"I Think We're Doing Fine": Dean's Live With Ken Harbaugh On A Regime Losing Its Allies, Its Voters, And Its Nerve

I had Ken Harbaugh back on the live, (every Tuesday and Thursday @ 1030 am ET) and the timing could not have been better, because the last 72 hours handed us four stories that are really one story. Ken is a former Navy reconnaissance pilot, President of MeidasTouch Studios, and founder of VALOR Media Network, which means that when the topics are cancelled war games, a nine-month carrier deployment, and a congressional district he personally ran in, he’s not offering takes. He’s offering receipts.

Here’s what we covered, and what you missed.

Hours before Ulchi Freedom Shield was set to kick off, Trump went on Truth Social and ordered his “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth to substantially reduce joint military exercises with South Korea. His reasons, in his own words: his “very good relationship” with Kim Jong Un, the drills send a “hostile” signal to North Korea, and South Korea had the nerve to refuse to join his Iran war.

So a ten-day exercise got chopped in half. Live-fire training turned into computer simulations. Days after, North Korea resumed ballistic missile testing in defiance of UN bans.

And here’s the punchline: Kim’s own sister, Kim Yo Jong, publicly spat on the gesture. No interest, no talks, and the drills are still provocative no matter the size. Trump gave away a 70-year alliance’s training readiness for a date that doesn’t exist, and the girl said no in front of the whole school.

Ken walked us through what actually breaks when you turn live training into PowerPoint, and what it says to the tens of thousands of Americans at Camp Humphreys, the largest US base on Earth, sitting in North Korean artillery range while their commander in chief calls their training inappropriate. His bigger point stuck with me: Japan, Taiwan and Australia are all watching America’s word expire mid-exercise. Allies get punished, dictators get gifts. Same playbook as the Qatari jet.

Tuesday was the worst endorsement night of Trump’s political career, and it’s not close. Nearly 300,000 Republicans voted in the three primaries where he endorsed, and only 28 percent of them did what he told them to.

Florida’s 7th: Cory Mills, a two-term incumbent and one of Trump’s loudest loyalists, buried under a House Ethics investigation, lost his own primary by more than 13 points. Florida’s 19th: Catalina Lauf got a late Trump endorsement in a deep red district and still lost. And Wyoming, the Trumpiest state in America, rejected his hand-picked governor candidate Megan Degenfelder by nearly 16 points in favour of a guy who ran on public lands and rural health care.

The scoreboard is brutal: ten Trump-endorsed candidates have now lost primaries this cycle, which equals his losses from 2018, 2020 and 2024 combined. Six of the ten lost in August alone. Even CNN is using the words “lame duck.”

Then we got to Ohio’s 7th, which is personal for Ken because he ran there in 2018. Max Miller, the congressman Trump built from spare parts, is drowning in abuse allegations from his ex-wife and daughter, which he denies, plus an ethics probe and Republicans begging him to quit. Trump won that district by 11 points. Democrat Brian Poindexter is leading Miller by 8 to 14 points, depending on the poll, and House Democrats have dumped more than $ 7 million into Cleveland airtime to finish the job. Ken knows those voters, those counties, that terrain, and his read on why a Trump +11 seat is slipping away was worth the price of admission alone.

That’s a real Trump quote about the Iran war. Here’s what “fine” looked like this week.

Monday, he bragged that his people were back-channelling with the Revolutionary Guard. Tuesday, he posted that there are no talks happening or scheduled at all. The IRGC denied him both days. He contradicted himself within 24 hours, and both versions cannot be true.

Meanwhile, the 60-day peace deadline expired with no deal. He reportedly threatened to bomb Oman. The mediator. The referee. Iran fired ballistic missiles toward the UAE, which responded by suspending all trade with Tehran. NATO issued a statement about being ready for Iranian threats to US targets in Europe. The Strait of Hormuz, which Trump insists is “open and operating,” is seeing six or seven ships a day against a pre-war average of about 110. The Pentagon is begging contractors to ramp up production because stockpiles are running low six months in. And the USS Abraham Lincoln has been deployed 266 days, 200 of them in a combat zone, with the admiralty now publicly acknowledging mental health cases aboard.

This is where Ken was at his best. He translated what 266 days at sea does to a crew, to families, to retention, in language no politician will use. Twenty-eight percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of this war. Two-thirds say it hasn’t been worth it. The sailors know it. Their families know it. The only person who thinks it’s fine is the guy building a ballroom.

We closed on the man of the moment. Jon Ossoff, supposedly the most vulnerable Democrat in the Senate, is sitting at 50 percent in the newest Georgia poll, up 7 on Mike Collins and up 9 in the AARP poll, with 42 million in the bank and Sabato moving the race to Likely Democrat. In a state Trump won.

Ken and I dug into what he’s actually getting right, because it’s a blueprint. He never apologizes. He fights on Trump’s terrain, where the currency is humiliation, and answers Pee-wee Herman insults with “draft-dodging crook president.” He fused the war, the corruption, the ballroom, the Qatari jet and Natalie Harp’s printer into one story about an unserious man surrounded by sycophants sending serious people to die. He talks about the sailors on the Lincoln, not “norms” and “guardrails.” And he baited the White House into proving his point, because when you say the president surrounds himself with thin-skinned sycophants and the official response is government spokesmen calling a senator a “cuck loser” on taxpayer time, the response is the evidence.

Ken’s take on whether the “war based on lies” framing lands with veterans and military families the way it landed with the Atlanta crowd? Watch the replay. I’m not giving that one away for free.

Ken Harbaugh is president of MeidasTouch Studios and founder of VALOR Media Network. Find his show and podcast, Burn the Boats, wherever you get podcasts, and follow him across social media at The Ken Harbaugh Show. If you care about the military, veterans and what’s actually happening inside this war, he’s essential.

If you were there live, you know. If you weren’t, the replay is up. Subscribe so you never miss a live again, share this with someone who still thinks things are “fine,” and drop a comment with what you want us to dig into next.

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Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, Diana Chapman, Andrea Tuthill 🇺🇸🏴🇮🇷🇨🇦, Emily Theroux, Ms. H, and many others for tuning into my live video with The Ken Harbaugh Show! Join me for my next live video in the app.