TribFest With Mitch Landrieu
01:07:38 Share

Freshly made ravioli or hand-pulled ramen noodles? When you dine with Chase Sapphire Reserve, either will be amazing because it's the choice between a front row seat at the chef's table while getting a live demo of how to make ravioli or dining family style as you hear the story behind your ramen broth. This weekend, it's ravioli.

Next weekend, ramen. Find the detail that moves you with immersive dining experiences from Sapphire Reserve. Chase, make more of what's yours. Learn more at chase.com slash sapphirereserve. Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member of FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened. There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. The United States of America. Good night and good luck.

- All right, I want to thank everybody for coming out today. My name is Rick Wilson. I'm a co-founder of the Lincoln Project. I've written a couple books. I piss off Donald Trump for a living. I am absolutely delighted to be the host of both the Lincoln Project podcast and the Enemies List podcast because what white guy in his 60s doesn't have at least one podcast?

But I do want to thank everybody for coming out today, and I want to thank the Texas Trib Festival for inviting us here to be a part of this remarkable event. It is something that I've been proud to have attended in many past years, and this year, the kinds of conversations that are had here at the Texas Trib Fest are more important than ever.

This year, we literally have democracy standing on a thin, thin line. We are at a moment in this country where we have to decide, are we going to be a constitutional republic and a representative democracy, or are we gonna slip down into autocracy and dictatorship and darkness? I know that sounds wild to think that sometimes, but have you met Donald Trump?

It is a moment that I think everybody who's having these conversations, who's fighting this fight, we appreciate the interaction and the input and the connection with folks like you every day. And so today, Mitch Landrieu, who is a former Lieutenant Governor of the great state of Louisiana, a former mayor of the beautiful city of New Orleans, one of my absolute favorite places in this whole wide world, and is currently a senior advisor to the President of the United States,

We're gonna talk a little bit about that future. We're gonna talk a little bit about where we see the country going. We're gonna talk a little bit about how we can bring people left and right and center together. I mean, I think we saw a great example of that yesterday when notorious Antifa radical progressive Liz Cheney and her father, Red Dick Cheney, decided that they were going to do something quite remarkable in our day and age, and that was to endorse Kamala Harris for president.

At this rate, I'm gonna see Karl Rove with a Bratz summer t-shirt.

But for all that, I do want to sit down and the Enemies List podcast, we generally run about a half an hour. We're going to go a little longer than that today so we can do some Q&A with you great folks in the audience. And I want to say thank you for one particular thing. We are up against Nancy Pelosi, who is being interviewed by my friend Kara Swisher. And they're so much better than me in every respect. And Mitch, you're just going to have to own that you and I are not Nancy and Kara. Although, you have my sunglasses somewhere. Anyway. Anyway.

So, Mitch, thank you again for coming on today, and welcome to the Enemies List podcast. Thank you. It's great to be here. So, I want to start out— Is anybody watching the UT game right now? You know there's a Manning who's from New Orleans that's on that team. You all know that, right? He's going to be great. Well, Mitch, again, thank you for coming on the Enemies List today. I want to start out with a question for you.

There's been this sense in our country for the last almost 10 years that we are so deeply divided we can never come back together. Talk to me a little bit about where you see that, because you and I have talked before about there's a lot more in the middle that we can get along on and do work on than I think people acknowledge. Well, first of all, thanks for being here. Secondly, I definitely can see that I'm not on par with Nancy or Kara. They're great, and we should hurry up and get to them.

And I'm sure they're going to excite your mind. I would just ask you to think about this in a couple different ways. In my life, I'm one of nine kids. My mother had nine kids in 11 years. My mother's a saint. She's great. I was the middle kid. And if you've been the fifth kid of nine, you know you've got to figure out how to make it work. You know, they either go on vacation with the top four without you or the bottom four without you. I mean, that's just kind of how it works, unless you get assertive. So...

I think I learned very early on in my life without going into the story of my whole family's history about how to figure out how to make things work. And my entire life has really been about just finding a way of making one. And I have strong feelings about life and I have...

ideological bearings, but in my existence, having been a lawyer, a lieutenant governor, a mayor, the head of kind of getting all the infrastructure stuff built, it was kind of like just find a way to fix the problem. Find a problem, fix a problem. Find a way, make a way. If you don't have enough people to help you make friends, because my entire life, the biggest message that I've learned is that we are much better together and we can produce more together together.

Even given the difficulty with the issues that we have, diversity and race. So that's just kind of my North Star. And as I have traveled the country as a mayor and lieutenant governor and as an infrastructure person who just this week, I think I hit my 170th city, town, or county. I get to talk to a lot of people and I see a lot of things and I'm in airports all the time.

And I love airports for a lot of different reasons besides the fact that I build them. But I love sitting there and watching the masses of people walk by. And it occurs to me, it's magical every time I go, so I don't mind delays. I just sit there and I watch people, races, creeds, colors, people who are all trying to do the same exact thing, which is to just get the hell home. And we do it miraculously. And it's wonderful to watch.

And so I have always believed, and I continue to believe, and I think the proof is just self-evident, that we have a lot more in common. That's not just a talking point. We have a lot more in common, which takes me to my assessment of where we are today. We have chosen this spot. We're not here by accident, that the people of America have actually chosen.

When you're the mayor of a city or you're doing whatever you do in your life, you choose to either find common ground or you choose to separate. It is a choice. And in this country, some people have come to believe that isolation and separating, it leads to power. And they want to have that power. And the question is, if they get it, what will they do with it?

And I think that really is the bigger picture. As you were mentioning earlier, it was interesting to me that Vice President Cheney, who for most Democrats was like Darth Vader. I mean, if we're being honest about it, I'm glad he's kind of, you know, going to do what he said he was going to do right now. But don't get confused.

Dick Cheney doesn't think like most of you people do about whatever the issues of the day might be. And Liz Cheney doesn't either, as magnificent as she is. But what they do agree on, and this is what this election is really about, and future elections, by the way, this is not the only one. And Donald Trump's not the cause, folks. He's just a symptom. So we have an illness in the country right now that we've chosen to kind of lean into, some of us to stay separate and some of us to try to get together, which is, and Rick is completely correct about this, and thank you for all your work.

