Alex Vindman: "Her Payoff Was a Senate Seat"

Cliff’s Note:

Florida votes Tuesday.

So this one’s free. All of it.

Alex Vindman on the $10 million, Ashley Moody, and the grand jury report nobody’s allowed to read.

No paywall before a primary. Watch it, then send it to someone in Florida.

—Cliff

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Cliff Schecter sat down with Alex Vindman on Saturday, three days before Florida votes in the primary, to talk about the $10 million that left children’s Medicaid, the political committee it wound up in, and the grand jury report that still hasn’t seen daylight.

The full conversation is below, along with a complete transcript for anyone who’d rather read it than watch it. If you want the money trail laid out step by step first, start with Dr. Eric Lullove’s reporting on the Hope Florida scandal—it’s what sent us looking for this interview in the first place, and like this one, it’s outside the paywall.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the interview.

[ 00:00 ]

CLIFF SCHECTER: All right, we’re live. Welcome, folks. This is another edition of Amped Up, but a really special one—we don’t often do it on the weekends. I got the opportunity here to talk to someone I consider an American hero in Alex Vindman, who served on the National Security Council. You probably know the story. Sorry, folks, I’m hearing an echo of myself. Let me see if this stops it. Hold on. I apologize, Alex.

ALEX VINDMAN: No problem.

CLIFF SCHECTER: The key point being that you served, obviously, and stood up and spoke out against Donald Trump when it was necessary. You were on that infamous phone call. We all got to know you through that. It led to an impeachment. And after that, you’ve remained committed to fighting corruption, and you’re doing it now in Florida, running for the U.S. Senate. So thank you so much. And again, I see you as a personal hero and appreciate your being here.

ALEX VINDMAN: Well, Cliff, thanks for having me on. Looking forward to this conversation. I really appreciate the warm words. I frankly just think I was doing my job. How can I, after twenty years of serving in uniform, swearing an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, serving in combat as well as all sorts of diplomatic postings, fail to protect this country when I see it under threat? And that includes corruption. So to me, I just did what I thought the patriotic duty was—my duty—instead of shirking responsibilities.

[ 01:43 ]

CLIFF SCHECTER: I wanted to mention you were the director of European affairs at the National Security Council. I want to mention that you got a Purple Heart serving in Iraq. I mean, you’ve shown your patriotism and devotion to this country again and again, even though you were born in Ukraine. What age did you come over here?

ALEX VINDMAN: I was four years old. My family was fleeing communism, fled the Soviet Union. Mom passed away just months before we left.

CLIFF SCHECTER: I’m sorry.

ALEX VINDMAN: It was Dad raising us boys that brought us over here, promised us freedom and opportunity. So this is the only country I’ve known. Even coming over as young as four, we knew this country was special and worth defending and worth fighting for. I wasn’t sure I was going to make a full career out of it, but I knew I wanted to do something to pitch back in. And all my brothers—all four of us—served in uniform at one point or another.

CLIFF SCHECTER: Amazing. Four brothers. That probably was a very quiet household, I can say, from having two sons and my poor wife. But was it cool having a twin brother growing up?

ALEX VINDMAN: It was cool. And frankly, we couldn’t seem to hold down an apartment for very long. Initially we shared a one-bedroom apartment when we first got to the U.S. It was Dad and us three boys in a room. We thought that was pretty cool. I’m not sure how Dad felt about that. But he then remarried a year and a half in. That’s when we got the bonus brother and the mom that raised us. And then we couldn’t seem to keep a place for very long. I guess maybe we were a little rambunctious. I remember vividly three or four different apartments along the way. My twin brother and I are super, super close. He’s actually the baby—he’s nine minutes younger. So he’s got a lot to learn.

CLIFF SCHECTER: There’s a lifetime of wisdom in those nine minutes.

ALEX VINDMAN: I have to keep reminding him.

CLIFF SCHECTER: Yeah, you’ve got so much you’ve got to help him out with. But I’ll ask you this quickly, and then I want to get to how you’ve fought corruption and will fight corruption, and why your integrity has, again, proven itself—and we need more of that in the Senate. Your brother is a congressman. Have you asked him for any advice? I know you’re running for the Senate, it’s different, but it’s running for office. It’s a different role than you’ve played in the past.

