The Winner Takes It All (with Chris Hayes)

Chris Hayes wants to talk about things we’ve gone through. In his twenty-five years of covering American politics, Hayes says he’s never seen an election quite like the 2026 midterms. Together, we unpack the blue wave (2:17), what caused this pendulum swing (3:36), and how Hayes sees the next two years of Trump’s presidency (19:40). Then, he outlines the affordability crisis that shaped voters’ decisions (24:26), what he believes are the top three priorities for Democrats entering Congress (32:07), and the future of party leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries (41:17). On the back-half, we discuss how the Trump fever finally broke (53:22), our path to a more decent, pluralistic politics (56:45), Democrats’ handling of Gaza (1:08:15), and the road to 2028 (1:11:46). To close, Hayes reflects on the emotional toll of the past few years—and why he’s determined to see this chapter through (1:17:53). Subscribe to our YouTube channel⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@talkeasypod. As always, our email: [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The biggest thing to always remember is the future is unwritten and what people do and how they act really does matter. We don't live in a low, nothing matters world. Like Donald Trump governed like he had an enormous super majority and he governed as fan service for the MAGA faithful and the people to show up at rallies. And it drove an enormous majority of the country to come to hate him.

• 0:26Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:42Sam Fragoso?

  Today, MS Now host, journalist and author, Chris Hayes. In his 25 years of covering American politics, Hayes said recently that he's never seen anything quite like the 2026 midterms. That's probably true for anybody who watched Tuesday night unfold. In a historic win, Democrats flipped both chambers of Congress, winning races in states that just two years ago seemed all but impossible. In Georgia, Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, and state after state, county after county, voters who previously voted for Donald Trump in 2024, delivered a resounding repudiation of the president.

• 1:22Sam Fragoso?

  These were historic victories, mind you, and by margins that don't even map onto recent political history. Voters ultimately did what universities, the media, and many other institutions couldn't or simply refused to do. They said no to Donald Trump. And yet, the scale and scope of this repudiation was far from inevitable. So to help talk through the results and the reckoning that will follow, I wanted to have Chris back on the show to make sense of this past week. How exactly did Democrats take back both the House and the Senate? And now that they have, what are they going to do with that power? And is this really, truly the end of the Trump era, as so many are claiming online right now?

• 2:07Sam Fragoso?

  And if so, what replaces it? That's all coming up next with Chris Hayes.

• 2:17Sam Fragoso?

  Chris Hayes, welcome back to the show.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  It's great to be back.

• 2:20Sam Fragoso?

  I'm curious, like, inside the Hayes household, because all of us, you know, who probably watched Talk Easy or listened to Talk Easy, I imagine at some point, they turned on MS Now and they saw you and Rachel Maddow and the panel of what sometimes people call like the Democratic Avengers sitting around. Is your wife watching at home going like, wow, there he is. I think, I think he's, he seems happy. This is good. I haven't seen him happy in a long time.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  No, Kate, Kate was watching a little bit, although, yeah, she was watching a bit and we were texting a lot.

• 2:56Sam Fragoso?

  She loves Newsmax, right? Is that what it is?

• 3:00Speaker 00

  Yes. No, I mean, she, you know, she has her own podcast and her own sort of, you know, she's got a podcast about the law and her own kind of set of concerns about both American democracy, but also specifically about the court and laws and, you know, DOJ being misused and weaponized for all kinds of crazy stuff in a close election. And, but no, I mean, we, we both feel great and, you know, we've had some, there's been some rough election nights in our household. And it feels wonderful to, to feel happy and buoyed and light as a feather.

• 3:36Sam Fragoso?

  On the night of the election, you wrote, "In my 25 years of covering politics, I've never seen anything like it." So with a little distance, what did you see and what do you think it is?

• 3:50Speaker 00

  It is a just wholesale rejection, repudiation of the incumbent party at a scale that I just, like I said, I hadn't seen. Now, you know, the closest we've got, there's like, if you look at '06, '08, and '10, 2006, 2008, you had two wave elections on behalf of Democrats in a row that created these enormous margins, right? 60 votes in the Senate, 257, I think, in the House. And then 2010, it kind of snapped back. So, you know, there's some, there's some, what we call thermostatic public opinion, right? The out party tends to make gains against the party that's in power. There's this kind of pendulum momentum that happens.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  But to me, it was the, it was the totality of the win in so many places and by such insane margins. And I think that is now backed up, now that we have the data where I say, I haven't seen something like this in the 25 years I covered politics. We're estimating that the national popular vote will be a kind of plus 13 environment, meaning that Democrats got, you know, won by 13 points. You know, here's an example. One of the first races we were watching was Kentucky 6, in which Ralph Alvarado was a Republican and he's being challenged by Zach Dembo, the Democrat. Now, this is a, I think it's, I want to say it's a plus 12, somewhere around a plus 12 or 15 district, Trump.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  The, the thought was, if this is close, it's going to be a good night for the Democrats. Zach Dembo won that by nine points. Wasn't close, just killed them. Like, that's a 24-point swing. So I just haven't seen 24-point swings a lot. Like, it's been a while.

• 5:33Sam Fragoso?

  People called it a blue wave, a blue tsunami, a prairie fire, a shellacking, a spanking, and a few other terms that I don't think I'm allowed to say. What would you call it a week removed?

• 5:46Speaker 00

  A comprehensive repudiation. I think a certain kind of politics was engineered and, and sort of fomented by Donald Trump starting in 2015. And he's obviously the president for two more years and he doesn't just go away, but the specifics of the worst kinds of the politics he created, I think, were destroyed on, on Tuesday night.

• 6:11Sam Fragoso?

  As you mentioned, midterms are historically a referendum on the party in office. But the total count right now, at least at the time of recording, 261 seats in the House, at least 54 in the Senate, and has been compared to the election of 1974, the year Nixon resigned. Is this a Watergate-level rebuke of the incumbent party? And what does that mean?

• 6:35Speaker 00

  Well, what I think is really, here's what I think is really interesting about the Watergate analogy. A number of people, including J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and others, have attempted to retcon Watergate itself and say, A, that Nixon was done in by a deep state plot, and B, that if the Republicans had just stuck together and there was more conservative media, then he never would have been impeached, he never would have had to been resigned, it would have been fine. And in some ways, they've operationalized that theory in Donald Trump, right? Massively corrupt president, completely abusing the power of office, an unpopular war and high inflation, all true of Nixon in 1974.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  But without the impeachment, without the, you know, legendary trip to the White House by Barry Goldwether and other Republican senators to tell him it was time to go.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  And guess what? It turns out, their theory of the case is wrong. If you just stick with it, the people do it for you in some ways, right? They're like, we hate this, get us out of here.

• 7:41Sam Fragoso?

  It is amazing that voters did what universities, the media, and many other institutions could not, or just refused to do time after time, which is to say no to Trump. That, that like the voters of Iowa, the voters of Kansas, who sent a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since, I think, 1932, is that right?

• 8:02Speaker 00

  Correct. Yep, 1932.

• 8:04Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, 1932, which is, I think, the year that Chuck Grassley was born, it's, it's sort of unfathomable. And you look at these voter surveys, it appears young people, 18 to 29, shifted back towards Democrats, where Trump won 43 or 44% of voters under 30 in 2024. The Republicans hovered around 28%. Independents broke for Democrats. The gains Trump made with the Hispanic community in 2024 completely eroded. Even white men moved towards Democrats by 15 points. What are, what are your top line takeaways from the shifts we saw in the electorate?