If the framework of democracy does not exist, if the very essence of the country that we all come to the table of democracy as equals and that we have all created a rule of law

for the distinct purpose of making sure that those of us who think differently have a place peacefully to exist, which is why the founding fathers designed it that way, then we really have no country at all. And it is absolutely true. This is the first time in, I don't know, I think I'm pretty much as old as anybody in this room. This is the first time in my lifetime, from Kennedy all the way through today, where democracy has really been at risk. And don't be unclear about this. You can't run from this. You can't hide from this. You can't say I didn't know

Donald Trump is an autocrat. Donald Trump does not believe in the rule of law. Donald Trump does not believe in democracy unless he thinks using that word is going to help him seize power because that is all that this is about. And if you give it to him again, he will be exceptionally better than

at destroying democracy than he was the first time that he was there. That's why this election is so unbelievably critical and so different from the one that you have, which is why you have to make the choice now, even if it doesn't meet with the way that you think the taxing system ought to be designed or whether you think regulations ought to be a way or whether you think free trade ought to be such and such. That is why you have to, if you want to have a country that is worth fighting for, make sure that he never gets close to that office again because once you lose it, my friends, let me just, you know this enough,

Once you lose it, it is even, if not impossible to get back, much, much harder. It costs much more and will cost us more lives than ever if we just go to the polls and show up and do what we're supposed to do in a couple of months. I think that is spot on, Mitch. Thank you for that. Thank you.

I wanna talk a little bit for the moment about the job you're doing right now. And the job Mitch is doing right now is implementing the President's Infrastructure Bill, which is one of the most consequential moments legislatively in this country in a very long time. And it was a bipartisan bill, as much as half of them didn't wanna sign it or vote for it, they sure show up when you cut the ribbons.

But I think we're gonna remember President Biden for four big things. First off, the selfless moment he had in making the decision to pass the reins on to Vice President Harris. I think that is gonna be go down in history.

But I also think we're gonna look at the infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Chips and Science Act as three pillars that started to reverse a multi-decade slide in this country in doing the things government ought to be doing. The literal infrastructure of roads, bridges, sewers, airports, everything,

Talk to us a little bit about what you're doing in that and what you're hearing out in the country because these things are going into red districts and blue districts. They're not just one flavor or another. Well, thank you for that, but let me just be clear with folks. I'm no longer in the White House. Oh, sorry. That's okay. I was in the White House until February, and I was, in fact, the person who was in charge with the White House.

with the president's blessing of implementing the infrastructure spend, and I'll talk about that. But right now, I became the chair of the Biden campaign for presidency, and now I'm one of the chairs of the Harris campaign for presidency, and I'm spending my time campaigning. But I'm generally a private citizen. But let me kind of take you back to the big idea. And this is what you and I may have a philosophical disagreement about.

If President Reagan were around still, or either one of the Bushes, and I know that we're in Bush country, their kind of thought was that the federal government should be smaller, not bigger, and that maybe the federal government shouldn't be giving money to the states. Maybe they ought to let the states keep more money, and then the governors ought to figure all of this out. However, there are certain issues that are so big, the federal government has got to play, and one of them is defense. Defense.

But one of them is domestic tranquility. But the other is like just making sure the country has roads and bridges and airports and ports and clean air and safe water. And so for 50 years, presidents talked about doing this. None of them can get it done. Joe Biden came into office and said, I'm going to make it happen. And of course, everybody talked about infrastructure week. We never had him. But he managed. And this is why, number one, I do believe that Joe Biden will go down as being one of the most consequential presidents in the history of the country. I do. I think.

I think just when you look back, I said Tom Brady's starting to be a commentator today for some reason, but if you were gauging quarterbacks and you were trying to say were they good or were they bad, you would look at their stats. You know, not just the campaign rhetoric, but you would look at what did they get done. And for example, President Bush's investment in AIDS in Africa, I mean, it's going to go down in history as being one of the greatest investments, but nobody really kind of paid much attention to that when he was president because we were busy being mad at him about other stuff if you were a Democrat. Right.

But history has a way of kind of reminding you about the real stuff later on. When you look back on his presidency, you will go, wait a minute, tell me again what he did? He passed four really big pieces of legislation that arguably mirror FDR level investments, Lyndon Johnson investments in things that are deep and foundational that will be with us for a long period of time. And it took the federal government showing up with real money

not just tax credits, but with real hard cash so that we could actually get about the business of fixing all the deferred maintenance that we have had that you see in your life that you get aggravated about when you're driving. And so the governor of Michigan who ran on this just fill the damn pothole

Is there a Republican or a Democratic way to fill the pothole? No, just fill the pothole. All the time you spend in traffic. Kids across this country, I know that some people in here don't understand this, but there are kids across this country that are drinking dirty water out of lead pipes. There are people in Lowndes County, Alabama that do not have

in their houses and sewage is in their yards. You have brownfield sites, the oil and gas industry, God bless them for all the work that they have done, but they left behind a lot of dirt. Evidently their mama forgot to teach them that if you mess something up, you gotta clean it up.

And if you're doing something that hurts other people, you might want to think about it. And so this $1.2 trillion to rebuild the roads, the bridges, the airports, the ports, waterways, make sure every little kid has access to high-speed internet. For all of y'all, y'all figured this out during COVID. If you couldn't get online, you were SOL.

And there are a lot of people in this country they don't have access to, including farmers who can't engage in agribusiness, or if your mom and daddy live in rural areas and they're sick, you can't get telemedicine to them. President Biden and Kamala Harris laid this bill down on the ground. Then they did the Inflation Reduction Act, which is a weirdly named thing, but essentially it gave the federal government

the power to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies to lower prescription drug costs because they're charging people in Canada and Great Britain a lot less money than they're charging you for the same exact drug. And people on both sides of the aisle have been fighting that issue. So you got part of that. Then they did the CHIPS Act. Now for all of you people in here that don't understand anything about CHIPS like I did when we started, like we can't do anything without CHIPS. They're the little things that make everything in your life work. Just trust me and ask your kids.

But most of those chips right now are made in Taiwan. Now Taiwan just happens to be really geographically close to China. And so when COVID happened and everybody went, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. All of those supply lines that we had got disrupted and then our lives got shrewd. Why don't we bring all that stuff closer to home? The CHIPS Act was designed to put money into building manufacturing facilities that are called fabs. I don't know why they call them fabs, but it's a manufacturing facility that are manufacturing chips.

