The Daily - The Mar-a-Lago Midterms

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

Unlike other former presidents after leaving office, Donald J. Trump has remained in the middle of the political stage — raising more money than the Republican Party itself and doling out coveted endorsements.Who has Mr. Trump backed in the midterms? And to what lengths have candidates gone to secure his favor?Guest: Shane Goldmacher, a national political reporter for The New York Times.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Inspiring fear, hoarding cash, doling out favors and seeking to crush rivals, Mr. Trump is behaving more like an old-time political boss than a typical former president.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 Bavaro. This is The Daily. A series of closely watched primary elections, starting today in Ohio, will be the first big test of Donald Trump's hold on the Republican Party since he lost re-election. My colleague Shane Goldmacher has been tracking Trump's midterm endorsements and the extraordinary lengths that candidates have gone to win them. It's Tuesday, May 3rd. Shane, what exactly is former President Trump's role in the 2022 midterm elections,

these Republican primary races that really start in earnest this week? Well, what I found is that what Trump is doing is just frankly unprecedented. He lost the 2020 election. And instead of exiting the political stage, he's very much remained in the middle of it. And you think of old past presidents, and they really don't play a big role immediately after their presidency in trying to shape the politics of their party. You know, Barack Obama was not trying to reshape the Democratic Party in his image after his two terms in the White House. He kind of let the party fight over what it was going to be without his involvement. Trump is not doing that. Trump is continuing to raise more money than the party itself. He's sitting on more than $120 million.

In the last six months of 2021, he outraged the Republican National Committee itself every single day but two. That's astonishing. So he's pulling in more money than the party. He is pulling in candidates to talk to him, to shape what they stand for. And the tool that he's using to most shape the party is his endorsement.

He's offering it to tons of candidates in races across the country, in governor's races and Senate races and congressional races and secretary of state races and state attorney general races and even state legislative races. And Shane, why are endorsements, which are pretty old school, why is that his most powerful tool right now? Well, it's not just a powerful tool. It's a barometer that Trump himself has used to measure his political power. It has just been stated that President Trump's endorsement is the most powerful asset in politics. Do you believe that? So for years, he has said the fact that when he backs people in Republican primaries, they win. In last year's congressional primaries, 120, listen to this, it's crazy,

120 of 122 candidates, I endorse one, 120. That's the evidence of his power over the party, because his power and his vantage comes from his voters, that the Trump electorate, that's what's really powering the Republican Party. And the two that lost were beaten by people claiming to be more Trump than their opponent. So I like those two people very much also. And so by endorsing all these people, he's putting his name on the ballot too, in a way. He's putting his reputation on the line and saying, if I can get these people over the line, I'm not just the most popular Republican in the country,

which we know in polling, but the most powerful one, the person who can get his allies into office. So should he run for president again, and he's making every indication that he wants to do that, that he'll have people across the government already in place supporting him. Interesting. So for Trump, endorsements aren't in any way the government already in place supporting him. So for Trump, endorsements aren't in any way just endorsements in the traditional sense.

They are a potential path for him back to power. They're a ratification of his influence, and they are a network of Trump supporters who would help him, I guess, not just win, but govern if he wins? Govern if he wins. And it's hard not to focus on the fact that one of the litmus tests he's made for his endorsements is amplifying and buying the falsehood that he didn't actually lose the 2020 election. And in so many of these states, he's focused on the battlegrounds that he lost and replacing some of the same Republicans who certified the election. And so it's not just about getting allies. It's getting people in key positions of power.

So start to take us inside the machinery and the logistics of this Trump endorsement process for the 2022 midterms? Well, like all things Trump, there's a little bit of haphazardness to this, right? But there have been efforts to make sort of a system in place. And really what it revolves around is, for much of the year, Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida. And he's working chiefly out of what was once

the converted bridal suite at Mar-a-Lago. That's where he has his office. He still has a big, big wooden desk. Looks a lot like the kind of desk he once had in the Oval Office. And he sits there and he brings candidates in and he talks to them about the races. And look, there are certain questions he tends to ask. How are you polling? How is your fundraising?