• 8:41Speaker 00

  The first one is that just that there was a bizarre overinterpretation of the 2024 election.

• 8:48Sam Fragoso?

  What do you mean?

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Donald Trump won that election by historically small margin. In some ways, the bar was so low for him because he had not even won the popular vote in 2016. So there was this sense, and he obviously not won the popular vote in 2020, when he also lost in the Electoral College. So I think there was a little bit of a sense of like, this, there was like the soft bigotry of low expectations for, for Donald Trump. So that when he won a plurality of votes, not even an outright majority, he didn't get over 50%, it was like, oh my God. There's this enormous mandate for everything. And, you know, there's a huge cultural vibe shift and now all young men are going to be right wing forever. And, you know, at the margin, some of that was true.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  He made real gains among Latinos, among black folks. He made gains in states like New York and New Jersey and California. He did make gains, like, all of it was true. It was, he made gains among these constituencies. But it was primarily driven by the fact that people hated higher prices and were punishing the incumbent party for those higher prices. It was not, we truly love the rhetorical stylings of unceasingly repellent Nazi trolls on Twitter who post Greek statues. That was not the like, that was not what the nation was clamoring for. And it was certainly not, we want to see armed thugs kidnapping our neighbors and shooting down Americans in the streets.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  And it was definitely not, we want a war with Iran. And it was definitely not, we want you to enrich your family to the tune of billions of dollars. So in some ways, it's like, there was such a misinterpretation of what happened in 2024, that all of this snapback is just, it's in every category for a reason. Basically, everyone hates it.

• 10:38Sam Fragoso?

  Tell me, how do you interpret what are historically lopsided wins? As you mentioned, is it that there are so many new Democrats? Or that Republicans either stayed home or flipped to the left?

• 10:58Speaker 00

  There's two components. There's a little bit of a turnout component. Core Democratic constituencies and Democrats did turn out at higher levels. But that only explains a few points. The largest share of the swing is, is people changing, persuasion, people moving from one column to the other. And again, there is a, as close as we get to a consensus in a complicated, diverse nation of millions of people, that this administration is terrible, and that it's in the wrong direction, that it doesn't care about Americans. I mean, the president's approval rating in the voter poll was 38%. You know, in the voter poll of the people that voted, that's, you know, 6238 is, that's real bad.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  I mean, I like to tell people, all the time I remind people, Herbert Hoover in 1932.

• 11:45Sam Fragoso?

  Are you often getting into Herbert Hoover conversations?

• 11:48Speaker 00

  Well, I always use this as a benchmark in the same way we were talking about Watergate, right? Like-

• 11:54Sam Fragoso?

  I just love when you're like, I always tell people, like, you know, Thursday afternoon, you know, Chris, he's talking about the Knicks or Herbert Hoover.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  It's, I am talking about her a fair amount. But, you know, Herbert Hoover in 1932, having had four years of utterly disastrous economic management over the Great Depression, got 40% of the vote. And the reason I say is, 40% is like, really kind of a-

• 12:21Sam Fragoso?

  Baseline.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  Right? Like, if Herbert Hoover got 40, that's really the floor. So when you're looking at 38% approval, like, you're near historic, like, this is as much as people can hate an incumbent administration as exists in the general flexibility of, you know, Democratic politics.

• 12:42Sam Fragoso?

  Well, on the left, in Democratic politics, there was a lot of talk in the weeks leading up to the election, that we should anticipate some amount of intimidation at the polls, that ICE agents could be dispatched, that Trump himself was likely to call the election rigged, that voter fraud and ballot harvesting would undermine the results, that the results themselves would not be accepted. None of that happened. Why?

• 13:10Speaker 00

  The margins were too big. I mean, it's funny, because I've seen, I've seen places like the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Tyler Cowen and a few others trying to make chicken salad out of another chicken thing with, with the aftermath of this, by being like, see, you libs are pretending the whole, you, you guys are all worried about nothing. You can't, what are you going to do when Tarrico wins by 12 and every Democratic state person wins? That we said throughout, as we covered this, two things. One, the margins are going to matter tremendously. If Tarrico is up 5,000 votes, and it's very close, and Abbott has won, I'm worried about what the state government of Texas and Donald Trump and DOJ get up to.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  Number two, we said, they're going to try a bunch of things, and a lot of it's not going to work. Some of it's going to be real, some of it's going to be performative, but they're going to try stuff. And they did try stuff. I mean, a lot of it, almost all of it enjoined in court. They did try to segregate ballots, they did try to purge voter rolls, they did try to essentially declare the United States Postal Service as the ultimate vote vetoer, where they could unilaterally decide whether you got a mail-in ballot or not. They sent target letters on the day, the weekend before the election to people involved in the Mary Paltola campaign in Alaska. They still yet may try to use the Department of Justice. Department of Justice sued on behalf of a partisan campaign, essentially.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  So they, they tried all this stuff, they really did gerrymander themselves between 11 and 12 states in a completely unprecedented move in mid-decade redistricting. It's just that it was all beaten back by the enormity of the margins and what voters said. And in the wake of that, it's just too much to try to do anything with.

• 14:58Sam Fragoso?

  And because of the enormity, I think people may look at the results almost as inevitable. But, but the fact of the matter is, the scale of this defeat was really far from it. I mean, Republicans had record fundraising, they had the world's richest man in their corner, a favorable Supreme Court ruling. In the Senate, they had a map that required Democrats to compete in states they hadn't won in decades. Like, when you think of those facts, those existing realities, why do you think they didn't matter?

• 15:33Speaker 00

  So let's talk about the money first. There's two things to think about the money. One is, there's still a big difference, this is a very, very weedsy point, but I'll make it because it's important. There's a difference between what we call hard money, which is money with, you know, that's donation limited that goes to a campaign, which is like what you raise to the campaign, and then the sort of dark or soft money that comes from super PACs, right? So one difference is that you get differential ad rates on television, which is, a dollar of hard money goes much further than the dollar of soft money. So that actually played a pretty big role, the amount of ads you can buy differentially, and a lot of the money they had was soft money. I mean, unprecedented billionaire participation, and unprecedented billionaire participation

• 16:18Speaker 00

  on the side of Republicans, and specifically, the world's richest man and first trillionaire dropping, we think when all said and done will be around half a billion dollars, we don't actually know the final tally. And a huge amount of that, maybe 300 to 200 to 300 million on, on Texas, and particularly defending Ken Paxton. So one is that differential ad rate matters. Two, and this is the more important point, is, there just are diminishing marginal returns to campaign money. I would say, the more attention there already is on a race, the most attention being on a presidential race, the least amount that matter, money matters, and the least amount of attention there is, the more amount money matters.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  So if, if you're running for state rep, no one even knows who your name is, right? So it's pretty important to be able to have higher campaign staff or to send out mailers, right? You know, in congressional races, it's massively important. But when you're getting to a Texas Senate race that the entire world is paying attention to, and you spend 100 million, your second 100 million doesn't go that far. And, and to your point about how bleak things look for Democrats, I mean, I remember conversations after 2024, people being like, looking at the Senate map and being like, okay, maybe we could recruit Roy Cooper in North Carolina, and maybe we can finally beat Collins. But we got to find two more states to flip, and like, I don't know, like, Ohio, we just

• 17:44Speaker 00

  lost by 12, like, maybe we can get Sherrod Brown, can we find a way to flip Texas? Paltola maybe can run again in Alaska, she's been elected statewide? And basically, everything came together, like, and, and then more.

