The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 7 episode of theDaily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump is already telegraphing all the ways he’s going to make life absolutely miserable for Republicans in Congress. He continues to declare that he wants virtually his entire agenda to pass in one big bill, which will put the congressional GOP through wildly unworkable contortions. He’s signaling that the demands he makes of House Speaker Mike Johnson will be borderline impossible. He just doubled down on his threat of across the board tariffs, which many Republicans will not want to support. And to top it all off, he’s empowered Elon Musk to propose huge spending cuts. Few people are better at making sense of GOP congressional craziness than scholar Norman Ornstein. Today, we’re checking in with him about all this. Great to have you back on, Norm.
Norman Ornstein: It’s always good to be with you, Greg.
Sargent: There’s a lot to unpack here. Things are happening quickly. Let’s start with Trump’s idea that he wants to pass much of his agenda in one big bill. That would be via the reconciliation process, which is a budgetary maneuver that allows for passage by a simple majority in the Senate. In an interview on Monday, Trump signaled a bit of flexibility here, saying he might be open to doing this in two bills, but he also reiterated that his preference is for one big, beautiful bill. This would include who knows what on border security, energy deregulation, and renewing Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Norm, can you walk us through what he’s asking for, and why it’s going to be so hard to pull off?
Ornstein: He’s asking for the impossible, Greg, because basically he wants to use this process of reconciliation. These are supposed to be things that are strictly related to taxing and spending, and are supposed to be ones under something in the Senate called the Byrd Rule, after Robert Byrd, that does not add to the deficit over 10 years. That’s why these tax cuts in the past go for 10 years, then completely die out and expire. Trump wants to continue all of those tax cuts, which would mean another $5 trillion added to the debt. He wants to do, as you said, Greg, who knows what on the border. He wants to include his tariff proposals and theoretically, all of these spending cuts that will offset the tax cuts and lead us to a balanced budget.
The problem there, to start with, is the only places where you can find big amounts of spending that you could in theory cut are from the defense budget or these permanent programs sometimes called entitlements: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. And Medicare and Social Security are not allowed under reconciliation. They could gut Medicaid, but a lot of Republicans are going to find out that that means cutting nursing home care. And to put all of that together in one bill, that is a dubious legality that would have to be approved by the Senate parliamentarian. What we know about Trump, Greg, is that if anything goes wrong, he’s not going to accept any of the blame for it. He is going to blame the Republicans who he said disappointed him and sold his ideas short.
Sargent: Absolutely. And Norm, we’re already seeing Republicans fighting over this. Senate Republicans don’t want to do this in one bill, but House Republicans do want to do it in one. It looks to me like House Republicans, because their majority is so razor-thin, would really struggle to do it in two bills. Trump has sided with House Republicans so far, screwing over Senate Republicans, but he also left Republicans dangling in the wind on this for a long time. They wanted a signal on which he wanted. And now as soon as he actually sends a signal, he starts sending mixed signals again. How does this play out?
Ornstein: It’s not going to play out well, we know that. There are going to be a lot of bumps along the way. We know that, first, Donald Trump knows nothing about the legislative process and very little about the executive process. It’s whoever whispers in his ear last that has him issuing demands that practically speaking can’t be met. But what we also know is that with a razor-thin margin in the House and with a Senate that often will have different ideas, the House and Senate Republicans are going to be at odds with each other, and Donald Trump will only make that worse.
Then we have to throw in the Musk factor. While it’s Musk and Ramaswamy, this is a runaway train being driven by Elon Musk. We’re already seeing Musk say in his various posts on his owned Twitter, which I will continue to call it, saying that he doesn’t see any reason why we can’t cut 300 of the government departments out entirely, why we can’t have trillions of dollars in cuts from the federal government without having a clue as to what the federal government is or what it does except that he knows about the subsidies SpaceX and Tesla get which he will not want to touch in the slightest fashion. So we’ve got all kinds of people mucking around in an out-of-control sandbox, and Trump will only throw sand on all of his friends in that sandbox if he doesn’t get what he wants, which he’s not going to get.
Sargent: Let’s talk about the predicament that Mike Johnson is in. Trump’s agenda is going to put Republicans in a bad spot. Generally speaking, tax cuts for the rich and corporations, plus rolling back Biden’s energy policies. You already have House Republicans opposing this because Biden’s incentives for the green energy transition are already creating huge numbers of jobs in GOP districts. Voting to undo all that will be politically hard. Then throw in some wildly extreme immigration legislation. Trump’s going to insist that Johnson succeed at this, all of it, but they’re going to need some Democrats to pass anything because he can afford to lose maybe one Republican. Democrats won’t go for a lot of this, then what?
