Surviving Trump. Saving America

Send us Fan Mail Voters delivered a clear verdict on Tuesday. After two years, my work here is done. Surviving Trump · Final episode On Tuesday, voters gave Democrats control of both the House and the Senate, by a wide margin. In this final episode, Bella Goode looks at what voters said and why. She also explains why this is the right moment to sign off. What's in This Episode The results. De...

Send us Fan Mail Democrats lead in the House and in the national mood. The Senate could come down to one state, and turnout will decide it. Overview On the first day of early in-person voting in Michigan, Barack Obama spoke to a packed rally in Detroit. When the crowd booed, he gave the answer he has given for years: "Don't boo. Vote." That is the message of this episode. In the las...

Send us Fan Mail Overview No candidate has given this speech yet. I wrote the one I want to hear from Democrats running this fall. The speaker is invented. Every number and every quote is real and on the record. In this episode What voters are paying: tariffs, utility bills, gas prices, and Affordable Care Act premiums that more than doubled for millions of people The jobs picture, and the people...

Send us Fan Mail The federal, state, and local efforts to tilt the 2026 midterms, and the fight to stop them Overview Democrats lead in all nine Senate races that will decide the chamber, and they need just three seats to win the House. When the races are this close, small changes in who votes can decide who controls Congress. Trump can't afford to lose, and his administration and his allies...

Send us Fan Mail We have been fooled before. In 2016, the forecasters gave Hillary Clinton strong odds, and she lost. In 2020, Susan Collins trailed in nearly every public poll in Maine, and she won by almost nine points. Now Democrats lead the polling average in all nine races that will decide the Senate. Most of those leads are within a few points. This episode takes a clear look at the candidat...

Send us Fan Mail FOUR SEATS TO TAKE THE SENATE Trump, the Money, and the Nine Races That Decide It Trump won Iowa by thirteen points in 2024. Today, more Iowans who voted in that election disapprove of him than approve — and the Iowa Senate race is close to even. That pattern repeats across the map. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to win the Senate, and for the first time this cycle, the f...

Send us Fan Mail Twenty-one House seats are rated genuine toss-ups this cycle. Sixteen are held by Republicans, five by Democrats. Democrats need a net gain of three. This episode sorts every one of those races — plus four more that became contests for reasons the official ratings haven't caught up to — into a clear picture of where that path actually runs. What's in This Episode Episode...

Send us Fan Mail Surviving Trump  Republicans hold the House by just two seats — the margin they started this Congress with in January 2025. That's the baseline behind the entire fight: a net gain of three seats flips control. This episode breaks down where that fight is actually happening: the maps redrawn to protect it, the scandals threatening to lose it anyway, and the money both parties...

Send us Fan Mail They control the House, the Senate, the courts, and the White House. Every rising price, every unresolved war, every unreleased file is Trump’s alone to answer for. And for the first time in years, he has no one else to blame. What’s in This Episode Episode 1 lays out the stakes for the season ahead — who’s afraid of losing, why the numbers favor Democrats, and what it will actual...

Send us Fan Mail Surviving Trump  It’s not long until the most consequential midterms of our lifetime. Season 3 of Surviving Trump: Saving America starts September 10th — nine episodes, tracking the 2026 midterms week by week, from the threats already in motion to exactly where your time and money matter most. What’s in This Season •Episode 1 (Sept 10): Sixteen threats to this election straight fr...

Send us Fan Mail Summary The thing about a “rigged election” is that you don’t have to prove it. You don’t need fake ballots or hacked machines. You just need enough people who believe that if their side lost, something went wrong — and enough officials, lawyers, and judges willing to act on that belief. This episode follows four ways that belief gets turned into power: pressuring officials not to...

Send us Fan Mail Spencer Pratt went to bed on election night looking like a winner. His odds on Kalshi and Polymarket were surging. Cable news loved it. X loved it. And then the ballots kept being counted. As late mail ballots arrived and Nithya Raman pulled ahead, Trump-aligned influencers — on paid affiliate contracts with the prediction platforms — began posting fraud narratives. Trump declared...

