Trump has managed to spray his musk over every single candidate so that they cannot escape it. I’m shuddering at that thought, by the way. Hi, I’m Robert Siegel. In a conversation about politics with as always, New York Times Opinion contributor E.J. Dionne. Always fun to be with you. And returning this week, Mona Charen, policy editor of The Bulwark and host of “The Mona Charen Show.” Welcome back. It’s good to see you. I’m delighted. Great to have you here. Thank you. When it comes to politics, we are not short of material this week. The biggest news was the Texas primary. Above all, John Cornyn’s defeat in the Republican runoff for what would have been Cornyn’s fifth term in the U.S. Senate. He was beaten by an opponent with enough political baggage to weigh down a battalion of red caps, but Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had Donald Trump’s backing, and that proved even weightier. E.J., what are the lessons there for Republicans in the Texas primary results. Well, I think the first is a lesson they should have learned long ago, which is Donald Trump’s loyalty only goes one way. John Cornyn went out of his way to be supportive of Trump. He even had a picture of Trump’s book, “The Art of the Deal,” that he was holding. And it did him no good. I think, by the way, Trump saw that Paxton was going to win and jumped on the bandwagon at the end. But in any event, Cornyn got killed. But I think there’s a larger message for the Republican Party, which is yes, this party is magnified now for something I’m writing. I’ve been looking at this great series of economist YouGov polls, and they followed this closely. In September of 2022, only 38 percent of Republicans identified as MAGA Republicans as of May. The proportion had risen to 62 percent So this party is magnified. But in the electorate as a whole, the only people becoming MAGA are Republicans, so that Americans who call themselves MAGA rose from only 11 percent to 19 percent So MAGA is a really small percentage in what I would call the MAGA gap between the Republicans and the rest of the country has gone from 27 to 43. And one of the places you’re seeing this is in sharp turnout declines in the Republican primary. In the first round of the Texas race, there were more people who voted in the Democratic primary than in the Republican primary. 200,000 more. And then in this runoff, the total turnout was 1.4 million. Donald Trump got 6.4 million votes in Texas in 2024. This is a dispirited party. And the part that’s dispirited is the non MAGA part. And I think this is a real problem going forward for the Republicans. Mona? Yeah, it’s really interesting in those numbers that if you look at Paxton’s performance in the initial round and then look at how he did in the runoff, it’s almost the exact same number, which means those MAGA people are going to be there no matter what, even in this kind of an environment. But the primary also shows us that this is unlike political parties in the past. Political parties in the past, where you had an unpopular president, which is the key to how things are going to go in a midterm. The president would understand that his people, his party, needed to put some distance, needed to show some independence from him in order to hold on to their seats in a rough year. Not in this party. In this party, Trump has managed to spray his musk over every single candidate so that they cannot escape it. And shuddering at that thought, by the way. And so they have no choice. They are going to be victims of Trump’s unpopularity, and he’s leaving them really hanging out there showing that he had well, we knew this, but he never had any interest in Republican success except insofar as it enhances Trump’s power. So he’s not concerned about Republicans who might have been like Cornyn would have been a better general election candidate. This is universally acknowledged. He doesn’t care about that. He wants the party to be percent MAGA and loyal to him. And what’s interesting about that. I’m not in the habit of comparing Newt Gingrich favorably to others. But when you go back to Newt Gingrich as speaker, he understood that his majority was built in part by Republicans who were way more progressive than any Republican out there. Now, people like Chris Shays of Connecticut, Jim Leach in Iowa, and Republicans then understood that if you lost all these seats, you wouldn’t have a majority. Jordi, now in a much more Conservative Party. They’re willing to throw over the side very conservative people who just aren’t loyal enough to Trump. That’s so dangerous. That is exactly right, by the way. They call those people in those swing districts majority makers. And that is something that both parties used to understand. I also have some questions about whether Democrats sometimes put purity tests and don’t think about matching their candidates to the districts, but that’s maybe a topic for another day. Problem now, there are some districts where there’ll be primaries, but mostly they from what I can tell, they’ve been pretty good at matching the right. I’m worried about Michigan Senate race, but that’s another. But let’s talk about the lessons of Texas for Democrats. I mean is one lesson for the Democrats, Mona, your opponents are suicidal. Do not get in the way. Never interrupt your enemy when he’s in the process of destroying himself. Yes, sure. That is one lesson. But another lesson, I think, look, the Democratic primary was interesting because there you did have voters. I think looking ahead and being kind of smart and saying, do we want Jasmine Crockett, who’s a little more polarizing, who’s much more appealing to the even though they may not have been that different ideologically, just stylistically, she was much more appealing to the progressive side of the Democratic Party. And they went with Talarico, who has more crossover appeal. And so that was I think, smart