Transcript - Simon Rosenberg Presentation To Hopium Paid Subscribers (January 21, 2026)
Welcome everyone, Simon Rosenberg, Hopium Chronicles, back with our weekly gathering of our proud plucky patriots, of our paid subscribers. Their generous support keeps this place going every day. And for those of you watching this on Substack or on YouTube and Spotify, all the ways that we see or hear these things, welcome, welcome, welcome. Thank you all on the screen for the hearts and the other emojis. We need more of that today.
You know, what we try to do here each week is take a step back from the day to day news and assess where we are in this grand battle for democracy and freedom against MAGA and their authoritarian allies around the world. And so that’s what I try to do here each week on Wednesday nights. And I will just say that today is one of those days where I’m living in this place where we have to keep two thoughts in our head at the same time that are fighting at odds with one another. One is that [Trump] is doing enormous harm to the country that will be difficult if not impossible to repair. And we have to work with incredible intensity to stop the damage and to win back power.
And then the second thing is, at the same time, his political project continues to fail. And he is weaker than he was. And he is old and addled. And I think that wearing out is welcome with the American people and certainly with the people of Europe after the last few weeks. And so both of these things can be true at the same time. I’ve done two kind of major events in the last 24 hours, one with Glenn Kirschner on the escalating lawlessness of Trump domestically and globally. And I did this big talk with Rob Shapiro this afternoon, which I just released, on the damage Trump has done in the last few weeks to our standing in the world and to our economy. And I think that I don’t have a big cogent thing I’m going to say, because to be honest with you, I’m unbelievably angry right now.
I’m angry at Trump and MAGA for creating this leader who is so obviously a wrecking ball for America and for freedom and democracy, and frustrated with our inability to have done more to stop him in the last 12 months. You know, what happened in the last few days is that essentially… and this is something we have talked about from the very first day of Hopium… and is something that is a major part of my career in politics… which is that this global international order that America imagined and built, and our party imagined and built after World War II, to try to build a world on the Four Freedoms that we’ve talked about here, that got us through the Cold War… and then after the Cold War, Bill Clinton and others tried to extend this American system to two thirds of the world that were outside of the West because, remember, during the Cold War, the world was split into three. There was the West, there were the non aligned nations, and there were the communist nations. And after the Berlin Wall fell, and I worked for Bill Clinton in 1992, sort of our great project in the aftermath of the collapse of communism was to extend this rules-based order that we had imagined to the rest of the world.
And I know that what I’m about to say is not a universally held view, but Clinton’s effort to do that was wildly successful. And it was a project that I worked on during the Clinton era, to bring our global system and our rules-based order and our economic approach to all the nations of the world. And, you know, within ten years, we had basically everybody operating within the American system.
During this period of time… the building of Pax Americana and the 80 years of this global order, humankind has gone through a golden age. There has never been a better time to be alive in all of human history. People today around the world have more opportunities than any set of peoples have ever had in all of human history. And we’ve seen statistics… things like life expectancy go from 45 years up into the 70s all around the world. Literacy has exploded, tripled during this time. The poverty rates across the world… the extreme poverty rates have plummeted while populations have grown. And democracy up until recently had spread to more places than it ever had in all human history. This world of the Four Freedoms and Pax Americana has created a golden age of human history. Many people here tonight are formerly young, as I call it, you know, we grew up and lived in this world of extraordinary, unprecedented prosperity, freedom and opportunity here in America during this time. And the attempts in some of our internal dialogues as a family to sort of cast this period, or even this age of globalization that came about, as sort of something that was not beneficial to the United States or to the American people is completely wrong. I mean, during the Biden presidency, you know, we had the lowest unemployment rate during a peacetime economy since World War II. We had the lowest poverty rate, the lowest uninsured rate. I know there are these arguments in our family about how the middle class has declined over the last 30, 40 years. That’s not true. Median incomes went up steadily during this whole period. It went up a lot more during the Clinton era. And that crime rates today are half of what they were, violent crime rates, what they were 30 years ago. And the truth is that the fundamental argument that Trump has been making about the United States… that letting all those people into the country has hurt the nation… is completely false.
By virtually every measure, America was more prosperous, and more powerful, and that regular people had greater opportunities during this period than [in] any other time. I mean, imagine thinking that prior to 1965 that women and people of color in America had more opportunity than they’ve had in recent years. It’s absurd. And so we can’t go back to that period, right? There’s no going back.
