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

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0:27Robert Siegel:Hi, I'm Robert Siegel in conversation about politics. E.J. Dionne is away this week, so I'm joined today by two guests, New York Times opinion contributing writer Molly Jongfast. Hello, Molly. Hi. Welcome. And Times columnist Brett Stevens. Hi, Brett. Good to see you.

0:49Robert Siegel: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. But 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?

1:26Robert Siegel:By the$2 billion slush fund that he used to support or the freedom for Trump and sons from the IRS? Or should he be judged by the nominees who would likely be waiting in the wings if his nomination were to completely fail? Brett, I suspect a lot of people would say this is a no-brainer, but a lot of people aren't U.S. senators. Well, in a million years, if I were president, I would never nominate Todd 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 pique or spite, Trump keeps him in his current job as acting attorney general.

2:15I think that's damaging to the rule of law to just have a succession of actings in the highest positions. And it becomes a precedent, I think, for future administrations to essentially skirt the constitutional responsibilities of advice and consent that are given to the Senate. The other alternative is that he pulls another Matt Gaetz type character out of his pocket and shoves a succession of them in front of the Senate while keeping Todd Blanche as the acting AG.

2:51Robert Siegel: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 hearings? You know, it's interesting because if you think about there's another confirmation going on at the same time, and Bill Pulte is acting as our top spy for the country. Director of National Intelligence. Bill Pulte, who is Donald Trump, got to know him through the Internet. He was an Internet philanthropist, right?

3:27So Bill Pulte, a real estate guy who is sort of most famous for finding mortgage crimes, which turned out to be not really crimes, that the president's enemies had committed, though none of those cases were ever proven to be criminal. So there are always worse people down the pike is a point that I'm trying to make when it comes to Trump. But I do think what I have been struck by so far is Cornyn has, you know, this is a person. Senator John Cornyn of Texas. Yeah, Senator John Cornyn. Outgoing senator. Yes, outgoing. Right, is a Texas Republican who is very well respected within the Republican Party.

4:11My sense is that he was, you know, really one of the good guys in the Republican Party in that world. You know, like John Thune, like, you know, a real establishment guy. Millions of dollars poured into his reelection. And at the 11th hour, it seems he's still not able to keep up with Ken Paxton and Trump comes in.

4:34Robert Siegel:This was his primary. Yes, his primary. Ken Paxton, the attorney general who was kind of MAGA before there was MAGA. He just, Cornyn couldn't beat him. Right. And they were heading towards a runoff and it was so close. And Trump would not endorse. And it's sort of right before the runoff, he endorses Paxton, thus sort of ending, you know, burning millions and millions of dollars, but also ending Cornyn's political career, at least in the Republican part. I mean, I don't know where else he would go. But what I was struck by in his questioning was that he saw where this was going and he saw what could really be a problem for Blanche and he dug into it.

5:15And that was the 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 going to vote. My guess is, and I'll have to eat crow if I'm wrong, he's going to vote to confirm for the same reason that I suggested earlier, which is that the alternatives are likely worse.

5:57Robert Siegel:One of his points that he made in 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. I mean, it's such an egregious. I mean, the IRS stuff is so egregious. The, you know, the idea that Todd Blanch is going to give the Trump family. And I think it was just the son's immunity from audits. I mean, personally, I mean, it was 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.

6:55And you saw this in the in the testimony. There was this where Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, right from Louisiana, who was not trying for a gotcha. Right. Says you're a friend of Trump's. And he says, no, I'm Trump's lawyer. Was Trump's lawyer, as he says. But, you know, it's been interesting to me talking to Republicans or Republican leaning figures who occasionally speak to the president himself, not politicians, but well off people. Um, the two things that have really hurt Trump in their eyes, um, are the slush fund and the reporting by the Times that Trump or his family enriched themselves by$2.2 billion last year.

7:48That 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 López Portillo was president and the corruption was so very much nakedly on display. I think to go from however an imperfect democracy we have to like a full on cryptocracy in just, you know, two years, less than two years, I think is pretty jarring, even for the most cynical. Right. Because the rule of law is something that even most Republicans value. And I don't think that they objected so much during election years when they could tell themselves the alternative is that much worse.

