The Great America Show is back with a brand new episode featuring Mark Mitchell, the lead pollster for Rasmussen Reports, who joins us to talk about all things election, including the potential for a 2020 Republican National Convention, the current state of the Republican Party, and much, much more!
00:13:21.180It's like, no, we can't have anything unique.
00:13:23.640Everything has to be confined within the same risk basket.
00:13:27.620And it's sickening because it's happening to every company.
00:13:31.980Everything gets this glossy veneer of private equity.
00:13:34.560You want to talk about private equity.
00:13:37.440I was always, I had on the show a few months ago, a guy named the name of Jerry Storch.
00:13:41.980He was the former CEO of Toys R Us, private equity guy, a former private equity guy.
00:13:49.340And I never knew what happened to Toys R Us.
00:13:51.740I was always under the impression that Toys R Us got crushed because of Amazon and other things.
00:13:57.440And I bring this guy on the show, and I was brutally awakened to the reality that private equity was the one who ruined Toys R Us by levering the thing to a tent that they could never pull themselves out of.
00:14:10.440Now, for the people like me who aren't, you know, economics guys, pretty much what they did was they took out so much debt on the place and took out so much loans against the place that they could never afford to pay it back.
00:14:23.740Another great American company that, by the way, Mark, I think he told me was doing a billion dollars a year in e-commerce sales at the time they went under.
00:14:31.880So, clearly, not an issue with, I got to, by the way, I got to get him back on the show.
00:14:42.280American icon put in the dirt by private equity.
00:14:45.480I'm pretty sure that you'll look, you'll find that it's Bain Capital, Romney's former employer, former, I think he wasn't the founder of Bain Capital.
00:14:54.720He was on, certainly Romney, I think, was involved in putting the corpse of Toys R Us in the grounds.
00:15:15.960And it'll say, well, you know, this is cyclical because it follows the consumer and we'll have some good years and bad years and they'll plug it in.
00:15:22.060And somebody will say, well, you know, that's not enough leverage.
00:15:25.040We can't have enough debt funded distributions to make this deal work.
00:15:28.320And so they say, well, let's put a different scenario in, one that doesn't have downturns.
00:15:34.660And then they'll say, well, that's a little riskier.
00:15:37.600We'll have to exit after three or four years to make that work so that we can all get paid.
00:16:53.500You go to another mall, and the place is absolutely dead because people don't have the money.
00:16:58.140People aren't spending the money they have because they don't know.
00:17:01.120And, you know, it's funny to think about it that we just talked about private equity levering the hell out of companies, putting them into bankruptcy.
00:17:07.640You've got American people who are more responsible than these private equity people because they know if I don't save this money or if I don't do this, I won't be able to pay my bills next month.
00:17:17.180Whereas private equity, guys, it doesn't matter because you implode, you move on to the next thing, and there's no, you know, accountability for any mistakes that you make.
00:17:26.020Imagine in America where there was accountability for people who are destroying the country.
00:17:30.200I mean, that's one of the problems with our corporate is there has been no accountability.
00:17:35.280This is the reason why, like, 70% of the S&P value is shoved into, like, 10 different corporations.
00:17:42.480There has been no redress for these monopolies, and these corporations literally cannot fail.
00:17:47.500First off, we've seen a situation where corporations were too big to fail, and responsible middle-class people had to bail out those corporations with a moral hazard.
00:17:55.480That was gross, and I was screaming about that 20 years ago, but then since then, what have you had?
00:18:01.060You've had zero interest rate and Bernanke bucks that have just gone flowing into all this stuff.
00:18:06.860It's really gross the way that they create things like massive unicorns that never had viable financial models, and then you had all of these H-1Bs and San Francisco people who don't represent the values of America get these $400,000, $500,000 jobs with all these perks in a company that obviously is going to implode someday.
00:18:34.600They take the 5% alternative investment allocation of major public pensions, and they dump them into businesses that will not succeed.
