The Stakes Are High – Sifting Through The Media Noise – with Mark Mitchell – [Ep. 256]

Linda J Hansen:  Welcome. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Prosperity 101 Breakroom Economics® Podcast. My name is Linda J. Hansen, your host and the author of Prosperity 101, Job Security Through Business Prosperity, the Essential Guide to Understanding How Policy Affects Your Paycheck® and the creator of the Breakroom Economics® Online course.

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So today I have another repeat guest, which I'm just so grateful that he is back with me today, Mark Mitchell. Mark Mitchell is head of polling at Rasmussen Reports, and he has been with me before. A lot of fun. If you guys have ever heard Mark Mitchell on any other broadcast, you love his energy, hear the depth of understanding regarding understanding people's opinions across the nation. But Rasmussen Reports is really the only polling company that does a daily, daily approval rating of our president.

I absolutely love this, and it's fun to watch because you can really see the effect of the media influence and you start to understand the American people. So I really appreciate Mark's insights. Mark, before we get into recent polls, I'd like to say welcome. Welcome back, and thank you for taking time for this.

But for the listeners who may have never heard of you or haven't met you before, could you share just a little bit about yourself, how you got into the polling world and what you'd love to see America understand about polling?

Mark Mitchell: Well, one of the reasons I love coming on your show so much is it's a combination of my interests. I love polling, I love politics and public opinion, but I came up through corporate circles. Just four years ago now, I was leading 100 people at Walmart Corporate and had gotten there through the jet acquisition.

So I've seen sort of both sides of it and it's all kind of messed up. You know what I mean? I think it's given me a particular insight into being able to come from the industry, into the industry as an outsider. But I was a naval officer on nuclear submarines, an academy graduate, and then worked in financial services, building operations teams, and got my MBA. And let me tell you, in 2008 to 2010, I saw a lot of this stuff floating down the pike. And people say woke is a major problem with corporations. I have the insight, in my opinion, that it's not.

It's just morally flexible people working together in aligned interests to do things that aren't good for objective measures like shareholder value and that kind of stuff. But anyways, like I said, I wound up working in technology and investing and then ultimately got to a corporate role at Walmart and then left because of the vaccine mandate and other things. 

So how did I become the head pollster of Rasmussen? Well, I knew somebody who knew somebody who was retiring and the company had been founded in my hometown. Scott Rasmussen's successor was my dad's best friend and golfing buddy. I passed the number one requirement, which was just being honest. I try really hard to put out numbers. I care about truth and I care about the people who subscribe to us and I want to give them accurate data, and that really kind of sets us apart.

Turns out that polling is commoditized. But what isn't commoditized is honest polling. There are very few of us. So we do pretty well with that as our business mission.

Linda J. Hansen: That is such a great business mission, to be honest, and to be able to really sift through the noise. That's one thing I've really appreciated about Rasmussen and about you in particular, why I've had you on several times, because you do help sift through the noise.

We can turn on the news and hear this poll, that poll, this poll, that poll, and they'll contradict one another. It's confusing for people who may not be paying close attention to what's going on. And what would you tell those people who really get confused because one day they turn on the news and the Trump and Trump policies are, you know, a skyrocketing success? And then they flip the channel and, oh, no, he's way down in the polls and he can't possibly make this up. What would you tell those people?

Mark Mitchell: Look at Trump as the first real anti-establishment candidate that we've ever had. And then with that frame of reference, go to Google Trends where you can look at the organic search volume over Google's history as a search engine. It goes all the way back to 2004 and put in the terms Bush approval, Obama approval, Trump approval and Biden approval. Something immediately will become very clear that there's something very specific about Donald Trump that people care a lot more and have searched a lot more about his approval.

In most cases, it's about two times higher than all of the other presidents. When you see people organically searching for stuff like that, it's because they're seeing headlines. It's because they're getting push notifications on their phone or they heard something on the radio about Trump's approval and they're trying to figure out, well, is this true? They're trying to find information on Google.