8:45but what you have with Trump is really putting into the shade whatever might have been said against Hunter Biden and his own dealings which remember were topic a of discussion on some of the Fox News shows just three years ago and by the way I think absolutely valid points of contention but this is something else I'm just curious what what your thought is

9:08Robert Siegel:This is speculative. If Senator Cornyn were to vote against confirmation and if he were to effectively block the confirmation of Todd Blanche, would he still be an extremely popular Republican in Texas? Would he be persona non grata for that? What's 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.

10:07And I would add that Corden's problem is that he wasn't popular enough in Texas. I mean, you had Paxson who had been impeached and was had gone to trial with a donor and had convinced senators, state senators not to vote to remove him. I mean, this is like, you know, this makes Trump look like Lincoln at the state level anyway. So I think the problem for Cornyn was always, you know, that he just could not out MAGA.

10:36Robert Siegel: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, the late Lindsey Graham, who had been one of the most fierce critics, Republican critics, of Donald Trump when Lindsey Graham was seeking the presidential nomination and after that. and then became an insider in the Trump administration and a friend of the president. And, Brad, you wrote about this, that this was a choice that Lindsey Graham made. He could have remained in Cheney land being a prophet of what's wrong with this president.

11:25Robert Siegel: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, you know, what we used to call the free world. And so when he flipped, especially after John died in 2018, after McCain died in 2018, I took it really bitterly, maybe because I sort of set my teeth as a conservative against Trump, that he had betrayed everything that I thought were his principles to curry favor with power.

12:23After 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.

13:25And so it caused a reflection or a reconsideration in a column that I wanted to be public about. I mean, I know everyone says, well, it was a devil's bargain, but some devil's bargains, you might say, are worth the price. Would Ukraine be safer today if Lindsey had had kind of gone up against Trump, gotten himself primaried six years ago and would have been sort of blabbing from a seat on a CNN panel today? I'm not sure that would that'd be the case. So that column, the question is, like, if Lindsey Graham were a professor, Professor Clemson writing op eds, would would Ukraine be safer? and it got me thinking about all of these senators who have sort of fallen at, you know, from Trumpism, like the Jeff Flakes, right?

14:15I mean, the real, all the people, the Republican, the sort of old school Republicans who could not, who couldn't join them, right? And I wonder, I mean, the problem with all of these bargains is that almost all politics is this devil's bargain, right? Right. And I mean, Fetterman is, you know, is another example of someone who 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 the most reactive to the last thing that someone has whispered in his ear.

14:55Yeah. 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 are 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, J.D. Vance, you know, this guy is entirely plastic.

15:46His 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 J.D. Vance. Lindsey never gave up on Ukraine. He never gave up on his sort of Atlanticist convictions, his 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 made.

16:24Robert Siegel: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 an influential person anymore. She's 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 Plattner had talked about how voters don't want candidates who were grown in vats. They're inauthentic. They're inauthentic. We're killing ourselves. 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.

17:12Politics now, to enter political life, makes demands on a human being that I think would be very difficult for most of us who have 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 coffee. He's a stainless guy. But that's a standard that 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.

17:49Graham Plattner, 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 Plattner 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.

18:25Robert Siegel: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. Well, authenticity has become a substitute for honesty. You can be an authentic liar. That's what Donald Trump is. 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 reason that J.D. 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.

19:08Robert Siegel: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 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 the elites are not as furious because I talk to all these different candidates from my podcast that are sort of state level candidates.

19:59And what I hear from them is voters are 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 chant. 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.

20:31Robert Siegel:But it seems like a kind of a short laundry list, which is it seems to be a Medicare for all and don't give Israel any money. Well, so I think these candidates don't want taxpayer dollars going to Israel for any number of things. And then I think single payer for sure. Now, I think there are other things. They want housing to be less expensive. They want, you know, they want inflation to go down, which, by the way, is, you know, as Trump is finding. And I think you see in the polling, it's very hard. I mean, I think Trump did a lot of things to make inflation worse, obviously. But but even if you weren't doing that, it's very hard as president to get inflation to go down.

