Chapter 1: What impact does the recent death of a GOP lawmaker have on the House majority?
A GOP lawmaker in the House of Representatives dies, meaning that the GOP majority has now shrunk to the bare minimum. President Trump continues aggressive action against Venezuelan illegal oil shipments. Plus, we bring on Alex Clark of Cultural Apothecary to talk about a major Supreme Court case. And we're joined by Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana to talk about everything going down in Venezuela.
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Chapter 2: How is President Trump addressing illegal oil shipments from Venezuela?
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of the Supreme Court case discussed with Alex Clark?
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Chapter 4: How is Senator Tim Sheehy addressing the situation in Venezuela?
That means that President Trump is not, of course, on the ballot. And so his coattails will really not apply to House Republicans or Senate Republicans. And that means an uphill battle for Republicans because, again, the incumbent party in off-year elections tends not to do particularly well. Right now, Republicans are running the barest majority humanly possible in the House of Representatives.
That is thanks to the untimely death of Republican Representative Doug LaMalfa. He represented a district in Northern California for 13 years. He passed away at 65 years old. According to the Wall Street Journal, his death further shrinks the already thin House GOP majority to 218 to 213.
Of course, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wants to run for president herself and seems to be running an anti-Trump campaign, formally resigned from the House in the middle of her term this week. So there are now four empty seats, two in red-leading districts, two in blue districts.
Also, Representative Jim Baird of Indiana was in a car accident, so he is sidelined at least temporarily, which means that in terms of who's going to show up, you're now down to 217. Then you also have people like Thomas Massey who routinely vote against the president of the United States. And now you're down to 216.
And so your majority, your workable majority is shrinking into the arena of unworkability. If you're a speaker of the house, Mike Johnson, you always had a very, very tough job. Now that job is becoming nearly impossible. And so the question becomes, How does President Trump, how do Republicans somehow get something done this year that allows them to claim victory heading into 2026?
Well, one thing the president is trying to do is pressure some of these erstwhile Republicans to do his bidding. That, of course, includes Thomas Massey. The president was slamming Thomas Massey yesterday.
Everybody loves him. I would say there's one person he's given up on. I mean, I think he just gave up on this guy. He's so bad. He never votes for us. But no matter how good, he won't vote for us. There's a sickness there. There's something wrong. You can have the greatest bill, the greatest for the country. Forget about for Republicans. Great, great, great for the country. I'm a no vote.
We don't even bother calling him at 3 in the morning, do we?
Yeah.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do Republicans face in the upcoming elections?
Well, you have a few things. One. yes, foreign policy wins actually do matter. I know that there is this idea that what happens on the foreign policy front doesn't help presidents at all or their parties. That is eminently untrue. Now, what really hurts is foreign policy losses, but foreign policy wins can help at the margins.
That is particularly true if you are targeting political constituencies that are drifting away from you. So one of the things about the Trump constituency that is really quite fascinating is that obviously in 2024, he had an outsized blue collar white vote, but he also radically overperformed with Hispanic Americans.
There's a case to be made that what he is doing in places like Venezuela, possibly Cuba, is going to have an outsized impact on voter turnout in 2026, particularly in some of the swing states. President Trump is trying to get his base jazzed up. He spoke at the House Republican retreat yesterday and he told Republicans that he's given them a roadmap to victory.
And I think I gave you something. It's just a roadmap and it's a roadmap map to victory. You have so many good nuggets. You have to use them. If you can sell them, we're going to win because we've won two races in like 50 years. It's. For whatever reason, I don't know why, but just don't fight it. It doesn't make sense. They've been two and they were unusual circumstances.
So whether it's a Republican or Democrat, whoever wins the presidency, the other party wins the midterm. And it doesn't make sense because we've had the most successful year probably in this. They say. And now you add what happened essentially yesterday. We've had the most successful first year of any president in history.
Now, again, I think there's a lot to that. The president of the United States does have a booming stock market. The president of the United States has a bunch of foreign policy wins under his belt. Doge is targeting waste, fraud and abuse, and that is now filtering down to the state level, which we'll get to in a little while.
Of course, the stakes are very high because if Democrats were to win the House of Representatives, basically the Trump agenda stops dead at that point. As President Trump put it, we need to win or we are going to be in a world of hurt.
These things are so important because you guys got to get elected. Because if you don't get elected, we have a country that's going to go to hell. So we can't play games. Ladies and gentlemen, the sun will rise tomorrow. And when it rises, we will all, we don't need this. We need to talk about favored nations. And your numbers are coming down at levels that nobody's ever seen.
We inherited high prices. We inherited a mess. We inherited the greatest inflation in history. And you know what was knocking it down? The bad economy that we inherited. We inherited bad. We now have the hottest economy in the history of our country.
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Chapter 6: How can Republicans regain momentum heading into 2026?
Dropped the thing. Walks off the stage crying. Her mother's crying. Her father's crying. Guy gets up. He said, have you lifted before? A little bit. And he walks up. Bing. He could have gone ding, ding, ding, ding. I think it was one hundred and twelve pounds. It's crazy.
OK, so he's right about this. But one of the things that Republicans, I think, are not going to be able to count on because, again, they are the party that is in power, not the party that is out of power. One of the things that they're not going to be able to count on is Democrats being stupid. I think Democrats are getting less stupid. They have lost a series of elections.
It has not been good for them. And now they seem to be jettisoning some of their worst baggage, including the trans issue. You do not hear Democrats talking about the trans issue as the social rights issue of our time, the civil rights issue of our time anymore. They just don't do it. You don't hear them talking about DEI anymore. Instead, they are refocusing on, quote unquote, affordability.
