a grown man and do what Mitch McConnell tells me to… I just can’t do it. Like, you know, I don’t know, that many years… you know, I’m miserable. My wife knows I’m miserable. And so he resigned. Now he has a great life… and I just don’t understand… what’s the upside? I don’t get it. But I think that we did something in the Republican Party that rewarded compliance and waiting your turn and following. Rather than leading and being willing to stand alone, all of those traits. And I think a lot of it has to do with race. Since 1964, the party became primarily a white party. Goldwater got 7% of the African-American vote, and in this last Virginia election, the Republican nominee who happens to be African-American got 7% of the vote. That’s pretty much a flat line. And you do this for decades. Republicans got very good appealing to a certain section of the electorate, which was white. Think about this. I think it’s a true statement. In our lifetime, no Republicans have been elected to office without the majority of the white vote. I think that’s probably true down to, you know, school board. Maybe when that Middlebury alum got elected to the city council in DC, it might have been an exception. [Simon laughs.] You get good at one thing and we… it was like a genetic experiment. And we bred this group of politicians who were rewarded for their weakness, not their strength. And now we’re seeing it play out.

Simon Rosenberg:
Well, so much there. And, you know, I want to just reflect on this hinge point idea. Because what’s happening now today… what I wrote today in my post that there are several things happening simultaneously. One was that Trump was, I think, increasingly looking abroad to restore his strength and power and manliness because his domestic agenda has failed, as we saw with the economic data today. And his soaring unpopularity. And that there is through federalism and the courts and through a little bit of Congress, there is resistance. He can’t just do whatever he wants. You know, he’s been constrained and he’s struggling and failing, and so he’s gone abroad.

And in that process over the last several months of them wanting to be strong abroad, he has crafted this ideology and this theory that was articulated in the NSS document in late November, where essentially he has declared, and Stephen Miller backed it up this week, that the age of democracy, the age of rule of law, both here and abroad, has come to an end. That we’re entering a new age, an age of power and strength, an imperial age and where we’ll be dividing up the world as great powers. And, you know, Trump has essentially this week declared himself to be the emperor of the Americas, the high lord of the Western hemisphere… which means that he’s okay with Russia taking Ukraine and China taking Taiwan and other imperial ambitions, because like one of the real estate families in New York City, he’s just going to get his and everyone else will get theirs and that that’s sort of how he’s approaching it.

But to the point you made… we saw unprecedented challenge for Trump coming from Republicans in Congress. And we had seen baby steps towards this. We had seen the rolling back of the tariffs. We had seen the overruling of, or the vote in the House to overrule Trump on the workman’s comp bill. We saw it with the unanimous vote to rebuke him on the Epstein files. But yesterday, on Thursday, there were four votes where the whipping mechanism, the Trump-Thune-Johnson whipping mechanism, failed. They had 17 Republicans in the House vote for the ACA… restoring the ACA subsidies. They lost the vote on the war powers in Venezuela in the Senate yesterday, which completely flipped Trump out. And they whipped like crazy against this, and it was 52-47. Then they had these two votes to override a veto he had done, and one of them got 35 Republicans, the other one got 24. And all of a sudden, you know, we had been talking about this at Hopium a lot… you were seeing Republicans growing increasingly weary of defending the indefensible, as I call it. And I’m hopeful that what happened yesterday is the beginning of, you know, we talk about it as sort of big little cracks becoming bigger cracks, right?

And I’m not saying this is a fissure or a structural break. But something like what happened yesterday would have been unimaginable six months ago, particularly given that Trump was giving all these interviews and speaking in public about how renewed, and strong and powerful and manly, he felt because he went and snatched Maduro and that this had actually worked, you know, blood of virgins, right, to sort of restore his strength. And then the response to that from the Senate Republicans is, you know, F off, right? Like we’re not on board on this stuff. And so, you know, I’m hopeful. I’m not being Pollyannish here or, you know, that we’re beginning to see just this growing sense that this Trump thing is impossible to defend at home and that they’ve got to find a new course. And I think one of the most interesting areas in the coming weeks is that Lindsay Graham announced the Trump had given him the green light to pursue the sanctions bill, this Russia sanctions bill which has 85 co-sponsors in the Senate. It would be incredible that if we as a country responded to this escalation in Ukraine from Russia with an aggressive sanctions bill that passed the Senate. And that Mike Johnson said he’d pass it in the House if it passed the Senate. Trump, if he green-lighted it, is implying that he would sign it. It would be an encouraging next step, Stuart, for us to find our way back here.