And so even without looking at polling, what that tells me is that there is some type of immune response to an anti-establishment candidate. And that's because a lot of people might be living in this matrix that we live in. But if you step back and really look at what's happening, everything's gotten so concentrated.

There are so many levers of power that have been corrupted. Corporations spend a significant amount of money on advertising dollars that can influence news media. Corporations lobby politicians. Politicians have taken money from all of these major corporates. And so power is being concentrated in a way that has prevented the bulk of America from doing well. 

I think by many measures, the middle class is getting hollowed out. Jobs are being sent overseas. The number of two income households is increasing. The number of kids raised in two parent households is decreasing.

Our education outcomes are horrible. And the polling is bad, too. We got to a point where this cycle, only 22 percent of U.S. likely voters think today's children will have it better off than their parents.

So you can ask people, what's the most important issue for you this election? And the answer is always going to be the economy. But what we do is that we poll on a whole bunch of different questions to try and measure the actual contextual truth. And the truth is Americans hated the Joe Biden presidency, but also specifically what the two party system that hasn't been focused on Americans has done.

Only 30 percent trust the federal government. A strong majority of people think that the government is on purpose invading the country for political reasons. The southern border—like measure after measure after measure, I could go on and on. Almost three quarters of voters are angry at the level of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government.

That's because this Kabuki red team, blue team stuff has been used to essentially perpetrate the biggest theft in world history of trillions and trillions of dollars of fraud. That might be a little bit too much of a red pill for people to look at. But when you realize how much is at stake and how strong this power structure and all the levers they use—think about how much they just harped on the stock market just in the last month.

But they use the S&P—well, like 70 percent of the S&P value is really only like 10 stocks. They're screaming about what's happening to 10 stocks that, of course, almost all of these politicians have significant investments in. I mean, it really is that fake.

And so, yes, the corporate media who takes advertising dollars from Pfizer, of course, they're going to use every trick in the book to convince you that the anti-establishment candidate is breaking things, doesn't have your interest at heart, is a Russian asset, hates you, is racist. Everything—they're going to try and it's all failed. Every single thing has failed.

And so what they're left with right now, they don't have political power. Now, I'm not saying Trump has complete political power because the establishment Republicans, I think, are trying to kneecap him. But the Democrats don't have any power. What they're stuck with now is to try to convince you that finally, after 10 years of everything being thrown at Donald Trump, finally his approval rating is tanking. They're doing it through all the normal tactics—information gatekeeping, cherry picking, misrepresenting numbers. And yes, corporate media pollsters, in my opinion, colluding to put out numbers that were bad for Trump on purpose all at once, like right into the weekend news cycle, right in advance of Trump's 100 day mark to try and get the headline, the ABC headline, that was probably written months ago, that yes, Trump has the worst 100 day polling in 80 years. Yes, he's the worst. Everybody hates him. No, they don't. His approval actually is doing pretty well.

But forget approval rating, our numbers for the number of people who say the country's on the right direction instead of the wrong track have been setting records now week after week after week, 14 consecutive weeks of numbers, 42 percent or higher. And that's incredible because the average for Biden's entire presidency was 30 percent. And we had the highest right direction number we've ever had back in March, 20 years of polling.

So people are happy with the stuff that they're seeing that Trump's doing. And I think a lot of people are sweating bullets and hoping that they can perpetuate their gravy train or maybe avoid criminal accountability. I think that's what's happening.

Linda J. Hansen: I love that. The Kabuki theater of the red and blue, I thought was great, too. I loved your statement on that. The red team, blue team, but also the gravy train is something that I think the average American citizen who tunes into news sometimes, doesn't dive into everything, maybe as much as you or I do. But they really have kind of a surface understanding because they're busy being an orthodontist or a nurse or a teacher or a parent with a sick child or a caregiver for an elderly family member. I mean, they're busy in their life.

