Show Notes
America turns 250 next year, and if you’ve been listening to cable news or scrolling social media, you might think the country is about to come apart at the seams. On the latest episode of The Drill Down, Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers push back hard on that narrative — unpacking what the data actually shows, who benefits from selling division, and what the Democratic Party’s botched 2024 autopsy reveals about where the opposition is headed.
The “Civil War” Narrative Is a Business Model
Schweizer opens by pointing to the 2024 Alex Garland film Civil War — a $50 million dystopian fantasy that pulled in $125 million at the box office. The premise sells because it taps into a mood the press has been cultivating for years.
A Pew Research Center report found that in 2022, 72% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats viewed the opposing party as more immoral than other Americans — up sharply from 47% and 35% in 2016.
But Schweizer argues the picture isn’t as bleak as the numbers suggest, and the country’s history is full of conflict we’ve conveniently smoothed over. He likens the United States to “a large Irish or Italian family where you have a lot of loud vocal disputes, disagreements, debates about things. But at the end of the day, you come together, and you recognize that you are a unified country, even if you don’t like the decisions that are being made.”
Eggers reminds listeners that in 1856, abolitionist Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was caned nearly to death on the Senate floor by Democratic Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina. Political violence isn’t new in America — it’s just newly amplified.
George Washington saw it coming. In his 1796 farewell address, the first president warned that political parties would “become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”
Trump Owns the GOP. Nobody Owns the Democrats.
Schweizer and Eggers point out a striking asymmetry between the two parties heading into the midterms.
President Trump is, by any measure, the unquestioned head of the Republican Party. He just notched another round of primary wins — Ken Paxton beating incumbent Senator John Cornyn in Texas, Senator Bill Cassidy finishing third in Louisiana after Trump went after him, and Congressman Thomas Massie losing to a Trump-endorsed challenger. As Eggers put it, Trump is “a hundred and one out of a hundred and one” in his endorsed Republican primary candidates.
“It is Trump’s party,” Schweizer says. “And it reflects not just his personality and his political muscle and his desire and willingness to go after people within the party that disagree with him. It also signifies how he has moved the party politically. The America First Agenda — it’s more blue collar than the old country club Republicans, you know, with the blue blazers and the gold cufflinks.”
The Democrats? Not so clear.
The DNC Autopsy: Late, Over Budget, and Missing the Point
DNC Chair Ken Martin — the former head of the Minnesota Democratic Party — commissioned a postmortem on the 2024 election. Like most government-style reports, Eggers notes, it came in late and over budget.
In April, Martin said he wouldn’t release the report. A month later, he released it anyway.
The author, Paul Rivera, is a former advisor to convicted New York state Senator John Sampson. And the report itself, the two argue, is a study in avoidance.
What the autopsy doesn’t address:
- The words “Gaza” and “Israel” don’t appear in the report a single time
- No serious examination of Joe Biden’s age or his late exit from the race
- One line even argues down-ballot Democrats fared better with Kamala Harris on the ticket than they would have with Biden.
“It seems like it’s got kind of Kamala Harris fingerprints on it,” Eggers observes.
The report does concede that Democrats have abandoned rural and southern voters and need to win them back. But Schweizer notes the disconnect between that diagnosis and the party’s actual energy.
“Pull Up to Alabama”
The Democratic Party’s top polling figures right now — Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — aren’t exactly built for a southern revival tour. Neither is Zohran Mamdani, currently the most popular Democrat among the party’s own base.
Then there’s AOC’s recent message about reaching southern voters, in which she suggested New York needs to “pull up” to Alabama. It’s not the pitch of a party serious about winning back rural America.
Meanwhile, Rahm Emanuel is quietly trying to run as a moderate — talking up Mississippi’s focus on phonics, campaigning in South Carolina. The energy isn’t with him.
“As much as the pundit class wants to declare that Trump’s policies are extreme, they’re actually not,” Schweizer says. “You can have a debate and argue that maybe he uses rhetoric that’s not right all the time, or people don’t like the tone, but his policy positions are not that unpopular. And that’s the dilemma that the Democratic Party has.”
A Medal of Honor Recipient Shuts Down CBS
The episode’s most powerful moment comes courtesy of a clip from CBS’s Face the Nation over Memorial Day weekend. Host Margaret Brennan, interviewing two Medal of Honor recipients, leaned into the now-standard framing about America’s “dark times.”
Lieutenant Colonel William Swenson wasn’t having it.
Eggers walks through Swenson’s story: a 106-man column ambushed in an Afghan valley by sixty insurgents at 6 a.m., surrounded on three sides. Four servicemen lost. Swenson crossed fifty meters of open ground to deliver life-saving aid. When the Taliban demanded surrender, he responded by throwing a hand grenade — an act of defiance that rallied his comrades and is credited with saving more than a dozen lives, including Afghan allies.
“That is the unifying — we are a nation of badasses,” Eggers says. “Greatest country in the world. And we shouldn’t be divided on that.”
Who Actually Benefits From the Chaos
Schweizer closes by naming the forces that genuinely are trying to pull America apart — and they’re not the political parties.
“You’ve got China through TikTok and through radical billionaires that are in China that are giving hundreds of millions of dollars to radical groups in the United States that are engaged in violent protests. You’ve got Mexico, you’ve got the Muslim Brotherhood, you’ve got foreign entities that want to pull us apart.”
The cable news incentive structure compounds it. Conflict drives ratings. Catastrophe drives clicks. “They’re all incentivized to create this sense of division, to create this sense that there’s this catastrophe coming,” Schweizer says.
“That’s what gives them eyeballs.”
Watch the episode above.
