The Morning Dispatch: What’s Next for the GOP

Happy Wednesday! A big thank you to everyone who tuned in to all or some of our What’s Next event programming the past two days, and an even bigger thank you to the three behind-the-scenes Dispatch staffers who worked tirelessly to make it happen: Catherine Lowe, Valerie Smith, and Caleb Parker.

If you missed a session—or want to rewatch one—they are all archived here.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• President Donald Trump has fired much of the senior leadership of the Department of Defense over the last 48 hours, including the Secretary of Defense and his chief of staff, the top Pentagon policy official and the top Pentagon intelligence official. In their place, the president has installed Trump loyalists, including Kash Patel, a National Security Council official close to Rep. Devin Nunes, and Anthony Tata, onetime nominee to serve as undersecretary of defense for policy whose nomination stalled after reporting on controversial comments he’d made about Islam and Barack Obama. The changes at the Pentagon comes after the White House named Michael Ellis, another former Nunes aide, to serve as the top lawyer at the National Security Agency. The moves have alarmed top military and national security officials, who worry that there may be more to come, possibly including combatant commanders and top officials at the FBI and the CIA. The removals have prompted a wave of speculation in Washington about the motives. One former Trump administration official familiar with the shakeups tells The Dispatch there’s no great mystery. The White House is “preparing for the second Trump administration.”

• Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a similar comment at a State Department briefing Tuesday, responding to questions from reporters about what his team is doing to prepare for a transition. Pompeo promised “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration,” with a laugh. While he might have been joking, Trump himself tweeted about the comment favorably. In an interview Tuesday evening with Fox News anchor Bret Baier, Pompeo pledged a smooth transition regardless of who is inaugurated on January 20.

• President-elect Joe Biden projected calm on Tuesday despite President Trump’s continued refusal to concede the election. “The fact that they’re not willing to acknowledge we won at this point is not of much consequence for our planning and what we’re able to do between now and January 20,” Biden said. He called Trump’s post-election behavior an “embarrassment,” adding that it “will not help the president’s legacy.”

• The Centers for Disease Control updated its guidance on masks to indicate that masks protect the individuals wearing them, not just those around them. “Experimental and epidemiological data support community masking to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2,” the CDC’s website reads. “The prevention benefit of masking is derived from the combination of source control and personal protection for the mask wearer.” The number of people currently hospitalized with COVID-19 hit an all-time high yesterday, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

• The New York Times contacted election officials in all 50 states to inquire about whether they’d observed fraud as they oversaw the recent elections. “Officials in 45 states responded directly to The Times. For four of the remaining states, The Times spoke to other statewide officials or found public comments from secretaries of state; none reported any major voting issues.”

• An internal investigation conducted by the Vatican detailed a decades-long cover up of the sexual misconduct of defrocked cardinal Theodore McCarrick with seminarians, priests, and teenage boys. The report found Pope John Paul II was aware of the allegations against McCarrick as early as 1999. McCarrick remained in public ministry until 2018.

• Oral arguments in the Affordable Care Act case, brought before the Supreme Court by Republican state attorneys general, seemed to indicate the law is safe. Chief Justice John Roberts said it’s “not [the court’s] job” to overturn the ACA, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh told lawyers defending the ACA he agreed with their arguments that the individual mandate could be “severed” from the whole if the legislation were to be altered.

• The United States confirmed 133,920 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 10.8 percent of the 1,237,365* tests reported coming back positive. An additional 1,416 deaths were attributed to the virus on Tuesday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 239,618. According to the COVID Tracking Project, 61,964 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19. (*The JHU Dashboard testing numbers glitched again yesterday, so we got the new test number from the COVID Tracking Project.)

Recapping Our What’s Next Event

Our first-ever Dispatch event is in the books, and, although it didn’t look exactly like we envisioned it would pre-pandemic, we were thrilled with how it turned out and the enthusiastic responses we’ve received from so many of you. With that in mind, we wanted to recap some of the newsier moments from the past two days for those of you who weren’t able to tune in.

