Welcome to Party Politics, where we prepare you for your next political conversation.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina, a political science professor at the University of Houston.

And I'm Brenda Rottinghaus, also a political science professor here at the University of Houston.

Thanks for hanging out with us and talking politics on an exciting post-Super Bowl week.

We've got a lot going on.

The big picture of the week is going to be a question about whether or not you can be too old to run for president.

Okay, maybe not be president, although that's part of the question.

Right.

This has been the kind of swirl of controversy after the special counsel released a report on Joe Biden that suggested that maybe his memory wasn't as good as it was.

Who among us?

Right.

But this is a kind of ongoing question because unlike us, who in the classroom can make a flub here or there?

He's the leader of the free.

Yeah.

And so making mistakes can.

Be considered.

Grave consequences.

So before we get to that, though, let's talk about going back in time.

And that's Robert F Kennedy Junior Super Bowl ad.

Now, we missed this ad because we were having a little party politics get together.

So our dinner party precluded us watching the specifics of the Super Bowl and the.

Super Bowl entire.

Some of it.

But like very little of it.

And the halftime show, which was, I thought, quite entertaining.

Yeah, but obviously we had important things to do, so we missed the ad.

But after the fact, people were talking about the politics of it.

So if you hadn't seen it then this is basically like a redo of John Kennedy's ad from the 1960s.

I actually show this to my students because it's really kind of catchy.

AD And in contrast to the ads of the day.

Well, I say this in contrast to the ads of the day, where it was like Richard Nixon, like looking very formal.

Right, right, right.

The camera, it was okay.

I see what you're saying.

Interesting.

And showed his kind of vitality.

But if you show this context today, it didn't exactly translate.

But the Kennedy family's mad because frankly, they were always mad at RFK.

Jr His positions on vaccines and other things are a little bit outside of the boundaries of where the family is.

But I actually think it's kind of a smart play.

It's expensive to run Super Bowl ad.

7 million.

But and I don't have the 7 million his super PAC did, but he did two things with this.

Number one, he said, you know, okay, I am sorry this happened.

I'm going to renounce this, although he did pin it to his Twitter account.

So how much of a renunciation is it?

But beyond that, I think it's more because you got a lot of free media from it, right?

We're still talking about it days later.

So what's your take on how this ad landed?

Well, I don't think anyone knows or remembers JFK, you know, especially younger generations there now.

And not that ad.

Right.

Exactly.

It's like, yeah, sure.

I don't know.

But political historians like us, we like that.

Stuff, right?

We do like that stuff.

But but again, what he got out of it was just basically people talking about him and creating perhaps name recognition and so on and so forth.

But the family came back, you know, pretty hard, you know, like you are the Yankee boxer, the black sheep of the family, you know, you use my mom, Mr. Shriver said.

And, you know, she would not be happy at all with these, you know, political leanings of of your campaign.

So, yeah, he got what he wanted, a little bit of talk.

But, you know, by the end of this week, we're going to be on another thing.

It'll be something else, right?

Yeah.

No.

And the question is, who's the target?

My sense is that they weren't really clear about that, that they just wanted sort of by soliciting.

And if you're running as a third party in this country, that's kind of what you need to do.

Need some eyeballs?

Yeah, he got that.

Yeah.

Not as much as Usher, probably, but you know, he did.

Okay.

That's true.

Speaking of attention, this week, Donald Trump made some serious headlines when he suggested at a rally that Russia could do whatever the heck they wanted.

I'm putting a different word in there to any NATO member nation who is not meeting its spending commitment.

The president has been very vocal about how the allied nations have to be able to contribute to NATO's in a way that they maybe haven't been and that the U.S. is doing in a different way.

Now, this also follows up reporting that was done by Politico during a private meeting in 2020.

Trump told the European Commission president that you need to understand that if Europe is attack, we will not come to your aid.

So what do you think about the kind of foreign policy ramifications of this?

And is this going to hurt Donald Trump?

Very serious policy ramifications in terms of foreign policy.

Europe is extremely nervous.

Especially right now.

yeah.

Like, it's like these are not times to play the game of chicken.

Yeah.

On the one hand.

And here.

Is it going to hurt him?

Absolutely not.

You know, it's the situation.

Foreign policy is extremely complicated nowadays.

So the way that the Republican Party, the way that Trump is, is making the argument, he's like, yeah, that's money that we could be using to solve our problems.

But yet again, we don't want to solve a problem.

Not right now yet, but when I'm president.

Exactly.

