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

Hi, I'm Robert Ciel in conversation about politics. E.J. Dion is away this week, so I'm joined today by two guests, a New York Times opinion contributing writer, Mollie John Fast. Hello, Mollie. Hi. Welcome and Times columnist, Brett Stevens, Hi, Brett. Let's 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 Blanche has gone before the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation as permanent Attorney General. By what standard should Blanche 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 of 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 US senators. Well, in a million years, if I were president, I would never nominate Todd Blanche. And it's kind of a sign of the times that we are 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 peak or spite. Trump keeps him in his current job as Acting Attorney General. I think that's damaging to the rule of law to just have a succession of Actings in the highest positions and 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 Gates-type character out of his pocket and shoves a succession of them in front of the Senate. While keeping Todd Blanche as the Acting AG. - As if to say, you think you don't like Todd Blanche. Look at what I've got next. - The best that can be said for Todd Blanche 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 Blanche confirmation hearing said? - No, it's interesting because if you think about there's another confirmation going on at the same time and Bill Polti is acting as our top spy for the country. - Director of National Intelligence. - Bill Polti, who is Donald Trump, got to know him through the internet. He was an internet philanthropist, right? So Bill Polti, 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 Kornin has, you know, this is a person. - Senator John Kornin. - Yes, Senator John Kornin. - Oh, going Senator. - Yes, absolutely. - 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 Tune, like a, you know, 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 Paxson and Trump comes in. - This was his primary, which Ken Paxson, the Attorney General, who was kind of Magga, before there was Magga, right? He just, Kornin couldn't beat him. - Right, and they were heading towards the runoff and it was so close and Trump would not endorse and it's sort of right before the runoff, he endorses Paxson thus sort of ending, you know, burning millions and millions of dollars, but also ending Kornin's political career, at least in the Republican Party. 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 a slush fund. 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 an axe to grind rightly because Donald Trump ended his career. That being said, and we're speaking on Thursday, so I have to stress that so we don't know yet how he's gonna vote. My guess is, and I'll have to grow if I'm wrong, he's gonna vote to confirm 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 slush fund? It seemed to be a set of questions that could be answered with a presidential action 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, the IRS stuff is so egregious, 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, firstly, I mean, 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 testimony, there was this where Senator Kennedy asked, right, from Louisiana, who was not trying for a gacha, right? It says you're a friend of Trump's and he says, no, I'm Trump's lawyer. - It 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 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 enrich themselves by $2.2 billion 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 a full on quote, talker say in just 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. But 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 your thought is, this is speculative. If Senator Kornin were to vote against confirmation if he were to effectively block the confirmation of Todd Blanche. Would he still be an extremely popular Republican in Texas? So would he be persona non-grata for that? What's the personal consequence? - I don't think it matters at this point. He's got six months left 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 Kornin's problem is that he wasn't popular enough in Texas. I mean, you had Paxton who had been impeached and had gone to trial with a donor and had convinced Senator as 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 Kornin 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, the 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. This was a choice that Lindsey Graham made. He could have, he could have remained in a chainy land of being a profit 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 a lot, like the defense of the Atlantic alliance, and 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 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 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 closer. And probably saving NATO from Trump's de facto destruction of the organization. And I remember asking myself after he died, well, if that's what he was able to do by sucking up to the president as nakedly as he did, maybe I shouldn't scorn him or hold him in such contempt as I had for years after he had, as I thought, gone over to the dark side. And so it caused a reflection and a reconsideration in a column that I wanted to be public about. I mean, I know everyone says what it was a devil's bargain, but some devil's bargains, you might say, are worth the price. Would Ukraine be safer today if Lindsay had kind of gone up against Trump, gotten himself primaries six years ago and would have been sort of blabbing from a seat on a CNN panel today. I'm not sure that would be the case. - So the question is like, if Lindsay Graham were a professor of Clemson, writing op ads, would Ukraine be safer? And it got me thinking about all of these senators who have sort of fallen from Trump as like the Jeff Flakes. I mean, the real, all the people, the Republican, the sort of old-school Republicans who could not, who couldn't join them, and I wonder, I mean, the problem with all of these bargains is that almost all politics is a devil's bargain. And I mean, Federman is another example of someone who came in, and a lot of us thought he was one thing, and he became a very different thing. But the problem with Trump, I think, and this is a fundamental problem with Maga, because Maga is Trump, is that Trump is always most reactive to the last thing that someone has whispered in his ear. - Yeah. The, look, in all politics, you do ask yourself, just how slavishly you're prepared to follow a party line. And politics does expect acts and proofs of loyalty. I mean, that's just the nature of the game. And I think that's true, by the way, on both sides. You can see a lot of Democrats signing up to things they really don't believe, because they feel that party unity demands things. And it's always a question of whether you're willing to partially submerge your convictions in order to curry favor, because you feel that will advance your goals. Or when I think of, say, JD Vance, this guy is entirely plastic. His convictions are whatever suits a political moment or a perceived political opportunity. I think there's a meaningful difference between a Lindsey Graham and a JD Vance. Lindsey never gave up on Ukraine. He never gave up on his sort of Atlantisist convictions