Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Old and Shrinking Republican Party | Morning Shots LIVE

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

Andrew Egger and Bill Kristol went live to discuss the terms of Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund for his fans, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche defending the outrageous fund to Congress, Trump’s slipping poll numbers. Plus, amid a war in Iran and surging gas prices, Trump has his eyes on one thing: the ballroom.Make today a good day, and get yourself some Soul gummies. Right now, Soul is offering 30% off your entire order! Go to https://GetSoul.com and use the code BULWARKTAKES.

Okay, I believe we're live. Hi, everybody out there. Welcome to Morning Shots live coming to you on Tuesday morning, as we do every Tuesday morning for The Bullwork. I'm Andrew Eger. That's Bill Crystal. We write the Bullworks Morning Shots newsletter every Monday through Friday. Comes out at 9-ish, 9-30-ish somewhere in there in your inboxes. And on Tuesdays, we come here live to talk about the news. Thanks for joining us. There is a lot to talk about today. As usual, most of it has to do with the precedent that we can't seem to get away from, even if we'd like to, no matter how much we might want to talk about. about other stuff. But before we do that, before we talk about the president's polling and his institutional support in the party and how this all relates to this really extraordinary settlement fund that we're going to talk a lot about, we've been talking a lot about, we're going to talk a lot about. We wanted to first really quick talk about the other kind of horrible headline out of yesterday, which was this mass shooting at a mosque in San Diego, apparently carried out by a couple of young people, a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old. Bill, can you just talk a little bit about what happened and what we know about it so far?

I mean, we know there was this terrible attack. And, you know, all attacks are terrible and all murders, obviously, are terrible. But there's something about an attack on a religious institution, especially one perhaps that has a school on its premises. And so you have those, a video, that video of the little kids, you know, being shepherded off campus. And it's terrible. So it seems like three people have died. Security Guard seems to behave really admirably, someone who's been a bit of, apparently who had the position for 10 years, himself, a Muslim who volunteered to be a security guard to help protect his community and did apparently protect it and perhaps avert many more deaths.

So a terrible thing, and I trust, I don't want to be political about it, but I will say this, I was pleased to see, I just was Googling around a bit this morning, the official Jewish community organization of California. I can't remember this proper day, but it's the kind of umbrella association of the Jewish groups of California. obviously been plenty of tension between Jews and Muslims in the world and in this country, to some degree, over the last years, last decades, forever, expressed a very strong statement of solidarity and sympathy, which is appropriate, I think. I hope that that will come from all religious groups. And so a terrible thing. We've seen it and we've seen attacks on Christian churches. We've seen attacks on synagogues, obviously. We've seen attacks on mosques.

It would be nice if it all stopped. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't, I hesitate a little bit to weigh in too much about it because I have not, I haven't written about it in our newsletter or anything. I don't want to get over my skis or anything. The one thing that stood out to me about this attack, and I guess it's just kind of a grim thought. I guess maybe in some ways it's a good thought, but it's just strange that we've been in this era of everybody grappling with these mass shootings for so long that everybody's got kind of policies in place for this sort of thing now. And this is an instance where, you know, the policies, that this institution put in place exactly to, you know, limit the damage if something like this, God forbid, wherever to happen, seem to have done some good. And I guess that's, I guess in some ways that's a good thing. And some, like you said, the security guard acted heroically. And in some ways, it's a pretty bleak thing just because, you know, you, you'd prefer to get out the other side of the era. So we'll turn off from that. But obviously, we're thinking about everybody affected by that. We're praying for everybody affected by that.

And that's all we'll say about that shooting right now. I'm not going to say turning to more cheerful stuff. None of this stuff is cheerful. Less immediately tragic stuff. It may be stuff more to get mad about than to be specifically more sorrowful about. I don't know. You can be mad about a mass shooting, too. It's all so bad.

All the news is so bad. We're sorry you all have to deal with it all the time. We don't really like dealing with it all the time. I guess it's nice that we're all sort of together to deal with a lot of bad news. But let's turn to some different bad stuff. Let's turn to first, I guess we'll get to the polling in a little bit here. But let's talk about what we've all been talking about for a few days now because there's more new stuff in the president's settlement fund. This all first broke on Friday when ABC News was reporting, maybe actually Thursday, Thursday afternoon.

ABC News was reporting that this was coming, that Donald Trump was going to drop his lawsuit against the IRS. is very silly $10 billion lawsuit over the leaking of his tax returns a few years back by an outside contractor for the IRS who had access to them. Trump was going to drop that lawsuit in exchange for his people at the Treasury Department and the IRS agreeing to set up this $1.776 billion, quote-unquote, anti-weaponization fund to basically give out grievance payments to anybody who, who can plausibly claim they were targeted by lawfare or weaponization of government during the Biden administration, basically to a lot of Trump allies who got in legal trouble or even just

