The Daily - Another Trump Campaign

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

Days after voters rejected his vision for the country in the midterms, former President Donald J. Trump is expected to announce a third run for president.Despite the poor results for candidates he backed, why are Republican leaders powerless to stop him?Guest: Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Republicans may still win the House. But an underwhelming showing has the party wrestling with what went wrong: Was it bad candidates, a bad message or Mr. Trump?Mr. Trump has faced unusual public attacks from across the Republican Party.Republicans pushing to move past the former president face one big obstacle: His voters.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Tonight, days after voters rejected his vision for the country in the midterm elections, Donald Trump is scheduled to take the stage inside a ballroom at Mar-a-Lago and announce that he will make a third run for the presidency. I spoke with my colleague, Maggie Haberman, about why Trump is in such a hurry to declare his candidacy and why Republican Party leaders are so powerless to stop him.

It's Tuesday, November 15th. Megan, just to start, I mean, this is a bit surreal, talking to you about the beginning of yet another Trump presidential campaign. Yeah, Michael, it's the campaign that never ends. It's the Hotel California of politics. We all check out whenever we want, but we never actually leave. Right, right. So, Maggie, I want to get to this announcement in just a little bit. But first, I want to dial back the clock to before the midterms,

this seismic political event. Prior to last week's election, how did Republicans think about Donald Trump's intent to run for president? So for months and months and months, most Republicans were not excited about the idea that Trump was going to run again, either because they wanted a different candidate or they wanted to stop talking about 2020. And they thought it was a bad idea, bad for the party. For the most part, they were hopeful that something would happen to keep him from actually announcing another candidacy. And they didn't really know what the midterms were going to look like. another candidacy. And they didn't really know what the midterms were going to look like. And, you know, they actually believed Republicans in the final weeks leading up to it that there was going to be a red wave, as we all heard about. But then the midterms happened, and they were

kind of a mess for Republicans. Right. Not exactly wind at Donald Trump's back. No. And the wind is not at his back, Michael, because the midterms did not go at all the way Republicans thought they were going to. They were a hot mess. And a major reason that they were a hot mess is Donald Trump. Not the only reason, but he made hundreds of endorsements all up and down the ballot, a bunch of which didn't matter, but the ones that did matter were in Senate contests where he thrust himself in and helped recruit and pick candidates and endorse candidates who other Republican leaders saw as problematic, particularly in Pennsylvania and in Arizona. Right. You're talking about Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and in Arizona. Blake Masters. Yeah. Both lost. Both lost. And it's a much more mixed bag in the House where Republicans are still fighting and believe that they're going to take the majority, but it's going to be incredibly slim if they get it. And so what could have been a big night is a completely muddied picture.

And Donald Trump is a big reason why. completely muddied picture. And Donald Trump is a big reason why. Right. Trump's insistence on getting Republicans to back his false claims about the 2020 election and repeat that over and over again did have an impact. And there's reason to believe it scared a lot of voters. And this was an issue that Trump has been saying for 18 months that he wanted people to run on. And they did. And look what happened. Right. Many of them lost. The majority of the election-denying candidates lost. And Maggie, plenty of Republican strategists and media figures have come out and said pretty openly that this midterm failure was Donald Trump's fault, that Trump was a losing strategy, right? Yes, there's a bunch of conservative commentators and analysts.

The voters have spoken. Who have said that Trump is the reason that things turned out this way. And I think the Republican Party really needs to look within right now and decide, are we going to go with the voters or are we going to go with this one man, Donald Trump? And you've seen their comments now echoed. We were in a moment, we were in a cycle, we were at a time when it's good for Republicans for the race to be about President Biden. By retiring senators. And instead, President Trump had to insert himself, and that created just too much of an obstacle.

Sitting governors. It's basically the third election in a row that Donald Trump has cost us the race. And it's like, you know, three strikes, you're out. And whether people agree with that or not... I mean, I think Trump's kind of a drag on our ticket. I think Donald Trump gives us problems politically. It's becoming a very loud chorus of people making the same point. If fealty to Donald Trump is the primary criteria

for selecting candidates, we're probably not going to do really well. And yet, just a week after this pretty bad outcome for Republicans and after all these analysts and strategists are saying it was Donald Trump's fault, this is the moment that Donald Trump decides is a great time to further make himself the face of the Republican Party by announcing that he's going to be running for president. So why does Trump think that, given the near universal consensus, that he played a big role in a kind of calamitous

