Episode Details

Something is cracking in the Midwest. Iowa farmers are staring at $1,000 fill-ups for their tractors, fertilizer costs through the roof, and a White House that only remembers rural America two weeks before an election. Meanwhile Donald Trump is spending $1.2 billion of taxpayer-adjacent money on an East Wing ballroom, a triumphal arch, a Garden of Heroes, and a plan to repaint the Eisenhower building because he thinks it should be whiter. Paul Rieckhoff joins Katie, Carrie Dan of the Cook Political Report, Mike Nellis, and McKay Coppins to connect the dots between the vanity projects, the $8 billion farmer bailout nobody trusts, and a corruption narrative that is finally landing with independent voters.

The panel digs into Dan Osborn's independent run against Cubs part-owner Pete Ricketts in Nebraska, Tarek the wheelchair-dragging Iowa Democrat scrambling the governor's race, and why Trump is campaigning in the one Iowa district that isn't competitive. McKay Coppins unpacks the sea change in evangelical politics — how "Christian values" quietly became a political signifier instead of a religious one. And Paul lays out why eat-the-rich sentiment, the same force that just took down Orban in Hungary, is coming for an American political class that forgot who it works for. If you want to understand the terrain heading into the next cycle, this is the conversation.

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