The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, December 20

Episode Date: December 21, 2018

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is stepping down after a slow freeze-out by President Trump. The federal government inches closer to a shutdown after President Trump refused to sign a spending bill from Congress. Trump announced his intention to pull American forces out of Syria despite being advised against it. And a new NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist poll finds that the majority of Americans think the country is too politically correct. This episode: political reporter Asma Khalid, Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, Congressional reporter Kelsey Snell, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, political editor Domenico Montanaro, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, and national security editor Phil Ewing. 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

Ahoy! This is Somerset. And this is Matt. Calling from a sailboat 700 miles off the East Coast in the Atlantic Ocean. This podcast was recorded at 625 p.m. on Thursday, December 20th. Things may have changed by the time we reach the Caribbean. Okie dokie, here's the show. I'm on a boat! I'm on a boat! Everybody look at me, cause I'm sailing on a boat! How did they send this to us? On a boat. I didn't get that. Really good satellite service.

All right. Well, hey there. It is the NPR Politics Podcast, and we're here with our weekly roundup. The Secretary of Defense is stepping down. The federal government is inching closer to a shutdown. Donald Trump, against all advice not to, says he's going to pull U.S. troops out of Syria. And a new NPR poll finds that a majority of Americans think the country is too politically correct. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent.

Well, that was a long list of political stories that we mentioned up top. So let's start at the beginning with the Secretary of Defense, James Mattis. Domenico, we got news of this via tweet. Do you want to start off by just actually reading what the president had to say? I'll read the tweet, but it's not the full story. General Mattis will be retiring with distinction at the end of February after having served my administration as Secretary of Defense for the past two years. Exactly. And you said it's not the full story. And that's in part because we also have a resignation letter from the Secretary of Defense. And Mara, that presented a sort of distinct list of grievances that he's had with how Donald Trump has governed.

Isn't that right? Secretary Mattis is not retiring. He's resigning. This is the first major Trump administration official who's resigning over principle. Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, was fired. Other top officials have been forced out. But Jim Mattis is choosing to step down because he can no longer serve a president. As he puts it, you have a right to have a secretary of defense whose views are better aligned with yours. On a whole list of things, he talked about alliances. He talked about the way the U.S. treats Russia and China. We know that he was against the the same thing in Afghanistan. We know that Jim Mattis feels that leaving the Afghan government in the lurch or our allies in Syria, and particularly the Kurds, would be wrong. And he's decided that he can no longer serve the president because he disagrees with him so profoundly. And so, Kelsey, I'm assuming there's already been reaction from members of Congress to this, because as Mara mentioned, it's a really high profile resignation. It's distinctly different from what we've seen with other administration officials.

Yeah, there's been a huge reaction. And I would say the majority of it has been total shock. There have been members who have been tweeting. And as we run into people in the halls, they just seem completely surprised by this. Now, it's probably not a big surprise that there were maybe some differences between Mattis and the president, but his resignation now is really taking people aback. And I'm looking through Twitter and I'm seeing people like Senator Mark Warner, who is the ranking Democrat, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, and he tweeted that this is scary. He says Mattis has been an island of stability amidst the chaos of the Trump

administration. And you're hearing that from a lot of Democrats and even some Republicans. It's funny that you picked the Warner tweet because I was looking at that exact one because it reminds me of as Mara was talking about, you know, this being the first person really to resign in a way that says they disagree with the president. But there have been a list of other people who've left the administration or have been forced out who a lot of people saw as closer to the establishment, closer to the sort of usual way of doing business with the world and within the United States. And I think that what this is going to indicate is that we're going to have a much more Trumpian second half of this president's first term. There's no doubt the president is now running foreign policy out of his gut. In other words, the decision on Syria was made with next to no consultation. He just wanted to do it. He's a party of one. He doesn't really want his own chief of staff, and he probably doesn't think he needs much of a secretary of state or a secretary

of defense. So, Mark, you were talking about Syria, and we're going to dive in a lot more depth about that Syria decision later in the show. But I am curious if you feel like that decision, I mean, Mattis did oppose that decision. Do we have a sense of whether that had anything to do with the time of this resignation? Oh, absolutely. I think this was the last of a long series of disagreements that Mattis had with the president. This was a resignation over policy and principle. This wasn't like the two of them didn't get along, the way John Kelly and Donald Trump became like oil and water, or Rex Tillerson and the president, where it was almost like a personal personality clash. Jim Mattis didn't believe, Jim Mattis didn't believe that the decisions the president was making were going to keep the United States safe and uphold our values around the world and

