Trump, Iran, and Where This All Might Be Headed: A Conversation With Mike Madrid

The news cycle is moving so fast it’s training us to forget. We invited Mike Madrid, a longtime classical conservative political strategist, commentator, and Lincoln Project cofounder, back on the show to help us slow down and put the recent chaos into perspective.

We start with crisis fatigue and the “flood the zone” feeling, then get concrete with the Minneapolis ICE crackdown and why masked, militarized enforcement collides with the conservative case for due process and constitutional limits. From there, Mike breaks down the hard truth about U.S. immigration reform: policy solutions have been obvious for decades, but politics rewards stalemate. We talk border security, pathways to citizenship, why comprehensive reform hasn’t happened since 1986, and how both parties have used immigration as an election weapon instead of a governing project.

Following on from our previous conversation with Mike, we also discuss Latino voters. Mike argues Latinos are the closest thing to a true swing voter left, and the data says that affordability and cost of living outrank immigration for that group by a wide margin. That insight reframes midterm elections, party coalitions, and why dramatic vote shifts can show up across different Latino communities. Along the way, Mike gives a midterms forecast and also offers a prediction about future presidential nominees for both parties that you probably won't see coming.

We close with the Iran war and why the Strait of Hormuz and the petrodollar system matter to our daily lives, from gas prices to broader economic stability. It’s heavy, but it’s not hopeless. Mike makes a historically grounded case that periods like this can forge a better version of the country, if we choose to build it.

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Transcript

Welcome And Why Mike Returns

Randy 0:06

I'm Randy, the pastor half of the podcast, and my friend Kyle's a philosopher. This podcast hosts conversations at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and spirituality.

Kyle 0:15

We also invite experts to join us, making public a space that we've often enjoyed off-air around the proverbial table with a good drink at the back corner of a dark pub.

Randy 0:24

Thanks for joining us, and welcome to A Pastor and a Philosopher Walking to a Bar. Every once in a while we have a conversation that just strikes a chord among our listeners and even with us. And Mike Madrid was one of those conversations. Mike is a um what is Mike?

Kyle 0:49

Oh God, he's a data guy, he's a political commentator, he's a campaign expert, he's a historian in some ways.

Randy 0:56

Right. He's a conservative, though, who actually helped found and start the Lincoln Project, which I have immense respect for. Any any group of people who are willing to say, I choose our nation over our party and our ideology, I think has integrity and I love that. Um but Mike is just a smart guy who has his finger on the pulse of the Latino vote in the country, and who has his finger in the pulse of just where we are as a nation in this crazy intense dystopian reality that we're living in. A voice like Mike can just be a helpful guide to root us historically and also be able to help us look forward to what's what's next after this crazy pothole we're in, right? So I just wanted to talk to Mike again because so much has happened in the last year, in the last 13, 14 months. But even since we talked to him, we talked to him in late fall of 2025. So much has happened since then. So I just wanted to have him be able to bring some context, bring some perspective, and hear what politics can look like moving forward, hear what his his take on a number of things, and I'm really glad we did.

Kyle 2:01

Yeah, he's also just really fun. I like him a lot. Absolutely. We don't agree about everything, but I want to hear him talk and answer questions, and he consistently answers in a way that I didn't expect. Um that's gonna you're gonna hear that in this. He's gonna make some predictions about who the candidates are gonna be for both Republicans and Democrats. Onto your butts you do not see coming. Guaranteed. Whoever you think it is, it's not. Um and compelling, you know, and he has this way of describing very soberly the really terrible, really risky uh reality that we're in, but simultaneously giving reasonable hope about it that is believable. Yep. Not smoke-blowing hope, but historically grounded, you know, reason-based kind of hope.

Randy 2:46

Um it's why I love history, right? Yeah. I mean, I feel like history is the one thing that maybe gives us hope right now.

Kyle 2:52

Yeah, I I can't say like I agree that he's right to be as hopeful as he is, but I really want to. I really want to, and I can see the the reasonableness of it.

Randy 3:02

So and I think you're gonna hear more from Mike on this podcast. I mean, we we have a fun time together, I think he enjoys us. So uh as the midterms approach or as as large events politically happen in our nation, I think this is uh this is something that we're gonna do regularly.

Kyle 3:17

Yeah, he's a voice to to follow for sure.

Randy 3:19

Yep, so enjoy friends.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

It's great to be back with you guys. Glad things are going well.

Randy 3:47

Yes, going well for us. I'm not so sure about the good old US of A. We're gonna find out here in a moment. Um, Mike, we were gonna have you on, I think it was February or something like that. And it just didn't work out last minute, and then we couldn't get our schedules together, and here we are on April 16th, and we're talking finally. Yeah. But I'm looking at the outline we added to it and all that stuff, but as I looked at the outline, I realized this was right after the um the the occupation of Minneapolis by ICE agents and that whole craziness that happened. And I had this thought, I just mentioned this to Kyle be right before he came on. I was as I was looking at the outline, I was like, hey, I know that the Minneapolis occupation, Ice occupation was is not super current. It was three months ago. Do we even talk about that or do we move on to something else? And as I said it, both of us were like, well, if the news cycle is such that we're not going to even talk about that, that we're gonna ignore it and move on to the next thing, that's a problem, right? We just had a city that was lambasted and turned into a war zone. And it feels though like because there's so much coming at us from this Trump administration, you just kind of rinse and repeat and move on to the next crisis. And it makes me wonder if that's kind of what they're trying to do in some ways, in some way, shape, or form, to just like go from one extreme to another, one crisis to another, so that we forget everything, whether it's the Epstein Files or the ICE occupation of Minneapolis, or eventually the Iran war, or you know, you name it.

Kyle 5:20

The flood the zone with shit strategy, right? Exactly. It has this long-term, once it's you know, over and over and over and over again. I feel like I can feel my brain changing to that habit. It's almost like uh this is very embarrassing to admit, but sometimes I'll realize I've been scrolling on Facebook for too long, I'll close the app, and then muscle memory, the app will be open again seconds later before I've realized that I've done it.

SPEAKER_03 5:47

Yeah.

Kyle 5:48

Shit. This is like something similar to that where I'm just tempted to say, Oh, we gotta talk about the next thing, you know.

Strategy Versus Incompetence

Randy 5:56

What are your what are your thoughts on on this reality that we're speaking to? Where I mean, in the it's how long has it been since Trump's been in office for the second term? Is it literally like uh just over a year? Isn't it yeah? Hard to believe. It feels like a dog year.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

I mean it's like 13, 14 months.

Randy 6:11

Yeah, it's insane. So what are your thoughts on this reality that we just keep getting blasted by crisis after crisis, um, you know, shitstorm after shitstorm, and eventually we just kind of succumb to it and become numb to it, which really might be the most scary thing.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

Yeah, there's no question that that is happening. I think the jury is still really out as to whether or not these people have the competency and the discipline to make this an orchestrated strategy. I have no doubt that, you know, in the Oval Office, there are definitely things that they do to distract, but for every one conscious thing that they do, the one deliberate thing that they do, there are probably four or five other things that they're just they're just sheer incompetence and bumbling nature unfolds while they do it. So, like, for example, and but but again, what happens is especially if you're like uh opposed to Trump and concerned about it, a lot of his own followers are just like, everything's fine now, I can just not scroll and not respond and just go back to my normal life because we're we're safe and we're comfortable again and delude myself as to what's going on. If you're frightened and watching it, it becomes addictive. So you're continually looking, your mind is searching for those instances, and the internet is going to give them to you all day long in every possible way, from not just Trump, but from you know Pete Heggsith's quoting Tarantino scripture today, right? To to to you know him putting out images of of him as Jesus to attacking the Pope. So it's going to be there, you're gonna find it. Um, and and so we do have to be mindful of what our appetite is for what the intake for what we're putting in our brains, because it's addictive. We know that. Like these tech companies want us scrolling, they want us scared, they want us um, and and the content that does that always rises to the top of the algorithm. So I I I hope I don't mean to be evasive, but if somebody who's watched it very closely, I can tell you as a political professional, they are not doing all of this daily content as an orchestrated strategy. You don't that is not.

