In this episode of The Bulwark Daily, Tim Miller and New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser discuss the fallout from the midterm elections and what they mean for Donald Trump's remaining two years in office. They cover reports of a delusional bubble around the president, the push to impeach Pete Hegseth over the Iran war and Caribbean operations, and tensions between JD Vance and the administration.
The conversation also turns to the Iran talks, Russia-Ukraine diplomacy, and Senate Republican leadership under John Thune. Glasser argues that Trump's leverage is ebbing, and listeners will hear her reasoning on each point.
In this episode Tim Miller, Susan Glasser
This transcript of Susan Glasser's discussion on Trump's midterm fallout was made with the technology behind HappyScribe's free AI note taker.
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Hello and welcome to "The Bulwark Daily." I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show. Staff writer at The New Yorker and co-host of its political scene podcast, it is the Susan Glasser. Susan, how are you feeling?
Well, hi, the Tim Miller. It's great to be with you.
To be with you. You know, it's been a week. You know, you've had time to kind of marinate on the American people rejecting this nonsense for the first time, you know, to the degree that maybe we had hoped for eight years ago or more. But, you know, how are you processing it?
You know, maybe it's all been a fever dream. I don't know. Sometimes I do feel like we're inside a Saturday Night Live sketch. And I know we're going to talk about Pete Hegseth, which really, literally, I now can no longer think of him separate from Colin Jost, but that's a separate issue. You know, it was a delayed reaction. I will say that on election night, I'm like processing it all. And it's sort of the rational me is like, yeah, that's what I thought. And then the actual me is like, what?
Did this really happen? And it actually, I needed to sleep a few hours. And then I woke up early Wednesday morning, like 7 a.m., and then I was like, oh, I'm in a really good mood.
Yeah, I'm with that. The scale of it took a little bit to seep in. And I was in Austin. It was really cool to be there. And there are obviously positive emotions. But at one point, my producer looked at me and was like, are you are you having feelings? And I was like, I don't know yet. I don't I haven't decided. Like, the scale of it was pretty remarkable. And, you know, now we have to kind of live in this liminal space, I guess, where like he's been rejected overwhelmingly, but he's still the president for two years, you know, so it is a victory, but not not a page turn, I guess, quite yet, you know?
Yeah. And I think that, of course, is the challenge right now. There's so many people, just, you know, regular people out there who are like, well, we've done what we're supposed to do now, right?
Yeah.
So it's is it over? And, you know, even a lot of, I think, well-informed people have perhaps inflated expectations for what it is that a Democratic Congress can do. I will say there was a little bit of a sense of, I don't know if it's relief or something when Trump finally did announce that he was getting rid of Suze Wiles and put in Stephen Miller the other day. And I thought, well, at least no one is going to ask us anymore like, well, will Donald Trump be the bipartisan conciliator and make deals with the Democrats?
The deal maker.
Right. And I thought on Friday, I thought, that's great. At least clarity, right? At least people will understand what's happening. And then I'm amazed at people's capacity, right, to sort of throw themselves back at the same fallacy. Because as soon as he gave that 60 Minutes interview, I feel like there was a whole nother boomlet in the, you know, well, Donald Trump, you know, he talked about really not being as tough and his deportation policy and this and that and the other thing. And I thought, really?
Yeah.
Really, we're going to do this again?
Yeah. I saw some charity mites sign a health care bill with the populist left.
I was like, wait.
I was like, oh, yeah. Medicare, Trump, Trump care for all. I'm sure that's going to happen any minute now. Well, to that point, we have even more evidence that Trump ain't changing as if we needed it. Yesterday, he held a press conference with Dana White that was straight out of the fever dream you were referencing earlier. The Lindell TV correspondent in the briefing room asked Dana White who would win in an MMA fight between Trump and Biden, something nobody wants to see. And it was just kind of make-a-wish presidency.
And then Trump went on to call, you know, Von Hilliard in fake news and Caitlin Collins a loser. And I don't know, it kind of felt like Trump, to extend the MMA metaphor, like had his bell rung a little bit through the 60 Minutes. And it even took him a few days to kind of, you know, get back to the Trump id that we've come to expect.
Yeah, I think that's right. You know, one thing, and we'll find out as history progresses and more reporting is done, I'm personally looking forward to getting more accounts of what was really happening inside the White House over the last couple of weeks, because I do think the sort of fragmentary evidence so far strongly suggests that Trump and possibly some of those around him, but certainly Trump himself was living in a sort of delusionary bubble leading up to the election.
And it does seem it took him a while to process and regroup, right? You know, he didn't act definitively on Wednesday. It took him a couple of days. So I'm feeling like I really want to hear those firsthand accounts as they eventually emerge of both the rage, but also what happens when, you know, the bubble is is is really burst for someone like Donald Trump.
He was definitely bubbled. And it's a nice transition because yesterday he showed us, or at least explained to us, how he gets out of his bubble. And apparently, according to him, he occasionally watches the C-SPAN Collins show. I'm just going to, like, very slightly break my Trump no voice rule. You're only going to hear like two of his words. So just just a little trigger warning, because this is a happy space. This is a joyous space this week. And so I don't want anyone to have their joy taken from them. But I think it'll be worth it.