And do you think I actually won the 2020 presidential election? And so there's candidates who have started to have stock answers almost to these things. They bring printouts of their polls. And strategists have recommended bringing those printouts and having graphics and big fonts because that's how he consumes his information. And in these meetings, you know, people make pitches both about themselves and about their opponents. Some of them bring sort of attack things

that they think will resonate with him. Some of them bring extra pieces of their bio that they think that he'll appreciate and like. And look, I don't know that there's a better race that shows this process than the Pennsylvania Senate race. So you have an open seat in Pennsylvania where a Republican incumbent has retired, and you had Trump make an early, quick endorsement

of that race of a candidate named Sean Parnell, who later dropped out because he was facing accusations of domestic violence. And then when Parnell quit the race, two other candidates soon got in. My parents came to America to find a better life. One is Dr. Mehmet Oz, the sort of longtime television personality and medical doctor. Pennsylvania needs a conservative who will put America first. And the second is David McCormick.

I'm Dave McCormick. I'm sick of career politicians too afraid to say what they're for and what they're against. Who was the CEO of one of the world's largest hedge funds. I'm anti-woke, anti-illegal immigration, anti-political correctness. And even though these two candidates have their own resumes, these two candidates have their own resumes, they both went down to Mar-a-Lago and made their case directly to Donald Trump. And in fact, each of them spoke about the other one. So I was told that at his meeting, Dr. Oz brought along a clip of McCormick speaking negatively about Trump. of McCormick speaking negatively about Trump. And in the McCormick meeting with Trump, both David McCormick and his wife are there. And at one point, Dina Powell McCormick actually takes out a picture that shows Dr. Oz alongside other people who are wearing what appeared to be

Muslim head coverings. And this is according to multiple people who were briefed on what happened at this meeting. And Dina Powell McCormick made the point that Dr. Oz is Muslim and that that has the potential to be a political liability in parts of Pennsylvania. And I should say that the McCormick campaign has denied this interaction.

Got it. But just to be sure I understand these series of visits with Trump, you have Dr. Oz showing Trump a video of McCormick dissing him. You have McCormick showing Trump a photo of Dr. Oz next to people wearing what looks like Muslim clothing. So these are two candidates using this precious time with the former president of the United States to basically

try to knife each other, make each other unendorseable. And that's just one race. Trump is endorsed in more than a hundred races. And now not every single candidate has had an audience with him. But sometimes you have multiple candidates in a single race in the same meeting with Donald Trump. So one of the biggest primaries that's going to test Trump's sway is the Ohio Senate race. And there's a meeting that has become almost legend in Trump world that happened last year, where you had multiple candidates in this Ohio Senate race, the former state treasurer, Josh Mandel, a former state party chair, Jane Timken, a couple of businessmen, Bernie Moreno and Mike Gibbons, and they're all down there.

And Trump sort of impromptu pulls them into a meeting. And Politico first reported about this, and they described it as the Hunger Games. And it's really how people have talked about it. And these multiple candidates started going after each other directly in front of Trump, making their case and undercutting each other in front of him.

And this is just like, not something that happens in politics. But for Trump, this actually is something that's happened for him before. Right, because this is something that happens on The Apprentice. Yeah, this is him. He is the decider of fates. He has emerged not just as a political leader, but as something almost like an old school party boss at this point. This is one of his favorite roles. This is the raw exercise of power. And this endorsement idea that he gets to pick without even having to be on the ballot, who's a winner and who's a loser, who gets to move on to next week,

that's just classic Trump. And it seems like the candidates here are very happy to, in a real way, perform for him and behave in a way that he wishes to see them behave in order to get that endorsement, even if that means, as in this case, slightly debasing themselves. Yeah. Now, there's a whole hierarchy of how people end up at Mar-a-Lago. There's people who get these formal sit-downs, and then there are other candidates who pay big money to host a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, paying thousands, tens of thousands of dollars to hold their events there. And sometimes Trump shows up. Sometimes he speaks at their fundraisers, even if he hasn't endorsed them yet.

