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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Donald Trump Starts 2019 With Political Turmoil and a Democratic House
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Donald Trump Starts 2019 With Political Turmoil and a Democratic House
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- [00:00]
A
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B
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. It's Friday, January 4th. Dorothy I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. President Trump started the year in turmoil. His demands for funding for a wall on the U. S. Mexico border sparked a shutdown of the federal government. His plan to withdraw troops from Syria was met with opposition within his own party, and his secretary of defense, James Mattis, resigned in protest. The Dow had had its worst December since the Great Depression, Democrats took over the House of Representatives, and newly elected Republican Senator Mitt Romney published an excoriating op ed in the Washington Post rebuking the president's personal behavior and criticizing his policy agenda. Here's Romney speaking with CNN's Jake Tapper.
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C
I'm looking to try and represent things I think our country needs at a critical time. And I do believe that a president, like any leader in a home, in a church, in a school, in a business, a leader has an impact not just on policies but also on the character of the people who get to watch that person and I think that's an area the president needs to focus more attention and hopefully make some changes there.
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B
Susan Glaser joins me from Washington to discuss what's ahead for Trump and the Republican Party in 2019. Susan, welcome back.
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D
Thanks so much, Dorothy. Happy New Year.
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B
You, too. You know, as we just heard on that little clip of Romney, he's already sounding a softer note than the one he struck in that op ed. So what is he after here? Is he just the Jeff Flake of the new Congress?
- [02:59]
D
Well, it's a good question. I think. On the one hand, you know, observers are eager to anoint Mitt Romney as the leader of the Republican resistance to Trump, and he may well be putting. But for now, that resistance remains quite muted. And Jeff Flake has become sort of the symbol of that, often criticizing the president over the last two years in the Senate, but not as often voting against him or actively opposing him. And I suspect that is the role that, for now at least, Mitt Romney will fill. But remember, he has more stature in the Republican Party. He was the party's nominee for president. It now means that the two previous nominees before Donald Trump, both John McCain and Mitt Romney, have emerged as senatorial foes of the president. And I think it underscores the discomfort that continues with President Trump inside his own party. He was an outsider. He came in, he took it over. For now, he remains so popular with a Republican base, it's hard for him to be challenged. But I don't think that's a permanent condition.
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B
And yet I have been feeling that we can now see some of the cracks in the facade of unity. It was very striking to hear Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, all publicly criticized Trump in the wake of the Mattis resignation and the announcement of the troop withdrawal from Syria. So how seriously do we take that criticism?
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D
Well, you know, it's an interesting question. Right. So they were critical. And what happened? Nothing. Nothing?
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B
Well, except he made some. He altered the speed with which the withdrawal will occur.
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D
Yeah, even that is sort of questionable. They had never really agreed on a specific plan. He says right away the Pentagon comes back and says, you know, a period of few months to phase out our bases, small bases in, in Syria is what we mean by right away. It's not necessarily clear that Trump had a very specific idea and vision for how he chose or wanted to leave Syria. I do think that in the end, the lesson for me, especially on national security and foreign policy of the last couple years, is that Trump continues to consolidate power and authority and There are ways to postpone him getting what he wants, but ultimately, he has moved to fire a secretary of state. State a national security adviser. I've been happy to push aside a defense secretary who didn't fully agree with his own policy inclinations.
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B
Actually, let me just pause for a second, because one of our colleagues yesterday was asking me about this. Trump's decision to withdraw the troops from Syria. And, you know, he made no secret of his desire to do this should he be elected. So, you know, how damaging is that in the long run?
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D
Well, look, I mean, first of all, when it comes to Syria versus when it comes to Afghanistan, we're talking about a very different footprint of the US Military on the ground. So in the end, we only had about 2,000 US forces on the ground in Syria. So it's not like we had some massive occupation presence or military footprint there. And not only that, but we had a very muddled and confused mission there. Nobody really could tell you what our strategy was. The president, Secretary of State, and national security adviser, much more hardline, envisioned our continued extended and indefinite presence in Syria as a way to counter Iran on the ground. But it's clear now that President Trump never signed off on the strategy that his own advisors thought they were promoting. So, you know, again, it's not just a question of whether you have troops in a place, but what are they there for? What are they doing? And I think the same question could be advanced in Afghanistan, where Trump seems to be moving ahead with a pullout of about 7 of the approximately 14,000 US military on the ground there. But again, my question is, what are the remaining folks doing? What is our strategy at this point, so many years into the conflict in Afghanistan?