ALEX VINDMAN: It is. He’s now a freshman congressman running for his first reelection. He’s done a superb job, actually. He is known as one of the most effective congressmen because he looks for solutions. To problems in the military, we think about mission first. And that means that bipartisanship is not an option, it’s a necessity. So: fight the fights that need to be fought, provide the guardrails, check corruption, demand accountability, but also look for solutions. So for me, probably part of my message here, and something I’m detecting from him, is we’re going to crush corruption and cut costs. Do something practical as well as provide the guardrails.

[ 05:16 ]

CLIFF SCHECTER: Well, I think that’s so important, and I like that you’re bringing both up, and I bet you’re connecting them. Because as we’ve seen—and with your background in European affairs—in the election against Orbán, for example, in Hungary, so much of what Magyar spoke about was that when you get rid of the corruption, you find that affordability becomes a real thing. Because so much of the corruption is, you know, which monopoly is giving Donald Trump this crypto gift or whatever it is. And so this ends up leading to more costs for all of us, because they won’t regulate anybody. So they’re very intimately connected, wouldn’t you say?

ALEX VINDMAN: Oh, it’s absolutely true. Hungary is an interesting case study on what happens with corruption, and frankly what happens when you come through corruption and there’s a democratic revival. A good friend of mine was a former ambassador there, so I ended up paying attention, as well as it being relevant to my portfolio in European affairs.

ALEX VINDMAN: Corruption is a national security risk. Corruption is compromising our national security. There are predictable relationships we should be having with our allies, and we should be warning off our adversaries, but a corrupt administration has decided to saddle up to our adversaries and abandon our allies.

ALEX VINDMAN: In the domestic context, it’s making life increasingly unaffordable. Just taking it down to my state level, it’s important to point out that my opponent for this general election is a woman named Ashley Moody. Nobody’s heard of her. She was in that role—how did she get there? She got there because she signed off on $10 million coming out of children’s Medicaid. These are needy children; this is their only source of medical care. And she siphoned off those resources. They ended up going to a political campaign, and her payoff was a Senate seat.

ALEX VINDMAN: I like to sometimes describe this in theatrical terms. If you’re a villain and you’re trying to make sure you recruit the loyalist henchmen—the person that’s going to be an automatic yes vote—you’ll test them. You’ll say, I want you to take away $10 million from children’s Medicaid. And if they do it, you’ve got somebody reliable for everything else.

CLIFF SCHECTER: Because they could do anything at that point. First I got to speak with your chair, Nikki Fried, a week ago. We talked about this, and I definitely wanted to highlight it. And then we have a contributor, Dr. Eric Lullove, to our enterprise here, who is based in South Florida. Because of his medical background—I’m going to put this piece in the chat for people—he wrote a whole piece on exactly the $10 million, the specific thing, and what Ashley Moody did. And I want to make sure people know that name, because not many people know it.

CLIFF SCHECTER: She was the AG, which is appointed in Florida. She signed off on this deal to take $10 million away from kids who needed it for health care and to put it into this charity started by Casey DeSantis or whoever, but it found its way into Ron DeSantis’s political committees to try to defeat a marijuana amendment. So this is money that’s supposed to go for kids—and I would argue medicinal marijuana is to help adults. They found a way to screw over kids and try to screw over those in pain, because Ashley Moody is a yes woman, and she’ll do, as you just said, whatever they ask.

CLIFF SCHECTER: So, you being a pro at this point at fighting corruption, being on that phone call that I’m sure you were horrified by at that moment, with Trump and Zelensky—who we didn’t know much about, and now we know is, I think, gone beyond Churchill in terms of status as a wartime leader. And you had to sit there and do that.

CLIFF SCHECTER: And I’ll just put in my one quick thing. When people think, oh, well—I know you say it matter-of-factly, oh, I was just supposed to do that. Well, a lot of people didn’t. I will never again respect—our senator here at the time, Rob Portman, was the head of the Ukrainian caucus in the Senate and had nothing to say about what was going on during that period of time. And you don’t need to comment on it, Alex. I’m just saying there are people who knew things who didn’t say anything, and you did.

