The Daily Signal - Rachel Bovard on Trump's Cabinet Picks

Episode Date: November 16, 2024

It's a crossover! On this weekend edition of The Daily Signal Podcast, we bring you Bradley Devlin's interview with Rachel Bovard from The Signal Sitdown. President-Elect Donald Trump’s picks for his Cabinet—Pete Hegseth, Rep. Matt Gaetz, and Marco Rubio, among others—have caught most people off guard. But there’s more than meets the eye to these picks. Rachel Bovard joins this week’s “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss the Senate’s leadership election, the Trump-Vance transition team, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the stories of everyday Americans to detailed policy conversations, we're going beyond the headlines to discuss the issues and events that have and are shaping this nation. Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast, weekend edition. I'm Virginia Allen. And today, we're changing things up and bringing you a conversation with the Daily Signal's Sitdown podcast. It's a crossover episode. The Daily Signal's Bradley Devlin hosts The Signal Sit Down.

and this week he sat down with the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute, Rachel Bovard. They discuss how John Thune will lead as majority leader of the Senate and some of Trump's recent appointments to his cabinet and other positions. Stay tuned for Bradley Devlin's conversation with Rachel Bovard after this. Pro-life, pro-women conservative and feminist? That's right. We're problematic. women. The radical left does not know what to do with strong independent women who believe in traditional values and love America. So you might say we're problematic to the left narrative of what a woman should be. Here on problematic women, we sort through the news to find the stories that you care about. Join Problematic Women on the Daily Signal's YouTube or Rumble every Wednesday

or catch the show wherever you get your podcast on Thursday morning. And be sure to follow problematic women on Instagram. loyalty is the game, right? Like you, this idea that somehow you're going to bring in people, I think it's very cute, that people are like, oh, I'm going to have people that disagree with me in my cabinet. Well, that might be true on, like, surface things, right? Like, they may disagree with you on, like, your choice of tableware. But at the end of the day, like, you're both committed to the ideological project of what you're

trying to do. That is just politics, right? Thank you so much for tuning into the Signal Sitdown. But before we get to the interview, we'd love it if you'd have to hear it. hit that like and subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you may be joining us. And please remember to give us a five-star review because we love your feedback. Remember, it's your government, and together we'll expose how it really works and how to affect real change. Without further ado, here's the interview.

Rachel Beauvard, welcome to The Signal Sit Down. Thanks for having me. Of course. We just had an election. I don't know if you heard. It looks like it's going to be a trifecta. Obviously, there's a lot of House races still yet to be called, but Republicans, appear they will have three, four, five member majority. That Delta is going to play a big role in future spending fights, et cetera, I think.

But we'll talk about that later. Trifecta, presidency, Senate, House for Republicans and for conservatives. What does that mean? Well, I mean, congrats to everyone. I think this is bigger than anyone thought possible. So I think it's very exciting. But remember, they also had this setup at the beginning of the first Trump administration, right? So I think a lot of people are looking back at that and saying, what didn't we do then?

What can we get right this time? But I think it's going to be very impactful for a couple of reasons. One, because I think the Congress, at least the Senate, is already talking about how to confirm Trump's people as quickly as possible. And I think that's a lesson that we learned from the first Trump administration is to get your people in as fast as possible to get working to get control of the bureaucracy. So there's strategies being discussed for how to get those people through the Senate quickly. And remember, the filibuster doesn't exist anymore on the executive calendar. So there are a couple of options. But I think also you have a reconciliation vehicle moving.

And so reconciliation is obviously a vehicle attached to the budget resolution that you don't filibuster it in the Senate, right? I mean, there are ways that you can drag it out, but as a practical matter, it doesn't require 60 votes. it passes with a simple majority. So I think people are already looking at ways in which that can be used to re-implement some of the former Trump policies and also looking at new things that can be done. So from a congressional perspective, there's a lot they can do to support the president. But the first thing they have to do is elect their leadership. And that's kind of what we're staring down the pike out right now. Yeah, we're recording this Tuesday, but this episode will be released Thursday. So we will have a Senate majority leader selected from the GOP conference.

We'll talk about that in a second. But I'm so glad you brought up. It was the same situation in 2016 to 2018. And what do we get out of it? We got like an impermanent tax cut, which of course is up this year again. When Trump didn't run on tax cuts, he ran on the issues of immigration trade and foreign policy mistakes. Now, granted, a lot of things you can do through the executive. branch, but to really give that, make that policy sticky, you need to go through the legislature.

And so I think when we look back on the 2016 through 2018 years, it was almost like, okay, Donald Trump, like, pulled out a straight flush, and he won the hand, and he took in all the chips. He won the electoral college. He didn't win the popular vote. And Republicans in the House and the Senate won not because of. of Trump or Trump's coattails, but because independently, people are just tired of the Obama administration and the malfeasance of, you know, the Democratic-led House and Senate. When that happened, all of a sudden, you don't have a president with a lot of power,

with a lot of political capital, with representatives on the hill. You do have that now with the size of this mandate. How does that change the way the Senate and Congress interact? with a president with a clear mandate. Yeah, and I think also, if we're being honest, you know, there's been a paradigm shift in the Republican Party a little bit more that's reflected in this win than in the 2016 win. I think, frankly, there were a lot of Republicans that weren't quite on board with Donald Trump's agenda, right? They were sort of prepared to wait him out. They weren't necessarily there for his agenda.

They were there for their own sort of whatever we want to do. This guy will be out in four years or eight, whatever. We just have to survive it. The country has changed. The Republican Party has changed. And I think the makeup of the Congress now, and this is especially true in the House, obviously because they're up for election over two years, the Senate slightly less so, but you're getting there, is made up of people who are products of the current Republican Party, not the Republican Party that existed 20, 25 years ago, although you still have people, you know, from that era. This Republican Party, as we saw with this election is much broader. It is, you know, a multiracial, multi-ethnic. working class party, it's made up of sort of the middle class and working class as opposed to a party in, you know, prior generations that was much more credentialed and, you know, business leaders and all these things. For better, for worse, and in many cases, I think for better, the Republican Party lost the corporate class. They are firmly in the pockets of Democrats. They are, they are woke,

they are progressive, they are virtue signallers. Democrats enjoy them, right? And business leaders who have gone that route, enjoy the Democratic Party. And so I think you have people in the Republican Party much more interested in the issues that really drove this election, which are working class issues. Immigration policy is a working class issue. The left tries to demagogue it as something else. No, it is a putting food on the table, access to jobs issue. It is a law and order issue. It is things like that. People want to see more support for working families. You know, they want to see just a return to what middle class America cares. about. And so I think you're seeing a Republican Party that is much more on board or accepting

