This Week in Politics | Explainer

All right, I'm going to jump right into things tonight, uh, because so much is going on, and I want to start in a place sort of sideways of where people have asked me to start, and that is a question about the Epstein files. And, um, and what people are asking about first of all, and a lot of it is this testimony from Sasha Riley. And why are people not talking more about that? And the answer to that is that, sort of, a big life lesson here.

Um, the radical right is salting a lot of crap around the Epstein files. It's doing that really quite deliberately because then, if some of the material turns out to be fake, they will be able to discredit all of it. So people are taking any new material like that really, really carefully. And I would urge you to remember that if it is proven true, um, in, you know, whenever that gets chased down, or if it is not, um, the horrors that the Epstein situation has visited on its victims, the survivors, and also on the country, are not going to be less bad because they're coming out a little bit later. So that's, you know, I've gotten emails all day with people talking about that and asking me to write about it. And I will not do so until it has been thoroughly vetted and looks really clean. And there's a lot of material in and around the Epstein files that has not turned out to be accurate.

So, um, so I wanted to start there with that question because so many of you asked it. But I don't want to stop with the Epstein files because everything else I'm going to talk about is always in front of the backdrop of the fact that the administration is breaking the law, even as we speak. That is, on November 19th, the US Congress overwhelmingly passed a law requiring, not saying we think it would be ducky if you felt like, requiring the Department of Justice to release all the Epstein files, not the ones they felt like, by no later than December 19th. And I know math is not my strong suit, but December 19th went flying by many weeks ago. Within that law, it's called the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and you can Google it. Unlike many of the laws that Congress passes, it's actually quite short and very understandable. It's only about a page long, small type, yeah, but it's very clear. Um, in addition to requiring that those files be released, there were very specific guidelines for what could be redacted. And it was to protect the victims and nothing else. And we know that the Department of Justice has said, "Oh, but there's another law that says we have to make sure that nobody's reputations get hurt." And that's why we have blacked out so much of it. What they have released at this point is estimated to be less than 1% of the totality of those files, and they are now saying, "Well, there's just so much, we can't get to it." In addition to the release that was required, the Department of Justice was also supposed to explain and justify every redaction. Well, of course, that went by the wayside as well, in part because, um, they haven't released anything, or they've released less than 1%.

So keep that in mind because clearly there is something in those files that they know is going to be unbelievably damning. And the way you know that is not just the obvious that they're not releasing them, despite the fact that, uh, Attorney General Pam Bondi said last July she had gone through them all [snorts]. But also because think of what the administration has done to the five, I believe it was, members of Congress, maybe six, who released that video reminding US military personnel that they had a duty not to obey illegal orders. They've gone ballistic over that. We now know that Jason Crowe of Colorado is being investigated. We know that Ali Alyssa Slotkin, um, is being investigated, and they've tried to, uh, go after Mark Kelly of Arizona, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, saying, uh, to reduce his retirement rank, sort of going after him administratively because of that video. In that video, they simply reiterated the law. These are lawmakers reiterating the law, and they also have the protection of what's known as the Speech and Debate Clause, which is outlined in the Constitution, and it is designed to make sure that Congress critters can criticize the government openly and can say things about the government without any kind of legal or professional repercussions or personal repercussions.

Now, it's the Speech and Debate Clause that the radical right has been using to seed crap all through the news all the time because you can't go after something a congressperson says. So, you know, they say crap in investigations, and then it makes the news, and nobody can say, "Hey, you shouldn't have done that," uh, because they're covered by the Speech and Debate Clause. So these same congresspeople who said you can't, uh, you have a duty not to obey an illegal order are now, that's what the administration is going after them, uh, for saying, despite both, uh, the First Amendment and the Speech and Debate Clause.