• 17:57Sam Fragoso?

  But that was 18 months ago. Again, I think it's worth reiterating, that's how much things can change on a dime, how quickly things can change.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  You know, there's that old apocryphal story of, of the British Prime Minister, and it turns out he probably didn't say this, but a British Prime Minister being asked about what the hardest part of being Prime Minister is, and he just says, events, my dear boy, events. And, you know, I, I think about that all the time. I think about the fact that in, in January and February of 2020, I was like, having conversations with my wife about how crazy my work schedule and travel schedule was going to be for the primary and presidential campaign in 2020. And I was stressing about that. And then it was like, six months later, the world shut down for, for months, like, stuff happens.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  And that's true in life, it's true in history, and it's true in politics. And, you know, there's certain continuity, there's, there's certain trends we see that go election to election. But the biggest thing to always remember is, the future is unwritten, and what people do and how they act really does matter. We don't live in a low, nothing matters world. Like, Donald Trump governed like he had an enormous supermajority, and he governed as fan service for the MAGA faithful and the people that show up at his rallies, and it drove an enormous majority of the country to come to hate him.

• 19:23Sam Fragoso?

  Because Trump is both chronically online and in front of his television, he was reached for comment by a whole host of outlets, including Fox, The New York Times, all on election night. Here he is on the line with Dasha Burns from Politico.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Just wondering, what, what's your message? What do you think happened with your party tonight?

• 19:44Speaker 03

  I wasn't on the ballot, and we didn't get the people out, but I wasn't on the ballot. If I was on the ballot, we would have won, we would have won it all very easily.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  But you know, Mr. President, you told voters that you were on the ballot, to go vote as though you were on the ballot.

• 19:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I said, say you're on the ballot, think about me being on the ballot, but they didn't agree, and they didn't like the candidates in most cases, just one of those things.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  Are there certain-

• 20:08Speaker 03

  Many people elected, by the way, too, but, you know, not enough.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Are, are there candidates that you think didn't do enough in this election?

• 20:15Speaker 03

  No, I don't want to blame anybody, I just want to say, you know, it was, it was a very interesting period of time, I watched with great interest, learned from it.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  What, what did you learn, sir? Curious what you learned.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  Well, we're going to work with the Democrats to make sure things go well for our country, very important. They've already called, and I want to work with them, I have the right to veto everything. But I don't want to be just sitting there for two years vetoing everything. They want to see things happen too, so I've already spoken to certain leaders of the Democrat Party.

• 20:46Sam Fragoso?

  Hearing that, he sounds almost-

• 20:50Sam Fragoso?

  Uncharacteristically resigned, but also totally at ease?

• 20:56Speaker 00

  It has always occurred to me that the fact that he wasn't literally on the ballot was going to be the place he retreated to if it was a bad night. And so he could say, look, these people don't have what I have. They don't have the magic sauce. They're not Donald Trump. And I, and that's literally the exact thing he said. And I think it's pretty easy for him to emotionally detach from the fates of other people.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  I think that actually contributes a little bit to why we're not, along with the margins, we're not seeing any sort of like attempts at some kind of Jan six redux.

• 21:25Sam Fragoso?

  But the casualness in which he just accepted everyone else's losses.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  It's so funny.

• 21:30Sam Fragoso?

  Is really staggering. Like January 6 is real.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  Right. But the other thing I think you have to think about January 6th, I don't think he really believed he lost. I mean, I think he wanted to retain power. I don't think it was a, I don't think there was a, I think if you gave him a truth serum, I don't think there was a core epistemic problem. I don't think it was a core, you know, misapprehension of reality. But, but on this sort of sense of resignation and checked outedness, I mean, it, it always seemed to me possible that that's where this would all go if it was a bad night for Republicans. And I thought it was pretty interesting and funny that the first event he did, like two things he did after the loss was a big tour of the ballroom, which is clearly his kind of comfort food, happy place, like his little blank, like the, like the stuffy you give your kid when they're upset, like calms them down.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  And they, a bunch of people went with Sharpies and they signed an I beam. He talked about all the chandeliers and that got him feeling good again.

• 22:26Sam Fragoso?

  Self-soothing by interior design.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  Exactly. Self-soothing by interior design. And then he also posted on Truth Social about the daylight savings bill.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  And I just think like, and it's funny because I'm actually trying to, one of the things I'm trying to gauge right now is I think about what, like, what are the next two years going to be like? Cause there's, to me, there's a pretty wide array of possibilities. There's a kind of, you know, demonically trapped and vengeful Donald Trump, who's ever more intent on using the parts of the government he has to his best. There's a kind of like checked out, old man Nero fiddling thing where like, he just gets more and more and more into the design projects and like, he's gluing more and more gold in the Oval Office and he gets, he spends, he starts spending 90% of the day on the golf,

• 23:22Speaker 00

  golf course redesign in Potomac. He was already pretty checked out. I mean, like he did the last speech in front of the reflecting pool and he, he did 30 solid minutes on the reflecting pool.

• 23:33Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, it was a tight 30.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, a tight 30. And Maggie Hareman, an interview, I think it was with Ezra, someone was just like, if you had the pie chart of him, like 70% of the mental energies on the, is on the, the projects, the redecorating. And that might go to, that might get to full 95 on 100 pretty soon, I think. Honestly, like, I don't, I don't know. I don't want to like, I guess I don't want to.

• 23:59Sam Fragoso?

  This is so insane. Do you know, like, I know we're doing jokes. This is so.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  There's a war. There's literally a war.

• 24:07Sam Fragoso?

  I know, but if you're a Republican watching this, and, and I think we have at least five, um, do you know that, that it's okay for everyone to go? This is really dumb and really insane. And the worst part is as much as we're laughing,

• 24:29Sam Fragoso?

  people are broke, they can't afford rent, they're terrified for their day to day lives.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 24:35Sam Fragoso?

  And he is spending his time going out there, talking about how $5,000 wouldn't even get you a hamburger and a small dessert in Mar-a-Lago.

• 24:46Sam Fragoso?

  And, and as funny as I think we both believe it is, um, it's backbreaking for people.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  I'm glad you said that because there really is, that's part of this election too, is like, there really is a creed of core thing happening. And I think the American economy is strange in many ways. And this was true, this, this is actually a source of some continuity. So one is people hate high prices and they hate inflation. It's clear as day. I think that has been partly exacerbated by two things. We had a generation long disinflation where we had historically a long run of very low inflation. So people are not used to it. And number two, we had a very sudden bout, you know, that in COVID, that really was created incredible, both real material squeeze and also kind of psychological sticker shock.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  And that's kind of endured longer than anyone wants it to. But there's also something strange about the American economy more broadly is that when you step back, and this I think is kind of gets at something important. There has been an untethering between historical patterns of macroeconomic performance and self-reported consumer confidence, or how people feel about the economy. So for a very long time, they kind of went together, like we knew what the relationship was. And starting under Biden, they kind of came apart, which is the top line numbers, particularly as inflation came down, growth was pretty high, wages actually started to come up, income, personal income went up. There was like, it looked like a pretty good economy from a macroeconomic perspective. And people were like, this sucks.

