Hey, everyone. It's read before we get started. I want to let you know about something exciting today. The Lincoln Project is launching our take back the flag initiative for too long.

Too many Americans have been afraid or worried to fly the American flag because they think it's associated with Trump or some sort of right wing extremism. Guys, it is not their flag. It is not his flag. It is our flag.

Please send us photos of you and old glory to info at LincolnProject.us and tell us why you are happy to fly the American flag. And now on with the show.

Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Gaeland. Today, I'm joined by Trick Wheels, Senior Advisor to Lincoln Project,

and President of Viking Strategies, LLC, a Washington DC-based public affairs and political consulting firm. Today, he is coming to us from the great state of Wisconsin.

Trick V, welcome back. Thanks for having me on, Reed. It's good to be on.

All right, man. Well, it's been a busy couple of weeks and it's been a while since we've had yawn. So let's start with a couple of things. One is, as of last night, as we're recording this, the United States Senate passed the

House's version of the debt ceiling deal. You know, shortly I assume it'll go to the president's desk for his signature. A lot of the MAGA Republicans were certainly unhappy. So I want to talk about that.

A number of Democrats were pretty unhappy too with the various policy pieces, but give us your sense of what this means for President Biden, what this means for Kevin McCarthy, and what it means for politics in America.

Well, I think first and foremost, I'm not sure that we should be giving too many accolades to the United States Senate for doing their most basic of jobs, right?

Like raising the debt ceiling and not screwing around with the reserve currency status of the United States. One of the things that makes America great and exceptional should just be regular business.

I think it's good as somebody who leans conservative, albeit who's not a Republican, that there is some spending cuts. I think there's pieces of it.

Some of the stuff around defense, I'm not a huge fan of, but on the whole, the fact that both sides on the extremes are complaining about it, probably is a really good sign that democracy worked.

And I think the interesting piece in this is that Joe Biden has been around a long time. He is somebody who, you know, people like when I did stuff in McConnell World, McConnell viewed as a worthy adversary.

You know, Joe Biden, Pac-Kev and McCarthy's a lunch, really, in a lot of ways.

But he also did what he had to do to get the job done. And sort of like in Ukraine, Biden is governing from the center lab, and he's doing it effectively.

Right. And it's interesting, you know, maybe it's the curse of America in 2023, Trigbee, that when the president does what they're supposed to do, what he's supposed to do, and doesn't make a big deal about it, right?

The old Reagan thing, it's amazing, which you can get accomplished if everyone's willing to avoid taking credit or whatever. I mangle that. But you understand my point is like he just figures it out. He and his team figured out, I heard somebody say he brings everybody to the Oval Office. He sort of lets them all do their sort of ad hominem thing that they need to get out of the way. And he says, okay, now let's get down to work.

But it's interesting that, you know, again, it's not flash. It's grinding it out. And maybe that's the years in the Senate that taught him how to do that.

I think that's really true. You know, Joe Biden came to the United States Senate. And in this way, he's a lot like McConnell and some of the other ones that were slowly losing.

They came to the Senate out of time when the Senate had some iconic lion type figures who they wanted to get things done. They weren't there to be somebody. They were there to do things.

And they may have had different perspectives of what those things should look like. But they were willing to work together to get half of what they wanted or a little more than half of what they wanted.

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