I think you should trust me. Let's listen to the president calling into C-SPAN last night.
And it looks like we've got a call from the White House. Mr. President, welcome to Washington Journal prime time.
Well, thank you, Mimi, and good luck with the show.
Can we hear that again? What was that?
Well, thank you. Well, thank you.
Who's giggling?
Thank you.
Is that you giggling, Susan?
The internet wants to know, Tim. The internet wants to know. You know, it has been pointed out that this might be the most interesting thing about Trump's call in, aside from the fact that.
The human printer maybe?
You know, did he call in on the Republican line?
We don't know. I don't know which line he called in on. He said that he likes to hear the Collins and that he watches. Well, who knows? Maybe. I don't know. It's this new Shark Week. But the giggling, I mean, people are speculating it's Natalie Harp. I don't know who is like a kind of a giggle audio expert enough to verify that. And this is, you know, this is a news podcast, so I'm not sure. But that's pretty strange. It's pretty odd behavior, I guess. I don't know. Late night, he's in the residence eating candy, the giggling girl.
We've walked away from, you know, concepts like dignity and the Oval Office and the presidency. It's long been my view that Donald Trump is the equivalent of the old dude, you know, shouting at the TV in the in the bar at the country club. C-SPAN calling in very consistent with that theory of the case. In the end, right, he's an old man shouting at the TV, joining the C-SPAN call line and, you know, home renovating his way through through the perils of old age.
I mean.
With a young woman around, like, you know, the CEO of Nvidia, T. He?
I don't I can't even laugh at that one. I mean, the screenwriters this season have outdone themselves.
Yeah. I mean, there was also I'm just going to, like, breeze over this. Like, he's back to kind of the half-hearted election was stolen stuff. He tried that yesterday. This morning, he bleated about the Alaska election, which I think will be the area that they try to challenge, talking about how the Dan Sullivan plus Dan Sullivan would win. It's not how things work. And and with ranked choice voting, it's particularly not how things work in Alaska. You posted a couple of days ago that it's as if Trump wants to make sure no Republican ever wins again.
Nate Silver posted this morning that a lot of fundamentals type people assume that parties respond rationally to incentives. I'm not sure you can really say Trump is doing that when he loses an election by 13 points and then elevates Hegseth and Stephen Miller again. I mean, certainly, you know, kind of we're all going to be white knuckling it through the last two years. But it does seem like he's not doing anything to address the the issues that led to the defeat.
Well, no, quite the opposite. I mean, if you and I'm not a math person, but if you do the math, a presidential election in which Texas is in play is essentially one in which Republicans start out with an almost insurmountable obstacle there. You know, essentially, Texas is so large. And because California, New York, other big states are pretty firmly in the Democratic column, what it means is that if Democrats win Texas or have a reasonable chance of winning Texas, they actually don't even need to win six of the seven other battleground states that have decided the last few presidential elections.
So if you wanted to keep Texas in play, would you promote Stephen Miller? I look at that line of blue along the South Texas border, where I believe every single congressional district now along that southern border is more or less now going to be held by a Democrat. And I think this is probably not the way to guarantee a resurrection of Republican competitiveness. Donald Trump is often kind of like over, I think, given too much credit for the idea that he has a plan at any given moment.
But to the extent there is a political instinct behind what he's doing right now, I do think it's about pulling back together the demoralized and shocked remnants of the core MAGA base, right? So, you know, that's certainly his default political setting anyways. But it does seem to me that what they're trying to do is to kind of like rally the defeated and to say, we're still, you know, we still have our core MAGA team here. Does that make any political sense in the longer term? I don't know. But that does seem to be what they're what they're doing.
It is every single district along the US-Mexico border now represented by Democrats. And, you know, a huge flip in some of these districts, 40, 40, 50-point flips in the Bobby Toledo, Monica Dela Cruz district, for example. So we'll see. I want to talk about the Hegseth part. Yesterday, when Thomas Massie filed the articles of impeachment, he presaged what Pete Hegseth might do in rebuttal. Let's watch that.
And I suspect since we saw the secretary have scheduled his own press conference, that they're going to let him deliver a rebuttal. And to that point, I hope he addresses the eight articles and doesn't get up and misquote the Bible in Quentin Tarantino fashion and do some pull-ups and, you know, call everybody fat and gay, like for being for this impeachment. Like, I may have just given you half his speech. I don't know.
Thomas Massie's on fire.
He's also got a beard.
He does. Yeah.
You know, no no beardos, no weirdos, right? Isn't that Pete Hegseth's motto?
That's true. One of the rules. Maybe that was a message to the to the secretary. The articles among them, people haven't, like, really locked in on this impeachment because they do think it's important. The unauthorized war in Iran is one failure to protect civilians, including the bombing of the elementary school in Iran. It also includes the extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean, kidnapping of a foreign leader, Maduro. It includes Yemen, unlawful conflict in Yemen, and then the First Amendment violation, suppressing the free speech of Mark Kelly and others who filed that video.
So it's pretty broad in the amount of offenses that it's pointing to Pete Hegseth. I want to play for you just a little bit of what Pete said today, and then we'll just talk about the politics of it.