So, you know, that has very, very serious implications.

Right?

Whether Europe is asking is like, should we really can we count on the US if these thing happens or not?

And obviously, Russia is salivating right?

Or we have.

Putin put the big map out and he's looks like chess chessboard.

We can go, yeah, here and here, here with the little toy soldiers on the map and move them.

That's what I would do as the leader of some right nation with guns.

But it's just, you know, very bad.

But it's irresponsible in a way.

And so Nikki Haley comes out saying basically like this should send a chill up everyone's spine.

She says it makes Joe Biden look sane.

So this is actually her sweet spot, Right?

So I think it's an opening for her to emphasize her credentials on foreign policy, which frankly doesn't get talked about as much as it could, but also a way for her to show that, like Trump may not be the kind of most reliable ally, again, like you, I don't know that it's going to matter that much.

But the other thing it does tell us, and this is the watchword of the week, and that's the sort of isolationist populism that Donald Trump has created in the party.

And we saw this also this week, the sort of a allied deal to be able to fund foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel and to Taiwan fell in the Senate.

And that's interesting because, again, this is something that the Republicans have been fighting, right?

How much money do we give to other nations of the this nation's treasure?

Donald Trump says none the right, whereas Republicans have this sort of responsibility in this.

So this is really, I think, a kind of conundrum that they face and is problematic from a big picture perspective, but from a political perspective, I'm not sure.

But now I'm actually about a different sort of Donald Trump ism from the week, and that is that this week he has talked aggressively on the stump about increasing the number of deportation camps.

And exactly what these look like is not clear.

The kind of Trump team has been a little bit vague, but if you think back to how things were, as you know, you know, since you're an expert in this, that there were a lot of temporary kind of tent cities, concrete along the Texas border to house immigrant children who during his term in office saw an increased.

This is something that can be paid for by a Pentagon budget, he says, But obviously as political ramifications because the border is a big issue, in addition to the fact that, you know, we saw that the homeland secretary was was impeached, Alexander Mayorkas.

That's part of this sort of ongoing kind of conundrum about border security and immigration.

What do you make of sort of the political impact of what these things are doing to 2024?

Well, I mean, it's getting the base completely riled up, right?

It's just once again, the situation in which it's a very, very, very good topic to get people excited about the election, especially for those that support Donald Trump.

Yeah.

So I think that that's the only political ramification.

But behind all these plans you have, Stephen Miller and Stephen Miller, He's serious about these things.

Yes.

And he's smart enough to know, you know, the legal route that he would need to do it.

And for example, he talks about the nationalization of state and National Guards, right from red states to enforce immigration policy.

Can this be done?

Technically, it can be done.

So the ramifications in terms of domestic politics, if these move forward, you know, implement and once again, the Muslim travel ban ending birthright citizenship to U.S. born children of undocumented migrants.

So he has a lot of ramifications.

And I think that, you know, people may not take Trump seriously when he battles around in terms of these policy initiatives, But Stephen Miller is serious and Stephen Miller can make a significant dent.

Yes.

In terms of how we move forward.

And that is very dangerous in terms of a institutional perspective.

You make a really good point that I want to bring up again when we talk about whether age is just a number and whether people can be too old to be president because we're not just electing the president.

Right.

Like there are no.

You doing the policy?

no, no.

They're not like checking the laws to see if like this executive orders resonate with that one.

They have a team of people to do that.

So it's really good to have that in mind.

But speaking of the institutional sort of side of things, this week, the former president has tapped a North Carolina GOP chair, Michael Whatley, to succeed Ronna McDaniel, who's stepping down.

There's been friction with Trump in the RNC as he tries to kind of wrestle control away from it.

He's also this week put one of his kind of campaign leaders in that mix.

Chris LaCivita video is online, possibly is sort of he's expecting to be the RNC chief operating officer that spends up to $1,000,000,000 every election cycle, in addition to the fact that Trump is proposing that his daughter in law, Laura Trump, be the RNC co-chair.

Now, I know if I was going to be chair of a committee, I would definitely pick you to be on that team.

Thank you very much.

I trust you.

And maybe he trusts her in that way.

But I think the big picture here is that presidents always try to kind of grasp control of the party apparatus particular.

That's been something we've seen.

Now, some presidents haven't because they've had kind of power outside of that.

So Obama didn't really mess with the Democratic Party because he didn't need to.

They had their own process.

They had their own setting.

But Donald Trump has really tried to do this pretty successfully.

right.

