🚨 DEAD AIR LIVE: Jennifer Welch & Angie “Pumps” Sullivan Of “I’ve Had It” Torch The MAGA Closet, The Green Pool Of Lies, And The Slow-Motion Death Of The Cult
Steve Schmidt joined me on Substack Live and we brought in the two loudest, funniest, most fed-up women in American politics. It got real. It got profane. It got biblical. Buckle up.
Some Lives you do because the calendar says so. This one I’d have done for free in a parking lot at 2 a.m.
Steve Schmidt and I sat down for “Dead Air LIVE,” brought to you by The Save America Movement and pulled up two chairs for Jennifer Welch Welch and Angie "Pumps" Sullivan — the brains, the rage, and the belly laughs behind I’ve Had It - the podcast that’s become the unofficial group chat for everyone who looked at the last two years of American politics and said out loud, in a grocery store, to no one: “I have HAD it.”
If you don’t know them yet, fix that today. Here’s the quick version.
Who Are These Two?
Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan are best friends from Oklahoma City who met through their kids — their children were each other’s first best friends, and the moms bonded over marriage, divorce, and the slow realization that they’d had enough. They previously co-hosted the Bravo series Sweet Home Oklahoma from 2016 to 2019, then launched “I’ve Had It” in 2022 — and somewhere between the jokes and the cursing it turned into one of the sharpest progressive political shows in the country. Wikipedia
Their origin story is the whole point. Welch is a longtime Democrat and atheist, whereas Sullivan is a former Republican and Christian who taught Bible study at a megachurch before walking away from her faith. One was always on the left. The other got there the hard way. That tension — the ex-Bible-study teacher and the lifelong atheist screaming at the same fascism from two different doors — is exactly why they connect with people the cable-news robots never will. Wikipedia
And the reach is real. In an interview with David Remnick for The New Yorker Radio Hour, Welch characterised the podcast’s style as “Dark Woke.” The New York Times has noted that Welch “appeals to the mainstream liberal, angers the Fox News viewer and thrills the dirtbag left” — which, frankly, is the holy trinity of doing it right. They’ve had on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Zohran Mamdani, and Bernie Sanders, and they’ve been just as happy to drag corporate Democrats as they are to torch the regime. Jennifer’s also got a book coming — Not Today, Fascists — which tells you everything about the energy. Wikipedia + 2
Subscribe to them. All the ways:
The podcast: “I’ve Had It” drops new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays, with IHIP News serving daily political hits in short doses. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and everything at ivehaditpodcast.com.
Everything else — Jennifer’s book, their Substack, merch — lives at linktr.ee/ivehaditpodcast.
Follow Jennifer Welch individually: @mizzwelch
Follow Angie “Pumps” Sullivan individually: @pumpspumpspumps
The show handle: @ivehaditpodcast
Now. What we actually talked about.
1. The Reflecting Pool Fiasco: A $14 Million Monument To One Man’s Fragile Ego
We opened on the dumbest scandal in America, because it’s also the most perfect.
Trump spent — and I want you to sit with this number — more than $14 million to drain the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, repaint the bottom in a shade he personally named “American flag blue,” and refill it for the nation’s 250th birthday. A Virginia-based contractor received the no-bid contract. Within days, the blue tinge quickly became a familiar green — algae, the thing reflecting pools have done since the dawn of reflecting pools.
So what does the God-Emperor do? He invents saboteurs. Trump claimed, without providing evidence, that vandals had “destroyed the grass outside of the Pool” and had “also done everything possible to hurt the inside surface that was just installed.” He claimed someone “took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250-foot-long gash” into it. He announced arrests — an administration official told CBS News that five people had been arrested for vandalism, and another five were issued citations.
And the actual menace they caught? David Hearn, 67, of Bethesda, a former Olympic canoe racer who reached into the water to see what the detached liner felt like. He was detained for five hours. A senior citizen Olympian poked some peeling paint and got black-bagged because the President can’t admit algae beat him.
Meanwhile the scientists were in the room the whole time. A George Mason University professor who took water samples confirmed the algae was not toxic — a natural bloom, common in shallow sun-exposed water. As Jennifer put it, this is a man who would rather jail a 67-year-old kayaker than concede to pond scum. That’s not strength. That’s the most insecure man who has ever lived, with the Park Police as his personal feelings-enforcement division.
2. MAGA’s “Open Secret” — The Loudest Closet In Human History
Here’s where Angie, the recovering megachurch girl, brought the receipts.
