With All Due Respect

Marcus and Madeline get into the news — and the news is a lot.They open on Trump's unilateral ban of CNN, Politico, and MSNBC from White House coverage, which by Monday had produced a lawsuit, by Tuesday had the Justice Department in court arguing that press access is a privilege and not a right, and by midweek had produced a clip of Trump telling Kaitlan Collins at the UN General Assembly that she shouldn't be there covering him. Madeline notes that the administration invented something called "post-deprivation due process" to justify acting first and providing process later — a legal theory she has never heard of in her life and describes as made-up BS. The judge assigned to the case is Trump-appointed Judge Timothy Kelly, the same judge who presided over the Jim Acosta access case in 2018. Marcus thinks this gets laughed out of court. The more important point: the press ban and the Iran war are not separate stories.Then the UN General Assembly speech — Trump threatening to either rebuild Iran into one of the greatest countries in the Middle East or "drive them into hell with no chance of survival." Marcus, who spent a decade serving in that region, says Iran doesn't believe him and has the upper hand in this war. Madeline traces the Board of Peace grift through Trump's own words at the UN: Morocco, Bahrain, Kazakhstan — countries whose names he can't pronounce, all lined up for the rebuild. It always comes back to the money.The final stretch is about AI — and it goes deeper than the usual conversation. Trump has hundreds of millions invested in AI companies and is not motivated to regulate them. The Chevron deference ruling gutted the ability of subject matter experts to enforce meaningful regulations, which is exactly the point. Madeline draws a sharp distinction between Anthropic — the good guys, who refused Pentagon contracts without human oversight guarantees — and OpenAI's Sam Altman, who stepped in when Anthropic walked away. Pope Leo's alliance with Anthropic against the Peter Thiel/Marc Andreessen war profiteer tech bloc is not an accident. These are people who understand what's at stake if this technology ends up in the wrong hands without guardrails, and they're saying so out loud.

Marcus is back from the Congressional Black Caucus Retreat in Washington, where the energy around the midterms was, in his words, uplifting. He met candidates from across the country, sat with Georgia state legislators, and caught a moment with Senator Warnock. The mood in the room: stoked, focused, and locked on affordability as the message that cuts through.Back on the show with Madeline, he translates that energy into actual numbers. The CNN independence polling is striking — Trump was plus 15 with independents right before his reelection. Now he's minus 71. That's an 86-point swing, and even if you discount it heavily, the math still points toward a wave. Marcus is thinking an eight to ten seat House majority. One member he spoke with is thinking closer to 30.The Senate is where Marcus stays cautiously optimistic — with one specific nightmare scenario involving John Fetterman and a 51-seat majority that immediately stops being a majority. They're going to need a cushion.Then there's Georgia. Rick Jackson has spent $83 million and is still within the margin of error against Keisha Lance Bottoms. He's about to spend another $87 million. If you're not running away with it at that spend level, Madeline says, earned media is a thing and it costs zero dollars. Marcus has been making up Rick Jackson attack ads in his head for fun, riffs on The Pit and the hospital staffing crisis Jackson has profited from, and gives a shoutout to Marcus Farrell — Marcus for America — whose AI cartoon content has been quietly doing real damage to the Jackson campaign.The episode closes on a point that both Marcus and Madeline keep coming back to: if Trump voters are switching to Democrats in November, it means they were always reachable. They were never gone. Democrats just stopped talking to them the right way.

Former Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh joins Madeline Somerville while Marcus Flowers is at the Congressional Black Caucus in D.C. — and the two waste exactly zero time getting into it. Walsh breaks down what Democrats must do the moment they take back the House, why he has deep doubts they'll actually do it, and what Republican insiders used to say about Democratic weakness behind closed doors. Then the conversation takes a turn: Walsh and Madeline disagree directly and substantively about Israel — and model exactly the kind of exchange they've both been arguing American political culture needs more of. Plus: what it cost Walsh, Kinzinger, and a handful of others to say no to Trump; why Democrats surrendered the flag to Republicans without a fight; and the one thing Walsh wishes his former party had never figured out how to do to the left.

Marcus and Madeline open on two stories sitting side by side that tell you everything about what this administration believes. The DHS official X account tweeted at Haitian doctors, lawyers, scholars, and engineers suggesting they'd be better off taking $3,000 and a flight back to Haiti — this, while the same administration is fast-tracking refugee status and government benefits for white South Africans, some of whom left because the benefits weren't generous enough. Marcus connects it to the physician shortage crisis. Madeline says she's writing the article.Then: the Pentagon quietly rewriting its military history curricula to replace accurate accounts with Lost Cause mythology and more "sympathetic language" about Confederate soldiers. Marcus knows exactly what that's about. So does Madeline.And then Trump's 9/11 story — which keeps changing. The version circulating this week has firefighters physically lifting him off the ground and carrying him from the rubble before a building came down on him. Marcus was in Germany on September 11th, on an airbase ramp, and heard Trump on the radio that same week talking about how the towers coming down meant he now had the tallest building in Manhattan. He remembers exactly what kind of man was in front of that microphone.

Marcus and Madeline sit down with Danielle Butterfield, President and Executive Director of Priorities USA — the Democratic super PAC founded in response to Citizens United that has spent the last decade becoming one of the most sophisticated digital voter outreach operations in American politics.Find Priorities USA at priorities.org.

Madeline wrote a legal brief accusing Pete Hegseth of war crimes, and she's walking through it here. Three documented actions: firing the civilian mitigation lawyers, rejecting Anthropic's human-oversight requirement for AI targeting, and explicitly changing Pentagon policy to prioritize speed over accuracy and lethality over legality — in his own words, in press releases. A girls' school was bombed. One human check would have caught it. Hegseth made sure no one had to look. The full sourced article is live on Substack. This is the argument.

Madeline goes solo to defend Abdul El-Sayed against antisemitism accusations — and she's speaking as someone who grew up in Orthodox Jewish Day School. She breaks down who's doing the cherry-picking, why establishment Democrats and Republicans share a common interest in painting DSA candidates as radical, and why criticizing a government's actions is not the same as hating a people. She also traces the Democratic Party's messaging collapse from the Clinton compromises to Hakeem Jeffries publicly rejecting Medicare for All — and makes the case that what the DSA is offering isn't radical. It's just hope, which is what Democrats stopped selling a long time ago. Personal, researched, and worth hearing from someone with real skin in the game.

Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, and now we know why: George wouldn't drop the investigation into an unauthorized Apache helicopter flyover at Kid Rock's house. Marcus calls it what it is — not a crime, but a cover-up. Then: the quiet move to strip Dorie Miller's name from a Navy ship (he was the first Black sailor awarded the Navy Cross, for shooting down enemy aircraft during Pearl Harbor without training), so Trump can put his own name on it instead. And finally: the firing of the Stars and Stripes editor and a Middle East reporter for "insubordination" — after they said on CBS that censoring military journalism would be a red line. Maddie unpacks the legal defense they're likely constructing. Marcus closes on what the First Amendment actually means and why it still matters.