Jonathan Lemire: A Bubble-Wrapped Trump

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Hey guys, quick scheduling note on what's been up with the podcast. So you got two podcasts yesterday.

So in case you're one of those who, you know, wakes up in the morning, does the Sunday morning commute, just goes to the most recent show.

I taped Amanda Carpenter yesterday morning and then Olivia Nootsi yesterday afternoon. So don't miss out on All Caps Amanda yesterday.
That podcast was excellent. The Nootsie podcast,

we had some mixed views on the Olivia Nootsie podcast. You'll be surprised to hear that.
And I'm going to have some more extended thoughts on that over on the next level.

But reason why we did that bonus podcast style, understand folks' views on it. But,

you know, when you have somebody that can personally testify to the horrific way in which the current Secretary of Health and Human Services handles the crisis and how he's hiding his drug use from his wife and a bunch of other stuff, I think that's some relevant information for us in this moment.

So I'll have more on that over on the next level, as I mentioned. So please go check that out.
Me, Sarah and JVL are taping that every week. It's where we get to let our hair down a little bit more.

On this show, it's a little tight because I'm flying to DC. I'm going to be doing the next level in person in DC.
And so I had a short window this morning and we had a little guest shuffle.

And so I appreciated Jonathan Lemire jumping on with me in between his Morning Joe segments. That dude, that dude works.
All right. Well, you were in bed.

Jonathan Lemire was on TV, leaving TV, doing this podcast, going back to TV. He's not a coal miner or anything, but

you got to respect the grind.

And so we had a little bit of abbreviated pod with Lemire, and then I gave you some extended remarks at the end of the show on the Tennessee special election results last night.

So there is no limit of content. Carpenter yesterday, Nutsie yesterday.
Today we got Jonathan Lemire. We got the next level coming out later.
Stick around for all that. Appreciate you guys.

Up next, Jonathan Lemire.

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Delighted to welcome to the show, a staff writer at The Atlantic, co-host of Morning Joe on MS Now.

He's covered the White House since 2016 for a bunch of outlets, political AP. It's Jonathan Lemire.
What's up, man? Hey, man, good to see you. Good to see you, too.

You had a great piece for the Atlantic this week I wanted to grab you on called The Bubble Wrapped President regarding Trump.

And I think it's interesting because it's kind of like sort of a traditional type of piece that you could have written about Joe Biden or George Bush.

Trump is different in a lot of ways and unique in a lot of ways. But this has been an issue kind of as old as time with presidents.

Like, how do you, you know, when you're inside this White House, like maintain touch with what's happening in the country? Trump avoided that.

a little bit through his like rallies and other ways throughout his time, but it feels like he is now kind of receding into a problem that we've seen from more normal politicians in the past.

What do you make of that? Yeah, I mean, he's far from from the first president, as you say, to struggle with the bubble. Some of that is the nature of the White House.

Some of that's the extraordinary security measures that come with the job. But Trump is facing an extreme version of it now.
And a big part of it is. There's a number of reasons.

But the biggest one, I'd argue, is he's stopped doing his rallies, which frankly are the signature political event of our last decade, the Trump rally, right?

Started in 2015, all the way through his re-election bid a year ago. And not only would he travel the country, but he'd use those rallies as like testing grounds.
He'd give a line.

He'd see what kind of response it got. If the crowd liked it, well, he'd say it the next night.

And it would, you know, a line would become this part of the speech, which sometimes would become policy.

If something that, you know, he said that went over like a dud, well, he'd usually would drop that.

But also before and after the events, he would meet with people, local officials, state party chairs, even just some regular supporters occasionally.

And though he didn't love traveling the country, it gave him a real window into what his base cared about. He stopped doing that, and people around him are afraid he's now flying blind.

Mike, did he stop? You're writing the article that he told his aides after the Grand Rapids rally at the end of the campaign of 2024 that that would be his last.

You said there that he didn't enjoy really traveling the country. He did seem to enjoy the rallies.
Oh, he loved being on stage, no doubt.