Because I think that you’re the way you’ve positioned this is so important… that we’re living through history. This isn’t something that’s happened and we don’t know what’s going to happen. But what we have to try to do is shape it as much as we can towards the outcomes that we all want.

Stuart Stevens:
Yeah, you know, I stumbled into an author named Douglas Reeman, who wrote about the British Navy in World War II. Wrote a series of novels. They are extraordinary. He wrote an extraordinary number of them. [Laughs.] I’m on number 17 now, and one of the haunting refrains in these novels is how long the United Kingdom was losing and how long they just had setback after setback after setback and how uncertain it was that they would win. And the horrible pain that had to be endured and the faith that had to be sustained. And I think that we tend to believe… I think it’s one of the problems in America, one of the disadvantages of our American exceptionalism is an inability to imagine it being otherwise. I think if you grow up in Berlin, you have a sense that maybe things could be different. It’s not inevitable. And we don’t have that.

And I think that that inability to imagine an America in which JD Vance says that masked men from the federal government can just shoot anybody… they have immunity, and they’re going to go door to door and F the 14th Amendment… I just think it’s so important that the Democratic Party address this moment with the assumption that the Republican Party is not a governing party. And that whatever they are going to do, they are going to have to force the Republican Party… if they take the House, cut off all funding for ICE. Cut off all funding for the executive branch. Test these things. I think you could have made a scenario that after Trump and the excesses of Trump, if we elected a normal president, there would be such a relief and a remembrance that you didn’t have to always think about politics, that it would be greatly rewarded and going back to Trump would be unimaginable. I think I would have said that was the case. The only problem is we tried that with Biden and it didn’t work. And I think it is critical that Democrats start talking about what legal structures are going to be erected to hold this administration accountable for the criminality. I mean, Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem should be indicted as co-conspirators in murder. And how are you going to do that? I think state attorneys general need to start talking about coalitions to go after because all the federal pardons won't exempt them.

I mean, states have a tremendous amount of power. That was Governor Walz and the FBI was refusing to do it. He has the Highway Patrol. He has police officers. Go have them ring the FBI headquarters and make the FBI walk past you every day, show force. And I just think the idea that you have to approach these problems differently is so essential because Republicans are not going to. I mean, to the degree that they think Trump is weak politically, they will distance themselves from Trump. Just pure self-interest. I mean, J.D. Vance would be a Trotskyite if he thought it would help. He’d be in a hammer and sickle. He’s not… because it wasn’t helpful. These Republicans, they will back away from Trumpism to the degree that they think that it’s hurting them and knowing that Trump isn’t going to be on the ballot. It’s a time in which… you’ve made this point that I thought was really profound and I hadn’t really thought of it this way… how did Newsom react after the last election? I mean, you pointed out, he’s not a bad politician, not an unsavvy politician. His immediate instinct was to try to make common ground with conservatives. Get Charlie Kirk on his podcast, you know, do other things. And how did the Democratic Party react? They sort of threw up on his shoes. So he changed and became the leading antagonist of Trump in a very Trump-like way, which he’s been, I think, fair to say, tremendously rewarded for it. And I think that’s a very encouraging model.

And that I think it’s impossible to say, obviously, who will be the Democratic nominee in 2028, but I think it’s not unlikely that whoever is willing to show the greatest fighting spirit will be the person who the Democrats will nominate.

Simon Rosenberg:
The word I keep writing down on my little pad here is courage. You know, I think that the Congress, it’s very easy to sort of… for people to stick to their knitting in Congress, right? To take care of their state, to take care of the district, to work on their committee, right? There are things to do that keeps them busy. And I think that this is a time of, you know, it’s a juncture point. We’re in a new age. And we’re long past the moment, in my view, that our Congressional leaders should really be struggling to meet the moment because we’ve seen, to your point, we’ve seen Newsom, Pritzker, and we’ve seen in recent days the Mayor of Minneapolis showing enormous courage. And this is how this country was founded. It’s how we were built. We did this audacious thing, which is we defeated a mad king and the most powerful empire in the world with just a couple million people here in the United States. By the way, a war that we were losing and losing and losing and losing, right, to your point about the Brits. And you look at now in Iran, where they’ve had dictatorships since 1979, you know, and all of a sudden, whatever reason why, right, this has now cohered into sort of a significant opposition movement. A year ago, Assad fell in Syria.

