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On Sunday, I joined Antonia Hylton for the full 3 p.m. hour of The Assignment, her new show on MS NOW, alongside my friend Adam Mockler, Amanda Litman, and Tim O'Brien. It was an excellent panel that took place the same weekend Trump moved to ban MS NOW, CNN, and Politico from the White House. He doesn’t want people like us talking about the truth of his failing presidency. So that's exactly what we did.
You can watch a highlight reel from the show above and read takeaways from our conversation below.
We started with the midterms, and the Senate map has shifted dramatically. A year and a half ago, we were bracing for Project 2025 and a looming authoritarian takeover. Now Republicans are forced to defend states like Texas, Iowa, Alaska, Ohio, and even Kansas. Roy Cooper is close to a lock in North Carolina, and Republicans have stopped spending money there. I made the point that the RNC war chest meant for offense is now tied up defending states Trump won by double digits. Democrats lead the generic ballot around double digits. To win the Senate, they need to hold Georgia, Michigan, and Minnesota, then flip four states. Their target list has expanded to encompass Maine, North Carolina, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, and Alaska. That momentum is Trump’s doing.
That’s why some Republicans are quietly trying to distance themselves from him. But it’s too late. It turns out, the “Snake” poem Trump recited at his 2016 rallies was a warning about himself. Republicans knew exactly who he was. They empowered him anyway. This November, Republicans will pay the price for that corrupt bargain.
We then turned to Trump’s corruption, and Adam called the greed coming from the Trump family almost impressive, inhuman even. I agreed. This is corruption at a scale never before seen. Trump brought in $2.2 billion in income in 2025, $1.4 billion of it from crypto alone. His Truth Social posts have become a pump-and-dump scheme. Another Iran deal gets announced. The market jumps. The trades flood in. Meanwhile, his actions are raising prices on Americans who are already struggling. His corruption is a tax on all of us.
The same self-interest drives how he handles AI. He calls the growing concerns a hoax while the frontier labs building the technology warn the risks are real. He has investments in the AI companies propping up the market. If AI slows, he knows the K-shaped economy could become a cliff-shaped one. Antonia pointed out that any real framework needs China at the table, and I pointed out that Xi himself has said AI is growing out of control. This summit was a chance for a global standard. Instead, we have the worst possible person in charge.
In the final block of the show, Antonia raised the story of a transgender commander she had on her show. She served 17 years. Then a Pentagon notice forced her to out herself, and she’s now on leave. Her story fits a pattern. Nearly 60% of the senior officers Pete Hegseth has fired are Black or female, according to Senator Jack Reed. And yet they make up fewer than 20% of generals and admirals. Pete Hegseth’s anti-DEI purges clearly targeted Black, female, and trans officers. They were highly qualified. Hegseth is the unqualified one. Now he’s injecting Christian nationalism into the military, which I noted was all part of Project 2025. Antonia said that it all comes back to Project 2025. She’s right.
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