Republican Elected Officials Split on Accepting Presidential Election Results

In the days since decision desks—from the Associated Press to Fox News—called the presidential race for Joe Biden, relatively few prominent Republicans have spoken up against President Trump’s (thus far) evidence-free claims of widespread voter fraud. Even fewer have extended their congratulations to the president-elect.

We happened to speak with two of the Republicans in that latter camp yesterday. “To me it seems pretty obvious that Vice President Biden is going to end up with 306 electoral votes,” Sen. Ben Sasse said during his conversation with Jonah on Tuesday. “That’s not particularly close, and for Trump to have any claim here they would need to overturn either two big states or three states overall. And it doesn’t look like any of the elections are really in doubt.”

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan concurred, explaining that Biden’s margin of victory in the Electoral College is wide, and only growing wider. “I wasn’t a supporter of Joe Biden’s, but I am a big supporter of our democratic processes and systems,” he told Sarah. “We cast the votes, we count the votes, and we live with the results.”

Longtime George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove also acknowledged Biden’s victory in a Monday panel with Sarah, Steve, and Democratic strategist Joe Trippi. “He’s our president, he’s due our prayers, he’s due our best wishes, he’s due a honeymoon unlike the guy who preceded him,” Rove said. “This act of the drama is going to come to a close soon.”

But not every What’s Next panelist was ready to go there yet.

Asked if he’d congratulated Biden yet on his victory, Sen. Tim Scott said he hadn’t. “The process continues, honestly. And I’m going to wait until the end until I jump into that fray,” he said. “There’s no doubt that the president has not conceded the election, and that his team and his focus will be on defending that position and hoping for perhaps the Hail Mary to be caught.”

Rep. Liz Cheney focused on candidates’ rights under the Constitution. “Either candidate, frankly, has the right to make the claims if they think there has been fraud,” she said. “The key thing is the courts are the forum where we see evidence presented. And it will be the courts that make the decision about that evidence. But there’s certainly the right here for the president’s team to do that and to have that adjudicated as we go forward.”

“If you look at the vote totals across a number of states,” Cheney continued, “the race was called for Joe Biden. But our system doesn’t work, that that’s the end of the line. The way that our system works is that you have the right to have your claims adjudicated. … At the end of the day, it’s the judges that make the decision. And they make it based on evidence. On some level, the claims can be made, and they can be made in the court of public opinion. But at the end of the day, it’s going to come down to whether or not there is evidence for those claims.”

Sen. Tim Scott: Police Reform, and the GOP’s Messaging Problem

David French and Sen. Tim Scott spent a hefty portion of Tuesday morning’s discussion talking about police reform and qualified immunity, the doctrine that grants state actors—namely police officers—legal immunity from civil lawsuits unless they have  violated a “clearly established” law. Sen. Scott said that he is open to amending the doctrine to expand access to legal compensation for victims of civil rights violations carried out by law enforcement officials. “What has been a red line has been demonizing and going after the officer himself or herself,” Scott clarified. 

Scott remained optimistic about future police reform efforts, despite his bill having been blocked by Democrats this past summer. “If we have another shot, another bite at the apple, perhaps we’ll have an opportunity to get it done,” he said. “If there is a Biden administration, I think there is an opportunity for us to continue to work on things like police reform. … I hope that under whoever is president in 2021, we’ll have a chance to move that legislation forward.”

Moving from policy to politics, Scott conceded that the GOP has not done a good job marketing its positions on a lot of these issues. “The president has a personality that repels many, but attracts a lot of folks,” Scott conceded. “Figuring out that secret sauce where we can have a policy position carried by someone who has the love language of words of encouragement as well, is going to be the task that we have ahead of us. The president’s love language has never been words of encouragement.”

Gov. Larry Hogan: Common Sense Conservatism

Maryland’s Gov. Larry Hogan—a lifelong Republican in an increasingly blue state—joined Steve and Sarah to share his thoughts on why the Republican Party needs to take a different approach in the post-Trump era. “I’m a lifelong Republican, a Reagan conservative. But I’ve been successful here because I campaigned as a common sense conservative,” he said. “I stood up for my principles, but I focused on advancing bipartisan, common sense solutions. … We focused on finding common ground instead of on divisive rhetoric. We focused on trying to grow the big tent as Reagan did, not just speaking to those who already agreed with us.”