And it is a surprise to some people around him that they've stopped. I mean, yeah, he closes every campaign by Sue.
He's very superstitious with that, with an event in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

And after the one in 2024, which was in the early hours of Election Day, that Tuesday morning, he said, that's it, I'm done.

Now, he's actually had a couple of small sort of rally-like events early this year. He did one to mark 100 Days in office.
That was also in Michigan.

But it was nothing compared to what you'd consider a full-fledged Trump rally. It's a couple of things.

I am told that, you know, look, I mean, he continued to do rallies after the assassination attempt in Butler County, Pennsylvania, but understandably got spooked by that.

Secret Service also has made it that much harder. You know, their qualifications for securing a venue that much higher now.
But also, I think he was sort of just worn out.

And we know the president doesn't like to talk about being tired or his fact that he's approaching 80, but it is exhausting. And he has instead traded those for nights at the White House.

He's traded that for dinners with billionaires or business leaders who want something for him. And we looked at his schedule.

In 2017, the first year of his first term, term, a pretty robust travel schedule within the United States.

This year, the first year of his second term, yeah, he's traveling overseas a fair amount, but he's done next to no domestic travel.

In fact, in October and November, the only times he left the Washington area to travel in the United States. Mar-a-Lago.
Let me guess. Boom, you nailed it.
Simply. His golf clubs.
His golf courses.

Yep, his own clubs. You write the article.
It's interesting. It's not just the fake news at MS Now that is noticing this.
I mean, Bannon is complaining about this.

Others are like, why are you traveling overseas so much? It does take a lot out of a president. We're going to get to the age stuff in a second.

But also, it's literally the antithesis of what is right there in the name of the slogan of America First, right?

And he seems, I guess, so obsessed with the Peace Prize and the dealmaking process that

he has ignored the domestic travel in favor of, you know, going overseas. Yeah, it's not just those of us at MS Now.

And I'm coming to you, by the way, from the darkest possible corner of the new MS Now offices. Apologies for the backdrop.
Looking nice, I think. It's a little ominous.

Yeah, it's sort of death star-ish, frankly, this room. Now, look again, this is where he's a little bit like a typical president.

A lot of second-term presidents who, you know, inherently are a lame duck find that they can't do as much with a domestic agenda. They often shift focus to foreign policy.

Oh, that's where we'll make my legacy. You know, that's where I think I can do more unilaterally.
I don't need Congress's approval on the world stage.

So in this case, President Trump is acting like that, but he also, you just said it, he's desperate for a Nobel Peace Prize.

By the day, the number of conflicts he's allegedly ended, his tally seems to go up. But some of his most faithful supporters are saying, wait a minute, like your focus should be here at home.

That's what you promised during the campaign last year. You know, I don't want to see you in Saudi Arabia.

You know, sure, it's important to talk about peace in the Middle East, but like, you know, don't forget here at home.

And Marjorie Taylor Greene, right before she fully broke with the president, she was one of those voices who said, look, leave Air Force One parked on the tarmac.

You know, stay here in the United States.

You would think that that would be a red flashing warning sign for him that if Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene are complaining about something and Marco Rubio is happy.

And that's just another thing about the second term that's kind of related to the bubble wrap, which is more than the first time, he does kind of care about the feedback of the rich CEOs, the people that are funding the ballroom, you know, Marco, right?

It's kind of this weird dichotomy where like the people that were in there last time that were establishment that were kind of putting the brakes on him, you know, those folks are not there.

But there's like a new class of kind of establishment suckups that he seems to be gravitating to more than the traditional MAGA allies.

What do you make of that? Yeah, and people around Trump have long said, and I mean, I've covered him for a long time now, say like the one thing that impresses him is wealth.

And he loves the idea that these rich, powerful people are coming to him to kiss the ring or to ask him for things or to donate money to whatever cause he suggests, whether that's the presidential library that allegedly is going to be built someday or the ballroom that's now in place of the devastated White House East Wing.

But you also make a good point.

In the first term, he was surrounded by some establishment Republican figures, folks you know well, who would occasionally tell him no, who would pump the brakes on some of his ideas.

That's just gone this time around, by design. It's just true believers.

