Has Trump Gone Full ‘Mob Boss’?

16:10Michelle Cottle:Probably not criminal to take the money. But I will say, you know, it's interesting. We're seeing this combination of factors happening right now. Trump is doing this at the same time that he has flexed an enormous amount of control over the GOP at the grassroots level. with defeating five Indiana senators who defied him on redistricting, getting rid of, you know, Congressman Massey, getting rid of Senator Cassidy. And there are two things that are happening as he does this. One of them is that he is showing everybody that, and he's putting these Republicans even more in a box than they were. They're in a terrible position for which I have no sympathy.

16:52Michelle Cottle:And the terrible position is, if they defy Trump, they are in all likelihood going to lose their job in a primary, if not now, maybe the next cycle. If they don't defy Trump, they are tying themselves to, as Jamel just outlined, they're lashing themselves to the mast of a sinking ship. So it's either you go down with the ship or you go down at the hands of primary voters. Those are your sort of two options. And why I said I have no sympathy is they could have put a stop to all this, as we know, after January 6th, which any healthy, functioning political party would have put a stop to this after January 6th.

17:30Michelle Cottle:But they chose not to. They made their bed. But you know what? They also made our bed as well. And we're all in it. We're all in this together now. but one of the things that's happening as he's targeted Cassidy, he has made a lot of Republican senators angry. Now, what are they going to do about it? Are they going to see then the green room and then continue to do everything that he asks in voting? Or is it some point, are we going to see one or two more people peel away? I can tell you it was already peeled away as Cassidy voted for the War Powers Resolution. I mean, Cassidy is unchained at this point.

18:07But this is

18:08Michelle Cottle:this is the box that Republicans are in, and the larger American public, independents and, of course, Democrats, are running away from them as fast as they can. And MAGA never had enough all on its own to make Trump president. And they are now alienating everyone who isn't MAGA, slowly but steadily. You can see the line moving. But it has been uninterrupted downward line since he was sworn in. And this is not going to change that trajectory.

18:37David French:And it's not done. I mean, we've seen a lot of news in the last couple of days how Trump, you know, cleared the boards with his revenge campaign. And it's not done. He's already teed up some more victims that he'd like to target. He's mad at, I think it's Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania, who has not been all that keen on some of his projects like the ballroom or whatever. And then basically the same day that Massey went down, I think Trump was endorsing Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate. And this is one of our favorite races, David. And that has absolutely gobsmacked Republican senators who have always viewed Ken Paxton, who has such a long list of scandals attached to his name and is a very flawed candidate.

19:29David French:They've always viewed him as the weaker opponent for James Tallarico, the Democrat who is trying for this seat. And now they're just like, what is the president doing? But I have to say, I'm right with you on this. It's just like, this is too little, too late, Guys, this is what happens when you allow your party to be hijacked by a guy who wants to be king. Jamel, have you thought what have you what are your thoughts on the primaries that we've been watching?

19:59Jamelle Bouie:No, I mean, I think I think the Trump's main concern in all of these things is not so much the viability of the Republican Party in November, but just sort of can he punish people he dislikes? And should they hold on, can he have people there who will be even more sycophantic and willing to defend him and shield him and make Congress as, you know, bootlicking and supine as possible? That's his only real interest because, frankly, Trump's autocratic aspirations are not possible without a totally acquiescent Republican Party. It's just sort of a Republican party that showed 30 percent more fight and a willingness to defend its own prerogatives and to defend its ostensible ideals would render Trump inert as a political force.

20:47Jamelle Bouie:Massey has just been outright defying the president in numerous places. And Trump can't let that stand because if Massey were to if he had won his primary, it would just send a signal to other maybe wavering Republicans. You can do this and hold on. The president's grip on the Republican base isn't that strong. But as far as winning elections, you know, I think a lot is already baked in. And if you were a Republican concerned about holding on to the House and Senate, the time to act was back in January. It was back in February. Now, it's too late, and we're likely in for a hot, expensive summer that people are going to leave very irate into a fall where the price of goods will continue to be high, where we might be entering an actual economic slowdown.

21:46Jamelle Bouie:And under those conditions, there's really not that much you can do to save a House majority. Even the recent gerrymandering, the Supreme Court decisions, all those things I think are quite bad. But they help you hold the House in a neutral national environment where all things are equal. They do not help you hold the House when the president's approval rating is reaching the bottom for a post-World War II president. And when the generic ballot is showing, our recent near-time Siena poll had Democrats up 11. This is in May. if the generic ballot is showing like 12, 13, 14, 15 points in October, there's like there's nothing you can do.

