Republicans are aiming to gut Medicaid to pay for trillions in tax cuts for the richest of Americans, and they're trying to hide it. The Dems need to bring the DC conversation home—hold town halls everywhere, tell voters what would happen, especially in rural MAGA areas where hospitals and trauma centers will close. Meanwhile, Trump is turning chaos at the border into chaos in the streets by having ICE grab people who haven't even committed crimes to pump up his deportation numbers. Plus, Elon's insatiable and scandalous quest for more money, the Dems' evolving media strategy, and how to help maintain mental health during these stressful times. Sen. Ruben Gallego and Zerlina Maxwell join Tim Miller. show notes Zerlina's show on SiriusXM Progress Channel 127 Zerlina's new Substack Will Selber's piece that Tim referenced
Full Episode
Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We've got a double dose today. Up in segment two, it's my girl Zerlina Maxwell. But first, she's a U.S. Senator representing Arizona. He was previously a U.S. Congressman. He was deployed to Iraq in 2005 as a Marine infantryman. His name is Senator Ruben Gallego. How you doing, Senator? Hey, good morning. Good to see you.
We were talking a bit in the green room about my friend Carrie Lake. You defeated her in the election in 2024. Solidly, yeah. Yeah. Bad news for the voice of America. Maybe good news for the Senate. I wanted to ask you about that, your point about solidly, because there were several Democrats that won elections. in states where Trump won.
But if you look at the data, it was mostly because those people voted for Trump and then went home. They're Trump-only voters. Your state was the one example that was different. You had about 100,000 more votes than Kamala Harris. And so I do think that your case is kind of an interesting one to study. So I'm wondering if you've reflected on that, if you have any theories of the case.
Was it something about you, something about Kerry, something about Arizona? Yeah.
It was a combination of a lot of things. Like, look, we ran a very retail-oriented campaign to begin with. We literally were going to baseball games, putting together boxing watch parties, rodeos, reaching out to Latino men, talking to everyone, talking to Republicans, going to rural Arizona.
I also think we actually were talking about Arizona and the politics of Arizona, but what was happening there in a realistic manner. We were talking about the cost of everything going up and how we need to fix that. And that is a problem. And I think that was... something that a lot of Arizonans appreciated because I think they were hearing from some campaigns like, no, things are good.
I'm like, no, they're not. But we were also very serious about the border. And we talked about the border in a very serious Arizona way, right, where we want more border patrol. We want, you know, bad people to get deported. We want immigration reform. We want to protect DREAMers.
And we want trade to keep continuing because that's really important to our business in Arizona versus someone like Carrie Lake who just – talked about the border, what like an East Coast Republican conservative thinks the border is in Arizona, right? She would say that, you know, the cartels own the border, the Arizona border. Now, I'm sure on the Mexican side, that does happen.
But you're telling people, police chiefs in Nogales, in San Luis, US citizens, that they're essentially controlled by cartels when they're trying to bring in business or trying to start their families, everything else like that. And then she would go to the border, go to the border wall as if it was like the Great Wall in Jerusalem. And she put her hands up on the border wall.
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