All of these things are being built now, according to the law, with products that we want to make in America because, as you know, in your lifetime, a lot of small towns and counties across all of the country have been burned out because a lot of the manufacturing went over. We're trying to bring it back home. Those four pieces of legislation together created, and this is the anti-Reagan book,

Biden message that doesn't matter to people right now because of democracy. Ronald Reagan believed in something called trickle-down economics, as did George Bush. He called it voodoo economics first, and then he switched, but they got on board, you know, your team with trickle-down. Joe Biden's like, I don't like that theory. I think we ought to invest in people and invest in things, and we're going to argue forever in the future about which one of those economic models work if we can save our democracy. So what's happening right now is all of those investments

are going out of Washington down to the states, red states, if you will, and other states. We have 60,000 projects going on in the country, and in the next couple of years, that number's gonna go up to 100,000 that are essentially rebuilding all of the country as we know it. It's the little things. And I do think that this is something that leads me to talk a little bit about the campaign. Because aside from one vision with Vice President Harris campaigning on somebody who is going to help people,

who is making the campaign about them, not about her. And you have Donald Trump, who is a campaign that is only about him. These two competing visions set aside the authoritarian versus democracy part. I'm seeing polling and our polling from the Lincoln Project and elsewhere and private polling and public polling

that that message she's communicating right now, it builds on this foundation that Joe Biden helped create with these bills. She's telling people now, these young people especially, who always ask that question, why can't I afford a house? Why can't I afford to get married? Why can't I afford to have kids? She's actually, for the first time in a long time, saying, I'm gonna take care of the things that are screwing you over,

I'm going to put the government on your side in these fights. I think it's a remarkable tone, but it is not driven like a lot of traditional Democratic campaigns on here's my 9,000 page book on climate policy or whatever. Talk to us a little bit about how effective the tone and that working for you message has been for her. Well, it's important. You've been doing this for a long time, and the Lincoln Project's ads are just fantastic. And I can't...

And I don't want anybody to think in this conversation that I don't think Donald Trump's like the worst thing that's ever happened to us and we have to stop him. But let's kind of put that discussion aside for a minute and kind of get back into, well, how are you running the campaign and how's that message working? It's really crazy when you start this campaign maybe two years ago or as soon as the media wants to start it and then it goes in a thousand different directions. As you get into the last 60 days or so, which is where we are, it starts to have to get really simple. This is a choice.

Two roads diverged into yellow wood, and they're really different choices. And one guy is for himself, for his rich friends, and for having power to hurt the people that don't like him. And there's a substantial amount of evidence to support that, so that message resonates. Or you can be for somebody who gets up every day fighting for you.

fighting for the things that you care about, for the things that really matter, and fighting against the people that are trying to do the things that hurt you. And then she has to lay some of those things out. So of course, prescription drugs is really critically important. If you're from a family that's got what we call in the South the sugar or diabetes, right, and you've been paying the cost of insulin for, see the people from the South, some of the people from-- - I saw some nods. - Not part of the South, like Louisiana, y'all might know that in Texas, but they call it the sugar.

And then you start listening to people tell you, I don't like that you keep telling me, Mitch, that y'all created 16 million jobs and you have the lowest unemployment rate and we have higher wages. I know all of that, but it's really just really expensive. I just came back from the grocery store and I tried to buy a cantaloupe and it cost $4 when, you know, last year I remember it cost in two. Y'all raised it. Or Havarti cheese that my granddaughter likes and my wife says, I'm not buying it anymore because it's too damn expensive.

Politicians have to stop telling people, well, yeah, but, yeah, but, yeah, but. You gotta go, okay, if you care about that, I got a plan to help you fix that problem. And so the vice president has laid out, I think you have to agree, even if you don't like her and you don't agree with her, that the last 40 days have been spectacular

If you're a political junkie and you look at how candidates are supposed to handle themselves, she's almost been near perfect. And I'm sure that there are going to be hiccups, but she's doing an excellent job of communicating to people that I am here to fight for you. I'm here to lift you up. I'm here to protect you. That's why she's talking about opportunity. And when she talks about opportunity, she talks about low in cost. But she's also talking about freedom. And this is where the issue of reproductive freedom comes in. And she's not just telling people, well, wait a minute. If you think...

that the government ought to be that intrusive in my private life, and the government is gonna take away from you what your mother has, what else do they want to take away? And how far will they go? And oh, by the way, since Donald Trump said leave it to the states, and the states have taken it and run with it, why don't you look at what Tennessee's doing? Why don't you look at what Florida's doing? Why don't you look at Louisiana putting Mifflip Bridgestone, I'm coming to Texas, I'm coming to y'all. Hold up, babe.

Why don't you look at the fact that Louisiana has now made mifepristone a controlled substance so that if a woman is bleeding and she's in trouble and she needs help, you can't do that without violating the law or your wonderful state of Texas, you know, who's one of, of course, the most enlightened states in the nation on this particular issue.

But the point is not just that, although that is a critically important point, and women are going to speak with great voices, but the men are now starting to wake up going, this is about our wives and my daughters. Look, I have two beautiful daughters. I have five sisters. I've got five sisters-in-laws. I have 19 nieces. All right? So I have, as a father, a husband, a mother, a brother, a stake in this as well. And the white men, especially the white bald-headed men, need to kind of, hey, hey.

need to really kind of get into, this is not just about them, it's about us, and we have to be really good allies on this issue, but it also goes to voting rights. It goes to the issue really of power and oppression.

That if you give them power, are they going to use it to lift you up or push you down? And that's true whether you're talking about women, whether you're talking about people of color, whether you're talking about any issue that you talk about. And when you know that Donald Trump is an oppressive guy, a guy that if you give power to, he will only use it for himself and to hurt other people, you start going, you know, maybe I'll give myself a little room, which is why I think

great Republicans like Adam Kinzinger or Jeff Duncan, all these guys and women and Liz Cheney, if they want to live to fight another day, if they want to have a real Republican party, if they really want to battle with me and our team over the future of democracy, we have to have a democracy first.

That's why this race is, it is a little bit about policy, but honestly, it's really about democracy. And essentially, it's about character and the ability of a human being to use the power that we give them to lift us up or to push us down. I think that is exactly right, Mitch. And you identified something, since the Dobbs decision came down,

It used to be the back of the envelope math was that Republican women were between 22 and 28% pro-choice before Dobbs. Now that meant somewhere between Roe v. Wade style pro-choice or libertarian leave me the hell alone pro-choice. Like government should have nothing to do with my life. That number has almost doubled since Dobbs among Republican women.