CLIFF SCHECTER: So you’re ready to take on someone like Ashley Moody and her corruption. What else do you see, besides the fact that they’re willing to just rip away millions in health care from children? Were there other issues you see yourself taking on in terms of fighting their corruption and affordability?

[ 10:21 ]

ALEX VINDMAN: Yep. So I would say it’s a pattern with Ashley Moody, which is one of the reasons she has to be sent packing. As the attorney general, she received more than a million dollars from the big insurance companies. And Florida’s got the highest insurance rates in the country. That’s not an accident. Her predecessors challenged the big insurance companies when they failed to pay claims and advanced rates. She didn’t. She’s traded millions of dollars in stock, including in companies she has oversight over. She sits on the health services committee and trades big pharma. So this is who I’m up against.

ALEX VINDMAN: But that’s not all. The reason that issue is so salient with the electorate is because people are struggling here. Life is hard. I get to travel all across the state of Florida—more than 250 events. We’ve hit every corner of the state. We’ve been to the reddest parts of the state, the Villages.

CLIFF SCHECTER: Good for you. You’re going to rural areas and exurban areas and talking to everybody, right?

ALEX VINDMAN: But the Villages, you probably heard of it.

CLIFF SCHECTER: Yes. I had a friend who went down there—got stuck there with his girlfriend’s parents for a weekend. And he told me enough to make it sound like—I don’t know if you saw The Odyssey—it looked a little bit like where they ended up in Hades.

ALEX VINDMAN: It’s actually not that bad. It’s more of an even distribution, actually, more Republicans than Democrats. But what was interesting is, I’m probably the only candidate—I’m sure I’m the only candidate in the country—I literally walked the line of folks waiting to get into a Trump rally. He did a rally there. And I had my veteran baseball cap on, and I made it a point to connect with veterans.

ALEX VINDMAN: And what I’m hearing is folks that are being crushed by homeowners insurance rates. They’re planning meticulously for their retirement and they can’t afford to have their homeowners insurance rates triple. Over the course of three and a half years here, my insurance rates have doubled. So it’s pricing these folks out. It’s making it unaffordable for young folks to buy homes. The renters—on average, 37 percent of monthly income goes for rent.

CLIFF SCHECTER: That’s insane.

ALEX VINDMAN: The state is becoming increasingly unaffordable, and folks are working harder than ever. And the connection that they’re making is: do they blame the billionaires? Yeah. Do they blame corporations? Yes. But they really blame the corrupt politicians that are supposed to be representing their interests but instead throw them under the bus. It’s a rigged system in which we’re delivering for these power centers rather than for people.

ALEX VINDMAN: So for me, when I talk about cutting corruption, it’s because I want to be able to create space for good ideas to cut costs. So we can tackle homeowners insurance, so we can make sure we have high-quality education, so we can break down the cost of utilities, so we can make sure that Social Security is solvent. I just announced a policy yesterday that got picked up by the media about making sure that we scrap the cap.

CLIFF SCHECTER: Great idea. Yeah, I did some work with Social Security Works, the group, way back when. That was our big thing. Why are people—up to these days, I don’t know if it’s about $120,000—back then it was a little lower. I mean, why would you? It’s such a regressive tax. You want to tax billionaires? Here’s a good way to at least get to some of that money.

ALEX VINDMAN: Well, it’s interesting. Both Medicare and Social Security are programs that people pay into over the course of their working life. These are not entitlements, which is what they’re called, to use a derogatory term. These are earned benefits. You’re paying in every day, and you want to make sure those things are there for you. So when Republicans like Ashley Moody are passing legislation to undercut Social Security—which is one of the most important parts of the social safety net in this country—attacking our retirees, she’s attacking the folks that have paid into the system, that we made a promise we would take care of. To me, that doesn’t fly. My dad raised me better than that. He was pretty strict on making sure that we keep our promises. That just doesn’t fly with me.

ALEX VINDMAN: And we need to make sure that we send these people packing and make sure we provide opportunities. I talked about retirees. It’s working families also—policies to make sure that we stop a tariff policy that is a tax on every single consumer. We end it, and we return that money back to consumers, because we know what the corporations did: they passed down the cost to us.

