Bulwark Takes - GOP Silent as Trump Goes Full Dictator

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Andrew Egger and Joe Perticone break down the silence from House and Senate Republicans as Donald Trump defies the rule of law, pushes the boundaries of executive power, and governs like a dictator.

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Here goes the whole congressional press corps to run after elected Republicans to kind of watch them squirm, watch them try to evade, watch them try to take a, you know, give the old college try to like rationalizing various things. We've seen a little bit of that this time around as well. But at the same time, Trump is wildly off the reservation in terms of like the stuff he's attempting. And we're coming out of the, you know, the Oval Office meeting yesterday with President McKellie of El Salvador, you know, where they basically talked about how they were just going to sort of ignore the Supreme Court's ruling on bringing a wrongfully deported man back to America, stuff like that. Joe, you are hanging out up on Capitol Hill a lot. Can we just talk like maybe for starters, just general strokes,

what the kind of Republican approach to Trump stories has been this time around? So in the early days of like 2017, everything was happening so fast. Like members of the press corps on the Hill, we would like bring printed out tweets of Trump's to be like, please comment on this. And over the years, they've quickly learned that they don't have to really address it if they don't want to and if it's uncomfortable. And we've now seen that where we have these select few that we know will comment on something. And maybe it's topic specific. So like Rand Paul actually cares about trade policy. And so he loves to talk about tariffs and rebuke the administration on tariffs.

The marketplace has millions of people interacting every day. And they all said, holy crap, this is a terrible idea. We thought that Bill Cassidy would be that kind of person for Robert F. Kennedy. He's issued vague statements, or when I asked him about RFK recommending removing fluoride from public water, he just kind of said, I trust the American Dental Association. And there's just this rhetoric with no action attached to it. And if you ask them what they'll do, they hop in an elevator and get away from you. There are many people who are not getting social service programs, especially people with disabilities. Are you going to do anything to stop what's happening? You probably

deserved it. This example this week, dead silence. And Congress is at a session this week, which is why I'm here. You're in the Bulwark headquarters. Yeah. So there's nowhere to like ask these members unless you're with them. And only a few are holding town halls and doing public events. Whether or not you agree with the president's suggestion of sending U.S. born U.S. citizens accused and who have committed crimes to notorious prisons like the one in El Salvador. You mean sending them to foreign countries? Yes.

No, I don't agree with that. They'll definitely be asked about it when they get back. In terms of what happens other than like, oh, I don't know, you know, nothing. We've seen nothing. Every single thing I asked them about the TikTok ban that should be law right now. And they just said, you know, like, ah, whatever. Like, I just care about the end result. This is a thing like, so I have a list on Twitter where I look at all, it's all of the house Republican members and I was checking it and there's just zero comment whatsoever on what happened in that

White House meeting yesterday. They just don't want to mention it. The people you would expect to maybe say something like Don Bacon, he's just spent the morning tweeting about how he's a moderate and a so-called Reagan Republican. You know, you would think that someone like that in this moment would want to speak up against something very obviously illegal, defying not just a Supreme Court decision, but a 9-0 decision, and then misrepresenting what that decision meant. As JVL noted, it's just a big middle finger to the American justice system. And no one seems to care, at least amongst elected officials, Republicans. And so it's very demoralizing.

Yeah. I have struggled to kind of wrap my own mind around how to deal with some of these like edge case people that you're talking about. Because I feel like guys like Don Bacon, they get all this attention. You know, we kind of single them out as like worthy of particular kind of scorn or rebuke or something like that. Just because there's kind of an open question going into it. Like, well, maybe he will speak up. Here's a guy who occasionally critiques the administration, occasionally will go after these excesses and things like that. And so then when he doesn't, then it's just kind of like, ah, come on, Don Bacon, we expected

a little more of you relative to, you know, a sycophant like, I don't know, Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert or, I don't know, any, basically 90% of the rest of the caucus who, but this is sort of an interesting thing to me because I feel like in a lot of these stories, you can almost get a better sense of how radioactive it is based on not just sort of how the moderates are taking it, but how much the kind of hardcore, card-carrying, ultra-MAGA House Republicans are paying attention to it. Are you saying that we're not even really seeing stuff from the likes of MTG about this El Salvador stuff these days? So you see some coded messages from these MAGA Republicans where it's like Andy Ogles

posted this morning, like, if you're not supposed to be here, we're going to kick your butt out. And that doesn't address anything related to the meeting, but it just kind of echoes his sentiment about how, you know, deportation's good, non-deportation's bad. If, when it eventually does happen that Trump takes a U.S. citizen and throws him to a foreign torture prison, you might see some changes there because there are some people that like, they have to defend it.