Send us Fan Mail Summary On July 26, 2024, Donald Trump stood before a room full of conservative Christian voters in West Palm Beach, Florida, and told them: “Christians, get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” The room cheered. A minute later, he said it again. He h...

Send us Fan Mail Surviving Trump • Episode 34 • Series 4: Corporate Power and Control It was 5:30 in the morning on October 30, 2025, still dark, when ICE agents began watching an apartment complex in Woodburn, Oregon. An AI targeting app had identified the neighborhood as a priority area — not because any individual had been suspected of a crime, but because the data said people like them lived t...

Send us Fan Mail Surviving Trump • Episode 33 • Series 4: Corporate Power and Control On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a bathroom sink. He posted a video. The caption read: “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in.” Within hours, he had fired the CEO, the CFO, and the head of legal policy — timed deliberately so the executives couldn’t cash in...

Send us Fan Mail In 2009, Peter Thiel published an essay in which he wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He was not alone in thinking it. He was just one of the few willing to say it publicly. This episode is about what happens when the people who share that view have enough money to stop democracy from working against them. When a small number of people accumul...

Send us Fan Mail Surviving Trump • Episode 31 • Series 4   Hatice Cengiz was supposed to be getting married. On October 2, 2018, she waited outside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul while her fiancé Jamal Khashoggi went inside to collect documents for their wedding. He never came out. A United Nations investigation confirmed that Saudi operatives killed and dismembered him inside the building. His b...

Send us Fan Mail On March 13, 2026, Pete Hegseth stood at a Pentagon press briefing and blurted out a secret. He said he couldn't wait for David Ellison to take over CNN. In one unscripted moment, the Secretary of Defense revealed what this administration has been carefully avoiding saying out loud: that the Trump White House wants indirect control of America's largest news organizations...

Send us Fan Mail Episode Summary Before dawn on January 14, 2026, FBI agents arrived at the Alexandria, Virginia home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson. They seized two laptops, her phone, an audio recorder, and an external hard drive containing her reporting materials. Her devices remained in government custody for weeks while courts fought over whether federal investigators could even...

Send us Fan Mail Mary Walsh spent decades at CBS News. She started her career under Walter Cronkite. She survived ownership changes, ratings wars, the collapse of the network news business model, the rise of cable, the rise of streaming. Then in early 2025, she wrote a memo and walked out. Her reason: she had been told to aim CBS News’s reporting at “a particular part of the political spectrum.” S...

Send us Fan Mail On January 24, 2025, the Trump administration fired seventeen federal inspectors general by email. Two sentences. No cause given. No thirty days' notice to Congress, as the law requires. This episode documents how the administration has systematically dismantled the independent oversight infrastructure that holds executive power accountable — and what that costs ordinary Amer...

Send us Fan Mail Ryan Schwank spent years training ICE officers. He taught them the use of force. He taught them constitutional law. He taught them the difference between a lawful order and an unlawful one. In January 2026, he filed an anonymous whistleblower complaint with Congress. He alleged that ICE training had been cut from 72 days to 42. That the class on the constitutional rights of protes...

Send us Fan Mail He survived a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. He came home with a Purple Heart and post-traumatic stress disorder. On June 11, 2025, he joined a protest outside a federal immigration facility in Spokane, Washington. More than a month later, FBI agents arrived at his door at six in the morning, rifles drawn, and arrested him on federal conspiracy charges. If convicted, Bajun Mavalwal...

Send us Fan Mail The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department was created in 1957 to undo Jim Crow and protect Black voting rights. It was the institution you called when local power refused to recognize Black people as full citizens. On December 9, 2025, more than 200 former Division attorneys published an open letter saying it was being destroyed. Three-quarters of its lawyers were gone....

Send us Fan Mail J.D. Vance stood before the March for Life crowd and announced that the U.S. would now cut foreign aid to any organization doing work tied to diversity, equity, or inclusion. A funding rule with a forty-billion-dollar reach. That’s the pattern this episode tracks: explicit language about racism gets replaced; executive orders, grant conditions, and state laws do the real work of d...