Let's be clear about what this resolution actually does. It tells our enemies, Iran, the cartels, every adversary watching, that the United States will actually punish its own warriors and its own civilian leadership for successfully executing lawful military operations. It tells them that a single rogue legislator, loaded with personal animus for the president, can attempt to veto national security decisions made by the duly elected commander in chief.
It puts a target on the backs of American warriors by signaling that Congress.
Pete, Pete also goes on to cite President Trump's impeachment. It's two impeachments. When he references the first impeachment, he says that they impeached him over a perfect phone call. And then he said in the second time they impeached him on the last week of his first term and then didn't explain over what. So this is maybe what the strength of of his feelings about the rebuttal was on each of those. But to me, you look at that and you look at Trump this morning, you know, kind of doing live theater criticism of his own secretary. He writes, Pete Hegseth gets an A plus, plus, plus for his defense against disgruntled, angry, defeated Thomas Massie, a total loser.
So A plus, plus, plus. I don't know. There was a lot of chatter that maybe Trump might turn on Pete after the election, but not seeing much signs, any signs of that right now. What do you think?
No, that's exactly right. You know, it's very interesting because there clearly are a lot of people around Trump who would be happy enough to have Hegseth gone. But he seems to have made this another test of personal loyalty. And right now, look at the elevation of Stephen Miller. That's that's really the frame of mind that he's in, you know, is is personal loyalty above everything. And interestingly, I think we're in early days of that internal fight among Republicans in this administration.
Trump has had his own vice president come out and in writing, the day after the election, publicly repudiate the signature foreign policy decision of Trump's second term. Right. And they're sort of trying to paper it over, pretend, yeah, yeah, you know, it is a really tough decision, but it's going to be good in the long term. You know, we've only begun to see that rift, you know, really open up and it will explode in public in a more dramatic way because in many ways, J.D. Vance is criticizing his own boss, the president, and he's criticizing Pete Hegseth, who is widely seen as the most aggressive proponent of the Iran war and also somebody who very likely gave Donald Trump a wildly optimistic and inflated assessment of what would happen as that war unfolded.
But to the question of impeachment, this whole thing is a reminder that impeachment is not a legal process. It is a political process. You look at those eight articles of impeachment and there are actually, I think, an interesting debate to be held about what constitutes a high crime and misdemeanor here. Historically, members of both parties have been very reluctant to resort to impeachment in the case of what are essentially policy disputes between the president, the or the executive branch and and Congress.
And there's a good reason for that because, you know, the even, you know, monumental policy disputes that involve matters of war and peace ultimately are not necessarily issues of personal conduct in the way that impeachment is envisioned as around, you know, crimes being conducted by the official, you know, him or herself. It was the Republican Congress who kind of broke that modern barrier, it seemed to me, with the impeachment of Ali Mayorkas, the Homeland Security secretary in Biden's single term in office.
Mayorkas wasn't even accused of any of the kind of misconduct of of Pete Hegseth, right? It was purely about his stewardship of the border, his execution of the laws. And, you know, I think that was that was the precedent that was broken that's now coming back to bite Pete Hegseth, it seems to me here. Now, you and I can debate whether it's a good thing or not to go in that direction.
And this almost feels kind of like if it was a parliamentary system, like a vote of no confidence is really kind of what they're.
Yeah, I think that's a good.
You know, we could have legal folks argue about the merits of the various impeachment parts and the extra. I mean, they are murdering people in the Caribbean, you know, so you could say that that gets out of kind of the policy space when it's that just sort of blatant illegality. But like, really, when you kind of look at all this, it does feel kind of like what would be a vote of no confidence of someone in the UK or something. You see this about ministers.
Yeah, I think that's that's a good way of framing it. You know, the other issue, of course, that's going to come up is that you strip away all the bombastic rhetoric and the press bashing and the lying and all that. You know, if it was impeachable to lie to the public and members of Congress, obviously there wouldn't be a lot of officials left in the government. But look, his defense actually is I was following orders. His defense is that Donald Trump is the one who ordered those murders in the Caribbean. Donald Trump is the one who ordered us to undertake an ill-conceived and ill-planned and poorly executed war in the Middle East.
Right. That it's not me, it's him. And, you know, that's probably true. Donald Trump really is the one who who made those decisions, you know, be fascinating. If there is a real trial of Pete Hegseth in the Senate to find out, you know, and get testimony as to how much latitude he had in carrying out that conflict and carrying out the boat strikes in the Caribbean, how much is he personally responsible for it versus Donald Trump? Great question. I'd love to have a real procedure.
Right.
Don't count on it. But I agree with you. I mean, the votes, it seems to me, are there.
Talk about that. I saw you said that on the New Yorker podcast, too. What what makes you think that the votes are there on the Republican side to have the impeachment?
Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. I mean, one, you know, reporters who spend a lot more time on Capitol Hill than I do, who really understand it well for a long time, they've thought that there were enough Republican votes. They only need literally a small handful. Look at the two groups of people who, in addition to all the Democrats who presumably would vote for this, who who now might be possible candidates for voting for it. You have the people who just lost their seats because of Donald Trump.
And there are a lot of them now.