They may not be able to have the time to dive in. And that's where I think understanding the difference with the polling can be so, so helpful, because when you show in your polling these things from history and you talk about it, it is so informative because not only do you have this daily tracker of the approval rating, which I do want you to get to, but you look at the history of these things and begin to say, OK, look at these Google search things. When I first heard you talk about that, I was so excited that you even brought that up because who does—I mean, who thinks about that? Right.

We need to look at what these historical trends were and be able to say something really amazing is happening. There's things that are amazing happening in the political realm here. There's things that are amazing happening in the cultural realm in America now.

I mean, there's like a revival bubbling up, a spiritual revival, which is exciting. But there's also things that are changing drastically in our economic culture. I mean, it is just incredible what 100 Days have done. I appreciate so much the fact that you bring these things together and break them down for people and help them see beyond the headlines. I think that's why I love having you back, because you help people see beyond the headlines and go a few layers down, but you simplify it, you simplify it and make it—not only that, you have humor, which I love because it kind of shows how the stupidity of some of it, because it's just—

Mark Mitchell: It's so stupid and perverse. 

Linda J. Hansen: It is, it is. But it doesn't always come across like that in the headlines, especially like I said to those who maybe only consume mainstream media. I mean, I've watched some people on X who've said they used to believe that every right-leaning person was racist, a hater, all these things. And then they started reading and researching and they began to say, wait a second, you know, I didn't have this right in my mind. I was being brainwashed in a sense. 

We all need to be careful of that from any place. Right. But that's where I think what you're doing really helps because it goes several layers down and has a broad spectrum of information it presents. So I really do appreciate it.

Could you talk about the daily opinion poll? And you mentioned before how before Trump's 100 days and before all of the news coverage of 100 days and everything. I mean, I noticed it even before I heard you talk about it, that it seemed like mainstream media all of a sudden he was tanking. And tell us how that kind of happened and the results and maybe how it influenced even some of the results you were seeing.

Mark Mitchell: Yeah, so we're the only ones that poll daily and it's a very simple question: Do you approve or disapprove the job that Donald Trump is doing as president? And a lot of other people poll it. They put the numbers out on places like the Real Clear Politics aggregate where you can go look at these numbers yourself. And a couple of things are true here. It's not exactly cut and dry.

Donald Trump does have historically a pretty low approval rating for early in a presidential term. But that has 100 percent to do with the political context where we're at. We're just not in the same kind of country that will give George W. Bush an 80 percent approval rating. We're not going to get back there because people are just upset, upset with the status quo. So it's 51 percent today. He's net approval plus three.

That's pretty good. And I think that he's going to—what I've been saying is that he had a little bit of a honeymoon and he's landed at about this 49, 50 percent range. And I think he's just going to stay there because, listen, you have to overcome multiple, very strong psychological warfare operations to become a Trump supporter.

It's very tough to become a Trump supporter. You have to go against all kinds of mainstream media and sociological programming that has been carefully constructed to prevent people from becoming Trump supporters. The fact that he has as many supporters as he does is kind of absolutely crazy.

His strong disapproval rating is only really about 40 percent on average right now. And this is the most reviled man in all of politics, everything, the most negative coverage. So my point is that once you become a Trump supporter, you pretty much stay there. That's been my theory, and I think it's held true. 

There are always left-leaning mainstream media pollsters who will put out numbers to the left of me. It's just part of what they do. I picked about 10 of them who I think are the worst players. It's like ABC News, CBS, CNN, Washington Post, Reuters, Ipsos, YouGov, The Economist. Like those are all the names of the absolute worst ones, probably high correlation again with major corporate advertisers.

And for most of—like 90 percent of this term, they've been mirroring what I have, which has been a gradual decay in Trump approval because he lost his inaugural bounce. But they were about three to five points to the left of me until this prior weekend—not this one, the one before—where all of a sudden they were 12 points left of me out of nowhere, all of them at once. Many of them had sat out and hadn't been polling. 