00:18:44.020They take a 20% cut of whatever upside that they can get by selling that thing to retail investors on the IPO market.
00:18:51.760So, retail investors are going to take the cut on that, right, when the business ultimately fails, if it ever does.
00:18:58.240And so, what you have is these businesses like Uber who, you know, they have a massive business, but it's never going to make any money.
00:19:06.140You have all these people reaping the benefits of these perks as this business kicks along, and then ultimately somebody is going to be left holding the bag.
00:19:14.100And it's not going to be the investor.
00:19:15.880It's not going to be the investment bank.
00:19:31.420Well, there's another side to that coin.
00:19:34.240Like, they're not doing this by themselves.
00:19:36.700Like, Zuckerberg literally purchased elections in order to keep this system going.
00:19:40.780Like, right, we witnessed, Mark, we witnessed, you mentioned Zuckerberg, Google, and all these other people emailing directly with the federal government posts that Donald Trump was making back in 2016 to 20.
00:20:39.560But, yeah, like, it puts the whole Epstein thing in a whole other, you know, light.
00:20:44.120It's, like, well, now I guess we know why Jamie Dimon never got investigated or even interviewed at all by the FBI.
00:20:51.320There is no Jamie Dimon Form 302 sitting around about the, you know, little talk he had about being on this plane.
00:20:58.220Nor Bill Gates, nor any of the people in Hollywood, nor any of these other people, Reid Hoffman, the big LinkedIn guy.
00:21:05.540Man, you know, our intelligence agencies love social media.
00:21:09.620So it makes a whole heck of a lot of sense that when you have somebody that founded one of the biggest social media sites in all of America, they're not going to go after him.
00:21:18.040Even if he is allegedly a predator of children, that's – oh, man.
00:21:26.160That's the thing, like, I've been trying to tell people for the last – I don't know, whenever this Epstein thing started, it feels like a blur now.
00:21:32.460You know, it started before the summer and the summer happens.
00:21:34.600And, you know, you forget, I think, a lot of things that have happened.
00:21:37.220But it's not about going after Donald Trump for the Epstein files or anything like that.
00:21:41.880It's about getting justice for the people who were wronged by the entire situation.
00:21:46.020And I think it's a testament to what's wrong with America with the powerful elites being allowed to skate by on everything and no retribution or no accountability for doing anything wrong.
00:26:55.700It doesn't really get much lower than that in polling.
00:26:58.720And so in a country where, objectively, we have the Second Amendment because of government tyranny, you're not going to be successful.
00:27:05.720Now, some of the blue states might crack down, whatever, and we'll see how that plays out because now you're going to have – I think we're getting closer and closer to some very secessionist-type stuff.
00:27:15.640The verbiage coming out of Pritzker today about how he'll respond if Trump decides to move the National Guards.
00:27:20.820I don't think that's going to be a problem.
00:27:23.240But this is a major – there's so much here.
00:27:26.200And it's got no simple fixes, and everybody's trying to gravitate towards a simple fix.
00:27:31.400I think the fix is returning to the society that we had in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
00:28:30.520And there were halfway houses because there used to be hotels, and some of them went out of business.
00:28:35.600So there were like crazy people in my town.
00:28:38.640And one time, this guy started harassing teenage girls.
00:28:41.840And my dad and a few other fathers went to this guy and had a little talk, and it never happened anymore.
00:28:47.860And that's because in a traditional community where people aren't hiding behind Facebook all day, people talk to other people.
00:28:55.740They know what the personal situation is.
00:28:57.700And quite frankly, I don't think we've heard enough about this person's family life.
00:29:01.780So the problem here, I think, is like, okay, yeah, there's so many white male school shooters.
00:29:06.500Well, how many of them are raised by a white suburban liberal who has Munchausen syndrome or who is using the kid as a fill-in for the father figure or so many things, who has robbed that child of the chance to go to church or whatever, right?