So therefore, no one is telling him, hey, you're actually out of touch here. No one's saying this is a bad idea.
And even his media diet has become more and more that way.

There was, you know, in the first term, yes, of course, there's Fox News. There's still Fox News, but now there's also OAN and Newsmax.

Last time, he was on Twitter, where at least he'd occasionally encounter, you know, an opposing viewpoint. He was watching you and Morning Joe.
He was live bleeding that.

I guess it was tweeting back then. He was still on Twitter.

I'm told he still does that a little bit this time around, but less. But it's more, he's existing Truth Social, which is a site he owns.
It's completely syncophants. It's all his acolytes.

We just saw him go on a, what was it? He tweeted or he truthed or retruthed over 100 posts the other night.

He posted once a minute all night long. Do we know what the deal was with that? Well, he likes to say he doesn't sleep very much.

I've long said that the best window into his soul is what he does on Truth Social in the middle of the night because that means he's not sleeping. he's up and likely unhappy about something.

Uh, and in this case, like, look, we know what his poll numbers are. I don't think it's a shock that this came after Gallup had him at the lowest mark of his second term.

Melania should be cuddling him a little bit more, I would think. You know, I'm going to decline him to comment on that, yeah.
Yeah, um,

you don't have any thoughts, you don't have any thoughts on that one, okay? We're gonna, that's fine, you know, I gotta keep throwing it out there.

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I don't know. So maybe just stop wasting time with all that and do what I do.
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In addition to his diet, there's the bubble of the press pool itself. Yes.
And I wanted to talk to you about that in particular. I wasn't invited.

The Bulwark didn't make the press pool the first time around. You were there though with AP and Politico.
And so, you know, he's doing a lot of press conferences still.

You got to just acknowledge that. Like he's still taking a lot of questions.
But like the makeup of the people questioning him has changed so dramatically from last time.

And like there are some handful of people mixed in. Every once in a while, you'll see Caitlin Collins in there.
The volume was at the White House yesterday. You'll see some people.
But like a lot of

MAGA blogger 420 also are asking him questions.

No, this is a great point.

And it's one of the things that he's done differently this time around is the White House has more or less hijacked the press pool over the objections of the White House Correspondents Association.

They kicked AP out early on for not saying Gulf of America. And since then, now the White House picks who's in the pool every day.
So you're right. Trump still takes a lot of questions.

But here's where it's changed in two ways.

In the first term, he held a lot of like formal news conferences where everyone was in there and reporters from every outlet, even in his estimation, the lamestream media, could ask him questions.

He stopped doing formal news conferences this time. He still takes a lot of questions, but only from the pool.

And since his staff is picking who's in the pool, largely he's facing friendly faces who are asking him less than tough questions. There are exceptions.

There are days where, whether it's on Air Force One. Sure, the Bloomberg was in there.
He's Connor Piggy. To be sure.

There are moments where he takes tough, he does take tough questions, but there are fewer and farther between than last time around. Some evidence of your thesis.

It's nice when you write a piece and then it gets proven accurate to a degree the next day.

Doesn't that feel good as a journalist? Trump has one of the cabinet meetings yesterday. He said more of those this time, it feels like the made-for-TV cabinet meetings.

Less time spent in Georgia, a lot of time having people tell him how great he is in the cabinet meetings.

And the bubble element of this is just kind of abundantly clear, both in just obviously the, oh, you're so great, sorry, you're so great, like the North Korea stuff, but also he's dozing off.

He's seeming tired. You can understand why he might not have wanted to travel, why it's easier just to go, you know, shuffle down to

the cabinet room, have have people tell you how great you are. It seems like a night, you know, take a little cat nap.
I'm a napper, so it's fine.

But, you know, it seems like he dozed off several times. It's usually one little nap for me in a day, but he's, it looks like he got a couple of them during that cabinet meeting.

Yeah, my own is I try to, I usually inevitably have like a 15-minute, like early afternoon. You're up on way too early.
Post-line.