of that mandate than you were when Donald Trump was elected in 2016. So I think you're seeing a Congress that is more interested in working hand and glove with the administration than they were previously. And I think the other addition to that is that, gosh, in the last four years, and even during the Trump administration, we saw how bad the bureaucracy is, right? These people that existed sort of in the bowels of the bureaucracy, you know, under the rate of, are, they really came out and bared their teeth. And so I think people are much more aware of how weaponized the government has become, how it is run by bureaucrats that are completely unaccountable to anything, and that Congress really is the only branch that can exercise permanent authority

over them, right? The president can come in, and to the best of his ability, kind of control it from the political appointments side, you know, and he can try to control sort of how civil service is hired and fired, but really Congress makes these reforms permanent and lasting. So I think for all of those reasons, there's more of an effort for the Congress, or at least Republicans in Congress, to work with this president. And a big initial test of this, I think, is how they're going to handle the funding at the end of the year, right? Because there's sort of two options they have. They're running up against a funding deadline on December 20th. They can either push through a giant omnibus spending bill with a ton of stuff. We call this the

clear the deck strategy, right? And the argument there is that you're moving everything off the table. So the incoming administration has a completely fresh start. They don't have to deal with the debt ceiling. They don't have to deal with these funding fights. The other option they have is a straight continuation of funding, a continuing resolution short term into something like March or April, which would allow the administration at that point to put its imprimatur and its plans into the funding bill that they pass at that time. So you're just moving up their ability. to shape what that government funding bill looks like. If you're moving up that timeline with a short-term continuing resolution,

and let's say your president-elect Donald Trump, and you're sitting there, do you like a September option or do you like the March option? Surely you want to be freed from any sort of constraints that Congress would put on you with passing a budget while you're not in office. But at the same time, a spending fight in March, you're in your first 100 days still. folks are probably still being confirmed up and down. And now you've got to expend potentially sizable political capital, given the margin of Republicans, the Republican advantage in the House. Like, you might have to spend a lot of capital to make sure that your priorities are protected.

Yeah. Well, and you're, you know, you're not dealing, you don't have a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, right? So you're going to have to muscle it through at that level, too. But I think there's a couple of considerations. considerations, right? I think arguments can be made for both strategies, but I think there's a couple considerations. And I think allowing the outgoing Democrat majority, particularly in the Senate, to shape a year-long funding bill, the first year of your administration, is a high-risk strategy for this administration based on the number of things that they would try to do, right?

The Congress, and especially these people that write these bills, and frankly, you know, our current Senate leadership has not really been up to the task of preventing them. from doing these things, they want to tie Trump's hands in any number of things, right? These appropriations bills essentially authorize what the agencies do with that funding. So they can say you're going to do this. They can also say you're not going to do that. And by tying the president's hands saying this funding cannot be used for X. This fund is, for instance, right, this funding cannot be used for X border policy or this

funding cannot be used to modify anything about the strategy in the war in Ukraine or something like that. You are effectively handcuffing the incoming administration. And yes, you know, you can argue that, oh, well, the admin has some flexibility in how they may be able to spend those funds via, you know, apportionment, turning things on, turning things off. That's literally what they impeached Stump over the first time with trying to hold back some funding from Ukraine while he was working on this diplomatic goal. So I don't know why you'd mess around with that again. Do you think they're trying to set him up for that? So that, I mean, my first read is like bloodbath incoming in the 2026 midterms.

I know that 12 million people need to be deported. It's not going to be immensely popular, I imagine, with some of the American people. I think Democrats are going to be very motivated to turn out during the midterms. I think the new Republican Party coalition, I mean, yes, there's probably weeping and gnashing of teeth with the establishment and the consulting class who said, what we need to do is identity politics to create this multiracial working class coalition. Well, you just got it, and you didn't do any of the identity politics game. You just actually spoke about the issues that these people care about.

But the problem with this new coalition is very prone to turning out during a presidential year, probably won't turn out to specials and probably won't turn out to midterms. So if I'm looking down the road, I see a very problematic situation for Republicans in the midterms. And all of a sudden, like if Democrats have control of the House come 2027, do you think they're trying to set up some type of impeachment trap before that happens? I think if I'm the Trump White House, I'm governing like I have a year, right, to get everything done that I want to do, right? Because you don't even want to play around with it the year that all these members are in cycle, right? You, it's, do you have a whole different type of politics in an in cycle year? So if I'm, I want to get as much done as possible. I think, I think every Republican from the executive to Congress should be looking at it like this. We have a year. And, you know, that's why I think looking at this funding. fight, they may in fact want to, they may decide that a short-term CR to March is what they want so they can shape as much of that funding fight as possible. They can lay it all on the table at

that point and get as much done as they can. I don't think they're going to have, I mean, we learned this the last time. They didn't have that much time. Yeah. One of the lessons that, as I was getting my feet under me in D.C. as a young journalist, one of the lessons that you taught me was about personnel. You were one of the first to raise some concerns about potential Trump personnel picks the first time around and the mistakes that the Trump administration made. And it's because they didn't, you know, it's difficult. He talked about this on Joe Rogan, right? Trump's like, I'm a business guy.

I've never been in politics before. All of a sudden, I'm the president of the United States. And I'm having to get a lot of input from like establishment party figures who weren't really with me on who's good and who's bad. And like, yeah, like, frankly, there's some bad people in there that shouldn't have been there. And I've learned my lesson. And so now I'm creating this team. As you look at some of these initial personnel, choices. Susie Wilde's, Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller deputy, you've got Mike Walts coming in as

the NSA, et cetera. Are you heartened by these picks? Do you think that the Trump administration actually has learned his lesson, that Trump has learned his lesson, and that they're going to be set up to win come to come January of next year? Yeah. I mean, I am, I'm excited for what I'm seeing so far. I do think it's shown that he, it just seems like it's more focused, right? He's, he's, he's, the administration seems very clear about what they want to do based on the people that they're picking. They're picking people who, you know, I think represent the fact that the party has moved toward Trump, right? I think a long time, you know, even, even six to eight years ago, people would have said Marco Rubio as, you know, Donald Trump's secretary of state, like, are you insane? But I think they're all under the same umbrella now.

