What A Day - The Far-Right War for Trump's 2025 Agenda

Episode Date: November 2, 2024

If Trump wins the presidential election, Project 2025 gives us an inkling of what his next term might look like. But due to a power struggle within the far-right, there could be another plan that’s just as threatening. On this week’s “How We Got Here,” Max and Erin hear from New York Times reporter Ken Bensinger about the America First Policy Institute and its political goals with a second Trump term.

So, Max, over the weekend, I was talking to somebody about what Trump would do with another term. Sounds like a chill time at brunch, Erin. It was an Instagram DM fight with someone who had posted a story claiming that both parties were the same, actually. And something occurred to me. That it would be terrible? That, and we're missing one very important piece of information. And what's that? We know what Trump wants to do because he won't stop talking about it.

And we know what he did last time. But we know a lot less about what the people around him would do. Oh, that's a great point. Because so much of Trump's first term was him getting boxed in or let around on policy by his own inner circle. Right. But there's only so much we can know about an inner circle that doesn't exist yet. Well, Erin, I have some good news for your next Instagram argument because a flurry of recent reporting just revealed that a kind of shadow White House has quietly formed with Trump's blessing. And we know a lot about what they want to do because they wrote it down. This is going to be like that scene in the South Park Imagination Land episodes when all the evil breaks out of evil imagination land.

Right? It's going to be worse. I'm Max Fisher. I'm Erin Ryan, and this is How We Got Here, a series where we explore a big question behind the week's headlines and tell a story that answers that question. Our question this week, what would the people around Trump do with a second term? An important, terrifying question.

But it's hard to know how to read the tea leaves since infighting and bungling were such big features of Trump's first term and frankly, his entire career in business as well. Yeah, it's exactly that chaos that the shadow White House I mentioned earlier formed in part to try to avoid in a second term by having everything in place and ready to go. What do you mean by that shadow White House? Erin, have you heard of a group called AFPI, or the America First Policy Institute? Well, Max, if I know anything

about Washington, and I know very little, it's that the more soothingly bland the name of something, the more evil it is. So by that metric, the America First Policy Institute, pretty damn evil.

Yeah, AFPI is from the Project 2025 school of bland names for insidious things. Project 2025, of course, is the Heritage Foundation's plan to turn America into a Christofascist state in 900 easy pages. But many, many more people are talking about Project 2025 than they are about the AFPI. And that is actually by design. The AFPI people don't want to broadcast who they are. But thanks to a flurry of new reporting, we know that AFPI has become, as one Republican source put it, the all but official Trump presidential transition. Wait, I thought Project 2025 was the waiting Trump transition. So they used to be. And part of what we've learned is

that AFPI waged a behind the scenes power struggle with the Project 2025 people for control of staffing out Trump's new White House and writing its agenda. And the way that they did it actually tells us a lot about how they would govern in power. A power struggle between two of the most sinister groups in the country, like when Predator and Alien fought each other, or Freddy versus Jason. Okay, so slow down. Who are these people? So to find out, I talked to a New York Times reporter named Ken Bensinger, one of the journalists who's been digging into the group. And it's a story that starts just days after Trump lost the 2020 election. Here's Ken.

It was formed in late 2020, just less than three weeks after the 2020 election in which Trump was defeated. And in the immediate aftermath of the election, I mean, within days of the election, Brooke Rollins, who was the head of domestic policy for Trump in the White House, reached out to Tim Dunn in Texas. And Dunn is a very wealthy oil guy, a billionaire, who also is a very strong evangelical Christian and was heavily involved in the Texas Public Policy Institute, which is a place where Brooke Rollins had previously served. And she went to him and said, hey, I think we need to find some sort of new organization to run now that Trump is out. And so he agreed, got together a couple of other very wealthy Texas buddies, and they created AFPI. I think the date was like November 20th, 2020. It wasn't revealed publicly until the next year. Early in 2021, you had