Yeah, I mean, I sleep in, look, the way too early days, the alarm would go off at 3.15. Now, with just starting at 6 for morning, Joe, I get to sleep all the way into 4.30.
15 minutes for for you.

So it's just, are you in the suit? Honestly, Tim, it depends on the day. I mean, this is going to, you know, some days it's just like leaning back in the chair.

Other days, it's more of a full-fledged, I'm going to lay down for a few minutes and, you know, be in my workout gear, whatever it might be. So we have two expert nappers here.

So I think that we bring some expertise to kind of assessing Trump's

issue is in front of the press pool in the cabinet.

And that is what President Trump did yesterday. It's not the first time.
There's been a few of these in recent weeks.

The Washington Post, Post in particular has been on this beat, noting when he was really chronically with video how long he appeared to have been asleep.

But I think the timing of this one is interesting because it comes just a week after the New York Times did a big story about his schedule and how, almost like a dovetailed piece with mine, but they really focused on the hours of the day that he was working.

And they said, well, compared to the first term, he's starting later and his days are ending earlier. And the White House pushed back.

We know President Trump hates to ever acknowledge any bit of human frailty, including what part of his body he received at MRI. But in this case, they said, no, he's working all hours of the day.

Look, look how he's tireless. He's got the stamina of a much younger man.

And then just days later, this happened in the White House where he was clearly dozing off, you know, off and on during what was a marathon three-hour cabinet meeting. He's pushing 80.

He's pushing 80. Like, objectively speaking, you have to, that has to explain part of the travel stuff, too.
I don't know. Anybody that has anyone pushing 80 in their life can know that

it's a bitch.

You got to change time zones you get tired i think that clearly they are either directed by him himself or you know in their management of him they're changing how to schedule i think there's no doubt of that that that he is much more white house centric in part because it is easier travel on anybody takes a toll there were moments in the you know his first term where i'd be on a lot of his overseas trips there was a in the first year we went to asia for literally two weeks and we're all running on fumes at that point like there's no question about how old you are traveling Traveling is hard, even for a president.

But like, it is striking just how little he has done here. This isn't a quirk of the schedule because I reported this in the piece.

They talked about this summer putting him out there to support the One Big Beautiful bill. They talked about maybe doing some campaigning this fall.
None of that came to be.

He got distracted with foreign affairs. He didn't want to be on the road and face questions about Jeffrey Epstein because that story exploded just as he was going to be out there this summer.

And instead, he's opting for tele rallies, which of course have far, far, far less impact.

Although it's also kind of reminiscent of his OG strategy, calling into the cable shows, calling to the talk shows. You've never fallen asleep one time during morning, Joe?

You know, Scarborough's on one of the soliloquies where he's talking five minutes, six minutes. You never just get a

quick little dozen? I mean, occasionally I'll look at my phone and do wordle. No,

I haven't fallen asleep, at least not that I'm aware of. I'm hanging on every word uttered by my co-host.

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Not to belabor the point here, but another thing that you might look to on evidence that he is a little bit out of touch.

He starts talking about the affordability he'll show yesterday during the Cataman. You see this? And he says that he thinks that voters are getting fake news from people like you about affordability.

Affordability is a hoax. It was started by the Democrats.

This actually dovetails with another piece that I wrote recently where suddenly Trump 2.0 is starting to feel a lot like Trump 1.0, where for the first seven or eight months of this term, I mean,

you can argue whether you agree with what he did was good, but he was effective

in sort of enacting his agenda, facing no pushback from Congress, very little from the courts, et cetera.

In the last two months or so, he's hit a ton of of roadblocks, including with a lot of unforced errors.

And this moment, yesterday, is just the latest time where he's really downplayed the affordability crisis.

And that reminds me of so many times in the first term where the White House would be positioned, staff around him would be like, okay, we're going to talk about this issue, X, Y, or Z.

It's important. And Trump would just be like, yeah, I don't want to and just blow it up in the moment.
And that's what happened here, too. The White House is actually prepared.

after the election results of a month ago, recognize that affordability is a crisis. Republicans are going to have a problem next year during the midterms on that issue.

