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Inside Politics
Trump Slams DeSantis In Return To Iowa; Iowa GOP Caucuses Set For January 15, 2024; Freedom Caucus Votes To Oust Marjorie Taylor Greene; Third-Party Candidate Raises Dems' 2024 Fears; Special Counsel Examines Trump Oval Office Meeting. Aired 11a-12p ET
Aired July 09, 2023 - 11:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[11:00:34]
ABBY PHILLIP, CNN ANCHOR: He's back. After seeding the Fourth of July campaign trail to his rivals, Donald Trump is back in action.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This January, we're going to win the Iowa caucuses in a historic election.
PHILLIP: Just absence make voters hearts grow fonder?
And the B word and the boot. After a controversial attack on a fellow member, the Freedom Caucus votes to oust Marjorie Taylor Greene.
REP. MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE (R-GA): They're proving to the country that they're just destructionist.
PHILLIP: Plus, no to no labels. Democrats' anxieties rise as the prospect of a third-party candidate gets more real by the day.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I totally understand the frustrations that lead to this kind of discussion. I may have to be choice C.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: Hello, and welcome to INSIDE POLITICS SUNDAY, I'm Abby Phillip.
The countdown is officially on. In just 190 days, Republican voters will cast their very first votes of the 2024 presidential race in the all-important Iowa caucuses, now set for January 15th. And it was in the Hawkeye State where former president Donald Trump finally returned to the campaign trail on Friday to rally the state's critical farming community. But his focus was clear. He wasted no time in attacking his chief competitor, Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: He would be a total disaster. First of all, he's got no personality. You probably found that out because his polls are crashing. He's got no personality, but he would be a catastrophe for the farmers of Nebraska and Iowa and everyplace else, anyplace else.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: The Republican frontrunner also made sure to take time to talk about one of his favorite subjects and that is himself.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: Every time I get a subpoena, you know, my polls go up, I get more and more subpoenas. Report to a grand jury. I'm the only person ever got indicted who became more popular.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: All right. The punch line, meanwhile, Trump's 2024 rivals took advantage of his absence on the trail over the Fourth of July holiday to make their own pitch to early stage voters ahead of his ex- running mate's visit former Vice President Mike Pence, he urged Iowans to take another look at another option.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MIKE PENCE, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I honestly believe that different times call for different leadership. And I'm very confident, more so after this week that the people of Ohio we're going to take a fresh look, not only at us, but at the former president, and that all the candidates.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: And then there was Governor Ron DeSantis, who hit the streets of New Hampshire and called for generational change.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GOV. RON DESANTIS (R-FL): Each generations got to step up and be a custodian of freedom. I think right now is our generation's time to do that. Because I think freedom has been under assault in this country. And we need people to stand up and fight back. And that's exactly what we're going to do.
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: But we should be clear, DeSantis is not the only candidate making that generational argument. But, increasingly, both inside and outside of his campaign, there are concerns that his candidacy simply isn't rising to the challenge of taking on Trump yet.
Let's discuss all of this and more with CNN's Jeff Zeleny, CNN's Melanie Zanona, Tia Mitchell of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Politico's Eli Stokols. Jeff, you were out on the campaign trail with all these candidates. Trump, just shows up on Friday after being gone for quite some time, skipping the Fourth of July parades. He is just, it seems, not playing by the same rules as everyone else here. JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Well, look, I mean, he certainly has a head start. So he doesn't have to introduce himself. But people are very well acquainted with him for good or bad, depending on your point of view of Republicans.
But he had a big campaign rally last Saturday in South Carolina, and he was back on Friday in Council Bluffs, Iowa. I was struck by his aides insisted, he was going to go after Ron DeSantis, talking about ethanol, talking about his opposition to ethanol subsidies.
He did a little bit, but then stepped on his own message talking about himself blatantly and bluntly a campaigning on the investigations, campaigning on the indictment. And when you look at the people in the room, it sort of fell flat there with him, obviously, if you're going to spend hours and hours going to a Trump event, but you can just see how consumed he was by that.
So --
PHILLIP: Yes.
ZELENY: -- we've known for a while, obviously, his legal case is his campaign, it's the same thing. But campaigning aggressively on the indictments and the investigation, it was just consuming him, you could tell.
[11:05:07]
PHILLIP: Yes. Well, let's show folks probably the reason why. This is the polling, according to a Fox News poll over the last several months. There was a time there in February and a little bit before then to when DeSantis was really gaining ground on Trump. And look at what has happened since. The reason Trump is so fixated on these indictments is that they've worked for him.
