Today, Explained - The flamethrowers and the fire extinguishers

Episode Date: January 8, 2021

Infighting among Republican lawmakers reached a breaking point this week. The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins explains why and the tough road ahead for the GOP. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. President Trump lost the election two months ago, but since then, you could argue he's been doing his best to lose his party. The Republican Party has, since the election, found itself devolved into infighting and acrimony and finger pointing, and also kind of these very fundamental debates

about the core tenets of democracy. I think the Republican Party is wondering what they are and what they stand for in a more elemental way than it has after past failed elections. McKay Coppins wrote about the GOP's bitter infighting for the Atlantic this week. And with the outgoing president impeding democracy and courting another impeachment, it felt like a good week to step back and talk about where his party is heading next. Like, you know, in 2012, the Republican Party got together and did an autopsy.

And the Republican National Committee did this report where they went through why they lost the 2012 election and the various policy issues they maybe had to moderate on. The perception that we're the party of the rich, unfortunately, continues to grow. That's frustrating because we care about every voter. We're the party of growth and opportunity. It was kind of a more normal process. It was like, how can we as a political party do better in future elections?

The debates that are happening inside the Republican Party now are way more radical in a lot of ways. I mean, they're questioning whether they should go along with the results of a presidential election. It's a move that will delight President Trump and rankle Republican leadership. Josh Hawley becoming the first Republican senator to say he'll object when Congress meets next week to certify Joe Biden's win. Some of the rising stars are trying to prove their value to the base of the party by calling for anti-democratic power grabs. I mean, this is about the integrity of our elections. And this is about taking a stand where you can take a stand. When you talk to lawmakers or, you know, smart conservative thinkers right now, the questions that they're asking are more about what is the party's place in the American experiment? What is the future of small L liberalism? You know, these are much deeper and more profound questions. And frankly, I think it's a little bit frightening that that's where the Trump era Republican Party finds itself right now. Well, let's go back to how this started before we get to the more cataclysmic events

of this week. After the election, before the election, during the election, Donald Trump is saying he's going to deny the results if he's not the winner. The second there are results, he's saying he did win. How does the GOP respond? Yeah, I still remember late in the night of the election when Donald Trump stood up in that room in the White House. This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. And the next morning, I remember kind of waiting for an avalanche of disapproval from Republicans

on Capitol Hill. Because I kind of figured, you know, not that this would be any kind of moment of moral courage, just that it was a moment of reality, right? That all these Republicans who had felt like they needed to stand with Trump because that's what their voters wanted and that was what was politically convenient, now that they saw the writing on the wall that he was probably going to lose, that they were going to break with him. And I kept waiting and waiting and waiting. And there were a couple early rumbles. I think that Marco Rubio tweeted something vague about how all the votes are going to be counted and everybody should calm down. But I just kept

waiting and it didn't happen. And after a day or two, you started to see these Republicans come out and say, well, look, the president has every right. Look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options. And that started to be the line percolating among Washington Republicans. It was President Trump's team is going to have a chance to make a case regarding voting irregularities. They deserve a chance to make that case. I'm going to stand with President Trump. We certainly don't know who's won yet. The media does not get to select our president. The American people get to elect our president. And so that that was the initial response from most of the Republican Party.

And it's important to note here that this is, even though a lot of the senior Republican leadership in the United States Senate are former colleagues, if not friends, of President-elect Joe Biden. Right, right. And a lot of them really like him. Joe Biden's reputation when he was on Capitol Hill was as a dealmaker, as somebody who crossed the aisle and worked with Republicans. And there's this famous video of Lindsey Graham from several years ago where he's giving an interview talking about how Joe Biden is such a good human being. The bottom line is, if you can't admire Joe Biden as a person, then it's probably you got a problem. You need to do some self-evaluation

because what's not to like? And that video has gone viral every few months in the Trump era when Lindsey Graham says something outrageous about Joe Biden. So yeah, it's not that Republicans were terrified of a Biden presidency. And in fact, I bet if you talk to a lot of them in private, off the record, a lot of them in private off the record, a lot of them were probably relieved that Joe Biden was about to become president because they were sick and tired of all the hoops they had to jump through in the Trump era and being asked every day by reporters about the latest tweet or whatever. So it wasn't that, it was just that they understood that Donald Trump had this grip on the majority of the