Sometimes holding an event at Mar-a-Lago is a way to get a meeting on the side with him. And then beyond that, you have sort of almost these hangers on who are showing up at fundraisers that are Mar-a-Lago where they're not the candidate, but they're showing up at somebody else's event and maybe shouting at Trump and saying, hey, I'm running for Congress. I'm from North Carolina or Michigan. Shouting to Trump? What do you mean? Like from the floor of a ballroom or something? Yeah. So when there's a fundraiser, it's typically held just on the patio, right? The weather's good in Florida year round. And Trump typically comes out and he says a few words

for these candidates. Sometimes again, even when he hasn't endorsed them, but usually when he has. And in the crowd will be people from lots of states across the country running for different offices. I have this great honor tonight of introducing to you the greatest president in modern history. So Michael, let me give you one example of a recent fundraiser that Trump attended for another candidate in Michigan. So there are the people that are running for office right now, Michelle, that are here that we haven't spotted? And he starts to invite the candidates in attendance up on the stage with him. We have governor right here.

Anybody else running? Perry's running. Come on up here. And there's a voice from somebody who appears to be sort of blocked from getting up there. I'm running for governor too. So thank you, but you're running for governor of what? Michigan. Can I come up? Come on up. And so Trump brings him up onto the stage.

Wow. And when he comes up, he shakes hands with another of his opponents, who also is in the crowd. They'll end up in a fistfight. And then Trump, of course, goes to Michigan, holds a rally of his own, and mentions neither of these candidates. He gives a shout out to a third candidate who's also running for governor,

who had paid to hold a fundraiser of her own at Mar-a-Lago back in February. So because everything you're describing is so grounded in Mar-a-Lago, what chance do people have who don't or can't make it to Mar-a-Lago to get one of these endorsements? Well, one of the things we learned about Donald Trump from his time in the White House is that he watches lots of cable television. And so one of the ways that candidates, sometimes from thousands of miles away, will find their way in front of him is by buying television ads that air in Palm Beach. They geolocate their ads to his part of Florida. Yeah. And it's relatively cheap, right? If you just want to buy ads on Fox News in Palm

Beach, that's a potentially very efficient use of your campaign money if you can end up with Donald Trump's endorsement. And so you had, you know, one woman. I'm Michelle Fiore, and I'm running for governor. Who rolled out this ad in Palm Beach, said she was going to run for governor of Nevada. I was the first female majority leader in Nevada Assembly and one of the first electeds to endorse Donald J. Trump. And it made very clear that she was running as the pro-Trump candidate. Washington Post called me a gun-toting calendar girl. And Politico magazine said that I was the Lady Trump. And at the end of the ad, she actually pulls out a gun

and shoots several beer bottles, the last of which was labeled... And stop voter fraud. Voter fraud. I'm Michelle Fiore, and I'm ready for the fight. And sometimes you can catch Trump in between the commercials too, right? You can actually appear on the programs that he's watching. So the lieutenant governor of Idaho was on Tucker Carlson's program last year. And the next day, her phone rang, and it was Donald Trump saying, hey, great job on Tucker.

And she dropped in, hey, you know what? I might be running for governor. And so she jumped on a plane soon, met with him in New York, and a few months later flew down to Mar-a-Lago to meet with him there. So what we're learning here is if you can't get a meeting with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago and you don't want to attend or can't afford to attend a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, you can just cut a very hyper local TV ad that runs at Mar-a-Lago, you can just cut a very hyper local TV ad that runs

near Mar-a-Lago, or you can work to land an interview on Fox News that might be watched by Trump at Mar-a-Lago. That is how hungry and desperate all these candidates are for his endorsement right now. Yeah, and just like on The Apprentice, you've got way more candidates than you have winners in this process. And for both the winners and the losers, it often just remains a mystery as to why they actually ended up with his endorsement or without it. We'll be right back.