00:30:54.780Now, I never had this problem, Mark, because I was always in trouble as a kid.
00:30:58.060So my parents always said, yes, it was my kid.
00:31:00.620You know, there was never any accountability issue there.
00:31:03.360I was always the one being thrown under the bus, rightfully so, because, you know, I was a prankster.
00:31:07.800But you have so many parents and it's hard for me to say it from the other side because I was always the one who was taking the blame for things, even when it wasn't me, which is very rare when it wasn't.
00:31:17.180You didn't need external validation, John.
00:31:22.800And that's the problem is you have all these people who are caught in a never ending loop of needing that dopamine hit of having external validation.
00:31:29.040All that stuff in his manifesto and all those things written all over those the guns were basically like, please like me.
00:31:37.500And you can tell he was brought up by I think he was in a single household.
00:31:42.000And you can't fix these are major societal issues where the dating numbers we've seen, like 40 percent of single men under 40 aren't even trying to date.
00:31:54.340And so we're going to see a lot more of this until there's a return to normalcy in our society is the problem.
00:32:01.900I mean, how do we get a return to normalcy when you have parents who don't want to acknowledge the fact that their kids are mentally troubled?
00:32:15.380Like I said, it's a very Trey Gowdy wants to talk about white young men.
00:32:19.400Well, I want to talk about the age of these people and the adolescence and why their parents continue to look past the issues.
00:32:27.460We saw an eyewitness account or a report out just moments ago from one of his neighbors that said they saw nothing wrong with him.
00:32:38.020OK, well, you have a guy who's transitioned to be a girl.
00:33:15.720And according to Google search volume, more than ever, it might feel like we're winning the culture war.
00:33:21.200But I just looked at Google Trends and for the Google Trend bottom surgery for people who don't know that's getting parts removed or added to you have never been higher.
00:33:31.260And so until we see a reversal in the number of 18 to 39 year olds identifying as trans or LGBT, this culture war is not one.
00:33:40.260And it's like, OK, you go on Twitter and you say, wow, things feel like they're going in the right direction.
00:34:32.100And it's like even within the quote unquote conservative voices, the type of coverage and the way certain things are talked about and others aren't like this.
00:34:58.700Trey Gowdy wants to talk about things like that.
00:35:00.680Why don't we talk about Trey Gowdy and what he did for Hillary Clinton and Benghazi?
00:35:04.640Trey Gowdy is a joke of a human being.
00:35:06.380But I guess what do you expect when he's on Fox News, Fox News, the same Fox News that called Arizona for Joe Biden like 10 minutes after polls closed?
00:35:16.680I guess that's that's Fox News for you.
00:35:18.860It's hard to believe we've we went on a half hour here, Mark, and we've only covered two topics.
00:35:25.020I mean, there's there's so much to talk about.
00:35:26.620And we're I want to I want to talk about where we're going with this can't be a three hour one, John.
00:35:32.360You know, there's a few people I get out here with, Mark.
00:37:16.100They have 50 legislative days left in this year.
00:37:18.560And they're not going to pass really anything except maybe they'll do another bite at the reconciliation apple.
00:37:25.160And so all of 2025 will mostly be a whiff for the 119th Congress.
00:37:30.660And that's not what they promised America.
00:37:32.920They promised America the MAGA agenda, and they have not delivered.
00:37:37.180And so Republicans in Congress have been a failure.
00:37:39.920Republican national messaging does not exist.
00:37:42.440They are going to wait until three months before the election, and then they're going to use all of their existing Republican establishment consultants to dump all the donor money into all of the traditional advertising avenues that don't really work.
00:37:58.800Trump's ground game is not going to be as good because you're not going to have all this press learn turning point and all these people coming out of the woodwork because it's not a national presidential election.
00:38:08.200And so they need to do something, and I think Trump's going to try and drag them over the finish line, and they'll maybe, if everything works, maintain a very small lead in the House.
