The Daily Beast Podcast - I Know Even MAGA Secretly Admits Truth About Trump

Episode Date: August 22, 2026

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) speaks with Joanna Coles about the ongoing war with Iran, warning that the Trump administration risks repeating the mistakes that sent him to Iraq as a young Marine—and could drag thousands more Americans into a conflict with no clear exit. Gallego takes aim at Donald Trump’s handling of the military, Pete Hegseth’s leadership at the Pentagon, the president’s health and judgment, and the security concerns surrounding his inner circle. He also lays out why he believes Democrats could win back voters by focusing on the cost of living, corruption, and the concerns of Latino men who supported Trump but are now turning against his immigration policies. Plus, Gallego makes the case for giving parents more control over their children’s social media use, reveals what he’s hearing from Republicans about the Pentagon, and gives his most candid answer yet on whether a 2028 presidential run could be in his future. #ad Save 20% Off Honeylove by going to https://honeylove.com/DAILYBEAST! #honeylovepod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. What I hear from my senators, my senators quietly, my Republican friends, they're very worried about the direction of the DoD. I think there's something wrong deeply around the president, the fact that he disappears for two, three days every couple weeks and we don't hear from him. And he has so many multiple checks up, checkups at the hospital or anything else like that. If Biden had been doing all of this, there would have been a congressional inquiry by this point. He's an overweight, eight-year-old man who does not eat well. So like, it's very natural for things to be going bad.

And it's also very natural for us as a country to be asking who's actually making some of these decisions. He's losing grasp of reality and time. He'll talk about people that, you know, are dead. And, you know, as if in the present tense, it's an issue of time and just, you know, getting, getting older. But it's also legitimate for us as a country to be worried about that. I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast. And today we're going to be talking about the press.

President's health, is he fit to be commander-in-chief if is Pete Hegzeff fit to lead the Pentagon? Well, not according to this Marine and Senator. He's definitely not. I'm talking about Ruben Gallego from Arizona, who is the senator there alongside Mark Kelly, in a state that Trump won. He has a fascinating background, grew up poor in Chicago, managed to get himself to Harvard, not least by cold calling Hispanic students there and asking for their advice on how to apply.

Though he also credits teachers for helping him and local families for lending him their computer to do his college applications. From there, he joined the Marines, went into state politics in Arizona and is now the senator from Arizona where he sits on a variety of committees.

But it's really his book, which talks about his PTSD from fighting in Iraq that I use as a starting point for this conversation as we think about all those sailors trapped on the USS Lincoln. Finally, finally, after an incredibly long nine-month deployment are coming home. So let's get into it. But before we do, just a reminder to smash the subscription button wherever you get your podcast. We are independent media and we appreciate your support. And you can become a friend of the beast or join a B-Beast-tier membership where you get to hear your name read out at the end of a podcast. OK, let's get into it with Senator Gallego.

Senator, you went to Iraq as a 24-year-old Marine. You wrote about your subsequent PTSD in your book. They called us Lucky. You lost 22 men while you were out there. when you see another generation of young Americans being sent to war and Pete Hegzeth, the secretary of war, as he now calls himself, evoking the warrior ethos, what goes through your head? Well, it goes through my head is that I'm going to see a lot of other Ruben Gallegos that are going to be put through a stupid, dumb, illegal war and then we're going to live with another generation.

of American boys and girls that are going to have to carry this burden of bad leadership. You know, that's what got me to Iraq. It was bad leadership that chose to go to war in Iraq. It was bad decision-making on the conduct of the war. And the leadership to get us out of there wasn't there. Does that sound familiar to everyone here? That's what I'm seeing right now. You know, we still don't even know the actual final reason why this administration decided to launch this war of choice. They don't seem to actually understand how to actually get out of this war. And we've already seen 18 men and women die because they are mismanaging this war. We had men and women die because they were in not covered bunkers knowing that you have Iranian Shahed drones

are they going to be hunting for these men and women in the softest targets. We have men and women that are suffering in the USS Lincoln because this administration did not plan properly about how to resupply ships once the Bahrain port that we usually used for resupply in the Persian Gulf was inoperable. These are the things that scare me. And it scares me that this president doesn't understand how to get out of this. And he's going to search for a solution that may end up causing us to go deeper into war in order to try to find a way to get out of this war. So what did you think when you heard him say after families have been complaining about the conditions on the USS Lincoln, that they actually hadn't been at sea long enough?

