82. Trump Says No To Putin: Is He Serious?

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics U.S.

I'm Caddy Kay in Washington, and today we have a very special guest, former chairman of the Republican Committee, my friend Michael Steele, who is about to become not just a weekend television host, but a prime time evening host with the week night on MSNBC starting on May the 5th every night.

So, look, I know you're super busy, Michael.

I'm very glad you're here.

Thank you for joining us.

I've been looking forward to this conversation.

As you probably know, you get the vibe.

You're one of my faves.

And I just, I love, I love myself some caddy.

And it's good to be with you.

Thanks for the opportunity.

Thank you.

And I'm sorry to everybody that Anthony is not here.

He wants to apologize.

He's drinking margaritas on a super yacht in the Mediterranean.

You know, but there you go.

Someone has to do it.

Someone has to do it.

It is the price we pay in the age of Trump.

Yeah.

He's checking out what the Trump visits.

He did ask me to say that he's on assignment doing something very important, but hey.

He actually told you that, huh?

We're between friends, so I think we can say the truth.

anyway we're very glad to have michael here look michael i thought what would be interesting in this half of the program

would be to talk about the kind of week that things didn't go so well for the trump administration i mean i think we're the week

well

it felt like there was a kind of culmination of almost breaks or roadblocks that the trump administration has hit just in the last week or so so we can run through some of those and then in the second half of the program i'd love you to talk about the g GOP, your old Republican Party, and how much it would take for Chairman Steele to be able to wrangle back the Republican Party.

I know you have some hot tips on that.

That we can talk about.

It's a family-friendly program, so we can talk about how much cannabis it would take.

I'll keep that in mind in my answer.

Let's start with Ukraine.

I don't know if you had a chance to see it, Michael, over the weekend.

I read this really good article in the FT by Yuval Hariri, who wrote

Sapiens, the great writer.

And he had this way of framing Trump's worldview in the context of what we're seeing with Ukraine this week, with Donald Trump

angry as we're recording this on Thursday morning about the Russian strikes on Kyiv, telling Vladimir Putin that he has to stop and that he's not happy with the Russian strikes, but basically

not asking the Russians for anything as far as we can see in terms of concessions.

I mean, this is not a negotiation.

The administration is saying we're fed up on negotiation.

You've got J.D.

Vance in India saying, you know, we've spent hours on diplomacy.

I mean, diplomacy, my dad was a diplomat.

My understanding of diplomacy was that it was a two-way street.

This seems to be a one-way street.

And Yuval Hariri says, listen, think of it like this.

Donald Trump basically thinks there are weak countries and strong countries.

And the sensible thing, perhaps even Trump's kind of thinking would be the smart, humane thing to do if you are a weak country, is just to to give in to a strong country.

It's zero sum.

So actually, that's why he thinks this is Ukraine's fault.

It is on so many different levels.

The psychopathy involved in all things related to Trump.

Really, just

so your audience has a better sense of where a lot of this comes from, it is.

This man has got daddy issues for days.

He's got family issues that has driven his entire behavior professionally and as president.

And a lot of it centers around this idea at this rightly leveled up, the weak versus the strong.

His mother considered him weak.

There's a famous quote of her talking about how weak he is

as a man.

So if your mama

thinks you're weak.

Yeah, that's bad.

You're always going to be overperforming and trying to prove her wrong.

If your daddy thinks you're weak and not competent, you're always going to be in a pressure cooker to prove them wrong.

And so that drives a lot of this.

Mary Trump, his niece, has written about this.

She's a psychologist.

She talks about the family dynamics.

And so you begin to understand the framing of his worldview around what happened around the dinner table.

And I think that that translation is one that you see right now of Donald Trump looking at the world the way his daddy and his mama looked at him.

And so Ukraine is weak because it's small.

Ukraine is the aggressor.

Russia is not.

So when you hear him going after Vladimir Putin, just know it's performative.

Because there's nothing in his behavior towards Vladimir Putin, a very strong man,

right?

That would

or prove to Donald Trump that they are the problem.