sort of political trouble during the Biden years. That was reported. ABC reported it was coming. Even I'm curious what you think about this bill, because even when it was reported by ABC, it just seemed so shocking, so like completely shameless and ridiculous. And obviously it's Trump we're talking about. You don't want to be surprised by the guy. But I did sort of wonder, maybe there's like internal disagreement about this. Maybe somebody's leaking this to ABC ahead of it being finalized in order to spark the kind of blowback that will make them reassess, make them take a step back. When it was first reported and we wrote about it in Morningshots on Friday, did you think,

no, this is just what's going to happen? Or were you maybe a little more Pollyanna-ish like me that maybe they would sort of step back away from this one? I thought it would happen because in the second term, we can talk more about this, the degree to which Trump, every shameless idea they have, they execute, apparently, no matter how much it would have been viewed as not just improper and inappropriate, but illegal and really terrible to do, a real violation of law and norms. They seem to do that in the second term. Actually, I was surprised that the General Counsel of Treasury resigned, and he seems to resign over this yesterday,

which is nice. Now, he hasn't said anything. So again, we'll have this principle we've seen, or practice we've seen in the Trump second term where decent people do leave. We've seen quite a lot of that in the Defense Department, for example. They also seem to feel weirdly constrained about saying anything about why they left. And this person is a political appointee at Treasury, been confirmed by the Republican Senate and been there seven years, seven months. So far as we know, carrying out all kinds of other policies that are pretty dubious, honestly, at Treasury. But this was a bridge too far.

So I think you were right to think this is a bridge further than some of the very bad bridges we've already crossed. But as you point out, and you should talk more about it in warning shots this point, really an excellent piece. I mean, the degree to which this is a slush fund for Trump, it doesn't even have to go, you almost were too nice in describing it. It doesn't even have to go to anyone who's, we don't even know who it's got. I mean, Trump could find people who aren't agreed, and just to say they're agreed and give them the money. And there's no appeal, there's no guidance, there's no oversight by the courts. And then, of course, we'll see if Congress steps up to actually reassert its control over federal funds. But so far, that'll

Republicans may make that difficult. No Republican that I know of on the Hill is objected to this yet. So it's really, you're right to be appalled that it's a bridge further than the previous bridges, but maybe I was right to think that the whole point of the Trump's second term was to keep going across the next bridge, the next bridge down the road to even further lawlessness, you know? Yeah, yeah. As luck would have it, my understanding, and you can correct me if I'm wrong here, because Matt was our producer was talking about this a little bit. I think Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General is talking about some of this stuff in congressional testimony right now. And Matt was saying he has a bit of a clip of Senator Van Hollen grilling him a little bit over

this. So Matt, if you want to play this, I mean, this is really just happening as we're talking about it. And then we'll get in a little bit more to some of the details of the settlement here. Chairman, Mr. Attorney General, this is an outrageous, unprecedented slush fund that you set up. Simple question. Will individuals who assaulted Capitol Hill police officers be eligible for this fund? Well, as it makes plain, anybody is... Just let me know if they're eligible for the fund. As was made plain yesterday, anybody in this country is eligible to apply if they believe they're a victim weaponization. Mr. Attorney General, let me ask you this. Are there going to be rules that say that if you've assaulted a Capitol Hill police officer or committed a violent

crime, you will not be eligible. Why not make that a rule? I expect that, well, because I'm not one of the commissioners setting up the rules. I expect that there will be rules set up. Aren't you, Mr. Attorney General? Pardon me? You're appointing four of the five members. I am appointing four of five members.

You can finally set up the rules. I would hope you would make a rule that anyone convicted of assaulting a police officer of violent crime is simply not eligible. They should not apply. Well. So what Van Hollen is getting at there, and it's a really good line of argument, because it's totally true. is what we have learned that's new since yesterday. So yesterday morning, we got basically, it's

official, this is really true, ABC's reporting was correct, there's going to be this fund. But last night, we got, I guess some of it was yesterday in a statement from the Attorney General, and then last night the actual terms of the settlement fund were released. And what was made extraordinarily clear over and over again is it's genuinely worse even than people had anticipated in terms of how astonishingly sealed off and unaccountable and non-transparent, all of the mechanisms involved are. So what Van Hollen is drilling down on right there, and this is part of the settlement agreement, is that these commissioners, who acting Attorney General Blanche is going to appoint, and who can be fired, by the way, at the president's sole discretion without cause at any time,

at which point Blanche could appoint more. So they truly are just under the thumb of the president and his MOOCs. They are going to have complete carte blanche, no pun intended, I guess, to set all of the terms of the disbursement, all the rules, all the procedures, who's eligible, who's not, all that stuff. None of that is in the settlement. It's all 100% determined by the commissioners of this fund, and they don't have to tell anybody about it.

The settlement fund says they may or they may not at their sole discretion. sort of release those procedures and make them public. Even who is going to be applying, who is going to be getting money dispersed, all of these things, they are applying directly to that commission. The commission deals with them according to the commission's own procedures, and they don't have to make that public either. Again, this is part of, I don't know what we have. Let's just go through a couple of these screenshots that we have.

