My condolences on a lot of your friend, Charlie, Kirk. Can I ask, sir, personally, how are you holding up over the last day and a half, sir? I think very good. And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks. They've just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years. And it's going to be a beauty it'll be a absolutely magnificent

structure and I just see all the trucks we just started so it'll get done

very nicely and it'll be one of the best anywhere in the world actually thank you

well we all mourn in different ways.

Some of us turn to the bottle.

Some of us seek catharsis and works of art having to do with mortality.

But for those of us who are especially empathetic and especially sensitive, when asked about the loss of a dear, dear friend who we truly care about, our coping mechanism is to discuss infrastructure, architecture, building projects, and most especially trucks.

All the trucks.

The trucks, as they take cement to and from ballroom excavation sites, these trucks symbolize the fleeting nature of our time here on earth. We are dust and to dust we shall return. And I think in his very sensitive and poetic

remarks, Trump was trying to give us all a hint as to his own grieving process and what it is like for a poet to mourn

the loss of a dear friend that he absolutely gives so much of a shit about now that he's dead.

So friends, we are here not to not not not to make light of the death of Charlie Kirk or the obvious sociopathy of his favorite

president, Donald J. Trump. We are here to investigate the fallout of the recent assassination of

one of America's most notorious and toxic pundits. Charlie Kirk was killed at a college event

last week. He was shot from long distance by a

someone whose brain had been completely destroyed by internet culture, it sounds like.

Hmm. Unfamiliar with that. You have you would have no idea what that feels like, right? No. No.

The name of the podcast, by the way, is election profit makers.

Now that Charlie Kirk is dead, we're hoping Ezra Klein will consider us one of the leading

practitioners of American politics done the right way, as he put it in a recent essay eulogizing

Kirk and bemoaning the loss of civility in American political discourse, we move up one slot in the rankings,

John, to get on Ezra Klein's radar as people who know how to engage in definite good faith

...