E.J. Antoni: Why Republicans Lost Texas
Transcript — TFTC
Article: https://www.tftc.io/ej-antoni-why-republicans-lost-texas
Transcript page: https://www.tftc.io/ej-antoni-why-republicans-lost-texas-transcript
Published: 2026-11-07
Machine transcription, lightly cleaned; may contain errors.
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[0:35] Marty Bent: DJ Antoni, welcome back to the show, sir.

[0:39] E.J. Antoni: Hey, thanks for having me again.

[0:41] Marty Bent: Well, it's been a while, and I think it's a good time to catch up considering what happened a couple of days ago with the blue wave. And as we were discussing before we hit record, it seems pretty clear that what happened with this shift towards the Democrats was essentially like referendum vote of no confidence in the Trump administration's ability to follow up on promises. And I think a lot of those promises were economic, some were foreign policy related, and I think the two really clash together when you consider what's going on with the war in Iran. And I think just starting there, leaning into the reality of the K-shaped economy, and despite the fact that GDP looks to be pretty healthy, that wage growth seems to be up and to the right compared to the Biden administration, real Americans, everyday common man Americans aren't feeling that. And we saw them react to those feelings in the polls this week.

[1:40] E.J. Antoni: Yeah, Marty, I think that's absolutely right. There was, I think, a couple of different repudiations. There was a repudiation of the Trump administration for taking us to war with Iran, but there was also a repudiation of Congress for failing to cooperate with the good things that the administration was doing. I mean, look at DOJ, right? We were promised $2 trillion in spending cuts. Well, DOJ, for its part, identified hundreds of billions of dollars in potential savings, abuse, corruption, fraud, waste, et cetera. And what does Congress do? They enact less than 1% of it. DOJ hands them a win on a silver platter, and these so-called conservatives in Congress say, nah, you know what?

[15:59] Marty Bent: Yes. And do not apologize for were going. I thought that was an incredible monologue. And I think just building on that, if you look at the shifts of voting tendencies in midterms, I think the 18 to 29-year-old demographic shifted 40 points to the left as a repudiation of not following up on these promises. And that's what's so frustrating about the situation we find ourselves in, because it's right there if you want to go grab it. We have the ability, we had the potential and the ability having both the House and the Senate to get things done. And all the while, over the last 2 years on the fraud, waste, and abuse side, it's been glaringly obvious that there is rampant fraud throughout the federal government, Medicare, Medicaid, all of the layering centers and hospice centers throughout the country that are literally, in many cases, immigrants setting up LLCs and taking money and sending it back to their home countries without actually delivering the product and service that they are supposed to be in those systems.

[18:14] E.J. Antoni: Yeah, Marty, I think there's a lot of truth to that. Now, one thing I do think is very interesting and worth pointing out here is that— and it goes back to the, the first part of our conversation— the fact that this was voters rejecting something as opposed to— in other words, voters were running away from something, not running to something else. I don't think this is an embrace by voters of the DSA. And the reason I say that is because in many instances when, at least on the economic side, maybe not the social side, but on the economic side, in many instances when the DSA's actual policies were put on the ballot were put to the voters, they rejected them.

[25:16] Marty Bent: Right.

[27:28] Marty Bent: Yeah. No, I think I agree with you. I hope the neocons have been sufficiently decimated morally and hopefully from a legitimacy perspective too, because I mean, it's very obvious that again, JD, I think his admission yesterday was admirable though, probably a couple months too late. And I guess that's the big question. How does the GOP rebuild? What is the message that they should be running with? And obviously the message they ran with in 2024 was very aligned with what people wanted. They didn't follow up. How do you follow up? And I guess leaning on your monetary policy sort of expertise, Is there a variable where the debt and the spending are in such a state that they literally don't think that they can make the cuts necessary because it would decimate the economy? Is that what their thinking is? And do you think if that's the assumption that it is a correct assumption?

[28:35] E.J. Antoni: No, I don't think it's anything along the lines of You know, these politicians are sitting there saying, oh my gosh, if we cut all the spending, it's going to crash the economy. I mean, what did all the spending do to benefit the economy? Right. We kept hearing in the Biden years, we'd get these GDP reports and there was the— these outsized contributions from government purchases. And that was just government purchases, right? Not overall government spending. Sorry, this is a pet peeve of mine. We, we so often when we get these GDP reports and sometimes I slip into it too, I'll admit. We get these GDP reports, you see the government number, and everyone says, oh, government spending grew by X percent, or government spending contributed X percentage points to overall GDP growth.

