With the midterms less than a week away, the closing stretch of the campaign is full of bad omens for MAGA abroad and peak weirdness at home. In Serbia and Brazil, Trump allies suffered stinging and surprising defeats driven in part by energized voter turnout. An anti-corruption youth movement spearheaded the surge in Serbia, while Brazil saw a dramatic comeback for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who defeated staunch Trump ally Flávio Bolsonaro.
“Both of the losing candidates, Bolsonaro in Brazil and Vučić in Serbia, wrapped themselves around Donald Trump,” co-host David Corn says on this episode of Stress Test. “So we see in Serbia and Hungary authoritarian figures who try to emulate and ride the Trump wave being tossed out of office. And in [South America], where we’ve seen a right-wing tide… they beat it back” in Brazil.
There’s a growing sense that voters worldwide are fed up with government grift. As David puts it: “Corruption seems to be the point of the spear.” Meanwhile, the Israeli election—where the final results are still uncertain—also was something of a referendum on Trump, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempting to retain power by promoting his close ties to Trump.
Back home, former President Barack Obama and Trump were each on the campaign trail in closing sprints. Obama is getting spicy, hitting Trump on his tacky taste and alleged corruption. Trump, meanwhile, has been obsessively commenting on physical anatomy—specifically “asses”—in one of the stranger closing arguments in modern American political history. “This has to be, like, the definition of being off message,” co-host Garrison Hayes observes. “Like, definitionally off message.”
Trump’s fixation on rear-ends extended to rapper Nicki Minaj, who appeared at a rally, where Trump asked her to stand and extolled her derriere, fueling the silly rumor she might be named press secretary after the brief tenure of Katie “Half a Scaramucci” Zacharia.“It reminds me of what happened in 2016 when Trump was campaigning and he would say, ‘Hey, where’s my Black friend?’” David recalls. For Garrison, the gambit is all-too familiar: “Here we are in the closing moments of this midterm election, and the way that the Trump administration has decided to utilize a Black person in order to, I imagine, appeal to Black voters is offensive. It’s almost a caricature of the kind of racism that has become emblematic of this administration.”
“Incoherent is the name of the game.”
All of this unfolds against an unprecedented deluge of generative AI “slop” and grotesque attack ads. David and Garrison run through the best and worst of the midterms’ campaign ads, , They also unpack how the White House has weaponized viral memes for crude attacks—including altering footage from Charlie Wilson’s NPR Tiny Desk performance of the 1982 Gap Band hit “Outstanding” to include top Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero—a callback to a racist tropeTrump’s crew hasdeployed before. “This feels like the slop election in some ways, right?” Garrison says. “Incoherent is the name of the game.”
Other ads have been total cringe, notably an ad from California Republican gubernatorial hopeful Steve Hilton that bizarrely equates voting GOP with experimenting with lesbian sex. (Yes, you read that right.) “Creepy, creepy, weird,” David says. What else can one say?
There are only a few more shows left before Election Night next Tuesday, when we’ll bring the biggest news of the day straight to your feed as soon as we can. Make sure to hit subscribe so you don’t miss an episode.
The following transcript was generated using automated tools and may contain errors.
David Corn: Trump loses in Brazil and in Serbia. What does that mean for us as we head to the midterms?
Garrison Hayes: President Obama is on the stump for Democrats, and he’s getting very spicy.
DC: And all those campaign ads: the best, the worst, and the yuck. This is Stress Test from Mother Jones. I’m David Corn.
GH: And I’m Garrison Hayes. Welcome to Episode 8 of Stress Test, David.
DC: Well, we’ve gotten this far, and there’s a week to go, Garrison, before we get a sense of what this election is going to be all about.
GH: Yeah, it’s been a journey. I’m excited to kind of get through this. I don’t know about our viewers and our listeners, [laughs] ready for it to be over, which is a good place for us to start here in the closing days, the closing week or so of this campaign. Both President Obama and President Trump are on the campaign trail. They are in Michigan—Obama with El-Sayed, who’s running for Senate there. This week, President Obama will be in Georgia with Jon Ossoff and Keisha Lance Bottoms, helping to kind of gin up a little bit of support down there. And so we know that when parties put their presidents on the front lines, they are really trying to close the deal here. Isn’t that right, David?