And the thing that I’m just struck by here is that what happened this week is that 80 years of that global order… and the Pax Americana and this partnership… this transatlantic alliance that had created this golden age in human history… has come to an end. We are living in a hinge point in history this week. The Europeans declared independence from the United States and gave speech after speech at Davos and all around Europe this week about how the America they had partnered with for 80 years was no longer the America of today, and that America had become unreliable and was actually becoming predatory and dangerous towards the Europeans. And one of the things that Rob talks about today in our discussion is how, you know… one of the things we talk about… is that there is no version of Trump’s vision for the world that makes America more prosperous, more safe, and more free in the coming years. There’s no possibility that any of that will happen. We are now a lesser nation, and it’s not something we can reverse.
This is something that we actually have to come to terms with here… that we have lost our European transatlantic security relationship. We are now seeing the Europeans start to disengage from our economic system and from investing in America. What I wrote tonight to you… is that Donald Trump has, in the last few weeks, committed the greatest mistake by an American president in all of our history. He is the biggest F*** up that has ever lived and walked on the face of our nation in 250 years. He’s done lasting damage and he has to be removed from office. I mean, the only way that we can salvage the damage… to start to salvage what has happened to the country in the last few weeks… and it’s really going on through ten years of Trump… but it’s culminated in his, you know, threatening to invade a NATO European country… and the Europeans getting rightly, you know, unbelievably angry about it… [and Trump] dismissing them as being unimportant. Some of the stuff that he said in his Davos speech, the insults that he gave to European nations today, were just shocking. Shocking. In Europe, sitting there in Switzerland, right in the middle, just insult after insult after insult. He was who he is in the United States every day there. And it was just wild. And yes, he backed down and, you know, it was a surrender, a retreat, but the damage has been done. And Rob goes into great detail today in our talk to help you understand economically what’s going to happen now.
And the truth is that if the European bondholders of American bonds, and of our equities, if they decide… because remember the Danish pension fund that started the sell-off yesterday that created this thing that scared the White House… the Danish Pension Fund said that they didn’t sell off American bonds because of the crisis, the political crisis. They did it because America was an unreliable investment now, and that our fiscal condition was so… because of Donald Trump’s tax cuts… so dangerous that they were no longer capable of reliably investing in the United States. And what Rob lays out today in his presentation is that if Europe decides to sell a third of their bonds in the next few months, a third, it will create an economic condition similar to 1929 and create a depression in the United States. Donald Trump is risking that level of calamity for his vainglorious, idiotic quest to make himself feel powerful and be the Emperor of the Americas and the High Lord of the Western Hemisphere… to somehow look at a map and decide that Greenland somehow was in the Western Hemisphere…
One of the things that I have come to realize in the last few days is that… and I’m going to publish on this in Hopium because it’s such a fascinating thing… the map that we all look at every day is a map that was developed hundreds of years ago called the Mercator map. And it is not accurate to scale. And there’s been an attempt by geographers and historians to kind of update this map to make it more modern based because it also had to do with how it was flattened from a globe and all this… one of the huge things in it that is wrong… is that Greenland is way too big compared to how it actually is in the real world. And that it’s much closer to the United States than it actually is… when you look at a map, and I looked at one yesterday, I spent like a half an hour on this because I didn’t know this… you start to understand why Donald Trump could imagine that Greenland was in the Western Hemisphere, you know, and why it was something that was like Venezuela, right? And we are dealing with, you know, just levels of idiocy and ignorance that are unacceptable.
If Donald Trump were a CEO of a company, the board would have met this afternoon and fired him on the spot. They would have cleared out his office… the damage that he did to the country in the last few weeks for no reason, right, for no reason other than his vanity and his idiocy and his vainglorious desire to be an emperor of a region of the world. And to carve up the world idiotically with other hostile powers. The whole thing is just so unbelievable that this is actually happening. But it’s happened and we’re in a new day.
