How MAGA Runs the House

Title: How MAGA Runs the House

[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. New York Times correspondents Luke Broadwater and Annie Karni are here. Their new book begins with this dedication, "To the leakers, gossips and busybodies who populate the halls of Congress." Of course, as many of you were just hearing on the BBC, no one needed any leakers, gossips or busybodies to inadvertently share the Pentagon's war plans with a journalist.

As the AP reported it yesterday, Trump officials texted war plans to a group chat in a secure app that included a journalist. It was just a few hours before the actual attack on the Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen. A statement from the National Security Council says, "The message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain."

Others on the chat included Vice President Vance, Defense Secretary Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and others, and oops, the journalist. Luckily for the mission, the journalist did the responsible thing and did not go public with the information, so the American pilots involved were not put at risk. It was Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic. Was President Trump grateful after his team leaked to Goldberg by mistake for the way Goldberg handled it?

President Donald Trump: I'm not a big fan of the Atlantic. It's to me, it's a magazine that's going out of business. I think it's not much of a magazine.

Brian Lehrer: Yuppie attacked the magazine that didn't do anything, but was only on the receiving end. Any opportunity to attack the press, I guess. That brings us back to Congress. Democrats are saying the incident shows this administration is incompetent. While the big topic within the Democratic Party is whether Chuck Schumer is competent at leading them right now, Republicans are downplaying the breach like, "Nothing to see here now. Move along."

All of this is consistent with the themes of the new book by New York Times White House correspondent Luke Broadwater and congressional correspondent Annie Karni. The title will take up half the segment. It's called Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress. Luke and Annie, thanks for coming on with us. Welcome back, both of you, to WNYC.

Luke Broadwater: Hi, thanks for having us.

Annie Karni: Thanks for having us.

Brian Lehrer: We'll tick through that list of identifiers in your subtitle and see who they match up with, but we'll also talk about the Jeffrey Goldberg leak and some other things in the news. Give our listeners the basics. Technically, this book is about the last Congress, the 2023-2024 edition. Why were they worthy of a book?

Annie Karni: Luke, take it away.

Luke Broadwater: Okay, sure. Look, the 118th Congress, the one that just ended, was arguably the most dysfunctional in modern history. They passed the fewest laws since the Great Depression. They ousted their own speaker. They ceased to function for nearly a month amid infighting and trying to find the next speaker. All of this chaos set the scene and led up to the current environment we have today. It is the precursor to what we're seeing with the Trump administration.

Trump was out of power last Congress. The Republican Party had to choose its direction. It chose to oust and vilify and throw out those members of Congress who stood up to Trump and elevate those who followed him in the most obedient way possible. We detail, step by step, inside conversation by inside conversation, behind the scenes development by behind the scenes development, how this takeover of the Republican Party happens and what we should expect these next four years.

Annie Karni: I would just add briefly to that that we get into these rooms and give you an understanding of how decisions in Congress are made and how often what looks-- It's not really about policy disagreements. It's about petty feuds and cliques and who hates who. A lot of actions that are taken on the House floor or how people vote on a bill are really about personal feuds that have very little to do with their constituents. It gives you a sense of how these people function and think and operate.

Brian Lehrer: You have lots of historical context. Let me go right to something in the last chapter of the book, very revealing and very relevant to right now. It's a scene from 2018, Trump's first term, where Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham, one Democratic, one Republican heavyweight, are in a meeting with the owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch. Schumer and Graham are pitching a plan for comprehensive immigration reform, but Murdoch has brought along a surprise guest. Does one of you want to tell that story a little bit and what it represented?

Annie Karni: Sure, I can talk a little bit about it. This was the moment that Chuck Schumer recalled to us as the fork in the road where our politics could have gone in a very different direction. It's when it looked like there what might be an opportunity to do bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform. He comes to this lunch. Rupert Murdoch seemed potentially open to the idea, but he brings Rush Limbaugh to this lunch and has Schumer make the pitch to Rush Limbaugh who says, "Let me think about it."

Then what happens is Rush Limbaugh has made his whole career on vilifying immigrants, and his ditto heads, which is what he calls his listeners at the time, were absolutely not going to go for this, which meant that Rush Limbaugh was not going to go for this, which meant that Rupert Murdoch would not go for it, which meant that Republican senators could not get on board.

