Why the GOP is SCARED, and Trump is Copying Zohran Mamdani

Speaker 1 What do walking 10,000 steps every day, eating five servings of fruits and veggies, and getting eight hours of sleep have in common? They're all healthy choices.

Speaker 1 But do all healthier choices really pay off? With prescription plans from CVS CareMark, they do.

Speaker 1 Their plan designs give your members more choice, which gives your members more ways to get on, stay on, and manage their meds.

Speaker 1 And that helps your business control your costs because healthier members are better for business. Go to cmk.co slash access to learn more about helping your members stay adherent.

Speaker 1 That's cmk.co slash accent has skyrocketed.

Speaker 2 But everyone can make content that's on brand and stands out with Adobe Express. You don't have to be a designer to generate images, rewrite text, and create effects.

Speaker 2 That's the beauty of generative AI that's commercially safe. Teams all across your business will be psyched to collaborate and create amazing presentations, videos, social posts, flyers, and more.

Speaker 2 Meet Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content. Learn more at adobe.com slash express slash business.

Speaker 4 Welcome to Raging Moderates.

Speaker 4 I'm Jessica Tarlov, and I'm so glad to be joined once again by my friend, Gen Z Sensation of Substack, YouTube, YouTube, and TikTok, lawyer and political commentator, Aaron Parnas.

Speaker 4 Aaron, how about that intro?

Speaker 5 I love the ever-changing intros. It's getting better and better with each time.
Love it.

Speaker 4 Okay, fantastic. Which means I have to like one-up it next time.
100%. Or the producers do, since they're the ones who rate it.

Speaker 4 I want to start with the big story this week, which was we had an election and Democrats didn't blow it. Quite the opposite.
How was your election day?

Speaker 5 It was a pretty fun day, honestly. A lot of people were excited.

Speaker 5 Hopium.

Speaker 4 It was weird to see smiles, right? Yeah.

Speaker 5 I mean, I will say, I feel like things are shifting a little bit. I don't know how to explain it.

Speaker 5 And honestly, what happened on election night, I don't know that it'll translate to next year or any other election, but for nine months, people were just all doom and gloom.

Speaker 5 And then Tuesday night happened. And now ever since then, it's been a completely different kind of environment.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 4 I think it was also, and maybe this is a little bit of an inside baseball way to look at it, but because those big memos came out the week before, the deciding to win one, right, where they talked to 500,000 people who said that the Democrats were weak and woke and out of touch.

Speaker 4 And then the working class one focused on, you know, how out of touch Democrats are, it made me think, like, which narrative is correct?

Speaker 4 Are the electoral wins, which were all the way down the ballot, right?

Speaker 4 You know, we talk about New Jersey and Virginia and Mom Donnie here in New York, which I want to get into further with you, but also things like the state house in Mississippi and public commissioners in Georgia and school boards.

Speaker 4 So, how do you see things? Like, is the brand being fixed a bit, or is this just everyone is so angry about Trump and the state of the economy that the pendulum swung?

Speaker 5 So, I actually think it's a third thing. I think every candidate in each state and each race ran a perfect campaign.

Speaker 5 I think that's what it was, whether it was Mikey Sheryl in Jersey, Mom Dani in New York, Spanberger in Virginia, Prop 50, wherever you look, the campaigns were run pretty much flawlessly.

Speaker 5 You had a good candidate who really didn't have much bad baggage out there. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 5 You had a candidate that was running on affordability and reducing the cost of living in every single election across the country. Yeah, they went about it differently.

Speaker 5 New York City is different from Virginia and New Jersey, but they all had that same overall message. They all wanted to build more housing.
They all wanted to make housing costs lower.

Speaker 5 So they ran very principled campaigns for the races that they were in. Do I think Mom Donnie, the exact race that he ran in New York City, would have won in Virginia? Probably not.

Speaker 5 Do I think Spanberger would have won in New York City? Probably not.

Speaker 5 But that's kind of what made Tuesday night so special for Democrats because it really showed that the party for the first time is a Big Ten and is really united in ways that we hadn't seen before.