Brooke Rollins along with Linda McMahon, who was the head of the Small Business Administration under Trump and a big backer coming together to publicly announce the formation of AFPI. Wow, and Linda McMahon with the folding chair. The former pro wrestling executive and performer whose feud with her husband famously played out in the ring in WrestleMania X7. I'll never forget it, Erin. I remember her. I mean, who can forget? After she stepped away from her ring wrangling in 2009, she became a failed Republican Senate

candidate and then held a low-ranking post in the Trump administration. Yes, it's something called the Small Business Administration. Mostly, she's known as a big Republican donor. She's a money person. The other name he mentioned, Brooke Rollins, I vaguely remember from Trump's first term, or was it Country Music Radio? It's a very country music name. Could be either one. And she is really at the center of this story about this little working group that formed in 2020 and eventually became the Trump shadow White House for 2025. And she's considered maybe one of the top contenders to be Trump's chief of staff. So who is she? So she had a weird little career in Trump's first term White House. She spent most of it at something called the Office of American Innovation, which is kind of a backwater.

But in 2020, she got promoted to head the more influential Domestic Policy Council, which she ran until Trump's term ended eight months later. I remember her now. Aligned with the Jared Kushner types types at odds with the Stephen Miller types. Stephen and Jared, by the way, the Pinot Noir and Merlot of oily sycophants. Her legacy in that job isn't really any particular policy, so much as her bureaucratic maneuvering to get herself there. And that turns out to be a big through line to her whole career and this story. Her big accomplishment actually came before Trump, doing in Texas what she now wants to help Trump do in all of America. Here's Ken again. Brooke Rollins, who had been involved in politics basically, I think, her whole life, for many years, I think for 15 years before joining the Trump administration in 2018, she had been running

that Texas group. And she was the, I believe, the president and the CEO of that group in that time. And it sort of like reshaped the political landscape in Texas and had like a very tight script of what they're interested in. We don't need to go too deep on Brooke Rollins' policy agenda in Texas, which is pretty Texas specific. But the point is that one, it pulled Texas right, and two, it helped install some Texas Republicans who have defined the last decade in the state. Here's Ken. Oh, I think it's been enormously successful. I think it's a model for a lot of groups around the country on how to do this. I mean, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, Ken Paxton,

the attorney general of Texas, are very closely linked to this group and the people on it and have been a very strong way helped lasso Texas's legislature, which is a Republican legislature, into producing these results. They've been very effective. And it's worth noting that Brooke Rollins' successor heading the Texas group was Kevin Roberts. And similarly, they had similar goals and it's kind of very much carried on the same tradition. He went on to be the head of the Heritage Foundation. So they're very similar parallel tracks. This, in a sense, has become an incubator for sort of thought leaders on the MAGA-oriented, right?

Okay. So this organization is the organization responsible for taking Texas from the lone star state to the one star state. The flag is a Yelp review, as the saying goes. Yeah, things are not going that well in Texas. If you are somebody who might need electricity during a storm, for example, where you require health care, if you're a woman, things are not great for you in Texas. If you're in the foster system are not great for you in Texas. If you're in the foster system, not great for you in Texas. If you need government assistance of any kind,

things aren't great for you in Texas. But it's a great state if you are a hard-right Republican who wants to hold office for many years. If you are a multi-multi-millionaire who wants to avoid the income tax, has no health problems or need for any infrastructure whatsoever. That's the plan. That's the model for America. There you go. So I asked Ken how this Texas group was able to do all this in just a few years. And this felt like an important question to me because, as we'll hear in a minute,

those same people are hoping to use this playbook in a second Trump turn. And Ken said a lot of it came down to Brooke Rollins, the woman who is now running the America First Policy Institute. Key key to the success, I think, in part has been the personality of Brooke Rollins, who is kind of legendary in political circles for being extremely an effective fundraiser and administrator, a person who works all the time and is really good at what she does, a very no-nonsense business kind of person. And another key part, of course, is that she's smart about linking herself to deep-pocketed donors who are not afraid to cut checks.