They understand that abortion has become a stand-in for these weirdos who want to remove the 19th Amendment and take away the woman's right to vote. They believe that they should have, and this is the exact opposite of what the traditional Republican government should stay out of our lives. We should be careful of what the state can do.

they're telling you every day, we don't want a little government, we want a big one, especially when it comes to monitoring your period, monitoring your travel, deciding if you're pregnant or not, deciding what kind of birth control you can use, and deciding whether or not you have to bear a rapist child. So that is a moment, we identified that in the polling, it has really moved women, but you and I,

are in this demographic between 1960 and 1990, if you're a man born between 1960 and 1990, and you have other children, daughters or granddaughters, you're what we call a Dobbs dad.

And they look pretty Republican in a lot of ways, but they are pissed off that the thought of their little girl or their grandchild, of which I have my first now, one week ago. Go ahead, Pawpaw. They're pissed off. They're pissed off that the idea that their wife or their daughter or their granddaughter is going to have to die to make Mike Johnson happy.

Well, I think that's right. And I think that many people who consider themselves to be people of faith, I think from their sense, they are pro-life,

are now saying, but wait, I don't trust my legislature now to be thoughtful and protective. I know that people in America, and people here are generally really wonderful, but I think that most people in America think, it's like Mr. Smith goes to Washington, where you go on the House floor where there are 435 members, and somebody says, hey, it would be a great idea if today we talked about X. And we'll have an argument about it, and it'll be really pleasant, and everybody will get a chance to talk, and we'll resolve it the way we resolve issues around the Landrieu dinner.

dinner table, or the way you do this at home, where you finally go, we have to live together. We actually have to come back here and see each other because we've got to get ready for school and we have to eat tonight. So we've got to resolve it. And then we work it out in a way that accommodates all of us. That's generally the way most of us do everything. That is not how your government works.

That is not the way it works. And so now that the Republicans, the hardcore pro-life MAGA folks on the issue of life have gotten their way and the Supreme Court has unleashed

complete freedom to state legislatures to do what they want, you're now beginning to maybe ask this question. Well, wow, how many legislatures are there in America? How many people are in those legislatures? What do they really look like? The answer is there are 7,000 legislators, plus or minus a couple. They are mostly older white men.

in the lower 13 southern states that like predominantly 70 to 75% older white men who may or may not reflect your views or your values about anything. And so now that you've returned the power to them, again, they're asking you to return power to Donald Trump, it's not like you could not, that's not something you could not have known. See, this is America, there is no hiding here, everybody.

There is no hiding here. America now needs to look at this really, really clearly and say to themselves, I know everything. You're not gonna learn anything more about Donald Trump that's gonna make you like him less than you like him now. So whatever you're about to buy, you better make sure that you are ready for the consequences. And I don't know about y'all, I got five kids. I used to tell my kids, listen, good decisions equal good consequences. Bad decisions equal bad consequences. That's just that easy.

And the character of a person, and I'm not talking about the kind of, oh, I got you, I caught you in a small lie, or you might have done something wrong that you know you weren't supposed to if you were Catholic. I mean, you go to confession and get over, and you're a good person, but you make mistakes and you try to get better. I'm not talking about that kind of character. I'm talking about dark character.

Like you think the world is evil. You think it's apocalyptic. You think that somehow somebody told you you were the savior. You think that maybe you're never wrong. You think that when you look in the mirror, you see a king and a good looking person rather than what you really see. Y'all understand what I'm talking about, right? That kind of delusion. And if you listen, this is what I get really defensive about Joe Biden because everybody was like, my guy is not all there.

because he stuttered and this and that. I listen to Donald Trump talk and I go, that guy, there's something really wrong with him. Like he can't finish a sentence. He can't, when he begins an illusion, allusion, when he alludes to something else, he jumps 50 different places and he starts talking about sharks and batteries. And if Joe Biden did that, you have to admit this. You have to admit this. If Joe Biden did that one time, y'all would send for the straitjacket.

But somehow his folks, and this is just what we had, many of them are my cousins. I got a big family and half of my family is like, I don't want to talk to y'all anymore about this. They are basically saying it doesn't matter what you say, what you think, what you do, how dark it is. Somehow, someway, I see in you somebody that's going to protect something that I used to have that I don't have. And so I'm going to be for you anyway. That is a very dangerous place.

because Donald Trump, as he's demonstrating now on the issue of abortion, has no allegiance to anybody relating to anything, and he will throw his mother under the bus. So I'm just telling all my friends that are thinking that I'm gonna be for Trump 'cause he's gonna be for me, he's never gonna be for you, 'cause he's only for one person.

And that's just kind of the way he is. - That is a 50-year track record of Donald Trump. He has screwed every single person he's ever interacted with. He has broken every vow from marital to business to his oath of office that he swore, that sacred oath on the west front of the Capitol that day.

He has never been honest with America. He's never told the truth to this country. It is truly all about him. And yes, you know, I'm kind of an anthropologist to this guy. I've written two books about him, probably a thousand articles and made, you know, hundreds of television ads. And he's way too much in my head. I can't wait to get rid of him. It's dark. But,

But he is not the guy he was in 2016. He's not the guy he was in 2020. He's not even the guy he was in 2022. This guy is breaking down in front of our eyes. I think he's falling apart.

In the lead up to the 2024 U.S. elections, more people than ever are wondering how our electoral process actually works, what systems are in place to ensure secure and accurate results, and how we can recognize misinformation and be able to fully participate in our democracy. The new season of Democracy Decoded, a podcast by Campaign Legal Center, covers all of this. You'll learn from top lawyers and democracy's frontline heroes, such as poll workers and civil rights advocates,

to understand how our elections function, the potential threats they face, and the checks and balances in place so voters can rest assured that the election results will reflect the will of the people. Because here's the thing, our election system works, and Democracy Decoded will help you understand why. Listen now at democracydecoded.org or on your favorite podcast app. And a big thanks to Democracy Decoded for sponsoring the show.

Well, you raised the issue that just made me think about one of the questions you asked me early on about, you know, do we really have more in common than not? And is it really a choice that we're making? When I was in the legislature, I was there for 16 years, I made it a point to go to breakfast and or lunch with the most conservative folks in the legislature, the ones that I disagreed with the most. And I remember the first time I heard Rush Limbaugh on the radio. Yeah.

I was in, I'm not going to tell you this legislator's name, but I was going to lunch with this guy and he turned the radio on and I heard him and I was like, I don't know if I want to go to lunch with you. That guy's really bad. And this was early. And one of the reasons I did it was because I wanted to see if I could work at finding common ground. You have to work at it. It doesn't come to you. You have to want to do it.