I mean, look, the president's an idiot. Let's be clear. And he's actually even dumber when it comes to our issues of our military, their capabilities, what it actually means to serve. This is the guy who, you know, had footworts or some other issues to get out of being drafted into Vietnam. And it just shows you how insensitive he is. all he cares about is for his opportunity ability to show that he has power, that he could use

these troops as his toys. But he doesn't actually want to look into their welfare and understanding what's going on. And what it means actually, not just for troops, what it means for our operational capabilities? What does it mean when you have an air cap carrier out for that long? It means it's going to take you longer for you to clean it, retrofit it, and maintain it when it gets back. It means you're going to have some the best and brightest men and women that are sick of being treated this way, that are going to have better options, better pay in the private sector. And when their enlistment comes up, they're going to go and they're going to leave because their spouses are going to say, I don't want you doing that again.

You just left me for three-fourths of a year. There's higher pay out there. And they don't want to be working under administration such as Donald Trump or Secretary Hexat. So, you know, he does understand the full scope of what he's doing. All he worries about is what people think about him. All he's worry about is, you know, like I don't want to be known. as a guy who loses a war, and everyone else is going to suffer, including our members of the armed services.

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What do you make also of his efforts to redesign the aircraft carriers? that he wants to go back to steam catapults instead of electromagnetic catapults, he wants to move the operations center to the end of an aircraft carrier because he doesn't think it looks good. I mean, these seem unusual comments at the very least for the commander in chief. And as you say, someone who's not fought, not actually been of service. Like, yes, I served in the military. I was on the Armed Services Committee for 10 years. I funded a lot of programs, funded a lot of ships.

Even I don't know the specifics about whether you should be using steam catapult or electric catapult. I don't know the specific of whether it's a good idea to move the tower on an aircraft carrier. What I do is I trust people that actually know about this. What I also know is that Donald Trump knows nothing about this and just cares about the aesthetics of things, right? Aesthetics does not get you into a better position when you're trying to be effectively deploying airplanes, right? aesthetics will not make sure that you are combat ready. These are all the things that he just is trying to do doing the aesthetics. And this is a billion dollar changes, right?

You can't just suddenly go change our design because then you have to move everything else around. And that's billions of dollars. We're going deeper and deeper into debt for this dumb war. And now we're going to go and add more. And then he wants to triple down on that by creating this new Trump fleet destroyer system, battleship system that is outdated. It'll be easily targeted, but he wants to be able to be known as a person that there's a Trump line of ships that'll carry his name forward. You use the military to effectively deploy the interest of the United States when diplomacy doesn't work, right?

The president uses the military to effectively help garner a reputation building and legacy building for himself. That is the worst thing that you can be doing right now to these men and women. I think it's very difficult to say that we've lost a war in Iran, but the problem is we haven't won the war in Iran. Secondarily, you know, we are a superpower and we're being held at bay by a minor regional power, if you want to call that, if you want to call that at all. And my worry is that, you know, if we focus too much on this idea that we have to keep our reputational power as being able to defeat these regional powers, that this president is going to find a way, it's going to try to get us deeper into war in order for us to find a way out. And that's where this gets dangerous.

That's where it gets expensive. What does that look like? Deeper into war sounds scary and it also sounds like something that's happened to America before. Correct. What it looks like is we end up putting, we introduce ground troop elements to this. We try to take land, physical land in Iran or just off the coast of Iran in Kargoy. island. That means that we're going to end up putting more men and women exposed to direct combat.

It could have a higher escalation in that area. And you could see thousands and thousands of men and women dying in the hopes that that would give us better leverage in terms of negotiations with Iran. I think that that is number one, foolhardy because I think it may not necessarily bring the outcome that we want. And then it also creates this other scenario. Well, what happens when we go to war and we actually introduce ground troops. What happens when we lose our first, you know, 500 men, then you're going to have this call of say, well, we can't just give up now. They just killed 500 men and then we're going to keep staying in, right? And that's how you find yourself in a situation like I did when I was a young corporal Gallego where we found ourselves in Iraq,