CLIFF SCHECTER: Right, and we gave it back to them. It made no sense except in Republican world.

ALEX VINDMAN: And then finally, the young people. I’ve got a fifteen-year-old daughter. I want to make sure that she makes Florida her home, close to Dad. It’s the nightmare scenario: Dad, it’s too expensive. Dad, there’s not the opportunities here. Dad, they’re taking away my rights. So I’m going to fight tooth and nail to make sure that she has opportunities here, that she stays close, chooses to make Florida her home. And I could do something about that. I could make sure we’ve got twenty-first-century jobs here. So it’s very much an agenda of taking care of the next generation also, and expanding their American dream.

CLIFF SCHECTER: But don’t you think it’s worth it if she does end up having to leave? At least it’s because money was wisely spent on a ballroom up in D.C.—a really opulent and completely unnecessary ballroom, and that kind of stuff that really is what our country’s about. Am I correct?

[ 16:00 ]

ALEX VINDMAN: It is an absurdity of the day. We have never witnessed this kind of corruption. But we’re also at a point where people are ready for a good direction. What I’m seeing everywhere I go is an environment that is absolutely ripe for change. Folks do not want the same old, same old. They don’t want career politicians. This is the first time I’m running for office. I’ve got a proven track record as an Army officer, a national security expert that can get things done, tough tasks. And they want somebody like that, somebody that’s not beholden to special interests.

ALEX VINDMAN: So that environment, my unique biography of coming to this country as a refugee, serving in uniform, working my way up to the White House, and this uniquely vulnerable opponent—corrupt, with little name recognition—that is the perfect recipe for us to win the seat. And I’m getting believers. This is very much a grassroots-driven campaign: a quarter million donors making 500,000 contributions are powering this campaign. We need to scale that up and make sure we reach 23 million people. But I feel confident we can get there and win this seat.

CLIFF SCHECTER: Wasn’t your average contribution something smaller? I can’t remember what it was.

ALEX VINDMAN: [inaudible]

CLIFF SCHECTER: That’s what I thought. And so that’s hugely important. And we’re in the middle of this right now, folks, but I’m just going to tell you—I’ve got alexvindman.com up there. You can stay and watch this. You can also, in a different window, click on that and donate. Please donate. Because if he has the funds, that’s it. I can tell you, from somebody who’s worked on a lot of races, when you’ve got an incumbent nobody knows, it means he has an opportunity to tell people who she is, as well as telling people who he is. And that’s important.

CLIFF SCHECTER: I’ll also say—and I’ll let you speak to this—I’m sitting here in Ohio, and people said, oh, Ohio’s lost and Florida’s lost, Democrats can’t win there anymore. I mean, obviously I talked to your chair last week, Nikki Fried, who won there. I don’t think it was that long ago. But also, we here have Sherrod Brown, who depending on the poll is up between five and eight points. And our attorney general candidate and our gubernatorial candidate are both winning. I’ve seen David Jolly up in polls there. I’ve seen you up.

CLIFF SCHECTER: So what people need to get is that when Donald Trump ran in 2024—I’m not going to defend it, but sadly he had a positive rating in both Florida and Ohio. He now has a negative rating in Ohio, but I’ll tell you, I looked up the Florida one before I got here. The most recent poll, he’s gone from a plus-nine rating to a negative eleven. He’s 42 approval, 53 disapproval. That’s a twenty-point—as in a fifth, sorry, of the electorate turning on him. And what you’re looking at is a guy deep underwater. Ironic, because of everything they’ve tried to do or not do about climate change, but deep underwater in Florida.

CLIFF SCHECTER: And how people view the president is very important too. How they view the president and Ashley Moody, who are both viewed very negatively, versus a hero we have sitting here. This should be easy. Let’s get him the money and make sure he can do it.

CLIFF SCHECTER: So do you have thoughts at this point—about corruption and going after Ashley Moody, that’s obviously most important, she’s your opponent—but looking at, I brought up the ballroom, and we’ve seen this absurd crypto scheme and everything else. Do you have ideas for any ways that we might be able to reform Washington itself and get rid of some of this corruption? Because I think we just relied in the past on norms, and “oh, they won’t take advantage of that loophole.” We didn’t require them to release their taxes when they ran for president. Everyone since Nixon just had, because it was what you did. But we need to codify some of this now. So I’ll toss it to you.