Speaker 4 I think also it showed that the party was able to take feedback and do something about it, actually in a pretty short amount of time.

Speaker 4 If you think that we were just a year out from the 2024 election and how endemic the problems that we had with focusing on cultural issues and like being defined by DEI.

Speaker 4 And part of that is right-wing media, which we should talk about as well.

Speaker 4 But you couldn't, besides Momdani, who is, as advertised, a Democratic socialist, but did win the Democratic nomination, you know, he wasn't running outside the party.

Speaker 4 Like no one can accuse Abigail Spanberger or Mikey Sherrill. of being a socialist.
I mean, they can. They actually did at work yesterday.

Speaker 4 But besides that, I mean, no one, no voter is taking it seriously.

Speaker 5 No, they're not socialists. And honestly, I mean, Mamdani is a self, like he embraces socialism.
And, but I think to me, that's the beauty of what the Democratic Party is.

Speaker 5 You have the far left, you have the centrist, you have those somewhere in the middle, you have those a little even to the right of center. And it all kind of comes together.
When it works, it works.

Speaker 5 And then if we lost any of the races on Tuesday night, oh, it would have been a bloodbath for Democrats online. I mean, it would have been a nightmare.

Speaker 5 But I think the party did well, had a clean sweep. And I will say, I give a lot of flowers to Ken Martin.
I think he has actually really, and a lot of people aren't talking about that.

Speaker 5 He actually has changed the party in a lot of ways. The DNC, yes, is not running these races, but really is on message.

Speaker 4 They're helping a lot, though. They are.
I mean, they're giving a lot of money, volunteers. They supported all these candidates at the amount that the candidates wanted, which is the secret sauce.

Speaker 5 Yeah, for sure. And I will say it's interesting.
Now, just a few days after Tuesday night's election, Donald Trump is embracing a new word, he says. It's affordability.

Speaker 5 That's the new word that he's embracing. He says it's a new word, even though it's been around for a long time.

Speaker 5 And James Blair, the deputy chief of staff and political director for the Trump campaign, said in 2026, affordability is going to be his top issue.

Speaker 5 So it's very interesting, the kind of shifts that we're seeing.

Speaker 5 If democratic messaging wasn't working, Donald Trump wouldn't be embracing the same messaging that Mom Donnie, Spanberger, and Cheryl embraced.

Speaker 4 Totally.

Speaker 4 I hadn't seen that yet, that he's adopting our lingo. It is interesting how a play on words or just changing it from, you know, cost of living, right, or the rent is too damn high.

Speaker 4 All these things are affordability, but that really is tapping into something specific, or it's like creating a feeling within people that they're glomming onto in such a positive way.

Speaker 4 So it'll be interesting, the dueling campaigns where the Republicans and Democrats are just screaming affordability at each other.

Speaker 5 Well, one's in office, the other isn't. I mean, that's that to me, that's what's going to be the catalyst in 2026.

Speaker 5 If prices are actually substantially down in November of 2026, I think Republicans could have a good night, but prices have only gone up and tariffs have only cost prices to go up. So I don't know.

Speaker 5 We'll see. But affordability, go.
Go Trump. Yay.

Speaker 4 MAGA, MAGA.

Speaker 4 I want to talk to you about SCOTA stuff, but before we get off the election train, two demographics that I wanted to get your take on that swung pretty wildly back to the Democrats, the Latino vote and also younger voters, in particular, young women by huge margins, but also young men back in the blue fold.

Speaker 4 What did you make of that?

Speaker 5 I wasn't surprised at all. But I also think, I mean, if you looked at 2024 in New York City, I'm pretty sure young men voted for Kamala Harris by a wide margin too.

Speaker 5 Same thing in some of these other bluer states. So it's not really surprising.

Speaker 5 And especially on the Latino vote as well, also not really surprising given the fact that immigration wasn't on the ballot at all.

Speaker 5 And none of these states were border states. Immigration had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 5 And also, I mean, in my opinion, Latinos are rebuking the president because they're like, well, this isn't what we voted for in terms of the mass deportations, mass raids, teachers being dragged out of daycare by ICE agents.