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[36:52] E.J. Antoni: Well, it's certainly not going to be good in the short run. It'll be a repeat of the Biden years, most, most likely. And I'm not talking about initially when the economy was still reopening and, you know, all these people were going back to work because it was previously illegal for them to go to work. My, isn't that, isn't that a great government jobs program, right? A way for the government to create jobs, make it illegal for people to go to work and then count it as job creation. when you say, all right, you're allowed now to go back to work, serfs. But I digress. Look, it's going to be higher taxation, more regulation, looser monetary policy to fund it all.

[42:27] Marty Bent: Shifting gears to the reindustrialization theme, I think AI being a part of that, how has that gone in the last 2 years in your mind?

[42:36] E.J. Antoni: Good overall. I think it's been a mixed bag though, mostly because of tariffs. You know, I think if the tariffs were done correctly, uh, it could have been a whole heck of a lot better. But I mean, and look, you know, we advise them, don't use AIPA. It's not going to stand up in court. Use the authorities that the president used in the first term, or even some of the ones that Biden used. There, there are plenty of examples where these, these different tariff authorities have, have been tested in court and they've held up in court because they— it was sound. There was no way AIPA was ever going to hold up at the Supreme Court.

[51:56] Marty Bent: Yeah. I'm thinking back to the Supreme Court ruling on the Chevron doctrine.

[52:02] E.J. Antoni: Huge. Huge.

[52:04] Marty Bent: Absolutely. And that's going to take time to matriculate and have the effects felt throughout the economy.

[52:08] E.J. Antoni: Right, exactly. So many people, Marty, that's such a great point. I'm so glad you brought it up. So many people misinterpreted that, or the implications of that court decision, as being all of this stuff now automatically gets overturned. No, we still have to go through the process of all of these different instances of regulatory overreach need to go to the courts. But now it's more likely that the courts are going to overturn it. And in terms of regulatory action that can be initiated today, whether that's in the form of new regulation or deregulation effectively, It makes it a lot easier for that stuff to start.

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[55:58] E.J. Antoni: So there's 2 things I would focus on, environment and finance. And we are seeing some of this already in terms of the pushback on the crazy environmental regulations. Excuse me. And I think that's really, really helpful because it doesn't matter if it's Um, manufacturing that you mentioned, or literally any other industry. It could be just somebody's trying to put up a power plant, and it doesn't even have to be like, you know, a natural gas power plant, which I love. It could be a wind farm, which I hate. But whatever the case, you know, oh look, we found a puddle in the area and now we're shutting this all down for the next 10 years as you go through an endless permitting process.

[1:02:00] Marty Bent: What does their capital requirement package look like?

[1:02:03] E.J. Antoni: It's much more reasonable. They've removed a lot of those, again, those different markers on loans where you look at it and you say, this has nothing to do with default risk. So it's like, okay, those things are gone. In the same way, you had all these crazy threats by regulators during the Biden years to basically try to strong-arm lenders into not providing banking services. This was part of the debanking scandal, right? They were strong-arming lenders to not provide loans, or even if it's just like a checking account or other kind of banking services, to anyone doing business with fossil fuels, right? If you're going to make a loan to somebody to build a nat gas power plant or a nuclear power plant or anything other than wind or solar, basically, you get dinged according to the regulators.

[1:04:25] Marty Bent: No, I remember when I was in Texas, this was a big problem with the renewable energy credits. You're subsidizing wind and solar, overproducing in West Texas, driving prices negative. And if you've got a nuclear power plant or a gas power plant, you're having to stomach those costs and then unable to reinvest in the reliable baseload power that nuclear and natural gas provide. And I think there were many reasons why the sort of blackout of 2021 happened, but I think that was a contributing factor, a materially contributing factor, was this renewable energy credit capital misallocation play.

[1:05:05] E.J. Antoni: Yeah, I don't think there's any other way you can see that. Absolutely. I mean, when you need power the most, it was exactly those sources, the solar and wind, that didn't deliver any. And it was so bad that tragically, as I'm sure you know, you had a lot of these natural gas power plants that are obviously being fed by a natural gas pipeline. And many, in many instances, the pumps for those pipelines were actually— the compression stations were actually on the parts of the grid powered by the wind and the solar. Yeah. And so the tragic irony is you ended up with this, this kind of cascade, this domino effect where a bunch of your reliable power plants were taken offline because they were on a grid powered by unreliable wind and solar. So wind and solar didn't just go offline, it caused other stuff to go offline as well.

[1:05:59] Marty Bent: Shifting gears and ending on the Treasury. You brought up Laarsh. Seems like you're positive on how he's positioning. I think leading into this administration, the implicit projection was that the Treasury and the Fed are going to work closely together. I think 2-part question, how do you think the Treasury has been handling everything that it needs to handle since Bessent took over? And how do you see the interplay between the Fed and the Treasury moving forward?