00:38:18.720We've got that statement from President Trump.
00:38:20.500We're going to pull it up here so we can read it together.
00:38:24.620The Republican Party is doing really well.
00:38:26.900Millions of people have joined us in our quest to make America great again.
00:38:30.660We won every aspect of the presidential election.
00:38:32.600And based on the great success we are having and poised to win big in the midterms, we have raised far more money than Democrats and are having a great time fixing all of the country, destroying mistakes made by the Biden administration.
00:38:45.660And watching the USA heal and prosper, the results are incredible, a record pace.
00:38:51.160In that light, I'm thinking of recommending a national convention to the Republican Party just prior to the midterms.
00:38:58.140Stay tuned, Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America.
00:39:03.980So I think it goes to what you had just said there, him, as always, having to bring people across the finish line because they are just terrible.
00:39:14.820The good thing is, Mark, that we've seen a lot of lately, and just a moment ago I got a wire over here that shows you're not a baseball fan,
00:39:23.140but anyone who's a baseball fan, a New York Yankees fan, Mark Teixeira, who was a World Series first baseman for the great New York Yankees,
00:39:30.600just announced he is running to replace, to take over Chip Royce in Texas's, I think it's the 21st district down there.
00:39:38.580This is, in my opinion, what we need more of.
00:39:40.860And he's a Republican, says he wants to run to perform Trump's MAGA agenda.
00:40:29.920First off, like getting back to that tweet, there's some things in there that are objectively wrong.
00:40:35.140So Trump has been doing a lot of things that are good, but nobody thinks that the Republicans are currently poised to win big in the midterms,
00:41:46.420The problem is, is the establishment's really good at shutting out MAGA people.
00:41:50.720And even when they get in, they're limited in what they can do because everything gets corrupted and co-opted.
00:41:55.140Even the stuff out of the Freedom Caucus recently, I guess there's been some problems with stances they've taken.
00:42:01.420And the real issue is that you have tens of thousands of people in the National Republican Party.
00:42:07.200And what they're really good at doing is finding a candidate like Romney, getting targeting voters of people who vote for people like Romney and getting a Romney style turnout.
00:42:18.940So it's like if you want to trump 77, 78 million turnout, you have to figure out how to message better, get grassroots on the ground, get your crossover Democrats, get disaffected independents.
00:42:30.400And I think Republicans are going to lose those people to the couch in 2026.
00:42:49.140But now you have Elon Musk who needs to put that money into actually reforming the national Republican Party leadership structure.
00:42:56.140The people that would do things like research and national strategy and vetting candidates, all that is still Romney kind of people doing Romney kind of things.
00:43:06.180And until those people get replaced, there's only so much that you can get done with with these with primarying these rhinos.
00:43:15.260This is the numbers, I guess, that I was referring to.
00:43:17.840The DNC is reported having only $14 million cash on hand as of the end of July, far less than the RNC, which reported having about $84 million cash on hand.
00:43:27.240The DNC also fundraised less than the RNC in July.
00:43:30.960They go on to say the news is better for Democrat official U.S. House campaign arms.
00:43:35.360This is, I guess, what you were maybe referring to.
00:43:37.560The Democrat Congressional Committee, the DCCC, one of the largest crime organizations in America, second to the Capone family or the Gambino crime family,
00:43:46.080reported having $40.5 million cash on hand by the end of July, while its GOP counterpart, the NRCC, reported having $37.5 million on cash on hand.
00:43:57.860The DCCC outpaced the NRCC in fundraising in July.
00:44:01.360So that goes to show, I guess, what you and I have been saying is that Donald Trump is the only reason that this Republican Party is afloat right now.
00:44:10.800The NRCC, it's, I mean, just as guilty, in my opinion, as the DCCC with the money laundering.
00:44:17.920Yeah, I'm not going to throw anybody into the bus, but I went golfing with a few Republican strategists,
00:44:23.920and out this person pulled out of their bag was a bunch of sleeves of golf balls.
