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See terms. Mark Thiessen is with us right now, former speechwriter for Bush, box news contributor, Washington Post Column. A fellow at AEI. Mark, welcome back. Good to be with you, Brian.
I think we should look at the midterms. I know you have people, everyone around you is somehow involved in politics, and that's most people talk about. Do you think this game is yet to be played? Do you believe the die is cast for either chamber? No, I don't think it's cast.
And look, I just look at the 2022 midterms, right?
So remember on election night how we were all expecting a red wave in 2022. Biden was an absolute disaster. We had just gotten through the Afghan withdrawal, which is the worst foreign policy debacle in either of our lifetimes. His polling numbers had collapsed after that. We had the worst inflation in four decades, worst border crisis in American history, worst crime wave in the cities.
And he put in the best midterm performance of any president since John F. Kennedy, except for Bush right after 9-11, which was an anomaly, right? How did that happen? We put up a bunch of really bad candidates. We put up, you know, in Georgia and other places with Herschel Walker and Dan Balduck and Blake Masters, and we lost a bunch of winnable races.
And we did the same thing in the House. This time around, it's almost the reverse. You've got, you know, the Democrats. have to win. They need four plus four to flip the Senate, right?
And they so they have to hold they can't lose any blue seats. And so in Michigan, which is an open blue seat, they put up El Saeed. Who's a radical Islamist, you know, hates football, thinks it's racist and homophobic in Michigan, a terrible candidate. Puts that seat in play. They have to flip.
main Susan Collins is their best chance of a pickup in the Senate. What do they do? They come up with a guy with a Nazi tattoo who allegedly raped his girlfriend. And then they come up with his replacement as a guy who Susan Collins said, I'm not going to raise the fact that he's fathered children with his cousin. Right?
Yeah.
So they're. In fact, do you want to hear that? Let's listen. No, we don't have it. But I do want you to hear this.
In terms of what's going on in Texas. The Republicans getting their own way there with Ken Paxson. Donald Trump is being pushed down to spend money there, and I think he will. Here's what Carl Rove said. The President Got him into the general election.
Without the president's endorsement, he would have lost. The president has $400 million as of July 31st sitting in MAGA, Inc. and tens of millions of dollars sitting in other pockets that he controls, Super PEX. And he's got to, if he wants to have Paxton win, he needs to come in. Time is running out.
If the president wants to have Paxton win, he needs to be tossing a lot of money Paxton's way so that ads can be run that depict Tallarico as the far left winger that he is. If not, Tallarico is going to run the message of my opponent is the most corrupt politician in Texas history all the way to the victory lane. Do you think it needs the Trump money? Oh, absolutely.
So here's the other thing.
So here's the counter to what I was just saying to you. We're doing the same thing again in some of these races.
So, you know, Trump pressured Tillis, you know, came out again, attacked Tillis, and Tillis just said, screw this. I'm not running again. And now we're probably going to lose North Carolina as a result of that, right? In Texas, we had a safe incumbent in John Cornyn, who was the chairman of the senatorial committee for two cycles and could raise his own money, right? And instead, we cast him out and put in Paxton, who's a corrupt philanderer, who's just an extremely unattractive candidate, except for the hardcore base, and who is lazy and is not raising money and has not spent Fourth of July weekend instead of campaigning across Texas, went to London on vacation with his mistress.
So, yeah, that's put Texas in play. And now the problem we have is that we've got all these, you know, One of the problems we have going into in this campaign is look at where the races are that are toss-ups. Alaska. Ohio. Iowa, North Carolina, Maine.
These are Republican seats. Many of them were safe red seats that are now in play. We've got to spend a lot of money, the Senatorial Committee, the Senate Leadership Fund, got to spend a lot of money to make sure that we hold on to those seats. And all of a sudden, Texas goes in and puts Texas in play that shouldn't be in play.
So, yes, I think if the president endorsed Paxton, and that's his prerogative as the head of the party, but he's got to help him over the finish line. Yeah, absolutely. And I think he will. And by the way, Paxton and Lawrence Jones always tells me that's unbelievably popular in Texas and never lost a statewide election.
So we'll see. He's got to push back on that. Listen, I'm a John Cornyn fan. I think he's one of the classiest people you're going to meet, type of person you want in Congress.
So I don't really know the problem. But here's the thing, Brian. I go by William F. Buckley's rule, which is that I support the most conservative candidate who's electable, right? And so you have a, and John Cornyn, I know that, first of all, John Cornyn has never lost a race in Texas either.
