Washington Wednesday: A harder line

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Wednesday, March 11th. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. 

Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. Time now for Washington Wednesday!

Joining us now is political scientist Hunter Baker. He is a WORLD Opinions Contributor and provost at North Greenville University. 

Good morning, Hunter!

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning!

MAST: Well, Trump’s pick for the new head of Homeland Security is gearing up for his confirmation hearing next week. Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin will face colleagues he’s served with for the last three years.

Mullin is a business owner and former MMA fighter … and he’s brought some of that fight into the Senate. In 2023, a verbal fight with the Teamsters President Sean O’Brien during a committee hearing almost turned physical.

MULLIN: Sir, this is a time, this is a place. You want to run your mouth? We can be two consenting adults, we can finish it here.

O’BRIEN: Okay, that's fine. Perfect.

MULLIN: You want to do it now?

O’BRIEN: I'd love to do it right now.

MULLIN: Well stand your butt up then.

O’BRIEN: You stand your butt up.

SANDERS: Oh hold, stop it…

Mullin later said he’s forged a working friendship with O’Brien, and he’s got wide support on the Hill to take the job at Homeland Security.

So Hunter, what does Trump’s choice of a replacement here for Kristi Noem tell you about his priorities?

BAKER: Just want to say that in Markwayne Mullin's short MMA career, he was 3 and 0, so the Teamsters President may have been wise to avoid that confrontation. 

This is a, this is a big deal. The Secretary of Homeland Security is a major position in the cabinet, despite its relative newness, starting after September 11.

For her [Kristi Noem] to leave at this point is, you know, it's, it's not a good development for her political career. I mean, I know that she's going over to be the envoy for the Shield of the Americas, but what this tells you is, is that she has lost the President's favor, she's lost his confidence. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that.

I think that, first of all, that the action in Minnesota did not go well. I think that it hurt the president on his strongest issue, which is immigration. I think that, you know, he may have lost, I don't know, 12 to 15 points of approval on that issue alone. And so what had been a strength has turned into a vulnerability. 

And in addition to that, there was the controversy over her spending considerable amount of money on ads that put her front and center, and then saying that Trump had approved that massive expenditure, therefore embarrassing him.

So that leads to going to Markwayne Mullin. Markwayne Mullin is a total Trump loyalist. He has built his reputation alongside of Trump, basically all the way. And despite that, I'll say, despite his sort of pugnacious reputation, my understanding is that he is well liked across the aisle, and that he may be able to leverage those relationships into good things for Homeland Security.

BROWN: Well Hunter, as you just said, Noem will be joining Marco Rubio’s Latin America team as Envoy to Shield of the Americas … a new partnership with 13 core member countries in Central and South America aimed at combatting drug trafficking and cartels. During the opening summit, Trump announced that with improvements coming to Venezuela, his attention is moving closer to home.

TRUMP: We're also looking forward to the great change that will soon be coming to Cuba. Cuba's at the end of the line.

Now when asked about it on Monday, Trump said Marco Rubio is working on a deal.

TRUMP: It may be a friendly takeover, it may not be a friendly takeover, it wouldn't matter, because they're really in they're down to, as they say, fumes.

So Hunter, Cuba has been an American national security challenge for the better part of a century, what kind of changes do you think could be coming?

BAKER: I'm interested to see how this works out. Obviously, the relationship with Cuba has been fraught ever since the revolution at the end of the 50s, and of course, we had the disaster of the Bay of Pigs during the Kennedy administration. Then of course, the terrifying Cuban missile crisis after that, and we have been in a tense, sort of a standoff situation with Cuba ever since. 

You might have thought that once the Soviet Union collapsed and with it their support for Cuba, that Cuba would fall apart. And yet that hasn't happened, they have survived as a highly ideological regime headed by the Castro family now for decades after the fall of the Soviet Union.

