"Buckle up. It's going to be a nasty two years."

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1:18The defenders of Susie Wiles make the case that she was an important moderating force, an adult in the room, and now she is gone. Trump is going to be more erratic. The way Steve Bannon, who obviously knows Stephen Miller pretty well, put it to me was, buckle up, it's going to be a nasty two years.

1:38Hello and welcome to the State of It USA, the Times podcast making sense of Donald Trump's America. I'm Katie Balls, Washington editor and columnist for The Times and Sunday Times. And this week, my co-host Jerry Baker is away. So we are joined by Max Kendix, our Washington correspondent. Welcome, Max. How are you feeling about stepping into Jerry's shoes? Big shoes to fill, but I look forward to getting over the week with you. This week, there's a new chief of staff in the White House. One who has excited parts of the MAGA base, but terrified establishment Republicans and Democrats. So what is Stephen Miller really planning?

2:13And we'll look at the Democrats as they turn a seismic victory into a battle for the soul of the party. Certainly one thing that has been getting everyone talking in DC this week is Pete Hegsif. It's a political spectacle, a personal manifesto driven by ego and resentment. Time for one man's final days in Congress to try to do damage to this president, this country, and most irresponsibly, the warriors who defend it. It's a farce and it's a stunt. This is the Wall Secretary in his renamed Department of War, who is under pressure from the Democrats and from some Republicans. Now, Max, we've heard a lot about impeachment attempts when it comes to where the new flock of Democrat congressmen and senators might go when they start in January.

3:04But before they even get there, there have been attempts to go after Pete Hegseth. And Thomas Massey, a Republican, but a rebel Republican, really, tried again this week. How close did he get and what went wrong for the critics of this administration? Well, he got reasonably close. There was a suggestion that everyone was kind of expecting his impeachment attempts to possibly pass because there were so many Republicans who weren't even in Washington, but after losing their results or retiring, they couldn't be bothered to come into DC. So there was an expectation that he would be successful in passing that impeachment.

3:40But But actually what happened was he was the only rebel. And in an act of extraordinary disorganisation, 11 Democrats didn't even turn up. And if they had turned up, including Nancy Pelosi, then there would have been a Democrat victory and impeachment would have carried on. So a slightly strange disorganisation from the Democrats. But they definitely will have an attempt to impeach Hegseth in the future. It just probably won't happen till January now. It doesn't bode particularly well, surely, if we think about the Democrats returning to power in Congress and the Senate and the sense that they want to put on this unified opposition and show that they're a respecting, you know, or listening to the voters who put them there, but also taking the fight to the Trump administration.

4:24Well, I mean, the Democrats will have a sort of 30, 40 seat majority in the House, so they can afford to have 11 people sort of scurrying around D.C. and not turning up. But it was it was quite farcical. There were Congress women and men putting out statements saying that they were stuck in traffic behind motorcades, which is a very Washington thing to complain about. But I mean, on the Republican side, it is notable that not a single Republican joined Thomas Massey in actually voting for impeachment. He was the only one, despite the huge loss in the midterms, which a lot of people directly put on the Iran war and Pete Hegseth.

5:03So there was clearly a successful attempt by the administration to steer congressmen who are sceptical of Hegseth away from this route. Yeah, and that's a key question, really, which is, you know, how safe is Pete Hegseth at the end of the day? He has survived this attempt. He obviously came out fighting ahead of it, giving a rare press conference. Yet I think the question remains, which is how how secure is his position? And then there's a question of how much support there is for him in the White House. And I think if we go back to last week, earlier in the week, there was a feeling that he could be the full guy.

5:41Instead, what happened on Friday is that Donald Trump denounced that his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, was exiting. and he was bringing Stephen Miller in her place. Stephen Miller being the deputy chief of staff back then and, you know, I think a very loyal advisor, very much seen as a hardliner in the magaspear. But also, notably, a friend of Hegseth's. Pete Hegseth very quickly welcomed Stephen Miller's appointment and kept putting out photos of the pair of them together on his Twitter account, which seemed to be trying to get to a point of suggesting that this is my guy and I'm not going anywhere.