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B
And he just. He muddies the waters constantly. During that long, very strange Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, one of his more bizarre digressions was about Afghanistan and the Russian invasion of 1979. Tell us a little bit about that.
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D
Well, I'm glad you brought that up, Dorothy. When we look back on 2019, will we even remember that the first workday of the year was spent, at least in part, in a debate, a big national debate, over the president's bizarre endorsement of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? I have to tell you, it's not the thing. I woke up in the morning saying, well, here's how we're gonna start 2019. And what I found so stunning about it was that it's not just historically ignorant. It seems to parrot what he believes to be a kind of Russian narrative and Russian propaganda where did he even get that from? I lived in Russia for four years, and even hardline former KGB types never made the argument to me that this was a good thing for the Soviets to have done.
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B
Chuck Schumer was interviewed the other day on a podcast, and he was talking about how Republicans in Congress speak much more negatively about Trump in private than they do in public. And, you know, mainstream Republicans, as you mentioned, they've stuck with Trump through the scandals, the emerging trade war with China, the endless nonsense about the Wall, and Now, you know, 800,000 federal workers are really feeling the pinch. What would Trump have to do to cause a genuine rift in the party?
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D
That has been the question since day one. In many ways, I'll give you two thoughts that are somewhat contradictory. Number one, I do agree, and I've always thought that President Trump's support on Capitol Hill among Republicans, elected Republicans, is much less than meets the eye, that these folks never wanted him to be their party standard bearer. In many ways, he carried out a hostile takeover of their party, the party to which they spent their adult lives, in many cases dedicated to. I did an interview recently for the New Yorker Radio hour with Claire McCaskill, departing Democrat from Missouri. She made that same point. She said, you should hear how they talk about Trump in the Republican cloakroom and among her colleagues. And if there is an opportunity for them to successfully dump Trump, I think there are many who would join. But the flip side to that, though, is that the astonishing imperviousness of Trump's political base to any new or damning evidence against him, even as it piles up. At the beginning of 2018, the Gallup survey found that Trump had a 39% approval rating. At the end of the day, December 2018. After all that transpired in 2018, Trump's approval rating was 39%. It was as if nothing had happened.
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Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy, Kennedy Jr. Charlemagne, tha, God, and so many more. That's all on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts.
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When talking about Trump, we often evoke Richard Nixon. And one of the turning points in Watergate was when Nixon's Republican allies in Congress turned on him. So remind us what that looked like at the time, what it took for that popular president to suddenly be in bad odor and then ushered out of the presidency.
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D
You know, one of the first things I did when Trump was elected was I went back and I reread Elizabeth Drew's coverage for the New Yorker, collected in a book, Washington Journal, of that culminating Watergate year. And one of the things is that history seemed a lot more clear and inevitable in hindsight. And for me, I was really struck by the fact that, you know, she was interviewing Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee literally 24 hours before the crucial vote on articles of impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee. And many of them were still uncertain exactly how they would vote and how the vote would turn out. Now, of course, we know in hindsight that they all held hands essentially and jumped together, and most of them did vote for these articles of impeachment. And that, in the end, is what triggered the, the march of the Republican leaders up to President Nixon at the White House and telling him, as Hugh Scott, the Minority Leader, Barry Goldwater and others did, was that the time had come for him to resign and he could not survive these votes on Capitol Hill. So they weren't leading the way, you could argue, but in fact were the sign that the very end had come. They were a lagging indicator of President Nixon's fate. And I think in history has been kinder to them perhaps than it should be.
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B
So the conventional wisdom now is that Trump is safe from impeachment proceedings as long as Republicans control the Senate. So we now have Nancy Pelosi, the second time speaker of the House, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who themselves currently oppose any action on impeachment. That's not what the more liberal, you know, younger new members of Congress feel, but that's pretty much what their position is right now. But do you agree with the conventional wisdom? Do you think that Trump is safe from impeachment?