midterm for Republicans? And why do it at a moment when the embers of that failure are still kind of smoldering? It's a really good question, Michael. This announcement is something that his folks have been working toward for several weeks now to hold in this moment in time. And the way Trump sees the midterms is that it's not his fault. But how can that be? I mean, how can he not see himself playing any role in the failure of so many candidates that he singularly elevated with his endorsements? Well, he's blaming Republican leaders for spending decisions. He's blaming them for how they allocated resources. He is blaming them for poor strategies in specific states. He is suggesting that candidates, you know, should have echoed his election lies more forcefully and that those who lost didn't do enough. They didn't do it enough, even though it backfired. So somebody like Mehmet Oz in

Pennsylvania, for instance, Trump was complaining when he was debating John Fetterman just a few weeks ago that Oz was not sticking to the election denialism hard enough. And that's what you're going to hear him say. And so to answer your question, he does not accept responsibility at all. Okay, well, putting that aside, there's still the very odd optics of announcing a

presidential run so close to a political failure for his party. So why the urgency of announcing a run for presidency basically a week after these midterms? So a couple of reasons. He doesn't want to leave an opening for anyone else. He has been trying to keep, in particular, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who just did a huge win over Democrat Charlie Crist in his reelection campaign. Right.

He was trying to keep and is trying to keep DeSantis from coming out of the gate with a head of steam and gaining any traction with the MAGA base. Interesting. That's a big reason. So in other words, announce, clear the field, send a signal to his next potential biggest rival, don't even bother, look at all the media I'm about to get,

that kind of thing. That's exactly right. He wants basically to make himself, and this is often his playbook, to look inevitable so nobody should even challenge me. Got it. Okay, so reason number one. What else? He

loves the idea, and he has said this to many people, that it complicates life for the Justice Department, because Trump is under investigation in two matters. One is the January 6th investigation related to the riot at the Capitol and the events that led up

to it in 2021. And the other is in relation to boxes of classified material that Trump had taken with him to Mar-a-Lago. Right. And he thinks that announcing gives him insulation against an indictment. Can you just explain that logic? Why he thinks an indictment is less likely once he's a candidate? It does make it more challenging for the Justice Department. Hmm. His thinking is that it's already complicated

for the sitting president, President Biden's Justice Department, to indict Trump as a former president, but that once he's an active challenger to Biden, it becomes even harder because even though Biden has been very clear that he wants an independent Justice Department, Trump is still going to say, Biden's telling his Justice Department to come after me. And there are going to be voters who hear it that way. Right. You can almost hear a candidate, Donald Trump, going to a rally after being indicted, if that were to happen, and saying, these are the lengths that Joe Biden will go

to stop our movement. They will literally charge us with a crime. And inevitably, if you're the Department of Justice, indicting a Republican presidential candidate who's facing your boss as a Democrat, just like you said, is much messier. It's very complicated. Exactly right. And I have to imagine, of course, at the foundation of this is yet another reason, which is that Trump wants to reclaim the office of the presidency. That's exactly right.

I mean, you know, he continues to maintain that he didn't lose his second bid. Most of his advisors, Michael, say they don't actually think he wants to really run another campaign, but they do think he wants to be president again. He doesn't want to go through the rigors of ginning up the votes,

but you're saying he does want to reoccupy the office. He does. He doesn't miss traveling all over the place, and he is much older than he was when he first started politics, but he does miss the power of that office. So Maggie, those are reasons why it would be good for Donald Trump to run for president,, those are reasons why it would be good for Donald Trump to run for president,

but not necessarily reasons why it would be good for the Republican Party for Trump to run for president again. And is it fair to say that Republican leaders after these midterms that we just talked about see Trump as a weak candidate for president, a weak general election candidate. Michael, a lot of party leaders worry that he is a weak candidate for a general election because he will likely face a lot of the same dynamics in 2024 if he's the nominee that just played out in the midterm elections. You know, these midterms were a proxy in many ways because he made so many candidates talk about his issue set.

