Jack Smith testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Trump's election scheme, document retention, obstruction, and classified materials in a bathroom. Only four of nine GOP Senate candidates are willing to associate with Trump. Derek Thompson's data shows Americans hosting friends dropped from 42% in 1975 to 12% now.
Chapters
Ultimize. Americans have officially stopped inviting each other over. Not for dinner, not for cards, and not even to show off the new air fryer. Writer Derek Thompson crunched the numbers. In 1975, 42% of Americans had friends or family over at least once a month. Today, it's down to 12%. That's a 70% collapse. 25 years ago, Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone, and everybody panicked. Bowling alone. How tragic. But think about what bowling alone involved. You left the house. You looked a teenager in the eye and said, size 11, please. You put your feet in shoes 300 strangers had worn before you. That's community. That's athlete's foot with a sense of belonging. Today, we're not even bowling alone. We're couching alone. 9 PM, the whole country is horizontal, faces lit blue like a crime scene, Watching a stranger in Ohio make lasagna. We don't want the lasagna. We don't want to meet the stranger. We just want to watch a human being doing something social from a safe distance, like a nature documentary about the species we used to be. Thompson makes a brutal point. Compared to your phone, a dinner party is terrible technology. It needs a clean house, groceries, a calendar, and a guest who announces at the door that she's now gluten-free, dairy-free, and joy-free. Your phone asks for nothing. It doesn't even ask you to wear pants. Restaurants are reporting more people eating alone. The hostess doesn't ask how many anymore. She asks, just you and the charger? And here's the part that isn't funny. When nobody comes over, nobody notices when you're not okay. The dinner table used to be where someone said, hey, you look tired. What's going on? Now the only checking on you is your screen time report. Your usage is up 30% this week. Thanks, phone. Great friend. Never once brought a casserole. So here's my coaching for the week, and I mean it. Invite somebody over. Not a big gala. Could be frozen pizza, paper plates. Don't clean the house. Your friends don't want to see a clean house. They want to see a house messier than theirs. That's the gift. And yes, I see the irony. A man who sells online courses you watch alone on your couch is telling you to get off your couch, which is why I'm launching a brand new course, Hosting Real Humans, 12 hours. Watch it alone or with others. Speaking of people you would never invite into your home, especially near the bathroom, Jack Smith testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Now, if you get your news from Fox or your uncle's Facebook page, you think the Jack Smith story goes like this: witch hunt, found nothing, the end. That's not a summary. That's a bedtime story for grown men in MAGA pajamas. Jack Smith, the former special counsel who investigated Donald Trump, told the Senate this week his team developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump committed serious crimes against the nation. Found nothing. Here's the nothing. 1, Smith says that rather than accept losing the 2020 election, Trump ran a criminal scheme to overturn it and block the lawful transfer of power. 2, Smith says after leaving office, Trump illegally kept classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. 3, he says Trump repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to hide them. And 4, Smith told senators some of that highly sensitive national security information was kept in a bathroom. A bathroom. America's most dangerous secrets sitting between a scented candle and a copy of Golf Digest. We spend billions on the Pentagon, and our last line of defense was a guy yelling, occupied! The other spot was a ballroom. Picture it. You're at a charity gala, reaching for a shrimp puff, and you knock over The Iran file. Now let's kill the other MAGA myth. Trump was never cleared. Grand juries in 2 different districts indicted him. The cases went away after he won the election because the Justice Department doesn't prosecute a sitting president. He didn't beat the charges, he outran them. That's not exoneration, that's a getaway car with a motorcade. And how did Trump respond? Back in January, he demanded that Jack Smith be prosecuted. That's the entire Trump management system. When the smoke alarm goes off, arrest the smoke alarm. As a success coach, I teach accountability. Trump believes in accountability too. He just thinks it's something you order for other people, like room service. Which brings us to the Senate's newest Sherlock Holmes. Missouri Republican Senator Eric Schmidt tried to catch former Special Counsel Jack Smith committing perjury. On live TV, Schmidt claimed he had texts placing Smith at an Atlanta Hawks game in February 2024, the day after Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis admitted a relationship with the prosecutor on her Trump case. Secret trip, Atlanta conspiracy. He called Smith, quote, a total dirtbag. One problem. Smith was at an Iowa Hawkeyes game. Women's college basketball in Maryland. That's not a perjury trap. That's autocorrect with a Senate seat. According to CNN, Schmidt's team checked the NBA and men's college schedules. It never occurred to them that women play basketball. So on one afternoon, Eric Schmidt was wrong about the facts, wrong about geography, and wrong about half the human race. That's a hat trick. which senator is hockey. The man used to be his state's attorney general, and his biggest breakthrough was undone by 4 letters: E-Y-E-S, which is also what he should have used. Senator Amy Klobuchar had to explain Atlanta versus Iowa like a kindergarten teacher spinning a globe. Did Schmidt apologize? No. He said, quote, Who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan? Buddy, everybody knew. Everybody except the guy holding the poster board. And this is the MAGA method. Don't ask whether a crime happened. Pick an enemy, yell perjury, and hope nobody reads the poster. It's not an investigation. It's a dartboard, and every dart has Trump's autograph on it. Schmidt wasn't questioning a witness. He was filming an audition tape for an audience of one. You can picture Trump in the Oval Office. He got him at the Hawks. Somebody get me the Hawks. Pro-Trump influencer Benny Johnson even posted that Schmidt had pulled out the receipts. By late afternoon, the post appeared to be gone, making it the most honest thing anyone in MAGA did all day. My coaching rule is simple. Before you accuse someone, check your facts. Eric Schmidt skipped that step. And the step before it and the whole staircase. Would you like to be the sort of successful person who is dominating news, at least in your industry? Well, if so, it's time to up your skills. At ultimize.com, I've created online courses to help you do that. Now, here's the thing. No obligation. You can get a free course on communication skills, a free course on how to build better habits. All you have to do is go to ultimize.com. That's ultimize.com. ze.com. No obligation. Go there now. And now some good news for everyone except Donald Trump. Donald Trump has become so toxic that Republicans running for Senate are avoiding him like a process server. The New York Times checked the 9 Republicans in the races most likely to decide control of the Senate. Just 4 of them want Trump campaigning with them or are even open to it. 3 won't say, 2 flat out said no. These people spent 10 years kissing the ring. Now they won't even text the ring back. Trump is about as welcome on the campaign trail as leprosy at a hot tub party. He's as popular as a giant AI data center in your backyard. Loud, overheated, sucking up all the energy, jacking up your bills, and everybody nearby is suddenly shopping for a new house. Actually, that's unfair to data centers. A data center occasionally produces something useful. And the 3 who left their positions unclear, that's the political version of your cousin asking to crash at your place and you saying, uh, let me check with my wife, and you're not married. Meanwhile, in Kentucky, a state Trump won by 32 points, Republican Senate candidate Andy Barr has been putting some distance between himself and the president. When you're getting ghosted in Kentucky, you're not a brand anymore. You're a product recall. Remember Derek Thompson's number? Only 12% of Americans have people over each month. Turns out Republican Senate candidates are right on trend. They've stopped inviting Donald Trump over too. 4 out of 9. For Trump, that's not a campaign schedule. That's a restraining order with yard signs. So this week, Do what the Republicans can't. Invite someone over. A neighbor. An old friend. Just use a little judgment on the guest list. Nobody who keeps national secrets in the bathroom. And definitely no Eric Schmidt. He'll show up in the wrong house, in the wrong state, and accuse your dog of perjury. I'm TJ Walker. Ultimize.