The New York Times—they've got a hundred times the budget to run polls as I do. And they haven't dropped a single poll since November until—oh, what's that? The weekend before Donald Trump's 100 day approval, and of course, it's an incredible left-leaning poll. They all did it at once. I think it was coordinated. I really do. And it just comes back to that. There's so much power at stake and so much fear that the gravy train is going to end, that people are going to lose the situation that they've presented to themselves, that you really can't trust any headline.

You really have to be out there on the front lines of the information war or just don't play. Like, listen, if you don't have the stomach to acknowledge that we're essentially already at World War Three and that it's an information war, then don't read any news, please. But don't just dip your toe in and think you're going to be able to parse mainstream media headlines and figure out what's going on for yourself. You just can't. It's not that kind of environment.

Linda J. Hansen: That's such a good point. As I've talked to different people, too, they—if you ask them, where are you getting your information? If they're very hostile towards anything Trump, and people can be so hostile to him. I mean, the clothes he wears or how he combs his hair or how he golfs, I mean, it's some of the craziest things. And a lot of times it's the people who hate him the most, at least what I've seen, seem to be the ones who refuse to dig deep into the truth of what his policies actually are.

Or, like you mentioned, they are absolutely the corrupt ones who don't want their gravy train stopped and, you can begin to see them both. So I guess my hope through everything I do, too, is just putting the crumb of information out there that helps someone be curious to say, well, where else would I get information? How could I find out more? Have I been fed things that aren't true? And how do I find out?

When I do speaking engagements, one of the more popular speeches I've given to a lot of places is about navigating cancel culture. And it's how does an employer chart that course? How do they navigate through that with their employees? How do they talk about it with their employees? How do they present what policies are good for the business or not good for the business without coming across as partisan and all these things, where the employee doesn't feel like you're telling them how to vote? It's just really helping them understand maybe how to think about things so that they can really form opinions based on more information.

Well, when I do that, I also share a slide that has multiple, multiple information sources and say, if you're getting your media from one place or five places, look at these 50, these 70 and say, what could I learn maybe from each one if I just looked? And thankfully, in the age of social media, we can find things quickly and the Internet and everything, we can find things quickly.

But that's also a danger because our attention spans are such that we don't like to digest information to a point of real understanding. And so again, going back to your polling, I appreciate the fact that you bring forth things on a daily basis. But when you explain these things too, you explain them in more depth, but you make them easy for people to understand.

Mark Mitchell: Yeah, and I hope to sprinkle some kernels of truth on top of what's happening, because I think the stakes are really high. I have four young children. I do not want them to die in a muddy Eastern European field. I feel like the world is itching for war right now. Structurally, we're not in a really great place. Massive amount of government debt, facing de-dollarization, the amount of willingness that other Western governments are willing to oppress people in order to maintain the status quo.

The status quo is trying really hard right now to make things bad. And so unfortunately, sometimes people have to be disagreeable. And that, especially, I think, in a corporate setting, is not popular. But everything has been perverted, including, in my opinion, even the concept of knowledge and education, because education has turned into, well, I read my information from a better book than you. And I've been trained on the best brainwashing algorithms and have the best narratives to parrot back at you without full understanding. Aren't I cool? Like, I'm part of this clique of people who are morally superior to you.

That's what education seems to have become. That's not what the first university was. The first university said, I don't care about credentials. We're going to have a discussion and it's difficult and we're going to use our minds and logic to come to some kind of mutual understanding. But what that requires is integrity and good faith and intellectual honesty. Those are all things in really, really short supply.

So in my opinion, we need to get back to old-school Western civilization education, which I think the closest proxy is probably what's happening on Twitter right now. Is there a lot of garbage on Twitter? Sure. Is there a lot of funny stuff on Twitter? Also, sure.