You understand? I mean, I know that this sounds elementary, but we don't want to do it, and therefore we don't do it. And even if we wanted to do it, we let people who are in our own tribe scare us, so we don't. Okay? So America, this is not like rocket science. You have to want to get something done, and there has to be a price for people that you hire that don't get something done. That means get somebody else to get something done. And so you have to vote for people, and I'll give you a big secret about politicians. They want to get reelected.

- No way. - And you have the power, so you should ask, this is an interesting question, you're a political anthropologist. How do you think we got here? Now I'm looking around the room, is anybody in here 24 years old? Okay, you're 24. You were born in 2000? Do you were born before the turn of the century or after? All right, so you don't remember Y2K.

So there was this thing, like right before you were born, called Y2K. All these lovely, thoughtful people in here felt like at midnight, when the century turned, that their life was either going to end or they weren't going to be able to communicate because there was this bug somewhere in the ether that was going to screw everything up. This is God's truth. Is this a real thing or not? Tell that kid, y'all were all crazy, all right?

But in his lifetime, I want you to think about this young man's life. You had September 11th, and our reaction to September 11th

You then have the Afghan war. You then had Katrina, which almost destroyed a great American city, which upended everybody, and thank you all for loving New Orleans after that. You had Rita, you had Ike, you had the national recession, you had the BP oil spill, you had the 2008 recession that almost destroyed the whole country. You had the trauma of Donald Trump getting elected president, so I mean, for a lot of people, they were like, well, what the hell was that? You had to live through all of that stuff,

Right. And then you had a bunch of other wars and you've gone through like all this stuff and you went through covid where like your world almost ended for these kids. You know, for that two years, they like lost their friends. They were, you know, doing what everybody did. So now let me ask you, do you think he's got a lot of confidence that everything's going to be OK? Have we have we adults handed ourselves in a way to make him feel like we got this for you?

Hell no. They're like, what the hey? Right? So we have to really kind of go back and look. And this is just my personal. I'm speaking for myself now.

I don't think America should have lost the first two decades of the 21st century to the rest of the world. But because of the choices that we have made, because our inability to kind of stay in the family and work things out, come hell or high water, as my mother would like to say, because we're all part of a family, and our choice is to fight with each other and let ourselves be torn apart, that's why it feels like we're apart. But we're apart not by necessity. We are apart by choice.

and we can choose differently. You can choose differently about gun violence. You can be pro-second amendment and think that there ought to be reasonable restrictions on who gets a gun and who doesn't get a gun. Frank Luntz, who's one of your guys, well, our guys, says not everybody needs any kind of gun all the time. Most Americans, if you put them in a room together and said, "This is the problem," would come out with some level of consensus

that respected everybody's fundamental rights and then a practical solution to the problem. And our political system is not delivering that to us now. So we ought to ask ourselves why. And we ought to help fix that because when Donald Trump gets beat, and I'm just praying to God that he does, we're gonna have to start restoring our ability to work together to get things done. That challenge is not gonna go away.

That idea that we have, there's a set of very bad incentives in our politics right now, folks. And right now, the extremes get the attention. And I mean that when I tell you that I don't wanna sit down and have breakfast with Marjorie Taylor Greene or the squad, honestly, okay? They do not represent the mainstream of a lot of American ideas.

But the incentive structure in the media, in the fundraising side, in online attention, is to be out there on the rim. Now it's much worse on the right. It is vastly worse on the right. Because that hothouse produces Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, Lauren Boebert, Tony Nels here in Texas. I mean, just the worst of the worst. And that idea that opposing everything

makes you a good political representative of the people that sent you to Washington or sent you to your state capital, that is fundamentally broken. That is a fundamentally broken brain model of America. I have just kind of a simple idea for everybody, just when you think about who you're going to vote for. Before you start asking them about what their position is on taxes or choice or trade, just ask yourself whether you would let them coach your daughter's soccer team.

Just try that first. Let's just kind of go back to... Hell, I wouldn't let Donald Trump within 500 yards of a Chuck E. Cheese. No, but think about how out of the way that we have gotten about electing people to office, holding office as a sacred trust. Mm-hmm.

And people make mistakes when they hold office, but it's okay for them to make mistakes and say, I didn't really mean that. And I made a mistake and I'm going to correct myself. That's okay. You should give people a lot of room and there should be a high level of toleration. But when you have someone or a group of people that are so rooted in like bad stuff that you wouldn't let them, you wouldn't hire them.

You wouldn't let them coach your kids, soccer team or basketball team. It's kind of a good idea not to give them power to tell you what to do with your life. That's really just, I think, an important thing that we've kind of lost a little bit. Before you even get to just kind of the freedom to have a thoughtful discussion that, let's say, Rick and I would have had when Reagan was in office and Bush was in office about the role of the federal government versus when Obama was in office and Clinton was in office. That's a worthy fight.

It's a worthy discussion. It's important. And you know what? More often than not, if the system design is pushing us into, but you've got to find an answer. Do not come, I don't know, my mama, I told you all about my mama. When I used to get in a fight with my brother, which is pretty much every day, she would make us kneel on the ground and face each other and put our heads against each other.

And then she would leave the room and say, do not come out of this room unless you want to go see your daddy, which was always like a bad thing. Go down the hallway, see your daddy. I'm like, I don't think so. But we would lean on, our foreheads would be on each other. Now, the genius of that

It's like you are brothers, and you can't come out until you fix your differences. Or if we were at the big table, remember nine of us, and there's not always a lot of food to go around, so everybody's got whatever, and you want to split a piece of meat, the way she would do it if you were complaining about it is one of you cut the piece of meat, and the other person chose.

Okay, now, my mother did not say, I don't care if y'all beat the hell out of each other and whichever one of y'all is the strongest, just go ahead and kill them. Or one of you gets to eat and the other one doesn't get to eat. Or, by the way, there's never any room at the table for any of your friends.

You see those choices? Those are choices like we have in politics too, but just because it's Congress doesn't mean that we're not supposed to act like regular, normal human beings in fixing the problems that the public needs. That's why people are frustrated with government, but because I'm a Democrat, I think government has a special obligation to be efficient, to be effective, to work hard, to get stuff done, like sooner rather than later, to not waste money.

All of those things are critically important, but if you can't get people to vote for the resources we need to fix the border or fix the roads or do something, then we're static and people are frustrated. Then they get angry, then they feel left out. Then they let somebody come tease them about the brown guy down the street is your enemy, not your friend, and then all of a sudden you're where we are and we're off to the races. And we need to make a choice not to be that way anymore.