TIA MITCHELL, ATLANTA JOURNAL- CONSTITUTION WASHINGTON: Yes. And he's seen a boost in the polls. He's seen DeSantis kind of start petering out. I think it's also interesting that Trump makes sure that when he's campaigning, he has to stays to himself, which I think is part of the reason why he chose not to campaign during the holiday, because that's when all the other candidates were out.
He doesn't like to share the stage, the proverbial stage, but even the literal stage when he might not even show up to these debates. But he likes to do it in his own way where he can control the message. And I think he thinks that these indictments are helping him, which is why he focuses so much on them when he does take the stage.
PHILLIP: He's also doing a little bit more retail campaigning that he's done in past campaigns. He took a stop at Dairy Queen and had this moment.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: Everybody wants a Blizzard? What that hell is a Blizzard? Who ordered the Blizzard? And take care of the people, OK? Will you take care of them for me? We'll do the Blizzard thing, all right?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: I mean, For Trump that is sort of like par for the course. But for any other candidate, that would be like --
ELI STOKOLS, POLITICO WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: well, that's not really (inaudible) but the guy who served McDonald's to a football team at the White House and who was 77 years old --
PHILLIP: He may not know what a Blizzard is though.
STOKOLS: -- still showing pictures of himself eating Happy Meals on his airplane. He knows what a Blizzard is, but that's just him sort of, you know, trying to do his thing and be the everyman, and the, you know, in the Dairy Queen. And I don't think voters really care. I mean, we might play the clip a lot, but I think people there.
And it gives you a sense of how, you know, confident one way he is if he's standing there. He can go to a rally, but he didn't do these things, you know, when he ran in 2016. He didn't do much retail politics at all.
PHILLIP: Yes.
STOKOLS: And now he's comfortable going into these places, you know, people in Iowa, for as much as he hasn't been there, you know, he -- they like attention almost as much as Donald Trump does. That's what early state voters are used to.
And so he has to give them some of that, whether he shows up on the debate stage, wants to take shots from all the other rivals, wants to do the side by side contrast. Unclear. Doesn't seem like he does right now that he needs to based on the polling. But he's sure -- he is doing a little more of sort of, you know, showing up at some of these places and doing the call.
MELANIE ZANONA, CNN CAPITOL HILL REPORTER: He is and I think part of the calculation is he knows one of the weaknesses for Ron DeSantis is retail politics, right?
STOKOLS: Oh, for sure.
ZANONA: And so I think this is also a way to kind of jab at Ron DeSantis.
But it's also interesting because you see Ron DeSantis now using Casey DeSantis, his wife, to try to soften his image, make them a little bit more personable and likeable. And they're really trying to hammer this image of a young governor, a family man, again, also a contrast to Donald Trump and his family and marriage life. So they are trying to use her in that way, but we'll see if that works.
PHILLIP: So speaking of which, Casey DeSantis did a couple of things this week. She launched a pack for mom -- Mamas for DeSantis. And also launched this video here of her kind of making this case, really the culture war case from the women voters side of things. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We've been forced into silence.
(SOBBING)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Into compliance.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Keep your mask on.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Told that we must trust the science.
ANTHONY FAUCI, FORMER CHIEF MEDICAL ADVISOR TO THE PRESIDENT OF UNITED STATES: Indoor and outdoor venues should be closed.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We've been told that we must deny truth, back down, and look the other way.
CASEY DESANTIS, WIFE OF RON DESANTIS: Every mama and every grand mama in every corner of the country to stand up and fight back.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: So, Tia, what strikes me about this, to be honest, is this is not a kind of like rainbows and butterflies and flowers message. It's a little on the dark side. It's very kind of pointed and tough. That's not typically what you see from the spouses.
MITCHELL: Right. And I think that she's trying to walk the fine line of saying, you know, this is about empowering parents. And we know moms care about their kids and care about their kids' education. I think that's also softening it a little bit by adding the grandma references as well.
But there's a chance if it starts being interpreted as like a safe spot in the campaign, for example, for the moms for liberty and things like that, that are more blatantly embracing the culture wars and ways that she kind of stopped short of doing, I think that's where the risk comes.
[11:10:00]
Because we know that the culture wars will, perhaps in vigor, a Republican base in a primary but they may not play as well in a general election.
PHILLIP: And even leaning heavily into this COVID message is really an interesting choice. Dave Weigel, in Semafor, wrote this, I thought was pretty smart. "The Faucian dystopia that DeSantis talks about preventing in Florida never came to Dubuque in Iowa, Nashua, New Hampshire, Spartanburg and South Carolina.