Randy 8:19

So, I mean, Trump, that wouldn't surprise me that he's just kind of like throwing darts at the wall and whatever. Stephen Miller, though, that guy kind of scares me. And he feels pretty conniving and evil and manipulative, and also his like this grand plan. Uh, tell me I'm crazy.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

I think he has a grand plan, but to execute it the way that they need to execute it, the way that we think it's happening is not happening. And again, I'm not saying that this guy is not a bad guy. I'm not saying that he isn't doing a lot of things off-screen and behind the scenes. He was the main mastermind behind iCE. He was the one driving and pushing these quotas that got these ill-trained ICE agents hired yesterday to do things like shoot people and you know, rip children from their mothers' arms and you know, get these detention centers popped up and triple the size of the ICE budget. That's absolutely happening. But but is there an orchestrated campaign, like I said, to just have a message constantly every day that is meant to terrorize us and drive us crazy? I don't think so. Okay, I think there may there may have been for a very short period of time, um, especially the first hundred days, which it's hard to remember back, but think back to remember he was assigning executive orders, like 20 and 30, and just thousands of them. That was absolutely designed to do that. But after that, you know, I think what they really found out was they didn't have anything left. And and then what they were dealing with was the wreckage and the fallout. This has not been a proactive administration since the Epstein files. The only thing that they were proactively working on was immigration, but Minneapolis was an inflection point, it absolutely was. That and the death of Charlie Kirk, what you what you see is a complete defensive posture from this administration. They've just been on their heels defending and trying to explain more than they're working offensively.

Minneapolis And The ICE Crackdown

Randy 10:08

Okay, so let's just touch on Minneapolis for a moment. Let's before we we move on. As a conservative, um, you know, we have we all want immigration reform in some way, shape, or form. We want better laws in place, we want uh enforceable laws, all that stuff might differ on which laws we want and how how that looks, but I think we're we have much more common ground than we don't. Yeah, so as a conservative, how do you look at what happened in Minneapolis in particular? You know, poorly trained police forces wearing masks and militarized police forces with no identifications. That sounds fascist to me. Yeah. Two Americans killed in the streets, just basically trying to defend themselves from what I see in the videos. Um, there's a lot of scary stuff, but as a classic conservative, how do you see what happened in Minneapolis?

SPEAKER_01 11:00

Well, and again, I appreciate the the the you know kind of reminder to the audience that I I am a classic conservative. I'm not a Trump Republican. That's that's and I think your listeners need to know the reason why I am so vehemently opposed to Donald Trump is because I'm a conservative. It's not despite the fact that I'm a conservative. Everything that he is doing is foundationally opposed to the core basic reasons of why I am a conservative, especially the ones you just outlined. It was the Republican Party that used to be worried about jack booted masked thugs violating the Constitution in due process. And that's precisely what they are now championing and marching down the streets for. It's why I really recoil when I hear a lot of folks on the left saying, well, this is a natural, you know, it started with Ronald Reagan. It's like connecting the line from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump is a complete misunderstanding of not just conservatism, but just of what's happening in this country at this moment. There's nothing at all in common that these two men had. And where there might be some sort of overlap, it's purely coincidental. So look, on immigration specifically, it was Ronald Reagan who signed the last Immigration Reform and Control Act, granting amnesty to six million, you know, essentially Latinos into this country.

Randy 12:19

Wait, still hold on for a second. So are you saying there's been no meaningful immigration laws made in reform happen since Ronald Reagan in 1988 or after? Or before, I'm sorry? 1986.

SPEAKER_01 12:33

1986, yeah. And meaningful is the right's term. Um, there may have been, may have been, which I'm not even really aware of, small tinkerings here and there on small pieces of statutes. 1986 was the last time we did comprehensive immigration reform. That's right.

Randy 12:48

That's crazy.

SPEAKER_01 12:49

It's horrible, but it's terrible policy. But but here's the here's the really frustrating part. To your point, the policy on this is quite simple. It's quite easy, and we have known it for 40 years. It's the politics that are complicated. And what I mean by that is there's really just two pieces to get immigration, comprehensive immigration reform done. There had, and it starts with border security, which unfortunately we we've gotten through the ugliest, off list of processes now. The the other is uh what is a pathway to citizenship? And the Republicans have always just wanted the border security, and the Democrats have always just wanted the pathway to citizenship.

SPEAKER_03 13:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

And what they found was both of their sides could double down onto their own respective bases and then demonize the other side for wanting the other. So the Democrats would say, we want to protect the immigrants, we want to protect the undocumented, we need a pathway to citizenship, but we don't ever put forth a border security plan. Ever. They never have in 40 years, up until up until the Langford bill, which became Kamala Harris's position. And the only reason that that happened, this is very important, is because Democrats were losing, they were getting killed amongst Latino voters on immigration.

Randy 14:08

But we could have had the first meaningful immigration reform bill happen just a couple of years ago, except Trump and the Republicans killed it for the sake of getting elected, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:19

Yes. And let's be very clear about this. It was not bipartisan, it was a Republican bill. The Democrats capitulated on everything. The Langford bill is a very conservative Republican immigration bill. It was Langford is one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, Senator from Oklahoma. And to show you how desperate the Democrats were to get the issue off the table heading into the presidential campaign in 2024, they literally adopted it. Kamala Harris adopted Biden said, take it, you can have everything you want. The DNC adopted this as an official party plank in their in their party platform. And like I said, I'm not assigning any virtue to what the Democrats did. They didn't do anything good. They got beaten. They were so bad on the issue for 40 years that when the Latinos finally had enough and said, Enough, you guys are out of control on the border. We're gonna go for Donald Trump. Then they said, forget it, take everything, take everything. I'm sorry, come back, come back, come back. And they were already gone by then. So there's there's no virtue on either side of this issue. Somebody who's been deeply involved with it for decades. There's plenty of blame equally to go around. And a lot of people go, How dare you? I I will have that debate all day long. Because the Democrats have always wanted to say the Republicans are just a bunch of racists, and there's something to that, but they've never offered any meaningful border security policy ever. And the Republicans are like, you know, well, we want the the great fraud in American politics on immigration is this idea that we can have we're for legal immigration, it's illegal immigration we're against. That is a complete quantifiable lie. And I can give you many examples why, but the most recent was what Donald Trump called for a 50% reduction in legal immigration. Legal immigration. You didn't hear one person say, no, no, we're for legal immigration. So the Republican Party's a dishonest operator here, too. There's no honest good faith discussions in this. They both politically want the issue to excite an anger and mobilize their base for elections. The problem is after 30 years, the Democrats lost that debate because the Latinos themselves said we want immigration reform.

Randy 16:44

There's a lot here. Yeah. Um now zooming out. I mean, it sounds so common sense when you talk about, you know, hey, Democrats want, you know, pathway to citizenship, Republicans have wanted secure border. That doesn't sound difficult to figure out, right? If you're not adults who can sit down and talk to each other and actually figure out what what I'm gonna have to compromise on, what you're gonna have to compromise on, and how we get to the best bill forward, right? Right. How do we now I'm talking about immigration, but I'm talking about everything in in our in Congress particularly. How do we get back to, or can we get back to the point where we can actually work together in bipartisan ways where we're not just trying to get elected, where we're not just trying to give sound bites and give our base what they're looking for, which means that we're gonna get not get anything done. Is there a pathway back to actually legislating and doing the work of being a leader in the government?

Why Immigration Reform Never Happened

SPEAKER_01 17:40

I have a very different theory on this. I I wrote a book on it, right? Which is our democracy has to transform itself. And I think what the reason why I have a very different approach to this is I've somebody who's been involved for decades in our political system. The idea that we can reform ourselves out of this, I think is a laughable notion. Everyone's got their own ideas on reform. Citizens United, you know, campaign finance reform, ranked choice voting, get rid of the Electoral College. None of those speak to the actual underlying problems of our democracy and our culture at this point in time. But what is happening, which is very unique, is the emergence of this new voter group, young voters generally, but Latino voters specifically. What are you talking about, Mike? Well, let me let me explain it here. Latino voters, and we're gonna get into this part of the conversation more, they're the only swing voter in America left. Black and white voters have a differential, as we call it, a change in voting behavior that rarely exceeds 3%. No matter how bad the situation gets, white, blue-collar, non-college educated workers, they're not gonna leave the Republican Party. They're just not gonna do it. They haven't for a generation. Black voters, the same thing. They're not gonna leave the Democratic Party. Doesn't matter how bad the economy gets, how bad the border situation gets, foreign policy, doesn't matter. They're locked in. And that has defined basically every adult aged American's experience with American politics. But what's emerging is this Latino voter that is much less racially polarized, by definition, a blended race people, and has the lowest rates of partisan affiliation. And we have a delta of over 20% in the last two years, which means we are more than happy to leave either party. And one of the really peculiar things about this is observers, journalists, academics will say, Why are Latinos acting so apparently? What so peculiarly? Like, why are they behaving like this? To which my response to that is actually, Latinos are the only ones voting rationally. The system was designed to set up that when a party fails you, you reject the party in power. The people that are voting apparently are those that are so habituated to voting with a red or blue tribe that doesn't matter if we're at war for no reason, if we're in the middle of a pandemic killing a million people, if the economy is crashing, if our borders are out of control, nobody changes their mind. Like that's the bad system. That's the broken system. And so I believe the seeds of our hope, the hope for our future are literally within our DNA as an American people. And what is emerging is something entirely new that is challenging this broken political system that we have, and it's actually going to save it. It's going to save the American project.

