With All Due Respect

Marcus is solo this week — Madeline is out — and he’s got two things on his mind: Trump’s diesel deal with Putin, and the Ossoff-Collins debate.On the Putin deal: the administration is planning to import 300,000 tons of Russian diesel to start, ramping up to a million tons and potentially more. Marcus isn’t buying the spin that it’ll bring gas prices down — the U.S. burns far more diesel than that — and he’s furious about what it actually is: lifting sanctions on an adversary, funding a war machine, and stabbing Ukraine in the back. Twelve senators, including six Republicans, pushed back and said it violates the 2022 ban on Russian energy imports. Trump did it anyway.Then there’s Georgia, where Jon Ossoff just wiped the floor with Mike Collins in their latest debate. Ossoff hit Collins on his federal ethics investigation, the House subpoena he refused to comply with, and the Laken Riley Act vote Collins has been lying about. Collins’s response — pure deflection. Marcus’s verdict: that Senate seat is coming home.He closes on the message he keeps coming back to: Republicans are running 2024 culture war playbooks against a 2026 electorate that is fed up and feeling it at the pump, at the grocery store, and at the doctor. It’s the economy, and Democrats are winning that argument. Get out and vote.

Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton is 20 days out from Election Day, running to succeed Senator Dick Durbin and join Senator Tammy Duckworth in representing Illinois in the United States Senate. She won a competitive Democratic primary and has the endorsement of President Obama, Governor Pritzker, and Marcus’s PAC, Hold the Line.The conversation covers the arc of her public life: growing up on Chicago’s South Side with a Navy veteran father who marched from Selma to Montgomery and a public school teacher mother, becoming a lawyer and mediator for two decades, then watching a state representative try to strip healthcare from seniors like her mother — who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s — and deciding that somebody needed to run against him. That somebody turned out to be her. She won that race against a 13-year incumbent, passed 10 bills in a single term with bipartisan support and a Republican governor’s signature, and has spent nearly two terms as Lieutenant Governor overseeing the Birth Equity Initiative, the Restore Reinvest Renew criminal justice investment program, and Girls Lead — a mentoring program for girls in fifth through twelfth grade across every corner of Illinois.Marcus asks her what she heard in the primary, what she’d do first in the Senate, and what she’d say to voters about affordability. Her answers are specific: roll back the HR1 Medicaid cuts immediately, raise the federal minimum wage to $25 an hour, give middle-class families a tax break paid for by a millionaire surcharge, and fight for universal healthcare as the long game. And she makes the accountability argument that Marcus has been making for months: flip the House and Senate, be a wall of resistance, pass things and let Trump veto them, then tell that story clearly.Twenty days out. Early voting is open in Illinois. Find her at julianastratton.com.

Marcus runs his watch list. Ohio is the early bellwether — if Sherrod Brown holds, the dominoes start moving. North Carolina matters early. Then Texas, Michigan, Iowa, Kansas. He's not making a 30-seat prediction like the bullish House member he spoke to at the CBC retreat, but he's cautiously optimistic, and he explains exactly why: anger gets people to stay home, but redirected anger gets people to cross the aisle. Democrats messaging on affordability — staying on the chain from gas prices to diesel to shipping to grocery prices — gives angry former Trump voters something to vote toward, not just against.Madeline brings her jury consultant framework: undecideds don't move on issues, they move on trust. The question isn't whether someone's upset about tariffs. It's whether they believe Democrats will do something different. And the primaries have already filtered out the most contentious intra-party fights — the candidates left on the ballot are mostly ones people can live with. That's a better position than the party has been in for a while.Then the 2028 bench: Westmore, Shapiro, Pritzker, and Ossoff all come up. Marcus loves all of them. He also does not want any of them to leave Georgia. He is explicit about this. He will not share. Pritzker can run. Warnock and Ossoff stay. That's final.Madeline closes with two announcements: daily videos launching on her Maddie's Hot Take YouTube channel, and a trip to Las Vegas to participate in a surrounded-format debate against Ben Michael and Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys — who, she notes with some satisfaction, is Canadian. Her geneticist husband is already pulling the studies. She's ready.

Madeline opens on Anthropic's legal wins — two cases, both decided in their favor, with roughly a hundred judges signing on in support of their challenge against the Pentagon. The context: Dario Amodei walked away from Pete Hegseth's military contract rather than agree to use AI for autonomous targeting without human oversight or for surveilling American citizens without warrants. Hegseth said no to both conditions, blacklisted Anthropic, and declared them a supply chain risk. Now the courts have weighed in. Marcus says what he's been saying since the beginning: there should always be a human who gets the last word on any targeting decision. AI doesn't know when innocent bystanders walk into a building that's been painted as a target. Pilots need to be able to redirect at the last second. That's not a political position. That's just how it works.Then the campaign ad problem. From January through mid-September, campaigns spent more than $54 million on TV ads that used or were suspected of using AI — and about $38 million of that didn't disclose it. Madeline calls the Spencer Pratt/Karen Bass situation — where Pratt used AI to put words directly in Bass's mouth — straight-up defamation. Thirty-one states have passed laws. Mike Johnson's Congress has done nothing.They close on the economic through-line that keeps coming up: gas prices drive diesel costs, diesel costs drive shipping, shipping drives everything in the store. That chain is why the president matters for prices — and this president started a war and a tariff regime that both pushed in the same direction. The JCPOA was working. Any expert could have told them what would happen. They didn't ask.

