Mark Mitchell: Trump Is Throwing the Midterms
Transcript — TFTC
Article: https://www.tftc.io/mark-mitchell-trump-throwing-midterms-2026
Transcript page: https://www.tftc.io/mark-mitchell-trump-throwing-midterms-2026-transcript
Published: 2026-08-17
Machine transcription, lightly cleaned; may contain errors.
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[0:07] Mark Mitchell: You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

[0:34] Marty Bent: Probably should be.

[0:35] Mark Mitchell: Probably should be.

[0:36] Marty Bent: Mark, welcome back to the show.

[0:38] Mark Mitchell: Yeah, great to be here. Been a long time.

[0:40] Marty Bent: It's been a long time. Almost, almost exactly 9 months. And a lot has changed since then. Last time you were on this show, you were still the independent, independent voice inside Rasmussen. And since then, you've started The Honest Poll. Things have changed. And I think the story behind your departure from Rasmussen and starting The Honest Poll is a good place to start here.

[1:04] Mark Mitchell: Yeah, sure. And what's cool too is that we were talking last time right after I went to the White House. And in that trip, I literally said, like, sir, you're going to lose the midterm elections unless you do this. And he didn't do this. And so now it looks like they're going to lose the midterm elections. And this was economic populism and visible reform of the government. And it's like, yeah, you could do Iran too, but give the people what they wanted. And we're not really getting it. We're literally just getting basically Iran. And you can argue about all these other things that Trump's doing.

[1:04] Mark Mitchell: And yeah, he's probably— he's making progress on a lot of this stuff, but it's leadership and it's about how he's communicating it. And he's just like not doing it well. , the people don't get represented. C. that they're doing it wrong. And what really has happened is pretty much everybody in the polling industry has either been co-opted by large left-wing media conglomerates or by academia or by dark money leftist NGOs on the left or on the right. What happens is a lot of these people will fix the numbers in order to get a paycheck to give large organizations, for instance, like the American Beverage Association, the numbers that they need to show, for instance, that Americans do like sugary beverages on SNAP.

[1:04] Mark Mitchell: And obviously the idea is preposterous. I went into the field and found the exact opposite, but I didn't get paid $2 million for that. And so independent means I'm not taking money from either side, and I can be political, but I'm trying to do it to represent the American people. And Trump's 2024 agenda objectively had most of what people wanted, and people think they're not getting it right now. And so when that, in my opinion, was endangered for the people, what they had voted for, I'm going to be very vocal. Because hey, you're we have this huge coalition. Everybody wanted these mass deportations. They want a middle-class wage-focused economy.

[1:04] Mark Mitchell: They don't want ridiculous nosebleed grocery and house prices. Stay on that target, and they didn't. And so I got very loud and vocal. And long story short, inside Rasmussen, they had made a new friend, a couple friends. There was a polling conglomerate that we built. That polling conglomerate has its foot very deeply. in the political action committee business on the right. And in that business, if you want a check from a Trump-friendly donor or from somebody affiliated with the RNC, you can't criticize Trump. It's, it's not good. They don't want that. And so I was told that my criticism of Trump was hurting the business.

[1:04] Mark Mitchell: And quite frankly, I don't care. I'm here for the people. And so I was silenced for a few months. And so I worked on my new business. And so as of 2 months ago, I left Rasmussen Reports and founded The Honest Poll. When I was ready, just to put a cherry on top, I went back on Twitter and Carolyn Levitt had said something stupid. So I'm like, I forget what it was. So I went out and criticized Trump again visibly, and they literally fired me for criticizing Trump. So that is one of the biggest names in independent polling who currently doesn't even have a pollster.

[1:04] Mark Mitchell: And the moolah, I guess, was more important to them.

[4:37] Marty Bent: Yeah, it's insane how Partisan politics can affect every corner of the economy. And I think polling, trying to be this sort of sober, nonpartisan vehicle for people to get actual signal, is one of the last bastions. And so good on you for not caving to the money grab and starting The Honest Poll. What is the plan with The Honest Poll?

[5:06] Mark Mitchell: I mean, literally just what I was doing before. We're going to do probably monthly tracking polls to start, and there's going to be a lot of good sentiment stuff in there. And usually most of these pollsters won't do sentiment work because they don't care what the people think unless that they're getting a paycheck to misrepresent it. Or when they're trying to— what happens on the right a lot is that just like a hooker on the street, they try and wear a really short skirt to show that they can do some good tricks. And so when the Iran strike started, you saw a lot of right-wing pollsters come out and basically do push poll questions to show that they The strike was popular.

[5:06] Mark Mitchell: Well, if you just ask the question straight up, should we strike Iran or not? It is not popular. It was like 37%, but nobody would do that, right? And so, or Trump wouldn't listen to a mainstream media pollster who's actually doing the legitimate question. He wants to hear it from insider advantage, and they'll pad the question with like, hey, Trump's going to take out the Ayatollah and get rid of all of Iran's nuclear programs with a wave of a magic wand. Do you support or oppose? It's like. Like, what do you think people are going to say? Right. But that's not helpful. And so I don't know what happened behind closed doors with Trump and the Iran strike.

[5:06] Mark Mitchell: I can only conjecture that it was probably people like Lindsey Graham who were very close to him. When I went to talk to Trump in November for 45 minutes about how he should win the midterms, he spent 15 minutes of it talking about Lindsey Graham. So I think he was a very influential character there, but he was obviously selectively being shown polling to paint a bad picture, like, hey, you'll be a hero if you take out the nuclear program. And it's like, yeah, people don't like Iranians to have a nuke, yet it ranks number 30 on their list of priorities. And so when you take their number one priority and put it on the back burner, and then take number 30 and spend the most important part of your presidency on it, obviously there's going to be a strong reaction.

[6:57] Marty Bent: Yeah. And speaking of top priorities that are actually on The minds of American citizens, I think it's squarely the economy, inflation, jobs, immigration. I mean, that's just reading the Twitter sentiment seems—

[7:11] Mark Mitchell: Well, institutional trust is one that people don't talk about, but was pretty high because we got Trump 2024 because of a lot of statist overreach under the Biden administration. And we can't forget that our elections are retarded. Our federal government doesn't represent the people. We're an occupied nation. And I think in some fundamental way, understand that because with questions like, are you more concerned about foreign or domestic terrorism? They're more concerned about domestic terrorism. 72% of America thinks we're living in a police state. So it's like this elite worship, golden age, Dow 50,000, the people are going to see through. They don't buy that anymore because it's existential now.

[7:55] Marty Bent: Yeah. I mean, you see the big backlash with flock cameras now and the push to ensure that they They get widely installed and distributed throughout the country, and they're not reliable at all. Since we last talked, I think Nick Shirley's investigative journalism and many others— shout out to Steve Robinson, The Maine Wire up in Maine, highlighting the Medicare fraud that is rampant throughout the country. And you look at the AI wave too, and I think that's a very nuanced discussion. I'm actually involved in some companies helping bring data centers to the United States, and there is a lot of misinformation around it, but the narrative is— it's a strong narrative because people say, hey, you have Dario Emodi and Sam Altman saying we're going to take all the jobs and we're going to become the richest men in the world.

[7:55] Marty Bent: And at the same time, you have the administration pushing forward with that, which I think they should. I think the narrative needs to change. But then on top of that, prioritizing Iran, nuking the oil markets headed into summer, and—

[9:09] Mark Mitchell: Which we haven't even really seen play out yet. No, it's going to get wild.

[9:14] Marty Bent: Well, and that's— and the other, just to end on a callback to the last time we talked, you said if Trump doesn't do these things, you're going to see socialism rise. in the United States. And we've seen Mondani, and we've seen all these democratic socialists winning primaries across the country. And it seems like Gen Z is stuck between a rock and a hard place and saying, well, we thought Trump was going to be anti-foreign wars and pro-economy, really secure the border and focus on the domestic economy. And that doesn't seem to be where the focus is. And Therefore, socialism is on the rise here.