Ornstein: Keep in mind that within a very short period of time, by January 21, they will be down to 218 members because he’s picked Mike Waltz, a Republican from Florida, to be his national security advisor. That doesn’t need Senate confirmation, he will move over immediately. There will be very likely a quick hearing on Elise Stefanik to be the U.N. ambassador. That means they will have 217 Republicans to 215 Democrats for at least several months. If any of them get sick, all these pandemics out there, the bird flu and large numbers of them who have at least said they’re not vaccinated for anything, he could be below a majority. But let’s say he’s not below a majority, and he’s got a margin of two at most. One, basically, because if he loses two when they’re down to 217 and all the Democrats vote, it’s a tie and they can’t get anything done.
Sargent: What kind of leverage does this give Democrats? How would you advise them to use it? Candidly, what can they actually accomplish here?
Ornstein: In the short run, my advice to Democrats would be: If Mike Johnson comes to you on his hands and knees begging for help, only give him help if you can protect seriously significant government programs, the safety net, and keep them from further eviscerating women’s health, for example, by defunding Planned Parenthood. Try and protect important things like public broadcasting and the endowments, Head Start program and other things that they want to cut. Tell them that they will not be able, with any democratic support, to block grant Medicaid and cut it by 25 or 35 percent. And if you can’t achieve those things, tell Mike Johnson, You’re on your own, you’ve got a majority, you make it happen.
At the same time, Democrats have to be sure, and they have to work, Greg, to build their own broader communications network. Because we know that when things go south, the right-wing media operation from Fox to X to Facebook and talk radio and a lot of others will blame it all on George Soros, the congressional Democrats, and a lot of people will listen to them. You have to make it clear: They have the majority. It is their responsibility. But you don’t want to send the country into utter turmoil, for example, by letting them breach the debt ceiling and destroy the full faith and credit of the United States. But you don’t give them things unless you get something in return.
House Democrats have to be prepared, not have this come on them and then scramble to find a strategy. They have to be prepared with every possibility where they can block bad things and maybe even get a few good things.
Sargent: Right. It sounds to me like what we’re really talking about here is that Democrats have to have a fully formed battle plan for all these scenarios. Norm, we’re seeing some signs that Democrats are trying to play footsie with people like Elon Musk, maybe even RFK Jr., who’s absolutely batshit crazy and has no business near running HHS. Does that concern you? Do you take that seriously or do you think it’s just rhetorical and that in the end Democrats will form this battle plan and really stay together and really be ruthless? It seems to me that maybe we shouldn’t be too confident in that, but I’d like to hear otherwise if you think so.
Ornstein: I’m uneasy, Greg, for a couple of reasons. One is I’m not sure that those 215 Democrats will always act in concert. Frankly, when it comes to these strategies that we’ve been talking about, I’m less worried about the so-called Squad going along than I am about people like Jared Golden and Josh Gottheimer, who are the center-right part of the Democratic Party, who may decide that they’d rather work with Republicans than pursue some of these hardball strategies. But having said all of that, I’ve talked to House Democrats, a lot of them understand that they’re in an existential battle for things that they care about deeply. I think Hakeem Jeffries is a strong, tough, and savvy leader. I am so relieved that Nancy Pelosi is back because she is their master strategist.
Sargent: Well, let’s go back to Elon Musk for a second. You could even read Trump’s empowering of Musk to come up with huge amounts of spending cuts as itself representing a real screwing over of Republicans. We’re already seeing this when Musk killed the continued government funding bill that you talked about earlier. Republicans had negotiated it with Democrats, Musk tweeted, and Republicans suddenly had to kill it. You had Republicans from rural districts reportedly really pissed off about this because it threatened subsidies for farmers. Trump almost let Musk screw over untold numbers of Trump base voters there. Doesn’t this conflict get worse also? It seems like there’s a real disaster looming for MAGA. Either Elon Musk is allowed to proceed with these immense spending cuts that completely screw Trump voters in all kinds of ways, or Trump has to neuter Musk and then that creates a whole different problem with MAGA. It seems like the conflict between Musk and Republicans is unavoidable and, either way, is a looming fiasco for the MAGA movement.
Ornstein: And there are two strands to that, Greg. The first is Musk mucking around in government, knowing nothing and basically throwing grenades in in ways that are gonna cause havoc among Republicans across the board. That’s one part of it. He’s already done that, as you said. The second part is, I believe that basically Musk and Trump had a tacit deal that Trump saw as working in this fashion—You’re going to give me $270 million to help get me elected, and I will say how wonderful you are, and I will take you and the loose cannon Vivek Ramaswamy and put you in charge of a powerless, meaningless operation and let you go out there because it has no government responsibility, no ability other than we’re calling it a department of government efficiency—without realizing what Musk could do, given his money and power and communications network, to screw him over.
Now you may remember the movie, The Defiant Ones, which had two prisoners, Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in the south, Curtis being a typical racist handcuffed to a black man as they both tried to escape this prison. Neither of them liking the fact that they were handcuffed to each other. Well, that’s where Trump is now with Elon Musk. And you can see when he’s there at Mar-a-Lago—and Musk has attached himself to him, handcuffed himself to Trump, sitting next to him, following him around—the disdain on Trump’s face about all of this.
