RNC in the Wake of Trump Assassination Attempt: What Happens Next?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: So, the RNC is being closely watched for answers about how the GOP will fine tune its strategy for the Oval Office. How will Trump further shift the ideological foundations of the party? How seriously should Project 2025 be taken? And what can the Democratic Party do differently? To answer these questions and more, Hari Sreenivasan asks Astead Herndon, the New York Times national politics reporter and the host of the “Run-Up” podcast.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Astead Herndon, welcome to the program again. Here you are in Milwaukee. I think the big story for most people is how does Donald Trump, how does the Republican Party react to the assassination attempt on the former president?

ASTEAD HERNDON, NATIONAL POLITICS REPORTER, THE NEW YORK TIMES AND HOST, “THE RUN-UP”: Yes, I think that certainly looms over this convention. You know, we have seen Republicans and Trump try to say that they will seek to strike a unifying tone. They’re going to use this moment to try to pivot their message to one that can bring in more people. I think that also reflects the Republican Party that feels fairly confident in their electoral position, even before the events on Saturday. They were reading the polling. They were reading a kind of the angst in the Democratic Party and feeling like this is their election to lose. And so, I would say that’s on one side. But I think we should also acknowledge that Donald Trump and Republicans have been part of raising the political temperature of — and division and rhetoric throughout the last several years. And that is what — who Trump is. I mean, even when we think about J. D. Vance using the moment on Saturday to frankly target Democrats and place blame at Joe Biden for the events, when we know that that’s not really a causal relationship. And so, you know, I think that we can say that their kind of political ambition will be to pivot a message, try to strike a chord of unity. That’s clearly the intention, but I think we have enough evidence over the last seven, eight years to know Donald Trump has not made his political kind of calling card one of bringing people in together. And so, this will be asking a leopard to change its spots here. And I think we should be pretty skeptical of that.

SREENIVASAN: Are there concerns about security? There was conversations as soon as the shooting happened, you know, was the Secret Service prepared? The Secret Service came out and said in their own press conference, the steps they took, and President Biden had said that he had had a conversation with President Trump and made a national statement about political violence. Is there any increased anxiety about not just the safety of the president, but anybody who’s there?

HERNDON: Well, I can say that, you know, even being here for the first couple of days, the downtown of Milwaukee is locked down. There are so many security checkpoints. There’s such a perimeter around Fiserv Forum. I think I went through about five or six checks even to get there when I was going there earlier today. So, I am pretty sure the security has already — was already beefed up, and he was probably even more so since the events on Saturday. But I would also say that we shouldn’t see political violence and the incident on Saturday as an isolated one. When we look back over the last six-ish years, violence has been a pretty core to a lot of what’s happened in our country. We think about the Tree of Life shooting, Paul shooting, El Paso shooting, the attack on Paul Pelosi, the attack on Steve Scalise, I mean, these have been consistent incidents over the last several years and it reflects a growing tenor of division and discord that is in our politics. And so, I think Saturday was certainly a bracing moment for a lot of people who watched. But unfortunately, I think it’s an American public that has come to expect a political system where violence seems at its core. I left out January 6th, but that obviously was a big one as well. It’s been a steady drumbeat of increased — of political rhetoric and that has people scared not only at this convention, but I think we’ll see that at the DNC. And I think that we’ll see that going forward for both candidates.

SREENIVASAN: You know, I want to pick up on something that you said, which is really how politicians are framing the events that happened. It was representative Mike Collins of Georgia. He said specifically, I want to quote, “Joe Biden sent the orders.” Then you have Matt Gaetz of Florida, “They tried to impeach him. They’re trying to imprison him. Now, they have tried to assassinate him.” What is — how do you square that rhetoric where there’s clearly some political opportunism going on with the campaign saying, we want to try a unifying message?

HERNDON: Particularly when we think about the attack dogs of the Republican Party, the Matt Gaetz, the Freedom Caucus wing, even J. D. Vance, they’ve been the ones who’ve been most explicitly trying to link this to Democrats, and frankly, creating an argument that says that Democrats have been violently targeting Trump for years. This plays within a Republican narrative that they’ve been creating for a long time, one that started with him as president being obstructed by Democrats. They point to the impeachments as things like trying to invalidate his presidency, certainly the legal proceedings that have taken place since he’s left office. And now, this recent kind of assassination attempts plays within a script that the right-wing is trying to say, which is that the left and Joe Biden are trying to do whatever they can to stop Donald Trump from coming back into office. I think it’s important to not conflate those things. The things we know about the shooter on Saturday do not link him directly to Democrats, do not — there’s no evidence to saying that there’s any kind of connection with the parties here. And frankly, if it’s a profile of kind of a mixed ideology school shooter type that we’ve seen often in this type of incidents. And so, Republicans are doing a slight of hand here to play their political purposes, but I do think that the seriousness of what happened does cause a kind of question mark for Democrats about what the message is going forward. The clear message from Democrats, up until this point, was that Donald Trump was a threat to democracy, and that created an emergency that forced people to act. And you even hear some Democrats now saying, is that tenor a little too — is little too intense for this moment? Are we contributing to the kind of polarization of this moment with that argument? That’s going to be interesting. Do Democrats back off from what has been their most potent message to rally their base?