The RNC is one thing because this is the national organization.

But if you look at kind of state by state, you can definitely see the influence of Trump, if not outright kind of his straight control over that.

So what do you think about the way that this is going to affect the election?

And is this something that's useful for Trump in terms of like making a move towards towards winning in November?

Well, I think it's hostile takeover 100%, right?

Yeah.

It's, you know, getting control of that apparatus, as you say.

And I totally agree with it.

And actually, it's a very good point.

Thank you.

Certainly.

Yeah.

Once in a while.

You know, it's only been, what, 15 episodes?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you have, you know, control over all the state apparatus, right?

Once you take control of the national apparatus, you basically own the Republican Party.

So two things could happen here.

Well, the first one is that by tapping North Carolina's party chair, what happens is that North Carolina in 2024 is a must win state right now.

In 2016, Trump won by around 3.6 percentage points.

In 2020, he won by 1.3.

Yeah, there has been a lot of reshuffling in the electorate.

More younger people are moving to the state that hold more progressive views.

But also you have people, you know, moving from Midwestern states, also more conservative.

So balancing things out.

So North Carolina is a must win state.

And having the RNC chair from North Carolina, you know, could speed things up to terms of having that state secure, talking about 16 electoral votes.

So it's good for it's important.

And the other thing that is important is if Trump succeeds in that, my question is, are we going to have the Lincoln Republican Party, you know, just basically having a complete separation and finally have a solid third party, allow in?

I did not expect you to go there.

Go.

Wow.

That's a good question.

I think the short answer is probably not.

Partizanship is so rigid but is possible, right?

I mean, as you see certain issues become kind of cleavage issues, perhaps abortion, is that issue perhaps sort of like marijuana?

Is that issue actually, that's been something locally that might not like last for long.

But basically historically, there have been these sort of big cleavages that have sort of split the electorate in a new way and a different party has formed or the parties that exist have absorbed some of those new ideas.

So it's a good question theoretically, and I do think that there's sort of potential for that.

And we'll talk about the GOP and their kind of battle royale in a few minutes.

But I actually think this is important because the way that Donald Trump has really emphasized the success of the party has been about mobilization.

Right?

He's drilled down vertically instead of going horizontal.

Right.

And most presidents try to use the party apparatus to, like, expand the brand.

Trump is saying none of this.

I'm the brand, and here's what we're going to do.

So that's the reason I think that he wants to have this control.

And frankly, you know, it's not unexpected.

Presidents would do this.

And as you say, you know, parties evolve.

And so there's not the party of Lincoln doesn't exist anymore.

Right.

In the same way, just like in 20 years, the party of Trump won't exist in the same way.

It'll be different.

And that's interesting to study.

But, you know, at least in the near term, they have to think about how that's going to play out.

All right.

So the big picture, obviously, this week is about age in the presidency.

This is party politics.

I'm Brandon.

This is Jeronimo.

We're talking about national trends in how people think about the way that age affects presidents.

So the big point of the week is, I think, a turning point in this race potentially.

Let me see what you think this week, as you probably have seen, special counsel Robert Hurl threw a grenade into the 2024 election, basically releasing a report on President Biden's handling of classified documents, calling him an elderly man with a poor memory.

There's a lot of bad stuff in this report for President Biden.

The good news is that it implies he didn't break the law, so no charges have been filed in it.

But I think that at least in terms of the story, it makes it obviously an issue.

Right.

Is Biden too old to be president?

Is Trump too old to be president?

These are important questions.

And there's also the document issue, right?

So both Trump and Biden have got documents, storage issues.

Just don't put it in your house, put it in your office and leave it.

Why they're doing this, I don't know.

But that's been a problem.

And of course, now there's an equivalency on that issue.

So lots of stuff here that's problematic.

To make it worse, I'll end on this and that's that.

The president held a press conference where he was pretty mad.

Partly he was mad because in the report her implied that he had forgotten the date his son died.

And that really made by that inventing internally to people.

And so he was in a fighting mood, but then in discussing foreign aid issues, came out and confused the president of Mexico with the president of Egypt.

And so he's sort of leaning into this problem.

I'll give Sid Miller credit.

He had a good line on Twitter and that's that.

He said he's calling on the president to use his executive authority to secure the border between Texas and Egypt.

All right.

Good line.

Is it going to stick?

Republicans are out in droves on this.

The Democrats are frankly pretty worried, like we said last week.

What gives?

well, I think that, you know, it's pretty evident.

Right.

And yes, both of them are old.

