Transcript: Mark Mitchell: The USS Trump-Tanic Is Sinking

Marty Bent [0:36] Mark Mitchell, we met towards the end of August, and it seems like a lot of what you prophesied in our last conversation came true last week.

Mark Mitchell [0:45] Basically a prophet. Yeah. I mean, but the funny thing is, is that I know from people that what I was saying out there on Twitter was all making it through the White House. And so really the big story in my opinion is like the people that know public opinion, this was not a surprise for. The problem is, is that very few people know public opinion because most of these people make money by basically lying and shilling for the establishment. And it's like, why didn't the Trump administration pivot? I think that's the entire question we should be asking ourselves. And after like the biggest electoral blowout since 1974, Trump is still not pivoting. Like, why? Americans deserve better.

Marty Bent [1:22] We're going to get amnesty for all.

Mark Mitchell [1:24] Yeah, that's a pivot. Not the right kind of pivot, but it's definitely a pivot of sorts.

Marty Bent [1:30] What was your take on JD's post on Wednesday? Because it seems like he at least had some level of introspection, or maybe was just hedging his 2028 potential run and trying to distance himself. But it seemed like he tried to portray like, I was hearing things, but the trusted insiders were telling us it was okay. Turns out the outsiders are right.

Mark Mitchell [1:52] Yeah, well, there was an insider that was right because that 13% pollster he was talking about, although I had 13%, was not me. It was Tony Fabrizio, the president's own pollster. So the president's out there banging on about election fraud now when his own pollster told him that it was going to be a blue wave. That's the kind of situation that we're in right now. But like, the way I would frame this is that Americans spoke and gave Trump a mandate to fix affordability and government corruption with Republicans. And then they looked at everything Trump did for a year and a half, 2 years, and they gave Trump a mandate to fix affordability and corruption with Democrats.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ That's where we're at right now. So America spoke very loudly that it's like he did not do what they voted him into. And so what Americans expected is, hey, we sent you a message, what's your response to the message? So far the response has been lacking. There was a similar shellacking in 2010 where Obama came in on this hope and change wave, and then got his butt handed to him in 2010. And the very next day he came out and said, you know what? I accept responsibility. I'm sorry. I'm gonna listen to the American people better. We're actually gonna do what you want. We're not seeing that at all.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ And so this is going to places where I just, I have no answer. We're gonna see crazy, unpredictable things. And unfortunately for JD, he's like literally the only person that had any introspection whatsoever. And I would applaud him because I think it's like, at least he knows his job is to serve the American public and he was trying to send a message. Now, unfortunately, that message seems to imply that he's under duress, basically. You know what I mean? That's what we're seeing here. And I kind of know this, I kind of got the vibe. It's like you have to literally stay on Trump's good side or things will go very bad for you.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ And at the end of the day, the vice president was elected by the American people to be independent. And what we're seeing, I describe as the USS Trump-tanic. This is going to become I think an absolute debacle of rats fleeing the sinking ship, throwing each other under the bus, massive wave of Democrat investigations and accountability. What are you going to do? Americans need leadership. They think they're not going to get it out of the Trump administration. And I'm telling you, Americans, I think, are going to be begging for the crook. I really think that we're speedrunning Nixon's resignation here. Trump's going to have a low 30s approval rating after this.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ Nixon resigned at 25.

Marty Bent [4:17] Yeah. Well, I mean, not only that, but I think that's the other question is how much of a power vacuum does this create for the GOP and the Republican Party at large as well? I mean, I think it was a repudiation, a rebuke have been the favorite words of the last 7 days of the whole GOP establishment. And that's the question, do they learn their lesson? Was something like Susie Wiles having to resign a signal in that direction? see— I mean, I've been watching the clips and following along his rise. I think a lot of people are looking at Nick Fuentes and saying he was, again, prophetic in terms of how he called this thing, and others saying not only was he prophetic, but he probably drove a lot of the voting tendencies in the midterms.

Marty Bent ⋮ Yeah. And I think that's a big sort of cultural inflection point we find ourselves in as it pertains to Republican politics, is who's going to lead this party moving forward? Is it time for the boomers and neocons to hand it over.

Mark Mitchell [5:18] Well, it's definitely time for the boomers and neocons to hand it over. Let's agree to that. Right. Like, we have a plurality of Americans thinking that Donald Trump puts Israel first. That should not be like what our president is like. I mean, it just shouldn't. So, yeah, a lot of questions there. First off, I would say this was a story about independents who are now the largest voting bloc of Who do you identify with? The Republican Party, Democrat Party, or are you unaffiliated, independent, or third party? Group of people who respond options 3 through 5 there, not their registration, because some people don't even know and they don't even vote in primaries.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ And a lot of pollsters fixate on that. Registration doesn't matter anymore. Who do you identify with? 40% of the electorate says not the Republican or Democrat Party. And the story of this election, if you look at each of those individual groups, All of the turnout was down from 2024. Now, it was up from 2022, but we have a crazy situation going on here where people are like freaking out and pissed and desperate. So presidential turnout among some groups in a midterm is very predictable, but it was down from '24 among all groups. So we didn't have some magical 20 million people just appearing outta nowhere.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ The story of the election is that independents have been breaking roughly even for the last 3 cycles. This time they did not. They broke 20 points for Democrats in a way that was 30 points different from 2024. So these people are increasingly pissed at both parties and they expected something out of Trump. They're not going to get it. Now, the Democrats have a window where they've been put in control of Congress as a repudiation, like you said, of Republicans. They're voting for gridlock. They're voting for compromise. They're voting for both parties to work together. That's the mandate the Democrats have on affordability and government corruption, unfortunately for the Trump administration, right?

Mark Mitchell ⋮ Trump will get blamed for a lack of progress because he's still the president and that's how Americans think. In 2028, when Democrats get into power, and they will have a lot of power, they're probably going to misinterpret their mandate and do a bunch of things that piss off the independents, and then the pendulum will swing back. So it's not like Trump converted all of these swing voters to Democrats. What really happened is a lot of the Republican-leaning ones just said, I'm out, screw this. He said he didn't want my vote. And even the Nick Fuentes thing is real, probably, but I would put that in the low single digits percent, which is— Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, right?