SREENIVASAN: You know, we just had Judge Aileen Cannon outright dismiss the documents case. It will be appealed, but I wonder if that impacts the overall standing and strategy when it comes to how the RNC frames the former president going forward.

HERNDON: I think it will partially because they’ve already tried to frame these cases as an effort of weaponization of the government against Donald Trump. So, the actions from Judge Cannon today, even the events over the weekend, will play into that sense of persecution and kind of Republican victimhood that’s already been core to that message. I don’t want to conflate those two things because I do think the shooting in this are a little different, but they get to the same type of message that Republicans are going to pitch. They are going to say, this is a candidate that has been under attack. And I walked past the big billboard today in the Fiserv Forum where they’re going to hold this that said, you know, one of Trump’s quotes from his speeches, which is that, you know, they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you. I’m just in the way. That’s going to be their message.

SREENIVASAN: What about the very location? You’re in Milwaukee, that has been, in some ways, a Democratic stronghold, but we know Wisconsin’s been a battleground state that’s slung in different directions before. What’s the GOP trying to accomplish by holding the convention and starting the national conversation about this campaign there?

HERNDON: I think it’s a really critical point. You’re mentioning of why is this convention here? Democrats, remember, tried to have their 2020 convention there before it was upended by COVID, partially because Milwaukee and Wisconsin remains a bellwether for the rest of the Electoral College. Many of the last presidential elections here have been decided by less than a percentage point. Wisconsin is a clearly purple state, but that has not been reflected in their state politics. They had a huge gerrymander that allowed Republicans to really control power on a state legislature front for years here. Think the Scott Walker era and that time. But what Democrats have been able to do is slowly claw back to the point, I think, the onus is now on Republicans to do a little better here. Here’s something I would say, Wisconsin’s not necessarily a really Trumpy Republican state, has a lot of those Milwaukee suburbs that have drifted away from him. You saw Nikki Haley put up pretty good numbers in Wisconsin, even though she dropped out, and they’ve kind of been pulled between the Trump base and a more, I would say, a traditional conservative type in this state. And it’s actually hurt him. It’s actually hurt Republicans here. Where Democrats have struggled is a motivating in places like Milwaukee and Madison. They’ve had a full drop off in terms of people of color in this type of places, which has allowed Republicans to seize on some of that. So, I think it’s important of why the Republicans are coming here because they’re trying to do two things, they’re trying to limit their losses in the suburbs in places like Waukesha and Oshkosh, outside of Milwaukee, and they’re trying to claw back some of the black and Latino voters in Milwaukee, because they think that is a recipe that allows them to make up what is sure to be a razor thin margin.

SREENIVASAN: I wonder a little bit about the sort of the stuff that’s off camera that happens in these conventions. It’s usually the party hashing out the planks of what they stand for, their values. They put it literally in writing, right? And I wonder what is this party been able to do? Have you noticed shifts in one direction or another? Is there more of an emphasis on executive power, et cetera?

HERNDON: Yes, I think this is an important point because one of the subtle things Trump has done is really take over the levers of the Republican Party. And so, the traditional kind of policy writing process, the platform process that we think about that happens at this type of conventions has been totally upended by Trump already. Last week, there was a lot of reporting about how the Trump campaign, frankly, steamrolled a lot of the traditional conservatives who are a part of that process to make sure things like abortion were not mentioned in the party platform, because he wants to have a really mushy position on that. Instead, you had kind of a series of Trump pronouncements that were largely pretty vague that now make up this party platform. Things like saying, we’ll make America safe. We’ll bring back energy independence. Just kind of the things you hear Donald Trump say on the campaign trail. And I think this is partially why things like Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s attempts to make up a policy platform have really exploded because Donald Trump and Republicans have been fairly vague on what they’re going to do on that front. And they have — and they intentionally have done that because they don’t want to be kind of pushed into unpopular positions. I think this is going to be a big thing to watch going forward.

SREENIVASAN: I wonder, is there a specific reason that you’ve got Project 2025 with 900 pages of policy prescriptions that any administration, a Trump administration in the future, could take and run with? And then you’ve got the official position of the Republican Party, which, as you point out, is very vague.