But why am I bringing it up in the context of the Epstein files? Why did the administration go so bonkers over that? Well, now we know that in fact, on September 2nd, that first set of strikes had at least two things that legal analysts have called war crimes. And the entire operation itself, uh, looks as if it is also, um, illegal and, uh, illegal and part of, uh, breaks all kinds of international rules. And those war crimes are, first of all, that they used a plane that appears to have been decorated, or I'm sorry, made to look like a civilian plane, which is against the rules of war. And also that double-tap that killed the people who were in the flotsam, um, is also a war crime. So why did they go so ballistic and try to shut those people up? Because it looks like they had already broken the law. And that's what I think you're seeing with these Epstein files. They know they're in deep trouble. So they're trying to muddy the waters. And they're muddying the waters not just, uh, by refusing to hand over these files and saying, "Oh, there's just so much." But also by trying to pull the Clintons into this. And so far, you know, lots of people are saying, "Oh, yeah, the Clintons should testify." Let me break that down for you a little bit. There were, I believe it was eight subpoenas related to the, um, the Epstein files that the House Oversight Committee, uh, put forward, and then they dismissed six of them. They have only interviewed two people in the last year, and now they are trying to hold the Clintons in contempt, even though Bill Clinton has been out front saying, "Please release everything that has my name or my photograph in it because you're just trying to make this about me when it's really about Donald Trump." And of course, Hillary Clinton wants no part of this because this has been a real way that the Republicans have repeatedly turned out their voters is by accusing her of things. You know, they'll lock her up, the email things, the Benghazi, all of that stuff. And I just think she's done. She's not going to play that game any longer. But this is not about the Clintons. If, I mean, if it is, if they're in it, you know, more power to whomever, uh, takes them to court and arrests them and all that. Um, but this is again an attempt to make those Epstein files go away. And the more, for me, the more they do that, the more it says to me, those, I mean, what we've already seen is horrific. So it says to me that there is something really bad in the Epstein files. And please don't lose track of that.

All right. So now, the other thing I want you to keep your mind around as we move forward, uh, through the material today, is Trump is not okay. People, I got a number of emails today with people saying to me, "What's he going to do next? You've said things are going to get bad. What's it going to be?" Have you ever had a relative who's got dementia? Um, and again, I'm not a doctor. I can't diagnose this man, but I can listen to him, and I know he is completely erratic, does not seem to know what's going on. I can't tell you what he's going to do. Um, but it's worth remembering in all of this that this is a person who is acting entirely by impulse, whatever looks good at the moment. And then his handlers and the Republicans in Congress are trying to make sense of it on the other side. And so you're seeing stuff that just doesn't make any sense at all. You're also seeing people putting pressure on him in different ways because they just don't know what he's going to do. And they're trying to stop him from doing things like attacking Iran or attacking Greenland. And so that's another thing as I'm trying to make some sense out of this for you. Recognize that we have never in our history had a president who was mentally, you know, many, many, many forks shy of a picnic. And that's what we've got going on here. Um, so those two things are really important in the background.

But there's also another thing. I'm sorry. You know, boy, when I went into American history, I did not think I was ever going to be literally the material that I'm going to talk about tonight would be an entire administration in any other presidency. And we're doing it all in this one day. And it's every day like this. There's a reason you're exhausted. And partly that's by design, to make us exhausted. Anyway, the other thing to remember here is that, uh, Trump is badly underwater in every poll. And he's badly underwater even in what are his signature issues. So the economy, for example, lots of people voted for Trump because they wanted the economy to get better after the pandemic. And in fact, he has really thrown a spanner into the works of the economy. Inflation, we know from material that came out in the last day or so, inflation continues, uh, higher than it should be. It's about 2.7. Uh, usually the Fed likes it around two. It's higher than it was under Biden in the last several months of his administration when he was bringing inflation down. It's going back up again. Um, and we also have the problem that real wages have not kept up with it. Under the Biden administration, real wages actually increased faster than inflation. That is no longer happening, and hiring is also down significantly. So the economy is a hurting thing.