• 26:23Speaker 00

  And it's, it's, it's true now, even before the, the, the real bad inflation hit with diesel and gas prices because of the war, even before that,

• 26:34Speaker 00

  you could look at sort of top line macroeconomic numbers and you could say like productivity is high, investment is high, GDP growth is pretty decent.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  Unemployment rate is low. Inflation is, is not at 2% of the Fed target, but it's, it's not super high. And people were like, this is the worst economy since the Great Recession. And you're a little like, wait a second. And, and my answer to this is we really just have this two economies kind of thing where the entire economy increasingly revolves around the top 10 to top 20% of consumers. That's where more and more of the money happens. If you go to a Delta lounge in an airport, you don't think, wow, the American people are really struggling because it's packed with people that spend a thousand dollars a year on a credit card that gets them in.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  But everything on the bottom 80% is a grind and people's ability to have a middle-class life, the core things that they need to afford, which is healthcare, education, housing, and then food and groceries, all feel unaffordable. And you've got a very weird situation right now where like, this economy is not working for most people. People keep saying it, the way they say it is on the price level, but it's deeper than that, because I don't think inflation returning to 2% would necessarily magically change that. And so there's just a deep structural problem with the economy that is, is going to continue

• 28:08Speaker 00

  to produce a tremendous amount of frustration until it starts to change.

• 28:13Sam Fragoso?

  Well, and it's that 80%. That's the reason the Democrats are now back in power, both in the House and Senate. So why don't we talk about them after the break? That's coming up next with Chris Hayes.

• 28:29Sam Fragoso?

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• 29:55Sam Fragoso?

  I've been wearing their merino wool all-season tees for just over a year now, and they've become some of the most reliable pieces in my closet. They're comfortable, easy to layer, and they've held up incredibly. They're exactly the kind of thing I'd want to give to somebody else. Quince makes those everyday staples with premium materials, including 100% Mongolian cashmere, Italian leather, and 14 karat gold. Their cashmere sweaters start at just $60, and they also have wool coats, down jackets and cashmere accessories for the colder months. And beyond clothing, there's bedding, cookware, luggage and more, so you can find something for just about everyone on your list. By working directly with ethical factories and cutting out the middlemen, Quince prices everything 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Give the gift of quality this holiday season.

• 30:40Sam Fragoso?

  Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Talk Easy. It's the best way to support the show.

• 30:58Sam Fragoso?

  I recently traveled up the coast to Santa Barbara for a live show. I was staying just a few steps from the water and in between preparing for the show, I got to actually enjoy some of the city. I had breakfast at a beloved cafe, spent some time walking around downtown and eventually made my way to the historic theater for the event. After the show, I realized I wasn't actually ready to leave yet, so I decided to stay another day. That's one of my favorite things about traveling for work. Every once in a while, a place surprises you enough that you want to stick around, which made me wonder how many people have had the same experience when visiting my spot in Los Angeles and how after a couple of days in the neighborhood, they might even want to extend the trip. That's why I think about listing my space on Airbnb whenever I'm away.

• 31:41Sam Fragoso?

  Someone visiting Los Angeles could have that same experience, discovering a neighborhood, finding their favorite local restaurant and getting to know the city beyond the usual tourist stops. And the extra income could help cover some of my own travels. If you've got upcoming travel, you should consider it as well. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com/host. Hey, everyone, this is Sam. I want to take a moment to tell you about MUBI, the global film company bringing great cinema to the world and to you. From iconic directors to emerging filmmakers, MUBI champions visionary filmmaking with films that are handspicked and worth discovering. One film I'm especially looking forward to is Making Marie Antoinette, a new documentary

• 32:24Sam Fragoso?

  from the late, great Eleanor Coppola. In 2005, Eleanor accompanied her daughter Sophia to the Palace of Versailles, where she was directing Marie Antoinette at just 34 years old. It was the first film production ever granted access to the palace, and Eleanor documented the entire experience, capturing some 80 hours of footage that would remain unseen for the next 20 years. Now, in fulfillment of her mother's wishes, that footage has become a film of its own. But perhaps most moving is the relationship at its center, a mother documenting her daughter at work, two generations of filmmakers looking at one another through the camera. Making Marie Antoinette is streaming on MUBI beginning November 6th. To experience Making Marie Antoinette and more of the best of cinema, you can try MUBI

• 33:09Sam Fragoso?

  free for 30 days at MUBI.com/talkeasy. That's MUBI.com/talkeasy for a whole month of great cinema for free. After every election, the winning party likes to talk about how they have a mandate from voters to do this and that. Before we do a kind of autopsy of the Republican Party, I want to start with the Democrats. What is the left's mandate? What should the first, second, third priority be the moment power switches over in Congress?

• 33:47Speaker 00

  I think there's three very clear mandates. The first is bring down prices however you can. And there's, you know, there's no dial to hit, but you can restore the cuts to Medicaid that were enacted by the Republicans in the, in the big bill they passed. You can attempt, one big thing that they took away were subsidies on Obamacare that have led to huge premium spikes. You can undo that. Those are like straightforward. To do, there's a permitting bill before Congress that I think would, in the long run, reduce energy costs for people that they're going to take up in the, in a lame duck, which I think is controversial for a bunch of reasons, though if I were voting, I would probably

• 34:32Speaker 00

  vote yes. But there's stuff you can try to do on energy. You've got to look for places where you can vote to bring people's prices down. Second is end the war, and that relates to prices because the biggest pain point for people right now, the most visible pain point, and I don't think it's necessarily the biggest, is our gas prices. And that's wholly driven by the war in Iran. And so you need to bring pressure to bear to bring the war to an end. That's war powers resolutions. That's not voting for more money for the war. That's possibly not voting for a continuing resolution unless there's, they've returned to the negotiating table for a diplomatic solution. But that's clear as day is too. People hate the war and you've got a mandate.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  And then the third thing there's a just very clear mandate on is corruption. And I think corruption means a whole bunch of different things. The first thing is the government and the people running the government should not be self-dealing and getting rich off that. And I think that means investigating Donald Trump, Donald Trump's families, that means cabinet members. I want to know all the details of how Alina Haba got paid $50 million from, you know, outside entity while she was still working in the Justice Department, the contracts that went to Kristi Noem. And when she was the Department of Homeland Security, the prison land that was on sale for $75 million and got bought for $400 million by the US government to a, you know,

• 35:55Speaker 00

  connected contractor, like enormous mandate to investigate, stamp out and root out corruption. And those three things, I think those are all real clear, like off the bat. It gets much more complicated and sort of after you get past those, but those are three pretty big things and pretty clear, and I think also have almost unanimity of all the people that got elected.

• 36:19Sam Fragoso?

  Well, that's complicated. Hakeem Jeffries has already said, quote, "I haven't had a single member of the House Democratic Caucus talk to me about impeachment." Do you think that's true?

• 36:31Speaker 00

  I think it might be. I think, I think impeachment is distinct from what I was saying about corruption, in part because the horse has to go before the cart. So there's absolutely a mandate for oversight of corruption. You need to start investigating it. I think you should view impeachment wholly in tactical terms with no sort of moral expressive value whatsoever. The guy's already been impeached twice and he survived and he came back and he won again. If you think you can impeach Donald Trump and get, for the first time in the long history of the republic, enough senators to vote to remove him, and you think it would be better for the country if he were not in office and JD Vance for the President of the United

• 37:14Speaker 00

  States, which again is a question, sure, but that's the bar. You don't, you know, if you don't think you have a shot or you think, well, we'll see what happens, like we have done this twice and I'm not sure what the point is the third time unless you think it's going to work.