Republican base, the majority of Republican voters that they didn't have. And that if they were seen now to be breaking with him, to be disloyal to him, they could face repercussions. And so that's why I think you saw a lot of Republicans sort of starting to go along with this. But I think there was also this idea, and this is important to note, there was this idea in the early days of the election that this would be no big deal, that there was no harm in humoring him, right? going along with this kind of voter fraud narrative for a little while and letting him save face and showing his voters that we're still on the same team. You know, at the end of the day, he's going to leave office and it'll be no harm, no foul. And how does the tally of Republicans who are siding with the outgoing president change as the vast numbers of these legal challenges are rejected, if not mocked. Yeah, I think that last word you said, I think, is key because there was a lot of frustration

from Republicans that I heard from in the weeks following the election that the president's legal team was such a joke, right? I mean, it was Rudy Giuliani and, you know, Eric Trump giving kind of ridiculous press conferences. The company counting our vote with control over our vote is owned by two Venezuelans who were allies of Chavez or present allies of Maduro with a company whose chairman is a close associate and business partner of George Soros. It was just very clear from the beginning that this was not going to be like a Bush v. Gore thing where both candidates had blue chip law firms and extremely well-credentialed lawyers kind of going over case law and, you know,

preparing their cases to bring to the Supreme Court. This was an ad hoc slapdash made for Fox News effort by the Trump campaign. And so I think once it became clear first that they were not going to have any real evidence of widespread voter fraud, not even a little bit credible evidence of widespread voter fraud, I think some Republicans started to back away. So as these cases started to be batted down in court, laughed out of court, Republican judges, in some cases, very curtly and candidly said these cases have no merit whatsoever. As that happened, you started to see people like Mitch McConnell and other Republicans

acknowledge that this was not going to happen, that Donald Trump was not going to be president on January 20th, that Joe Biden had won the election. It still wasn't the consensus view among all Republicans, but there was kind of a breach in the wall around Donald Trump that started to happen, I would say, sometime in December. And while that's happening, you start to see fissures in other arenas, in policy, right? As the year's ending, there's all this talk of stimulus, and then the president inserts himself and throws it off the rails.

I am asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2,000. There's talks of military spending, and the president inserts himself and throws it off the rails. President Trump officially vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act for 2021. That's the roughly $800 billion spending bill that was coupled with the coronavirus relief to essentially make the relief bill a must pass. And then there was a bipartisan vote to override that veto. And that that moment in isolation is not a big pass. And then there was a bipartisan vote to override that veto. And that moment in isolation is not a big deal. I think in Washington, military spending is one thing that Democrats and

Republicans, for the most part, never want to touch. It's not crazy that there would be a bipartisan vote like that. But what it suggested was that a lot of Republicans were fed up with Donald Trump and were not quite as afraid of him as they might have been even a few months ago. And just frankly, we're tired of dealing with the way that the White House was constantly derailing negotiations on Capitol Hill, constantly throwing a wrench in the business of legislating. The stimulus, I think, was a big moment where Trump had sent Steve Mnuchin to be kind of his representative for the administration in those negotiations. And Republicans and Democrats had been dealing with Mnuchin for months in these stimulus talks,

and they got to a point where there was consensus. And nobody was really happy with what they had come up with. But that was kind of the nature of legislative compromise and they were ready to pass it. And then Donald Trump stood up out of nowhere and said that the checks weren't big enough, they should be $2,000 instead of $600 and immediately derailed the stimulus bill. And for a lot of Democrats and Republicans, but I think especially Republicans who are always looking for ways to give him the benefit of the doubt, it was just an extremely frustrating moment where that laid the groundwork for a lot of Republicans to just sort of start to wash their hands of him or in whatever way they could. And it was amazing to see Republicans stand with him on claims of election fraud, but for these spending bills to be sort of the coup de grace. Like, no, you're not going to get us on stimulus or military spending. We'll let you maybe question