Kyle 20:40

So connecting this back with the ice thing, how has that, in your view, impacted the Latino vote? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

Well, it's definitely been a part of it. I'm not going to suggest that it's not, but I think one of the fallacies about the ice rage and the crackdown is that it is somehow the main driving issue for Latino voters. It is not. And this drives a lot of you know people crazy because we immediately, when we think of Latino voters, we want to think of a racially, ethnically focused issue. And it always comes down to immigration. Always, always, always. And that's a narrative that, again, has been pounded into us for decades. The truth is, by a two and a half to one margin, the polling is showing that Latinos are saying they want somebody to address the affordable issues facing them, cost of living issues, economic issues, by two and a half to one over ICE and immigration reform. That is a big number. So it's not even close. This is foundationally and fundamentally a sign of both parties' inability to address the needs of the working class, a multi ethnic working class specifically, but the working class broadly. But our need to again say, oh, it's got to be about ICE. ICE is absolutely terrorizing people. It's absolutely having an impact in the community, it's absolutely pushing Latinos into. To uh the Democrats' arms again away from the Republicans. But it is not the key driving issue. In fact, I would argue if the economy was doing quite well, we wouldn't be seeing the type of movement away from the Republicans that we're seeing. We would see some for sure, but we wouldn't see these massive 20-point shifts that we're seeing. And you add the economy, the economy crashing, the ICE terrorization, and that creates this perfect storm of throw the bums out.

Kyle 22:27

Yeah. How recent is that 20% data?

SPEAKER_01 22:30

It's everything since Donald Trump took office.

Kyle 22:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 22:32

And it's reflected here. That's a great question. And it's broadly, you know, if you look at, for example, the uh off-cycle elections where New Jersey votes for a governor and Virginia voted for a governor just a few months back, what you had was Latino voters in Passaic County, northern part of New Jersey, which are Dominicans, Dominican Republicans. 30-point shift away from Republicans. This was one of the counties that went the most Trump, is now leaving him fastest. Manassas County, Virginia, which is more Central Americans, 22-point shift away from the Republicans, away from Trump to the Democrats. Then you look at New York City, where Mam Donnie's elected, Puerto Ricans, same shift.

SPEAKER_02 23:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

Miami mayor's race in December. A Miami Latino Republican man running for office against a white progressive woman, shift over to the white progressive woman. Mexican Americans in the Rio Gran Valley with James Talarico's contest or in Prop 50 in California, Mexican Americans shifting 20 points to the left. So this is the first time I've ever seen all of the diasporas, all the different countries of origin moving in the same direction. And as I was sharing with the reporter this morning, for the first time I can say quantifiably Latinos are monolithic at this moment in time, but they're monolithically anti-Trump. They're all moving against them.

Kyle 23:58

And do we have good, like strong qualitative data that it's because of economic stuff?

SPEAKER_01 24:05

Oh yeah. It's overwhelming. It's not even close. Yeah, uh yeah. Well, I mean, we have qualitative data. We also have quantitative data. You can see it in focus group work. So yeah, it's it's it's it's overwhelming. And like I said, I'm not saying that that this stuff that the ice raids and the social media stuff isn't having an impact. It is, but it's not what's driving the vast majority of the sentiment.

Randy 24:29

So here's a question. This is a pretty sensitive question. I'm trusting, Mike, that you're trusting in my where it's coming from. And uh we if we got to edit this out, we can. But can you help a white, you know, liberal-ish? You know, Kyle would be like the liberal. I'm like the liberal um of the group. But can you help a white liberal man like me just understand um Latino voters? Because when I look at what's what happened in Minneapolis, even if you took that out of the equation and you just listen to the rhetoric coming out of Donald Trump's mouth and his his lackeys, it's ugly and it's stereotypical, it's racist, it's hate-filled, it's it's terrible. And then you see what happened with the fascist police force, militarized police force wreaking havoc, killing people, devastating families, people being evicted currently out of their Minneapolis homes, Latinos, because they couldn't go to work for a month straight, right? All these things happening. Can you help me understand how a Latino person or family or community looks at all that happening and says, I'm still more motivated by the economy and affordability in the housing crisis? Like there's part of me that understands it, and at the same time, I still am like there's some blockage here. I don't understand that.

SPEAKER_01 25:53

That's a great question. There's nothing wrong with that. There's no reason to need to edit that question out, but I I I I will answer it in great detail. But I I want to ask you a question first. How can white people put up with that?

Randy 26:05

Yes. Yeah.

Latino Voters And Kitchen Table Economics

SPEAKER_01 26:06

It's a good question. Uh, we shouldn't. Yep. Yeah, correct. And that's ultimately what it comes down to because it's a human question. It's really not a race or ethnic question, and that's the way the question is perceived. Now, there is absolute like, yeah, yes, but yeah, but they're targeting all of you, they're looking at all of you. That's not the way Latinos see it. And um, I think there's some good arguments to be made for that. Um, this is many ways, I guess you could argue it's more about colorism than it is about racism, as they say. If you've got somebody who's been here for four or five generations, the the likelihood it doesn't speak, you know, uh any Spanish at all, which you know is the fastest growing segment of the Latino electorate is the US-born, primarily the third and now a discernible fourth generation voter. They lost the Spanish language two generations ago. They haven't they don't speak any Spanish. And for all intents and purposes, consider themselves, you know, um a typical American. And I say typical American because that's literally the phraseology that's used in when polling when Pew uh research does their their assessments of how people perceive themselves. So now look, there is no question, also, so so the intersection of that and this moment in time, because we are witnessing for the first time Latinos starting to have a negative impression of being Latino in America. It is happening. Like just in the last couple of months, just for yeah, just in the last couple of months, and it's the first time in ever Latinos have ever responded that way. Interesting. So there is there is a changing perception that it's not as important about how I feel about my Americanness, it's an awareness that there are a lot of people in America that don't see me as fully American. And with Trump in the White House, that matters because of what we're seeing. So there is uh, I think uh an increasing consciousness that it doesn't matter whether you've been here five generations or five years, they don't see you any differently. And my good friend Alex Badilla, U.S. Senate from California, who was accosted and thrown on the ground, kind of learned that lesson, right? If they can throw an MIT graduate, a US-born guy who is a US senator and treat him like that, that wouldn't have happened to an Adam Schiff at the same time, right? The junior senator from California, because he's white. And that that matters. And I that that consciousness is rising. But so I don't want to sound like I'm saying contradictory things because I am a little bit, but you will find in conversations with me to answer these questions, there's almost always something contradictory to my answers because by the definition of being a blended race, people, we are contradictory. Okay, we just are. It is a it is on virtually every issue, every issue, one notable exception, Latinos are in the middle between black and white voters. Every issue. The the one being a pathway to citizenship, we are more open to it than black and white voters who are less responsive to immigration. But on every issue, when I pull Democrats, the moderates in the survey are Latinos. When I pull Republicans, the moderates in the survey are Latinos. Interesting. And if you look broadly at surveying both, the people in the middle are overwhelmingly Latinos.

Randy 29:27

So just a little commercial, if you want to know more about these realities and the data behind it, go get Mike Madrid's book called The Latino Vote. That's what it's called, right? Latino century.

SPEAKER_01 29:38

Damn it, you were so close. Here's the advertisement. The Latino Century. I go all through all of it. We did read it, I promise. Yeah, it's a data, it's a data-driven book, but it is readable, it's accessible. Absolutely. But uh thank thanks for the plug. Yeah.

Kyle 29:50

So let's talk about the midterms. What do you think is the most likely outcome at this point, particularly among Latino voters, but just in general?

SPEAKER_01 29:57

Well, let me talk general first. I think there's going to be a historic pickup of uh democratic seeds. Now, let's keep in mind what what month are we in? April right now. There's a there's a long way to go. Sorry, I'm just losing track of uh we're still very, very early, but I have never seen the fundamentals of a race this bad for an incumbent party except for maybe uh 1994. A little older than you guys. No, 1994. Oh, I remember it. You remember the 94 cycle? Okay, yeah. So you'll remember that the Democrats lost the House. That was New Gingrich, right? That was the rise of Gingrich. Yep, it was 1994. It's the first time Democrats lost the House in 40 years. This is back when, you know, now we have parties taking over all the time, switching parties. That had never happened in four decades.

Randy 30:41

Wasn't that the birth of the Tea Party?

