Isaac Saul

The FCC is involved in clearing the way for them to roll this phone out that's going to be this.

It's like, yeah, again.

Yeah.

And it's, you know, what I talked about in the piece is like, it is bizarre to be operating in this environment where it feels like everybody's just kind of under some spell that I can't break to make them care.

Not everybody, the people that I want to care about this.

I'd like to hear it.

Yeah.

yeah i well i would say the the sort of parallel is what just happened in hungary with with victor orban and you know i think there are a lot of sort of western lenses put on that where it was like oh this you know objection to the the the uh the erosion of democracy in hungary and when you read a lot of people who write about hungary for a living and people who are like you know hungarian focused reporters what they were all saying was

it wasn't this big objection to Orban's right-wing policies.

It was that he was corrupt, the people knew he was corrupt, and their economic fortunes were not getting better, and they just got tired of it.

And I think that parallel could translate here where the what is Trump doing to democracy stuff isn't necessarily going to resonate, but the idea of

is Trump actually self-dealing?

And is he doing that while my economic fortunes are not improving?

That sort of one plus one, I think, is a big problem for him.

And we're seeing, I mean, I haven't seen a ton of polling about people's views of him and self-dealing and corruption stuff, but his economic numbers are the worst they've ever been across his two terms right now.

So, you know, I do think people are, one half of that is here already, which is people are not happy with how the economy has been under him.

which is really distinct from what happened in the first term.

So, you know, obviously, hopefully he's not going to run for a third time.

So his electoral prospects are not really at issue here.

But the Republican Party is in trouble for sure.