They're trying to prepare Trump to talk about it, and he simply won't. He'll use the word affordability, but it's always joined by the words hoax or conjob.

He simply won't acknowledge that Americans are feeling the pain right now.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: They tried to do a cleanup on the Venice Women boat strike yesterday at the cabinet meeting as well, where Hag says, of course, as Secretary of War, I was watching the first strike, and then I walked away.

Then an hour or two later, this Admiral makes the decision to shoot the people out out of the sea.

I guess that's their kind of spin on the Washington Post story and trying to their defense of why they initially pushed back and said it was a total lie and that they're an enemy of the people.

But I don't know if you had anything else on that. Pete Hagseth's under a lot of intense pressure right now.
And we saw the day after.

I'll remind everyone listening here, the day after that September 2nd strike, he went on Fox and Friends and boasted that he was there, saw the whole thing, oversaw the operation.

It was under his authority. He got this done.
I'm paraphrasing only slightly.

And that's a very different tone that we've heard from the last couple of days, where he's clearly trying to point the finger at this admiral, you know, and say, look, that was his call.

You know, I support him, but like, I wasn't in the room. I wasn't involved.

And, but look, the White House itself, Caroline Levitt, the press secretary, said this week, like the order to kill them all, as it were.

you know, the sort of umbrella order was issued by the Secretary of Defense. And then like specifics were carried out by Admirals and the like.
So Hagseth is still very much in the focus here.

And this week is going to be potentially really tricky for him. That Admiral, Admiral Bradley, is going to be testifying on the Hill behind closed doors tomorrow.

Also this week, the SignalGate report, the IG report from the Pentagon is being released to Congress this week. And at least a redacted version will be made public.

So Hagseth is certainly the temperature's up. Yeah.
And Laura Loomer, who is,

besides you, the best reporter on the beat of letting us know what's happening inside the White House, is talking about how there's a coup for Hag Seth, the Secretary of Army potentially trying to angle for the slot.

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Just kind of briefly run through a couple other things. You're about the DMZ for Ukraine and what the plan is there.
Talk to us a little bit about what the White House is thinking about on that.

The talks there have truly have stalled yet again, it would appear.

You know, there was seemingly some momentum about a week or 10 days back when I wrote that piece, in part because the White House was making a new push to get a deal.

Now, what we then learned is that they were doing so with talking points largely provided by Russia, and Ukraine, of course, wanted nothing to do with it. Now, Kyiv has learned their lessons.

They don't want to publicly disagree with Trump anymore. They saw how that happened when Trump blew up at Zelensky in the Oval Office.

So they're being much more diplomatic about it, but they've made it clear. There are things in that deal they just certainly could not agree to.

The Secretary of State Rubio stepped in the process, you know, struck a more supportive tone for Ukraine than perhaps Steve Witkoff has done. But yesterday, Witkoff and Jared Kushner were in Moscow.

They met with Putin. Both sides acknowledged, okay, you know, we agreed to kept talking and maybe small progress made, no breakthrough.

Unless Trump is willing to step in decisively one way or the other, and your guess is as good as mine as to whose side we would come in on, I think that that conflict is going to continue as is for a while, and we're going to do this all again in a month or two.

Sixth meeting between our Outer Borough Russia-Ukraine envoy and Putin. Zero trips to Ukraine for him.
Not one. Did he get any presents yesterday?

Putin has been pretty good at like but at butter and up witcoff. Did he get any paintings of himself or anything? Or a medal.

No, he's done that before, but I'm not aware of what he had to declare customs coming back this time. Another, one of your colleagues read this today.
I just wanted to pop this.

It's kind of related to what you see happening in Europe, something you've been covering is in Germany. You guys read at the Atlantic.

For the first time since World War II, Germany is permanently stationing troops beyond its borders. Not long ago, these plans would have set off international alarms.
But as the U.S.

upends the global border it created, Germany may have no other choice.

This is something while we're doing Groundhog Day on the Russia-Ukraine negotiations, Europe is moving. Things are changing.

And I just think this is an interesting kind of tangible data point on that. No doubt.
My colleague Isaac Stanley Becker wrote a great piece on this.