And, you know, Rubio has really pivoted toward, you know, making sure China stays where it needs to be, right? In Iran Hawk, like, these are things that have been in line with what Trump has been talking about. I think you're seeing, you know, Susie Wiles ran a very organized campaign for Donald Trump. And I think you're seeing that organization reflect in how these picks, who these picks are and how he intends to govern, right? I think picking Tom Homan and Stephen Miller to run immigration policy, the man of serious, right? And I think also he's bringing a very smart thing he's doing is bringing back people who were with him the last time around because everybody learned those lessons together. Right. And so I think people are walking in ready to execute on day one. Whereas before, I think

even what Donald Trump had said on Joe Rogan, it took a long time for everybody to get their feet under them. And it was like almost every single executive order, it felt like issued on day one. And, you know, January 20th, 2017 was like instantly stopped with a court order. And it like, it almost felt like, oh my gosh, this is like self-sabotage of the president's agenda. Yeah, you know. Like you can't write any of these executive orders in a way that like you can't prevent any sort of court injunction. And I'm sure they're going to be doing a lot of that again this time. There's going to be a lot of lawfare.

But I think the difference is, you know, and I think sometimes it's underappreciated. The fact that, you know, as conservatives were like, oh, government is so easy. If it would just run like a business, it would be fine. And that might be true, but in theory. But the reality is that it's its own type. of work. And it's its own ecosystem. It has its own rules. And it's run by thousands of people that report to no one that understand the levers and labyrinthine parts of power that the rest of us have no idea about. And so I think that's why Democrats so successfully wield it because

they're creatures of it, right? The Democrats, if you look at them and their party, they're, they come from the bureaucracy a lot of times. They're community organizers and like professors of political science, right? Like, Republicans tend to actually have had private sector jobs. Right? They're only used to working in like monarchies, i.e. the corporation. Yeah. Well, it's, but they're like real people, right? If you look, like I come from the Senate, if you look at the Senate Democratic Conference, it's literally community organizers and like a couple of like professors. Whereas the Republican Conference is, you know, business leaders and doctors and lawyers and engineers and, you know, all kinds of things. They don't necessarily, they haven't spent their life figuring out how this works. And we saw the case study of that with Donald Trump. And so I think people have to appreciate. appreciate that fact. You know, that's why when you can bring in someone, you know, during Trump One, where he brought in Rex Tillerson, you know, Rex Tillerson has an undeniably impressive resume as a corporate CEO as an oil guy. Couldn't necessarily translate that experience very well to running the State Department because it just, they're built differently. And so I think the fact that Trump has figured out, hopefully, and I think his picks reflect this, that you actually do need people who know how power works in D.C. He's bringing those people to the table. And I think that's very, very smart. Yeah. You turn on corporate media and says Trump chooses loyalists. Loyalists. That's their buzzword right now.

How important is loyalty in these picks? And what actually, like, when I, what I see, when I look at the, from a 10,000 foot view, like the personal problems last time is like, Trump unexpectedly wins. Trump is basically handed Team One. Team One does not agree with Trump on a lot of things. There's a lot of infighting, a lot of leaking. Team two comes in a little bit better. Still, cracks start to show, a lot of infighting, a lot of leaking. Then all of a sudden, Trump kind of cleans house yet again and puts in place some very loyal people. And also, in part, because Trump continued to consolidate his control over the Republican Party through the course of his first administration when the economy was humming, when borders crossing started to go

down, right? Like, he actually created the center of gravity that he is now. He wasn't necessarily that in 2016. And that last team, yeah, loyalty was at a premium, but like the leaks decreased from my perspective. Like there was a lot less leaks, a lot less internal chaos from the Trump One administration. And so as we, as corporate media shouts loyalists everywhere, I mean, how important is loyalty in this business? I mean, it's, loyalty is the game, right? Like you, this idea that somehow you're going to bring in people I think it's very cute that people are like, oh, I'm going to have people that disagree with me in my cabinet. Well, that might be true on like surface things, right?

Like they may disagree with you on like your choice of tableware. But at the end of the day, like you're both committed to the ideological project of what you're trying to do. That is just politics, right? And so I think this idea that like being a loyalist is a bad thing. Look, what we saw in the last, in Trump one was just massive undermining of the president. And I mean this both at like a constitutionally threatening level as much as I mean it on like a superficial people trying to like make money off it. And I really think if you look back at some of those examples, like, you know, you had this ridiculous interview with I think the guy that was like the envoy to Syria where he openly said, oh yeah, the president directed us to get troops out of Syria, but we would just lie about how many there were and we would sort of play shell games to make sure he never actually knew. Like, what?

Like, are you insane? Yeah. And we don't have a republic if that's what. And the military, there's, there were reports in all the investigations that have come out now over January 6th where reports came out that Donald Trump, and this has been all documented now by the congressional committees, he asked for the National Guard to be in D.C. on January 6th. And his orders just weren't followed. They were just like, no, we're not going to do that. Like members of the military ignoring the commander in chief, that is just dangerously close to an actual coup at this point, right? So you have to be committed not only to the president, you know, you respect and honor the person that you serve, but the president's ideological agenda.

And it is, of course, common sense that you would pick people who want to execute your agenda. And I think it's especially true when you're dealing with Republicans because of the by and large, and we know this by their political don't. donations, the bureaucracy is hostile to Republicans. And so when you're putting in place political appointees over the careers, you have to, you want to make sure that they're going to all be kind of singing off the same song sheet. Why wouldn't you? Right? This is just common sense. And, you know, the other thing that we saw in Trump one to is the institutional incentives, I think, that will be there again for staff to turn on the president, right? Because corporate media loves that, right? They love bringing MSNBC loves bringing on the like the Republican that, you know,

if you, who was the guy that wrote the book, Anonymous, Miles Taylor. Yeah. Right. And the New York Times spun him up to be some big senior official and he was some like mid-level funky. But like, what did he get out of it? Like left wing fame, fortune and a book deal. Right. And we saw that time and time again, turn on the president. And it is if you want a media career, that is the way to go. So you want to be sure to the extent that you can vet for that, yeah, why would you, why would you want those people in your administration, right? It's a completely, you want people there to serve the president who's been elected by the American people. So they're serving the American people by serving the president. They're not there for their own agenda, but to their own self-interest. Yeah,

and it was kind of funny watching, you know, being old enough to remember 2015, like a bunch of establishment types were like, well, this is what happens when there's an administrative state because it turns the presidency into a figurehead, and that's the only reason Donald Trump could ever become popular is because the presidency actually means nothing. It's like, no, you're reading this all wrong. Like Donald Trump is, as Michael Moore said, like a human Molotov cocktail being thrown into the system.

Like, it was the American people testing if Article 2's vesting clause still existed. Like, can we give power to this outside person who promises to break things and then rebuild the top of them? And the answer that they got the first time was no. COVID happens. Trump loses. and now big mandate for conservative governance.