Another reason for the fade also state home orders and vaccinations were the least controversial among older voters who are the likeliest to show up for Republican primaries in both Iowa and in New Hampshire, 95 percent of retirement age voters got vaccinated, a smaller share, but still a majority receive booster shots."
So this anti-COVID message is almost a little dated in some way.
ZELENY: It is. It's not in the moment as much as it was. And that just shows you that we never know what presidential campaigns will be about at the end. In this case, we barely know what they're about in the middle, because at the beginning, they sort of were about COVID. But I think that's a very good point.
And when he's campaigning on this, when the governor is campaigning on this and talking about the COVID message, it does seem like a long time ago. And there's not that much difference between these Republican rivals on this message of COVID. He's, of course, trying to draw some distinctions with the former president on his views of COVID initially, but that also seems a very long time ago.
We're going to start to see, we're told, some policy speeches from the Florida governor. He's going to try and have a more forward-looking message again to draw a distinction with the former president and try to break out. But the COVID message, it seems like ancient history.
ZANONA: You're not going to take down Trump with a coded message, right?
ZELENY: Right.
ZANONA: You're just not. I mean, I get why he's leaning into it. It is what made him popular back in 2020, so he's trying to tap into that. But you're right, it's outdated. And he has to have something else to come at Trump.
STOKOLS: Well, and it's interesting, you rarely see the spouse on the trail, sort of as the featured act on the campaign trail, the principal this early, if at all --
PHILLIP: She had a solo. Yes.
STOKOLS: -- until the general election. Which tells you again about DeSantis' own liabilities in terms of connecting with voters.
But also with women. He's a 30 percent with women in Florida. And you can talk about how he's leveraged transgender issues. You can talk about how he's, you know, wants to say standing up for young girls in terms of playing sports.
But there are a lot of other things that are concerning to women. And I don't know if they will play or if there'll be sharp contrast drawn in the Republican primary. But when you have a six-week abortion ban that he's signed in Florida, when you have a law that he just recently enacted related to changing alimony making it harder for women down the road to get alimony. I mean, there's a reason his standing with women is really low in Florida. She's trying to improve that within the primary.
And it makes sense, given that Republicans as a party, have hemorrhage women voters ever since 2016. But it's kind of a tightrope she's trying to do.
PHILLIP: Yes. And, Jeff -- so, Jeff, before we go, I want to get your take on this, because this is the Times headline about Iowa, specifically, which seems to be where DeSantis is putting up the biggest fight.
Trump and DeSantis are battling for Iowa voters and for its governor too. That's Kim Reynolds, who was with Casey DeSantis at her solo event this week. What do you make of whether Kim Reynolds is really as neutral as she says that she is?
ZELENY: By neutral, I mean, she's not likely to endorse, but she's been pretty open about -- saying that she would like a governor or a former governor. She believes governors and former governors make better president's translation. She believes that it's time for the party to move on from Donald Trump.
She was not at the Trump event on Friday. She's been with every other candidate. And she's still very supportive of him, obviously, but I think this is really interesting to watch. She's has a strong connection with the DeSantis' and she is, you know, not necessarily tipping the scales for him, but for other candidates as well.
So I think they're -- she's embracing the fact that a lot of Republicans are open to turning the page and talking about the future here, but this will rankle Trump.
PHILLIP: And look, it's almost as just as interesting that the Trump campaign is worried about this to the extent that they are.
ZELENY: Popular figure --
PHILLIP: Yes.
ZELENY: -- in Iowa without question, but she's calling a special session to talk about abortion this week on Tuesday to get a law passed for the six-week bans. That also will inject abortion into the campaign as well.
PHILLIP: That will be fascinating to watch. Standby for us.
Coming up next, sometimes the sting from a little bee can cause a very severe reaction. That's next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[11:15:20]
PHILLIP: Marjorie Taylor Greene got kicked to the proverbial curve by the Freedom Caucus. Why would you ask? Well, apparently it stems from a mean girls moment on the House floor just a few weeks ago.
You may remember that's when Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert could be seen their bickering over their competing articles of impeachment. And at some point of the heated conversation, MTG had a few choice words for the congresswoman from Colorado's third district. She called her a little b, which I won't say here at 11:00 in the morning.
Now, the Freedom Caucus has told Marjorie Taylor Greene that she can't sit at their table anymore. And Congressman Andy Harris actually confirmed to reporters this week that they had voted to revoke her membership before the July 4th break.
He told Politico, "I think the straw that broke the camel's back was publicly saying things about another member in terms that no one should."