It’s important you listen to Mark Carney’s speech that I shared this morning, and so I’ll just say two things and then I’ll get to your questions. One is that, you know, we have an opportunity now because we’re coming to an end of thing and the beginning of a new thing… to imagine how we are successful and how we view this next period as a period of opportunity for us. And I have talked here in the last few weeks about how, you know, we need to start imagining and visualizing victory and success for the global democracy and freedom movement. That we can’t just accept that where we’re headed is consolidation of oligarchy and authoritarianism. But there’s going to be somehow a new birth of freedom over the next ten years, and we can’t see it today… in the way that our founding fathers couldn’t see how to beat Great Britain and how, until Grant came along, Lincoln couldn’t see how to win the Civil War, right? You don’t have to see it in the beginning. FDR didn’t know how to win World War II. We went through it and executed against it. And I worry deeply that our level of our imagination is deeply inadequate to the moment. And that we have been playing defense, shock and awe, you know, blah, blah, blah. I’m not going to go into what’s happened.
I think the Democratic Party’s response to what’s happened over the last year has been, you know, to use a fair term, wildly inadequate, right, to the scale of what’s happening. And while we’ve had electoral victories, we’ve driven Trump’s numbers down, all these things I talk about all the time, he’s continuing to do extraordinary damage. And I wrote to you a piece on Sunday that I just want to end with here… I want to describe what happened.
I’ve done a lot of global television, television in general. I was a regular participant on Fox News for 18 years. I’m doing a little bit less TV these days in part because there’s just so much time in the day and doing television is very time consuming. And I’d rather pump out Hopium and do the work at Hopium. But having said that, I used to do a lot of BBC. And I got a call from a producer last week who I’d worked with saying, we’re in the States doing a lot of interviews about what’s going on in the country, and can we interview you? And the timing didn’t work out. Then they called me Friday and said, we want to come to your house, and we want to interview you. So I was like, okay, you know, come on over. I had no time to think about it. I didn’t prep. You know, the mornings for me through the early afternoon are very busy. And they come in and the correspondent whose name is Richard, and I don’t have his last name, is somebody that I recognize actually as kind of an amazing commentator. I didn’t know they were bringing an actual correspondent. They sit down, we go into my living room, they set it up. And, you know, most of these interviews… they’re trying to get one soundbite. They take five minutes, you know, and they ask you about something very narrow.
Richard looks at me and says we want to do a long interview with you about why from our perspective in Europe and the United Kingdom all of you Democrats aren’t doing more to fight Trump. And, you know, I take these international interviews very seriously because I want people… our former allies… to understand and view America the way that I see it. And I did a 45-minute interview about this topic on Friday, and I almost cried several times during the interview. I got very emotional at times. Because they don’t understand why there isn’t more fight here… because we’re America and fighting for freedom and democracy is what we do. That’s who we are. And I tried to explain to him a couple of things. One is that I think, you know, a lot of these smaller European countries are countries where we see revolutions take place. You know, the capital city and the capital square are two to three hour drives for most of the people in the country. So, you know, the idea that the way we’re going to see a kind of rebellion is going to be in the capital city… I just don’t think that’s going to happen here. We’ve seen No Kings. I think we’ve seen a lot of distributed protests which I think over time really matter. I think that part of what we have to recognize is that we’re in the very early stages of this, what will be a 10-year effort. Year one was not so good. We need to make year two better. That’s part of the premise here for this.
Then I said the other thing I’ve thought a lot about… and we’re going to be talking about this a lot more in the coming weeks, and I’ve been writing about this… is that we don’t have a parliamentary system. So there isn’t a shadow Prime Minister and a shadow Foreign Minister that are official… that isn’t some artificial thing that we could create that would pretend that we’re the shadow Foreign Secretary and so on… but it’s part of the government that there is a formal centralized opposition, and we don’t have that in America. And we’re not gonna have it until the summer of 2028. And it’s a really big problem.
It’s part of the reason that we have been inadequate to the moment is that everyone is divided and doing their thing. I mean, Schumer’s managing the Senate and Hakeem’s managing the House, and Gavin’s doing California, and J.B. Pritzker’s in Illinois. And because of our system of government, there isn’t really any kind of mechanism to bring everybody together. You also have the additional issues of federalism and presidential rivalry and all the things that come about in our system. And what we’re learning is that we are not well designed as an opposition to grow into the kind of opposition movement that we need. And so part of what I want to be doing is that… I want to conclude with this and get to your questions… is that in my head, rattling around in my head, and you’ve seen it in some of my writing, is that we really have to start approaching everything very differently than we’ve been doing. And that I think that we really have to see ourselves almost like as a government in exile. We need to force the governors and the Congressional leaders and the big city mayors to start meeting and coordinating together.