But as you said, right, there's Trump from the business world and in the Republican conference in the Senate, doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. They need to figure out when they get up here where all the levers are and how to work it. And for the first time in 18 years, Republicans will be choosing a new Senate leader for the conference. That vote is going to happen between taping this and the release of this. episode. Three candidates, Rick Scott of Florida, John Thune of South Dakota, and John Cornyn of Texas. What do you make of these three candidates, these three men? Where do you think the Senate is heading under their leadership? Well, can I first like say that it's, I know, you know,

nobody focuses on the Senate, really, and no one focuses on the Senate leadership, but this is a huge deal, right? Like Mitch McConnell has been at the top of the Republican Party in the Senate for 18 years. As long as I've ever worked in D.C. as long as I've ever worked in politics, you know, the Senate has known one way of doing things. So this is the first time. And, you know, yes, every six years in theory Mitch McConnell could be challenged, but he's only been challenged one time, right? And it was the last time by Rick Scott, who reportedly got 10 votes. We don't actually know because it was a secret ballot. So he has just been sort of rubber stamped into this position. And it's gotten the Republican conference to a

point where the majority of them are really almost all of them minus one or two have only seen one way of doing things. And that one way has been Mitch McConnell's style of governance, which is a very top-down centralized management. All the strategic and policy decisions are made, you know, behind closed doors with just his staff or a very close, you know, group of senators. And the rest of the conference is completely left in the dark. And so I think for the first time, the conference has an ability to choose a different way. They have the ability to say, oh, hey, we're up here. We would like the opportunity to be senators. We would like the opportunity to offer amendments on legislation. We'd like our committee work to matter. We'd like to know and be invested in the strategy for bills

that come before the Senate. Because what's critical about the Senate, right, the House is incredibly majoritarian. All of the power of the floor is vested in the speaker. When you're electing the speaker, he is in charge. And that's by design. The founder set it up that way because the House is the populist body. It's supposed to move very fast and it's supposed to be responsive. And that's why they have two-year elections. That's why the Speaker is allowed to sort of control the majority, which then crushes the minority. That is all by design.

The Senate is the opposite. You know, in the Senate, the minority view can prevail because each senator, regardless of party, has almost equal institutional authority to call bills up to the floor, to offer amendments, to shape the product that reaches the Senate floor. To be a senator is to be a very powerful individual in Washington. But you never see that. Because the leadership of both parties has really centralized all of that power in themselves. And I would say to the detriment of a functioning Senate, to the detriment of the senators.

Because if you're a leader, why wouldn't you, as Senate majority leader, Senate Minority Leader, want the caucus, want the Senate to work more like the House. in that way, right? Because it's more power for you, more control over the legislation, more control in cycle years where you have your hands all over the purse strings and, you know, it's kind of a horse training business. You kind of want, if you're, you have your self-interest is to make to the extent that you can, the Senate look more like the House, right? Yeah. I mean, if that's the legacy that you want to leave, but it's a detriment in the Senate, right? You're leaving, if that's your goal, it may be true that you,

you have irrigated all that power to yourself and you can claim to be the most powerful majority leader, minority leader, whatever, but you're leaving the Senate in much worse shape. And that is, I think, a shame on our bicameral legislature, right? And also it requires majority leader to take a very heavy hand because senators actually have power, right? So if senators do start to use that power, and you've seen this in McConnell's later years, he slaps them down very aggressively, kicking them off committees, weaponizing campaign funding that he gives them or doesn't give them.

And so that's the vibe in the Senate conference. And I think they're approaching a point now where with whoever wins this next spot, things could really change. They may not, right? I think not all these candidates are the same, but at least the conversation is on the table. Well, I'm glad that you bucked my question and said that first because we will revisit Scott, Thune, and Cornyn. But you brought up something so important. And that is as we look at this Senate leadership election, the reason that it's so important, The reason that it's so important is because for the first time in a long time, it feels like there's a real appetite for change in the Republican conference.

2022 elections come by. Republicans don't win the way they thought they would win. Remember the red wave that we were promised? Never materialized, especially on the Senate side. And though Rick Scott was at the NRC at the time, he had raised a lot of money, and it seemed like the resources, or the feeling is that the resources were mismanaged by McConnell's. campaign apparatus going all in for Oz in Pennsylvania, for example, leaving a candidate like Blake Masters in Arizona to kind of flounder. Scott runs. As you said, allegedly he gets 10 votes, secret ballot, we don't actually know the vote total. McConnell kind of rushes that vote to remain

leader. And then over the course of 2023 and 24, the conference started to buck McConnell a little bit more. What were those instances? I mean, do you agree with that? Like, they started to kind of actually, no, you're not just going to like railroad us with Ukraine funding all the time. Yeah, no, there was definitely agitation. And, you know, for the first time that in my experience, at least in one, and watched and worked in the Senate for a long time, the leader laid down what was going, a plan for funding Ukraine that the party, I'm sorry, that the conference literally rejected in a conference lunch, came out and all voted the office. opposite way. Like, I've never seen them do that before. And I think there are a couple of things

going on. And the first of which is that the party's changing, right? I think people like to refer to the sort of restraint foreign policy views in the Republican conference as a rump of the conference. And that may still be true. It's definitely not the majority of the party. But the people representing that view are extremely articulate advocates for it, right? J.D. Vance, for instance, monumental on this debate in this debate in the Senate. And he joined Rand Paul, who's been pushing these ideas for a long time. Same with Mike Lee. Same with Eric Schmidt, also a new senator from Missouri. Same with Ron Johnson. So there is a group of senators that feel particularly, I think, more reflective of where the base is on these foreign policy questions. And it really irks McConnell.

I mean, you've seen, you know, he's stepping down from his position of leader, but he's going to stay in the Senate. Well, I'm going to tell my party a thing or two about Ukraine before I leave. No, he literally said I am going to stay in the Senate to these were not his words exactly, but they weren't far off, fight my own party, essentially. And I think he called it the isolationist wing of my own party. But, you know, for me, you know, I'm looking around at the world at Democrats trying to like put boys and girls sports, you know, they're trying to like bring down the administrative state on top of everybody. There's like massive lawfare going on. Pick your priority. I'm not sure that I would say out loud that my priority is this like

intra-party feud. Maybe fight the Dems, but you know, whatever. Maybe prices should go down. Yeah, right. Like inflation, but like, okay. But yes, it's the growing isolation of the Republican Party. So, you know, the Senate is always going to be slower to change, right? It's just the nature of the institution, the nature of the six-year election cycle, and the type of people that have been in the Senate for a long time. They represent other eras of the Republican Party. But I do think going forward, Senators, newly elected Republican senators are going to be much more in the mold of J.D. Vance than they are of Mitch McConnell, frankly. And so I think this new leadership has to accept and appreciate that fact. We're not going back, right? The party has changed. The Senate needs to, I think,

reform itself to more reflect those priorities. And it's been interesting. to see, like, the way I've separated it out in my writing and a little bit on this podcast, but there's like the reform candidate. Like, if you want maximal reform, Rick Scott's probably your guy. There's the, like, middle candidate. That's Cornyn because Cornyn has for six years not been in leadership. He's been a regular member. He's felt like some of his priorities have been railroaded by the McConnell style of leadership.