Speaker 5 That's not what they voted for.

Speaker 5 I think that it all kind of goes back to something that I've been saying for a long time, and people yell at me for saying this, but the 2024 election was actually pretty close, in my opinion.

Speaker 5 Like it wasn't that wide of an election. The gap between Democrats and Republicans wasn't that large.
Yes, Democrats, they have a bad approval rating. The party brand wasn't great, fine.

Speaker 5 But if you look back to 2020, 2021, the Republican brand after Trump lost also wasn't great. It was January 6th insurrection and whether Mr.
Potato Head was a boy or a girl.

Speaker 5 And they still somehow won. So I think we have to always remember that in American politics, this is a 50-50 country, no matter which way you spin it.

Speaker 5 And Republicans will win some years, Democrats will win other years, and voters are just going to shift kind of in blocks. So I think we're going to see it again in 2026 and then again in 2028.

Speaker 5 It's just a pendulum.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Though the pendulum stuck to one side in New Jersey, which a lot of people had not predicted to happen.
You know, getting a third term is a difficult feat.

Speaker 4 And Cheryl winning by 13 is quite something.

Speaker 4 On the Latino vote, something that I've been focused on is whether the swing back to the Democrats and then some, Cheryl picked up 64% of the Latino vote in New Jersey, being led by some of these heavily Hispanic counties like Passaic County, might make Republicans think twice about their gerrymandering plans.

Speaker 4 Because like in Texas, for instance, that only works that they pick up five seats if they can win Latino voters. And it doesn't look as likely that that's the case.

Speaker 4 It saw Kansas was getting a little skittish about the plan. Do you think there's going to be a reevaluation in light of Prop 50 and the Latino vote?

Speaker 5 100%. I think Republicans overplayed their hands heading into 2026.

Speaker 5 I was reading this morning that in Texas, two of the five districts that were drawn further to the right are Trump plus five or six districts. In a blue wave year, those are blue seats, right?

Speaker 5 Republicans are not guaranteed to pick up those seats in Texas. And I will say this.
I was watching our good friend Harry Enton talk about something.

Speaker 4 Melting down about something.

Speaker 5 Melting down about something using prediction models. No, I'm kidding.
No, he was saying something interesting is that.

Speaker 5 In all of these races in New Jersey, Virginia, California, you look at Donald Trump's approval and disapproval rating, and it tracks the final turnout, right?

Speaker 5 So Donald Trump has a 42% approval rating in Jersey, 53% or 54% disapproval. That was almost the final result for Mikey Sheryl.
Same thing with Spamberger in Virginia.

Speaker 5 It was a 15% win for Spanberger, 15% shift between approval and disapproval for Trump. Same thing in California.

Speaker 5 So I think if that trend holds, Republicans are in big trouble, big trouble heading into 2026.

Speaker 4 Yeah. I mean, that's actually a good Harry Enton observation, and I will check that out.
I can use it on the five this afternoon.

Speaker 4 Quickly, before we get get off electoral politics, you saw that Nancy Pelosi has announced her retirement.

Speaker 4 This felt like it was in the offing and there were people already jumping into the race who wouldn't normally be primarying Speaker Pelosi.

Speaker 4 But what are your thoughts on her career and the state of Democratic leadership as she exits?

Speaker 5 I think she was probably the most powerful speaker of my lifetime, Republican or Democrat. Your life.

Speaker 4 Yeah. I mean, like, I think maybe

Speaker 5 ever, maybe. Yeah.
I think she'll she'll be the most powerful speaker for a long time. I don't know that anyone could, like, have her party in check the way she did, no matter what.

Speaker 5 She always knew where the votes were and how many votes she had. It was a career of public service.
But I also think, like, listen, it's time, right?

Speaker 5 She served 40 years in the House of Representatives. I don't think anyone should be serving more than 15 years, let alone 40 years.

Speaker 5 And so, I think she recognized that it's time to kind of step aside, pass the torch, new generation of leadership.