00:44:29.920Now, you're not a golfer, Mark, but title is Pro V1s.
00:44:32.900For all my golf people here, no, they're about $6 a ball.
00:44:36.400The average golf ball is about a dollar and a quarter a ball, and it gives me a few sleeves of balls.
00:44:41.300I turn the balls, and it says NRCC on it, and I said to myself,
00:44:46.120Mother Effort, this is where you guys spend the money that's being given to you.
00:45:49.560WinRed apparently, according to one report, raised $240 million the first half of 2025.
00:45:55.660The number I saw was $793 million through ActBlue.
00:45:59.160And so I still think we have major Chinese money probably coming in, getting laundered through Smurfs into deep pockets that are going to be spent intelligently.
00:49:20.000I'm trying to find this picture because I'm going to get it up here about when we were in Washington, D.C., our little interesting dinner we had.
00:49:27.040And the slew of people that walked –
00:49:40.000But the one in Washington, D.C., it must have been about – by the time we wrapped up the interviews, I don't know, like 5 o'clock, 5.30 in the afternoon.
00:49:46.540And Mark and I pull up to the restaurant, and outside it was just government vehicles with government license plates and lights on them.
00:49:54.780So we figured that it was maybe probably somebody important in the place.
00:49:58.800And we get in there, and off to the left was, I guess, Senator Bill Cassidy.
00:50:04.660And off to the right was this congressman.
00:51:05.200We talked a little bit before the show.
00:51:07.220And everybody says, I'm going to have crazy numbers coming out.
00:51:10.340I'll have to come back on in a week or two about the Zoomers, about the 18 to 39-year-olds.
00:51:16.160And everybody's like, oh, the world's going to be great because these people are so conservative.
00:51:20.320Well, they did vote Trump more than anybody expected.
00:51:23.240But these people are not conservative.
00:51:24.880They are economic populist in a way that's going to surprise a lot of people.
00:51:28.540And I'm not just talking about, oh, we need to rebuild the American middle class.
00:51:31.840I'm talking about, no, wealth forcibly needs to be taken from the rich and powerful to fund our lifestyles because America is fundamentally unfair to young people.
00:51:42.060And so the problem with D.C. is they are not in crunch time, even though they all looked you in the eye and said the 2024 election is existential for the future of our country.
00:51:59.160And maybe they were good intention lies, but they're lies nonetheless.
00:52:02.520The problem we run into is that if Trump's economic populism does not succeed for the vast majority of young middle class people, then the rich will get eaten.
00:53:38.540Before we wrap up, I want to get to John Bolton.
00:53:42.400You have some numbers that show people think it's retribution what's happening to John Bolton right now because he decided he was going to go out and maybe send classified information from his computer to other family members.
00:54:24.700But I was on the nuclear submarine and, you know, I was a guy responsible for the target packages.
00:54:30.000And it's kind of weird that our number one trading partner probably has the most nuclear missiles pointed at it of any nation on Earth.
00:54:36.700But anyways, what I can tell you is that if I had lost any classified material, I would have been thrown in jail in Leavenworth, stripped of my career.
00:54:45.960And and Hillary Clinton was not kind of weird.
00:54:49.680She did way more than anybody I've ever known about in the in the Navy.
00:55:13.260The investigate in the investigation of Bolton is about defending America's national security or it's about President Trump getting revenge on his political enemies.
00:55:22.980Thirty eight percent say it's about national security.
00:55:26.500Forty eight percent net plus 10 say it's Trump getting revenge.
00:55:29.800So here's the problem is that this was an election that was a referendum on government trust.
00:55:36.120It wasn't a referendum on America loves Trump.
00:55:38.960And so America picked Trump as their avatar of government reformation.
00:55:44.480But just because he's in charge of the government now doesn't mean that everybody forgot that the Mar-a-Lago raid happened with deadly force.