And this shows you just how the world has changed because of Donald Trump's foreign policy.

And what Europe, the lesson Europe has learned over this last year in particular is They can't count on the United States anymore. And, you know, and it's not just because Trump's in office now.

It's that, you know, we had four years of President Trump. Then President Biden is elected basically on, you know, he came out of the gate saying, America's back.
You can count on us again.

Well, that turned out not to be the case because Donald Trump was then put back in office.

You know, Europe has realized they can't just rely on us to be their security guarantor or their financial backing. Like that these nations are going to have to step up their own spending.

And that includes Germany, which, you know, even a decade or two ago would have been unfathomable.

My last thing, anything on this Honduras pardon you got and it is it's pretty it's so crazy president juan hernandez of honduras was officially pardoned or we said this was coming early in the week but that's now happened he was at the center of what authorities have characterized as one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world this is kind of a dgaf a moment i guess for these guys like in the middle of bombing venezuela over imaginary fentanyl they're doing this this pardon it's pretty crazy what are you hearing on that i mean you'd be hard-pressed to find a republican to defend this one that it comes as first of all just how discordant it is that we're ramping up military operations against these boats off the coast of Venezuela, and Trump threatened we might do land strikes in Venezuela in the coming days.

In the press conference yesterday, I should have mentioned that, yeah. Yeah, and this is nominally about drug trafficking.
I mean, I think there's more to it than that.

At the same time, he puts out, releases this guy, gives a pardon to the president of Honduras, who prosecutors say ran an international drug cartel and who bragged about stuffing drugs up the nose of gringos.

Again, I'm paraphrasing only slightly. That's what he said.
I think that there's strange connections here with Roger Stone took his case.

You know, Trump is sympathetic to anyone who feels like he's been victim of a political prosecution. There's no evidence that that's what this was, but that's what Trump has convinced himself.

Also, the investigation into this president started. during Trump's first term.

There's a crypto angle here as well, where Honduras under this president was very offered safe space for some of these crypto tech leaders. It's creating this crypto city for, you know, Peter Thiel.

It was like you can buy and sell Twink blood with cryptocurrency there. You know, there's just a lot of opportunities, potentially.
There's a lot of opportunities to make money.

And that's probably at the end of the day what this was about. But this is a head spinning part

and one

that I'm waiting to hear from like police unions and other law enforcement officials say, hey, this guy flooded our streets with drugs. How is this making us any safer?

Yeah, I should correct President Hernandez, though, that we live in a pluralistic multicultural society.

The drugs are going up the nose of people. Not just Gringos.
Okay. Not just Gringos.
Jonathan Lemire, man, thanks for hopping on this morning. And everybody else, stick around.

I'm going to talk about the Tennessee 7 race. Thank you.
Happy to come back anytime. See you, buddy.

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Hey, everybody, just wanted to nerd out with you a little bit on that Tennessee 7th special election last night. The Republican there, Matt Van Epps, gets the win with 54% of the vote, basically.

Afton Bin, it's 45%. So it was a nine-point victory for Van Epps.
But this is in a district that the margin in 2024 was 21 in the House, 22 at the presidential level.

So it's a 12 to 13 point gain for the Democrats. I think that there's a lot of potential implications about that looking ahead to the midterms.

First, I just want to talk about Nashville a little bit because I was interviewing former Vice President Harris there a couple weeks ago. She had just done a campaign stop.
for Bain. There's

a little bit of controversy there in Nashville about whether

the vice president was wanted there.

They didn't show up together. So there were no pictures.
This question of like, are we trying to focus more on turnout versus persuasion?

And then I thought it was interesting that after that whole dialogue, I believe it was the final day or final two days, she has a Zoom rally with AOC and with Al Gore. Watched a little bit of that.

There were some commenters calling for Gore to run in 2028. So you better watch out there.
Al Gore, I think, younger than Joe Biden or Donald Trump.

So you never know if we're going to continue the gerontocracy.

But, you know, in one of these special elections, I think at this point, you're like trying to pull any lever you can get to try to get people to realize that this is happening.

