The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Is The Past, Present, And Future Of The Republican Party

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

The former president's speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference is confirmation that Donald Trump won't go quietly into retirement—loyalty to Trump and white grievance politics will remain the Republican party's central tenets for the foreseeable future.This episode: White House reporter Ayesha Rascoe, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Kristen calling from the Salteshi Trails in Soldotna, Alaska, where I'm taking a break from vaccinating my patients against COVID to learn how to skeedra with my dogs. The time is 11.23 a.m. on March 1st. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. All right, puppies, hike! Okay, enjoy the show. Wow.

So what's she doing with the puppies? Is she going, like, sledding with them or something? I think she's doing way more than we are, is the answer. Yes, yes. Our listeners always do awesome things. They do a lot of awesome things. And speaking of vaccinating patients, my 92-year-old grandpa is going to get vaccinated today. So very happy for my grandpa. Hey, grandpa. Yes. Hey, there is the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm

Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House. I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. All right. So I don't think any of us thought Donald Trump would stop breaking presidential norms after he left office. It's pretty much his thing. So it's not surprising that unlike most former presidents, Trump is still trying to hold on to the spotlight. He gave this big speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday, where he continued to lie about winning the presidential election. He also blasted President Biden over immigration, and he teased a potential 2024 run. Domenico, you watched the speech. It came after Trump had really been kind

of quiet or very quiet for Trump for a month. Are we going to see more of him in the coming weeks like this? You know, I think that we might not necessarily see this kind of speech over and over again, where we see those kind of big rallies that really give him a lot of energy necessarily. But I think we will see him start to stay engaged during that speech, which ran an hour and a half. Not surprising to those of us who've listened to a lot of Trump speeches. Not his longest CPAC speech. No, I think last year was two hours, the one where he hugged the flag beforehand. But he said to donate to his PAC that he is going to stay involved in 2022. And he dangled running for president again in 2024. So he very much wants to be not only a player, but the player in the GOP.

And Tam, I'm sure a lot of people may be thinking, why are we even talking about this? He's not president anymore. The reason why we're talking about this is because even though he's out of office, Trump is still the leader of the Republican Party. And he has influence over those in office and those who are running for office. And Trump has emphasized, and he emphasized over and over that he's not he's not giving up his throne. He's not giving up, you know, his position of power in the Republican Party. Yeah. He said that he is not planning to start a new party.

He says we have the Republican Party and he says it's going to unite and be stronger than ever. So, you know, starting a third party would have been a lot of work. Essentially, what he's saying is there's no division in the Republican Party. There are just some people that don't like him in the – you know, there are some Washington people it is united behind him. Aside from the the enemy's list that he read off in in this speech, an enemy's list of people who voted to impeach him. He's essentially like, other than them, it's mine, baby, mine. And, you know, that is what Trump is about right now. He said there's no reason to start a third party because we got to stay unified. We're not going to split our voters.

And for him, being unified means doing it in the mold of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, which, you know, it was the dominant thing at CPAC this week. And what he outlined a little bit of Trumpism, right? Because a lot of people do wonder, what is Trumpism? Well, you know, I'm not sure Trumpism is what he defined it as, because he talked about how it means fair trade, basically, you know, that it means not having bad trade deals. And yeah, that was part of what Trump did. But really, when it comes to Trumpism, we know that it is cultural grievance, cultural white grievance in particular. That's why so much

of his speech was focused on immigration. It's always been the thing that had the juice for him and for people in his base. We have to acknowledge that the lies that Trump told about the election and about him winning the election led to violence and death, really, on know, on January 6th when people stormed the Capitol. He is still repeating those things, even after the impeachment, even after people are being charged and saying that they did things. I mean, they are telling authorities they did things and felt like they were doing it on behalf of Trump. That, to me, seems serious. I mean, like, if you thought he was going to be censured by a second impeachment, which nobody actually did.

No, he is not held back by that. He does not have remorse about what happened. Certainly not that he is expressing and he is continuing to repeat lies about election fraud, about having actually won the election. And, you know, there are some share of people who support him who believe these lies still. And he's not taking it back. He's not, you know, he's not like, oh, gosh, that insurrection happened. And maybe I should be careful about my words. No. Yeah. And it was a big part of CPAC. They had several panels on it trying to justify it.

You know, Ted Cruz, for example, during his speech, he said that when in Houston there were no, quote unquote, riots because he said, let's be very clear. If there had been, they would discover what the state of Texas thinks about the Second Amendment right to keep in bare arms. Huge applause for that. It's like January 6th never happened. Speaking of Ted Cruz, Domenico, one of the things they do at CPAC every year is that straw poll. And I'm sure that Ted Cruz was hoping to come out on top or maybe not on top. That would trump in there. But you know what I'm saying? He wanted to at least do a strong showing, right? How did the straw poll go? Yeah, I mean, Ted Cruz didn't fare very well. He would have liked to have done much better. He only got about 2% in the poll. And this is a poll, we should say, of people who are in attendance at

CPAC who chose to participate in it. Donald Trump was far and away the winner. He got 55% of the vote. That's what we expected. And maybe some of us actually thought, given how pro-Trump it was, he would do better than that, actually. But what was interesting, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis finished second with 21%. And that was really interesting because nobody else came even close to that. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem finished with 4%.

