The Daily 202: Six revealing quotes that speak volumes about the political moment

Analysis | The Daily 202: Six revealing quotes that speak volumes about the political moment
By James Hohmann
52-66 minutes

President Trump on March 11 asked Congress in his fiscal 2020 budget to increase spending on the military while slashing non-defense spending by 5 percent. (Reuters)

With Joanie Greve and Mariana Alfaro

THE BIG IDEA: The United States, so deeply divided, faces profound and pressing problems. Six quotes that came out on Monday, from a range of sources, could be grouped together and put into a time capsule to help future historians make sense of American politics circa 2019.

-- The first is a little-noticed paragraph inside the 150-page budget request that President Trump submitted to Congress on Monday: “Even with high levels of economic growth, excessive deficits continue to threaten the Nation’s progress, and any unforeseen shocks to the economy could make deficits unsustainable,” it says. “If financial obligations continue to grow at the current pace, the Nation’s creditors may demand higher interest rates to compensate, potentially leading to lower private investment and a smaller capital stock, harming both American businesses and workers.”

The document warns that deficits are on track to remain over a trillion dollars per year “for the foreseeable future,” the national debt — now $22 trillion — “will soon surpass a percent of GDP not seen since 1947,” and interest payments alone on the federal government’s debt will double by 2023 and exceed spending on the U.S. military by 2024 “if nothing is done.”

The White House projects that the government will need to spend $482 billion on interest payments for the debt next year alone. That’s more than the entire budget for Medicaid.

What’s remarkable is that there is no evidence of meaningful political will to tackle this potentially existential crisis. Leaders in both parties called the budget dead on arrival.

Although the budget proposes “the ‘most spending reductions ever sent to Congress,’ as one of Trump’s top aides put it, the deficit is expected to hit $1.1 trillion this year and stay above the trillion mark every year through at least 2022,” economics correspondent Heather Long reports. “This is unprecedented in good economic times and is occurring because Trump and Congress are spending more at the same time the GOP tax cuts drive down government revenue. (Trump’s budget shows small increases the next few years in tax revenue, but that might be a stretch given what is occurring so far this fiscal year).”

What should give Americans heartburn is that even the dire numbers are based on some fantastical — if not impossible — assumptions, including that there will not be a recession at any point in the next decade. “No president likes to predict a downturn, but Trump is being exceptionally rosy in his outlook,” Heather notes. “His budget predicts about 3 percent growth every year for a decade. In contrast, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts growth of slightly below 2 percent a year. To achieve Trump’s projection, the economy would have to grow at A-plus potential for years with no recessions, something the United States has never achieved before.”

There are certainly some fiscal hawks who work inside the administration, like acting OMB director Russ Vought and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, but what matters is who sits in the Oval Office. Trump has called himself the king of debt and argued privately that deficits don’t really matter because they won’t blow up until after he leaves office. He didn’t even mention the issue during his recent State of the Union address.

There’s a pattern of Republican politicians demanding fiscal responsibility when they’re in the wilderness but then spending like drunken sailors on shore leave when they hold power. It’s happening again. The 2017 GOP tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefit the richest 1 percent of Americans and the biggest corporations, will add an estimated $1.5 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. With no change in trajectory, the ship of state will continue drifting down a river that ends with a waterfall.

Former vice president Dick Cheney attends a memorial ceremony for George H.W. Bush at the Capitol in December. (Jonathan Ernst/AP)

2. Dick Cheney: “We’re getting into a situation when our friends and allies around the world that we depend upon are going to lack confidence in us. … I worry that the bottom line of that kind of an approach is we have an administration that looks a lot more like Barack Obama than Ronald Reagan.”

The former vice president uncorked one of the most searing conservative critiques to date of Trump’s foreign policy while conducting a Q&A with Vice President Pence at a donor retreat this weekend sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. Someone leaked a transcript yesterday of the off-the-record session on Sea Island, Ga.

“Cheney respectfully but repeatedly and firmly pressed Pence on a number of the president’s foreign policy moves,” Ashley Parker and Bob Costa report. “He expressed concerns at such actions as taking a harder line toward U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deciding to withdraw troops from Syria during what he fretted was ‘the middle of a phone call.’ … Cheney expressed alarm over news reports that Trump ‘supposedly doesn’t spend that much time with the intel people, or doesn’t agree with them, frequently,’ as well as the high staff turnover rate at the intelligence agencies.