And I know that he's not as conservative as Paxton is, and some people in the base were unhappy with some things about him. He was the safest bet to hold on to that seat. No, no, I know. It's not worth talking about. It's just, you know, it was a mistake.
Stakes to push him out. How can we help make stronger communities happen?
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C-terms. Right. What they got to do, too, is shore up some of those redistricting seats that were going to go Trump's way if he held on to the Hispanic vote. And we'll see if he's going to. The most vulnerable one, the best chance to flip, I think, is Michigan with El Saeed there, which if you look at the real current average, he's up a point, but the real, the least.
The latest polls have Rodgers up, but listen to what he called Rodgers yesterday, cut 20. It's cut 20. Given the fact that Mike Rogers, who you agree is a beta, is my opponent, it probably shouldn't be very hard. They're coming at me on football. How's the captain of a high school football team?
I literally told I I was like, okay, you want you want you wanted football? You know Oklahoma Drill is? I bought me and Mike Rogers doing Oklahoma drill right now. I'll show you how much I love football. Ian Mike Rogers and Donald Trump.
That's American masculinity. We're um we're headed in very much the wrong direction. And then there's like eyeliner uh J.D. Vance.
So number one, that is him with Jesse, and then the other ones were recently. But Rogers is beta, the military guy with an FBI background who was on the Senate Select Committee the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Number two is, really? You're the one who called football racist and you didn't like it.
So, I'm pretty sure either you're not telling the truth or you weren't captain. Because most people become captain when their teams vote for them. Did a bunch of racists vote you captain? Wally hates fireworks too? Yeah, well, let's tell me your, you know, first of all, tell me you peaked in high school without telling me you peaked in high school.
I was the captain of my high school football team. Yay. You know, like, go to, you know, and also, by the way, he's projecting himself as an alpha. What the Americans really, really want is an alpha Islamic radical. That's what we need in America in the Senate, an alpha Islamic radical.
I mean, give me a freaking break. And I'm sorry, he said that it's a racist and homophobic sport. Mike Rogers should put up ads, and this is, and we should not give any money to Paxton that would stop him from doing this. Put up ads in Michigan, every single Michigan State, University of Michigan football game, every Detroit Lions game, playing El Saeed's words to him to every football fan in Michigan. That's how you spend money.
You don't spend money on a candidate who, instead of fundraising over the weekend in Texas, Decided to go with his mistress to hang out in London. Of all places to spend the 250th anniversary of the 4th of July, in London? Are you serious? Yeah, and by the way, JD Vance looks like that. He doesn't wear eyeliner.
He's got eyebrows. You know, he's got, what are you talking about? You're making fun of people's looks? All right, that's fine.
So let's talk about the latest in Iran. I know she wrote an editorial just saying, let first, we'll start with Ukraine. Let Ukraine build their own patriots. But what the president's worried about, or what they've told him, is that if you let Israel, excuse me, Ukraine build their own patriots, they're worried about the intelligence behind those patriots getting into Russia. Yeah.
So how do you solve that problem?
So Jack Keene and I talked about this, and we've got an elegant solution. And the president actually just truthed out my column, so he seems to like it. It's very simple. You do three things. You license them to produce a less capable Patriot missile that Lockheed has developed called the Patriot Ace, which is basically 70% of the accuracy of the Patriot, the MSC, which is the one we build now at 50% of the cost.
You license the Ukrainians to build that. And you also license the Ukrainians to use the Patriot, the PAC-2 missile, which is the original Patriot missile that we produced in the 1990s, which is less capable. That way you don't have any of the risks of technology transfer of the really, the special seeker that we have in the new missile and the rocket motor, which is what you don't want to get into enemy hands. And then the second thing you do, even if the Ukrainians are able to build those, you've still got an immediate need.
South Korea has its own version of the Patriot, Indigenous version of the Patriot that they are producing. They have tons and tons. of patriots. In a world where we have a patriot shortage, South Korea has more patriots than it could possibly need, and it's exporting them. They're giving them to the UAE to protect itself from Iranian missiles.
They're selling them. Trump should press the South Koreans to sell those missiles to Ukraine so that they can and ship them there immediately. They just did an emergency airlift to the UAE. Let's do an emergency airlift to Ukraine of the same Patriot battery so we can defend them. Because right now what Putin is doing, he's trying to, he's attacking all the energy infrastructure and the critical infrastructure because he wants to freeze the Ukrainian people to death when the winter arrives.
