Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Sarah Posner: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Posner: Well, I know that Thune has said that and some other top Republicans like Susan Collins have echoed that, but other Republicans are starting to attack the parliamentarian in, of course, the very typically ugly, dangerous ways that we see too much of from the Republican Party in this climate of political violence. Tommy Tuberville took to Twitter today and called her “WOKE” and said she needs to be fired. So if that thinking starts to take hold and Trump enters the equation pressuring Thune, who knows what’s going to happen? I think that Thune is sincere in saying that he doesn’t want to get into a conflict or a conflagration with the Senate parliamentarian. But we also know that even when Republicans say that, at the end of the day when Trump enters the picture, they can rapidly change their minds.
Posner: Right. So the unusual situation here is that the parliamentarian serves at the pleasure of the Senate. Trump himself cannot fire her, but Trump obviously has been very successful on putting pressure on top Republicans to do his bidding on Capitol Hill. So the dangerous thing that could happen is if he starts to pressure Thune and Collins and other top Republicans in the Senate who have expressed reluctance to fire the parliamentarian. I think it’s a very dangerous situation because as much as we like to think that somebody like Thune is going to be very reasonable about this, we’ve just seen it happen so many times where congressional Republicans just cave to Trump. I think it’s a big unknown at this point.
Posner: Yeah. And to be perfectly honest here, I think that Trump probably has no idea of the intricacies in the bill; what the reconciliation process is; why the parliamentarian struck certain provisions because they weren’t amenable to the reconciliation process. I doubt that Trump knows all the ins and outs of that. He just wants his big bill with the big tax cuts. And he wants to be able to say, We didn’t cut Medicaid, when they did cut Medicaid, right? This is the game that he and Mike Johnson are playing where they say, We’re not going to cut Medicaid. We love Medicaid, but then the bill actually cuts Medicaid to shreds.
Sargent: Well, I think a big part of this will be what starts to happen on Fox News. If Trump starts to see that a bunch of Fox News figures are saying the Senate parliamentarian is an enemy of Trump, then all bets are off. That’s how it works.
Sargent: In your piece, you flagged a bunch of new polling that finds the big budget bill really underwater. A Fox poll has it at 38 percent favor it versus 59 percent who oppose it. Quinnipiac finds that only 27 percent support it. Pew Research has supported 29 percent and a Washington Post/Ipsos poll has it at 23 percent. Now in fairness, those polls have a lot of voters who are undecided, but those are just terrible numbers. Trump and Republicans have had months to try to sell this thing, but they’re not even trying really. How do you explain this striking level of public sourness? You’ve been following this stuff for a while. You’ve seen some of these big legislative debates. This is really one of the most unpopular pieces of legislation I think I’ve ever seen.
And I haven’t seen Louisiana-specific polling, but Politico had a story the other day about Republicans, including elected Republicans in Louisiana, who are literally begging Congress not to pass this bill. Thirty-five percent of Louisianans are on Medicaid. So I don’t know what the Republicans are thinking in terms of what’s.… I guess they’re hoping to get it passed and ride off into the sunset, or hope that people won’t notice what happens to their health care coverage and so forth. But they’re really acting strangely confident that the public is on their side.
Posner: Well, I think that he’s operating in this mental system where anyone who contests his way of thinking is lying and deserves to be berated and fired and all the rest. You’ve seen it in his reaction to his own intelligence community’s intel about the effect of the bombing of the nuclear sites in Iran. He’s basically saying he “obliterated” them and the intelligence community is saying, You didn’t, and he refuses to believe it. But here, he has the complete capitulation of Senate and House Republicans in advancing this bill that is a threat to their own majority. It’s really astonishing, unless they really have drunk the Kool-Aid that they’re going to win some argument that the 2026 midterms were rigged or something. I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it that they forge ahead despite this horrific public opinion about what they’re doing.
Posner: Yeah. The only thing that I can figure from all of this is that they hold out hope, which is maybe their least unrealistic hope, that somehow the Supreme Court is going to save them at the end of the day on whatever issue it is. Now, obviously the Supreme Court can’t save them from the parliamentarian and can’t save them from public opinion, but maybe.… I don’t think that they have a specific trick up their sleeve, but I think that they’re just so deep into Trump loyalty that they don’t know how to back their way out of it at this point.
Posner: They believe that basically our modern, surrealistic liberal democracy in the United States is antithetical to the Christian nation that they contend God intended America to be. So they come at every political dispute from the standpoint of we are defending white Christian America from the woke liberals who have taken away our rights to pray in public and to have our religious freedom and to ban abortion and trans health care and all the things that they want to ban. And when you come at every political dispute from that point of view, you don’t really want to have a democracy. You want to have some kind of theocratic Christian Republic or maybe even a theocratic Christian autocracy with Trump at the helm. So they’re not really thinking about it within the same framework that you or I would be.
Sargent: So what you said there really, to me, sheds a lot of light on what we just saw from Marjorie Taylor Greene, this wild rant. I don’t think it’s an accident that she kind of defaults to three different things, right? One, the Senate parliamentarian is woke, which I think that means demonic to them, right? Two, the Senate parliamentarian wants to fund sex changes for kids. And three, the Senate parliamentarian wants to provide health care to illegals, right? So it’s just a small step from there to firing the Senate parliamentarian because they don’t see themselves as functioning in a democracy. It’s a theocratic mindset, right? They’re fighting against these demonic enemies that are allied with people inside the bureaucracy, supposedly, to stop Trump.
Sargent: Just to close this out, maybe the way to think about the public opinion piece is they just don’t think of themselves as beholden to the broader public in any sense, right? They don’t have any conception of the public interest. They don’t see themselves as representing the whole country in any way. They don’t have any sense of obligation to the whole country, to people who didn’t vote for Trump. It’s messianism at the core, right? This is your specialty. What’s the mindset there?
Sargent: Sarah Posner, it’s really interesting to talk to you. I think the bottom line here is that that shows why it’s so essential to hold the line in a situation as small as this one. Senate parliamentarian—99.9 percent of Americans don’t even know there’s a Senate parliamentarian, but we need to be sure she stays there because those broader things are at stake. Sarah, thanks so much for coming on. Always great to talk to you.
Posner: Thanks, Greg.
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