And if you look at the betting markets today, they're at the highest point in all the years Trump has been in politics saying that Trump's going to win. It's like the average, I think, today is like 58%, 59% of the betting market is saying Trump. And you can track how that betting market has gone since she came into the race. When she was first announced, when we went through the sugar high, and then the debate. I mean, the betting markets followed her and were favoring her. But over the last month, as the campaign strategies have impacted the electorate at the grassroots level, you've started to see it ticking up for Trump, and now it's dramatically up for Trump, going into the close, the last two weeks of the close. And I don't see any major October surprise, as we call it, that's going to come up that can change that trajectory now. The hurricane season is almost over. The war situation, I think, is they're waiting it out for the next two weeks to see who wins. I could be wrong, but if Israel does something striking in Iran, that doesn't hurt Trump. It could hurt Harris. The economy's not going to get better in the next two weeks. So there's no event that's going to change the trajectory of the race like the debate did in 1980, Reagan versus Carter, allowing the undecideds to vote their economic interest. There's nothing that's going to change, I don't believe, that will allow the undecideds to vote against their economic interest for heirs. And again, Trump is ahead in all seven states right now by the public polling summaries. So the foundation is there, and you also have what we call the unknown Trump factor, where historically Trump is one or two points better than the polls show him to be. And in some cases, dramatically more than one or two points. You look at the national polls today, Harris is up by about a point and a half nationally, and national polls of all voters is not in a good measure any longer of what's going to happen on Election Day. Plus, you have people voting now. So it's not just voting on Election Day. The changes that we're all seeing happen in Trump's favor has happened in contemporaneous people actually casting votes. And, you know, one of the, you know, the Harris campaign has had the money advantage, but they've also been told- Big money. Big money advantage, but too much money advantage, meaning that we don't need as much money as she has to win. We were, Hillary Clinton outspent Trump by almost half a billion dollars in 2016 and lost. And so she's going to not be much more than, if she won't be that much ahead of Trump in the end. But her money advantage and her, quote, field advantage, you know, it was to make the difference. Well, she doesn't have a field advantage. And that's one of the myths that the mainstream media has perpetuated during this campaign. It's that Trump has no ground game and Harris has this juggernaut. Well, the last time I heard that was in 2016 when I was told that the campaign we had put together was a terrible grassroots campaign and that Hillary Clinton had the most professional field operation in history. Well, we know what happened there. It's the same thing. They're saying the same thing today. We have a very good ground. I mean, when you look at the early voting that's happening, and millions of votes have been cast by now, between the early voting and absentee voting, and everyone's modeling that stuff. And the Democrats' turnout advantage on early voting is dramatically less than it's ever been over the last eight years. And so we're holding our own or doing better than our own in the early voting. But then guess who has an advantage on election day? We do, because that's where we've always had to turn all of our vote out, because we always were against early voting until this cycle. She doesn't have as good an organization for the election day as she has for early voting, but she's not winning the margin she needs so far in the first two weeks of early voting that's happened. So the field organization isn't even an advantage at this point in time. We've got the issue advantage, and we've got more than enough money to do what we need to do in our campaign. Therefore, looking at all the pieces of an election, her race is counting on her getting people to vote against their economic interests because Trump is a threat to democracy. I don't see that happening.

I agree with you. Looking back over the last three months, really since June, since the debate between Trump and Biden, what are the things that the Trump campaign has done right, do you think? Well,

they were ready for Harris. I mean, we saw going into after the debate in June, the possibility that Biden might not be a candidate. I didn't believe it. I thought he would never quit. But the campaign saw the possibility. And so they did their research on Harris and on the other potential candidates that could have been the nominee so that when Biden did drop out, we were ready. We had ads ready and we knew how we wanted to define all of the potential opponents we might have. We didn't think that they would get rid of Biden and give us Harris. Because we viewed Harris as the weakest of all the potential candidates because she'd have to live on the record of the administration. Exactly. But that was Joe Biden's gift to Donald Trump, because Biden was so upset with the democratic coup d'etat against him that he told them he was going to endorse his vice president when Nancy Pelosi and Obama wanted an open primary of all the leading candidates so that they could control who would come out of the Democratic Convention. They didn't get that. Biden announced on Sunday he was quitting, and announced on Monday he endorsed Kamala Harris, and then it became impossible for anybody to run against Harris.