Mark Mitchell ⋮ " Like, let's be real. It was Trump putting Israel first. It was Trump saying, "Let them eat GDP and don't talk to me because the Dow is 50,000," right? Like this is why we got here. The Iran war was just the cherry on top of what has been horrifying governance for the last year and a half. But the problem with Democrats is that I don't think they're going to blow up. and swing this pendulum back until after the 2028 election, which means we're going to see what a Democrat trifecta means. And Republicans have a very uphill battle in 2028. Even if JD could somehow get through now, what can he even do?

Mark Mitchell ⋮ There would need to be some kind of change. And Americans want progress. They want collaboration. They don't want to be shooting each other. It would great if there was some leadership. It would be great if Democrats moderated. Some of them literally are. And this is important. We need this to happen. The Callie Means interview was very clear. It's like, we know our government is co-opted now, but not all the Democrats. They still trust the Democrat Party, and we'll have to see what happens under them. There's no mandate to piss on the Constitution or pack the Supreme Court or do any of these other things that they think they probably have a mandate to do.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ So I would be wary if I were them. Right. And hopefully some of these people like Jon Ossoff are good faith actors. I think that's the question mark. Right. It would be a fluke if JD got in somehow now. And Rubio has no chance, in my opinion. But all the interests want Rubio because it's a big moneymaking opportunity.

Marty Bent [9:17] Well, again, I think that's the big question is, are the interests going to get out of the way? I mean, they're going to fight. Hand, tooth, and nail. I think the Callie Means episode, I've only seen clips so far. I haven't had the time to sit down and watch the whole thing, but I feel like I get the gist. Susie Wiles was a longtime lobbyist for Big Pharma and a lot of special interests and was basically the stiff arm at the administration deciding who was getting appointments and who wasn't. And again, I mean, the the loot the treasury aspect of the Trump administration has been the most disheartening. I mean, my world, Bitcoin, crypto, the fact that he launched the Trump coin the night before the inauguration was completely insane to me. But obviously the reports of Susie Weill's children getting very cushy lobbyist jobs very close to the administration, I mean, it just created such easy soft targets on their backs for when the blue tsunami eventually hit.

Mark Mitchell [10:20] Yeah, I mean, the themes that stood out to me most are that we can't offend any of the interests because we need all this sugar daddy money so that we can have money to win the midterms. And so the midterm strategy was just keep the interests happy so we can be flush with capital and then hopefully just redistrict everything. And that should be enough to make up for the fact that we've done nothing. That was Susie Wilders' plan for the midterm. And not only her, but apparently James Blair and Chris Lasavita. who are out there gleefully spending this money because they most likely get a cut, right?

Mark Mitchell ⋮ So, or at least the wheels of the consultant class gravy train get greased, right? And that's the way Republicans spend all their money. It's reactive, it's pissed away and spent on ads that did literally nothing this cycle. The ads didn't do anything. The polling was baked in, very stable, very clear what was happening. So they, I mean, again, I expect to see a pivot, but at this point the pivot needs to come from Trump and it's not happening. And at this point, I also have to wonder, with a president approaching a 30% approval rating, who can even get to staff this beast? Democrats are out for blood.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ They do have a mandate for government corruption. You would have to be walking into something that's going to be absolutely horrifying, right? Like, I don't know. I think this reasonably does end with him finishing out his term. Now, whether there's deals that get made behind the scenes, but we're already starting with a 56-57 vote for conviction in the Senate. There's enough Republican squishies in there that they would be selling their impeachment vote for benefits out of whatever Democrat pork bill happens next. This is the kind of stuff that's probably happening behind the scenes.

Marty Bent [12:07] Yeah. What do we learn about polling in this midterm election? You were mentioning before we hit record, Polling industry is still not on the ball.

Mark Mitchell [12:20] Yeah, no. So everybody should use RealClearPolitics. In my opinion, that's the best aggregator. I think what was interesting is that there are some left-wing people that are good faith actors, like G. Eliot Morris, who I've taken a bunch of swipes at in the past, did a good job and he wants to put accurate stuff out there. He's a raging leftist, but he did a good job. Rich Barris, Did a good job, like saw this coming a long way away. You know, I had my issues with Rasmussen and I had to break from them, so I had like a little hiccup in my polling. I showed up in August and nailed this right outta the gate.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ New York Times was a little too favorable on Kamala Harris, but was one of the better media pollsters in 2024. They correct— they did what a pollster should. They missed and they corrected for it, and they did a good job this time. They were like among the top 3 or 4, right? Then you have Atlas showing up at the buzzer after everybody did all the heavy lifting just to go one point to the left of me and Rich like they always do. So I guess you could call that polling maybe. They certainly weren't helping people understand the context of public opinion. Let's just put it that way.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ And Emerson did a good job. And then you have people like Lester Tellez at On Point Politics, who's an up-and-comer, but he did a good job too. He had kind of another problem going on. So people who are trying to represent the American people saw this, but the problem is that that's 5% of the industry, right? So there— and there's some people that sort of stumbled into it, like economist YouGov did all right, but they wound up at like D+9 or something like that. My number was exactly what Fabrizio's is, which was D+13. So the White House knew this was coming if they believed their own pollster.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ And they all, again, follow me and Rich. So there's no reason for them not to. So then you have about 65% of the industry, and this is where most of the academic and media pollsters were. And they were all basically clustered around the RealClearPolitics aggregate, which means they're either being cowards or maybe they're trying to rack up some Republican-leaning error so they can cook their polls for Democrats next cycle. I mean, I really don't know, but these are all people that were between 5 and 8 points to the left of me back in 2024, and now they're 5 to 8 points to the right of me in this cycle.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ So it's like you guys can't really measure anything. And this is like your NBCs and your Morning Consults and all of the big names that everybody cites, CNN, right? And then the Republican pollsters just absolutely freaking clown themselves. Harvard Harris put out a Republican +2 in August when I had a Democrat +11, and he wrote an op-ed today about public opinion on RealClearPolitics. Like, this is one of the most legendary people in the polling industry. And you know what he's doing out there now today is he's shilling for the war in Iran. And so it's like, bro, we all know you oversampled Trump 2024 voters.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ Like, we all know that. We all know that you removed the recalled vote from your reporting in July because it was uncomfortable and people were asking questions. So that's bad. Then you had like some of them traditional Republican-leaning ones like Echelon and Signal, and they were all in like in the D+5 or 6 range. And it's like, okay, you missed by 8 points. Like, Terrible. That Harvard Harris one though, that's more sigma than the Ann Seltermus, just so you know. It's a national poll. It's a smaller standard deviation. He was multiple times outside the standard deviation more than she was. That was a state poll with a 4% margin there that she gets raked over the coals for.

