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Mitt Romney will be defined by opposing Trump
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC shares his perspective on US politics:
Mitt Romney is retiring from the Senate. Will he be missed?
Utah Senator Mitt Romney and former Republican presidential candidate announced this week that he won't be running for reelection in the Senate to represent Utah in the next election cycle. Some people are speculating that this is because he might lose a primary challenge.
Romney remains pretty popular in his home state, but he does represent a dying breed of Republican, which is kind of a Reagan's Republican, Reagan's Republican. He's firmly from the pro-business country club wing of the party that has really been demolished by President Trump over the last several years as more populist Republicans, who have a stronger appeal to white working-class voters, have really taken over the party and trying to reshape it in President Trump's image. Romney was well-liked by some people in Washington, but not necessarily by his Republican colleagues in the Senate, where he was a bit of an oddball, supporting President Trump's impeachment, going against the tide of several other Republicans on a host of issues. And even though he ran as a conservative Republican in the 2012 nomination process that he won, he's now retiring with a reputation as a moderate Republican in today's party.
Romney always had kind of a difficult time fitting into the political world. He was obviously a businessman who was looking for ways to succeed, running as pretty liberal on issues like abortion when he was governor of Massachusetts and then positioning himself as, quote, “severely conservative” when he ran for the Republican nomination in 2012. And his legacy, however, is probably going to be mostly defined by his opposition to President Donald Trump over the last several years in his tenure as a Utah senator.
He'll probably be replaced by somebody further to the right of him. And the Senate itself is set to go through a generational transition as more of the old era Republicans start to retire and a new crop comes up. It's going to move the party in this much more populist direction.
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The fundraising prowess of "wokeism"
In a development that will surprise exactly no one, there’s more than a little kicking and screaming going on these days in Washington over the debt ceiling debate. Utah Senator Mitt Romney, a throwback from another era of US politics, has a message for the rabble-rousers on both sides: pipe down.
That means stop playing brinkmanship with a US debt default, Romney tells Ian Bremmer in the latest episode of GZERO World.
“Our economy will be dramatically impacted almost immediately” Romney warns, if a default comes to pass. Despite the dysfunction that is already kneecapping this young Congressional session, Romney is confident that a deal will get passed before the worst comes to pass. “At the end of the day we are going to get it done, because if we don’t we’ll get blamed.”
Watch the GZERO World episode: Sen. Mitt Romney on DC dysfunction, Russian attacks, and banning TikTok
Is the GOP still a MAGA party? Or just Trump's party?
There's a lot of hand-wringing going on right now within Republican ranks after the GOP's worse than expected midterm results.
The big question is: Is the Republican party still the party of Trump? NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith tells Ian Bremmer that there may be no going back to what the party used to be.
"There's just a lot of people in the Republican party who don't see themselves going back to the nice, polite Mitch McConnell, Bob Dole Republican Party," Keith says in this week's episode of GZERO World.
Why? A lot of it has to do with how voters have become as polarized as the candidates they're electing.
Watch the GZERO World episode: US democracy after US midterms: polarized voters & Trump's GOP
Podcast: What US midterms tell us about the state of US democracy
Listen: Remember when the US midterms were boring? As the dust settles on the most surprising US midterm elections in decades, ‘what’ happened is becoming clearer, but ‘why’ it happened is a harder question to answer.
On the GZERO World podcast, Ian Bremmer tries to make sense of the outcome with NPR's White House correspondent, Tamara Keith. They break down the reasons for the election results that no one predicted and analyze the issues that led more voters to support Democrats. They discuss the power struggles in the GOP and look at the road ahead to 2024 for both parties.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.
"Red wave" coming in US midterms
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here. A Quick take to get you started on your week, and of course, we are looking forward, if that's the right term, to tomorrow's midterm elections in the United States. Increasingly a time of political dysfunction and tension and polarization and conflict, and tomorrow will certainly be no different.
First of all, in terms of outcomes, almost always in the United States, the party that is not in power, that doesn't occupy the presidency, picks up seats in the midterms. Tomorrow should be no different. Biden's approval ratings are not incredibly poor, but certainly low. View of the economy, which is the top indicator that most people say they are voting on, is quite negative, and expectations are negative going forward, even though the US isn't quite in a recession.
That means that the Republicans will easily win the House. I don't think that there's any need to question predictions around that front. It's more whether it's 15 seats or whether it's 30 seats, how much of a wave it actually looks like. Some believe that it's easier to govern if there's a 30-seat swing, because that will mean that the Republicans will be less beholden to relatively extreme members of their caucus.