as belief that America should be a force for good in the world. And so he didn't do what Liz Cheney did, which is essentially get himself evicted from the party, but maintain a sense of moral purity, which I can respect, but you don't succeed in politics typically by playing a martyr. And that's the choice he had. - I think a Cheney fan would resent purity and say integrity. - Okay, integrity, you know, you're right. And she does, I have great respect for Liz Cheney, but she is not, she's not an influential person anymore. She is a person who sacrificed herself on an altar of truth. And that's great, but the world sadly moves on. - The operative who found Graham Platner had talked about how voters don't want candidates who were grown in Vance. - Yes, they're inauthentic. - They're inauthentic. - I mean, we're killing ourselves, I don't know. - The basic problem, and this gets to the original premise of our conversation, which is compromise. You know, one of the tragedies I think of political life in America today is it's become a contest between the shameless and the stainless. Politics now to enter political life makes demands on a human being that I think would be very difficult for most of us who've lived normal lives. And so if you're not a stainless person, right? If you haven't lived an absolutely unblemished life if no one has ever criticized you, then you'll go into politics. I mean, Mitt Romney was in politics very honorably, I should say. I mean, the guy never had a cup of coffees, you know, a stainless guy. But that's a standard of very few people attain. And then on the other side are people who are shameless. They don't care what comes out about them. They'll go for it. Graham Platner in that sense was a perfect emblem of shamelessness. How do we return to a politics where normal people don't feel inhibited from entering the political game? So that line from the political operative who discovered Platner is one I actually endorse. We don't want candidates who were grown in vats. We don't want rapists either. And unfortunately, the choices with which we're now typically presented, increasingly, by the way, leans to the shameless side, people who just don't care what's said about them. Donald Trump's a perfect emblem of that. - And it's my impression that authenticity can get you through almost everything in American politics. It can be Donald Trump, that's Donald Trump, that's who he is, that's what everybody is. - He's become a substitute for honesty. You can be an authentic liar. That's what Donald Trump does. - But Donald Trump also was a celebrity. - Yes. - Like, celebrity plays a huge role. And the reason that I think, I mean, part of the, the reason that JD Vance is unable to capture any of Donald Trump's whatever kind of political magic that he has, I think is partially because he is pretty smart and partially because he's not a celebrity. - Keeping with the theme of compromise, the recent primary successes of a few democratic socialist candidates, could soon force concessions from the democratic party leadership, or the DSA newcomers will compromise on their values once they're in office. Molly, what do you make of the new, new, new left in America? - So I would, so I think there are a couple of things happening that have opened the door to this insurgent group. I think the larger issue here is that the base is furious. And I think we're not seeing that so much in our world. I think that the elites are not as furious because I talk to all these different candidates from my podcast that are sort of state level candidates. And what I hear from them is voters, or democratic voters are furious in a way that Republican voters were furious. Like in 2018, democratic voters, you know, they would go along with a Chuck Schumer, you know, kind of chance. They just wanted the nightmare to be over. And I think now, fast forward a decade, they want more. They want, they have a 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 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 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 healthcare 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 last five years, kind of is a communist like in the old fashion 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. So I really think that the liberal Democrats represented, maybe not by Chuck Schumer, but by younger Democrats like Jake Alkenklaus 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 there certainly are people who will be elevated 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 there are people who are angry that Cheney campaigned with Harris and do not think that they were able to grow the tent. The Venn diagram for Democrats and Liz Cheney is, you know, like the audio show that I made of strange and gesture. But the question is like, did Liz Cheney grow the party or did Liz Cheney alienate the base? And is this the base biting 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 one at the center. But by growing your base on the extreme right or extreme left, Harris lost for a number of reasons. She would say she got into 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 far left voters that some Democrats think 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 playing to kind of middle-class concerns 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? And I don't think that those voters are Gaza voters. I would just add here about 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. And when I was a kid, my father told me about Mayor London, who was Mayor London. Violin was the socialist congressman from New York in the 1920s about Vito Marc Antonio, who was Vito Marc, core of the American labor party and progressive New York City congressman. After the Republican Party was won over by the gold water 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. You have also a primary in Denver, one by a DSA back candidate. The DSA back candidate for the Wisconsin Democratic Aburnatorial 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 and foreign wars sometimes. To just close on a note of joy, if some joy of experienced recently that you'd like to share with us, Molly, why don't you kick things off? I have a rescue dog, a naked Chinese-crested rescue dog named Inca Tadas. We call her Inki 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 frolicing is really wonderful. And it's bringing me a lot of joy. 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 obituries of people, of improbable figures. And last week, the Times ran an obituary for the singer Bonnie 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 searching vocals dancing on the edge of camp seemed 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, conjuring a mood of gothic har 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 sucked into the World Cup and have enjoyed it tremendously. - Who are you cheering for in the fire? - Well, I keep on losing all the teams that I cheered for. I started out being a good USA fan, and then the Franco-File in me came out. But it's great stuff. And even with the craziness of the U.S. red card, which reminds one of something that involves the Trump administration and FIFA, it 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 to you. - I am rooting for Argentina, but for reasons that are so abstract, 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. [BLANK_AUDIO]