They were a proxy for how this will play in a general election. Right. If he himself were the candidate. Exactly. And Trump is not the same as he was in 2016. You know, when he was seen as a political outsider and there was a newness about him, he is obsessed with election denialism and, you know, a number of other issues that are not seen as appealing to independents as they are to his MAGA base. Right. So are Republican leaders, Maggie, trying to stop Donald Trump from doing what we all expect him to do at Mar-a-Lago, which is announce that he's going to run to be their nominee? No, Michael, look, many of them would rather that he does not run. Some of them have been open about that,

but they don't have any power to stop him. If he wants to run, he will run, and all indications are that he's about to announce he's doing just that, and there's just nothing they can do about it. Trump is the party. This was settled in 2016 when he became the nominee, and in 2020 when he was the nominee again. There's no apparatus to stop him.

We'll be right back. Maggie, when you say that the Republican Party has no real power to stop Donald Trump, even if they want to, that's still a little tricky to wrap your head around. So can you explain that? Because at the very least, Republican leaders have their own voices, right? They can say out loud to everyone else in the party, to all the leadership federally and at the state level within the Republican Party, we think this is a bad idea and we want you to mobilize against it. You know, whether that's the Republican minority leader, Mitch McConnell, in the Senate, or the presumed Republican House leader, Kevin McCarthy, or the head of the entire party,

they can do that, presumably, right? They could, in theory, say whatever they want. But Kevin McCarthy needs Donald Trump in order to become the House Speaker. Right. Because a lot of these members are loyal to Donald Trump. And these leadership elections haven't happened yet. Mitch McConnell knows that a lot of his senators, voters, support Donald Trump. The party chairperson has long been an ally of Donald Trump and was initially

installed by Donald Trump. So that takes care of that. But these people also know, Michael, that it's kind of pointless. You know, remember, there was this effort to stop him in 2016 by donors, by Republican leaders at the Republican National Convention, where Ted Cruz opposing Trump got booed by the delegates on the floor. It didn't matter because Trump had won one primary after another, and it's ultimately the Republican voters who make these decisions. So ultimately, if party leaders can't operate as gatekeepers, like you said, then this heads to primary voters. And is it the conventional wisdom among Trump's advisors that he would win the primaries the same way he did in 2016 and 2020, even when we account for the fact that voters saw the same results we just did in the midterms?

Yeah, his advisers certainly think that he maintains his grip on the party. And I have to say that, you know, even people who don't like him among Republicans think that he remains in a very strong position to become the nominee. But can you explain why Republican voters would be willing to cast their vote for someone who, as we've just pretty clearly established, is not appealing to so many different kinds of voters? I mean, I ask that because in 2020,

we saw that electability was such a huge issue on the Democratic side. Literally, voters told journalists, many of our colleagues, that they wanted their nominee to be the most electable person. And it feels safe to say that Donald Trump's electability is very much in doubt after January 6th and after his efforts to overturn the election and given the results of the midterm. So why is it that we don't think or Trump's advisors don't think that Republican voters want the most electable nominee? The personal fidelity that if not a majority, a close to half of Republican voters feel toward Trump is enormous. And they will point to things

that he did in office. Often it's about the Supreme Court judges. Often it's about other judges that he appointed federally. They look at it as he told us he was going to do something and he did it. And that has enormous staying power for him with these voters. That really has not ebbed. A lot of them also don't like the enemies that he professes to have. The media, liberals, tech companies. For all of those reasons, they're less focused on electability than they are about Trump personally. Well, what about his potential rivals and the possibility that they will simply outmaneuver him, maybe not because of electability, but because they're just good candidates? maneuver him, maybe not because of electability, but because they're just good candidates. I'm thinking about the possibility of a Ron DeSantis, for example, or quite possibly a Mike Pence. So Mike Pence is still going to have to explain to the base that elected Pence and Trump in 2016

why it is that he's preferable if Trump is right there as an alternative. And that will require most likely pointing to the events of January 6, 2021. And there's very little evidence that base Republicans care about that. Liz Cheney has been mentioned as a possible candidate, the soon-to-be former congresswoman from Wyoming who has made stopping Trump her cause. Right. She got drummed out of the party for opposing him. And so Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, appears on paper to be the strongest of these candidates, especially after this victory that he had in his reelection.

But he just has not been tested nationally at all. And there's a very long history of Republican donors in particular falling in love with the idea of some on paper candidate who kind of falters out of the gate. And so far, we don't know that he's strong enough to beat Trump. Right. Maggie, when you mentioned donors falling in love with candidates who stumble out of the gate, I feel like I need to say on behalf of Jeb Bush, that he resents that. Excuse me, it's not only Jeb Bush. Tim Pawlenty is in there too. There are other people. Right.