Speaker 5 I'm curious to see what this means for Hakeem Jeffries because I really think, and this is also a bit of a hot take, that so long as Speaker Pelosi was in office in the House, Hakeem Jeffries couldn't live up to his full potential as Democratic leader because I think her kind of overarching shadow was always there.

Speaker 5 And I think her leaving now will kind of allow him to have free reign. And we'll see what happens.

Speaker 4 We're going to take a quick break. Stay with us.

Speaker 6 Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to.

Speaker 6 Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin, or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro.

Speaker 1 You just have to hire one.

Speaker 6 You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today.

Speaker 7 Support for this show comes from Odo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo.

Speaker 7 It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier.
CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more.

Speaker 7 And the best part: Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch.
So why not you?

Speaker 8 Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com.

Speaker 9 Race Race the runners, raise the sales, raise the sales, captain. An unidentified ship is approaching.
Over.

Speaker 10 Roger, wait, is that an enterprise sales solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more.

Speaker 10 Start converting your B2B audience today. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a free $250 credit for the next one.
Get started today at linkedin.com/slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

Speaker 4 Welcome back.

Speaker 4 You already gave props to Ken Martin, which I think is important, well-deserved, not being done enough.

Speaker 4 What do you think about, you know, it feels like the tide shifting a bit on the shutdown as well, Donald Trump admitting that the shutdown was a big factor in the election, that it's not going well.

Speaker 4 He wants to get rid of the filibuster, which Thune is not going for. But clearly, the Democratic play there has been working out.

Speaker 4 So do you see Schumer and Jeffries in a better leadership light than we did a few months ago?

Speaker 5 I think they're doing their job the way they're supposed to be doing their job.

Speaker 5 I don't know about better leadership light because I still think the party overall, the base, is not a huge fan of where democratic establishment leadership is, especially with Schumer with the Mom Donnie non-endorsement vote, that whole situation.

Speaker 5 Like, I voted.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Like, just we saw you come out of a polling place.

Speaker 5 You voted. Say who you voted for.
It's not that deep.

Speaker 4 Do you think you voted for Cuama?

Speaker 5 100%.

Speaker 5 100%.

Speaker 5 100%. It's like when you walk out of a polling location and you say, Trump versus Harris, I'm not going to say who I voted for.
We know who you voted for. Like, let's be real here.
Just be honest.

Speaker 5 But I do say this. I give Schumer and Jeffries their flowers in the sense of I think they're playing the government shutdown really well.

Speaker 5 I think that they're doing their job as leaders of the Senate and of the House. I wouldn't necessarily say that either are leaders of the party, though.
And I think that's kind of the difference.

Speaker 5 I don't know how long this government shutdown lasts. I hope it ends soon just because air traffic controllers are not getting paid.
Yeah, I have to get out of flight tonight.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, it's really, it's not good.

Speaker 5 And I could totally see Donald Trump weaponizing this, shutting down pockets of air travel across the country starting this weekend. I don't know.

Speaker 5 It's all bad for America. And I think it just shows, if you look back over the past, however long, Americans, they don't like Congress.
And I think this is no different.

Speaker 5 Yes, Republicans are being blamed more than Democrats, but ultimately, like, it's on Congress as a whole. Like, get your act together, get to work.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, Mike Johnson would tell you that he has been hard at work.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 But forgot about that one.

Speaker 4 He's doing annoying press conferences and interviews. Though I do find it impressive that he continually does interviews, even though they're more and more humiliating each time.

Speaker 4 Like going back to CNBC is,

Speaker 4 it's a move. And he does that.
Just add one. Yeah.
No, I saw it. And I'm like, you really want to go talk to Andrew Ross Orkin right now?

Speaker 5 No, I got to read you this quote because Johnson just did a press conference. Okay.

Speaker 11 Mondami and Democrats want to talk about affordability?

Speaker 7 We love that subject.

Speaker 11 We love it. Look at the facts.
I brought some this morning. It's the Republicans who are working every day to make life more affordable for working families.
And it's not a talking point for us.

Speaker 11 We are delivering.