And he's not going to go up against it.

That's like going up against his daddy.

Now, he's going to try to prove his daddy wrong, but he's not going to confront

that individual.

He's not going to confront Putin.

So I don't put a lot of stock when I hear him whining about what Russia is doing, because

to your last point,

He's done nothing about it at the diplomatic table.

He's not put the pressure on them to conform their behavior to diplomatic norms, if you will.

In other words, sit down and tell us what you're going to do and tell us what you want.

Ukraine, do the same.

And the U.S.

acting as an arbiter, he's just a bully for

Vladimir Putin.

And in this instance, his pushback,

Putin knows it's coming.

Putin is like, okay, let's let him get that off his chest and we move on because nothing will change.

So he's takes psychology, I mean, every president that I've ever known of had a certain psychology they brought into office, right?

All of the, I started in this country covering Clinton.

He certainly had his own psychologies that he brought into office.

Sure.

George W.

Bush may be less so, oddly.

Barack Obama certainly did.

I mean, his sense that he was right and didn't really need to explain terribly much about healthcare because he was smart.

And so

if he just did it, people would get the message that it was the right thing.

They'd get it.

They'd get it.

And if they didn't, really, that wasn't his problem.

I mean, to some extent, right?

I mean, Obama did many great things, but I do think there was a certain arrogance around him and his team that they brought into office with them.

Trump won, Joe Biden, but all of those people had people around them who were explaining the kind of chess version of the world, not just the checkers version of the world.

If you give in to Mr.

Putin, Mr.

Trump, then

people in Venezuela, leaders in Venezuela will take that message.

Autocrats in China will take that message.

The message to the Baltic states will be that they are weak and Russia is strong.

And anyway, how do we really determine who is weak and who is strong?

America thought it was stronger than the North Vietnamese.

It turned out not to be stronger than the North Vietnamese, right?

ISIS in many ways did far more damage than America expected it to do in Iraq.

So who that's perhaps the difference is that every, of course, every president has a psychological profile, but they also surround themselves with people and with a party who is saying, here's the alternative position.

Here's the complicated position.

And I think that's what we're seeing at the moment now is that Trump just doesn't have that.

He doesn't have it because a couple of things.

One, it doesn't work around him

because number two, he doesn't want it.

He wants people who agree.

So he, while he loves the fight, And we'll talk about a couple of fights that a fight that occurred in the West Wing this week.

Nice and calm place in the West Wing this week.

Nice and calm place.

But he loves that.

He loves seeing people fight over him.

You're so right.

He loves seeing people fight for his attention.

When you watch a cabinet meeting and they sit around and tell him how great he is,

that's where that comes from.

You're not at that table unless you're willing to say, Mr.

President, you know, there's never been anyone who's seen this problem the way you have and have moved on it the way it is.

I sit here, sir,

just absolutely amazed by what you.

In fact, I can't even finish the thought because it is so,

I am so taken, I'm breathless.

That for him, oh, he's just wet his pants at that table.

Why do people never say that to us, Michael?

We're on television sets all the time, and I'm never getting that.

I mean, what's wet what went wrong?

I know,

I wish if I, oh my my gosh, I just want that influence with my wife.

I just want her to say, you know, baby, man, I'm so happy I married you.

I just, she looks at me some days and going, why?

What was I thinking?

You know what they say?

If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

The only person that ever looks at me, forget my kids, the only person that ever looks at me like that is my little dog.

But that's it.

I mean, don't you think, Katie?

I mean,

when you're covering Washington and you're covering the White House and you're talking to these people, you can hear it in their voices when they talk about him, his people that are close to him, because they can't even afford to have it really drop when they're away from that table.

Because they never know if that clip, that sound will get back to him.

So they're always, these people are always in this vortex of pleasing him.

As a consequence, for diplomacy and dealing with our allies in Europe and Asia against the aggressors,

it becomes that much more difficult because

Donald Trump's psychopathy is: hey, I'm the strong man, or I want to be a strong man.

I'm going to do strongman things.

I want to do strongman things.