• 37:32Sam Fragoso?

  I think some of the frustration is you hear James Tellerico already saying that he has a mandate for bipartisanship. Quote, "I'm not interested in retribution. The people of Texas did not elect me last night for retribution." Is he, is he wrong for taking that tact right from the start here?

• 37:50Speaker 00

  Well, I think he's probably rhetorically correct to say he was not elected for retribution because I think it allows him to distinguish retribution from accountability. And I think, again, I do think, look, I, the guy just won by 12 points in a state that hadn't elected a Democrat to the Senate since the 1980s. So he knows something or he knows something I don't about what the voters in Texas want. I'm going to defer to him on that. But again, I come back to the corruption thing. People do want accountability for the corruption. They do. Again, you've got to do the work of oversight and investigation before you do anything anyway.

• 38:34Speaker 00

  There's so much, everything we know is, is we know because of reporters, because there's been zero congressional oversight. So there's like, I would like to just get some stuff on the record. Like I think we deserve, like my pet issue is that we've, I think to my mind, murdered over 200 people in boat strikes in the Caribbean and the Pacific. And I use the word advisedly. I do not think there's a colorable legal claim that we are at war with the people that we are killing. And if you kill people outside of a war, you are murdering them unless it is in the context of self-defense and there's no plausible claim for self-defense. I think that's mass murder. I truly do.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  I think morally it is, and I think there might be a pretty good case it is legally. Before we got to prosecuting people for that, which I don't, I would not take off the table, I don't know, there's just a lot we need to know about the people we've killed, the conditions under which we've killed them, the legal justifications for killing them. And there's a lot of oversight work to do. And like, before we get to anything that even begins to look like retribution, like I want to know, I want to know the answers to those questions.

• 39:46Sam Fragoso?

  And it's clear that the right knows that we want to know that because over the summer, House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has just stepped down from his post and won't seek minority leader, attended the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference, where he offered a warning to his Republican constituents, should the Democrats win the midterms? Why don't we take a look at that?

• 40:06Speaker 04

  If we were to, we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats, y'all, impeachment's not even the big concern. They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body and they'll go after the president's family, the cabinet, his donors and friends. Half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. I'll take care of you. Okay, we're going to win. We're going to win the midterm. Okay? All right?

• 40:27Sam Fragoso?

  It's really eerie that that speech from this past summer. Like, there's nothing subtle about it at all.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  No.

• 40:36Sam Fragoso?

  In the conversations you've had with people, do you get the sense that leadership has to change? That Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House, that they have to be replaced?

• 40:48Speaker 00

  Well, I guess the question is have to, according to who? Like in terms of the numbers, I don't, I think Hakeem Jeffries will easily be elected the next speaker. I think Schumer's probably in a little more trouble, but I still think the, he's the odds-on favorite, partly because, look, after a win like this, it's like Schumer clearly had some pretty big missteps in this cycle. The two biggest, I think, being backing Haley Stevens in Michigan and recruiting Janet Mills in Maine. But he also had a lot of, you know, pretty sure-footed steps, getting Mary Peltola in Alaska, getting Sherrod Brown, which was, I think, from what I understand, a sort of

• 41:30Speaker 00

  a tough sell because I think he had kind of thought about retiring. Roy Cooper in, in North Carolina. You know, there's, there's reasons for him to say, look, I played a key role in bringing about this Senate majority. But there's also people saying, you know, who said on the campaign trail and said now that they're not going to vote for him for leader. So I think he's in more tenure circumstances. I do think-

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Broadly speaking, I think there's a reason that people feel frustrated with a leadership generation that is born of a different set of politics than the one the moment maybe requires. And I think it'll be interesting to see how that plays out.

• 42:20Sam Fragoso?

  Chuck Schumer has said, when commenting on this historic week, quote, "The issue is not me." And I kind of wonder, like, isn't it a little? Like, the more he talks, the more he sounds and feels like Joe Biden after the midterms in 2022. And, and as you said, senators like Adam Hamilton of Kansas, Troy Jackson of Maine, have explicitly said in their respective campaigns that they will not support Schumer for party leader. And so when we look at this election, I keep going back to this, this like repudiation idea. Do you think it's just a repudiation of Donald Trump?

• 43:01Sam Fragoso?

  Or is it also a repudiation of what I charitably describe as the fecklessness of neoliberalism, so to speak?

• 43:10Speaker 00

  Oh, man, the fecklessness of neoliberalism. I mean, I don't know. I feel complicated about that.

• 43:16Sam Fragoso?

  That's the title of your next book, right?

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Well, you know, the funny, I mean, I can go on a long, I can go a long tangent here about neoliberalism, actually. So let me just put that aside for a second and just say,

• 43:28Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  I understand why people feel that way. I often feel that way myself. I just am not sure. I guess my question is like, if it's not Schumer, who else? And how much of a break that is, right? So Van Hollen has talked about, I think Van Hollen has some real substantive disagreements with Schumer on stuff, particularly around foreign policy, and particularly around Israel and Gaza. I think the generational case that you, when you just said it was like Biden after 2022, I think that's a very strong argument. And I think someone like Brian Schatz, who's in leadership and considerably younger, his politics are different than Chuck Schumer's, I think probably more progressive, but is also an institutionalist fundamentally, would be an interesting person for that role. I

• 44:13Speaker 00

  guess I sort of feel like people make too much of leadership a little bit. Like, I just don't think.

• 44:19Sam Fragoso?

  Well, tell me more about that.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  I think there's just a little bit of kicking the dog that happens. And what I mean by kicking the dog is like, you're frustrated, and so you like kick your table, you kick your foot under the table, and the dog is there. And it's like, there's a lot of that that happens when you're out of power, which is, I am mad. I am mad they are doing all these things. Why don't you Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries stop them from doing them? And sometimes that's legitimate. Sometimes it really is legitimate. Sometimes it's not really that legitimate. It's mostly you're just frustrated because like, the other, like Donald Trump, the Republican Party, won both houses of Congress and the presidency.

• 44:59Speaker 00

  And like, man, that sucks. And so I, I guess I'm, I'm careful to distinguish what I, there are things that I think leadership have done really poorly, and there are things I think they've done well. There are places where they are so wildly out of touch with the base and the grassroots of the party that I think it's dangerous. There are ways in which they are enmeshed with some of the same big money actors that are, you know, driving the AI build out that I think are really dangerous. But I just think like, the personalization of like, the problem is Chuck Schumer as leader, I just don't quite totally buy.

• 45:37Sam Fragoso?

  The three big items that you listed at the top of the segment, do you think they can be carried out with Schumer at the helm, with Jeffries at the helm?

• 45:48Speaker 00

  I think, I guess I would say yes, because I think those are fairly low hanging fruit and fairly straightforward. But I also think there's, I generally think there's a real generation page turning argument in the case of Schumer. I think Jeffries is just going to be a much harder climb, partly just where the caucus is at.

• 46:12Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think Chuck Schumer will be replaced?

• 46:13Speaker 00

  I think it's a probably 60, 40, he won't be. But close. I think more likely than not, he won't be. But I also think, I think Jeffries is probably 80, 20, 90, 10 that he will be the next speaker, maybe even 95, 5. I think Schumer is probably 60, 40 that he will be the next Senate Majority Leader. Much, much closer. And I think there's good arguments for why he should be. But that'll be a battle.

• 46:44Sam Fragoso?

