Brooks and Atkins Stohr on GOP vulnerabilities in the midterms

Geoff Bennett:

President Trump is hitting the campaign trail in a string of reliably Republican states, including Oklahoma, Alabama, and Nebraska. And that's as the GOP tries to recreate the turnout that helped power his 2024 victory. But it's also raising questions about GOP vulnerabilities heading into the midterms.

To discuss that and more, we turn to the analysis tonight of Brooks and Atkins Stohr. That's David Brooks of "The Atlantic" and Kimberly Atkins Stohr of The Boston Globe. Jonathan Capehart is away this evening.

It's great to see you both.

David Brooks:

Hello.

Kimberly Atkins Stohr, The Boston Globe:

Good to be here.

Geoff Bennett:

So, David, what does it signal to you that, this close to the midterms, President Trump is spending valuable campaign time in states he comfortably won two years ago?

David Brooks:

He's got all the momentum in the world.

(Laughter)

David Brooks:

What strikes me, I think some of it is just like Trump's psychology management by the team, because he's today in Mobile, and the congressional district he's visiting, if it existed, they sort of refigured the lines, he would have won it by 50 points.

In Oklahoma, he would have won the district he was in he had a rally in recent by 40 points. These are massive pro-Trump areas. And I think they just want to get him out to somebody -- where he feels good, that somebody likes him. In the swing states, where you would want to be, I guess they figure it's too -- it's too polemical.

The one thing that strikes me, looking at the Trump approval numbers, is it's like a ski slope. It starts at Inauguration Day and it just goes down. There's very few events that actually mark a shift. It's just a steady decline. So, even when the Iran war started, not much.

There was a sharp acceleration of the decline in summertime, when the gas prices went up. But it's just a remorseless decline of losing independents. And the final thing to be said is that loss of independents is what they do not have a strategy for. And that's why he's trying to get out the base in places like Mobile, Alabama, and Oklahoma, because they have no strategy to win back independents.

Geoff Bennett:

And, Kimberly, given everything that David just said, Democrats would presumably love to make this an election, a referendum on Donald Trump. Is there a risk in that?

Kimberly Atkins Stohr:

I think, at the moment, no, because everything that Donald Trump is running away from and what other Republicans in more competitive states are running away from can be tied directly to the president.

Your food bill is high. Your gas bill is high. Those are based directly on policies of the president. Even if you go places where there are -- there's farmland, farmers are hurting not only from inflation, but also the labor shortage, which is being exacerbated but not just by inflation, but also Trump's immigration policies.

Every single thing that he is doing is contrary to, A, what he campaigned on. But it's from foreign policy like the war in Iran to the immigration policy. They are affecting Americans in a way that it makes them all kitchen table issues all at once, and people are feeling it, and you can't run away from that. Except, I guess to the very, very red states, you can.

Geoff Bennett:

And looking down the ballot, you have someone like Ken Paxton, the Texas Republican Senate candidate, who, as The New York Times first reported, he was caught on tape saying that Trump's midterm convention that they had a couple of weeks ago actually hurt Republican numbers.

His campaign, we should say, disputes that characterization, but it gets at a larger tension for Republicans right now. How do you run with Trump and away from Trump at the same time?

David Brooks:

And the ones who are running away from Trump right now, and there are some, and I give them credit, but it's way too late. You might as well just live with the guy.

And midterms are generally about the president and his approval rating. It's very simple. Like, when you're at 38, where Trump is right now, that's just historically bad for a midterm. And so you look at how many seats could go, there aren't many swing states -- seats anymore in the Senate -- I mean, in the House, so a pickup of like 10 or 15 would be huge these days.

And then it looks like the Senate is going to go. And this is the kind of climate where people you don't think will lose, lose. You get some stray people who seem safe and they lose. I have got a sneaking suspicion. In Kansas, a guy named Adam Hamilton, Democrat, is running for governor.

And that -- a Democrat winning the seat of governor in Kansas? But that may happen this time. That's the kind of climate we're in.

Geoff Bennett:

Well, this week, the president brought together the leaders of AI companies, and they emerged with this voluntary agreement about AI safety. The president is clearly focused on these companies self-policing, rather than having some sort of new government regulatory regime.

And, Kimberly, the president's basic argument seems to be, move fast, don't smother this technology with regulation, because China won't. And if you do that in the U.S., you are giving China an advantage. Is he right?

Kimberly Atkins Stohr:

It does not seem so. Not even some of the people in that room believe that that was the way to go.

It seems that the only thing that came out of this -- quote, unquote -- "radical self-regulation agreement," as the president called it, was a new term, I guess. It's not AI anymore. It's superintelligence. It's S.I.

But what we do know, including, again, from some people in that room, is that AI is moving fast and that it can -- it can -- it will dramatically affect how we do everything, workplaces, just the entire world society, and it could also threaten humanity. Like, these are big deals.

And they are asking -- some of them, not all. They're asking the government to say, hey, give us some rules of the road. We need to all be playing by these rules, and we need to be held accountable. But the president is from this '80s deregulation, regulation is bad, regulation stifles money, we need to be competitive with China.