Not there are a lot of them, and they lost their seats. Many of them, they believe they lost their seats because of Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump and the ill-conceived war that they were forced, in effect, to defend without having any way of defending it. So that's a very large group of people that that would not just produce an impeachment vote, but a very large majority in favor of impeachment. And then there's also the caucus of people who were retiring or already leaving Congress, Republicans. And there were a large number of them.
Actually, one of the reasons there were so many open seats is because a lot of Republicans had already voted with their feet in this Congress and decided not to seek reelection. And they may feel more emboldened to just say, you know, I'm going to vote how I want to vote now. I'm not I'm not dependent on Donald Trump anymore. And so.
I don't know if there's a group to that even. There's kind of the paleos. Like there's going to be a handful of Republican kind of MAGA types that want to signal to MAGA voters that they actually weren't on board with the war stuff. You know, that's going to be a big fissure in the party as we head up to 2028. And so potentially, you know, I don't know, there's like Warren Davidson and like these type of kind of MAGA, Tea Party type guys that might use this as a vessel to kind of burnish their paleoconservative isolationist kind of worldview.
Yeah, I mean, that's right. So again, we literally are in a situation where they only need about three Republicans to join the Democrats. So, you know, they've got a large pool, let's just say, to draw from.
It's always dangerous to predict anything in politics and certainly Trump. And, you know, you don't want to say something on this podcast when we tape it at 9:25 a.m. and then by the time it publishes at three, Pete Hegseth is fired. But like, to me, there's something about like impeachment triggers something in Donald Trump's brain, you know, the same way that Russia does and some of these other topics that like he associates with, you know, his grievances against people that have come for him.
It does just make me wonder, especially looking at his bleat this morning, which which once again, a plus, plus, plus three pluses from Donald Trump. It makes me think that like the fact that it's an impeachment versus an investigation almost makes it more likely for Trump to want to like circle the wagons and come to his defense, you know, because he sees it a little bit as an echo of what happened to him, right? That it's like all these impeachments are fake. This is fake news, you know, and maybe that that plus the idea that he knows that Pete Hegseth will be loyal to him and he's not sure that a replacement would be.
I don't know. All that makes me think he might be sticking.
Yeah, well, I think Pete Hegseth has your theory of the case, which is exactly why Pete Hegseth was mentioning Donald Trump's impeachment in that press conference. It was like the audience of one factor here. He was like, yes, perfect phone call. Yes, please. You know, I'm surprised he didn't go on at length about Russia, Russia, Russia, because I think the goal was to kind of stimulate that defensive impulse of Donald Trump's. The problem for Trump and for Hegseth right now is that this is not the Democratic impeachment, you know, that this is a rogue Republican congressman who is bringing this up right now, that it's still the Republican Congress that is going to be voting on it.
And by the way, you also have in the Republican Senate in this lame duck session, Tom Tillis, another departing Republican member who said it is literally the goal of his remaining time in office to bring accountability to Pete Hegseth and Tillis and I think a handful of other Republican senators who are departing, a number of them unwillingly, a la Susan Collins would certainly be more than willing to provide the 51st vote in order to have a real Senate trial of Hegseth and not just sort of one and done, get it over with Senate vote.
So even if they don't have two thirds to convict Pete Hegseth in the Senate, which is not a realistic number in this day and age, it only takes 51 votes, a simple majority in order to set the rules of a Senate trial. So that could include evidence, witness, and, you know, essentially perform the role of live televised hearings into Hegseth's conduct.
It's interesting. There's some buzz that Tom Tillis was asking to meet with the new incoming Democrats in North Carolina, and there are a lot of them because North Carolina had the dummiest of the dummy manders. And so who knows what is going on in his head. But I'm intrigued by the idea of the Senate trial, which is all the things that we've been talking about. Obviously, that's going to be short of conviction, but there's a lot we don't know about how these decisions were made, you know, and who is driving them and the degree to which Trump was involved and who knows what of his other corrupt foreign buddies were involved in any of these deals.
But his business partners in the UAE or Venezuelans who we've got bank accounts from, I don't like in this area in particular, there still remains a lot of to borrow from a former secretary of defense, known unknowns. And I don't know, I mean, that type of trial, I think, would be really revealing and interesting.
Absolutely. I mean, look, you know, one of the signatures of this conflict is that the Pentagon has refused to provide regular briefings, basic public information.
Pete Hegseth hadn't addressed reporters since May.
That's exactly right. And not only that, but his his Pentagon is not giving even basic information. You know, I covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, in addition to journalists being embedded with the troops throughout those conflicts, you know, which has not happened in this conflict. There were regular basic briefings about information. If you think about the scale of the damages that have been done to U.S. military facilities across the broader Gulf region, we're talking billions of dollars.
Again, we know that largely because of excellent reporting by news organizations like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which have looked at publicly available satellite photographs, which have talked on a background basis to military officers. The scale of the injuries to U.S. troops, they keep revising it upwards without any explanation. So we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of U.S. troops. That's one area that I think you would want to see people focus on. I also think there's, again, this basic question about like what information was Pete Hegseth given by the professional military?