do the things that he thought would keep faith with the U.S. military. And so in the immediate sense, Mara, you say that this is an indication that we're going to continue to see foreign policy just governed by President Trump's instincts, by his gut. But even though it is kind of early on, do we have any sense of who he may want to replace Mattis with? No, we don't. We know what names have been batted around. Lindsey Graham, who, of course, is a huge critic of the pullout from Syria. Tom Cotton, who's a hawkish, ambitious senator from Arkansas. General David Petraeus, who apparently would like to get back in the game. Mac Thornberry, who's the chairman of

the, the outgoing chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. The question is, will the president be able to find someone who feels the same way that he does about alliances, meaning suspicious of them and doesn't really like multilateral alliances, doesn't see them in U.S. national security interests. Somebody who feels the same way about Vladimir Putin that he does and also feels the same way about our military commitments around the world. So, yeah, you know, we've been talking a lot about the president just going with his gut. And there's another situation today that's been unfolding where he, again, is just going with the way he feels. And that is his decision to essentially torpedo a spending bill because it does not include funding for the border wall.

Kelsey, it seemed like we were close to a deal, but no more, right? Yeah, the Senate overwhelmingly passed a short-term spending bill to keep the government open at the current spending levels through February 8th. They did it by voice vote last night. But even before they were done voting on it, a group of conservatives in the House were on the floor railing against it because it doesn't have money for a border wall. But it still seemed like House leaders were going to try to get it passed. But then things kind of fell apart this morning and this weekly meeting that House Republicans have. And it kind of just kept going downhill from there, including that White House meeting where leaders were called to the White House and the president told them he wouldn't sign the spending bill without wall money. Which is amazing because just the day before, Mitch

McConnell was saying the White House was very flexible. The White House was signaling that the president would sign maybe a short term funding bill so he could have this fight with Nancy Pelosi after the first of the year. But now he said very explicitly today, he says, I've made my position clear. There has to be money for border security in the bill. And he defined border security as a wall or what he called steel slats. Sounds like a macho fence. But he has been very specific. He seems to have put himself back in the corner he was trying to get out of before when he said he would be happily blamed for a government shutdown. And I still can't figure out what is his legislative strategy to pass this,

to pass the thing he wants, or what is his political strategy to avoid being blamed for a shutdown, which he has said he would gladly take. So, Mara, but do you really think that he will be blamed for the shutdown? Yes, I do, because he has said, blame me for the shutdown. I mean, I understand. I understand. You're saying that somehow or other he'll be able to blame the Democrats for not giving him. Or even the people within his own party who are not. Yeah, exactly.

The Democrats or the Republicans who have not been in sync with it because this is such a powerful issue for his base. His base will not blame him for the shutdown. His base is happy to have a shutdown in exchange for a fight over funding for the wall. They took him seriously and literally when he promised to build a wall. And his base is not a majority. I mean, that's the issue. Yes. And the problem is the majority of the country doesn't want a wall and is absolutely adamant in every poll we've ever seen that they don't think the government should be shut down over funding for the wall. And playing to his base is part of the reason why Republicans lost 40 seats in the House. That's a huge number. His base is loyal. It's not growing. Indeed. But he feels that popularity. Right. And there's something to be said about a president who ultimately makes decisions based on his gut often is making them

based on instinctually what he feels is popular, right? And going to make him feel more popular. But I think the difference between most presidents and this president is most presidents look at the independence number in polls, and they look at persuadables and they try to win over people. What makes him feel good are going to rallies with like minded people who tell him that his policies are exactly what they want. And I think part of the problem for him politically is because he has is basically put all all the chips in on his base to ramp up turnout in rural places to get people to go to the polls who completely back him on all of his policies, that if he were to kind of go against some really mainstay things that they want done,

like the wall, then that can be politically problematic for him. And the thing that's so interesting to me is I always thought that his base, as we were told, took him seriously, but not literally. And they really wouldn't hold him to this wall thing. They just wanted to see him fighting for them. But what I'm told by one conservative after another this week is the wall is something that his base takes seriously and literally, and it really matters to them, not just to the Ann Coulters of the world, to the actual conservative base, whether he can build the wall or not. They really see that as a sign of his commitment to them. Well, I had a Republican. We were just kind of chatting off the record.