And you saw in Tennessee a little bit higher turnout than you have seen in other special elections. It was, you know, I think about over 50%

of the

general election turnout showed up in the special when you're usually seeing something more in the 30s and 40s.

And so on the one hand, hand, I think it's a good sign for Democrats and kind of in a higher turnout special, they still gain 12 to 13 points.

On the other hand, you see how you get kind of stuck in these gerrymandered districts where like the higher the turnout is in a red district, the more that marginal voter is going to end up being a, being a Trump person.

But I think we learned a little bit here. Afton Bain was,

I think it's fair to say it's kind of more left on the left side of the party. And the campaign itself was pretty focused on affordability and so-called kitchen table issues in her advertising.

You know, in the primary, she was a more progressive candidate. I think she's doing an interview over at Breaking Points this morning.

If that tells you anything, for folks who are familiar with those guys, they're kind of more of the lefty type horseshoe part of the media ecosystem. So I think that's her spot.

And so you see like some arguments between the moderates and the progressives online about how maybe a moderate could have done better here. And I think that's probably true.

I don't think that a moderate would have won nine more points here. Like, you know, you can sort of see this argument where the progressives are like, we outperformed by 12.

The moderate's like, well, you need to outperform by 20. And so, you know, that's kind of a never-ending fight that's always going to happen.

I don't know that we learned a ton about the internal Civil War within the Democratic Party, about the mods versus progressives, but I think we did learn a little bit about kind of where Democrats should be thinking about and focusing about their gains.

If you look at the map of Nashville, Nashville is one of the most offensive gerrymanders in the country to me because Nashville doesn't have a Democratic rep, which is crazy.

I mean, the Davidson County, which is the main county where Nashville sits, Bain won by 56 points in the portion of the district that goes into Nashville.

Obviously, Nashville deserves a representative.

Instead, Tennessee is gerrymandered like pizza style, you know, the skinny part of the, of the pizza slice going into Nashville and that gets out and gets wider and wider and goes out into rural Nashville.

And then, you know, there are like three or four different pizza slices that like meet in the middle of Nashville.

And so this, you know, this was just kind of one, one slice of that, of that district.

And so, you know, this is why I've kind of been on the side of like the Democrats just need to go fully whole hog in the gerrymandering war.

We can talk in 2029 if we, you know, if we're doing some reconstruction in this country, we're doing some political reforms. I'd sure be for some federal gerrymandering reform.

But in the meantime, you know, you got to play hardball if they're going to, you know, carve up Tennessee to the point that Nashville doesn't have a fucking congressional district.

It's a total outrage. But when you look at the results last night, you have like the inner core of Nashville, you know, people that are like really, really live in downtown.

Younger people, it's going to be more diverse demographics. Big gains from the Democrats last night.

Pretty good, but like not as big as you saw in the inner suburban core, where you just see this massive, like the Democrats now are, I used to joke that the Republicans get Saddam Hussein like numbers in red parts of the country.

The Democrats are getting close to getting Saddam Hussein like numbers in the suburbs that are the closest to any big city in the country. And the Democrats do that last night and run up the score.

In that next ring, though, in Williamson County, Williamson is a little bit of an outlier nationally, where if you're in New Orleans here, Williamson County is Medery. If you're in D.C., it's Fairfax.

It's the

big

upper middle class suburb county next to the city. And Nashville has like attracted MAGAs.

There's something about, I don't know if it's country music or Candace Owens and Theo Vaughan or, you know, just kind of the reputation that it is a place where if you're a conservative and you live in a blue part of the country, that's a place that you're going to be welcome if you want to move.

And so Williamson County. It is the highest educated county in the whole country that Trump won, I believe.
And Van Eps wins it handily by 20 points. Afton only gains seven points there.

So you look at that and you think, well, that's really, that's going to be where the Democrats are going to have to, you know, focus on their overperformance there.

And I think that Williamson County is maybe a place where the moderate argument that having maybe a more culturally right candidate might have helped a little bit.