Marty Bent [15:54] That was her Iowa call.

Mark Mitchell [15:55] Yeah, that she was off by 17 points. Well, he was off by whatever, 13 or whatever it was, right? But it's like a national poll with a 2% margin of error instead of a 4% margin of error. And it's national polling. It's like the states have their idiosyncrasy. They're harder on a per margin of interest, margin of error basis. But, and then you have the group of pollsters who I was affiliated with, who I believe were taking political action committee money from the Trump administration to suppress criticism of Trump because I was told to be silent. Because it would prevent taking a check from the Trump PAC and that my name was brought up by Susie and we weren't going to get that allocation, me and Rich Barris.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ So that's why I had to leave. So these are the people that were on Sean Hannity talking about the silver wave, which never came. And of course they were off. Like the average of Rasmussen's polling was like, you know, D+4. It's like, good job guys, you missed by 9 and you nailed it when you had me as the head pollster. So it was more important to take a check than to have a pollster. For them, they didn't even— they're still using the 2024 presidential weights in a midterm cycle. They had D+2. That's what they're doing in Rasmussen right now. They bragged about it. So,

Marty Bent [17:07] well, for those who are uneducated about the science of polling, why is that idiotic to have presidential weights in a midterm election?

Mark Mitchell [17:15] So Rasmussen's got a bit of a stale methodology that doesn't really work that well. But you ask the questions and you ask if people are going to vote. And at the very end you say, you know what, I think the electorate looks Democrat 33, Republican 35, and independent 32, right? Well, I have that backwards. So Democrat 35. So that means when you compare the Democrat and the Republican sample, there's 2% more Democrats than there are Republicans. Now, that's a heavy-handed way to do it. You're almost applying your own view of the political makeup On America, of America at the end, after everything's been screened and sampled.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ I do something different. I apply my view of the electorate at the adult level before we screen everything and before we wait and stuff like that. That way I can see who tells me they're part of the electorate, and then what decisions do they make on the way there? Are they registered? Are they going to show up to vote? Right. So there's that. But it's like, okay. The methodology that Rasmussen has could work if you're smart and you understand what the electorate is going to be. Okay. And in— I was accurate with the D+2 in 2024 because that accurately represented the makeup of America that came out to vote.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ That was roughly about what, you know, like there's an aspect of it that is specific to your sample sources and stuff like that. And then there's more because I was waiting for the 2020 recall vote, which is actually the biggest signal, because in that election people cared a lot about whether they voted for Biden or Trump because they were coming back out to make their voice heard again. Right now what you have is that over the last 2 years, the electorate is not D+2. A whole bunch of Republicans got pissed off, a whole bunch of independents sat out, a whole bunch of independents changed from a Republican lean to a Democrat lean.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ There was a lot that was happening. So if you go out with a D+2 and you apply that signal over all of your sampling, then What you're taking is people's opinions now, but using the 2024 electorate. And this is not the 2024, and we know that, right? So they're off by almost 10 points. And like, they did not have a pollster. They decided not to make any changes, and they got a lot of money for it. A lot of money.

Marty Bent [19:30] Money in politics, it leads to vast corruption. And I really want to talk to this about you because I've been enjoying your commentary on this on the show circuit and then just tweeting on X. Like, what does the Republican Party look like? There's been a number of young Republican groups in colleges beginning to distance themselves from, from the parent organization this week. Again, going back to like the Fuentes perspective is like—

Mark Mitchell [19:58] Oh, we didn't even talk about him. Yeah, keep going.

Marty Bent [19:59] Yeah, like it's going to be like the indictments are coming, the subpoenas are coming, everybody's going to quit. So it's your time to like get into these staffs and just ride out the wave and become somebody of importance there. I think demographically, depending on which numbers you look at, what was it, 18 to 29-year-olds shifted 40 points to the left. The millennials and the Gen Z, I believe, are going to be the largest collective voting bloc moving forward for the foreseeable future. And you can feel it. I mean, I'm a younger millennial, or actually I'm smack dab in the middle. And I mean, I've got a wife, 3 kids, a house.

Marty Bent ⋮ I've done okay for myself, but you can still feel it, not only amongst my peers, but especially kids that are— not kids, but people that are 5, 6, 7 years younger than me. They are frustrated. A lot of them don't have hope. for the future. And I think it's becoming abundantly clear, if last week didn't make it clear, you need to get your head out of your ass. There needs to be a solution for this voting bloc or it's going to be incredibly chaotic and volatile moving forward.

Mark Mitchell [21:16] Yeah. I mean, yes, 100%. The day of the pillow, right? So I'm a Xennial, right? And I'm right on the dividing line between X and millennial. And I would say the people to the left of me, think kind of different than the people to the right of me, you know what I mean? Like the boomers and Gen Xers. Now, Gen Xers are pretty based, but they're also like sort of piling into sort of the stale Republican Party politic and are still like supportive of Trump, whereas the other generations aren't. And I would also say, you know, we talked about the fourth turning before, I'm pretty sure, and that there's an aspect of generational change that will drive the future of politics, a disagreement of sorts between the young and the old.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ That's actually not holding up as much as I thought, you know what I mean? Like, you have a lot of boomers that know what's going on. You really do. The problem is the way that those boomer talking points maintain control over a certain aspect of the discussion, particularly online and on Fox News. So people are smarter than you give them credit for, which I'm actually like, for instance, Israel was one of the big dividers, right? And you're like, oh, the boomers love Israel, Gen Z hates them. Well, they're like 30 points apart, but only 50% of boomers support Israel over Palestine. You know what I mean?