So it would be fair to say that from the moment Donald Trump enters this race tonight at Mar-a-Lago, he's the clear frontrunner. That is correct. You say that without any ambiguity. Until I see evidence that somebody is able to beat him among voters, Trump remains the frontrunner.

So if, Maggie, we step back for a second, and you're a Republican leader, elected official, and you turn on your TV, 855, Tuesday night, and you watch Donald Trump make this announcement, you have to find yourself in a very peculiar place because you're watching this guy who already lost the White House in 2020 and then loses the midterm elections with his endorsements, running for president in 2024 pretty much on the same set of issues that didn't do well in those elections,

and dominate the airwaves for the next two years. And so you might be forgiven for thinking that your party, and your party's voters in particular, are dooming you to repeat what we just saw a few days ago, which is to have an extreme-sounding candidate win a nomination pretty easily and then likely go on to have those policies rejected by a general election electorate, and there's nothing you can really do about it. Yes, and they have some blame in that, Michael, because they could have spoken out more forcefully at various points.

And some of them did, but most of them did not. And particular moments when that could have come were his two impeachment trials, especially the second one, which was after the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. And if these senators had wanted Trump not to run again, they could have voted to convict. But instead, they decided not to take an action that would have imperiled them with their voters, many of whom like Donald Trump. And it occurs to me that the result of all of this is that Trump has suspended the normal rules that govern politics, because defeat is supposed to be the most powerful force in politics. You lose, and then you reflect on why you lost, and you change. And the Republican Party in the era

of Trump is designed to operate outside those rules, right? Failure does not lead to change. Failure leads to more Trump. That's the unprecedented situation that we're going to see when he announces that he's running again. I put it slightly differently, Michael. You don't acknowledge that failure even exists. Failure is actually winning. So you just keep on doing the same thing you've been doing the entire time. And that is what we're going to say tonight.

But you don't win. But if you tell people you really did, then what's the difference? That's what he's testing, and that's what got tested in the midterms the other day, and we saw its limits, and we will potentially see its limits again. Maggie, I want to end on the other side for a minute. If you're a Democrat, especially if you're a Democratic leader right now, is this a moment that you kind of relish? The thought of Donald Trump entering this race, instantly becoming, as you say, the frontrunner, and putting the party on a path of disadvantage from the start. Yes, and to varying degrees, Michael,

they are relishing it publicly. Hmm. You have seen Bernie Sanders talk about how it's a good thing for the Democratic Party if what you don't want is to see a Republican ever elected again, to have Donald Trump as the nominee. You have seen President Biden celebrating the defeats over MAGA-ism, which is something he's been talking about for months now. After 2016, nobody wants to say, you know, it's impossible for anyone to win.

That's what they said in 2016, Donald Trump won. Right. So they're certainly mindful that it could happen again. But they think he's beatable. And they think if they have to face someone, he is not the worst person to face. Well, Maggie, thank you very much. Michael, thank you. On Monday night, yet another high-profile Republican endorsed by Donald Trump was defeated when his choice for governor of Arizona,

Carrie Lake, lost to her Democratic rival, Katie Hobbs. Like many of the Trump-backed Republicans who lost this year, Lake eagerly embraced Trump's false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. As of early Tuesday morning, despite their poor performance in the midterms, Republicans were on the cusp of winning control of the U.S. House of Representatives by a narrow margin. Republican candidates were declared winners in three more races, two in California, one in New York, bringing the party just one seat shy of the 218 seats they would need to control

the chamber. The result is likely to be a split Congress with the Senate in the hands of Democrats and the House in the hands of Republicans. And. I just met in person with Xi Jinping of the People's Republic of China. I just met in person with Xi Jinping of the People's Republic of China. In their first meeting as heads of state, President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping said they would seek to repair a relationship between their two countries

that has reached its lowest point in decades over issues ranging from human rights and trade to the future of Taiwan. We're going to compete vigorously, but I'm not looking for conflict. I'm looking to manage this competition responsibly. The two leaders sought to downplay the possibility that they were headed for a confrontation, especially over Taiwan, the self-governing island that China claims to control and that the West fears China could someday invade.

Based on this meeting today, do you believe a new Cold War with Chutna can be avoided? I absolutely believe there need not be a new Cold War. Today's episode was produced by Luke Vanderplug, Moosh Zady, and Rochelle Banja. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn, contains original music by Marian Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansfork of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.