Author, former GOP strategist Stuart Stevens: 'There is no Republican Party'

Welcome to the other side. Mississippi today's political podcast. I'm Jeff Pender. Welcome, and today we have a special guest, someone we've had on before, always great to talk with him. We have Stuart Stevens, a Jackson native who Dunn made it big, author, political strategist for dozens of congressional candidates, governors, senators, presidents, presidential candidates. foreign leaders. Stewart has forgotten more about political strategy than any of us will ever know. Stewart, thank you for joining us. Thanks for asking us. Thanks for asking the party, Jeff. Love the podcast. Listen to it all the time. Well, thank you, thank you for slumming, you know, like that. I think I was mentioning to you earlier, I don't think I can go on social media or television these days without seeing you commenting on the current state of affairs. Just recently, I know you wrote a really good piece I read about Lindsey Graham, I think. That has gotten a lot of attention. I really enjoyed that. I should point out, Stuart, I think, how would I describe it? You're a recovering Republican? Disillusioned Republican? No, no, I'm not, I'm not a Republican. I left the party after Trump. You know, there. There is no Republican Party for, you know, for crazy left-wingers like me and Liz Cheney. You know, there's just, there's not a, not a party for us. I was a conservative. We need a conservative party in America. The Republican Party has turned into the pro-tariff's party. The party that loses its mind over a guy who's mayor of New York talking about maybe five city-owned grocery stores and then we nationalize Intel. Right, right. You know, the party that, at least the president, can't really decide who invaded who. in the largest ground war since World War II in Europe. You know, I was in the personal responsibility conservative party, and now, you know, to take any person responsibility is to be a sucker. So anyway, I could go on, but we don't have a center-right party in America now. We need one. I'm not optimistic about when they'll happen, but that's a different conversation.

Sure. Well. Again, you can go to Lincoln Square Media and pretty much anywhere else and hear more from Stewart. And again, we really appreciate you, appreciate you coming on. Now, you told me earlier that what you really wanted to talk about today was Lane Kiffin. Of course. We have to save that for another. I think it needs to be at least a four-hour episode. Okay. Okay. For that, maybe we'll get you and Carville both on. That could be wild. That could be dangerous. Yes. I will just say this about Landgivis. My favorite thing about the Lanegiv's story is, you know, he was a big hot yoga guy. as I must confess, am I. And he was always, you know, sort of putting hot yoga out there as like an image builder, I think, you know, like I'm a cool guy to go. And as soon as he left and he moved to Louisiana, I love these posts that these various women put up who are in the hot yoga class, like, thank God this guy is gone. You know, I don't have to like wake up at six in the morning and have some guy like checking me out. which I just thought was like the perfect moment there, Lane, buddy. And good luck to the women of the hot yoga community in Baton Rouge. May the force be with you. Okay. Okay. Well, look, I mentioned you did the piece recently on Lindsey Graham. And I believe I read the line in there a complete moral reversal. Anyway, there's been a lot of that going on in the Republican Party. But if I could, bring it back to your native state, too. What's going on at the moment in this second Trump era with our senior senator Roger Wicker, whom you have... been a top consultant to before? Yeah, listen, I love Roger. We were both pages, not the exact same time, for Democratic Congressman in Washington. Our dads were good friends. His dad was this legendary judge, larger than life figure, a wonderful, wonderful person. I helped work for Roger when he was appointed to the Senate and had to run. against Musgrove, which is actually a very, very tough race. And I always admired greatly his focus and commitment to global politics, particularly with a focus on NATO and his statements on clear-eyed statements on Vladimir Putin and on Russia for that on the Soviet Union.