President Trump successfully picked up the second-most votes of any presidential candidate in history last week, Hogan conceded, but he noted that Republicans have only won the popular vote in a presidential election twice since 1988. “If we want to keep winning elections nationwide, we’re going to have to find a way to have a message that appeals to more people instead of an ever-shrinking base,” he said. “It was a great night for the Republican Party, it was best for right-of-center Republicans in suburban areas and in blue states who outperformed the president. … You don’t get to govern unless you win elections, and it looks as if [Trump] didn’t win.”

Rep. Liz Cheney: Foreign Policy and the House

In an interview with Steve, Rep. Liz Cheney responded to a question about President Trump’s firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper. She acknowledged  Trump is president until January 20 no matter what, and he has the right to pick whomever he wants for his Cabinet. “Having said that, I do think it’s very important that we are able to send a message of stability, of reassurance,” she continued. “We are going through our process, and I think that this is a moment where you certainly could have foreign adversaries who would think that they could exploit the situation.”

Moving to national security, she agreed with Rep. Mike Gallagher’s claim from the day prior: That the main foreign policy challenge facing America was “China, China, China, in that order.” 

“If you look back over administrations in both parties, I really think we got China wrong,” Cheney said. “I think there was a sense of if we help them open up economically, and help them become a member of the WTO, they’ll be forced to open up politically and they’ll be responsible players on the world stage. And that didn’t happen.”

But they also discussed other challenges, from Biden’s plans to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal—which Cheney said “essentially gave the Iranians a pathway to a nuclear weapon”—to Cheney’s opposition to a complete drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. “The notion that we’re somehow going to be able to count on the Taliban to keep us safe … is not a responsible way to conduct foreign policy,” she said.

They also discussed why Cheney opted to stay in the House rather than run for the Senate—she says “it’s a fascinating place that I think really reflects this nation”—and why she thinks partisanship in the House is such a problem: “I think you’ve gotta put that at the doorstep of Nancy Pelosi.”

Sen. Ben Sasse: Tocquevillian Politics as a Path Forward

Ben Sasse—frequent Remnant guest, part-time Uber driver, and Nebraska senator—joined Jonah on Tuesday for a discussion about how we might mend our broken nation in a post-Trump era. According to Sasse, it starts with the acknowledgement that there’s more to life than just politics. “Only about 14 percent of the American public pays attention to political news on a daily basis,” he said. “Eighty-sixpercent of people don’t want politics to be the center of their life.”

“We need a lot more people in politics who think the center of life isn’t supposed to be power structures,” Sasse continued. “It really is supposed to be a whole bunch of neighborhoods, and towns and communities across a 330-million-person, continental, really diverse nation.”

Stronger political parties will improve our politics, too. . “The contingencies around what happens next are really giant because the parties are so weak, and there’s such a small share of people that have any confidence in either of these political parties,” Sasse said. But there’s a glimmer of hope here, as the Nebraska senator thinks the extreme degree of polarization in today’s politics has created a real appetite for change among ordinary Americans. “There are a lot of regular people that are really, really tired of just ‘lesser of two evils politics.’ I think there is a real deep desire for gratitude over grievance.”

Dr. Russell Moore: Earning the Evangelical Vote

Dr. Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, joined David for a discussion on the future of evangelicalism in our nation’s politics. The movement has evolved alongside American society to contend with some of 2020’s starkest challenges, including our renewed attention to police brutality and systemic racism, the coronavirus pandemic, and political fragmentation in our institutions and on social media. “My primary worry right now is cynicism,” Moore said. 

As evangelical voters increasingly take on the priorities of younger generations, their platforms become more difficult to predict. “The differences between the evangelical constituency that we see now and what may be seen in the future is not so much that one’s left and one’s right,” said Moore. “It’s a difference in mentality towards politics altogether.”

