Week In Politics: Reince Priebus Out, GOP Health Care Repeal Efforts
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NPR's Robert Siegel speaks with political commentators David Brooks of The New York Times and E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and Brookings Institution. They discuss President Trump's decision to replace Chief of Staff Reince Priebus with Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly. They also discuss GOP health care repeal efforts and White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci.
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David Brooks of The New York Times and E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post discuss President Trump's decision to replace Chief of Staff Reince Priebus with Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly.
Transcript
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And we'll get to health care in a moment with our regular Friday political commentators, columnists David Brooks of The New York Times and E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and The Brookings Institution, both of whom join us by phone. Welcome back, guys.
DAVID BROOKS, BYLINE: Good to be with you.
E J DIONNE, BYLINE: Glad to be with you.
SIEGEL: First, before health care, I want to ask you about the news of this afternoon out of the White House. President Trump's chief of staff, Reince Priebus, is out - his replacement, retired four-star Marine general, John F. Kelly. Kelly will move over from a Cabinet position, secretary of Homeland Security. We heard this very brief announcement from Trump himself this afternoon.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: General Kelly has been a star, done an incredible job thus far, respected by everybody, a great, great American. Reince Priebus - a good man. Thank you very much.
SIEGEL: David Brooks, Reince Priebus - a good man, but a man out of a job right now. What does this say about the Trump White House?
BROOKS: Well, they've fired - how many people have they fired? - five major people in the White House or so over the last few weeks, an amazing thing for the first six months in administration. Priebus never had a chance to be chief of staff. The chief of staff is usually the alter ego of the president, somebody who controls the schedule and controls really the tempo. And Priebus was never given respect, never given the job. He's just sort of hanging loose in a Scaramucc (ph) of predators.
SIEGEL: (Laughter).
BROOKS: And so one wonders what John Kelly is thinking - a Marine, a very decorated Marine. Maybe he can bring order to this group, and there is some rumor that he's getting to control access to the president, which would be a major thing. But it's very hard to see one person imposing order on this bunch.
SIEGEL: E.J., your sense of the change at White House chief of staff?
DIONNE: Well, I think in an odd way, Priebus was always a kind of artificial appendage. He was from the conservative ideological wing of the party, a Paul Ryan, Scott Walker kind of Republican. He never particularly liked Trump until he started liking Trump, and then he tried to unite conservatives behind him. So he was never fully trusted.
What I think you're seeing both in the sacking of Reince Priebus and in the attack on Attorney General Jeff Sessions is that Trump is about Trump. He's not about an ideology. He's not about a philosophy. Because Sessions, who he's been assailing, really was the spokesperson for what Trump got elected on - immigration, backing off civil rights, toughness on crime. And he is under attack. And now you have Kelly, who has no real ideological profile at all. I think it is going to be seen as a kind of victory for Jared Kushner, who never particularly liked Priebus and is apparently not very ideological himself.
SIEGEL: Just one point we might recall about General Kelly. According to Donald Trump, the reason that he went ahead with an immigration ban that was not well written was he said that General Kelly had told him, you have to do it right away or bad people will sneak into the country. General Kelly either made that suggestion or took the hit for the president, either way you like. But it was not an auspicious start as secretary of Homeland Security, frankly.
DIONNE: No, I think there are some real issues about him as secretary of Homeland Security. When people - when General Mattis was brought in at Defense and when H. R. McMaster was brought in in the White House, they were - it was often seen as a triumvirate that could occasionally stand up to Donald Trump. I think Mattis really has maintained his independence, McMaster to some degree. But Kelly has really gone along with the Trump program. So it's not surprising that of that triumvirate, this is the general he's putting in the White House.
SIEGEL: Let's turn to health - David, let's turn to health care and what happened last night, which was a very dramatic vote cast by Senator John McCain to defeat the so-called skinny repeal bill and to put an end to what has been about seven years of Republican campaigning to repeal Obamacare. An important moment for the country, for the Republican party - what would you say?
BROOKS: Well, there was the immediate prospect of Republicans voting on a bill they all hated and they were asking the House not to pass, which you've maneuvered yourself into a pretzel. The larger story is that the Republicans don't have a vision in what they do want to do with health care and maybe what they want to do with government. For the past seven years or maybe even longer, they've been the party of let's cut government. Let's cut government.
And I think that was an effective thing to do when stagflation was roaring in the '70s or '80s, but now people are under assault and they want a little government assistance. And if you - you can't pass popular legislation by offering them less. And so I think the country's come to a spot where they think we want some sort of guaranteed health insurance. It doesn't have to be through single-payer. It could be through market mechanisms. But we don't want it taken away from people. And Republicans could never quite get their mind around this new reality.
SIEGEL: E.J., can you imagine Republicans and Democrats both moving from that starting point toward a new health care bill? Or is the gap between them just too great?
DIONNE: For right now, it's too great. But the fact of the matter is one of the reasons they had so much trouble with Obamacare is that it was really the most conservative way that you could do expanded coverage because it did use market mechanisms. It did use ideas from The Heritage Foundation to try to make health insurance markets work with subsidies for those who couldn't afford it. The Republicans couldn't go to the right of this without throwing millions of people off health insurance. I think eventually, as Republicans came to accept Medicare and as they came to accept Social Security, they're going to accept the basic idea of Obamacare, which is a commitment that the government has to help everybody who can't afford it to get health insurance. But that could take some time for that acceptance to take hold.
SIEGEL: Now, I want to turn to one other matter before we're out of time, especially for David Brooks. Anthony Scaramucci had essentially foretold the dismissal of Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff in a vulgar rant that he made in a phone call to a New Yorker political writer. Scaramucci's going to be the new communications director. Some people say that it's - you know, he's Trump squared, that you have somebody who deals with the public in the same way that Donald Trump did. What do you make of Scaramucci's role?
BROOKS: Well, you know, as a New Yorker, I want to apologize on behalf of 8 million New Yorkers to the whole country for the way we talk, though even by our standards Scaramucci is a bit of an extreme, extreme outlier. And I think it's just amazing, you know, that interview he gave to Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker is mind-boggling in the extreme. I spent three hours on Twitter unable to get off just because there were so many things to pierce out. He was threatening to fire the entire communications team unless Lizza leaked or told who his leaker was. And he was - you know, he was cursing out the chief of staff, at the senior adviser. It is a knife-wielding team there. And the scary thing is, what happens if we actually have a crisis?
SIEGEL: Yeah.
BROOKS: If some world event happens and the team has to do a sort of a guns of October, the scenario is nightmarish.
SIEGEL: David Brooks of The New York Times, E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post, thanks to both of you.
BROOKS: Thank you.
DIONNE: Great to be with you. Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF DAMU THE FUDGEMUNK SONG, "PARANOID REMIX") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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