The NPR Politics Podcast - Bannon Declares War On GOP; Trump And McConnell: "We're Fighting For The Same Thing"

Episode Date: October 16, 2017

Breitbart head and former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon says this is "a season of war against a GOP establishment." And in the last few days, President Trump has made a couple of big moves that essentially dump big, thorny policy issues right in Congress' lap — namely, the Iran deal and healthcare. This episode: host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional reporter Scott Detrow, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers, and Embedded is back. And we recently realized it's hard to assess a politician who has virtually no political record. But with Donald Trump, we tried anyway. And we wound up with stories and lessons from the record he does have in business and on TV. Listen on the NPR One app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Faith. And this is Kira. And we're calling from the steps of the 50th most beautiful state capitol building in Juneau, Alaska.

This podcast was recorded at 12.04 p.m. on Monday, October 16th. Things might have changed by the time you hear it. To keep up with the latest NPR news, check out NPR.org or download the NPR One app. Or just listen to your local NPR station. All right, here's the show. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. Former White House chief strategist and Breitbart head Steve Bannon is making it official. There's a time and season for everything.

And right now, it's a season of war against a GOP establishment. All righty then. Bannon is recruiting candidates to run against incumbent Republican senators up for reelection in 2018, especially those he sees as establishment or not loyal enough to the president. And in the last few days, President Trump has made a couple of big moves that essentially dump huge thorny issues right in Congress's lap. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent.

Okay, so what were they saying about their state capitol? I hope they weren't saying it was the ugliest state capitol. I'm a big fan of visiting state capitals, so I appreciate that timestamp. I do too. Mara, what's your favorite state capitol? so I appreciate that timestamp. I do, too. Mara, what's your favorite state capital? Ooh, West Virginia. West Virginia. A golden dome.

Okay. I just go with California because all my wedding pictures were taken in front of it. I'm going to go with Pennsylvania for the same reason. All right. This lately has started to feel like a regular refrain from President Trump. We are really working very hard and hopefully Congress will come through. He has said that again and again and about any number of things. Last week, the president made two major announcements, one that he was

decertifying the Iran nuclear deal, but not pulling the U.S. out of it, and that he is ending cost sharing subsidies to insurance companies under Obamacare, those subsidies designed to help reduce costs for lower-income people. But those issues now effectively wind up in Congress's hands, just like the DACA move a month or two ago. So let's just start with the basics. The Iran nuclear deal. Scott. So this was an interesting move that is very similar to what President Trump did with the Paris Climate Accord, where it seems like what he really wants is a do over. He wants a chance to redo this entire deal. And the argument with Iran is that if we threaten to pull out, that gives the United States leverage to go in and renegotiate.

There's a couple problems there. But the main one is the rest of the global community is saying, yeah, we are not interested in renegotiating this deal. Right after Trump made that announcement, you had a joint statement from the prime minister of Great Britain, the chancellor of Germany and the president of France saying, no, we're pretty committed to this. It took 13 years to get and we are going to stick in this deal, which is also very similar to what happened in Paris. So that's problem number one. Problem number two is Congress doesn't really have any interest in doing anything with this. Yeah. And he, President Trump, is very interested in getting Congress to do something about it. Let's hear a little bit more from his announcement. I am directing my administration to work closely with Congress and our allies to address the deal's many serious flaws so that the Iranian regime can never threaten the world with nuclear weapons. So here's the

thing you have to remember about Congress and the Iran deal. They didn't like it when President Obama put it together, but Congress basically went way out of its way to twist and turn itself backwards so that it could say it did not like the deal, but say it did not like the deal without any sort of repercussion on the deal itself. Congress, members of both parties did not want to actually tank the deal. They just wanted to say it stunk. And one of the ways they did that was requiring the president of the United States to recertify it every 90 days so the president would own it. They were thinking about a Democratic president. They wanted Hillary Clinton to ultimately own it. But President Trump has now certified this twice. He doesn't like it. He doesn't like having to certify it twice.