[ 19:58 ]

ALEX VINDMAN: You’re absolutely right. Now, I’ll talk about the guardrails that we need going forward. But one last plug on Florida. What I’m seeing is pretty amazing. When I say that the electorate is ready for change, it’s not just guessing. It’s not polling. The contributions I’m getting to this campaign from inside Florida—tens of thousands of people pitching in—7 percent come from registered Republicans, another 13 percent from independents. My support comes from outside of a Democratic base. That, to me, is a transformed electorate showing up for us. Those are folks that are ready and ripe for change, that are tired of corrupt politicians, that want somebody that’s going to be a problem solver.

ALEX VINDMAN: What do I do when I get to the Senate? It’s going to be in the same two areas. It is going to be about guardrails. It is about the fact that our founding fathers conceived of a system of checks and balances where Congress provides oversight.

CLIFF SCHECTER: Did Mike Johnson get that memo, you think, or no, he didn’t get that one?

ALEX VINDMAN: Yeah, I think there’s a number of folks that are going to be in for a rude awakening about the fact that they’ve lived in an era of impunity, where they were unaccountable. That is not my life. That is not what I’ve stood for. Accountability is coming. Watch out.

ALEX VINDMAN: What that means is that when we have to pursue—wherever it takes us—oversight of abuses within the Department of Defense, politicization of our military ranks, negligence in the way we conduct our operations in regard to Iran, and what we’re seeing right now in the news about the Abraham Lincoln and how that’s told on our national defense and readiness, we will pursue that to the end. We’re going to do the same thing with regard to absurd ideas over ballrooms. The bottom line is accountability is coming. Get ready for it. Democrats are taking control of the House and Senate. You’re not going to be able to do anything about it.

ALEX VINDMAN: But that’s part of the equation. We’re going to fight the fights that need to be fought. Absolutely need to fight the fights that need to be fought. This is that beautiful line of good trouble and necessary trouble. We’re going to get into that trouble.

ALEX VINDMAN: But it’s all about delivering relief. It’s about making sure that we make life easier. So for me, collaboration is not optional. That’s me figuring out who I can work with to end a tariff policy. To make sure that we set up a safety net for insurance so it stays in Florida and backstops against natural disasters, and that will keep insurers here competing against each other and driving costs down. To make sure that we provide for education. To make sure Social Security is funded—that is going to have to be bipartisan.

ALEX VINDMAN: So we will fight the fights that need to be fought, guaranteed. And we will solve problems that need to be solved in order to make life easier for Floridians and for Americans.

CLIFF SCHECTER: Right. And I think that’s what we’re all looking for. You’ve proven you can fight, because you took on Donald Trump, and there was no predictability as to how that was going to turn out for you. We didn’t know where this country was headed. We still don’t fully know. And we want fighters, right, who are willing to take him on. But what I say to people all the time is, you need to support people who know the difference—which is, there are times to fight, and there are times there may be somebody, it could be Ted Cruz, it could be somebody who, I’ll speak for myself, I find reprehensible. But if he’s right on one issue, and on that one issue you can work with him and get something passed that helps people’s lives, that’s how we’ve passed legislation for generations. And I think that’s an important point you make. It’s not just, yes, fight. Fight them when they are wrong. And that will be a lot of the time. Most of the time, one could argue. But when it comes to something like Social Security, where you do have a bipartisan group, bring aboard the folks you can bring aboard. And that, to me, is what I’m hearing from you, and I’m really glad to hear it.

CLIFF SCHECTER: Is there any discussion in your campaign of what we might do to strengthen our relationships again with NATO or some of our allies? Obviously, your background. I’m not going to say I’m copping to this—I’m proud of this: I’m one quarter from Odessa originally. My grandfather came to this country when he was six months old—I wouldn’t be here—escaping pogroms in Odessa. So Ukraine has a place in my heart, beyond the fact that Putin’s a fascist and a thug. Let me toss it to you, what your ideas might be on these things.