Did he choose to disregard it? Did he pass it along to Donald Trump or did he hide this information from the president of the United States? What was the actual briefing from the U.S. military before they launched this war? You know, did Dan Kane, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, did he look the president and the defense secretary in the eye and say, sir, if you do this, they're going to close the Strait of Hormuz and we don't really have a remedy for that? I mean, you know, these are really, really important questions.
Why did the Navy commander quit at the beginning of the campaign of bombings in the Caribbean? What was the memo that he sent to Pete Hegseth? The other thing that's not in the eight articles of impeachment, by the way, which I think in some ways is an important omission, and I'm not quite sure why that is, is one of the things that Hegseth has most directly personally done, as far as I can tell, is to intervene in the promotions and to block the promotions of a whole generation of future one-star generals and admirals in the military.
That's supposed to be, you know, a process. There's laws passed by Congress that dictate what the criteria are for that and in what cases the civilian leadership, i.e., Pete Hegseth, could intervene in that. He seems to have just taken a no process, willy-nilly approach of purging people that he thought weren't loyal to himself, to Trump, and to their political agenda. You know, that's quite possibly illegal, but also it might go directly to an abusive power that might rise to the level of impeachable offense.
And I think it's interesting that that's not part of it, because that's something that we know that Pete Hegseth was personally doing in the Pentagon. And it's, you know, I think it's more attaches to him than to President Trump. So, you know, that should come out too, I think.
One other kind of subplot of all this is what's going on with the vice president. I was intrigued by one other line from Pete Hegseth's press briefing this morning. I agree with what the president said when he said, if I had to do it again, would we do it again? Absolutely. It was a necessary undertaking. This is in the context of Trump and 60 Minutes being asked about JD's statement about Iran being to blame for the loss. And Trump said he was fine with the statement, but he would have liked to have him add one thing, which is that he would do it again if he had the chance.
Hegseth, echoing him on that, continues to ratchet up the pressure on Vance to actually weigh in on this. He's going to have to weigh in on this at some point. I think it is an interesting preview as to how Trump is going to pressure anyone that wants to be his successor, in particular the vice president.
Absolutely. You know, Vance is just in a box of Donald Trump's making, and I don't see how he gets out of it. You know, it's remarkable, by the way, that that it's a subplot and not the main plot. The vice president of the United States like rejecting the war that the president has got them into. I mean, that's just just an amazing thing. And I think we're going to circle back to that, you know, over time, like, you know, as the history of this is written, that's that's the moment, you know, for me, that's really definitional here.
And it speaks to a guy who's watching his political fortunes evaporate almost in front of our eyes. It's hard for any vice president, see, Kamala Harris, to run for office and, you know, sort of disavow without disavowing the record of the administration that they're supposed to be the loyal number two. And that's the reason why we've only had a couple of vice incumbent vice presidents actually win office. You know, we had George H.W. Bush. He was the first one since the 19th century who went directly from the vice presidency into the presidency.
And this is exactly the reason why, as with everything involving Donald Trump, it's just like more pronounced and more crazy, this version of it. Yes, it's the new loyalty test. The problem has always for Trump's cabinet secretaries is to get into a situation where they're trying to parrot and mimic what the president says, but the president says so many incoherent things in defense of his policy. You're, you know, often stuck, you know, watch Marco Rubio try at any given moment to to offer something that's in fluent English, but also mimics what the president says.
It's not an easy trick to do.
Speaking of Marco, he was also holding a press conference this morning in Paris at the G7. And I want to get into the Ukraine part of it in a second. But he had some interesting comments on Iran. He said, for example, Iran would love a deal. The problem is the conditions they continue to place are absurd. They're not even serious. That could change. Eventually, you have to eat. He goes on to talk at length about how Iran is to blame for all the instability in the Middle East. He didn't sound like a guy who felt like we were really close to a deal on Iran.
And that is the complicating factor of JD's posture. I mean, there's so many complicating factors of JD's posture, but one is like it's not as if you can just say like, okay, war over, right? Like the end of the war requires some kind of deal with the Iranians. And the secretary of state and national security adviser is out there this morning saying basically the things that they want for a deal are not only not acceptable, but they're absurd and we're that far away from coming to an agreement. So I don't know. It doesn't sound like this thing's wrapping up to me.
Yeah, well, I mean, I've thought that for a long time. So one of the problems, and there are many problems with JD Vance's statement, we're talking about the politics, but just as a pure matter of, you know, a word that Donald Trump holds near and dear leverage to have the vice president basically come out there, box his own president in and underscore what the results of the election already underscored, which is that Donald Trump is desperate for a way out of a conflict that he unleashed with no clear endgame. You know, this is not exactly a recipe for the United States being able to negotiate from a strong position with the Iranians.
So the Iranians are, you know, very good negotiators. They've seen the results of the election. They've seen Donald Trump saying in every way possible, yeah, I want to get out of this. And of course, it wouldn't surprise anyone in the world that they would have upped their demands as a result of the events of the last week, making it harder and harder and more and more politically unpalatable for Donald Trump to agree to anything with them. So, you know, Donald Trump, one of the things we're going to see with his efforts to talk tough with his appointment of Miller is a desperate effort to kind of regain leverage on all fronts because the election results and his political predicament have basically sort of ebbed the power of the presidency away from him.