But if you go post misinformation on Twitter, you're probably going to get called out by somebody, and so you can block them or try and run from it. Or you could say, oh, I did something stupid. Let me learn from that and maybe I'll grow as a human being and operate in good faith. I think that that should be happening in corporate settings as well. Here's a sad truth, you can't go through life and have just everything be sunshine and roses. Sometimes you're going to be wrong. Sometimes you have to face tough truths.

And I—listen, I was a complete open book at Walmart, not a very popular person. I ran a powerful team focused on customer issues on the e-commerce business, and there were a lot, and that was just not part of the corporate culture.

Everybody was supposed to be happy all the time. They can't acknowledge the fact that customers are harmed by their bad engineering decisions or low standards for quality control or stupid logic that they built into all of these products and services. And it's like, I'm sorry, you're going to keep losing hundreds of millions of dollars in order to make yourself feel like– and I bet you that's playing out in a lot of corporate situations.

So the corporation that can very easily overcome this quandary about cancel culture probably is not solving its existential business problems as well. I'm just going to guess that there's a pretty high correlation there.

So I guess my call to people would be like, are we sheep or are we men? Figure it out. Buck up and solve your problems. And your problems are—sometimes people don't get along, and sometimes the loudest voices are wrong and need to be told to shut up. That's, I think, reality. I think it's better for everybody because we have a much better functioning society if we live by that. So sorry, that was a rant.

Linda J. Hansen: No, that's OK. I like your phrase. Are we sheep or are we men? And that's the thing, there's always going to be information. There's always going to be things that every one of us can learn.

We cannot say we have all the answers all the time. We can't. The only perfect person that has ever been on the face of the earth is Jesus Christ. And the rest of us are all fallible human beings.

And so, I think, too, we have become such a judgmental society. And you touch on that sometimes, with the polarization in our society, and that is sad. We need to be able to come together to a place that says, I can disagree with you and still respect you. That is not happening as much in this, and I think that that's intentional.

That is an intentional thing pushed upon this culture by media and those who really want to destroy our culture—really pushing people into disengaging and cutting people out of their lives because of political views. And this is happening everywhere. It's happening in families. It's happening in businesses. It's happening in marriages. It's happening all over.

That is something I'm curious if you have polled—that type of thing at all, like the polarization effect. Then also the other question I wanted to ask you, and you can decide which one you want to dive into more, but is the polling say on DOGE and the effects on DOGE.

I think that what they're showing through this waste, fraud, and abuse that has been coming up—we're seeing so much. I almost feel like that's a unifying thing because people can look at it and be like, are you kidding me? They're spending money on what? And then how do we get past that moment of unity into something that actually helps move our country forward in a more positive direction?

Mark Mitchell: Yeah, absolutely. About judgmentalism—I think it's good to be judgmental. The question is, are you being judgmental about the right things or not? And that's where it all breaks down.

I think we're in a society where it's OK to be judgmental about certain things, which I think are the wrong and stupid ones to be judgmental about. And what you can't be judgmental about is objectively the right things. Like, hey, we need more investigations and criminal accountability. That's the wrong kind of thing to be judgmental about in today's society, and that's wrong.

And even—they're pulling every trick in the book. They're trying to teach you that, yeah, even Christians aren't allowed to be judgmental. That's a lie. Christians are allowed to be judgmental. The Bible tells us that we have to allow people to steal from taxpayers? No. That's not okay. We have actually probably a biblical moral authority to stop that kind of thing, right? And it's like—even in Christianity, in the mainline denominations, you go to church, it's not about redemption or repentance.

It's about acceptance, and acceptance is an absence of judgmentalness, right? Like, that's wrong. That's evil. That says that we're not allowed to address sin. No. So just the level of effort that they have put into maintaining the status quo and preventing accountability has permeated everything—corporate boardrooms, every institution, academia.

It's got to change because I think that history tells us we're approaching the cusp of the fourth turning. You brought it up with DOGE, and I think that the way that Trump should be perceived—and I do think that there was divine intervention in Trump's election. I really do. However, I don't necessarily think that Trump represents some form of holy war.