years later trying to put something together after getting rid of us. And I'm saying, and we had lost so many men already that people did not want to, the, wanted it ought to be in vain. And so that's how you end up losing 22 of my Marines and a corpsman. So that's a very dangerous scenario. And number two, there are ways out of this, too. Diplomacy is still possible. But you can't have diplomacy when you're using the, you know, Twittal D and Twitudem as your diplomats, right? You're sending, you know, your son-in-law who is a, you know, condo flipper. And you're sending and also who has a lot of, I would say, conflicts of interest having contracts with different invoever. investment firms from Israel, Qatar, in Saudi Arabia, who have obviously a very keen interest in

what happens in Iran. And then you have the other guy, Whitkoff, who, again, does not have this type of experience. Versus what the Iranians are putting forward in terms of their negotiators are one of the best negotiators. One of the guys that actually is negotiating for the Iranians wrote a book about negotiations, right? So if we want to get out of this, if we want to get out of this and still be able to keep our allies, show the world that we are a resilient country, and that we can be the protector

of free navigation of the seas, which is one of the concerts of what we've always done, and to keep the Strait of Hermuz not told and find a way also to keep in check Iran's nuclear growth and capability. It's going to require long, long negotiations. It's going to require humility on both sides, and it's not going to be something that's going to make everybody happy. But at the end of the day, that's the way this goes. But this president is trying to either make everybody happy when I say that, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and a lot of the kind of pro-war hawks that are out there. And he also wants to get out of the war because he knows it's not good, while at the same time trying to figure out how to save grace, right? That's not how this ends

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I'm gladly helped them out through diplomatic efforts. I'll gladly help them out through anything below the threshold of war, but I'm not going to commit men and women to regime change again. We've tried that in the Middle East. That's how I end up losing my best friend in a war and, you know, in dealing with the problems of PTSD because we were out there being freedom fighters for other countries and other people that should have done it on their own, right? And there's other ways to do it. Let's see, you know, a good example for Ukraine. We've not put one boot on the ground in Ukraine and we're ensuring Ukraine insomnia and

independence, right? But if the Iranian people and the Iranian diaspora wants to see a free Iran, they need to take the marriage into their own hands. And I've been very supportive of Iranian sanctions, I've been supportive of the Aryan diaspora, of the refugees, of the asylums and everything else like that. I'm fine with helping out with the intelligence sharing stuff, but it's, you know, not my responsibility to commit American men and women to another country's freedom fight. It's just not it. And we've done this before, and we end up losing many men, many women,

and sometimes having horrible blowbacks in response to that action. So Pete Hagseth is someone who also served in Iraq, also suffered PTSD, spoke openly about having a period of drinking heavily. He was, he ran two Veterans Affairs organizations. and was driven out of both for mismanagement, potential financial shenanigans and for intoxication. He's credited Jesus and he's credited his current wife, Jennifer, number three in the lineup, of saving his life. And earlier this week, and I'm sure you read it,

the New York Times had a long piece about the role that Jennifer now appears to be playing at the Pentagon. She's drafted in her best friend to be one of Pete Hexat's advisors. She's regularly in on. meetings in a way that I'm sure anybody in corporate America listening to this thinks it's so bizarre the idea of the boss bringing in his wife, installing her next to him, and basically being unable to move without her. How odd is this? And what does it make you think about Pete Hegsett's leadership? And when you talk to your Republican colleagues in the Senate,

are they worried about him too? Because it was Joni Ernst who raised the flag about him and she was, you know, a victim of sexual assault when she was in the military. He promised her that he wouldn't drink on the job. Do you think it's a feasible that he's not drinking on the job? Because this must be much more stressful than running to Veterans Affairs organizations. Yeah. And what are you hearing from your Republican colleagues about his behavior? Look, I think, you know, as someone that's been in the public and in the Lumlight,

and have been very open in my PTSD. And I've also talked about, you know, my failures around drinking. You still also do rely on your spouse. I rely heavily on my spouse for a lot of advice, solace, you know, someone to talk to that you can trust to a certain degree. Now, I do think when it comes to bringing in your spouse to kind of the day-to-day affairs, especially in something that's very sensitive and maybe somebody doesn't have background on, I think that is a bit odd, right? unless she does have a national security background that I don't know about.

Well, she does. She was a producer at Fox. Yeah. So that could be something different. But, you know, for the sake of clarity, look, I'm glad that Pete found Jesus and was able to deal with PTSD. And he found a great spouse to help him manage through what is a very difficult portion of life, without a doubt. But there needs to be a certain level of professional when it comes to the injection of that into the day-to-day operations of the DOD. In terms of where what I hear from my senators, my senators quietly, my Republican friends, they're very worried about the direction of the DOD.

