Are Republican candidates sick of Trump?

The News Agents - USA

The episode examines the growing rift within the Republican Party as several candidates begin to distance themselves from Donald Trump's infl

Key takeaways

• Florida Representative Maria Salazar is explicitly criticizing Trump's administration regarding immigration enforcement and ICE policies.
• Iowa candidate Ashley Hinson is pivoting toward a bipartisan approach to secure independent voters in a competitive race.

Main topics

• GOP distancing from Donald Trump
• Midterm election strategies

Notable quotes

The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.

Conclusion

The episode highlights a period of significant political realignment a

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) This is a global production. It's a Speaker 7 (0:05) president. Some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far. In July, 50 % of the 50,000 people that were detained had no criminal record. Be careful what your advisors are telling you about immigration policies. The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today. You can be for immigration when Lincoln was for slavery and Reagan was for communism. I'm not talking about giving them amnesty. I'm talking about giving them a dignified life in this promised land. And only you can do that. Speaker 3 (0:35) That is Maria Salazar. She is a Florida congresswoman for, wait for it, the Republican Party. And the reason her voice is getting so much attention right now is because she is perhaps the first to properly break ranks with Trump, with their Republican president, and call him out on immigration. Is the outlook now so Speaker 5 (0:57) dismal for the Republicans and for Donald Trump in the midterm elections that survival... is no longer about sucking up to Donald Trump. It's about putting maximum distance. Welcome to the News Agents USA. The Speaker 2 (1:13) News Agents USA Speaker 5 (1:14) with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel. Speaker 3 (1:18) It's John. It's Maitlis. Speaker 6 (1:20) And it's Miles. Speaker 5 (1:21) And for how many years, Emily, have you been asking the question, when will it ever happen that Republicans will find a backbone and find a sense of sort of purpose and morality? And I don't know whether it's happening that they found morality and a sense of purpose, but it does look like they're breaking with the Trump show. Probably. out of an existential angst that unless they do they're going to lose their little perches in the Speaker 3 (1:54) midterm elections that are coming up in a few weeks time. It is interesting, isn't it? I think we can't distinguish the sort of end of amoeba GOP with the oncoming November midterms, because you are starting to see backbones appear in very curious places. But the one thing they all have in common is that they are about to fight a race of their lives. And they are starting, I think, to work out that. Rather than having Trump on the ballot, which is, you know, his favourite phrase, remember when he was supporting Darlene Graham, Lindsay Graham's sister, and he went down to South Carolina when she was fighting her primary and said, just imagine my name is on the ballot. Pretend I'm on the ballot. Pretend I'm on the ballot. We are starting to see the signs. And let's, you know, go with caution, caveat emptor, because it might just end up being three people that we cite today and no more. But it feels like people are saying, pretend he's nothing to do with me. Pretend we are not Republican. And I just want to take you to a couple of examples that we've had of that. You heard from Maria Salazar, really interesting, that she's gone straight. for the anti-ice message here. She knows as a Latino, and Trump previously won over a much greater number of the Latino voters this time than before. She knows that Latinos have been massively put off by essentially his ice agents going around cities like Minnesota, herding up people of her culture as if they were cattle and trying to... send them off to places. Well, she Speaker 5 (3:38) sounded like a Democrat in that ad. It was indistinguishable. You thought that's a Democrat congresswoman's ad. And then we find, oh, no, it's Speaker 3 (3:47) not. It's Speaker 5 (3:47) a Speaker 3 (3:47) Republican. I mean, she does say she doesn't say, Trump, your policy. She says your advisors. So there's this clever little place where she. puts him at one as if to say, oh, I don't know if you know this, but your advisors have been going around, you know, making life hard for us and rounding up Latinos. But essentially, the reason I feel like I've heard that clip that we played in about five places over the last couple of days, because it feels like quite a moment, right? She is now breaking ranks and saying, this is not helping me. This is not helping me for your party get re-elected. The other one I want to play you is. Ashley Hinson, who is competing for an Iowa Senate seat, and she has lambasted the impact of Trump's war in Iran. And now she's gone one step further and she's basically offering to cross the divide. Just listen to her here. Speaker 7 (4:38) I'm Ashley Hinson. Used to be that reaching across the aisle wasn't just OK. It was expected. Some people in Washington forgot that. I never have. That's why I worked with Democrats to expand mental health care for veterans and with President Trump to take on health insurance companies to lower your costs. I'm Ashley Hinson, and I approve this message because working across the aisle isn't always easy, but it's how you get results. You Speaker 6 (5:05) know, that's surprising, friends, to see that happening in Iowa. OK, Iowa is not a place that Republicans thought they were going to have to spend time and money and effort in this election. And RFK Jr. said it the other day, too. He said, you know, if you would have asked us, you know, months ago, we wouldn't have thought this much money would need to be spent in typically safe areas. Remember, Joni Ernst is the sitting U.S. senator there in Iowa, a Republican mainstay, a longstanding Donald Trump ally. And now you've got folks like Representative Hinson having to take a different tact because they're worried that independent voters who they will need to win these races are breaking overwhelmingly for the political