Speaker 4 Love it.

Speaker 4 You really like the delivery with a straight face also, when millions of people came out to tell you that you absolutely are not focused on affordability and that you have a dismal approval rating.

Speaker 4 Also, you should see people that won free and fair elections.

Speaker 4 I want to talk legal challenges, a big week at the Supreme Court hearing a case about Trump's use of emergency powers as justification to impose his tariffs. It did not go well.

Speaker 4 I wasn't listening live to the whole thing, just picking up from clips, but Gorsuch in particular was not having it. What do you think is going to happen there?

Speaker 5 I think it's going to be a 5-4 decision overturning Trump's tariffs. Okay.
I think Roberts and Barrett are going to vote with the liberals. Not Gorsuch.

Speaker 5 No, I don't think Gorsuch, because I actually...

Speaker 4 Oh, because he was mad.

Speaker 5 He was mad. I listened to the entire thing.
And he.

Speaker 4 Look at you preparing in fall.

Speaker 5 No, I'm just a nerd.

Speaker 5 Gorsuch, if you listen to him, he was very mad. He was very upset, but he gave off ramps to the administration.
I think he's going to be able to split the hairs in this tariff situation and kind of.

Speaker 5 issue maybe like a limiting concurrence of sorts.

Speaker 5 I think ultimately Trump's tariffs won't hold up. And I think Roberts and Barrett are going to be the ones that do them in.

Speaker 4 Okay. It'll be the Roberts court again, which he's desperate to have.
What else are you interested in, Marjorie Taylor Greene?

Speaker 5 Sure, she's running for president.

Speaker 4 Yeah, which like kind of hurts me, but I'm getting through it. Like I'm watching Marjorie Taylor Green on all of my programming, like invading Bill Maher.

Speaker 4 Though I did love it that she was holding his feet to the fire about the fact that she hadn't been invited before. He's like, no, no, of course we have.
She's like, no, you've never invited me before.

Speaker 4 Like, not until I started bashing Republicans. And like, you make fun of me about Jewish space lasers, which is legit.
But, you know, she's been on the Vue,

Speaker 4 going on Bill Maher. Now she's talking about running for president.
What do you think is going on with Marjorie Taylor Green?

Speaker 5 She's been scoring by her own party. I mean, like, she wanted to run for Senate in Georgia and she probably would have won that nomination.

Speaker 5 I think Osoff would have beat her, though, but she wanted to run statewide and Trump called her and said, no, don't do it.

Speaker 5 And now Republicans don't have a clear favorite in that primary and it's a bit of a shit show and so she's upset she's scoring by her own party and she's also i think upset at leadership yeah it does seem genuine that she's mad about the obamacare subsidies and not being at work yeah for sure i mean but remember she was really close to kevin mccarthy like like she buddied up with him like that was her guy and then he left and she kind of overplayed her hand there then mike johnson came in and she wasn't ever a fan of johnson from the beginning she didn't want him and so i i think that there is tension there johnson is kind of reducing her power in the party.

Speaker 5 Trump doesn't really want to talk to her, it seems like, is asking folks what's happening with Marjorie. And Marjorie wanted to run for Senate and they said, no, don't do it.

Speaker 5 Party bosses kind of overruled her. Now I think she's just charting her own path.
But I think people need to like remember. This is the lady that did Jewish space lasers.

Speaker 5 She is one of the most furthest to the right Republicans. Like there is a true horseshoe theory in American politics.

Speaker 5 Some of her policies and her ideas may sound good because if you go so far right, you end up far left.

Speaker 5 I mean, like, I get why some people are like, oh, well, Marjorie Taylor Greene's good, but don't forget everything that she's done. Like, don't forget everything that she said.
She's not your friend.

Speaker 5 She's not your ally. So, do I think she's going to do well in the Republican primary? No, if she runs for president.

Speaker 5 But I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a Tucker Carlson Marjorie Taylor Greene ticket in 2028.

Speaker 4 Oh, my God. Well, that brings me to, I'm very invested in the brewing, or is it like a full-on civil war now on the right over this Nick Fuentes?