So here's one thing. This is from the DOJ's enforcement memo. Once the funds are deposited into the designated account, which means this 1.6. $7,6 billion fund, no longer part of the Treasury but in this fund. The United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds. So that's handy. Let's move along. This is basically, let's skip the applying for money bit. That's a little bit

less important. On to the appeals thing, this settlement agreement is enforceable and challengeable solely by plaintiffs, defendants, and the United States, which means specifically the two parties in this case, which are Trump in his personal capacity, and Trump's own MOOCs at the Treasury Department and the IRS. And then by the United States government. Really, it's Trump. Trump is the one who could challenge this arrangement. It's possible other people will find standing, but they are asserting the right that nobody has the right to challenge this but them. And then just to kind of put a finer point on that because the claims process is voluntary. There shall be no appeal, arbitration, or judicial review of claims, offers, or other determinations made by the

anti-weaponization fund. So again, just complete black box. And the thing I started to gesture at before is that the only person who needs any notification about disbursements made for any reason is the attorney general. The fund has to tell the attorney general confidentially who they've given money to and how much they've given. They have to send that to him quarterly. And again, it's confidential. He, in theory, I guess, could choose to release that. The president could choose to release that, but he's under no obligation in the terms of the settlement agreement to do so. Am I missing anything here, Bill? I mean, it just seems like it's one outrage piled on top of another. Yeah, totally. I hadn't even focused on the sentence you read earlier about no appeals for fraud

or anything like that. I think about this. This is disbursement of funds that the federal government has. It's this settlement fund that they have as an open-ended fund to actually pay people. So when the The U.S. government gets sued and has done something wrong. They took your land and didn't pay you for it or whatever. They defrauded you. Some U.S. government agency mistreated you and defrauded you. There's money there for the government to pay you, just like there would be in a corporation to pay you. That's what this is for. It's not for this kind of thing. But anyway, the fact that you can't sue for fraud or you can't be penalized for fraud apparently is unbelievable. I mean, if you defraud Medicare, you can, the government can go to court to both get its money back and to punish you. And that is true. Every government program, if you lie at a government contract, if you defar the Defense Department, if you claim to be X and you're not, if you claim to be a disabled veteran, you're not a disabled veteran and you get VA money. I mean, right, that is kind of part of running a government where the rule of law obtains and fraud is not permitted either by the government or against the government. In this case, an explicit, an explicit rejection of any such claims. So I suppose you could show up lie, say you were a January

six protester, say you went to jail, they didn't do very good diligence on your criminal records. you got the money, nothing can be done about it. So, I mean, the degree, as you say, of unaccountability, the degree of arbitrariness is really astonishing. It's not even really for, I mean, leave aside whether it's appropriate type of fund, which is ridiculous for victims of Biden's Justice Department. If they're real victims, they can sue in court like every other victim of the federal government, but they already could.

But no, this is a special fund for them. But it's not even limited to them, right? It can just be other people, Trump's the sides he likes, you know, every member of the proud boys. just could be given money. And no one could appeal. No one can challenge it. And as Senator Van Hollen pointed out,

it doesn't matter if you've been convicted of a violent crime. So it's really worth the outrage that you heap upon it in morning shots. And it's worth saying that Congress can stop this. I mean, Congress can and does often restrict the expenditure of federal funds and all kinds of programs. And just, you know, one point on that, there's been a certain amount of disingenuous stuff. While this isn't an appropriation, this is a standing fund. Well, Medicare isn't an appropriation. It's an entitlement, right? I mean, a million program, many programs are not annually appropriated. There's some rules are set up, and then the money goes out the door. And if it's more one year, it's more one year. That's why it's called entitlement. That's why they grow, you know, sort of unregulated by Congress. But they have rules. They have limitations. And indeed, Congress often imposes limitations. Very famous things, the Hyde Amendment. Certain funds have Medicaid funds can't be spent for on abortion. But I mean, there are many, many such things, obviously, right?

perfectly legitimate for Congress to say, we're happy that Justice Department has a settlement fund, has to be able to pay off what it's found to have done something wrong in court. But no monies in the settlement fund or any other monies in the federal fisc can go to this purpose, and they can specify it pretty concretely. I guess Trump would veto. I mean, I don't know if the Republicans, I mean, the Democrats really need to make a huge ruckus about this,

and make Republicans as much as they can vote on, to make them vote for this, you know, $1.77 billion, billion dollars, slash fund. It's a lot of money, Bill. I know. I know. It's a billion dollar. Hi, man. Yeah, I, this point you're bringing up is really good, and I want to highlight it because

I think, like, the corruption, the corruption angle and the fact that it is going to allies in this unaccountable way, all of that is so staggering that, obviously, you know, we're going to spend a lot of time and energy talking about that and condemning that. But even if, for the sake of argument, this were like a really actually noble cause that this was all going to. There was some genuine grievance, some real thing, all the conflict of interest stuff. You could set all that aside. We should note how astonishing of a short-circuiting and circumvention of the congressional power of the purse, this would still be even setting aside all the corruption and everything like this. And I talked to a guy, Matt Placken, who's the former Attorney General of New Jersey yesterday.