That's not the ethos nor the diplomatic stance of the United States.

And it's certainly not the position that we've or posture we've taken with Great Britain or France or Germany.

And yet, you've got Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, supposedly negotiating, but because they don't like the position Ukraine has taken, first off, not even really inviting Ukraine to the table.

How do you have a diplomatic resolution when the other party's not even invited into the room?

But then walking away, why?

Because it's performative.

That's what Trump wants.

He wants to see that.

He's been instructed to do that.

And so a lot of what you see happening from his national security team,

his State Department team,

the

UN team, is that they are performing for the man.

Unlike in other presidencies, where the expectation was the president says, this is our policy, this is what we want.

We've had this conversation with the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

We've talked to the president of France.

And here's where we are.

Go make it happen.

Let me know how it turns out.

He lets his team go do what is in the long line since the end of World War II of diplomatic and international negotiations, et cetera.

That's how this system, this world order complex has been held together because there's this kind of glue.

He's come in and cracked the glue.

that's holding it and now doing things that could further break that alliance.

And a lot of it's because his people are imitating what he wants them to do.

And it's not anchored towards that long line of diplomacy that the U.S.

has followed with our allies.

Because there are times, you know how it is.

You know, the Prime Minister of Great Britain and the President of the United States will consider an approach together.

When was the last time that happened?

Particularly with respect to Ukraine.

And so it's, you know, it would be Biden, the Biden era.

Hasn't happened in this period because you have a president who is following the Putin playbook.

And that's outside of what our diplomats and our State Department.

It's not built for that, but you have the Secretary of State performing

in a way that pleases Trump.

Yeah, so the institutions are all revolving around Trump.

I was struck by what you said about the in-fighting in his team and how he likes to pitch people about it.

Actually, Kellyanne Conway said this to me just a couple of weeks ago about how he likes to have, she describes it as scorpions scorpions in a bottle.

That's how she sees them.

She loves this idea that they all fight it out with each other,

ideally in his presence, and then he makes the decision.

He is the decider.

And it is a sort of slight power play.

I mean, yes, you do want your cabinet members ideally to be giving you different points of view, but the way she described this is it's sort of slightly gladiatorial.

And he is the emperor who is then making the decision.

I guess another little snafu from the White House this week was we saw one of these fights play out and it leaked out into the press pretty damn quickly.

First of all, which is interesting because Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, came in saying no more leaking from this White House.

Second, it's interesting because you have Scott Besant.

Good luck with that.

This is Washington.

You have Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, getting into literally a shouting match.

in earshot of President Trump.

And if ever you've been in, obviously, into the West Wing of the White House, I should explain to people who haven't, it's not glamorous.

It's tiny little corridors.

Where if somebody moves past you, you hear everything from if you're sitting in the Oval Office, you can hear everything happening down the corridor.

And Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, and Elon Musk got into a massive

fighting match that emerged over something super arcane about who's going to be the head of the IRS.

Besides, wanted one person,

Elon Musk wanted another person, possibly to give himself more leverage over the tax services.

That is always a possibility.

You didn't hear it from me.

And at one point, apparently in this argument, Scott Besson, who seems to me like a pretty mild-mannered guy, right?

I mean,

not a yeller, starts yelling and says to Musk, fuck you.

And Musk replies, say it louder.

So he hasn't got the day one Ukraine deal he wanted.

He now has...

fighting amongst his advisors happening in a way that I don't think we thought this administration was planning for things to turn out.

Well, you know,

the administration wasn't planning for this, but the rest of us knew it was coming.

There was no tell that this term would be different from the first in that regard.

I thought it might be.

I thought this might be a terrible thing.

Did you really think that?

I thought for a moment, because the first month or maybe I was so short-termist, the first month or two did feel a little different than the first month or two.

For a start, Mooch was not not fired after 11 days.

So that was already looking good, right?

We didn't have any major firings in the space of the first month.

There was a little less chaos, maybe.

There was a little less.

And I think the difference, the difference in why you kind of got lulled, I think a lot of folks got lulled into that was they had a Project 2025 strategy.

