Hi, Bill Crystal here. Welcome to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined again today by Ron

Brownstein, opinion columnist at Bloomberg, and for CNN, a CNN political analyst, author most recently of a book on popular culture, a very interesting book on the 70s, Rock Beyond the Water.

You and I were discussing it a week ago when Rob Reader died, right?

And you have a very interesting section on all in the family, which we should discuss some other time at a different conversation, actually. Right. Yeah,

RIP, though, what a great guy he was. Yeah, yeah, that show was so important in the history of TV

and in some interesting ways. You and I both remember it. I'm a little older. I watched it in college.

You watched it, I guess, in what, middle school, high school? Yeah, middle school and high school, yeah.

But everybody watched it. We all watched it, you know? Isn't that amazing? I mean, what were the numbers? Like, like, like, 40 million people were watching it at one point. A week, you know? I mean, it's like just, I mean, there hasn't been anything like that on TV in decades.

Right. And at the same time, it wasn't like in those days you could watch it stream it and

whenever you wish to call it up, you know? This isn't why we're here, but like I remember saying to someone the other day that I'm sure my dad went through his and your dad went through their entire lives without ever saying I'm behind on a TV show. Like the concept didn't even exist. It was there and then it was gone. I mean, you weren't trying to catch up with all in the family or Mary Tyler Moore. It was really with lost, I think, that that began, that you were like kind of behind and you had to see everyone in order to understand what's going on. That's interesting, isn't it? Yeah, no, it's really true.

Okay, but we're here to talk about the political situation.

We talked right after the election.

You had an excellent analysis of the 2024 results,

and we're now a little over a year from that,

almost a year into Trump's presidency,

more than a year into his becoming president-elect.

And so let's talk for a minute about what happened over this past year in 2025, politically,

and then what might well happen in 26.

Then we'll get to the maybe sort of the bigger picture of questions about the coalitions,

the two parties, what might conceivably happen in 28.

But 25, what's the political story of 2025?

You know, as usual, with Trump in the White

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