[9:53] Mark Mitchell: Yeah, 100%. We're going to see a lot of political turmoil. And it's so predictable because the Republican Party not only is incapable of understanding the change that's coming, they are directly incentivized not to. And so on the Republican Party, power is mostly about controlling the allocation of donor bucks. And so if you're one of these people high up at a political action committee and you know people who know people, or you can get no-bid contracts, or you can get Trump apart, carded. It's all about selling this access, monetizing your position. And so any change to the status quo is dangerous to these people's bottom line.

[9:53] Mark Mitchell: So if you say to them, listen, the young people are not really ideological. So if you just pound your chest about capitalism and conservatism, they're just going to ignore you because it's stupid and they know it's failed. I've been saying this for probably years now, and it's like, that's what they're doing now. So it's like they came in on a massive populist wave, a reform, massive popular— and let's be very clear, with a mandate for austerity. That's pretty ridiculous. People wanted to see the deficit cut. That is wild. And it's like, okay, you had Doge. Maybe all of the Republicans in DC didn't vote for it or want Doge, but you had it.

[9:53] Mark Mitchell: And it was the most popular thing Republicans had ever done with under-40 voters. Trump had a 60% approval rating. There's a Doge. And Doge could have come in and cut a trillion out of the deficit, and it mostly would've been fraud. And they got sent packing, and it's because they endangered the Republican status quo in Washington, DC. There were a lot of corporations that were getting these no-bid contracts or profiting off of Medicare waste or all of these things. And these people own these senators. They own these senators and congressmen. Pharma's got money into everybody. AIPAC's got money into everybody. Like, that's just how it works.

[9:53] Mark Mitchell: And so they would rather lose and then draw a perimeter around the parts of the party they want to keep. And that's what they're doing right now. And you can see these people who are probably just apparatchiks for intel or for foreign interests, whoever, just take a Nancy Mace. So she seems based when you hear what she talks about, but if you follow what she does, she just takes one issue and just pounds on it. So during the Biden administration, she was just pounding on the trans issue. And it's like, okay, fine. Is that our biggest problem? Like, no, but fine, we get it, right?

[9:53] Mark Mitchell: And so now what is she pounding on? She's like, well, we all have to hate Muslims. They're terrible. Let's kill them all. Let's get them all out of the country. And it's like, for God's sakes, are we really going to regress back to the party of George W. Bush? Is that like where the conservative movement that was populist just 2 years ago— remember, like, Dearborn Muslims, like, in part voted for Trump and helped him get over the finish line. Like, are we gonna forget Muslims for Trump? And it's like, fine, I don't like radical Islam. Americans are afraid of radical Islam. But are you a constitutional conservative?

[9:53] Mark Mitchell: Because if they're a citizen, they have natural rights from God. You know what I mean? So like, what are we even doing here? They don't care. They'll talk about conservatism, but they're not conservative. They're like neoconservative, which is an entirely different thing. And that's what I guess the Republican Party right now is throwing a temper tantrum. to force everybody on the internet as part of this broad coalition. Trump got a lot of under-40 socialist votes. He did. And so now they're saying, well, socialists all want to put you into a ditch. And the under-40 socialist Trump voters, like, no, I just want to be able to afford food and get a job, and you give my job to Indians.

[9:53] Mark Mitchell: So that's what's going to happen is Republicans are trying to lose beautifully right now. So that they can wrestle control of the party back from essentially not even Trump anymore, just the people that gave the Republicans the biggest coalition they've ever had. And they're doing it by just this massive circular firing squad. I come up on Twitter every day and it's like, oh look, another podcaster from Podcastistan getting money from Qatar. It's not a winning message. It's just—

[14:03] Marty Bent: Do you want to clear the air here? Are you getting money from Qatar?

[14:05] Mark Mitchell: I'm getting money from no one. I have to go out and kill what I eat or eat what I kill right now. So no. And when I'm up and running, most of my money will be coming from people through subscriptions and YouTube and stuff like that.

[14:18] Marty Bent: Awesome. Well, I mean, to your point about austerity, people welcoming it, I was one of those people and I still welcome it. But then you juxtapose that with the Treasury's July statement where it had $334 billion in receipts, $766.3 billion in outlays, and a $432.3 billion deficit. Yeah. National debt's about to cross $40 trillion, I think officially now, on a trailing 12-month basis, interest expense on the debt surpasses healthcare and defense spending. And this is a runaway train that, again, to your point, austerity is what people wanted. And I think a lot of Americans intuitively understand that this runaway debt train is having some consequence on the price of goods at the end of the day, combined with the immigration and the H-1B stuff, and they're not seeing anything done about it.

[15:12] Mark Mitchell: Yeah. No, 100%. I like high interest rates in a balanced economy where we have a relatively compressed wealth equality curve so people can save money and earn interest and stuff like that. But when you have to finance $40 trillion in debt with a 10-year Treasury approaching 5%, and when we have a repressive housing market because mortgage rates are astronomical, it's like we're not— I mean, maybe there's 2 ways out of this essentially, is hyperinflation or we just absolutely get completely crushed. And it's like, okay, we're going to add another $500 billion to the annual deficit to expand defense spending. One could argue if that's reactive to the Iran strike that we were woefully unprepared prepared for, or whether it's forward-looking for when the Democrat Bolsheviks get in charge to expand their expansionist NATO war against Russia.

[15:12] Mark Mitchell: It's like the pendulum is swinging towards war is what it looks like. And we can all throw temper tantrums, but right now we don't control the government, and that's what the government seems to want. And it's people, seem to agree that reindustrialization is better for America. Well, that's a good way to get it. Our debt burden is too high. Well, that's a good way to get it. They have been sort of improving the ability of the government to call up the draft. So we did changes to the draft over a year before Pearl Harbor was bombed. So we saw World War II coming and we're preparing for it essentially.

[15:12] Mark Mitchell: And I don't know, I don't want to be conspiratorial, but I look at the way that NATO people have been talking about— and here's the other thing, does NATO even stand for anything anymore? Who knows? So a lot of change coming.

[17:09] Marty Bent: Not only that, but bringing the AI subject back into this, I mean, it is pretty clear that the Trump administration has made it a matter of national security and really pitted the United States versus China. You have this frontier closed-source model in the United States, you have that race, and then you have the open-weight model out of China in that race. And it seems pretty clear that the, the setting, the scene is being set for a confrontation with China over, over AI, among other things.

[17:42] Mark Mitchell: No, that won't be good. No, I mean, there are nuclear Power with ICBM capability, and and we're a lot less better off than we were a year ago to actually like engage with them. And I think we've just learned that our entire military doctrine, you know, doesn't really work right. Like in this new environment, like we've put a lot of money and thought and time into building these massive platforms that are very difficult to defend from low-cost munitions that China is very well equipped to manufacture a bunch of, and we are not.

[18:19] Marty Bent: Yeah, we've fully transitioned into the age of the sovereign individual where the leverage on power has completely shifted towards those low-cost munitions, particularly drone warfare. I don't think the American public is aware of just how drastically modern warfare has shifted in the last 2 years with drones specifically.

[18:37] Mark Mitchell: Yeah. Listen, America's hard to invade, but if I was forced to pick which amphibious vehicle to be on, as part of an amphibious landing, I would probably prefer to be on a Chinese landing ship going after America and not vice versa. But you know what I mean? I'm just saying, just based on the strategic forethought and the— I mean, they're part of the reason Iran is doing well, are they not? They've been preparing for war against America for a long time. And they're using real-time satellite intel and they're sharing targets and they're probably sharing technology as well. And we just give ours to everybody else. It's like—

[19:22] Marty Bent: Yeah. Well, talking about midterms, what is the state of these races across the country right now? How's it looking?

