Charlie Sykes & Josh Cohen

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:00)
Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast, and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And the former president, Obama, says, the US is worse off now than before the war in Iran. We have such a great show for you today. To The Contraries, Charlie Sykes stops by to talk about President Trump declaring himself to be a God King. Then we'll talk to Ettingermentum's Josh Cohen about how he thinks the midterms are shaping up. But first, the news.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:33)
So, Molly, we are starting to see what the Democrats' disadvantage for taking back the houses. We did get some rough news up in the state of Maine in a contentious district.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:44)
So this is his Maine second district, which is represented by Jared Golden. It's a very, very rural district. It's the part of Maine that is the most conservative part of Maine. It has been a seat that Jared was sort of a unicorn in that seat because Democrats have really lost rural voters recently. And so the thinking was this was going to be a hard seat to hold on to. The DCCC had a candidate who was they thought would have done better. The Republicans had a candidate that they wanted. The Democratic candidate that they wanted won. Now the Republican candidate is Paula Page. He is pretty wacky Trump before Trump guy. The thinking is it's going to be hard for Democrats to hold on to this congressional seat. This was always a seat that it was going to be hard to hold on to. But what's important about this story is it's showing what the new, very gerrymandered everything looks like. And it looks like a lot of the seats that Democrats have held may be starting to go out of reach. And a lot of them are seats in these states where they went in and just took them out because Trump told them to. So Emanuel Cleaver, he's now in a Trump plus 18
Darren Soto in Florida is in a Trump plus 17
You have Marcy Capter in Ohio. She's now in a Trump plus 10 So we have Democratic districts that are being flipped. So the question is, and there are a bunch of these seats in Texas where the legislature redrew to support their guy Donald Trump. I don't know what happens here, but there's real headwinds. There are anti-democratic headwinds that Republicans did at the behest of Trump. And Trump isn't as popular as he was when he ran in 2024
And so they're using the 2024 maps. So he probably will underperform those numbers. But again, there's a fair amount of cheating here. And what's important about this story is the cheating and that we're watching Republicans cheat here.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:05)
Yep. Speaking of Republicans cheating, Trump is doing his thing where he goes and campaigns for what he wants, tries to pressure Republicans into it. And this time it's getting rid of the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act because he knows he's in trouble with this.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (3:17)
Yeah. So Donald Trump is really, really worried about the midterms. I mean, look, he did some really anti-democratic stuff, but even he understands it's not going to be enough. And so he really wants John Soon to get rid of the filibuster because he thinks that if he passes the SAVE Act it'll be so hard to vote he can stay in power and Republicans can stay in power. There is zero chance that they're going to kill the filibuster, especially now. Let's just math this out for a second. 53 Republican senators, right? Three have lost their jobs because of Trump. That's the YOLO caucus, Cornyn, Cassidy, and Tillis, OK?
So already you only have 50 votes for anything. So you need 60 votes. That's 10 more than 50 And then you have a bunch of senators who are not necessarily YOLO but who are in no way on the Trump train. And so he would need about 15 Ken Paxton's in order to get this passed. So it's not going to pass.
We talk about this later in the episode with Charlie Sykes, but I don't think Trump understands just how much goodwill he has burned in both the Senate and the House and in Punchful, which only reports on Congress. And they have reporting which shows that a lot of Trump's people are now saying that the President of the United States is just not good at being leader, and they should have someone better, and they're turning on him. And you know, that doesn't work when you've already turned on a bunch of different Republican senators. You have someone like John Cornyn, who's a Republican from Texas, who raised a ton of money and who has like relationships with a lot of Republican senators. People are not going to just give up their loyalties for you. And part of the thing about the Senate is it doesn't work like the House. Though the House doesn't work like the House anymore either because there have been so many things that have ended up being passed as discharge petitions, which was something that never happened before this period when Donald Trump really installed someone as Speaker of the House who doesn't know what he's doing and doesn't have loyalty among his caucus. So what's going to happen here? Next week, the House and the Senate are back. We're going to see Bill Poulty is DNI right now.