There were 93 Democrats who filed an amicus brief in this suit, basically pointing out how bad this is from a separation of power standpoint. But this is what he said to me yesterday. It is Congress who appropriates money. It is the executive who spends it. Put aside all of the potential corruption with this case. If the president can just sue himself and then settle with himself and then spend huge amounts of money outside of that appropriations process, why would any president ever go to Congress for money ever again. And that is a great point. It's just obviously true. The settlement fund that's being set up here has so little to do, zero to do with the actual lawsuit that's being

claimed, or that that was filed in the first place. Trump sued his own government over this tax return thing. He's the plaintiff in that case, right? He's the one who was supposedly harmed. And then and then he now drops this in order to set up this completely unrelated settlement fund to give cash payments out to friends and allies. I mean, he could have asked Congress to appropriate money to go to these friends and allies in particular if it was such a political priority for him. But he doesn't think he needs to do this because he has such tight control over his own Treasury Department, over his own IRS, that he knows that these guys will be willing to play ball according to this bizarre, unprecedented, really corrupt mechanism. And what we are learning about that mechanism is, again,

it's yet another of these things that we learn under Trump, certain parts of the government, turn out under current law to just kind of run on the honor system, that you will never actually see a president go through this mechanism because the judge does not seem, at least right now, it does not appear as though this judge is going to be able to challenge this settlement. She does not believe she has the authority to do this because this settlement was never docketed. It was never filed in her court. Ordinarily, again, in an ordinary adversarial process where you have the government on one side and somebody suing the government on the other side and both of them actually sticking up for their relevant interests, this would never happen. You would have the settlement

take place over a long period of time get hashed out in court. A judge would need to approve it and okay it. But in this instance, it turns out maybe not so much. It's just another one of these loopholes that Trump has pried open just by being his normal, shameless, sort of rule scoffing at unaccountable self. Yeah, it's even whether the loophole is just driven right. to any normal barrier. You know, it's interesting. Most of the settlement fund obviously is used for resolving, as you say, lawsuits where a judge has presided and there's been an adversarial process and so forth and a decision about how much and to whom and who's a part of what other plaintiffs, maybe there's a class action, in which case is a whole class that people get money. There have

been times, and this I knew, I haven't looked at in a while, but the happen times of the federal government has decided to compensate a whole group of people who aren't necessarily litigants, I believe in a court case, but who have been treated badly. There was Japanese reparations for those who were locked up during World War II, Japanese Americans put in the detention camps of World War II. And I think Congress passed that, I don't know, maybe two decades ago. I was sort of interested at the time because a lot of conservatives were against it, but I thought it was kind of reasonable.

Anyway, so I knew I haven't looked at this in a long time. But there was still a mechanism set up for who would get the money and how much, right? And there was, you had to show, I believe, that you were a descendant of, you. had been locked up or had been a dissentist of someone who had been treated unjustly in this way, and that there was a certain guidelines for how much people would get and so forth. And you couldn't, you know, fraudulently claim money, and the government couldn't arbitrarily give money to people who hadn't been victims of this. So there are times when it's not even, the federal fines are expended,

not as a result of an actual lawsuit. That's the majority of the cases, of course. But even there, there are guidelines. then there's also transparency and there's a chance to go to court and say, wait, they said no to me and I should have gotten the money or the opposite. You know, the government can go to court and say this person made up, you know, things and shouldn't get the money, right? So it's, yeah, the degree of, this is just arbitrary rule. I mean, this is just Trump has his money. Trump claims the money. This general counsel of Treasury sees what's happening and resigns. And I think really thinking this is basically criminal. I mean, this is, you know, behavior going up to the president.

but so far at least he's he's going to try to do it and we'll see if Congress really steps up on this or not and even if Congress steps up Trump of course could veto Congress and even if Trump vetoed it doesn't and I have no confidence that Trump would even follow the law if Congress says you can't do it you know I mean it's like one of these you know good good good Congress who's going to enforce this exactly the Justice Department I don't think so they're part of the they're part of the criminal scheme you know so anyway but this is it's a good I mean it's like good it's a very useful illustration of how far Trump is willing to go. Maybe we could talk about this now,

where I think you had originally thought we took it later in the program. I think it's such an important point. The degree to which Trump is just barreling through every norm and laws for that matter here in the second term, also the degree to which he's indulging all of his private kind of grievances, whether it's about the 2020 election or his private wishes to have ballrooms and so forth. It is really astounding, isn't it?

I mean, it just, it's not, it kind of goes beyond. a whole qualitatively goes beyond all the particular, well, almost all the particular things he did during the first term until January 6th, actually, which were more like, more like actually finding loopholes. Here, we're just barreling through everything, you know? Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it really is astonishing. I guess the one sort of grim comfort in all of this is that this shit sucks, but it's not popular. I mean, it genuinely is he loses more and more ground all the time. We're going to talk about that more in a minute. Before we do, before we turn to that, let me just say one more time real quick.