So he sympathizes, also a good fundraiser, et cetera. So he's kind of in the middle. And then you have Thune, who despite being the number two right now, and despite being, you know, the most expected to carry on some of the McConnell tendencies, he's been open to some reforms too, like putting term limits on a leader election, et cetera. Well, I will say I think there's a distinction between Thune and the other two candidates on that issue. And we should talk about why that's important. Go for it. But so, yeah, so term limiting the leader. is something that's come up as an issue in this race.

And so to unpack it a little bit, every other position in the Republican Senate leadership is term limited to six years. So you can be the conference chair, you can be the whip, you can be the policy committee chair. All these positions you can only hold for six years except for the majority leader. You can hold that position as long as you want. That's accepted from the term limits. So there's an effort by some, well, it's by the conservatives. Let's be real. it's an effort by the conservatives in the Senate Republican conference to impose that term limit on the leader.

Now, Scott has come out affirmatively in support of it. Cornyn has affirmatively come out and said he would do it as well. Thune has said he's open to it. So read into that what you will. The other two have said, I will do this. Thune has said I'm open to it. It's a softer commitment, but you wouldn't like just Thune make that commitment if the bucking didn't happen over 23 and 24. McConnell is very, very opposed. He's been vocally opposed to this. His argument is that, well, this will limit the leader's ability to fundraise. And I don't completely buy that argument because of the fact that the leader is raising funds not because of who he is, but because of what he represents, which is the Senate majority. People are giving to the leader because for the maintenance of the Senate majority, not necessarily because of who's there. So I don't necessarily buy the argument that somehow fundraising would dip because the leader would.

change. But even if it did, those funds will remain the same. They'll just be more dispersed, right? This may empower other members of the conference to fundraise in ways that they really haven't because the leader's been sucking up all the money, right? So it's just, I think there are a number of ways to look at it. But I do think this is an incredibly important reform because, again, it goes back to the idea that the Republican conference is so talented, right? We really have a deep bench of talent in the Senate Republican Conference that you never see. ask the random person on the street if they know who their senator is. They probably don't, right?

But they know who Mitch McConnell is probably, right? So it's like you want to allow that talent to rise. You want to allow the conference to be debating the vision that they want and the type of approach they want every six years. This is iron sharpening iron. It can only make the Republican conference more effective and better, I think, if members are continually being exposed to new ideas and new strategies and new vision. So I think this is a very important reform. It's sort of a small flashpoint in the overall conversation of leadership race, but an important one. Yeah. Rick Scott was in here and said, we've got a lot of people on this bench.

They're really talented folks. Yeah. He also came in and said, like, I want to empower my members. And that's kind of the like corporate business mind that Rick Scott would want to bring to the office of Senate Majority Leader. One, what do you make of Rick Scott's chances? I mean, he surged over the weekends, over the weekend with all these key endorsements, whether that was Elon or Tucker on the outside or someone like Senator Haggerty and someone like Senator Rubio, you know, people who, you don't like really make endorsements in secret ballot elections that are strictly internal. But like, more senators than ever have kind of started to speak up about who they're endorsing for these roles. And I don't know, I don't know what to make.

There's part of me that's like, wow, like, senators actually coming out. in support of Rick Scott. It makes me feel like there's a little bit of momentum there. At the same time, like, it's a secret ballot. How do you actually, how do you actually know? How do you actually create any sort of firm commitments? How do you actually go about whipping that? It just like seems very, very difficult to me.

So with that, your read on Scott's candidacy and on Scott's chances. Yeah, I can I just say I love for the first time, I think that people, like the Senate leadership race has actually punctured like normal people's thinking, right? I've been in Washington for a while and I've never seen anyone care about it before. And now finally, it's amazing to watch. Like as a nerd, it's like I'm so pumped that people are like, like Elon Musk has an opinion about who's your Senate leader. Like I never in my wildest dreams that I think we'd be at this point. But I think it just goes to show that like people understand, even if they don't understand the minutia of the Senate, even if they don't understand at a granular level anything that would change, they understand that something has to change.

because they understand that the status quo isn't working. And I think for Senator Scott in particular, that's really driven his candidacy is that he's been a senator who's always been commenting on the fact that the Republicans have no plan. If you remember, was it, I guess, two or three years ago at this point, he put out an agenda for the Republican Party in 2022 because he's like we he couldn't believe that McConnell, and he said, McConnell said this publicly, he affirmatively ran on having no agenda. Like he said, no, I don't have an agenda. We're not running on an agenda. And Rick Scott, like, they blew his mind. And so he's like, okay, fine, I'll make my, I'll write my own. That's what he came in here and said that same thing?

He's like, we don't have a mission statement? Yeah. It's like, what institution he'd ever heard of that doesn't have a mission statement? And he comes at it from his, you know, being in business. And I think a lot of that business experience does translate in instances like this, right? Just as an organizational matter, wherever you are. Like, you want to know as a good. group what you're trying to achieve. And so I think he's just been shocked at kind of how dysfunctional

the conference is and how it's been run. So I think that's, you know, a lot of what he's, he's running on. And Cornyn, John Cornyn, you know, has been done a little bit of that too, right? He's an institutionalist. He's been there for a long time. He was the whip. You know, he formerly had John Thune's job and then termed out. And I think it's interesting for him because now he's seen both sides of the coin, right? When you're in leadership, you're in the room, you know, you know all the things, you know, but then you jump back, you get thrown back into the pond, essentially, you're rank and file and you see how annoying it is to not be told anything. Right. And then just for your vote to just be demanded. And so I think that's

compelling a lot of the, he's a little bit more granular about his reforms in his communications with the conference. You know, he said, this is how I'd handle amendments. This is how I'd handle filling the tree. This is how I'd handle committees, how the Senate runs day to day. This is what the approach's process would look like. And John Thune, I think, is very much, as far as I've seen, has not articulated

as specific a vision as the other two, but I think is hoping that members know him, right? He's been in leadership. If you remember last year, McConnell was out of the Senate for five or six weeks because he had had that fall. And at that point, Thune was effectively the leader right? And so I think he's hoping, you know, senators look to that time as his campaign, essentially.

