I'm Charlie Secks. Welcome back to the To the Contrary Podcast. Why, what a hell of a week.

Donald Trump prepares to address the nation and the networks for some reason have decided to air it all.

He moves closer to wagging the dog in Venezuela with an embargo on sanctioned ships.

Meanwhile, fallout from his incredibly, even by his standard, nauseatingly,

crass and callous attack on Rob Reiner, we continue to get that. And I don't know whether

it's a sign of the apocalypse or not, but Marjorie Taylor Green continues to make sense,

saying that, you know, that Donald Trump is losing his grip on MAGA. I don't know.

Is it a sign?

I'm asking for a friend we have an awful lot to talk about today.

And joining me on a rather extraordinary week.

By the way, that's true of every week, isn't it, though? Our good friend Tom Nichols from The Atlantic. How are you, Tom? I'm good, Charlie. Season's greetings. Merry Christmas. Yeah, Merry Christmas. And I know you just got back from London. You celebrated your birthday there. Congratulations. I hope things were calmer and nicer there. You know, it's strange that you

say that about this week, Charlie, because when I got off the plane last week, I got back on

like Thursday night, I said, wow, Donald Trump's having a really bad week because I had,

you know, my Christmas or my birthday present to myself was I went to London, and of course,

you can watch the BBC and keep up on the news and not have it be Donald Trump 24-7. So I got back and I knew that there was stuff going on. But when I got here, I realized he'd lost in Indiana. He was getting rolled by just about everybody that had anything to say about him. Big deal. I mean, he was having a really bad week.

And I don't think it's gotten better. I mean, he's been appalling, but I don't think his week's gotten

any better. And I don't think his political fortunes have improved any. So I, you know, it was kind of

nice to get back and say to see a majority of Republicans and, you know, kind of nice to see some local, local and regional.

I mean, state level politicians saying, no, thank you. I don't want to be pushed around by the

president of the United States. And no, I don't want some, you know, megalomaniacal, narcissistic

real estate developer in Washington sending people telling my fellow citizens here in the

Midwest to threaten me. I was pretty happy about that. Well, and also you had, I think it was 13

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