Mark Mitchell ⋮ It's not as much as you'd think. And really what it is, is it's who holds the reins of power. But you're right about this tipping point. So in '34, I'm pretty sure is when Gen Z and millennials become the majority bloc of the electorate. And that's also perfectly timed for when all the social services fail and run out of money. And when that happens, the boomers in silence will still own 3 times more wealth than them, and these people will be economically shut out. still for the next couple— I mean, what we have is a stealth depression among most Americans in the United States. And so we're literally tiptoeing down the path to the French Revolution and all of the indicators of violence, political violence, like the civil war number has ticked up closer to 50.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ I haven't processed it yet, but I just did. How likely is it that economic hardship will cause an uprising against the government in the next few years? That's going to be high 50s. So, like, this can be negative, right? It could be some kind of violence and turmoil and a collapse of all of our systems, economic ruin. But it also is the impetus for people to get past traditional politics, consider new ideas, form new coalitions. Because I think the good way out of this is, especially if these under-50 people say, you know what, I know they're using these laser pointer distraction techniques of, like, they're going to put your kids in a hijab or they're going to trans your kids or whatever.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ People have to get smarter and see past that stuff. People need to stop watching Fox News and MSNBC. And I think also people need to be more open to seeing other people in the other coalitions as your citizens that you don't want to be fighting with, like your neighbors. And that there's things on the left, and I'm acting as if they would compromise. We have to find the people who will and convert them, right? And there needs to be things that we give up as well. It's like if you could get more border sovereignty, is it worth maybe amnesty for some of the Dreamers? Like, probably, right?

Mark Mitchell ⋮ And we were actually very close to a deal like that that would've gotten conservatives more than they ever could've dreamed. Because when there was the mass deportation mandate in the beginning of the Trump administration, the left-wing open borders think tanks were ready to make a deal. You know who blew that up? Donald John Trump. with his own scaling back of the anti-illegal immigrant metric. So he's a boomer, right? They are incapable of doing this. And we're starting to see people like Matthew McConaughey and Thomas Massie and The Young Turks trying to step outside of this two-party framework, which is really just captured by one party, as Kailey Leinz made it quite clear.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ So what's the refined and very focused reform platform that most Americans could support? And then what tactics will the establishment desperately use to try and prevent accountability from that? This is, in my opinion, the fight that we have to fight.

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Marty Bent ⋮ And I think a lot of people are looking at Hinojosa in Texas and saying, all right, that's it for data centers there. But To your point, to compromise, I think that's actually, as Democrats take power, one of their opportunities too is like, hey, we hear your malcontents about particular areas of this data center build-out. However, there is a there there in terms of the productivity gains it can bring to the economy. So we're going to try to figure out how to do it the right way. We're not just going to put an iron fist down and say no more data centers.

Mark Mitchell [28:34] You know what I think cynically is that we have a very concentrated and overinflated stock market and a lot of like—

Marty Bent [28:43] They need it.

Mark Mitchell [28:44] Well, yeah. I mean, you can't— our system is now, it's gone beyond being allergic to deflation. It would literally be the death knell that, in my opinion, brings this whole thing down because then we'll have like a sovereign debt crisis and stuff like that. Right. You know, people still think that America will pay its debt down. But part of that is because we still have a president who's out there saying we're going to monetize the debt. The problem is, is that we've already completely concentrated all the wealth and the power to the top. So any attempt to do that is going to further disrupt our societal fabric in a way that will literally cause torches and pitchforks.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ So when I say the music is stopping, it's like, I don't know if it's this year or the next year or in 5 years, but that's what it means in my opinion. And the only hope we have is being the cleanest dirty shirt. Right? And the rest of the world goes to hell. But I, as a cynic, I acknowledge that they, whoever they is, have a lot of financial levers. Like, for instance, Larry Fink could bring this bitch down whenever he wanted. You know what I mean? Like, he probably could, right? And so I would say, well, hey, they'll probably pull another George W. Bush where they'll dump everything in his lap on his way out.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ And then what happens is the Democrats come in on a wave of help us fix this crisis. And they get to write the bailout bill. So an AI bailout bill could be an opportunity for moneymaking. It could be opportunity for regulation. One of the things they might do is, you know, do what they did with Obamacare, which is get a foot in the door and float some kind of UBI thing. And that could be the beginning of socialism in America.

Marty Bent [30:17] You get Elon on deck for that. Universal high income, not basic. We're going to get universal high income. And it actually would be a bit poetic.

Mark Mitchell [30:25] Can you even do that in a world where there's inflation? You know what I mean? If everybody has the same amount of money, then the money's worth less. Yes.

Marty Bent [30:36] Yeah. I mean, but this is the narrative that they will feed people. I mean, we had it like Josh Shapiro, they got the Pennsylvania House Democrats did. And first thing he tweeted out was, we're raising the minimum wage. It's like, okay, somebody lives in Pennsylvania. not very much looking forward to that. But, uh, and that's, that's like the—

Mark Mitchell [30:56] At least they know what to say though. I mean, obviously minimum wage, I think it does actually help some people. Like, it really does. Um, you know what I mean? Like, I'm not willing to point at that and call it socialism anymore because capitalism has completely failed. Conservative economics is a luxury belief right now. Like, I really think that. And if they were really conservative, they should have like actually conserve the system of capitalism that protects the common interest of every American. And they haven't— like, they literally failed. And I don't even know how they regain the authority to step in and fix that problem with the amount of, like, power that is really needed in order to do that, because you need to, like, be really brutal with these companies.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ You need to actually regulate them very hard on certain things. This is, you know, and Teddy Roosevelt knew this. He was the great regulator and he was trying to give Americans a square deal and he did the trust busting and stuff like that. And like, ultimately, the environment that we're operating in is very similar to the early 1900s all the way up to World War II. None of this stuff is new. I mean, yeah, it's AI, but it's just another technological advancement. It's going to compress wages, right? So at the end of the day, like the fact that 100 years ago they knew the problem was monopolies and the fact that now nobody will say that is It's a pretty big regression.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ And the Republicans are so intractable that they're unwilling to even acknowledge that any economically progressive policy could be helpful under certain circumstances. I don't know how you win in that scenario. You can't just call everything that's the opposite of Reaganomics socialism and expect to win. People are not going to ever put you in power again.

