The simple reason Republican Sunday show hits are disasters
It's hard to defend the indefensible.
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Not so long ago, the Sunday morning news shows were a vital part of the political ecosphere. Politicians and government officials clamored for the mainstream platform provided by ABC’s This Week, NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation, and to a lesser extent, CNN’s State of the Union and Fox News Sunday. This is where presidential campaigns were launched and political agendas defined.
Regular viewers have probably noticed, however, that elected Republicans increasingly don’t perform that well outside the safe spaces of Fox and Newsmax. There’s a simple reason for that.
Last Sunday was a case in point. Trump’s vice presidential hopefuls fanned across the Sunday shows and made fools of themselves. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum spent the evening prior at a Mar-a-Lago donor event where Trump ranted about special prosecutor Jack Smith, spread his usual lies about the 2020 election, and compared President Biden’s administration to the Gestapo. On CNN, State of the Union host Jake Tapper asked Burgum if he was comfortable with this rhetoric, and the governor simply changed the topic.
”Yesterday, we had an opportunity to listen to the president talk for 90 minutes without a teleprompter, covering a wide range of topics, and largely very upbeat, because, if the election was held today, Trump would be winning,” he said.
Burgum downplayed the criminal charges Trump faces and insisted it would be a “travesty of justice” if he was convicted at the end of his New York trial. When Tapper asked him about the recent Time magazine interview where Trump seemingly supported political violence if he lost the election, Burgum could only ramble nonsensically about the 2000 and 2016 elections, neither of which ended in violent coup attempts. Yet Burgum condemned the January 6 attack on the Capitol as it happened, so he should understand the difference.
Even worse was Sen. Tim Scott’s appearance on Meet the Press. On January 6, Scott voted to certify Biden’s win. But when host Kristin Welker asked him if he’d commit to accepting the 2024 election results, Scott wouldn’t say “yes.” Instead, he kept reiterating that “at the end of the day, the 47th president will be Donald Trump.”
This is how democracies die. (Watch below.)
These shameless displays generated bad press for Burgum and Scott, which helps explain why some elected Republicans are choosing to stay away from mainstream interviews entirely. Notably, on April 28, not a single elected Republican appeared on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. This came weeks after GOP Rep. Nancy Mace called for a boycott of the show over Stephanopoulos’s grilling of her. But there’s something deeper going on — Republicans simply can’t defend their ongoing support of Trump.
Mace’s This Week interview on March 10 was a complete disaster. She’s spoken publicly about her own experience as a rape victim, and Stephanopoulos asked how she squares that with her current support for Trump, who has been found liable for defaming a woman he sexually abused. Mace had no real defense, so she lashed out at Stephanopoulos. She argued that Trump wasn’t found guilty in a criminal court (neither was Mace’s rapist). She later accused Stephanopoulos of “mansplaining” rape and shaming her on national TV, when in reality she shamed herself. (Watch below.)
A month later, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu crashed and burned in similar fashion when Stephanopoulos pressed him on his support for Trump. Sununu went on This Week on April 14, the day before Trump’s criminal trial in New York began. He had enthusiastically supported Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign and spent the past few years trashing Trump as a weak, tired shell of his 2016 self.
“He’s fucking crazy!” Sununu said at a 2022 event. “The press often will ask me if I think Donald Trump is crazy. And I’ll say it this way: I don’t think he’s so crazy that you could put him in a mental institution. But I think if he were in one, he ain’t getting out!”
While campaigning for Nikki Haley, Sununu said that Trump “can barely keep a cogent thought” when he wasn’t looking at a teleprompter, adding “this is not Donald Trump when he had his fastball.”
But after Trump clinched the nomination, Sununu inevitably folded, and that was on pathetic display on This Week. It’s not unusual for staunch critics of a candidate to turn around and support them as their party’s nominee, but the expressed differences are typically related to policy — not mental stability, criminal activity, or a desire to end free and fair elections.
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Under questioning from Stephanopoulos, Sununu didn’t pretend he hadn’t said Trump was an existential threat to democracy who incited an attack on the US Capitol. He just made clear he doesn’t care.
Sununu claimed, “For me, it's not about [Trump] as much as it is having a GOP administration.” Stephanopoulos shot back, “But he will be the president! That doesn't make any sense to me. You believe that a president who contributed to an insurrection should be president again?”
