Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Paul Waldman: Thank you.
Waldman: Democrats have been talking about getting rid of the debt ceiling permanently for a long time. And over the years, you and I have both written many articles explaining why it’s a terrible thing to have this extra vote that needs to be taken in order to validate the spending that has already been allocated, in order to satisfy this archaic idea that you have to keep coming back again and again and again to allow the government to keep borrowing money. All it is is a tool to create government shutdowns. Democrats have long thought we should just get rid of it—there’s only one other country in the world that has anything like it—and Republicans have been resistant to that because they like the idea that they can force these shutdowns and use it as a tool to extract spending cuts that would be difficult to get otherwise.
The problem, at the moment, is that Republicans have this razor-thin majority in the House, and you have a group of people in the Republican caucus, some of whom are in the Freedom Caucus, who are real serious anti-government ideologues. They’re not just Trump loyalists—that’s an important distinction here because you have a lot of far-right people in the Republican caucus who will do anything for Donald Trump. You have a group of people, including Chip Roy from Texas, whom Trump now says he wants to find a primary challenger for, who are genuine, committed, principled ideologues who say that they are never going to vote to increase the debt limit without serious spending cuts, that any time we get into one of these situations they want to see the size of government brought down. They’re willing to shut down the government, even if it’s something that is damaging to Trump and the rest of their party. That’s what they’re dealing with right now.
Waldman: This is the essence of what rural politics has become. One of the arguments we make is that voters in rural areas keep electing Republicans and are represented by Republicans at all levels, from president all the way down to dogcatcher, and yet what they don’t give them is material improvements to their lives. They give them a lot of culture-war campaigning, and a lot of emotional satisfaction. That was what Donald Trump really gave them: the feeling that he hated the same people they hated, and he would basically be a weapon against the people they despise. Even if it didn’t change their lives for the better—it didn’t improve their education systems, their economic opportunities, their local infrastructure—it wasn’t as important as the emotional satisfaction that they got from Donald Trump.
For instance, he says he wants to privatize the U.S. Postal Service. Well, who benefits most from the postal service the way it is now? It’s rural people. He’s talking about promoting school vouchers, which don’t benefit rural people at all because they just don’t have private schools where they live. Mass deportation is going to have a devastating effect on a lot of rural communities; not just because the farmers themselves are employing a lot of undocumented people to pick crops in the fields, but because those people are spending money in those communities where they’re living. The cuts to Medicaid that Republicans are contemplating? That is devastating to rural communities because there have been hundreds of rural hospitals that have closed in recent years, and they absolutely depend on Medicaid funding in order to stay alive.
We’re going to go back into that cycle again. You have all of these ways in which Trump’s most adoring voters are going to get screwed over by the policies, when they thought that he was just going to come back in and make America great again and make eggs cheap.
Waldman: A lot of it has to do with this fundamental orientation against institutions and establishment power. People have a lot of anger at not just the government, but other established institutions like news media, big business. There’s a lot of free-floating anger at the establishment. And looking at a figure like Musk, it looks like the establishment hates him. He’s so disruptive and erratic in his way, and he insults people all the time. He has some of that same characteristic that Trump has: He pisses people off, and he looks like he’s just changing everything willy-nilly.
If your feeling about all the established institutions, including government, is that they just need to be torn apart and made uncomfortable, then you can look at him and say, He seems like he’s a hero. He seems like he’s on my side. But where the rubber actually meets the road, things get a little more complicated because the people who feel that actually depend on government in a lot of different ways.
Musk comes out during the campaign and says, I think we could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. And when people who know what they’re talking about actually look at the federal budget, they say, Well, if you set aside Social Security and ...
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