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D
Look, the conventional wisdom is always wrong. It's just a question of figuring out when and which part of it. You know, I do think that, of course, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have to say that right now. And that does not mean that they are inalterably opposed to pursuing impeachment. In fact, you've seen Pelosi's language on this change and modify somewhat in recent days. They're waiting.
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B
What has she said? I'm curious because I haven't noticed that particular shift.
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D
Well, she said, right now we're not pursuing it. Or yesterday, right before she was sworn in, as the new speaker of the House, she was asked about whether a president could not be indicted as per Justice Department policy. She said no. She disagrees with that. And again, I think there's an openness to pursue impeachment should the investigation of Mueller or other investigations produce material for it. So we wouldn't want them to be saying right now, well, yes, we're going to pursue impeachment. Even without the results of this investigation. Due process is crucial in any impeachment proceeding. That's the lesson I take from our three previous efforts at impeachment. This is such an enormous step to take. It is the only constitutional process for accountability, legal accountability of a president. And it's a blunderbuss of a process. Right. It's an enormous. It's like capital punishment is the only punishment allowed. And so you need to have process fairness. You don't want your speaker of the House out there before an investigation is finished saying, why, yes, we already know the outcome and we're going to pursue this political process.
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B
It strikes me that Trump, it's going to drive him completely crazy that Pelosi and House Democrats are now going to be stealing airtime and headlines from him and putting him constantly on the defensive. So, yes, it's going to be impossible to get, you know, all the legislation through that, all their grand plans. That's not going to happen. But how do you foresee the White House Hill dynamic evolving in the coming months?
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D
Well, it's a great question. And I think that in my own view, just to go back to this impeachment question, is that inevitably, the allegations against Trump, the investigations, his own dramatic response to that, are going to be the driving political dynamics of the year. I don't believe this is a year that we're going to be talking about landmark legislative accomplishments and a new era of bipartisan comedy as Trump joins hands with Democrats to get things done. I just. That's not going to be what's going on in 2019. And so I do think that we are likely to see the initiation of impeachment proceedings in the House. And I also agree that it's certainly not 100% forwarding conclusion that Trump is invulnerable in the Senate. The dynamics are very hard, and he has counted on that as his firewall. You would need approximately 20 Senate Republicans to agree in order to vote to remove him from office after any Senate trial. That's enormous uphill battle. The odds are obviously very stacked against it, but they're not zero.
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B
He's also unfettered now in a way that he hadn't been at least as long as Mattis, you know, the sole grownup in the room, as everybody loved to call him. He's now gone. He doesn't yet have a new secretary of defense. How chaotic are things in the White House right now?
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D
Yeah, I think chaos is the word. Right? It's extraordinary. I mean, you cannot overstate how disruptive it is and impossible to run the US Government, at least in the way that it has been run under Republicans and Democrats for the last few decades. With the lack of staffing and process and clarity of aim and purpose and policy that Trump has, you are talking about 65% turnover and senior levels of his administration over the first two years, according to the Brookings Institution. I believe the comparable figure for Barack Obama's after two years was 24%. It's an empty room. When he had the Cabinet meeting the other day, there were six acting secretaries there, the acting secretary of defense, acting interior secretary, acting attorney general, acting EVA administer administrator, acting White House chief of staff. These are crucial positions. It's essentially an administration of one.
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B
All right. Well, and the first podcast of the new year on that note. And I will have you back soon as things develop. Thanks so much for coming on.
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D
Well, thank you, Dorothy. I suspect it will still be in many ways an administration of one even later in the year.
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B
Susan B. Glasser, a New Yorker staff writer, writes the Letter from Washington column for newyorker.com this has been the political scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. And find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com Feel free to rate and review the political scene on Apple Podcasts. Our theme music is by Russell Gillespie. This program is produced by Alex Barron and Hannah Wilentz. For newyorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden. America is changing and so is the world.
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But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is the Global story.
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Every weekday we'll bring you a story.
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From this intersection where the world and America meet.
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Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts from. PRX.