6:17It's curious that a lot of people assumed that Pete Hegseth would be the full guy, but Trump has really been rowing behind him. And when he did that press conference, Pete Hegseth did a press conference, as you say, the first time in six months that he did one of those. And he was, you know, really going at Thomas Massey. And Trump then put on Truth Social afterwards that it was an A++++ performance. Obviously, there is a bit of a tendency for Trump to row in behind his cabinet secretaries and then fire them the next day. So he's an unpredictable man. But do you think that this is the fallout from Hegseth's impeachment strengthens his position in some way?

6:58When I was watching the Pete Hegseth press conference, I did feel as though there was an audience of one, Donald Trump. And he was saying, you know, well, they went after Trump and now they're coming after me. And I think it was really trying to invoke this sense of solidarity. and so far Trump has stood by him. But really what has Hegseth done? He won the war. He was in charge. He won the war in Venezuela. As I said, 48 minutes. It was flawless. Nobody killed. And he certainly, I think he's won the war in Iran but he's certainly winning the war. Iran would love to make a deal. In terms of how safe Pete Hegseth is in the long term, it's hard to predict these things.

7:38What I do think has happened though is since those disastrous results for the Republican Party, you have actually had Trump and some of his inner circle defending the war. And I think that is quite good news for Pete Hegseth. The difference between what J.D. Vance said last week in a post on X where he talked about the midterm defeats and what other members of the cabinet have been saying. And J.D. Vance put out, I think it was about 600 words, this X post, in which he talked about one main takeaway, which was that the defeat was heavily to do with the Iran war. And he said, you know, and the president has said the same.

8:19The feeling amongst some of the administration is the president did not say the same. The president, when he was asked about, is the Iran war to blame for these losses, said, you know, well, it did affect gas prices, but I would have done the same. J.D. Vance has left out the, I still would do it again if I could. In the great power struggle as well, it was interesting to see that during the whole debate about impeachment of Hegseth, Vance put out another post on X saying that the impeachment process wasn't about the war whatsoever, which is quite convenient because all the Republicans ended up voting against the impeachment efforts.

8:56So Vance really trying to conveniently reframe the impeachment process, which was objectively about the war, to say that it was actually going after Hegseth because he was standing up to the bureaucracy of the Pentagon, which wasn't the claim at all. Yeah. And I think we can hear this clip now in the Pentagon briefing when Pete Hegseth is asked about J.D. Barnes's comments on the Iran war. I respect the vice president greatly and I'm certainly not going to exchange in any finger pointing. And thankfully, politics is not really my thing. And the vice president has been a critical member of the team in every aspect of this.

9:27And we're grateful for all the input he's given me personally in our department. And I think going forward, we're going to learn all those lessons and apply them. And there you have Pete Hex of saying how instrumental J.D. Vance has been, how involved he has been in the process, which not everyone thought was particularly helpful to the vice president. I guess, Max, if we take a step back and think about the White House as a whole, we talked about Miller's appointment this week. There have been some interesting moments. We both got the email, which was two minutes notice to gather for a press briefing with none other than UFC's Dana White.

10:03Dana, would you like to be press secretary of the United States of America? Look at a sign. You'd have this behind you all the time. The White House, Washington. Would you like that? Or do you just want to stay with this ridiculous UFC? Thank you for the offer, sir. For the offer. I have no, I do not want to be in politics. I am devastated to hear this. Goodbye, everybody. Max has certainly been a bit of a feeling since Susie Wiles' exit that Trump was obviously frustrated about the midterm results. As we understand it, he initially was brushing them off more. And as the days went on, grew more angry about those results and blamed his most senior aide in part for them.

10:46Susie Wiles now has parts of MAGA saying she was too close to a lobbyist. She's too close to big business. But the defenders of Susie Wiles make the case that she was an important moderating force, an adult in the room. And now she is gone. Trump is going to be more erratic. Or, as MAGA might say, he's going to be more MAGA MAGA and more true to himself. Do you think that Dana White press conference was a taste of it? That was a slightly bizarre press conference. And I did try and attempt to run down. but I mean, we're about 10 minutes away from the White House and I couldn't run there in two minutes.

11:20And they come out and do this bizarre thing where Trump was offering Dana White press secretary in front of him and he was turning it down. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing that we saw at all in the Wiles era of the past two and a half years. So it's possible that wouldn't have got through. But I mean, the whole reaction with getting Stephen Miller in is a classic Trump doubling down when in crisis. and Stephen Miller is really sort of pure maggot. I mean, he is at the heart of all the most controversial things that anyone associates with the Trump administration's first or second term. The Muslim ban was the very first example of those and the immigration hardline ICE raids in this administration are kind of authored by him.