[ 24:58 ]

ALEX VINDMAN: My family has roots in Odessa too. We came from Kyiv. We have roots back there also. So it’s an easy thing.

ALEX VINDMAN: Based on my diplomatic service, I’ve got some expectations that in the aftermath of even the midterm election, we will cast the reality that the U.S. will turn the page after 2028, and that we can return back to form, that we will once again be a champion of democracy and be able to work against authoritarianism. Our allies are looking for signals that we can get there. They’re right now kind of scrambling, muddling through. They’ve already accepted part of that reality: Europeans are investing in their own defense. But they’re going to be looking for an opportunity to embrace the U.S. and have that mutual support for our mutual community—protecting democracy and creating democratic value.

ALEX VINDMAN: So we just need to send these people packing, and then we have a lot of hard work to do. They’ll be more skeptical, but there are opportunities there.

ALEX VINDMAN: There are other challenges, frankly, that I think are more huge. We do look like we’re short of friends. Our enemies are predatory. They’re going to look for ways to drive wedges between us and our allies, and within the United States.

CLIFF SCHECTER: Especially with the propaganda. I mean, they’re doing that constantly, right?

ALEX VINDMAN: They’re doing that at every turn. A lot of what we’re seeing right now in the social media landscape is foreign-funded. This is just asymmetric statecraft. And we’re not doing enough to defend ourselves, because I don’t think the administration cares that much about stemming disinformation.

ALEX VINDMAN: I’m also deeply concerned about the Iran war. I think it’s going to go on. And it’s a war that has already cost eighteen lives, hundreds injured, $100 billion. Every day it’s costing folks at the pump, at the grocery store, pretty much for anything and everything. And this administration has no way out of it. And I’m worried that this is going to extend for months and months, because they’re incapable of pivoting into negotiations to get us out of it.

CLIFF SCHECTER: Do you think you’ll be in a position where you can step up, and others who have that kind of experience, with ideas? I mean, I wish you’d been there still, maybe in the National Security Council. Maybe you could have taken out some crayons and drawn the Strait of Hormuz with an arrow and pointed to it, and in very monosyllabic words tried to explain to Trump what that meant. But…

ALEX VINDMAN: Well, just remember, I was there doing that before. So I think I made a valiant effort to try to communicate in ways that could connect with the president to preserve U.S. national security. But how do you communicate with somebody that believes they’ve got all the answers and they don’t need expertise?

ALEX VINDMAN: I think that, yes, in the Senate there will be lots of room to provide oversight, and to press the State Department and Department of Defense to make better decisions, to navigate these errors, and see if we can figure our way out. My God, this was a major, major own goal. Nobody wants Iran to get nuclear weapons. But the threat was not imminent. We didn’t have to go into this war.

CLIFF SCHECTER: Right, we had an agreement that was working, right? I mean, inspectors were there. All right, so we’re coming toward the end. I know you’re busy, this is an important weekend.

ALEX VINDMAN: Action for us. We’re out in the field. Five thousand volunteers. We’re out at polling stations talking to constituents. It’s pretty awesome, frankly. Being out in the field, especially as an Army guy, is a terrific place to be.

CLIFF SCHECTER: No, it’s great. I just wanted to ask you, because we all have either relatives or know people in Florida, what can we best do to help you get over the line? Is it, for those of us who aren’t there, donating, of course—and alexvindman.com is still up there, please, folks, donate—otherwise, is it calling friends? Go ahead.

[ 29:39 ]

ALEX VINDMAN: So I think if you go to alexvindman.com, you can take a look at my policies. There are lots of experts. I know some things, but I’m not an expert in everything. So we’ll take that kind of advice.

ALEX VINDMAN: It is a place where you can sign up to volunteer. We’ve got lots of folks that are volunteering inside the state of Florida. It doesn’t have to be geographically limited. We’ll take folks from across the country pitching in with letter-writing campaigns, with outreach. There are veterans out there that are paying attention. Veteran-to-veteran outreach is critically important. We’ve got 1.5 million veterans and military families.