22:24David French:And it has been so notable. You know, Trump has been out there bragging literally like we've won all our races this month. He's talking about races against his own party, against his own incumbents in which his vengeance monkeys have spent literally tens of millions of dollars in races that were going to be red. And we're going to be with conservative candidates. These are not rhino squishes he was launching this against. So he's doing this victory dance, rubbing everybody's face in this. It cannot be good for the party just strategically.

23:02Michelle Cottle:Oh, Michelle, can I coin the term vengeance monkeys with proper attribution? Oh, you may have my term.

23:09David French:Yes, you may have my term. Okay, okay.

23:10Michelle Cottle:Go for it. That's tremendous. Very vivid. But yeah, Jamel has called these gerrymanders potentially dummymanders, which is a phrase that I really like. And what Trump has done is he sort of cemented the momentum of these dummymanders, which when Shane Massey, the senator from South Carolina, I wrote about him over the weekend, got up and refused to go along with the gerrymander that would have eliminated Jim Clyburn's seat in South Carolina. And the hope was to turn South Carolina to have, which is about a 65, 35, 60, 40 red state, turn it into seven Republican members of Congress and zero Democrats.

23:54Michelle Cottle:And he stood up to oppose that. You know, he made two arguments. One was very principled, which is the one I focused on, which is we don't jump. We don't say how high when a president of the United States tells us to jump. There's a separation of powers here. But he also made some pragmatic points, which are when you do these gerrymanders, and we've said this before, you lower your margin for error. And in my home state of Tennessee, they gerrymandered Memphis, just lickety split after the Calais decision. And now there is, Memphis has been divided up. But if you look at the margins, these margins, they really decreased.

24:31Michelle Cottle:So it is not beyond the realm of possibility that you could have instead of the eight one, you could have three, six, or two, seven because of this. And so again and again, what you're seeing, the common theme here is just a monumental amount of hubris that we can do whatever we want to whomever we want, for whomever we want, and we will not pay a price. And they can be forgiven for thinking that because the January 6th president won an election, which has led them to believe that they can do anything. And now, you know, it's like mask totally off. He's not even pretending to be in the sanitation business anymore.

25:13Michelle Cottle:He's just like, yep, I'm a mob boss. That's what I do.

25:16Jamelle Bouie:I want to go to that point about just that they can't imagine political consequences. I really think this is downstream of something that really has taken off, took off on the online right and kind of like part of online reactionary conversation, which is referring to people as NPCs, non-playable characters. Like, I think there's this pervasive sense that your political, and I've written about this before, that your political opponents aren't real. That, you know, that the protests in 2020 were the product of Soros or whatever, or that whatever, the elections you lose are because of fraud and mass illegal voting, or your political opponents are, they don't really believe anything.

25:58Jamelle Bouie:They're just being funded by nefarious forces. Like a really pervasive actual belief that the only people who are real, the only political world that is real is MAGA and everything else is fake or an op or something. And I do think that there's a basic, you know, lack of psychological understanding of the existence of other people. Some Olympic-grade solipsism is what you're telling us. Right, right. Olympic-grade solipsism is exactly right. And just from a purely kind of strategic perspective, that's how you lose wars, right? Notably, that's why we're losing this war. But that refusal to see the people on the other side as people making decisions and people who have an agency and can take actions leaves you profoundly ill-equipped for when they exercise that agency.

26:51Jamelle Bouie:And you see this again and again with this administration. You saw it with Minnesota. You saw it with the reaction to the National Guard deployment. Like I said, you're seeing, you saw it with the Iran war, which they did not imagine that the Iranian regime were like actual actors who could make choices. And I think that the, you know, there's a pretty good chance they're going to see it in November when after insulating themselves for two years from any kind of public response, they're going to be shocked when there is quite a strong public response against the behavior of the administration.

27:30Jamelle Bouie:And it's going to lead, I mean, we all know it's going to lead to accusations of fraud, to claim to the election for rape, that they should be disregarded, all this stuff. They're going to claim again and again that this is all fake and should be should be ignored.

27:45David French:OK, so what we've been seeing in the primaries is actually a highly energized, mobilized Democratic primary electorate, including in states like Texas. It has the Republican Party freaked out and a lot of questions about, well, what can Trump do to turn it around? But as best I can see, Trump doesn't even really seem motivated to focus on things that could turn it around. I mean, he's doing his ballroom and his arch and the reflecting pool and his war, and maybe he's going to invade Cuba. and he's making statements about how he doesn't care about Americans' affordability crisis. What am I missing?