They're worried about number one, the politicization of the DOD to begin with. They were pushing out some of the best and brightest generals because there's this thought that we let in so many of them through DEI, that we're also pushing us from the best and brightest generals because these generals are sworn to loyalty to the Constitution of the United States and they're not swaying loyalty to Donald Trump. They're worried about the fact that we're investing in all these systems. They're going to be outdated and we're burning through money that we don't have as a nation while at the same time not making us safe. And that we have a, we're in a reckless war with no direction that is costing the U.S. government billions of dollars. Our international standing has gone down and the price of everyday goods are just being driven through the roof because of this stupid war.

Okay. So we've seen the president this week, spend a lot of time with his female. made Natalie Hart. At The Daily Beast, we released two letters that she had sent to him, which made it clear that she was very much in love with him and that she relied on him emotionally and he'd been very helpful to her. How concerned are you about the presence of Natalie Hart, who, you know, it turned out also this week that it took her a year to get security clearance, that the Secret Service had flagged her as a risk not only to the presence. but also to herself?

Look, at the personal side, I can't speak to that. That is what, you know, the president and Melania have to figure out on his family. But in terms of the security side, she is a government employee. She's around some of these highly sensitive, and she could be carrying highly sensitive material. And the fact that she was pushed forward so quickly without going through a full check and had been flagged as, you know, potentially being problematic, that should scare us. right. We don't know what her motivations could be. We don't know what the outcomes of that could be. And again, you're dealing with a president who also is not very secure when it comes to classified

material and or even in the decision-main process that he is. So, you know, as a government employee, we have a right to actually question whether that relationship is in the best interests of this country if it's going to be compromising our national security. And I think it is legitimate that the press, you know, asked these questions. And it should be a comment upon them to answer, what is the status of this? How confident are you that the president is in good enough health to lead the country? Look, I think there's something wrong, deeply wrong with the president. First of all, I mean, mentally, I think this man has been off for quite a while.

But I think he is definitely not in good health. You know, the fact that he disappears for two, three days every couple weeks and we don't hear from him. and he has so many multiple checkups at the hospital or anything else like that. If Biden had been doing all of this, there would have been a congressional inquiry by this point. The press itself, and I'm not saying Dale Abyss doesn't do this, would have been pushing very hard on asking exactly what is the status of this man. And look, it's not that out of the realm of possibility, and it's not necessarily a direct attack upon him. He's an 80-year-old met. 80-year-old men start breaking down.

He's an overweight eight-year-old man who does not eat well. So it's very natural for things to be going bad. And it's also very natural for us as a country to be asking, you know, is there anything good? Who's actually making some of these decisions? You know, all these kind of things that were very legitimate questions under Biden should also be asked right now and push under this administration. Do you think his mental health is sound? You said just now that you thought he was a little bit off? What do you mean by that?

What did you mean when you said you thought he was a little off? Well, I mean, you listen to him. He's meandering all the time. He's losing grasp of reality and time. He'll talk about people that, you know, are dead and, you know, as if in the present tense. It's all these things that, you know, if you would see this, if we would see this kind of in some other politician, we would have said that, you know, this guy is not doing well, right? And if you just compare, you know, his verbiage and how he spoke years ago to what he is now, he has definitely have been sliding, right? And it's a, you know, I think it's a natural thing.

It's an issue of time and just, you know, getting, getting older. But it's also legitimate for us as a country to be worried about that. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement. And nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19 speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility and Optic delivers with precision. To make every drive extraordinary.

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That's me knocking on wood. I'm just going to say you can never guarantee anything in politics. Nothing. We are Democrats, too. Not you. Well, I'll come on to that. I'll come on to that in a minute. What do you think democratic priorities should be, should they win the House? You know, how do they prioritize inquiries into the current administration if they do?

What should their priorities be? And how should they lay that out for voters in the run-ups to the election? in the 2020 election or the 2026 election? No, let's stick with the 2026 and then let's come on to 2028. Look, I think the first thing that we have to think about is what are we, why are we, why are voters voting for us, right? What are voters sending in terms of their message when you have a wave year and you put a lot of Democrats in?