And, you know, he's someone who's wanted to be chairman of the Armed Services Committee for a very long time. And I just find that I don't know what the words are sad. I've heard a lot of people say disappointed. Well, I'm sort of beyond disappointed. I think it's dangerous. He didn't have to, so he gets to be Chairman of the Armed Services Committee. His first act is to usher in Pete Higgshead. Now, Senator Roger Wicker didn't have to do that. He could have called Donald Trump and said, look, you know, the 317 million Americans, there's a lot of really good conservatives who actually know something about the military, who aren't the town drunk, who don't have a history, such that his own National Guard unit didn't want him in Washington after the insurrection. And appoint one of them. And he would have. Trump would have done that. And Senator Roger Wicker, for reasons he can best articulate himself, didn't do that. And what is the consequence of that? We've lost really two wars. We've lost the Iran war. We seem to lose it every 65 days. Iran is in a much stronger position than it was before we spent however many. trillions of dollars we spent before Americans died. They, a much more powerful position. We've lost the Iran war. And America's losing the Russia-Ukraine war. Ukraine is winning. But America's chance to be a leader in the world, to show the world that we're still that shining city on the hill, that were still the people who airs to the greatest generation. I mean, there are Americans buried in Ukraine because they were fighting Nazis. We've lost that opportunity. And it's a very shameful moment in American history. And when you look at what Pete Hegseth said is doing to the military, this childish, racist, misogynist stuff that he's doing. His latest is he wants testosterone. for our military. So let me get this straight. This little Princeton guy, this Kay Ivey League guy, is so woke. He's for hormone replacement theory for our troops. Really? It's come to that? We're going to have hormone replacement tree, really? Really? And I think that it's been a disastrous period that's pushed the military back to an era that we had decided as a society was not beneficial to America. And you look at the total package and what is better? What is stronger about America? What is stronger about our military since Roger Wicker became chairman of the Armed Services Committee? And I would dare anybody to make a statement as to what it is. And we're now going to increase the budget for $1.5 trillion. And we still have this ridiculous buffoon as chairman of the Armed Services Committee. You know, I wrote that I think that it's painful to say, but I don't know how you don't make, come to the conclusion that Roger's been the most disastrous modern chairman of the Armed Services Committee, which is a terrible, avoidable legacy. There was a lot of speculation with Roger Wicker and the Hexa confirmation that that was the result of some sort of deal he cut with Trump, most likely.

pertaining to Ukraine things we know Senator Roger Wicker cares about greatly. If there was a deal cut, he didn't appear to get much out of it. Anything. No, I mean, look, I think if you read what Senator Roger Wicker has said about Ukraine, it's very moving. I think he genuinely cares about Ukraine in a very deep way, as did Lindsey Graham. But look at the results. You know, Vladimir Putin came to America and American soldiers got on their knees and rolled out a red carpet forum and Lindsey Graham and Roger Wicker said nothing. You had the leader of Ukraine in the Oval Office berated by this absurd JD Vance and Donald Trump. And Lindsey Graham and Roger Wicker said nothing publicly. America right now is doing a bare minimum in Ukraine. And that's what you're judged by. You're not an editorial writer. You're a senator. It's not like, well, I wrote this and that's my opinion. And, you know, we should have done what I said. Oh, that's all fine and good. But you're one of the hundred, one of the most powerful people in the country, particularly in these affairs. And this is the end results. I mean, if I just woke you up in the middle of the night 10 years ago and said, Roger Wicker is going to be supporting Jeffrey Epstein's best friend who talks in public about dating his daughter, who's been found guilty by a hometown jury of 34 felonies, who's been found liable for assault at a judge called rape, who can't decide who, which country invaded, which country in Europe. I mean, I think we both would have laughed and said, like, man, that's not going to happen. Don't be ridiculous. And yet here we are. Why is this? I mean, I mean, Trump is, you know, conventional wisdom, Trump's a lame duck dropping drastically in the polls. Why would someone of Roger Wicker's stature be? It's not just Roger, it's the whole group of Republican senators. And I think this is a question that's going to be studied for a very long time. And I've thought about this and thought about it because, you know, I was, I helped elect a lot of these people. I was involved in this. I can't, you know, there's a certain trope of book that people write about Washington, like if only they had listened to me. I couldn't write that book. They did listen to me. So I'm as guilty as anybody in this. I think we did something, Jeff, inside the Republican Party for decades that we didn't realize. I certainly didn't realize that we were doing. And that is, we rewarded a culture of compliance that if you waited your turn, if you went along, if you echoed the party message, you were rewarded. Independent thinking, standing up for something different, was punished. So it's like a genetic experiment. You do that for 40 years and what do you end up with? An extraordinarily compliant group of Republican senators. And it baffles me. Getting elected to the U.S. Senate is a real pain in the ass. You got to do all this stuff. You know, it's kind of humiliating. You have to ask all these people for money that you can't really stand. Okay, you finally win. To wake up in the morning and do it Donald Trump?