So Lyndon McMahon is a good example. Not a Texan, but someone who very freely spends money for political candidates and spent, I think, in his current cycle, has sent $20 million to Make America Great Again, Inc., which is a super PAC supporting Donald Trump and an additional multiple millions to other Republican things like the RNC

and to senatorial efforts and that sort of thing. So she has sort of very sagely and in an organized fashion gotten big, big, big donors to jump on board as well. You know, it's funny because I've found when we talk about people who are really effective at raising money, I hit this weird resistance point in my brain where I cannot understand, like, I can't understand the type of person you have to be in order to raise money.

Like, Paul Ryan was a really effective fundraiser, and I find him so unappealing. Mike Pence is a super. Who are these people? That's an important. They're driving our politics. It is wild. Like the ability to get very rich people to give up money, the qualities that it takes are completely different than the qualities that are appealing whatsoever in a hang for me. I don't get it. brings Brooke Rollins to 2021 and her coming off her fairly short and unremarkable stint in the Trump White House and getting together her old Texas pals plus some big money donors to start

the America First Policy Institute. Sure. Okay. But what actually is an America First Policy Institute? And will Linda McMahon's involvement mean that we'll eventually see their feud with the Heritage Foundation play out at WrestleMania? I should only be so lucky. Like a lot of partisan think tanks, AFPI basically served as a holding pen for officials from the party out of power. But the officials in this particular holding pen were Trump people. So instead of Reagan or Bush alums dreaming up the next tax cut or Middle East war, AFPI's offices were buzzing with weirder, darker stuff. Here's a clip of Brooke Rollins herself, the group's president, speaking at an AFPI event in 2022, marking their first year. We have put boots on the ground in 32 states around this country on key America First agenda

issues from election integrity to school choice and patriotic education to healthcare transparency to taxes and spending to our fatherhood initiatives, to border security, to big tech censorship. The list goes on. The AFPI team was in full force in the states over these last 15 months. We fought on behalf of American businesses and workers against Biden's vaccine mandates all the way to the Supreme Court, and we won. We launched our sister C4 organization, America First Works, to ensure that the America First agenda continues unabated in the states as well as in Washington, D.C. Erin, care to translate that from Maguspeak to English for us? Sure. Okay, here we go. Election integrity means election denialism conspiracies.

School choice means defunding public schools, patriotic education means book banning and removing history that makes white people feel bad from history textbooks, border security means a border wall and subhuman treatment of migrants, and fatherhood initiatives means cutting social services for the poor. Wait, really? How do fatherhood incentives mean cutting social services for the poor? Yes, this is the astonishingly heartless and economically unsound theory that helping lower-income families buy food and keep the lights on somehow incentivizes people not to work or get married. to starve and enabling people to escape harmful marriages or harmful domestic unions creates a crisis of masculinity that weakens fathers. You know what? If patriarchy is so natural, then why do we need so much legislation to enforce it?

Well, the fathers of America must be so thankful to know these rich Republican think tankers want to take food out of their kids' mouths. Wouldn't you know it? They're not. Anyway, Erin, did you catch this spinoff group that Rollins announced at the end of her talk, America First Works? Yeah, she said it was a 501c4, which is a tax status for nonprofits that engage in political advocacy.

Why? Well, it's one of a few things that put AFPI into direct conflict with another larger think tank that is supposed to be the all but official incubator for every Republican administration. Ah, you mean the Heritage Foundation. Yes, I do. Heritage has their own longstanding 501c4, so when AFPI launched one, they took it as evidence that this scrappy new think tank was coming for them, which they were. Yeah, they were right.

That same year, in 2022, AFPI announced it was also starting its own transition project, that is, a team that would lay out policies and staffing lists for any new Republican White House. But this had been the Heritage Foundation's all-but-official role in the party for decades. So this would be like if you and I both changed our names to John and announced we were starting an irreverent politics podcast from the perspective of progressive former White House speechwriters. Yeah, it was a shot across the bow. It set off something of a civil war within the usually cozy world of Washington Republican power brokers.