“He worried aloud, again and again, that for Trump, foreign policy boils down to a crude dollars-and-cents transaction. … He worried about Trump’s decision to cancel the decades-long U.S. military exercises with South Korea and referenced a recent Bloomberg News report about the president’s directive ‘to pursue a policy that would insist that the Germans, the Japanese, and the South Koreans pay total cost for our deployments there, plus 50 percent on top of that.’ … ‘I don’t know, that sounded like a New York state real estate deal to me,’ Cheney quipped.”

Pence, unprepared for tough questions, mostly shrugged off Cheney’s concerns and praised Trump as a transformational leader. Reading the transcript shows what a total loyalist Pence has become to Trump. He staked out several positions that are at odds with the posture he took as a congressman and governor.

Moreover, the conversation between the two men who have held the No. 2 job underscored the deep fissures that remain inside the GOP over Trump’s foreign policy. It’s the same tension that led to Jim Mattis’s resignation in December as defense secretary after Trump abruptly announced the complete withdrawal of troops from Syria. The president eventually relented under pressure from hawks on the Hill. Some troops will stay.

3. Nancy Pelosi: “I’m not for impeachment. … Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.”

“This is news,” the House speaker told our Joe Heim last Wednesday for a story that published yesterday. “I haven’t said this to any press person before. But since you asked, and I’ve been thinking about this.”

The California Democrat said this knowing that she’d take instant and intense heat from her left flank, which she has, but her goal appears to be protecting vulnerable moderate members who are up for reelection next year in districts that Trump carried. Pelosi saw firsthand what happened to Republicans when they impeached Bill Clinton in the 1990s. She’s realistic that the Republican-controlled Senate wouldn’t convict Trump to remove him from office if Democrats acted unilaterally, and she gave herself an out to change her mind if something new emerges.

Many Democratic strategists believe that impeachment would give Trump a useful foil and get recalcitrant Republicans to rally behind him for 2020, barring big new bombshells from the investigations by special counsel Bob Mueller or newly empowered congressional committees. Pelosi is one of the shrewdest tacticians in modern political history, and she appears to be playing a long game of trying to increase her party’s odds of keeping its majority.

“While liberal firebrands have won an outsize share of media coverage, the House Democratic majority was captured largely because of freshmen who ran to the center, said Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.), chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — and many of them are uncomfortable with impeachment talk,” Mike DeBonis and Rachael Bade report.

“We’ve got 31 Democrats who serve in districts that Donald Trump won, and I’m one of them,” Bustos said. “When I go home, I don’t have people asking me about impeaching him. That is just not something that I hear. They consistently ask about health care and rebuilding our country and figuring out how to work together.”

Pelosi’s comments will make it harder for Trump to say Democrats plan to impeach him and will tamp down on momentum to do so from the left.

During her interview with Joe, the speaker was unequivocal that Trump is not fit to be president, ethically and intellectually. Then she demurred. “I hardly ever talk about him,” she explained. “You know, it’s not about him. It’s about what we can do for the people to lower health-care costs, bigger paychecks [and] cleaner government.”

President Trump celebrates the passage of the GOP tax cuts in December 2017 with Paul Ryan. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

4. Paul Ryan on 2020: “The person who defines that race is going to win the race. If this is about Donald Trump and his personality, he isn’t going to win it.”

The former speaker of the House reportedly said during a speech last night in Vero Beach, Fla., that there are some Democrats who could beat Trump and the president must make the race about his policies, not his personal brand, if he’s going to prevail.

“Ryan said one of the House’s biggest mistakes during his tenure was taking too long to negotiate a plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act,” Ali Schmitz reports for Treasure Coast Newspapers. “Ryan blamed the right-leaning flank of the party, including the Freedom Caucus, for causing a three-month delay in moving the legislation through the House. ‘That three-month delay eroded public support for it, so by the time it got over to the Senate, it was hanging on a thread,’ Ryan said. Ryan said if there weren’t delays in moving it through the House, he would have expected it to pass the Senate.”

The 2012 GOP nominee for vice president said technology has created an outrage machine, according to the story: “He said people are ‘monetizing’ emotions, causing ‘entertainment wings’ of each party that focus on emotional responses rather than focusing on the merits” of their policies.

5. Tucker Carlson: “[W]e will never bow to the mob — ever. No matter what.”

Ryan didn’t mention Carlson, but there’s no doubt that the former House speaker was talking about people like him when he lamented the “entertainment wing” of the GOP and the way it is “monetizing” emotions.