And if I can just reflect on this, Stuart and what you were saying… it’s what makes the work that we all do and our encouragement of American patriots to go stay in the fight is so important because you just don’t know when the autocrat is going to fall. You just don’t know. And the thing is, you can’t score unless you shoot. We aren’t going to see Trump defeated and MAGA defeated unless we fight with everything we have. And what’s important as we head into 2026 is to remind ourselves that we’ve had remarkable political and electoral victories over the last year. I mean, winning those four states in November by more than 20 points, Spanberger and Sherrill winning by 15 and 13 points in New Jersey and Virginia, enormous victories. Eileen Higgins winning in Miami, a place we hadn’t won in 28 years. We’ve had important and validating victories that when we fight, we can win. When the government was shut down really by Trump and the Republicans, which we forced, his numbers went way down and it helped contribute to our strong electoral performance. We are stronger than we know.

And I think that what’s required now and what I believe is two things. (1) is that our leaders just have, we have to continue to reward courage, to your point, and the fighting spirit, and to encourage it and demand it from our leaders because they’re Americans. And fighting for freedom and democracy is what we do. It’s what we’ve always done. (2) is it does feel like we are inadequately organized, that the pro-democracy movement in the US is still atomized and it’s still not a single kind of theory of the case or a single movement. There’s pieces of the movement. Some of this has to do with our federalism and the House and Senate being on their own. But some of this is also just us not realizing that we will be stronger together than apart. And that just in the way that the Democratic attorney generals have created this group where they meet on a regular basis to strategize. I think there are two things that are going to have to emerge in the next six to twelve months. One is the blue states are going to have to figure out, despite presidential ambitions, how to work more cooperatively together. And we’ve seen the AGs work together. We’ve seen cooperation on health issues, reproductive health and health care, and also on democracy promotion. There has been some nascent work done in that regard.

But the other piece is that we here in our country, the way that we kind of institutionalized the fight for democracy around the world was through things like the UN, and NATO, and all these institutions that the United States is now withdrawing from. We’re going to need to create a sense of a global pro-democracy movement that we’re part of that includes our European allies, that includes Japan, that includes political parties and governments around the world that are continuing to fight for democracy… in a new set of arrangements that don’t exist right now. Because the arrangements we had to have those that work together have disappeared and we don’t have access to them anymore. And I’m very interested in, given your travels, for us to continue a dialogue about that, Stuart, about how we can reimagine both the pro-democracy movement abroad internationally and here in the United States and where we all fit into that… I think if we feel like we’re part of this historic movement that began in the 1770s in the United States, that is a universal belief and desire for the four freedoms and for democracy and freedom, it feels… we feel less alone in that fight than I think sometimes we all do every day.

Stuart Stevens:
Yeah. You know, Anne Applebaum is brilliant on this. Her book, Twilight of Democracy, which I give out in airports like Watchtowers to random strangers, you know… yeah, read this, it’ll change your life. You know, the premise of that book is sort of brilliant. She lives in Poland, married to a former Polish Minister of Defense, American, but she’s worked a lot in Europe. So in 2000, Millennium, at their country house in Poland, they had a big celebratory party. And it was a moment of great hope in Europe. Hope in the Soviet Union was coming down, you know, now we get a Russian Federation. And she talks about like that. And then she compares that to 10 years later, when the same people couldn’t be in a house together without killing each other. And what happened? And how did this happen? And how did this moment of hope become frayed? And one of the things she talks about, and she talks a lot about Hungary, the ability of the Orban forces to appear stronger than they are and to convince others that opposition is hopeless. And I think that that’s a really essential element here.

It goes back to this mantra I have I wish Democrats would adopt, which is, we’re right, they’re wrong, there’s more of us than there are of them. There needs to be moral clarity here. Going back to Hillary Clinton saying that these people are deplorable and that being seen has have hurt her, there’s some hesitancy for Democrats to characterize things. I don’t want to understand the guy in the Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt. I don’t want to meet him halfway. I want him to be put in jail. I don’t want to understand why it is that a guy who is in a residential street in an unthreatening situation pulls out a weapon and shoots a woman three times in the face. I just want to prosecute him for murder. And there needs to be very clear moral clarity here. Democrats should embrace that they’re on the right side of history here. And they should embrace how Republicans are not. And they should use language that is defining. This is something we were good at in the Republican Party. They should be saying, if you vote for Pete Hegseth, you are not a patriot. You’re not. You can’t be. You may like to think you are, but you can’t. And they should call them anti-American. And I hope that those sort of broad sweeping emotional appeals… you know, are we a country in which masked men can go door to door and shoot innocent people in the face? I don’t think so. But we’re only going to know that if we say that we’re not, and if we fight it.