That was the straw that broke the camel's back. The number of times we've had to censor what these member of Congress -- members of Congress say on cable TV is probably one to many.
ZANONA: Yes. There's also almost a fistfight on the House floor between speakers race. So, you know, this is just par for the course these days.
But, listen, yes, there was this heated competition between Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been trashing some of her fellow members of the Freedom Caucus.
But really what the cardinal sin was for Marjorie Taylor Greene was that she has become an ally of leadership. And in the eyes of the Freedom Caucus, that's against their founding mission, right? They were this group that became an ad -- antagonistic thorn in the side of leadership. They derive their strength in numbers.
And to have Marjorie Taylor Greene out there, you know, sidling up to Kevin McCarthy, raking with them on a number of things, they just -- that was the last straw for them.
[11:20:03]
But the Freedom Caucus is really struggling right now with their identity and what do they stand for, are they going to be about Trump? Are they going to be fiscal spending issues? Are they going to try to play the inside game to get what they want? Or they -- do they still want to be the outsiders?
PHILLIP: So what I hear you saying that it's wasn't calling someone the B word. And it also --
ZANONA: Wasn't heard long. History of phrases (inaudible)
PHILLIP: -- wasn't all -- well, let's play some of the controversies.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GREENE: The so-called plane that crashed into the Pentagon. It's odd. There's never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon.
I really want to go talk to these ladies and ask them what they are thinking and why they're serving in our American government. They really should go back to the Middle East.
It's a crime punishable by death is what treason is. Nancy Pelosi is guilty of treason.
JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: But it's being proposed by somebody. Look --
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: So not all of that, but getting close with leadership.
MITCHELL: Yes. I think it's not just the fact that she got close with leadership, it's that she was publicly, you know, criticizing other House Freedom Caucus members for not supporting leadership positions, not just not supporting the leadership, but she criticized them for not supporting the debt deal.
And I think some of them just privately started to fill away that they felt she was playing both sides, both claiming them as a member of the House Freedom Caucus, but then publicly distancing themselves from them in ways that I think they felt that she was kind of stepping on their backs to cozy up to leadership and to further her own personal aspirations. And I think that was kind of what they felt that was no longer tenable.
And I also think they kind of felt like they couldn't trust her --
PHILLIP: Yes.
MITCHELL: -- to invite her into the room with them, but then feel like she's also meeting what she says weekly with Speaker McCarthy.
PHILLIP: Yes. And then saying publicly things like this about the debt limit negotiations, which was really a core fight for the Freedom Caucus. Listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GREENE: I'm angry I have to deal with the debt ceiling issue. But again, to me, it's like the shiny object. It's not connected with the budget. The budget and appropriations is the real fight. I'm willing to negotiate and get it -- get something and get it over with so that we can do the real work and cut spending.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: To be honest, that sounds actually perfectly very simple. But for the Freedom Caucus, she was basically saying to them stop fighting over this thing that actually is really their sort of reason for being in many ways.
ZELENY: For sure. I mean, she is, you know, she's kind of matured as a member of Congress, I guess, in terms of being more pragmatic, which the Freedom Caucus obviously doesn't like. But she has one supporter overall, and that's Donald Trump.
I mean, so I think she's probably less concerned about --
PHILLIP: Yes. ZELENY: -- what, you know, random members of the Freedom Caucus say her a profile has grown incredibly. And, you know, she is close to the speaker and she's gotten a lot from them.
STOKOLS: But, you know, this is also reflective of just the new politics and the Republican Party since Trump came along, right, the petty infighting, the backstabbing or the front stabbing, or whatever.
We're doing just -- it's -- this is why Speaker McCarthy's job is so impossible, right? You have an ally, you're like, oh, a valuable ally on the right. And then it blows up in your face because her colleagues and the Freedom Caucus find her allyship with McCarthy to be problematic.
I mean, it's just so complicated. But, you know, you look at this and the sort of proxy wars that play out in the House related to the presidential politics, who's in charge to the Republican Party. She's got Trump as an ally.
Well, after, we talked about this on Friday, Donald Trump Jr. is out there saying he's going to go help Lauren Boebert fundraise in Colorado. She's got a really --
PHILLIP: That's very interesting.
STOKOLS: -- difficult reelection race. She's one of these seats that, you know, isn't supposed to be competitive, but because of how she is as a politician --
PHILLIP: She came like a few votes.
STOKOLS: -- that's going to do again that her opponent is running against her again, he's raising a ton of money. And so where's her fundraising going to come from if McCarthy's not as invested in her if, you know, you lose people on one side, you got to find them elsewhere. It's just -- it's such a minefield on the Republican side, the intraparty politics.