Madeline went to the Braves game Monday night and came back moved. Watching the kiss cam pan across the crowd — farmers, hipsters, people of every background, all lighting up the same way when the camera found them — she felt the weight of what's been done to us. Those people aren't enemies. They were made to think they are. And she walked back through the cognitive dissonance she watches play out every time she talks to Trump supporters who genuinely don't know the answer when they're asked what evidence they have that the 2020 election was stolen. They just know what they've been fed.Marcus connects it to the Good Liars — the YouTube channel that does what Jordan Klepper does, going to rallies and asking hard questions — and then goes further back, to his campaign experience in Northwest Georgia, where he heard the same talking points over and over and could trace each one to Fox News or hostile foreign actors. And then further back still: to Newt Gingrich and Roger Ailes, who figured out in the 1990s that politics weren't divided enough and built an industry around changing that. Georgia went from a Democratic state to 22 years of Republican control in no small part because of what those two men decided the country should look like.The through line Marcus keeps coming back to is Nelson Mandela: we're all victims of people who wanted to take advantage of us. The goal isn't to beat the other side. It's to remember we're on the same team. And the first thing people who want to destroy democracy always go after is a shared set of facts and a free press — because without those, you can't have the conversation at all. The judges pushing back on Trump's press bans are doing something important. So is this show.

First, the Georgia gubernatorial debate. Marcus wasn’t there (he was traveling), but Madeline watched the whole thing and her verdict is clear: Keisha Lance Bottoms was prepared, quick on her feet, and answered every question with substance. People who had privately wondered whether she could hold her own on a debate stage got their answer. Rick Jackson, by contrast, looked like he didn’t know the topics, looked out of touch on others, and got caught in a flat-out lie — denying that he’d ever suggested using the National Guard during elections, while a clip of him doing exactly that was sitting right there. They play it. He was talking about it with a voter at what appears to be a campaign event. On camera. Marcus’s read: he was trying to distance himself from Trump and it didn’t work. Too late, Rick.Then Trump’s Nebraska rally, where he called rising gas prices “a small price to pay” and suggested that if Iran wanted to take out Los Angeles or San Diego, well, that’s just how it goes. Marcus says that should be an impeachable comment. Madeline says Democrats should be hammering the simplest version of this argument relentlessly: aren’t you supposed to be the president for everyone? He’s never tried to be. The evidence is everywhere — withheld funds from blue states after disasters, a war that any expert could have predicted would drive up gas prices, tariffs he lied about who would pay for. And yet the coherent messaging argument against all of it keeps getting lost in the noise.They close on the independent voter collapse — Trump won independents by 15-17 points in 2024, and he’s now 60-plus points underwater with them. That’s the tell of the tape, 27 days out.

if the Senate actually wanted to investigate something useful before heading out for recess, what should it be?Madeline has two answers, and they're connected. First, the MAHA movement — specifically RFK Jr.'s promise to get rid of forever chemicals, which got quietly reversed, and the backdoor deals with Big Agriculture and the EPA that she believes explain why. It's a bipartisan issue with a paper trail, and it's sitting there unused. Second, AI regulation — not the self-regulation that the tech giants are currently selling to Washington, but real laws with teeth. She draws a direct line between the Chevron deference ruling, the death of subject matter expertise in regulation, and the current situation where the fox is being asked to write the rules for the hen house. Marcus adds the compliance lens: you need subject matter experts to inform policy, but the moment you let them write it themselves, you've handed over the keys.The through line, as Madeline puts it: in both cases, this administration made promises it didn't keep, money changed hands, and the people who were supposed to benefit got left holding the bag. That's an investigation. That's a hearing. That's what 40 days before the midterms could look like if anyone in the Senate wanted to use their time that way.

Pete Hegseth standing up a new 20-member Homeland Defense Board that he personally chairs — because apparently he can't get independent advice from his own staff. Then a clip from a recruiting stop at Texas A&M, where Hegseth used a transphobic slur in front of future military officers to applause. Marcus draws the contrast plainly: whatever happened to "be all that you can be"? To serving something larger than yourself? To pride in the cloth you wear? Madeline calls it what it is: Hegseth is trying to turn the United States military into a college fraternity, recruiting disaffected young men through a manosphere pipeline that has more in common with historical authoritarian recruitment tactics than anything resembling American military tradition.Then the story that cuts through everything: the Pentagon quietly removed four American troops from the official Iran war death toll, then restored them, with no explanation. Fourteen Democratic veterans joined Rep. Pat Ryan in accusing Hegseth of a cover-up. Marcus connects the dots directly back to the press ban — if you're hiding the death toll, you don't want cameras anywhere near this war. The official count is at 19. Nobody trusts it.Madeline confirms that her war crimes brief — the legal argument that Hegseth bears criminal negligence liability for civilian deaths in Iran through conscious disregard of his duty — has now landed with both Chris Cuomo and Mehdi Hassan. The piece the media keeps missing, she says, is that Dario Amodei at Anthropic explicitly warned the Pentagon what would happen without human oversight of AI targeting. Hegseth said no. The school got bombed.They close on a ProPublica story that finally explains something Marcus has been puzzling over for years: why Susan Collins has spent a decade wringing her hands about dangerous Trump policies and then voting for them anyway. According to the reporting, the FBI had her dead to rights on a defense contractor bribery case — and Trump shut it down. The compromise is the vote. Marcus says it's time to get rid of Susan Collins. Madeline agrees. Troy Jackson, Maine. Write it down.