[19:31] Mark Mitchell: So I would say the bookends right now for the national House popular vote, the last time I did the generic ballot was really right after They got that deal with Iran and right around July 4th. So I think it was a high. It was Democrat +4. I think a case could be made back then it should have probably been about Democrat +6. And then if you look at Rich Barris and Emerson, and I'll be doing another one soon, if you look at good pollsters like Rich Barris and Emerson, they have something more like Democrat +10 or +11. And so those are, I think, the bookends.

[19:31] Mark Mitchell: And if you compare it to other races like 2018, it's It's kind of similar now. Maybe the race will tighten or maybe it's not. And we can talk about cases of why that might happen. But this feels very similar to a 2006 where you had a second-term Republican president mired in an unpopular war. And a case could be made that this war is less popular than 2003 was. Now, obviously everybody hated Bush by 2008, but they asked for that war. They wanted that war. America wanted that war. And they did not want this one. So it's like you layer that on top of just the historical trend that Democrats should pick up both houses, looking at 70%, 80% of the last races where the opposite party was in power.

[19:31] Mark Mitchell: It looks like a pretty good chance at a Democrat House pickup, and the betting markets agree at about 85% Dem pickup. So now there's a lot of, again, a lot of things that could happen. There are positive or negative exogenous shocks. We could have the best economic numbers we've ever seen over the next 2 or 3 months. I think that's an uphill fight. I don't think that's going to happen. People would need to feel the economy getting better. It's not going to happen. We would need the biggest 4D chess, big brain exit from Iran. I don't think that's going to happen. You could say, all right, well, maybe Iran strikes America.

[19:31] Mark Mitchell: I don't think they're stupid enough to do that. Maybe there's a false flag or a Gulf of Tonkin incident. Maybe the Democrats do something Stupid, but I don't think they're going to. And so I also, everybody says, oh look, the RNC is outraising the DNC. And it's like, okay, but you guys forget they put most of their money through ActBlue, so they're going to have a huge war chest. So it's like the best case scenario I think for Republicans is because of these changes to the electoral map is that these seats are more entrenched than they usually are and that they could limit any loss and maybe eke out a slight majority.

[19:31] Mark Mitchell: I think that's probably the best reasonable case scenario. The worst-case scenario is like a 2006 where the Republicans lose like 30 seats. And it could be worse than that by the time we get there because, as you and I both know, this Iran thing is only getting worse. And Iran has every incentive to make it worse between now and November because not only does Trump have an election, but Bibi Netanyahu has an election. You better believe they want that guy gone. And then on the Senate, it's like I care, everybody's going to focus on these Senate races. And at the end of the day, the Republicans don't even have the Senate now.

[19:31] Mark Mitchell: So it's like, why are we even talking about this, right? Okay, maybe they eke out a one-seat majority, but they're not gonna get any legislation through in the 120th Congress. So Trump's time as an influential leader of America is on the decline. I think by November it'll be like, okay, it's not as bad as it could have been. maybe we wish we had done better, but Trump's done. His political capital will be over. Democrats will have Congress and will probably be picking apart his administration with show trials over the egregious things that are happening, pardon sales and antitrust and no-bid contracts. And they have a lot of that.

[19:31] Mark Mitchell: So they've been preparing for this. They've been watching the Trump administration very closely. And it's like, if you go work in the Trump administration, you have to know that the Democrats will come after you and the Republicans are not coming after the Democrats. So, you know, like weird things that you would expect to— like you would expect to see at this point in Trump's term, more turnover, people leaving, people burned out, new people coming in, and they're not. And I cynically conjecture that it's like, okay, they have to stick around for the pardons. Like, it might get that bad. So It's like we started the conversation.

[19:31] Mark Mitchell: It's going to get wild. I just— I like— I don't— people can call me a doomer, but I don't see any— like, what is going to motivate this broad coalition of people that Trump built? Because the Republican, like, Mitt Romney voter is not big enough to compete with your Democrat electorate now, who obviously a lot of it is just ballot harvested, mail-in ballots, obviously. But again, we didn't go after that. And they turn out, they will turn out 70%, 80%, 90% of their presidential turnout. Republicans will get a much smaller number as we've seen in all these special elections.

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[26:41] Marty Bent: It seems like they've been too slow to act on this. I mean, I think There was clips going around the CNN, uh, polling guy or their, their election night analyst, and he was exacerbated because I think he realized in real time that there was like mail-in ballot harvesting going on. We saw with the California mayoral or the Los Angeles mayoral race with Spencer Pratt, seems like he's posturing that maybe there is some legal action in motion. But then you have things like the Maha mandate that the Trump administration had, like they did do the reduced vaccine schedule thing last week, which I was very happy to see. But again, and who knows, like, you always hear that it's really hard to get things done in DC and it moves very slow. Um, but I think considering everything you just said, like, moving slow is not an option if you want to secure the House.

[27:33] Mark Mitchell: This was a tenuous toehold that the Trump MAGA coalition had over American politics. It should have been, you know, they like They treated it—I'm trying to use an analogy—they treated it like a marriage with the American people, when in reality it was just a first date that the people didn't even really want that much. They just needed it. They're like, "Oh, my friend guilted me into this," you know, or whatever. " And it's been a bad first date, and it's like we America again is making votes of existential need. In 2024, not the same thing as 2016. 2016 is like, oh God, sick of this retarded two-party politics.

[27:33] Mark Mitchell: It doesn't serve us. Let's just try an outsider and see what happens. Like, that was 2016 because they didn't like Hillary Clinton was just more of the same, right? 2024 is, dear God, we need somebody to fix it and all we have is Donald Trump. Get in there and fix it. And so, like, I don't want to set the bar. Like, again, this is a lot of this is about messaging. Yes, he can't come in and snap his fingers and deport 10 million people, but it is, again, a wartime, economic and political wartime. And a wartime leader is very different than a peacetime leader. A wartime leader has to come in and have laser-focused strategic vision on who the enemy is, what the battlefield is, and how that battle is being fought.

[27:33] Mark Mitchell: And Trump has just objectively not been doing that. Oh, I love the Dow's at 50,000. We're in a golden age. Don't talk to me about affordability. We need 600,000 Chinese visas. And what's wrong with the H-1Bs? We don't have American talent here. Just like stuff like that. 50-year mortgages. And it's like we're going to destroy civilization tonight. And it's like all of this is just— and maybe I don't think he's the same Trump as 2016. I think 2016 Trump would've been like, he was a little bit better at his Twitter game back then. He was a king of Twitter. He understood interaction with people and the feedback loop.

[27:33] Mark Mitchell: And this is just like slop. And it's like, again, you can't go on your first date and just put out slop like that. And America is reacting exactly like you'd expect, and the polling shows it. I mean, we had 50%, we asked the question, has Trump kept his promises more or less than recent presidents? And only 33% said more, 50% said less. So that's a pretty resounding defeat there. Do I have that right? 50% less, 33% more. So only 1 in 3 Americans are like, yep, Trump has fulfilled his promises. And again, obviously you can't fix it all, but it's like how you talk about our problems and how you frame everything.

[27:33] Mark Mitchell: And we could have done Iran with no problems if we had been focused on increasing wages, Talking about reducing legal and illegal immigration as a means to increase job availability when— and this is why I love what Tucker's doing. So like, in retrospect, it would seem that a lot of the things that Trump ran on didn't really have a moral core. So for instance, why are we going to mass deport everybody? Is it because we're racist, or is it because of rule of law? or fairness, or is it because we're putting American workers first? Like, what's the moral or the value behind why we have this policy?