You've seen me do the job. You know, now let me do the job. Yeah. With Cornyn, it's interesting his six years in the wilderness almost coming back and wanting to have this leader position. And of course, you kind of hear stories about this from the Hill. Like Cornyn does have a very, he has gravitas. but one of the vices that I hear potentially is that Corny's just not that aligned on the ballsy stuff. How do you read Corny right now? Because like my vice for Cornyn is like maybe he's not completely aligned with what Mago wants to accomplish. Whereas Rick Scott is like fully aligned. But if Rick Scott somehow manages to pull this out when like a year ago I think you'd think, yeah, no,

He got, if he got 10 votes last time, he's probably getting 10 votes this time. Like, if he manages to pull it out, the downfall for Scott would be like, he kind of pulled it out of nowhere. And I don't know actually how much political capital he has as the leader. So what do you make of Cornyn's policies and then that potential downside for Scott? Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is that if the leadership style changes, right, in the vein of what we're talking about. And what I mean by that is individual senators are empowered to go to the floor, to offer their own amendments, to participate in conference strategy for what bills are brought to the floor and when, then the leader's policy positions don't really matter that much at the end of the day, right? Because what matters is what the conference decides together and how deferential they are to views within their own conference.

because that's been a big gripe about McConnell's leadership, is that he always goes along with Democrat bills in the sense that more Democrats will support. The majority of Democrats support this bill is coming to the floor. Most Republicans don't, but he'll find 10 Republicans that will cross over to give Democrats 60 votes. And that's been how he's done things in the Senate.

There's no fight, right? There's no... The immigration bill last year is a great example of this, that disastrous immigration bill. Yeah, we didn't even talk about that. Yeah. But that's kind of, well, but that's kind of a case study in this, right? This bill of the whole of why centralized management top-down leadership structure has failed

because this bill, you know, this so-called bipartisan immigration bill was negotiated in secret by James Langford, Senator James Langford and Mitch McConnell. Other members of the conference wanted input. They had ideas. They demanded to be in the room. They wanted to help shape the product. They were completely denied. they weren't given any details until very late about what was in the legislation.

As a strategic matter, when the details of it started leaking, the conference was like, we need to walk away from this. Like, I don't, you know, this bill allows two million illegals to come in before any enforcement. It, you know, hands out, it still allows the Biden administration to exploit asylum loot polls. There's all this refugee resettlement. Like, it was a terrible bill, right? Everyone tries to paint it as it was like some real big compromise. No, it was awful. And there was like a train.

It was like you were standing on the tracks and you could see the train coming to hit you. And the conference was like, no, walk away, walk away from the table. But they weren't included. Yeah. Right? It was just McConnell and Linkford and they pressed ahead knowing that the majority of the Republican conference was not going to support this. But stayed at the table anyway so that by the time it got to the floor, it still had the imprimatur of Republicans on it. right and even though the majority of the conference including McConnell ended up voting against it in the end

the damage is done right right and if it would have and if for some reason McConnell doesn't walk away and gets those you know 10 or 12 whatever senators to come with them I mean I don't think Republicans actually win the Senate I think it's tied 50 50 because you just passed an amnesty bill no exactly and also but because it was handled the way it was because they it was a terrible bill The conference was saying flashing red light. Like the train is coming on us. We're going to get run over here. They didn't walk away.

They let it go to the floor. It got hung around the next of Republicans as blocking any border enforcement. And Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris used that talking point on the campaign trail. And that was just disgraceful. I'm sorry. Like this is, it was a failure of not only policy but strategy. And the conference tried to stop this, but McConnell didn't take the. put of his conference. So what I'm saying is if you have a leader that is much more open and aware

of conference dynamics and says, oh, I may want to do this, but gosh, I do not have the support of the majority of my conference. Maybe I'm going to back off this. The leader's opinions don't matter so much. Right. So that could be if Cornyn actually commits to these kind of reforms, hey, maybe it's okay that Cornyn can be a little squishy on the Second Amendment issue sometimes, or maybe it's okay that he's a little squishy on this, that, or the other thing. And like, because ultimately, if he puts the reforms in place, he's not going to matter as much. Right. Or it's an, yeah, it's an instance where like, okay, maybe there is a gun bill on the floor of the Senate. Cornyn has his specific position on the Second Amendment. He'll offer an amendment and he'll allow everyone else

to offer amendments too. And the Senate can decide which idea they like better. And maybe it is John Cornett's or maybe it's not. Right. That's what the Senate is designed to do. It's not designed to be a facsimile of one person's viewpoint jammed through, you know, with with 10 Republicans crossing over to help Democrats. It's just not how it's supposed to work. It's been a big two years for Capitol Hill nerds like us because everyone was really interested in like what a motion to vacate was and what like the rules committee. I've never heard of the rules committee. What is the rules committee? And don't forget the Senate has rules committee. Yeah, exactly. But they're like, what are these things? And all of a sudden you have like McConnell getting

bucked by the conference. Now we have a Senate leadership fight. I want to talk about the enforcement mechanism over the course of this campaign. Obviously, they're not making many public promises about how exactly they'd run business within the conference, because a lot of it is ultimately private. They are committing to like opening the amendment, you know, opening the tree, et cetera, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like how, if you are, let's say, Senator Katie Britt, who is considering voting for Scott, Thune, or Cornyn. And she's meeting with all three of these guys. She's like, listen, it's really important for me to be able to issue, to, you know, put forth amendments on any type of, like, how do these candidates actually say, not only can I say, I'm going to, like, I'm going to promise you that, like, this is how I'm going to deliver on that promise.

Is there actually a mechanism? Like when we had the McCarthy fight, it's like, no, no, no, I'm serious about these reforms. How do you know I'm serious about these reforms? Well, I'll put three of your guys on the Speaker's Committee, on the Rules Committee. And like, I'm going to have Thomas Massey, Chip Roy and Ralph Norman, who like, they're not slouches. But like, you probably, like, McCarthy probably could have gotten away with, like, having less conservative conservatives on the Speakers Committee. And a lot of people would walk away really happy with that arrangement. But that's how they knew it was serious.