And what I’ve called for is sort of a coordinating council that starts in two places, right? Just clear affirmation that we want to push freedom and democracy around the world and that we are going to fight Trump’s foreign policy. And we don’t believe in grabbing foreign leaders in the middle of the night, all this stuff we need to make [clear]. And domestically, we have to fight ICE and the unbelievable violations of our liberties and our freedoms here in the United States with an escalating campaign in Minnesota that’s now moved to Maine today that will move to everywhere, right… it’s coming. They have built this, you know, terror regime and they’re executing on it. And that we have to start as a baseline to say as a family that this is where we are on these two things. And we have to draw the line, and say, we’re going to fight this with everything we got going forward. In the way the Europeans just figured out how to fight Trump in a way that was effective… they had to think outside the box. They had to reimagine the relationship. I think too many of our leaders are still in this place where they think we’re just going to win the election and things will snap back to being something like normal. At this point that is insane thinking. It’s just ridiculous, insane, absurd that we think that’s the path.
We have to reimagine completely and build a completely different kind of opposition pro-democracy movement in America… the free states and the free cities not only need to work together in a far more ambitious fashion, but need to start coordinating and cooperating with free nations in the way that we would almost be as a government in exile. And Gavin Newsom, to his credit, went to Davos… was there essentially as the counter to Trump, the pro-democracy American counter to Trump the last few days. And this so spooked the Trump regime that today Newsom was supposed to speak right after Trump, not at Davos itself, not in the main room where Trump was, and where we’ve seen a lot of other stuff, but at a Fortune magazine hosted event in the American Pavilion at Davos. And this was going to allow Gavin to rebut the speech. And somehow the White House was able to deny the Governor of California entry to an event that he was scheduled to speak at today in an American pavilion which is not owned and has no relationship to the government of the United States of America. Somehow through their relationships and the pressure they put on whoever, whatever group of private leaders were managing the American pavilion, they locked out the F****** Governor of California this afternoon, and prevented him from speaking at an event.
And what we have to recognize is just how pathetic and desperate and weak and ridiculous that is. Right. I mean, it’s just like you have to be kidding me. The small ball. It’s just staggering how much they betrayed us and how much they have let us down. And how they continue to pursue this agenda of I call it sabotage, plunder and betrayal. And how scared they are of Gavin Newsom. Hats off to Gavin for going there and setting himself up as essentially the opposition figure of the pro-democracy movement in the United States. You know, we had Chris Coons on last week right before he led a delegation that went not only to Denmark, but then to Davos. They were there… Thom Tillis and Murkowski, they all were there… showing the sort of free state, free city flag of the United States. We may even need some kind of new emblem for this movement that we’re in because we don’t have one. This is not just a movement that we should view as just American. This has to be seen as a global movement for freedom and democracy that we’re all participating in… and that we all need to figure out new ways of networking, and working together and collaborating, and building what I wrote about the other day called the liberal international to counter the illiberal international that is on the rise here in America and all around the world. We have to start imagining how to have victory and success over the next ten years in restoring and creating, as Lincoln called it, a new birth of freedom.
I think this is possible. This is what I’ll close with… because Trump is such a piece of sh*t, and so ugly and fat and obnoxious and just ridiculous and a comical figure and try to sell that as the future of the right wing movement in the world… it’s a disaster for the right in Europe. And for the parts of the free world that want to move the free world to become more like Russia and China. It’s a disaster for them. Trump did enormous damage, not only to America, but he did enormous damage to all the right wing parties in Europe in the last few days. And so I do think that we have to recognize that, you know, this is a long struggle. Which is hard. It means that you have to pace yourself and take care of yourself. It’s something that I have to do, frankly, a better job at than I’ve been doing because I’ve been here every day, you know, fighting it out and I’m a little tired. I’m going to admit to you, in the last few weeks I’ve had… I won’t say burnout, but I’ve been a little bit tired. I also got sick which was just a big pain in the ass but I’m over that now.
