Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Gaelin. Today I'm joined by

my fellow co-founder and host of LPTV's The Breakdown, back this fall, an author of

Everything Trump Touches dies, Rick Wilson. Hey Reed. And also on the show today is our

resident freedom fighter, senior advisor to the Lincoln Project and president of Viking

Strategies, Trig V. Olsen. Trig V, thanks for coming back. Yeah, thanks for having me on.

So before we get going, I just wanted to take a moment and thank all of our incredibly

loyal listeners and Lincoln Project followers out there. This past week, the podcast crossed

this threshold of six million downloads since I relaunched this past February. Get out of

here. So I just want to say thank you to everybody for that. That is an incredible number.

I am humbled, flattered, beyond any true conception. So thank you to everybody. And let me

make a pitch, you know, if you're out there listening to one of your friends, tell two of

your friends and let's jack that number even more so the good word is spread. All right,

guys, so let's get to work here. So I want to talk about Republicans and the sort of chaos

theory of life that they've now ascribed to, including threatening to block the raising

of the national debt ceiling, as well as the total lack of leadership that we're seeing

from Rhonda Santis and Greg Abbott in Texas and Florida, respectively. But first, we have

to talk, I think, about Afghanistan, which for those who are watching the news or reading

the news, we're seeing scenes out of Kabul and other places there reminiscent of, you

know, South Vietnam in 1975 and other places. And just before we started this recording,

folks, we listened to President Joe Biden give remarks on why he decided to continue the

drawdown that the Trump administration had begun. And Rick, and I want to go to you first,

what I thought was a pretty stark and candid illustration of how Joe Biden sees not only

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