Cornered, Sununu was reduced to incoherency. Yes, he believed the insurrectionist in chief should be president again, but this made him no different from “51 percent of America.” (Trump never reached 50 percent support as president, and his national 2024 polling average is about 47 percent.) Spinning Trump as the “people’s choice” also contradicts Sununu’s repeated insistence that Trump was too toxic to defeat President Joe Biden.
“Just to sum up,” Stephanopoulos said, nailing shut the coffin lid on whatever was left of Sununu’s reputation as a serious politician. “You support Trump for president even if he's convicted in the classified documents case. You support him for president even though you believe he contributed to an insurrection. You support him for president even though you believe he's lying about the last election. You support him for president even if he's convicted in the Manhattan case. I just want to say, the answer to that is yes, correct?”
“Yeah. Me and 51 percent of America,” Sununu said, exposing himself as a craven opportunist once and for all. (Watch the full interview below.)
Sununu won’t receive plaudits in the history books because he criticized Trump before deciding he would blindly support him. His humiliation at the hands of Stephanopoulos embodies the problem for Republicans who still go on mainstream news programs: They have no good answers for why they’re still supporting the orange wannabe authoritarian.
This is why Republicans love going on Fox
The big three networks still command relatively large audiences for the their Sunday news shows. They offer politicians a significant platform to promote their message, which for Republicans usually involves actively spreading disinformation. Moderators often push back, but that gives Trumpers an opportunity to look tough holding their own against the “liberal media.”
But the traditional Sunday show model frayed during the Trump administration. Jason Zengerle at the New York Times wrote in 2021 that, for Republicans at least, the “shows were less about educating the viewing audience than flattering an audience of one.” Zengerle recalls Trump stooge Stephen Miller telling State of the Union host Jake Tapper, “The reality is that the president is a political genius.” Tapper replied, “I’m sure he’s watching and is happy you said that.” He was correct: Trump shared a link to the segment and praised Miller’s performance like he was an obedient puppy.
Republicans who aren’t devout MAGA cultists can sometimes briefly seem sane and rational. For instance, House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Mike Turner, who’s pro-Ukraine, cogently discusses world affairs as a regular guest on Face the Nation until he’s asked about the pro-Putin, NATO-trashing Trump. Then it all falls apart.
Watch below as Turner deflects a question during a recent Face the Nation appearance about Trump hawking MAGA-brand bibles with debunked nonsense about Biden banning children from putting religious symbols on Easter eggs.
GOP Rep. Don Bacon has also distanced himself from the House GOP’s extreme nihilist wing. He said “what happened on [January 6] was wrong,” voted for Biden’s infrastructure bill, and admits there’s no evidence that Biden committed any impeachable offenses. But Bacon can’t dare break with Trump, who he still supports as the party’s nominee.
Welker asked Bacon on March 31 how he justified his endorsement, considering Trump’s violent rhetoric, including personal attacks against the judge overseeing his criminal case. Bacon was reduced to ridiculous bothsidesing, claiming that “I don't support the rhetoric. By the way, we see rhetoric on both sides.”
Along similar lines, GOP Sen. James Lankford was asked during a January appearance on Face the Nation if the $83 million judgement against Trump in a sexual assault defamation case gave him any pause about Trump returning to the White House.
“It doesn’t,” he said. “It's been interesting the number of legal cases that have come up against President Trump and then have failed and had been dropped or had been kicked out of the courts on it. This one's actually went through. He's already said he's going to challenge it. So let the courts actually make their decisions and let the American people make their decisions.”
This is a morally bankrupt statement that would justify supporting an OJ Simpson candidacy after his acquittal in 1995.
Lankford actually told Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan that Trump “would be a much better president than what we're dealing with right now, definitely on national security.” Just a week later, the bipartisan bill that Lankford negotiated was killed on Trump’s orders. He even makes Republicans look like idiots retroactively.
There’s no escaping January 6
Republicans who condemned Trump in 2016 mostly did so on character grounds. He was vulgar and sexist, hardly a “role model” for Americans. Haley said Trump was "everything we teach our kids not to do in kindergarten.” Rep. Elise Stefanik called out Trump’s “inappropriate, offensive comments” on the Access Hollywood tape. Then-GOP Sen. Kelly Ayotte said she couldn’t bring herself to vote for Trump because he’d talked “about assault of women.” Now, after a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse, Ayotte says “there's no question [Trump’s] the right choice for the White House.”
