This is the Nov. 6 edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
I first met Nancy Pelosi when we worked together in Congress fighting for human rights and religious liberty in China. It was a battle we waged every year against multinational corporations that cared more about doing business with the Asian behemoth than about freedom and justice.
Nancy Pelosi continued that struggle across five decades, becoming the first woman speaker of the House in U.S. history. Nancy also proved to be the most effective speaker to hold the gavel since Texan Sam Rayburn passed away in 1961.
On this day, when Nancy Pelosi announced that she would end her run in Congress, I think back to a morning that Mika and I spent with Nancy in 2019, when she reclaimed the speaker’s chair.
A deeply religious woman, Nancy and I spoke alone in the speaker’s office about her Catholic faith and her father’s influence on her life. As she showed me his picture, I said, “I’m sure you wish he could be with you today to see all of this.”
Without a pause, she smiled, put down the picture and said, “He’s with me every day.”
If he is looking down on this day, Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro must be so proud of his youngest child, the causes that she fought for and the remarkable history that she made.
“When I die and happily meet my Creator, He will ask me to show Him my wounds. If I tell Him that I have no wounds, my Creator will ask: Was nothing worth fighting for?”
Q&A: IN THE RING WITH PIERS MORGAN
Piers Morgan has a message for his old progressive friends: Defend free speech whether you like it or not. The onetime liberal became disenchanted with his side over speech codes, virtue signaling and “wokeness.” But in his interview with The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe, Morgan also criticized the right, saying that many conservatives who once called themselves defenders of free speech abandoned those principles following the tragic killing of Charlie Kirk. I asked Piers about his book, American politics and his beloved Arsenal.
JOE: Give us your take on the huge Democratic wins this week. But first, is this finally Arsenal’s year?
PIERS: Ahh, yes, and there’s a link to politics because [Zohran] Mamdani is a massive Arsenal fan. Our 2004 team was called the Invincibles. But now [we] have the Impregnables, because nobody can beat our defense. It’s all very exciting, but in English football, as you know, it’s the hope that kills you.
JOE: In “Slow Horses,” Gary Oldman tells young River that it’s not the hope that kills you; it’s the knowledge that it’s the hope that kills you, that actually kills you.
PIERS: (Laughing) Precisely!
JOE: I’ve been fascinated by the buzz your YouTube show has gotten from followers and industry types. They seem to think you’re onto something.
PIERS: I see myself as a kind of ringmaster. I like to sit somewhere in the center and let both sides debate. I used to identify very proudly as a liberal, but I don’t have anything in common with the progressive left and how it has manifested itself in recent years. But I’m in the center. I’m a journalist at my core.
JOE: What do you say to your liberal friends?
PIERS: That we went slightly insane and that what they’re doing now is not liberalism. It is, ironically, a new form of fascism — where a narrow worldview is created. And if people don’t align in the most absolute sense with your views, then we’re going to vilify you, shame you and cancel you.
JOE: What is your solution?
PIERS: I’ve seen you all on “Morning Joe” warn about this a lot. Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have both tried to warn their party to save itself from this madness. But enough aren’t listening.
JOE: How do you explain the phenomenon of “wokeness” in your book?
PIERS: It’s a very pleasing phenomenon when you’re on social media, because you get all your likes and clicks. But while that’s happening, you’re also alienating most everyone else.
JOE: What type of liberal are you now?
PIERS: Well, the cornerstone of liberalism is free speech and the freedom of expression. That’s what I write about in “Woke Is Dead,” and it’s the follow-up to the book I wrote four years ago called “Wake Up.” That book was supposed to be a clarion call to my liberal friends, warning them to be careful because free speech is something to protect and cherish. The moment you stop, things get precipitously worse. But the left has ignored all such warnings and continued dismantling the principle of free speech. And when you don’t honor and protect free speech, liberalism dies.
JOE: How has the right responded to these free speech issues following the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk?
PIERS: It’s been interesting to see what unfolded with Jimmy Kimmel. I began looking at people on the right and thought Kimmel would be a real test to see if they believed what they claimed to believe. Some stepped up and were true to the beliefs they espoused about free speech. But there were others who — given the opportunity to oppress others’ speech — immediately became what they hated. Still, some did the right thing and remained intellectually honest.
JOE: Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey were not tarred with the “woke” label and won big on affordability issues. Did you see this landslide coming?
PIERS: (Laughing) No. Virginia was a very expensive Democratic win for me. I had a £1000 bet with James Carville that Spanberger would not win by five points. I lost, and now I have to take James to Scott’s in London. I never thought it would be that wide of a margin. Carville called it right three months ago.
EXTRA HOT TEA
BORN OUT OF NOWHERE
An old mattress? Sciatica? That’s what Virginia schoolteacher Rebecca Johnson thought was causing her back pain — before she unexpectedly gave birth to a full-term baby girl later that day.
“Never once did pregnancy cross my brain,” Johnson said.
Her astonishing story, featured in The Washington Post this morning, is not as rare as it might seem. According to the Cleveland Clinic, as many as 1 in every 2,500 pregnancies goes unnoticed until delivery — a phenomenon known as “cryptic pregnancy.”
For Johnson and her husband, who had spent years navigating infertility, the sudden arrival of their daughter felt nothing short of miraculous.
“Everyone was very kind and very loving,” Johnson said of the hospital staff at TriCities Hospital, which doesn’t even have a labor and delivery unit. “Everyone came down to see the crazy baby who was born out of nowhere.”
A SECOND CUP WITH … STEVE BANNON
Bannon to the GOP Ruling Class: Fuck ’Em
Unlike Piers Morgan, Steve Bannon was not surprised by Republicans’ dismal performance on Tuesday night. Donald Trump’s longtime ally skewered GOP candidates for campaigning from a 1990s playbook — while commending Zohran Mamdani, Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill for talking about affordability and kitchen table issues.