DC: Well, you’d think that, but with Donald Trump, that’s not the case. They’re sending him to Mississippi. Mississippi, because they’re worried about what’s happening there in the Senate race. I mean, the idea that a Democrat would have a chance in Mississippi is almost unbelievable. And while he’s out there on the campaign trail, he’s really not talking about the matters—this is Trump—that are probably foremost in the minds of most voters. There’s been a lot of talk coming from Donald Trump about a particular body part of candidates and other people.
GH: Yeah, okay, so we should get into that. There’s a clip that I want us to take a look at and then react to. It just happened in the last couple of days, of President Trump commenting on Nicki Minaj’s rear end. Let’s play that.
DC: Derriere.
GH: [Laughs.] Derriere. [Laughs.] There you go.
[Clip plays.]
GH: Yeah, this has to be, like, the definition of being off message. Like, definitionally [laughs]off of—
DC: I mean, yeah, but this is Trump’s closing message in the final days of a campaign that he seems to care about because he believes he may be impeached if the Democrats take control of the House. He’s out there, he’s talking about asses, he’s talking about, you know, the glitz in the White House. He’s gotten into a little feud with Barack Obama when Barack Obama said that what he’s done to the White House looks like what Saddam Hussein would do if he was running a Cheesecake Factory. And he, of course, is bringing out racism, saying that Somali Americans are all thieves and crooks, and going on and on and on about that. But, you know, when he brought out Nicki Minaj and made her stand up because of a body part, well, what do you make of that?
GH: Yeah, it’s—I have a few thoughts. I mean, obviously he was talking not just about Nicki Minaj, he’s also talking about Jon Husted, who, you know, is a candidate that, you know, I imagine if I were in Husted’s position, I would be a little miffed that my moment with the president is really being turned [laughs] into a show-and-tell.
And so I guess the kind of interesting thing here is that, you know, the way that the Trump administration, the right wing, has utilized Black bodies specifically in this interesting way of kind of trotting them out in order to demonstrate that they are proximate and they have some Black folks here. You saw this with a few others—I won’t name them—but obviously here with Nicki Minaj, it’s kind of—it’s almost, like, so on the nose that it’s hard to imagine that it can be taken seriously by Black voters. I mean, here we are in the closing moments of this midterm election, and the way that the Trump administration has decided to utilize a Black person in order to, I imagine, appeal to Black voters is offensive, and it’s almost a caricature of the kind of racism that has become emblematic of this administration.
DC: I mean, it reminds me of what happened in 2016 when Trump was campaigning and he would say, hey, where’s my Black friend? And find, you know, some supporter in the crowd. And it was the same guy. I mean, he wasn’t like [laughs]—it was like, yes, I have Black friends, too.
GH: [Laughs.] Yes.
DC: It is pretty, pretty evident and transparent, and I find it hard to believe it’s gonna win him over Black voters.
GH: You know, it’s interesting that you say that. You know, I covered Black Republicans a ton in 2024. I have a video on our Mother Jones YouTube channel called I Spent a Week With Black Republicans. And in some ways, this notion of representation, of just kind of being in the room, being proximate to this power—for some people, it’s enough. For some Black Republicans, just seeing themselves kind of in the room, despite being disregarded, despite the interests being kind of cast aside, it is enough.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t say that some Black voters feel this way about, you know, Democrats in a way, that representation isn’t really enough. And so what I’m kind of curious, as we kind of see the results of this election over the next few days, I’m really curious if Black voters particularly will take the bait of a potential Nicki Minaj press secretary as enough to give their vote to candidates across, you know, across the map.
DC: Yeah, I think they’re just trolling when they put out the trial balloon that Nicki Minaj [laughs] will be press secretary. I, you know, [laughs] I’m not sure where her head is at these days, but maybe she has enough sense not to take that job.
GH: Yeah, she shouldn’t take the job, and the Barbz shouldn’t take the bait. Okay, we should probably zoom out and go global here. I’m not—you know, we’re obviously thinking about the midterms here in America, but there are elections, David, taking place really all across the world, and social media has been abuzz over some of the results that have come in from places like Brazil, from Serbia. We’re seeing youth revolution kind of happening across the world, and I’m wondering if we can kind of make sense of this moment from a global perspective, David.