And then another line that you see is like this, what about-ism where they say, Lake and Riley didn't get any due process. And it's like, okay, are you making the case that no one should get due process ever? Did Lake and Riley get due process? The answer is no. So there's ways that they get around it.

But in terms of explicitly saying U.S. citizens should be thrown in foreign prisons indefinitely, part of that is that Congress is out of session. They're not being compelled to talk about things they don't want to talk about. By this time on a regular Tuesday at noon on Capitol Hill, we would have had the Republican House conference meeting. We've had some Senate votes. So you would have seen lots of people be asked about this and have to address it or run away trying not to address it, literally running away. And we just don't have that right now.

When they get back, the thing is, is that like the signal story was two weeks ago, two weeks and a day ago. So things move really quickly. And so part of what I do is like when they go out of session like this, I'll just like put reminders in my phone. Like I know that like when certain things happen, I go like set a reminder to check the stock transactions in Congress within 45 days. And so you have to kind of circle back to those. And if you're not organized, you can lose track. So I'm sure it will be asked about, I'll be asking about it when they're back or the next time, maybe if I walk down the street, I'll see a Republican who didn't head back to their district. That has happened before. But it is just like in terms of like getting an answer on this. And the

important part about getting answers on it before it happens is to be able to plant that flag and happened before. But it's just like in terms of like getting an answer on this. And the important part about getting answers on it before it happens is to be able to plant that flag and say, well, please explain why you're not doing anything about it now. If you thought it was so egregious back then, that makes it harder for them. There's obviously like political implications of that. You know, when somebody flip flops, that's still one of the most toxic things in a political campaign. And so being able to ask them about these things is important. And I hope that my colleagues won't forget to circle back when they return to D.C. Yeah. I mean, I guess the like, quote unquote, good news as far as that particular question is concerned is that one would imagine this is far from the last time the Trump

administration is going to make news about like flaunting due process in all these ways and going up against the Supreme Court in all these ways. The thing you said about planting a flag strikes me though, because I mean, the last time I was up on the Hill, obviously, you're up there constantly, I dip in and out much less frequently. But the last time I was there, I was talking to Senate Republicans about this due process stuff, right? And this was when the stories about Andre Hernandez and Kilmar Abrego-Garcia were just starting to trickle out. You know, the administration had not yet dug in its heels nearly as much, although they were already kind of signaling that was the way. And kind of one of the, like, safe answers, if you can call it that, that I would get from a couple of the Senate Republicans who

are trying to, you know, not make waves, but also signal a certain amount of respectability or respect to the institutions or whatever, would basically be saying, well, let's see what the Supreme Court does, right? They were gesturing toward that explicitly, like, well, you know, the Trump administration is going to try to do these things, and they're going to make their case before the court, and then we'll see. And now, obviously, we're in a whole new world, right? Where like you say, they're not around to answer to any of this. But that is kind of where they were drawing the line before. You know, guys like, I don't remember who all, John Cornyn, I want to say Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, just to name like a few. What do you see happening? Like, I mean, not to, you know, ask you to cast your mind forward. What would you anticipate like the experience of going up to like

Josh Hawley, like a civil liberties guy or Rand Paul and saying like, look, like, here's this complete short circuiting of due process. Like what's the next thing beyond just sort of like, well, we'll leave it at the Supreme Court at this point. So I've learned a lot from Rand Paul, especially over the past several months, but certainly over the past decade. And I've learned that like he is a right wing guy, but he is very different, I think, than some of the other Senate Republicans. And we really saw that with tariffs where his point was not. He's like, yeah, I don't like tariffs, but my point is that tariffs are a tax and they must originate in Congress.

