Washington Wednesday: The first lady’s lane

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 4th of February. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

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. Good morning, Hunter.

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning!

MAST: Hunter, I want to start somewhere a little different this week. I spent a couple of hours last weekend seeing the new Amazon documentary Melania. It is highly curated, yes, but it is an interesting look at the weeks leading up to the inauguration last year.

MELANIA: Hi Mr. President. Congratulations.

Did you watch it?

I did not. Yeah, I will see it on the news.

Melania has done better than expected at the box office–earning over $7 million. That’s the highest opening weekend for a non-music documentary in years.

I'm not going to ask you about fashion, Hunter, but I will give you my takeaway—and a question for you. What I saw was a busy woman who stays in her lane. She understands the power and the influence that she yields and does it in a feminine way. 

Yes, she is a model who still loves to look good, but what I saw in the film shows her deeper dimensions: she is a wife accompanying her husband who has work commitments. She’s a mother being mindful of her son Barron. She’s a daughter grieving her mother’s death, and a First Lady gathering information about everything from the Israeli hostages to global initiatives to help children.

So there’s my little midweek movie review for you, (I am no Collin Garbarino). But in all seriousness, Hunter, as a political scientist, talk about the role of the First Lady. How do you measure success?

BAKER: So first ladies really matter, and they matter in different ways. You know, a lot of people in our era might think first about Hillary Clinton, who famously took the lead on the attempt to nationalize healthcare during her husband's administration, was also a source of sort of a speculation about scandal with regard to her finances, eventually became the secretary of state, and came very close to becoming president of the United States.

But maybe the biggest one of them all was Eleanor Roosevelt, who, you know, it was completely impractical in the 1930s to think about her succeeding her husband in the presidency, but she left a big mark on American policy, and was a big part of the UN Declaration on Human Rights after World War Two.

We might also think about Betty Ford, who became famous for her problems with addiction. Also one of many Republican first ladies who were socially liberal; she was in favor of keeping abortion legal. 

And then you think of first ladies like Nancy Reagan with her Just Say No campaign. But really, who you think about more for her stalwart support of her husband, Ronald Reagan. It's almost impossible to imagine him getting where he did without her kind of bolstering him and just kind of unconditional love and support throughout his political career.

And the one that I really like is Pat Nixon. Pat Nixon, I think a lot of people don't realize this, she was the most traveled First Lady for something like 25 years after she served in that role. But more famously, when there was an attempt to take Richard Nixon off of the Republican ticket in 1952, she encouraged him to fight, and he gave his famous Checkers Speech in which he deflected complaints about him receiving gifts from donors by saying that they had received a little dog named Checkers, and the girls loved him, and he wasn't going to give him back. And it was also in that speech when he talked about his wife Pat's respectable Republican cloth coat. She was a fighter, and she really wanted him to demand a recount in 1960, though he did not choose to do so.

And then, and then finally, since we're talking about Melania Trump, she makes me think about Jackie Kennedy. Jackie Kennedy, who was similarly sort of a fashion and style icon, and also the builder of, sort of the myth and legend of Camelot after her husband's death.

EICHER: All right, Hunter, well, the partial government shutdown, very different from the previous one that we talked about here, the record setter last year. This one not quite about budget disagreements, but a specific fight over Homeland Security and Immigration Enforcement. Democrats are withholding support unless Republicans go along with some changes to ICE and turning DHS funding into the leverage point here. 

So what are the concrete issues actually on the table, Hunter? Border enforcement, detention policy, asylum rules, ICE authority? And just thinking as this kind of drags on, what do you think Republicans are prepared to consider giving up in order to get a deal?

BAKER: There's really two levels. There's the substantive level, and then there's the political level. So on the one hand, is this really about the way ICE operates? To some extent. Americans are clearly concerned. These two deaths of protesters have put a big spotlight on the issue and took it beyond just sort of this question of kind of mass actions by ICE, but also created the sense that their activity was actually dangerous to American citizens. And whether you agree with that or not, it has become kind of a salient political issue. 