I'm Andrew Eger. That's Bill Crystal. We're with the Bullwork. We write the Morning Shots newsletter every morning, Monday through Friday, free in your inbox. We come live on Tuesdays for the Bullworks channels to talk through what's going on in the news. We've been talking about Trump's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, extremely corrupt, you know, pick your Madlib's adjective settlement fund that's going to go to pay out apparently a bunch of January 6ers. and who knows who else. We're going to talk a little bit more about how this all fits within

the broader picture of his collapsing popularity in a minute. Let me kick real quick first to an ad from our good buddy Sam Stein. So let's do that quick and we'll see you in a second. We've been listening to this show for a while. You already know how much I love Sol's out of office THC Gummies and their sparkling beverages. Now they've launched something new just in time for the summer. Mood Gummies. Soul is a wellness brand that makes delicious. Hemp-derived CBD and THC products designed to make feeling good simple. Soul's new mood gummies have precise dosing, clean ingredients and formulations designed for predictable effects so you can choose how you want to feel while staying in control. And let me tell

you, staying in control, kind of important. Instead of having a drink, you can take their uplift gummies for the perfect buzz for a night out or when you're just winding down. Take their mellow Gummy for fully unplugging. My personal favorite is the soul's balanced gummies, the perfect one to take when you're just listening to your favorite podcasts. That's why I take so many of them. I'm always listening to Bullwark Takes. Whatever the moment, there's a Soul mood gummy to match. Make today a good day and get yourself some Soul gummies. Right now, Soul is offering our audience 30% off your entire order. Go to getSole.com and use code bulwark takes. That's getsole.com promo code, Bulwark takes for 30% off.

Yeah, however many soul gummies Sam is taking, my sort of professional opinion is he could take a few more. I think, you know, get a, get Trump all, or get a Sam Stein all sold up in the office, you know, all of us, all of us underlings of his, that seems like a good deal. Anyway, we can move on past that. You wrote today, Bill, about what we were just talking about a second ago,

about the way that, I mean, the narrative of Trump having a floor that has seemed to hold steady for like a decade now. The bottom has fallen out of that narrative because the bottom continues to fall out of his popularity. And you pulled out a couple of really interesting things about the ages of various people in the party and things like that. Who is abandoning Trump?

Who's sort of sticking with him? Can you just kind of talk us through where we're at right at this moment in terms of the president's approval? You know, Trump's approval was sticky. And he dropped in his first few months when Doge and the sense that, oh, my God, he's a little crazier than he was in the first term. He went from his 49% on Election Day to basically down to the low mid-40s, well, mid-low 40s.

But he stuck there for most of the last half of 2025. So that was pretty, you know, and that was frustrating to people, right? How come Trump has this floor? He doesn't seem to go beyond. The big story of 2026 is he has steadily decreased. Not quite that the bottom is falling out because it's not quite been that abrupt in the polls that we've, CBS, I highlighted this yesterday, today, he goes down one point. I think we could probably remove this thing

from the screen here since I don't intend to read it. And not that I just want to make sure I can see you better. The, you know, he got down one point a month in the CBS poll, kind of very steadily. New York Times poll, which they do less often, but it looks a little more about, but even there, it average is out to about a point a month. Now, a point a month is not as fast as some of us

might have hoped the American public would kind of come to its census. On the other hand, a point a month adds up, right? We've been, what are we, five months into 2026. And if you go from 40% to, well, 41 or 2% to 37%, and some other polls from 40% to 35%. That's a big difference. If you're at 35, 37% Trump approval, you're a president, your party controls Congress,

you go into a midterm election. History shows there really no contrary indications that your party is going to get thumped in November and that I think Ron Brownstein has looked at this very carefully. 90% of disapprovers usually vote for the other. party, 90% of presidential disapprovers, vote for the other party in an off of your election. That would get you if you have 60, 63% disapproval. It gets you to 54, 55%, 56% possible vote against the Republicans, which if you do the math,

gets you to a generic ballot. It's about plus 10 or 11, which is actually the New York Times generic ballot. Yes, in the new poll they put out yesterday. So it actually sort of coheres, you know, the different polling and shows the Republicans were in very bad shape for this November, really due to Trump and due to the fact that the party is so tied to Trump. It's not as if you can really distinguish Republican candidates or Republican members of Congress from Trump very much. So that's, I think, the big news. The only other point I'd make is there is a pretty striking age gap among, well, a other two quick points,

one very quick, which is the Republicans are hanging with Trump infinitely more than the general public. The public is, you know, as I said, 3763 in the CBS poll against Trump. Republicans are still 80% for Trump. So that's a huge gap. I think I read somewhere, largest gap between the party loyalists and the rest of the public that we've ever seen. So that's pretty striking. And again, so Trump has a loyal party, but some losses even within that party and a bit of a shrinking party in terms of support. But also, the losses within that party come predominantly from younger Republicans or Republican leaders, people who have voted Republican in the last few cycles. And there, the gap is pretty striking.