But either way, the relevance of the MAGA right in going after Biden in launching investigations and making it much harder to go about the business of day-to-day governance for the Democratic president, I think, is certain from the new House. So that's the first point.
And on the Senate, I think it's a much, much, much closer race. We're talking about a few individual races that really matter: Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia. The Republicans should take the majority back, but then again, the Republicans should have had the majority in the last two years, and they didn't. And the reason they didn't, very oddly, is because former president Trump, angry that he had lost the election and promoting the idea that it was stolen, called all of his friends on the ground and said, "What are you doing to help me overturn my election?"
When that didn't happen, and there were special by-elections in Georgia that the Republicans should have won, Trump was much more focused on the fact that he had lost his election and he claimed it was stolen, and that meant that a lot of people that otherwise would have turned out in the by-elections for Republicans down ballot from Trump chose not to vote.
And the Democrats, and no one, no friends of mine in Senate thought the Democrats had a shot to win these elections, they ended up winning both of them. And so they ended up with a 50-50 seat majority. Biden owes that majority almost completely on the actions of former President Trump.
And here you have some of that happening yet again, where the Republicans would have a much easier time if Trump personally was not pushing and endorsing a number of candidates that are particularly weak, but they're very loyal to him. And we're talking about, of course, Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania. Should be easy for someone to beat Fetterman, especially given the challenges that he has experienced in campaigning and then on the debate stage after his stroke. There's no question that that has hurt him significantly in how he is perceived in the upcoming election. But Dr. Oz is an unfit candidate to run, and so the Dems have a chance of actually winning that seat.
In Georgia, Herschel Walker is just thoroughly incapable of acting as a Senator, should not be running for Congress and certainly shouldn't be the nominee, but because he is, the Democrats have a chance of holding that seat; Reverend Warnock in a very, very tight race against Herschel.
Even given all that, I still think the Republicans are likely to take the Senate, maybe pick up one or two seats. If they have a very strong day, they could even get to 54. It's possible.
But the fact that the Democrats are still in this race is really because of Trump. And it's so interesting. So you try not to generalize on politicians, but if you were going to generalize, one thing that I certainly always felt was true is that they want their party to win. And in this case, that's really not true. Trump cares about winning personally, but doesn't care all that much about his party winning if it's not about him. And as a consequence, the Republicans are less likely to pick up the Senate than they might otherwise be. And this, of course, is deeply frustrating to rank-and-file Republicans in the leadership of the GOP, but they're not going to say it publicly. Why? Because Trump is still by far the most popular character in the party.
Now, the Democrats are in trouble here, and Biden in particular, who has shifted his campaign message from overturning abortion to focusing more on the economy to then now the idea that this is about the end of democracy: if you don't vote for Democrats, it's the end of democracy. Whether or not you believe that's true, it's really not a great campaign strategy for a couple of reasons.
First is because the Democrats haven't acted that way at all. If you think about how the Democrats have actually run Congress over the last two years, it's not been as if democracy was under threat. It's been legislating as usual. And furthermore, the very fact that Democrat leadership has actually funded election deniers in Republican primaries, because if they win, they're more likely to lose the general election to a Democrat; that's certainly not consistent with the idea that democracy is in threat. It's consistent with the idea of, "No, this is politics as usual. You do everything you can to win these individual races."
So I think that Biden should not be using this argument. And furthermore, you should really only talk about democracy being an existential risk in an election where either, number one, you're pretty confident you're going to win, or number two, you're desperate. Well, the Democrats aren't desperate right now. They have two years still with the presidency under their belt, and we don't know what the Republican nomination process is going to look like or whether Trump is going to be the nominee.
So I don't think you need to do that, and furthermore, after Biden and the Democrats take up pretty significant to potentially a pretty catastrophic loss for them this week, it's going to be very hard for them to move away from the, "Wow, we said it was all about democracy and we lost." So what does that mean for your ability to govern going forward? What does that mean for the way you're perceived internationally going forward? So I think that was a mistake, and the way they took this on at the end.
Of course, the biggest problem that we all have is that right after the Congressional midterms, we are going to be dead into presidential elections, and Trump will almost certainly be announcing his candidacy in relatively short order, probably back on Twitter and on Facebook and all the rest, and the country is just going to feel politically so crisis-oriented. It's just going to feel like a disaster.
