Hawk Podcasts

From there Hawk lays out the political reality. Even with 52 or 53 Senate seats, Democrats would be far short of the Republican votes needed for conviction, and a Republican-controlled Senate might decline to hold a trial at all. He notes how Mitch McConnell pointed to the courts after January 6th, and how impeachments historically boost a president's poll numbers, as they did for Bill Clinton and...

From there he runs the board on eight Senate races where Democrats are polling ahead: Mary Peltola in Alaska, Jon Ossoff defending Georgia against Mike Collins, Josh Turek in Iowa, Troy Jackson taking on Susan Collins in Maine after Graham Platner exited the race, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan against Mike Rogers, Roy Cooper with a commanding lead in North Carolina, Sherrod Brown mounting a comeback...

The conversation turns to a hard truth: nobody is doing anything to stop him. Hawk points to Donald Trump's second term, the harm being done to others on purpose, and the fear that Trump and Republicans will interfere with the midterm elections. He calls out the Supreme Court for gutting the Voting Rights Act in the South and names it the most racist court of his lifetime, arguing that American in...

Hawk examines AIPAC influence, Democratic Party divisions over Israel, Gaza, military aid, Zionism, antisemitism, and whether criticism of the Israeli government is being unfairly conflated with hatred of Jewish people. Names raised include Hakeem Jeffries, Cory Booker, Alyssa Slotkin, Josh Gottheimer, Rashida Talib, Bill Maher, Jonathan Greenblatt, and Wolf Blitzer. He questions whether establish...

Two genuinely ridiculous things crossed Hawk's desk today, and they rhyme. First, The Atlantic reports that with his approval parked in the low thirties, the president sat his advisors down to figure out how to spend a roughly $400 million super PAC war chest, and the master plan they landed on is more of himself. The diagnosis from his own team is that voters just haven't been properly introduced...

The center of it is expert testimony. When a defendant's mental state is the whole question, both sides bring in psychologists, and everything those witnesses say is opinion, not fact. Hawk walks through what it takes to qualify an expert, why the phrase to a reasonable degree of psychological certainty matters, and why cross examination is where these witnesses are really tested. One clip shows a...

His argument is simple and hard to answer. If ICE and Border Patrol were detaining dozens of violent criminals, carjackers, traffickers, members of Tren de Aragua, this administration would put them in front of cameras every single day. It has not done that once. What the cameras show instead are car accident victims, longtime residents, and families. One case Hawk returns to: a sailor serving abo...

The reasoning is the interesting part. Rogers's team reportedly believes AIPAC spending would backfire and help El-Sayed, which is roughly what happened in the primary, where heavy spending on Haley Stevens preceded her loss. At a Myrtle Beach rally for Darlene Graham, Trump said out loud what Republicans have been worrying about privately: his voters do not turn out when he is not on the ballot....

Hawk set aside everything else he had planned to make this one instead, and to let Dolly speak for herself through her own words. The numbers are staggering, but they were never the point. Born the fourth of twelve children in a one room cabin in East Tennessee, to a father who could not read or write. She launched the Imagination Library in 1995 and it has mailed hundreds of millions of free book...

Trump has since announced that on January 1st, 2027, tariffs on Canadian cars, trucks, auto parts, and steel go to 50 percent. Carney says Canada will match them dollar for dollar. CNN's Daniel Dale ran the fact check. Canadian unemployment is 6.4 percent and has been falling for three months, not 10 and rising. Canada does 72 percent of its trade with the US, not 95. And the trade deficit runs on...

Hawk reads the order rather than the coverage, and the distinction matters. The Court did not decide whether any of this is lawful. It held that the states lack standing because the order has not been implemented, that a president may direct agencies within his own branch, and that setting prosecutorial priorities falls under Article II. The majority says explicitly that implementation may still p...

Follow Dr. G here: https://www.tiktok.com/@drg.bodylanguage The part Hawk keeps coming back to is why the temperature is rising now. The Save Act has not moved through the Senate. The Supreme Court has not ruled on the executive order aimed at mail voting. The effort to obtain state voter rolls has lost in court repeatedly. The midterms are coming and the numbers are not close. The Iran war has no...

