Washington Wednesday: Political adjustments

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 16th of July.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Time now for Washington Wednesday.

Let’s start with fallout from the Epstein investigation … we did talk a little about this last week. Attorney General Pam Bondi said it’s case-closed—despite earlier promises that suggested we were about to get bombshell revelations. That nothing-to-see-here response didn’t sit well with many Trump supporters.

Over the weekend, several took their frustrations to a TurningPoint USA conference. Fox News host Laura Ingraham polled the crowd on the Epstein case.

AUDIO: How many of you are satisfied– you can, you can clap– satisfied with the results of the Epstein investigation? [crowd boos]

MYRNA: Even Turning Point USA head Charlie Kirk seemed to back away, saying he’s trusting the administration to handle it.

Here he is on Monday, after a weekend call with the President.

KIRK: Honestly, I'm done talking about Epstein for the time being. I’m going to trust my friends in the administration. I’m going to trust my friends in the government to do what needs to be done, solve it, the ball’s in their hands.

EICHER: Joining us now is lawyer and political scientist Hunter Baker. He’s provost of North Greenville University and a contributor to World Opinions. Hunter, good morning.

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: Hey, so what do you make of the conservative backlash here, Hunter? Is this real tension between Trump and MAGA, or do you think it’s just kind of an online frustration that will disappear at some point?

BAKER: Well, so I know that, I know this is big on social media, but the thing that I keep wondering is, are we actually going to see any polling impact from this, you know? So if I, if I continue to watch the polls on job approval or favorability, am I going to see any changes? And I kind of doubt that we are. I suspect that a lot of this is in the area of what we might call anecdata, right? Anecdote and data mashed up into one thing, where it's going to, it's going to make a lot of noise, and we're going to hear a lot, but it's sort of the podcast grist, as opposed to being much more important.

The other thing I want to say is that we've had Trump pouring water all over this thing. Did he participate in ginning up this controversy, as he has with other controversies? That is certainly the case, but he has made it totally clear that he stands with Pam Bondi. And in the July 15 Wall Street Journal, Alan Dershowitz, who was Epstein's lawyer, or at least one of his lawyers, really made clear that to the extent that there's any kind of a list, there may be a guest list, but that guest list does not have any current office holders on it. Now translation, if there are no current office holders on that list, that means Donald Trump is not on that list. So that would, that would kind of dispel the idea that Trump is crushing this thing because he is some sort of person of interest, or something like that.

BROWN: Now shifting to Elon Musk—he floated a new party on the Fourth of July and says he’s serious about fielding candidates in 2026. President Trump dismissed it.

TRUMP: Third parties have never worked, so he can have fun with it, but, uh, I think it's ridiculous.

And the president has a point: third parties almost never get traction, even though dissatisfaction with the two-party system seems sky high.

Is this Musk being Musk, or is there a real appetite for something outside the Republican tent? What’s the significance here?

BAKER: Yeah, so I think that there, there is certainly an appetite. Certainly there are many Americans who feel misrepresented or over represented or underrepresented by our two party binary system, and they wish that there was something else that was closer to their own preferences. But the problem is basically structural. There are other countries that have a proportional system that makes it quite possible to have maybe 5, 6, 7 political parties who then are able to form coalition governments. We do not have that. We have a winner take all system, and it's simply one or the other, and it makes it extremely hard for a third party to come in.

Now, we had something interesting with Ross Perot, who made a significant impact in 1992, less in ‘96, tried to set up a third party, the Reform Party, which people may remember that Donald Trump contested that in 2000. He was interested in maybe being the Reform Party candidate in 2000 but it didn't work out. But the Reform Party sort of petered out, and we've only seen third parties that are sort of marginal, like the Green Party and the Libertarian Party.

If Elon Musk really wants to try to achieve his goals, which right now he's focusing on paying off the debt, then really the way that he would be most likely to be successful would be to pull a takeover of one of the two parties. That's effectively what Donald Trump did with the Republican Party. Donald Trump really changed the priorities and sort of some of the fundamental goals of the Republican Party, starting in 2016. And you could imagine another figure, especially one who had extraordinary resources like Elon Musk, being able to reorient a political party to achieve goals that would work out a lot better than making a third party in our system.

EICHER: So Hunter, let's pivot away from Elon Musk and talk about the Democrats doing a little retooling of their own, though, this is more about mechanics than message or ideology. There was a pretty big piece in The New York Times saying that some of the party's biggest data firms are running some pilot programs, some cash prize contests, even AI analysis of door knocking campaigns to try to figure out what still works. The goal here being, I guess, to find out which voters are still listening, how to reach them before the midterms in 2026.

So Hunter, this is pretty typical political soul searching after a kind of a stinging defeat. But what do you make of the Democrats going back to the drawing board here. Is it possible that they find out, for example, that Mamdani, the New York socialist candidate for mayor, represents the future of the party, or do they go moderate?

BAKER: It's a good question. At the conclusion of the Cold War, the Democrats looked inward and they decided to kind of come out with a more pro-business direction. That was Bill Clinton's run in 1992 he was going to be the pro-business Democrat. He was going to be more moderate on abortion. You remember the line about safe, legal and rare? You know he was supposedly appealing to the NASCAR voter in that election.

At another time, I can remember a lot of hullabaloo around work being done by George Lakoff, who was trying to find the rhetorical keys to victory in electioneering for the left. You know, that sort of thing goes on whenever you suffer a significant defeat and you're experiencing the other side winning in public policy, and that's going to happen now with AI. The truth is, everybody is going to be using AI to that end. Republicans and Democrats. And the Republicans are going to have to figure out what the post-Trump future looks like as well.

Now with regard to Mamdani in New York, I think that a lot of Democrats are in crisis over him, because he is pushing the socialist button harder than even Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. He is being pretty frank about it. And so I hear a lot of Democrats going on, say, CNBC or or similar outlets and kind of saying, “I am not a socialist, I'm a capitalist. I'm a Democrat who is a capitalist.” And so you are going to see a battle within the Democratic Party over that kind of identity.

BROWN: One more question before we let you go, Hunter. A major move this week from the Supreme Court on the emergency docket: the justices cleared the way for the Trump administration to move ahead with mass layoffs at the Department of Education, over 13-00 jobs cut, including most of the Office for Civil Rights. Now, critics say it’s a back door dismantling of a cabinet agency, something only Congress has the authority to do.

Hunter, are we seeing a structural shift in how federal agencies are governed?

BAKER: Yeah, so it's all a question over what does it mean for the President to have authority over the executive branch? I mean, it's unquestionable constitutionally that the President has the authority to run the executive branch. Now you're certainly right that you can't just take away agencies, especially when they've been established by law, but you can reorganize. And I think that arguably, that's a lot of what's being done here. You know, some of the functions that have been in education will get farmed out to other agencies. It's not like they're going to just stop doing the things that the law requires. You know, the wide variety of laws that have been passed over decades and decades, there may just be simply some sort of reassignment of those things. I agree that he cannot completely eradicate the department without an act of Congress. I do think that he has wide authority to reorganize.

BROWN: Hunter. Baker is North Greenville University Provost and a world opinions contributor. Thanks for joining us, Hunter.

BAKER: Thank you.

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