ALEX VINDMAN: And then the financial contribution—I think that’s just ground zero for a campaign. Florida’s different. That should be the motto. We’ve got Republicans, we’ve got Democrats, but we also have millions of non-politically-aligned voters. That is where we need to reach. These are folks that are not ideologically driven. They’re not paying attention to politics. They’re living paycheck to paycheck. They’re living their lives. So the ability to reach these folks that are not tuned into MSNBC, MS NOW, that are living their lives, that’s why I need the resources. That’s why this becomes such an essential figure.

ALEX VINDMAN: But when we get to the Senate, we’re looking at structural reforms. We kind of glossed over that. I’m looking to make sure that we end Citizens United, get money out of politics.

CLIFF SCHECTER: Absolutely.

ALEX VINDMAN: Another important place for me to go to—we need to look at reforms that allow Congress to be more transparent and reliable, and frankly agile and deliverable for people. So those are the things I’m going to be fighting for.

CLIFF SCHECTER: Fantastic. And so everybody knows, get out there, knock on doors. You can volunteer. If you’re not in Florida the way I’m not, trust me when I say I’m going to be emailing and calling everyone I know down there. And at some point I’m going to have to meet up with you and get you a key lime colada down in Key West, where we go sometimes for spring break with the kids, a place that I absolutely love.

ALEX VINDMAN: That’s beautiful. You’re welcome. Come on.

CLIFF SCHECTER: That’s fantastic. I’m trying to think again, and I know we’re just at the end—is there any other issue you wanted to cover? I brought up climate change. I don’t know if that’s something you discuss a lot on the trail. Obviously it affects Florida. It’s a pretty important issue there.

ALEX VINDMAN: Climate change is important. I think, frankly, people know Florida because it’s a travel destination. We’ve got some beautiful coasts. We need to preserve those. Climate change is certainly a major factor. People here in Florida are not skeptics, because they see it in their pocketbooks, their budgets, their accounts, because of the homeowners insurance. So these are important issues.

ALEX VINDMAN: I guess what you have with me is somebody that’s a problem solver. That’s really the takeaway. If we connect with folks on that level, I think we are winning—winning big.

[ 33:00 ]

CLIFF SCHECTER: Perfect. I’m just going to say at the end, put my pitch in. Look: Alex Vindman here, who has lived the American dream—the one we want to bring back—came over young and grew up here and ended up on the National Security Council, just sadly under the wrong guy, who didn’t appreciate his knowledge or integrity. And when that moment faces all of us, we all ask ourselves what we’ll do. And as you heard from Alex himself, it wasn’t even a thought. He didn’t flinch.

CLIFF SCHECTER: If you want somebody who is a patriot, a patriot through and through—and I mean that not in the right-wing sense of joining some militia, I mean in the sense of being for the United States of America, all of its people equally, and standing up for us—this guy has shown it on the battlefield. He has shown it in Washington. I just wish I had the opportunity to vote for you down there. As much as I’m going to enjoy voting for Sherrod and Amy and others up here, I wish I did. So I can’t.

ALEX VINDMAN: Everybody makes it here eventually. It might be a few more years. Everybody comes to Florida eventually. Again, really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you and to your listeners and your audiences. Thank you. Looking forward to seeing you again in the future and maybe having a lime—what did you say?

CLIFF SCHECTER: I said a key lime, because I go to Key West. So they make a nice key lime colada down there. I’m a big fan.

CLIFF SCHECTER: But otherwise, yeah, let’s have you on again in the future, obviously based on your schedule, and take this through to the end. Because again, folks: Trump’s at negative eleven. Ashley Moody is mired in scandal and took $10 million from kids for health care. These should be your walkaways. And we have a guy here who can win in Florida, a state we can win right now. Let’s go do it.

CLIFF SCHECTER: Thank you so much, Alex Vindman, for being here. Thanks, folks, for watching this special edition of Amped Up. We will get this sent out to everyone on the list, and we’ll get it put up at Substack and YouTube and Twitch and all the wonderful places. And I think that should do it for this Saturday. Have a great evening, and thanks for being here. Take care. I guess my sign-off is: as the sun sets slowly in the West, I bid you a fond farewell.

ALEX VINDMAN: Thank you.

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