[27:33] Mark Mitchell: And the voters said, well, Trump wants to deport everybody because he cares about us and he wants us to have jobs and wages. And then when Trump comes out and says, well, you know, some of these illegals work pretty hard, everybody's like, well, wait, there's a disconnect. Like, he did this for a different reason than we thought. And then what you're left with is he probably just said it to get elected. And so, I mean, look, again, his numbers might come up a little bit. Republicans might perform better than people expect, but they've been underperforming the polling in every race, including the primaries. The turnout for Republicans is super low.

[27:33] Mark Mitchell: It's off the charts for Democrats. So the most likely scenario is a pretty big loss. And, you know, you know, people like us have been screaming about this for over a year now.

[31:51] Marty Bent: And there's been no change. Yeah. And I think you've been beating the drum on X and other platforms too about how they can fix the narrative. I think you just said it with the moral case for immigration policy specifically, but other things I think you've been passionate about are like fair capitalism, uh, Square Deal Now. Like, what does, what does that look like? What do you think the American people want on the economic side? What would a platform that could win actually sounds like.

[32:20] Mark Mitchell: They want a champion who will make America more fair. And so we can talk about the American dream and what that means, but one of the biggest questions I've been tracking is that only 35% of Americans say today's children will be better off than their parents. So this aspect of opportunity and upward mobility is really what America has offered, and it's gone. It's objectively gone for most people, especially young people. And everybody knows it. And at the same time, you have this like frustration and anger at the system. 72% of Americans are angry at the level of waste, fraud, and abuse. Over 70% think politicians are profiting ill-gotten gains from their positions.

[32:20] Mark Mitchell: And then what nobody talks about is you also have a very, very anti-corporate view where over 80% think that, you know, big tech needs to be reined in because of their excess stuff like that. And the under-40 voters specifically, even though— and again, people say, oh, socialism's popular. Well, socialism's becoming more popular and socialism wins with under-40 voters now, but it's still not popular. It's still only in the 40s. And everybody acknowledges that we do have a capitalistic system. So I think they want capitalism to work, but it's like under both parties, it clearly doesn't. And there's this aspect of oligarchy. Now, people don't know what an oligarchy is, but I think what we're seeing is just subtextually, they understand they're getting screwed by the system.

[32:20] Mark Mitchell: And those questions have strong majorities. It was 65%, 67%, something like that, percent of the under-40 voters think that the economy is unfair to young people, and only 20%, 30% disagree. So it's over 2 to 1, right? So these are very strong majorities. And again, they overwhelmingly support socialistic policies like nationalizing major industries. That's a 3 out of 4 position. For under-40 Trump voters. And excess wealth confiscation, that's an almost 60% position of under-40 Trump voters. So, you look at this, what we really have is this boomer capitalism, Reaganomics, trickle-down, let's cut the capital gains tax and let's cut corporate taxes, and maybe you'll get some scraps.

[32:20] Mark Mitchell: And the problem is that this plutocracy, this oligarchy has become so entrenched on both parties that Americans aren't feeling that. They're not getting that anymore. With the inflation, they're just absolutely getting crushed in this K-shaped economy. And they'll selectively pick a good economic number without looking at the fact that consumer confidence is like the lowest it's been in decades. And no, because nobody wants to address the fact that the system is failing people and the people are screaming that the system is failing them. And so again, I think like none of what we're dealing with is new. I mean, they had the Gilded Age, they had a big problem with monopolies in the late 1800s.

[32:20] Mark Mitchell: And then you had people like Teddy Roosevelt come in with very progressive economic policies. He was a capitalist, he wasn't a socialist, but he wanted capitalism to work for everybody. And so he would go after these businesses and break up these monopolies and call them out. And Trump invites him over to Mar-a-Lago to wine and dine. Like, Zuckerberg stole your election, bro. And the first thing you did after you got inaugurated was invite him over to your house and wine and dine him. Like, what are the American people even supposed to do with that? Because they knew Zuckerberg, they didn't like Zuckerbucks. It was like almost 80 to 20, they were against Zuckerberg specifically putting money into elections.

[32:20] Mark Mitchell: So, you know, I've heard Trump talk about how he wants to be on Mount Rushmore, but Teddy Roosevelt is there for a reason. It's because he acknowledged that there was a problem that the American people were suffering. And it was only just because the system wasn't fair to them and he tried to make it more fair to them. And part of the stuff he did, part of the stuff that FDR did, obviously World War II and us being re— again, becoming a major industrial player, like obviously that had a part to do with it. But most conservatives will remember the '50s, '60s, and '70s fondly, especially for the like ability for a single-income janitor to have a house and 5 kids, right?

[32:20] Mark Mitchell: And live a comfortable life. But it's like, you can't forget that we had like a 90% upper income tax bracket there. You know what I mean? Like, we were confiscating wealth from billionaires then when we were supporting unions and had very pro-worker policies. And our system is now incapable of that. Like, we had a chance, we can't do it. And so somebody's going to, and I hope it's JD. He talks like that. But whoever does this is going to be going up against just the absolute I mean, we're pretty close to like this, like state corporate fascism. Like, we're getting there.

[37:10] Marty Bent: It's there. I mean, it's there. You said oligarchy. It's like corporate socialism. Like, you have the Trump administration taking equity stakes in a bunch of these companies, and people are like, rah-rah, reindustrialization support. It's like, no, like, this is— that— I mean, that's how Mussolini defined fascism, was the combination of corporate and state power working tightly together. And I don't think Trump is a fat— like, and I think the idea that Trump is a fascist is like a weak meme. I just think the system is set up and has just sort of embedded— so like, I tweeted this out the other day, like, because people were complaining, uh, there was some socialists, like, uh, he sent a tweet out of a headline about healthcare, like, 95% of American males don't go to the doctor, um, more than once every 5 years because it's too expensive.

[37:10] Marty Bent: And he's like, what stage of capitalism is this? It's like, that's not capitalism. That is corporate fascism, where healthcare is the most heavily subsidized industry in the country, and it's expensive because it has socialist tendencies. And there's this complete misunderstanding of the fact that we don't live in a capitalist society and haven't for a while. There are capitalist, um, sort of variables and aspects of the economy that we live in. You can go spin up an LLC, you have an idea, you start a business, you can do that. But Once you get to economies of scale, the bailout culture and the favoritism that exists is very socialist.

[37:10] Marty Bent: And it's very clear to me, but the American public doesn't understand this.

[38:41] Mark Mitchell: No, we need people that are really pushing the edge of thought in DC. And unfortunately, like I said, all the money goes towards maintaining the status quo. For instance, I don't think we should have publicly traded equities. I just don't. I think it's very bad. It's very shortsighted. It drives a lot of risk-averse— risk-on behavior. It incentivizes corporations to do really stupid things. Like the whole Cracker Barrel redesign they did was financialization essentially. They wanted to borrow a bunch of money and they destroyed the business. And it's like, okay, well, if that was a privately held company with people who had a long-term view, they wouldn't have completely destroyed their brand image and pissed off all their customers like that.

[38:41] Mark Mitchell: And I think that happens in financial services. I think it happens in Like literally every industry, they're basically got to get that stock bump like this quarter. Now we're probably past that now because everybody's stock just goes up, right? But like we have this disgusting melange of all this stuff, corporate socialism, socialized losses. There is some fascism. Like, you know, people, like you said, people call Trump a fascist. It's lazy. But like, let's not forget that under Trump, we shut down all the small businesses in America and then worshiped Walmart. Like, what? Right? And that was very brutal. A lot of people lost their jobs from small employers.

[38:41] Mark Mitchell: It was a tough time. And objectively, because of all the asset money that got put into the industry, those big corporations all did much, much, much better. And we've continued to see wage stagnation since then. And obviously, the foreign-born worker population did a lot better post-COVID than So, you know, it's just, it's, it's our enemy and nobody is willing to call that out because they need the donor bucks. Even on the Democrat side, they love big corporations.