DC: Well, we saw just this week in Brazil, Lula defeat Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the former president, who’s under house arrest for plotting a coup [laughs] against the Brazilian government. And we’ve also had in Serbia a surprising victory for the opposition that basically tossed out Aleksandar Vučić, who’s been the dominant figure in Serbian politics for 14 years. He’s a more or less conservative nationalist populist who’s been engaged in all sorts of corrupt schemes, at least accusations of that.
And what sort of ties both of these elections together is that Trump was involved in both elections. Both of the losing candidates—Bolsonaro in Brazil and Vučić in Serbia—wrapped themselves around Donald Trump. And, you know, the MAGA people here, too, went to Serbia, they went to Brazil. Donald Trump Jr. had a very close relationship with Bolsonaro’s son. And it all kind of fell apart.
And we see, particularly in Serbia, the issue of corruption was a very, very big deal. And this is kind of a trend. We saw this happening with Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who had been there for 16 years—again, another Trump wannabe—and what brought him down were charges of corruption, too. So we see in Serbia and Hungary authoritarian figures who try to emulate and ride the Trump wave being tossed out of office, and in Brazil, where we’ve seen—or I could say in South America, where we’ve seen a right-wing tide—well, in Brazil, they beat it back.
GH: Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I wanna kind of, like, kind of pick at a couple of American assumptions. One is this kind of idea that we exist out here on an island, we do our thing, we are the center of the world. And so there is a connection here, obviously, like, these, you know, changes in leadership across the world are kind of related in some way to what’s happening here in America.
But it’s also kind of interesting—I mean, we saw this in 2024. There was this big anti-incumbent wave in 2024. Obviously, that affected the somewhat incumbent Biden-Harris campaign administration, but then we also saw that in places, again, across the world. And so I’m curious if this is just one of those moments where, you know, authoritarianism, corruption are being rejected—we’re seeing kind of a rejection of that around the world—and if that’s gonna be connected to what happens here in America, not just here in the midterms, but maybe as we go forward.
DC: Well, we do see in Europe a tide, momentum for right-wing populist parties, and that’s gonna continue. There’s gonna be elections in the next year or so in some European nations. To me, what’s interesting here is if you look at particularly Hungary and Serbia, where we’ve had authoritarian rule for over a dozen years in each country, finally people are saying enough of that, and corruption seems to be the point of the spear there. And we also—I think it’s good news that these authoritarian leaders have bowed out. They’ve accepted the will of the electorate, which, of course, Trump didn’t do in 2020. [Laughs.] And who knows what’s gonna happen in 2026 after the midterms. So democracy had a couple good wins recently, and we’re gonna see what that means for us here.
GH: Yeah, I mean, and obviously a really big element to that—you know, 10 million folks in a WhatsApp group in Brazil to support Lula. I mean, huge voter turnout in these places are what really carried these candidates over the line. And so, you know, obviously people have to turn out, right? And do we have a sense here in America, kind of turning our attention back here at home, do we have a sense of voter turnout in these midterm elections so far?
DC: Yeah, turnout has been really very big and has exceeded previous levels in a lot of key states where there are critical Senate battles, for instance, in Texas. Now, you know, you can guess and speculate, and you can look at: Are these more Democratic-leaning voters or Republican-leaning voters? And in Texas, for instance, it seems to be that Democrats are voting more at this point in early voting than Republicans. Does that mean something, or are Republicans gonna wait to vote the day of?
I mean, the bottom line is we’re gonna know soon enough how things play out, so I would caution against drawing too many speculations or assumptions from this, but, you know, Democrats have reason to at least not be unhappy [laughs] at this point in time. So we’ll see on the turnout.
And we also, you know, we see that in at least one Fox poll recently, voters picked corruption as the No. 1 issue. Usually that’s gonna be bad news for the incumbent party. That’s who most people think of as corrupt. But also remember, a lot of Republicans believe Democrats are corrupt. And so, you know, Republican respondents to these polls may say corruption is a key issue for them, too. But in any event, everything right now is pointing in the Democrats’ direction, and we’ll see afterwards if the polling and these early voting numbers are being read accurately.