The war that we have is that, it's a very divided America, and that there is now like a quasi religion around being judgmental about the wrong things. And we've measured it. I'm not like—this isn't all conjecture.

An example is in the fall, in one of our massive swing state polls, we asked people, “Of the following TV cable news networks, which one do you trust most?” CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, or Newsmax. And then we asked them this: “This election, of the following four issues, which ones are the most important? Abortion, immigration, rising prices, or protecting democracy.” And people who say they trust MSNBC most—three quarters of them said protecting democracy or abortion.

And Fox News, Newsmax people—unsurprisingly, three quarters of them said no, rising prices and abortion. Well, two of those—actually rising prices and the border. Sorry, not abortion.

Two of those are actually real issues. Like we do have an invasion at the southern border. We do have a problem with rising prices. We don't necessarily have a problem with abortion. Roe v. Wade was overturned. It's at the state level. Some states are allowing things. There's nothing that a federal official can really do about abortion right now. So it's a non-issue.

And then what the heck is protecting democracy? That’s essentially code speak for “keep the orange man out of the Oval Office.” And so those two issue sets are very, very different, and it got so bad. There’s really a very religious aspect to the polling. Evangelical Christians, depending on the poll, were between 30 and 40 points pro-Trump over Harris. That’s a massive margin.

Atheists in our polling were almost 80 points more likely to vote Harris than Trump, so that’s bigger than ideology, income, education. That’s a really, really strong signal. So there is a religious aspect. And the problem is that even Christians, even people who call themselves Catholic or Protestant, actually worship a different religion, which is hating Trump. Again, there’s only 40% of those people, so that’s why Trump’s in the White House.

But it’s like, there is so much wrong that Donald Trump was wise to bring DOGE. He’s uncovering the right things. I will say it seems to have abated some, and I don’t like that. But at the end of the day, our federal government is going to have a million, a million and a half employees. Donald Trump can’t run everything.

And so ultimately, we’re back to this issue with a failure of integrity and who's going to lead our institutions. Who can we trust to go down to Washington, D.C. and not sell out to China, not enrich themselves on the taxpayer dollars through money funneled through dark money NGOs? I don’t know how we solve that problem, and again, everything is arrayed against Trump. He will fix some things. Will he fix all of it or enough of it? Or will the Democrats regain power?

I kind of see Trump as like one of the last peaceful options that Americans have to prevent the direction of where the status quo has been bringing us. Because if, again, if a Democrat gets back into power, I think there will be a lot more on the table that wasn’t on the table just even in the Biden administration.

Or if the establishment wing of the Republican Party succeeds in getting another Romney or something into office—I just don’t know. People are not going to forget the fact that there are hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud happening on basically a daily basis.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah, you brought up some really good points. And I appreciate that you said we do need to be judgmental about certain things. I mean, there are certain things that are right and there are certain things that are wrong, and this culture has basically told everybody we just have to accept everything. Your truth is your truth, and it doesn’t matter what’s actually true.

So we have kids claiming to be cats, identifying as cats in elementary school, and you have to have a litter box in the bathroom because the kids identified as a cat. And it’s like insane, right? You know, right is wrong and wrong is right. And everything’s upside down and backwards.

But I think some of those things are being addressed. I think that we—the grassroots of America—we are beginning to make headway into some of these things, like even some of these laws about guys not being in the girls’ bathrooms or the guys not in women’s sports. I mean, all these things. It’s like, somehow, you think—how did we even get here? Hello. But then at the same time, you have to go through the process. You have to fight through it.

You mentioned the polling that was always on immigration and the border and things too. Look at the change. I mean, in less than 100 days, the amount of immigrants—illegals—coming into the border is incredible. I mean, this invasion is stopped, and then now you have the left screaming because we’re trying to send these criminals out. So the hill they die on is wanting to make sure this MS-13 gang member comes back.