And one of the things he said was that, you know, the wall is physical. It's concrete, literally. Or steel slats. Or steel slats. And that's so much different than a conceptual immigration policy. And that's something that is just easier to wrap your head and arms around if you want a solid manifestation of a policy coming into fruition. Building a wall is so much easier to say, look at my success than saying, I passed a complicated, complex, drawn out, massive immigration policy that, you know, it may be hard for people to feel is real. And not to mention the fact that he led umpteen million chants at rallies. What do we want? We want the wall. Who's going to pay for it? Mexico. I mean, he has created this monster now and he has to fulfill the promise or else it's going to become like his Guantanamo,

the great white whale that he never could get. But I don't see a path to actually fulfilling it. I don't either. Because no matter what, if this passes in the House, it goes back to the Senate, and that can't pass in the Senate. So what's the Senate going to do? Strip it out and send it back. I mean, this is a game of ping pong with no end in sight. So Kelsey, are you saying in the immediate future, we should expect the government to just shut down? I mean, maybe not. Maybe there's some other way. There are a couple of members who told me, well, there's still time to negotiate. Sure, there's time to do some negotiation. But Democrats are not negotiating on the wall. They're just not doing it. As much as President Trump thinks that

this is a winning issue for them, Democrats know that fighting back against the wall is a winning issue for them, and it's a core belief for them. All right. Well, Domenico and Kelsey, thank you to you both. Thank you. I'm going to go chase down some lawmakers. All right. And Domenico, you're going to leave for a little bit, but I know that you're going to be back at the end of the show to talk to us about that poll on political correctness. Don't worry, I'll be looking in through the window of the studio. All right. When we get back, we'll talk about why Donald Trump wants troops out of Syria. This message comes from NPR sponsor, Google Home Hub. You know how your phone has 20 different apps to control your lights and everything in between? That's why there's Google Home Hub, which shows you your home at a glance,

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but I don't know if I'm going to keep singing. She was like, you have to keep singing. I'm Sam Sanders. My chat with J-Lo on the secret to her continued success this week on It's Been a Minute from NPR. All right, we are back and we've got NPR's national security correspondent with us, Phil Ewing. Hey, Phil. Hi. And NPR's congressional correspondent, Scott Detrow. Hey, Scott. How's it going? All right. So we've got both of you now here with us. And Phil, in particular, I'm really interested because you are our resident expert on all things national security.

And on Wednesday, President Trump announced that he was planning to pull out U.S. forces from Syria. We have won against ISIS. We've beaten them and we've beaten them badly. We've taken back the land. And now it's time for our troops to come back home. Why is he doing this now? Well, he says their work is done. There are about 2,000 or more troops in northern Syria. They've been there trying to help local forces learn to defeat the Islamic State on their own,

mostly trying not to fight if they can avoid it, but facilitating, as the Pentagon would say, an increase of capabilities by the Turkish mostly forces there, and also trying to keep other parties in the conflict apart, keeping Turks from fighting the Kurds, keeping the Russians from fighting the Kurds. But the president said the most important mission was ISIS, and that's over, he argues, and so they're going to come home. Okay, so quick backstory just to confirm what you're saying, Phil. It sounds like the central reason the U.S. was engaged in Syria ever to begin with was ISIS. That's right.

The Islamic State was one of the many terror groups that spun out of this horrible civil war that's been raging in Syria for many years. And it was an external terror threat, which is why the world powers cared about it so much. The prospect for people outside of Syria and Europe or the United States being affected. And so the United States, after a torturous process of decision making, responded with these deployments and also with airstrikes to help forces there fight the Islamic State. Now, what a lot of people say is ISIS isn't really defeated. What's been defeated is this caliphate that it declared. So there's no more imaginary country in northern

