Now we've got a midterm convention.
Yeah. Now it's time to lock in.
This is the brainchild of President Trump, a way to galvanize the Republicans in a way that they haven't been in the era of Trump for midterms.
They professionalized their operation to a level that will turn Trump voters out even higher in 2026. And this convention is part of that.
Our politics has become so national and so consumption-heavy, in that like I think this has an opportunity to do real good.
And refocus the Republican electorate, which is really what we're talking about here. If we can turn this midterm into the environment of a presidential election,
the Republican party's going to do well.
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It's an honor and a pleasure to welcome the great Sean Hannity. Guys, I love you. Congratulations on all your success. This is why you listen to the Ruthless Podcast, cuz nobody else would ask that question. The only political podcast worth listening to is the Ruthless Podcast. It's time for our main event, the Ruthless Podcast.
Good Tuesday to you. Welcome back to the Ruthless Variety program. I'm Josh Holmes along with Comfortably Smug, Michael Duncan, and John Ashbrook, left to right across your radio dials. Absolutely always, we got a real burner going on here today. An incredible show.
It's gonna be great. It's gonna be a great week. You know, this feels like the real official kickoff of the midterms.
You know, I mean, there's a tendency throughout the summer, you kind of forget and everybody's doing their own thing, and then you get into that Labor Day period and now we've got a midterm convention.
Yeah. Now's time to lock in.
Yeah. So, I mean, we're going to do a whole bunch of stuff on that. Also, we have the best interview.
Anyone in media has Dina Powell McCormack.
She is the president of FA of uh Meta. And I got to tell you, she's also the most impressive person I think I know.
Yeah. I mean, you get that that question from time to time on P like who's the most impressive? Who's the most famous person in your cell phone
in terms of impressiveness of an individual? I think she might be it.
I don't you guys I mean it's like everything she's touched
since I have become vaguely aware of Dana
She's a force of nature and she's got just such a great personality. You would never know talking to her that she has as much pull and swat and power and relationships.
You would be like, well, okay, I'm sure people know her, but you would have no idea. She knows everybody and she couldn't be easier to talk to or get along with.
A normal human being and huge, huge. And you've heard us talk a lot about the data center controversy, AI, you know, our views of all of that. And so why not go to the grand dame, right? The person who knows and can speak about all of that better than anyone else in the country.
Yeah. I think it was the other week I was chatting with Mark and Dre and I said I think Dina Powell is probably the best messenger in tech right now, bar none. And every American needs to hear what she has to say, what she's doing, how what a patriot she is. By the way, she'll discuss all the things that she's accomplishing for Americans. Um, and so something we can do to make sure every American is hearing all this good news and can get involved with this is giving her a platform on our show. So grateful she came in.
Oh, totally. I mean, so much of our show, it's not just on this topic, but so much of our show is like the frustration long before Ruthless of being like, man, if everybody knew what I knew about this situation. I wish there was a way to communicate what we know about the situation. There would be so much more clarity about like who has lost their minds, who is crazy, who's advocating for the destruction of America or who is like kind of got it right. And sometimes the American public flip-flops the villain and the hero when it comes to messaging. And we do this with politics all the time cuz we're kind of under the hood and been under the hood for a long time. I feel like increasingly over the last couple of months we're doing this in the tech space and we're doing it in the defense space and stuff like that. So very proud to give you all of that, but we need to start with the convention. Um, as you're listening to this, I think we're on our way to Dallas, Texas and the first of its kind midterm convention. Obviously, this is the brainchild of President Trump, a way to galvanize the Republicans in a way that they haven't been in the era of Trump for midterms. Every time that Donald J. Trump's name is not on the ballot, Republicans have struggled since he's come down the golden escalator. This is a way of trying to reverse all that. And boy oh boy, does it come at a good time.
Well, and it's a natural solution for the greatest showman in American politics, right? Is okay, well, we have a problem with enthusiasm or turning out my voters. I know what I'll do. Huge party.
I mean, like, this is what he does.
Let the entertainer entertain, right?
So, we're going to have some shows for you from Dallas for some really interesting stuff. And the Fox crew has been great. We're going to be working with them on a bunch of different things. Needless to say, from a consumer standpoint, plenty of content. Plenty of content on its way. I think I'm also going to take over the Instagram account a little to give people a sneak peek, you know, as we're traveling and our various
You're not going to like film yourself on the selfies.