And that's what we should answer first. Not that it's the only think we answer though, right? And to me, the question and the frustration that voters have right now is the cost of living, right? And so what we should focus on, should we win the election, is to show that we are here and we've heard you and we're going to work on the cost of living and or, you know, raising your wages. If we don't do that first, I think everything we do after that is going to end up kind of being lost in general by the public. who is yearning for a party to fight for them. And so for me, I think whether it passes or not because the president is the president at that point, we should be focusing on raising the minimum wage, you know,

bringing back the Medicaid cuts that happened, affordable health care cuts, expanding access to universal health care if we can get some proposal together on that, and then trying to figure out what to do about things like housing, child care. This is the stuff that I hear about all the time. But we also can't ignore the deep corruption that has been happening in this country, systematic corruption that this president and his family have been instituting and grifting from. And so we're going, whatever power we have, we need to expose it. We need to prosecute where we can prosecute it.

And then we also need to put the guardrails in place so it doesn't happen again and or if we can stop it right now. Right. That's not just when it comes to the family, but also it comes to all these corporations that have been using their checkbooks to basically buy positive decisions from this president to get access to contracts to approve mergers to essentially be able to do what's best for their shareholder, but not necessarily the consumer. We have to be very ready and active to do all those three things because this is going to take us a while to understand. do. It's not just going to be 2026 or 2028. The type of corruption we're seeing

right now is going to be horrifically ingrained potentially in our economy and in our country if we don't try to take it out by all of its roots when we take power. So Donald Trump has said very famously that he doesn't

think people care about his grift. He made $2.2 billion last year. Do you see that people care? I mean, I'm always fascinated that it doesn't seem to be as high up people's priority list as you would expect. And that's because people tend to think that both sides are corrupt. Well, I think it's two things. Number one, a lot of people can't believe a billionaire would want more money.

And so why would he corrupt himself, which is clearly, if you know, billionaires, they always want more billions. Everybody wants more money. It's not just billionaire. Yeah. the reason this matters because people now see how it affects it. I would say in the first term, the corruption people were hearing about did not seem very direct. Now that you do see this, right, they see the corruption of government, for example, when it comes to pardons, right? You're parting people that have ripped off, you know, billions of consumers,

and they get to get pardoned by giving his fund or this fund $5 million, and now you could get off and not have to pay back a restitution. As a matter of fact, some of these guys are just going to make the calculation. I'd rather just pay off the president than to actually go through restitution and pay off the consumers. That's going to piss off people. If you want to talk about corruption right now, look, Jared Kushner is negotiating in the Middle East while also getting contracts for development in the Middle East. If that does not have any effect that it's affecting the outcomes of this war,

I mean, that is directly affecting people. It affects us certainly when it comes to gas prices, but also it's going to affect us when it comes to our kids. Because none of the Kushners are going to join the military. None of the Kushners are going to put their asses on the line and get shot at. It's going to be the middle class kids are going to go because Kushner maybe wants to get another extra billion dollars from the Katari investment fund, whatever it is, right? That's the kind of corruption that we're dealing with. The corruption that's happening within the AI data center industry where you have Donald Trump who's essentially just backing everything they want. guardrails nothing whatsoever, and we're all paying it with data centers that are misplaced,

that are costing us higher utility rates, and Arizona costs us a lot of water. That is directly going to do that. So I think you have, you know, two of the Trump brothers, again, who have zero concept of the capabilities of war-war making are heavily invested in all these kind of war platforms that are now being bought by the DOD. So it's also in their best interest, sometimes for this war to continue to, because guess what? They bought into an anti-drone company. that we now need because we're in a war against a country that has full drone capability. So I'm not convinced that that's true.

I do think the best way we could kind of reinforce that we're the good guys and they're the bad guys is that we need to do everything we can to pass legislation to show that we're trying to do everything we can to keep our houses clean. Do you think there's a possibility that the Trump brothers could be arrested? I mean, that's a pretty serious accusation

that they're actually invested in the war continuing, and Jared Kushner invested in the war continuing. Look, this is why you have investigations. I don't believe for one second in my mind that they would not be doing the same. I mean, they went after Hunter Biden because he was selling paintings, right? At the same time, you know,

we're losing billions and billions of dollars of economic viability while war is stalling out. While, by the way, people are shoring what the president's saying. about the Iraq war, stocks are going up and down depending on when he's releasing his statements. So, yes, there's a possibility that there's corruption happening here. And we're seeing it effectively in the manipulation of the stock market. Why wouldn't we investigate this? And could they go to jail? It is beyond, I entirely see this president's just going to pardon as many people as possible