Syria called the Islamic State. But there are many terrorists, fighters, extremists, foreign fighters still there. And that's what these U.S. troops have been doing, trying to help indigenous forces defeat those people who are remaining in Syria. And to that point, Phil, I mean, we have seen a number of GOP senators, I would say, rather vocally slam the president, criticize his decision. Yeah, they're mad. They are very upset. Senate Republicans are so upset that yesterday, Vice President Mike Pence had to motorcade over to the Capitol and meet with Republican senators about this. They're mad for two reasons. First of all, a lot of Republican senators are mad at the strategic decision. They're thinking that this hurts allies, this hurts and undermines efforts that were already underway, that things could fall apart again without U.S. troops. They're also mad at a more basic level that nobody bothered to tell them. They found out about this

when President Trump announced it. But Mara isn't, I mean, isn't the argument from the president that this was a campaign promise that he is upholding, that he promised to withdraw the troops once he had, you know, apparently defeated ISIS. And you talk to his supporters and I routinely hear this praise that now ISIS is gone. and this is thanks to President Trump. Right. Well, the campaign promise was to defeat ISIS. The preference that he has strongly expressed, which much of his base agree with, is to get U.S. troops out of foreign entanglements. But what's interesting is he gave two conflicting reasons for why he was doing this. First, he said ISIS had been wiped out.

Then he tweeted that ISIS isn't America's problem. Russia, Iran and Syria can fight ISIS instead of us. So which is it? But the other thing that I was really struck by was we have seen now several instances of Republican senators pushing back against the president's foreign policy decisions, whether it was to accept the Saudi Arabian explanation of Khashoggi's death, whether it was, and this one, to pull out of Syria. And Lindsey Graham even went so far as to say that this was as bad a decision as when Obama put an end date on our involvement in Iraq. To those who say we have defeated ISIS in Syria, that is a inaccurate statement. To say they're defeated is an

overstatement and is fake news. It is not true. The Republican senators are more restive than they've ever been. Ben Sasse called this decision weak. And that really struck me. The reason this is a consequential decision is it not only brings back deja vu for people like Lindsey Graham and Bob Corker about the period in Iraq after Obama committed the American troops to withdraw, which turned into chaos. The critics said they didn't finish their job chaining the Iraqis and supporting them, which allowed the country to kind of fall apart, especially militarily. People are worried that could happen again in Syria. And that'll have big consequences if this section of northern Syria basically defaults back to being an ungoverned space.

And the story of the 21st century and international security is ungoverned spaces like Afghanistan and elsewhere are these petri dishes where terrorism can take root. And that's what people worry about so much. There's also a kind of geopolitical level to this as well. The Turks are upset about the American support for the Kurds in northern Syria. The Russians are upset about the American support there. And the Iranians have been helping support the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad in the south. And with the United States backing away from Syria, each one of those powers gains in the Middle East by having more of a share of this pie, more of a say of what happens there. And for Iran hawks, including the president's own national security advisor, John Bolton, that was a reason all along to keep an American presence in Syria,

because if Iran was there, they argued the United States had to be there. Now, according to what the president says, the United States is pulling out. What was also so striking about this was that the president seems to have made this decision all by himself and from his gut. There was no interagency process. The national security advisor, John Bolton, who's a real hawk, has said we're going to stay in Syria as long as Iran is there. But all of a sudden, Donald Trump didn't just declare victory and say ISIS is defeated. He decided to pull out lock, stock and barrel in contradiction to the advice he was getting from all of his military advisors. And he even went so far as to record a video where he suggested that fallen American warriors are, quote, looking down from heaven with approval. He said that's the

way they wanted, pointing towards the sky. But they've killed ISIS. Who hurts the world? And we're proud to have done it. And I'll tell you, they're up there looking down on us and there is nobody happier. I don't think we have ever heard a president invoke the wishes of dead American soldiers to justify his foreign policy decision. We won. And that's the way we want it. And that's the way they want it. reasons the Obama administration was always so hesitant about getting involved in Syria was they felt like the amount of resources the Americans were willing to commit wouldn't be enough to really achieve all the ends that the U.S. wanted to see here. So you heard something mirroring that from Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut who's really been pushing and scaling back on a lot of different military efforts lately, kind of a skeptical endorsement of what Trump's trying to

do here. He said America's military presence in Syria has always been too little to make a decisive difference, but just enough to prolong the fighting. Our half-hearted military commitment made no sense from the start. So he said he's glad troops are coming back. But he said in order for this to work, the Trump administration needs to actually engage in diplomacy in a way it hasn't so far. So it sounds like what you're saying, Scott, is that some Democrats are open and welcoming the idea that troops should come home from Syria. And then on the flip side, you have some outspoken Republicans who are worried and saying that really, if ISIS is not entirely completely