It was much easier to walk back expressed reservations about Trump and simply focus on right-wing policy wins when he was in the office. Republicans could just pretend they never read his tweets. However, the last traces of plausible deniability went up in smoke on January 6.
We all lived through Trump’s coup attempt. We witnessed his refusal to disavow the violence and his continued promise to pardon the convicted insurrectionists, who he calls “January 6 hostages.” Republicans who stuck with Trump after January 6 either minimize the Capitol attack or outright embrace it. When Sununu called out Trump’s election lies and his starring role in January 6, he sounded like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, but his shameless attempt to remain in MAGA’s good graces tars him as the worst kind of phony. Chris Christie and even Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, understand that rejecting Trump’s anti-democratic actions requires withdrawing even tacit support for his current candidacy. Of course, Cheney and Kinzinger are no longer in Congress and neither Christie nor Pence have realistic political aspirations.
Former AG Bill Barr has roundly repudiated Trump. He said Trump “will always put his own interests, and gratifying his own ego, ahead of everything else, including the country’s interest, there’s no question about it.” Nonetheless, he recently told CNN’s Kaitlin Collins that he’ll vote for him anyway because “I think Trump would do less damage than Biden, and I think all this stuff about a threat to democracy — I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.” (Watch below.)
COLLINS: Just to be clear, you're voting for someone who you believe tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, that can’t even achieve his own policies, that lied about the election … you’re gonna vote for someone who is facing 88 criminal counts.
BARR: … the answer to your question is yes. I’m supporting the Republican ticket.
Suggesting that student loan forgiveness and climate legislation are greater threats to democracy than someone who tried to overthrow the government is just absurd. Barr looks as foolish as Sununu.
In 2017, Trump’s personal failings didn’t get too much in the way of mainstream GOP policy objectives, specifically tax cuts for billionaires and rolling back regulations. Now, Republicans who claim they support Ukraine and recognize Russian President Vladimir Putin as a global threat to democracy struggle to rationalize their support for Trump, who has a hard time concealing that he’s on Putin’s side.
Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell was visibly unsettled when Brennan pointed out during an April 28 interview that his foreign policy positions are more in line with Biden than Trump. She asked how he possibly hoped to maintain support for Ukraine during a second Trump presidency. McConnell’s response began with the usual magical thinking — a GOP Senate majority could do the right thing despite Trump — before collapsing into nihilistic despair.
“What kind of influence, even if I had chosen to get involved in the presidential election, what kind of influence would I have had?” he said. (Watch below.)
Trump is an ongoing problem for Republicans who still want to pretend they stand for traditional values like democracy and basic human decency. Mace is a rape victim who must now twist herself into knots defending Trump, who has a long and well documented history of mistreating women. Sen. JD Vance, once a vocal Trump critic, is stuck defending January 6 as a “peaceful protest,” so he walked into a rake during a recent interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, who called out his hypocrisy when he condemned the protests occurring on college campuses.
These train wreck interviews make for entertaining clips on social media, but you’d think Republicans would like to avoid starring in a comic farce. Republicans with an agenda other than slavish devotion to Trump would prefer to hammer Biden and Democrats about the border or campus protests, but their presidential nominee is a criminal defendant charged with serious felonies who actively promotes political violence. They can’t escape their support for someone so unfit for office.
Trump has turned the search for his next top running mate into its own reality show, and the contenders like Vance, Cotton, Burgum, Scott, and confessed puppy killer Kristi Noem (who had her own Sunday show disaster on Face the Nation last weekend) will probably keep coming back for more. They have their “audience of one” to please.
It’s unclear if Trump watches anything but Fox News and Newsmax, but it’s obvious from his social media feed that he’s aware if any Republican dares speak heresy against him. The mainstream TV interviews are humiliating for Republicans — but maybe that’s the point. Right-wing media outlets are less likely to challenge Republicans about January 6 or accepting the 2024 election results, so the true loyalty test is on the major network shows. Unfortunately, there’s no limit to the moral depths that elected Republicans will sink to remain in good standing with their orange king.
That’s it for this week
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Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.
This tells me, an outsider watching from the sidelines, that the media is holding the GOP accountable for its support of Trump—at least more than I had thought. That’s a plus.
I believe the Republican support erosion will continue for the next six months because their support for Trump won’t provide an off ramp to sanity in time to save them. I’m becoming more comfortable with how the election will play out with the reelection of Joe Biden in 2024. It’s going to come down to the fact that there is really no other alternative.