That makes it impossible for him to cut deals with Democrats, to cut deals with Iranians, to broker any kind of a peace between Ukraine and Russia because his authority is evaporating by the minute. So I think that's the big picture context for the Iran negotiations. There's also the question of, you know, how bad of a deal is too bad for the, you know, remnants of Trump's party to to accept it. Remember, he's the one who pulled out of Obama's deal with Iran.
Frankly, he could never get back to that. I think at this point, any deal he would cut would be significantly worse than the deal that Obama got with the Iranians that Trump rejected. And that is a built-in kind of nightmare situation for him. So you could see a kind of frozen conflict situation emerging here for the remainder of Trump's term, which is that they continue to talk on and off with the Iranians. Hopefully, there's a military standoff so there's not too much active fighting, but that a long-term agreement may very well be out of reach for this president.
I definitely don't expect him to cut some kind of a lasting peace deal with the Iranians, frankly.
No, I don't either. And that is going to make JD's positioning on that super interesting to continue to monitor. All right. On the Ukraine side of what's happening at the G7, Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and not government employee that is the point person for the negotiations who should be preparing to spend a lot of time on Capitol Hill in the coming months, put out a very long statement yesterday about the planned negotiations on the Russia-Ukraine war.
The statement began like this: President Trump today advanced an important discussion with several European leaders about the need for a broader European security architecture that can help establish the conditions for a lasting peace. Now, if you're not kind of really that deep on diplospeak, that might not jump out to you as an issue, but the Europeans did not like us. We already have a European security architecture in place. Europe's top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, told reporters, the problem remains that Russia keeps breaking the treaties that underpin it.
Daniel Fried of the Atlanta Council, for everybody, there's an appalling sense that Kushner and Witkoff don't even know what they're looking at. Anyone could have told them that talking about a post-war European security architecture is a Kremlin talking point. And so, you know, they just stepped in it again. Well, they didn't step in it. Maybe this is intentional, but, you know, immediately after the midterms, Kushner is basically like, okay, Europe needs to do some concessions to Russia if we're going to get anywhere on this.
Yeah, that's been the bind all along. But you're exactly right. There is a European security architecture. Russia repeatedly signed on to it in the wake of the Cold War and repeatedly violated its terms in the same way, of course, that Russia violated Ukraine's sovereignty and security by invading it. You know, it's worth pointing out since we're talking about treaties that Russia repeatedly in the aftermath of the Cold War signed agreements, binding international agreements with Ukraine to recognize its borders, to recognize its independence, and then decided, well, we're strong enough, so we're just going to ignore the things that we ourselves signed on to.
And I think that's, you know, for me, I know there are many, many lies. One of the most pernicious things that Donald Trump has done from the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine is to lie again and again and again and to say that somehow Ukraine and the West itself was responsible for Russia invading its neighbor in an unprovoked way. This is a blood libel. I mean, let's be honest, this is a blood libel. When you look at the scale of the conflict there and all things flow from that, Jared Kushner, yes, he's completely ignorant.
He doesn't know what he's talking about. And it's true that he's repeating a Kremlin talking point, but the reason he is is because his father-in-law from the very beginning had decided that he was going to get credit for making a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine by forcing our friend and ally, the aggrieved party here, to sell out to Russia. That's the only terms on which Jared Kushner and Donald Trump are pursuing this agreement, is pursuing how many concessions they can make on Ukraine's behalf that might make Vladimir Putin move off his maximalist demands to dismantle Ukraine's viability as an independent state.
What's fascinating is that Russia hasn't moved at all in this process in two years. The European security architecture.
This is what Von Hilliard was asking about. Yes, Trump asked about yesterday in the press conference. He was like, you have made several demands of Russia, but they have not changed anything in that time. You know, aren't you getting run over? And Trump didn't have a response to him. You know, he just.
Yeah, he doesn't have a response to it because the answer is that it's actually Vladimir Putin, not Vladimir Zelensky, who has been humiliating Donald Trump. It's Putin who has been humiliating Trump. And on the European security architecture, there was an effort by Putin to camouflage his impending invasion, which he lied and said he wasn't planning at all. In December of 2021, his government released the proposed terms of two treaties, one with the Europeans, one with the United States that it wanted to have, in which a new European security architecture was going to be codified that essentially gave Russia the right to do whatever it wanted to its neighbors.
So A, that's not security, that's insecurity. But B, and most notably, he's now gotten Jared Kushner, the kind of the old communist term for this, I believe, was useful idiot to amplify and parrot the fake treaty that they tried to put out in advance of the invasion in December of 2021. Trump, I mean, is buying right into the maximalist demands that Putin made before launching the invasion.
Did you see on Friday that Melania got a gift from the Russians? It was a drawing from what seems to be a kidnapped child. I don't know, but like Carol DeRanger said that it was a child that chose to live in Russia, which seems to me like a euphemism for a child that they kidnapped from Ukraine, gave Melania a drawing. She accepted it and talked about how much she appreciated the commitment to human rights. Totally insane.