And also, like our longtime listeners know, when we're going on site for a convention or for a debate, you're going to get some insane, incredible content. You're I mean, like, you won't want to miss it. I remember when we were doing the presidential convention and you had like Speaker Johnson roll up and this is like what maybe like two weeks after the assassination attempt on President Trump. There's like 5,000 security guards in the plaza cuz we've got the prime plaza spot. We're like in a sea of officers and Secret Service. That's the level of access you're going to be getting when you watch. If you're audio only listening to this right now, go to YouTube right now. Hit subscribe. Go to the Instagram. Follow us on Instagram cuz you're going to get some great stuff from the convention this week.
It's really well said. Just as a reminder, graphic five, if you want to pop that up. So, that was
speaking of visuals. What a
That was our setup in the last convention in 2024. What you're looking at in the backdrop is the front door of the convention hall. And there is one and only one media setup outside the front door. Well, that's the Ruthless Variety program.
Yeah. You had like Fox and CNN people going by and being like, "How the hell did you swing this?"
Yeah. Graphic six is what you remember. That's, you know, all of us.
There we are with George Washington.
Nobody was returned and now goes by Doug Burgum. My favorite part of that entire thing was our location was A1A.
You know, and that led to a little bit of jealousy with the mainstream media and now this gives me an opportunity to attack them.
We were given media passes at the RNC convention in 2024, which we found hilarious walking around there and these like mainstream media people had to, yeah, how the hell did you get one of those? You don't deserve that.
In fact, I remember one exchange I had, and I'm going to put her on blast right now. Caitlyn Collins. Really?
Yeah. I was just kind of making a little goof like I'm a journo now. And she's like, where did you go to journalism school? No way, dude.
And I said, I said the Ernie Pyle School of Journalism at Indiana University. It happens to be better ranked than the one she went to in Alabama, I would point out, you know, not that that's the point, but like that tells you everything you need to know about the way they view their jobs versus us. Oh, how the hell would we possibly know how to cover a convention for our party, you know?
Totally. I mean, they love jourros, love to gatekeep information. Here's what you need to know, right?
Which I've filtered through my left-wing brain and spit out in terms of like complete cynicism and shittiness.
Yeah. And the high priests of American culture.
Exactly. Right. Now, I will say the arrogance.
As we are giving you this episode, we don't quite know what our accommodations are yet. I mean, we have accommodations. We don't know what they are yet. I will say in Milwaukee in 2024, it left a touch to be desired.
For you OGs, you will remember this clip three. It's a very important investigative piece that's being done here. Jared, who's been incredible here throughout the week.
We're here at the Ambassador Hotel. And I think at the Ambassador, very famous.
Infamous. Maybe for one reason. It is the site that Jeffrey Dahmer claimed his first victim. And he did that in room 507. And 507, this actually happened, is no longer, I'm told, listed here. That was 503 that we just walked through. 504, 505, and 506, and privacy. And that is, that's the door, folks. So, big thanks to the RNC for putting this in. Can't wait for the paranormal activity that's happening later on this evening. Really appreciate it. Thank you.
What Josh did not make clear in that Blair Witch video was that room 503 was my room. And I had no idea this was the Jeffrey Dahmer hotel. But when we get in the elevator and we're riding up to the fifth floor, he starts telling the story and it was like Paul Harvey telling a story and he was like, "You know, this hotel is famous." And I was like, "Oh, yeah." Not really paying attention. And he was like, "Yeah, Jeffrey Dahmer was here." I was like, "Oh, wow. That's kind of creepy."
And then the doors open to the fifth floor. And he was like, he killed his first victim right here on this floor. Right before I got out, the blood's draining from Ashbrook's face.
I didn't sleep so well that night.
One eye open. But that's why you got to follow the Instagram account because that's the sort of content you'll see when we hit the road.
Yeah. Yeah, 100% right. Like, subscribe, go to Instagram, follow. You're going to love what it is that we come up with. Hopefully, there's no infamous serial killing in our domicile. I'm just, and I'm blaming Wolf if that's not, if anyway.
So, conventions, they're very exciting. You'll just recall a couple of clips from the previous convention to get you in the mood for what we're going to talk about. Clip one.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the next president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
This is his first appearance following the Butler assassination. Yeah, look at the bandage on his ear. Wow, dude. That was electric. It's a crazy moment. It was a wild moment. And I also want to extend my thanks to Vice President JD Vance who invited me into his box at the convention so we could watch from there. It was very gracious of him. His family was there. Lovely family, wonderful family.
All this is very true. The fact that you personified that was like, well, he's extend, Vice President Vance is very, very kind, generous, he is.
And I always want to, when there's people who are very kind and generous, I want to make sure everybody knows they're a good person.
He is, he is all those things and all of what you said is true. The humble brag of it though is it leaves a touch to be desired.
I think it's nothing to. I recall that moment watching from the vice president's box.
I always express gratitude for people who are very kind to me.