I just want to end by saying that, you know, we have to remember at every moment this thing that we talk about, which is that he is weak, not strong. He’s a loser. He’s not a winner. He’s a failure. He’s not a success. He’s a big blubbery baby man. He’s not a strong man. And what we saw in the last 24 hours, what we saw in Davos today, was a big, blubbery, globally embarrassing baby man. And he did enormous damage to the illiberal international in my view in the last couple of days. And that’s what gives me, after what has been a very hard few days, hope and optimism that there is a path forward through all of this. Where we can, you know, create a future for our kids and our grandkids that is one that we are proud of. But man, do we all understand how much work this is going to take. And man, do we understand that we have to keep the pressure on our political leaders to continue to have greater ambition. And to be highly tolerant of risk. The way we’ve seen with Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker and Chris Murphy and others, right? We have to be unrelenting and unceasing in our communication to the leaders of our party that we need them, that history is calling them, and they need to meet the moment.
Because right now, we didn’t have a good first year. We need to have a good second year. And the Europeans should have just inspired us the way that Gavin Newsom inspired us, J.B. Pritzker inspired us, and the Texas Democrats inspired us, and other people have inspired us. We just saw the global pro-democracy movement have a big win today over Trump. He backed down. He retreated. By the way, everyone needs to stop using the term TACO. It makes light of this. This is far more grave than this. It was fun and kind of goofy… it’s wrong. It’s the wrong sentiment. Trump doesn’t always back down, actually. He doesn’t always chicken out. That’s actually not true. He chickens out if you fight him and if you contest him.
And this is the thing that our leaders have to learn is that we must be in his face every day on every issue all the time. Our politics has to be 24/7/365, and combative and fighting, and comfortable with that. Because when we fight him, we have been winning. So that means we should be fighting him more and not less. And I know we’re going to talk about what’s happening with the budget right now… I just haven’t had as much time in the last 24 hours to look at it… I’ll try to do my best in the Q and A to sort of give you my sense of where we are. But I want to challenge all of you in the most powerful way that I can communicate… do not allow any disappointment that we’re about to have in this budget fight to become our understanding of the moment because we will be selling short what’s actually happening here. There’s something more complex happening here. Trump just had a global humiliation today. This is a big deal because it shows the Europeans that if they stand up to him, that he’ll back down.
And I think that we may have gotten closer to have created this kind of pressure on our leaders to find a higher gear to meet the moment. That is why I’m choosing to end this day optimistic as opposed to where I was in how I started, which is I’m F****** angry and I’m worried. And I am shocked at how much this guy hates America. And it reminds me how much we have to love it in order to prevail over him.
Let me get to your questions. Thanks everybody. Thank you all for what you do every day. As I say, we have good days and bad days. Today was not a good day. We need to have a good day tomorrow.
Lots of interesting comments and questions tonight.
A lot of questions here about Mark Carney’s speech. And Ursula von der Leyen… I have to learn all these new players because they’re now deeply consequential figures in the global democracy movement. Yeah, I mean, there was a single message really coming from Europe this week, which is that the transatlantic alliance is no longer what it was. It’s a new day. They declared their independence from the United States, and it’s not clear that this thing that we’ve called the West still exists anymore. I mean, Trump was far more supportive of Putin this week than he was of Europe in a variety of ways, including inviting Putin and also Putin’s ***** in Belarus, whose name I’m just forgetting right now [Lukashenko], to join this ridiculously corrupt and insane occupation of Gaza that’s going on right now.
And remember, part of the reason I think Trump made this move on Greenland is that he has successfully taken over Gaza. And is building this kind of country club there… where you can buy property, you know, like put a billion bucks up and you’ll get your share and you’ll be able to build like a little town, whatever, of your people in this newly occupied place. He’s treating it like a gated community or like a country club. Where they’ve taken over land… these vast developments where you buy two acres and you build your house in a community. That’s how they’re treating Gaza right now. I mean, it’s really it’s kind of unbelievable. How insane this all is and what he thinks he’s doing. Two weeks ago he declared himself the acting president of Venezuela like some completely insane person. But he has somehow actually legitimately taken over Gaza. And so he took over Gaza… then he snatched Maduro and declared himself the acting president of Venezuela. And so he’s like, okay, that worked… let’s go for Greenland. And that didn’t work. And he’s done enormous harm to himself and to the country. He was humiliated by the Europeans today. And that was important.