The Fox News host opened his 8 p.m. show last night with a defiant, six-minute monologue in which he refused to show any contrition at all over a batch of offensive comments he made a decade ago.

Meanwhile, “Media Matters for America published a new video with clips of the Fox News host using racist and homophobic language to describe Iraqi people, African Americans, gay people and immigrants while speaking on a radio program between 2006 and 2011,” Michael Brice-Saddler and Eli Rosenberg report. “The self-described watchdog of ‘conservative misinformation in the U.S. media’ published the audio from Carlson’s appearances on a Tampa-based radio program, the ‘Bubba the Love Sponge Show,’ just 25 hours after releasing similar recordings in which he’s heard flippantly using sexist language to express his views on child rape, rape shield laws, underage marriage and other sensitive topics.

“The new audio highlights about a dozen instances of Carlson using racist language on the ‘shock jock’ show, which he apparently called into for about an hour per week. In 2008, Carlson lamented that ‘everyone’s embarrassed to be a white man,’ before stating that white men deserve credit for ‘creating civilization and stuff.’ In another instance, Carlson is heard saying that Iraq is a ‘crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys,’ adding, ‘That’s why it wasn’t worth invading.’ That follows a 2006 segment on the show in which Carlson said he had ‘zero sympathy’ for Iraqi people and their culture because they ‘don’t use toilet paper or forks.’

“Carlson also spoke crassly of immigrants and questioned Barack Obama’s identity as a black man. ‘How is he black, for one thing? He has one white parent, one black parent,’ he said in 2006. Two years later, he added, ‘I don’t know how black he is, but I’m sure he’s a good basketball player — he says he is, anyway.’”

Carlson went on the air about the same time the second video was released and said his critics weren’t motivated by genuine concern. He said they’re trying to silence him. Carlson praised the network for having his back even after the revelations.

“First, Fox News is behind us, as they have been since the very first day,” he declared. “Toughness is a rare quality in a TV network, and we’re grateful for that.”

We live in an era of conservative counterpunchers. Tellingly, Donald Trump Jr. praised Carlson for refusing to apologize:

6. Donald Trump: “The Democrats hate Jewish people.”

Attendees say the president made that comment on Friday during a Republican National Committee fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago Club.

During her first news conference in more than 40 days, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders repeatedly declined to answer yesterday whether Trump truly believes Democrats “hate Jewish people.”

“I think that’s a question you ought to ask the Democrats,” she said from the podium.

George W. Bush wrote in his memoir that Kanye West saying that “Bush doesn’t care about black people” after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the “all-time low” point of his presidency. The rapper’s comment generated massive controversy. West later apologized to Bush, who forgave him.

In this case, it’s the president saying that the opposition party hates an entire faith of people and his press secretary not even trying to walk it back. The fact that it barely moves the needle shows how normalized over-the-top rhetoric, and questioning people’s motives, has become in the Trump era.

Sanders criticized the anti-hate resolution that passed the House last week for not singling out allegedly anti-Semitic comments made by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Trump allies say that he hopes to capitalize on the internal divisions among Democrats that the episode exposed, which pitted vocal newcomers on the far left, including Omar and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), against veteran lawmakers and Jewish members.

The numbers don’t bear out Trump’s claims. “Thirty-two of the 34 Jewish members of Congress are Democrats. According to the Pew Research Center, more than 70 percent of Jewish Americans voted for [Hillary Clinton] in the 2016 presidential election,” Eugene Scott notes. “An October 2018 poll found that 74 percent of Jews planned to vote for Democratic candidates in the midterm elections. Three quarters of respondents disapproved of the president’s policies. … The president has developed close ties with Israel, and in particular [Bibi Netanyahu], but being pro-Israel and being the party of American Jews is not the same thing.”

Neither does the record: “After white nationalists marched through Charlottesville, chanting ‘Jews will not replace us,’ Trump called some of the protesters ‘very fine people,’” Eugene recalls. “During the 2016 campaign, the president defended the use of an image of a six-point star, which resembled the Star of David, over a pile of $100 bills. The image was part of an attack against Clinton; many Jewish leaders said it was anti-Semitic. At a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition in 2015, Trump made comments that reinforced stereotypes about Jewish people. And in the final days of the campaign, he made headlines for running an ad that referenced the ‘global power structure’ attempting to control the world through Clinton while featuring images of prominent Jewish leaders.”