GH: Yeah, and it’s worth saying, David, I wanna take your caution seriously, but I’m gonna kind of differ a little bit, because we are seeing a surge in Black voter turnout in places across the South—Louisiana, which is obviously at the center of a lot of these discussions around Black voter suppression, Black political power, you know, the Louisiana v. Callais decision this summer from the Supreme Court. And so Black folks in Louisiana are surging to the polls. In many ways, folks are reading that—again, caution understood and heard and taken not to read too much into it—but people are reading into that that there is a real backlash to some of the kind of dirty tricks that people perceive Republicans to be doing around redistricting and gerrymandering, which is also kind of in its own way—it’s not exactly connected to corruption, but it is a kind of form of, like, electoral corruption that I think Black voters particularly are seeing, and which is why so many Black voters are showing up to the polls.
DC: And I’ll add one thing, too. I think when you have an election where voters feel a sense of mission, purpose, the stronger that is, it’s gonna work out better for that side. And, you know, I think a lot of Republicans—not the die-hard MAGA people, but Republicans who still like to vote for Republicans—you know, are disappointed in Trump, are not as keen about him as they once were, and that’s certainly true with independent voters, while people who are voting for Democratic candidates, particularly some of the more charismatic ones, even the ones who have an uphill battle, I think they feel more energized, and that can make all the difference.
But there’s another, you know, election overseas that we probably should pay a little attention to now, and that is the Israeli election. The final results are not in as we’re talking, and it will take time to sort out who got what seats in the Knesset there, the parliament, and who can form a majority government. That may take weeks to determine. But this election, too, is somewhat a referendum on Trump. I mean, you see ads with Bibi Netanyahu with his arm around Donald Trump, and he’s running as the Trump-endorsed candidate. And so is that gonna work?
GH: That’s the question I have. I mean, this doesn’t make sense to me. I’m not as tapped in on kind of the way that politics run in Israel, but Donald Trump is historically unpopular here in America. I mean, I think I saw something at, like, he’s polling at maybe 35 percent approval rating, which is, like, really, really incredibly low. And so is the appeal to the kind of American Israeli voter, or what’s the appeal for a candidate like Benjamin Netanyahu choosing to associate himself with someone who is so deeply unpopular here in America?
DC: One of the basic themes in all of Israeli politics, particularly in national races, is the candidate’s ability to work with the United States. You know, we give billions of dollars of aid to Israel and a lot of military support, so that relationship is all-important, they believe, to Israel’s survival. So Bibi Netanyahu is going by a very conventional playbook here, which is to say, I have the relationship with America. I have this bosom-buddy tie with Donald Trump, so you elect me and that will continue.
Now, there’s a lot of opposition to him, and it’s not necessarily from the left. A lot of people in the center and the right hold him responsible for what happened on October 7, for not preventing that, and they don’t like the way the war has been run—not that they’re antiwar, but they raise questions about how it’s been prosecuted. And in fact, his chief opponent is a former chief of staff for the Israeli military, who’s not antiwar, but wants to hold Netanyahu accountable for what led to the war and how the war has been handled. So it’s really a very, you know, I think complicated situation, but it will show to what degree hanging on to Trump, you know, whether that can succeed or not in Israel these days.
GH: A story out of the Near East is complicated. Who would have thunk it? Okay, I wanna get back to home. [Laughs.] I wanna come back here to some of the messaging that we’re seeing in battleground states here in America. This one should be a little fun, David. I wanna look at some of the ads that folks have been running here at home. So let’s get into some of these campaign ads.
DC: Yeah, you know, some are irritating, some are unimaginative, there’s a lot of mud being thrown, a lot have false claims. But, you know, here’s one that caught my eye, maybe because it almost is a act of investigative journalism. I’m talking about an ad that was put out by the Talarico campaign out in Texas. James Talarico is running against Ken Paxton, a very corrupt—I think we can say that, not even allegedly corrupt—Republican who was impeached and not convicted and has all sorts of accusations against him. But in this ad, Talarico takes aim at another person who lives in Texas. Let’s take a look.