  On the other side of the aisle, the infighting has already begun. Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis said, "This is close to an extinction level event for Republicans. In January, when everyone in office leaves, only one state will have Republican control of their state, the state of Florida." There's something kind of poetic about the fact that the blue wave has its limits, and that limit is the state of Florida.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  [laughing]

• 47:10Sam Fragoso?

  It's like, oh, no, no, it's gonna be amazing. Not for Florida. I mean,

• 47:16Speaker 00

  I mean, they came close, man. They came close. And, and let me say this. They came close. And also, there were four congressional seats in Florida that were all gerrymandered into Trump plus double digits. And I think Democrats are going to go 4-0 in those seats. Three of them were called, and one I don't think is quite called. But, so it was, it was actually a surprisingly good night for Democrats in Florida. It's just that that state has become very, very difficult to win in.

• 47:41Sam Fragoso?

  And I've heard, I think, pretty reasonable critiques from the left saying that the Democratic Party did not do enough to support the Senate candidate down there. But extinction level event for Republicans, true?

• 47:55Speaker 00

  Well, here's the thing about American political parties. There's only two of them. So, you know, they, they kind of can't go, I mean, we've had this same two party system, you know, functionally for over a century. So they kind of can't go extinct unless they're replaced by something else. Extinction level event for an entire cohort of Republican office holders? Absolutely. And for, I think the extinction, the real place where you get to extinction level is the implications for the Electoral College of a Democratic presidential ticket carrying Texas.

• 48:35Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  I think by my count, the Democratic governors in the country now will govern states that add up to 393 electoral votes. A state in which, a presidential campaign in which Texas is genuinely in play and 50-50 is just a completely different universe and makes Republican math so, so, so much harder.

• 49:05Sam Fragoso?

  Do you believe it is turning in that big way? Like, do you believe Texas is turning blue for 2028?

• 49:12Speaker 00

  I think it's up for grabs. I think it's, I think it's up for grabs. And that's why it's going to be, it's, that was one of my first thoughts when I saw what was happening in Texas. I was like, the 2028 presidential campaign is just going to be operating in this totally new math. And also, the amount of money that's going to pour into, I mean, Texas is already an incredibly expensive state to campaign in because of how big it is, how many media markets they are, there are, and how expensive the media markets are. I can't even begin to think of the numbers of a world in which both major presidential part, both major parties and campaigns are running full operations across Texas in a presidential.

• 49:54Sam Fragoso?

  I want to go, because you are the man who wrote, I think, the book on the attention economy. Something that I just, I cannot square away, or I'm kind of vexed by, is in the aftermath of this, J.D. Vance, who I think competes with Trump for like, time spent in front of a screen, watching himself,

• 50:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really bad.

• 50:19Sam Fragoso?

  and/or his constituents. He kind of gave his autopsy, a diagnosis of what happened. And he wrote, "The four issues were, from voters, end the war, focus on cost of living slash inflation, put America first, change our relationship to Israel. Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos-Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. She's also a great person." And I just want to hold on something. The

• 51:00Sam Fragoso?

  Vice President of the United States thinks the people in Iowa, in Kansas, in Georgia, in Texas, spent most of Monday talking about what someone on Fox and Friends said. And I know I'm like harping on a small detail, but I wanted to ask if you think it speaks to this larger attentional issue. And the fact that, as Zadie Smith says, "This is your brain on algorithm."

• 51:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 51:34Sam Fragoso?

  And we have a, we have a presidency that is governed by two people who are addicted

• 51:40Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 51:41Sam Fragoso?

  to their phones.

• 51:43Speaker 00

  I think that is so well said, and it shows up everywhere. And it's not just those two. It's everywhere. It's the, the whole administration is too online. I said afterwards that I was thanking Elon Musk, and I think he did a favor for the Democrats and progressives and the whole pro-democracy coalition in the country by turning Twitter into a feeded swamp of feral right wing freaks who talk like cartoon movie villains all the time because they think it's cool, and they all talk to each other. And, you know, Vance is such a perfect example. Someone had a funny joke about that essay he wrote up. It's like, you can't reply, guy, your own administration while you're sitting in it. Which I thought was pretty good. But like,

• 52:24Sam Fragoso?

  Amazing.

• 52:24Speaker 00

  Yes. They all are so far up their own, you know what, like,

• 52:30Sam Fragoso?

  You can curse here, it's okay.

• 52:31Speaker 00

  They're all so far up their own asses. I mean, and they're, and they're, and they're just in this like, hothouse environment.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  Where they're performing for other crazy MAGA right wing chuds and, and think that the chudier they are, the more people like it and they're, they're trapped in this algorithmic cage and they're, they're addicted to attention about themselves. And it, it shows up in their politics, like they don't talk like normal people.

• 53:04Sam Fragoso?

  And they also think their timeline is a snapshot.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 53:09Sam Fragoso?

  Of an American electorate. And, and to some degree, I think the Democratic Party in 2020 suffered from similar.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  Hundred percent.

• 53:18Sam Fragoso?

  Timeline delusions.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. And I think all the, when people talk about like woke one was crazy and when people pull up the things that people said in this kind of hothouse atmosphere, again, it's important, I think, to make distinctions between people's principles and the way they communicate, you know, and their, and their, their sensibility. Like, I think the principles of like, you know, equality and tolerance and trans rights are like incredibly important. That's distinct from like how you communicate to people and talk about voters and whether you say Latinx or not. And I think there's ways of talking to people that reach more people and ways that are more alienating.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  And there's definitely a part of the critique of the kind of late teens, 2020, Twitter addicted, progressive Democratic staff complex that got way too

• 54:13Speaker 00

  far away from how people talk to each other. And they have recreated the same thing for themselves. So, yeah, I think it's a huge part of the problem. I mean, the fundamental problem they have is that the president has been a terrible president and done a bunch of terrible things that people hate.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  But the thing I would say is like, you don't get something this big without a whole bunch of stuff. It is the totality. There's not just one thing here.

• 54:38Sam Fragoso?

  When we look at what we've now described as a Watergate level rebuke,

• 54:45Sam Fragoso?

  is this the end of Trumpism?

• 54:49Sam Fragoso?

  Like, are we actually here?

• 54:50Speaker 00

  I know.

• 54:51Sam Fragoso?

  That's, well, the media on the left has been predicting it, I think, because they've just, I think it's called wish forecasting.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:59Sam Fragoso?

  They've clearly wanted it to be true, so they thought if you say it enough, you could will it into existence.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  I only speak for myself here.

• 55:09Speaker 00

  I've had the thought of like, how can people be tricked by this slash like this slash even tolerate it a lot? And that's, that's like a genuine personal feeling I have about it all. I had it during 2024 when he was running around being like, I'm going to lower your prices by putting tariffs on everything. And I was like, guys,

• 55:31Speaker 00

  he's literally saying, I hear you. The number one thing is you want prices to go down. Don't worry, I have the solution tariffs. Like, this is not going to work.

• 55:41Speaker 00

  I, so, yes, I've wanted something like this rebuke from the moment that he came down the escalator and it hasn't happened, except for when it did. And I don't know the future. It feels to me like this is the end of this era of politics. It doesn't mean it's the end of Donald Trump, who's still president. It doesn't mean that there won't be new permutations. It doesn't mean there won't be, you know, people, national political figures, particularly on the right, who I find awful or disagree with, or

• 56:19Speaker 00

  I do think that his political life force is now drained.