So, Shane, who has been winning these endorsements? And what are we learning as a result about which of these tactics that you have been describing are most effective and what kind of Republican Trump is leaning towards in this moment? Well, let's start with one of the races we've already talked about, which is the Pennsylvania Senate race. And in that contest... By the way, I endorsed another person today, Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania. Dr. Oz. Trump has picked Dr. Mehmet Oz, who in a lot of ways is kind of a quintessential Trump endorsement pick. Tremendous, tremendous career. And they liked him for a long time. That's like a poll. You know, when you're in television for 18 years, that's like a pole. That means people like you, but he's a... And Trump, both in public and in private,

for months has talked about the potential appeal of Dr. Oz because people voluntarily tuned in to watch him on television. You know, Trump knows that power as a former television host himself. Now, if you lived in Pennsylvania and you were watching television... Oz may be right for Hollywood, but he's wrong for Pennsylvania.

The story about Dr. Oz you would see for the wave and wave of television attacks has been that he's a Hollywood liberal. They even have images of him kissing the Hollywood star. And they pull clips of him from his television show. Rhino Records presents Mehmet Oz's greatest hit. You know, dancing with Michelle Obama. and dancing the night away with liberal friends and all these things, raising real questions about his sort of,

you know, conservative credentials, Hollywood liberal Mehmet Oz's Republican in name only hits just keep coming. And so by endorsing Oz, Trump is sort of saying, look, you might've seen these ads, but he's with me. And it has the potential to give him a real seal of approval, the Trump seal of approval, which is sure he might not have been perfect before.

But look, maybe I wasn't perfect before. Really interesting. In Trump's statement on Oz, he did something that I found to be unusual, which he talked about Oz's electability. He talked about him being able to beat the Democrats in the fall, and even cited the fact that women were drawn to him through television. And this is sort of interesting. This is a state, Pennsylvania, that is on top of the list for places that Trump is focused on because of what happened in 2020, because he lost so narrowly. And he wants allies in that kind of a state. And he thinks that Oz is the person who can be his ally. And

President Trump endorsed Dr. Oz for Senate because Trump knows who the Of course, Oz immediately turned Trump's endorsement into television ads and is pushing back on those Hollywood star ads that have been airing so often in recent months, now saying, sure, you might have seen that, but I'm standing with him now. Trump calls Oz smart, tough, and someone who will never let us down. Endorsed by Trump, the conservative fighter Pennsylvania needs. So Dr. Oz is a perfect Trump candidate, you're saying, because essentially he's moderate and in many ways he's a political unknown. And so in that sense, Trump's endorsement can help him convince skeptical Republican primary voters by saying, this guy's for real. He's my guy. You can trust him.

And then because Oz is seen as such a moderate, he can then go on, Trump thinks, to win in the general election because he's not seen as too to be higher, right? If you pick, if he endorses in some race, the Trumpiest candidate already, those voters are already going to know that Trump supports them. If he endorses someone else, they have a lot more room to grow. Interesting. The flip side of that is the sort of MAGA base of the Republican Party is like, excuse me, this isn't our kind of a candidate. And so it puts Trump in a place of, can he push and define Republicanism to be allied with Trump, regardless of some of your other politics? Okay, Shane, what about Ohio?

Talk about the endorsement there. Well, let's start with that scene at Mar-a-Lago, where you have multiple candidates vying for Trump's approval in front of Trump. Mm-hmm. Okay, none of them actually got his approval. The approval actually went, the endorsement has gone to someone else entirely.

He loves Ohio and he frankly, he's a great Buckeye. So what I'd like to do is ask J.D. Vance. A candidate named J.D. Vance. Come forward. I want to pick somebody that's going to win, and this man is going to win. Come on up, J.D. And Vance actually has some parallels to Dr. Oz because Vance is a little bit famous.

