Derek Thompson

as if it's not normal at all.

That tells me that we're still trying to figure out what is this thing that we're dealing with.

It's why I'm so interested in this topic, but it's also why I think there's like so much, so much uncertainty.

Because I don't think a lot of people would have predicted in April 2025, when you joined the Trump administration, that no more than 10 months later, the Pentagon would be trying to nuke from orbit the first private sector company, an AI company, because they wouldn't sign a contract with the Pentagon.

we're in strange territory where I think norms are changing very, very fast.

Dean Ball, thank you very, very much for appearing on the show.

With an unjustified, unexplained war spreading in the Middle East, with ICE rampaging through various American cities, with tariffs going up and down and up and down depending on the day, Donald Trump's polling has continued to edge downward every week.

And yet the approval rating of the Democratic Party is still stuck near its all-time low, according to Gallup and other surveys.

One interpretation of these polls, one obvious interpretation, is that the deep unpopularity of that letter D at the end of a candidate's name is a huge albatross around Democratic candidates nationwide.

But there's another interpretation that I think is more interesting and perhaps more true.

The fact that the party has no clearly defined leader, no clearly defined brand, to use the dreaded B word, is an opportunity for young Democrats to define it for themselves.

Rather than act like a congregation all singing from the same hymnal, they can experiment, disagree, adapt their message to the electorate.

Today's guest is Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego.

I think Gallego is interesting because he's hard to pin down.

He's deeply critical of the Trump administration on immigration, obviously, but he was also deeply critical of the Biden administration on immigration.

While the concept of abundance, ideas from the book that I co-wrote with Ezra Klein, are often held up in direct opposition to economic populism, Gallego is a proponent of abundance principles who also isn't afraid to talk about taking on corporate power and even breaking up companies.

He's someone who could be plausibly accused of being a moderate, but he questions the very concept of moderation.

Today, we talk about the latest in the Iran war before talking a bit about why the Democratic Party is still so unpopular and why that unpopularity might be a sneaky opportunity for Democrats.

And we end up in an interesting place that I didn't quite anticipate.

Democrats, I think, are very good at talking about affordability at the moment.