28:31David French:What do you guys see that he is aggressively investing in that suggests he gives two figs about turning this around? Besides rigging the game, of course, but that's different. Rigging the game is how he likes to play. But in terms of actually accomplishing or telegraphing that he's focusing on something that voters actually care deeply about.

28:56Jamelle Bouie:I don't think there's any evidence that that even crosses his mind. I mean, I do think that it's two things. First, it's sort of he himself lives in a world defined by the power of positive thinking. Right. So as long as he is like everything's going to work out, he genuinely believes everything's going to work out for him. The other thing is that he has organized his White House in a way that he does not receive contradictory information. He does not receive anything but the rosiest possible picture. He is like, well, I'm 100 percent with MAGA, right? He has no sense. First, like he does not.

29:31Jamelle Bouie:It's like my parents.

29:32David French:I'm 100 percent with my parents. They love me, right?

29:35Jamelle Bouie:He doesn't understand himself first as like president of the entire country. So like broad approval ratings just don't matter to him. And second, you couldn't, if you're in the White House, you can't, if you're Susie Wiles, you can't tell him that anyway because he doesn't want to hear it. It's bad. It's bad information. It doesn't sound good. So he hand waves it away. This is his thing. Whenever anything is negative, he's like, well, it doesn't really exist. And so that just means that there's nothing that's going to turn this around. Back last November after the elections in Virginia and New Jersey, I made the point somewhere that for things to turn around for Trump, you have to imagine him being capable of taking actions that can respond to public discontent.

30:26And I said at the time, there's no evidence he's capable of doing that.

30:30Jamelle Bouie:And it's still true. There is no evidence whatsoever that he is capable of taking actions that respond to discontent. So I think that what we should expect over the course of the summer is he's going to continue to, you know, dither and dather and double down on his mistakes in Iran. He is going to maybe try to look for some shortcut to deal with rising fuel prices. I won't be surprised if they try to repeal the gas tax, which incidentally would be great for the president's fossil fuel donors. They can make some more money. But there's not going to be any meaningful effort out of Congress or the White House to deal with what I think will be quite rapidly rising prices over the summer.

31:16Jamelle Bouie:And we're going to enter the fall. And I really think it's going to be, you know, a speed run of George W. Bush's second term. You know, we're going to we're going to be in the in the fall of 2008. with this president pretty soon.

31:29Michelle Cottle:The playbook here is not, I do not believe the playbook here is provide voters with things they like. The playbook is going to be to try to rerun all of the previous playbooks in recent history against the Democrats, trying to freeze the party in amber around 2019, 2020, run again against wokeism, et cetera. You're seeing this with Tallarico, for example. Tallarico now is a real contender. I'm still of the belief that Texas is sort of the final boss of the Democratic Party's quest, that it's very hard to get over the hump in Texas for Democrats, even with this matchup. But I think Tallarico has a far better chance against Paxton than he had against Cornyn.

32:18Michelle Cottle:But the playbook is going to be—

32:19David French:Wait, wait, wait. No, this is your opening. You have to do your standard Paxton synopsis. Why does he have— The best chance. I just, every time, David, I need it. I need to hear it.

32:30Michelle Cottle:Michelle, the multiple times adulterer, corrupt, impeached by his own party, attorney general of the state of Texas, who is an election denier and who is actually one of the most loathed political figures in America by his peers. It is very difficult to find anyone who would say, yeah, Ken Paxton, great guy, just awesome guy. But, you know, the instant and the impeachment when he was about, he was headed for impeachment and conviction in Texas. And then his rescue became a cause of MAGA. And ever since then, he has become a MAGA darling. And I don't think in spite of all the scandal, I think because of all the scandal in part.

33:13Michelle Cottle:I think the more transgressive he is, the more parts of MAGA really like him. And so the playbook is not going to be Ken Paxton, great guy. The playbook is going to be James Tallarico, woke, woke, woke, vegan, woke, vegan, woke, woke, woke. And that's going to be the playbook across the length and breadth of the country. And what's interesting is when you talk to some Republicans, MAGA Republicans, they feel, you can feel that they seem, they still seem very confident that when they unleash sort of the woke barrage on the American people, that they're going to win. and that there's this conviction that they have that as much as the American people may hate Donald Trump or may be discontent with Donald Trump, they dislike the Democratic Party more.

34:00Michelle Cottle:And so look for this campaign to be not, look what we did for you to make your life better, but look at it to be, do you want those awful woke, woke, woke Democrats, have I mentioned woke before woke Democrats in office? And that's gonna be the way the campaign is gonna be run.