Now, he's not television famous, but he wrote a book, Hillbilly Elegy, right after the 2016 campaign. I read it. That became kind of this manual for a lot of people. What did happen in the 2016 campaign? But Vance was not exactly a pro-Trump person at the time. In fact, he was pretty much the opposite.

I'm a never Trump guy. I never liked him. In 2016, he used the words never Trump to describe himself. So my dad is a Trump supporter. And I love my dad, and I always say, Dad, you know, Trump is not going to actually make any of these problems better. How does that guy get the Trump Republican primary endorsement?

Well, he did one of the things that Trump likes most, which is he flipped. I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016 because I've been very open about the fact that I did say those critical things, and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy. I think that he was a good president. He went on Fox News in 2021, and he said he regretted some of his past statements about Trump. I've taken a lot of flack myself over the last few years for standing up for the president's voters, but also standing up for the agenda. He said, I'm now a Trump Republican. And he did it publicly and he did it privately. He went and he had a meeting with Trump, too. And he

moved beyond what he had said before and said he was with him now that he had been wrong. And that is meaningful to Trump. He likes the idea of people who were once against him who he flipped. It shows his power. Got it. Okay. So what lesson do we think can be drawn from the endorsements that we've seen so far from Trump, especially the Vance Oz endorsements? Well, there's definitely not a broader formula on ideology that applies across his endorsements.

To the extent that there is a lesson, it really is, are you loyal? And we talked about this earlier. You know, he's emerged as this sort of party boss figure. And if you're running a political machine, what do you need most? You need loyal soldiers in your machine. And there's a specific thing he's been looking for loyalty on. It's, will you repeat the fact that he believes the 2020 election falsely was stolen? And in race after race, that's the thing he says out loud that he's looking at. It's where he's issued anti-endorsements

where he said, I haven't picked a candidate in this race, but don't vote for the guy who was against me on the 2020 election. Where did he do that? He's done that in Arizona, where he has not picked a candidate for Senate yet. But he did say, don't vote for this guy because he wasn't with me sufficiently. He did an anti-endorsement, sort of a conditional anti-endorsement, even more complicated, in Alaska, where he said, I'm going to endorse the governor of Alaska so long as he doesn't endorse the incumbent Republican senator from Alaska, Lisa Murkowski, because she voted for his impeachment. And sure enough, the Republican governor of Alaska said, okay, I'm not endorsing Murkowski. And Trump's conditional endorsement sort of went into effect.

So beside the ability to immediately tell the world that you're a Trump Republican, what do these endorsements from Trump in 2022 actually come with? Well, not a lot. It comes with a $5,000 check in most cases, and a written statement that Trump has issued. And, you know, you're just supposed to do with that what you can. And so even though you're getting in some ways so little, that little bit you're getting, the Trump seal of approval is worth all this fight because in some ways that's just almost everything. It's a shield. It's a weapon. It is the way that these candidates are differentiating themselves and saying to voters, you can trust me because he trusts me. Mm-hmm.

Shane, you started to hint that the Trump endorsement has been meaningful for Dr. Oz and for J.D. Vance in these two closely watched Republican Senate primary races that are coming up. I'm curious, though, as we zoom way out to the question of whether Trump's endorsement is working in the 2022 midterms, what is the overall effect so far of a Trump endorsement? Well, it's important to know that that's just two of more than 150 endorsements that he's made. And we're going to find out a lot more in the coming weeks as we have a series of primaries that are going to test his power. But so far, some of the people he's backed haven't surged at all. I think the most important one, one of the ones he's most been focused on,

is the Georgia governor's race, which is later in May. And he personally recruited David Perdue, a former senator, to run against the incumbent Republican, Brian Kemp. And this race, like so many others, comes back to the 2020 election lie, because Kemp certified the election. to the 2020 election lie because Kemp certified the election. Right. And Trump is still angry at him over it. But Trump's endorsement alone has not been enough to lift Perdue,