SPEAKER_01 30:43

No, the Tea Party came comes in the uh Obama years, 2010. 2010 time frame. But so there's the palpable anger, there's a palpable volcanic emotion on the on the left. You're gonna see very high turnout. You're seeing a historic anti-Trump, anti-Republican, anti-incumbent break with independence, and you are seeing a very depressed Republican base, depressed in terms of turnout. All three of those things start to put states like Texas into a competitive position. It starts to put the Senate in play. And I think the Senate is very much in play. Um, so even though we've done a huge, you know, redistricting, very partisan redistricting in the midterms since Trump's first midterms, which were historically bad, I think it's going to be equally as bad. I think you could potentially see a 30, 35-point majority uh for the or vote swing with um seat swing with with the Democrats, which is which is extraordinary with with the tight redistricting that we have. The Latino voter, if you want to talk about Latino voters really quickly, the the the fault, the the the bad assumptions that the Republicans made after the 2024 elections were that this was part of a new governing coalition. These Latinos actually are really MAGA, they just kind of figured it out. I was saying back then, like the day after it happened, and it's in the book, that's not true. There's no data saying there's no polling, no hard evidence saying that Latinos are becoming more MAGA or more Republican. There's a lot of data saying that they're becoming less Democratic, that they're moving away from the Democratic Party, and they will they will punish the incumbents when things are going bad. That means when the Democrats are in power, they're gonna lose and Republicans are gonna pick up. But for the exact same reasons that Kamala Harris lost the Latino vote historically in 2024, the Republicans are gonna lose historically amongst Latinos in 2026. Exact same reasons. The economic ones, economic immigration overreach. Yeah, it is an issue, it's not the primary issue, but it's overwhelmingly economic, and then um the overall chaos, just the just the the environment. Is the war popular? No, is the the the Venezuela stuff is not popular. I'm sure we're gonna invade Cuba before the midterms. I have no doubt in my mind because it is the one thing that is pulling well with Cuban Americans in Florida, overwhelmingly will come back, and he's got to get something back. If they invade Cuba, I think we take over Cuba. I don't know if it'll necessarily be a direct military invasion, but because of the humanitarian crisis, we will go under some thematic about needing to be there and take control of the island. There will be some military component, but I don't think we're gonna be like F-35 hitting Havana. I think it will just be under the guise of humanitarianism, but we will either decapitate the government or make sure that it's under basically like a U.S. protectorate. That would be my prediction by before November. Okay.

Randy 33:39

Can we put a little bookmark there? Because I want to come back to Cuba, Venezuela, Greenland, all that. But sticking on the midterms a little bit, yeah. Um MAGA, there's this phenomenon. So we live in Wisconsin, which is a one of the biggest swing states, if not the biggest swing states.

SPEAKER_01 33:55

The most important, the most important.

Randy 33:57

And so we get blasted by all this. But what we find is that in a presidential election that Trump is in, it's a very, very close race, and probably it tips towards Trump and MAGA Republicans, right? Yeah. Um, when it's a midterm election or a Supreme Court election or a gubernatorial election, when Trump's not involved, in other words, it's a completely different race. We just had a Supreme Court election happen just a week or two ago. Trump, yeah, Trump won by one point, I believe, one percent, less than one percentage point in 2024. The Democratic, basically the liberal Supreme Court candidate, won by 20 percentage points just a week or two ago. I mean, just a couple of years. Big deal in Wisconsin. What do you attribute to, and what can we say about the future then of in a 2028 uh presidential election that Trump hopefully is not involved in? Does that mean that those MAGA Republicans, the working class, more rural perhaps even, I'm thinking in Wisconsin voters who really turn out in droves for Trump, but not so much for other people? What do you think that translates to, particularly in the swing states, in future presidential elections? Are we gonna see is MAGA forever kind of solidified and they're gonna turn out to vote for JD Vance or Marco Rubio or whoever they're gonna put out? Or is it just if Trump's not involved, it's a completely different ballgame?

SPEAKER_01 35:18

There's a few different questions there, so let me tackle all this. Sorry about that. And at the end, I'll give you my shocking prediction of who the likeliest Republican nominee is gonna be, and it's neither Vance nor Rubio.

Randy 35:28

Okay.

Midterms Forecast And Wild Candidate Picks

SPEAKER_01 35:29

Um what you have to understand, and if you look at Wisconsin's trend line, it's really more about negative partisanship with marginal voters than anything else. There's the the party out of power that is perceived to be out of power is going to do marginally better than the party in power at any given time. Okay, and that's not atypical of the way swing voters broadly vote anyway. They're voting as a check to be like when the Democrats are in power, we got to make sure that they don't get too crazy and go too woke-left or whatever they whatever. When Trump is in power doing his thing, uh, we're gonna vote for Democrats because that's what it's gonna be. But remember, 95% of these voters are already locked in. You're not persuading anybody. It's one of the great misnomers of our elections, is the amount of money that goes into our political system has an extraordinarily de minimis effect because you can't, you literally physically cannot contact the small sliver of voters that are actually moving enough to make a difference. Um, especially when we're spending billions now, worth the B billions on our national campaigns. It's like we're talking about 100,000 voters determining the outcomes of these races. You can't spend a billion dollars. You literally can't. Like you could hire people to go like hound them on their way out their front porch to their car to be like, vote for X, vote for X, but you there's just not enough ways to communicate with that much money. Sorry about that, that you know, rabbit hole just went down. But my point is if you look at the world through negative partisanship, meaning people are voting against things, against parties, as opposed to voting for something, I think the world starts to make a little bit more sense. Doesn't make it better, doesn't make it a healthier democracy, but at least you come to some better understanding of why Wisconsin is voting marginally one way or the other, because everybody else is so locked in. It's why this victory, this most recent victory and the margin is so indicative of the move on the ground. And it comes back to those three things that I said: democratic uh emotion, anger, and motivation to show up and vote is volcanic. Historically bad numbers with independents who are breaking hard, hard, hard historically hard towards the Democrats and depressed GOP base. So now the next question is what becomes of MAGA after this? Is Donald Trump a unique threat to the Republic? I believe that he is. I believe that what has happened is the Republican Party has, when it moved away from its classical conservative foundation and basically capitulated to a cult of personality, it will shatter in a million different directions, or at least dozens of different directions, rather than be a typical fight about conservative versus moderate. We haven't had a conservative versus moderate fight for over a decade now. And what that means in real life is watch what's happening with the right-wing media system. It's Ben Shapiro versus Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson versus Mark Levine versus Meghan Kelly and now Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes. There's very little ideological commonality here. This is really kind of the malignant manifestation of the politics of theater, of performance and networks, and followings and audiences matter than party ideology. And so when people have a larger following, it's kind of like what a party used to be. People would follow the party because it used to be a philosophy of government. Now it's just I trust in that person and that brand, and I want that person to be my leader.

Randy 39:01

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 39:02

And it is happening now, the left is starting to catch up in that same way. It's why the Democratic Party is having such a difficult time figuring out who it is, because the elites are still trying to play the game in this old way of understanding the right-left spectrum. And that spectrum doesn't exist anymore. And you're seeing the rise of these new influencers and these younger generation folks who are just more populist and anti-establishment and anti-republican and anti-capitalism and anti-Israel, basically saying, We're throwing all of that out. And the old establishment is kind of saying, Well, wait a minute. We're the institutionalists, we're the ones that believe in government and in these systems. We built them, we've been running them. And this younger segment, this generational split, is saying, We're done with that, we're not going to do that anymore. And so I think that the Democratic Party is as ripe for a hijacking as the Republican Party was with the Tea Party.

Randy 40:01

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 40:01

It's about to be hijacked because you're seeing, even with Trump's historic unpopularity, the generic ballot for Democrats, Democrats are less popular than the average Republican by a wide margin on the generic ballot. But when you look at why, it's because a lot of people who are going to vote for the Democrats anyway just don't like their party. They hate the Republicans, so they're going to vote for Democrats, but they're not at all happy with their party. And that the last time I saw that dynamic, this inversion, this backwardation was the Republican Party before the Tea Party movement, when they were just like, throw out the globalists, throw out the Wall Streeters, throw out the leather shoulder, you know, sold guys in$10,000 suits who've been telling us about free trade and tax cuts and country club Republicans, get the pitchforks, and you know, we're we're taking our country back. That's where the DSA movement is at in the Democratic Party. And I think you're gonna see that in full display after the Democrats win the majority in 2026, after November. Is that you following?

Randy 41:05

Yeah, uh totally. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 41:07

I'm not asking you if you agree. That's just kind of the way I'm I'm seeing it.

Randy 41:10

You did dangle a carrot and said that you were gonna tell us who you think was gonna be the nominee.

