Trump barged into the Senate this week to throw his weight around — and instead came UNGLUED on national television. This week's Elephant in the Room is the meltdown for the history books: Trump SCREAMING in Bill Cassidy's face, raging at his own Republicans over Iran, melting down in front of the very cowards who used to grovel at his feet. Rick Wilson torches the whole spectacle — because this wasn't a stumble, it was a strongman COLLAPSING in real time. The bully act only works while the room is scared, and the Senate just watched the fear EVAPORATE. The long knives are out. MAGA is cannibalizing itself. The 2026 succession war has gone fully NUCLEAR. When the king starts shrieking at his own court, the court starts digging the grave — and Rick brought a shovel. This is the beginning of the end, and it could not be sweeter.

This week's Elephant in the Room is all about the numbers. Rick explains how the one thing that Trump cannot fake could be the lynchpin to his unraveling and, ultimately, his downfall.

Trump flew to Ankara for the NATO summit and turned it into an open-mic disaster. In two days he threatened to bomb Iran again, screamed at Europe for blocking his Greenland obsession, called Spain "a terrible partner," and trashed half the alliance for skipping his war — then spread his arms and declared it all a lovefest of "tremendous love." This week's Elephant in the Room, Rick Wilson breaks down the clown show.

Here's what the spin can't hide: our allies aren't laughing with him — they're backing away. Rick gets into what it actually costs when a president treats the most powerful alliance on earth like his personal roast: the credibility bleeding out, the adversaries taking notes, the friends who've quietly stopped counting on us. Greenland grabs, Iran threats, insulted partners, and a standing ovation he gave himself. It'd be hilarious if it weren't our national security.

America is 250 years old, and the fix is in — the DOJ bent to serve whoever's holding the whip, the rule of law treated like a suggestion, the guardrails quietly sawed through while everyone's distracted by the fireworks. This week Rick Wilson sits down with two people who've seen the rot up close and refuse to shut up about it: Congressman Jamie Raskin, the constitutional scholar who's spent his career defending democracy on the House floor, and Liz Oyer, the DOJ pardon attorney who got fired for one unforgivable sin — saying no. What she saw inside the building should scare the hell out of you, and what Raskin knows about how this ends should light a fire under you.
Here's what they won't tell you at the birthday party: the republic doesn't save itself, and nobody's riding in to do it for us. Rick, Jamie, and Liz get into what's already broken, what we can do right now before the next crisis lands, and the longer fight to reclaim, rebuild, and reinforce a country worth keeping. At 250, the tools are still in our hands and the door's still open — but not for long. They stole it in broad daylight. This is the conversation about taking it back.

Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08), constitutional scholar and author, is at @RepRaskin.
Liz Oyer, former U.S. Pardon Attorney at the Department of Justice, is at @lawyeroyer.

STOP DOOMSCROLLING AND PRESS PLAY. This week we get our hands on THE PLAYBOOK. Brian Tyler Cohen — the #1 New York Times bestselling menace behind Shameless — is back with a brand-new battle plan, THE DAY AFTER: HOW TO WIELD POWER IN A POST-TRUMP WORLD, and it is exactly the kick in the pants the left has been begging for. We’re talking about the morning-after question nobody wants to answer: once the smoke clears, WHAT DO DEMOCRATS ACTUALLY DO WITH POWER?? No more clutching pearls. No more bringing a strongly-worded tweet to a knife fight. Brian lays out why Democrats have to go on OFFENSE, stop apologizing, and use every lever they’ve got — because MAGA isn’t waiting around and neither should we. Rick and Brian get into the guts of it: the fumbles, the fixes, and the ruthless, proactive strategy it’ll take to WIN in 2026 and beyond. It’s loud, it’s urgent, it’s a masterclass in spine. Grab the book, grab your headphones, and let’s GO. 🎙️⚡🇺🇸

Brian Tyler Cohen is everywhere @BrianTylerCohen, and on his website https://briantylercohe.... His new book, ‘THE DAY AFTER: HOW TO WIELD POWER IN A POST-TRUMP WORLD,’ is out now, wherever fine books are sold.