opposition right now. Poll after poll shows that those Speaker 1 (5:57) independents are breaking. But it's not just that. They are losing their own voters. And that's why you're also seeing. other Republicans go out there Speaker 6 (6:07) and push back against the Trump administration. The other one I wanted to point to, friends, was Mike Rogers in Michigan. Mike Rogers, I worked with him in the House Speaker 1 (6:17) of Representatives, worked with him for a number of years, typically a more mainstream conservative. He wasn't MAGA to begin with, but then he tacked far right to win Donald Trump's. approval. And now he is sprinting Speaker 6 (6:32) back toward the middle because he is terrified. He is underwater against Abdul Al-Sayed in this race. Even he is now demanding that Donald Trump's war with Iran end and differentiating himself from this administration. Take a listen. Speaker 2 (6:48) Michigan families are struggling with the price of everyday life. Groceries cost too much. We have to bring prices down. The war with Iran needs to end and end quickly. When it does, energy costs will plummet. But Michigan families can't afford to wait for that to happen. We need to do something now. I previously called for the suspension of the state and federal gas tax, 70 cents a gallon. And another place we can start, diesel. Diesel fuels the trucks that bring groceries to the store. It fuels the tractors that grow our food. And when diesel costs more, it costs more to grow it, ship it, stock it, and ultimately Speaker 5 (7:24) buy it. And so There you have a Republican candidate taking Donald Trump to task for the policy in Iran. Emily, you know, you were just saying a moment ago how Donald Trump, when he was campaigning with Darlene Graham, saying, imagine I'm on the ballot. When he made his speech at the UN yesterday, he was saying, I'm not on the ballot. And it's just the Iranians who are using this because they think that they can leverage me because of the midterm elections and they can't. And I think the mixed messages. that are coming from Donald Trump right now are contributing to this kind of flight of so many Republicans. You know, like, look, the Republican Party probably had a pretty good strategy worked out where they were thinking, right, how can we fight the Democrats when they're on the up at the moment and we're kind of the incumbents in the House and in the Senate? What can we do? Right. We paint the Democrats as democratic socialists or communists and they're out of control. What does Donald Trump go and do? He cozies up to Zoram Mamdani, the very picture of a kind of progressive socialist in New York. He's about to welcome President Xi into Washington, the communist leader of China. That doesn't chime exactly. There is just a little wee bit of dissonance there between what is the Republicans party's message and what Donald Trump is actually doing. Speaker 3 (8:49) Yeah. I also wonder how helpful it is to threaten to annihilate Iran, just this particular point, but we can come on to that. I think the really interesting bit of the polls is how Democrats v. Republicans sit on these two key issues now, which is immigration and economy. And there used to be a massive gap between... where the polls were for Democrats on immigration, i.e. they were seen as soft and they let people through and Biden had made the southern border porous and all the rest of it. And since Trump has done, you know, in fairness to him, exactly what he said he would do on the floor of the Republican National Convention two months before he won November 2024, he talked about mass deportation now. And sure enough, he enacted mass deportation now and people just went, oh, Jesus, you know. Everyone from the neighborhood is disappearing. I'm not sure this is what we want. So the Democrats are now really closing the gap on this issue. Now, I don't think that immigration is going to drive people to the polls in November. I'm not saying that loads of people are going to go out because they like the Democrats stance on immigration vote for them on that. But it's just interesting that this has always been the issue that Trump was. soaring away on, and it isn't anymore. The gap's much smaller. When it comes to the economy, and again, these are national polls. We've said it a thousand times. These are very individual races. They sometimes depend on 10,000 people. So they're very, very localized races. And we have to remember this isn't a national thing, but it is useful just to give you a sort of sense, a bellwether of where America's sitting right now. On the economy, it looks as if more people are now supporting the Democrats over Trump. And that's extraordinary because we remember... inflation being pretty darn high under Biden, we remember that he kept on saying to everyone, oh, I'm doing wonderful things with the macro economy. And they were going, no, no, we're hurting. But right now, this question of affordability or inflation or whatever you want to call it, people are really feeling it. And they're feeling it in very specific ways. And one is the price of diesel, the price of oil. And if you look at places like Nebraska, where I think I was reading that 92 % of Nebraska is dependent on kind of rural jobs, you know, sort of farm jobs. It's a big rural community. And Trump is now importing or planning to import foreign beef from Argentina because he doesn't want the consumer to see how expensive it's getting in America. So it's actually becoming easier for him to sneak Argentinian beef in the door rather than turn around and... And screw American farmers. Screw American farmers. Screw not just the farmers, but... Everyone who is, you know, the hauliers, the people who are involved in the whole rural economy of America. That sounds crazy Speaker 1 (11:37) for a Republican president. It does sound crazy. And look at the numbers. Look at the impact that it's having Speaker 6 (11:44) just down the street. My friend Larry Sabato lives. He works at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and famously Speaker 1 (11:52) produces this crystal ball, this forecast based on the polls of how the races are going to go. And there was a watershed moment this week. Larry shifted three Senate races. And for gubernatorial races, the seats for governor in different states around the country to