If you're 45 and over, especially if you're 55 and over, especially if you're 65 and over, you're sticking with Trump. There's almost no erosion, actually, among 65 and over that I can see in the polling, in the breakdowns. If you're young, you're really, this is not what you thought you were getting when you took a kind of gamble on Trump. And you're off the reservation. Now, if you're young, you also can get back on the reservation, I suppose, because young voters are more volatile and less, many of them paying less attention, less set in their ways in

terms of voting than older voters, obviously by definition almost. But still, it's a pretty striking development. Some of the polling in the race in the Thomas Massey race in Kentucky Four that's happening as we speak and that we'll get results from tonight, had this gap that I think a lot of people commented, they've never actually seen in a primary kind of, you know, where Massey, who Trump has obviously gone after in a big way, is up by 30, 40 points among voters under 45,

under 55 even, and Trump's up by 40, 50 points among voters, you know, 55, 65 and over. And that's within the Republican Party. That's not, that's not, you know, liberal kids who were Democrats, right? So that's pretty, so that does suggest to me that certainly younger Republicans are beginning to desert Trump and the public as a whole is beginning to, is deserting Trump. And that's both important, I think, for 2026, the latter, the public as a whole. Maybe the younger Republicans deserting is important for 27, 28, belong, and beyond. They're not, you know, they're not deserting fast enough to really, really suggest a post-Trump or certainly not an anti-Trump Republican Party, maybe not even a post-Trump Republican Party, but maybe a little less

tightly tied to Trump Republican Party, you know, two years from now than we see today. Yeah, yeah. I'm a little bit of two minds about this. And I'm curious, I'm curious to get your thoughts here because, well, I'm a little of two minds because there's, it kind of seems to me there are sort of two groups of young Republican voters who are sort of moving off of Trump for different reasons, some of which are a lot better than others. And I think about kind of the young people who made up that that 2024 coalition that won him the presidency. And there were a lot of kind of like normie-ish young men, disaffected, anti-establishment, angry at the status quo, but not really necessarily bought in on these various ideological projects who went along with Trump

in much greater numbers than we had seen before in 2024. And a lot of them are abandoning Trump for these obvious reasons. He got us into a war in Iran. He did not fix the economy. He made us, he made it worse. He seems to be, you know, corrupt and self-dealing in a way that it was sort of unexpected. All of that is to the good. There is another category of more kind of plugged in and professionalized and networked young Republican types who I think are getting off of Trump for sort of different reasons. And like, more insane reasons. I mean, these are, these are, like, the young reactionaries who spend way too much time doing political stuff online. They don't just sort of tune in vaguely every once in a while and

happen to like Trump or happen to not like Trump. I mean, these are the people who have been mainlining what passes for Republican youth culture now for quite some time, all of the sort of like shameless, conspiracizing and racism and all this nonsense. And I think about things, races like the governor's race in Florida right now. where Byron Donald's, who's a Trump ally, a congressman, just very MAGA, he's running away with the nomination, but he has this sort of gadfly insurgent challenger in this guy named James Fishback, who is basically running as a groper. He's running on a ton of, like, basically winking anti-Semitic jokes and stuff like that, and anti-Black jokes against Byron Donald's,

who's black. I mean, just like this campaign of just sort of naked political transatlical aggression, even for the Trump era, and just channeling the gross id of the online right. And like I said, he's not going to get a ton of votes, fishback. But his support is wildly disproportionately from young Republicans. It's from these under 30 people who, again, have come up in this environment. We're always getting this barrage of news stories of these group chats of young Republican groups that are just, you know, chocka block with the grossest rhetoric. I mean, this is just how these young people talk to each other and how they come to think about the world and all these things. And so, I don't know, I am reassured that Trump's co-el. I mean, any vote that leaves Trump for any

reason, it's hard to argue that that's a bad thing. We want his support to be fragmented. We want it to go in bad directions. We don't want him to have this power to continue to abuse the country in the way that he's been doing. But I do have this worry that what's coming up after him on the Republican side might not be a lot better in a lot of different ways. I don't know. What do you make of that bill? No, I think that's well said. I say I think both, well, it's two points. First of all, I think both things are happening clearly. There's this, there's normally Republican disaffectioner with Trump. There's extreme reactionary extremist, what do you want to call it, bigoted. Trump's not, hasn't gone far enough. He's portraying the worst parts of MAGA by being, you know, not, by not, by not

being as crazed as the groupers wanted to be on various reprehensible in various reprehensible ways. So both things are happening at once. I think if historians might say that's sort of what happens when these kinds of demagogic, somewhat autocratic, coalitions that are led by a charismatic person tend to fall apart. Some people leave them and say, this was kind of crazy. I'm going back to normality. And other people say, this guy betrayed us. We need a truly, we need Stalin, not Lenin, right?

So you get both. True MAGA has never been tried. Totally. We're going to get that. No question. So I think, A, that's a, I think that's just going to happen. And, you know, obviously one has to deal with the fact that there'll be some young people there. A lot depends on numbers then, though. This is, you're sort of indicating that you said in passing Donald's way ahead of fishback. I think it's true, right?