What Schumer told us that he took away from this moment was that the Republican Party was being driven from the bottom up and that by the most far-right forces already, were driving the policy and making it impossible to get that bill passed then. Rush Limbaugh is dead, but there's a lot of outside influencers like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk and other people. The same thing is happening now. The base controls members of Congress.

We've seen some Republicans who want to defy Trump, for instance, like didn't want to vote for Pete Hegseth to be defense secretary, and the base and these outside influencers threaten them with a primary challenge and they fall in line. The same dynamic is at work today, but Chuck Schumer really looks at that moment with regret that if they had been able to do that, everything would be different today, but they didn't, and it's not.

Brian Lehrer: That lined up with many years of some Republicans being interested in comprehensive immigration reform, a stronger border, but a pathway to legal status for millions of people, mostly from Mexico for many years, who were living here as law-abiding workers. John McCain was for it when he was the presidential nominee in 2008. George W. Bush was for it when he was president, but it never happened. Here we are with animus toward immigrants, not just the violent criminal-- Yes, exactly.

Annie Karni: The driving force of Trump's movement is animus towards immigrants. We've come a long way from that being something possible. Although when we spoke to Schumer just before the election, he was bullish on everything. After the party had ditched Biden for Harris and was dreaming of having a Senate majority, that they could do this again, but that was very overly optimistic, clearly.

Brian Lehrer: This may be a heretical question, but why is what you describe in the book, and you were just characterizing it now as politics from the bottom up driving the party? If Limbaugh was a no, then Murdoch was a no, then the Congressional Republicans were a no, and Limbaugh was a no because his listeners were a no, one could argue that meant power in the party was flowing from the grassroots up, not from the elite leaders down.

Separate from the policies they support, is that dysfunction or is that democracy at work?

Luke Broadwater: Obviously there's one way to view this that way. You could say that what we have here is a populist desire in the country, and the Republican Party was out of step with that populist desire and they have been remade in the image of the populist movement, and that Donald Trump was the harbinger of that movement. If what the populist voters want in government is laws passed in sync with their desires and the policy moves that they want, what we're seeing instead in Congress was so much bitterness, personal infighting that really not much of an agenda got passed in any form.

Essentially what happened was people that embraced the style of Donald Trump and the style of MAGA, which is this fisticuffs first, this demonize your enemy first strategy, fighting just to fight. That's what really was the driving theme of the last Congress, not necessarily a specific policy agenda.

Brian Lehrer: Flash forward to the last two years in Congress that your book is mostly about. You call it the first MAGA-controlled Congress. Maybe this is where we should go through the subtitle of your book, How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress. Let's do it. Who are the MAGA mean girls?

Annie Karni: That one's easy. You should guess that one.

Brian Lehrer: I know. That's Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Is it anybody else or just those two?

Annie Karni: Nancy Mace became a MAGA mean girl, and she's a big character in the book, but I'd say those three take the cake.

Brian Lehrer: Do they have much influence or are they just mostly media magnets?

Annie Karni: The thing about a House with such slim margins is that anyone can really have influence. When you have a one-seat majority, any member who wants attention that day can throw themselves into the mix and say they're the holdout vote that Trump needs to call to get on board or that the speaker needs to give concessions to. Really, governing with such a slim majority lets anyone have outsized power, which is why this was the first MAGA Congress.

This far-right group of 20 members really drove the place off a cliff because, they had control because they needed the votes. Marjorie Taylor Greene was a player in the last conference for sure. The other two, more attention seeking, but still had to be paid attention to by leadership.

Brian Lehrer: Next reference in the subtitle, "A Former Used Car Salesman." Who's that?

Luke Broadwater: There are multiple former used car salesmen in Congress, but this one refers to Kevin McCarthy, the former speaker, who famously got his start flipping old cars to make money in California. He also opened up a sandwich shop and was, as a young man, a real hustler to try to make money, make a buck any way he could before he really got into politics.

Brian Lehrer: Next reference in the subtitle, "A Florida Nepo Baby." Maybe define nepo baby for those who don't know the lingo and say who that was.

Annie Karni: A nepo baby is someone who's the son or daughter of a famous person and gets where they are because of their connections. The Florida Nepo baby in our book is Matt Gaetz, whose father was a powerful state senator, Don Gaetz, and who was one of the main players. The feud between Kevin McCarthy and Matt Gaetz was one of the driving principles of the past two years in Congress.