But also, we have the issue of immigration and ICE enforcement of the immigration rules. Now, there's a bunch of things that are causing problems right now for the administration. One of them is that a new report today out from Wired, uh, which is a really interesting magazine, by the way, as is 404 Media. Both of, uh, both organizations that look primarily at, uh, technology. Anyway, Wired today came out with a study about the ways in which the US intelligence community has been looking at Tren de Aragua, which is the Venezuelan gang that Trump insists has invaded the United States. And what they found was that looking through hundreds of pages of reports from US intelligence in 2025, that in fact, US intelligence is not even sure that gang is operating in the US. While there are members of that or former members of that gang operating in the US and committing low-level crime, they are not at all sure that in fact there is any kind of an organized attempt, uh, to make Tren de Aragua a thing in the United States. So that whole justification for this really violent crackdown, remember the Blackhawk helicopter where the people parachuted, repelled into an apartment building in Chicago, now looks, you know, and said, "We had to because this place is full of Tren de Aragua." Well, maybe not, you know. So they have that hanging out there now.

But the real thing hanging over the administration is that the American people did not like the roundups of undocumented immigrants, and sometimes legal immigrants, and sometimes US citizens. Anyway, uh, they thought that this was way more than they barganined for when Trump ran for office in 2024. He said he was going to go after the worst of the worst, remember, the criminals, the rapists, the murderers, and so on. [snorts] Instead, what we're seeing is what one always sees, as I've said before, when you have roundups like this, uh, officials always go after the low-hanging fruit. They always go after the women and the children, the vulnerable populations, because they're easy. And this is written in neon all over American indigenous history. Whenever, um, the officials went after, uh, a group of indigenous Americans that were, uh, hostile, usually young warriors, they didn't go after the young warriors. They went after the elderly and the women and the children because they didn't fight back. Well, you're seeing the same thing now with these sweeps. And Americans didn't like it. And they didn't like it before a week ago Wednesday. But a week ago Wednesday, when the ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, a 37-year-old white mother, uh, real, uh, support, any kind of real support for ICE deployments, um, just plummeted. It just fell off a cliff to the point right now that only about 20 to 30% of Americans think that ICE is doing a good job, and everybody else doesn't. Those are really bad numbers. I have said to you before that even in the worst of a worst-case scenario, a right-wing movement will have between 20 and 30% approval. Even at the very end, even when it's going down, you really never go below 20%. And in this case, they're at that with this, um, with the ICE deployments.

So they have that going on. At the same time, in December, on December 23rd, I believe it was, the Supreme Court said that the administration could not federalize National Guard troops to impose its will in Democratic-dominated cities. That they didn't, it wasn't a final decision, it was a temporary decision, but usually that's a pretty good indication of where the court is going. So now all of a sudden you've got a president who can't use the federalized National Guard the way that he and his, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller, have been arguing. You may remember in October, Steven Miller talked about Trump having plenary power over the military, including the National Guard. Um, and the Supreme Court just said, "Not so much." The Supreme Court said that you can't, in fact, the president cannot in fact use the National Guard, um, instead of the military to enforce laws. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 17, uh, 1878, prevents the government from using the military that way.