So they knew from the inauguration moments for at least that first couple of weeks, they had what was going to happen.

So they roll out these executive orders and so there wasn't there wasn't oh let's figure out what we can do they'd already figured it out so when you so the what the fights you're seeing now are not on the oh let's figure out what we're going to do It is on the implementation of what they've already agreed to do.

It's on the execution side.

It's on, okay, who are we going to put in this department?

Are we going to fire all these people?

Oh, do we have to bring some of these people back?

So it's now on the other side of having made the decision now the tensions are around the power that results from the execution that's what the best at musk fight is about musk wants control of the irs that sob wants to put his tentacles inside one of the largest pieces of infrastructure in the federal government so that he has access to data about every living human being in America, right?

And he can do what that.

I still believe he's already created back doors to many of the systems in our government.

The next president will have to do one of the biggest tech enemas on the planet to clean that crap out of the system.

I'm just telling you, that tech enema is going to be the order of the next Democratic administration because

you think you run in the government?

No, everything you're doing is going to be siphoned through back doors that Musk has already put into the system.

That's why you put a 19-year-old in the Department of Health and National Security for what?

So I think that's what you're seeing.

But how do you, let me ask you this.

We're all kind of focused in here.

And I, you know, I've done work in the diplomatic space.

So I'm also cognizant of the other side of the script.

What are our allies?

Say, what are you hearing from the folks in parliament, in the diplomatic space, guys and gals in the pub?

I mean, they've got to be sitting here going, what the hell is happening to these people as they're about to celebrate their 250 anniversary from breaking up for Toldi I shouldn't have gone anywhere.

How is that going for you?

How well is that going?

That little spat we had over a bunch of tea in Boston.

And you guys can't even make tea.

I'm sorry.

You cannot even make a proper tea cup of tea in this country.

That's how bad things have gotten.

Well, you throw it all into the harbor.

That should tell you everything you need to know about tea.

Without boiling the water in the harbor

and warming the harbor and then putting, yeah, no, it's look,

I mean, you're right.

This is causing a huge amount of confusion and concern.

And I think there is a very real, and we started with Ukraine, and now it's people are starting to ask about the competence of this administration and who is really in charge and will the American system hold.

That we thought America had a system that was built into

the laws and infrastructure of the country that made this a reliable partner.

And there's now a realization that in that kind of forever balance in democracies between laws and norms and customs, actually the ratio of norms and customs was a lot higher than than people thought.

And they can be smashed.

And actually, when you take away the norms and customs and you have a president who's prepared to say, screw the norms and customs,

actually, he can do a heck of a lot.

And what you said just now about the reason, and this is the reason that Besant and Musk have always had this beef, was that Musk wanted to go into Treasury at the beginning and get all of our data, right?

All of our social security numbers, all of our addresses, addresses, all of our tax returns he wants.

He wants to know everything about us because we're living in the era that data is the most important commodity in the world.

And he could see that he could get all that.

And Besant, actually, to his credit, I've spoken to people who are very close to Besant.

Besant said no.

Besant really pushed back and realized how bad that was because that is one of the firewalls of democracies that the government cannot know everything about you and hand it over to some private guy who in about, you know, whatever it is, 120 days is going to be out of government anyway, but still have access to your data.

And I think that's, that's what's really surprised America's allies in particular.

And guess what?

You know, you have Xi Jinping flying around Asia, talking to the Europeans, saying, who's the reliable superpower now?

You may not like our system, but we're not going to shaft you like this.

And he's doing a pretty good job of it.

So that then, I think, kind of begs the question again, because the next part of

this relationship between us and the rest of the world, but particularly with respect to our allies.

And, you know, at the end of the day, there's nothing stronger than the relationship between the U.S.

and Great Britain, period.

There's just,

for the reasons you alluded to,

glad you're bringing up the special relationship.

It really, I mean,

it is, it is on so many levels for a lot of reasons that are inked in history.