and looking at the future and Democrats are being handed look, is it the first time in 25, 30 years that they might possibly win a Senate seat in the state of Texas. And it’s very important that Democrats use this opportunity by remembering that they can’t win just with the Democrats. They need those independents desperately. And I think something interesting is going on in the Democratic Party with Talarico. Also, I would say somebody like Jon Ossoff in Georgia, Greg Sargent in The New Republic had a very interesting line where he said, Trump, there’s a realization that Trump and Trumpism are wrecking our common life at a very profound moral and spiritual level. And I think you’re hearing Talarico and yes, they’re going after some of his theological statements from the past. But Talarico is putting not simply people’s interests at the heart of the campaign, although he talks about those. I mean, you always talk about people’s interests in a campaign, but it is really a moral critique. Obviously, Paxton gives him a lot of room for that. So does Trump. But it’s a moral critique for how the economy works, and we’re not going to say much about it today. But I think you see, in the response to Pope Leo’s encyclical on A.I. a real longing for something that’s not just political, not just economic, but a kind of moral view of how are we behaving toward each other and in our economic life. And Talarico really nails that home. And just about every speech he gives Yeah, and he’s shown some graciousness toward opponents, which is a desperately needed tone in American politics. So that’s hopeful to know. It was ironic because he was ready to rip up Cornyn as an establishment Republican, but he instead put out this he lost. When Cornyn lost, he said that we both appreciate public service. Yes just a nice little tweak at his opponent. Well, John Cornyn is a member of the Senate Republican leadership team. But having lost his reelection bid, he’s now eligible to join Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, who lost his primary in the. It’s not quite a caucus, but the YOLO Republicans. YOLO stands for you only live once. The idea is you’ve been loyal to Donald Trump and nearly everything, but now that you’ve been defeated by a MAGA backed opponent, you’re a lame duck. You can actually vote in accordance with your real principles, assuming you can remember what those were. Mona, can the YOLO Republicans actually influence events now that their spines are out of storage. I like that. So the numbers are very close. So you would need more than two or three Republicans to really affect things in the Senate in particular. And it has been the case that Republicans, even after they have lost their races, even after they’ve announced their retirements, have proven less courageous than one might hope. You could still become ambassador to Liechtenstein, I guess. Pretty little place. But there are. I mean, there has been a burst of frankness that’s come out of this, what you call the YOLO caucus, which includes Thom Tillis, who is not running again, From North Carolina. It includes Mitch McConnell. It includes several others. And they are making some pretty forthright statements. Thom Tillis, for example, said regarding this slush fund that Trump proposes, I call it a payout for punks. Now, that is the kind of language we haven’t heard. You even heard people like Senator Mitch McConnell saying, this is a quote. So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops. Utterly stupid. Morally wrong. Take your pick, he said. Those are the kind of words you did not hear from most Republicans for the past 10 years. I’m not sure there’s going to be a legislative impact, but what we are getting now with these newly freed YOLO Republicans is insight into what they have been saying behind the scenes all this time. And any dose of honesty is healthy. I think there are two issues here –– One, to go where Mona left off, it is clear that there is more dissidence publicly now than there was even a month ago. I think his endorsement of Paxton and turning his back on Cornyn actually played a role in this. Because Cornyn was very popular among his colleagues. He almost became the leader, and he raised a ton of money for them and so I think a lot of them took that badly. And so they become dissident. This slush fund is a step or five steps or 100 steps way too far, even for them. The war itself is starting to split. Republicans with some of the most hawkish Republicans. Roger Wicker from Mississippi. Who’s not known as somebody who’s going to run out there and attack Trump. I mean, a very strong statement about the possibility of he didn’t use the word sellout, but it was along those lines. So you are seeing this dissonance. The magic number is three plus one. And the question is if these yolos vote together, YOLO is a new term. I use it respectfully. If the three of them vote together. Who that puts a lot of pressure on is Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins of Maine, who’s up for reelection, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, because they have been publicly dissident, but they could cast no votes. Up to now, that had no actual effect on what was happening in the Senate. If these three vote no, then the Collins and Murkowski votes become very significant because they are, in another sense, to pick up your earlier term majority makers. They get them to 51. Now, I’m still skeptical that John Cornyn, who is a party loyalist deep all the way down is going to break as much as I think Cassidy and Tillis might. But we’ll see. John Cornyn reminds me of that great novel, darkness at noon. Where this Communist is arrested by Stalin and he for on trumped up charges. And he knows he’s innocent, but after a while, he just comes to embrace that. If the party has arrested him, he must be wrong. He must have done something to deserve