• 56:24Speaker 00

  And the specific kind of politics he assembled around himself has ended.

• 56:30Sam Fragoso?

  The real facts of the case, as Aaron Reddick, a producer at the Ezra Klein Show said, I thought this was really astute, which is what it took for this to happen, for the Trump fever to break. What it took was pretty remarkable. I mean, it took an unpopular, inconclusive war in Iran, coupled with a spike in gas prices. It took Latino voters being taken for granted, hell, not just taken for granted, targeted in the streets, some gunned down. It took Trump attempting to bribe people with $5,000. A bribe that he then mocked voters for even wanting in the first place, saying that if you came to Mar-a-Lago, you could barely afford a hamburger and a dessert with it.

• 57:16Sam Fragoso?

  It took Trump doing an interview in 2024 with NBC when he's asked, don't you need to uphold the constitution of the United States? And he says, in the, in the layup of all questions, he says, I don't know. I have brilliant lawyers who work for me. And that's just an abbreviated list. What does it say as a country that it required all of this to deliver such a historic night for the Democrats?

• 57:46Speaker 00

  First, I'll say this. I don't trust anyone who hasn't changed their mind on anything over the last 10 years. Like, I encounter people all the time who have just had all their priors reaffirmed by 10 years of Trump and I'm like, really?

• 57:59Speaker 00

  So let me say what, there's different schools of thought. So the one, which I think is associated with a sort of left Bernie wing and, and other folks is the sort of rising inequality and pain to working class, middle, middle class life, particularly precipitated by deindustrialization and the neoliberal consensus, and then the Great Recession, produced a kind of pain, distrust in institutions and elites that was the fertile soil into which Trumpism was planted.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  That's in some ways in line with the first book I wrote, which I wrote way before, you know, Donald Trump or, you know, was actually appeared three years before Donald Trump appeared. Another theory is the racial backlash to the first black president and a kind of, you know, reclaiming of certain forms of, of privilege for people, particularly white men who are viewed themselves as losing out in a, in a world that kind of, you know, is more, more equitable along racial and gender lines. And I think there's something to that. But one of the things I kind of come to think is like, if you go back and read the founders, or if you go back to the Greeks, like, the reason the word demagogue is a

• 59:18Speaker 00

  Greek word is because as long as there has been democracy, there have been figures like Donald Trump, quite literally. Like, that's why it's a Greek word. There are figures who are good at essentially, in craven, charismatic ways, marshaling the worst instincts of the mob.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  And these figures appear in all kinds of places. Now, there's structural conditions that may make them more or less able to appeal to people. But it has made me think hard and deep about liberalism, democracy, populism,

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  in a broader way, in a global and historical way, about what does it mean to create a set of institutions that doesn't give rise to this? Or when someone is like this, that they are hemmed and penned in? And that, to me, is like a place I keep going back to because I think, here's the one thing I've really come to believe. There is a pervasive and to me somewhat pernicious

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  idea in a lot of political punditry, which is that if you just did it this way, then we would win. That there's some one weird trick. And if you just, but the whole point of a democracy, definitionally, is that sometimes the ruling party loses elections. That's actually what it means to be a democracy. If you take the fact that public opinion will change, that people will sometimes like the leader and sometimes not, and they'll go back and forth. And actually, thermostatic public opinion is playing some important regulatory role in the body politic. You stop thinking in this sort of like, what was it mean to win forever, to build a permanent majority?

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  And you start thinking in terms of what is the system as a whole producing when it's running healthily, even if it's moving back and forth as public opinion moves back and forth? And to me, the fundamental question is, Americans are just generally not that happy right now and haven't been for a while because there's something deeply missing in our lives. And I don't know the answer to the question of what's missing. I don't think our politics are doing a good job of speaking to it. And I don't think the structure of our economy is. But I think solving for that is kind of the fundamental question.

• 1:01:42Sam Fragoso?

  What do you think it is?

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  I think it's a combination, basically, of inequality. I think we have lost a middle class economy and even more importantly, a middle class society. I think we have a radically increasingly segmented, inequalitarian society. And I think that comes with, I think we're becoming like a very stratified, low trust country. And I think that is exacerbated by the tech and the attentional things I wrote about in Sirens Call on our phones. And so I just think there's a lack of.

• 1:02:27Speaker 00

  The sensibilities of a middle-class society and a middle-class democracy that have really come apart.

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• 1:03:17Sam Fragoso?

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• 1:06:34Sam Fragoso?

  This week on The Ezra Klein Show, Ezra said, quote, "I think one of the giant opportunities in politics right now is to rebuild a politics that is explicitly moral within the moral wreckage of Donald Trump." What does that even look like?

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  In terms of what it looks like, there's a kind of politics you're talking about, and there's the policy stuff. I mean, I think on the sort of policy stuff, the things we talked about corruption, and I think there actually has to be, you know, one of the things to close the loop on the Watergate analogy precedent is that there was a whole suite of post-Watergate reforms that were passed. Laws, right? Like, the creation of inspectors general, for instance, is a post-Watergate reform. There was reforms to the Department of Justice. There was reforms to the way that we conduct essentially secret agencies after the Church Committee and the CIA and the FBI. You know, there's a huge suite of reforms that attempted to bring more transparency into government to stop abuses of power and

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  corruption. In terms of the style of politics, though, I really think it's like not vice signaling and just decency. And like, I keep coming back to this, the word I keep coming back to is pluralism, because I think it's an interesting word, because it's born in a context of religious division. But in some ways, our own ideological and partisan affiliations can feel as strong as religions these days. And I think Adam Hamilton embodied this very well. And I actually think Abdul El-Sayed did in his own very distinct way, is like,

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  being upstanding and decent in your own personal behavior, speaking in a way that's open-hearted and kind, and inviting and welcoming. Talarico is, you know, a great example of that. And then being fundamentally pluralistic in your approach to difference and disagreement and conflict, which is like, we're not going to agree about certain things, and that's okay. And, and maybe there's areas where we do agree, where we can work on stuff together, but I'm not writing you off because I don't agree with you on these things. Everyone's going to have their lines about what's a bridge too far. Like, I'm not going to get

• 1:09:02Speaker 00

  into a conversation with someone with a swastika on their arm, right? Or, or someone who's like hurling gay slurs. But I do think that some, at some point, those, those lines started to mount up and get too restrictive. And so I think part of what a moral politics is, is accepting difference, accepting conflict, accepting ideological distance, and still being open and welcoming and pluralistic about how you talk to people and with people.

• 1:09:32Sam Fragoso?

  The litmus test for the quote-unquote "moral politics" for a lot of people on the left is Israel-Palestine. And, I mean, even Vance in his tweet-

• 1:09:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was, that was interesting. That was very interesting.

• 1:09:47Sam Fragoso?

  This is a repudiation of our longstanding ties to Israel. Do you think the future of the Democratic Party needs to have a certain moral bent when it comes to that, to that area?

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  Yes, I think, I mean, there's a moral reckoning that is still, I think, left undone with the fact that fundamentally, we facilitated the prosecution of a military campaign in Gaza that killed 15,000 children and laid waste to an entire society, essentially of 2 million people. That's just not acceptable. It's not morally acceptable, and it's not right to facilitate that. And that's putting aside all the questions of like, the fact that it was precipitated by a horrible atrocity and mass murder of Israelis, and there was

• 1:10:41Speaker 00

  some military response that was, I think, probably justified and, and defensible, both legally and morally. What actually happened and what we actually supported was not okay.