I think just in a pure political science sense, everything about the Trump coalition has shattered. This was not a moment… 2024 was not a realignment election. We saw that, you know, you and I have talked about this, November reverted to the mean where they were back to getting 31% of Hispanics, 7% of African Americans. And I think that this horrible nightmare of a woman with stuffed animals in her glove box being murdered is… I think there are very few Americans who do not find that deeply disturbing and horrible. And this isn’t, you know, black-clad, anti-fascist, so-called, you know, kids rioting. This is a woman, you know, in her Honda Pilot with stuffed animals in her glove box. Gets shot in the face. I hope this is really a battle between good and evil. I think one of Joe Biden’s favorite lines was don’t bet against America. I still have that hope. But I think we do have to learn a new language and a new organizing principle, how to go about this… we need to be looking at South Africa, at Poland. What is it that… how is it that Americans should organize themselves now? I mean, should you go down an economic boycott route? Should you go down to just mass demonstrations? Should you do all of the above? What’s really interesting if you compare it to the Civil Rights Movement, there were charismatic leaders. There was Martin Luther King. Democrats don’t have one leader, and there probably won’t be one because it’s a party, not a movement. And I think that that’s problematic, but maybe inevitable. But this is only gonna get worse. There is nothing that Trump is going to do that will be self-limiting.

Simon Rosenberg:
Well, he made that.. I mean, the New York Times interview this week, in addition to Stephen Miller going on CNN multiple times and just talking about how the age of democracy and rule of law had ended and a new age had come… Trump literally says in the New York Times interview that the only thing restraining his power was his own mind, which is a scary and terrible thought, and his own morality, which we know is a dark and desperate place. And so this is why I go back to this… I think that in the last few weeks, by desperation, by failure, that he has essentially declared himself to be the emperor of the Americas, including the United States. And that laws… the way I’ve written about this is the U.S. Constitution, domestic U.S. law, the U.N. charter, international law, and Senate ratified treaties don’t apply anymore in their mind.

J.D. Vance’s articulation of this idea of… what was the term he used… not unlimited immunity, but this idea that someone working for the U.S. government could not be prosecuted for crimes they committed… it’s something that is inconsistent with democracy. I mean, the idea that you could even imagine that somebody in paramilitary gear on a residential street in Minneapolis could be unaccountable, that they could do whatever they wanted and there was nothing anybody could do. You’re describing, when you articulate that J.D. Vance has seceded from democracy. It is literal fascism, right, where there are elites that govern the serfs and these ubermen, these supermen that govern the serfs. And for time reasons, Stuart, I want to just put an exclamation point on something you said, which is that we do need a new language.

Where Democrats have been successful so far is by focusing on affordability and on health care, but we need a third leg in the stool and the third leg has to be one around patriotism. And love of country and of courage. And about fighting for democracy here and everywhere and rule of law. That is a language that is still not yet fully articulated. We’ve seen it with Newsom. We’ve seen it with Pritzker. We’ve seen it in, frankly, the Maine ballot initiative, the California ballot initiative, and the fight in Pennsylvania. Spanberger and Sherrill both ran avowedly as patriots who had served their country and used language around patriotism, and running into battles instead of running away from them, right, and used the kind of toughness of having served in the national security community. It was critical to their brands. They didn’t just run on affordability and health care. They ran on a much bigger argument. I think that part of what my task is going to be over the coming months is to liberate the Democratic Party from what I call the tyranny of kitchen table issues.

Stuart Stevens:
I could not agree more. You would see in campaigns this weird sort of contradiction that people would list economic issues as a number one issue. But when you ran ads on it and talked about it, it didn’t really move because if they felt that, you didn’t need to tell them they felt that. You didn’t need to remind somebody that gas was expensive when they’re filling up gas every day. So it was sort of like, okay, every issue will take you to a certain point, and what are you gonna build on that? What you needed to remind them of is the consequences of that, what it meant. You needed to remind them of other issues. And people have an ability to hold these things together in their head… I don’t remember seeing a lot of polling that showed hope and change was a number one issue in America in 2007. A huge outcry, you know, and that guy, you know, in Chicago, he just decided, hey, well, hope and change is testing. Well, let’s go for it. No.