Brooks Brothers and Searsucker shrapnel everywhere. Wow, that was a tongue twister. Just for you. Searsucker shrapnel, Searsucker shrapnel, Brooks Brothers and Searsucker. I think you nailed it. I really think you nailed it. Okay. Here's Ken Bensinger again, the New York Times reporter, and how that conflict played out. Remember in 2022, it wasn't totally clear that Trump was going to be the Republican nominee for president, right? At that time, we're getting ready for the midterms. And what we saw in the midterms, in fact, was that Ron DeSantis in Florida had a massive, I think, 19-point victory in the polls there and for at least a brief period was the darling of the right. And Heritage, to some degree, had begun and was beginning to align itself a little bit with DeSantis and at least play footsie with him about potentially what a DeSantis administration might look like. of 2023, when we're starting to get in the presidential primary season for real and Trump

is on attack and all of a sudden it starts to look like maybe he actually does have a chance to be the nominee, Heritage starts lashing out at AFPI and saying that they stole their idea for a transition. They stole everything down to like the name and the style and the font and who knows what else. Oh boy. I know a certain former Republican president who really, really hates anything less than total and unflinching fealty. Yeah. For Heritage, this was a big strike one with Trump, who hated that the think tank had even prepared for the possibility that someone else might win the GOP nomination, unlike AFPI, which had been a purpose-built Trump loyalty machine from day one. So what's strike two?

Strike two is also, wouldn't you know it, vanity related. Trump is basically offended that these two think tanks are fighting one another over who gets to be the GOP policy gatekeepers when, in his view, they should both be courting him for his blessing because he sees himself as not just the head of the party, but the embodiment of it and the only person who matters. Here's Ken again. When things started getting into public, when newspapers and other places started writing

about the tensions between the two, finally the Trump campaign said something about it. So Trump's campaign leadership, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, who are his top two aides in the campaign in November of last year, say enough is enough. No one speaks for Trump except for Trump. Neither of you guys are driving the bus here. And anyone who pretends to be the sort of the driving voice forsoness is, you know, very misguided. So what happens

after that? Well, two things happen. One is that AFPI and Brooke Rollins hear this, listen to it, take a note, and basically stop talking. They get really quiet. They stop making noise. They don't talk about transition anymore. Heritage does the opposite. Heritage makes a lot of noise about Project 2025. They promoted Kevin Roberts. Its president is working on a book, and it's actually helping promote the book by talking about how Heritage has supported Project 2025, which I think I should note is not just a Heritage project, but Heritage funded it and brought in something like 100 different Republican groups to help put it all together. So he's basically doing victory laps and taking credit for it. And this turns out to rub a bunch of people in all the wrong ways. So you're telling me that the Heritage Foundation, the center of Republican Party policymaking for half a century,

put it all on the line so that its president could go on a book tour. I mean, Heritage is used to wielding power within the party. Even if they love Trump, which they do, even if Project 2025 is really just the articulation of where Trump's own politics have always pointed, they're not going to let this disgraced former president shut them up, which sets them up for strike number three with Trump. They called him a short-fingered Bulgarian? Worse. Here's Ken. Trump has a long-known history of hating the idea that anyone could make money

off his good name. He had been not so privately angry at AFPI at one point because their name was America First Policy Institute, and he believed somehow that he has intellectual purchase on the idea or the term America First. And so he felt like somehow they were, any dollar they fundraised was money that somehow was out of his pocket and that made him mad. But then Heritage was doing all these events and talking about how their transition project was important in raising money off that. And that, I'm told from sources, kind of enraged Trump and made him very angry. And he felt like they were also making money off him.

Oh, my God. Do not let Trump have access to a time machine so he can go back and chastise Charles Lindbergh for using America first. Or Ronald Reagan or many of the other people who have used America. Does he really think that he's the first person? He's not a smart man. If it entered his head at any point, he owns it in his mind. He believes he originated it. Yes. That is wild.

