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Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Abby Livingston.
That drinking-water-from-a-fire-hydrant rhythm of the Trump 1.0 days has most certainly returned to Washington. And this time, the water’s coming at Democrats and Republicans with a much fiercer force, as daily life is organized around not merely the president, but also Elon Musk, R.F.K. Jr., etcetera. Today, I have the latest on the R.F.K. nomination, while my colleague John Heilemann’s recent interview with Senator Brian Schatz is a must-read. And lastly, my partner Dylan Byers has the dish on Chuck Todd’s exit from NBC News (from Chuck himself!).
Let’s begin…
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Dylan Byers |
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- Todd man out: On today’s episode of The Grill Room, I hosted NBC News vet and former Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd for a veritable exit interview after two decades at the network. In this short excerpt from our wide-ranging conversation, Chuck offers his candid take on the string of legal settlements brokered by media organizations that have been targeted by Trump. (Download The Grill Room to enjoy their entire chat.) Herewith…Dylan Byers: Trump has leverage to bring these lawsuits in a way that the news organizations do not…
Chuck Todd: Of course he does, and by capitulating, you’re just sort of enhancing the idea that this leverage is constitutional power, whereas it’s simply business leverage. And that’s what makes it a little scary, because it’s sort of like they’re just folding and not even testing the premise. I mean, it’s questionable whether these tariffs are legal. So in theory, Congress should be suing the executive branch for usurping their authority. But do you think a Republican-controlled Congress is going to fight to get their authority back in this case? Of course they’re not…
I think major media organizations owe it to their journalists to have their backs in good times and in bad. Journalists are going to fear for their jobs, and companies are going to fear lawsuits. And by essentially accepting the premise that the lawsuit is legitimate by settling, you’re just encouraging more of this; there isn’t going to be less of this. And all it’s going to do is make the public trust all of us less.
[Listen to the full episode here.]
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The Cheap Umbrella Caucus
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There was a fleeting moment, shortly after Trump’s victory, when it at least looked like Senate Republicans might exercise some independence. They elected John Thune as majority leader over MAGA favorite Rick Scott; they avoided Trump’s push for recess appointments; and they torpedoed Matt Gaetz’s A.G. nomination before it even got to committee. Of course, those days are long gone: Barring a surprise John McCain moment, Trump’s most controversial nominees— Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard, and R.F.K. Jr.—are highly likely to be confirmed, or, in the case of Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, already have been. As one Republican operative on Capitol Hill put it to me today, Republican Senators have “folded like a cheap umbrella.”
And yet, over the past few days, Democrats held on to the fantasy that Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee—and who, as a physician, expressed serious reservations about R.F.K. Jr.’s bid to lead the Department of Health and Human Services—would vote against Kennedy’s nomination. After all, Cassidy’s committee has partial jurisdiction over H.H.S., and a nay vote from Cassidy—along with other potential swingers Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell—would have been enough to kill the nom. Earlier today, however, he announced that he had extracted concessions from Kennedy, and had gotten to “yea.”
I spoke to plenty of Republican sources today who felt sympathy for Cassidy. He’s up for reelection next year in his Trump +22 state, and has already attracted a primary challenge. These sources were also quick to point out that, even with his “yea” vote, it’s not clear he can count on Trump’s support in his next race: Cassidy, you may recall, was one of seven G.O.P. senators who voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial over January 6, which is how he attracted the primary challenge in the first place.
Meanwhile, Susan Collins announced her decision to vote for Tulsi Gabbard to serve as director of national intelligence, even though she’d appeared to waver after Gabbard’s rocky Intelligence Committee hearing. (Collins was a rare G.O.P. “no” vote on Hegseth.) Here, the timing also seemed significant: Collins made her announcement shortly after Elon Musk’s latest series of power grabs—in particular, gaining access to the Treasury payment system and attempting to kill USAID—which carry the potential to hollow out Collins’s power as the Senate’s top appropriator.
Collins, too, faces reelection next year, although unlike Cassidy, she’s more vulnerable on her left flank than her right. She’s the last Republican senator in New England, and will be a Democratic target next year. So far, she hasn’t been punished for controversial votes, including her vote to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court just weeks before the 2020 election. That year, she easily won reelection against a Democratic candidate who vastly outraised her, but the stakes of this vote are potentially higher—and the political consequences possibly harsher—since the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created specifically to prevent another 9/11. In the event of another national security catastrophe, Democrats will hold this vote over her head.