Somebody who probably literally would not have, you know, at least certainly your spouse wouldn't have allowed that having your house for lunch 15 years ago. What, Donald Trump's coming? No, I don't think so. And now that's what you've done. And, you know, I know this for certainty as can be, all the stuff that these senators have done, Graham, Roger Wicker. John Thune, Mitch McConnell. All the stuff they're not going to be remembered for anything but supporting Donald Trump. It's like segregation. Nobody remembers the bridges Jim Eastland built. Nobody remembers like, okay, you know, he got this grant for, you know, this community college. No, he was a segregationist. And, you know, We all hate moral tests, at least I certainly hate moral tests, and do everything I can to avoid them every day. But Trump was the moral test that we couldn't avoid. And the Republican Party failed, and these senators failed. And it's as simple as that. And I have no patience for saying, well, they had to go along with this. They had to, look, they're heirs to the greatest generation. People like my dad, you know, fought three years in the South Pacific, 28 island landings, my uncle, who was grievously wounded in Europe, never really recovered. They were just like hundreds of thousands of others. And they came back, they built lives, and they handed on this legacy. And, I mean, does anybody really think if the dead Americans who died in World War II and buried in Europe came back to life, they'd be for Vladimir Putin? I mean, it's such a shame. And what did they have to do to defend democracy? The wickers, the thunes, the corn and another client. All they had to do after the 20 elections was have their comm shop put out a statement congratulating the president-elected the United States. That's a pretty low bar. And they didn't, for the most part. And they're like, what's it going to matter? And then on January 6th, when they were, and their colleagues were running for their lives, maybe they kind of thought like, well, maybe it did matter. And now, if you saw yesterday, we have this guy who's the head of national intelligence to the U.S. Jake Layton, who will not say who won the 20 election. I mean, he has teenage children. How humiliated must they feel is sitting in their class The teachers saying, well, we don't know who won the 20 elections according to your father. That's what's happened to the Republican Party. And when you have a threshold of admittance to the Republican Party that you can't say what fifth graders know to be true, the leadership you're going to get in that Republican Party is not going to be very strong. There's a limit of people who would humiliate themselves that way. You know, it's like, okay, we're going to run NASA, but you have to refute Copernicus. Really, the sun revolves around the earth. Like, okay, how's that going to work out? And, you know, they had a simple moment they could have avoided if they had elected to convict Donald Trump after January 6th. They didn't. That's going to be Ms. Mitch McConnell's legacy.