I mean, it’s kind of crazy. But I think when you bring forth these numbers from people and you drill down—and I want to make sure people understand—you’re not just polling Trump’s opinion poll every day. I mean, there are so many different issues that you poll all the time. Whether it’s DOGE or the border, or all these different issues that you poll, it really helps people to think—think through. So our time is out. But I would like just one more question. I always ask you this: What would you say to employers who would like to help educate their employees about why understanding these issues is so important?

Mark Mitchell: Oh wow, I could come at that in so many different ways. And thanks for bringing up DOGE again—I didn’t even mention the polling. That is what sets us apart. Because ultimately, you can, like I said, cherry-pick the numbers and find whatever story you want.

We’re actually interested in what is actually going on and understanding the real political context. That’s how we knew that people were concerned about our degrading judicial system, they were concerned about the COVID overreach—all of these questions that we asked about that nobody else did.

DOGE is overwhelmingly popular. Imagine that. Donald Trump is the highest rated politician according to favorability of anybody we poll. And DOGE beats him. It was like plus 11 when Donald Trump was plus 7. So people like that.

My advice would be to put out more of it. It needs to be aggressive. Why can’t we have 1,000 people in DOGE? Why can’t we have 10,000? Let’s expand that part of the government and keep it, right? 

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah. That’s the one we want.

Mark Mitchell: So thinking about business, though, I think it’s important to manage corporate culture. This is something that I think companies are really bad at, and it’s something that I’ve used as a tool. It’s something that excellent organizations like the military use selectively in order to create high-performing teams. And this whole concept of high performance—the mission is first, everybody’s got to work together and compensate and understand each other—has all, it seems to me, gone out of the window.

So there’s, in my opinion, a self-interested reason in understanding how people think, and you really can’t have a high-performance team if there’s people that have to step on eggshells because somebody is going to scream that they got their feelings hurt.

Sorry, the mission is more important than your feelings. And so again, are we going to act like adults? Or are we going to be children here? Not everybody has to come to work and not have their feelings hurt. Because if somebody screws up, they have to be told that. You have to figure out a corrective action and figure out how to not make that happen again in the future.

I didn't see root cause and corrective action at Walmart. I didn't see true problem solving and systematic responses. It was all like whack-a-mole and sweeping under the rug, and it was all because we can't address the fact that no, we're actually pretty bad at our jobs.

And we should get better, not only for our fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, but because the customer is in our mission, right? And it's objectively the right thing to do. And so again, think about how many billions of dollars of corporate value has been sacrificed on the burning pyre of virtue signaling. Virtue signaling is objectively bad. It's essentially a lie.

But then here's another thing that companies should understand. I hear so much about, oh, we can't predict the future. Oh, there's so much chaos. Oh, how can we operate in this era of Trump? Well, here's what you need to know.

You heard me say fourth turning—I think it's coming. And people might not be familiar with what that means, but what it means is that Western history pretty much has an undulating wave of periods of high social order and low social order. And what causes those periods of high social order? Well, it's a massive crisis.

What it's saying is—notice I didn't frame any of this Trump stuff as like, oh, Republicans versus Democrats. And oh, if Trump doesn't succeed, a Republican will come in and fix it. No, it's like pretty much Trump is either going to instill social order because our institutions have been corrupted and have decayed.

World War II, we came out of that era with a lot of social cohesion. Everybody was interested in the same things. Everything was great. All the institutions were trusted. People trusted each other. And now we're in an era where everything's corrupted, it's all individualistic. It's all gimme, gimme, gimme. It doesn't work. It doesn't work at scale long-term with humans. There will be a reversion to the mean. The question is, how do we get there?

And it's either through Trump fixing the government, trying to shame people into having integrity and fear to get them to operate the government correctly and hopefully lead by example and fix some of these institutions that are failing—but they're all fighting him. Or we're going to have a major crisis and it's all going to get sorted by itself. A vacuum is going to form. New leaders are going to step up and reorder society around new cultural values.

