Transcript: Trump’s Hold on the GOP Has Never Been Weaker

Bacon: Right. They don’t care about high prices. They care about helping their elite friends.

Donegan: For you means he’s going to lower your grocery bill—he’s not going to do this supposedly silly trans stuff, and he’s going to focus on what really matters. You could actually read that ad, bigoted as it was—and I do not want to understate that—as mocking Democrats for the supposed triviality of their culture-war issues.

I just don’t think there are that many people—clearly they’re out there and they’re dangerous—but I don’t think there are that many people who are motivated day to day by contempt for trans Americans. And I do not think you can win people over just by moving to where you think they are on culture-war stuff. That thermostatic instinct—the trying to chase the middle on the culture-war stuff—makes you look cynical. It makes you look like you don’t believe in anything, right?

When Spanberger and Mamdani and these winning candidates refused to do that, it looked more like they had a sense of principles but really had a sense of priorities. I’m focused on affordability was Mamdani’s answer to every single question he was asked. And so I think one way Democrats have begun to evolve, and that I’m encouraged by, is choosing the questions they want to answer—choosing their own messaging priorities as opposed to constantly chasing whatever the Republican attack was, being on the defensive, and fighting on the territory that has been given to them rather than the territory they chose.

Bacon: My worry was that they were going to move to the right on cultural issues. And it seems to me that they’ve kept their same positions while leading with economics. And that’s probably a better—that may have been a better course. And maybe Kamala, to be fair, did some of that herself, but the context may be different now.

Donegan: Yeah. I think Kamala got kind of screwed.

Bacon: I was going to say that.

Donegan: I don’t think she had a real opportunity in the very short amount of time she had to campaign to carve out a separate identity from Joe Biden. She also was not willing to break from Joe Biden on several important issues. But I don’t know exactly how much of a chance she had. I think her political career is over. I do not think she should try to run again. I think she should make a lot of money giving speeches to Goldman Sachs or whatever people do after they’ve been the vice president.

Bacon: And you don’t really mean Goldman Sachs, but I get the point.

Donegan: Well, she should exit electoral politics. but that’s because she’s tainted by the unpopularity of somebody else.

Bacon: It’s a good place to finish—actually, one more question, and I’ll let you go. If you’d asked me in mid-2024, I was a big hyping-for-Gretchen person. She would be a great candidate to run; someone like that would be great. She’s a woman, she’s appealing. If you had asked me who should replace Biden, I would’ve said Harris is dragged down by the ticket—maybe you pick somebody like Andy Beshear. I could pick a few other people.

But I have to confess, I’m curious where you stand now, because having this whole year finished, Gavin Newsom—who is not somebody I normally like—has been better than I thought and has led more than I thought. And Whitmer has spent a lot of the year doing the Let me show you how bipartisan I am stuff. Shapiro is in that box too: let me show you how much I reach the other side while they destroy the country.

So, in other words, who do you like? Anybody you’ve been impressed by for 2028? Anybody you’ve been disappointed by? Because Whitmer’s on my list of people I wanted to be excited by and am not. And Newsom and Pritzker are on my list of people who have led this year and made me feel better about them.

Donegan: Yeah. I’m going to be honest with you, Perry: when I think about another Democratic primary, I just want to put my head in my hands and hide until late 2028.

I think you have Democrats trying to square their local obligations with their national reputations, right? I think you’re right that Pritzker has been an interesting leader. I think the way he got Donald Trump to back down on a more aggressive National Guard deployment to Chicago is very impressive. Pritzker is also the leader of a very blue state.

Gavin Newsom has his finger in the air trying to see which way the wind is blowing, and sometimes that blows him in directions that I like and sometimes it doesn’t. But I don’t really totally trust him to have a core set of principles, which I think is symptomatic of an older Democratic problem.

Bacon: But he’s also not that old, right? He’s in his fifties. He’s not actually old. He just sort of thinks old. He’s been around for a while, but I don’t think he’s actually that old.

Donegan: He’s a Gen X guy with a boomer mentality. But he is the leader of a very blue state. He is being more aggressive because he has the leeway to do that within his state.

Whitmer really disappointed me in the first six, eight months of the Trump presidency. She was an excellent, aggressive, progressive leader of Michigan during the first Trump and Biden terms. She was, I thought, really skillful in handling the post-Dobbs fallout in her state…

Bacon: I’ll come back to her. I’m not going to rule her out.

Donegan: But she made the mistake a lot of people made in that post-2024 era, where she thought Trump represented something really significant and overestimated his power. She’s also responding to her state, which is not very blue. And so this is something where everybody is accumulating liabilities as they go.

And I don’t have a pick right now. I think it’s kind of an open field. I will say there’s basically nobody who seems like a viable candidate for that nomination who I would be thrilled with right now. They’ve got a couple of years to fix that, and I hope they try.

Bacon: Okay. And with that, that’s a great place to end. Thanks for joining me. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate it. Be in touch.

Donegan: Thank you so much, Perry. It was a blast.