The ‘Devil’s Bargain’ at the Heart of American Politics Now

Hi, I'm Robert Siegel in conversation about politics. E.J. Dionne is away this week, so I'm joined today by two guests, New York Times opinion contributing writer, Molly Jong Fast. Hello, Molly. Hi. Welcome. And Times columnist, Brett Stevens. Hi, Brett. Good to see you. We're starting today, and we are recording on Thursday morning, talking about a vital element of politics, compromise. Candidates don't typically campaign on promising a half a loaf, but often that's the best that they'll be able to deliver. And the uncompromising politician may end up delivering no loaf at all. Well, we're seeing some of this play out in a few ways right now. And let's start with one example from this week. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch has gone before the Senate. He's going before the Judiciary Committee for confirmation as permanent attorney general. By what standard should Blanch be judged? By the $2 billion slush fund that he used to support, or the freedom for Trump and sons from the IRS? Or should he be judged by the nominees who would likely be waiting in the wings if his nomination were to completely fail? Brett, I suspect a lot of people would say this is a no-brainer, but a lot of people aren't U.S. senators. Well, in a million years, if I were president, I would never nominate Todd Blanch. And it's kind of a sign of the times that we are, you know, in this position where he is the nominee. The question is, what is the alternative? Or what are the alternatives? One is that the Senate refuses to confirm him, and out of pique or spite, Trump keeps him in in his current job as acting attorney general. I think that's damaging. I think that's damaging to the rule of law, to just have a succession of actings in the highest positions. And it becomes a precedent, I think, for future administrations to essentially skirt the constitutional responsibilities of advice and consent that are given to the Senate. The other alternative is that he pulls another Matt Gaetz-type character out of his pocket and shoves a succession of them in front of the Senate. While keeping Todd Blanch as the acting AG. As if to say, you think you don't like Todd Blanch, look at what I've got next. The best that can be said for Todd Blanch is he was a well-regarded career prosecutor. Since then, it's been a less reputable record. Molly, what did you make of what you saw of the Blanch confirmation hearings? You know, it's interesting because if you think about there's another confirmation going on at the same time, and Bill Pulte is acting as our top sponsor. Director of National Intelligence. Bill Pulte, who is Donald Trump, got to know him through the Internet. He was an Internet philanthropist, right? So Bill Pulte, a real estate guy who is sort of most famous for finding mortgage crimes, which turned out to be not really crimes, that the president's enemies had committed, though none of those cases were ever proven to be criminal. So there are always worse people down the pike is a point that I'm trying to make when it comes to Trump. But I do think what I have been struck by so far is Cornyn has, you know, this is a person. Senator John Cornyn of Texas. Yeah, Senator John Cornyn. Outgoing senator. Yes, outgoing. Right, is a Texas Republican who is very well respected within the Republican Party. My sense is that he was, you know, really one of the good guys. In the Republican Party in that world, you know, like John John Thune, like, you know, a real establishment guy. Millions of dollars poured into his reelection. And at the 11th hour, it seems he's still not able to keep up with Ken Paxton and Trump comes in. This was his primary. Yes, his primary. Ken Paxton, the attorney general who was kind of MAGA before there was MAGA. MAGA, right. He just, Cornyn couldn't beat him. Right. And they were heading towards a runoff. And it was close. It was so close. And Trump would not endorse. And it's sort of right before the runoff, he endorses Paxton, thus sort of ending, you know, burning millions and millions of dollars, but also ending Cornyn's political career, at least in the Republican part. I mean, I don't know where else he would go. But what I was struck by in his questioning was that he saw where this was going and he saw what could really be a problem for Blanche and he dug into it. And that was. And so you really saw like the wheels turn and you saw how really smart senator could, if they wanted, just derail a nomination. Yeah. And look, he's a former judge. He knows the law very well. And he has a he has an ax to grind, rightly, because Donald Trump ended his career. That being said, and we're speaking on Thursday, I have to stress that. So we don't know yet how he's going to do it. My guess is and I'll have to eat crow if I'm wrong. He's going to vote to confirm on for the same reason that I suggested earlier, which is that the alternatives are