Brian Lehrer: Out of Congress now, the one failed Trump nominee as well. He was going to be Attorney General or one of the few failed Trump nominees. Did he matter in Congress? Is there a legacy there? [crosstalk]

Annie Karni: Oh, he mattered. He made history for the first time ever, ousting a sitting speaker of his own party and thrusting the entire House into three weeks where it was literally frozen, and they couldn't do anything because they couldn't elect a speaker. Matt Gaetz probably caused the most chaos of any member in the past two years.

Brian Lehrer: The final reference in the subtitle, "a Man with Rats in His Walls." Who had the dreaded wall rats?

Luke Broadwater: That would be Russell Vought, who is now the Director of Budget for the Trump White House. In his time out of office, he wielded a lot of influence on Capitol Hill, including with those hard-right members like Matt Gaetz from a little office near a Starbucks just a few blocks from Capitol Hill. He was dictating a lot of the policy shots from there and wielding a lot of influence. When we visited with him, the interviews were sometimes interrupted by the sound of these animals in the walls. It was not the best working conditions to say the least.

Brian Lehrer: The whole subtitle says How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress. Is Congress broken? I think we're seeing so far, since the Trump inauguration, that the Republican caucus, despite its factions as you describe in the book from the last couple of years, is holding together. They only have a one-vote majority, really, but they passed that six-month budget bill.

Again, separate from the policies and what anybody thinks about those, is this Congress shaping up to be different from the last one, despite the even smaller majority, maybe more daunting for the Democrats because in this Congress as opposed to the last one, the Republicans are actually unified or no?

Annie Karni: Yes, it's a different dynamic. First of all, Trump is in office, so that changes everything. This Congress, so far I would say is distinguishing itself for ceding all of its power to Donald Trump. They are just giving it up and acting as his-- not as a co-equal branch of government, but as an extension of the administration. I would say that they are sticking together because of Trump.

We saw on that short-term government funding bill that they passed, some of the members who voted for that are the same members who literally ousted Kevin McCarthy for basically the same bill on principle. Now, they voted for it because Donald Trump asked them to. The challenge here is now Republicans control every-- last Congress was a moment of divided government. They had a Democratic president, Republicans were in the minority, which is where they--

Sorry, they were in the majority in the House, but they couldn't actually pass any legislation without controlling everything. Now the onus is on them to actually get stuff done because they control a trifecta of power, the Senate, the House, and the White House. So far we'll see if they can actually get hard stuff done, but the pressure's on them to actually show anything for their power.

Brian Lehrer: Speaking of the budget bill, that brings us back to Chuck Schumer. Here's a text from a listener after we talked about the Republican Party being controlled by the base as defined by listeners to Rush Limbaugh a few years ago, and now the MAGA base as you describe it. Listener writes, "Shouldn't the base be controlling the Democrats too? Maybe the Democrats keep losing because the out-of-touch elitists running the Democratic Party have never had an insurance claim denied." Fair question.

Annie Karni: We actually have a line in the book describing Kevin McCarthy, which is he thought of himself as a leader who was a thermometer, which is checking the temperature of things, but really he was more of a thermostat, which is shifting with the temperature. I think I got that the right way. The point is there is a question like, should leaders choose the direction and lead or should they just be responding to what voters want and saying, "Well, if the base is xenophobic and racist, that should be our policies," or should they try and lead in a different direction for Democrats or for Republicans?

I don't know what the answer is, but it is a good question. I think Democrats at this moment are certainly struggling with reckoning with the fact that the-- A lot of Democrats in Congress right now are admitting that they missed understanding how much pain working class voters are in, how much-- talked about economic issues the wrong way, didn't appeal to that pain and anger that working people across the country are feeling, and they're now trying to come up with some way to address that. They think they missed the boat. I don't know if that answers the question.

Brian Lehrer: Whether Schumer is right or not about the strategy, he's not seen as carrying the outrage and enormity of the fear of authoritarianism and the end of science and diversity and America supporting democracies around the world more than dictators and everything else. They ask, "Where was the rhetorical knife's edge, at very least, as the Republican budget with its cuts were coming to a vote?" I don't think they, let's say, highlighted a few clear things they could villainize like the Republicans do so effectively. It was, at least, a failure of imagination. No?