In the end, MAGA pressure has overwhelmed many reluctant Republican senators. The next question is whether House members will face the same scenario during coming tax cut negotiations. Between California, New Jersey, and New York, there may be a dozen or so House Republicans who object to a bill that caps state and local tax deductions, known as SALT, that give some tax relief in high-cost states. If the Senate calculation regarding nominations was all about placating Trump to avoid getting primaried, some House members will have a trickier challenge. Pro-SALT Republicans may get on board with Trump in order to avoid their own challenger, sure, but they’ll also have to defend a vote that hits their constituents in the pocketbook.
And now, over to Heilemann…
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Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz has a message for shell-shocked Democrats struggling to find the right resistance in Trump 2.0: “Don’t chase every flying monkey Trump hurls at us.”
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In the face of Donald Trump’s blizzard of executive actions in his first two weeks back in the big chair—some of it purely performative, some legally dubious (at best), all plainly designed to disrupt established norms and long-standing precedents with respect to the division of power between the presidency and Congress—the Republican majorities in the House and Senate have shown little appetite for pushback. In fact, many seem to welcome the usurpation of their traditional prerogatives. Meanwhile, Democrats, befitting their minority status in both chambers, have expressed plenty of desire to push back, but have been at a loss regarding how to do it.
Which is why the move made yesterday by Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz is worth noting. In the wake of Trump and Elon Musk’s bid to shut down USAID, Schatz—who served as a Democratic congressman, lieutenant governor, and state party chair in the land of luaus before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012 (and who incidentally attended the same high school as Barack Obama and Michelle Wie)—vowed to place holds on Trump’s State Department nominees until the agency was up and running again.
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“We are out of power, but we are not powerless,” Schatz said when he came on my Impolitic podcast at the end of last week, before the USAID fracas broke out over the weekend. In advising Democrats to get over their shell shock and to start using their leverage, he foreshadowed the type of assertive tactic that he uncorked yesterday. At the same time, Schatz advised his party against chasing “every flying monkey Donald Trump hurls at us,” and urged his colleagues to focus on those Trump actions that “do real harm” while ignoring those where the president is merely “using executive orders as substitutes for tweets.” As usual, this excerpt has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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John Heilemann: Trump is constantly testing the boundary of what executive authority is versus what the legislative branch was intended to have in its purview. What are your thoughts on all this?
Brian Schatz: I think there’s an unholy alliance between Trump’s basic instinct to just press boundaries, break rules, and push people around, and now there’s a kind of underlying legal theory that is trying to white-shoe-law-firm-up his authoritarian tendencies. I think that’s the balance someone like me has to strike. We have to separate out those things where he’s just trying to wish a political problem away [from] where he can do real harm. Because of his federal funding freeze, portals were shut down, housing projects were stopped, loans were stopped, and all the rest of it. That’s real harm, and we had to intervene. Whereas, some of this other stuff is just like, he’s using executive orders as a substitute for a tweet. And in those instances, I think we have to monitor them, but not overreact.
On both the right and the left, there’s this tendency to think of [Trump] as all-powerful. Online, people are like, Well, it’s all moot because the Supreme Court is bought. I’m not pleased with the Supreme Court at all—and I do think we’re gonna get some adverse opinions—but they talk about not obeying in advance, and that goes for the left, too. We’ve still got leverage. The filibuster still exists. These statutes still exist. We still have some Republican colleagues who are going to, at least quietly, push back when it comes to their prerogatives. So I just think it’s very important for people on the left to not assume that this guy just writes something down and it’s now the law of the land. Part of what we have to do is sort out how much of this is just talking, and how much of this is, Oh, he’s doing it. For example, on tariffs, he’s got pretty unambiguous authority to just raise our prices by next week. So that’s real stuff. But him yammering about Greenland—it’s not happening.
A lot of Democrats have viewed the O.M.B. memo being rescinded as the first win of Trump 2.0. JB Pritzker said the pressure from governors and people outside is what led them to have to climb down. Do you see it that way? Does this point the direction toward how Democrats should go about taking on Trump in this new term?
Firstly, yes, I think this was a minor victory, but it’s going to be a long battle, specifically on the question of federal spending. Politically, we have a long road to travel, and so this is not like, Hey, we had a great week, good job, everybody. But it’s important to remember that we are out of power, but we are not powerless. We have tools in our toolkit, and we have to start using them. I do think we were so shell shocked by the loss, and—in my view, appropriately—not running back into the same fight with the same playbook, that there was a little bit of, What the hell, what’s the plan?