But what was so interesting, you said he really wants Congress to do something. I wonder if he really wants Congress to do something. What he got out of the announcement was, for most people who aren't paying attention to the details, they think he pulled out of the Iran deal. He looks tough,ose sanctions on Iran, the kind of sanctions that would blow up the deal. He wants some other sanctions on other kinds of Iranian misbehavior. But he very significantly did not ask Congress to reimpose the sanctions on Iran that were part of the deal, because that's what blows the deal up if Congress reimposes sanctions on Iran. So we could end up with a situation where the United States government has a tougher position on Iran. So we could end up with a situation where the United States government has a tougher position on Iran's behavior, not nuclear behavior, but all sorts of other kinds, with the nuclear deal intact. The deal he says is a huge embarrassment to the United States. Are you saying this is kind of like the Rose Garden celebratory press conference when the

House passed the Obamacare repeal, but for Iran, just creating the impression that you accomplished something? Yeah, I think that the rhetoric is always big and bold and bombastic, and the reality is sometimes different. And on a lot of these things, as Scott just mentioned, he does punt to Congress, Dreamers, health care, which we'll talk about in a minute, and now in Iran. All right, let's talk about health care. The president, late Thursday night, announced, it was pretty darn late, though most people were awake because there was a baseball game on. Sorry, Scott. He announced that he is going to stop paying these subsidies, these cost-sharing reduction subsidies that he has been threatening to stop paying for

months and months and months. And then on Friday, he was at the Values Voters Summit and talked about seemingly what is in game here is on all of these moves. One by one, it's going to come down and we're going to have great health care in our country. We are going to have great health care in our country. We're taking a little different route than we had hoped because getting Congress, they forgot what their pledges were. So one by one, trying to tear down the Affordable Care Act. Yeah, and this is a little bit different than the theme that we've been exploring with the Iran deal where his bark might be worse than his bite. On this one, he really actually did something. He did pull on a very important piece of string that could unravel the Affordable Care Act by taking away subsidies from insurers who have to provide discounts to low-income people. Now, they have to continue to provide those discounts just because they're not being reimbursed anymore by the federal government means that they'll probably raise premiums on everybody else. Most likely next year, though, there's some fungibility on that. And another executive order that he signed that allowed for certain kinds of health care plans that don't meet the criteria of the ACA cheaper. They cover less.

That could leave older, sicker people in the exchanges. But anyway, what Democrats are saying now is, aha, this is Trump care. You break it. You own it. Now Republicans own health care. And I don't know if that political analysis is going to work out or not, but Democrats feel they do have a card to play in December. You know who else is saying it? Some Republicans. Now, are asterisks retiring? But a couple of Republicans,

Ileana Ross-Lehtinen from Florida and also Charlie Dent from Pennsylvania are out saying, Mr. President, you're going to raise people's premiums. This is going to be on us. This is going to be a Republican problem. But even non-retiring Republicans had been saying for a while that this would be a mistake, that this would lead to higher costs for people. And this would lead to higher costs for, frankly, a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump. And I think you can understand the Democrats' argument that if they can point to a specific thing, an easy to understand thing that the president did that directly led to higher health care costs, that's an argument that voters are going to be receptive to. And the president probably will just point the finger at Congress,

as he's been doing more and more frequently lately by saying, hey, they could have fixed it. They could have sent me a repeal and replace law. They could have fixed the subsidies. They could have done X, Y and Z on any number of things. So President Trump held a cabinet meeting today and he took questions from reporters during what's called a pool spray during that meeting. And he was asked about the CSR payments, the cost sharingsharing reductions. We need health care. Now, we're going to get the health care done. In my opinion, what's happening is as we meet, Republicans are meeting with Democrats because of what I did with the CSRs,

because I cut off the gravy train. If I didn't cut the CSRs, they wouldn't be meeting. They'd be having lunch and enjoying themselves, all right? They're right now having emergency meetings to get a short term fix of health care where premiums don't have to double and triple every year like they've been doing under Obamacare because Obamacare is finished. It's dead. It's gone. It's no longer. You shouldn't even mention it's gone. There is no such thing as Obamacare anymore. So the amazing thing about this is that you have the president saying, well, hopefully, maybe they'll get a deal.

Democrats and Republicans, they're meeting. Of course, they had been meeting before he made this move on CSRs. They're meeting again. But his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, in a Politico interview on Friday said, there's no way this Murray Alexander thing is going to work. We're going to need a lot more than just some sort of a temporary fix. We're going to have to get something much bigger than anything they're talking about. Now the president is coming out and saying, hey, maybe there's a maybe there's a short term fix. But what's so interesting is he said, oh, but there is no such thing as Obamacare anymore. That is the argument Democrats are going to make.