She finished third. You know, when you took Trump out of the picture, DeSantis and Noem really spiked. So they're two people to keep an eye on. You know, I was talking to a Trump ally a while ago and I was like, you know, what is Trumpism without Trump? Trump. And he said, oh, it's Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem, more disciplined politicians who are still in the Trump mold in terms of populism and things like that. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll have more when we get back. The news is about more than what just happened. You need to know why it happened, who made it happen, how it's felt in the communities you care about. NPR's daily news podcast, Consider This, gives you all of that with

context, backstory, and analysis on a single topic every weekday. It's not just information, it's what the news means. Consider This from NPR. And we're back. One thing Trump was very happy to talk about yesterday was vaccines. He spent several minutes taking credit for Operation Warp Speed, for vaccines. And in a very, we talked about Trumpism. So in a very Trumpian fashion, he did encourage people to go get vaccinated. He, of course, couched that with some insults against President Biden and false claims about President Biden's memory. But deep in that, in those insults, within those insults, was encouragement for people to get vaccinated. Remember, you know, we took care of a lot of people,

including, I guess, on December 21st, we took care of Joe Biden because he got his shot. He got his vaccine. He forgot. It shows you how unpainful that vaccine shot is. So everybody go get your shot. And Domenico, this is important because you pointed out that the crowd at CPAC and that some of these people are the people have said that they were least likely to get vaccinated. Yeah, I mean, when you look at surveys, Republicans are least likely to get vaccinated, Trump supporters in particular, the least likely to get vaccinated. And Trump himself had been a vaccine denier for other things, you know, falsely claiming that they lead to autism, for example, when he ran for president. He's now pro-vaccine.

And I think it's very important, you know, for his base to hear it from somebody that they trust. And that's something that scientists and, you know, Democrats have been urging Trump to do through the pandemic, whether it came to masks or getting vaccines or other things that adhere to science. Tam, I know you've been following the coronavirus response from the federal government. Trump yesterday did mention the latest big vaccine news, which is the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, authorized emergency use for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Yeah. authorized emergency use for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Yeah, and a CDC advisory panel recommended that it be used, and the CDC signed off, and those doses, four million doses, or just shy of four

million doses, are being distributed now. Well, one thing Trump did talk about, and that Republicans have been trying to zero in on when it comes to policy is being against the big COVID relief package that is going through Congress right now. And that, you know, Trump did talk about this issue of opening schools. And he says that the relief package is not going to help with opening schools. The Democrats now say we have to pass their $1.9 trillion boondoggle to open schools, but a very small part of it has to do with that. You know where it's going. It's going to bail out badly run Democrat cities, so much of it. But billions of dollars for schools remain unspent from the COVID relief bills that were passed last year.

So on behalf of the moms, dads, and children of America, I call on Joe Biden to get the schools open and get them open now. It would be a great thing to do. But, Tam, you have done some, I guess, let's do a little fact check here on what Trump said, because you've looked into this idea of money being left over from other relief packages, and why that money hasn't been spent. Yeah, so a couple of things. Yeah, a lot of it hasn't yet been spent in the like, money has actually been spent, but it's been obligated. Schools and also the state and local for cities and states,

that money is long gone. It is obligated for expenses, and it just hasn't either made it through the accounting system or it's, you know, the reality is the deadline to spend this money is either a year or two or three years away. But there's another more important bigger point here, which is although a lot of the Washington conversation and a lot of the political conversation is about reopening schools, outside of the biggest cities and their near-end suburbs, schools have been open. Schools have been open all year. And a lot of this money is not actually to open schools, the money in this relief package that the Biden administration wants. This is money to help fix what will be broken for a long time after kids were out of school,

learning loss and the psychological impact of not having those important interactions at school. Well, where do things stand with the bill right now? The bill passed the House, and now it's headed to the Senate. Yeah, and the Senate parliamentarian determined that the $15 minimum wage provision that was passed in the House version that passed Friday, that does not meet Senate rules because this is a budget bill. And that is not, strictly speaking, a budgetary item. Although people like Bernie Sanders, Senator Bernie Sanders, who is the chairman of the Budget Committee on the Senate side, although he really wants it, it's basically it's going to have to

drop and it's going to have to be something that Congress deals with later. And right now there is a deadline that is looming because expanded federal unemployment benefits run out in mid-March. And so the goal for the administration and for Democrats is to get this passed before then. Exactly. All right, let's leave it there for today. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House. I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.