Are Republican candidates sick of Trump?

0:02This is a global production. Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far. In July, 50 % of the 50 ,000 people that were detained had no criminal record. Be careful what your advisors are telling you about immigration policies. The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today. You can be for immigration when Lincoln was for slavery and Reagan was for communism. I'm not talking about giving them amnesty. I'm talking about giving them a dignified life in this promised land. and only you can do that. That is Maria Salazar. She is a Florida congresswoman for, wait for it, the Republican Party.

0:42And the reason her voice is getting so much attention right now is because she is perhaps the first to properly break ranks with Trump, with their Republican president and call him out on immigration. Is the outlook now so dismal for the Republicans and for Donald Trump in the midterm elections, that survival is no longer about sucking up to Donald Trump. It's about putting maximum distance. Welcome to the News Agents USA. The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel. It's John. It's Maitlis. And it's Miles. And for how many years, Emily, have you been asking the question, when will it ever happen that republicans will find a backbone uh and find a sense of sort of purpose and morality and i don't know whether it's happening that they found morality and a sense of purpose but it does look like they're breaking with the trump show probably out of an existential angst that unless they do they're going to lose their little perches in the midterm elections that are coming up in a few weeks time.

1:57It is interesting, isn't it? I think we can't distinguish the sort of end of amoeba GOP with the oncoming November midterms, because you are starting to see backbones appear in very curious places. But the one thing they all have in common is that they are about to fight a race of their lives. And they are starting, I think, to work out that rather than having Trump on the ballot, which is, you know, his favourite phrase, remember when he was supporting Darlene Graham, Lindsay Graham's sister, and he went down to South Carolina when she was fighting her primary and said, just imagine my name is on the ballot, pretend I'm on the ballot, pretend I'm on the ballot.

2:42Now, we are starting to see the signs. And let's, you know, go with caution, caveat emptor, because it might just end up being three people that we cite today and no more. But it feels like people are saying, pretend he's nothing to do with me. Pretend we are not Republican. And I just want to take you to a couple of examples that we've had of that. You heard from Maria Salazar, really interesting that she's gone straight for the anti-ice message here. She knows as a Latino, and Trump previously won over a much greater number of the Latino voters this time than before. She knows that Latinos have been massively put off by essentially his ICE agents going around cities like Minnesota, herding up people of, you know, her culture as if they were cattle and trying to send them off to places.

3:38Well, she sounded like a Democrat in that ad. It was indistinguishable. You thought that's a Democrat congresswoman's ad. And then we find, oh, no, it's not. It's a Republican. I mean, she does say she doesn't say Trump your policy. She says your advisers. So there's this clever little place where she puts him at one as if to say, oh, I don't know if you know this, but your advisers have been going around, you know, making life hard for us and rounding up Latinos. But essentially, the reason I feel like I've heard that clip that we played in about five places over the last couple of days, because it feels like quite a moment, right?

4:12She is now breaking ranks and saying, this is not helping me. This is not helping me for your party get reelected. The other one I want to play you is Ashley Hinson, who is competing for an Iowa Senate seat. And she has lambasted the impact of Trump's war in Iran. And now she's gone one step further. And she's basically offering to cross the divide. Just listen to her here. I'm Ashley Hinson. Used to be that reaching across the aisle wasn't just okay. It was expected. Some people in Washington forgot that. I never have. That's why I worked with Democrats to expand mental health care for veterans and with President Trump to take on health insurance companies to lower your costs.

4:57I'm Ashley Hinson, and I approve this message because working across the aisle isn't always easy, but it's how you get results. You know, that's surprising, friends, to see that happening in Iowa. OK, Iowa is not a place that Republicans thought they were going to have to spend time and money and effort in this election. And RFK Jr. said it the other day, too. He said, you know, if you would have asked us, you know, months ago, we wouldn't have thought this much money would need to be spent in typically safe areas. Remember, Joni Ernst is the sitting U.S. senator there in Iowa, a Republican mainstay, a longstanding Donald Trump ally.