This is the thing that they are focusing in on over and over and over again. And you can see why, because they believe that that is essentially their only winning path right now, because affordability, as I've said before, is a mush word. No one ever thinks things are affordable. Very few people in their entire life have thought, hey, things are so affordable right now.
Maybe when your income goes up, things become, quote, affordable for you. But affordability is a subjective measure. It is not an objective measure. So even though President Trump can look at the inflation statistics and say it was up at nine, 10 percent under Joe Biden, it is down to two, three percent under me. People still understand that the prices are higher now than they were in, say, 2019.
And so things are, quote, unquote, unaffordable. And so even though President Trump is winning victories in, for example, Venezuela, which we'll get to in a moment, Democrats are refocusing on affordability.
According to Politico, Democrats hoping to win higher office this year are seizing on President Trump's intervention in Venezuela to push a twist on one of his campaign promises, America first. Former Senator Sherrod Brown, who's running to reclaim his seat in Ohio, said Ohioans are facing higher costs across the board and are desperate for leadership that will help deliver relief.
We should be more focused on improving the lives of Ohioans, not Caracas, meaning Venezuela. The frame from Democrats, according to Politico, shows how potent the party views affordability as an issue in the midterms, one that President Trump and his team have grown increasingly preoccupied by after across the board losses in twenty twenty five.
Longtime Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson was a former spokesperson for Hillary Clinton, said the problem Trump was already having was he looked like he was focused on everything other than what matters in people's daily lives. And now he's just supercharged that.
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Chapter 7: What role does foreign policy play in Republican strategies?
You have to actually connect it with democratic policy and you have to connect it to something that Republicans have been loathed to connect it to for a while, which is the size of government. We'll get to the size and scope of government and why that needs to become a Republican argument. Yes, again. Thank you. as a veteran-led company that cares about giving back to those who serve.
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puretalk.com slash Shapiro to save an additional 50% off your very first month. See, when I was growing up, being a conservative meant that you were against the expansion of the size and scope of government. Nowadays, it seems in vogue for Republicans to be in favor of that expansion, but at the same time to want to quote unquote cut that waste, fraud, and abuse.
Well, that's not a great argument because inherent in a bigger government is waste, fraud, and abuse. And when you combine that with loose immigration policy, the way Democrats have, you end up with Minnesota. As the Wall Street Journal points out,
Defendants allegedly set up sham businesses and falsely claimed to provide meals to children, pay kickbacks to parents to enroll kids without autism in autism treatment, build Medicaid for phony housing services to addicts, among other scams. 90 of the defendants who were charged, of those 90, over 80 of them were of Somali origin.
These issues are not relegated to Minnesota by any stretch of the imagination. Again, they are inherent in the size and scope of government and the expansion of the welfare roles and of our immigration roles, particularly with regard to either claims of asylum or illegal immigration itself.
It turns out, as always, that a Scandinavian social model can only exist temporarily as long as you don't crush capitalism and in combination with strong border control. And Democrats have pursued weak border control, no controls with regard to waste, fraud and abuse. And the result is what's happened in Minnesota. And that bears political fruit.
That's why Tim Walz is no longer going to be running for that third term in the state of Minnesota. And again, good news for Republicans. This stuff exists across the board. Over in New York, Zoran Mamdani, of course, has appointed a person to lead his tenancy department.
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Chapter 8: What is the significance of Greenland in U.S. foreign policy discussions?
But when those subsidies went away, you saw a radical escalation in the price of Obamacare for people particularly who are elderly or people who are on family plans under Obamacare. So President Trump yesterday was speaking at this House Republican Leadership Conference, and he suggested that when it came to Obamacare, we should let those subsidies continue to expire.
We should just put money directly into health savings accounts for people and then allow those health savings accounts to be used in order to pay off not just the deductible, but also to pay off the premiums.
You can own health care. Let figure it out. Let the money go directly to the people. It goes in a health care account. It does. There are numerous things you can do, but you have to let no money for the insurance companies.
Okay, now here's the problem with this particular line. This is a problem. The problem for this particular line is that the insurance companies actually are not making that much money. Just on a profit level, the insurance companies are not making that much money because of the extraordinary regulations that they have to go through in order to work with the federal government.
The fact is that Obamacare consolidated the industry pretty radically. Obamacare forces young people who want insurance to get comprehensive coverage as opposed to catastrophic coverage as a sort of backdoor subsidy to elderly people who they group together. The Obamacare coverage It has not bent the cost curve in any material way. Costs are still up on Obamacare.
And again, those subsidies have been rising radically. The problem, of course, is that when you hit that cliff, the amount that the Trump administration is talking about putting in HSAs is probably not going to compensate the people who really, really need the help. And right now, the average person
annual deposit that Trump is talking about, $1,000 annual deposit, that's insufficient to cover the premium increases, particularly for people who are elderly and people who have families. The average premium increases under Obamacare that just kicked into place are like a thousand bucks a year.
So you think, okay, a thousand bucks a year in the HSA, a thousand bucks a year increase, those cancel each other out. But the problem is that that's unevenly distributed. Because the high end premium increase can be over $12,000 per year for older couples or families. The average bronze deductible is $7,476. People are spending above and beyond their premiums, obviously.
So what is probably the best case solution, at least in the short term, to get us through the midterms? If you're not going to do a full scale restructure of Obamacare, which is what Republicans should have been pursuing when they had a much larger majority in Congress during Trump's first term. Well, since they didn't fix it then, they're not going to fix it now.
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