And the one thing I know about campaigns is you have to invest in it if you expect voters to invest in it. And this is where Democrats need to be about what this moment means. And it’s not contradictory. It’s not an either-or choice. You know, if you go back to… and I was reading a lot about this at the World War II Museum, if you go back to how propaganda, pro-military, pro-U.S. propaganda was run, it was, in World War II, it had multiple affronts. It was, you know, images of innocent women being bayoneted. It was also pictures of Rosie the Riveter. It’s a sense of, you need this complete sort of appeal to different aspects of what motivates people to vote. What I always ask myself about the Republican Party is, what do we know? You need a messenger and a message. What’s the message of the Republican Party? I don’t know. And who’s the messenger? I guess Trump, but is that a winning messenger?

Think about this… so the Vice President of the United States was sitting around his office and saw that this group of Republicans, youngish, but not kids, had thousands and thousands and thousands of pro-Nazi messages. And he decided that he needed to go out and defend this. I mean, think about if you were sitting there and your boss said that, you know, somebody’s got to stand up for these pro-Nazi guys. You go like, I don’t know, man. Is that really like a winning issue? But he decided it was because he knows the way that you advance in the Republican Party with the core is to be more transgressive. So Trump started out with Mexicans and rapists and all of that. Okay, that’s kind of passé. Let’s be pro-Nazi. I mean, I dare you, Marco Rubio, to follow me, to say that you’re pro-Nazi. I’m going to do something nobody else will do.

Simon Rosenberg:
Well, Vance’s performance yesterday in the press conference was just shocking. It was shocking. I mean, honestly, it was shocking. And do you know that one of the leading Catholic newspapers in America has published an editorial just trashing him for blaming the victim who had been killed?

I want to say one last thing, because I have not said this inside of Hopium, and you raised it earlier, about the lying that happened on something that matters to people. A woman in a Honda Pilot, 37-year-old woman with a child. Killed. We now know what happened. We’ve seen the video. There are eyewitnesses who were there. She was parked. The four different ICE agents surrounded her. One of them ran towards her open window and yelled, move, move, move. You can hear the audio. We’ve also heard it confirmed by the eyewitnesses who were there. This ICE agent stuck his arm in the car. And she then complied and she started moving the vehicle. The idiot who shot her was standing right in front of the vehicle where they’re never supposed to be in their training. And so what she did is she started driving away with a guy screaming at her in her ear and started driving away as she was being told. And there was this f-ing idiot standing right in front of the car. And so she swerved to make sure she didn’t hit him. And she didn’t hit him. He wasn’t injured. And she did her best to follow and comply with the orders of ICE. She was shot in the face three times at point blank range for complying with their orders.

And for the administration to have concocted, Trump to have written… that he was run over and that he was hospitalized, which is what Trump said, and for Kristi Noem, by the way, whose story changed during the course of the day because she was being told by lawyers that things she was saying were ridiculous. This is what makes their big lie that happened over the last few days even more egregious, because it’s just very clear what happened. The other piece of this, that we’re all going to have to sort of come to terms with, is them denying her medical care for 15 minutes while she died and passed away while doctors and nurses who were on site wanted to deliver care to her. We also saw that in Oregon, they shot this van in Oregon and wounded two people. They didn’t call the local police to say there’s a van on the loose with wounded people and we need to find it. There was no effort to render aid. Again, in this case, when they shot up a van, they just let the van go, believing they had caused significant damage to these people. If this was an actual police… a legitimate police force, they would have called it in and said, there’s a van with wounded people in it and we need to go track it down. Instead, they just let them go because they don’t f-ing care and they don’t care about whether people live or die.

And what Trump did and what happened.. and Vance did… is that they said that’s what they want. They want the agents on the ground to feel as if they’re operating with impunity and that killing people is okay, not rendering aid is okay. And that the level of cruelty, to your point, I do think that this is another moment, right, where our movement increases in intensity and in vigor and in strength. Because of just the level of outrageous behavior that they’re encouraging. This wasn’t an accident. This was by design, all of this. And so I want to close by saying that this has been a very hard week on a lot of levels. January 6th, fifth anniversary. We had Trump acting lawlessly in the Americas, declaring himself emperor. We’ve had this escalation in Ukraine. We had obviously the murder of a young mother in Minneapolis. But we also saw Republicans yesterday standing up to him in a way they hadn’t before. And so, you know, we end this sort of hard week on a note, in my mind, with sort of a little bit of optimism. I don’t want to be Pollyannish about this, but, you know, they have a very small majority in the House and Senate. I mean, if we can cleave off four or five members, you know, on major votes… it doesn’t have to be the same ones. It can rotate. Like what happened, you know, the people that voted for the War Powers Act yesterday were not the same people that voted to roll back the tariffs. We don’t need a structural break. We need these kind of rough coalitions that emerge around issues. To push back.