5:39And now you've got folks like Representative Hinson having to take a different tact because they're worried that independent voters who they will need to win these races are breaking overwhelmingly for the political opposition right now. Poll after poll shows that those independents are breaking. But it's not just that. They are losing their own voters, and that's why you're also seeing other Republicans go out there and push back against the Trump administration. The other one I wanted to point to, friends, was Mike Rogers in Michigan. Mike Rogers, I worked with him in the House of Representatives, worked with him for a number of years, typically a more mainstream conservative.

6:24He wasn't MAGA to begin with, but then he tacked far right to win Donald Trump's approval. And now he is sprinting back toward the middle because he is terrified he is underwater against Abdul Al-Sayed in this race. Even he is now demanding that Donald Trump's war with Iran end and differentiating himself from this administration. Take a listen. Michigan families are struggling with the price of everyday life. Groceries cost too much. We have to bring prices down. The war with Iran needs to end and end quickly. When it does, energy costs will plummet. But Michigan families can't afford to wait for that to happen.

7:04We need to do something now. I previously called for the suspension of the state and federal gas tax, 70 cents a gallon. And another place we can start, diesel. Diesel fuels the trucks that bring groceries to the store. It fuels the tractors that grow our food. And when diesel costs more, it costs more to grow it, ship it, stock it, and ultimately buy it. And so there you have a Republican candidate taking Donald Trump to task for the policy in Iran. Emily, you know, you were just saying a moment ago, how Donald Trump, when he was campaigning with Darlene Graham, saying, imagine I'm on the ballot.

7:40When he made his speech at the UN yesterday, he was saying, I'm not on the ballot. And it's just the Iranians who are using this because they think that they can leverage me because of the midterm elections and they can't. And I think the mixed messages that are coming from Donald Trump right now are contributing to this kind of flight of so many Republicans. You know, like, look, the Republican Party probably had a pretty good strategy worked out where they were thinking, right, how can we fight the Democrats when they're on the up at the moment? And we're kind of the incumbents in the House and in the Senate.

8:17What can we do? Right. We paint the Democrats as Democratic socialists or communists and they're out of control. What does Donald Trump go and do? He cozies up to Zoram Mandani, the very picture of a kind of progressive socialist in New York. He's about to welcome President Xi into Washington, the communist leader of China. That doesn't chime exactly. There is just a little wee bit of dissonance there between what is the Republicans Party's message and what Donald Trump is actually doing. Yeah. I also wonder how helpful it is to threaten to annihilate Iran, just this particular point. But we can come on to that.

8:56I think the really interesting bit of the polls is how Democrats v. Republicans sit on these two key issues now, which is immigration and economy. And there used to be a massive gap between where the polls were for Democrats on immigration, i.e. they were seen as soft and they let people through and Biden had made the southern border porous and all the rest of it. And since Trump has done, you know, in fairness to him, exactly what he said he would do on the floor of the Republican National Convention two months before he won November 2024, he talked about mass deportation now. And sure enough, he enacted mass deportation now.

9:37And people just went, oh, Jesus, you know, everyone from the neighbourhood is disappearing. I'm not sure this is what we want. So the Democrats are now really closing the gap on this issue. Now, I don't think that immigration is going to drive people to the polls in November. I'm not saying that loads of people are going to go out because they like the Democrats stance on immigration vote for them on that. But it's just interesting that this has always been the issue that Trump was soaring away on. And it isn't anymore. The gap's much smaller. When it comes to the economy, and again, these are national polls.

10:08We've said it a thousand times. These are very individual races. They sometimes depend on 10 ,000 people. So they're very, very localized races. And we have to remember this isn't a national thing. But it is useful just to give you a sort of sense, a bellwether of where America is sitting right now. On the economy, it looks as if more people are now supporting the Democrats over Trump. And that's extraordinary because we remember inflation being pretty darn high under Biden. We remember that he kept on saying to everyone, oh, I'm doing wonderful things with the macro economy. And they were going, no, no, we're hurting.

10:44But right now, this question of affordability or inflation or whatever you want to call it, people are really feeling it. And they're feeling it in very specific ways. And one is the price of diesel, the price of oil. And if you look at places like Nebraska, where I think I was reading that 92 % of Nebraska is dependent on kind of rural jobs, you know, sort of farm jobs. It's a big rural community. And Trump is now importing or planning to import foreign beef from Argentina because he doesn't want the consumer to see how expensive it's getting in America. So it's actually becoming easier for him to sneak Argentinian beef in the door rather than screw American farmers.