[Clip plays.]
GH: Pretty good.
DC: Yeah, they did what [laughs] we do at Mother Jones sometimes: You follow the money, and you see all these, you know, innocuously named super PACs—you know, super PAC for freedom, super PAC for liberty, super PAC for everything that we like, [laughs] you know—and they all come back to the same guy, Elon Musk, who, last time I saw, had committed $158 million—I think the number is higher by this point—just to the Senate race in Texas. He is basically keeping Kenneth Paxton alive, and we’ve never seen a donation of this amount for a single race. This is literally buying a politician, maybe a deciding vote in the US Senate. So I think highlighting that is the way to counter it, because as much money as Talarico has raised, he doesn’t have a sugar daddy like Elon Musk.
GH: [Laughs.] Very effective. I loved all of, like, the deep impact sound, like, boom, boom—like, those are very effective as well. All right, I wanna look at an ad in Michigan.
[Clip plays.]
GH: Also very effective.
DC: Yeah, I mean, it’s warm, it’s human. And, you know, one criticism against El-Sayed is that sometimes he comes off a little brash, maybe arrogant, you know. He’s very strong and fierce, and that works as well, but this is, you know, it’s a softening ad. It has a great amount of humor, which I think is always effective in a political ad. And it’s also targeted to seniors, if you catch that: You can’t fool us seniors, right? So I think it scores high on all the things you want to do with a political ad.
GH: And I think it’s worth taking it to the next level: not just seniors, but, you know, white seniors, a very specific kind of senior demographic that they’re appealing to. You know, I think this is kind of out of—a bit out of the Obama playbook, right? You have this kind of weird cultural, racial dynamic that you have to overcome in order to win. You know, for President Obama, it was that, you know, he is a politician who happens to be Black, right? He’s this very qualified, well-put-together person who happens to be Black.
And I think in many ways what the candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, is trying to do is basically saying, like, hey, I am qualified and interesting and all of these things, and I’ll get things done for you, and I just happen to be Muslim, and I have people in my family who are Presbyterian, right? And so almost using the proxy, you know, using that as a way to kind of get around some of those well-worn patterns in the American electorate, particularly around race and religion.
DC: Well, you know, in the final days here, they’re throwing a lot of Islamophobia and racism at him. You know, Ted Cruz says, I know he’s in the Muslim Brotherhood. Well, he’s not. So there are a lot of scare tactics being thrown at him. So this is basically saying, hey, [laughs] like you, I have white grandparents, [laughs] you know, and I’m obviously not a terrorist, and would these people, you know, raise a kid who’s a terrorist in the Muslim Brotherhood? So, you know, it’s really aiming at that as well, and I think probably as effective as it can be. And his election is really a test case for a Muslim running against this Islamophobia and racism that’s coming from Donald Trump and everybody else in the Republican Party.
GH: Yeah, especially in the middle of the country. Okay, we should go back out to the coasts here, David. There’s one more ad that we wanna take a look at.
DC: Yeah, I don’t know how to introduce this one. [Laughs.] Let’s just say, let people know it was produced for the campaign of Steve Hilton, who’s a Republican running for governor in California, doesn’t have much of a chance, and I’m not sure this ad is going to help. Let’s see it.
[Clip plays.]
GH: It’s weird. It’s weird. It’s weird. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.
DC: Creepy, creepy, weird. [Laughs.] I mean, they’re—I mean, I think we can say this: They’re [laughs] making voting for a Republican look like trying lesbian sex for the first time?
GH: Weird.
DC: I mean, I don’t know who this ad is [laughs] being aimed at. And, you know, the thing about all these ads we see: They’re watched by a lot of people before they go out. People write the scripts, people make them, the candidate usually looks at them, other people see this. You know, how could that get through all those levels of inspection, and people kept saying, yeah, yeah, this is a good idea?
GH: Yeah, I know. Sometimes I wonder if this stuff is even designed to do the work of persuasion as much as it’s designed to get folks to talk about it, which maybe is the point, and maybe it’s working here. But it’s all so weird to me, and it doesn’t appeal, you know, I imagine, to the average queer voter, who I can’t speak for, but it’s just—it’s all a little strange to me. Okay, I wanna keep us moving forward, David.