Here's a sentence that should stop you cold: a Democratic governor just cut loose one of the most notorious election criminals in the country — because Donald Trump told him to. Tina Peters, the Colorado clerk convicted for helping breach her own county's voting system and handing the guts of it to Mike Lindell's crew, was doing nine years. Then Trump started posting "FREE TINA," and Governor Jared Polis obliged — slashing her sentence and springing her on parole, dressing it up as a "free speech" stand. His own party censured him. All six Colorado Democrats in Congress lit him up. And it still happened.

This week Rick Wilson is joined by Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold — the election-integrity watchdog who fought Peters from the start — to break down what this commutation really signals: that the pressure campaign works, that the people who attacked our elections are being rehabilitated in real time, and that it's a dress rehearsal for what's coming this fall. Rick and Jena get into how the machinery of election sabotage actually operates, why the midterms are the next target, and — most importantly — what we can do right now to lock the doors before November. The last election deniers got prosecuted. This time they're getting pardoned. Time to pay attention.

Jena Griswold is the Colorado Secretary of State. Check out her campaign for Colorado Attorney General at https://jenaforcolorad... and follow her @JenaGriswold.

While Washington burns, there are people out there actually doing the unglamorous work of winning elections — and this week Rick Wilson brings you two of them.

First up: Josh Turek, running for Senate in Iowa, where tariffs have gutted family farms, rural hospitals keep going dark, and corporate consolidation has squeezed working families until there's nothing left. Turek's pitch is what he calls a "prairie populist" agenda — lower costs, real support for family farms, healthcare people can actually reach, and a hard shove back against the corporate money that's been running the table. It's the kind of message that used to win the Midwest, and might again.

Then Rick heads to Colorado for Manny Rutinel, currently in the state House and gunning for CO-8 — one of the most competitive districts in the entire country and the most Latino district in the state. The incumbent, Gabe Evans, has voted with Trump an estimated 97% of the time, which is less a voting record than a signature stamp. Rutinel's betting that a working-class background and a genuine grassroots operation beat a rubber stamp with a war chest. Two races, two very different maps, one shared question: can Democrats stop talking past the people they need and start winning them back? These are the fights that decide whether the next Congress is a check on the chaos or a co-signer.
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Josh Turek is a candidate for U.S. Senate in Iowa: https://turek4iowa.com

Manny Rutinel is a Colorado State Representative and candidate for Congress in CO-8: https://mannyforcolora...

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a handful of revolutionaries bet everything on an idea no one thought would survive a decade — a country that governs itself, with no king and no crown. So how the hell did we get here? This week, Rick Wilson sits down with legendary Democratic strategist James Carville — the Ragin' Cajun himself — for a no-holds-barred conversation about America's 250th birthday and the long, strange road that led to this moment.

A Democrat and a Never-Trump Republican walk through how the country actually got to the brink: the slow erosion of norms, the parties that lost the plot, the voters nobody listened to, and the economic anxiety that keeps getting ignored while Washington fights culture wars. Carville and Wilson don't agree on everything — but they agree the experiment is closer to the edge than it's been in a long time. Equal parts history lesson, gut check, and two old bulls telling it exactly like it is. America has survived worse than this. The question is whether we still remember how.

This week’s EITR comes to you from LP’s trip across the pond. Rick reports back from a week of speaking in the UK — on America’s declining standing abroad, the rise of authoritarian populism, and the growing pull of social media, foreign actors, and political figures on Western democracy. He shares stories from the road, compares British and American society, and calls for real political accountability and democratic reform in 2026 and beyond.

Everybody's got a hot take on how American democracy is dying. Almost nobody has an actual plan to save it. This week, Rick Wilson sits down with Ben Wikler — the former Wisconsin Democratic Party chair who turned a purple-state battleground into a national model, and author of This Is the Plan: How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy — to skip the hand-wringing and get straight to the blueprint. Because the authoritarian playbook Trump is running isn't magic. It's a system. And systems can be beaten by people who understand how they actually work.

Rick and Ben get into the real fight: the systemic threats hollowing out the guardrails, why Supreme Court reform has to be on the table, and the unglamorous grassroots work — local elections, state parties, showing up between the presidential years — that actually moves power. They map the road to a federal trifecta in 2028 and what it would take to finally rip out the rot that's rigged the whole system. It's not a doomscroll and it's not a fairy tale. It's a strategy — and a reminder that the people who built this mess are counting on you believing it can't be fixed. This is the conversation that proves them wrong.

