Stephanie Ruhle & Robinson Meyer

**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 a new survey from the European Council on Foreign Relations says only 11% of Europeans view the United States as an ally. We have such a great show for you today.
MSnow's Steph Ruhle stops by to talk about Trump loving inflation. Then we'll talk to Heatmap's own Robinson Meyer about the opposition to data centers and AI in America. But first, the news.

**Jesse Cannon** (0:34)
So, Molly, we had not very surprising results in the primaries last night. Graham Plattner is a nominee. But I think that the really interesting thing is that three out of the four Republicans who forced the release of the Epstein files are now out of jobs.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:47)
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of really interesting takeaways from this, from Tuesday's election results. First is that Graham Plattner won his primary. What does that mean? It could mean any number of things. So far, his scandals have not hurt him. His campaign has had a bunch of revelations, but so far, he's been okay. Early returns show him with about 72 percent of the vote. That's pretty close to his poll numbers before these headlines. That means that really he has so far been okay. Preview of some of the ads that are coming down the pike are pretty scary.
The Republicans are all in on saying that he's a racist, sexist, Nazi-loving, domestic abuser. Plattner is a combat veteran. I mean, I don't know what happens here. You know, there are people who are comparing this to Trump and Hillary, right? That Collins is like a long-time DC person and Plattner is an anti-establishment firebrand. I don't really think it's the same thing, but there's some history rhyming here. The question of whether or not Plattner wins, I think, is really about whether he can get the low frequency voters, the populist voters, the ones and twos, the white men who feel they've been abandoned, the people who voted for Trump and voted for Zoran. If those voters register and those voters come out for Plattner, then Plattner wins. If they don't, then he doesn't and that is going to be the big thing.

**Jesse Cannon** (2:21)
I'd be curious though, do you think though, a lot of people, particularly like after that Sean Trendy stuff, after 2016, thought that Trump's people just wanted their way. They wanted the madness to stop, the swamp to be drained. And it seems like the Democrats are having that moment with Plattner. They don't really care about his flaws. They just want him to vote the way he says he's going to vote.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (2:44)
Well, we don't know, right? I mean, this is the thing, especially in Maine, where the polls have been so screwy. And we saw the candidate, Sarah Gideon, who ran against Susan Collins last time. She was way up. She was up like eight points. So the answer is, I don't know. I still think Maine is this state where it's like two states. It's this very poor, rural state that's a little bit like West Virginia, and then this very affluent coastal state that's a little bit like Massachusetts. And so the question is, does the more rural part of state come out from? And one of the things that, remember, we talked to someone who was a Maine-based reporter, who was talking about how there's this thing about Maine, are you from Maine, are you a Mainer? And his father was sort of a country house Mainer, but he was born in Maine and they feel that he's a Mainer. So and Sarah Gideon, there was a lot of complaints that she was not a Mainer. So again, remember, these races are about controlling the Senate, but they're also about how people feel about their Senate candidates and their congressional candidates. And so, you know, it's possible that he gets people to show up for him and he wins and none of this matters and it's possible that it just totally derails him and that we have months and months and months to go.

**Jesse Cannon** (4:09)
So let's go down to a totally different electorate, South Carolina, where Nancy Mace, not going to miss her at all, she finished in fifth place. Unbelievable.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (4:18)
Nancy Mace is like a very, very chaotic chaos agent. I think that's fair.

**Jesse Cannon** (4:26)
That's one way of describing it.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (4:29)
Like I heard her speak probably four years ago and thought like, oh, this person is really smart. Like she used to give the speech where she talked about the most important Supreme Court justice to her was Ruth Bader Ginsburg because she made it so she could go to the Citadel. Is that nuts?