But if, let's imagine, if it happens that that regime falls and they enter into a constructive relationship with the United States, could be amazing! I can just imagine what a tourist Mecca Cuba would become. I could imagine a Major League Baseball team in Cuba, it could be just a total transformation. But I'm waiting to see. I'm excited about what could be, but I don't know if we're going to get there or not.

BROWN: Well, let’s go to the main event, the war with Iran. 

We saw dramatic swings in oil prices early in the week with the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed. We talked about the economic side of that a bit with David Bahnsen on Monday… but I understand you think there’s an important political aspect to this. What are you watching there?

BAKER: One of the things that we've been saying now for several weeks, maybe even months, is that Americans are highly focused on affordability. When Trump tells Americans how good things are, there tend to be two things that he focuses on. One is the stock market, which is down right now, you know, couple hundred points at least. And the other is gas prices. He loves to talk about low gas prices. 

And with this action in Iran, we have seen the price of oil go up substantially. And you know, Americans may have noticed, depending on where you live, I live in a relatively low gas price area of the country, couple of days ago we had a shock increase to about $3.20 per gallon. And so that gives people the impression, regardless of how big a piece of the pie gas prices are, and they do affect the price of everything, that price is constantly in your face and it gets people's attention.

And so we saw the price of oil spike, you know, went up from, say, about $70 a barrel to something like $119 a barrel. Now it's come back down some since then, but that just shows you the political risk. If those prices go up and stay up, then Trump is going to be in a real fight on the affordability front. So it's in his interest to figure out how to deal with this strait of Hormuz problem. Something like 20% of the world's oil goes through that strait. So if Iran can impose enough economic pain through the Strait of Hormuz, then Trump could lose political support for his war. So he's got to figure out a way to gain control of the Strait, and to do so fairly quickly.

MAST: Well Hunter, let’s move to what New York Times columnist David French is calling “The Talarico Moment.” He’s referring, of course, to James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas who will face off against either John Cornyn, who currently holds the seat, or Attorney General Ken Paxton—they still have a runoff to get through.

Here’s a bit of Talarico in his speech after he defeated Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett in the primary last week.

TALARICO: We're a threat to their corrupt system. 2,000 years ago, when the powerful few at the top hurt those at the bottom, that barefoot rabbi didn't stay in his room and pray. He walked into the seat of power and flipped over the tables of injustice. 

Now he’s supposedly running on the “politics of love” and often uses references to Jesus in his speeches. He went to seminary and is affiliated with the mainline Presbyterian Church (USA).

In French’s article this week he seems to be taking up Talarico’s cause to an extent, calling him decent, and one of the few Christian politicians who actually acts like a Christian.

Now we played a good bit of Talarico’s comments on the program yesterday so I won’t rehash them here. But you'll notice how often he cloaks his progressive ideology in scriptural references. Yet even French himself says he thinks Talarico’s far too progressive to win over many conservative Christians … But says there are “legions of weary Americans who aren’t motivated primarily by ideology.”

So Hunter, here’s my question: is French right?

BAKER: So he may be right that there are Americans who are interested in hearing a Christian type of political appeal that is not conservative or right wing in nature. But what I think that Tallarico is peddling is not necessarily Christian at all. I think that he has Christian language, but if you look at what he has had to say, we are, we are not in the neighborhood of Orthodoxy, there's nothing there. I mean, we're talking about classic progressive Christianity of the type that that, as Al Mohler pointed out, J. Gresham Machen referred to as liberalism, as opposed to Christianity. In other words, it's a different religion altogether.

I was wondering about this as I watched the primary campaign. I wondered how he would do. And then after he won and I started to hear more of the things from his recent past, the past five or six years, I realized that the opposition file on him is going to be incredible. I mean, when people see the things that he said, and I understand it's been played here on the podcast, you know, "trans people need abortions too," that kind of stuff, I think that most people in the state of Texas are going to be seriously turned off. And I don't think he's even going to present the kind of threat that Beto O'Rourke did a few years ago.

MAST: Well, Hunter Baker is provost at North Greenville University. 

Thank you so much, Hunter.

BAKER: Thank you.

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