DC: Yeah, away from that, away from that.
GH: I just wanna get away from that as quickly as possible. There’s probably so much more to say, I’m just ready to go. Speaking of [laughs] creepy, I wanna touch on what some might call the robot takeover. This feels like the slop election in some ways, right? This feels like the AI election. Obviously, you have AI and pro–data center kind of candidates that we’ve talked about a little bit, but you also have the use of generative AI going crazy in this election, and particularly around ads.
DC: Yeah, there have been hundreds of ads using AI without telling us they’re AI. You know, they’re trying to make—in this one ad we’re looking at Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania, shredding documents and doing all things about data centers, and, I mean, it’s pretty well done production-wise. They’re connecting him to the Epstein case. There are other ads where they show candidates walking with Hillary Clinton, hugging her, when these are not real footage.
And, you know, you can tell, I think you can kind of tell it’s AI, but they’re not confessing to that. And we’re gonna see—we’ve seen a lot of it this campaign, we’re gonna see more and more of that. And I don’t know what the solution is, if there needs to be some degree of legislation, at least some kind of notice. I mean, you have to say who an ad is paid by, paid for. You gotta say, I approve this ad, if it comes from a campaign. We do have limitations on ads, and so it seems to me you might have to, you know, at some point say this is not real. And, you know, some of that stuff that we just saw was kind of funny, and most people would probably assume it’s not real, but you could do stuff that’s very, very realistic and make a candidate look very bad without fessing up that it was totally created by generative AI.
GH: Yeah, yeah. I don’t—you know, there’s certainly a degree to which platforms have been kind of carrying the responsibility of labeling things that are AI, and so you might have a label on a Meta product like Facebook or Instagram or some other, you know, product. But it does feel like the way that the federal government [laughs]—the way that government officials and those seeking elected office are using this, it feels like we need some legislation. I don’t have the legislation in mind, but it just feels like there’s a gap here that you probably can’t rely on these platforms to fill. And so, you know, who knows what that will look like, and maybe that’s something for voters to decide.
But I am kind of curious to touch on—I wanna touch on one more thing around AI. The Trump White House has used AI a ton, David.
DC: Yeah, oh yeah.
GH: A ton. I mean, like, constantly over the last however long Donald Trump has been office—in office. And so this past weekend they put out another piece that was interesting. Maybe we should play it.
[Clip plays.]
DC: Okay, you want to explain that?
GH: Yeah, so, okay, so this is a kind of a meme coming—this was maybe, I guess, based on, derived from, I don’t even—what’s the right terminology with AI? But it’s based on Charlie Wilson’s Tiny Desk concert. That’s, you know, “Outstanding” by the Gap Band—shout-out, easily one of my favorite songs. Play it at every single function, I’m dancing, I’m on the dance floor every time.
Okay, all that said, you know, this meme kind of was used as a way to kind of celebrate teams and put, you know, basketball teams and football teams and coaches in this kind of interesting, fun environment. And I think the White House is trying to use this to embarrass Democrats and say that they’re outrageous and out of touch. But the interesting thing is that this is an amazing song. I love this song. I love this song. So why—it’s not negative to me.
DC: I mean, yeah, I don’t get what the message—yeah, what’s derogatory about this? Now, they put Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer in sombreros, which, you know, some people consider a racist move, but are they showing that all Democrats like a good song? I mean, again, this gets back to my overarching point, which I talked about at the beginning: I don’t see this White House doing anything to persuade a persuadable voter to vote for a Republican candidate, you know, if that person hasn’t yet made up their mind. Who’s gonna watch this and go, oh, I can’t vote for James Talarico now?
GH: Yeah, exactly. [Laughs.] Exactly.
DC: Right? You know, I can’t vote for, you know, Abdul El-Sayed after seeing this video. So I don’t get it. I don’t understand what they’re doing other than just trolling and shitposting. I mean, I think Democrats should be happy that this is what they’re devoting their time, energy, and resources to.