He becomes a Trumper. And he's beaten by a guy he would have put in jail as Attorney General. That's your reward. So come January, he and Jeff Flake, former senator from Arizona, are both going to be former senators. Who do you want to beat? Jeff Flake, who never bent the knee to Donald Trump? Or John Cornyn? And... You know, one of the things that just baffles me about this is politicians tend to have big egos, which I have no problem with. So do great writers, God knows, musicians and athletes. But why is it you don't see how you're going to be remembered? I'm not talking about 30 years from now. I'm talking about right now. You're a Trump apparatchik. That's it. You are. And, you know, I think what happens... You know, I'm going to go back to my page days and being around a lot of senators. Now, they all get together and they convince themselves there's nothing else they can do. And because they're all for this, you can't be that bad because you're not a horrible person. So that must mean I'm not a horrible person. And we're going to do something that we know is wrong collectively, but we're still not horrible people. It's a kind of mob mentality. It's just kind of how lynch mob work. It can't be that bad. I mean, my good neighbor's in the mob, so, you know, they're not a bad person. And look, it's just a profile in the collapse of a party. I mean, we were talking earlier. We have no center-right party in America. Republican Party, in many ways, is to the left of the Democratic Party. We're the pro-terrorist party. We're the beating heart of the pro-Vladimir Putin movement in America as in the Republican Party. We, you know, Republicans losing their mind over a guy gets elected mayor in New York, most maybe five city-owned grocery stores, and we nationalize Intel. Really, guys? We're going to have state-owned industries now. You know, and that guy from Auburn, Tim Cook, who went and gave the golden statute of Donald Trump, if he doesn't think Donald Trump's going to come for Apple, good luck, dude. The statute wasn't big enough. And, you know, one of the things we always said in the Republican Party is you can't negotiate with terrorists. And that's what the Republican Party's done. And look, you know, I think that they're... is a group of us who were Bush people who believed in compassionate conservatism. We're drawn to compassion and conservatism. And I think we thought that we were the dominant gene in the party that George Bush Street. If only because the party, the country was changing so much, the party had to change. And I've always, I looked at it was all the line, I really read a bunch of studying this, you know, it's kind of two strands to the Republican Party post-World War II. Eisenhower Strand, same boring, governing, Joe McCarthy Strand, conspiratorial, often racist, non-governing. We thought we were the Eisenhower Strand and we were the dominant strand. I don't know any conclusions come to, but we were the recessive gene. Because why is Donald Trump in power? Because Republicans love him.

Nobody makes anybody vote for Donald Trump. And, you know, I had all these Bush tribe people after Trump won in 16. They're like, oh, Trump hijacked our party. And I can't tell you how much I wanted to believe that. But I couldn't. The hijacker on the plane is never popular. It's never like, oh, great, we're going to go to Cuba, not grandmas. And Donald Trump is really popular. So he didn't hijack the party because I'd say he revealed the party. And we have to live with that truth. And we are living with that truth. And I think the Republican Party now is no longer a functioning American traditional political party. It's an extremist movement. And what do we know about extremist movements? They just get more extreme with higher and higher purity test. And, I mean, a perfect example is JD Vance. I mean, imagine you're a staffer, right? And I've been in these rooms a lot as a staffer. And your boss hears, reads that there's thousands of youngish Republicans, not kids, you know, 20s, early 30s, who have thousands and thousands of messages that are pro-Hitler, pro-Nazi in a chat group. And you decide, you know, I'm going to go defend the Nazis. I mean, what do you tell your boss? You're like, I don't know boss. Maybe we could just sit this one out, like, we really have to do it. But he goes and he does it. And why does he do it? Jenny JD Vance is a very smart guy. Why does he do it? He does it because he believes, and I think he's correct, that the way to advance the Republican Party is to be the most transgressive. So Trump runs, it calls, you know, Mexicans rapists, horrible people. Now that we have an army of mass men with a budget larger than the Marines, you know, chasing gardeners through Brentwood and shooting people at random, you know, a functional death squad, which is what ISIS become. That's kind of old hat to be attacking Hispanics. So, Jaddy JD Vance defends Nazis. And you can just hear them, you know, like, okay, Marco. We're going to run against each other probably 28. Are you going to defend Nazis? I don't think so. I am. And he'll probably be rewarded. And JD Vance will probably be the Republican nominee. Stuart, it's been amazing to me, some of this phenomenon you're talking about. It was. It was fascinating enough when the Tea Party movement got rolling. But they had some different ideals, maybe a little more libertarianism mixed in and there. But a lot of what you're talking about has seeped down to... lower level, more local politics, it appears in a lot of places. But one thing I'm curious to ask you, you paying attention to our midterms in Mississippi at all, headlined by the Cindy Hyde Smith, Scott Cologne Race. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, I did.