Look, the fact that one of the first things that happened after this incredible across-the-board rebuke of Donald Trump in our elections in states from Texas to South Carolina to Kansas was the White House hosting Kirill Dmitriev at the White House in the first place days after this election. He is Putin's personal envoy to the US. He is under sanctions, which have still not been lifted. You know, he is one of the people, frankly, who most has the blood on his hands in this war.
He is the leader of the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is the way in which Russia funds its projects, taking its incredible energy and mineral wealth and turning that, you know, into assets around the world. So, you know, for him to be hosted at the White House in this event by the First Lady of the United States, it was actually and any other moment in our history, you know, really just a national humiliation.
And disgrace. Yeah, disgusting. It's just absolutely disgusting.
No, absolutely. It flows from the false equivalents, the idea that there's no real difference between the Russians and the Ukrainians in this war, which again, for me, is the original sin of Trump's approach to the conflict.
I want to talk a little bit about the leadership fights over on the Hill or non-fights, which is what I expect, but I want to start with the Republicans first. Reporting is the Republicans expect Thune to have the votes today to maintain his role as minority leader. By the time this podcast is out, I will assume that will have happened. If not, we'll get into it more tomorrow. Entering the conference meeting, Senator Lee and Senator Hawley and Senator Johnson all were kind of grumbling about it a little bit, but it doesn't seem like they have the votes to oppose them. I don't really understand why there isn't more anger at John Thune.
And we'll get into Jeffries and Schumer next, but like there's a lot of discussion out there and criticism of Schumer and Jeffries from within their coalition. Thune is almost like a non-entity. He doesn't exist. Nobody talks about him. He just finished the weakest and most inept tenure as Senate majority leader in at least over half a century. I was like going down the Senate majority leaders list. You can get back to some people I'd never heard of in the 1940s maybe, but like, you know, everybody else, you know, had, you know, huge legislative accomplishments, you know, other types of, you know, accomplishments that they could point to long tenures.
Like John Thune was in there for two years. He was unable to protect even his safest members in South Carolina, Mississippi, for example. And he was unable to protect his members from primaries in Louisiana and Texas. No real legislative accomplishments to speak of. A weakening of the Senate and the Senate's power dramatically over the past two years and giving that power to the executive. It is just a totally, you know, embarrassing and incompetent two years. And Republicans, I guess, are going to turn to him again because they have nobody else.
But he does seem to like not be holding the bag for that in a way that past leaders would have. And I guess that's just because of the nature of Trump.
Yeah, I mean, it's such an interesting point. I think it speaks to who the senators clearly blame for their predicament, which is not John Thune, but Donald Trump, right? It seems to me.
And the agency, though, you know, they could have opposed Trump. I know, I know, you know, that's like we have an entire history of the country where senators, I go back and read about Kennedy and LBJ, like, you know, there's an entire history of the country where you have senators that were, you know, at times in different places from the presidents in their own party and Senate leaders and that there is a push and pull. He could have done that.
He could have done that. You know, let's just say that, you know, he's not going to be winning the Profile and Courage Award anytime soon. It's an impossible job in the age of Trump to be a Republican leader at the national level who is neither fully a Trumpist nor fully an anti-Trumpist. And, you know, I keep thinking of this, you know, remarkable poem from the late Soviet era about the fatal half measures that essentially doomed Gorbachev, right? You know, you can't be Soviet and anti-Soviet.
You can't, you know, be a reforming communist in an absolutist state. You know, Donald Trump's MAGA party is an absolutist deal. You know, you're signing up for whatever the leader wants to sign you up for. And that means, you know, chandeliers and marble. And it means putting your name on the Kennedy Center because, you know, that's what you wanted to do last Tuesday. But it also means dismantling an independent branch of Congress if that's what, you know, the boss wants. And, you know, there was a lot of good reporting, good sort of TikToks after the election.
And one of the enduring images is this idea of Tim Scott, the Republican senator from South Carolina who was in charge of the Republican Senatorial National Republican Senatorial Committee. That's the main campaign funding arm for Senate Republicans. And, you know, essentially telling his colleagues at the beginning of the cycle, yeah, I'm not going to have this position make me get out of favor with Donald Trump. And, you know, so they were sort of dooming their campaign.
Now he's got a Democratic colleague, Annie Andrews.
Yeah, yeah. How's that going to go? You know, has he apologized to her yet for, you know, repeating Donald Trump's vile nicknames for her?
I don't know.
No.
I assume not.
No.
Yeah, I heard from a friend that they had a pollster come in to Tim Scott had a pollster come into the NRSC like not long ago, like this fall, who was making the case that there was a path to gaining seats. They were going to lose North Carolina, but pick up Maine and Michigan, I guess. You know, they totally cocooned themselves. They showed absolutely no spine. They went around with every atrocity of Donald Trump. And, you know, as a result, that is like the most humiliating defeat for a party since 1974. And so like the idea that I guess Republican senators would go into this meeting today and say, hey, Tim Scott and John Thune, that's great.
That's a great job. I don't know. You would think they'd be like, guys, you guys sit in the back now. You know, I don't know. We need some new people in charge. All right. But I guess they're going to have to wait for Donald Trump to leave in order to do that.