Hawk's objection is structural. Kushner holds no government position, which is what keeps him outside security clearance and financial disclosure requirements, and he is simultaneously serving as envoy on Gaza, Iran, and Ukraine while raising money for his own fund from the governments he is negotiating with. The arithmetic is the part worth watching. Steven Rattner's chart work shows the fund is...

Hawk walks through Adam Serwer's Atlantic piece, The See No Evil Supreme Court, and the framework Serwer names the neo Korematsu doctrine: if any non racial explanation for a policy can be constructed, however hypothetical, the racial animus behind it stops mattering legally. Serwer traces it from Trump v. Hawaii through Louisiana v. Callais and the TPS ruling, and contrasts it with Masterpiece Ca...

The testimony in that case has covered her marriage, her care, and what she was experiencing before the killings, including perinatal and postpartum mental illness. A lot of women recognized pieces of their own experience in it and said so publicly. Hawk's point is the distinction being deliberately collapsed. Empathy for what someone went through is not approval of what they did, and he has not s...

The letters themselves are extraordinary. Pride and Prejudice references, apologies for losing focus, a line about him being her guardian and protector. Alongside them is the earlier reporting that Harp spent her first year in the White House without a security clearance while sitting beside the president for twelve or more hours a day, with world leaders routing messages through her. Melania Trum...

The quotes from Republican officials are the ones that land. One said they are not devious enough to anticipate what is coming. Another warned about what replaces the ballot when confidence in it collapses. Hawk walks through 2020 footage from Phoenix, Detroit, and Philadelphia, plus the Fulton County ballot seizure and why the statute of limitations makes that warrant hard to explain. His argumen...

Hawk's interest is procedural. Two actions like that mean two warrants, which means agents went to a federal judge with an affidavit and established probable cause, both that crimes likely occurred and that evidence of them would likely be found in those specific places. That is a meaningful threshold, and it is not a finding of guilt. The open question is jurisdiction. Sexual assault is generally...

The main event is Kash Patel's defamation suit against The Atlantic and reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick. Joyce Vance laid out on her Substack why it goes badly for him regardless of outcome. Dismissal ends it. Survival opens discovery, and Patel filed, which means he answers document requests, interrogatories, and requests for admission, then sits for a deposition, along with however many FBI personnel...

The Downballot ran the numbers on 110 special elections since January 2025. Democrats are outrunning Kamala Harris's 2024 margins by 12.5 points on average and Joe Biden's 2020 numbers by 8.4. That implies a roughly 12 point environment in House and Senate races, slightly better than what the same measure showed heading into 2018, when Democrats gained 40 House seats. Brandon Dukes just flipped Pe...

These are candidates who won Democratic primaries. Eight or ten of them now, several against sitting incumbents. Angie Nixon is running the same play everywhere it works: populism and affordability, gas and groceries and rent and utility bills. Hawk's read is that elected Democrats spent fifteen or twenty years answering to donors, AIPAC, and the DNC instead of their own voters, and this is what t...

The background matters. Judge Sweet's 2016 protective order let the attorneys themselves designate documents confidential, with no judicial review unless the other side objected. Dozens of filings went under seal on that basis and stayed there after the 2017 settlement. Maxwell was deposed twice in 2016, and prosecutors later charged her with perjury over that testimony. Preska's holding is that t...

The Senate sits at 53 to 47. Democrats need four seats for a majority. Realistic targets include Alaska, Texas, Ohio, Maine, Iowa, North Carolina, and possibly Kansas and Nebraska, while holding open seats in Michigan and Minnesota. The House is tighter than it looks: Southern redistricting after this year's Voting Rights Act ruling is projected to cost Democrats a dozen seats, so the real number...

One question, asked directly, for eleven minutes. Who were you before June 2015? Hawk's premise is that something changed when Donald Trump rode down that escalator, and that for a lot of people it changed permanently. An identity built around one man. A grievance framework that assigns every disappointment to somebody else. A new community that replaced the old one. The part he keeps returning to...

Four stories. Former State Department official Matt Bartlett joined Jonathan Lemire on Morning Joe and was candid about Republican midterm prospects and the absence of a message beyond one bill. Charlamagne tha God gave Hakeem Jeffries a Donkey of the Day over his answer on Medicare for All, a bill Jeffries cosponsored from 2013 onward before becoming leader. Hawk connects that to why DSA backed c...