And so it just kind of, when you're looking at the, the diplomatic piece in dealing with borish and ugly and brutal behavior of Vladimir Putin and how the U.S.

and Great Britain would order the world

around dealing with that versus now Trump throwing, you know, tariffs around like they're, you know, bits of candy, right?

Very sour candy to our allies and our friends.

And then now the attack on Jerome Powell, the head of the Fed, where he noted Powell's termination cannot come fast enough for him.

The economic piece is also another big part of this relationship between us and our allies, imposing indiscriminate tariffs on them of crazy numbers, 10%.

Oh, now it's going to be 50%.

Oh, back to 15.

Let's make it 10.

How does that rattle the halls of economic power, the markets in Europe and Great Britain?

Now, Great Britain is in a unique space because it's outside of the EU.

So it has, you know, those conversations, I guess, a few weeks ago, Caddy, about trade agreements or, you know, some type of mutual negotiation between the U.S.

and Great Britain on some economic issues.

What does that look like?

Because from our perspective here in the U.S., it's all a crap show.

We're harming everybody.

And we know that at some point there's a downstream negative effect from all of this.

How is it playing overseas, and particularly with the leadership of Great Britain?

I mean, the Prime Minister Starmer is, you know, he's still getting his sea legs in the job in many respects, and he's got this roguery

going on from his ally

who's behaving like a 10-year-old.

I don't know.

I think crap show is the technical term they teach you in second year of economy majors, right?

The reason I kind of would try to frame these things in the context of the week things didn't go so well or the week the Trump administration hit roadblocks, because Ukraine, we were meant to do in a day.

That clearly isn't happening.

There is no negotiation.

He's just rolling over.

The rows with Elon Musk and Bescent are an indication of the fact that I think Musk is on his way out, as he said, that there's little tolerance for that form and there's a big fight in the administration.

But the tariff thing, we've seen it again.

The markets are roaring back.

And obviously every single country is trying to figure out how they can deal with their own tariff regime with the United States.

So they are having conversations.

But

I'm not seeing a deal on the table with anybody.

All we had this week was JD Vance and India saying we've agreed to start negotiating.

I mean, don't confuse that with a trade negotiation, which can take, if you look at, you know, NAFTA, that took about four years to negotiate.

So good luck with coming up in the next, how long have we got?

We had 90 days pause.

We've got like 60 days more of pause.

There is not a single trade deal on the table.

So I think allies are also watching.

So they're watching.

how that's not really happening.

They're watching how Donald Trump this week basically caved on China.

Scott Besant speaking to a bunch of Wall Street people saying, oh, please don't leak this.

And they leak it obviously two minutes later, basically saying this is unsustainable.

And Trump has already said to the Chinese, of course we're not going to keep the tariffs this high.

What's rule one of negotiating in the Trump playbook, The Art of the Deal, is you never concede anything, right?

He's conceded.

He's put America's cards on the table.

So I think for the rest of the world, the chinks in the White House's tariff weakness have kind of emerged this week in a way that they hadn't done before.

And that is ceding a certain amount of power.

That's an excellent point.

And the backstory to a lot of that concession

is going back to what we were saying earlier about the people around Donald Trump who's whispering in his ear and trying to get him to understand is what he's hearing now is from everyday folks out there through their representatives.

Republicans don't want to do town hall meetings because they get their ass blowed up.

Hold that thought, Michael Steele.

We're going to take a quick break.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US and my new co-host, Michael.

Anthony, Anthony, who was the other guy?

Anthony, Anthony, where art thou, oh Anthony?

Come ye back from the Caribbean.

Come ye back from the Caribbean, baby.

Come on.

Okay, Michael Steele.

Former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

How's it going?

It sucks hard.

It really does.

I don't know what the hell has happened to my party.

I'm in my 49th year as a member of the Republican Party.

Next year will be 50 years, if I make it that long.

I joined as a young man of 17.

My first election was Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford in 1976.

And we were, the party was reeling, Caddy, from the Vietnam War,

the cultural revolution that had occurred and was continuing to occur.

The Equal Rights Amendment was all the raids and working its way through Congress.