So it looks as if the administration is trying to ratchet up violence in order to give it an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act. And this, by the way, is something that Steven Miller has called for for a long time. And their seeming understanding is that the Insurrection Act will let them declare martial law. There's those actually aren't the same thing. The Insurrection Act would let the, the military enforce federal law and any state laws that involve constitutional rights. It's not clear that they would be able to enforce state law. Of course, the Trump administration has been, um, interpreting federal law really, really broadly. So I'm not trying to downplay what this means. I'm suggesting this is really a stretch, but it seems clear that's what they're trying to do. And I'm going to come back to what, uh, Governor Tim Walls is doing to try and prevent that. But before I get there, I want to point out something. And that's that when Trump was using the concept of federalizing the National Guard troops and being able to move them state-to-state, he took on Los Angeles. He took on Portland, Oregon. He took on, uh, Chicago. Um, when he took on those big cities, those are big cities, he wasn't very successful. So the next place he really has deployed stuff is in the cities that are the next size down, the next tier down in terms of size. Minnesota's, I'm sorry, Minneapolis, St. Paul, beautiful cities, by the way, but they're not as big as LA. And the reason I mention this is because there's all kinds of rumors out there today and statements out there today that the next thing he's going to do is he's going to go into Lewiston, Maine. Lewiston, Maine has a fairly large Somali population. They've been there a long time. I mean, I don't know anything about citizenship rates here. I know in Minneapolis, the citizenship rate of Somali Americans is about 95%. And I'd be very surprised if it isn't the same here. As I say, this is not a new population of Somali. But the reason I mention that is, have you been to Lewiston, Maine? I've been to Lewiston, Maine quite a lot, actually. And it's small. It's teeny tiny. So why do I mention that? Because I think there's a numbers problem here for the Trump administration. That is, right now, we know there are about 2,000 ICE agents. We also know that Trump has been pulling in Border Patrol agents. And it appears there's been at least one sighting of a different kind of police force. And now I don't remember which one it is. Remember that the Department of Homeland Security has a lot of different kinds of law enforcement within it, and so to some degree does the Department of Justice. The Federal Bureau of Investigation sits under the Department of Justice, and it certainly has agents who are supposed to be doing sort of white-collar crime, corruption, and so on, that they have removed and put onto immigration enforcement. But there's just not a lot of people there yet. They're trying to hire a lot of people, but as you know, that's not going brilliantly either. They've had to get rid of age caps, um, because they're not coming up with as many people as they need. The reason I mention this is because as you are looking at your television screen and you're seeing these truly horrific pieces out of Minneapolis, I'm going to talk more about them in a second. Remember that there are 340 million people in this country. And if you watch what the administration is doing, is having to move these ICE agents around. And again, the minute you decide that you've got to take over Lewiston, Maine, um, as a show of force, clearly there's an attempt to, um, to terrorize the people, not just, by the way, the Somali Americans, but also white Americans. I mean, at this point, it's pretty clear they're trying to terrorize white Americans as well as immigrants. Um, I'm not saying that this won't be horrific if they do it, but come on. I mean, if you could go into New York City or Lewiston, Maine, in order to enforce your will, what does that say to you, right?

So, um, so I wanted to have that piece there. But I also want to back up a little bit. Uh, Tim Walls, governor of Minneapolis, has been begging, um, people in Minneapolis not to give the administration an excuse. And I'm seeing a lot of people saying, "Why doesn't he call the National Guard? Why doesn't, you know, why doesn't he get in there with them?" Well, remember that governors are responsible for the people in their states. And in my experience, um, which is not nothing at this point, they care deeply about the people in their states. Um, I haven't, I don't spend a lot of time with radical right governors, but certainly even the moderate governor, uh, Republican governors, that have come across my path, and, uh, certainly the Democratic governors, they care deeply about the people in their states. I mean, deeply. Literally, um, I mean, I guess it's okay if I say this because he's not in office any longer, but my only contact at that point, I did later campaign for him, with Sharon Brown, was I had once referred in one of these nightly letters I write, um, to the Rust Belt, which is what historians have called Ohio as being in the Rust Belt. And I woke up the next morning to a text on my phone, and I have no idea how I got my number, saying, "Please don't refer to my state as part of the Rust Belt. We are the Opportunity Belt and my people." And it was just this whole thing. And I thought, man, this is a guy who cares a lot about the people in his state. If he went to the trouble of finding out where I was and saying, "Please don't do this again." And do you know what? I never did do it again. That was pretty typical of the governors. They care a lot about the people in their states. There's a reason they're governors, you know. And, um, and Tim Walls, if he calls out the National Guard in Minnesota, the feds are going to be violent toward them. People are going to get hurt, and he doesn't want to do that. I mean, I assume, I don't have any contact with him at all, but he doesn't want to put Minnesotans in that position because if things start to happen, people from Minnesota are going to get hurt. So when people are all over him going, "Why are you being such a wimp?" I think that's the wrong way to look at it. I think he's actually sort of saying, "I'm trying to keep people, the people that I protect, from getting hurt." And I think you're going to see that a lot from the governors. There are a lot of places where state governors have backed off if their people looked like they were getting hurt. And to some degree, Trump is trying to weaponize that by saying, "Okay, I'm going to come after you, and you're going to back down because otherwise I'll hurt your state." And that has actually been a leverage, a piece of leverage that has worked pretty well on occasion.