Annie Karni: I think Schumer's been-- I think the anger-- he said he was expecting anger, but I would imagine this was more than he was expecting. On the merits of why he decided that he needed to vote with Republicans to avoid a government shutdown, he has a fairly decent argument, which is that Elon Musk and Donald Trump would have wanted a shutdown. It would have gone on forever. In a shutdown, there is no court check on what is considered an essential or non-essential.

He keeps using the example of SNAP or food stamps that in a shutdown, they could just say that's not essential and never bring it back. You can disagree with him, but that's a reasonable argument to make about why his vote made sense. I think where he missed the boat a little bit is the politics of it. One day, he said they were going to be against it, and the next day he said he was voting with the Republicans.

There was not a lot of priming the groups, priming the grassroots to tell them, "A fight over a government shutdown in March, we don't have leverage. This is not the fight." Explain to them what the actual fight is. Politically, this obviously was a fail because all of the anger, all of the emotion about just wanting anything to show that Democrats are standing up to Trump just went straight onto Schumer over the past week and is still there.

Brian Lehrer: Luke, for you as the White House correspondent in the room, now we have Trump breaking things in the government and society from the top like nobody has ever seen before, to use a Trump phrase. Does the size and breadth of what he's doing surprise even you as an experienced Washington reporter and national politics reporter or given your coverage of Congress previously? Now you're a White House correspondent. Did you see anything like this coming?

Luke Broadwater: Certainly you could see it coming. These were plans drawn up by Russell Vought and others in the Project 2025 document and by the Heritage Foundation and other groups, but the fact that they have done it all so fast, so relentlessly, I think anybody would be lying if they claim there wasn't a bit of shock to it all. Dismantling whole agencies in the government, trying to fire thousands and thousands of people, upending America's alliances at every turn, threatening to take over countries and sovereign territories, things that weren't even in Project 2025.

Nobody said, "Take over Greenland," in Project 2025. The amount of rapid change has been breathtaking, I think, for everybody. it's part of an intentional strategy. One of the people we spent a lot of ink on in the book is the plans and strategies of Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon is the originator of the Flood the Zone strategy. He has been cheering on this information and this administration at every turn, and using his War Room podcast as a really influential voice, turning the administration into this rapid-fire populist agenda. In the book, we show how he back channels with lawmakers one on one, how he has ins with the media, how he has ins with the administration.

He uses his influence to wield a lot of power even though he's not in government.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, any questions for Annie Karni, congressional correspondent, or Luke Broadwater, White House correspondent from the New York Times? It can be on any of today's Congress or White House news or anything about their book, Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Here's a text that's come in. As listeners, of course, you can text as well as call.

This goes back to what you were describing at the beginning, that scene from 2018 where Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham together during the first Trump administration were trying to get Rupert Murdoch on board to get Fox News on board to support comprehensive immigration reform bill. The scene you describe has Murdoch bringing a surprise guest, the right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh to the conversation. A couple of listeners have written in about this.

Luke, listener writes, "You'll chuckle at my naive take, but WTF was Limbaugh doing in that discussion about immigration legislation in the first place?"

Luke Broadwater: This gets to the heart of who Chuck Schumer is. Chuck Schumer, at the end of the day believes you can reach across the aisle and cut a deal with the Republicans. He thinks there's good people on that side of the aisle and that reasonable negotiations can take place even with the leaders of the conservative media movement. In the book, he said to us, and this is one of the chapter titles, that the Republican Party, once it removes the turd of Donald Trump, will go back to being the old Republican Party.

He talked about Trump being an evil sorcerer over the party. He does long for the days when there was the Bush Republican Party where leaders did work together on bipartisan legislation, but what we really found reporting the book and interviewing all these House members is that one by one, they have embraced MAGA as their own movement and really made it their own style.

Our belief is that the MAGA movement, while it owes a lot to Trump, obviously, will outlast Trump and that the party has been transformed away from the old party into this new party. When Trump goes away, there will be another leader of MAGA. Our reporting is not that it's about to veer back to the Bush style of Republican politics. We just don't see that happening.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, another listener texts, "Good morning. Please ask your guests to give some credit to Biden for achieving a great deal despite the Republicans. I'm surprised they haven't mentioned that." Do you mention it in the book?

Annie Karni: What deal?

Luke Broadwater: Just generally?

Brian Lehrer: Generally to Biden for achieving a great deal, meaning achieving a lot.