12:08It's hard to see how they can go even harder on immigration, especially when there is a voter backlash out there. Yeah, when I was calling around on Friday and bid to the weekend to get reaction to Stephen Miller's appointment I mean, there are certainly some who think it's brilliant. I spoke to Steve Bannon who of course advised Trump in the first term and is still an influential figure in that movement and he was saying, you know, this is what we needed Stephen Miller's going to be, you know really infuse everyone again and get MAGA back, focused on what they should be prioritizing. And he listed in that list of things, you know, that they need to get back to was mass deportations.

12:48I think first of all, obviously, it's sending a signal that for all Donald Trump's talk of, oh, we might negotiate and work with the Democrats, they are at least preparing for the most likely scenario being that there isn't much negotiation. It's just going out to fight. it's testing the limits of executive power and how far you can push them we're also hearing that Stephen Miller looks at those mid-term results and thinks that actually one of the biggest problems they've had when it comes to the Trump coalition is male voters and particularly younger men the polling on the collapse of support in young men is pretty astonishing in terms of how quickly it's gone and how do you get back to them it feels as though we're now in a stage where People are moving to, you know, if they've only got two years left, let's just do everything we want.

13:38And let's worry less about kind of vested interests and so forth. And we'll see more of that, I suppose, in the coming weeks. Stephen Miller is an expert at all the loopholes and various methods to get around Congress and get around the judiciary and really just exert the executive as much as physically possible. I mean, he spent four years in the wilderness preparing exactly for that. And he's got he's got a whole list of ways to get round any attempts to stop him. So it's going to be a really sort of confrontational period. I mean, no, Stephen Miller likes to talk about activist judges. And yet the way Steve Bannon, who obviously knows Stephen Miller pretty well, put it to me was buckle up is going to be a nasty two years.

14:23And with that, we're going to take a break. And when we are back, we're talking about what the Democrats are planning and whether they can make their plans happening as signs of infighting already arise.

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17:12I'm back. So, Max, on paper, the Democrats ought to be having a wonderful week. They have obviously returned with majorities in both the House and the Senate. The new intake doesn't start until January, but they have been around the Hill in Congress for induction week. All smiles. But yet, if we scratch the surface, there are signs that already there is a battle taking place for the soul of the party and disputes about who should really be the key faces. Talk us through what's happening when it comes to Chuck Schumer and also potentially Hakeem Jeffries. Yeah, so there's obviously after a blue tsunami, you would expect everyone to be hunky dory.

17:51But this is the Democratic Party. And so they have descended into internecine warfare as always. And at the centre of it is Chuck Schumer, who has led Democrats in the Senate since 2017. He's been around for decades in the Senate. And really, he's been a bit of a figure of hate for a lot of Democrats who have accused him of preventing them from winning the Senate in previous cycles. And so when he did win the Senate for the Democrats this cycle and, you know, 56 seats, a huge majority, it was assumed by a lot of sort of commentators that he would now be safe because he has basically engineered this.

18:32I mean, he personally went out and recruited a lot of the candidates who then ended up being successful and who were praised a lot and outperformed a lot of other people. But what's happened is that everyone's come to D.C. and the big war between the moderates and the progressives of the party has centred on him and his leadership of the Senate. he's been saying that he will be uncontested to be the majority leader in the Senate, a very powerful position that gets to sort of control the agenda and the timings. But instead, it looks like there will be challenges against him. And we saw an extraordinary press conference by Bernie Sanders from Vermont, a longtime progressive senator, and Elisa Slotkin from Michigan, saying that they think there needs to be a challenge to Schumer and that what they learned from the blue tsunami was that there was an anti-incumbency feeling, and that extended to Schumer himself.

19:33And now that there is a bit of a campaign, and the biggest challenger to Schumer looks like it will be Chris Van Hollen, who's a senator who has always been slightly more on the progressive side, and he's been backed by, for example, Abdel Al-Assad in Michigan, who was a left-wing candidate there. but broadly within this debate what I find really interesting is that the debates are going on doing data analysis into the size of the majorities because everyone won, right? The progressives won and the moderates won but the moderates and the progressives are now trying to go into the numbers to claim that they won more than these guys won and when you compare all the winning together it's different, you know.