MITCHELL: And I just wanted to mention back to Marjorie Taylor Greene, we can't discount how politics and personality and ego also plays a part. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not the only House Freedom Caucus member who support Kevin McCarthy. She's not the only House Freedom Caucus member to support the debt ceiling deal.
There were only eight but there were eight, but she's the one who's getting kicked out. So it's more than just the policies. It's also again, the personality, the conflicts. And, again, I think they felt that they didn't like the way she was treating them publicly. And they wanted to send a message.
PHILLIP: So you raised an interesting point about how deep this really goes. And Ralph Norman made this point to Politico, suggesting that this may not be the end of the story. He says, "The speaker's race, there was some difference of -- in opinion. The debt ceiling, there were differences of opinion. We had to get to 80 percent on any major issue that we had to take positions on. On some big issues, we have not been able to get there."
The House Freedom Caucus to your point, Melanie, it is struggling to figure out what do they really stand for? And can they be united enough to even matter in some of these debates?
[11:25:08]
ZANONA: Yes. Their strength comes from strength in numbers and voting as a bloc on whatever the issue is that they decide, right? I will say in such a slim margin, it only takes like five or so members to be able to hold things up.
But for Kevin McCarthy, I'm sure he is sitting here this weekend looking at the growing divide in the Freedom Caucus and saying, this is actually helpful to me. If these guys can't unify around a single ask in these negotiations, in these demands, it weakens their negotiating hand and strengthens his.
PHILLIP: But how far does this really go? I mean, if they can't get to 80 percent, I mean, that's a lot of members that they're going to have to take some look -- looks at, or maybe they're hoping that they scare them enough with what happened with Marjorie Taylor Greene that those folks say, OK, let's get in line.
ZANONA: Yes. I mean, I think part of it was they were trying to send a message with this vote. Marjorie Taylor Greene became the face of it, but there are certainly, to Tia's point, other members who have not been falling in line, who have been cozying up to leadership. Jim Jordan is a perfect example.
He's been walking a real tightrope of, you know, being in the allies of Kevin McCarthy, but also still, you know, playing to his conservative base. He's the head of the Judiciary Committee. But these tensions are definitely grown.
STOKOLS: And it's just been interesting to watch going back to when we were negotiating over the debt ceiling and the spending package. You know, initially, these guys let McCarthy get this bill on the floor, they let him pass the bill, shocked the White House and they put him at the negotiating to put Republicans in a stronger position.
All these recriminations, the infighting, seems to have happened after the whole negotiations were figured out and the debt ceiling was lifted. And the recriminations are still going after the fact. But --
PHILLIP: Yes.
STOKOLS: -- in the moment, they really weren't sure how to play it. And they just sort of held their fire and they did swipe at McCarthy in that manner.
PHILLIP: In some ways, it seems like they weren't really aware of what was really happening in that negotiating room because they read the bill, like the rest of us didn't realize a lot of the things that they thought they got, were, you know, and my favorite phrase rainbows and butterflies. Not all that real here in Washington sometimes. But coming up next, two's a party and three's a crowd. That's what many Democrats are shouting from the rooftops hoping that one particular group will take the hint. That's coming up.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[11:31:19]
PHILLIP: As the possibility of a Biden and Trump rematch in 2024 shapes up, is there room for a third-party candidate in the race? At least one political group seems to think so, that centrist nonprofit No Labels is now eyeing a third-party unity ticket in the upcoming presidential election.
And their ideas seem to be gaining some steam. But now Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans are teaming up to sound the alarm that the group's efforts could end up handing the White House right back to former President Trump. This has been something simmering for a while now. And every day the drumbeat gets louder. A lot of Democrats who previously were like fine with No Labels. They're questioning really what this group is after?
JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: They definitely are. And they believe that it would simply hand the election and the presidency back to Donald Trump, should he become the Republican nominee. So this conversation is -- we should say it's premature, because we don't know that Trump's going to be the nominee. But say he is, there are a ton of worry from the White House throughout the ranks of Democrats that didn't know labels would be a big problem for them. I think a bigger problem for them or as big is Cornel West.
PHILLIP: Yeah.
ZELENY: He is running as a Green Party candidate. And we can look back to 2016 to Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and Jill Stein --
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIP: Let's -- let's -- let's actually do just -- just that.
ZELENY: Sure. And those numbers tell the story.