Hyde Smith has what has been the golden ticket, a Trump endorsement, and you go around and say Trump, Trump, Trump, and don't have to actually have any policy proposals or anything. Yeah. Is that still going to work? Is that still a winning strategy in Mississippi right now? Well, you know, it's actually harder to elect a Republican in Mississippi than most people realize. You know, I did Haley's races. And in the first race, we would always get these calls from Washington if people who knew Haley knew how impressive he was. He says, like, why aren't you 10 points ahead? And we're like, does it work that way? I'm sorry. So it's like all politics, it comes down to a math problem. It depends on African-American turnout. But with high African-American turnout, you as a Republican have to get about 70% of the Republican vote. And as Haley used to say, I have a hard time getting 70% at Thanksgiving dinner. Right. And that's actually a lot harder than think. And if you look at the Roger Wicker, Muscove race, Roger Wicker was behind in that race for a bottle. So. Could a Democrat win the Senate rights? Absolutely. If that happens, will the reason the Senate went Democratic because what happened in Mississippi? I don't think so. It'll mean that there is a wave and you have James Talarico winning. You have in Maine, whoever's going to be the nominee winning. You're going to have these races. It's going to be one of these years, 1980 was won. Republicans elected Paula Hawkins, Senator from Florida, said that she was a graduate of the Naval War College because she spent a weekend there once. Literally, you had these people that had no business getting elected to get elected. Democrats actually have good candidates. So it could be one of those years. We're an uncharted order here politically. Donald Trump's approval on the economy is under 20%. I once was getting a briefing from a pollster and I had a candidate whose approval on the economy was under 30%. And the pollster said, you know, we've never seen this before. And usually these pollsters who are all super smart people bring an assistant, somebody they're bringing up who's also super smart. And his super smart assistants spoke up and said, well, no, there was Bulgaria. Oh, yeah, which was worse than Bulgaria. So ask yourself, you know, as a Republican consultant, what are you for? The two linchpins of the modern Republican, contemporary Republican Party, as it is just to now, were the Epstein files and no foreign wars. So there's been no Epstein prosecutions. In fact, this, you know, mob lawyer-like character who is trying to be Attorney General, was assistant attorney general, got on a plane flew to Florida and met with the most notorious pedophile of our time. Out of that, she was transferred to a club fed.

What did Roger Wicker say? What did Lindsey Graham say? I don't remember anything. So we're now the pro-pedophile party? It was so bad that the inmates at the club fed were offended just when Maxwell was transferred there. I mean, think about that. When the inmates are offended, like, you know, there goes the neighborhood. Maxwell came here. And there's been no prosecution, but he's, you know. going after the seashell conspiracy against James Comey. You know, if that's what the party is. I mean, look, my dad was an FBI agent before he kind of was a partner in what became Butler Snow law firm. He had great respect for the FBI. I always was brought up with great respect for FBI. So Kash Patel, I mean, if the, Human traffickers, drug dealers, pedophiles could vote. It's hard to say they wouldn't vote for Kash Patel. You have 250 highly trained FBI agents who are now dispatched to Georgia to find something wrong with this election, which supposedly Donald Trump's going to talk about tonight, and it's Thursday. Those are 250 guys who aren't finding bad people. America's less safe. They're not going after terrorists. They're not going after Iranian terrorists that might be out there. They're not going after pedophiles. They're not going after human traffickers. They are being used as a fantasy fulfillment of Donald Trump and Kaspetel, who hopefully will be prosecuted. for his abuse of office. I think it's really important for Democrats to start talking about what process they're going to erect to hold the criminality of the Trump administration responsible. And we've never done this before, but we've never had a criminal administration like this. And they're criminals. What Stephen Miller's doing is criminal. What Christine Ome did was criminal. You have to, there's all this corruption inside the administration with Steve Witkoff and his son and crypto. This is a level of corruption. We've never had in American politics. And, you know, we put a vice president in jail for taking a $10,000 bribe once. And now we have Donald Trump making $2.2 billion. And this idea that he's immune from prosecution is only for official acts. And Donald Trump keeps saying all the stuff he does with crypto and all the money he's making isn't official. So, well, thank you very much, Donald Trump. We'll probably bring that up into trial. And the attorney generals of Democratic states, because Republicans won't do it or they should. They should be ashamed or not. Need to start. Who's going to try Stephen Miller? Who's going to try Kristi Noem? How are you going to go after this? And I think it's very, very important that this be a topic of discussion in the 28. It's nonsense to say that people don't care about this. People deeply care about corruption. They deeply care about the image of America. And they deeply care about rule of law.