Yeah, that's how he was. He put a fox literally in the henhouse is great. But anyway, like how do you, if you are Rick Scott, say, Katie Britt, don't worry, I got you. Here's what I'm going to do. Here's how I actually follow through my promises so that we're not left in this state of limbo. So there is no similar or analogous like motion to vacate function necessarily in the Senate. And don't forget to you. like the Senate is much, much more collegial in the sense that it does operate a lot on handshake

agreements and gentlemen's agreements, gentlewomen's agreements, whatever. So there's a lot of, you know, senators are less, I think, inclined to try to, like, bind people procedurally. But this goes back to the term limit, right? The term limit is your enforcement mechanism to some extent or basically to all extent. because if you are unhappy with how, you know, this guy made you a bunch of promises and then he ran the conference like a tyrant. Well, he's up for election in six years. Or I'm sorry, he can't serve beyond six years, right?

Like he's got one term and then he's done. And now we can have someone who has a new fresh vision and we have to have competition for that. Because everybody just saw how unhappy they were, the conference was with how this guy ran it. So, you know, they have to promise us something new to get elected. That is why the term limit, frankly, is so important. because it prevents a specific style of governments from being entrenched and locked in and being unable to be challenged. Because technically, yes, you can run against the incumbent, but if they have no term limit

and access to this war chest and all measure of punitive procedures they can implement against you, like you're not really able to challenge them. The Senate Rules plays a big role as the House Rules Committee in these type of arrangement? No, that's the interesting thing. The House Rules Committee has no equivalent, really. The Senate has a Rules Committee, but it deals – it does deal with Senate procedure matters, but very, very minimally. It primarily deals with, like, campaign finance laws and even, like, Senate administration issues and things like that. It is a very powerful committee, but not in the same way as it is in the House.

Because, again, this goes back to the design of the House, which is completely powers vested in the Speaker through the Rules Committee. The Senate is much more freewheeling. the Senate floor. Like when bills come to the House floor, you know exactly what's going to happen because the rules committee's already structured it. When bills come to the Senate floor, buckle up because anything can happen

because senators have so much authority individually unto themselves, which is why the Senate is awesome. And it's super fun to work there. Do you think there's a bunch of people, senators, looking at this and saying like, you know, I don't like the way Mitch McConnell's handled things, but maybe

it's worth having someone who's willing to be a little bit more iron-fisted about this, since we only have 18 months to get this stuff through. Like, we just can't, like, debate things at infinitum. Like, is that, is there, is there, is there a, is there a maga mold senator who could say, actually, I need this model of leadership to continue for two more years, at least, just with someone at the top who is on Trump's side, right? Does that make any sense? Yes, but I think it's like an outside weird question because I don't think two of the candidates who would,

the two candidates most likely to behave like McConnell aren't like maga, maga, maga people. Yeah. You know, I think it's counterintuitive, but I do think that, I mean, we've seen the tyrant model, it doesn't really work for anything but Democrat priorities. You know what I mean? Like, I think it is counterintuitive, but sometimes the, the best way to get consensus in the Senate is to just let people speak into the void, right? Allow them to have their say. And then at the end of the day, you end up kind of getting

what you want because of the rules of sportsmanship, right? If you are allowed to have your amendment, the only thing you can ask of the Senate is that they vote on it, right? The outcome is going to be what it's going to be. You can't demand it when, you can't demand it lose. You got your vote. Then if you're going to continue to filibuster after you got the vote that you asked for, that's just poor form, right? And most senators won't do it, frankly. So there's, it's this idea that like the floor, allowing the floor to function is, is catharsis. It allows people to get their vote, have their views heard. And then at the end of the day, okay, we're all going to just agree. We don't have to file cloture. We're just going to pass this bill or whatever. Right. So I do think that like it's just not in the nature of the Senate and it's not in the nature of senators to respond to a clenet. Fist necessarily. I think you will be surprised that if you do have a more open process, you have senators that want to support the president, they will, you know, I think fall in line, not because they're told, but because they want to support the president. And a lot of it's going to

have to be done through budget reconciliation. A lot of it. But yeah, but I mean the Senate, not everything can be done through reconciliation. So I think, you know, it would be nice, I think, for the Congress to do legislation again. You know, when's the last time you actually saw the House and Senate pass a bill, like an actual bill that did things, right? Outside of the things that have to pass every year. So the approves bills, NDAA, a farm bill every five years, outside of the things that hit on a timeline. Right. It was infrastructure? Yeah, like, maybe. And like, and like infrastructure was like, oh, the first act of the first act of Republicans in the Biden administration is going to be passing an infrastructure bill after I think we had like 256 consecutive weeks of infrastructure

week during Trump line. It just drove me crazy. But anyway, I think that's probably the last time. It's like, it did a lot of things. Didn't do a lot of great things, but it did a lot of things. Yeah. So, but I mean, I think it's an exciting time for the Senate. Yeah. When you look at this new crop of Republican senators coming into town, very interesting group,

from Jim Justice to Dave McCormick to Shih to Moreno, what do you think of this, this class? of, I guess, 2024, if you'd call it that. I'm pumped for them. Yeah. I think it's a great time to be coming into the Senate.

I think you have, you know, these senators getting elected on a Trump wave. I think, you know, they are going to be much more open, I think, to these ideas,

to hearing from the administration. You already have people, I think, you know, Bernie Marino and Jim Banks in particular, who are a little bit more skeptical of that. Jim Banks, too.

I was only talking about the flips. Yeah. Of that, like, neocon worldview that I think that is fracturing in the Senate, which was potentially like the last bastion of neoconservatism in at least the legislature. So I do think you're going to see more interesting ideological partnerships with grow within the Republican ranks. And I'm very excited for that. Yeah. And as these guys come in to Washington, D.C., or if they've already been here, they're moving to the other side of the capital complex, they're going to be placed into

committees. They're going to be doing the business of members of Senate committees. That is another big question mark after this leadership race. It's like, what do these committees look like? Well, and do committees matter anymore? Yeah, if you have a decentralization, that's exactly what I was about to ask you. If there is this decentralization from the leadership office that we hope to see, does that empower more? It empowers the committees. I think, and I think that's another level of frustration that you've seen within the conference is the committees no matter anymore, because everything is done in the leader's office. The leaders office writes every bill or, you know, has a heavy hand in every bill. It sets the schedule. Like committee chairs are given not a lot of independence

and autonomy to set their own agenda and to put their mark on legislation. You have committees in the Senate that literally go years without reporting bills. Yeah. And, you know, committee chairman used to be the center of power in deciding kind of what bills look like and when they come to the floor. That's all been arrogated to the leader's office. And so I think part of this leadership race is that question, right? As a committee chair, do you matter? Right. And if this decentralization happens and you look down the road at some of these these potential chairmanship, is there like going to be chairmanship fights? What could that look like? No, I don't think so. I mean, it's pretty, again, this goes back to the idea that the Senate is like, you know, collegial.