it. And I had that vibe from Cornyn a little bit. I always hear he has been defeated by somebody that he himself described as a moral abomination, which Paxton is. We haven’t gone into that. It takes the whole segment. Exactly exactly. So he’s beaten by this guy with the help of the leader of his party. And he says, support the Republican ticket. And I plan to this time. I mean, it was really kind of pathetic. Yeah I mean, he spent tens of millions of dollars saying what a morally flawed, to put it gently person, going after his divorce. I mean, it was the least really remarkable as he was impeached by his own party. Paxton in Texas. Yeah is it overly cynical to say that a lot of Republicans have done well by there being this constant buzz that behind closed doors when they’re not on television, when they’re speaking off the record, they’re expressing the same condemnation of Donald Trump that you, the center Republican, maybe even Democrat, or that you’re feeling a lot of Republicans have managed to imply that they do share this critical view of Trump. They just are not saying it in public, which we may fault them for. But in a way, it’s a survival strategy. It is. But those people I think, are more morally culpable than the true believers because they’re so dishonest. I mean, the true believers at least are saying what they think, and. Marjorie Taylor Greene believes what she believes. Crazy things. But the others, who kept silent, the Mitch McConnells of the world, who in private are so critical, but in public. Not although that’s now changing. I think that’s actually worse. O.K, well, on to familiar territory in these conversations. Part of the backdrop of this political season is, of course, the war with Iran, which marked a break with two Donald Trump campaign promises. First, given the blockades in the Strait of Hormuz, gas prices at the pump have gone up instead of down. And while going on three months may not count as a forever war, the U.S. is finding it very hard to exit from this war without at least appearing to concede the Islamic Republic’s right to rule in Iran. Mona, how do you think voters are going to perceive the war and its relation to the election in the midterms. I promise I’m getting to the war, but I have to introduce it by saying, have you all seen this structure that they are now building on the White House lawn. It’s this enormous scaffolding for a big M.M.A. dome, where they’re going to have this thing in honor of Trump’s birthday or whatever. O.K, so it occurred to me, yes, I can’t wait for this. So Trump is like a good dictator is trying to present his people with bread and circuses. So he’s got the circus. It’s right there on the White House lawn. The bread, though he has not produced. And that’s going to be critical. Now regarding the Iran war. It not only violates Robert his promises that he would not get involved in foreign wars. But it undercuts his image as I am the strongman. When I say something, it happens. Nobody can gainsay me. Nobody can stand in my way, both domestically and internationally. I know how to throw my weight around and watch me. And what voters have seen is that this supposed strongman has marched himself straight into a box canyon in Iran. He is unwilling to send ground troops because that would be catastrophically unpopular to actually topple the regime. And so he has to deal with the regime. Yet they have been able to withstand all the pain of repeated bombings. And on the other hand, they have discovered all kinds of leverage that he did not anticipate, because he’s not very bright, that they would close the Strait of Hormuz, and that the instability and the high prices would bounce back on the American public who, having not been prepared at all for this war and having had no buy in to this war, saying you’re imposing costs on us without ever having asked our approval. And now he appears to be walking into a situation where he’s going to have to accept a humiliating climb down and some deal that they will attempt to package as a victory. But everybody can see that it really is an American defeat. E.J. my head is still swimming that you actually landed that intricate M.M.A. fight metaphor. I salute you for that I’ve been thinking of variations on Donald Trump Rumsfeld’s line all through this war. You go. In my version, you go to the war with the president. You have not the president you wish you had. And Mona and I were talking before. Mona is pretty hawkish in her views on foreign policy, it’s fair to say. And yet she’s taken some grief because she didn’t have faith in this war. Where others said, oh, great things are going to happen from this, we’ll topple the regime in Iran. But all those expectations depended on a long term strategy, and I think they were foolish from the beginning. And they weren’t going to happen. But let’s assume you believed in them. You also had to believe that Donald Trump knew what he was doing in the war. The fact that as he never felt an obligation to make a case to the American people for why he was doing this, the fact that the rationales at the beginning changed day to day and hour to hour, and the fact that he just never gave a sense that he thought this was anything more difficult than throwing out the government in Venezuela, which he didn’t actually do. He just has a new ally. It’s still the old regime, but now paid off. And so now he has tried to describe this already as a new –– as a new regime. He keeps trying to say that Yeah no, that’s exactly right. And so in the end, I think he’s going to face attacks from both ends that the Hawks are unhappy because they see him selling out. And more dovish people say, we told you in the first place this war was a terrible dumb idea. And so I think that really reduces support for this war to basically the most Trump loyal people in the electorate and almost nobody else, including non MAGA Republicans