But what it gets to is the question about the new world order… this new world order, I think, is far more of a new world disorder. Whatever this post Pax Americana, post Four Freedoms order becomes, we’re going to have to go build it. And what I hope… and my vision… is over these next ten years, the free states and the free cities claim back power in America. And then America becomes once again a builder of this next thing rather than seceding from it which is what Trump has essentially done. Trump has essentially seceded his political party and his current government from the west, from the international order, from the U.N. charter, from all these Senate ratified treaties for American democracy. They’re a secessionist movement, you know, from the global system… even our domestic rules-based order here in America.
I loved Newsom’s video yesterday. Gavin’s a friend. Not everybody loves Gavin. I know that. I have been friends with Gavin Newsom for 22 years. He reads Hopium. We email each other. He’s a friend of this community’s, or mine anyway, and hopefully this community’s. But the language he used yesterday, which I shared at Hopium… you know, Trump is a T. rex and either he eats you or you mate with him, or, you know, the law of Don, not the rule of law, or the law of the jungle. I mean, his language was amazing in trying to explain what Trump really is, right. Instead of, you know… like he’s just kind of a crazy guy and boys will be boys and locker room talk and all this stuff, right. And I give Gavin a lot of credit… on a global stage, you know, he was out there fighting and people need to see Americans fighting on the global stage.
They need to believe that the pro-democracy movement in this country has a pulse. Because here’s why. And Rob and I talked about this today. If you’re European investors, and you have these massive holdings in the United States, you’re seeing the country become so fundamentally unstable, right… terror regimes, you know, kidnapping five year old children off streets, they’ve renounced rule of law, there’s a corrupt Justice Department, he’s attacking the independence of the Fed, you know, they all know what this means… right, those kinds of countries go to sh*t. And the economies go to shit and your investments go to shit. I mean, they all know this, right? Everyone’s seen this movie before. It just hasn’t happened here. It’s happened in Hungary. It’s happened in South America. It’s happened in other places, right? And so the investors who have a fiduciary responsibility to create returns for their shareholders and their investors and their pension funds, they’re looking at the United States and it’s like, we got to get out of here. This is a mess. And the question is, should we get out of here a lot or a little? And is there a chance that in the next few years that America will kind of snap back to being the way it was or is it going to be unstable for years?
And the answer is we’re going to be unstable for years. And that means that it’s creating an incentive for there to be massive disinvestment out of the United States. And Rob sort of describes what happens if that happens, and how it’s going to cripple the country, if this happens. And I’m worried that domino has basically fallen and that we are in this inevitable place where the Europeans… as Rob points out, a large amount of the equities held by Europeans in the United States… the bonds are held by private, not government entities. And those private entities have a fiduciary responsibility to withdraw funds from unstable places that aren’t going to provide return. Or where they can’t guarantee the safety of their investment because we don’t have rule of law in America anymore. And the implications of this for our economy… our future… are terrifying. I think that’s why part of what has to happen, in my view, to the question I got about Carney’s speech, Democratic leaders have just got to start taking responsibility for what’s happening now. For what’s happening around the world.
And this idea that the election in 2026 is going to be fought over affordability and health care is a farce. It’s absurd. I mean, there may have been a moment where that was true, but we’re no longer in that place. You know, this issue about whether we’re a democracy, and how we interact with the rest of the world, and what happened to the global system that was there 12 months ago that’s not anymore… these are like world altering things that our leaders have to buck up and start F****** dealing with, right… and not retreating to this place of false comfort, you know, that we can just talk about [how] Trump has made your prices too high and everything’s going to be fine. I mean, that didn’t really work, did it? And so, what I’m going to be working towards at Hopium is to try to create this kind of understanding now… you know, I wrote in the very first Hopium post that I wanted to help the pro-democracy movement understand the nature of the conflict that we’re now in. I think that there’s a lot of wishful thinking in our party right now about the nature of the conflict. And part of our job is to help us understand where we are now and develop a plan for victory and not failure.
I had an old friend that once said that what Simon does… at my old organization… is that while we were taking this hill, I was always focused on taking the next hill, right? Well, that’s called strategy, right? And I’m a strategist, and Hopium is going be spending more time talking to people about how we imagine now how we go forward given the gravity of everything that happened over the last few weeks… where we’re entering a far more dangerous and precarious world. There is no question now that America will be less prosperous and that we are less secure than we’ve been in decades. And that certainly we are less free in America than we’ve been in a very long time. We have to take responsibility for that. This notion that somehow we’re just going to win back power and everything is going to be fine is just absurd at this point.