You had women burning their bras.

You had the sexual revolution, the war in Vietnam, the war on crime.

Are these themes somewhat familiar, folks?

Yes.

It is amazing how particularly on the cultural front, the Republican Party sort of stood itself up to resist

this more

free-flowing anti-1950s kind of revolution of American culture.

Certainly at that time, we were dealing with a new pope, Paul VI,

after the death of John XXIII, who had opened up the church doors and windows to the world.

And everybody was going, oh my God, someone closed the windows quick.

But it opened up a lot of things that would then come back and really uh uh crush the church and the sexual abuse why for you the republican party i mean you came out of that period of cultural tumult in america particularly the civil rights movement you were born and raised in maryland is that right well i was actually born in maryland at andrews air force base but raised in washington dc liberal state at that point still a democratic state what drew you to the republican Party because it was a not an obvious thing for a black man in Maryland involved in politics at that time to join the Republican Party as opposed to the Democratic Party.

Because the Democrats were wooing black voters generally very hard.

The early 1970s, that was not necessarily the case.

You know, again, I grew up, growing up in the city in D.C.,

the world that unfolded was my backyard.

So all the protests, you know, whether it was the 68 riots where the city basically, they burned big swaths of the city on the murder of Martin Luther King.

The cultural revolution played out,

the protests for the war.

So all these things kind of influenced.

But when I got to that stage, as my mom, my mom used to say, God rest her, she would always say, how did you become a Republican?

And I would look at her and I'd say, well, you raised me well.

And my mom raised me in a city that was still segregated.

in large measure.

There were parts of towns she could not take me as a child to.

There were parks we couldn't go play in.

And this was still in the early 1960s, mid-1960s.

The city was kind of moving out of this segregationist mindset.

Folks forget Washington is a southern city.

It's below the Mason-Dixon line.

And it's officially in the south.

And so it's a lot of that culture and that attitude is baked in.

But for me,

the transforming moment were twofold.

One, my mother in the spring of the year that I I could vote before I registered to vote, and I was asking her what I should do.

She's a Democrat.

My dad was a Democrat.

They're both Roosevelt Democrats from the 1930s and 40s.

So I said, what should I do?

She said, well, don't be a Democrat because we're Democrats.

Find out for yourself what you value and what's important to you and do that.

Right.

And so I did.

I went out.

I learned about both parties, Katty, and I learned about the history of the Republican Party, which is why I always refer to myself as a a Lincoln Republican, never just a Republican.

I always wanted to be very clear.

I'm out of the Lincoln-Douglas definition of the party from its founding about the individual rights and liberties of everyone under our Constitution.

We're all free to follow our dream, to create our American dream.

We're all free to raise our families the way we see fit.

We're all free to live our lives the way we should.

Now, some will say that has libertarian bent to it.

It has the

whatever.

For me, the core has always been what the party was formed on, was

recognizing that the words in this document right here, our Constitution, right,

laid out for us why we are Americans and why to this day we are the place people still want to come to because of what the words in this document say, but more importantly, how we live it out.

So that animated me.

76 campaign, the former governor of California, running for president, Ronald Reagan, failed attempt at the presidency, laid out in his loss.

And if you recall the moment when he lost, Ford called him onto the stage at the convention and allowed him to speak and give a concession.

And I was just so moved by what he said because he spoke about an America that my mother used to talk to me about, a place where I could realize my self-worth and my dreams.

And, you know, I could get beyond the bonds of segregation and Jim Crow.

Your mother, who had been born into a sharecropping family in South Carolina,

then worked as a laundress to raise you children after your father died

and ignored the advice.

of her friends to take government assistance

because she said that she didn't want the government raising her children.

I mean, that is, I can see where your Republican roots come from.

That idea that you do it by yourself.

Yeah, and my mom, when I would tell her, I would say sometimes, mom, that was very Republican of you.

She'd look at me like I have four heads, right?

I think Maybell was a Republican.

Yeah, she loves Detail.