So we've got to protect them now. The South Koreans can provide the Patriots to do that. And then we got to license them so by next year they have up and running the ability to produce their own Patriots. And then we don't have to give them to them. It lifts all of the needs, all the pressures on us.
And on top of that, we could actually ask the Ukrainians to backfill some of the European supply.
so that we don't have to give patriots to Europe and we have more for ourselves.
So it's a win-win-win solution for everybody. I hear you, and I'm firmly in support of that. And Mike Pence brought that up too, but you're a much better spokesperson for Donald Trump's eyes than Mike Pence right now. Major John Spence was on me last night as I filled in for Jesse, and I asked him, from the war college perspective, I mean, this guy is a war college guy. You've been in battles for 25 years.
How's this Operation Economic Fury going, Cut 30? Despite those wishing that we don't succeed, almost on every line of operation, whether it's the economic noose around the regime and its proxies, Hezbollah, its crown jewel proxy currently being destroyed by the southern Lebanon government and Israel asking for money. Iran can't do it. It's hyperinflation. The real is worth nothing, like 2 million real, the $1.
So many indicators. We control the straight-up formuz. We can get all of that oil out. The bypasses are starting to work. There's actually more getting out for a single day, and people want to criticize, but not on a weekly rate.
It's all indicators that the strategy is working. And I agree, the ship. Has sailed on the Memorandum of Understanding, and we're looking at capitulation, I believe, of the Islamic regime to save itself. Do you think he recapped where we're at right now effectively? John Spencer is awesome.
He's 100% right. We're winning. We're winning. Donald Trump is showing strategic patience, right? The biggest thing our enemies do is they just wait us out until we lose our will.
And that's not going to happen with Donald Trump. He is tightening the screws on them. You've got gas lines. You've got two kinds of lines, actually, in Russia too, but that's a separate story. But in Iran, there are lines for gas miles long because people can't get gas.
And then when they do get gas, they're putting stuff in it to water it down that is causing cars to break down.
So the other side, the line going into the gas station is filled with cars waiting for gas. And then the line coming out is broken down cars along the side of the road because they put additives in it that are destroying the engines of the cars. It's a catastrophe for the Iran. They've got zero oil exports going out. Zero.
And we have control of the Strait of Hormuz right now. We've brought more than 1,000 ships through the Strait of Hormuz, according to Admiral Cooper. We've reached near pre-war levels of oil coming through the Strait. And also there's oil coming through other ways because people are bypassing the Strait with pipelines and other. The Iranians can't win.
They cannot win. The only danger, the big risk that I'm worried about is that we stopped at the 20-yard line. They've still got ballistic missile capability now. I think they're husbanding those things for a big attack on the eve of the midterms because they want to hurt Trump politically. They think that if they attack, kill some Americans, hit some ships, that they can cause the Democrats to win, which means that the Democrats will come in and cut off funds for the award.
And that's their play. And we just have to be on top of that and make sure it doesn't happen.
So do you believe that Iran is starting to act in a bellicose way towards Israel? Could be a precursor. Into an attack, at which time the gloves come off from Israel and the IDF. Do you think Iran would be fools enough to do that? I think they actually would be smarter to not attack Israel, but to attack us and to attack the Gulf, because they know that Israel will absolutely pummel the hell out of them if they do it.
We probably will too, but right now there's a hesitancy in the administration to go back to major combat. There's no hesitancy in Jerusalem to do that. Would you like to see the assassination squads back in? I can tell you what I want to see happen. I think we need to go back and do about a week's worth of bombing.
And we can do it in a week and finish off the job of what we left unfinished when we paused to pursue this memorandum of understanding. Take out leadership, take out their economic targets. We've got the blockade going on the sea, take out their airports, take out all the bridges and roads going that allow them to have land trade.
So you add land and air to the naval blockade and take out the leadership and then arm the Iranian people and overthrow that regime. Donald Trump has an opportunity to rid the Middle East of the Iranian threat. And as soon as he does that, we can draw down our forces in the Middle East, focus on China, reload, rearm, and not worry about this problem. Make this problem go away forever. And he will be the greatest president in American history, foreign policy president in American history if he does that.
All right. I like that for your next column, by the way. You could just take the verbatims from this interview. Thanks so much. Marty said, Yeah, take him out of the Washington Post.
Go get him, Mark. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.
Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back.
So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills. But it turns out, That's very illegal.
Uh, so there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/slash switch. Up front payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for a 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra.
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