But then you look at the city and you see there's still just a little softness from the Democrats among young voters and among voters of color, black voters in particular, younger black men really in particular.

you see maybe the stuff is coming both ways.

So it's like a little bit of a challenge where you're trying to continue to run up the margins a little bit more with some of the cultural conservative voters out in the exurbs while also juicing what had been a traditional Democratic base, like finding a candidate that can do both is a little challenging.

But all in all, if you gain 12 points, all of a sudden you start looking at the map for Democrats.

As I keep saying, you go back to 2018, Democrats win a House seat in Oklahoma City, in Charleston, places that they'd never won seats before.

And I think that if you're looking at a place like this in Nashville and you're seeing these gains, you see there's a shift from 24 to 25 blue everywhere.

Huge shift in Nashville, 20 points to the Democratic side. But then even in the rurals, you're seeing moves of Dixon County, 11 points, Humphreys County, 12 points, Perry County, 15 points.

You're seeing significant moves to the Democrats. and that I think opens up seats.
You know, if you're a Republican and you won in the midterm last time by 10, 11, 12, 13 points,

you might have thought yourself safe.

I don't know that you should think yourself safe anymore.

So for folks who are looking for candidates and campaigns to support, if you're wanting to support Democratic candidates where you think you can actually make a difference, I get this question a lot from people.

I'll just go ahead and pull up the cookpolitical.com ratings. I had Dave Wasserman on over on Bulwark Takes a few weeks ago, and him and Amy Walter, they're extremely good.

And they're nonpartisan, but they have these rankings.

And if you look at the rankings and you go to the category that says lean Republican and then likely Republican, likely Republican is kind of these stretch seats.

Like these are seats that are probably going to go to the Republicans, but that in a big wave year, Democrats could win. Look at the Alaska at-large Begas.

Mary Peltola had that seat for a while. You look at that.
That's certainly winnable.

You look here at Colorado's third district, which the district Bobert moved out of, that includes a lot of the western slope, potentially, that's winnable.

Montana, Zinke, you kind of go down to the south, North Carolina, Edwards.

So I would look at the kind of those likely Republican seats and finding kind of the potential Democratic candidates. So there you go.
That's a little bit of analysis.

It's unfortunate for the Democrats because I think right now everything's very tenuous in the House

as far as potential retirements.

I think another result of this, you're going to see more Republican retirements, but you can't retire and quit like Marjorie Taylor Greene is doing because it's putting their current House majority in jeopardy.

So I think that there are some implications that you're going to see there.

But you look at this, the Democrats are like, man, if the economy stays in the trajectory it's on, if the political environment doesn't change for Trump, if he stays bubble-wrapped, it could be ugly next year.

And you start to see places like, well, let's just throw this out there. Start to see places like these Senate races, Texas, Ohio.

I mean, these are states statewide that Trump was not, you know, that was winning by about the shift that we saw in that special election last night.

So this is not an apples to apples comparison, but you can at least see that in theory, those seem to be potentially in play. And it looks.

at least more plausible that the Democrats could compete in a place like Texas and Ohio if these trends continue than it would have seemed a couple weeks ago.

So that is some good news for the Democrats directionally. Everybody, appreciate that.
I'm running to DC. We're going to have much more on this over on the next level feed.

So, go ahead and check that out. We're taping that this afternoon.
We'll be up. I don't know.
Will that be up later tonight or tomorrow morning? Will we just refresh? Just refresh, just kind of

refresh. It'll come up soon.
And we'll be back tomorrow for a Thursday edition of the podcast. And we'll see you all then.
Peace.

Cover me in bubble.

Keep me in tight.

Smother me with loving hands. When I stray from the path,

if I get

to

those golden gates,

and he does the way.

You can say, I told you so. And I'll love forevermore,

like the sun that will rise even after I die.

Cover me in double red.

But I'm peeking through cracks in the old Tiffany glass. And I'm trapped behind spur me on the pleasures.

Can't you see that you're killing me?

Fighting

through those golden gates.

And he took me away.

And you can say, I told you, throw it

The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown. Brown.io/slash performance at pendo.io slash podcast.
That's pendo.io slash podcast.

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