SPEAKER_01 41:14

I think Tucker Carlson is gonna be the nominee. What? What? Yeah. And I'm gonna tell you why. It's because of what I just said, which is whoever has the most pervasive cultural following with a network of emotional backers is what is going to be definitive of our of our politics now. To think about our politics in this next president, whoever it is, as Republican versus Democrat is a real misunderstanding of how this works. That structure will be with us for a while, but the characters that are going to emerge in both parties are not going to be the people that we think they are. So, like on the Democratic side, there's this like, is it Gavin Newsom, or is it Andy Bashir, or is it Tim Walt or is it Amy Klobuchar? Now, it's more likely to be uh Jon Stewart than it is anybody else. You're serious. I'm 100% serious. Whoa.

Kyle 42:11

Have you I laugh knowing that I would 100% vote for John Stewart. Yeah, of course you know, of course you know.

SPEAKER_01 42:17

And why would you? Stephen Colbert or smart guy, good champion for your cause. He's he knows what he's talking about, he knows how to, you know, own the conservatives, and he you agree with him on values, and and he's he speaks to audiences that's that a guy in a suit from California doesn't. Like experience is a liability in a populist age.

Randy 42:40

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 42:41

So the fact that you know you just said, I mean, rightfully, it it's funny, it's laughable, it's a joke. That's kind of what you know when Anne Coulter was saying Donald Trump is gonna win this thing, and I was like, You're you're a nut, you're a wacko. She's 100% right because the dynamic she understood was the Republican Party had become so unmoored from its establishment and had so lost faith in its leadership that they were looking for a cultural warrior, and that's what the left is looking for right now.

Randy 43:06

So are you saying Tucker Carlson? I can see Tucker Carlson a little bit more because the Republicans already have Donald Trump, right? It's already happened. You like but John Stewart, um are you Well, I'm not let me say this.

SPEAKER_01 43:21

It could be it could be somebody like John Stewart. I'm not saying that John's gonna run. It could be Stephen A. Smith, it could be Mark Cuban, it could be Oprah Winfrey, it could be you know Hassan Piker, it could be anybody.

Randy 43:30

Jen Saki, whatever, yeah. Um are you are you hearing other people, and it's not to say that I don't trust you, Mike, because I respect your your knowledge based on the right.

SPEAKER_01 43:39

You don't have to agree with me. You don't have to be nice to me either.

Randy 43:41

But but no, I I'm interested. I work in politics. Are you hearing other people say Tucker Carlson might run and if he does, he's gonna win?

SPEAKER_01 43:49

Yeah. Yes.

Randy 43:51

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Is Tucker giving I don't listen to Tucker at all. Is he giving hints that he might run?

SPEAKER_01 43:58

Well, the fact that he is the the Lead attack dog against Trump right now, and it's visceral. He's basically calling him the Antichrist right now. And follow me here. Like, this is what happens when things grow malignant on this populist cancer on our body politic. Understand this. Trump is now the establishment. He's pro-forever war. He's hiding the Epstein files. The there's a wide swath of that MAGA tuned-in political base that is so anti-this stuff, who put their faith in this guy, who now feel betrayed by him. Like, think of what they have swallowed for this guy. I'll lie to myself for you, I'll put up with your indignities, your crassness, I've lose my family over you. I'll lie about vaccines and science for you. And then it turns out on the two main things that they could hold on to the Epstein files and anti-war, he's been the worst on. The only person who is against both of those and saying this is a charade and this guy's sold us out, is Tucker Carlson. And now you see Meghan Kelly fall in line, and then you see Candace Owens fall in line, and then you see Alex Jones from InfoWars fall in line, and then you see Nick Fuentes from the Nazi wing fall in line. These are very, very big hitters in the conservative, it's not conservative, in the Republican Party space. And so, yes, uh, I look, I believe that you know, when Ronda Santis got into the race in the primary against Trump, I was like, this isn't this is not gonna turn out well. You're not gonna be people aren't looking for a return to competence and experience of a governor with a good record, like which I think is being generous to Ron DeSantis, but anyway, yeah, of course, yeah. But what I mean precisely, that's fair. But what I'm saying is that by Republican standards, you know, he was the one that you know got rid of masks first and yes, free floor, you know, whatever it is.

Randy 46:04

He's very committed to the I to the ideology, yeah.

MAGA After Trump And Reagan Comparisons

SPEAKER_01 46:08

Where woke goes to die or whatever goop goofy stuff he was saying. But uh I was absolutely convinced if Tucker wants this nomination, as he was as as Trump was trying to resurrect from post-Jan 6, and remember, his numbers weren't great for the first six months after January 6th. Republicans were ready to turn the page. And Tucker could have, I believe firmly, he could have swooped in and won the nomination. I think he had a longer arc of what he was trying to accomplish here and and saw that. I I believe that he will absolutely you're gonna start hearing his name being bansied about shortly after uh the midterms. Wow, wow.

Randy 46:46

Okay. Do you have more?

Kyle 46:47

I'm still processing.

Randy 46:49

Sorry, guys. You thought you thought you wanted to invite Mike Madrid here. We're gonna make a soundbite out of that Tucker Carlson moment and just like squeeze the juice out of that baby. Um, so you said Trump was the establishment.

SPEAKER_01 47:01

Well, he has become the establishment for MAGA, yeah.

Randy 47:04

Yeah, yeah. So this could be a simple, quick no answer to this, but we're almost uh approaching 50 years since Ronald Reagan was first elected president. And that was a transformative uh administration. I mean, like I I grew up, you know, I was born in 1978, so I, you know, I've I've heard my whole life about Reagan Republicans and how, you know, conservatives just hold up Ronald Reagan as just this figure, this person to be emanated and to emulate and to just fall in line as a Reagan Republican. It was a transformative force for the Republican Party. Yeah. Is MAGA in Donald Trump what this generation's Ronald Reagan? In other words, is Donald Trump kind of a flash in the pan? He was the cultural phenomenon that identified with a bunch of people, and I kind of think a lot of people vote for Donald Trump who normally just don't vote at all.

SPEAKER_01 47:59

That's correct, that's true.

Randy 48:00

So is that is he just a flash in the pan, or is he a transformative force in the Republican Party similar to Ronald Reagan? Will we be hearing Donald Trump? Will we be hearing people say he's a Trump Republican or she's a Trump Republican 30 years from now?

SPEAKER_01 48:16

There are there is a segment of of the American populace that will be taking flowers to his grave 20 years after he's dead. Yes. Is that that is a that will be a small, peculiar, and shrinking share of Americanness. And I also believe that Donald Trump will live on for hundreds of years, as long as the Republic goes, there will be people that will hearken back to him the way they do for Andrew Jackson, the way they do to some of the ugly elements of what American presidents have been, because he he's a nativist, he's just an open nationalist nativist, and that will always be with us. And he gave that a face, he gave that an era in American history, and there will always be a hopefully small element of our people that will revere that. That is very different than what Ronald Reagan did. What Ronald Reagan did was, and we can, you know, let me let me talk about the imagery and the the branding and why I became a Republican. I was born in 71, so I'm I'm I'm in very formative age when Ronald Reagan becomes president. Ronald Reagan, um, I don't think people remember how bad the Carter years were. They were really bad. Like we were talking about 12% inflation. Yeah, you had odd and even license plates to get gas. There was an energy shortage. You couldn't get gas, guys. You couldn't, if you had you had to look at your license plate, and if it ended an odd or even number that told you which days you could get in line and wait two or three hours to get gas, pri it was it was a very Iran had our hostages. It was a really bad time to be an American. It just it just was. Yep, and this guy comes onto the scene for whatever reason, for however it was done, and it really was mourning in America. Things the country felt very different about itself, and I think in many ways, the rise of Ronald Reagan allowed us to kind of turn the page on the Vietnam era, the stagflation era, the weakness abroad era, and America kind of really started to embrace that sugar high of American flag and screaming eagle Americann-ness, which was never real. It's not real patriotism, but it was something that America really needed. It just did, in my opinion, just did. But he also did it based off of a philosophy of government. Incidentally, it wasn't one he adhered to very well. Government grew under Ronald Reagan, the debt grew under Ronald Reagan, but he would talk about this philosophy and talk about America in a way that we hadn't heard since probably FDR was rallying us to fight against global fascism. And again, there's a lot of debate as to why the Soviet Union fell, but there's no question that his posture helped lead to the end of the Cold War. Sure. And the Cold War was again for those of us that grew up and remembered the Cold War as a defining part of our view of the world, this was a big deal. Like we won. America won. And so the fact that Reagan, I think, brought in a different ideological era. Conservatism at that point, as much as you may have disliked it or disagreed with it, it was truly an intellectual movement. You had Charles Krauthammer, you had George Will, you had Thomas Sowell, you had some of the Friedman. Again, a lot of these things you can discredit or toss out, but that's been replaced by Diamond and Silk and Charlie Kirk and like you know, clowns, which is what the Trump era is. Yeah, and so the reasons why they were held in reverence are for foundationally different reasons. And again, you can't connect the thread. I'll have this debate all day long with people, uh, Reagan conservatism with Trump nationalism. They're not the same thing. The fact that the Republican Party hollowed itself out and why it hollowed itself out allows for an understanding on how Trump could hijack the party. And um, so what does that mean going forward? I I don't believe for a moment that there will be there will be a a dominant force in GOP politics that is going to say, let's make America great again, again, which incidentally was Reagan's tagline in 1980, right? Really, where Roger Stone was in 1980. But what I do believe is that the Republican Party is going to balkanize, it's going to fracture, it's not going to split, it's going to atomize. And so there's not going to be much of a Republican party to hold him up reverentially and say, that's our guy. Let's get back to that again. There will be a faction in our society that does. There will probably be a marginal party that is a MAGA America First Party. But I don't believe that it will be a generational reverence, the way we used to kind of put Reagan up on a pedestal and be like, that's what America was at its zenith.