So we need to start taking responsibility for not just building the pro-democracy movement. We need to start imagining what the future is going to be given these new realities and building a politics that is going to make it more likely that we get there. Right now, you know, we’re starting at scratch. And so what that means is, as for all of my frustration and anger, that this is a time for entrepreneurship and leadership and to recognize that we’re here now. Zelensky… his country was attacked and they’ve fended off Russia for years now… four years now. And he can’t get up every morning and bemoan where he is. He just has to figure out how to win, right? And that’s where we are. We just have to be unrelenting in our commitment to figure out how to win. Part of what I’m doing here at Hopium with all of you is I’m trying to create a rationale for how you stay in the game and not withdraw in fear, anger, frustration and worry. I try to do it every day because I have to do it for myself. And I try to do it with all of you. That’s part of the Hopium project, right? Which is… how do we make sure that we are not obeying in advance and withdrawing? Which is what they want.
We have to stay vigorously involved in fighting for our freedoms and our democracy. And I think there are green shoots… there are signs of things that we should be pleased with, but we also cannot be satisfied with where we are at any moment. We are not where we need to be. And we need to keep pushing our leaders to reach higher and find a higher gear, as I’ve called it here, and be proud American patriots, and fight for freedom and democracy here and everywhere. That’s our birthright. That’s our creed. That’s who we are. We have to take that seriously. By claiming somehow that we’re going to win by focusing on health care and affordability, in some ways, is to me cowardly and it is not accepting the nature of where we are and the things that must be done now. We talk about the three legs of the stool… affordability, health care, threats to democracy and freedom. You know, I’m working very vigorously to get the family to accept this third leg… we’ve been a little bit hesitant to… and this is another area we can we can work on.
I will tell you that the reports from Minnesota in the last couple of days, in the last 24, 48 hours… there seems to be further escalation. One of the stories is that kids are starting to disappear now. And families are being taken in. I saw a clip before I came on here… a five year old kid was separated from his father. They were both detained. The kid was sent to Texas. There was no mechanism for notification of the family. So the family just didn’t know where their five year old boy was. They had lawyers and people calling trying to figure out where he was… there was a family left behind. And there was no process of notification of any of them. Right. I mean, the inhumanity of this stuff is so staggering. I think that we have to use this to continue to motivate ourselves.
I want to thank all of you who participated in the fundraising campaign we did for the Minnesota Democratic Party, the DFL, as it’s called. We raised almost $70,000. And I want you to know why we did that… we did it because it’s my belief, and I should have talked about this in the opening segment, but it’s my belief that as part of our 10-year plan, that the Democratic Party as an entity, as an institution, has to expand its understanding of itself. That it can’t just see itself as an electoral machine, which is important, and that’s still going to be its primary job, but it needs to become a more conscious defender of democracy here and everywhere. It has to be a stated like a dual mission. When I interviewed Richard Carlbom, the chair of the Minnesota Democratic Party, he talked about how in Minnesota now there is sort of this understanding that everybody’s got to do more. And so we raised this money to help them do more and to start to create a new model for what a Democratic Party in America could look like, a state party, given the threats to democracy, given ICE, so that if we could expand and create new models, and new understandings and new tactics and strategies, those then can be shared with other state parties around the country to help them evolve and mature. And so your funding went into that.
I just want to tell you tonight is that I set up a meeting between the Minnesota Democratic Party and the Maine Democratic Party… ICE descended on them because they have Somali communities there. ICE has now opened up a new front in Maine today. And the Maine Democratic Party and the Minnesota Democratic Party are now talking to each other about shared lessons, you know, what they can learn from each other. And your resources allowed that to happen. So my hope is that what comes out of this, not in the next two weeks, but over the next year or two years, is that we reimagine what a Democratic Party could be. It’s not just about winning elections. It’s also protecting democracy. And you saw that with the California Democratic Party in Prop 50. You saw that in the Maine Democratic Party who defeated the ballot initiative that would have restricted voting. You saw it in the Pennsylvania Democratic Party that fought to retain the Supreme Court justices… so critical to maintaining our democracy… you’re already seeing, whether the Democratic Party understands it or not, an evolution of this entity… to have a dual mission or an expanded mission maybe. And that was what this was about.