And is owed a payout for it. And this is what led Trump to finally disavow Project 2025, maybe as much as the public blowback over its extreme policy provisions. He wanted Heritage to pay him effectively licensing fees for the privilege of helping him execute his own ideas. Oh, that is the Trump way. But Ken said Trump was mad at AFPI for the same thing, right? Yes, but AFPI did what Heritage wouldn't. They paid Trump off in the form of hosting big annual events at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort and paying him way, way above market rate for it. In other words, they bribed him for the right to continue operating within the Republican

policy ecosystem. Wow, everything's going great. I know. And it worked. Trump embraced AFPI as the new gatekeepers of the party, effectively kicking the Heritage Foundation out of their own political party. Here he is at an AFPI event in 2022. I want to begin by thanking the America First Policy Institute. My, my, have you come a long way for hosting me for today's remarks and in particular to recognize America First Policy Institute President Brooke Rollins. Brooke, fantastic woman. After this, AFPI installed itself at kind of every level of the Trump campaign. Their advocacy arm we mentioned earlier, America Works, is one of three groups running his campaign

ground game along with Elon Musk's PAC and the Christian right group Turning Points USA. AFPI is taking the lead on voting lawsuits like one in Georgia to give election officials the right to overturn elections. AFPI people are leading Trump's transition team to the point that they are effectively in charge of staffing up his White House. And they've even released their own version of Project 2025, a 300-page blueprint for Trump's first days in office called the America First Agenda. You're telling me that there's another new Project 2025?

So this is what we have been building up to here. The new far-right plan that has displaced Project 2025 is the document officially plotting out another Trump term. We should be clear that it's not like Project 2025 is suddenly meaningless. All those policies like closing the Department of Education didn't come from nowhere. These are ideas taken from Trump's own statements, from policies dreamed up by people from his first term and from people who will fill out his second term. And a lot of these ideas predated Trump as well.

It's true. It's true. But they were sort of like wild swings for the fences that nobody thought would ever actually happen. I know one person who would execute them. Yes, it was and remains an honest, accurate reflection of the Trump agenda as of this moment. Right. And obviously we've learned that formal written plans only mean so much in a Trump White House. But the point is that AFPI would also be staffing out that White House, including with AFPI President Brooke Rollins, potentially chief of staff. So whatever is or isn't in Trump's head on day one, probably very little, the people around him would be committed

to this 300-page plan that they, after all, put together. Okay, what's in it? So it's missing some of the really controversial stuff from Project 2025, like banning porn. Maybe they learned their lesson to not write those down. Right, but there's still a lot. Here are a few top lines. Mandatory ultrasounds before any abortion, including by medication. Defunding Planned Parenthood. Wait, let me interrupt. So it doesn't call for a federal abortion ban? It doesn't, but we do have a clip of AFPI President

Brooke Rollins talking about abortion, and it didn't leave me feeling that she was for sure going to be more, quote unquote, moderate on the issue than the Heritage Foundation. Here's Rollins in 2022. America is an extreme outlier on abortion policies compared to the rest of the world. And most Americans don't know this. We are only one of six countries in the world that permit elective abortions throughout all nine months. The shocking reality puts us on the list with both China and North Korea, a red flag for any American that respects freedom and liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. Okay, I can only sputter for a few seconds here.

But even when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, elective abortions were cut off at 24.5 weeks, a.k.a. the point of viability. And that has always been how things have been. She's truly on Mars here. Elective abortions through nine months of pregnancy have never been legal in any state. Yeah. She is sounding like QAnon level off reality here, which is concerning for what she would actually want to do in office. Absolutely bananas. Okay.

But before I sputter further, can you finish listing what's in the AFPI agenda? Okay, so some other big items. Ending multiple forms of legal immigration like the visa lottery and family immigration, which is a big one. What? Quitting the Paris climate agreement that has done so much to tamp down global carbon emissions. Legally limit gender identification to male or female only. That's a scary one. Impose a Medicaid work requirement, which would strip health benefits from millions of low-income people.