34:20David French:OK, and I like to think that that doesn't work as well when people are actually dealing with the economic incompetence of this administration. But that's just me. And also when you're dealing with a different electorate.

34:33Jamelle Bouie:I mean, I think it's like when Trump is in the ballot, a lot of low propensity voters come out, come out in hopes that voting for Trump is going to make them more prosperous. But if two years later that hasn't happened and in fact the opposite has happened. and then you have a bunch of very angry college-educated voters who are leaning Democratic coming out, I think it's sort of, yeah, you can run a woke, woke, woke campaign. I think what's likely to happen is it's going to be a general collapse in Republican turnout and a surge in Democratic turnout. And that doesn't get you anyplace good if you're a Republican.

35:09David French:Okay, we're going to land that there. And it's time. Recommendations. Jamel, we've missed yours. Hit us.

35:17Jamelle Bouie:Uh, sure. I watched recently for the first time, uh, Warren Beatty's 1998 film, uh, Bullworth. And how do I say this? It's insane that it got made. Um, it's a Hollywood production and Warren Beatty, obviously a huge star. And it is simultaneously extremely cringeworthy and also sort of daring and brave in ways. And did I say insane already? Kind of an insane movie. And I don't know quite what I think of it, but I do think it's worth watching both as an artifact of American politics in the late 90s, but there's something actually quite prescient about the sorts of concerns that are going to animate politics 20 years later.

36:12Jamelle Bouie:And as I think a showcase of Beatty in particular, who I think is one of the most fascinating stars of his generation. He is obviously extremely handsome and quite smart and savvy, but he often plays these characters who I could best describe as himbos who become self-aware and then lose their minds. And I just, it's, it's, that's, that's the character in Bullworth, a kind of vacant guy.

36:44David French:That should go into his obituary whenever that, you know, I'm just saying.

36:48Jamelle Bouie:Who, a kind of vacant guy becomes self-aware of his own vacancy and then loses his mind. And And yeah, so watch Bullworth. Very strange movie. Glad I saw it. Don't know what I think about it.

37:04Michelle Cottle:Okay, David? Man, it's always hard to follow Jamel's because mine are just so basic. But here is your basic, enjoyable streaming recommendation of the week. Do you remember the show Jury Duty? That was, you know, you had a guy who was a normal guy. But I do remember. Oh, oh my gosh. Okay, well, I have a double recommendation, Jury Duty from a couple of years ago. And then the next one, which is Jury Duty Presents Company Retreat. And here's the premise of both of them. Is you take one person who's a normal person. They think they're part of a documentary. This is a documentary about a small business making a transition from father to son.

37:48Michelle Cottle:And you bring in a normal guy and everyone around him is an actor who's literally insane. in just crazy, funny ways. I'm sensing an insanity theme this week. They're always riding this line between absurdity that's realistic enough to be funny, but absurdity that's so unrealistic that the guy kind of wakes up to it and realizes he's in something. They've both times selected just like good guys, like just good, solid people who are sort of like the island and the storm around them. And so it's both laugh out loud hilarious, but then sort of oddly heartwarming that there are folks out there who just are good folks trying to do their jobs with integrity as kind of the world crumbles around them.

38:35Michelle Cottle:So it sort of feels like a metaphor for like, I don't know, America, but it's fun. It's fun.

38:41David French:Okay. I am going to go with Netflix's How to Get to Heaven from Belfast. I know you think that I have some kind of some Irish obsession, David. You may be right, but...

38:54Michelle Cottle:I'm listening. You've never led me wrong.

38:56David French:This one is a comedy slash mystery about three millennial women who were childhood friends who get this message to return back to their tiny hometown because their fourth girlfriend has mysteriously died. So you start from there and it is a... It spirals. there's conspiracies there's twists there's turns it is simultaneously exciting and kind of creepy but also just drop dead hilarious um it's i don't know if any of you watch dairy girls but this is the same folks and it is it is absolutely brilliant i highly recommend so go forth and with that i think we're going to end it let's land that plane as always guys thank you we've solved the world's problems.

39:47David French:I will now be going to prepare my application from the slush fund, and I'll let you know how that goes.

39:55Michelle Cottle:Good luck, Michelle.

39:58David French:Jamel, say goodbye.

40:00Jamelle Bouie:Oh, yeah, I should say goodbye.

40:05Jamelle Bouie:Good luck collecting your reparations, Michelle.

40:09David French:I choose to reject your patronizing tone.

40:17Thank you.