20:15But Max, why is it that they don't like Chuck Schumer? Why is it that he has quite a long list of Democrats who don't like him? Because I think even last week, I was hearing from people that they thought Hakeem Jeffries, and we'll get to him, who's the Speaker of the House, the minority speaker at the moment, was probably going to stay in position. But Sheba would have a fight on his hands. Is this about Israel or is this about more than that? The thing is about more than that, with Hakeem Jeffries, the fact that he's got such a large majority in the House means that the main challenges to him, the kind of progressive faction, aren't big enough to really properly challenge him for the leadership.

20:53and also the idea of the first black leader of the House is also appealing to a lot of Democrats. But Chuck Schumer, who's been around for longer, he is seen as not taking the fight enough to the Trump administration. He's seen as being too collaborative with the Trump administration, which is a remarkable thing, really, because if you listen to him speak, he does not sound collaborative at all. But there are accusations that he's... So a time though, Max, when we've got James Tadarico, new senator, senator-elect, saying that he is willing to work with Trump on some issues. El Saeed, the senator-elect from Michigan, as you say, the progressive left, saying just this week that, you know, he's happy to work with Trump.

21:37If Trump wants to do Medicare for all and call it the Trump Medicare for all bill, he'll go for it. Now, of course, this is trying to get the administration to meet him on their terms. But there has been an effort by some of these figures to suggest that they they will work with the president sometimes. Yeah. And it's the nature of the Senate that you've got to work with the other party, unlike in the House where everything can pass with the majority. In the Senate, the filibuster means that you need to have 60 out of 100 votes to pass most things. And so it's just the nature of that chamber that you need to work with the opposition.

22:09And so it's not unreasonable for Chuck Schumer to try and be doing that to get things passed. But he's just got this weight on him that in the last two elections where when the Democrats possibly could have won the Senate, he didn't win it. And so it's seen as now that there's been a rebellion to Trump and he did win it. Some senators are saying, well, it wasn't him that created the majority. It was just Trump's ineptitude. And we need to have someone who's driving us forward to 2028 instead of the same old people that have failed us before. So that's the argument that's coming from some of the senators.

22:45I think on balance, Schumer has still got a good amount of support within the Senate. But it's just the fact that there will be a contest at all, which is which is quite remarkable when Chuck Schumer was going around pretty confidently saying that he didn't expect anyone to challenge him. Now, there have also been some questions about Hakeem Jeffries. He is a minority speaker at the moment. He is by far the favourite to become the speaker. He would be the first black speaker. He hails from New York and depending on his mood, preaches scripture or rap lyrics sometimes. Because there is obviously no opposition leader when it comes to American politics, whoever is Speaker of the House is going to really become the face of the party, so to speak.

23:29And therefore, there's still be some questions about whether Jeffries is the right person for the role. And that's led to AOC, the congresswoman who something could run in 2028 or could perhaps challenge Chuck Schumer for his Senate seat when it comes up. And they've been looking saying, well, should we have our own candidate? This is a fascinating intervention by AOC. I was on Instagram and I assumed it would be a kind of 60 second clip. And I started watching it and realized that it was 100 minutes long. I did watch it on. I think dinner plans would go. My bit of bounce to go. Two times speed, I think, was the name of the game for watching AOC and doing that.

24:07And it was she had a whiteboard behind her. She was drawing all sorts of diagrams about why she thought that there needed to be new leadership in the House. and you know her argument is basically that she was uh treated terribly when she came in in 2018 as this left-wing firebrand everyone just told her to get in line and that Hakeem Jeffries is a kind of authoritarian leader that isn't allowing new debate and new ideas to come into the democratic party uh but she represents a wing of the democrats which it is actually really small I mean, we talk about the democratic socialists a lot, but there are now about 11 of them in that particular caucus.

24:49There are double the number in the blue dog caucus, which is kind of right wing Democrats, not even centrist ones, the ones with kind of conservative social ideas. and when we're talking about a majority of 30 or 40 in the house the progressive wing really can't sort of hold Hakeem Jeffries to ransom like a lot of them plan to do before the midterms because the buffer is simply so big and so AOC is venting some of that frustration and she's obviously also laying the ground or her allies are laying the ground for her 2028 run you know the votes haven't even fully been counted and the 2028 competition is is getting in full swing and And there's an organisation that's running around her ready for AOC, which wants to get a million volunteers for her presidential campaign.