And so the money that we raise, for example… they have to hold 4,000 precinct caucuses on February 3rd in the middle of all this. How are they going to ensure the security of these sites? And how are they going to make sure that people have training in case ICE comes in in the middle of an event, right? What are their legal rights to deny ICE entry and so on? And how do we make sure democracy continues in the middle of this onslaught? Well, no one’s ever had to do anything like this before. And we wanted to provide resources to Minnesota, the Minnesota Party, to make it easier for them to invest in providing solutions and trainings for all of their people to make sure these precinct caucuses come off in a few weeks. And Richard, the chair, will come back and talk to us after the precinct caucuses about what’s happened in the evolution.
The whole point here is that we have to continue to accept responsibility for what’s happening and not see the world as we wish it were to be, but as it is, and then build a successful winning politics around that. And that’s what Hopium has been about from the beginning. It’s been our core mission. I want to thank all of you who’ve participated in the fundraising we’ve done and the volunteer work that you all do. When we’re done here, I’m speaking at an event with a grassroots group in New Mexico that we’ve done a lot of work with, that’s doing amazing work in southern New Mexico, with Robert Hubbell. He and I are speaking here in a few minutes.
What we did together… we’re helping now make the Democratic Party as an entity a more effective warrior, given the new circumstances. And so people are asking me about what do we do? You’re going to see a lot of exploration of new ways of thinking about how we organize ourselves given the realities of where we are and not where we used to be. I see a lot of comments about [how] the offices not are capable of of receiving phone calls and, you know, we have to fix that. And our leaders should have greater machinery and mechanism to hear from us. And we have to work on that. A bunch of people in Minnesota kind of, I think, got confused about what we were doing in Minnesota, and I got kind of raked over the coals over the weekend. I don’t want to dwell on that, you know, things are very fraught in Minnesota, and I think there was some misunderstanding, and there’s a lot of just agita in our politics right now. To be generous, I think a few people jumped the gun a little bit and misunderstood what we were doing and created a little bit of a brush fire that, you know, I think we managed. That I and the Minnesota Party managed together. It was unfortunate. As I often say here, you know, this is a hard time and people are going to be disappointed by people’s behavior. And I stood my ground and I defended the work that we were doing. I just think things are so hard in Minnesota right now that we have to give a lot of grace to people there who are struggling in extraordinary circumstances, who feel alone and want more help. We were providing help. This was something… they didn’t understand kind of the grand strategy because as many of you know, not everyone’s really happy with the party right now. And so there were some people who were disappointed in the party and were pissed that we were giving money to the party instead of other things. I mean, if I can handle 17, 18 years on Fox News, I can handle, a couple unruly people in Minneapolis who were fighting for their community, but things on the internet can spread quickly.
I talk a lot here about the need for us to provide grace to others and to respect one another and to recognize that this is a hard time. And that not everyone is going to make you happy every day and people are going to make mistakes and fail… they’re going to let you down. Do not allow yourself to be perpetually disappointed because that’s going to take you down. That creates the negative spiral and, you know, you can go down that road, but you’re going to be less effective as a patriot if you do that. I need you in the game here. We need to keep fighting. 2025… we had great election victories. We need to do the same in ‘26, but we need to find a way to challenge Trump more effectively to minimize the damage he’s doing to the country. Part of our mission has been it’s been inadequate, it’s undeveloped, it’s a muscle that is not ready for prime time, right, or whatever you want to call it. But that’s our job at Hopium. Our job is to help our electeds understand what’s required of them now and all of you need to keep working as hard as you possibly can.
This has been a bad couple days. There are some hopeful signs in all this and we have to be able to see both at the same time. And now we have to go build a new America together and not to restore, but to renew and to do something historically meaningful together, and not to view it only as stopping him, but we have to start thinking about how we go build something better than what we had. I think we can do it. I think it doesn’t always feel that way. But Trump… the last thing you should remember is that Trump got pantsed today by the Europeans. I mean, he was publicly humiliated, and he had to retreat, and he looked addled, idiotic, lunatic, weak, pathetic, and desperate. And that’s a good way to end, everybody. Love you guys. Keep fighting.