[40:32] Marty Bent: Yeah, it's disgusting. I mean, you're talking about like 1950s, '60s America, and that's another meme that's emerged over the years, but I think it reemerged over the last week, which is wages priced in gold for 1950s minimum wage workers, and they're making more than Like a middle-class American today in purchasing power.

[40:55] Mark Mitchell: Yeah. But we all know this is the case though, is because the people still live in our communities. You could drop out of high school and get a salaried job as a janitor with benefits and then retire and live in the same town with a house and a single income. It was possible. People did that. And now it's like, okay, well, you're going to be cleaning houses as a gig worker competing with illegals and barely being able to afford rent in a single-bedroom apartment, and you certainly don't have healthcare. That's the same person.

[41:34] Marty Bent: Yeah. And I mean, the last time you were on too, you welcomed the idea of a controlled demolition of the housing market. I don't think a manufacturer-controlled demolition is the way things went. But if you look at the divergence between houses that are for sale and houses that are being bought right now, it's the largest ever. And so you do have this situation where I think boomers or many, many who have houses right now are trying to sell and they simply can't because interest rates and the prices are still high. So 9 months after our last discussion, it seems like something has to come to a head there because that divergence can't persist forever. It's like prices either have to come down or you have to—

[42:12] Marty Bent: Yeah. Lower the interest rates drastically.

[42:14] Mark Mitchell: I personally think recessions are healthy. And it's like when we have a deflationary— when we have a deflationary birth rate, then the idea that our economy is going to continue to be inflationary is kind of retarded. Like, it's not going to go up 5% every year when we are producing less people. I mean, like, productivity only takes us so far, right? I'm pretty sure our productivity has been flat for 10 years or whatever. AI's, I don't think, making it better, right? And so it's like the corporate press who wants stocks and the line to go up use recession as a dangerous boogeyman, bad word. And so it justifies bipartisan rescue bills to prevent recession or to recover from recession.

[42:14] Mark Mitchell: And all of that is socialistic spending and transfer payments. It's all socialism. And it's like Probably at this point, the most dangerous thing is if we don't have a recession. And people might scratch their heads, but it's like, again, the specter of not being able to service our own debt and losing reserve status, currency status as the dollar, right? These are existential problems that will turn us into the Weimar Republic. And again, I'm not an economist, but where are these conversations? Why are people not talking about this?

[43:30] Marty Bent: They're only happening on Bitcoin podcasts, unfortunately.

[43:33] Mark Mitchell: Yeah. I'm old enough to remember when capitalists used to talk about things like creative destruction. You know what I mean? And it's like, no, we can't— those corporate loans, they can't go bust. Well, it's because they're leveraged 50x and buried in all these off-balance sheet complex securitized products and crap like that. And the whole thing's going to come tumbling down like a house of cards. I guarantee you, if you just go ask Grok, is our global financial system more leveraged and at bigger risk of a systemic financial collapse than in 2007 or not? It'll probably say, Yes. You know what I mean? These problems have not gone away, they've gotten worse because now our entire stock market's like 10 companies, right?

[43:33] Mark Mitchell: And it's like everybody's leveraged to the hilt and it's all been like a rent-seeking grift. And that's not capitalism. Like you said, capitalism is a doctor in your town that comes to your house and you pay him cash and he renders services. That's capitalism, not like a private equity-backed roll-up of chain store urgent care centers because you can't afford a real doctor. That's not capitalism.

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[47:11] Marty Bent: It's scary because you mentioned like midterms, like the House could go to Democrats, likely will go to Democrats, and then they'll start the trial shows. And that's the most frustrating thing about the fumble that has been the Trump administration as it pertains to domestic economic and immigration policy is I do not want to see this happen. I wish we could be focusing on the things I just mentioned. But if we're just being objective, we saw it in the Bitcoin and crypto industry, the meme coin stuff. It's like, why are you doing this? You had a mandate to clean things up and out of the gate, the night of the inauguration, you're launching a meme coin. What the fuck is going on?

[47:54] Mark Mitchell: Are you aware of what went on in antitrust?

[47:56] Marty Bent: No.

[47:58] Mark Mitchell: Oh, wait till I tell you this one. So again, looking back, and listen, I was personally a Trump guy. I spent hours trying to get this retard elected back on The Donald, and again, because he objectively was an outsider with the right policies, and I wanted to see that work. Right. And he left me, not vice versa. And I'm allowed to have personal biases because I don't pretend that pollsters shouldn't have them. I just try and separate my numbers from them. Right. And I think my track record speaks for itself. In the first Trump administration, it was like, okay, we know he's not a Russian asset.

[47:58] Mark Mitchell: Like, what are you doing, guys? Come on, Hillary. This is hubris. Right. And then I was like, okay, well, the Zelensky call. And it's like, okay, now this is really retarded. Like, you're showing us Democrats Democrats are insane and this isn't helping things. And I guess it got them their ends of handicapping the Trump administration somewhat, but his approval rating was pretty high when they were impeaching him for the Ukrainian call. And then when they went after him criminally, that's what sealed him as the Republican nominee for 2024. It made him more popular. Right. So even if they're not sane, they could learn from their past excesses and moderate and not be like crazy.

[47:58] Mark Mitchell: Like, that is something that Democrats really could do. Now, right now what they're doing is stealing primary elections away from socialists so that they can continue to have an establishment AIPAC person in. Like, that's what's happening right now. So that's kind of insane. But, uh, but when they come out, and probably it'll be next month in September, I know Ro Khanna has been working a lot on this. I know other Democrat offices have been like putting these cases together. There's real stuff here. Like we all see the smoke. There is fire. And one of the most egregious ones is what happened in antitrust. And it's like, okay, I can't point to you the exact UCC code that makes this a federal offense, but it looks egregiously bad.

[47:58] Mark Mitchell: So the antitrust person— and we actually had a pretty good one under Biden, but we got a new one, Gail Slater. I know her. She's a really nice lady, and she also cares about the American people and said, okay, in this job, I'm going to put the American people first. Corporations have too much power, and so we're going to do what antitrust is supposed to do, which is break up monopolies and sue the hell out of these companies. And they started these lawsuits, and one of the lawsuits they went after was to prevent Live Nation from buying up new, you know, Ticketmaster venues or whatever, right?

[47:58] Mark Mitchell: And so this is a, like, a real circumstance where people go to concerts and they have to pay $200 for a ticket. And it's literally because there's a monopoly.

[50:38] Marty Bent: It would be very popular if they broke this up universally.

[50:42] Mark Mitchell: And they, and they were going to, and because it was egregious again, and very— it would have been a very popular win. So Mike Davis allegedly gets hired as a lobbyist for Live Nation, gets paid $300,000 a month as a retainer, gets a $1 million success fee. There's video documentation on this already on YouTube, but I assume that it's going to be in ads and stuff and gets her fired. And not only gets her fired, gets her office raided by police within the DOJ. And there were other cases too that just— there was like a Hewlett-Packard acquisition. They sued to stop it and they immediately just got overturned because Kellyanne Conway was taking a million dollar check.

[50:42] Mark Mitchell: Like, this is just what happens. The Republican lobbyist takes a big check and goes and screws over the American people behind closed doors. It's literally the exact same, like, guy with a monocle in a smoke-filled cigar room right out of the political cartoons of 1905. Like, that's exactly what's happening in the Trump administration. So, you know, at the end of the day, I would've loved for the Trump administration to hold the people who violated law in the Biden administration criminally accountable, or at the very least fire them. Like, where was the frog march of the people out of the FBI who spied on all those moms in the school boards?