The movement that built its entire brand on policing other people’s bedrooms is — and the data on their own platform tells the tale — extremely not what it advertises. The “I’ve Had It” line says it best, and it’s already a t-shirt in spirit: MAGA in the streets, Grindr in the sheets. The cruelty is the projection. Every drag-show panic, every bathroom bill, every “groomer” smear flung at a librarian is a man screaming at a mirror he’s terrified of.
We’re not outing anyone. We’re pointing out that a political movement obsessed with everyone else’s sexuality, run by people who keep getting caught in the exact behavior they criminalize, isn’t a coincidence. It’s the engine. Shame needs a target, and they’d rather aim it outward than look down.
3. Reclaiming P***** — Saying The Quiet Part Loud, On Purpose
Steve and I are both old enough to remember when a sitting candidate bragged about grabbing women by it on a hot mic and got elected anyway. Jennifer and Angie have spent two years refusing to let that word stay a weapon men use against women.
The bit isn’t crude for crude’s sake. It’s reclamation. You take the word they used to humiliate, you put it in your own mouth, and suddenly it’s not their cudgel anymore — it’s your punchline, your power, your podcast title energy. That’s the whole “I’ve Had It” methodology: the things they think will shame you into silence are exactly the things you say louder.
4. Naming The Insanity — Stop Calling It An “Administration”
Steve Schmidt has been beating this drum since before it was fashionable, and on the Live he was unflinching: language is load-bearing. When you call it an “administration,” you smuggle in normalcy. You imply process, deliberation, governance.
What we’re watching — secret-police arrests over algae, no-bid contracts to a golf-course vendor, doctored before-and-after photos posted by the President of the United States — is not an administration having a rough news cycle. It’s a regime. Call it what it is. The “I’ve Had It” women have built an entire audience on the radical act of accurate description. Insanity that gets called “policy” survives. Insanity that gets called insanity dies in daylight.
5. The Homoerotic Obsession He Can’t Put Down
This one had the panel howling and Steve doing the thing where he stares at the ceiling like he’s asking God for strength.
There’s a fixation. The man cannot stop publicly fantasizing — about strongmen, about other leaders’ bodies, about who’s “tough” and who’s “weak,” about Putin, about generals, about the physiques of his own cabinet. The “I’ve Had It” crew has clocked this for ages — they’ve literally had to rank the “best lover in the Trump administration” on air, which is its own kind of public service. The point underneath the laughs: a man this consumed by other men’s strength and bodies, who governs entirely through dominance and submission, is broadcasting something he will never say out loud and would jail you for saying about him. See item #2. It all connects.
6. Church And State — And The Megachurch Defector Who’d Know
Angie taught Bible study at a megachurch. So when she talks about the collapse of the wall between church and state, she’s not theorizing — she’s a defector with a map of the building.
The Christian nationalist project doesn’t want religious freedom. It wants religious rule. And the cruelest irony — which became the spine of the whole conversation — is that the people waving the biggest crosses are running the most un-Christlike operation imaginable. Jailing the curious. Punishing the poor. Worshipping a strongman. Lying as a daily devotional.
The Throughline: This Is The Opposite Of America, And The Opposite Of Jesus
Here’s where it all landed, and where Steve, Jennifer, Angie and I actually agreed without a single joke in the room.
Strip away the gold sneakers and the Truth Social tantrums and ask the simple question: what are the actual values here?
The founding pitch of America — flawed, unfinished, but the pitch — was no kings. Separation of powers. A wall between the altar and the state precisely so no one could do what these people are trying to do. And the teachings the movement claims as its brand? Feed the hungry. Welcome the stranger. The last shall be first. Judge not.
Every single thing the regime does is the photo negative of both. They worship a king. They fuse the cross to the flag to the fist. They cage the stranger, they punish the poor, they lie as a sacrament, and they jail a 67-year-old man for touching a puddle. That’s not America, and it’s not Christianity. It’s a cult wearing both as a costume.
And cults end. That was Steve’s closer, and I’m stealing it: movements built on a single fragile man’s ego, propped up by shame and projection, screaming at algae — they don’t have a second act. The math of it is death. Slow, then all at once.
Jennifer and Angie have built a movement of their own on the opposite bet: that if enough of us just keep saying it — loud, funny, profane, unafraid — the spell breaks. Two years in, 70,000-plus of you here and millions over there, I’d say the bet’s paying off.
Go subscribe to “I’ve Had It” everywhere. Follow Jennifer at @mizzwelch and Angie at @pumpspumpspumps. Pre-order Not Today, Fascists. And tell a friend who’s still saying “administration” to knock it off.
We’ve had it. You’ve had it. Good. That’s where it starts.
— Dean
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Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, LC - Silence is Complicity, Vicki Whicker, Richard Hogan, MD, PhD(2), DBA, Peter W Shuster, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.