25:35And this long rant on Instagram appears to be the kind of start of a start of a real war within the party. But she was really quite aggressive in that. Yeah. And I think speaking to figures in the progressive movement, I mean, the jury is very much out on whether AOC actually runs for 2028. her other option is to go for the Senate and it feels as though she is testing the water with various interventions. I think to your point earlier about the various parts of the left trying to go through the math to say one side, one more in the midterms, the slight problem they have is because they won in so many places, you can find whatever your poison is and say, well, this seat shows X, so therefore that's the direction we should go in.

26:20Now, you, Max, have been speaking to a member of the AOC, El Saeed wing of the party, if we define it like that. Talk us through it. Yes, her name is Maylak Kiros, and she's from Colorado, from Denver, the first congressional district there. And she's only 20... Denver, where I am going tomorrow for the What's Next Democrat gathering, but go on. She will not be at that because that is a more moderate gathering. There's two centrists for her. She is the Democratic Socialist of America, her sort of flag fly. She is the new AOC in this Congress, the first Gen Z, Gen Z woman elected to Congress. And she's said lots of controversial things in the past, including that 9-11 was inevitable in a sense.

27:09She has a background in the kind of pro-Palestine activist movement. And now she's here with this rump of democratic socialists in Congress. And she's really trying to push their ideas. And she wants votes all the time on things like Medicare for All. She wants votes on cutting support to Israel. And these kind of votes will be momentous occasions within the Democratic Party used to align sides either way. You spoke to her at Crooked Con, didn't you? Which we both attended at the weekend in DC, which was obviously the Obama-Aid linked podcast for this big event. So there are lots of different speakers.

27:47You asked her what she thought of the idea of AOC running for president. I'm supportive of whatever Rafa Kassnick decides to do. I think she would be amazing at anything. It would be amazing to see her run as president. So she's clearly very keen on that. But something I've been interested in as well is this ideology, this kind of left-wing part of the Democratic Party. What does it represent in terms of the world? That's what we're interested in a lot. And what does it represent in terms of Europe? and a lot of the kind of diplomats that I speak to over here are concerned that when you go to a Abdul El Saeed rally, it does sound very America first.

28:26It's all about, you know, let's stop foreign wars. Let's always be focused on American tax dollars and so on. Does this mean that America is going to be isolationist even on the left? And so I asked Malak Kheiros about this. Does she mind the term America first? Does she think that she represents it? And this is what she had to say. I think there were a lot of folks that bastardized what America First meant, maybe, in the MAGA administration and Donald Trump specifically. But ultimately, we're just leading with the focus on protecting basic human dignity. Yeah, I was quite struck by that, Max.

29:02I think this nice idea lots of diplomats have, or, you know, that things just snap back to the old ways of Uncle Sam once Trump leaves the White House, as long as J.D. Vance, the isolationist doesn't get in. It's quite far from reality. No, totally. And, you know, this liberal internationalism that defined pre-Trump Democrats is really quite far off the current debate, not least because Trump has ended up in the kind of foreign wars that have cost him electorally. And, you know, basically that the next presidential candidate is very likely to run on a platform of let's focus back on America and let's have peace abroad and bring our troops home and stop spending tax dollars abroad.

29:45And you can hear that on both sides of the aisle. So it is really a pretty fundamental realignment of what the White House wants in the world. And on the subject of the Democrats, I've been speaking to a politician more on the moderate end than El Saeed. And that interview will be in the Sunday Times, Andy Beshear, the Kentucky governor. His name is definitely coming up quite a bit when it comes to potential contenders in 2020. So we talked about that and more. Now with that, do join us again next week. Jerry will be back. Max, you may be back one day though. And if you do like this podcast, please do like and subscribe.

30:58It's the film that convinced Americans the Second World War was worth fighting. A reason to be in Hollywood that is really quite a terrifying situation. And its production is an extraordinary story in itself. Ronald Reagan had been named as the potential lead. Join me, Misha Glennie, and three expert guests for a special live edition of In Our Time, where we discuss Casablanca. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.