[50:42] Mark Mitchell: Like, we never saw one. Maybe it happened or not, but it's like, if you don't see it, it didn't happen. You don't get credit for it. And so Trump, like, has held nobody accountable. And I guess if the Democrats are going to come back in office and hold criminals accountable, like, this time around, I'm not going to pretend that it's some affront To democracy, you know what I mean? Like it's like well, like you got you guys got yourself to blame for this one. And and again, like just the level of hubris and openness with which this is happening is is bad. And there's like another one with it'll be a story in the Wall Street Journal.

[50:42] Mark Mitchell: But let's just say I was part of a polling engagement where somebody paid a lot of money to right-leaning pollsters to convince Trump to. scale back deportations and support an amnesty deal. And it was, in my opinion, the most effective thing that made him change his mind. And I didn't do it willingly, but like, that story is going to come out too. Like, there's a lot of things like that. So yeah.

[53:10] Marty Bent: Again, it's just so unfortunate and egregious. Again, the crypto, the meme coin stuff is something that I'm closest to, and it's like, what Why? Completely unnecessary. Like, just, you're already a multi-billionaire. When you get out of office, your family's going to be set. Like, why do this while you're in the halls of power? And to your point, like, I'm not going to be like, this is a political witch hunt. Like, it's objectively corrupt to a certain extent. And to your point about like perp walking people, like, again, Just the speed with which they're moving, or the lack of speed with which you're moving. And we did have a good step in that direction with the indictment of the woman from— where was it? The SPLC or SLPC? Southern Poverty Law Center.

[54:04] Mark Mitchell: Yeah. Nobody really knows who that is. You know what I mean? This needed to be Brennan. It needed to be Wray. It probably needed to be whoever signed the auto pen pardons. It needed to be Mayorkas. And of course, They're not going to go after Mayorkas, and we all know why. Like, you know what I mean? Like, this is where we're at. Like, it's, it's, and I, you know, I don't know if a lot of people knew this, but the House Oversight Committee did not a lot, but it did go after the AutoPen parts, right? And I'm pretty sure that they made criminal referrals to the DOJ and that the DOJ chose not to pursue these people.

[54:04] Mark Mitchell: One can only you know, conjecture why. It's because they don't want to undermine the massive overreach of pardons that the Biden administration did. They don't want to, you know, kill the goose with the golden egg. So, I mean, like, that's what I'm guessing. So again, it's— I mean, it's just, it's just not what America wanted. And I don't know, like, you can't, you can't pump out like Reaganomics and Muslim hate and dehumanize the socialists enough for me to forget the fact This was the best chance America had, the best coalition America ever had for financial austerity, for government reform, for economic populism, for reining in the excess of large corporations, for reindustrializing America.

[54:04] Mark Mitchell: And it's like at the end of this whole endeavor, it will have been essentially for naught. In fact, we're not only that, I mean, I think if we play what's going on In Iran, to out to its most likely conclusion, we will have seriously degraded our capabilities to deploy force around the world, and certainly everybody's view of how powerful we are as a military has been seriously undermined. Yeah. Oh hey, like again, I'm not trying to make everybody drink, but it's like tell me I'm wrong.

[56:09] Marty Bent: No, I mean, it's hard. It's hard to refute those points. And that's what I like— I'm sort of staring out into the sky here on my back porch. It's like, where do we go from here? Like, Democrats take over, do we get a wave of socialist taking hold? And how long is it going to take to untangle that Gordian knot of terrible policy decisions that just accelerate us towards Weimar, or is JD28 or somebody like JD the only hope to actually revert course?

[56:45] Mark Mitchell: Well, let's find something optimistic to talk about. Okay? So first off, no matter what happens, America will continue for the likely near future. Okay? We still have a country. And I can't say the economy's going to get a lot better, but it's like The debt will probably not go up much faster than it already has under this Trump administration. The exponential curve is not going to increase by a factor. It'll stay on its current trajectory. So we got time to figure this out. And we have 2 very entrenched establishments. And like we've said, they're both very corporate. oligarchy, plutocratic, whatever you want to call them.

[56:45] Mark Mitchell: And they both like have aligned interests in many things and work together. They look out for one particular country in the Middle East. They— and they want you divided. And I think very honestly that the idea that the constitutional right has of being like racist and undermining people based on things like, you know, like, I don't want the people from Somalia to come over here, but if they went through our process and they are a US citizen, we have to assimilate them. We can't say they all have to go back. You know what I mean? Like, we're not like at the same place that the UK is yet.

[56:45] Mark Mitchell: Okay. So like, if you can't call yourself a constitutional conservative and say that radical Islam is our biggest threat and all Muslims have to leave America, we were founded on like freedom of religion, right? It's like literally why we exist as a country, right? And on the left, they, you know, they dehumanize the right and they say that they're Nazi fascists and they do the LGBT stuff so that the right can attack each other over culture war issues. And it's been very effective keeping these people divided and not realizing the extent to which the Democrat and Republican establishment are tied together. And I, again, I'm not saying it's all about Israel, but that is the most obvious Venn diagram overlap, right?

[56:45] Mark Mitchell: So if you take establishment Democrats and establishment Republicans, they are aligned on that issue. And they're also aligned on blowing up Russia. It's really military-industrial complex/foreign interventionalism. It's neoconservatism. That's what unites these people. Those people are getting old and dying, and they're also losing the plot. And the internet's getting better, and they're losing their grip on their ability to keep these people divided. Because that's how they succeed. And I said, we see it right now. You know, Hezbollah got $730 million allocated to it this year. I'm sure some of Chris LaCivita's Republican political action committee have astroturf out there, and they're literally doing it right now.

[56:45] Mark Mitchell: All the left wants to kill you. Don't you remember Charlie Kirk? And it's like, come on, guys, it's not all the left. Yes, the left has some violent people, but they also think the right is violent because they stormed the Capitol building. So I'm most optimistic that the young people are unideological enough that they can see through these neoconservative division tricks and form a youth coalition that is focused on national populism. I think that's possible. And you're starting to see people try. This thing that Tucker did, I don't care. He's not getting funded from Qatar, right? Like if you've just bought his borrowed talking point, if you think he's funded from Qatar.

[56:45] Mark Mitchell: Now whether his track record is great or whether he should have talked to Hunter Biden, like valid questions. But what he did with his ten points was very important because what it does is it signals common ground and collaboration. And I happened to watch the way that the young Turks covered what Tucker did, and there was olive branches there. So this is possible, and all it would need to do is is for people to say like at the end of the day we really all are American. That's what a nationalistic populist platform would do. It would find common ground and unite us to building a better country.

[56:45] Mark Mitchell: How does that country get better? Well, it's not like the AI data centers. You know, maybe that's number fifty-two, right? But it's like people should be able to afford food here. They should have livelihoods. And the government should work for them. And incidentally, what's great, like I said, is under 40 socialists voted for Trump. These people are also very interested in fairness. They think the people that did things that were wrong should be arrested more so than the boomers. Like, like we asked if people who did the Autopen thing should be arrested, and it was like over 60% of young people, and it was like down in the 40s or something.

[56:45] Mark Mitchell: I forget what it was, but it was lower with older people. Like, these people want to— they liked blowing up narco They're like, yep, that's defending America. Blow them up. So these people also have even some autocratic tendencies. So there's a chance that whatever this is is going to color fast and loose with the Constitution. And you know, like it's up for grabs right now. It really is. And like this isn't a small amount of people. We're talking about twenty, thirty, forty million. Like whatever this coalition is going to be, that's enough for an independent. to maybe not win, but at least take out one of the other parties.