At one poll, I saw Donald's almost at 50 and then Fishback is that his name. Way away. Yeah. Yeah. A 10, a close race. But I think it matters. So let's even assume he gets 10% of the vote. let's assume he gets 15% of the vote in the primary.

Let's assume that does twice as well with young people. That would be 25 or 30%. That's not great. On the other hand, 25 or 30% is a lot more manageable than 50% or 60% or 70% of young people talking about here. 10% or 15% of the overall Republican electorate in Florida, which is 5% to 10% of the whole electorate,

is also pretty small at that point that you're kind of in Pap Buchanan, Ron Paul, protest land, right? that actually got bigger at times. So I think it really, the numbers matter and how in terms of how manageable this is just as a phenomenon for the country. I don't know. I mean, we see a lot more as we follow things online

and we follow people who have to take the trouble to join and then take over young Republican groups in different cities and sometimes college Republicans on campus. That's a very disproportionate, obviously. And it matters. You know, the activist matter, right? We've seen that in American.

politics in the last 50 years in both parties, small groups of activists can really change the character of a party by convincing others. Maybe these can't, you know, the McCarthy activist convinced others that the war was a bad idea. They became ultimately kind of a majority, you might say, of the Democratic Party, but that, I don't know, are these activists going to convince their peers that various things, you know, of much of anything? I don't know. It's a lot would depend on, I suppose, what happens in the world. Anyway, a long way of saying that I think you're absolutely right to point to both things happening at once. I think so far there's some reassurance to be taken in the limited appeal of the true

MAGA crazy faction, you know, Trump not crazy enough faction. But, you know, it exists. And I do worry, we have a bad recession, things really go bad in the world, and then there's suddenly more ability to recruit for the crazies and the extremists to recruit among those who haven't been part of that yet. But it'll be interesting to see what happens in Florida, because it is kind of a nice test case, both the overall primary results,

but how strong is this guy actually among young Republicans? I have a friend who teaches in one of the Florida universities, and he's a little, and he's, on the one hand, since what you were saying, on the one end, most of the students are not interested in politics, honestly, but they're fine, they're rooting for Florida, you know, football teams and so forth. I mean, fine, in the sense they're not crazy, at least. Maybe not the greatest students in the world.

Some of them, he's got a little custom concerns about that, and getting all the AI written papers. But that's a topic for another day. That's a topic for another day. I'm carefully not trying not to say where he teaches. But he says he's also alarmed that there is a subset of students at his university who are very excited about the extreme Groyperism, who go to the rallies for this guy fish back and so forth.

And again, hard to know if it's a – so I think the numbers do matter there. But it's something to really keep an eye on. And you should keep – you're good at following these young Republican types and they're closer age to you, God knows. So you should, among the many things you should be following over the next months and years, I guess, will be this. Well, relatively closer, unfortunately, and to my growing anxiety, not as close in age as I used to be, but that's okay. That's fine. This is all a little bit grim. Let's end on a comparatively returning to a comparatively happy note that you were gesturing at earlier, which is, I just want to quantify a little bit more, the slow sag in popularity that we have seen, again.

again, throughout this year in 2026. Let me just run through a couple of these, Matt, a couple of these Silver bulletin. Nate Silver, he's got a great rolling, basically average of polls for the president's approval. He updates that every day. I check it a lot. Let's go through a couple of these.

So Donald Trump's decline in the polls, this is from today, doesn't seem to be slowing down. Net approval of minus 22%, according to New York Times, minus 20%, according to Atlas Intel, minus 26%, according to CBS News. UGov, and this is the most astonishing thing, because they keep saying this. Trump hit a new second term net approval low of minus 20.1% on Sunday. One week ago, net approval was minus 19.1%, which was a new low. One week before that, it was minus 18.6%. So we are seeing this real,

I mean, it's not a collapse, like you said, it's not really the bottom falling out, but it is, the sag is, if anything, it's getting faster. Let's go onto one other slide. We can probably skip over to the, yeah, I mean, this is that same thing. You can just see. that the line actually does start to really point down after that long period of stabilization in late 2025, all through 2026. It's just been getting worse. And let me jump then to this other thing, the generic ballot, because this was the other narrative that has sort of turned around a little bit is, okay, Trump keeps getting less and less popular, but does that actually translate into better electoral outcomes for Democrats in Congress? Because that's what matters this midterm,

right? Full stop. Democrats have to be able to win some of these races if they're going to be able to exert some actual control over the president in the second half of his second term. And that is, again, something where we saw stasis for quite some time. They were hovering at this plus four, plus four and a half in the generic congressional ballot. And just in about the last month, that too has now started, that gap has started to widen. So there's something new that's being shaken loose here in terms of not just Trump supporters getting less enthusiastic about him, but actual voter appetite to turn some kind of corner and really start to rein him in. And I'll just end on a point that I've made a bunch of times on this live stream and in different

places in the past, that all of this is in an environment where Trump, last November, lost everywhere. In all of these off-cycle elections, he and the Republicans did, and his Republicans did extraordinarily badly, and Democrats overperformed across the board. And we were writing and saying then, Trump has one year to turn this around. He's halfway there now. halfway, it's, you know, late May, and these elections are in November. He has lost half the time he had to make up whatever gap he could. Now, they've done some things to make up that gap in terms of gerrymandering, in terms of making the map more productive for them, but that's really the only thing that has gone in Republicans' direction, period, in that entire intervening time.