More importantly, they must originate in the House, of which he's not a member. And his kind of grasp on who holds the power for these things was very principled. His positions, you may disagree with them, and I would bet that most of the audience does too, and lots of people do. But he kind of held firm in his understanding of where power should be shared. That's not the case with many of these others. And so we saw the way that they essentially lied about what the Supreme Court decision actually meant. And so I'd expect a lot of them to take that line. I'd expect a lot of others to say, well, he's not being serious when he talks about homegrown. We also have homegrown criminals that

push people into subways that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking that are absolute monsters. I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country. Or does that mean citizen? Or this won't happen. And then it does happen. And then they find a new way to explain it away. In terms of drawing that clear line, part of that is like on the job of the reporter to articulately ask a question that elicits a more clear answer. That's why I hate asking questions like, what is your reaction to, or do you have a comment on? Because that's so open-ended and it

allows them to just say whatever canned thing that's either coming from the administration or coming from whoever their comms advisor is. The way that they answer it is really important. So trying to figure out is, is it legal to send a U.S. citizen to a foreign prison? Or is there recourse for people who are sent to foreign prisons to petition their way back? Is it wrong or right for the administration to go hands- on this. Trying to understand on a more detailed, in-depth level is really important. And I, you know, I just hope that there's, you know, a clear pathway for some of the people who do have like moral misgivings about this

to be able to answer it honestly. I don't think they will because they don't like to. At least you can make them feel a little worse about. Yeah, but there's like, you know, there's ways to elicit answers. The problem is though that it's often within the Trump era is it just stops there. It's not followed up by action.

And you can pick any, really any policy or any red line that Trump has drawn. That red line's been pushed back by Republicans. He crosses it and they say, well, well, you know, and they explain it away. And so trying to figure out what happens next, there's no way of predicting it.

Yeah. Really. Yeah. Well, you can predict behavior like you heard the reactions, but you can't predict how it'll go about in terms of action that follows.

And Congress is so neutered, there's not going to be really anything that can be done in this current system where it's a slim House majority for Republicans and a pretty strong Senate majority for Republicans. Very exciting. Can you imagine a single thing that Donald Trump could do in the next 300 days or however long the guy has left, my God, that even would plausibly raise the prospect of a Republican House impeaching him? No. Not a single action? Not a single thing. He made that comment in his 2016 campaign where he said, I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and my supporters would still back me. Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay? Which at the time wasn't really

about like Congress. It was about like the base. But a decade later, it explicitly applies to Congress. We have seen time and time and time again tanking the stock market and everyone was like, well, stocks can rebound. Well, now look at the bond markets. That's extremely dangerous. That shows everyone's losing faith in the United States and their ability to pay its bills, which I thought was a major concern amongst conservatives. And they're just saying, we got to give them time. We got to figure it out. National security, the TikTok ban, this is legally supposed to be enforced right now. And they're just not enforcing it. They scrapped the deal they had because of the tariff snafu, and they're not enforcing it. And so – and there's no eagerness to enforce these things.

When you look at what action is taken, someone like Chuck Grassley tries to seek exemptions on tariffs on, say, like the corn industry. Or Susan Collins picks up the phone to make sure that the social security changes in Maine aren't affected in her state. Everyone's going to ground to basically try to nibble around the edges for their own constituents. Yeah. And so you don't see collective action that would extend this protection to their other Republican colleagues or to Democratic colleagues. It's all special interests. So when you do see action, it's very limited. An area where I could see a real revolt would be Chris Van Hollen says that he's seeking a meeting with the El Salvadorian president this week. And if he doesn't get it, he's going to go to El Salvador. He could be rebuffed and not let in.

If there is something that becomes much worse, which we don't know it could be, that could be an example because that is their colleague in the Senate. And if something can happen to one senator, it can happen to another. They're very much self-preservationists. And so that's something I'm definitely keeping an eye on. Yeah. Although not to go too bleak on that, but another thing I was up there, I guess, a few months ago now, asking around about was Trump's calls for, you know, Liz Cheney and Benny Thompson and, you know, the whole House January 6th Select Committee to be criminally investigated. He said they were all guilty of treason, essentially, and poking around a little bit with House Republicans. They're like,

your colleague, Benny Thompson, your former colleague, Liz Cheney, any any reservations at all? And got absolutely no bites at all on that. The House is kind of like a kiddie table. They're not as like closely knit as the Senate. The Senate is very closely knit. They all know each other. They all talk to each other. There's only a hundred of them.

And so- They've all been there for 40 years. Yeah. They've all like been friends since the 60s. But like they, something like that, something that could go wrong there, I think you'd see more people stick up for their colleague. Maybe not because it's the right thing to do,

but because they understand if it can happen to an identical position to person, it can happen to them. We're getting really dark here. Yeah, oh my gosh. All right, should we leave it there, Joe? Thanks for coming on to chew all through this stuff with us.