Marty Bent [32:29] Yeah. Well, I mean, not only that, but I mean, on the other end of the spectrum, instead of free market dynamics, it's like, okay, figure out the fiscal side of the books. They had the opportunity with Doge. I think that was another resounding reason why they lost last week was you literally had the golden platter. We had uncovered all this waste, fraud, and abuse, and you came into office with this mandate to clean all this stuff up. And 2 months in, it's like, oh, well, actually we can't do this.

Mark Mitchell [33:01] Doge was a historically retarded betrayal of the American people. And a lot of people don't understand why it was so great, because a lot of people will say, well, it was super chaotic and everybody hated Elon and all the federal workers were up in arms. And don't you know, they had No Kings rallies and stuff like that. But it was literally the only plausible scenario that we could ever come up with where Republicans supported austerity and where the American people were clamoring for it. You know what I mean? We had an austerity platform. We were going to cut the deficit and everybody was totally for it.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ And that was just completely sidelined by Suze Wiles and Jared Kushner and all the Republicans who wanted to get their pork bill through. And actually tying Doge spending cuts to it is why they all freaked out. It's like, hey, no, we have to pay ourselves first. Got to get all these interests or favors, and we'll put a few MAGA things in here. That's the one priority the 119th Republican Congress had, the only priority it had. was to extend Trump's tax cuts to keep from getting drawn and quartered in public opinion. That was not for the American people, right? And a lot of them were corporate tax cuts, which Americans now oppose.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ They think big business gets enough tax breaks, and they don't think it actually spurs economic growth. So that's literally what we did. We took away America's only hope for fiscal reform and sold it down the river for a pork bill.

Marty Bent [34:29] Well, I mean, let's dive into this. For those who are listening who may not have watched the Callie Means appearance on Joe Rogan, I mean, we brought her name up quite a few times heading into the second administration. I remember vividly, between election night and inauguration, there was a lot of positive talk around Susie Wiles and the fact that she ran the campaign, did such a good job. She's going to be such a good Chief of Staff. How corrosive or parasitic was she in the role of Chief of Staff?

Mark Mitchell [35:04] She was there to manage Trump and not to actually execute on a plan for the American people. She made a lot of money, I would presume, especially for Ballard Partners. And literally everything that the American people voted for, anything that looked like systemic change, she shut down internally. Or other people that were part of her cabal shut down internally. And I think it's unfair to blame it all on her and not Trump. Like, A, he hired her. You know, at the end of the day, I think he knew a lot of this stuff was going on, but I've heard back and forth. Like, I heard she was taking his phone and blocking people she didn't want him to talk with.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ At a certain point, you have to ask yourself, is this not like a silent coup or something like that? And it's like, okay, he probably knew some of this stuff was going on. But at the end of the day, he's not completely isolated, although I heard that there was a coordinated effort in order to shut out certain interests from him. And when I went to the White House, I was told that he watches Fox News all day. He doesn't think anything's real unless he sees it on Fox. He talks to Sean Hannity every day. He talks to a lot of these billionaire interests. He talks to Lindsey Graham, and that he used to talk to Charlie Kirk, and that was a positive influence on him.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ It helped us limit what we did with the 12-day war. But then once Charlie Kirk got assassinated, then he was completely and finally isolated in a bubble of a very specific set of influences. And I was brought in by JD essentially because they were— I mean, not just me, they were trying to bring other people to throw stuff at the wall to see what would stick. And I'm sure that the second I left the White House and I was telling them last year, you were going to lose unless you do X, Y, Z. And I'm sure my message was completely subverted the second I walked out of the White House by her.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ Oh, we can't do that because Pepsi is going to freak out or whatever it was. And so, like, what I can say is they knew this loss was coming. There was literally no effort at all. We never saw Trump really pivot on anything other than closer to the neoconservative and corporatist stuff. Like, I was part of an effort, and this will probably come out in The Wall Street Journal, but to do polling on a presumed amnesty deal by a very rich person who's friends with Trump. And this was one of the influences of him scaling back and only focusing on criminal illegals. Now, it was push-pull questions, and I did it against my will, and I was told I would have a chance to represent the context of the results.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ That didn't happen. Right. And so I wrote an op-ed about it freaking out, which is like, people still want mass deportations. You screwed it up. The ICE tactics are terrible. Go after the employers. It's not hard. And ultimately, where we're at is that now it's very clear that every interest the establishment Republican Party has is diametrically opposed Not just different than, like 180 degrees out of alignment than what the American people want. The American people want accountability from pharma and from like Bayer with the glyphosate. No, you're going to get the exact opposite. You're not even going to be able to sue them for the things that happen to you.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ 180 degrees out of alignment. And so it needs to be burned down and they've done a pretty good job at this point. I would say like, let's just keep, let's just keep the push up. Like, You know what I mean? Like, the groipers can take this one as a scalp, you know, like, drive the enemy before you and hear the lamentation of their women. Like, where's the, where's the meme army coming out and just literally obliterating Trump into— like, that's, I think, what needs to happen. This needs to be a cautionary tale of betraying the American people because the Republican Party is totally fine with betraying the American people.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ Like, look at how they're digging into neocons because that's where the money is. And I just don't see any way out of it. I did an op-ed. Again, it's so bad that we need to explore very different things that a lot of people have talked about and nobody's done. America sat back on its butt and said, you know what? We don't have to organize or protest or do anything anymore because Trump's going to solve it for us. For 10 years they've done that. Now you just got betrayed and okay, we know more than we did, but we're in a worse position than we were. So I— my assessment is the Republican Party cannot be fixed now.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ C. to set up new flows of capital into an infrastructure that's dedicated to a very specific set of values and policies, and that, that needs to, like, siphon any money that would go to the Republican platform and oppose it and basically starve the consultants and then provide up-and-coming candidates, like, actually find these people, train them, give them money so that they can primary all the Republicans. And that organization needs to be okay with Republicans losing, and it needs to be okay in some circumstances at running Democrat candidates.