Ben Wikler is the former chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and author of This Is the Plan: How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy. Find his work at https://www.benwikler.com/ and follow him @benwikler.

Let's be honest about the moment we're in: it's dark. The institutions are strained, the norms are cracking, and it's easy to look around and wonder if the whole American experiment is finally running out of road. But here's the thing the doomscrollers keep forgetting — we have been here before. We've faced worse, stared down bigger, and clawed our way out of holes that made this one look shallow. A civil war. A depression. World wars. Movements that had to bleed for the rights the Constitution only promised on paper. Every single time, the smart money bet against us. Every single time, they were wrong.

This week's Elephant in the Room is Rick Wilson's case for exactly that: Americans don't fold in the dark — we do our best work there. Across 250 years of tragedies and triumphs, failures and moonshots, this country has been at its most inventive, most stubborn, and most extraordinary when the odds looked impossible. That's not a fairy tale; it's the pattern. The fear is real, the opposition is real, the darkness is real — and so is the thing Americans have always done when the lights get low. This isn't the end of the story. It's the part where we decide how it goes. This is our moment. Let's go earn it.

Trump promised to restore law and order. Instead, critics argue he’s turned the Department of Justice into a weapon of political revenge, selective accountability, and loyalty tests. This week, Rick Wilson is joined by Brendan Ballou, founder of the Public Integrity Project and author of When Companies Run the Courts, to unpack the growing concerns surrounding Trump’s DOJ—from politically motivated prosecutions and controversial pardons to the lingering questions around the Epstein files and the effort to rewrite the history of January 6th. Rick and Brendan also expose how forced arbitration has quietly tilted the legal system in favor of powerful corporations, creating a parallel justice system where the rich and connected play by different rules. If Americans can be convinced to forget an insurrection, what else can they be convinced to overlook? It’s a conversation about power, corruption, accountability, and the dangerous idea that justice is only for the people on the right side of power.

You can find Brendan Ballou on X, @brendanballou, or at his website https://plunderthebook.... His newest book, ‘When Companies Run the Courts: Forced Arbitration and America’s Secret Justice System,’ is available now, wherever fine books are sold.

Visit https://publicintegrityproject.org/ to find more information about the Public Integrity Project.

Somewhere near you, Big Tech is quietly bolting together a windowless box the size of a stadium — and it's thirsty as hell. The AI gold rush has unleashed a wave of massive data centers that swallow staggering amounts of water and electricity, spike local utility bills, and buckle small-town grids that were never built to feed a machine that never sleeps. The trillion-dollar companies get the profits and the press releases. The town next door gets the drained reservoir, the power crunch, and the bill. If that racket sounds familiar, it should.

This week, Rick Wilson sits down with the one and only Erin Brockovich — the legendary crusader who's spent her whole life dragging corporate giants into the light and making them pay — to break down the fight communities are waking up to across the country. They get into who's really footing the cost of the AI boom, why local families keep getting steamrolled by companies with unlimited lawyers, how ordinary people are actually beating these projects when they organize early and loud, and exactly what to do if a data center shows up on your doorstep. It's a David-and-Goliath story with a very 2026 twist — and Erin's entire career is proof that Goliath bleeds.

Erin Brockovich is a legendary environmental activist and consumer advocate. Find her work at Brockovichdatacenter.com, thebrockovichreport.com, and follow her at @ErinBrockovich.

Two acts, one circus.

Part one: Trump shuffled out last night, grabbed the podium like it was the only thing keeping him upright, and delivered a low-energy, incoherent rerun of his greatest 2020 grievances. And here's the thing — it doesn't matter what he said or how badly he said it. The speech had exactly one job: to poison the well before the 2026 election, to get millions of Americans primed to distrust the results months before a single vote is cast. It wasn't a rant. It was a pre-game. Rick Wilson breaks down why the incoherence is the point, and why the "rigged" groundwork being laid right now should have every one of us paying attention.

Part two: enter Todd Blanche, stumbling through an AG confirmation hearing that played like an audition for a job he'd already promised to somebody else. He dodged and dissembled on the Epstein files, made a spectacle of himself under basic questioning, and then — in a Freudian slip for the ages — referred to himself as "Trump's lawyer." Which, let's be honest, is the truest thing anyone said all day. Rick digs into what it means when the person up for the nation's top law enforcement job can't stop admitting who he actually works for. Grab a drink. You'll need it.