You think that was an act of aggression against his own party? I do. Really? Yeah. So diminished though he is, you think that Joe Biden was angry enough at Pelosi and Obama that he decided to screw the Democratic Party by gifting them Michelle.

You've watched his Irish temper enough times as I have. Yeah. And you know how he's always felt disparaged by the Democratic establishment, including Obama, including Nancy Pelosi. Yeah, especially Obama. Yeah. And he didn't want to quit. He felt, and there's a case to be made today, that he could have been a better candidate than Harris because he felt all along that the Democratic base, which was the reason why he was trailing badly after his debate, would have no choice but to come together after Labor Day and support him. And then he thought he could beat Trump again. You look at the, if you want to analyze it through his eyes, he's probably right. The base would have come back to him. The media would have had to come back to him against Trump because they were always going to be against Trump. And he would be a much better candidate in Pennsylvania. He'd be a much better candidate in the Midwest because he's got working class roots. You've got an elitist Democrat liberal as the Democratic nominee when the battleground states are in the Midwest. And so you could make the case that he would have been at least as strong as Harris. But Pelosi's strategy was never to have Harris. And Shapiro or Whitmer or even Newsom could have had a certain appeal in the Midwest that a Harris didn't have. So

you think Obama and Pelosi never thought they were getting Kamala Harris when they pushed Biden

to retire? I don't. Really? Yeah. And that was Joe Biden's gift to them in return for the gift they gave him.

Knifing him.

Yes. And so, but that's why Harris, but what we didn't analyze, nobody could have, is how all in the media would be to just, you know, make her into the second Obama. Try to make her into this, except she can't speak like Obama. She's, you know, Obama's much more articulate. Obama stood for something that she can't stand for. Obama was going to be the first black president. Yeah. Now she's going to be the first black woman president, but the concept- Who cares at this point? Yeah, exactly. And she's not articulate. She's afraid of being with the media. If they don't prop her up, she can't hold her own. And I've learned, having done enough elections, that the American people generally get it. By election day, they get it. I mean, sometimes in 2020, COVID distorted everything. And then the changing of the rules on voting distorted everything. And then Republicans not knowing how to deal with early voting and participating distorted everything. Well, this is a much more normal election. I mean, the rules are the same, are settled rules. We fixed some of the excesses of 2020 in a number of the battleground states so that voter identification is going to be important. Republicans are participating in early voting this time in an aggressive way, and we're seeing it in the early voting results. normal election, having a California liberal who hasn't been out there running for president and trying to define herself should not be a victorious campaign. The reason she's in play is because the media has defined her for her as the saint and this turning the page. Well, again, the American people know turning the page from what? From the Biden-Harris administration? How do you turn the page on yourself and give them something different? And especially when she hasn't defined what she's going to do. Or when she has, it's been a contradiction to what she said she stood for before. And again, she's winning her vote. And most polls show this because even in the Democratic base that supported her, they're anti-Trump. Because a lot of those people who weren't so anti-Trump Democrats would be voting for a Republican candidate right now, not named Trump, because of the economic failures of this administration against theirs. But Trump brings out an additional kind of voter that no Republican can get, and he's changing the composition of the Republican Party into a working man's party, working class party, to a middle American party.

I think it's finally happening. It must be weird for you, as someone who's been top levels of the Republican Party for all these years, almost 50, to see all these people you know come out against Trump and in some cases for Kamala Harris. Like the pillars of the party. Dick Cheney is just one among many.

Yes, it is. And it's because of the personality that's coming out, but it's also because they've had their time and they're settled in their ways. And they think that Trump doesn't represent the party that they were a part of 20 years ago.

Well, he doesn't.