Kyle 53:36

Good. What do you see the timeline of this atomization being? Help help me square that with what you just said about Tucker Carlson carrying the torch.

SPEAKER_01 53:44

I think you're starting to see it happen now. Um, you're starting to see the fact that, and again, it's hard to see it because we are so drowned in what is happening day to day as we started the conversation with. But if you look back at just the past five or six months, let's just look at the last six months. We had the House of Representatives, Republican House of Representatives, basically unanimously turn on Trump on the Epstein files. He couldn't hold back the Republicans, so he basically said, Well, I'll agree with it. It was my idea in the first place, because they were going to buck him on the Epstein files. Then Marjorie Taylor Greene leaves. Then you start to see uh the eight House senators, I'm sorry, the eight senators defy Trump on the ICE stuff and shut down the government, start the process of shutting down the government. Then you see uh Tucker Carlson turn on him and Candace Owens turns on him and Megan Kelly turn on him, and and all of these right-wing huge voices in the right wing media ecosystem. This is just in the past few months, it's coming apart. We're we're we're we're we're used to just seeing these things in silos, but if you look at the trend line, it's already happening. Now, as he gets more feeble and he gets older and he is and more senile as he is, the vultures are gonna start circling more politically. So when you're gonna really see a change is what after the midterms, when he's a massive political liability and loses both houses, and Ted Cruz wants to be president, and Rand Paul wants to be president, and Tucker Carlson wants to be president, and Marco Rubio wants to be president, and JD Vance wants to be president. A couple of them are gonna do this early dance of Trump and Trumpism. But if the war is still going, and I think it will be, and it's going bad, which I think it will be, and the economy is in tatters, which I think that it will be, you're going to have one of them, Tucker, be anti-Trump. And when he is anti-Trump and he starts to consolidate the anti-Trump lane, and the other five or six are trying to be as Trump as Trump he is and beg to kiss the ring for Trump's endorsement, that's when things are gonna just start shattering. That's when things are really gonna foundationally change. And and incidentally, I don't mean to alarm people, I think that's gonna be the most dangerous moment for the Republic. When Trump starts to not only lose power, but when he's losing power and and is gonna be forced to leave without his own on his own he's gonna start losing as an unpopular president, he's gonna be pushed out by his own party, he's not gonna have any of that. I'm also not convinced that he doesn't try to get Ivanka to run or Don Jr. to run. Because it's a family business. And Donald Trump, after this is over, I mean, there's a lot of the anti-Trump sentiment in the country is gonna be palpable. And and the only way he can protect himself from a whole lot of ugliness and exposing the corruption and the illegalities is gonna be to control the apparatus the way he has.

Kyle 56:47

Yeah.

Iran War And The Strait Of Hormuz

Randy 56:49

So we're we've been talking for a while ago. I'm gonna bring it all down. Well, no, no. Long healthy pause. This is all fascinating. Um, can can we move on to the Iran war?

Kyle 57:01

Yeah. So you mentioned Iran. I had a question on here about that. Anyway, so many angles we could come at this from. You just said that you think it will still be continuing and going badly come election time. That is terrifying. Uh terrifying. Why do you think that, I guess? But also I wanted to ask you, how is it playing amongst the average Republican voter? Like we have all those names you've been rattling off who are turning against Trump on this. That's significant. Has that, to use a Reagan phrase, trickled down? Trickle down. So like significantly. Because it seems to me, I don't have any data on this, but it seems to me the average Republican is weirdly not as against it as maybe I would expect them to be.

SPEAKER_01 57:43

That's exactly right. For the moment. For the moment. Um, and again, I also don't want to suggest like they've somehow broken the fever and they've got religion and realized that he is responsible for gas prices as they're about to escalate or the um you know inflationary pressures that people are feeling. There's still a lot of cognitive dissidents. And you're hearing Donald Trump playing that's blaming Joe Biden. Like their their path, their their argument is this was Joe Biden screwed this up that bad. And the the MAGA, you know, folks will believe that. A lot of them will, a lot of them will believe that. So there's always going to be that base of support, like I was saying. But we have to understand the the we are learning the lesson that Russia learned when they invaded Ukraine, which is the kinetic war is is a um tool of the last century. And even where the kinetic war.

Randy 58:35

Can you describe kinetic war? Can you define that real quick?

SPEAKER_01 58:37

Where there's actual tanks on the ground and and bombs dropping and bullets flying. The nature of warfare in the digital age is gonna be much more impactful through currency fights, through misinformation campaigns, through destabilizing governments, through public opinion, infrastructure attacks. Yeah, exactly. You're gonna accomplish a lot more than you are by destroying things and killing people. Kinetic war is kind of the traditional understanding of war. Okay. And there's when so when Russia invades the Donbass, they start to remember, oh, yeah, we haven't done war in a long time, and it was very expensive in treasure. It's also very expensive in lives. They're a little bit less concerned about lives lost, but they're very worried about money because it's very expensive. War is expensive, as we're finding out. And the US, you know, we the Ukrainians are holding them off by fighting the war somewhat asymmetrically. They they, you know, we were arming them and holding them back in the kinetic war, but you know, we were also, at least during the Biden era, we were squeezing them with sanctions. And we were, you know, the Europeans, NATO gets bigger, and we start using economic power and markets to kind of limit their approach. Um, the and the Ukrainians start to you know do things like develop really incredible drone technology because they know that the United States is not going to be a reliable partner to arm them to fight it the way that they were, so they've got to fight it asymmetrically, and they're incredibly successful right now with that. The Russians currently hold less land than at any time since a month after the war. They're pushing them back and they're doing it with drones, they're not losing as many Ukrainians. The Russians are still throwing bodies at at bullets as part of their old way of war strategy. The Iranians are doing something very similar. What they what the Iranians realized was war was coming. It's just, you know, Israel wanted war. The United States was going to be complicit in it. What does war look like? We know they're going to strike, they know where they're going to hit our our facilities. Um, so they developed you know longer-range missiles and to to attack who uh Israel certainly, but but they were attacking our allies, who we have the architecture to defend. That was the agreement with the Saudis, essentially, to get us on the petrodollar back, the deal that Kissinger cut in the 70s. Sorry if I'm going too far down the road here. But that once that happens, and once we start hit, once they start hitting the oil capacity, the oil infrastructure of our allies, our allies start going, wait a second, what's happening here, right? Bring this to an end. Like, stop this. And then the Iranians controlled the Strait of Hormuz with just a bunch of mines.

Randy 1:01:16

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:17

And so what that does is it starts to create this economic choke point. And and then everybody starts suffering economically, right? So we are then, you know, shooting down these cheap armaments with expensive patriot missiles, like for every missile they put up, we're spending, you know, a billion dollars to their million dollars, and they're just like, we'll do this all day long. We'll just bleed you out for your own treasures, but we're also going to put all of your economic partners in a lot of pain. And that's why NATO's like, we're not getting involved in this. And then Trump tries to fight back and say, well, if you want to get through the Strait Armors, do it yourself, which alienates them even further and realize that's not hurting them as much as it's hurting us. So now we've got to get back into a different type of war because the Iranians were fighting it asymmetrically. They could never win a kinetic bilateral war. They've known that, they've learned that. So they built up capacity to fight us and hurt us where it matters. The basic strategic consideration that the Iranian regime is doing right now is we believe we can hold up losing bodies, lives, and cities longer than the United States can hold up losing the valuation of their dollar, their economic relationships around the world, and their standing as the global um economic force with the petrodollar. And it looks like they're probably right. Which means this war is going to be a longer economic war. There are not planes bombing Iran right now, right? That's not happening. But what is happening is that choke point is squeezing us more and more and more. And so we want to deal more than they want to deal, right? Which tells you whoever wants the deal is is losing. And we want the deal. Yeah.