PHILLIP: They really do. I mean, the margin on the right there, the right of the screen, that's Trump's margin and Jill Stein's margin in the green, and looks at Michigan, I mean, 51,000 votes, Trump won by 10,000 votes. That's -- that's a big potential difference maker.
ZELENY: Without question. And everything is different, of course, a lot of that Jill Stein vote was a hangover from the Bernie Sanders's primary fight with Hillary Clinton. So that has been done away with Bernie Sanders is now very supportive of this president, and he has been. But I think the bigger issue other than No Labels is Cornel West, and what is he going to do on the campaign trail? But again, the -- a lot of questions about who's behind the funding behind these, and what is the unique ticket mean, is that Joe Manchin maybe is it to Larry Hogan? Maybe -- PHILLIP: Or some -- yeah, or some combination of the two. I mean --
ZELENY: It's -- it's a worry for the White House, and it will continue to be probably for the next year.
PHILLIP: And it's not just -- so there's the, you know, the third- party candidate of it all, the reality is, is that there is a desire in the electorate for some other option, and that desire seems to be actually stronger among Democrats. Look at this poll from the NBC News 45 percent of Democrats say they would consider a third-party candidate, only 34 percent of Republicans say the same.
TIA MITCHELL, ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: Right. And that's one of the big reasons why Democrats are way more concerned about the potential for third party spoilers whether it be Cornel West, No Labels or otherwise than Republicans because we know a lot of these Republican voters they're all in for Trump. They're not budging no matter what.
And so for Democrats, it's a question mark, but like Jeff mentioned, one of the reasons why the Democrat like establishment is so worried is you don't know who No Labels might put up. And so it's hard to plan for that. And again, you don't really know who's behind No Labels.
Now, I spoke to No Labels National Co-Chair Ben Chavis earlier today. And he said they're not going to feel the candidate unless they feel like that candidate is viable, which then that throws everything away because no third-party candidate in modern U.S. history has even earned an electoral votes. So what do they mean by -- so you don't even know really the roadmap for No Labels as far as what their endgame may be.
[11:35:00]
PHILLIP: That so a fascinating because I mean you can have someone that you put up who is a real person with credentials and everything, but that doesn't mean people are going to vote for them. But that could be why there's so much talk about the Manchin's and the Larry Hogan's, as Jeff pointed out, both of them not knocking this down in public appearances recently.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LARRY HOGAN, (R) FORMER MARYLAND GOVERNOR: Look, it's not something that I'm considering or pursuing at all. But I totally understand the frustrations that lead to this kind of discussion. You know, you have choice A that no one wants and choice B that no one wants, there may have to be --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So you don't want to be choice C?
HOGAN: I may have to be choice C.
SEN. JOE MANCHIN, (D) WEST VIRGINIA: No Labels has been moving and pushing very hard of a centrist middle, making common sense decisions.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Ruling it out, not ruling it out?
MANCHIN: Not ruling anything in, not ruling anything out.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: I don't know if that pause was the connection there or -- or that, I mean, Joe Manchin is really the one that I think, is giving a lot of Democrats even more headaches, and in some of the stories, they're talking to him about it on Capitol Hill. And he's just like, you know, leave me alone while I figure this out.
ELI STOKOLS, POLITICO WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: He hasn't said that he's running for reelection to a Senate. Again, he looks to have a tougher race on his hands, especially after passing, you know, the IRA last year. And so -- but, you know, Manchin -- does Manchin or Larry Hogan, do they want to be on the ballot, as you know, the third option? Do they want to go around the country, get a lot of attention, and then go down in history potentially after getting 6 percent, 7 percent, which is what the polls that are out there say that a third-party option might take in the end? Do they want to go down as that person who got 7 percent and flip the election and the White House back to Donald Trump again? I'm not sure. But I know that's a calculation that they are going to consider because that's obviously sort of the impact of this based on what the polling is.
And, you know, when you ask questions to the No Labels, people about the rational, you know, it all just sort of falls apart. It all just falls apart. Yes, people are frustrated with the two likeliest options. But they're thinking in terms of viability or I mean, it's just -- it's totally nonsensical --
MELANIE ZANONA, CNN CAPITOL HILL REPORTER: And they also said they will only put someone up if Trump is the GOP nominee, not a --
STOKOLS: Well, and they espouse the bipartisanship is what they care about. Joe Biden has achieved more bipartisan legislative accomplishments in his first two years than any president in decades. So if that's actually what they want, are they going to stand up a candidate that flips the president away?