HERNDON: Yes.

SREENIVASAN: So, how do you kind of reconcile those? Is it — you know, is that part of the strategy? Because the president has tried repeatedly to distance himself from Project 2025.

HERNDON: Yes, they have. And I think the truth that we know is somewhere in the middle here, but I think Democrats have an important point. Donald Trump cannot fully distance himself from Project 2025 because the writers and the policies come from a lot of people who worked in the Trump administration, are close to Donald Trump, and are very likely to be involved in the Trump administration if he was to come back. I think it’s pretty obvious why Trump wants to remain vague on these policy platforms. It’s because a lot of the things proposed in Project 2025 are massively unpopular. Think about eliminating the Department of Education, a refusal to mention gender in any policy regulation or law. Some of the goals they have specific to abortion, some of the goals they have specific to LGBTQ rights are unpopular. The other thing I would say is Project 2025 is very explicit about kind of the unitary executive theory that’s at the heart of a lot of this kind of Trump policy rhetoric. And what that is is a belief that the chief executive, the president has kind of ultimate power over a lot of the legislative branch and that that — and more importantly, over the regulatory and kind of civil service ecosystem. And so, when Republicans talk about draining the swamp, this time around in ’24, they have a plan to do so. They have a plan to upend kind of the normal kind of druthers of federal government and to install loyalists in those positions. And so, I think the reality of those plans is why we see Donald Trump distancing himself from something like 2025. And I think you also have the Biden campaign focusing on it because it adds a little meat to the bones of the regular old lesser of two evils argument where we used to hearing Democrats make.

SREENIVASAN: Let’s talk a little bit about the Democrats. Right now, in the past couple of weeks, ever since the debate, the narrative that the Democrats have struggled to overcome is Joe Biden’s age. So, in your conversations with Democratic strategists and leadership, where is that process at on the possibility of him not being the top of the ticket? Because day in and day out, Joe Biden says it would take the Lord almighty to stop him.

HERNDON: For the last year and a half-ish, we’ve been hearing from voters consistently concerns about Joe Biden’s age. It was the biggest thing that will come up if we talk to anyone — if we talk — when we talk to most people about how they feel about the president, it wasn’t really a feeling about him as a leader right now, but the sense that the idea of four more years, it frankly founds kind of ridiculous. And the caricature of him, a kind of doddering old man, had really set in with the electorate long before the debate. And so, when we took these questions to Democratic strategists, folks close to the Biden campaign, even some leaders in the Biden campaign. For the last year, I was frankly, shocked at how much they were dismissing the idea that Joe Biden’s age was a big political liability when we looked ahead toward November. What the debate did was nullify their ability to stick their head in the sand, because frankly, that’s what they were doing. And it was such a, frankly, disaster for Biden that it swung from one end to the other, where they went from, I can’t acknowledge this, to what do we do about it? But the year of time between those two things gave them very few options about what to do about it. And so, if they wanted to have a more robust conversation about this, that time was last year in the early stages of that primary. At this point, they’ve become kind of hamstrung. And I think you see that realization here. And so, what we — and so, to actually answer your question about what is the current state of the kind of movement to maybe replace Joe Biden, is that that is much more acceptable among the broader Democratic electorate than it is among the inner rungs of the Democratic Party. But when I talk to Democrats, kind of professional Democrats, the idea of replacing him at this stage is such that it would take kind of another moment, like the debate to make that kind of come even semi close to fruition. That decision is going to Biden and the people around him. And that’s going to be a hard hill to climb. And so, you still see some evidence, you still see some reporting, people like Nancy Pelosi calling around, seeing if that temperature is still there. But I really don’t know what happens, to be honest with you. Because at this point, we’re going to be in a situation where 70, 75 percent of the public might think he’s unfit to serve a second term, even if he’s close in the polling. And so, if you’re a vulnerable Democrat, if you’re someone running for Senate in a close race, Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester, if you’re a House member who’s trying to hold on to your seat, how do you not say — how do you align yourself with the president that most Americans would think is not fit for next four years? That’s going to become the real tension here is how do they have a singular message of unity behind Biden if that message is completely out of step where most people are? And so, I think that’s going to be the real tell for me. Does some of this –does some of the polling and incentives start to favor Biden? And then maybe those frontline Democrats walk back what they say and say, you know, actually, I’m fine with him. We’re rocking with him. I’m riding with Biden, or do things move in the opposite direction and it frankly becomes a party, an open revolt against the top of the ticket? And I think both those possibilities remain on the table.

SREENIVASAN: New York Times political reporter and host of the podcast the “Run-Up,” Astead Herndon, thanks so much for joining us.

HERNDON: Thank you so much for having me. I always appreciate it.