You're right now. It's Trump care and everything you don't like about it is because of Donald Trump. He has at various moments said nice things about Alexander Murray, the effort to shore up the exchanges. But that could change, as most things do with Donald Trump. Can we talk about why the president felt he needed to do this? And Congress plays into this as well. The interesting thing is that these payments were being litigated, that this was a fight that House Republicans had sued to stop the Obama administration from making these payments. They won on a lower court level. It was under appeal. But then the House Republicans kept pushing off the court date as if to say like, oh, well, look, he did this with the Dreamer Bill, too. Said,

look, we have litigation in the courts. The executive order that Obama signed around the Dreamers was unconstitutional. He's saying the same things with these subsidies. You know, they're not constitutional because Congress has not appropriated them. He could have said, OK, Congress, fix it like he did with the Dreamers. Go appropriate these subsidies. That's not what he's saying. That still is a possibility. There is Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray who have been working on comes to Obamacare, which is their base and their donors want it repealed. But their voters could be hurt by the unintended consequences of repeal or getting rid of the subsidies, which the president did. And every chart that we have seen shows there are more voters in red states that will be hurt by this than blue states. But this could very well end up on Congress's desk, in part because of the many members of Congress who are concerned

about this affecting their constituents. Yeah. And in part because Democrats are going to make it. Democrats are going to make sure it ends up on Congress's desk, even if Republicans continue to be stalemated about health care, because when the Democrats made that fiscal deal with the president, they funded the government into December, December 8th. And that means that by December 8th, they have to pass another bill to keep the government open. And Democrats are going to insist as the price for their votes that these subsidies continue. And that was the reason why Republicans, Steve Mnuchin and congressional Republican leaders, wanted to get as long of an extension as possible, because that is one of the few

areas where Democrats have real leverage. Remember, Steve Mnuchin was saying, I want a funding bill past the midterm elections. And that's when Chuck Schumer said, oh, it's interesting that you think the ideal time frame just happens to be right after voters weigh in. But, yeah, Democrats can push for that. The immigration issue, Democrats have some leverage on as well. And there's a whole lot of stuff that's kind of a self-created ticking clock that President Trump has created. And Congress has so far shown no urgency to leap to fix these problems. Right. He also wants a great Christmas gift, he called it, to the American taxpayer to have a tax system overhaul by Christmas. But I'm pretty sure the possibility is

that Christmas could get all wrapped up in a fight over government funding and possible government shutdowns. Everything the president has done in the last couple of weeks has added to the already large and burdensome to-do list that Congress has. He keeps on giving them other things to do. Fix the DREAM Act. Fix the Iran deal. Fix health care. You know, there are a lot of things. Tax reform is a big, hard, heavy lift. And just today, he started talking about welfare reform as if there wasn't already enough going on. To be devil's advocate just a little bit, I mean, we spent early September saying, oh, Congress has 100 things to do. They're not going to have any time. And then partially because of that Chuck and Nancy deal, Congress took care of all of its

musts in the first few weeks. And September was kind of like a cruising easy month in Congress. So sometimes when motivated under the right circumstances, Congress can get the stuff done. But again, these are bigger, thornier issues that can't easily be punted, partially due to the things that President Trump has set in motion. So you're saying don't cancel Christmas yet? You know, just get traveler's insurance on your flights, as I have done. Okay, we're going to take a break right now. And when we come back, Steve Bannon's war on the GOP. Support for politics comes from Sun Basket. Sun Basket sends organic and sustainable ingredients to your door, pre-measured and ready to go,

so you can prepare delicious meals in around 30 minutes. Sun Basket takes the guesswork out of preparation, makes cleanup easier, and you get to skip the grocery store with meals designed to fit every busy lifestyle choose from paleo lean and clean gluten-free vegetarian and family options get 35 off your first order at sunbasket.com slash politics hey y'all sam sanders here want to tell you about the only npr show where you can hear about the latest White House drama and the return of TRL to MTV. The show is called It's Been a Minute. Every Friday, we catch up on the week of news and culture, everything. And every Tuesday, I sit down for some long interviews with authors, filmmakers, directors, and more. You can find It's Been a Minute on the NPR One app or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back. And ever since Steve Bannon left his post as chief strategist at the White House, he's made it pretty clear that he's making it his mission to take down the establishment wing of the Republican Party. Or maybe the entire Republican Party, especially those he sees as not loyal enough to President Trump. This weekend, he spelled it out at the conservative religious values voters summit. This is not my war. This is our war. And you all didn't start it.