Well, he doesn't, but a lot of the principles he does. Yes. And so, but they've put, they've subordinated principles to how they want the party to look, which is the exact opposite of what the Democrats have done. They don't care what the party looks like. It's principles that drive the Democratic Party, and it's woke leftist principles that are not in the interest of the country. And as a result, you've had the changing of the electorate, of the composition of the two parties, where the Democrats are now an elitist party from the coast, and the Republicans are Main Street and not Wall Street, even though their reputation is still that, and Trump is making it into a really working class party. What do you think of that? Well, I think if you want to run a country, you have to have more than elitist as a focus of where your policy should go. I mean, that's why I got involved in politics. I mean, as a conservative, back in the 60s, I was upset with what was emerging as Johnson kind of big government, the social welfare program, things like that. And so I was coming from a working class background. I saw the Republican Party, not necessarily the leadership of the Republican Party, but the principles of what Goldwater was talking about as something that attracted my interest. Well, Trump has taken that to a new level. Trump has made it into the leadership of the party, not just the focus of the principles of the party. And I think long term, that's a coalition that can govern for a long time, especially when you take the negative part of Trump out of the equation and keep all the positives in the equation. I think that the Democrats are either going to have to come back towards the center or we are going to be in power for a long time. I mean, I think it's not inconceivable to think that Trump is going to have a Republican Congress. He's going to have a Republican Senate. He could have 54, 55 members of the Republican Senate. And it's probable with him winning, with breaking the way I think things are going to break, that we'll keep the House. And if we do that, then something very different from 2017 is going to exist. You're going to have an experienced President Trump who understands Washington a lot better than he did in 2017 when he took the oath of office. And you're going to have a Republican Congress, controlled Congress, that's people that are part of the Trump make America great again agenda. a Speaker of the House who actually is supportive of the economic policies that Trump wants to enact versus what Paul Ryan was doing as Speaker of the House, convincing Trump not to do the things that he should have done in the first year and therefore having immigration reform and economic reforms that Trump wanted put on the back burner to never get to the front burner. That's not going to happen in 2025. And so with those changes, I believe the country is going to get stronger economically. I think the world is going to get better, get safer. I think we're going to have borders again. And that is going to lock in a lot of this new support that is voting for Trump because they think he will be better for them. But then they're going to see that the party as a whole that Trump has put together can also be better for them after Trump. And with somebody like J.D. Vance, and even people like Marco Rubio now out there talking about the Trump record, the Trump policies, it's going to make a big difference. And I think Hispanics will be attracted to that. I think working class Americans will be attracted to that. And with Trump having a government of people for him, as opposed to a government of people that were not for him, but then wanted to be part of the government that he created, and then undercut him as president time and time again, that's going to be different this year. The people are going to be put in power that will implement the Trump agenda and be supportive of the Trump agenda. And that's why to all of these former Republican Trump administration people who are now supporting Harris, they didn't support Trump in 2016. They became part of his government after he won, but they were not supporting him in 2016. They did not buy into the Trump policies that Trump was elected on. And so when they didn't follow his direction, he fired them. The difference is Harris's people and her staff as vice president, you know, 95% of the people who worked for her quit on her. They didn't get fired. They quit on her. They couldn't take her because she was such a terrible boss. That's the difference. That's what you can expect under Harris. She can't manage people. Trump had the wrong people in office because he didn't have a team in 2017 because he was an outsider coming into Washington. But he's got a team now. And it's a team that believes in what he wants to do and what he's campaigning on. And so what he gets elected on, unlike what Biden and Harris did in 2020 and then did as president and vice president, Trump is going to implement the policies he's been out there talking about. And he's going to bring people in who are committed to those policies different than 2017. And I think we have a chance to have a very good two years. With that, a lot of these changes can start to take root.

What a disaster, if Trump does win, it'll be for the Democratic Party. The second he won in 2016, well, the first thing that was resolved to put, you know, the people who got him there, including you, in prison, and they succeeded. Mike Flynn, they tried to put him in prison. I mean, Roger Stone. I mean, they really went and just tried to imprison the opposition. And then they tried to imprison Trump. And I think pretty clearly they stole the 2020 election. That's my view. They eliminated free speech. That's theft enough. And it didn't work. And then he wins in 2024 after all of that. What is it like if that happens in the Democratic Party? I think the left takes over.

Interesting. Yeah. think who's going to get gutted here is the centrist in the Democratic Party. Really? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that the Washington part of the party will be dramatically controlled by the Sanders wing. But I think Sanders, you know, the unspoken story here is the guy with the network in the states, in the Democratic Party, is Bernie Sanders. Of course, yes. And what you saw happen with Ronald Reagan in 1977, after he lost the nomination to Jerry Ford and Ford lost the presidency to Jimmy Carter. Reagan's network of people spent three years building in the States the Reagan organization that elected him president. Because Reagan had foreseen the future issue wise. I think the Sanders people are going to do the same thing if there's a debacle in 2024, but they're going to be misreading the future, in my judgment on the issues, unlike what Reagan did. So as they take control, they're going to push the party further and further left.