the foundations of our democracy, but no, don't mess with our end of year spending bills. Well, again, though, it goes back to this poisonous idea that was planted in the Republican establishment a long time ago, and especially in the days after the election, that there was no harm in humoring his conspiracy theories. There was no harm in letting Donald Trump save face. I think for a lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill, the thinking was on this legislation, this concrete thing that we need to vote on, we're going to not allow Donald Trump to mess it up. But on these kind of wild ideas that are really aimed at social media and the conservative media and Newsmax and Fox News and all of that. Yeah, we can play along with that. That's just kind of

political theater and that's just our job, right? There's this very cynical idea that part of the job of a Republican legislator, especially in the Trump era, is to sort of go through the theater of, you know, being a MAGA diehard. And that's just how you keep your seed and you can continue to do the work that you really want to do. And then the chickens come home to roost. So let's talk about what happened this week. How was the establishment GOP responding to this effort to sort of have some sort of rally, some sort of protest in D.C. the day they'd be certifying the election results? Most of the establishment Republican Party was pretty frustrated with what was happening. And it wasn't just that. It was also the fact that Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri, Ted Cruz, senator from Texas, were cooking up this stunt to object to the electoral college votes members in the House and the Senate. And these

members ran the gamut from Mitt Romney, who is kind of often on the other side of an issue with Donald Trump and is one of the people who's constantly speaking out against him, to Thomas Massey, who is a libertarian Republican in the House of Representatives, staunch Trump supporter, is almost always in like the MAGA camp. And kind of across that spectrum, a lot of Republicans were just completely outraged that there was this effort that they were going to have to deal with. And it's funny because I think part of it was, this is clearly anti-democratic. It makes the party look terrible. It's not going to work. We're just misleading voters. But there was also this just

frustration that they were going to have to spend hours and hours debating this issue. So much of what angers members of Congress is when they just have to spend an entire day jumping through dumb parliamentary hoops for no reason. It's just like, it's like the same way that like, I get annoyed when I have to file my expense reports, you know, it's like, it's just like, ah, like this annoying chore that I have to do. Right. Then you layered on top of that, the fact that Donald Trump was calling on his supporters to come to Washington to, you know, protest the certification of the electoral college and in Donald Trump's convoluted thinking somehow changed the outcome. There's a very interesting moment I at least read about

in the New York Times where while they're shutting down, Mitt Romney starts yelling at his colleagues. I mean, what is it like the moment the GOP and Democrats in the Senate realize on some level this plan was a success? And he had actually just flown out to Washington and his travel day had been kind of terrible. He was harassed by people in the airport. They didn't want you in there anyway. So to be honest with you, I wouldn't be surprised if you weren't even voted in legally. Trump is a juggernaut. Your legacy is nothing. You're a joke.

Absolute joke. It's disgusting shame. He got on the plane and a group of passengers on the plane started chanting traitor. Traitor! Traitor! Traitor! Traitor! But when I talked to him, he wasn't actually that interested in kind of venting about the people who were confronting him. His position was that President Trump had misled millions of people and convinced them that the election was stolen and that this frustration that they were seeing was because Republican voters were being lied to. And he told me that in combustible moments like this one, this is the night before

the storming of the Capitol, he said, in combustible moments like this one, you can either be a fire extinguisher or a flamethrower, and President Trump has been a flamethrower. So he was kind of clear-eyed about the fact that something was happening in the Republican base and that Donald Trump not going to be able to hold the Capitol and they needed to get senators out of the chamber and into a secure facility. They started to kind of scramble to get everybody out. And in the midst of this chaos, Mitt Romney turned to Ted Cruz and yelled, this is what you've gotten. And I actually was texting with somebody who worked for him in the middle of all this, just shortly after that episode, to ask, because I had seen the reports of that. And I asked, is this true? And the person I talked to said yes and said, he is furious. That moment where the Capitol, in an unprecedented way, was being taken over by this angry mob,

I think for a lot of them, it sort of drove home just how dangerous, not just the stolen election narrative was, but how dangerous so much of the Trump era has been. That you can't actually just lie to your supporters with abandon and tell them that all these terrible things are happening without eventually those people believing you and taking to the streets in response. You know, there is actually a cost to humoring President Trump. In a moment, yes, a bunch of members in the GOP saw the storming of the Capitol as the cost of humoring the president, but dozens of representatives and even a few senators

got right back to feeding quarters into his manure machine. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, Thank you. from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame and because she's a little bit older,

it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. Okay, McKay, a mob enters the Capitol.