Another clip. And we were down on the floor for this bad boy. We were literally just, could reach out and touch. Yeah. Who now the late Hulk Hogan clip two.
When they took a shot at my hero and they tried to kill the next president of the United States. Enough was enough. And I said, "Let Trumpamania run wild, brother. Let Trumpamania rule again. Let Trumpamania make America great again."
Oh, that was such a great moment.
It was incredible because look, there was a lot of energy in that convention. You mentioned the backdrop with the Butler attempted assassination, a lot of unease about that. And so when you were getting into the programming that just hung over everything and there was a vice presidential nominee announcement and all kinds of different, a bunch of news components to it, but everybody was just kind of like whatever that happened. The plate that took the top off the place.
I mean, people, it was so loud and we were right in the front watching all that. I mean, he was just killing it up there.
It was incredible. Incredible moment. The energy and I think that's what President Trump understands is now is not the time for complacency. Now is not the time to be like, "Oh, you know, I wish we'd get to this thing or this thing." Listen, it is crystal clear what we are up against right now. You're seeing candidates, it's not just a New York City problem. Coast to coast, the DSA has openly socialist, openly communist candidates who are now on the ballot on the midterms and they're counting on Republicans to stay home and they're counting on historically well the opposing party in the midterms. Nope. President Trump knows we got to capitalize. We need to get everyone focused and like Duncan said, lock in because this is critical. We all got to show up.
Yeah. No question about it. So, all right. So, we're talking Wednesday, Thursday of this very week. And the whole goal is to raise the intensity. What happens during midterm elections when your party is in power is generally speaking most of your party's pretty content. You won things, you're running things. You don't have that fear of like what can happen to your pocketbook, your bank account, your community, the social reorganizing that the libs always try to do. Like that's all at bay. So the anxieties that are created to ensure that there was nothing in the world that could stop you to get to the ballot box go away.
Mhm. And there's always a challenge from that party in power to try to figure out how to overcome that and put that same anxiety or at least motivation back into your electorate to ensure that your people show up. We did not do that in 2018, the first midterm of President Trump. Now, the Senate did okay. House had catastrophic losses. And then what happened immediately afterwards? You got into Russia Gate. You got into impeachment one, impeachment two, Robert Mueller, like everything was about trying to just destroy anything good and any progress this country was making and distract it and try to pretend like all of these various things are happening. That's the goal and that's the game plan again. So, you know, whether you're feeling terrific about the way everything is going or you're just content, the same impetus applies here. Or the midterm convention is an attempt to try to focus you and get, and I think it's a lot of critiques about like, well, you know, should you spend money doing this kind of thing? Should you, you know, gather people when they should be out, you know, meeting voters and whatnot? Our politics has become so national and so consumption-heavy, in that like I think this has an opportunity to do real good.
And refocus the Republican electorate, which is really what we're talking about here.
Well, look, I think that the Trump team has really learned from these midterms over the past several years. I mean, in 2022, the Trump voter turned out at a higher rate than they did in 2018. And I think there's reason to believe that they've professionalized their operation to a level that will turn Trump voters out even higher in 2026. And this convention is part of that. You know, you have to remind the people who love Trump so much that they came out and they maybe they were a Democrat and then they voted for Trump. You have to remind them of what's on the ballot here. The president has done that himself. He says, "Think about it like my name is on the ballot." He's going to say that over and over at this convention. Everybody's going to say it over and over at this convention. And there's a reason. It's because we need those low propensity Trump voters to turn out. And I think this sort of an event getting them excited and focused like you guys were talking about is really, really important for that.
You just got to turn the volume up. If we can turn this midterm into the environment of a presidential election,
Yeah. The Republican party is going to do well in the Trump era when things are at 11. The Republican party has done well. I think that is ultimately the goal of this midterm convention.
Yeah. No, you couldn't have said it better. That's exactly right. So, we've got a couple of things that we're going to put a fine point on here in our next segment. Surprising new polling painting what looks like some kind of a promising picture. But we're going to contextualize that in how midterms are looking right now and give you a little bit of our reality right after this.
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Okay, so look, there's all kinds of prognosticating tools on the internet now. And I think basically every publication has got like a who's up, who's down, whatever. One that does a pretty good job of just laying out the map. And I think maybe because it's visually it appeals to me. I don't know. This
Hey, it helps. It really makes it a lot more crystal clear.
It does. It's this 270 to Win. I've used it for years just because you can also mix and match based on what your internal understanding of things are and you can kind of count
play around with it a little. Yeah, exactly.