You know, it's a matter of fact.

So there's big questions and little question.

One of the big question is whether the Republican Party doesn't have someone younger to run, whether the Democratic Party doesn't have someone younger to run for the presidency.

Yeah, of course they do.

Right.

But once again, is this control that Donald Trump has had over the RNC of the GOP and has, you know, the brand and now the brand of the GOP is Donald Trump.

Good point.

End of story.

And theories predict that elites in the parties are the ones who are picking the like nominee.

yeah, that happened for Biden.

It happened right sort of now for.

yeah.

Not the first time.

And so they're going to pick people who are seasoned and that's these people.

Right.

And they happen to be older now.

So that's part of it.

The other question is this is about perception.

It's nothing's you know, in order to have to know Eve, you know, Trump and Biden have memory issues, cognitive memory decline, whatever it is, we would need to do a bunch of tests, not just taking the Montreal test of mental acuity.

That takes 10 minutes of it.

No, like serious stuff.

Right.

And that could take days of testing.

We're not going to do that.

No one is going to do that.

And if they did, they would never tell us.

Right.

But it's about perception.

But you remember when Trump did this, right, Like he had the like, you have to repeat the like the words that someone gives to you.

Yeah.

And he was bragging about how well he went at it.

So he's a stable genius, as he says.

Right.

But he's, you know, the perception.

You have Trump, as we said last week.

Yes.

Running around all over the place, having two hour speeches.

The speeches are completely incoherent.

It doesn't make any sense what he's saying.

Right.

It's like what?

Yes, but he's there saying these, that, etc., etc.. You know, we just saw it this week in terms of, yeah, I would allow Russia to do whatever the heck they want.

That doesn't make any sense.

That's not, someone that has someone as a stable genius would say it's like, no, no, there's no message.

Exactly.

And if Biden had done that, it would just enhance this notion that, like, he's just too scattered to be bright and Right.

And that's because of age.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

I mean, this is Trump's kind of frenetic personality that provides this.

Joe Biden has always had a kind of, you know, bit of a hiccup, right?

I mean, part of it is his stutter is part of it is that that's sometimes how people are like you just write as smooth on this.

Right.

And some of it's just the way that you are.

So I don't know that we can hold presidents accountable to that.

But you made a good point earlier, and that's that like the president is one person.

They are the most prominent, obviously the most visible, but there's a whole team around them.

I describe this is like basically you're electing the Kansas City Chiefs.

You're not electing Patrick Mahomes, Right.

You're not picking just the president.

You're not being nice, the quarterback.

You're picking the entirety of the people, right?

Them.

So I think people should be comfortable to say like, we're going to pick the team.

We like the side.

We like not just the person, but obviously there are some times where you need the quarterback to get that pass and you need the president in the room doing the negotiation right.

They have to look those leaders in the eye and sort of give them their perspective.

So do you think that that's something that is risky for either or both of these.

Candidates or for both of them?

Right.

For both of them, because, you know, for Biden might be this perception that he's, you know, not into the job or whatever.

Right.

And for Trump is that he's all over the place.

So, you know, both of them have.

But once again, is, you know, whatever we think, whatever it's first thing doesn't matter.

Right?

What matters is the public perception and how the public and voters are going to see these, you know, coming November.

And that's going to be very important.

Now, the Democrats, right?

If they want to have a fighting chance, they have to do what we saw in this special election.

We, George Santos, replacing, he said.

And Tom, some say what what they did is what we've been telling.

And I said it last week, thank you ought.

To remember that I didn't write that down.

You are entering a mud pit, right?

You cannot fight without getting dirty.

Yeah.

So obviously understood that and he said, Fair game.

Yeah, I'm going to get dirty.

We're going to get dirty.

And that's how they did it, right?

Right.

He was attacking.

It was putting, you know, Republicans in an uncomfortable position and banging those issues that really resonates with the Yeah.

With the general like abortion, education, so on.

And so I think you're right.

You can't you cannot have the president sort of hide from this this is too old.

Even Democrats an NBC poll last week, half of them said that they expressed some discomfort about the president's mental or physical acuity.

So this is definitely an issue just even inside the Democratic Party.

So they've got to be more proactive.

But of course, they do have to balance it with the fact that he is 81.

And an aggressive schedule can sometimes be a lot.

I will say this, too.

It's a very partizan thing, right?

you have their own perceptions about this.

So people I saw a study that said looked at the kind of differences in terms of how different Partizans saw age and they asked people without them knowing or telling them what ages each of the Biden candidates were.