21:13You 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 health care and, you know, peace and justice in the Middle East.

21:48But they also, if you listen to the platform of the DSA, want essentially an open border. And they talk about having control over the means of production. And there are two kinds of dangers that that poses. One is that they actually get an agenda through, which maybe call me an old-fashioned conservative or even a liberal. That scares me. I believe in free market capitalism. But actually, I think the bigger fear, and this is something I say to my moderate Democratic friends, is these are the people Donald Trump wants to run against. You know, there is now a soon-to-be congresswoman from New York who, if you at least credit her tweets and other brainstorms from the last five years, kind of is a communist, like in the old-fashioned sense.

22:34I'm old enough to remember this and sort of use this C word quite proudly. That's a lot to hang around the necks of the Democratic Party. And so I really think that the liberal Democrats represented maybe not by Chuck Schumer, but by younger Democrats like Jake Auchenclos 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.

23:22This party does not represent us. That hasn't happened so far. And I fear that those Democrats are making the same mistake that kind of Jeb Bush Republicans made in 2015 saying Trump and all of this anger will subside and we will once again nominate a normal Republican. I both agree and disagree with you. So I there certainly are people who will be elevated. And and this has always been true. Let's remember the squad like we've seen AOC go from outlier to bridge builder. I mean, she is like 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.

24:09And then there are politicians who don't. One of the things that I'm struck by when we talk about this is there's a school of thought that that there are people who are angry that Cheney campaigned with Harris and do not think that they were able to grow the tent. The Venn diagram for Democrats and Liz Cheney is, you know, let the audio show that I made a strange hand gesture. But the question is, like, did Liz Cheney grow the party or did Liz Cheney alienate the base? And is this the base biting back to some extent? The evidence, and I'm sure someone's going to contradict me, but the evidence still shows that elections are won at the center, not by growing your base on the extreme right or extreme left.

24:58Harris lost for a number of reasons. She would say she got in too late. I think she was a bad candidate. I don't think she should have just been coronated. There should have been a better nomination process. But I do not think that she lost because she was insufficiently appealing to the Gaza protest types of people. I think they are loud, but they're not hugely representative. And I think the Democratic Party would make a big mistake lunging to its left, trying to replicate what Trump did. Because remember, too, that the far left voters that some Democrats think are winnable and stayed home, they live in New York.

25:44They live in California. They're not OK swing state voters in Wisconsin or Michigan or Georgia or North Carolina. Those are the voters that you have to win over by by playing to kind of middle class concerns. Right. Of by people who have voted for both parties in their past. I do want to just add just because Trump did something that's interesting, which is he got these low frequency non voters to vote for him, which is why his victories were so strange. Right. So and I don't think that those voters are Gaza voters.

26:22Robert Siegel: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 Meyer London. Who was Meyer London? Meyer London was a socialist congressman from New York in the 1920s. About Vito Marcantonio. who was veto Mark, core of the American Labor Party and a progressive New York City congressman. After the Republican Party was won over by the Goldwaterites, New York City nominated the most liberal Republican you could possibly find, John Lindsay, to be its mayor.

27:04Robert Siegel:And he was elected. But it's not just New York. I mean, you have also a primary in Denver, won by a DSA-backed candidate. The DSA-backed candidate for the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary is in the lead. It's happening outside of the usual kind of red diaper baby precincts of American politics. You know, we have a practice here to wrap up these discussions after we've been hearing about the horrors that lie in store for us in our politics or in foreign wars sometimes. to just close on a note of joy, of some joy you've experienced recently that you'd like to share with us. Molly, why don't you kick things off?

27:55Oh, I have a rescue dog, a naked Chinese-crested rescue dog named Inca Tadas. We call her Inky. And she is, it's just to have a rescue dog and to bring them into a little pack of tiny dogs that are running around and frolicking is really wonderful. And it's bringing me a lot of joy. I am not embarrassed to say that the greatest section of The New York Times is not opinion or foreign. The best desk is the obit desk, far and away. It's the first thing I turn to. And not just because I'm looking for real estate as the old joke has it. It just has such great obituaries of people, of improbable figures.