Rick Wilson & Robert Faturechi

**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 for the sixth consecutive month in a row, the United States has accepted only white refugees. We have such a great show for you today. The Lincoln Project's own Rick Wilson joins us to talk about Trump melting down on Meet the Press. Then we'll talk to ProPublica's own Robert Fattorucci about Trump's doom choice for DNI, Bill Pulte, but first the news.

**Rick Wilson** (0:31)
So, Molly, Axios has this interesting article and graph about how hard it actually is that Republicans have made it for the Democrats to get a majority. This is an old thing we used to see in North Carolina, that they would need to get like 60% of the votes to get half the House. And now we can see this in actual numbers now that most of the dust has settled on a bunch of this redistricting fuckery they've been doing.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:53)
Yeah. So basically, Democrats have to over perform in order to win the House. We saw this, again, this is the point of gerrymandering, is to make it so that it's harder for Democrats to flip the House. And this, and look, remember, this is a joint effort between Republicans in the legislator, the legislature, and Republicans in the Supreme Court, who stripped Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and made it so that basically disenfranchised all of the many people who gave their lives for civil rights in the 1960s. And it is just totally disgusting. Before the redistricting push, Democrats only needed to outrun Harris' margin by 3.1 votes points to win a House majority. By the way, that's still not a democracy, but whatever. Now they have to run 4.9 points ahead of Harris' margins in order to flip the House of Representatives. It will probably work this year because Democrats are running so ahead and Donald Trump is doing so much unpopular stuff. But eventually, this is going to, and probably in 2028, completely fuck over Democrats. So it is really, really, really just completely criminal on the part of Republicans and anti-democratic.

**Rick Wilson** (2:26)
Yep. So we have always seen that California is the slowest state to count votes in America on a very regular basis. A very big state, but particularly, you can't believe how late these come in when we saw Hillary Clinton win the popular vote. We saw that that number just kept going up as California counted votes. This has been going on for a long time. Trump obviously had a meltdown about it on Meet the Press today that you and Rick Wilson talked about in the next section. But the DOJ is going in to investigate and waste our tax dollars as they find out infrastructure is bad and we haven't invested in it.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (3:04)
Basically, this is so interesting for any number of reasons. California just takes forever to count votes. Should it? No.
We should have infrastructure so this doesn't happen. Do we have the infrastructure? No. Is this a failure of Republicans? No. It's a failure on the part of Democrats. It's a one-party state, Democrats, super majority, and it's a failure on the part of everyone. But the point is now Spencer Pratt, who is a complete lunatic, is going to say that the system was rigged against him when in fact, what's really interesting, and if you're Karen Bass, you'd rather run against Spencer Pratt than the more lefty Democrat, because I think that the city of Los Angeles is 65 percent Democratic.

**Rick Wilson** (3:49)
The estimate I saw was plus 50 score, yeah.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (3:52)
Yeah. So this is not a city where Spencer Pratt should win as a lunatic who posts AI, unless he's trying to like appeal to moderates. And that I think is a real, I think what his people don't totally understand. And remember also, a lot of his people don't necessarily live in Los Angeles.

**Rick Wilson** (4:13)
Yeah.
They keep talking like this is their corner. And when you spend any time in Los Angeles, like you and I do often, you know damn well that it's just like being where we live, where it's pretty hard to find somebody who's really into the guy who puts crystals to his head, tells Alex Jones, he's the greatest journalist of all time, and says that we're reaping dogs in the streets all day.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (4:34)
Yeah. It just shows a complete lack of understanding of the district he's running in. That said, there's also counting going on in other parts of the state. We are Steyer fans. Let's just be honest here. And everyone's mattered us for being Steyer fans, which I guess I don't know why, who knows. But you know, I think Steyer is probably not going to catch up with Steve Hilton. But there's a world in which it happens, right? Or is it? I think it may be too late now.