Mike's Minute: We should all be worried about America episode artwork

EPISODE · Jul 19, 2026 · 2 MIN

Mike's Minute: We should all be worried about America

from The Mike Hosking Breakfast · host Newstalk ZB

With a war he doesn’t know how to finish it seems the Trump plan, given the Iran problem will reflect badly for him in the midterms, is to gerrymander the vote by pretending they have an emergency. That was largely the point of Friday's speech, which contained a re-issuing of old material, none of which specifically claimed his famed 2020 election was stolen. A couple of polls out over the weekend have; 1) His approval rating for the war and the economy down, 2) The overall view of personal financial circumstances at multi-year lows. Americans are miserable. Oh, and import prices out over the weekend as well were way higher than expected, which of course means everything gets more expensive for those already miserable and adds to inflation. And that’s before the 30-year fixed mortgage is now mid 6%. So once again, multi-year highs and killing any summer house-buying sentiment. Faced with all that, stacking an election would seem the only way to move forward. Whether he can pull it off will be interesting and worrying to watch. You wonder if at some point even the Republicans who have stayed the course with the increasing amounts of madness might see it as a bridge too far. It looks increasingly obvious that America is run by a dictator, if not in reality, certainly in his own mind. His whole second term has been about testing the boundaries of presidential power, mainly thanks to the Supreme Court, in a futile fashion. But the plan appears to be to try ten things and maybe win two. An emergency around voting will be another test of the system. Ironically this should be fertile ground for the Democrats. But they are busy pulling themselves apart as they scrap over progressive madness driven by the Mamdani brigade vs centralism as led by the likes of Gavin Newsom. But one of the aforementioned polls only gave them a four point edge on congressional success. All that madness and corruption in the White House and you still can't muster a runaway lead? How broken does that make the place look? Which would be fine if this was Poland or Turkey. But it's America and America counts, which is why we should all be worried. It can't end well.   LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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