They desecrate the chambers. Tons of people are injured. Five people so far have died. When business resumes later that Wednesday night, one would think the president's party would have second thoughts about supporting his lies about the election. I mean, you can't come up with something that would be better designed to force a reckoning over what these Republicans have been encouraging

and the plan that Republicans have been pursuing, right? You just saw what happens when you go along with these crazy nonsense conspiracy theories and convince your voters that an election has been stolen? And yet, House reconvenes, the votes start, and more than 100 Republicans in the House decide to object to electoral college votes from states that Donald Trump lost. These are the moments that we should raise the issue about integrity and accountability and accuracy in our elections. But you know what we should do the next difference? Not just raise the issue, but work together to solve the problems. And was it a similar line in the Senate? It was was although i think what happened in the senate was a little more interesting because before the capitol was stormed by this mob what i had heard was that about a dozen republicans in the senate were going to vote to object uh that number was

cut in half by the time that business resumed uh late on wed. And so, you know, still a lot of Republicans went along with it. And Ted Cruz made the same case that House Republicans were outlining. But for those who respect the voters, simply telling the voters, go jump in a lake, the fact that you have deep concerns is of no moment to us. That jeopardizes, I believe, the legitimacy of this and subsequent elections. Very kind of Orwellian line of logic. But you also saw a lot of Republicans angrier at Donald Trump than I think they have ever been willing to show up to this point, right? I mean, Mitch McConnell. We will not be kept out of this chamber by thugs, mobs, or threats.

You saw Mitt Romney say that What happened here today was an insurrection incited by the President of the United States. And then get sustained applause from the chamber when he said that... No congressional audit is ever going to convince these voters, particularly when the President will continue to say that the election was stolen. The best way we can show respect for the voters who are upset

is by telling them the truth. Thank you. voters who were upset is by telling them the truth. You saw Lindsey Graham, who has been an extremely loyal supporter of Donald Trump's throughout his presidency, stand up and say, all I can say is count me out. Enough is enough. I've tried to be helpful. And in a very kind of Lindsey Graham fashion, you know, like very casual kind of. So Mike, Mr. Vice President, just hang in there. They said we can count on Mike. All of us can count on the vice president. You're going to do the right thing. You're going to do the constitutional thing.

Strange tone, frankly, given what it is. Like maybe he's drunk a little bit. There was definitely, I'm not going to say one way or the other, but drunk Lindsey Graham was trending on Twitter for a while. But that I thought was an interesting moment because, you know, again, these aren't moments of moral courage anymore. You know, like at this point, you don't get a lot of credit for breaking with Donald Trump after your life was just put at of the realities in the Republican Party, which was, I think, kind of a final breaking point for a lot of Republicans who had been trying their hardest

to find ways to still be on his side while even trying to kind of tiptoe away from the crazier stuff he was saying. For a lot of Republicans, this was the moment where they just kind of threw up their hands and said, look, he's just wrong and he's lying and I'm just not going to be part of it anymore. And we should mention here, the person presiding over all of this, the person sort of in charge of this legislative moment is the Vice President of the United States. So, you know, we talked, I remember back before the election about Mike Pence and, you know, I've spent a lot of time reporting on Mike Pence and kind of examining the various tensions that exist in Pence's decision to just fully support Donald Trump all the time,

but that's what he's done. From the moment that Donald Trump put him on the ticket in 2016. He has been an unfailingly loyal, subservient, obedient deputy. When Donald Trump says jump, he says how high, right? He will do anything Donald Trump says. He will carry any water Donald Trump wants him to. He will defend anything Donald Trump does, no matter how brazenly corrupt or out of keeping with Mike Pence's values as an evangelical Christian. This is just who Pence is. And for that unfailing years of loyalty, Donald Trump rewarded him by putting him in an impossible position. All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people. Just to be clear, he does not have that authority.