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Mark Mitchell [42:45] Has Nick come out and supported him yet?

Marty Bent [42:47] Uh, I'm not sure. I think, uh, I'm not sure. But for those who are unaware, I mean, he was the guy who came in to clean up the mess during Trump 1, right? Between the midterms of that election in 2020.

Mark Mitchell [43:03] Yeah, I talked to John once and I didn't hear too much about like what he thinks or how he plans to do things. I mean, like the things I know about him is that like, I don't think he would be operating within a very small operating envelope, which is good. Like, we'll, we'll consider new things, we'll be based, right? And that he's young and charismatic, like that's plus. I think like the negatives are he's affiliated with Trump. Like that's going to be a big negative soon, right? And maybe you can get over that very easily by just trashing him. Like I just don't know. I think he's like Groper friendly, which is a green checkmark, right?

Mark Mitchell ⋮ You know, like I don't really know how a lot of this is going to play out. And I would look at Turning Point sort of as an example, right? So you had Charlie Kirk. And under his leadership, Turning Point was very good at defining youth politics, like building an Overton window around something that people could get behind and support and that it would spread as an ideology. That's what a leader does. And unfortunately, Turning Point without him as a leader shows me that although the infrastructure is still there, they're still getting funding, they still have the show. It doesn't look like they actually have an ideology that's converting people to followers right now.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ In fact, I would imagine that And I don't know this, but I'd imagine their satellites and their groups and their meetings are starting to lose influence and people are leaving. I would just guess, right? And so Turning Point was all of youth politics on the right. I mean, you have the Young Republicans, but they're like a meeting group. They don't necessarily stand for anything, right? So who's left? Who is converting people on the young right? to their ideology set. It's literally Nick Fuentes. He is what's left. And Tim Pool saying that he's the future of Republican politics, he's probably right. And he got Wall Street Journal writing shock articles about how Ted Cruz can't hire any staffers because all of them are groipers.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ Well, it's like, are they all groipers? Probably no, but they all listen to Nick Fuentes because Nick Fuentes is a thought leader and is the only one that's calling this stuff accurately and stuff like that. So if the right, if it wants youth back, has to figure out how to square that circle. Have a scenario where there is a get-out-the-vote, there is a youth movement, there is structure behind it that can accept the fact that a lot of these people also watch Nick Fuentes. And right now, you have this fight, this friction, and this inability to work together. And I would say it's most evident when you look at the speaker lineup for AMFEST this winter.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ You're not going to see certain views represented on that stage. And I really don't know what— like, if somebody comes out and says, like, on the stage at ANFest, and I don't even know how many people are even going to show up for that. Like, I wasn't invited to speak and I was last year.

Marty Bent [45:57] What is ANFest?

Mark Mitchell [45:58] America Fest. It's Turning Point's main— and so they've had it for years and years, but it's turned into a Trump cult of personality event, essentially. Right. And so last year it was still super rah rah rah because people didn't know the loss was coming and the Iran situation hadn't happened. And there were people there like Daily Wire and Ben Shapiro on the stage speaking, right? Dana Loesch, people like that, Brandon Tatum. If they get up and they say that we've been at war with Iran for 47 years, one of those speakers, you're going to see booing, you're going to see jeers.

Marty Bent [46:35] Is that one of the lines they're running with behind the scenes?

Mark Mitchell [46:37] I mean, this is a very— this is a This is the primary neoconservative explanation for why we had to do Iran now. They've obviously been one of our foreign policy priorities for forever, and this is our only chance to do it. And don't you know, they're a week away from a nuke? And it's like Trump said, we got rid of their nuclear program and then we did this strike. Right. So it's, you know, like— and the reason that they lost spectacularly is because they literally insulted the intelligence of all of America. And it's like, you told us we bombed Iran and America was forgiving of the 12-Day War.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ And Trump was also very specific in talking about it and very limited. Right. We came for the nuke. We got the nuke. That's it. Thanks, Israel. But no thanks. Stop your striking. Right. This one, we opened Pandora's box and it's still open from what I can tell. Right. But it was like, no, no, no, we got rid of the nukes 6 months ago, but now we got to really get rid of the And it's like, you liars. So from the same standpoint, the acknowledgement at all of this loss and what it meant, is anybody on AmFest stage going to really acknowledge the fact that Trump was repudiated for his lack of an ability to govern, for economic populism?

Mark Mitchell ⋮ He literally failed at economic populism. You can't have a movement, you can't have authority as a leader if you can't tell the truth. And so can the current iteration of Turning Point at AmFest, which is supposed to be a pump event for the Trump movement, can it tell the truth? I don't think it can. And I think it's going to be very obvious this time. And maybe they surprise me or maybe they completely shake up their lineup. I really— but like, like, imagine being in that situation. Like, how do you even do this?

Marty Bent [48:24] Like, I mean, it seems like you mentioned Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin. Looks like the tack they're taking is just blaming Trump. It wasn't Iran. People just don't like Trump. And it's The people who— some of the people who campaigned the most vigorously for the war in Iran and trying to justify it seem to be jumping ship pretty quickly, too.