I understand the frustration. The easiest thing in the world would have been to rev up the outrage machine, and that’s a recipe for only once in a while being the majority party in Congress and in the presidency. So we’ve got to do some thinking about how to reconstitute the Democratic Party.
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Now, the good news is that public opinion is thermostatic. Trump and his people have shown a willingness to try to operate with impunity and overreach, and that will cause an electoral backlash—and so we have to marshal those forces. The other good news is that this is the first time I’ve looked my colleagues in the eyes, and everybody has collectively agreed that we need some structural changes: the way we talk, the way we think, how our coalition is put together, how we campaign, how we govern—all of it needs to be reconsidered.
We are in a period of trying to get back to full strength. But the easiest thing in the world to do would be to slap a new coat of paint on and say everything is fine. That might have gotten us through these next midterms, but that would not get at the structural problem that we have, in which most people are agreeing with us, and yet they kind of don’t like us as humans.
The fundamental message was handed to us on Inauguration Day. Their whole enterprise is to distract us with culture war crap and get us fighting with each other while they pick our pockets on behalf of the wealthiest human beings that have ever walked this earth. It’s easy to say. It’s absolutely true. It immediately resonates and unites the coalition that comprises not just the Democratic Party, but even some people who at a cultural level are like, Fuck those guys. So there’s an opportunity for us if we can stay disciplined. We still have to fight all the other bullshit, but we don’t have to chase every flying monkey that Donald Trump hurls at us.
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Is this more a moment for Democrats to be rethinking their ideological orientation regarding what they believe, or is this a moment to be focused on thinking about tactical, strategic messaging changes?
We lost a bunch of people who are nominally liberal, who voted for Donald Trump. There was something in the water culturally that didn’t have to do with where we are on the right-left spectrum. I want to recognize that was part of the problem. My own view is that people were very, very pissed off at inflation. People were very, very pissed off at having an old president who didn’t look like he was up to it. And we could shake off some of that with Kamala Harris running a vigorous—and, in my view, excellent—campaign, but we couldn’t shake off all of it.
I think, ideologically, on questions of immigration and the border, we should go back to home, which is not to accept cruelty to immigrants as the Democratic Party position, but to just get across that we believe in order. On immigration, we do need to shift back to the Obama/Clinton view. I don’t think that’s true across the board.
For the people who’ve expressed this newfound sympathy toward the Republican Party, the main objection they had to Democrats was they just couldn’t see Joe Biden serving another four years and being capable. At least Donald Trump looked vigorous. He’s only two years younger than Joe Biden, but he’s wrong and strong. He looks like he’s in charge of things, even if he’s incompetently in charge of things. So I think our next nominee ought to be from the next generation. I don’t know if that’s someone in their forties, fifties, or sixties—but I do think that we are ready for a generational shift.
The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last recently argued that the Supreme Court is now the only institution that can check Donald Trump—but at least two votes there will support anything he wants to do, and the court has already granted him blanket criminal immunity for official acts. So, he points out, “any meaningful check on Trump will require the participation of a large number of elected or appointed Republicans who have
not taken sides against Trump en masse for nearly a decade.” And his question is, look at the system and tell me why it won’t produce the kind of outcome we would see in Belarus. Is that catastrophizing?
I think it’s both catastrophizing and potentially true. There’s something in between “everything is going to be okay” and “we’re all cooked,” and that’s where we should all live. Democracy is not what we have, it’s what we do. The separate and coequal branches of government are not inert constitutional provisions. They’re about exercising power. And I think that wins beget wins, and losses beget losses. People are desperate and terrified. And I understand that point of view. But we have to not presume we are powerless. Like it or not, the filibuster is still in place. So if Donald Trump doesn’t like one of these laws, he can’t waive it by executive order; he’s got to come back to us. If he wants a federal spending bill, he’s gotta come back to us. If he wants to waive any of the provisions of any statute, he has to come back to us. And look, I think the courts are going to back him when it’s close, but we have to remember, some of the things that he’s doing are not close. I don’t think he’s going to get rid of birthright citizenship because the constitutional language is absolutely plain.
All I would say is that if we’re going to win this, everybody has to live somewhere in between “we are cooked” and “we are going to be just fine.” But we have to be vigilant. We have to work together. We have to kick ass. And as my old friend, the former Speaker of the Hawaii House of Representatives Calvin Say, used to say: Be like the bamboo—bend, but don’t break.
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