Yeah, I remember, but going back to the 2016 race, when Trump used to always say about various problems that have plagued the country, it’s so easy, he would say it’s always that was one of his favorite go to lines. It’s easy solving these problems. All you need is will. And I bring lots of that. And that, I think is part of the problem here, is that he genuinely believed that if previous presidents had not made war against Iran, it wasn’t because they balanced the risks and benefits and said what. Not really going to work out very well. No, it was because they lacked his iron will. And what he’s discovering is things aren’t so easy and will is not enough. And he keeps attacking Barack Obama’s, or as he insists on saying, Barack Hussein Obama’s deal with the Iranians, the J.C.P.O.A. that he ripped up at the beginning. And if you look at what people are talking about, this deal may not even be nearly as strong as the J.C.P.O.A., or it will, if he’s lucky, be very close to that deal that Obama made. And there’s no evidence that he can get there. And by the way, there’s no evidence that he has the degree of expertise negotiating this deal that Obama brought. That was a long, intricate process. The energy secretary was there. I mean, they were very careful. You could. Two more points to add to what you’re saying. One, the J.C.P.O.A. cost zero American lives. This outing has already cost more than a dozen and two. The other thing that has happened is we have expended all of these munitions. So it’s been a tremendous economic loss for us, which we’re going to have trouble making up. And finally, he has told he has let the world know that Iran has another weapon that it didn’t really know if it had before, namely the ability to close the Strait. So on every level, this is far worse than the J.C.P.O.A. I would take us back earlier than the president’s we’ve just heard about. E.J. you and I shared the experience of being in Wiesbaden in 1981 –– January of 1981 for the return of the Iranian hostages, covering their return. The Iranians waited until Ronald Reagan had been sworn into office before they released those hostages. The point was, Jimmy Carter should be humiliated by not being able to bring them out. The Iranians are big league when it comes to humiliating American presidents, and they’re doing a pretty good job on Trump right now. And when German Chancellor Mertz said that Trump was being humiliated, he used that word in these negotiations. Trump pulled 5,000 troops out of Germany. Again, just a totally personal foreign policy rooted in nothing else. Yes well, just so that we shouldn’t leave you thinking only about the Strait of Hormuz or the yolos for that matter. We always end these conversations on some joy that we’ve experienced in recent days. E.J. why don’t you go first. So when our kids were young. I used to praise them for having excellent taste in the parents of their friends, because we met some of the best people that we know because they had kids like we had kids at the same age. And my whole Memorial Day weekend was made possible by the good taste our kids had in the parents of their friends. It began at a naming ceremony. It’s a Jewish tradition, and I actually got to say the prayer. They invited me. I put on my shawl. I’m a Catholic kid from Fall River, but I put on my shawl and I love the end of the prayer. It was a prayer for peace appropriately enough, at this moment, let justice and righteousness flow down like a mighty stream. Let God’s peace fill the Earth as the waters fill the sea. Amen and it was such a moving experience. And then we headed out to our friends in West Virginia. And I discovered that, as my wife put it to our kids, I was a pool shark. I actually knew how to play this game, and that was a great joy. All made possible. Thank you to our kids. Oh, I got chills, actually, when you were describing that ceremony. That’s lovely. And Mona, some joy you’ve experienced recently. I also am hitting on the kid theme, but it is that I have recently become a grandmother. My husband and I are grandparents for the first time. Thank you. So it is such sheer joy. So the –– There are many things in life that bring us satisfaction and pleasure, but there’s nothing like just being in the company of this little eight-month-old. And when he smiles, the whole world lights up. And I just want to say to those people who are young and who are thinking that maybe kids aren’t worth it or kids are too much trouble. The greatest thing that I ever did was become a mother. I mean, it was the most gratifying. Not the easiest, but the most gratifying thing I’ve ever done. And then the reward is, if you raise your kids, you get the sheer joy of grandchildren. That great old line that what do grandparents and grandchildren have in common? And the answer is a common enemy. Yes well, I’ll just mention one source of joy for me in this past week was going back to listen to some tracks from a record that I bought back in college, and that really changed my tastes and introduced me to a whole new world. And that was an album called in those days. It was called “Work!” You can find it online as “Sonny Rollins and Thelonious Monk.” I love this album so much. I must have played it 100 times, and I went and bought every Thelonious Monk album and every Sonny Rollins album that I could find. Sonny Rollins left us, died at age 95. There’s a track he plays with Monk there, a version of “I Want to be Happy,” which is twp men who had some pretty difficult times being happy in their lives and resorted to some chemical happiness along the way. And it’s just a brilliant take on an old standard. And I listened to it over and over and over again and got joy from it every time. Music like that is such a blessing and I salute your taste in jazz. E.J. Dionne and Mona Charen, thank you both very much for this conversation. Great to be with you. Pleasure.