likely worse. One of his points that he made in questioning of and questioning Blanche was you say that the slush fund deal is dead. Is there some way in which the government might still end up paying out part of this this slush fund? It seemed to be a set of questions that could be answered with a presidential action if if if Donald Trump cared to do that. Yes. My hunch is he doesn't care to do that. But I mean, it's such an egregious I mean, the IRS stuff is so egregious. The you know, the idea that Todd Blanche is going to give the Trump family and I think it was just the son's immunity from audits. I mean, personally, I mean, it was. It was just like clearly they had been sitting around cooking up whatever was the kind of most insane thing he could do for Trump and put it together. And you saw this in the in the testimony. There was this where Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, right from Louisiana, who was not trying for a gotcha. Right. Says you're a friend of Trump's. And he says, no, I'm Trump's lawyer. Was Trump's lawyer, as he says. But, you know, it's been interesting to me. Talking to Republicans or Republican leaning figures who occasionally speak to the president himself, not not not politicians, but well-off people. The two things that have really hurt Trump in their eyes are the slush fund and the reporting by The Times that Trump or his family enriched themselves by. Two point two billion dollars last year. That sits very ill, even among people who are his voters and in some ways his peers, because it reeks of a form of corruption that reminds me a little bit of my youth in Mexico when Lopez Portillo was president and the corruption was so very much nakedly on display. I think to go from. However, an imperfect democracy we have to like a full on kleptocracy in just, you know, two years, less than two years, I think is pretty jarring, even for the most cynical. Right. Because the rule of law is something that even most Republicans value. And I don't think that they objected so much during election years when they could tell themselves the alternative is that much worse. What you have with Trump is really putting into the shade whatever might have been said against Hunter Biden and his own dealings, which, remember, were topic A of discussion on some of the Fox News shows just three years ago. And by the way, I think absolutely valid points of contention. But this is something else. I'm just curious what what your thought is. This is speculative. If Senator Cornyn were to vote against confirmation and if he were to effectively. Block the confirmation of Todd Blanche, would he still be an extremely popular Republican in Texas? Would he be persona non grata for that? What's what's the personal consequence? I don't think it matters at this point. He's got six months left in in office. I think the question for him is a legacy question. Does he want to go down over this or be remembered? For this vote and a note of defiance against Trump or as I suspect, because he is a former judge, he cares about the separation of powers and honoring the spirit of the Constitution and doesn't want to see acting secretaries for the remainder of Trump's term. And I would add that Cornyn's problem is that he wasn't popular enough in Texas. I mean, you had Paxson who had been impeached. And was had gone to trial with a donor and had convinced senators, state senators not to vote to remove him. I mean, this is like. You know, this makes Trump look like Lincoln at the state level anyway. So I think the problem for Cornyn was always, you know, that he just could not out MAGA. Let's move on to another case of compromise that a lot of us read about and thought about this week, which was the remarkable career of Lindsey Graham, Senator Lindsey Graham, late Lindsey Graham, who had been one of the most fierce critics, Republican critics of Donald Trump. When he, Lindsey Graham, was seeking the presidential nomination and after that, and then became an insider in the Trump administration and a friend of the president. And, Brad, you wrote about this, that this was a choice that Lindsey Graham made. He could have remained in Cheney land being, you know, a prophet of what's wrong with this president. And he decided, and he was pretty open with people about this, that he was invited into the room and he liked that. You know, I knew Lindsey pre-Trump and was very fond of him. He was very funny. He was one of the three amigos with Joe Lieberman and John McCain who liked to defy partisan type, at least on a few issues. And they were united in things that I think mattered. They mattered a lot, like the defense of the Atlantic Alliance and, you know, what we used to call the free world. And so when he flipped, especially after John died in 2018, after McCain died in 2018, I took it really bitterly, maybe because I, you know, sort of set my teeth against, as a conservative against Trump, that he had betrayed