And for American allies around the world who want to count on the United States, that looks a lot weaker. It makes it feel like the two years of Biden were not a move back to normalcy, but actually a brief breather in the midst of a country that is becoming much more dysfunctional, much more divided, much more politically incompetent as a partner. And of course, for adversaries, it means more opportunity for them to act against American interests with impunity.
We'll see where it gets, but the level of division in the United States is certainly going to affect not just US domestic policy, but US foreign policy as well. Anyway, those are a few words of how I'm thinking about the midterms tomorrow. We'll all be watching very carefully, and I'll be talking to you real soon.
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Biden attacks 'MAGA Republicans' at the nation's peril
Biden attacks 'MAGA Republicans' at the nation's peril
Joe Biden ran for president in 2020 as the unifier of a broken nation.
After four years of partisan rancor and chaos under Donald Trump, Americans elected him to lower the temperature and heal rifts inside what has become the most politically divided and dysfunctional of all major economies. In his inaugural speech, President Biden vowed to put an end to “the uncivil war that pits red versus blue.”
Things have changed. Two weeks ago, Biden called out Trump and his supporters as “semi-fascists.” Then, last Thursday, the president spent the bulk of his prime-time address about democracy at Independence Hall in Philadelphia vigorously denouncing those he labeled ‘MAGA Republicans’ as a threat to the republic.
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“The Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country,” he said. “MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.”
Why did Biden suddenly change his tune? After all, Trump is still the same man he was two years ago. The MAGA movement hasn’t changed, either. The threat is no different today than it was when Biden was inaugurated.
The clearest explanation is that he sees a short-term political opportunity.
Trump had been sinking a bit in the polls for the last few months. Most Republicans still liked him but weren’t as excited about him as before, and they were starting to consider other potential leaders like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The January 6 hearings got a lot of play with Democrats, but Fox News barely covered it and Trump supporters didn’t pay much attention to them. This was all bad news for Democrats, who need Trump to fire up their base and draw moderate voters away from the Republican Party.
Enter the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. Trump was thrust back into the news cycle. His supporters rallied against the FBI and the Justice Department for what they saw as yet another witch hunt. Suddenly, Republican officials and candidates were forced to make a choice: either distance themselves from Trump or embrace him.
Biden’s strategy is to make hedging on this choice harder for them as the midterms near. Given that most Americans prefer moderate and centrist candidates, going full MAGA makes Republicans easier to beat in November. But if they take the Liz Cheney route instead, they risk losing their GOP primary bids to Trumpier candidates—who in turn would face longer odds of winning general elections. Either way, Democrats stand to benefit from sharpening the stakes.Indeed, this gambit may well be the Democrats’ best chance of holding the Senate and minimizing their loss in the House.
Yes, the Biden administration has notched meaningful policy wins like the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and student debt forgiveness that they can run on. Gas prices have come down from their highs, and the job market remains strong. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturnRoe v. Wade has energized Democratic voters and turned more than a few independents and suburban women off the GOP. But inflation is still very high, the average American is deeply worried about where the economy is headed, and Biden’s approval ratings are quite low. These fundamentals would normally spell trouble for the incumbent’s party.
By beating the drums against MAGA Republicans from the bully pulpit and making the midterms a referendum not on Biden’s tenure but on Trump, Democrats are keeping themselves in the race.
The downside of this strategy is that it will probably lead to more election deniers in office and strengthen Trump’s hold over the Republican Party, setting up a Biden vs. Trump contest in 2024. While Trump is more likely to lose to Biden than any other conceivable Republican nominee, he could win fair and square. Given how unfit for office he proved to be the last time around, the prospect of a second Trump presidency is extremely dangerous for the country.
And that’s not the worst of it. Should Trump lose, his efforts to overturn the election would be much more likely to succeed if there were more election-denying governors, state senators, secretaries of state, and attorneys general to aid him. This is a graver threat to U.S. institutions than a Trump victory.
Biden’s gamble may be a winner for the Democrats but a loser for America.
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Biden vs. MAGA Republicans
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here. And as you can see from the getup, I am back in New York City. Happy to be with you for a Quick Take of what I think is going on. I wanted to talk a little bit about Biden versus the MAGA Republicans, because of course, if you go back to the inaugural when President Biden had just taken over, he was the unifier. This was the man that was elected to try to reduce tempers and division inside what has become the most politically divided and dysfunctional of G7 economies. And wanted to bring to an end, what Biden referred to in that speech, as the uncivil war that pits red versus blue.