Rep. Mike Gallagher and Ambassador Mark Green: America and the World

This discussion, from Monday, ended up being very timely as news broke that Trump had fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper not long before it began. “I’ll admit I was a bit surprised that they fired him, even though there’s not going to be a second term most likely. I’m not sure what the strategic move is, other than to prove a point, that Esper has wronged the White House.”

 The group also discussed China. Both Gallagher and Green agrede that a successful Biden foreign policy hinges on his administration’s ability to counter Chinese aggression, through robust American leadership and enterprise around the world. And to that end, Green argues, there is room for optimism. In four years, Biden went from referring to Xi Jinping as a “reformer” to denouncing him as a “thug.”

Strategists Karl Rove and Joe Trippi: Can We Expect a Resurgence of Civility? 

Steve and Sarah talked to the two campaign veterans about the crazy year that was, and what we might have to look forward to in the year ahead. After all, the president-elect’s promise of healing and unity helped secure his election, in contrast to the many House Democrats who buckled under the unpopular rhetoric of “defund the police” and socialism. “He had Teflon on those attacks that other Democrats did not,” explains Trippi.

Worth Your Time

• If you’re wondering why so many prominent elected Republicans are standing by TrumpWorld’s increasingly untethered to reality conspiracies about widespread voter fraud and election theft, Burgess Everett offers one explanation in Politico. “The party needs President Donald Trump’s help to clinch two runoff elections in Georgia on Jan. 5 that will determine the fate of the Senate GOP’s majority,” Everett writes. “And accepting the presidential results ahead of Trump, a politician driven by loyalty, could put Republicans at odds with the president and his core supporters amid the must-win elections down South.”

• In a Q&A for The New Yorker, Isaac Chotiner sat down with Nate Cohn—who heads up the New York Times’ polling and elections analysis operations—to talk about what the polls got wrong. Cohn says the biggest surprises for him this election were Trump’s repeatedly strong showings among white Midwesterners, and the GOP’s relative strength with Hispanic voters. Cohn offered several theories as to why the polls missed badly again, including enthusiastic liberals being more likely to respond, a misunderstanding of the likely electorate due to high turnout, and the coronavirus simply throwing a wrench in things. He also spoke to the potential costs of polling being faulty: “If you cannot do a good job of interpreting the will of the electorate at any given time, our politicians won’t either.”

• “What happens when Trump gets out of our brains?” Katherine Miller asks in her latest for BuzzFeed News. For half a decade, the president has been omnipresent in all our lives—from dawn to dusk—and his successor is … unlikely to keep up the frenetic pace. “Nobody may ever command anyone’s attentions ever again like this,” she writes. “Years from now, this might be difficult to explain: the way entire days got yoked to one person’s rants, reactions, cruelties, refusals, jokes, tangents, and to just thinking so often about the president. Even weirder, and more difficult, would be explaining how an entire country became accustomed to living inside one person’s head.” 

Something Incredible

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Also Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• In his Capitolism newsletter (🔒) Tuesday, Scott Lincicome makes the case for political gridlock, which we are likely to see a lot of over the next few years. “There is substantial evidence that political gridlock can actually be pretty good for the economy and especially good for fans of limited government and fiscal restraint,” he writes. “When the GOP was in charge from 2003 to 2007 and then 2017 to 2018, spending increased at an average annual rate of 7 percent and 4 percent, respectively; when Democrats were in control during Obama’s first two years, it climbed 16 percent. On the other hand, when government was divided during the last six years of the Obama era, spending climbed at an annual average of just 1.9 percent.”

• On the latest episode of The Remnant, Jonah is joined by Carlos Lozada, the Washington Post’s book critic, to discuss the glut of books that have been published about Trump over the past several years. Lozada has read about 150 of them, if you can believe it. What does this canon say about our politics, our culture, and our era? 

Let Us Know

We’ll ask you a question similar to what Sarah asked the guys in the event recap last night: Are you more or less optimistic about the future of the country, conservatism, and the Republican Party than you were a week ago?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), James P. Sutton (@jamespsuttonsf), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).