everything that I thought were his principles to curry favor with power. After he died, it actually. It actually hit me harder than I thought it would. And in part because, say what you will about Graham's choices, in the last week of his life, he accomplished consequential things like a sanctions bill on Russia that the president is willing to sign, the president's agreement that Ukraine can conduct deep strikes into Russian territory, which are changing the balance of that war and hopefully bringing peace a little bit. sort of a laundry list of things, and I think They are as angry about inflation as the people who voted for Trump in 2024. But it seems like a kind of a short laundry list, which is it seems to be a Medicare for all and don't give Israel any money. Well, so I think these candidates don't want taxpayer dollars going to Israel for any number of things. And then I think single payer for sure. Now, I think there are other things they want housing to be less expensive. They want, you know, they want inflation to go down, which, by the way, is, you know, as Trump is finding. And I think you see in the polling, it's very hard. I mean, I think Trump did a lot of things to make inflation worse, obviously. But but even if you weren't doing that, it's very hard as president to get inflation to go down. You know, I understand the Democratic anger. But with any typically when people are furious, they do dumb things. I mean, when Republicans were furious during the late Obama years, they went and got them. They got themselves and got us, the rest of the country, Donald Trump. And I'm worried that the Democrats are about to fall into the parallel trap. Now, I know that there are going to be people listening to this conversation saying, oh, it's absurd of you to, you know, to suggest that MAGA has anything to do with those nice Democratic socialists who just want universal health care and, you know, peace and justice in the Middle East. But they also, if you listen to the platform of the DSA, want essentially an open border. And they talk about having control over the means of production. And there are two kinds of dangers that that poses. One is that they actually get an agenda through, which maybe call me an old fashioned conservative or even a liberal. That scares me. I believe in free market capitalism. But actually, I think the bigger fear, and this is something I say to my moderate Democratic friends, is these are the people Donald Trump wants to run against. You know, there is now a soon to be congresswoman from New York. Who, if you at least credit her tweets and other brainstorms from the last five years, kind of is a communist, like in the old fashioned sense. I'm old enough to remember this and sort of use this C word quite proudly. That's a lot to hang around the necks of the Democratic Party. And so I really think that the liberal Democrats represented maybe not by Chuck Schumer, but by younger Democrats like Jake Auchincloss or Seth Moulton in both of them. From Massachusetts, Andy Beshear in Kentucky. They actually should want a, I don't want to say a civil war, but a real debate in the Democratic Party. Are we Democrats or are we Democratic socialists? There's a significant difference between the two. And I'm looking for a passionate, articulate, old fashioned FDR type liberal to say we are not the DSA. This party does not represent us. That hasn't happened so far. And I fear that those Democrats are making the same mistake that kind of Jeb Bush Republicans made in 2015, saying Trump and all of this anger will subside and we will once again nominate a normal Republican. I both agree and disagree with you. So I there certainly are people who will be elevated. And and this has always been true. Let's remember the squad. Like we've. Seen AOC go from outlier to bridge builder. I mean, she is like it gets a lot of criticism from the left for being too centrist. So there are politicians who come into office and learn how it works. And then there are politicians who don't. One of the things that I'm struck by when we talk about this is there's a school of thought that that there are people who are angry that Cheney campaigned with Harris and do not think that they were able to grow the tent. The. One diagram for Democrats and Liz Cheney is, you know, let the audio show that I made a strange hand gesture. But the question is, like, did Liz Cheney grow the party or did Liz Cheney alienate the base? And is this the base fighting back to some? I think the evidence and I'm sure someone's going to contradict me, but the evidence still shows that elections are won at the center, not by growing your base. On. On the extreme right or extreme left. Harris lost for a number of reasons. She would say she got in too late. I think she was a bad candidate. I don't think she should have just been coronated. There should have been a better nomination process. But I do not think that she lost because