Good afternoon from Washington. I am not Chak Tod. I'm carried in sitting in for Chak.

But fear not, we have an awesome show for you today because today I get to sit with

something very valuable in all of our hands, menna from the political unit, gods. Because

that's right, we have real numbers, people. We have Monday night, which was the FEC deadline

for candidates to file their second quarter fundraising. And there's just a ton of interesting

information in there. And who better to sit with me right now and go through it? Then

my colleague, Mark Murray, senior editor of the political unit and Ben Kamesar, who burned

the midnight oil Monday night. We were getting emails from Ben at like one in the morning,

digging through all of these numbers. And we found some fascinating stuff to talk through.

So let's get right to it. Welcome to Mark and Ben.

Woo woo. Go there.

All right. But first after that big wind up, a little bit of a deep sigh, we got to talk

about those tweets first. But we're going to talk about those tweets as a campaign issue.

We've had a few days to digest all of this. President Trump's Twitter attacks on four

newly elected congresswomen of color. Let's talk about something else here. Let's talk

about this as a 2020 issue. And I want to bring you in Mark. We wrote about this on earlier

this week in first read. Trump appears to be trying to tie Democrats, all Democrats

as a party to these four congresswomen. What does this say about what he's trying to do for

2020?

It's always about playing to the base. And I get that people are trying to think of this

as some kind of three dimensional chast or 13 dimensional chast, some what he's actually

trying to do. But to me, this is just what Trump has done from the beginning of his presidential

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