The establishment started it. Yeah, and public enemy number one, at least as far as Steve Bannon is concerned, is the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Now Mitch, I don't know if you're watching today. I don't know if you're watching Value Voters or you maybe have your staff, but if I can take a little rift on Plutarch and Shakespeare up on Capitol Hill, because I've been getting calls, It's like before the Ides of March, right? The only question is, and this is just an analogy or metaphor, whatever you want to call it, they're just looking to find out who's going to be Brutus

to your Julius Caesar. Okay, so Steve Bannon is someone who speaks in very grandiose ways about what he's doing. What is he doing? And is there a lot of puffery here? Well, sure, there's puffery, but he's also doing something specific, which is he does have a vision for what he wants the Republican Party to be, a kind of nationalist, populist workers party. And he has some money behind him, the Mercers, billionaires, and he's going around and trying to fund challengers to sitting Republicans in primaries. So he's fomenting this civil war inside the Republican Party. Sometimes it's hard to know what his criteria is. He doesn't like the establishment. He has picked Mitch McConnell as his enemy number one, even though Mitch McConnell is the one who probably performed one of the most audacious acts of keeping that Supreme Court seat open, which every one of these values voters thinks was one of the greatest accomplishments in the last couple of years.

So it's really interesting. And which President Trump brags about. Right, brags about all the time. So when I look through this speech to find what is his criteria, he has a bunch of them. Obviously, voting against Trump, that's easy, but only three or four Republicans do that. He's talking about primarying people because they didn't criticize Bob Corker enough. He also talked about how authenticity is the criteria. We need an authentic candidate. So it's not clear. But one thing that I think is really interesting, the Republicans are now a majority party. We just don't know if they are

ever going to become a governing party. This is not going to help them become a governing party. That's the thing. On one hand, Steve Bannon does deserve political credit for being in August and September and October of 2016, one of, you know, maybe several dozen people in politics who thought that President Trump had a chance of winning. He was insistent all along, Trump's going to win. And Trump won. And Bannon played a big role in turning that campaign around over the final months and gaining up ground. On the other hand, Steve Bannon has made his career all about going to war with the GOP establishment, picking fights with the people in power. And when you helped get a guy in the White House and when you had an office in the White House, it's really hard to rail on the establishment because guess what? It's now you. So this seems

to be a little bit of a branding opportunity for Steve Bannon to give himself a lot of presence and be in the conversation going forward. Well, and I think a key to his post-White House branding was the Alabama Senate race. Roy Moore was already likely to win. He was already polling well. Now, President Trump had endorsed the other guy, Luther Strange, and he was more establishment. Roy Moore is a pretty special case in Alabama. And Steve Bannon came in relatively late, hitched his whatever wagon on a winning horse, or like maybe we should go with Caesar. What are those things called?

Chariot. Yes. Hitched his chariot on a winning horse and is taking a lot of credit for it. Well, he should because Donald Trump went down to Alabama and asked his supporters to vote for Luther Strange and not Roy Moore. And the Trumpian candidate, which Donald Trump was not supporting, Roy Moore won. And Donald Trump seemed like he didn't have a whole lot of juice with his own voters.

And we're going to see this repeated, you know, over and over again in these primaries. Donald Trump was asked about Steve Bannon today because it puts Donald Trump in an unusual position of defending the establishment against Steve Bannon and the Trumpians. He was asked about this today at a cabinet meeting. It depends on who you're talking about. There are some Republicans, frankly, that should be ashamed of themselves,

but most of them, I'll tell you what, I know the Republican senators, most of them are really, really great people that want to work hard and they want to do a great thing for the American public. But you had a few people that really disappointed us. They really, really disappointed us. So I can understand fully how Steve Bannon feels. Donald Trump is talking about the people who voted against him, people like John McCain or Susan Collins, people who have not supported him. Steve Bannon is talking about something else. He's laying out criteria like, will you pledge not to vote for Mitch McConnell as majority leader? You know, that's quite different. Or did you not come out and criticize Bob Corker when he criticized the president. I mean, this is tribalism inside the Republican Party.