00:55:52.260Doesn't mean they forgot that the DOJ was weaponized against a political opponent.
00:55:56.120And so unless they see overt accountability, they're going to assume that Trump is doing the same thing with these corrupt organizations.
00:56:39.860I know you're not big on tick tock, and this is kind of a little side to it here, but I've recently got into tick tock to see what it's all about.
00:56:46.740And it's every by the way, the algorithm they have on there is absolutely like something I've never seen before.
00:56:52.900It's absolutely ridiculous how how good their algorithms are.
00:56:56.280But the latest stories on tick tock now is that Donald Trump is dying because he has congestive heart failure because he has bruises on his hands.
00:57:05.480Now, anyone, Mark, you have a mother who's elderly.
00:57:08.000I've had grandparents who are elderly.
00:57:09.900Most old people are on blood thinners.
00:57:11.540And what happens when you're on blood thinners?
00:57:14.160If you put your hand down on a table, I had a grandmother and she's like, well, and she put her arms down on the table, Mark, and would have black and blues from top to bottom.
00:57:22.600Like she got the speed out of her, and it was just simply from these blood thinners.
00:57:27.420But that's the latest Democrat hoax now because he's got swollen ankles because he's got bad blood circulation, as most old people do.
00:57:35.840He's got congestive heart failure, and he's going to die any day now, just so you know.
00:57:42.820It's one of their top stories right now.
00:57:45.100You know, they're sharing all these pictures of his hand and blah, blah, blah.
00:57:47.900The stunning hypocrisy is what gets me most because not even two years, just about one year into Biden's administration, 68% of America was not confident that he was mentally and physically up for the job.
00:58:05.080And 66% wanted him to get a mental test.
00:58:07.560And so for them to completely ignore the fact that we had a guy that took – we had 12 o'clock lids on the very few days that he actually came to work.
00:58:18.560You know, I don't think this story is going to go anywhere.
00:58:20.520But yeah, Trump is probably on the downslide.
00:58:28.240I think what's going to happen is that – people are going to hate me for saying this – is that Trump is going to lose political capital.
00:58:33.980Between now and probably the beginning of 2027, it's just inevitable because people have had MAGA for 10 years.
00:58:44.080But America is going to start looking forward to the next leader, probably going to be J.D. Vance.
00:58:48.400I know you don't like me hearing – you know, saying that.
00:58:51.680But he's the five-to-one odds-on favorite according to the polling.
00:58:55.520And somebody is going to have to get more organizationally minded towards how to create the new direction for the Republican Party.
00:59:03.980The Republicans are going to try and do it themselves, which is trying to revert towards Romney territory.
00:59:09.620And if anybody understands that the correct path forward for the Republican Party is very aggressive, middle-class focused economic populism, then it's going to start happening soon.
00:59:20.500And it can't just be MAGA because there's going to come a day where Trump doesn't mean as much anymore.
01:00:14.700I don't – you know, I'm just impartial.
01:00:17.280I don't want to get ahead of my skis here.
01:00:19.700A lot of people, when Donald Trump was running for president again in 2020, they said, oh, it's going to be Trump for another four years, and then it'll be Pence for four, and then Pence for another –
01:00:28.720I just don't want to get ahead of ourselves here, and maybe it will be J.D.
01:01:56.080So to get to that point, Mark, before we wrap up, I guess this is an excellent segue to election integrity.
01:02:04.280It's a thing you and I have been talking about since we first became friends and first started coming on the show.
01:02:09.320I think it's actually been about a year now, and we see no movement on it.
01:02:15.320We saw a tweet from President Trump last week about election integrity, getting rid of the paper ballots, getting rid of the election machines.
01:02:22.200Do you expect we see any sort of movement on this, or was this just a tweet trying to kick the Republicans in the rear end to get their act together?
01:02:31.060If we don't see vast election integrity accountability, then that's the number one thing Trump will have failed at because the 2020 election was stolen.