contributor, Mark Thiessen, who joins us now. So obviously, a lot of people are feeling economic pain right now, but you've seen a drop in crime, you've seen a drop in inflation numbers, you've seen a border that has been closed, but that doesn't necessarily mean that people going to the polls feel all of that. No, that's exactly right. But I mean, think about this, think back to the '22 midterms. When Joe Biden, we had just had the Afghan withdrawal, the worst foreign policy debacle in our lifetime, we had the worst inflation in four decades, worst crime wave since the 1990s, the worst border crisis in American history, and he put in one of the best midterm performances of any president since JFK. So you know, those things, what matters really is candidate quality. And so if you think about the Senate, right, the Democrats need to gain a net of four Senate seats in order to take back the Senate and they have to hold on to Michigan, which is a blue seat, it's an open seat, but it's their seat, what do they do? They nominate an Islamic radical socialist who hates football in Michigan, right? They have to beat Susan Collins. So what do they do? They find Graham Plattner guy with a Nazi tattoo, and then they replace him with a guy who came in third in the gubernatorial race and has children with his cousin. So, you know, candidate quality matters a lot. Now, the bad news for Republicans is, if you look at the toss-up states, what are they? Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, you know, North Carolina, leaning down. So seats that used to be solidly red are in play this time around. Texas is a toss-up. That's insane. So a lot, it could go any way, any direction. Yeah, you know, I totally agree with you, candidates. That absolutely matters. And I see that. I think Vance's message is very good in that, you know, although as Charlie said, people are feeling the economic pain and I was just in the Midwest, spent a lot of time this summer in Wisconsin, and people are upset about the inflation. They also said their comments on the war were interesting. Their comments were wrap it up. I kept hearing that everywhere I went. He needs to wrap it up. So my question to you is, do you think it could wrap up before midterms? And what would that do to the midterms? Because as we pointed out here, everything else is going great. I'm a big advocate of wrapping it up and wrapping it up with a final hurrah that would really set this regime back a decade. Look, what Donald Trump did in Iran is one of the most important foreign policy decisions any American president has made in my lifetime. That regime has been at war with us for 47 years. He's the first president who fought back. But the problem is we stopped at the 20 yard line in April, right? We still had about 14 days of bombing that we had to do to take out their capabilities. And so what that means is it left them with the capability to hit Gulf oil infrastructure. It left them with the capability to hit American troops in the region. And what I'm really worried about is not just that the war is not wrapped up, but that there could be an October surprise in Iran. Yes, I read a column in the Washington Post about that, that the Iranians know the midterms are coming up. And they may want to affect the midterms by carrying it by raising the price of oil by attacking Gulf oil infrastructure right before the right before the midterm vote, causing some sort of chaos, forcing the president to go back to combat by killing some Americans right before the midterms. When what we should do, I think, honestly, is go back and just finish this thing, declare victory and end it and which we which we can do. What does that look like? What that looks like is finishing the last 14 days of the bombing campaign that was planned, hitting their economic infrastructure hard, taking out, you know, we've destroyed 85% of their defense industrial base, destroying 99% of it. They've got the plans on the table. Admiral Cooper has them. Execute that. And then you'd stop, you say, man, combat is over at the 20 yard line. Because I think he thought that we could get a deal. And he was it was suggested to him that a deal was possible. And President Trump always wants a deal rather than combat and we're and in killing people. And so that and that's an admirable quality about him. But we've and then what happened is we got into this cul-de-sac of negotiations followed by Iranian violations, followed by America having to retaliate, followed by more negotiations. And we've been stuck in this since April. And we could have this could have been done in April. I mean, the comp major to people who said midnight hammer. I thought we did it in midnight hammer. Why did we go in when we know that you talked earlier during the break, you said the threshold for pain in Iran is very high. Yes. But we kind of knew that before. Right. So midnight hammer was enormously important. Yeah. But what the audience were doing is they didn't they responded to midnight hammer not by saying, okay, this president's going to stop us from getting a nuclear weapon. They went on a barrage of building missiles, which what their plan was was to have a large enough missile capability that they could overwhelm any defenses that the U.S. had of its troops in the region or Israel had of its country. And then they could they'd have a shield by way behind which they could rebuild their nuclear program. And President Trump saw that and he had to stop them. I think I think just add to what you're talking about, which is so smart and so insightful is that we are looking at the administration unleashing an economic strangulation on Iran that has never before been seen. And the president mentioned that because it would cut off all energy transactions and financial dealings with all of the Gulf states. And that would be an economic impact that we would see certainly before the midterms. If that's coupled with an October surprise, does that settle this? So I think what the president is doing economically, it's been dubbed Operation Economic Fury, is one of the most effective military. So the Iranians are selling zero oil right now. And by the way, Admiral Cooper, the Ascent Comp, we've escorted 1,000 ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Not many people know that number. It's like 20 a day right now. We're sending about $10 billion of barrels of oil a day, a million barrels of oil a day. A thousand ships have gone through the Strait. The Iranians do not control the Strait of Hormuz. We control the Strait of Hormuz. So if you finish the military campaign and take that off the table, we're done. Open the strait, keep the blockade on. The Iranian regime will eventually collapse. But you can't predict if that escalates things. So that's a little bit, but we'll see what happens. I mean, I think people said wrap it up. So thanks for being here. Thank you.
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