PHILLIP: Let's -- let's play in their own words, This is Joe Lieberman, who's a part of No Labels talking to our friend at the show here, Sid Herndon on his podcast recently.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FORMER SENATOR JOE LIEBERMAN, NO LABELS NATIONAL CO-CHAIR: If we find in polling next March, if it is Trump and Biden, that we're somehow disproportionately going to help Trump, I think there's going to be a lot of people within the No Labels movement, who will say, it's not worth it. Don't do it. I just happen to be through a group of young business people. I said, we don't want to be spoilers. And a guy raised his hand and said, why are you worried about being a spoiler? The whole system knows so rotten, and unproductive, it needs to be spoiled.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZELENY: And that's exactly the problem. I mean, that's exactly what worries, the White House of Senator Lieberman, it's obviously wise and -- and been around Washington long enough to know that being a spoiler is a potential issue. He doesn't want to be involved in handing the president --
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIP: But he's like -- let me take you facts --
ZELENY: Yeah, exactly but --
PHILLIP: -- from a person who has basically offering this nihilistic view of it.
ZELENY: -- a lot of young voters are not tied to either party, and they do want to blow things up, that's very attractive to people. So look at the core of all of this is a lack of enthusiasm for President Biden, if -- if that wasn't there, we wouldn't be having this discussion, but it is what it is. So that is his burden and his challenge to get people excited for his candidacy.
STOKOLS: You just said nihilism and that's important, because that's what's at the root of all this. That's the self-rationalization here is if you think that everything is worth just blowing up, then then maybe you can get to, we should do this, we should do it. But beyond that, like if that's not your rationale, there's no rationale for doing it.
PHILLIP: All right, it's so interesting, that this has come to this because No Labels -- I mean, I remember No Labels was created, it was sort of like this feel-good group and now they're just raising a lot of money that is making it possible for them to be in a serious conversation about this. So we'll see where all of that goes.
Coming up next for us, how do you get Democrats and Republicans to work together? Well, it turns out, you may need a little bit of psychedelics to do the trick. That's next.
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[11:43:35]
PHILLIP: Strange bedfellows and an even stranger city, take a look at this new Washington Post piece that might blow your mind. What do a democratic socialists and a Republican war veteran and a long-haired lobbyists from Montana have in common? Well, they want the government to relax about certain mind-altering substances. And as the writer of that piece can tell you, that's hardly the strangest bit of news in Washington these days. Ben Terries is here with us now. He's also the author of The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals, and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses Its Mind. Ben, it also seems like Washington might be losing its mind a little bit too. But this piece is so was interesting, in a good way. Because it was -- it was about the strange bedfellows, but also about maybe the triumph of like real policy over like craziness here in this town.
BEN TERRIS, WASHINGTON POST STYLE REPORTER: Yeah, I mean, you know, for a long time, nothing has been able to get done at all. I mean, he had to have like a hostage crisis just to be able to fund or pay bills that we already had to pay. And this is, you know, a piece of legislation that could come together because a lot of people believe in it.
PHILLIP: And what's interesting to me about, you know, the AOC's and the Crenshaw's and Matt Gaetz' of the world is that these are all characters who've kind of come up in a Washington, where the performance is a huge part of how you make your name around here.
MITCHELL: I think so and I think that they all kind of have a reputation for playing to populace in different ways, you know, Matt Gaetz being more libertarian when it comes to drug use, medical marijuana, recreational marijuana, same thing for AOC as a Democratic socialist.
[11:45:15]
And what I thought was interesting about Ben's piece is that it shows a generational divide as well. AOC and Matt Gaetz being much younger than people like President Biden, who has been way more resistant even to marijuana use, you know, you have the old school of marijuana being the gateway drug versus the new school that's looking not just at medical marijuana, but we have states like Maryland and others that are doing recreational marijuana. So it just shows that the evolution now we're talking about micro dosing shrooms as, you know, medical policy.
TERRIS: Yeah. When I reported out the story, I talked to AOC for the piece. And she said when she first introduced a bill on this, somebody from her own party came up to her while it was on the floor and said, oh, is this your little mushrooms bill or your little shrooms bill and laughed at her face, and it got rejected. And people didn't take it seriously. They didn't really take her seriously when she first came to Congress. But this is a story about how things can become serious if, you know, they get the right coalition's behind it.
PHILLIP: Yeah, and she is probably principal among these -- this new phenomenon of younger, more freshmen, not freshmen, but just newer members who have really become like the principal actors in this town. You have a really interesting part of your book here where you say, when Trump dissented from the golden elevator and became a candidate for president, he was just a sideshow.
