Wyoming Rep-Elect Chuck Gray has only been in Washington, DC for a few days, but he’s already trying to offer disillusioned Republicans new hope for a path back to the majority.
After attending meetings in Congress with the freshman class of newly elected Republicans, Gray visited the Timcast studio Thursday night for a show with podcaster Tim Pool.
This is Gray’s second appearance on Pool’s show, after making his debut in September 2025 reacting to the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Gray, 36, shed a lot of his volatile campaign rhetoric and spoke directly to Pool’s unique national audience of young, mostly-male populist conservatives and disaffected liberals.
Republicans were trounced in the midterm elections, as they are projected to lose over 40 seats in the House of Representatives, leaving Democrats with historic majorities in Congress.
“It’s a big problem, and we’ve been talking about it in the freshman Republican class and we need to have an answer with policies that are going to improve the lives of the American people,” Gray said.
He said he is optimistic for the party’s future, citing the recent election of longtime Representative Jim Jordan as the Republican minority leader in the House.
With a conservative like Jordan leading, he argued, Republicans could get back to work to realign their policies to increase affordability and reduce government spending
The American public continues to suffer the punishing effects of inflation, he said, and Democratic spending policies would only further cripple the country.
"We need to talk about the fact that the number one cause of inflation is out-of-control spending,” he said. “Simple macro economics - they don’t teach it anymore, we have to be talking about it every single day.”
Massive Debt
Pool, 40, and his cohosts voiced increasing disillusionment about the future of the country while calculating the cost of the national debt.
The nation is over $40 trillion in debt, Pool noted, and the interest alone on national debt is the third-largest federal spending category, under Social Security and Medicare.
“What should we cut?” Pool asked, citing the nation’s nearly two trillion dollar deficit. “We need to cut three trillion dollars to start reversing course.”
The US spends over 1.5 trillion on social security, over $1.2 trillion annually on medicare, and over $1 trillion on interest from the national debt.
“That’s a little bit doom and gloom,” Gray responded offering a third option of pro-growth government policies that could help the United States grow out of its debt crisis.
“We can protect Medicare and Social Security. We can also create a plan to control federal expenditure, and it’s all centered around controlling discretionary expenditure, and as you do that, the cost of borrowing will go down,” he posited.
Enzi Plan
Citing debt-cutting proposals like the Penny Plan, introduced by the late Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), Gray appeared confident that a bill that reduced federal spending by one percent each year would help rein in the national debt and balance the federal budget.
“That glide path down is what’s going to bring confidence to the markets, lower the cost of borrowing, increase productivity and grow the economy. That’s how we lower the deficit,” he said.
Political progress on a proposed solution would be extraordinarily difficult, Pool and his co-hosts said, citing the stubborn 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate needed to pass significant legislation.
The problem, they noted, was how would Republicans convince enough Democratic senators to join a plan to reign in spending?
“You don’t think my charm could get me there?” quipped Gray with a grin.
He proposed that ending the Senate filibuster was the solution and could help Republicans push major legislation forward in the short time they have left in the majority.
“That’s part of why President Trump is saying nuke the filibuster,” he said.
Republicans, however, have no intention of doing so now, as they face working in the minority in both branches of Congress next year.
"Woke Wind"
In the meantime, Gray said he would spend his time in congress pushing for more access to markets for Wyoming coal, soda ash, and the development of rare earth resources.
He also vowed to fight the construction of inefficient government subsidized windmill projects in the state of Wyoming.
“I call it woke wind,” Gray said. “The media hated it.”
He pointed to the wind and solar lobby that spent heavily in Republican primaries in Wyoming and other states to defeat conservative candidates who opposed subsidizing green power projects.
That was a “big problem” he said, and vowed to keep fighting to cut the federal subsidies for those projects.
Pool and his co-hosts expressed concerns about the American electorate, pointing out they were increasingly flighty on issues that President Trump was elected on.
Trump campaigned on raising tariffs on foreign goods to push businesses to build their production facilities in the United States and hire American workers, but voters were furious about domestic price increases.
Trump campaigned on “mass deportation” of illegal immigrants, but voters recoiled at images of heavily armed government agents rounding up people in the streets. Business owners also balked at the prospect of losing cheap labor from illegal immigrants.
“In the long run, we are just in a recursive death spiral,” Pool said flatly.
In response, Gray urged the group to find hope in the Republican path forward, realigned with the same “America first” conservative values on which Trump campaigned in the first place.
“Give us a chance Tim, we’re going to show that we have the policies to save this country,” he said.