demolished in Syria, then there's this threat that they could carry out attacks on Americans, potentially here on American soil. And so do we have a sense that Congress is going to actually do anything about this? Or will the president's word just stand? Unclear right now. Important to point out that there are literally hours left in this Congress as scheduled. It looks like Congress will be here this session a little longer than planned because of this funding issue. There's no real time for any sort of resolution like you saw past the other week demanding an end to military action in Yemen. But there's always the next term, which is just a few weeks away. And it's clear that you have a big chunk of the Senate Republican caucus upset here.

But it's hard to, you know, compel the president to have troops where he doesn't want them to go. I think the broader point that both parties agree on is the fact that this was such a snap decision with zero heads up is something they find intolerable. I'm not sure what sort of levers of pressure they can use to say, hey, why don't you give us a heads up next time? All right, Phil and Mara, you guys have got to jet. Goodbye. Bye. When we get back, we'll talk about what it means if the majority of this country does not want to be politically correct. Support for NPR and the following message come from Walmart. Walmart is using virtual reality to train managers and associates on everything from customer service to adopting new in-store tech.

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Find us every week on the NPR One app and wherever you listen to podcasts. And we're back. And Domenico, hey, you're back with us. Hey, Asma. And also we've got Danielle Kurtzwebin. How are you doing, Danielle? I'm good. Normally this is the part of the show where we talk about the one thing that we cannot stop thinking about.

But this week we're going to mix it up because there was something that the Internet could not let go of. And that's a new NPR PBS NewsHour Marist poll that we put out. So, Domenico, what's the big picture on the poll? Well, so, you know, one of the things we wanted to look at was some of the language around political correctness. And there's a trend question. In general, are you in favor of the United States becoming more politically correct and like when people are being more sensitive in their comments about others? Or are you against the country becoming more politically correct and upset that there are too many things people can't say anymore? And people could have said, I don't know, not sure, and sort of opted out of the answer.

But what came back was that 52% of people said that they're against the country becoming more politically correct and upset that there are too many things people can't say anymore. Just over a third or about 36% said that they are in favor. How does that compare to previous results? So because of all of the back and forth about the questioning about this poll, I went back to our pollsters and asked them why they picked this question and why they decided and what they were trying to get out of it. And what one of what Barbara Carvalho, who's the director of the of the poll, said is that the goal of including the same question in the current survey was twofold. One, to get the results in the time of President Trump. Obviously,

he's somebody who's been using this phrase, right? And two, to see if opinions had changed since the beginning of the Tea Party movement in 2010, which is when this poll was first conducted with that same question from another outlet. And what they found is that there has been at least a slight change. The margin of favor and against political correctness has narrowed somewhat, actually, from a gap of 28 points in 2010 to 16 points now. So, you know, interestingly, given that the president has used this phrase over and over again, it's still something that a majority of the country, including independents, and I think that was the big thing that popped up here, is against the country becoming more politically correct, you know, as loaded a phrase as that is. But it's gotten somewhat tighter.

Okay. So that's what the poll found. Danielle, what was the summary of the beef with this poll and the wording? So the criticisms, at least as far as I saw, were that were with the term politically correct, that it is a loaded phrase and that it is a poorly defined phrase. That, first of all, it's loaded in that it's a thing that people already automatically are quite ready and willing to say, yes, political correctness is bad. And that in that capacity, it's a frame that has been heavily politicized, as critics were telling us, particularly on the right. Aside from that, political correctness, if you sit and try to think of what is a good definition of it, it can cover a broad swath

of things. I don't know if you guys saw, but there was a debate on Fox News this week, I believe, on the Tucker Carlson show about whether they should be called gingerbread men or gingerbread people. You can think of that as political correctness, or you can think about the name of the Washington football team as an example of political correctness. You can think of affirmative action as political correctness. I mean, the question is, what do you consider that? And that can very heavily change how you answer this question. I hear you, Danielle, in saying that the term is very loaded. But one of the intriguing parts to me about this criticism was that we as a network in conjunction with Marist, I felt like did actually define what we meant by political correctness, saying that, are you upset that there are too many things that people cannot say anymore? routine sentiment. I would say certainly among Republican voters. I've heard a lot. I was just out in Ohio last week, frustration from some people about the fact that some people don't want you to play the song, Baby, It's Cold Outside anymore. Right. So that's something I hear from