11:28Screw American farmers. Screw not just the farmers, but everyone who is, you know, the hauliers, the people who are involved in the whole rural economy of America. That that sounds crazy for a Republican president. It does sound crazy. And look at the numbers. Look at the impact that it's having just down the street. My friend Larry Sabato lives. He works at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and famously produces this crystal ball, this forecast based on the polls of how the races are going to go. And there was a watershed moment this week. Larry shifted three Senate races and four gubernatorial races, the seats for governor in different states around the country, to the left in favor of the Democrats.

12:13He did that yesterday. Let me tell you which ones those were. He moved the Iowa Senate race that we mentioned earlier with Ashley Hinson from leans Republican to a toss up. That's why you're hearing Ashley change her tune because her race isn't safe anymore. It's a toss up. He moved the Kansas Senate race from likely Republican to just leans Republican. Again, Kansas, another deep red state where you can imagine, Emily, farmers are a little more than pissed off to see what Donald Trump is doing. And he also shifted races in Nevada and Ohio, places that Republicans weren't expecting to have to invest as much money and attention as they are now.

12:54Well, am I not right in saying, though, that the one thing that the Republicans do have is more money than the Democrats and that the Democrats want to expand the map and want to go campaigning and therefore advertising on TV in all these places like Kansas, as you say, which who would have thought they'd be kind of competitive in Kansas? But the Republicans still have a fuller war chest than the Dems. Yes and no. They've got more cash on hand, especially Donald Trump's MAGA aligned super pact that has close to a half a billion dollars in cash to spend on this election. But of course, Trump has been slow to trickle that money out the door.

13:38Now, we'll probably find out this week in filings about whether Donald Trump and his super PAC are being more generous to Republican candidates. But there's been a lot of anxiety on the Republican side that Donald Trump doesn't want to spend his money on GOP candidates, that potentially he wants to hoard it for himself and future efforts for whatever he has planned in public life. That's one piece. A second piece to this, of course, is that as we look towards the election, the Democrats are having a little bit of anxiety about all of this excitement because they've seen this movie before. They remember in 2016 when Hillary Clinton was so certain to win the presidency that they were campaigning in Texas and they were campaigning in states where they said they were going to expand the Democrats map because it would be a blue wave.

14:31And then they were rocked after Hillary Clinton lost that race and they lost a number of other races around the country. So I'm hearing this week, I'm starting to hear some Democrats backpedaling and say, let's not spike the proverbial American football in the end zone when we haven't won the game yet. Let's focus on what we've got to do. Let's keep people motivated to get out to the polls and let's run a race through the ticker tape. I love an American sports metaphor. I always have to just check and see what shape the ball is. Hail Mary. Hail Mary pass. You're welcome for saying American football.

15:06I didn't want to confuse anyone. Oh, yeah, no. I mean, I know there are some NFL fans out there. Yeah. But I'm not going to get too deep in that. Miles, you were talking about the gubernatorial races, the governor's races. And Tom Tiffany is the Republican nominee for Wisconsin. He has also broken with Trump on his plan to import foreign beef as a way of reducing price for Americans. And we came across this clip from Brute Rollins, who's the Agriculture Secretary, explaining to Americans on The Benny Johnson Show what to do if they find beef too expensive. Just have a listen. But if it is too expensive, unlike Fuel Benny, you can eat chicken, pork, salmon, eggs.

15:50There are other sources of really good protein. And all of those prices are coming down as well. So it isn't necessarily breaking out there. And listen, I'm a mom of four. I'm still feeding a whole bunch of kids, very hungry kids. we realise the price of groceries are too high. We're doing everything we can to bring them down after the Biden years of crazy, crazy inflation. Agriculture Secretary and wellness guru there, Brooke Rollins. You can eat pulses. It's really helpful to know what the other sources of protein are and have it spelled out for you on a podcast. I'm not sure that's her primary job at this point, to sort of point out that lentils are great too.