That is exactly on point. And we do learn a lot of things about how to deal with other people when we're young. And I hope that we don't end up with a Donald Trump, because look, at 24, you've lived through half of your life. Donald Trump has been the predominant political force in the country. And you know, I can tell you, I don't think there's anybody who wants their daughter to be in a workplace with a guy like Donald Trump.

or their son to act toward women like Donald Trump. I can't imagine that. And so, you know, that idea that part of this decision

is modeling what our kids and grandkids are gonna watch for the next eight, 10, 12 years, the kind of people who are gonna be elected in the wake of this. If we elect Trump, we will then probably elect worse than Trump. I know that's hard to conceive, but when President Stephen Miller takes the stand after a brutal campaign, but look, and that idea that we learn from things when we're young,

having to hash it out with your brothers and sisters. I have been to that rodeo, my friend. And my grandmother would also have one other, she was, she had a little more stern about some things. She would say, you go out and get a switch. Yeah, 100%. It better be a good one. Because, you know, we, but we lack a discipline in our legislative processes where there is a deadline, where there is a absolute, where there is something, aside from when we're playing like chicken on continuing resolutions, um,

We lack that sense, and that's partly from the public. You guys have to also pressure, pressure, pressure when you want to get stuff done. And the White House did a very good job of getting public motivation behind getting the infrastructure bill passed, and members of Congress were hearing about it. Well, you know, it's funny that the other day, the governor of Louisiana, who is like Donald Trump plus to the negative side,

and who hated everything that Joe Biden did. Without all the charm and ethics? Yeah. And he just railed against everything that we did. And I told you, in the infrastructure bill, we did a lot. But one of the things that the president did was make sure that everybody has access to high-speed internet. So we're laying fiber optic cable everywhere in the country right now. The governor, you know, when the bill passed, said it was terrible, it was awful. Yesterday, a press release went out, yesterday, last week, I'm sorry,

that Governor Landry is now bringing the state high-speed internet. Now, well, I actually kind of like...

Gonna get it a little bit, but it doesn't, in the entire press release, it doesn't say anything about Joe Biden. And so Nancy Pelosi, who's gonna be here in a minute, who I adore and have been knowing my whole life, she coined the best phrase about this. She said, they voted no, but they want the dough. Now, that's the negative side of the story. Let me tell you about character, and I'll tell you about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

When the president had me in the Oval Office and he pointed his finger at my chest and he said, "You need to get this done." And he said, "Make sure everybody in America benefits from this. Everybody in America. So that in red states, for example, make sure it gets to the ground. In other states, make sure it gets to the ground." And people complained and said, "Mr. President, but this has gone in states where Republicans are." He goes, "I represent all Americans."

Joe Biden, I've never in all of my time with him, and I was with him a lot, I never heard him say one negative thing about people who did not vote for him. He said, I am the president for everybody. And as a matter of fact, I can demonstrate to you, you can go on invest.gov right now, you can see where every project in America is. 99% of the counties in America have gotten an infrastructure dollar that has touched them, and that is irrespective of how they vote. So again, just your view of life, together versus apart,

I use power to help people. That comes from the character of a person. That character produces a choice, and that choice produces a consequence. And it's not really much more complicated than that. Everything flows from those things. And if you have those things first...

which is a let's get the first things right first, which is democracy first, then you have a chance to have a battle over the choices and the consequences. But if you don't have democracy first, I mean, you got a real problem. And again, I should say I don't want to scare you. I want you to not be able to say that you did not know.

that democracy was on the ballot because it absolutely is. And it is something that we're going to have to curate and sacrifice for for the next because freedom is not free. People have paid the ultimate sacrifice for this. And you don't want to put us in a position of having to do that. And the best chance of doing it is doing this thing that you have the power to do. Just show up and vote. And if you're in a state that's going to vote one certain way and you go to another state, go to Pennsylvania, go to Wisconsin, go to Michigan, go to Nevada, go...

Go to Georgia. Go to North Carolina. Don't go anywhere other than those places. And find somebody who's like you and say to them, please help me protect my rights because I'm disenfranchised because the future of the country is at stake. Absolutely. So, folks, we're going to get to Q&A in one minute. But I want to ask one more question, Mitch, before we wrap up our conversation and get in the conversation with the folks here. We've got 59 days to go.

We've got a big debate coming up this week. How do you think that's going to go? How do you think she's going to approach that debate? I mean, I think Trump's going to be like a monkey in the zoo throwing his you-know-what everywhere. But how do you think she's going to approach that debate? Well, first of all, Donald Trump has debated more than anybody that we know. I think he's been through 16 or 17 debates, and he basically dominates every debate stage he's on because he doesn't follow any rules.

And you can expect him to do the same exact thing he's done before because he's not going to change. And he's scared of her. And he doesn't like her. She's a woman. She's a person of color. And he's freaked out by her. And he doesn't know what to do. So my prediction is he's going to be initially sedate. And then he's going to not be able to control himself because that's generally the way he is. Kamala Harris is a really...

I mean, I don't know if you know much about her or not, but besides being just a really smart person, she ran for district attorney and she was a district attorney. She was a courtroom lawyer, which meant she prosecuted criminals and sexual abusers, by the way.

She was the Attorney General of California, which for the lawyers in the room, she ran the biggest law firm in America and maybe in the world. So she's really good at it. And she went after, of course, business frauds, and she went after transnational gangs. And, of course, when she sat in the Senate on the Senate Judiciary Committee, she prosecuted the view against nominees that she didn't think was qualified. So Kamala Harris, contrary to some people's thoughts about her,

feels really good about herself and really good about her ability to stand toe to toe. And she's been fighting bullies her whole life. So they asked Kamala the other day, he doesn't pronounce your name the right way. And he said you're a DEI hire, which J.D. Vance is, by the way. He's only been in office 600 days. He's never run anything. He doesn't have any qualifications, but nobody asked him, is he ready? But they asked Kamala. I mean, you know, you figure out why. I'll leave that to you. But the point is they asked her about this, trying to provoke a response, and she just effectively went...

Same old, same old. You know why? Because Kamala Harris grew up with a bunch of dumb white guys like Donald Trump, and there's nothing new that he's bringing to anything that she's had in her life, so she's not worried about being able to handle it. And my expectation is that she will do fine. And I feel really good about her ability to do that and stand up to him because she's been doing it her whole life. Well, thank you, Mitch. Give Mitch a hand. That was outstanding. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Freshly made ravioli or hand-pulled ramen noodles? When you dine with Chase Sapphire Reserve, either will be amazing because it's the choice between a front row seat at the chef's table while getting a live demo of how to make ravioli or dining family style as you hear the story behind your ramen broth. This weekend, it's ravioli.