Speaker 4 Tucker Carlson interview, I saw Kevin Roberts from Heritage finally issued an actual apology and admitted that he just read a statement, not actually knowing the content of the conversation that Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson had.

Speaker 4 Though you could probably imagine what a Nick Fuentes conversation is like, what do you think it means for the party? Because people like Megan Kelly are really mad.

Speaker 4 Like they're talking about the fact that the election results from Tuesday are due to the fact that Republicans are spending time tearing each other down, and it doesn't have to do with actual issues.

Speaker 5 That's what happens when you live in this hyper online bubble. The average American doesn't know about.
Tucker Carlson and Heritage Foundation, like that's just not it.

Speaker 5 But I will say it is emblematic of a much bigger issue for Republicans right now. And I think that they don't have a clear future.

Speaker 5 No one knows what's going to happen with the Republican Party in the future. They don't know who's going to take over.
J.D. Vance was once heir apparent.
I don't think he is anymore.

Speaker 5 If I had to predict, actually, Marco Rubio Rubio will be the Republican nominee. I don't think Vance will be the nominee.

Speaker 5 I think that a lot of people are kind of splintered on whether or not they should continue embracing Trumpism or they should try to go back a different route in like this Republican populism era that they, some people want to go to.

Speaker 5 I think the Heritage Foundation doesn't know what to do because I think parts of the Heritage Foundation have actually also been iced out of the White House, this Trump administration.

Speaker 5 I think Tucker Carlson is a nut job, but he's doing his thing.

Speaker 5 So I think ultimately this is, it is a full-blown civil war in the Heritage Foundation online bubble situation, but it hasn't reached the Republican Party as a whole.

Speaker 5 And I actually think it's going to be a very ugly 2026 to 2028 before the 2028 election for Republicans trying to figure out who they are moving forward, because I don't think they know who they are.

Speaker 4 No, it is very hard when someone has been taking up all the oxygen for a decade, basically.

Speaker 4 We've never recorded the Friday episode together.

Speaker 5 This is exciting.

Speaker 4 So here is the question. What's one thing that makes you rage and one thing you think we should all calm down about?

Speaker 5 Oh,

Speaker 5 that's a good question.

Speaker 4 Thanks. I ask it every week to the Friday guests.
We just haven't done this.

Speaker 5 Yeah, one thing that makes me rage is the price at airports. Everything is way too damn expensive at airports.
And it seems like it's just so frustrating, like regulate these kiosks.

Speaker 4 And you can't do anything about it. Like Hudson News is the only place you can go.

Speaker 5 Well, that, and also like what also, I guess, I have something else that makes me rage is that airplanes don't have enough bin space for all the people going on the plane.

Speaker 5 Like if you're going to give them a ticket, have enough space to put their bags. Anyways, I have a whole thing on that.
And one thing that people should calm down about is

Speaker 5 just the direction of our country. Like democracy is going to survive.
Calm down, folks. I really do think it will.

Speaker 5 Our institutions are crumbling, but if you saw what happened Tuesday night, we're going to,

Speaker 5 it'll push through.

Speaker 4 I love it. Yeah.
That's a good uplifting note, Aaron Purnas, it was great to have you. I will talk to you later.

Speaker 5 Talk to you later.

Speaker 7 Support for this show comes from Odo. Running a business is hard enough.
So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo.

Speaker 7 It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier.
CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more.

Speaker 7 And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch.
So why not you?

Speaker 8 Try Odoo for free at Odu.com. That's ODOO.com.

Speaker 12 Whether you write code or shape strategy, if you build, you belong. Twilio's customer engagement platform is the ultimate toolbox for developers, designers, business leaders, and everyone in between.

Speaker 12 Looking to create truly memorable customer experiences? With Twilio, you can combine data, AI, and real-time communications in one open, flexible space.

Speaker 12 So you can build without limits, without workarounds, and without compromise. So, what will you build today?

Speaker 3 Learn more at Twilio.com.

Speaker 12 That's T-W-I-L-I-O.com. Be a builder with Twilio.