But all of that moved me, and it set in motion for me this idea that this party, given its connection to my community as an African-American, the party that freed the slaves, the party that elected the first black men to Congress and to the United States Senate governors, that fought for the extension of our rights by extending the black community the vote.

That was a powerful storyline.

But then there's the rest of the story.

And the rest of the story was we gave up too quickly on Reconstruction.

The rest of the story was we embraced white nationalism too quickly.

We've always had this underthread, which many of us inside the party, both as activists and as leaders in the party, have always tried to fight against.

And

the party leadership caddy always had to sort of redirect, steer the party away from some of these uglier impulses.

The John Birch Society in the 1950s, which segregationist group wanting to take control of the party.

Barry Goldwater in his 64 campaign for the presidency.

basically jettisoned all support for civil rights that the party had fought for in the voting rights and the Civil Rights Act.

So we've always had this struggle within the party, which is why I stay for that fight, to hold the party true to its true north, that Lincoln Republicanism.

When you were chair of the Republican National Committee from 2009 to 2011, just after Barack Obama had been elected, was it a struggle you were aware of at that stage?

in the Republican Party, in your Republican Party?

Yes.

I mean, because it was a struggle that I'd had to contend with as a state party chairman of Maryland and as a county party chairman here in Prince George's County, Maryland.

Yeah,

it has always been that.

But

the difference was, and this is such an important aspect of this,

the difference was there were always men

and women in leadership

who would remind the party of that true north, right?

It would remind the party of

our origin story and why it was important.

So you'd have Bush 41, President George H.W.

Bush, who talked about America through this concept of a thousand points of light, where we help each other.

His policies were designed to

help Americans on their path to their dreams, right?

So it was this recognition that we weren't about grievances and turning against people and you're bad, you're good, but trying to move us all in a better direction.

So you had that, Eisenhower, you had that with Teddy Roosevelt.

I mean, we were the environmental part, for God's sake.

We were advocates for environmental policy when everybody wanted to just drill, baby, drill, right?

Which I coined, by the way, just for the record, Donald Trump.

You heard it here first.

Yeah.

So those things were very, very important.

That's the difference between the party and its struggles then and the party and and its struggles now.

Then the party leadership stood to resist that thread, that undercurrent, that underbelly of seeking power for the sake of power and having in place

systems that did not benefit everybody to what it's doing now.

And the leadership capitulates.

It gives in.

It doesn't resist.

When that fail-safe goes away,

this is what you have.

There's no resistance to Donald Trump from the Republican leadership.

You don't hear Speaker Johnson is a sycophant.

In fact, he was one of the architects of January 6th of the insurrection.

He quietly worked behind the scenes to make it happen.

You know, so as Speaker, you think he's going to resist Donald Trump?

John Thune, who is an institutionalist, groomed by Mitch McConnell for the leadership, leadership, right?

Where's the resistance?

He knows better.

He absolutely knows better.

He knows this whackery is bad for the country and is damn sure bad for the party.

No resistance to it.

Won't even get started on Lindsey Graham.

Yeah.

You know?

So this is where we are.

So you're still in the Republican Party.

You're still a member.

It's not tea in this cup.

Let me tell you.

Let me tell you, my British brother and sister, it ain't tea.

Michael needs a good dose of something else.

We know what Trump has done to the party and how he's captured it.

We've seen that with the rollover on the nominations recently.

The fact that Pete Hagseff, who had absolutely no experience, is now running.

America's Defense Department.

And look at the trouble it's causing everybody.

But we just, you know, you can name the countless times they've rolled over, despite their better instincts and despite what they would say to you and I on a regular basis in private.

What is it going to take or do you think there is even a possibility for something to happen for the Republican Party to become the party where you once again feel at home and recognize the policies, the Republican Party of Lincoln,

both the policies and the people that brought you into the Republican Party?

I'm presuming that you wouldn't stay in it if you didn't think there was a chance for it to shift.