GH: Yeah, you know, I think the meme is that the people in the video are, quote-unquote, washed. They are kind of outside of their prime, past their prime. But you know what? Shout-out to Charlie Wilson. When I watched his Tiny Desk, I was like, this guy still—he is still doing it. The song hits, and the Tiny Desk was incredible. This isn’t NPR promo, [laughs] but I thought it was so—I thought it was strange. And it also kind of gets to, I mean, not to make everything, you know, a little bit of a racial analysis here, but it feels like, how is it that Charlie Wilson and the Gap Band and this particular song, which is a banger, a classic—how could this be emblematic of being washed up and outside of your prime when this is such a timeless classic? Okay, this is—
DC: I mean, wait, wait a second, wait a second. I have one more thing to say about that.
GH: Please, please.
DC: “Y.M.C.A.”
GH: Okay, all right.
DC: I mean, if that’s your theme song—
GH: That’s a good point.
DC: —you have no basis, you know, making fun of this. I mean, talk about a washed-up song, washed-up people, yeah.
GH: Come on, the Village People? [Laughs.]
DC: But also getting it exactly wrong, since it was a gay anthem. So nevertheless, I mean, the White House, the Trump White House, is the last place that should be making fun of anybody’s musical choices.
GH: There it is. Incoherent is the name of the game. Okay, we should get out of here. [Laughs.]We should wrap up. As always—
DC: Okay, so you’re gonna tell me—you’re gonna tell me, after being chilled out by that song, what’s stressing you out.
GH: That’s—that’s exactly where I’m going, David. You know exactly where we’re going: What’s stressing you out? David, do you want me to start? Do you want me to give you a little time to kind of get back to your stressful place after listening to “Outstanding” by the Gap Band?
DC: [Laughs.] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You go with the vibe.
GH: Yeah, I’ll go, I’ll keep it rolling. Let me tell you what’s stressing me out. You know, at this point, the elections are what they are. We’re gonna keep our great reporting here at Mother Jonesgoing, but I am slowly trying to withdraw from that. And my little escape from reality has been the WNBA Finals. My team, the Atlanta Dream, have reached the WNBA Finals. They’re playing amazing—shout-out to Angel Reese—but there is a little bit of a hiccup. There’s been this question around where the games will be played, and that is stressing me out. Game 6 in Atlanta will be played at 12:30 in the afternoon because they had a scheduling conflict with the stadium, and it’s all stressing me out. I feel like the WNBA needs a new commissioner who really, you know, thinks strategically about the schedule. And so I’m a little stressed about that, and how I’m gonna watch this game in the middle of the day, David. [Laughs.]
DC: Well, I’m glad politics is not taking up all of your stress. That’s a good sign. My stress is more to the point here, [laughs] and that is Trump and the Justice Department are trying to pull off these BS moves in Alaska and California, challenging voter rolls, or in Alaska, even putting in a preemptive challenge to the results if their candidate, Dan Sullivan, loses, claiming that because there’s another candidate named Dan Sullivan on the ballot, that the election should be nullified if the Democrat wins.
Now, this isn’t gonna go anywhere in the courts, and in the California case, where they’re trying to get 20,000 votes nullified as well, that’s not going forward either in the courts, but it shows that they are thinking and trying to lay the groundwork for challenging races after the results are in. I know the Democrats see this, I know there are a lot of lawyers out there, but it indicates to me that the midterms may not be over on the evening of November 3.
GH: Yeah, that’s become a bit of our American reality, is that these things are just kind of dragging along a bit these days. Well, David, thank you for all of that. Of course, we’re here at the end of the show.
DC: If you missed earlier episodes of Stress Test, you can catch them on our YouTube channel and your favorite podcast apps.
GH: Yes, listen, you have your phone out, you have your laptop open—go ahead and do it right now. Press subscribe, press the plus in whatever app you’re listening in or watching on. Subscribe, like, all of that stuff. Our great journalism here at Mother Jones is only made possible because of your support. Yes, your views and subscriptions, they do keep us going. So don’t forget, again, to like, to share, to subscribe, put it in your favorite group chat. And if you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment down below. We are reading and watching them right there—[laughs] we’re reading all the comments. Well, listen, we will be back in just a couple of days with another edition of Stress Test. Until then, take care.