[56:45] Mark Mitchell: So you could see a Ross Perot spoiler. And I think JD also gets all this stuff. He is the only populist, the only true populist that I'm aware of. Bernie talks the right way about some things, but he's an establishment creature. But he's in the hardest spot he could possibly be in because he's still attached to Trump. Trump's not going to really have much in the way of coattails, I think. And the establishment Republicans hate him because he's not a Zionist, and they're going to do everything in their power to try and take him out. Not only that, but for the corporate reasons, for the fact that he actually is a populist.

[56:45] Mark Mitchell: So it's like he's got a really uphill fight, and he's the best guy that I personally think we have right now to get America this national populist platform I think it needs and it asks for. So it's like, okay, maybe it's JD, maybe it's AOC, maybe the establishment succeeds in getting Rubio in there. Rubio will almost certainly lose, and AOC will probably just be like a laughingstock, retarded president that just does Biden stuff, right? So, uh, so it's like pray for an outsider. Like, that's really what it is.

[1:03:30] Marty Bent: Yeah. Ah, it's such a clown show. Yeah, it is. Uh, it makes you want to focus on local politics, just like get down to the county, city, state level and just focus there.

[1:03:44] Mark Mitchell: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1:03:46] Marty Bent: Because when you think of the debt, I, I think I said this last year when you're on, um, I'm economic populist nationalist myself too. Uh, and I think it all comes back to the money. I literally think the core of all these problems, and both parties would never agree to do this, and that's why I'm such a strong advocate for Bitcoin because it's a sly roundabout way that Hayek described in the '80s to take money out of the control of governments and central banks. You can't fix any of these problems because they're all spending problems at the end of the day. They're all favoritism problems that are enabled by the ability to issue debt wantonly without any thought of repercussions or opportunity cost because the Fed will always be there to monetize that debt until you take away their ability to just print money and throw it at all this bullshit and enable this crony oligarchic corporate fascism, whatever we want to call it. It is what it is.

[1:04:45] Mark Mitchell: Yeah.

[1:04:46] Marty Bent: I think it all comes back to the money. And from an economics perspective, the only way out is debasement, and that is what is causing everybody to really feel the pains of financial strife via higher prices. And they think it's Trump, corporate favoritism, or the socialist and the doling out of subsidies and entitlements. And it's all of it. And it all stems from literally the money, the most important tool we use as humans. How do you express value and coordinate economic activity? It's money. And if the money's broken, your political and economic system is going to be too.

[1:05:26] Mark Mitchell: Yeah. So, the Fourth Turning tells us that the pendulum swings back on things like morals, values, and integrity. And then ultimately, what we have here is systemic failure of integrity. And all of these institutions have been built on ideals that were very popular with the boomer generation instilled post-World War II and mean nothing now, especially to the younger people. And They want a fair values-driven economy where people are held accountable for being criminals and where there's justice. And that has a lot less to do with things like liberalism and socialism. And also, what's kind of wild is that whether or not they support things like flooding the country with illegals or they support the LGBT stuff, Like there's this libertarian classical liberal idea of like, okay, they're a citizen and we're a country.

[1:05:26] Mark Mitchell: You know what I mean? Like the— like I really do think that the more racist anti-human parts of the conservative are coming from the older generations that just love to go over and bomb brown people. And it's like, okay, well, if you're— if you're a constitutional conservative Christian, Persians have natural rights from God too. You know what I mean? It's like, no, we got— oh, we just got to glass the whole country. Like, really? That's your position? Because you just made yourself look insane, and you're going to try and win an election with that being a core fundamental belief? Like, that's not wise because the young people don't like that.

[1:05:26] Mark Mitchell: That turns them off, most of them, right? And yet at the same time, they're fine with deporting everybody. It's like, that's not fair. They shouldn't be here. Get them the hell out, right? But they also don't want to see ICE goose-stepping around neighborhoods shooting people in the face with tear gas because that's not American. And so they have finer sensibilities, in my opinion, about what the future should look like, and they're going to get political power. And it's like you look at where we're at objectively as a country, it's not a surprise we're here. Many countries, many empires have been in this particular circumstance. But it's just like you can never predict how it's going to play out.

[1:05:26] Mark Mitchell: It could be a long, slow decline like Rome, and we just like people stop repairing the roads, and then like fiefdoms pop up. Like I don't know. Could be a massive civil war. It could be total global war, and the establishments will externalize our enemy. That could actually get us out of this, right? I don't know if the young people would sign up to fight and die for it, and how well conscription would go over now. Like I don't know. Or these people could just, like, get a really good outsider who's astute enough leader to find very easy to find common ground. It's very easy to find common ground.

[1:05:26] Mark Mitchell: And it's like, hey, like, guys, just shut up about the tranny stuff. We're gonna get rid of the under— we're gonna get rid of the sex change for minors. We'll give you your parental rights. But it's just let them be retarded. You know what I mean? Like, like, there are common grounds on things like this. Somebody could easily do that. It's like, No Reddit. Stop talking about killing your political enemies. You know, bring the CEO in, give him an earful, tell him he's under investigation. Like, whatever you have to do, like, let's tone this down. And, uh, you know, like, the entrenched deep state, the corporate interests, the foreign interests are not going to want that to happen.

[1:09:00] Marty Bent: Is Spencer Pratt a dark horse outsider in your mind?

[1:09:05] Mark Mitchell: I don't know.

[1:09:06] Marty Bent: He caught a lot of people. He was doing the right thing in the LA race.

[1:09:11] Mark Mitchell: Yes. Yeah. Whoever this person is has to be very impressive. That's the problem. You know what I mean? The bar is so high just because one Teddy Roosevelt speech he makes will get printed in every newspaper and nobody ever sees what he does 99% of the rest of the time. You know what I mean? Now it's like Al-Sayed. Again, I don't want a Democrat socialist to win, but it's like Blues Brothers, dude. Like, you know what I mean? It's so— it's Blues Clues. Yeah, Blues Crew. What did I say? Blues Brothers? Yeah, Blues Clues. Like, what are we doing here? Yeah, it's a clown show.

[1:09:50] Marty Bent: It's embarrassing to be— it almost is like we're in the humiliation ritual of some satanic occult or something like that. And, uh, yeah, or like a socialist overtaking, the color revolution, just humiliation. But to your point about this younger coalition, what's their propensity to actually get out and vote? Is that increasing? Will they actually show up or they just talk about it online?

[1:10:17] Mark Mitchell: I mean, there is certainly going to be less of a turnout. And the problem is it's like, okay, you look back 20 years ago and it's just a totally different set of young people. And it was a totally different politics. There was a lot more cultural conservatism and a lot of, you know, like just very different, right? And so the most recent example we have is a 2024 presidential election cycle where a lot of new voters came out for the first time and where there were a lot of crossover Democrats and independents. So we have this one data point of a 77 million Republican electorate for a presidential cycle.

[1:10:17] Mark Mitchell: But we do not yet have a very good data point for like, yes, 2022 was higher turnout than normal, but it was still like very old, you know what I mean? Like, and it wasn't the same. You know, people hadn't decided on Trump yet. He was like kind of a nonentity. Like, he wasn't really doing much in 2022 other than getting raided in Mar-a-Lago, I think happened that year. And Biden was being awfully retarded, but the Democrats got a wave on the on the Dobbs decision. Like that's the Republicans were up a lot, and then that tightened it down to I think a three-point race at the end.

[1:10:17] Mark Mitchell: But what we're seeing in all these special elections is that all those people that came out for the first time for Trump are just not coming back out. And so whether that's because of the youth propensity or lack thereof to come vote, I think it's more of like the youth propensity to. Not want to put up with, like you say, humiliation rituals, right? I think that's really what's going on. And, uh, like, I, I have no case to be made for a higher than expected Republican turnout. Like, I just don't see how that even happens because they've literally underperformed every polling. And, and even in these primaries where it's like, you know, you got a bunch of people to show up for Galerine, it's like, okay, well, how much of that was harvested and unrepeatable in a national Scale.