So, um, so I think that's what is happening in Minnesota. But the other piece of that, of course, is that the images that we are seeing coming out of Minnesota look a great deal like the images from the Civil Rights Movement. I mean, literally last night, yet another person got shot, apparently in the leg. And I'm not going to try and tell you what happened there because the only information that has come out has come from the administration, and I just don't trust it anymore. They have a very formulaic thing they say, and I'm not there for it, and I could not find a police report of what had happened. Um, and at the same time as that happened, we do have a report of the fact that a family with six children got caught in what appeared to be, um, some kind of a clash between protesters and the police after that shooting. And three of their children, they were in a van, they were just trying to get home. Three of their children got hit with tear gas, and the flashbang grenade detonated near their van, and all the airbags went off, and the kids got hurt. So three of the kids got taken by ambulance to a hospital for treatment from tear gas and from the flashbangs. And, you know, there was no problem in Minneapolis until ICE got there. And that's worth remembering here, that this is being caused by the feds. And we also have this image of a young man from California, I believe it was, who got hit in the eye socket and has lost his eye in California, um, during the ICE raids there.

So, um, so these images that we're seeing are infuriating a lot of people who were not otherwise involved. You know, I keep saying about all the people who are not involved. The reality is, it's becoming increasingly clear to white Americans that these raids are not just about undocumented criminals, as Trump initially said. They're about American civil rights, and they're about American constitutional rights, and about the attempt of the administration to take them away from us. And as we do that, as we become aware of that, that 340 million person weight begins to get traction, uh, against this very small group of, um, federal agents.

So if that's what's in the background there, so far, you have a president who is under extraordinary stress, extraordinary stress. Not only does he have the Epstein files out there, not only has he gone underwater on immigration and on the economy and on this big immigration issue, but also he keeps lashing out to try and show how powerful he is. And as he lashes out, he gets extreme pushback. So this idea that we are going to attack Denmark or take over Denmark has organized Europe to stand against the United States of America. And, uh, and the idea that we want to go into Greenland is enormously unpopular with the American people, but it is also unpopular with significant percentages of the Republicans in Congress who have no real interest in destroying NATO and destroying the rules-based international order that, among other things, protects world trade. I've talked about that before. Vladimir Putin likes it quite a lot, but there are a lot of Americans who look at this and say, "What are you doing?" Like, we're already an ally of Greenland. You want to put more troops in Greenland? Greenland will say, "Here, let us help." This idea that somehow we need to take it over to get those things is just crap. And Trump actually said in an interview the other day, "I want to own it." As I say, he's mentally breaking down. "I want to own it. This is important to me psychologically. I want to own it." Well, it's not important to me psychologically, and it's not important to another 340 million Americans psychologically either. So the more he tries to do these things, the more pushback he is getting.

At the same time, I think you are seeing, um, the stress points coming out here. One of them is the fact that the administration raided the home of Hannah Nathanson, a Washington Post reporter, yesterday, allegedly to try and find her files on people who were leaking to her. This is a really big deal to have gone after a member of the press, and she's a very, very good reporter. I quote from her often. And clearly, what they're trying to do is to intimidate reporters, but also to find out who is leaking from the administration. If you're that worried about leaks, you know you've got a problem in the administration. One of the things that you never saw from the Biden administration was leaks. You know, they didn't feel the need to go behind the back in that case, uh, very rarely. There were a few leaks over, uh, the Palestinian crisis and Gaza, but for the most part, you know, you just didn't see that. When you see, uh, an administration leaking like a sieve and complaining about it, you know you've got a problem. Remember the plumbers that Richard Nixon's plumbers? It's always a way to think about it. You know why they were called the plumbers? Is because they wanted to prevent leaks. And when you want to prevent leaks, you get plumbers. And the reason that Nixon thought he needed someone to stop the leaks was because of the Pentagon Papers. And in the Pentagon Papers, which, by the way, ended before he was in office, they only went up to a certain point, and didn't go into his administration. But he was afraid that they would go into his administration. And we now know that, uh, he pulled some really dirty shenanigans even before he was in office in scuttling peace talks with Vietnam, uh, before, you know, under the, uh, Johnson administration. And my guess has always been that he knew that was going to come out if, you know, he was afraid people knew about that, and if that came out, he'd end up in jail or in prison. And that's always been my guess with that. Anyway, that's, I just traced back leaks, plumbers, and there's an administration that's like, "We can't have leaks." Clearly, Trump is very worried that somebody might leak something. Well, what do you think that could be, by the way?