And Trump yesterday, in this great moment of triumph, his party humiliated him, repudiated him, rebuked him yesterday. And that was really important. Let’s hope this is the beginning of something more structural as opposed to episodic in the Republican Party and frankly Congress finding a pulse. And the Republican Party starting to get off the mat here and fight for freedom and democracy, which is what we’re all about. And certainly we need to continue to keep the pressure on everyone. We’ve had some wins and we need to get more. But as Stuart said, and I want to echo what he said, is I think that Trump is going to continue to escalate. As he fades, as he weakens, as he struggles, as he stumbles, as he declines physically, the likely scenario is that this escalates and gets harder. And we have to be able to hold those things in our truth at the same time. But in all likelihood, in my view… this year, while it’s a year of opportunity for us politically, it’s also going to be a very hard year. And we have to be prepared for that. And I’ll give you the last word today, Stuart.

Stuart Stevens:
Look, I think that what’s being tested really is what it means to be an American. You know, I think that we had an assumption that America was a force for good in the world. And that assumption is being shattered in Ukraine by Trump because we’re on the side of Iran, the Russian Federation. And I think that we had an assumption that, flawed as it was, that there was a justice system that ultimately, more often than not, would hold people accountable, including police officers. And when you have the Vice President of the United States asserting that they are extrajudicial, they’re not governed by the laws of the United States, the positive side of that is he’s wrong and judges aren’t going to agree with him. Cops go to jail all the time. Law enforcement go to jail all the time. And there’s nothing exempt because you’re part of some Stephen Miller wet dream. So, look, I just think being loud and being forceful, and being clear and being confident, is how you get through this.

Simon Rosenberg:
And courageous I would add. I think courage is a muscle that is not fully developed on our side yet.

Stuart Stevens:
And courageous. And I love Hopium Chronicles, and if everybody out there isn’t subscribing and paying Chronicles, you should do it. I’ve said this about Simon before… what I like about reading Simon is I’m not sure what he’s going to say. And I think that’s why you want to read something. We now, for many reasons, a lot of them technological, we tend to read to confirm our opinions, not inform our opinions. And I think it’s really important to do everything you can to fight that trap.

Simon Rosenberg:
Well, Stuart, tell everyone who may be new to you, and I don’t think there are many, where they can find you?

Stuart Stevens:
Look, you know, we have a Substack called Lincoln Square. It’s sort of an affiliate of The Lincoln Project, but it’s really not. It’s sort of a common cause. And that’s where I’m writing. I do occasionally post on Twitter, but not very often.

Simon Rosenberg:
And you’re on MS NOW now quite a bit, I think. And that’s where I see you from time to time. I just want to say, listen, we get together once a month, Stuart. I host and then he hosts and we go back and forth. And there isn’t much that I do that I look forward to more than these discussions. And I learn a lot and you make me get out of my comfort zone. And, you know, I’m grateful for that. And it’s also just great to be on your team. We didn’t used to be and it’s just a kind of exciting, crazy moment.

Stuart Stevens:
You know, I’ll just say, one of the things that drew me to the Republican Party was this concept of personal responsibility. That you don’t blame the victim. That you are responsible for what you do. And I was part of this in the Republican Party at the highest level. I helped elect more of these people than anybody. And I should have seen this. I didn't. And that realization really came to me in 2016. And that’s really why the Lincoln Project got started. Those of us that wanted to try to use some of the skills that we developed in the Republican Party… to help crush the Republican Party. And that’s sort of all we can do. But it’s a great delight and joy to be on the same side. Wish it had happened sooner.

Simon Rosenberg:
Okay everybody. Stuart, keep fighting, man. I’m sorry, again… my heart is with you about Ole Miss…

Stuart Stevens:
Yeah, Hotty Toddy.

Simon Rosenberg:
Always next year, right? There’s always the… you know, we got this recruit coming in and this guy’s not going to go into the portal. We always, you know, tell ourselves, next year, but they had a tremendous season. So congratulations.

Stuart Stevens:
As we say in Ole Miss world, we may lose a game, but never the party. All right, take care.

Simon Rosenberg:
Keep fighting everybody. Take care.