16:28Have you tried a chickpea? She's literally in charge of the agriculture section. And it's a bit like Trump saying two dolls. Do you remember his whole thing? Why do you need a whole load of toys? Two dolls is fine. And I do think that takes you into a place that the Republicans really don't want to go, which is we are literally telling consumers how to limit choice and limit their demands. But also, isn't there a statute of limitations, or at least should there be a statute of limitations, on how long you can blame Joe Biden for the price of grocery in the shops when you have been in the White House for the past 20 months or so.

17:08Well, when you started a war. When you started a war, which has led to the fuel prices going up so spectacularly, has led to the kind of cost of, you know, the fertilisers going up massively as well. And that this is why your food bills are so high right now. And I just don't I just don't believe it washes with Americans just to say, oh, well, it was all Joe Biden's fault. Hang on. Well, it makes it even harder, John, when they are the ones placing the tariffs on the foreign governments that literally directly raised the prices. There was a great moment earlier this year when the Trump administration said they were going to lower the price of coffee because Americans were so upset that coffee prices were high.

17:53And it was pointed out to them by reporters that the reason coffee prices were high is that Donald Trump had placed tariffs on coffee. So the way they made the prices lower was removing the tariffs Donald Trump put in place. It was a direct admission that this administration is literally making individual decisions on individual products and countries that are making prices go up. I'm also reminded by the Brooke Rollins quote. I used to work with Brooke in the first Trump administration. And I don't envy her job right now, which is not so much as putting lipstick on a pig. It's like putting lipstick on a pig the size of an aircraft carrier.

18:32Like everyone, even Donald Trump's friends know that they are to blame for high prices. And so she's got this terrible task of trying to sell why high prices are OK. And she went viral in January for this claim that in America you could still make a healthy meal for$3. And she was asked, well, how could you make a healthy meal for$3? And said, well, you could get a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and, quote, one other thing. And it would still cost around$3. And then people put together these photos of a dinner plate with a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and then a question mark and said, is this what you want to eat for dinner?

19:21Yeah, it's so good. One other thing. Can I just talk about the anti-Spartacist movement that we're starting to see now, which is, and this is according to the Washington Post analysis, all the candidates who are starting to dial back Trump's presence on their websites. So in other words, people that were kind of maga, maga, maga, you know, had Trump all over them, like Mike Beltran, Republican who's trying to unseat a woman in Florida, has now said, you know, early he was saying Mike felt inspired by Trump's 2016 victory and offered a clear answer and has stood with Trump every way. And now it just says, you know, he says he's been called to public services and is running to be a champion of lower cost, lower taxes and increased health care.

20:06It is fascinating. What, no mention of Donald Trump? He's been whitewashed. He's been taken out. It's like, who the what? Donald who? No, no, no. This is about health care. Yeah. Well, I think that that is the sort of telling. I mean, that's the cowards kind of, you know, quietly. I'm just going to scrub. Scrub, yeah. Yeah. And there's sort of, isn't there something in inverse proportion that the more Donald Trump wants his name on the Kennedy Center, the less candidates want the name Trump on their campaign literature. It's just absolutely perfect. The symmetry of it right now. And I, you know, I saw Trump going on about how the arc to Trump, you know, the arc to triumph that he wants to to build by sort of Arlington Cemetery.

20:46and he's now it's just getting more and more far-fetched with every incarnation and iteration of how he wants it to be and now it's going to be there are going to be snipers on the roof and it's going to store in the concrete walls ammunition and drones and whatever else i just think what is he on about it just kind of sounding more and more unhinged and i i don't want to kind of be oh my god we've all got trump derangement syndrome he's gone absolutely mad but some of it is sounding increasingly eccentric. And the focus of that is increasingly eccentric. Yeah, I mean, I think, look, frankly, he's always been utterly eccentric.

21:21And the sort of the abiding curiosity with Trump is how so many people have been fooled for so long, quite frankly, right? And I know there are complicated answers to that. And some of them are just about, you know, their own personal wealth or what they think they're getting from the stock market at this point or any of the rest of it. But I guess, Trump, to your point, and yeah, nobody's ever going to forget 2016 and how safe it looked for Hillary then. But there was a sort of red wave predicted, I remember, in 2018. And actually, the inverse happened then. We saw extraordinary gains for the Democrats.