All right. So, so you see it with that attack on Hannah Nathanson, which is a really big deal to go after a press person. But you can also see it in a couple of other things, um, that I think are really important to throw into here. You may or may not have seen it yesterday in all the crap that's flying, but the US said yesterday that it has sold $500 million worth of Venezuelan oil. Now, you may not have put these two things together, but you also might remember that Trump said by virtue of the fact that he is commander-in-chief, and that somehow, I mean, I'm not even going to try and chase this down because it doesn't make logical sense, but because the military took Nicolas Maduro and his wife Celia Flores, that, and the next administration, under his, Maduro's former vice president, that, uh, that apparently has given him, given Trump access to oil. Sorry, I'm struggling with the logic here. That Trump is the one who has control over that money from the sale of the oil. Okay. So Trump says he has control of the money. And at that point, when he said that, instantly, oil companies that had their property seized after the 2007, not the 1976, but the 2007 nationalization of the oil fields in Venezuela said, "Excellent. If you're going to be selling oil from Venezuela, they owe us." I think, uh, I think Kico Phillips, uh, is owed $12 billion, or some huge sum. They basically said, "Okay, excellent. If you're going to take that money and you're going to sell that, if you're going to take that oil and sell that, here's our handout. We would love to have outstanding claims against the Venezuelan government for our property that got stolen, so hand over the hand over the Benjamins." Trump then, uh, on Friday, I think it was, issued an executive order saying that we have an emergency. This is, I believe, his 10th emergency declaration that enables him to go around the law and says, "You know, you can, I don't care if you lost money and that you actually have claims against the Venezuelan government. I'm not going to pay any attention to that. I get control over that money." All right. So yesterday, they apparently sold $500 million worth of Venezuelan oil. Where did they put that money? Do you think in the Treasury US bank? No, it's in a bank in Qatar. And Trump theoretically, according to him, is the only person who has control over it. Now, many things could be going on with that. I promise you that's not okay on any level. And if a Democrat did it, he'd have been impeached by now. But the reason that I put that in the category of there appears to be concern is it is like boilerplate that when a person in charge of a country is worried about their future, they start to stash money that the government can't get its hands on. This is dictatorship 101. So the fact that the US president has a bank account in Qatar with a certain, you know, up to $500 million, I mean, maybe they put it in a bunch of different places that only he can control theoretically. All I mean, these are all his statements. Whether the law is going to agree with it is something very different. That says to me this is not a man who's confident that he's going to stay where he is now.

But finally, I want to leave you with something else that happened that takes us right back to the beginning of where we were when I said you cannot forget those Epstein files. And that's that on Tuesday, Trump was doing a tour of a Ford plant, um, you know, sort of to shore up his base among the workers, right? That's theoretically the people who back him, and that's what he likes to think. And somebody yelled out at him something. It has been reported he yelled, "Pedophile protector." Um, I think at least Trump heard "pedophile." I'm not sure he heard "protector." And by the way, you know, I read my letters every day for, uh, a podcast for people who don't want to read them. So I'm getting, it's been two solid years now. So I'm getting pretty good at voice work. And I think if you go and say to yourself, "pedophile protector," and listen to it, you will hear that "pedophile" comes out quite loudly. "Protector" is harder to hear. So I would make the case that at the very least, Trump heard "pedophile." He may not have, it may or may not have heard "protector." But when this guy yelled "pedophile protector" at him, rather than blowing it off, and by the way, politicians get heckled all the time. This is like, literally when I do an interview with a politician, um, in public, we always have a plan for hecklers just because there's always a heckler, right? So, you know, this is not, and you don't get to, I mean, it's just the way it is. Like this is just a thing. When this guy said that, Trump didn't ignore him. He gave him the middle finger. Like that's a really big deal for a president to crack like that. He gave him the middle finger. But he wasn't done. He actually dropped the F-bomb twice. "F you. F you." on in this factory with workers all over the floor looking up at him. That's what he did. And I'm telling you, the only time I can think of that we have had a president crack like that was when, I'm so sorry, but when Andrew Johnson was doing his swing around the circle in 1866, before the midterm elections of 1866, which he insisted were going to, on which the future of the country was going to hang. At that point, he cracked during one of those, and he compared himself to Jesus Christ, and he started arguing back and forth with hecklers, and he really never recovered from that moment. It's something historians talk about as like, even his supporters were like, "Oh, dude, this was a bad idea."