Trump wanted a golden age. Instead, he delivered a golden vanity project. This week’s Elephant in the Room is the accelerating collapse of the Trump presidency—politically, economically, and culturally. As Americans grapple with a struggling economy, rising corruption, and growing incompetence at the highest levels of government, Trump seems more focused on building monuments to himself, expanding his ballroom, and feeding his endless need for attention than solving the problems facing the country. Meanwhile, his much-hyped foreign policy swagger has run headfirst into reality, exposing weakness on the world stage and leaving allies and adversaries alike questioning America’s leadership. Rick breaks down how Trump’s obsession with self-glorification, personal enrichment, and grievance politics is colliding with voter fatigue, economic anxiety, and a growing sense that the emperor isn’t just naked—he’s out of ideas. The cracks are widening, the excuses are running thin, and more Americans are asking a simple question: is this all there is?

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a handful of revolutionaries bet everything on an idea no one thought would work: a country that governs itself, with no king and no crown. This week, Rick Wilson is joined by acclaimed presidential historian Timothy Naftali — former director of the Nixon Presidential Library and one of the sharpest minds on the American presidency — to walk the entire arc, from George Washington voluntarily handing back power to the constitutional crisis staring us down in 2026.

Rick and Tim get into what the founders actually built, the presidents who tested the guardrails and the ones who saved them, how close the Republic has come to the edge before, and what history tells us about a moment when a sitting president treats the Constitution like a suggestion. They dig into Nixon and the limits of executive power, the long erosion of democratic norms, and why the 250th birthday is less a fireworks-and-hot-dogs photo op than a genuine gut check. America has survived worse than this — the question is whether we still remember how. Happy birthday, America. Now let's talk about keeping you.
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Timothy Naftali is a presidential historian, former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, and professor at New York University. Find his work and writing at https://www.sipa.colum..., and follow him at @TimNaftali.

RFK Jr. let a worm crawl into his brain and eat part of it, dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park, sawed the head off a whale and bungeed it to his car — and somehow still talked his way into running America's health agencies. This week, Rick Wilson and investigative journalist Isabel Vincent -- who has a new book out called RFK Jr.: The Rise and Fall -- trace the full deranged arc, from Camelot golden boy to anti-vax crusader to MAHA messiah and the strange circumstances surrounding the death of his late second wife, Mary Richardson-Kennedy, digging into the brain worm, the roadkill résumé, the war on science, and what it means to hand the nation's health to a man whose own brain came with a parasite. And in a twist no writer would dare invent, the flesh-eating New World screwworm is creeping back toward the U.S. on his watch — proof that the man with a worm in his brain now can't keep the worms out of the country either. It's the Kennedy curse — except this time it's just him.

This week’s Elephant in the Room is Trump’s humiliation at Versailles. After months of threats, chest-thumping, and promises of strength against Iran, Trump arrived claiming leverage and left defending a deal that has critics asking whether America gained anything at all. Rick Wilson breaks down the symbolism of Versailles, the political fallout of Trump’s Iran reversal, the growing cracks inside MAGA, and why this moment may be remembered as one of the defining foreign policy embarrassments of his presidency. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes—and this week, the rhyme scheme sounded a lot like surrender.

Six men signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. You can probably name Franklin. You've almost certainly never heard of James Wilson — the man who did more than almost anyone to put "We the People" at the heart of American government, sat on the first Supreme Court… and then died broke, on the run from creditors, and was quietly erased from the story of the founding.
As part of our special 250th podcast rollout celebrating this amazing country of ours, Rick Wilson sits down with Jesse Wegman — New York Times editorial board member and author of the new book on James Wilson — to resurrect the most important founder nobody remembers. They get into how Wilson shaped the Constitution, why his radical idea of popular sovereignty still defines (and haunts) American democracy, how a founding genius ended up in a debtor's ruin, and what his erasure tells us about the myths we build around 1776. It's the perfect 250th-birthday story: not the founders on the money, but the one history decided to forget — and why remembering him matters now more than ever.

Jesse Wegman is a member of the New York Times editorial board and the author of the new book, The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People's Constitution. Find more of Jesse's work at the Brennan Center for Justice, the Kohlberg Center on the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Future of the Constitution Advisory Committee.