[1:06:34] E.J. Antoni: So let's take the last part first, if I may. When you have a $40-something trillion Treasury market, you need the Fed and the Treasury to work hand in glove just to ensure smooth operations. You do. Look, it's not the system I want. It's not, believe me. I don't even want centralized monetary policy at all. I want to go back to a decentralized system. I want the government to be covering weights and measures, and that's it. But look, that's not the system we have. So given the system that we have, it requires, because of the sheer size of the Treasury market, for the Fed and the Treasury to work together.

[1:12:33] Marty Bent: Economic Outcast.

[1:12:34] E.J. Antoni: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. And, you know, they've— you know, he's trying essentially to put as much financial pressure on Iran in the ways in which we have not been able to put military pressure. on them. And I mean, look, hats off to him for that. He has done a really brilliant job. And the number of avenues of attack that he's been able to take on that, whether it's the traditional banking system or crypto exchanges, I mean, genuinely, he has done an absolutely remarkable job. And I've been more than impressed by him for that. But it's like everything he's doing, again, it's clean up aisle 6.

[1:16:38] Marty Bent: Yeah. And again, it's a shame we're in the Iran War because, to your point, I think Scott Bessen is extremely competent and I think he stepped up to the plate. I mean, the famous Manhattan Institute interview that he did in July '24 leading up to the election saying, hey, I think there's going to be a grand global or monetary reordering, and I want to be next to the president while this is going on. And to your point, I think the Iran war threw a wrench in that to think where we could be to protect America from this monetary reordering or set us up for success. If it is happening, it's like, what is the opportunity cost of time and capital that has been dedicated to the Iran War? And I guess the last question is, let's run through the 2 scenarios. If the war persists and if we end it rather quickly, what do you think could be accomplished in the next 2 years?

[1:17:39] E.J. Antoni: Not a lot in terms of Uh, any— anything that requires congressional cooperation? No, and I— look, I think, um, I think both the president and actually some of the Democrats who won are setting the right tone when they talk about, look, we have, we have, you know, A, B, and C different areas on which we agree and we can work together on those. Um, that's great. As of right now, it's all talk, so we'll see. People like to talk that way, and— but let's see how they actually act versus how they talk. Again, promises made versus promises actually kept. So that's the congressional side. Don't expect— I would say don't expect a lot of action on anything in which Congress has to cooperate with the president.

[1:21:59] Marty Bent: You destroy your engine, you're turning it on and off and exposing more methane into the atmosphere.

[1:22:05] E.J. Antoni: But why do we even have that? It's because the way the EPA wrote the rule was that for every second an engine is off during the emissions testing, It basically gets bonus credits for reducing emissions. So at that point, they're not even just measuring what's coming out of the tailpipe anymore, which is what you should be measuring. Instead, you had a regulator put his thumb on the scale and say, I want this, basically. And so I'm going to actually change— literally change the formula that we're going to use to calculate your emissions. And so that the longer the engine is technically not running for, We're going to artificially reduce even further the emissions that you're producing.

[1:24:50] Marty Bent: The engine-off multiplier. Is the bane of my existence. If I forget to turn it off— I do this, I drive my boys to school every morning. We have like a stop sign at the end of the block. I have to make a left across the intersection. It's pretty busy. And if I— it actually like prevents me from making the left sometimes because the engine has to restart. You have that like half a second delay in actually getting any thrust. It's, it's the bane of my existence.

[1:25:16] E.J. Antoni: I mean, that's like, that's dangerous, right? Like there, there will be instances when you need to gun it to make sure you don't get into an accident. let's say. I mean, it's, it's actually dangerous. It's the kind of thing that ends up costing lives. The regulators don't bother, you know, they don't bother calculating that. Look, one, one of the things that this administration has done that has been just extraordinary— there's a law a lot of people didn't know about. A lot of people still don't know about it, but it's finally being used. It really never was used before, and it has to do with the Small Business Administration, the SBA.

[1:26:50] Marty Bent: Well, here's to hoping they continue. We get some positive momentum the last 2 years while the House and the Senate are sort of gridlocked with the executive. E.J., this has been great. We need to catch up more often. We can't have too much time between interviews next time.

[1:27:12] E.J. Antoni: I would love to. It's been fun. I would love to do it again.

[1:27:15] Marty Bent: Awesome. Well, peace and love, freaks. Hey there. Thank you for watching the whole video. If you made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of it. If you wouldn't mind liking and subscribing and maybe sharing with friends and family, it helps us out here at TFTC immensely. And then beyond that, we have a very valuable newsletter called The Commoner. You can go to tftc.io and subscribe to that. We cover Bitcoin, AI, energy markets, macro, political, cultural discussions. We've been running it for a decade. Highly recommend you sign up for that to stay up to date with what we're covering beyond these conversations. And then you can go to tftc.io/ai as well. We have an

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