Annie Karni: Oh, achieving a great deal. Yes, he had an incredibly productive first two years. Chuck Schumer, Senate majority leader, passed a lot of major legislation. We talk about some of that. We have inside-the-room scenes of Biden negotiating with McCarthy about staving off the debt ceiling, not defaulting on our debt, which not doing something isn't a great achievement, but that was a major thing.

Biden's legacy, I think, was fairly tarnished by the fact that he lost to Trump when his entire reason for being there was because he defeated Trump and was allegedly a bridge to something else, not a bridge back. We have a lot of reporting in there about the Democratic efforts from Congress members who were very nervous about Biden for a long time before that disastrous debate and talked about in the book first, but felt like their hands were tied, that they couldn't publicly criticize him if he wasn't going to leave the race because that would weaken him further.

We have a really emotional scene of Schumer's one-on-one conversation with Biden at his Rehoboth Beach house, telling him just very bluntly that he has less than 5% chance of winning and that if he loses to Donald Trump, he will go down in history as one of the darkest figures, and urging him to leave the race. I think yes, Biden achieved a lot of major legislation his first two years, but he lost to Donald Trump. In the words of Chuck Schumer\, he may go down in history as a very dark figure.

Brian Lehrer: One of the interesting things that's breaking out in our text message thread, and I read one of these before, one of the first to come in, is about the relationship between grassroots members of either party and the elites, because you had written about the Rush Limbaugh listeners driving Limbaugh's opinion and then Limbaugh driving Murdoch and Fox News, and if Fox News was against it, the Republican Congress was going to be against it.

A listener said, "What's wrong with the base driving the party? The Democratic base should be driving their party." Now, there have been responses to that. A lot of listeners are echoing that one, where's the responsiveness to the Democratic base? Here's an interesting one that came in that questions the whole premise. It says, "The so-called base, if it's misinformed and manipulated by extreme influencers like Rush Limbaugh, is that really a valid representation of the population?"

Annie Karni: That's an excellent point. That's a really good point. It reminds me of something. Then to be a leader is to correct misinformation, and let voters-- When Kevin McCarthy was the speaker, he used to defend his most extreme members like Marjorie Taylor Greene by telling concerned donors, "You think she's extreme? Go to her district and see her voters. I'm telling you, that's who sent her here. She accurately represents her district," which, okay to that reader's point.

Then he's saying Congress accurately represents the country, but then the country is deeply misinformed because Marjorie Taylor Greene got to Congress because she was following QAnon theories online. That's a really good point, that a misinformed public driving policy and decisions in Congress and the White House is scary.

Luke Broadwater: It can be circular. I remember, I think it was on the day of January 6th, Mitt Romney gets up and says-- Everyone's complaining about how the lies had led to this mob storming the Capitol, and Romney gets up there and says, "The job of the leadership, our job, guys, is to say that these are lies and to make that clear and maybe people will listen to us if we're the senators," and he has quickly been run out of office. There's been no appetite for standing up to incorrect, false information that the base believes.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue for a few more minutes after a break with Luke Broadwater and Annie Karni from the New York Times with their book Mad House. We're going to focus more on things from today's news when we come back and take a few more of your comments or phone calls for them. Stay with us.

[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue for a few more minutes with Luke Broadwater, White House correspondent, and Annie Karni, congressional correspondent for the New York Times. Their new book is called Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress. Let's talk about some things in the news right now.

I will note that the headlines on each of your most recent articles, though you are on different beats, relate to each other. Luke, yours as a White House correspondent, A Third Deportation Plane Left the US After a Judge's Order. The Trump Administration Argues There Was no Violation. Annie yours as a congressional correspondent, Musk Donates to GOP Members of Congress who Support Impeaching Judges.

Interesting to me that on your different beats, both roads led to Trump's confrontation with the judicial system. Luke, how much is this the biggest story of our time right now, in your view? How much the rule of law will survive this onslaught as measured by the preservation of the judicial branch of government as prescribed in the Constitution?

Luke Broadwater: What we're seeing is what happens when a co-equal branch of government, the Congress, becomes a subservient branch to Donald Trump. That's what we lay out in the book. Trump has already made Congress subservient to himself by the choices of these rank-and-file Republicans and the Republican leadership. The only branch of government left that can stand up to Trump is the judiciary. You're seeing that in case after case.