• 1:10:54Sam Fragoso?

  When Ben Rhodes came on the show and I asked him, do future Democratic candidates in 2028-

• 1:11:02Sam Fragoso?

  Is the only chance they win or become the nominee, do they have to call what's happened there a genocide? He said resoundingly and without hesitation, yes. Do you think he's right?

• 1:11:17Speaker 00

  I don't think he's right necessarily about that specific answer to that specific question, actually. I think there's probably more room than that.

• 1:11:26Sam Fragoso?

  Because when you talk about moral politics, this is what I imagine people are going to listen to. And they're going to go, if you can't be clear on that, that's going to be the litmus test. And you've seen it. You've seen that test be administered. And so I think it is going to come up again.

• 1:11:41Speaker 00

  Oh, it'll, it'll come up. I mean, the question is whether people can navigate that in ways that aren't quite the yes, no question. I think you're right that that will be asked and it will be a litmus test. And for a lot of people, it will be, that will be a threshold question. Here's the, the other thing I will say on this. This relates to your question about moral politics, but it also relates back to Trump. You know, Trump's, two things really helped Trump in 2016. There were two issues where there was an enormous gap to exploit. And the two issues were trade and immigration. The primary voter, voters of the Republican Party were far more opposed to free trade and far more right wing

• 1:12:25Speaker 00

  on immigration than the elected politicians, the think tankers, the policy wonks, the professional class and the staffers. That exact gap exists in the Democratic Party on Gaza. The primary voters of the Democratic Party are far more critical of that war, far more likely to view it as genocide, as a moral stain than the elected leaders, political class, think tank folks of the Democratic Party. And one of the things you learn from Trump in that 2016 is like, that gap will be exploited. It's not sustainable over the long run.

• 1:13:03Sam Fragoso?

  So in the next two years, before, you know, we talk about 2028, and that's another podcast. Can we game out the ways in which the Democrats do the next two years right? And the way in which your timeline where they do it wrong?

• 1:13:21Speaker 00

  The big concern I have is 25 people are going to run for president. And the attention incentives of a field like that are going to be pretty bad for the brand of the Democratic Party. Because if, if, if everyone's trying to get attention in that very crowded environment, it's going to select for all the things that we know that, you know, the Times Square casino supermarket tabloid algorithmic world is, is like, what's the loudest, brightest, rage baityest things you can do? What are the stunts you can do? And I think that form of politics can get pretty toxic pretty quickly and can also lead to producing

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  of a brand or vision of the Democratic Party from people who are kind of like seeing it in the distance that is not ideal. So that's my big fear. The thing that I hope happens, which is distinct from that fear, is that the lessons of this pluralism are learned. And the lessons of you need to be able to speak to people about what you want to do for them and what your vision is, that doesn't write people off. And having a Kansas senator and an Iowa senator and, and a Texas governor, all these people in the party now reaffirms that, right? Reaffirms the party's process of coming up with a language

• 1:14:49Speaker 00

  that is progressive, is populist, is moral, and does travel well across various sub constituencies.

• 1:14:56Sam Fragoso?

  You know how for years we've talked about the walls cracking and this being the moment where maybe there's some light at the, at the end of the tunnel? I've been trying to think about, and I want to just like, propose this theory to you and see where it lands. But, but ultimately it came down to affordability. Right? And at various points in the past two years, Donald Trump has called affordability a hoax, a con job, a fake crisis created by the Democrats, insisting even recently that, quote, "food prices and almost every other item are rapidly going down, even as consumer prices have increased by 4.3% since January 2025."

• 1:15:41Sam Fragoso?

  I was thinking about the word hoax and his treatment of this. And it reminded me of COVID. And it reminded me in 2020 of, of Donald Trump saying, you know, it'll be done by summer. The heat will knock it out. You can take this, it could take that. And over and over again, he would call it a hoax. It was created in Wuhan. It was created by liberals. And over and over again, he couldn't get around the central fact that there were dead bodies. He couldn't escape the fact that people had to zoom in to see their family members take their last breath.

• 1:16:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:27Sam Fragoso?

  There wasn't an amount of myth making hoax talking that he could do to obscure that fact. And it's not dissimilar to people going, but I have a bill and I have to pay the bill or I frankly can't afford to pay the bill and I'm now in debt because of the bill at the end of the month. Like, over and over again, he tried to tell people that the rent that they have to pay is not that high. And I just can't, I can't separate the fact that he called it a hoax, that he kept trying to deny people's realities. And he kept trying to say it's not real.

• 1:17:10Sam Fragoso?

  And you can tell people trying to tread water that it isn't that bad, that they aren't drowning. But at some point, they either sink or swim. And I guess what I'm left with this week is voters felt like if it's going down, I'm not going down with it.

• 1:17:32Speaker 00

  I think, I think that's very true. I think the idea, we always use the phrase on our team, like, gravity exists. And there's a lot of watching him like wily coyote over the cliff and wondering when it's going to fall. And you're exactly right. That was the thing with COVID. He couldn't spin it. He couldn't salesman patter his way out of it. He couldn't, ultimately, that's what, and you're right also that I think absent that, I'm not sure. I think he probably wins that election absent COVID. And I think that's exactly what's happening with affordability. I think particularly the war in gas prices,

• 1:18:16Speaker 00

  that reality kind of won. And my first thought after that night was, remember, this is the guy that somehow managed to bankrupt casinos. Like, this is someone who is extremely, I mean, generationally, era-definingly good at bullshit and, and salesman patter. And, and, and there is really far you can get with that.

• 1:18:47Sam Fragoso?

  And we are susceptible to his myth making and storytelling.

• 1:18:50Speaker 00

  Totally. There's only so far, you act, in the end, you have to, the, you, the, the bill will come due, you have to meet up with reality. And ultimately, that's exactly what happened, you know, this week.

• 1:19:07Sam Fragoso?

  And because you have to go do your show now, literally after doing this interview, can I ask just a very personal, why are you still doing this?

• 1:19:27Speaker 00

  I've been doing this for, I've hosted a television show for 15 years. I've been doing the primetime show at 8:00 PM on MSNBC for 13 years. And I sometimes ask myself that question. And I will be totally honest that the combination of two things, the war, October 7th and the aftermath of the war in Gaza, the 2024 campaign, and then the first two years of Trump, took a lot out of me. I think that I have to see out the Trump era through 28.

• 1:20:10Speaker 00

  And I feel like if I bail before he does, he will have won in some deep sense. And not he as an individual, but like the forces that he represents that to me are like the opposite of the forces that I've devoted my life's work to cultivating and nurturing. And so I got to see it out.

• 1:20:32Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I'll, I'll leave you to it. Chris Hayes, thank you very much.

• 1:20:37Speaker 00

  Thanks, Sam.

• 1:20:48Sam Fragoso?

  Thank you for watching Talk Easy. If you enjoyed today's episode with Chris Hayes, be sure to subscribe on Apple or Spotify. You can also now find the program on YouTube, basically wherever you do your podcasting. As always, our show is produced by Caroline Reebok. This episode was edited by Ariel Gardner with assistance from Jessica Brooke Sanders and Alex Dishal. It was mixed by Andrew Vastola. It was produced by the good people at Higher Ground Media. And I'm Sam Fragoso. I'll see you back here next Sunday. Until then, stay safe and so long.

• 1:21:21Speaker 05

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

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  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

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