And what have we seen besides that? One disaster after another, right? We saw the Minneapolis occupation with the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Preti. We saw the launching of this war in Iran, and all of the stuff that has metastasized from that. We saw the Trump getting more and more obsessed with, you know, the sort of Napoleonic pageantry of his second term in office and himself as this sort of emperor figure, with the ballroom being like the most obvious example of that. People care about the ballroom. I was actually a little surprised how much people care about the ballroom. People are going to care about this settlement fund. I mean, this is just out in the open, insane stuff. He is not pulling away from doing it. He continues to, to, you know,

put more and more pressure on his people to do unpopular things in service of these aims. He just asked John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, I think it was reported today that he is asking Thune to fire the Senate parliamentarian, because the parliamentarian doesn't think, has ruled out putting that billion dollars of public ballroom funding. in a budget reconciliation bill for these procedural reasons. I mean, he wants these guys to leave nothing on the table in pursuit of all these vanity aims of his. And it's making him less popular.

He's running out of time to course correct. He's running out of options to course correct. In some of these cases, it's not like even if he wanted to course correct in the straight of Hormuz. It would be obvious for him to be able to do that. He's unpopular. His project is failing. He's going to do badly.

And November, it becomes increasingly obvious. So those are all good things. not too bad. Anything, I think probably we are close to wanting to peel out of this. Oh, actually, Matt has a clip. Sorry, let me, let me, on the, on the ballroom thing specifically. Let's, let's just do a quick live bit from the president right now. Zool, my money and donor's money. This is tax-free. That's how everyone's talking about, they're going to give money, they're going to give money. The money they're going to give is really for the security of that and the whole White House premises. And I guess you probably need that nowadays. So there you go. You don't need to worry about that billion dollars in ballroom funding because why.

It doesn't really make sense. No, you don't understand. We're paying for the ballroom. The billion dollars is just for the other improvements that we need for the ballroom and for the rest of the White House. I don't know. What do you think, Bill? I'll just close. I think your summary of what's been happening is excellent.

And the only point on the kind of chronology of the time. It's very much the case. Yes, you say the first half almost now of 2026 has been pretty disastrous for Trump. He's got five, six months, I guess five months. It's five and a half months to fix it by election day. But really, things start to settle in at Labor Day or very soon thereafter, I would say. A lot of evidence that you don't get much change, except a little more erosion usually of the party in power, a little more of the intensification of a trend that's already going in September and October,

which means the summer is actually very important. The summer's funny. People take summer off. school ends, people got vacation, they sort of assumed that the world stops, but actually politically in elections, especially off-year elections for some reason, the summer is when things either gel and solidify or maybe could reverse, you know, but I certainly, I've been through this a few times in 94 and 2010. The summer was important. I remember, you know, being involved in things right before now and before Memorial Day, weren't sure what was going to happen. A lot of,

I remember this in 94 so well, when Republicans won both houses for the first time in 40 years. Democrats had a lot of structural advantages. They were been through this a million times. They always pulled it out. They were going to use, let their head the presidency in Congress. They could pass popular legislation. A lot of some good indications for Republicans in 94. And I was then on that side, obviously. But, you know, very unclear. I remember by Labor Day, I thought they're going to win both houses. It wasn't quite the conventional view yet, incidentally, but it was happening. It was moving. So I think the summer is going to be very important, which is why stick with us all summer. We'll be up. We're not taking much of a very

break, are we the summer? I don't think so. And maybe none, I don't know, but it's a little bit, maybe one or two days off here. But we're locked in the basement. Sam, Sam, let's us out for bathroom breaks every once in a while. We're laboring away. Yeah. So anyway, the summer will be, will be interesting, honestly, though, and important. Legislatively on the Hill, in terms of who actually wins some of these Republican primaries, in terms of the themes that are gel and don't gel, in terms of over the next two, three months, really worth playing close attention. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's a good place to leave it, because again, we will be following this very closely.

We'll be back here next Tuesday. No morning shots in your inboxes next Monday, I believe, because I think that's Memorial Day. But by Tuesday, we'll be back in the saddle, breaking down everything that happened over the weekend and beyond. Thanks, Bill. Again, I'll say I'm Andrew Regger. That's Bill Crystal.

We write the Morning Shots newsletter for The Bullwork. Thanks, Bill, and thanks to you all out there for watching, for subscribing. We hope you will subscribe to our YouTube feed if you are not already. Head over to The Bullwork.com. Get our free newsletter in your inbox. newsletter. We have a good time with it. More and more people are saying that morning

is appointment reading by mid-morning. By mid-morning. You're not going to rise and read us because that's not how we do it around here. But thanks to everybody out there, and we will see you all next time.