Mark Mitchell [48:45] I mean, it's both, you know what I mean? Like, we have America— bipolarity thinks Trump puts Israel first. Israel has lost its— Israel is now— America now supports Palestine more than Israel. And Israel has been telling us that Palestine harbors Hamas and they're terrorists. And yet Americans still say we support them more than Israel now. So that's what we're working with here, right? And it's not, again, necessarily that we did some foreign policy intervention. It's that this comes on top of all of these other symbolic betrayals by Trump. Don't want your support if you care about Epstein, the stock market. I don't even think about Americans' finances.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ Why didn't they just buy stocks? The stock market's doing great. This is the best economy we've ever had, when we literally have the lowest worker share of national income that we've had literally since the record started in 1909 or something like that. That's what's crazy. This wealth concentration and this wage suppression is literally worse than under Teddy Roosevelt or the Great Depression. You know what I mean? And this is— and back then it ushered in FDR. Now, FDR and his socialist platform ultimately were not popular. America wasn't really sure what they were getting with him. They just knew that they didn't want Hoover anymore. Right.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ That's kind of the same scenario we're at now. Like, this is a 17-point generic ballot swing. Hoover was 21. So we're getting pretty close. Right. And, you know, so we got FDR and he did all this stuff and some of it was popular and some of it was patronage. And yet at the end of the day, he wasn't super popular. What bailed him out is World War II, right? So we're at the end of the Fourth Turning and some kind of conflict is coming. And we have a person that was supposed to come in and fix everything. We have a stealth depression. We had an economic populist president who was going to come in and fix it.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ His party failed. The other party's going to get a chance. They're going to probably run somebody that's going to act like FDR. And then we'll probably go to a total global war. And then it will be the war that saves us and not any amount of actual leadership. That's probably what's going to happen. And then hopefully we'll get a golden age on the tail end of that when all of the grizzled veterans come back and lead our corporations again. Maybe. Like if we get, if we realize that to win this war, we have to get rid of DEI. You know what I mean? Like,

Marty Bent [51:04] it sounds like a long, arduous road. And that's the thing. I had E.J. Antoni on from the Heritage Foundation focusing on like the economics of everything. And that's the one thing he said before the Iran War, things were slowly but surely beginning to turn in the right direction from In economic perspective.

Mark Mitchell [51:23] Not in public opinion.

Marty Bent [51:24] No, but that's the thing. You needed 9 months of that momentum turning the other way to— Well,

Mark Mitchell [51:31] I gave Trump an out to this. So I said, you're not going to be able to fix the economy. You have to get over that hump. You cannot gaslight people and say we have the golden age. Nobody's going to believe you. They don't listen to government numbers. Nobody gives a shit about the stock market. And so how do you solve that when the problems are too big to be fixed in any one cycle? You have to be an economic wartime president. And so it's like, hey, we're digging in for a war. You are now Patton. You're fighting the Nazis in order to fight an economic war.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ Because I think that very succinctly explains the difference between the first administration and the second administration. The first administration was a peacetime presidency. This one is a wartime presidency. If you're going to fight the economic war in a way that Americans keep you in the job, You have to name the enemy and know what their capabilities are. You have to have a strategy that appears to be successful, and you have to stay focused on that mission every day. George, you know, Patton can't take a day off, right? He can't afford a bad day. And so who's the enemy? Like, who are we fighting against? What's the enemy here?

Mark Mitchell ⋮ Like, Trump's not going to call it out. In my opinion, it's an entrenched corporatist oligarchy.

Marty Bent [52:40] No, it's a swamp. That's what we were all sold.

Mark Mitchell [52:42] That's right. Yeah, he used to say the enemy, but now he won't, right? And so that tells me that he has been co-opted.

Marty Bent [52:53] Yeah, which is— I mean, you think of somebody who's very self-conscious about their image in the eyes of the public too. It doesn't seem like it's going to be it's going to be salvaged at this point. Do you think he realizes that, or is his hubris such that he thinks everything's fine and really believes like, I don't care, the stock market's at all-time highs?

Mark Mitchell [53:18] I think he unintentionally tells the truth a lot. I think he really does believe that he can like just go off to Israel and at least they'll celebrate him over there. You know what I mean? Like

Marty Bent [53:29] be the president of Israel.

Mark Mitchell [53:31] Yeah. I mean, My interaction with him was limited, but it confirmed, in my opinion, what was going on then, which is that he's operating under different constraints than he had before. And so he probably feels to some extent powerless to fix a lot of these things. And when I was saying stuff, it didn't feel like he was engaged in a way that meant that he was finding things he could do. And that's broad, but that was my observation. And that he was. So if you're going to fight for the American people, and you're up against a powerful foe, and like you have to listen to everything, and you have to be humble, and you have to understand that there's things you don't know.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ You have to have people on your team backing you up. You have to have strategy and goals and all these things that weren't there. Like they just weren't there. And so it really feels like what we're finding out is that Susie Wiles runs the White House, and the White House plan is just to keep Trump's. calendar full all day and keep him from doing anything counterproductive to the interests. And, you know, that's sad, but like, it fits for somebody who's lost their fight. And in what I think we're seeing in the absence of the ability for him to govern the way he wants is that he will— he'll define his own success criteria.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ Right. So he, he can, he can convert his words and what he thinks in his head to success. My polls are the best they've ever been. It's like, bro, we know like they're not. Like we know that, but yet he still says it. I've won this war 50 times, right? It's like, like come on, you haven't. This election was stolen from me. No, everybody knows that the polls weren't this bad. It's like they were, dude. Like and so and he will be perceived to be the enemy of the American people, a barrier standing in the way of economic reform for the next two years. And this is the path that he continues to go down.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ It's not. It's it's going to be horrifying.

Marty Bent [55:30] What do you say to the plan trusters out there? Susie's out, Stephen Miller's

Mark Mitchell [55:35] in.

Marty Bent [55:36] He's got nothing to lose.

Mark Mitchell [55:37] At this point, you're either a smooth brain or you're paid. And I know that a lot of these people are on the payroll. Like, I've heard names called out. You know, they tried to put me on the payroll to shut me up. They literally did. Right. Susie Wise's people, Chris Lasavita, tried to put me on the payroll. And the condition was I was not allowed to criticize Trump. And I've heard the people that the Israel folks have come to. I've heard the Qatari people come from. Come for them. And I actually heard from somebody who they came for both of, both of them that said, well, the Israel people tell you what to say.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ The Qatari people don't care. I actually heard that, you know, and then like we've seen names of people who are allegedly running these inorganic bot networks. We know some of them were actually secretly on the payroll of the Department of Defense. So we have the Department of War secretly funding influencers that are putting out pro-regime statements. Yeah, like,

Marty Bent [56:30] and this is, I mean, and it's, again, it's, we don't have good leaders on either side because I was like the DNC paying influencers on TikTok and lead up to '24 to pump Kamala. That was like one of the things everybody highlighted, like you're all paid shills. It is, I mean, to your point—

Mark Mitchell [56:47] Trump won because he didn't have paid shills. And all the consultants heard is that, well, we can pay shills and make money off of them. That's what the consultants heard. And so the Republican Party deserves this. They really do. I hate to say it. I've been a straight ticket Republican voter my entire life. Like, what did you think was going to happen, guys? Like, you had the moral authority, you had an authentic movement, you had the perfect platform, you had the best mandate you were ever going to be given.