That's not like 50 years down the line. That's like five to ten years down the line. So as you're preparing your five-year budgets right now, think about the fact that we've got a shooting war in Pakistan and India right now—both nuclear powers. We're on the cusp of World War III. China is probably sharpening its knives to go after Taiwan. We're dropping bombs on Iran right now. Things are falling apart and they're going to fall apart more, probably, unless we clean house here. We'll see if Trump's able to do it or not, but that's what it all hinges on.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah. Well, and I would say too, the American people really need to step up. Part of the reason Trump is even there is because the American people got more engaged, and you saw people getting more engaged at the local level all the way up.

So the American people are the ones who are actually supposed to be in the lead, and when we put pressure on our elected officials the way we're supposed to, things begin to happen. Ideally, that's what's supposed to happen.

That comes with making sure we have an electorate that understands history, understands our system of government, understands their role in our system of government, and the importance of their engagement. I think we've gotten this far because people were asleep at the switch and decided to live a comfortable life instead of being an engaged citizen, and we need to bring that back.

And so to employers out there, I want to say—help your employees become engaged citizens. I'd love to help you have those conversations. So contact me. But also educate yourself in these things so you can just talk to your employees more when something comes up. We don't all have to be experts at everything, but it's great if we can help point people in a direction for more information—where they can find the experts if it’s an area they’re really interested in.

So, well, we have gone way over time. So listeners, thank you for staying with us through this whole thing. It's great that we've had this long conversation. Mark always brings some really fascinating insights, and I appreciate that. I really do. I can't wait to have you back again in a few months. We can see how things maybe progress over the summer months and what's happening as we approach the next hundred days. And this is—it’s fascinating to see what's happening in American history right now and what's happening in our culture. So thank you.

How can people follow you, get a hold of you, and let them know how they can reach you?

Mark Mitchell: Yeah, it is a fascinating time because the people are doing this themselves. And you might have your carefully constructed corporate culture, but you have to understand that America is not necessarily what you see with your employees. There's a lot of gatekeeping happening that's keeping true America out of positions of leadership.

But 60 percent of these people think the media is the enemy of the people. A strong majority of these people don't trust their health experts. They do not trust any authority, period, whatsoever. So if you're going to do your virtue signaling stuff and launch your Pride campaign, you're going to get Bud Lighted. Right? Like these things—it’s so tone-deaf, and it’s going to happen.

So anyways, yeah, I'd love to have people who are interested in understanding that follow us at @Rasmussen_Poll on Twitter. I’m @HonestPollster on Twitter as well. And we stream usually Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 9 p.m. Eastern. And we have really long discussions about this kind of stuff because there’s really not a lot of information about it out there. Every pollster is really just shilling for the Democrats at this point—the establishment. And we’ll see. It’s a war against the occupied territory of D.C. and right now, it might be like on the Western front and you're not seeing it in your boardroom, but it's coming. It's coming for you.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah. So, well, thank you so much again. And just give the website one more time and your Twitter/X handle.

Mark Mitchell: RasmussenReports.com, @Rasmussen_Poll on Twitter and also on YouTube, and we also stream on Getter, Rumble, and both of our Twitter channels as well as Facebook. So come follow us there.

Linda J. Hansen: So listeners, you can find him many places—but please do, because you will learn a lot, and I’m just really thankful that you were able to take this time with us today. Thank you for making the time for the interview. We just look forward to having you back. Thank you, Mark.

Mark Mitchell: Great to be here. Thanks so much.

Linda J. Hansen: Thank you again for listening to the Prosperity101® podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share and leave a great review. Don't forget to visit prosperity101.com to access the entire podcast library, to order my newest book, Job Security Through Business Prosperity, the Essential Guide to Understanding How Policy Affects Your Paycheck®, or to enroll you or your employees in the Breakroom Economics® online course.

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