Which is not to say that you can't talk about that and also talk about like, you know, how it costs 80 bucks to fill up your car. The two are not mutually exclusive. So, sit back to Sidney Hudson. Can she lose? Absolutely. Is it easy? No. It's kind of like taking two tires and swinging tires and standing 20 yards away and throwing a football to them. Can you do it? Yeah. Is it easy? No. She said, do nothing senator in a small state where, you know, we don't have many congressmen. We really need two effective senators and we don't have one. Who, you know, seems to have been appointed because she went to Southern. And government might want someone else who went to Southern. I love Southern. That's great. My alma mater there. I love Southern dude. I love it. But there were other people who went to Southern who would have been more qualified, let's say. Well, as we record this, we're on the eve, apparently, of a big announcement from Trump, supposedly, on elections. Look, what's your guess on what's going to happen with, you know, he's trying to federalize them? Save Act, all kinds of stuff. Mississippi has passed a Shield Act. Are these going to go off? Look, I have a very simple response to this. If you're an elected official and you believe that elections were rigged, you must resign because it means you were illegally elected. It's, you know. I don't remember a ballot where like the top half is illegal, but the bottom half is legal. Like, how does that work? I never got one of those ballots, and I've been voting for a while. It's absurd. And at the heart of this is race. It always was, and it remains so. What was the certification battle about? Race. Where are all these stolen votes? Atlanta, Philly, Detroit. What are they, Chicago, where do they have in common? A lot of African Americans. And it's basically Jim Crow. You can't stop them from voting, but we can stop the counting of it. And I worked in American politics a long, long time. I never saw voter fraud. The problem we have in this country is getting people to vote when it's legal. It's always waking up in the morning and go, you know, I'm going to commit a felony. I think I'll vote. Instead of like, I was going to knock off a 7-Eleven, but I think I'll vote. No, it's an absurdity. And everybody knows it's an absurdity. Every time there's been an effort to look at it, they've never been able to find anything. All these commissions just fade away after wasting millions and millions of dollars. Every secretary of state, of which the majority in 20 were Republican, all said there was no problems in their state's voting. So, again, this is defending democracy. And, you know, when this happens tonight, and odds are, Roger Rico won't say anything.

You're not defending democracy. And if he does say something, he should be highly praised for it. But there has been a Vladimir Putin wish list that is being executed by Donald Trump. And you can argue, is he doing it at the direction of Vladimir Putin or is he just aligned with Vladimir Putin? But what would that wish list be? Attack all American civil institutions. So Trump attacks the Justice Department. He attacks courts. He attacks the voting system. He denigrates the military. He appoints this, you know, drunken frat boy to run the largest military in the world, who then goes out and loses a war. He questions. the whole definition of what it means to be American. I mean, one thing about Ronald Reagan, right? For Ronald Reagan to be born in America, you had won life's lottery. There was inequality in America, but nobody was disadvantaged for having been born in American. Donald Trump turns out on his head. If you're born in American, you're a sucker, you're a victim. There are these powerful forces out there in the world like Canada that's taking advantage of us. And I'm going to go even the score. And that completely changes what it's like, what it means to be a citizen. And, you know, if you go back to remember everything that Republicans said, all the beautiful words that were written about how back in the Clinton, you know, Monica Winsky days, about how the White House is more than just the executive office, it's the soul of the nation, it's what we represent. It was all true then. I work for Dole. And now we have this guy that talks in public about dating his daughter. who had sex with a porn star four months after his youngest son was born. That person's in the White House. And you're fine with that. Epstein's best friend. You're okay with that. And when you go along with that stuff, it means that's who you are. And it just, you can't say that. You don't have to vote for Donald Trump just because you're Republican. A lot of people didn't. A lot of really... strong conservatives, like Liz Cheney, like her dad. It just means you don't really believe all the stuff you said. So I call my book, it was all the life. People don't abandon deeply held beliefs in a few years. And that's what the Republican Party did. All these things that we put out as values were just marketing slogans. And it's incredibly depressing, Jeff. I mean, I feel like the guy working for Bernie Madoff who actually thought we were beating the market. It's like, what? We weren't. This was all rigged. Well, Stuart, is the Republican Party going to pull out of this? The country going to pull out of this? I don't think we know that the country does not agree with most of what Donald Trump is trying to do, which is to say does not agree with what the Republican Party is trying to do. Most of America supports Ukraine. Donald Trump doesn't. Republican Party has failed Ukraine. Most Americans still believe in elections. Most Americans do not believe that you should be convicted.