[1:10:17] Mark Mitchell: His turnout was like all boomers. You know, like it's it's not going to be this nationwide groundswell of young people that are afraid of so they're not afraid of the socialists. They're not. I think a lot of people they hear defund the police and it just goes over the head. Not because they don't hate the idea, but it's like they don't think they're serious about it. And we and it's like, well, how can how can that be? That's crazy. Was like think about the kind of things that people had to forget about Trump to vote. For him, right? It's like, it's pretty equivalent, right? Yeah.

[1:10:17] Mark Mitchell: Like, they had to, they had to hold their nose and choke down January 6th. And I think January 6th obviously was a fed op. It was a psychological operation. But a lot of people don't think that. They think that Trump tried to overthrow the government, and then a lot of those people still voted for him.

[1:13:12] Marty Bent: Yeah. So, I mean, January 6th was fed op, and in my opinion, if you just like look at the people walking around the Capitol building, it's like, okay, yeah, I think we got up to about 57% of America Agreed that federal agents were involved in the January 6th riot.

[1:13:30] Mark Mitchell: So a lot of people had their eyes open. But then you had a quarter of Republicans say that it was the biggest threat to democracy since the Civil War. So it's like—

[1:13:38] Marty Bent: Yeah, it was all, again, a clown show, humiliation ritual. All right, we're approaching midterms. Let's just— maybe the last thing to touch on, what are you seeing? are the most important races or topics that people should be paying attention to?

[1:13:55] Mark Mitchell: I'm just worried about what happens with this conflict in the Middle East between now and November because we've probably never been in a bigger window for a suspected false flag. And I hate to sound conspiratorial, but it's true.

[1:14:11] Marty Bent: It's not conspiratorial. We got to stop. You got to stop. We have to stop. What's the word I'm looking for? Disclaiming. I hate to sound it's because it's objectively true. These false flags exist; they have existed throughout history.

[1:14:24] Mark Mitchell: And we are in the window for the biggest, you know, the benefit, the the risk benefit analysis is probably the best calculus it's been for a long time for one of those to happen, and hopefully it doesn't. And the same thing, like I just think like really what we're going to do is we're going to tick along till November and nothing's going to change. Like Trump's. gonna put out some positive economic numbers. The Democrats are gonna put out some negative ones. Everybody's gonna run a bunch of ads and everybody's gonna be harvesting a bunch of mail-in ballots. And I don't know what's going on with the machines.

[1:14:24] Mark Mitchell: I don't know who controls them now. It's gonna be very unpredictable. There's probably gonna be a huge polling miss because how can you even predict what's gonna go on? But it's like, what I don't know yet is how effective the Democrats will be with whatever this anti-corruption advertisement and theatrics they do because they've been very quiet. And There hasn't been a lot of overt Trump hatred and they've just let him cook. So we'll see what that looks like and it could be wild and maybe it won't do anything. But it's like if we tick along till November and the polling stays about the same, I do think Republicans will underperform the Democrat +8 RealClearPolitics aggregate right now at a House popular vote level by a point or two.

[1:14:24] Mark Mitchell: I think that's Based on what all has happened with all the special elections. And what we're looking at then is how accurate were the estimates of how many seats that people have picked up in redistricting, because all of that was based on 2024. And so if you really have— what that would be is like if Democrats pulled a +10 House popular vote, that's like almost a 12-point swing From where we were in 2024. And so when people say the House is entrenched or the Republicans are picking up seats, it's not in an environment with a 12-point swing. And so what you might see is there's this trough where the House doesn't really move that much if we stay within this range.

[1:14:24] Mark Mitchell: You get outside of it, the Democrats are just going to be picking up seats that people didn't expect. And who knows who they are? Because in some of these districts, it's only going to be a 5-point swing. In others, it's going to be a 17-point swing. You look at like the Watley race that's going on in North Carolina, and he's underperforming Trump by 17 points in the latest poll that I saw. So like, you know, like that's that's not good. Like, and so I don't know. I think you see potentially like like Texas is in play. It absolutely 100% is in play, and it only comes down to.

[1:14:24] Mark Mitchell: electioneering at the state. It really does, because the polling is tight, a couple points apart, and that's not where it should be when Trump won by 13 points in Texas. And then Ohio, I think Vivek's in danger 100%. Iowa. But again, if it's not a 57 to 43 Republican lead in the Senate, they're not going to get any legislation through anyways. So I don't think the Senate matters. I think We're just going to wake up to a very close House race or Democrats just ran the board.

[1:17:43] Marty Bent: Yeah. I do want to note before we wrap up here, it is insane that ballot harvesting and rigged elections are just expected now. It was taboo in 2020. 6 years later, 2026, it is Basically accept it as a fact of how the system works.

[1:18:06] Mark Mitchell: Yeah. Michigan, look at El-Sayed, right? He underperformed the polling by 9 points. There were good pollsters like Emerson who had him up 14, I think Emerson had him. And then of course, Trump comes out the same the next morning and says he only won because he cheated. And it's like, no, bro, the Black precincts in Detroit were stuffing ballots. And because he doesn't have the SEIU behind him or whatever it is, because he doesn't have the political organizations that bus people from neighboring states, because he doesn't have the people in vans that go around to nursing homes with blank mail-in ballots or write these mail-in ballots in a warehouse somewhere, again, with SEIU workers or something, the anti-establishment people don't have that capability.

[1:18:06] Mark Mitchell: And I think they— it's impossible to know how much. And obviously some of it was a mismatch in capabilities from an advertising perspective. And I don't know how good of a campaign he ran, but there was some cheating, guaranteed there was some cheating. And who cheated? They wanted to keep the AIPAC candidate in. That's really what it was. They paid $70 million for Haley Stevens, and then they would've had an AIPAC candidate on both sides of that race. And why? Like, Trump freaked out. Out on Truth Social, he came out the next day. It was one of the only races he talked about, right? And it's like, well, like why is that?

[1:18:06] Mark Mitchell: Well, the APEC lost a Senate seat. That's what it is. You know what I mean? Like not in the general, in the primary. Like because everybody can say like and there was a poll that put Rogers out four points. I think he loses. Rogers lost when Trump was on the ballot. So you know, I think that four point was an outlier. But we'll see. Maybe he maybe people don't really maybe they'll really vote against. a Muslim socialist in— but I, I don't, I don't think so. I don't know.

[1:19:58] Marty Bent: We'll see. And hopefully, um, we don't wait 9 months to do it. Maybe we'll catch up after the midterms. I'm sure you're gonna be busy the next couple of months. Um, but really appreciate you coming on. Congrats on starting The Honest Poll, um, doing it with integrity. Uh, it's lacking these days, so I really appreciate that you're putting an effort to, to preserve your integrity and do things the right way.

[1:20:21] Mark Mitchell: That's what I'm here for. It's my goal. If I ever lose my integrity, I'll shut down.

[1:20:25] Marty Bent: Where can we send people to learn more about The Honest Poll?

[1:20:29] Mark Mitchell: So we have a landing page at thehonestpoll.com. Please sign up for free Substack notifications. And the second I get this YouTube thing straightened out, we'll have the YouTube channel back up and we'll be putting out— we're really going to get our content honed into higher value stuff, like understanding public sentiment and how it drives behind the narratives. Because again, almost everything we see now is establishment kabuki theater, and there's nobody really nailing that. And so on Twitter, it's @honestpollster as well. So people check me out. I got a lot of hot takes.

[1:21:03] Marty Bent: Go check it out. Great follow. Mark, it's always a pleasure, sir. Thank you. Thanks, Marty. Peace and love, freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes A day early and ad-free. Make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that.

[1:21:48] Marty Bent: $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time. Okay.