Concealed gun permits would apply, and all 50 states get ready to see some Glocks and Wendy's. Tax cuts for the richest earners and for corporations, of course. More religious exemptions from things like vaccine requirements. That's another fun one. Harsher criminal sentencing across the board, and declaring left-wing protest group Antifa a terrorist organization. So, Erin, what do you think? Having gotten to know AFPI here, how they operate, how they took power within the party infrastructure,

and hearing some of the fun highlights from their plan for America, do you feel like you have greater clarity on what a Trump term would look like? Do you feel any differently about it? Yes. I feel better that I only have to read 300 pages instead of 900 pages. You love brevity. You always have.

I do. You know, I always was like, my major problem with Project 2025 is it needs an editor. Brevity is the soul of fascism. Needs an editor. Look, I find that having feuding and infighting is something that we saw in Trump's White House before. And despite the fact that it was kind of funny to know that Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner hated each other

and that they called each other names behind each other's backs and the fact that people made fun of Ivanka behind her back and then Kellyanne Conway behind her back. That was funny. It was. This is like less funny because the two people fighting are, like I said, like alien versus predator. Like who do you want in charge of babysitting? And the agenda is similar enough to Project 2025's agenda that it, and they've cozied up successfully enough to Donald Trump that he is not intimidated by the legacy that they have in the Republican Party. Like, it sounds like he was intimidated by Heritage. So it's scary in a different way, much like

how Freddie is scary in a different way than Jason. Yeah, I believe that the ruthlessness with which they basically defeated Heritage and kicked them out of their own party shows that they would be very effective, I think, at getting this agenda through a Trump administration in a way that his first administration was not. And that's scary because these people are these sort of like upstarts, outsiders coming into town, kicking out this established think tank. I think Heritage, for as gross as I find most of its policy objectives, had some connections in the town of D.C. And politics is more than just ideas. It's also connections and relationships. And I don't know that AFPI would necessarily be able to accomplish its policy goals unless it's able to accomplish 100% of them right away. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, Heritage needed people to cooperate. You know, in order to accomplish giant sweeping reforms within the government, you need

to find people to cooperate, or you need to get everybody out of the government. And that's kind of a moonshot. So I think that AFPI is kind of like, yeah, but what if we cured cancer? What if we took away all the challenges that have sidelined every other revolutionary group's policy agendas? Well, so Erin, that is a perfect segue to the one big agenda item from AFPI

that I did not mention, but is the one area where AFPI goes way, way beyond even Project 2025. And that is in empowering Trump to purge the nearly 3 million civil servants who staff the federal government. Here's Ken. They believe that there are basically, you know, somewhere close to 2 million federal employees who are disloyal to Trump and are leftists and will never do what he wants and will do everything to stop him. And so the goal is to basically be able to get rid of any of those that are judged that are sort of standing in the way. Just to jump in here, Trump was so obsessed

with this that near the end of his first term, he set a rule called Schedule F that allowed him to replace certain civil servants with political appointees. It was extremely controversial. Biden rescinded it on day one of his presidency. Project 2025 calls for reinstating it. But back to Ken about AFPI's version of this. AFPI actually has a much more ambitious plan than that in terms of the deep state and the bureaucracy, which is they want to basically change the federal law so that all federal employees are at will employees.

So just to be clear, if this came about, Trump could have his people march through the EPA and fire everyone who says that climate change is real or fire everyone who won't pledge to stop enforcing certain regulations. He could fire everyone at the Department of Justice who won't prosecute his enemies or won't let him break laws in office or anyone at the IRS who looks too closely at Trump's tax returns or his donors' tax returns or maybe just all Republican tax returns. And he could replace all those people with Proud Boys and January Sixers. See, this is why it's really important if you feel like you're about to be laid off, some malicious compliance, just, you know, like password lock things that are really important. Delete root files from your computers. I mean, on one hand, like on a practical level, immediately this would just be chaos.