It was quickly becoming clear, however, that the sideshow was moving to the main stage with Trump in the White House. It was boom time for weirdness in Washington, and not just, you know, I mean, it is fascinating that now so much of the story, we were just talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, which, in another era, why there would be no reason to talk about members of Congress who have basically no sort of official position in Washington, but they are in the headlines.
ZANONA: You know, I was also thinking about Congressman Steve King, he's a former member of Congress, he had a long history of racist remarks. And he was really a pariah in the party. They ended up abandoning him. They stripped him of his committee assignments pretty quickly when he questioned why the term white nationalism was so offensive.
And I think if he would have come into Congress in the 2022 class of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, he would have been right up with them, of being one of these members that is influential within the Republican Party, because as Ben writes in his story, the -- the -- the fringe has now become the mainstream, particularly in the GOP. And we've seen that as Trump has taken over, and now we're seeing the aftershocks of that.
ZELENY: I think a lot of it is, I mean, there really was, you know, from the Reagan era to the Bush era to the Bush era, a lot of the same Republicans, a lot of a family members, a lot of the legacy people when Trump came in, he brought in his own a cast of characters, a lot of those old school Republicans didn't want to work for him. So he brought in a whole wave of people. And now with the -- the rise of social media, basically, at the same time as this thing, people come in with their own brand. So from staffers to members of Congress, it is a new Washington --
PHILLIP: And not just those people, but just something in the news this week. This is the meeting in the Oval Office that the Special Counsel is looking at as in their January 6, investigation and some of these characters there's Rudy Giuliani, the Sidney Powell, and Michael Flynn, and then this guy, Patrick Byrne, who's the CEO of Overstock, what is he doing in the Oval Office?
TERRIS: I mean, what are any of these people doing in the Oval Office, right? And this is -- this is what Trump brought, he brought this new world in which anyone could be anywhere at any given moment. I wrote a profile of Mike Lindell, the pillow guy.
PHILLIP: My pillow guy.
TERRIS: And he was, you know, just some kind of up-and-coming wannabe Republican figure who's now in the news all the time too. It's like, Donald Trump has really opened the door for people to have influence and power and be part of something. But it also opens the door for legal investigations into -- into why they're around.
ZANONA: Look at George Santos, he was a member of Congress, or at least for now -- for now. He -- but he used the Trump brand to rise to fame. He's obviously under investigation for a whole litany of things. And it's not who he says he was. But he used that too.
And now he's leaning into Trump and sort of using us as a shield like it's, you know, he's getting all this criticism. He said, oh, it's because I'm a Trump Republican. They're coming after me the same way that they're coming after Trump and he was indicted, just like I was indicted. And Trump has made that, that sort of rhetoric possible.
ZELENY: I'm sure that that's transferable. We'll see.
ZANONA: Yeah, right.
MITCHELL: I was just thinking, you know, Trump himself, I mean, think about it, he's the -- you know, you're fired guy, and he was able to parlay that to the White House, and to kind of create his own story that isn't always rooted, in fact, and again, parlayed it all the way to the White House. He's been indicted twice so far, and he may be back in the White House again, you know, that there's a previous iteration of what we considered D.C. politics that said this would never happen but now he's really normalized things. And I think, like Melanie said, particularly on the right, it's become kind of par for the course now.
[11:50:17]
PHILLIP: Yeah, I mean, on the -- you just saw the question of people being under a criminal investigation, Trump has made that sort of like, just another day in Washington. It's happening so much nowadays. Ben, thank you so much. Please pick up his book at the -- at your nearest local bookstore if you can.
But coming up next for us, what's love got to do with it? In this case, everything. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter celebrate 77 years together and make history yet again.
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PHILLIP: It's a love story for the ages this week. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter celebrated their 77th wedding anniversary, making history once again as the longest married first couple. This is how the former First Couple reflected on their marriage as they celebrated 75 years together just two years ago.
[11:55:17]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JIMMY CARTER, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: Well, we're starting to date with her. The next morning I told my wife, my mother, that was a girl I wanted to marry.
ROSALYNN CARTER, JIMMY CARTER'S WIFE: Life with Jimmy Carter has been an adventure.
J. CARTER: Every night we try to make sure we completely reconcile from all the arguments the other day. When we go to bed for 75 years of marriage, we've always gone deeper in our love for one another. I think that's kind of extraordinary, that you don't have to very many couples, but he certainly happened to us.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: And all of us continue to wish them all the best. But that's it for us on "INSIDE POLITICS" Sunday.
Coming up next, "STATE OF THE UNION" with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. Thanks again for sharing your Sunday morning with us, have a great day.
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