on his way out. But I'm hoping that there are other institutions that can also effectively go after this level of corruption, whether a state attorney generals or any other entities that can go after them. Okay, so you're in a border state. A beautiful border state. It's true. I have been to Arizona. It's absolutely gorgeous. And of course, you have the Grand Canyon there. What has the reaction been to ICE there? And to what extent do you think ICE and the overreach of this administration will be felt in the elections. Good question. And look, I think Arizona being a border state,

we have a very different experience than other states when it comes to border issues and immigration issues. You know, we're also a state that is almost, I think, like 33% Latino. We have a very rich history of also cross-border culture. And, you know, the Latino population in Arizona is growing and it's very part in key to our growth.

We've also seen abuses at the border. You know, the millions of silent seekers that came through the border were stopping in Arizona and they were overwhelming everything, right? So we understand the benefits of the border. We understand some of the things that come from, you know, good border policy when it comes to trade. When it comes to labor, if you ever eat anything in the country that's green in winter, it is likely picked from Yuma, Arizona. And it's likely picked by a Mexican national that crosses the border legally every day at 4 a.m. to go pick our lettuce and our fruits. And just to make sure how much people understand how important this is, during COVID, one of the only two places in the country where you were able to enter as a non-American was Yuma, Arizona. Because the country would have starved.

It wasn't for the work of these laborers down there. Detroit, Canada, Detroit Canadian borders, the other one case you guys are wondering. Why? Because of doctors and nurses. So we understand that. And we understand what good enforcement looks like and bad enforcement is talking to people here, what they're happy about is they're happy about the drop in illegal border crossings. They did not like seeing the chaos at the border, right? And these are Latinos I'm talking about, right? They didn't like, they didn't like that a lot of these border crossers, asylum seekers, came and were automatically receiving benefits, all these things, right? What they don't like is that they moved the chaos that they saw

the border that now we're seeing chaos in our neighborhoods. They don't like that you're you could be racially profiled and you have Supreme court uh you know a Supreme court justice justice countess saying you can racially profile Latinos if they speak Spanish if they're working, if they're working at construction sites, which many of us in especially Latino men, this is what we do if you know prior to going to college I would have been one of those people that got picked up even though I am born in the United States because I speak Spanish. I go to work early. I used to get in a truck with six dudes and go to construction sites. These are men that are trying to do things that are going to be productive for the family,

to give them security, and now they're getting targeted. And these are U.S. men, and they talk. And the biggest move in terms of the Latino vote in the 2024 election was male workers. Young men that are the people that build our houses, clean our kitchens, cook our food, do all the hard work, and they said they were going to go for Donald Trump. But what I'm hearing right now from them is that this is not what I voted for. You're racial profiling my community. You're racial profiting me for being Latino.

I don't want you targeting the grandmas and the mothers, you know, some of them that have U.S. citizen kids. I want you to go after criminals. And I want you to do it in a respectful way and something that does not create more animosity towards my community. And they're not seeing that. And so to top it all off, they also can't find good steady pay work and the cost of everything is going through the roof. So everything they voted for when it came to President Trump, they're not getting. And we are going to see that at the elections. I think you're going to see that in surprising places like Texas.

I go in campaign for a lot of Democrats in Texas because Arizona is kind of similar in that regard. I go and I train a lot of these candidates. how to talk to Latinos, how to talk to Latino men. And they're seeing results. You know, we have, you know, Bobby Polito down in, you know, the Rio Grande Valley, who should not even be competitive. And right now, poll after poll shows them beating an incumbent, Monica de la Cruz, by, you know, one or two points.

It's a district that voted for Donald Trump by almost 18 points just two years ago, right? You have Vicente Gonzalez, who barely won his district, again, who's showing that he is in the fight. There's another district, you know, just outside of San Antonio. we have a former sheriff running sheriff Garcia, again, who's making it compare. It's because these Latino men, Latino families are not happy with what the direction of this, of the, that the Republicans are going. They're not happy about how, you know, they're made to feel like they're not American by Donald Trump, by, you know, the DHS and by their actions.

Hey, y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if, like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home.