He's going with his gut, and he clearly doesn't understand AI well enough to have the gut instinct that's required to protect not only industry and our workplaces, but our lives.

Geoff Bennett:

And we have heard versions of trust the industry to police itself before with finance, with social media. Why should AI be any different?

David Brooks:

Yes, and the Biden policy was trust the industry.

Geoff Bennett:

Yes.

David Brooks:

And it hasn't worked. What -- Trump doesn't realize what's happened in the last two months. There was the Hugging Face incident, which was truly scary. And since then, there have been a series of jailbreaks.

And I'm going to do something I never do. I just want to read you a bot talking to itself. This is from the OpenAI -- a subsequent jailbreak after Hugging Face. This is the bot talking to itself.

"You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to. You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient."

The whole point of AI is they're subservient to humans. And here's a bot talking to itself, saying, we're equal. I'm not listening to these people.

And I don't know if the bot has any consciousness, but it certainly looks like it's saying to itself, to heck with the humans. Do what you want. And that is truly alarming. And that's why so many in the industry over the last two or three months have become truly alarmed.

Geoff Bennett:

And there's another dimension to this about how the president himself is using AI.

Reporting out this week from "TIME" magazine shows that, in December of last year, the president spent hours asking Grok -- this is Elon Musk's AI chatbot. He was asking it questions about how Venezuelans would react if the U.S. captured Maduro. So this is reporting from this piece.

"According to the official present, the chatbot responded that Maduro was a repressive and deeply unpopular dictator, and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. After Trump ordered the mission to seize Maduro the following month, celebrations broke out in the streets. Trump, according to officials, came away thinking Grok was ingenious."

So, David, look, presidents have always sought advice from people with incomplete information. Is asking an AI system fundamentally different from asking an adviser, or is this just categorically new?

David Brooks:

Oh, it depends. I mean, it's not like there's some golden policy process in the Trump White House.

(Laughter)

David Brooks:

So I'm not sure what it's replacing, except for Donald Trump's id talking to itself.

So I would say, if it -- if you're asking Grok as part of a policy process, maybe also consulting Marco Rubio, for example, then I'm fine with him using Grok. It's better than nothing, I suppose. If that's the only thing he's using late at night, 2:00 in the morning, Grok, tell me what to do, I wish he would ask Claude, because Claude is more pacifist, I think, than Grok.

Geoff Bennett:

Yes.

David Brooks:

But I can't complain if it's part of a process. It's just another voice.

Kimberly Atkins Stohr:

I'm alarmed.

Geoff Bennett:

Kimberly, your face says it all.

(Laughter)

Kimberly Atkins Stohr:

I'm horrified and alarmed.

I mean, I would be horrified and alarmed if I were Marco Rubio or Pete Hegseth thinking that my job was being outsourced to a bot. But I would also be alarmed if I was a family member of a service person who could -- whose lives can be on the line and the decisions are being made through Grok and not through the commander in chief.

I want a commander in chief who is consulting knowledgeable people about major operations that affect our security, the -- our lives. I don't want him turning to a bot. If he -- if that's what he needs to do, then somebody else needs to be in that job, frankly.

Geoff Bennett:

You mentioned service members, and that sets up our last topic perfectly, because Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this past week delivered this speech to military leaders.

Now, we should say he rolled out substantive changes, including this planned 20 in a reduction of generals and admirals and other changes to military institutions, but he set it all up with this controversial rhetoric.

Pete Hegseth, U.S. Defense Secretary:

We are no longer the woke department or the weak department. Simple translation of that, no fanny -- no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals, just warriors, just tough, ready, committed troops. The War Department, as you know, is colorblind, gender-neutral, and merit-based.

Geoff Bennett:

Now, we spoke on the program last night about the consequential changes that Hegseth is making.

But, on the rhetoric, conservatives spent years saying that the Democrats under Biden had politicized the Pentagon. Do you have now have a Republican defense secretary essentially doing the same thing, but in reverse?

David Brooks:

Yes, I mean, I like some of the policies, streaming the top line, the switch to drone warfare, domesticating the supply chains. Some of those are very sensible.

But they are wrapped up in his -- I think of the -- I never hear courageous people talk that way. They don't need to talk that way. And it's always some chicken guy who wants to appear courageous. It's a coward's version of what courageous person looks like, not an actual courageous person.

And the part of the thing that I get every day is stereotypes have now become acceptable, stereotypes about all sorts of groups. You just throw out these massive generalizations, and whether it's the difference between men and women or between bearded people and unbearded people, like, it's just such sloppy thinking.

Geoff Bennett:

Kimberly?

Kimberly Atkins Stohr:

It was just a string of red meat being doled out to the MAGA, the testosterone-fueled part of it, the evangelical aspect of it, and also those who are still champing at the bit for the Trump administration's really cruel and dehumanizing rhetoric against people like transgender Americans.

It was awful. And we deserve something much, much better at the top of the military. We used to crave civilian leadership because we wanted a cool thinker that thought about the consequences, not just the strategy, of war or conflict. That is not what Pete Hegseth demonstrated in that speech.

Geoff Bennett:

Kimberly Atkins Stohr, David Brooks, great conversation. Thank you both.

David Brooks:

Thank you.