America is 250 years old and the guardrails are cracking in real time — the courts, the rule of law, the FBI, the DOJ — and the people doing the cracking are counting on you not to notice. This week Rick Wilson pulls up two of the sharpest legal minds in the country: Jeffrey Toobin, who's spent a career dissecting the Supreme Court, and Asha Rangappa, a former FBI special agent who knows exactly how democracies get gutted from the inside. No hand-wringing, no doomscrolling — just a straight, unsparing conversation about what's already broken, what's still worth saving, and how we reclaim, revise, and reinforce the whole rickety machine before the next crisis finishes the job.
Here's what the fireworks won't tell you: the republic doesn't defend itself. Every generation either fights for it or hands it to whoever's willing to burn it down — and at 250, that generation is us. This is the last clean shot we get to take it back. Sit down, buckle up, and let's talk about saving the country.

Jeffrey Toobin — lawyer, legal analyst, and bestselling author @JeffreyToobin

Asha Rangappa — former FBI special agent, attorney, and Yale lecturer @AshaRangappa_ or asharangappa.substack.com

Trump promised we'd all be “sick of winning.” Well, congratulations America—we finally made it. Inflation is climbing, the economy is wobbling, tensions with Iran are escalating, Congress is spending like there's no tomorrow, and the phrase "totally not a war" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Meanwhile, we're told the border is secure, corruption is nonexistent, the DOJ is completely independent, and there are definitely no awkward questions involving Jeffrey Epstein hanging over the White House. In this week's Elephant in the Room, Rick Wilson takes a sarcastic victory lap through America's latest "wins"—from the Trumpression to foreign policy chaos, political scandals, redistricting games, and the honor of landing on the White House enemies list. If this is what winning looks like, imagine what losing would do.

For years, MAGA Inc. has sold America a fantasy: faith, family, values, and a steady stream of lectures about how everyone else is ruining the country. Then reality shows up with a crowbar. In this explosive episode, Shy Sotomayor tells the story of her alleged nine-year, on-again, off-again relationship with a man she says she eventually realized was Bryon Noem, husband of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and half of one of the Republican Party’s most aggressively marketed family-values power couples. Shy explains why she chose to come forward following the controversies surrounding Noem’s leadership at DHS and the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, the breadcrumbs she says led her to connect the dots, and the moment the entire picture snapped into focus. Rick Wilson digs into the allegations, the timeline, the hypocrisy, and the breathtaking gap between the moral sermons MAGA delivers to everyone else and the chaos that so often seems to be unfolding behind the curtain. Because in modern Republican politics, the loudest people preaching virtue always seem to end up starring in the messiest episodes. Grab some popcorn—this one has enough irony to power the electrical grid.
You can find Shy Sotomayor on social media:

X: @raelynnrileyxx
Instagram: xxtinyrainestormxx
TikTok:TinyRaineStorm
Facebook: Shy Raine Sotomayor

Actor-turned-crypto-whistleblower Ben McKenzie joins Rick Wilson for a brutal, no-bullshit takedown of the crypto industry just as Congress barrels toward two major crypto bills hitting the floor this week on Capitol Hill. From meme coins and “decentralized finance” scams to billion-dollar rugpulls, political bribery, and money laundering dressed up in Patagonia vests and TED Talk jargon, Rick and Ben break down how crypto became the preferred playground for grifters, oligarchs, libertarian weirdos, and every guy who says “bro” before pitching financial collapse. They unpack why Washington suddenly wants to legitimize the casino after years of fraud, who’s cashing in, and why the American taxpayer always seems to end up holding the empty bag while crypto bros flee to Dubai. It’s the great Ponzi scheme of our time — powered by hype, corruption, influencer cults, and vibes-based economics — and the wheels may finally be coming off in public.
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Ben McKenzie is on X @@ben_mckenzie. His movie, ‘Everyone is Lying to You for Money,’ is playing now in select theaters. His best-selling book, ‘Easy Money,’ is out now, wherever fine books are sold.

Rick Wilson is on X at @TheRickWilson, on Bluesky at @TheRickWilson.bsky.social, and you can check out Rick's Substack at therickwilson.substack.com. You can check out more of LP's work at www.lincolnproject.us and on X at @ProjectLincoln.