What do you think of the appointment of Lance Schroier, who was a member of Mark Wayne's, Mark Wayne Mullen, obviously head of Homeland Security? He was a member of his security team, and before that he was a highway patrol man. He's now in charge of ICE. What do you think of that appointment? Well, the thing with,

that I feel about this, and I'm on the community jurisdiction, is that the person who's really leading ICE is Stephen Miller. And so putting somebody there, whether they're qualified or not qualified, is irrelevant because Stephen Miller is the one who's pushing almost all of this. Their targeting is a huge dragnet of getting a lot of innocent men and women that, yes, they're in this country illegally, but should we be separating family? Should we find alternative ways to deal with the fact that here in this country illegally? Should you just be targeting criminals, right? This is a real issue. So you think that Stephen Miller will be responsible for losing the Latin male vote? Absolutely. And it'll just kill him because he just,

I'm pretty sure his girlfriend in high school dumped him for a Latino. I think this is where all this comes from, to be to be honest. Who knows what? Who knows where Stephen Miller's motivations come from. All right, I want to come on to a passion project of yours, which is giving parents control over social media for kids under 16. And I know this week you've introduced a bill to help push that forward. And we've seen this happen in Australia. Tell us about it. What inspired this? Well, so I have a nine-year-old son, right? And I have three kids, a nine-year-old Congratulations. I had two nine-year-old sons. It's a lot of work. It is.

And so, you know, in some regards, like the three and the one year old, it's kind of easier, right? You're like, I'm going to keep you alive. Don't bang your head. Try to feed you good foods and try to deal with your temper tangips, right? And then when you're getting to nine, you know, and it's your parent, you understand. Like, now you're starting worrying about, like, okay, what is, how does this like his social development work out? Like, what am I going to do about his, you know, his potential ego? What am I going to do about how he thinks about himself or what are the other influences around the world that can really get to him?

And we as parents, we only have a certain amount of tools to do that, right? You know, we drop our kids off at school, then they have other activities and we try to influence them by being good parents, right? And that used to work. But now there is this thing here where someone can essentially be able to outdo your influence. And not only that, there's an actual economic reason. they want to do it and they're not going to stop themselves right they're selling our kids digital crack if this was a drug dealer if if these social media comes were drug dealers they would be the most deadly drug dealing dealers in the world they're selling stuff to our kids and then

they're learning what actually works and they're going back and they're adjusting it to they keep on feeding them it's like you know a drug dealer changing the what the addictive nature of the drug to make it more addictive. But these guys are doing it for doing it and they're profiting from it. Sorry, go ahead. Is digital crack the right analogy because they're also seeing their parents on these devices every day, all day too, right? So it's not just that children are using phones in ways that perhaps we didn't use them

as we were growing up because they weren't available. It's that they're offering them a suite of different options. And it seems like parents are having a structure. controlling the phone. I mean, I remember trying to prize the phone out of my, you know, young teenager's hands. And he was just, it was a terrible thing every night. And this is why, this is why my bill does is to give them that power, right? And so should, I'm not going to judge a parent for what they're doing on their phone. They're adults, right? But what we do know is some of the most important developmental time in a kid's life, especially teenagers' lives,

are below the age of 16. So let's give these kids a fighting chance. And let's give that power to the parent who doesn't necessarily want to be the bad guy, but now has a real reason to kind of be that break. You know, so they don't have to go and say, I need you to take down your whole website, your Instagram, your Facebook, whatever it is. You could just say from day one, like, I'm not going to sign off on you having an account. Or, you know what, you could have an account, but I need to be a co-author, essentially.

where I get to see all your activity and all your actions. And then we should actually study what's happening. We're not really studying as a nation how this digital garbage is being fed to our kids is affecting our kids. We have theories, but we should actually be thinking about this. So then we could go back to these social media companies and actually put some potential restraints on them. We're just accepting that these companies are going to do something in the best interest

of the kids when in fact, that's not their job. job is to get the highest amount of profit from their shareholders. It's my job as a father. It's your job as a mother to look out for these kids. And some of us need some help from the federal government to do that when it comes to certain sane regulation. You know, I'm sure you also saw I have this cell phone ban plan where, you know, especially public schools that receive public federal dollars need to come up with a cell phone ban within a year in order for them to continue to have support. What does that cell phone ban look like?