Marty Bent [57:10] Yeah.

Mark Mitchell [57:12] So it's like, if you can't accept the fact that the problem is Trump at this point, then you're probably— your paycheck depends on it. And some of them, it's audience capture. We all know this, right? And some of it is just access. They're not actually on the payroll, but at the end of the day, they're lying for people.

Marty Bent [57:27] Yeah, I know you got to go here in a few minutes. I want to ask this, I guess, philosophical question, but are these the leaders we deserve? How much of the—

Mark Mitchell [57:41] Obviously not, right? Yeah. The Fourth Turning tells us that integrity will save us. It's just a matter of how desperate everyone gets. And so the temperature of the pot of water that the frog is in has increased. We all saw the hand that turned the dial up. We're learning a lot more, but the government is increasingly delegitimized. So I don't know how this ends. And The Fourth Turning also tells us that just we enter a period of disillusionment, a failure of institutions, and then a snapback in public, rapid change in public opinion because Americans realize that values matter, cohesion's more important than death, and out of necessity, this will come together.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ I hope that this is the trigger. But I think we probably have to see more stuff out of the Democrat Party still. They're on a high, they won. They're going to get what— and all of them are not a unified mindset, right? They all have the things they want to see. Some of them actually want to see people on the right killed. So we'll just have to see what happens and if those people win out or if sanity prevails. Maybe we won't have to get there because NATO will drag us into war with Russia. and a whole bunch of young lefties are going to get drafted.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ We'll see. This could go literally any way.

Marty Bent [58:53] Yeah. Here's to hoping that Scott Galloway and Hasan Piker aren't indicative of the overwhelming mindset of the left, because it is crazy how emboldened some people on the left have been.

Mark Mitchell [59:08] But you might see crazy things. You might see people like Amy Acton call out folks like that. 'Cause she's done, in my opinion, she went beyond, above and beyond what your typical Democrat has in order to paint herself as not one of the typical scary Democrats. And if you were a smart Democrat that cared about America, you would be doing that. Oh, we went a little far with the open borders and, you know, like we want the deportations to be humane, but there's an opportunity to make a deal here. And no, they're not all your enemy. And yeah, we should probably have police. Like if you had a Democrat do that kind of stuff, They will— I think public opinion will reward them in a way that it won't, because look at the Democrat socialists that the Republicans tried to paint as the scary enemy.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ They're talking like Trump. So they're not leaning in on woke. They are moderating in a way that's healthy for America. Now, the problem is, is that you still have the rabble-rousers and you have the Antifa types and you got all the freaks on Reddit. And so they have to control their people. The right has to control our people. And we know these people. So it's like we just won in Dearborn 2 years ago with the Muslim vote. If you're going to tell us that our biggest problem here is Islamic extremism and that we have to go to war with global Islam, then you are the enemy of the American people.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ I'm sorry, I don't like Islam, but that's a fact. You know what I mean? Like, that's not our biggest problem. Y'all have to pump the brakes on that. Like, this is the kind of stuff that the right has to get smarter about, too. But these are the people that are being funded by the consulting class right now. And those are, in my opinion, the biggest enemy of anybody who even has an iota of conservative values or Christian values for that matter. Right. It's like we actually, as Christian conservatives, I don't know what you are, but I would call myself a Christian constitutional conservative. Right. A Muslim in Iran.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ First off, I don't think Iran is actually all that religiously extreme, has natural rights from God, you know what I mean? And grace from Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. So like, should we glass them or should we try to convert them and work with them? Like, like, what is the right path forward? Right. And it's like the people who are still attempting to control the Republican Party are the enemy of that view.

Marty Bent [1:01:30] Yeah, I don't think we should be glassing them. No. To that point too, family formation, strong economy, secure the border. It's very simple, in my mind.

Mark Mitchell [1:01:38] Yeah. Economic, I would say strong economic progressivism for a common good capitalism. That's what I would say. We probably need a really progressive tax system. We probably need to tax billionaires now because Teddy Roosevelt did it, right? And it's not from a place of socialism, but from a place of excess. And because this is like— conservatives ignore this too. And so yeah, the period that everybody wants to conserve, the '50s through the '70s, the period known as the Great Compression, where you could literally have a one-income family, right, and buy everything you wanted, was partially caused by us being a superpower after everybody got decimated in World War II.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ Partially. A lot of it came from strong unions, and the economic upheaval that happened during World War II. There was a lot of creative destruction from a very progressive tax system. The upper marginal rate was like 90%. You know what I mean? Like, these are things that are impossible to escape. Workers had a lot of protections because of the Progressive Era and stuff that FDR did. And it's like nobody on the right will even understand that or even deign to study it, right? Like, we're still using Art Laffer talking points here. And so it hasn't worked. Trickle-down economics has failed because these people have co-opted our government.

Mark Mitchell ⋮ So how are you going to fix that without unco-opting our government?

Marty Bent [1:03:03] The government and the central banking system. Mark.

Mark Mitchell [1:03:07] Yeah, sure.

Marty Bent [1:03:08] It's always a pleasure, sir. Thank you for your time.

Mark Mitchell [1:03:11] No, my pleasure. I love being able to talk about economics and thanks for having me on. Thanks for platforming me when my voice was unpopular.

Marty Bent [1:03:19] Well, I genuinely love the conversation, so I can't wait to do it again.

Mark Mitchell [1:03:23] Yeah, anytime.

Marty Bent [1:03:24] All right. Peace, 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. io and subscribe to that. We cover Bitcoin, AI, energy markets, macro, political, cultural, Federal 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. io/ai as well. We have an MCP server with all the episode transcripts, all the newsletters we've ever written, and even some data, Bitcoin ETF flow data, treasury auction data, treasury general account, US debt.

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