Now over the course of the last few days, President Biden has said something very different. He's referred to MAGA Republicans as semi-fascists a few months ago. Of course, he was talking about ultra MAGA. I guess those are now full-on fascist. And of course, they're also Americans and yes, it is absolutely true that some MAGA Republicans overtly support overturning a free and fair election and even using violence in so doing. And that is deeply problematic for the persistence and strength of a democracy. But it's also true that not all supporters of Donald Trump feel that way and taring 30% to 35% of the US population as beyond redemption tends to harden the political divides in the country.
So what is going on here? Because it's not like Trump has changed, right? Trump is the same person that he was when Biden gave the inaugural. So there's no surprise here. There's no Biden suddenly realizing, “Oh my God, look at who this guy really is.” That isn't different. And the MAGA movement and the people that support “Make America Great Again” as a slogan haven't changed, and those numbers are roughly what they were. Biden knows that too. So why would Biden's message be so dramatically different today than it was six months ago, a year ago, two years ago? The answer I think pretty clearly is that he and his administration sense a short-term domestic political opportunity.
Trump was of course sinking a little bit in the polls. Republicans still liked him, but they weren't talking as much about him. Other potential candidates were getting a lot more air time. Most notably at this point, Ron DeSantis, the Governor of Florida. Even with the January 6th hearings that got an enormous amount of play with people that opposed Trump, supporters of Trump weren't paying all that much attention. Fox of course barely covered it. Newsmax, you couldn't find it. So wasn't that big of a deal. And then Trump pops up and becomes pretty dominant in the news cycle, following the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, and that made it much harder for those Republicans trying to distance themselves from Trump or not talk about him to stay quiet. Suddenly there was an outpouring of animosity towards the DOJ, towards the FBI for taking Trump on. It made it hard for Republicans to hedge.
Biden, I think has a clear strategy. He wants to make it harder. He doesn't want Republicans hedging about Trump. He wants them forced to embrace Trump or take the Liz Cheney route, which virtually none will do. And this is all about electoral opportunity with the midterm elections nearing. The Dems of course do have some significant policy wins that they can now run on. In particular the completely misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, horrible. No one's reducing inflation with the bills that have just been passed. You're spending a lot more in terms of student debt and in terms of the CHIPS Act and semiconductors. But nonetheless, when you put these policies together, meaningful policies, that will matter to a lot of people that support Joe Biden and to a lot of independence that are wavering.
So they have policy to run on, but inflation still seems pretty high and it's probably going to be reduced somewhat by November, but not enough to make the average American feel really confident about where the economy is, especially with a still significant potential of a recession coming in the coming months. At the same time, a really close Senate, a set of Senate races that could go either way in part because you have a significant number of overtly Trump supporting candidates that are not likely to perform as well in the general election as more moderate, more centrist Republicans would.
I think it's important to remember that Trump won the Senate for Biden and the Democrats the first time around. The Republicans would've taken the Senate if it hadn't been for Trump opposing the so-called stolen election and telling people in Georgia not to turn out because of the failure that Trump had to carry the state to carry the election. And that meant that in two special elections back in January, a year plus ago, Trump and the Republicans lost both of them and that meant a 50-50 win for the Democrats. That's a really big deal.
So I think it's pretty clear here that Joe Biden believes, and therefore he's going to bang this drum against MAGA Republicans harder and harder up until the midterms, that if he takes that position there's a better shot that the Dems are able to hold the Senate and maybe even take one or two additional seats. That the Republican House, which is very likely to be brought about, will be a smaller red wave than the swing that you would otherwise expect. I think that's pretty clear.
It is probably true that Biden's strategy leads to more democratic seats come midterms. It is also true that that strategy probably leads to more election deniers in office. It gives Trump more hold over the Republican Party than he otherwise would have. It makes it more likely he ultimately secures the nomination. As we look ahead to 2024, yes, Trump versus Biden. Trump is more likely to lose than a lot of other Republicans that could get the nomination against Biden I get that, but any possibility that Trump could legitimately win, and certainly that is within the realm of plausible, is much more dangerous for us democracy.
Of course also, even if Trump loses the likelihood that he would lead an effort, more likely to be successful given governors and secretaries of state and others with electoral authority in individual states, that Trump would be able to break an election that he lost is all so much more likely. And my personal view is that anything that gives Trump more capacity to either win the election or to break the election and erode us institutions is a deeply problematic thing for the United States. So in this regard, I have a great deal of concern about where Biden is going with his strategy presently.
So, that's my view in a few moments for all of you. I hope you find it interesting worth chewing on. I'll be talking to you all again real soon. Be good.
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