Republican voters. But I will say, I've also heard that from a number of more independent or even Democratic leading voters, particularly around conversations about the Me Too movement. A number of men I've spoken to, you know, sometimes will say that they feel like that entire movement has gone, quote unquote, too far. Sure. And that there are things that they feel like they cannot say, or just terms that they would have used before phrasing that they feel like is not socially acceptable before. And to me, what's kind of interesting is you've got a third of Democrats also saying that and a bulk of society right now, a majority, we could say, seems to feel like there is a line that they cannot cross about certain comments that they want to say. I guess I have I have a couple thoughts on this. And I think one of the problems that

you get having a conversation about this and trying to like make some sense of this is that any conversation lumps the two extreme ends into into one camp right yeah like some people use oh that you just i can't be politically correct to cover like saying generally offensive things right like if you pulled like can you go and insult people for being gay in public like you know or something like that the extreme end of it it's like no and that's absolutely and that's a good thing that that's not okay in a way that it might've been marginally okay 30 years ago. Right. But at the same time, Danielle, you mentioned the baby, it's cold outside thing. I have not come across many people who are marching in the streets demanding an end to baby, it's cold outside. Right. Like, I feel like the extreme end of that often gets over, over-emphasized in a way that

it's like not actually the top grievance on people's minds. And I think like, obviously, those are two extremes. And the real thing of what's okay and not so not okay is in the middle. Likewise, the Starbucks cups every year, like it always seems like a thing that becomes a bigger deal because news outlets write about it, as opposed to people actually being angry about Starbucks cups. You know what I mean? I did. I was driving back from daycare this morning, and I was just rolling with that, you know, that station in every town that goes all Christmas all the time. Somebody called in and they said, I'd like to request Baby It's Cold Outside.

Have a Merry Christmas. And I was like, ooh, that is a political call. But don't you feel like that this is where, though, the entire culture of the country has shifted as we've become more politicized around these culture war issues. Because to this very point, I remember being in grade school in my very small town in Indiana, and my sister and I sang a quote unquote, Muslim song in the Christmas program. And like, we were the big celebrities of the show. And I look at that now and I was like, that is not something that would happen in an equally small, non-diverse town today and be welcomed with open arms.

Is there a breakdown between older and younger respondents on this or just in terms of the general worldview of this? Yes. And I think that's why the trend is so interesting about this, because when the younger people get, the more open they are to saying that people should be more sensitive in their comments. The only age group where a majority of people, 50% or more, said that people should be more sensitive in their comments and they like the country becoming more politically correct are young adults, people under 30. Every other age group, a majority was against it. And that is particularly interesting given how the country is changing long term. I think we know where things are going short term. I think that's why President Trump has been able to exploit some of the grievances, especially white grievance.

That what you're speaking about, though, speaks to the very conundrum that Democrats seem like they're going to be facing in a Democratic primary, because you're talking about emphasis, right, and tone on some of these issues, Domenico, and whether or not a Democratic candidate comes out and says, I am going to speak in a politically correct way. Like case in point, I think of is, you know, Bernie Sanders was criticized quite a bit after the midterms for a comment he made about why some white voters felt uncomfortable, perhaps voting for Andrew Gillum or Stacey Abrams. Now, is that political correctness that he had to sort of go back and contextualize those comments? Who knows? But in a Democratic primary field, those comments are going to be of a greater emphasis than they would in a general election.

I just find that to be a very fascinating line that any Democrat is going to try to have to navigate. Most definitely, and that makes political correctness one of the most powerful weapons that Republicans can have. I should say he was walking that back very quickly. I was actually the next interview he did after that minutes later, and he was already trying to spin that back pretty quickly. So it wasn't like he was sticking to that until he saw the blowback.

All right, that is a wrap for today. We'll be back in your feed the next time there is political news you need to know about. Until then, if you like what you hear, please head over to iTunes and give us a review there. It does help out the show. And we are on Twitter and Facebook at NPR Politics. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.