Well, i i think i could begin to answer that this way uh we can't grow enough marijuana on the planet for that to happen

it's just it just i tell you and colorado they're trying

it's true how do you reorient the thinking of someone who believes donald trump did not lose the 2020 election to this day how do you reorient the thinking of someone who believes that just grabbing people indiscriminately off the street with jack-booted thugs dressed in black with their faces covered and thrown in the back of a SUV and shipped off to a Louisiana prison or directly put into a foreign prison in El Salvador, that that party is just going to stop doing that?

No.

The fight now is an internal one that's not being really covered by the press.

A lot of folks think that everyone inside the party, folks like me, our numbers are small.

Our numbers are not small.

We're just quiet, and we're quiet for a reason.

And that reason has to do with the plotting and the planning for the next move.

There is a battle coming in 28.

Donald Trump is sort of trying to set himself up, and you already hear the crazy about, oh, yes, we're going to be looking at a third term.

Okay, that's just a lot of noise because I think even among a lot of the MAGA folks in Congress, especially, that's a bridge too far.

Because when you snap that, then you've lost all control.

Even they don't want that.

They want some level of control about who's going to be in that line of succession that they can play out.

So that fight is going to happen.

I want to be a part of that fight.

I stay because I want to be a reminder of what we once valued, because there are a lot of us that value that.

And more importantly, Caddy, there are a lot of Americans who value that.

I can't tell you the number of times I'm out and I hear people say, I just wish the Republican Party was like it used to be.

And these are people who disagreed with that party, right, on policies around health and

taxes.

But they recognize that that spirit of Tip O'Neill, for example, the former Speaker of the House Democrat, and Ronald Reagan having these big battles, but then working together to solve the problem.

Newt Gingrich, of all people, and Bill Clinton balancing the country's budget while being impeached.

Right?

Could you imagine doing Barack Obama or

even the Trump era with all the other stuff that getting the country's budget balanced where they would require to sit down and actually connect those dots?

So there are those of us who fight for that,

for a return to that civility in our politics.

This idea that I disagree with Democrats on a whole lot of things.

My friends at MSNBC,

I joke with them all the time, you like me now because we're fighting for democracy.

But when we get back to fighting over policy, y'all not going to love my ass too much.

You know, because I got some views.

And they're conservative.

So just so you know.

But, you know, I think a lot of Americans want that.

And we want the stability of our partnership with our allies.

We want the stability of our partnership with the American people.

And they're not a threat.

We want the stability of recognizing, yes, our immigration system is broken, but it's fixable.

And that the lady standing in New York Harbor holding that light as a beacon to the world to give us they're tired, they're poor, those searching to be free, right?

That still is a value set for us.

And so I want to be in a space where I can make that case for a once-grand party

as it moves or something else is born up out of that.

I want to bring those values with us.

So I'm like, I call it this way, final point is I'm like a Motel 6 Republican.

Someone's got to keep the lights on, right?

So I'm there on the front porch, putting the light bulb in, saying, we good.

Y'all come now.

And there's some SOB out there still shooting out the light bulb, but I got more.

I'm just going to put another light bulb in and we just,

you know, but there will come a point, Caddy, where, yeah, I pack my bags too

and I move on.

But when I do, I'm going to be moving on into something

better.

Just as.

Just as the Republican Party was born out of the Whig Party over the issue of slavery,

Something better will come out of this party born out of MAGA.

That's the leading edge that I want to be a part of.

Michael Steele, keeping the lights on in the Motel 6 Republican Party.

Such a good image.

You'll have people there with you.

Michael, thank you.

It's been a pleasure having you on the program.

And Michael is kindly sticking around for our founding members' QA.

We've got some great questions this week, including: could Trump invoke martial law?

My God, people keep asking me that at the moment.

How permanent is the mess that Trump's created?

And at what point will Trump lose his MAGA crowd?

If you want to listen, you can sign up at therestispoliticsus.com or follow the link in the episode description box.

And if any of you are having Antony withdrawal symptoms, I'm sure you won't be after today's episode.

He will be back as usual for our regular episodes, of course, next week.

Caddy, thank you so much and love the work you're doing and just so glad to be a part of it.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.