Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on Trump’s promises to religious voters

Amna Nawaz:

President Trump makes promises to religious voters, denies writing a letter to Jeffrey Epstein, and has some members of his team wearing many different hats.

It's time for Politics Monday with Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR.

Great to see you both.

Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:

Good to be here.

Amna Nawaz:

So, as you both saw, President Trump was at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., earlier today. He announced upcoming action from the Department of Education to protect prayer in public schools.

Tam, he was also talking about other actions his administration has taken investigating what he calls anti-Christian bias, pardoning anti-abortion rights activists. Why this message and why right now?

Tamara Keith:

He created this Religious Liberty Commission through executive action earlier this year, and this is a regularly scheduled meeting. They have more meetings coming up of this commission, which includes a wide range of mostly Christian people, pastors, as well as administration officials.

And this is part of keeping the promises he made when he was campaigning. Evangelical Christians, white evangelicals are very important to his base. They are very important to how he got elected. He said he wants more prayer in school. He made a lot of promises when he was campaigning.

And, I mean, we have seen this with any number of issues that he campaigned on. He is checking the boxes. He is going down the list. He is going through and trying to deliver on promises he made to key constituencies, which now the midterms are a little bit more than a year away, and you want to keep those constituencies happy when there might be frustration with other things going on.

Amna Nawaz:

Amy, he's not a regular churchgoer, right? But, as Tam points out, this is a core part of his base.

Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:

That's right.

Amna Nawaz:

Is this just about making good on those promises? Is he shoring up weakening support?

Amy Walter:

Yes, I do think that that's exactly right. It is checking a lot of the boxes and saying to folks who voted for him, see, I told you I was going to do these things and I'm delivering on it.

What's interesting, though, as we go into the midterms, we know that getting your base behind you, really important, but you can't win without at least some independent voters. And there was a poll out this weekend from CBS News, and they asked a question this way, which is, do you agree or like the goals of Donald Trump or dislike what his goals are?

And 90-some percent of Republicans said, love, love it. In other words, he's checked all the boxes. He's doing exactly what we wanted it to do. Obviously, Democrats overwhelmingly said, no, we don't like the goals, but only about 40 percent of independents agreed with the goals.

And this gets to the central challenge as we go into this upcoming election, which is, when I talk to Republicans who believe that, yes, the president was elected in part on improving the economy, but also on a lot of these cultural and social issues. And delivering on those cultural and social issues will be really important for Republicans to talk about as we go into the next election.

However, it is also clear that concerns about the economy are a major drag. And it's also true that, even on some of the issues where he has put the most emphasis, immigration, for example, or even on crime, he's not getting the return on that from independent voters.

Amna Nawaz:

There has been an issue that splintered his base somewhat. That is the pressure to release more of the Jeffrey Epstein files, which his White House has not yet done. We saw just today House Democrats released this letter that President Trump has repeatedly denied even writing to Jeffrey Epstein.

Does that kind of thing, the letter, his denials, does that matter to supporters?

Amy Walter:

What's interesting is, I think the issue matters. I don't think his presence as a part of it, i.e., whether he knew Jeffrey Epstein, whether he wrote that letter or not, is as important.

I think the animating force of this issue is this idea of — and many of his supporters feel this way — that there is overall just an elite class of people who do bad things that are corrupt and get away with it, and that this was going to be an opportunity for Donald Trump to rip off that shield around them.

And so even if you listen to somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has come out and said she wants to see this report, she has said repeatedly, I don't think Donald Trump has anything to do with any of this. This isn't about Donald Trump.

So while Democrats may see that letter and say, ah, it implicates him.

Amna Nawaz:

Yes.

Amy Walter:

What somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene or many supporters will say is, I'm not concerned about Donald Trump and what he did. I don't think he had anything to do with it. But I know there are a lot of famous people and influential people who need to be exposed.

Amna Nawaz:

Well, Tam, let's talk a little bit more about who the president has around him. You have been doing some great reporting, finding that there are more people taking on more roles. Tell us about that.

Tamara Keith:

Yes, there are at least a dozen administration officials wearing more than one hat. And what I mean, by that is they have two full-time jobs.

These are not small jobs. These are at least two big jobs. And there are three administration officials who have three jobs. That includes Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also the national security adviser and the archivist of the U.S. He just gave up his fourth job, which he had had for several months, which was being the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development. He handed that off to Russell Vought, who is the budget director, but also the head of CFPB.

In that particular case, it's very clear that Russell Vought is sort of the Grim Reaper of the administration's when it comes to agencies that the president and his party want to get rid of. And the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and USAID are both on the chopping block.

Amna Nawaz:

What does it say to you that there seem to be now fewer people around the president because more of them are taking more jobs?

Tamara Keith:

And these people are loyal to President Trump in a way that his administration didn't always have loyalists in the first term. In the first term, he had to lean on a lot of former Bush administration officials. This time, these are loyalists. These are people that he trusts.

And what one person told me is that Trump is used to running a family business where, if somebody is good and you trust them, you just give them more projects. And so this is President Trump running the U.S. government, which is a very different beast, as sort of like he ran his family business.

Amna Nawaz:

Well, let me ask, Amy, about one specific member of the team. That is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

He took some tough questions on Capitol Hill from Democrats, yes, but also from several Republicans, notably the doctors in the Senate.

Amy Walter:

Yes.

Amna Nawaz:

It's clear there's some frustration, though, here growing among the president's own party about Kennedy's policies. But this line some of them are trying to walk. We saw them really hold up the president, the work that he did on Operation Warp Speed to get to a COVID vaccine, and still criticize Kennedy.

Amy Walter:

Right.

Amna Nawaz:

How difficult is that line?

Amy Walter:

Well, the president himself is sort of walking that line.

When he was asked about the Florida decision on no vaccine mandates, he was like, I don't know if that's such a great idea. He has said, even in response to some of the things that the health secretary said, not all vaccines are bad, right? So he too is trying to have a very clear line there.

It's also notable that a poll was leaked from the president's own pollster, Tony Fabrizio, where the poll memo, we don't have — it really is just a poll memo. So it feels like one of those things that was meant to be leaked that went out to senators, especially Republican senators, saying a majority of Trump voters believe in vaccines.

And so, while they said don't mistake a lot of the frustration that many Republicans have about the COVID vaccine for a blanket disbelief in vaccines. Vaccines are still popular. So that is how the line is now being walked.

Amna Nawaz:

Tam, given all that, what does that mean for Republicans trying to create this wedge here between Kennedy and the president?

Tamara Keith:

So, yes, here's the thing. These Republicans had an opportunity to make Kennedy not be the health and human services secretary. That is the advise-and-consent role of the Senate.

And several of these senators had reservations, and they were reassured that Kennedy wouldn't do some of the very things that he is doing now. But he's in. And so the only way to get Kennedy out essentially is to get the president to fire him. So far, I don't think President Trump is anywhere close to that, in part because the MAHA, the Make America Healthy Again movement, was a big part of his base.

It's part of how he won. And making America healthy again is another one of these promises that he wants to say he's keeping.

Amna Nawaz:

We will see that key report coming out very soon as well.

Tamara Keith and Amy Walter, always great to see you. Thank you.

Amy Walter:

You're welcome.

Tamara Keith:

You're welcome.