In Bannon’s interview with The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe, the MAGA flamethrower discusses how a decade of Republican gains in New Jersey were wiped out on Tuesday night, how conservative and liberal populists share many of the same goals and why Trump needs to raise taxes on billionaires. Bannon also has a blunt message for members of the Republican establishment who see him and Trump as “little more than a passing summer storm.”
Where does the state of populism stand after Tuesday’s elections this week?
Populism is the future of politics, not just in the United States, but in Latin America and for Western democracy. You saw it in Zohran Mamdani’s campaign. [He] is more of a neo-Marxist than populist, but he clearly ran on a populist agenda of affordability that galvanized all these young people. New Yorkers from very different ethnic groups came together around him in a way you see with Bernie Sanders and AOC. They’ve been doing the work of populists, and all of that manifested itself into a huge victory.
Now Americans will have a choice between left-wing populism and right-wing populism. Mamdani scored a massive win Tuesday night, but that’s not to say the MAGA populist movement was hurt by the results the other night because President Trump just wasn’t engaged.
Most Republicans who lost this week ran old classic GOP campaigns centered on tax cuts and cultural issues. That just didn’t resonate. Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill focused on affordability throughout their campaigns, and they won huge 12-, 13-point victories that brought working-class voters back to Democrats.
Like I said, populism is the present and the future of American politics, and now we’re going to slug it out to determine whether left-wing populists or right-wing populists win the future.
Explain the scale of Republican losses this week.
We used to look at Pennsylvania as the new Ohio. After Trump did so well in 2024, we began calling New Jersey the new Pennsylvania.
We were closing the gap, and Republicans were sure we could start winning there soon. Momentum was on our side. That got totally reversed on Tuesday.
Jack [Ciattarelli] ran a very traditional Republican campaign, a pre-Chris Christie 1990s Republican campaign. It was all about tax cuts and cumbersome state government. There was no populist fire to any of it at all.
Mikie Sherrill, on the other hand, campaigned about high electric bills and went right to the people’s pocketbook, talking about dinner table issues. She was very, very aggressive and promised to take very populist-driven actions. The Republican candidates in Virginia and in New Jersey never fired back. And that allowed these Democrats to carry the populist message and reverse essentially everything we gained in New Jersey over the past decade. Republicans have a ton of work ahead of them to get that advantage back. New Jersey will not be competitive for a while.
Talk about Virginia.
Virginia is worse. Glenn Youngkin turned his back on populism over the last four years, and this year’s Republican candidate became a Never Trumper when Ron DeSantis was trying to gain some traction in 2022. So she killed herself with the MAGA crowd. MAGA stayed home, and [Winsome Earle-]Sears just wasn’t a good candidate. Youngkin destroyed his career in the process.
Let’s talk about the state of populism today. Where do Republican populists and Democratic populists meet ideologically?
The establishment in both the Democratic and the Republican Party, on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, attack [former Federal Trade Commissioner] Lina Khan — but she’s perfect to me. She’s the smartest person regarding the ecosystem of business and how it revolves in certain sectors, so she can really improve structures that are tremendously helpful for entrepreneurs. That’s what populism is all about. She also understands the concentration of corporate and state power. The fact she is helping Mamdani run his transition in New York means that he is a very serious guy.
What do you believe connects you, Lina Khan and populists on the left who also fear the concentration of corporate and state power?
Populists on the left and the right both see the managed decline of this country by elites. The belief that elites on both sides have destroyed the country for their own benefit — that they benefited politically from it — explains why Mamdani was so cruel to [Andrew] Cuomo and the entire family in his acceptance speech. He sees them as elites who have sold out the city and state. Billionaire Bill Ackman seems desperate to be his friend after the election. Word is that [JPMorgan Chase CEO] Jamie Dimon called him and is still waiting for a return call.
What about making billionaires pay more of their fair share?
During the debate over the Big Beautiful Bill, President Trump thought about creating an upper tax bracket for millionaires and raising the top rate to 40%. I was fighting for exactly that.
You would’ve thought I had burnt the Gospel of Jesus Christ. These guys went absolutely crazy even at the concept of raising taxes on the rich. We have another reconciliation bill next year. I think we’re gonna raise taxes on the wealthy, but as you know better than anybody, the ideology of the Republican establishment is still the Republican Party. Tuesday night showed the old Republican Party’s ideology is dead. You can’t win elections reading from their playbook either in big states or nationwide.
How does Donald Trump fit into that fight? Isn’t he an ally with all those establishment figures you mentioned?
No. President Trump changed the Republican Party into a working-class party and a lower-middle-class party of voters. The problem is the rich donors who see Donald Trump as a passing summer storm and hate the debris he’s bringing with him — people like me, Stephen Miller and [trade adviser] Peter Navarro. They think we are just passing through Washington. They’re the permanent party, and Fox News is the permanent network of [Rupert] Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, the National Review and the Upper East Side. The donor class thinks that is the real Republican Party. We’re just intruders who will soon go away.
And your response to that is?
Fuck ’em.
CATCH UP ON MORNING JOE
The elections this week were a rebuke of Trump: Sen. Amy Klobuchar
Newt Gingrich warns Republicans have a problem after election defeats
SPILL IT!
Next week, we’ll have Sen. John Fetterman on the show to discuss his new book, “Unfettered.” Want to ask a question? Send it over, and we will pick our favorite to ask on the show!
Former Rep. Joe Scarborough, R-Fla., is co-host of MS NOW's "Morning Joe" alongside Mika Brzezinski — a show that Time magazine calls "revolutionary." In addition to his career in television, Joe is a two-time New York Times best-selling author. His most recent book is "The Right Path: From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics — and Can Again."