So when you think about this moment, we are in it up to our eyeballs. And I'm going to tell you again, it's going to get worse. This is going to get worse before it gets better. But for all the horrors, and they are horrors, it is not clear that the administration is in fact going to be able to pull off what at this point is very clearly an attempt to overturn our democracy and create a fascist government. It just isn't.

So again, what can you do going forward? And I'm going to be a weenie here. Like, um, like I said to my friend Joanne on Saturday, last Saturday, um, I've actually been trying to get enough sleep. Um, which, as you know, is a little bit odd for me. Um, it really makes a difference to get enough sleep and eat right. Uh, that sounds stupid, and I feel like, you know, I feel like this is freshman in college 101, but I'm 63, and I was not getting enough sleep, and I probably won't tonight. But try to take care of yourself and to take care of the people around you. Uh, because we're all on edge. People are snapping. They're mean to each other. Um, I've noticed I'm short-tempered. You know, try and give people grace and to be, do something nice for people if you possibly can. It'll make them feel good, but I promise you, it'll also make you feel good. And, um, and once you get past that personal stuff, call, call both at the local level. These local elections we've got going on in this next year are incredibly important. Run for office. Work for people. Uh, create teams of people to get voters out. Work at the local level, work at the state level, work at the national level. Um, but keep your voices heard.

And I want to say a final word here. I'm seeing a huge amount of frustration with the Democrats and how they don't seem, many of them don't seem to be stepping up to the plate. Some are, some are not. I just want to reiterate that we are not in a normal period. You do not have to wait for your party or your people to start speaking out. You can push them to speak out. And if they don't, you can find someone who does, or you can start speaking out yourself. So this, you know, the more, the more you voice what you care about and the future you want to see, the more likely you'll find other people like that, and the more likely the pendulum will move in that direction. A friend of mine was embarrassed today. He said he called Susan Collins. I live in Maine, for those of you who don't know. And he called Susan Collins, who's the Republican senator. And his wife said, "I'm just embarrassed because he started screaming at the person saying, 'What are you thinking that your president is coming into Lewiston, and this is not how he normally behaves?'" And I said, "You know what? They needed to hear it." Um, at this point, our electeds need to hear what we care about. So make sure you speak up. And the more of us who speak up, and the more of us who continue to own the space of this country that, after all, belongs to us, the better the chances are that we can, um, can restore American democracy. And on the other side of that, as I keep saying, we don't know what things are going to look like, but we do know that if we can push back against this administration and reclaim our democracy, we have the opportunity to rebuild the country in a better way than it was before January of 2025. And, you know, it hadn't been working real well for about 40 years. So now we get the chance to do it again, right?

And the comparison, as I say, of Selma and Birmingham and so on to these shots out of Minneapolis is a really useful one. Not only because it helps us to remember just how horrific progress in the past had to be, I mean, it had to be before we got progress, but also because we remember that on the heels of those horrific moments that cost so many lives and so many families and so much opportunity for people, those four little girls who were killed in church and so on, on the other side of that, we got to build a better country. And we still have that opportunity to do it even better now. But I got to tell you, here's what my contribution is going to be to that. I have ideas about stuff I'd like and so on, and I hope I get to talk about tax policy. But what I'm going to contribute to that is I'm going to be the person in the back of the room always saying, "Okay, these changes are great. How are we going to make sure we never backslide again?" Because that's going to be a key lesson going forward.