There's at least 15 decisions by my count, in which various federal judges have blocked actions of the Trump administration, but this latest order, which attempted to block Trump deportation flights down to El Salvador, is the one that's really bringing us to what a lot of experts are calling a potential constitutional crisis. That is this judge ordered these planes to turn around with migrants on them back to the United States, and the administration didn't do that.

They offered a lot of legalistic reasons why they didn't do it. They've argued they didn't really technically break the order, but I think a lot of people are growing more and more concerned that if they defy this order and the next one and the next one, who is there left to stop the Trump administration if judges are ruling that what they're doing is illegal or unconstitutional? One remedy would be for Congress to do oversight or for Congress to even consider impeachment, but they're not looking at the executive branch. They're looking at actually impeaching the judges. You're seeing the constitutional order get flipped on its head.

Brian Lehrer: Julian in Northvale, you're on WNYC. Hi, Julian.

Julian: Hi. Thanks for taking the call. On the topic of Congress being subservient, I see the cause of that being the threat of being primaried, which in red states is pretty much the general election, the minority that votes in it. My thought is Democrats, particularly in red states, should vote in the Republican primary. If they have to register as Republicans, they should do so perhaps even with the existing Congress, knowing that there is not really a threat of being primaried, they'll change. If not, we have to wait two years. I'm curious what your guests think about that.

Brian Lehrer: Annie, any thought?

Annie Karni: That sounds complicated to me. You want them to change their voter registration to register as Republican to then vote for the Republican in office to stave off a primary challenge from a more hard-right Republican.

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Annie Karni: That's tough because, also, there's not-- I don't know that that would give these Republicans in Congress enough-- First of all, I don't know how fast you can do that. I don't know if it would give Republicans in Congress enough backbone to not fall in line. I can see Trump making a case about election interference and, who knows, trying to--

Brian Lehrer: Of course, this is a strategy that comes up from either side from time to time. We were talking about Rush Limbaugh before. He used to do this. I don't know if you remember. He would urge Republican listeners to register as Democrats in certain primaries so they could vote in the less-likely-to-win in the general election nominee. Just not many people do that.

Annie Karni: Also, the other thing I would say is hijinks like that generally backfire on Democrats. Not that that works for anyone, but if it was going to work, Republicans get away with stuff like that more than Democrats because part of the Democratic brand, however much of it still exists, is that they play by the rules. When it goes wrong, it backfires more on Democrats than on Republicans.

Brian Lehrer: I think the caller is also critiquing the primary system which tends to push people to the wings.

Annie Karni: I think that a better answer to that is ranked choice voting, I think, is maybe a way to get more moderate candidates in than a primary system, but there's other ways to possibly have elections that don't just allow a hard-right person to always win a primary.

Brian Lehrer: Either moderate or just candidates who feel like they need to build coalitions with various blocks of voters. Another listener in a text because we were talking a bit about the grassroots of the party driving what the party does, whether that's the grown-up approach to running Congress or not, listener writes, "Corporate lobbyists. You'd never know they exist from hearing this conversation." Luke, do corporate lobbyists play a role in your book about Congress as opposed to just the MAGA base driving what's extreme there?

Luke Broadwater: Yes, lobbyists do and certainly high-money donors do as well, but what I would submit is that the rise of influencers and social media has made it so these high-money interests are not as powerful as they used to be. What you see a lot of times-- let's give an example of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She had the choice to be on the committee that regulates Wall Street in Congress, but she chose to be on the Oversight Committee instead.

Now, 20 years ago, no one would ever do that because all the donations, the big lobbyists, care about Wall Street. What she realized is that on the Oversight Committee, you can have a lot more impact. You're on TV a lot more. The voters care a lot more about you trying to hold the administration accountable, for you fighting for your side of the aisle. That was a better committee for her because of social media, because of small-dollar donors.

Yes, obviously there's a robust lobbying industry. Lobbying plays a huge role in Congress, but there are new ways, podcasts, influencers that are actually having a lot of impact on the direction of politics, more so necessarily than your traditional K Street lobbying firm.

Brian Lehrer: We will leave it there with Annie Karni, congressional correspondent, Luke Broadwater, White House correspondent for the New York Times, talking about today's news and their book Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress. Thank you for joining us.

Annie Karni: Thank you, Brian.

Luke Broadwater: Thank you.

 

Copyright © 2025 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.