But, you know, generally speaking, a lot of that is handled by seniority. There is, the leader does have a fair amount of discretion over certain committee spots because of the fact that the Senate rules say you can only be on two A committees. And A committees are like probes and finance and foreign relations and kind of go on the way down. But because the committees have become so large, many members now have to serve to fill them up on more than one. And so we call that a third day. And the leader has the ability to appoint those members. And so he can dangle that out there as a carrot or a stick, frankly. But most of the committee assignments are done by seniority.

And they're set by something called the committee on committees, which is a group of senators in sort of shadow leadership that appoint members to the various committees. But it's usually done pretty even handedly, although one of the major issues last year was after Rick Scott. challenged McConnell, it was believed that McConnell punished some of the people that voted against him in that race by kicking them off, using that third-day discretion to kick Mike Lee off of commerce, to kick Rick Scott off of commerce, to deny Eric Schmidt a seat on judiciary, which is bananas because he's a former attorney general. Why wouldn't you want your hitters on judiciary? But it was believed that by those members that that was retaliation for their vote against McConnell. And the leader should never do that. Yeah. The legacy of Mitch McConnell two years from

now when he goes, how much of that can actually change? You know, if he comes out, we talked a little bit about this. He's going to be remembered mostly for how he governed this conference for 18 years. But he could pick a lot of fights and be kind of a thorn in the side of whoever the next majority leader is for the GOP. It is 2027 and you have been asked to write an obituary for Mitch McConnell's time in the Senate. What does it say?

Well, of course it would open by thanking him for his public service because anybody who I think commits their life to public service, we should congratulate and memorialize. But I do think his legacy will be one of of really just devaluing the Senate for what it is. His leadership has been marked by pettiness and almost insecurity, this need to control absolutely everything,

from who gets money for campaigns to what comes to the floor and when and who can offer amendments and what this outcome is going to look like and what the bill is going to look like to the extent that only I am allowed to draft it in my office with my staff. that is the mark of an insecure person. It's not the mark of a powerful person. And so I think it's a distortion of power that really has shrunk the Senate from just, you know, this huge, the world's greatest deliberative body is what it's supposed to be, right? To this, this like shell of itself.

But that's, the Senate is bigger than Mitch McConnell, right? It can recover from that. So I think, you know, we'll look back on his legacy as something that was. and perhaps not to be repeated. Perhaps not to be repeated. And there's going to be someone else in the Senate who has a little familiarity with the body. Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, now vice president-elect.

He's going to be there presiding as president of the Senate. You've seen this floated. Like, if we can't get Rick's got his leader. You've heard this from personality's like Glenn Beck, who's like, I remember how John Adams ran the Senate and therefore, like, what realistically, what role should J.D. Vance have in the Senate. It seems like the vice president is a non-entity, and it's kind of funny to see over the course of the campaign cycle in particular when,

like, Kamala Harris cast a series of very important votes to get the Biden-Harris agenda across the finish line and ultimately led to an explosion of inflation. But it's funny to see, like, the entire Democratic Party turned into like anti-federalists all of a sudden. They were just like, the vice president, for want of other employment. Like, they just completely ignored that the vice president had anything to do with how legislative, with how, you know, the Biden-Harris legislative agenda got through. What role should J.D. Vance have? I mean, I know it's not a 50-50 Senate, but like what type of, what type of carrots and sticks can he dangle?

He has a tremendous amount of authority anyway. He has a constitutional role as president of the Senate. That is not limited to breaking ties. that he can preside any time he wants over the Senate. So he can be in the chair of the Senate issuing rulings, recognizing senators or not, right? The vice president has an office off the Senate floor. As far as I know, it's the only executive branch official that has an office anywhere in the legislature. So he can play a very muscular role.

And that's why, you know, this idea that he can be a majority leader, he doesn't need to be, right? He already has a fairly muscular role in the Senate. Being in the chair, you know, it's the modern Senate. The chair doesn't operate in all of its full power because the senators don't follow. First of all, not that much happens on the floor these days, but also the senators are sort of advised by the parliamentarian to stay within the Senate's precedence, which is a good thing most of the time. But the chair is empowered under the rules of the Senate to do all kinds of things. So, and I think J.D. Vance, you know, that's his technical role as vice president, but he also has a very important diplomatic role in the Senate as the president's representative. He can go and talk to the Republicans anytime he wants. The senators, the Republican senators meet for lunch three times a week. He can attend those lunches. He can be there representing the administration, working on strategy. I mean, he can be a very powerful player in the conference itself, but also on the Senate floor if he chooses to be. Most vice president. presidents have not. Do you think, do you think he, one, do you think he will, two, do you think he should?

Or is he going to be more like a Nixon vice president who's not too concerned with how the Senate does business and is more concerned with what's going on abroad? You know, it's honestly, I think, a decision for Donald Trump, you know, how he wants his vice president to comport himself. But from where I sit, why wouldn't you be in the Senate? Like, it's a, especially, you know, in that first year when you're trying to get the president's agenda done, there is no better ambassador to the Senate than the vice president, and especially someone like J.D. Vance, who is well respected among his colleagues, who was a senator, right, and who can so ably articulate the president's agenda. I would, he is, he is the best ambassador of the president has to the Senate.

Trifecta for Republicans, Donald Trump, four years, and then he's going to, he's going to find a fig tree somewhere. Where does, where does MAGA go from here in the next four years? I, you know, it's an interesting question, and I think one that people didn't know the answer to before the election. But I think what the Republican Party and sort of MAGA generally has inherited with this election is a tremendous coalition. And we cannot waste it. We cannot waste it naval gazing about K-straight interests and foreign wars and the things, you know, and the issues of a top tier of corporations and the defense base. The things that we've done in the past are not going to satisfy this new coalition. I think we have a very limited time to get it right with policies that really resonate with the working class, get the border under control, you know, fix the economy and promote families in this country again.

I think we do those things in the first year. MAGA becomes synonymous with Republican policies which are synonymous with helping working people. And then it's we're taking that rocking ship to the moon. As Alex Jones once said, Barnes one said, Barton-Hell globalists. Thank you so much for coming on the Signal sit down. Thanks so much. We're going to leave it there for today. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button. So you never miss out on brand new shows from the Daily Signal. Every weekday, catch top news in 10 right here in this podcast feed. And keep up with the news that you care about in just 10 minutes every weekday at 5 p.m. And if you want to go a little bit deeper on the weekend, you can also find episodes just like this one for The Daily Signals interview weekend edition. If you like what you hear, take a minute to leave us a review of the show.

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