of a hometown jury of 34 felonies. That's not a good thing. Nobody ever is up for a CEO position and puts on a resume convicted of 34 felonies. So I think the Republican Party is way out of step with the mainstream of America. And look, so the answer your question in a very simple way is, when is the Republican Party going to nominate somebody? who will assert without equivocation that Donald Trump won the 20 election, or lost the 20 election. It's not going to happen in 08. We saw that yesterday with Jay Clayton, the guy who went to Cambridge and, you know, PIN. How do you wake up in a minute and say, in front of the entire world, I refuse to say who won the, like, how do you go home to your kids? And they just don't look at you with disgust. You know, that's the threshold. To join the Republican Party, you have to admit that you are willing to lie about big stuff. So is that going to change in 32? I don't know. And we need a conservative party in America deeply. I think there, you know, we talk about how we need an extra party, three parties. I think there really are three parties. There's two parties inside the Democratic Party. And it's, you know, my hope that the more moderate center-right element of the Democratic Party emerges triumphant. Though I think it is a healthy thing in a party to have a debate like this. It's not bad to have somebody elected mayor of New York. It's New York City. He won overwhelmingly. He's been governing for about a year. He's incredibly popular. That's a good thing. That's not a problem. So, look, it's a very, very weird feeling to spend a long time of your career pointing out flaws in the Democratic Party and be forced to say by the facts, it's the only pro-democracy party in America. And, you know, there's a guy Joe Trippies in the Lincoln Project, who was, I think, well, is the best Democratic consultant of his generation. And we used to do races against each other, and I hated going against him. He was so good. And we look back at what we used to make attack ads about and argue about. It was like, should the capital gains tech be 32 or 28? It's like, really? Really do? It's like arguing over like, you know, what the dressing should be at Thanksgiving dinner. I don't know. I like grandmaws. No, I like my mom. You know, it seems just so quaint. And that's what we need to get back to. And everything that these people said that Donald Trump would destroy conservatism, Donald Trump would destroy the Republican Party. They were right. He did. Here we are. Well, Stewart really appreciate you, appreciate you coming on and giving us a big picture here. We...

We'll have to, as I understand, you have another book in the works near completion. We're going to have to get you back on when you get close to that. I love that. I love what you guys are doing. And we'll have to have that full episode on Lane Kiffin, I think, at some point, too. Listen, I have canceled. everything in my life, the week after September, what is it, 19th is the game? Because I still expect to be recovering from celebrating. Okay. Because I'm absolutely convinced only this is fantastic team and is going to crush LSU. And let me just say, you know, I tend to sound very negative, but there's a lot of hopeful stuff out there. Hungary, what happened in Hungary is incredibly hopeful. I was in Hungary before the elections. It's incredibly difficult to look at how difficult it was to run against the Robon. You couldn't run television ads. It's hard to have rallies, hard to put up posters, and they weren't overwhelmingly. Ukraine is on the verge of decisively winning the war. Spend a lot of time in Ukraine working with the A group. And they're going to emerge from this, the strongest military in Europe. and America is going to need Ukraine more than Ukraine needs America now. That's all positive. So there's a lot of big picture positive stuff out there. And I remain hopeful and optimistic. Well, again, thank you, sir, and always enjoy talking with you and hope to have you on again soon. All right, admire so much what you guys are doing. All the best. Thank you.