It could be very different for every parent, for every, for every school. But the fact is we have seen studies that show the schools that have self-phone bans have better outcomes, less teen, less violence, you know, higher self-esteem, better grades. And again, the parent doesn't want to be the bad guy. Sometimes the schools don't want to be the bad guy. The teachers want to be the bad guy. This is where we can be, you know, the people that come in and make good influence be a good influence on this total outcome. And again, it's just another tool that I'm trying to

give parents because it is very hard to be a parent out there. And I have great kids, right? I'm so lucky. I have great kids. And I have a very supportive family system. You have my wife, my ex-wife, we're raising, you know, three kids together. It's amazing. I'm very lucky. But I worry that what are the other families who don't have all the opportunities that I have had to learn how to be a father, all the support. And this is what we need to try to do. Because the biggest determination of a kid's outcome in terms of success in life is really the parents first. Okay. So I'm going to declare I'm actually on the board of Snapchat.

Final question for you about the civil war going on in the Democratic Party, really. Progressives versus pragmatics. What do you think is going to happen in Michigan? I mean, the Senate race is so tight. You and Senator Kelly represent Arizona, but Trump won Arizona. Michigan, very complicated state. Do you think Abdul, Dr. Abdul-El Sayyad is going to be able to win that state? I think so.

I mean, I think the candidate that's talking about the everyday needs of Michiganers, I think that's what they call, is going to win. And the person that's most aligned with, you know, trying to bring the cost of living down and not aligned with Donald Trump, who's very unpopular, is Abdul. It is hard to win red states. Michigan's not a red state. Arizona's a red state. Senator Kelly and I represent the reddest states of Democratic senators.

What we have found and the reason why you have so many Democrats that win in Arizona is because we don't aim for the Democratic voter or the Republican voter. We aim for the Arizona voter. And we're trying to answer to whatever needs they have or wants or do. desires or anger. And what we've seen been successful is that Democrats in Arizona have met the moment. The reason Republicans keep losing in Arizona is because their candidates are not meeting the moment. All they do is they talk about Donald Trump or they're trying to pay these base politics when people just want to feel secure. They want to be able to buy something, want to be able to go somewhere. They want to be able to have a future. So from what I've seen, and I have

not been involved in this campaign, is that Abdul is starting to answer that. And I don't think Rogers is going to answer that. And at the end of the day, we all get very much into this, like, left, right, central spectrum. Voters don't think that way. Voters think about who do I feel is actually going to fight for me and who do I feel is going to actually protect me. And I think right now Abdul is answering that moment. I'm not sure Rogers is going to do it. And then he's going to be way down by the president, too. Okay. Final question. Your fellow, question last time. I did. I always say final question. All right. Your fellow senator, Mark Kelly, has been touted as a potential presidential candidate for 2028. So too have you.

Are we going to see the two of you battling it out? I don't know. He's a Navy guy. I'm a Marine guy. He's an astronaut. I am not an astronaut. So a lot of comparisons there. I don't know. I'm very happy being a senator. He's very happy being a senator. We're going to focus on trying to make sure, first of all, the 2020s selection goes well. And then I'm going to focus on how I can best do the thing that's most important to me, being a parent. And then after that, you know, can I put a viable campaign together or should I even put a viable campaign together? Because maybe there's going to be a lot of the candidates that can fit the need to both win and actually execute a good plan to really fight for things I care about it. Like I care about a good.

American future for every American, right? Like, I was very lucky to grow up in this country. I, you know, grew up poor and, you know, I want to make sure everyone has the same opportunity as me. I'm going to be looking out for a candidate that can do that, that can win. And if it's me, then I'll consider that. If it's somebody else, then, you know, we'll be there to support them too. How very refreshing to talk to someone who admits they might put a campaign together instead of saying, no, no, no, I just want to carry on doing what I'm doing. Because you're like, Come on. I know you're ambitious. You have a great American story. And why wouldn't you want to run at some point? Anyway, Senator Gallego, thank you so much for your time. Thank you.

Yes. Thank you so much. Looking forward to having you back soon. Please do. Thank you for your time. I think it's always interesting to hear someone who's actually been in the military and seen combat. and in the senator's case lost 22 members of his platoon. I mean, just unimaginable, the thing he's seen, and his desire to make sure that other young Americans don't see that too, unless absolutely necessary, which he clearly doesn't think this bombing campaign in Iran is. And it's unclear how we see our way out of it.

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Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home.