So, they have a new map. If you want to toss that bad boy up in graphic one, that's the Senate map. Now, we started this cycle, keep that up while I'm talking. We started this cycle with a big discussion about how problematic the House of Representatives would be to hold because of the very thin majority and the historical precedent of losing House seats when you're in power. Now, redistricting reset the floor on that in a really material way and that you're talking about, you know, nine plus seats that are more red than they were the last time everybody voted. And so there's some optimism and we've talked to a lot of White House folks and people involved in the political apparatus where in terms of the House it's still going to be an absolute dog fight and the likelihood of this being a very thin majority is I would say for all intents and purposes likely, right? There's not going to be any comfortable majorities here one way or another but it's looking a lot rosier than it was at the beginning of the cycle. The conventional wisdom at the beginning of the cycle is well it's pretty good map for Republicans, right? You've got a couple of opportunities out there, Georgia probably foremost amongst them, and then places that we have had a 10-15 year history of defending like your home state of North Carolina. Well, as this has sort of dragged on, the Senate is now the place where people are put the most concern. And this map shows you that as of today, the way that 270 to Win is doing that. They're mapping it out based on
it's called a consensus map. So, it's polling averages basically.
So they're sucking down everything that everybody's putting out and then projecting out a map that has the places that are most likely to be in play and what the shade either red or blue or purple that they projected. And so the competitive polling in terms of what they're talking about here, Maine, New Hampshire, Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, Texas, Alaska, you will notice there are a couple of states that I did not mention on that. Those are the two that I previously discussed. North Carolina and Georgia, which according to polling at this point is not competitive.
Yeah. Doesn't mean they're not competitive, but it certainly means that as of current day, if you were to have the election tomorrow, we're going to lose both of those races, which was if you would have told the Republican party in January of 2025,
that's the thing. Deeply troubling, right? I mean, these are two places.
This is a gut check, folks.
But it's also why we run campaigns, you know, and the campaign in North Carolina, Mike Watley, great dude. The campaign in Georgia with Mike Collins. Those guys have their work cut out for them, but they also know what they need to do and they know they need to energize these voters on the right and they know they need to explain why the person they're running against should not get your vote.
And I think they both face a very similar challenge in that their Democrat opponent has won statewide before. In Georgia it's a sitting senator, in North Carolina it's a former governor who has been allowed to run as a quote centrist and has governed as a far-left lunatic. You know the headlines, everyone knows about the horrible murder of Zutuska happened under this program that this governor allowed of letting felons out on the streets and they've committed all these horrible crimes. But he's trying to skate by as, you know, I'm just a centrist. I think Watley needs to define him as a radical, make sure that message gets out there. And it's going to be a tough fight. Fighting against someone who has a history of winning statewide is a challenge.
It's a huge challenge. But Smug, you've identified, I think, what Republicans think is the best path to knocking down the facade of moderate Cooper in North Carolina, and that is on the crime issue. They've been absolutely pounding him on his failed record on keeping criminals in prison basically, which I think, you know, is obviously smart. I mean, to Ashbrook's point, you know, in North Carolina and Georgia, the Republican nominees know what it's going to take to win. And clearly, this consensus map has Republicans like on their back foot right now. Now, if we're talking about places like Ohio and Texas being toss-ups, obviously you'd want to have those in the bank, right? But we also know what we have to do to win places like that. These are Republican strongholds where if we put together a solid message and get our voters out, we should win. So, I mean, it doesn't look great in the data right now, but we know what the path to victory is.
Yeah. And let me just ballpark the rest of these states. Maine is always going to be a dog fight. We have been, you know, when you say in the political business when you carry a state that is deeply colored for the other party, you're renting it essentially. But there is no such thing as a rental when Susan Collins is involved because she is the epitome of Maine. Has been for as long as I've been involved in politics. And she's really tough and she's really good. And of course, we followed the Graham Platner story. What now we end up with this clown who has kids with his cousin and everything else. And you'd like to think that that sort of would be disqualifying, the fact that your first nominee is like an alleged rapist and then you replace him with some guy that you find out a week later has kids with their cousin and they're a left-wing lunatic and all that stuff. Like, you'd like to think you could take that off the board. Not me. There's more Democrats than there are Republicans. And so it's going to be a fight all the way to the end. I still like her chances, but that's why it's on the board. New Hampshire, we've discussed on the variety program, but you haven't heard it anywhere else.
You haven't heard it anywhere else. I mean, Cenounu in that race, John Cenounu, is an extraordinarily formidable candidate that nobody's really talked about because they have that dumb late primary that they have there and nobody's really focused on it. But if you talk to White House folks, if you talk to MAGA Inc. folks or SLF people, they'll be like, "Keep an eye on that situation." Democrats are trying to pretend like that's in the bank for this Papus guy.
Yeah. And Papus has played more than footsie with the DSA. Yeah.