Randy 1:03:09

So you don't think that Republicans will put immense, immense pressure on Trump as the midterms approach or even beyond that, as the presidency, you know, flags towards the end, and Trump won't just want to hit the eject button and call it a victory and you know weave a false narrative.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:29

I I think the damage has been done because we haven't felt the economic impacts yet. We're going through the next few weeks. But recovering from what the damage has already been done is going to be hard enough. And by the by the way, once we feel it through the summer, um the the the the bad fundamentals politically set in people's minds on who's to blame for this rightfully are going to be in concrete. There's nothing you can do to change it. The Republicans who have turned have already turned. And the difference between this moment and every other moment for the past decade is there's always been this delicate balance between needing the MAGA base, but also enough independence to move in this direction. So you can't live with Trump, you can't live without him. What's going to happen after the midterms is Trump is going to be more liability than asset. Yes. And that has never been the consideration. It's always been, at worst, a 50-50 proposition. Now it's going to be he's more liability than asset. And Trump has never operated in that environment, nor have any of the Republicans. So they will turn on him, but I don't think that they're going to turn on him in a meaningful way until after the midterms.

Randy 1:04:39

Did did the Trump administration just completely brain fart about the Strait of Hormuz? Or what's what like it mystifies me that some of the smart people or not, but people who are supposed to know this shit, just headed into this and are like, oh, about that whole waterway thing, this is gonna this is this is a bit of a mess. It just seems so foolhardy to me. Tell me help me make sense of it, Mike.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:05

Well, I I can't uh because there's no sense to be made. Um what you said, yes, the answer is incompetence. Pete Heggs is completely over his head in this, he doesn't know what he's doing, and he surrounded himself with sycophants to tell him that this is what we're doing because that's what Donald Trump wants. Yes, they they think that you know running a military is about you know getting warrior tattoos and face paint and you know running down the hills screaming freedom, right? They're not they're not you know the warrior ethos, they're not professional soldiers, they're not people who who do this with an understanding that bombing things is easy, it's dealing with the aftermath, which is the nightmare. I mean, those are the those are the lessons that we've learned since the Marshall Plan. You know, you've got to go. We had we had to go in and rebuild Europe, and we did it aggressively with a we got a lot for it. We got you know to the protection guarantee that kept the world stable for 50. 50, 70 years, but that's a massive investment. You can't just bomb Iran, it's 92 million people, a very sophisticated, diverse, advanced society. This is not Afghanistan. And and and that's what we're figuring out. It's like, oh, we thought that people would rise up. I mean, how many times have we said that in the Middle East? We thought they would rise up and greet us as liberators. Like, there literally was no plan after killing Khomeini. So they killed him and nothing changes. And then they're like, oh shoot. Like, what what do we do? And that was there was no, there was no post-war planning for that inevitability. Yeah. That very likely scenario. So I mean, I hate to answer the question by saying, yeah, it was incompetence, but yeah, it it's been incompetence. And it's not just on this war, it's on basically every policy that they pursue.

Randy 1:06:54

I don't want to keep treating you like, you know, a personified crystal ball here, Mike. But two things that I'm interested in your take on. One is in both having to do with Iran. Um, one is what do you think, like what are our daily lives gonna, the impact on our daily lives gonna look like? What is whether it's gas prices, the way, the way our lifestyle around cars and transportation and and planes, all of the things? How how far reaching are the effects that we're gonna feel from the Iran war? And two, what is Iran gonna look like after this is all done? Are they gonna be stronger because of this? Are they gonna be, you know, be headed towards a nuclear state? Are they gonna control this the Strait of Hormuz in ways that can completely economically shifts power in globally? What are we looking at here, Mike?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:41

Well, I hate to say the answer depends, but it it depends. And again, the reason why we are trying to get to a deal, we are trying to get to a deal, is because we see the economic impact coming very, very quickly, and it's gonna hurt us far more than anybody else. Let me tell you what the nightmare scenario looks like. The nightmare scenario is there's no deal to open the Strait of Hormuz, and that Iran controls the toll booth, right? And starts charging people to go through their oil first, then others. Anything that's gonna have a direct benefit to the United States will be stalled or shut down. But what happens in that scenario that people aren't thinking about is this it's really would mark the end of the petrodollar. And what that means is all the global exchanges for barrels of oil around the world are done in the US dollar. We moved to the petrodollar shortly after we went off the gold standard. Literally, what happened was we realized we were overspending the goal from the gold that we had in Fort Knox. The dollar was devaluing because we were getting into so much debt to finance the Vietnam War. That what we did was we sent Kissinger to the Saudis. And what we did with the Saudis is we said, we're gonna cut you a deal. If you make sure that all of the oil that you put out is exchanged in dollars, we will be your military. We will defend Saudi Arabia, we're gonna put bases there and we're gonna protect you from everybody else, and we're so vested in your commodity that we have no reason to ever leave, and we're not gonna double back on you. And and your guarantee is you trade the world's most valuable commodity, oil, in our dollar, so we're both joined at the hip. Okay, that creates the petrodollar system. That's essentially what has kept the dollar the most powerful currency in the world. Interesting. Once that changes, once India starts saying buy these with rupees, or the Chinese start saying, let's execute these trades in yuan. Once the BRIC nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China start using other gold-backed currencies, the value of our dollar is going to I don't want to say collapse entirely, but you could see literally 30% declines in the quality of American standards of living. The dollar could just so for so people that understand this.

Randy 1:10:28

This is worst case scenario.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:30

This is worst case scenario, but it's it's it's not it's much better than 0% chance. This is why we're panicking. This is why we keep sending JD Vance, go get a deal. No, they don't want a deal, go back and get a deal. Because every day that goes by, this scenario gets more likely. And that then, like in our money right now, it says it's backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. That's not exactly true. It's also, by the way, that's why we went into Venezuela, fellas. It's not because we wanted the oil production per se, it's because the Chinese were working with Venezuela to start taking Yuan for their oil. That's why we were protecting our currency. It wasn't that we needed the 20% oil reserve. I mean, we'll take it, but the real problem was if the Chinese started executing oil trades with the Venezuelans outside of the dollar, that's an attack on our currency. That's an act of war in the digital age. That's kind of back to our previous part of the conversation. That's why we had to do it. And they're thinking. That's a choke point. They choke us out that way. Uh, you know, we're the the dollar's in trouble. And if the dollar starts to devalue by 30 percent, I mean the politics of our of our country get very unstable. And that's that's the war that Iran is fighting right now. That's the leverage that they have on us. They can't compete with us and kill us. Maybe I I'm looking, I'm not, I'm not don't again don't want to scare anybody. Could they do a dirty bomb? Could they do terrorist acts? I suppose, but that's not what they need to do. That's not gonna help them, that will make it worse for them because then we'll retaliate militarily and hit them, hit them, hit them. What we what we what they do have is tremendous leverage over the global currency right now. And if you start to see uh you know other currencies trading in oil, executing trades in oil, especially the Yuan, the Chinese Yuan, it's a whole new economic system that we're entering. And um, no living American has ever experienced that.

Randy 1:12:39

So, what are the odds? Last question for me about this. What are the odds that we see a weaker American weakened America and a strengthened Iran at the end of this? Is it like probable now?

Hope And How A Nation Heals

SPEAKER_01 1:12:52

We are definitely going to see a weakened America. We already are. I think the rise of China is the real is is what's happening. China's meeting with the Taiwanese right now. In fact, I wouldn't, again, not to alarm people, but I wouldn't I wouldn't doubt if a deal is cut between Trump and Xi in China to say take Taiwan and we'll take Cuba, and no one's gonna say anything about it. Not that that's a good trade for us because it's a terrible trade, but at least gives Trump some sort of weird saving face to not invade because we can't defend Taiwan right now. Like we're we we can't take on Iran right now. Like so, so that you know, that's the the the world saw how weak we really are by by trying with this bravado BS. That's what Heg Seth and Trump showed the world is how incredibly weak we are, how little leverage we really have. The real strength that we had is our dollar, and even that can be brought to bear. Will we see a stronger Iran? I mean, arguably, I just I think that that conflict at some point is ultimately between Israel and Iran.

Randy 1:13:56

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:57

If if Israel's if Israel's political leadership changes, I think that equation could change. But Israel's Israel's gonna have to change at some point. And you know, that's a whole different episode, but but yeah, yeah, was that a sufficient answer?

Kyle 1:14:13

That was, yeah, thank you. Yeah, the Israel layer is a whole another complication that we haven't brought into it. From reporting I've heard, apparently, Netanyahu just talked him into it like that. There's your explanation.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:25

I I think that's exactly what I think. Or forced them. Yeah. Or or leveraged them with all sorts of different leveraging opportunities. But it was one, it was one or the other or both.