Next weekend, ramen. Find the detail that moves you with immersive dining experiences from Sapphire Reserve. Chase, make more of what's yours. Learn more at chase.com slash sapphirereserve. Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member of FDIC. Subject to credit approval.

This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please, read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you, and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com.

- All right, we're gonna do some Q and A. I guess there's two mics, line up, let's do it. You first, up front. We'll alternate microphones, okay? So we're gonna do the front mic first, go. - Okay, Nancy from California, thank you for being here. - Thank you. - I've been so disappointed in our mainstream press, and most recently they've been same-washing Trump's words to make him sound...

saner than he is and more coherent than he is. This goes way beyond the biased headlines. What can be done about the mainstream press? How can we slap some sense into them? - Well, so let me say this, Nancy. This is a question that the press itself wrestles with every day because Donald Trump floods, in the words of Steve Bannon, floods the zone with shit every day.

They have trouble because of two big reasons. One, the Republicans have worked the refs for decades. Since the 1960s, they've been saying to everyone in the press, you're liberal, you're liberal, you're biased, you hate us. And so they have naturally gotten a very brittle reaction to that stuff. They do need, I think in the

in the video side of it, in the news side of it on television, they need to show him doing these things. Because when you say Donald Trump had difficulty answering a question about childcare,

That does not get to what happened the other day, which was this 15-minute, like, you know, and all the guys from the New York Economic Club, they were staring, they're like hostages. Like, they were in a hostage video, like, oh God, what is he saying? Before they clapped. Yeah, well, I know. But long story short, I think you have to show him on the video side. I know we don't want to platform him, all that stuff, but you can show how disconnected from reality he is. Every time he's out there, it hurts him.

And so, and on the print side, look, you have to read-- How do the people get the press to do this is the question. It is a very high hill to climb. Believe me, we've tried.

and it's a very high hill to climb. And look, I am sympathetic to some of their difficulties in this. You only have so many hours in a day to cover. Trump produces 20 hours of crazy and you've got one hour to cover. So it's a difficult question. They're doing their best, I think, in a lot of ways. Some are not, some have, the same washing thing is real. I'm very critical of it, but it is a difficult question for them to grapple with.

In part because the media has never been able to grapple with Donald Trump. He doesn't play by the rules, he doesn't believe in any of the things they believe in, he doesn't care about truth, and he is genetically incapable of shame. Okay, next question, back mic.

On that note, welcome back, Rick. Every time I come to the Trib Fest, I go to your sessions because I know I'm going to learn something and I'm going to have a good laugh. So thank you for that. I'm going to rattle off some names that I think are relevant to the question I have. It's going to start with Rick. Michael Steele, Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney, Nicole Wallace, Steve Schmidt, and has been alluded to, I can't believe I'm going to say this one, Dick Cheney.

I think you all summoned great personal courage and stood against the people that hijacked your party. And I think that makes you honest-to-God trained democracy superheroes, and the rest of us owe you our thanks and gratitude. Well, I agree. Now, given that cast of characters and people like them,

I'm an optimist. I'm like Barbara Jordan. My faith in the Constitution is complete. I believe the Constitution will endure, the democracy will survive, but what comes next for the GOP? Where does that party go? We need a two-party system

Does the party come back with those people or do we see that it's the Whig party of the 21st century? What's next for you guys? - I mean, look, you referenced the Whig party, which in 1854 backed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which extended slavery, and it was dead two years later. The party I worked in for 30 plus years, and I started out working for George Herbert Walker Bush, that party is as dead and gone and disappeared as the Whigs.

The Republican Party of today kept the branding and the elephant logo and the red, white, and blue icon, but it doesn't believe in anything except for the adulation of Donald Trump and the abuse of power. And so do we need two parties? I think we absolutely need a center-right party in this country that believes in the Constitution, believes in the rule of law, believes in individual liberty, believes in a strong national defense and fiscal conservatism and all those things,

I don't know when that happens, but the Republican Party has to be broken fundamentally. It has to be utterly defeated at the ballot box, not for just one cycle, but probably several before another party emerges. It's a really hard job. I'm 60 years old. I don't know if we'll see it in my lifetime. Can I touch that just a second? Yeah, of course, please. I'm gonna tell you two things.

the first one's not the most important. In 2040, the country's gonna be majority-minority. Now that freaks people out for some reason. It shouldn't. It has been this way in America for a very, very long time, especially if you're Irish and you're Italian. You know the story if you ever go back and read it, and it's probably most of our history in this room. But the second part should concern you more. When people are moving to places where they wanna live, which you can do in America,

That's a good thing right now. You can move to California, you can move to Arizona, you can move to Texas. In 2040, 70% of us will have chosen, unless we change what we're doing, to live in only 30% of the states. Okay? So start doing your math hat and start thinking about the electoral college and start thinking about how senators are elected. And you'll come to the quick conclusion that you're going to have two-thirds of the senators will only be representing 30% of the people.

Okay? Now, I don't think the founding fathers really thought about that and these things that we have that are not in the Constitution, like the filibuster and the way that we organize and how many congressional seats that we are. We have to start asking ourselves now how the structures that we have adequately reflect what the will of the people really is. That's a really interesting mousetrap to start thinking about because I don't think when this election is over

that the 46% of the people that vote for Donald Trump, or 48 of them, let's just say 35 of them, are people that you're never ever gonna get back and don't represent the George Bush wing of the party or the Ronald Reagan party, they're not gonna change overnight.

They're different kind of coalitions that have to get put together. They're different people that have to win. But I don't think that a country can survive if the governing structure that governs it is not responsive to the needs of 65% to 70% of the people. That is not sustainable. So we have to, as soon as this election is open, and I feel...

very hopeful that it will be Kamala Harris. Because if it's Donald Trump, everything that I say here, all bets are off. We're going to have to spend the next 10 years of our life in a fight, in a very serious fight. But if she's there, the Republican Party that used to be

different theories of philosophies of life can begin to reassert itself and we as the country can grapple with the tough issues of immigration, of crime, of taxation, of reproductive rights and try to find, if we choose communion, which we should choose, finding a way, a pathway forward that works for most of us, then the country will be in the business of having to lap the rest of the world as the United States of America should have been doing for the past two decades. - Exactly. Yes, ma'am.