There is no constitutional authority for the vice president to change the outcome of a presidential election. But Donald Trump, literally up until Wednesday, on Wednesday morning, continued to tell the MAGA base that Mike Pence had that ability. And if he doesn't, that will be a sad day for our country. He either does what the only thing he actually can do, which is to just count the electoral college votes and certify the election, which would lead to a massive backlash from the Republican base. Or he can basically recuse himself or try some kind of antics that would never actually work, that would end his political career, but somehow retain the blessing of Donald Trump. Anyway, what he ended up doing was sending a three-page letter saying that he had looked into it.

I'm sorry, I shouldn't be laughing. I mean, it's just so ridiculous. But he said he had carefully considered it and determined that he did not have the constitutional authority to send the electoral college votes back. And Donald Trump immediately turned on him. I'm going to be very disappointed in you. I will tell you right now. I'm not hearing good stories. Throws him under the bus. Throws him completely under the bus. It basically set up Mike Pence as the fall guy, said that Mike Pence didn't have

the courage to do what needed to be done, that because of Mike Pence, we're not going to win this election, basically turned Mike Pence overnight into one of the biggest villains in conservative America. Immediately, memes started to circulate, conspiracy theories started to circulate in conservative social media circles that he had been compromised, that Mike Pence was working with the deep state, that he was never loyal to Donald Trump. Basically, on the way out the door, Donald Trump torched Mike Pence's credibility and ended his ability, I think, to have a future in Republican politics. At least that's what it looks like now. Okay. I guess this all brings us to the question, you know, we wanted to ask you, which is, you know, if people thought they were going to get a reckoning in the Republican party after Trump won the election, you know, they didn't. If they thought they were going to get

one after the GOP lost the house, they didn't. If they thought they were going to get one after the GOP lost the House, they didn't. If they thought they'd get one after President Trump lost the election in November, they didn't. But if they thought they were going to get one after the outgoing president incited a quasi-insurrection in the Capitol the day of the certification of his opponent's win, are they going to get it? I actually think yes. I don't know what the reckoning will look like, and it's possible that the eventual result will be an even more kind of undemocratic, demagogic party. But I do think that after

what happened in Washington combined, and this is important, combined with the fact that Republicans in the midst of all this officially lost control of the Senate. Both Georgia runoffs went to the Democrats, which means that Republicans now are completely out of power. They have lost control of the White House and both chambers of Congress and are now in the wilderness. And there was this kind of line of argument in the immediate aftermath of the November election that even among those who acknowledged that Donald Trump had lost, there was this idea that, yeah, but Republicans actually did pretty well down ballot and overperformed with certain segments of minority voters. And, you know, there are actually positive

signs to look at in all of this. And there was a sense that Republicans were at least going to be able to have control of the Senate. So they would be able to block a lot of the legislation that the Biden administration was pushing for. So there were a lot of silver linings in November that Republicans were looking at that don't exist now. And for the Trump presidency to end with an angry, violent, armed mob storming the Capitol, putting Republican members' lives at risk, I think for a lot of Republicans, will finally cause the introspection and the kind of infighting that probably should have started months ago. I'm not going to make any predictions about where that infighting and introspection leads. There is definitely a faction of the Republican Party that believes the answer, the solution to their ills is more Donald Trump, more Trumpism, more Trump-style populism, quote unquote. And that faction of the party is powerful and they are going to continue to make that case regardless of what happened this week in Washington.

And then there will be other factions of the party who are arguing for a return to Reaganism. There will be factions of the party who argue for moderation. There will be some that argue that they need to get back to very conservative economic politics, that spending in Washington has gotten out of control. that'll be a convenient rediscovery in the Biden era of austerity politics. So you're going to see a lot of debate within the Republican Party now, I think, about where they're headed. And I don't know where it's going, but the debate has, I think, finally started. McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic. You can find and support his work at theatlantic.com.

Since we spoke, Democrats in Congress have said they would move to impeach the outgoing president again as soon as next week if he didn't resign immediately. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, a Republican who you briefly heard in this episode, has said impeaching the president with only a few days left in his term would only divide the country more. Two-thirds of the Senate would be necessary to convict. And as of publishing time, all of one senator, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, has said he'd even consider impeachment over this week's events. I'm Sean Rottmisfirum. This is Today Explained. Thank you.