And that really takes us to the second part of this, which is, I think the Democrats have accurately intuited that these events have opened up an opportunity, and so they are not going to just kind of pass this entire budget without taking the opportunity to highlight ICE and Homeland Security. And so that's what they're going to do, and they're going to focus on that, and they're going to talk about changes that have to happen. They're going to try to get rid of these mass actions entirely. They're going to try to have cameras on all of these ICE agents, they're going to try to prevent them from wearing masks, all the, all the different kinds of restrictions and changes that you can get. 

And then, having done so, they'll be able to say, “Look, we stood up to Donald Trump, we stood up to Kristi Noem, and we got these important changes.”

EICHER: My question comes down to, how far can Republicans go without fracturing their coalition? I mean, there's got to be a point here where Republicans can't go beyond?

BAKER: Yeah, I think that Republicans are not, are not really divided so much about the immigration issue. I think that Donald Trump has, has basically convinced them, through his sort of remarkable career, that immigration through the border is, or can be, a winning issue, and that it's that it's actually important. 

But the division here is over the way that ICE goes about it, right? And that's that's going to be the issue, right? And so you're going to have Republicans who are going to say, "look, there's a point at which this becomes counterproductive" and counterproductive in the way that they care about the most, which is electorally counterproductive. So that's going to be the big division.

EICHER: Well, staying on politics, Hunter, The New York Times cast this as a political jolt to the Republicans: a local Democrat winning a Texas district that President Trump carried in 2024 by 17 points. 

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis weighed in after that special election. He said special elections—granted—are quirky and not necessarily projectable, but he added that a swing of that size, 17 points, that's not a thing that can be dismissed. 

So how should Republicans read this? What part is signal, what part is noise? And is this state Senate race a reliable proxy for the kind of headwinds that we think Republicans may have going into the November midterms?

BAKER: I think that there is more signal than noise. 

Yes, it's a state Senate race, but in Texas, I think that this state senate district is as big, or a little bit bigger than a U.S. Congressional District. So you're talking about, you know, an area of like a million people or something like that. 

It's true that it was a special election. It's true that it was held on a Saturday, which is odd. It's true that the weather was frigid, but it's also true that the Republican had, I don't know, something like a four to one fundraising advantage in this race. And so when you lose in Texas, in a conservative district where you have a whole lot more money, I think there's a signal, and the signal is there's a lot of frustration, and that the Democrats are well organized. I mean, whatever happened, they were able to get their voters to the polls, and the Republicans did not. So I think that this race matters.

MAST: Hunter, last week a jury awarded a gender de-transitioner $2 million in damages for the mastectomy she underwent at 16 years old. The Free Press reports that this medical malpractice case is the first of dozens currently in the legal pipeline. 

So I want to draw on your dual legal and political expertise here—what does this verdict mean politically? Surgeries like this are still legal in more than 20 states. How will lawsuits like these affect not just the courtroom landscape but the regulatory landscape?

BAKER: Right, well, what is legal is not necessarily what is dispositive. We know, for example, that cigarettes were legal for decades. They still are legal, and that damages from smoking cigarettes added up into, I think probably the billions for the cigarette companies in those famed lawsuits.

Now, I think that the typical American when they hear about a minor having a sex change operation of the most serious sort, right, where the body is being literally radically changed—we might even say mutilated—and so drugs and surgery are used—I think that the typical American thinks to themselves, "A teenager should not be doing this. Their consent should not be enough to make this happen." And so I think that intuitively, it's a very potent issue, and I think it's going to be potent for juries. I think that juries are going to say, "I don't think that this should have been done to this young person."

Now, what that does is it kind of takes us away from this sort of glitzy, influencer type world that we've been living in, where we act as though people can have their sex changed like rubbing a lantern and asking a genie for a wish. Clearly, is not the case. And you know, it takes us into this world that C.S. Lewis talked about in The Abolition of Man, where we just lose all sense of the natural law and sort of moral reality about about what human beings are, and submit ourselves to this class of elites that he called the 'Conditioners.' 

To me, this is the revenge of The Abolition of Man.

EICHER: Hunter Baker is provost at North Greenville University, a WORLD Opinions commentator, and our regular Washington Wednesday analyst. Hunter, thank you, we'll see you next week. 

BAKER: Thank you.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.