Democrats were more likely to say that they were about the same age, whereas Republicans were more likely to say that Trump was a lot younger.

and independents were also more likely to say that Trump was a lot younger.

So that's the issue.

Yes, a perception issue.

And that's kind of bipartisanship by very strong way.

So I do think that's an issue.

But like a lot of other academic work on this, suggest that there is a penalty for being older in various countries.

Now, people don't usually test this in the US because we historically haven't had terribly old leaders like other countries have very old.

Right.

And so if you look historically, that has been something that's been a problem.

So maybe we'll see the same pattern.

But it's interesting to sort of see how this is played out and people have talked about this like it's an equivalency, right?

Like or like there's actually a CNN poll on is Biden's age a bigger problems than Trump's indictments?

I don't know.

The answer to that is people have to make this decision.

But like using this as an equivalency, it's not really fair, right, Because they're not the same thing.

Correct.

But I do want to play up on this issue.

You mentioned about the special election in New York.

George Santos, obviously resigned from Congress in a cloud of controversy.

We can't even we don't have time in our whole season to get into all of it.

But obviously he's leaving and the Democrat won this race.

But what's happening is how he won.

He won by running as a centrist, aggressive centrist.

Yeah, right.

Saying that as a member formally of the Partizan Bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, he raised a lot of money, spent a lot of money.

Is that a recipe we can see here in Texas?

I think so, yeah, I think so.

Calling all red looks a lot like that.

Person when you look at, you know, the distribution of partizan ideology in Texas.

You have a lot of people in the center, the people on on on the opposite ideological spectrum.

Right.

Make a lot of noise.

Yes.

But they're not the majority of the Texas electorate.

Yeah.

The Texas electorate tends to be more independent.

Texas tends to be more centrist, right?

Yes.

Left and right centrists.

And I think, you know, it could have a potential issue.

But once again, yeah, you have to be very aggressive.

Yeah, Like being civil.

Yeah.

No, it doesn't work.

Yeah.

No, more like it kind of buttoned up like we need to get rid of the tie skateboard in like Beto, Right?

Yeah, well, but I think you're right.

And I'm glad we're talking Texas because that's what we do best here.

Here's a party politics.

I'm Brandon.

This is Jeronimo.

We're definitely going to get into some of these battles about primary elections next couple of weeks leading up to the primary.

But I'm going to talk about two big issues this week.

The first is that the GOP is having a battle royale like break out the folding chairs.

Yeah, I want to see like, you know, people being thrown out of the ring.

That's what's happening this week in Austin.

The state executive committee for the Republican Party voted to censure House Speaker Dade Phelan, who I have in my notes here, is a Republican for lots of reasons.

Impeachment again, PACs and appointing Democratic committee chairs lack of fidelity to Republican principles.

What does this mean that they're fighting?

And the most important committee in the state, the leaders of the state Republican Party, are sanctioning their own Speaker of the House.

Well, I mean, it's very problematic, right?

But once again, we see these divisions within the Republican Party and the Republican Party.

Is everything board unified?

Yeah.

And is that problematic?

It is problematic for the 2024 election.

Yeah.

And we're going to see if that happens.

And we also seen that with John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

A little dustup.

On Twitter, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

What are they fighting about?

We're fighting about everything, right?

That we're fighting, you know, that Senator Cornyn decided to support foreign aid and, you know, calling him a RINO.

Right.

Right.

And then.

America last, Ryan.

Exactly.

Hit back and said like, can you should be, you know, focusing on your legal problems rather than picking a fight, you know, these things are ready to go.

So it's important.

It's very, very, very important.

You have two very important figures.

I mean, Cornyn can be the next leader of the Republican Party in the Senate.

It's a great point.

Yeah.

He's one of the three.

JOHNS Right.

That may be up in the Senate leadership.

I think, too, it's a problem for Republicans.

They're in danger of squatting on their spurs.

Right.

Like politically, they could basically hurt their own message going into a pretty important year where they might lose a couple of these seats, especially a Senate seat, which is a big plum or.

Absolutely.

And, you know, one of the major issues here is that indeed, Paxton has very important legal questions to answer.

Yeah.

And we're going to see how that develops.

And we're going to see, especially during the next weeks when we start delving into these very important primary elections, how the fights within the parties, you know, shake up at the end.

But for these week, my dear friend, that's it.

I'm Karen Cortina.

And I'm Brianna Rodding House.

The conversation keeps up next week.