21:58I mean, we can just say whatever happens in the midterms, like that's what midterms are about. They're about not very many people voting, but the ones that do are generally politically engaged and a bit cross. Well, John, I think I think on the arch, you're right, because Donald Trump is learning the wrong lesson here from the ballroom. OK, when he said he wanted to build this billion dollar ballroom on the White House grounds, Republicans got squeamish and said defending golden chandeliers is not really the position we want to be in in an election year. And then Donald Trump said, well, really, it was about this military complex.

22:40And he tried to give them this national security justification, which they still tried to shy away from. They really didn't want to vote on a ballroom or be talking about a ballroom. Donald Trump took the wrong lesson from that and thought this isn't about corruption. People aren't upset about corruption. They just need to see it's about national security. And so he's done that again with the arch. What you don't see is a single Republican going out there and saying we need a magical Transformers style arch that turns into a counter drone monstrosity because they read the room. They see what their voters are saying and their voters, super majorities of Democrats and Republicans now say that the United States government is corrupt.

23:24They can't stand it. They're disgusted by it. And Donald Trump is completely missing that point. And it's going to cost him seats in this election. Miles, that's a really interesting point you make about national security, because it seems that Donald Trump is using that as his fullback argument for absolutely bloody everything now. And if you look at the kind of argument for why MS now, CNN and Politico have been banned from the White House, he's now saying it's a question of national security. We can't have people that are so biased coming into the people's house when they want to do us down.

23:59And they're kind of, you know, acting on behalf of communists and left wing governments to do this sort of stuff. And again, it's using national security to cover up the weaknesses in your own argument. it's the justification he's trying to use for everything. And I remember living this, okay? When we would get these tweets, like Trump's tweet about the arch the other day, I can tell you how these are built. There is no one in the U.S. Pentagon and across the federal government, at least no civil servant, who went to the White House and said, Mr. President, we need a gorgeous arch that's jam-packed with counter-drone technology.

24:38No one said that. It didn't happen. Donald Trump sat there with a Big Mac in his bed in the residence of the White House, cooked this idea up, put it out into the world. And in the first term, what would have happened is we would have shown up at the White House that day and said, Mr. President, this is Congress hasn't authorized it. It's not lawful. We need to let it go. And you might not have heard about it again, or maybe there would be a flare up later. In this second term, he's got people who will now take that as a directive and try and go carry it out. But the other thing here is that the Republicans he's counting on to defend him, they're seeing through it now.

25:16They don't want to defend it anymore. And we mentioned earlier, Utah Senator John Curtis now calling for investigations into this administration, namely into the president's son taking money from the Russians. We talked about that last week. We broke news that House Republican James Comer said he was very concerned about the same. The issues where Donald Trump thought he had the high ground on national security are now the issues his own side is saying he needs to be investigated on, that he's taking money from foreign adversaries. So I don't think his national security justifications are going to work anymore because he's lost the credibility even on the right.

25:56Stay with us. In a moment, we're going to be talking about the curious case of Susan Collins and allegations of corruption for the senator in that critical main race.

26:22The News Agents USA. We're going to talk about Susan Collins now. She is one of those slightly rare Republicans who keeps looking as if she belonged to the group that voted against Trump, you know, that did have the backbone that sort of stood up and called him out. She gets sort of 90 % of the way quite often to voting against him and then suddenly flips and you kind of go, oh, right, sorry, we thought for a whole moment you might vote to impeach. We thought for a whole moment you might stand up against this. But no, she is fighting the fight of her life in November, and that is to retain her Senate seat in Maine.

27:03You might remember the whole scandal surrounding the Democrat candidate Graham Plattner, who was then forced to essentially give up his candidacy over allegations made by several women about his past behaviour. And the nominee for the Dems is now Troy Jackson. This seat is absolutely critical because it could be one of those that decides who controls the Senate overall. and the Democrats are desperate to take control of the Senate, which is my way of explaining why there is quite a lot of context around the story that we're going to tell you now. And it follows a ProPublica corruption report into this senator, into Susan Collins.