Well, that's right. I mean, part of the reason, as I understand it, that a John Thune stays in office there is because the alternative is not, you know, the Republican Senate leader of yours and my dreams. The alternative is a sort of more conspiracy theory, Trumpist-driven extremist who, you know, really couldn't make the Senate function, you know, but would be part of the Trumpian Steven Miller burn it down caucus. And so that's where you keep somebody who's clearly feckless and not empowered in play because you're too afraid of the alternatives.
And it does strike me that in both the House and the Senate, the alternative here is between, you know, the sort of Trumpist who's not really fully a Trumpist, feckless remnant of the establishment versus somebody even more extreme and on the far right burn it down flank. And so that's the dynamic that you're seeing, frankly, in both the House and the Senate.
I understand if John Thune was a college football coach, he'd be on his way to Cancun right now. But I guess there's higher levels of accountability in the SEC than there is in the Senate Republican Conference. On the other side, just briefly, I want to touch on this Huber and Jeffries stuff because I'm kind of, I'm a little confused, but it almost feels to me like some in the kind of progressive media and activist space are like addicted to wanting to be upset about how things are going in their own party.
And they're addicted to outrage about the Democratic establishment. And I've got plenty of critiques and quibbles with both Hecking Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, but like the idea that they want to pick a fight right now, you know, when there's 56 Democratic senators, maybe their choices will merit that, you know, next year. We'll see. You know, you don't want to go blindly into a battle with the administration with leadership that you don't think is up for the job. But like the decision, like on the Thursday after the election to be like, okay, the next fight is against Chuck Schumer after they got 56 seats.
I don't really understand. But I mean, you're in DC. What's your sense of what's, you know, kind of happening there with Schumer and Jeffries?
Yeah, look, I mean, it's very on brand, let's just say, for Democrats. You know, there's a long tradition of this, you know, Will Rogers, I don't belong to any organized political party. I'm a Democrat. Comes to mind, you know, big tent means lots of fighting. And historically, that's just been much more where Democrats are at vis-à-vis Republicans who, you know, were much more of a hierarchical party in recent decades. You know, look, both Jeffries and Schumer are going to survive.
They're going to be the leaders for right now. And I think you're right. The question is, you know, the inflated expectations that have come along with the inflated majorities that they won. I mean, right? That's the real question is that people now seem to have expectations about what they can do with this majority that are not necessarily consistent with the actual powers of Congress to defy a president like Donald Trump. So to me, that is going to be the dynamic that powers the next couple of years.
But, you know, I think disproportionate coverage was given throughout the election cycle to the idea of the kind of Democratic internal ideological fights.
Case in point, the Haley Stevens thing, which seems to have yielded about 12 votes and countless news cycles in the Michigan Senate race.
Yeah, I mean, you know, arguably it was riffs among Republicans in other key Senate races that were as decisive in producing this Senate majority as anything.
South Carolina for sure.
That we saw in Michigan. Yeah, look at Ralph Norman, the defeated congressman who ran for the Republican nomination in South Carolina. His criticism of Darlene Graham, I think, definitely seemed to play as much of a role and just generally that of disaffected Republicans, right? So.
We'll see what happens. I'm for high expectations. I want to be clear. I mean, there has to be accountability, you know, and, you know, everyone has their hobby horse, which I get it. You know, my hobby horse is that we need to have, you know, ensure that people that we're currently detaining illegally in internment camps, you know, have human rights and that we do something to demilitarize ICE from the streets, right? Other people have different priorities. And I think that like holding them to account and having high expectations is one thing.
Like doing spitballs and mockery of them when they have a 56-seat Senate majority and a 260-seat House majority. I don't know that that's serving a lot, but we'll see how it all shakes out. Anything else I forgot to get.
In the immortal words of Trump. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. You know, I just want to know what new construction project, if they were really genius at distracting him, they would come up with a really big new project for him to sink his hard hat into.
We'll pray on that. We'll take suggestions in the comments.
Oh, that's a good idea.
The more that he's doing construction and the more that Jared and Elon and Pete are testifying, the better I think it is for all of us. All right, that's Susan Glasser. Appreciate you as always. Finally, you get to come on a day where we have, you know, positive developments in our liberal democracy. And so let's enjoy it while it lasts, all right?
Hey, you know, thank you for having me on before the bloom is off the rose.
All right, sounds good. That's Susan Glasser. We got a good one coming for you tomorrow, so stick around. We'll see you all then. Peace.
And I thought of thinking about how we did together. When we first met. If I knew to do it, then I did it with you. If we didn't know, we learned pretty quick together. When we first met.
The Bulwark Daily is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Dante DeCicco and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.
Trump’s loyalist foot soldiers in Congress are still sticking by him but the power of the presidency is ebbing away from him. He’s lost not only the leverage to broker a peace between Russia and Ukraine, the Iranians also saw the results of the midterms—which significantly undercuts Trump’s ability to negotiate a deal favorable to the US. Plus: Vance’s political future is evaporating before our eyes, Thune has been the weakest majority leader in decades, and Trump was clearly living in a delusionary bubble before the midterms (with the help of his giggling assistant). Susan Glasser joins Tim Miller.
Susan Glasser joins Tim Miller.
show notes:
Susan's column on the election results
The New Yorker’s ‘Political Scene’ podcast
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