But what can he do? He is handcuffed to the richest man in the history of the world who has his own powerful communications network that now has a huge following in MAGA. And if Elon Musk is dumped by Trump, Musk, who of course wants to be the alpha male, he’s always been the alpha male, and Trump doesn’t want another alpha male around him, he could make real trouble for Trump. So you’ve got Musk screwing with congressional Republicans, and Musk then screwing with Trump. It’s hard to see how all of that works out into a set of happy marriages.
Sargent: Yeah. Trump is now heavily reliant on the immense propaganda network that Musk has created with Twitter, and I won’t call it X either. So it seems to me that the end result here is really a looming fiasco for MAGA in one of many different possible ways, don’t you think?
Ornstein: I hate to use tired metaphors, but the metaphor of the dog chasing the bus and then catching it is very much like MAGA with its grandiose views of destroying government and having freedom reign without any consequences for Americans other than positive ones. Now having the reins of power and soon to see that this will not work and there will be a giant backlash. And I have to tell you, the backlash, one could be in economic terms.
One thing we haven’t talked about is it’s not just Musk and Ramaswamy. There are all these other tech bros who basically got JD Vance into the Senate and then into the vice presidency, starting with Peter Thiel. There are ignoramuses like David Sacks and egomaniacs like Bill Ackman, who now, among other things, want to take gold from Fort Knox to buy Bitcoin and make those kinds of currencies the equivalent of the dollar, which could result in the dollar being destroyed as a global currency. You’ve got what would happen if we have these tariffs across the board, which Trump himself mused last year could replace the income tax because so much money would come in. It’s clear that he has no concept of what tariffs actually do. You’ve got what RFK Jr. would do to broader medical research, but also to strip away every protection we have for the next pandemic. You have this proposal, which MAGA is lusting to do, to privatize the Weather Service and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which would take away our early warning for hurricanes and violent storms, most of which will hit red states. They don’t have any idea how to back off from this stuff.
Sargent: Yes. And the MAGA project envisions turning much of government into nothing more than a generator of propaganda for Trump. It seems to me that the real root of the problem here is that MAGA exists in this alternate information universe where nothing will actually work as planned. This alternate information universe is just completely detached from how the world actually runs, and now they are running things. And that right there, that gap between appearance and reality, between MAGA fantasy and governing reality is going to really loom larger and larger as all this unfolds.
Ornstein: Trump thought that in the second term, he could get rid of all of those people pushing back against him and bring in a bunch of complete lickspittles who would do what he wanted. And he’ll have plenty of those. But we’ve already seen that these tech billionaires think that they bought and paid for Donald Trump and he’ll do what they want him to do. We also know that the Steve Bannons of the world believe that they are the masterminds, the puppet masters who will get Trump to fulfill their vision of a dystopian autocratic world that is driven by this right-wing populist fantasy. We see this playing out now with a civil war going on between Bannon and Musk and the Bannonites and the Muskites.
The tech people rely heavily on immigrants coming in on so-called H-1B visas, which means that you’re bringing in people who have skills. These are tech skills. Elon Musk, for example, brought in a lot of H-1B visa people to his space company and then fired all the Americans because when they’re here on those visas, he can pay them less and have more control over them. It’s that immigrants, not just the ones who are in the meatpacking plants or are in the farm fields, are driving forces in our economy. We bring in the best and brightest from abroad to help us out across a whole series of fields that require technological expertise. Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, all of those people not only want to get rid of every person who’s here who’s undocumented; they want to get rid of lots of people who are here on temporary work visas. They mentioned the ones in Springfield, Ohio, for example, the Haitians, but they also want to curtail legal immigration.
So you’ve got the economic interests of billionaires up against the populist fantasies of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump, basically mouths what the populists want but is never going to go against what his fellow billionaires demand. Instead of having this united group with him as the dear leader, he is going to find himself regularly trying to referee in disputes. That includes, obviously, what we talked about earlier, the Freedom Caucus radicals. I mentioned what Ronald Reagan once said when his White House was not functioning well, Sometimes the far-right hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. And he’s going to have to do that in Congress as well.
I don’t think they have any clue about not only their own inability to unite together but what havoc it’s going to bring to the society. And all of those voters who thought that Trump was going to snap his fingers and the price of bread would be cut by four fifths, the price of gas would go down to a dollar a gallon, the economy would have all of these new jobs, and they would only deport the ones that Hispanic voters didn’t care about or didn’t like, not their own family members or neighbors.
Sargent: It seems to me that it’s really a recipe for chaos and a major comeuppance for MAGA. Norm Ornstein, it’s always great to talk to you, man.
Ornstein: Always great to be with you, Greg. The podcast is really a terrific one.
Sargent: Thank you.
You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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