Governor of my home state, welcome to Texas again. I'd like to address something that we haven't really discussed much. And without bringing in the state of Israel, I'd like to address the uptick in anti-Semitism in this country. It's very disconcerting for me. As you should. Yeah, 100%. It's real and it's horrifying. You see this seed...

The seed of hatred, and it's really from the fruit of the poisonous tree. The root is hatred of people who are other than you. And that manifests itself in racism. It manifests itself in anti-Semitism. It manifests itself in anti-Muslim. It is a other people are not us. And if they're not us, they're worse than us. And we don't need to protect them. You know, this goes like, who are they coming for?

You know, if they came for such and such, you know, when would they come for me? There was nobody there to protect me. And you see this now.

And because of the incredible conflict that's going on between Israel and Gaza, and the passionate feelings around that, people have seen fit to become really overtly anti-Semitic. And there is real, people feel really at risk and really at danger. You don't have to be Jewish to defend people against anti-Semitism and to tell people who are acting that way that is not who we are. That is why you need to kind of reach out to help other people. But if the idea is that some of us are better than others,

And that we're the ones who get, and so nobody else gets, and I don't have to protect anybody. And this is why, Rick, I really just want to echo what that guy said back there about you guys. What these guys are doing with the Lincoln Project and what Liz is doing and Vice President Cheney, it's really hard to go against your tribe.

It is really hard because you know where you get ostracized? You get ostracized at the grocery store. You get ostracized at the cleaner. You get ostracized at the ballpark. If you're getting your nails done or you're getting your hair cut, I do get my hair cut. You get, you know. At least it's easy for us. We got to come up. You know, in those intimate places of your life, when you're standing there and somebody that you know

The mother of a child that your kid goes to school with comes and looks you crosswise and says, you're not in our tribe. It's really hard to stand up to them, you know, in the locker room at the tennis facility where y'all play. If one of the gals, so you go, we don't talk like that. That's just so that I can be really clear with y'all again. So nobody can say, I don't know what I mean by sacrifice for everybody in this room.

is in your personal relationships, your sisters, your mothers, your brothers, your cousin, your neighbors, you have to say to them,

This matters to me. If you love me, maybe you don't understand, and maybe you disagree, but I need you to do this for me. This is how personal this election has to be. And on this issue, we've really confronted it. We cannot allow ourselves to hate other people because we don't agree with who they praise or where they came from or what they look like. That is not what America is. That does not make America strong. It makes us weak. It makes us worse.

We believe that diversity is a strength, not a weakness. And that's for everybody, everything, all the time. - Okay, go ahead. - I feel really lame asking this question after the one about antisemitism, but I'm a politically homeless conservative here in Texas, but I vote for competence, voted for Hillary and Biden. When Biden got into office, some of the Republicans in the Senate approached him about doing another bipartisan COVID bill, and they said no and did the American Rescue Plan.

Spent a lot of money. I was disappointed in that, again. I want Kamala Harris to win, but I worry about how Congress will govern because I really am concerned about the trite issue of the debt and the deficit and that we spend so much on interest payments on the debt, more so than the defense budget. So, yes, Kamala Harris win. How do we...

empower people like John Curtis from Utah, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Bill Cassidy, how do we empower those Republicans who are staying in the party but they want to work in a bipartisan basis? - Look, it's a hard assignment. I'm not gonna lie to you. The incentives in DC are very, very ugly right now. The way the models look now, the Democrats will take the House.

And it's a matter of do they take it by a little or do they take it by a lot? I'm leaning in my modeling towards the more like a lot, but we'll see. There are very few really swing seats left. In the Senate you have a very small cohort of Republicans, probably six, seven of them.

The problem is they have been governed by Mitch McConnell, who governs them with an iron fist. If Mitch McConnell had decided after January 6th to whip his caucus, Donald Trump would not be our problem anymore. It would have been over. But McConnell's era is ending. You're going to end up with a more MAGA-type leader in the Senate on the Republican side. Even if it's John Thune, you're probably going to end up with some pretty...

bad people on committees, it is a tough assignment. And again, you've gotta change the political incentives in the country. And it's not that you wanna, look, elevating Susan Collins or elevating any other quasi-moderate Republican, it matters, but you also have to knock out some of the crazy

You also have to knock out some of the people who are the worst obstructionists, who are the ones, there's got to be a political price for being an obstructionist a-hole in the Senate. And that's a tough thing because we've got, you know, elections are staggered, although the next map in 20...

I have trouble even thinking about it. It's pretty good for the Democrats on the Senate side. But we'll see. Look, it's also legislative negotiation is a really hard thing. It's really tough. So, yes, ma'am.

- First, I wanna thank you for the ad that you did that has the dad in with the daughter. - Oh, thank you. - Yeah, that's absolutely incredible. And I also wanna acknowledge, if you're the chair for the campaign, the roll call at the convention

Such a showstopper. Turned down for what? Yes, and I'm sure that got under Trump's skin because it was just incredible. And also, I really enjoyed the freedom and the patriotism and all that and the language. And I heard, I think it was Longwell saying that not using the word democracy because, believe it or not, it can confuse people. And so freedom...

It was just perfect, you know, really and truly such a great thing. But one quick thing I want to say is that would y'all please consider in terms of an ad telling people you can be pro-life, just like you said, but that doesn't mean that you should vote that way because you're endangering other people's lives. And I hate to say that you would have to minimize it and make it so simple, but

people, but a lot of people do need politics for dummies because they're not people like us that love it. And so they just need to see a visual like, okay, you're, I mean, it's bad enough that someone rapes you, but imagine your dad raping you. And like, it's just this thing. It's just this flash, you

You know what I mean? - You'll see more content directed to that because look, our audience at the Lincoln Project are moderate Republicans, suburban Republicans, more educated Republicans, affluent Republicans, independently-leaning conservatives. You will see more of that because Dobbs is a gigantic issue for the voters that we've identified and persuaded over the last five years.

So you will see more of that. And the one last thing, and I just want to say that I know it's terrible. Nobody wants to see the darkest parts of people's minds. But, like, I didn't know there's actually a website for daddies and daughters. And nobody needs to know that. But then maybe they do. Like, that's how far we're going to go. We're going to go that far. And so people, unfortunately, we can't protect them anymore. They need to know how bad it is. Absolutely. Well, folks...

Thank you so much. We are out of time. I want to say thank you for coming today. Thank you all for coming to the first live taping of an In These Lists episode. We look forward to seeing you again soon. And thank Mish Landrieu for his participation today. Thank you so much, my friend. That was outstanding. Thank you all. It's great to see you. All right. Thanks, everybody. Good night and good luck.