And I've said this before, and I'll keep saying it because it's such a key point. If the biggest Republican concern right now is we are not accomplishing goals, we are not getting an Obamacare repeal through, we are not getting a tax cut repeal through. The biggest problem has been senators who have not followed Republican leadership and have said, no, I'm going to hold out until you meet all of my demands. People like Roy Moore are the people who are much more likely to make that number of senators who are hard to wrangle even greater and make it even harder to pass these things. At that cabinet meeting today, Trump also talked about that, how hard it's been to get things passed. Look, I have, you know, despite what the press writes, I have great relationships with actually

many senators, but in particular with most Republican senators. But we're not getting the job done. And I'm not going to blame myself. I'll be honest. They are not getting the job done. We've had health care approved and then you had the surprise vote by John McCain. We've had other things happen and they're not getting the job done. That to me is such an important statement by the president. I am not going to blame myself. He is really triangulating getting ready to blame the Republican Congress for not getting anything done. He really is a kind of brand unto himself. He's not dependent on the Republicans. And I think this is a warning to Congress. He's going to go after them. But the Republican base likes him better than they like

Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan. And as a matter of fact, their animus to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell is even bigger than their animus to Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. But how does that work next year when it's like congressional Republicans, they didn't get the job done. So make sure you show up and vote for them, Trump base. Like what's what's what's the argument? Maybe he doesn't care. Maybe he figures if Democrats come in, then he'll work with them. The other thing about Bannon doing this, making these sort of public pronouncements like this, is it probably helps him raise money to fund these primary fights. Yeah. Sebastian Gorka, who was a Bannonite, he had worked for Breitbart before coming to the White House. He also spoke at the summit this weekend. that. He actually, Tam, made a Star Wars joke about it. And he said that him and Bannon are

much more powerful outside of the White House than inside of the White House, saying, you know, if you strike me down, I'll become more powerful. Because Gorka, of course, was also basically asked to leave the White House after Bannon left. I don't know if I buy that. I think being working in the White House is a pretty unique and powerful spot to be in. And I have a hard time seeing that Bannon has more influence on President Trump outside the White House than inside the White House. But he has a much higher profile. Yeah, that's true.

And without the downsides of having to keep his light hidden under a bushel, because you can't look like you're too important if you work in Donald Trump's White House. He wasn't going to do a 60 minutes interview when he was still in the White House. Right. Okay, the time now is three thirty six p.m. And I am back in the studio here with Mara Liason because President Trump, shortly after we left taping the podcast, held a wide ranging press conference in the Rose Garden, an impromptu press conference that we weren't really expecting. Scott Detrow had to go home, but President Trump talked about something that we had been talking about on the podcast, which is why we came back. He actually came out into the Rose Garden with Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority read, we're probably now, I think, at least as far as I'm concerned, closer than ever before. And the relationship is very good.

We're fighting for the same thing. And Mitch McConnell also weighed in. Contrary to what some of you may have reported, we're together totally on this agenda to move America forward. So basically like kumbaya, we love each other. We're all on the same team here. This seemed to be a complete 180 degrees from where he had positioned himself in the Republican Civil War just minutes before in the cabinet room where he expressed sympathy with Steve Bannon, understood where he was coming from.

He said, if things don't get done in Congress, I'm certainly not going to blame myself. I'm going to blame Republicans. But now, standing with Mitch McConnell, my relationship with him is outstanding, he said. And it sounded like he was going to be back supporting Republican incumbents, not putting himself on the Steve Bannon side of supporting challengers. The first time he supported an incumbent in Alabama didn't work out too well for him. Steve Bannon won. But this was, you know, yet another example of the president maybe siding with the last person he talked to, or this is just operative until the next time when he decides to change his mind on this. But what was so

interesting about this, he described Steve Bannon as a friend of mine for a long time. Remember in April to the Wall Street Journal, he said, Steve Bannon is a guy who works for me. So he runs hot and cold on Steve Bannon. But Mitch McConnell laid down the law, standing next to the president. He said, our goal is to win elections. The problem in 2010, 2012, which we talked about earlier in the podcast, was that we nominated all these people who were too extreme to win general elections. But my goal is to keep us in the majority. Winners make policy. Losers go home. That was Mitch McConnell at his essence. So, Mara, did anything else stand out to you from this news conference? It was

incredibly wide-ranging. It was 45 minutes. He clearly backed away from the tentative bipartisan deal on the Dreamers that he'd made with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. He said, we have to have the wall. We do want the wall. That was something that he, according to them, explicitly said that he wasn't going to insist on in some kind of a legalization of the Dreamers. All right. So now we are going to return to your previously recorded credits here. We will be back on Thursday with our weekly roundup. In the meantime, keep up with our

coverage on NPR.org, on your local public radio station, and on the NPR One app. One of us is also on Up First basically every weekday morning. And for those of you in Chicago or, you know, the greater region, we're coming to town this weekend. We'll be live at the Athenaeum Theater on Sunday, October 22nd, and there are still a few tickets left. Just go to wbez.org slash events. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. Thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. © transcript Emily Beynon