You're really two million people. You're going to fire two million people. They run the largest government on earth. Yes. You're going to fire two million people at the same time. Replace them with people who do not know how to do the jobs. Yeah. And expect the government to keep working? I think they would love it if it didn't keep.

If the EPA stopped regulating our air and our water supply, I think they would love that. And I think Elon Musk would love that, who is putting himself in charge of firing the regulators. But it's not even just that. It's infrastructure. Like, what about the airplanes that are flying in the air? What about the, you know, what about the... That is, Elon Musk has literally targeted air traffic controllers for mass regulatory firings, which is scary.

We don't even have, oh, God. We're this morning. They passed a bunch of new rules to make it harder to fire career civil servants that is meant to not stop but to slow down Trump from executing exactly this plan. And it would slow him down for between six months and a year. We just have to undo the, like, legal protections, basically. But this is something that I know sounds kind of technical and esoteric. But for people who understand what the federal government does for us day in and day out, it's really scary. I'm just going to pour a little bit of cold water on the hair on fire that we have right now. I'm going to go ahead and say that Donald Trump wasn't great at paying close attention to the quality of people that he was hiring in his last administration. I remember at least two or three members of his last administration who had some pretty blatant domestic violence issues that were so serious that they couldn't pass background checks. And Donald Trump

claimed that he wasn't aware that those existed. I don't think he's the most observant person in the world. So if he had deputies who were a lot more observant than him, then maybe this could get done. But considering his reticence when it comes to relinquishing control over things that he believes he originated, I don't know if it would actually be successful because it's such a huge undertaking and it would really need someone who is both evil and brilliant. And I don't know that there are enough MAGA people who are brilliant. They got evil in spades, but I don't know if they're all, there's not that many smart ones.

Well, I will say that Brooke Rollins has been very effective in the last few years at executing her agenda. And this is the top of the list for her. I mean, Ron DeSantis was a very popular governor in the state of Florida. And then when he got like nationwide exposure, everyone was like, this guy sucks. I mean, she was playing small ball to an extent. This is trying to jump from like, you know, single A baseball to the World Series. Right. Well, I think she's got a chance at executing it, which is, of course, why we recorded the episode.

See, you always see the glass half full, Max. I'm just trying to help people calm down because I'm sure that the paper bags that they've been breathing into for the last three weeks are starting to get worn out. Well, one piece of good news is that it is not too late to stop these wackadoos from coming to power. The polls, of course, are basically tied, which is breaking my brain. But the silver lining is that even a

fraction of our listeners volunteer in these last few days that really could make the difference. We've got a few clips of folks talking about how much fun they had canvassing and phone banking with Vote Save America. And I'm going to be joining them this weekend. If you want to come along, go to votesaveamerica.com slash vote. Here are our volunteers. Hi, my name is Zaria Rubin, and I have been phone banking and door knocking in Portland, Oregon. This is Stephanie. I'm a VSA volunteer in central North Carolina, and I have been canvassing for the last several months. My name is Adam. I'm 33. I'm volunteering with the Arizona Democrats,

working their virtual phone banks. I get to talk to voters all over the country and hear them resoundingly cast their vote for Kamala Harris because they are rejecting the MAGA extremism, the insanity that is Donald Trump. I often go with a friend of mine from real life that is somebody that I don't know because of politics. And we have developed a really good canvassing rhythm.

So it's like getting to go out to lunch with a friend, except we're going to save democracy and save America by canvassing. If you're like me and the phone bank time slots don't really fit with your friend, except we're going to save democracy and save America by canvassing. If you're like me and the phone bank time slots don't really fit with your schedule, reach out to the volunteers and staff who are running those phone banks, because there are a lot of roles like data entry and confirmation calling that support the phone banks. We are ready to move forward. We are ready to turn the page. We're ready to elect down-ballot candidates and a president who is going to serve

everyone. How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher, and Aaron Ryan. Our producer is Emma Illick-Frank. Evan Sutton mixes and masters the show. Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos. Production support from Leo Duran, Raven Yamamoto, and Adrian Hill.