who polling shows is pretty far behind Kemp still. Shane, it feels like in some ways the right question at the end of this primary cycle is not going to be how many candidates that Trump endorsed win, right? Because in a sense, these primaries, everything you have described, reveals that almost everyone involved has in one way or another transformed themselves into the kind of candidate that Trump might endorse. And therefore, the winner will inevitably be, in a lot of these cases,

some form of a Trump candidate, even if they didn't start that way in their political career. And that feels like the real power of this party boss machine that you have been reporting on. It's this gravitational pull for the entire Republican Party. The story of Trump's power, it's partly how he exercises it. It's partly what he's doing and the endorsements he's making. But I think the bigger story is told through the actions of everyone else. It's through the centralness of Mar-a-Lago, through the fact that senators and governors and house members and ambitious Republicans of all stripes are flying down there to meet with him, to make their case and to pledge their loyalty.

And in all of those ways, he's really already won. But, and this is a big but, these are just primaries, right? And in a primary, you face the party faithful. You face the base. But at the end of the primary, all these candidates end up having to face regular voters in a general election. Independents and Democrats, many of whom we know from polling, have a pretty dim view of Donald Trump and his claims of election fraud. have a pretty dim view of Donald Trump and his claims of election fraud. So doesn't his endorsement and the things that these candidates,

the Vances and the Ozzes, have had to do to get it, doesn't that end up becoming a pretty big liability for a general election voter this fall, in the election that really matters? I mean, this is the box for the Republican party in the Trump era. Donald Trump and being allied with him is the surest way to win a Republican primary. But Republicans who are allied with Trump were losing, including Trump himself, throughout his presidency. In four years, Republicans lost the House, the Senate, and the White House while allied with Donald Trump.

And that's what makes his staying on the political scene so remarkable. It's not just that he's a former president exerting all this power in politics. It's that he's a former president who oversaw massive losses for his party, and the party remains adhered to him. And that fact is frankly one of the things that gives Democrats some hope in 2022. In a year in which Joe Biden's approval rating is dim too, around 40%, in which gas prices are going up and inflation is going up. You know, Democrats, they have passed some significant bills, but the public isn't talking about them.

And so look, if you don't have a lot to run on, you run against someone else. And in Trump, they think they have someone who they can run against because they've done it before with some success. Because it gives the Democrats a pretty straightforward message. They can simply run as, you're still the party of Trump. You're still the party that stands by this guy who lost,

who was involved in January 6th, who has been kicked off every major social media platform, they can run Democrats against Trump versus a big comprehensive set of ideas. Possibly. The issue is that midterms are almost always a referendum on the party in power, and it's Democrats who are in power now.

on the party in power. And it's Democrats who are in power now. But Democratic strategists see that possibility of running against Trump as maybe one of the best arguments they'll have this fall. And Republican strategists are worried about that too. Because in a year in which you want voters to be thinking about Democratic failures when you go to vote this fall,

the possibility of Trump being out there means that voters might be thinking about him instead. And if you have a choice in your Republican campaign, you want voters thinking right now about Joe Biden, and you don't want voters thinking about Donald Trump. Well, Shane, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday night, Politico reported that the Supreme Court has privately voted to strike down Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that has guaranteed the right to an abortion for nearly a half century.

to an abortion for nearly a half century. Politico said it had obtained a draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito in February in which the court's conservative majority ruled that Roe was wrongly decided and that abortion should be left to elected officials, not the courts. In the draft, Alito wrote, quote, Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.

If the Supreme Court issues a ruling similar to the leaked draft, each state would decide for itself whether to allow or restrict abortion, and many Republican-controlled states would be expected to or restrict abortion. And many Republican-controlled states would be expected to severely restrict it. Politico did not identify the source of the leaked opinion. On Monday night, the Supreme Court declined to comment on its report, but did not deny the legitimacy of the opinion. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Rachel Quester, and Sydney Harper.

It was edited by Patricia Willans with help from Paige Cowett, contains original music by Brad Fisher, Rowan Namisto, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.