she was insufficiently appealing to the Gaza protest types of people. I think they are loud, but they're not hugely representative. And I think the. Democratic Party would make a big mistake lunging to its left, trying to replicate what Trump did. Because remember, too, that the the far left voters that some Democrats think are are are winnable and stay at home. They live in New York. They live in California. They're not OK. Swing state voters in Wisconsin or Michigan or Georgia or North Carolina. Those are the voters that you have to win over by by playing to kind of middle class concerns of by people who have voted for both parties in their past. I do want to just add just because Trump did something that's interesting, which is he got these low frequency non voters to vote for him, which is why his victories were so strange. Right. So and I don't think that those voters are Gaza voters. I would just. I would just add here about where where these socialists have been elected or nominated when I was a kid, I'm a New Yorker who's been living out of town for 60 years. Yeah. And when I was a kid, my father told me about Meyer London, who was Meyer London, Milan was the socialist congressman from New York in the 1920s, about Vito Marcantonio, who was Vito Marcantonio, core of the American Labor Party and progressive New York City congressman. After that. Yeah. After the Republican Party was won over by the Goldwater rights, New York City nominated the most liberal Republican you could possibly find, John Lindsay, to be its mayor and he was elected. But it's not just New York. I mean, you have also a primary in Denver won by a DSA back candidate, the DSA back candidate for the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary is in the lead. It's happening outside of the usual kind of red diaper baby precincts of American politics. You know, we have a practice here to wrap up these discussions after we've been hearing about the horrors that lie in store for us in our politics or in foreign wars sometimes to just close on a note of joy of some some joy you've experienced recently that you'd like to share with us. Molly, why don't you? Kick things off. Oh, I have a rescue dog, a naked Chinese crested rescue dog named Inka Tardis. We call her Inky and she is it's just to have a rescue dog and to bring them into a little pack of tiny dogs that are running around and frolicking is really wonderful. And it's bringing me a lot of joy here. I am not embarrassed to say that the greatest section of the New York Times is not opinion or foreign. The best desk is the obit desk far and away. It's the first thing I turn to and not just because I'm looking for real estate as the old joke has it. It just has such great obituaries of people of improbable figures. And last week, the Times ran an obituary for the singer Bonnie Thompson. Tyler, who passed away sadly at the age of 75, a Welsh singer known to anyone who came of age in the 1980s on 1980s MTV for her song Total Eclipse of the Heart. Better known to a friend of mine as Total Eclipse of All Art. The obituary for her in the Times, which is just kind of one for the ages, is from Alex Williams. And I just have to read these. Two paragraphs, if you don't mind, on the song Total Eclipse of the Heart. Slowly and inexorably, momentum builds to climax after climax, during which Ms. Tyler's surging vocals, dancing on the edge of camp, seem like they could melt the microphone. Quote, together we can make it to the end of the line. Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time. The accompanying video, extravagant even by 1980s standards, was shot in a former asylum in Surrey, England. A mood of gothic horror with ninjas, half-clad football players, and altar boys with glowing eyes mixed in, turn around bright eyes indeed. It seemed to play once an hour on MTV at the height of the network's influence. And I just want to say thank you to Alex for absolutely making my morning with such a wonderful obituary. And for me, I just have to confess that once again, as it happens every four years, even though I think I don't care, I have been totally. into the World Cup and have enjoyed it tremendously. tremendously. Who are you cheering for in the final? Well, I keep on losing all the teams that I cheer for. I started out being a good USA fan, and then the Francophile in me came out. But it's great stuff. And even with the craziness of the US red card, which reminds one that something that involves the Trump administration and FIFA has the ethical possibilities of a professional wrestling match. It's quite a combination. I guess I hope Messi does well and wins it for Argentina. But I don't have a strong preference. Do you? I am rooting for Argentina, but for reasons that are so abstruse that I'll leave them for another conversation. On that note, Brett and Molly, thank you both very much for a wonderful conversation. Thanks a lot. Thank you for having me. Thank you.