Kyle 1:14:37

Yeah. To really just lift the conversation here, I want to ask one more thing. Uh, given the increasing desperation that this administration has to be feeling in this situation, given you know what's gonna happen to the economy here real soon if something else doesn't happen, or regardless, I mean, damage has been done. It's gonna gas prices are gonna be what they are for a long time, even best case scenario. That's right. Uh, given Trump's increasing senility, as you've been talking about. How concerned are you about him ordering war crimes?

SPEAKER_01 1:15:09

I'm gonna answer that by saying there's almost nothing that Trump hasn't tweeted that he hasn't followed up with. And I I'm saying that because you can't say that it's not on the table. He's saying it's on the table, a tact the use of a tactical nuclear weapon. Um, I I think that the sign that violence itself, the kinetic war, is de-escalating, is very helpful and promising that it's not going to get to that point. But I don't see a way for us to gracefully get out of this because Iran has basically we will have bombed Iran, and Iran will end up in control of the Strait of Hormuz, which they didn't have before the war. I mean, and that's a massive concession that we're gonna have to make to get out of the war. They're not gonna just give that up because the only concession that they would make to give that up is basically a nuclear weapon, and he's not gonna do that, he can't do that. So, what does he do? He has to slink out and and and somehow suggest that they got something out of it, and I don't know what that something is. That's the other problem that we have in our negotiations, which is what does success even look like after you've screwed this up that bad? There's nothing that you can get out that we didn't already have before when you said it was bad. So that that then that environment could see an escalatory framework towards conflict. The good news is, like I said, I think enough people have backed them down and pushed them down to say that's not only not appropriate, that's just that's that's genuinely a sign of of true weakness, which it is for him just to put that out there. But I don't think the the fear of of a tactical nuclear weapon is necessarily going to be a function of escalating violence in Iran because of Iran's pushback, although we just discussed that, I think that's definitely a factor. I think the likelihood of him being as erratic and paranoid and uh and challenged within his own party after the midterms is gonna create a very precarious moment for the Republican for the world, because I have no doubt that somebody who has the malignant narcissism that he has does not see, imagine, think about, or has ever considered a world without him. And if he is in a place where he is brought down, it doesn't matter anyway. It's Donald Trump's world and we're all living in it. So if it goes down in a in a blaze of fire, okay, it's a good way to leave the stage as any, because when I'm done, it's all done anyway. It's my world.

Randy 1:18:03

Well, on that note, on that bright note, yeah. Uh so we started. Started the drink tequila. Yeah, yeah. Good tequila at that. We started this conversation talking about Minneapolis and the mess that was. We've just finished talking about Iran. We we kind of hit a high little mountain peak with Jon Stewart and Tucker Carlson. That was kind of fun. But Mike, can we finish off with just throwing you a nice juicy fastball down the middle? Um we are just normal Americans, normal people. How do we begin healing our nation from the inside out? Like, I I have very little hope that the people that we're talking about who are in power or who could be in power are going to do that. So, how do we begin doing that, Mike?

SPEAKER_01 1:18:49

I'm this again, and this is really funny because sometimes when I have these conversations, I was like, whoa boy, now what do we do? I'm despondent, there's no hope.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:57

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:57

And then I say something that kind of goes like, how dare you say that after all this? I'm actually quite optimistic about where we're at. And I'm gonna tell you why. We have needed to have as a culture our basic assumptions about who we are challenged for a very long time. Okay. From the end of the Cold War, we just thought it's all gonna be unicorns and rainbows going forward. And what we found as an American people was without a common threat, without a war out there, we don't really know who we are. And it's freedom, whatever you say about it, we know that every generation of Americans have had to fight for and struggle for freedom. This struggle for freedom and for our values is a unique challenge at this time, but the struggle is the same. And every generation of Americans that have successfully struggled for freedom have pushed the arc of progress forward. Think about that. Every time, whether it was through our Revolutionary War, whether it was through the war of uh of our civil war, our great struggle over slavery, whether it was about um you know Jim Crow, you know, desegregation or or or the second world war, every time we have been challenged in an existential way, and the forces for good have won and we will win, we have pushed who belongs at the table to a new, more encompassing place. That's what's gonna happen. So, my advice to everybody is we are building the character of a new nation that's going to emerge right now because we're struggling for it, we're fighting for it. It's like faith, it really only works when it's tested. You have to your faith has to be tested to make it deeper and stronger. It's the same thing with characters, individuals, and characters as a nation. So when when you're when you're feeling despondent about the world in this country, what I would urge people to do is think about what that new uh phase, this new chapter in human and American history is going to look like. And then practice that because it is coming, it is emerging, it always has, it always will. I think that's the great promise, whether it's as Americans or it's as a species or as a people, that is what the arc of progress looks like. It has never been easy, it's not supposed to be easy, it's the struggle that defines us, it refines us, it makes us better human beings because we know what the price of losing it is. And that is the gift that we are now able to give to the next generation of Americans. We have fought for it, we have successfully beat it back, and it wasn't by a lot, and it has never been by a lot. It has always been by just enough, and that's what forces us to be a better people. That's so good.

Randy 1:21:50

Mike, I know you've made a lot of fans of listeners on our podcast who just enjoy hearing from you. Where can where can people get your stuff?

Where To Follow Mike Plus Tequila Wars

SPEAKER_01 1:21:59

Yeah, the best place to thank you for that, fellas. It's always great talking to you. I feel good about our conversations afterward. I hope I hope I left you on a on a better note because I genuinely believe that. I I write mainly, I live on Substack. Uh, my Substack is called The Great Transformation. It's called that because I talk about changing institutions in this time of incredible change and the great fears that we have. I try to look back historically and provide an understanding of what happens when political systems change, what happens when monetary systems change, what happens when culture changes, what happens when religious devotion changes, and say, we've been through this before. Here's the tools that we have learned. It's a little bit different at this moment. But fortunately, as human beings, we started to document and write our history so that later generations could learn from us. And that's kind of what I tried to accomplish there. So follow me at Mike Madrid at uh the uh the Substack at uh the Mike Madrid at the Great Transformation if you're interested in the things we've talked about today.

Randy 1:22:55

Brilliant. And can we have you back on around the midterms and or when Carlson throws his head in the ring?

SPEAKER_01 1:23:03

Sorry about that. I know that messed with you a little bit. We loved it. We loved it. Yeah, yeah. No, I will uh I well, I will be back anytime you get to ask me. I love being with you. Love talking to you guys.

Kyle 1:23:11

Are you planning to run for anything?

SPEAKER_01 1:23:14

Hills. No, no, I will never seek public office. I think, I mean, I I think there's virtue in it. I would never put myself through it because it's just too brutal in the public square now. But there are so many other ways to make good positive change. Yeah, what you guys are doing, talking about faith, talking about spirituality, talking about the goodness in us. All of those are the right things to do. But what I have found in this journey since the Lincoln Project is so many people will come and say, you know, I'm I I don't really like I can write, but that's I'm a writer. What can I do? And I'm like, right, or I'm a musician, what can I do? Make beautiful music. Like we all literally be the best you in these moments. And that is what is transformative. And I don't mean to sound goofy, it is absolutely true. We need to hear it. That's that's what builds a better society, a better man humankind. That's what makes us better is by us individually being better, be true to yourself, bring the gifts that you have to bear. It inspires people in countless ways that you can't even imagine. And I think it ultimately heals us as a people.

Randy 1:24:22

Okay, last question. This might be into the before the last, last, last yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like I'm a fisherman, the last cast is never really the last cast, right? But um, how is the have you been able to work on the tequila wars family? Um Yeah, thank you for asking.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:37

I do have a proposal out there. Uh, the the debate right now that is happening is is this a um screenplay, which I really want it to be, or is it a or is it a novel? And the publishing industry, well, they're both they're both in deep trouble right now, right? But I think it's more of a visual medium. And what what we're talking about is this book that I want to write, uh, most of it's the framework of it is is completely done. Now it's just trying to find uh you know a buyer for it. Is the the the family rivalry between the Cuervos and the Sauzas? These were two you know tequila producing families that were very real people. Jose Cuervo was a real person, the sauzas are real people. Um, those families are still there in the tequila valley in Jalisco, Mexico, and over for 200 years they were rivals between famine and pestilence and revolution and prohibition and technological change, uh, Romeo and Juliet stories and murders and mayhem and all the good stuff. So I'm working on that story. Um, but thanks for asking. I'm uh I'm uh appreciate you remembering that.

Kyle 1:25:36

I can't wait. Seriously.

Randy 1:25:38

Mike Madrid, thank you for joining us so much.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:40

Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. Yeah, good to see you.

Randy 1:25:56

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Kyle 1:26:12

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Randy 1:26:20

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Kyle 1:26:28

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