Washington Wednesday: What comes after

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s the last day of December, the last day of 20-25. It’s Washington Wednesday and joining us now is political scientist Hunter Baker. Good morning Hunter!

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning!

MAST: Hunter, Mary’s story makes clear how much the work of Charlie Kirk was about holding things together—especially among younger conservatives. And that brings us to where we’d like to start: the idea that those things are not holding together so well. In any assessment of 2025, I think we have to acknowledge the fragmenting of the conservative movement. Talk to us about what you’re seeing here at the end of the year, and what we might expect along these lines headed into 2026.

BAKER: Well, it's strange that you see a moment like we saw after the death of Charlie Kirk, where you have just this gigantic sort of memorial service that was tremendously inspiring and unifying, and yet, in the wake of that, you do see a lot of division among people who would call themselves conservatives or Republicans. So in the wake of his dying, we had, we had kind of a collective moment, but now it's all sort of falling out. And he was, he was really a movement builder. He was somebody who understood that politics is about addition, not subtraction, but right now, we're going through maybe some subtraction now in terms of the way the overall landscape looks. When I think about Charlie Kirk, I think about young people. He apparently had the ability to move young people in terms not only of their activism, but in terms of their voting. And young people are asking that sort of question that comes up generation from generation: will I be able to live as well as my parents have, or even to exceed them? And for a lot of, lot of young people right now, the answer to that is no. And you hear them often saying that earlier generations had a better setup than they do. So that's one issue. How do we address that challenge? How is AI going to affect young people? It will affect them more than it does people my age. And then the other question is, what is going to really drive the conservative movement? Is it going to be constitutionalism the way it was in the past, or was it going to be something like strong executive power?

EICHER: Let’s turn from movements to governing. If there was a single issue where Washington moved from argument to action it has to be immigration.

Not that President Trump was silent in his first term. It was central then, too. But between term 1 and term 2, we had the Biden presidency and an unprecedented number of illegal crossings of the southern border. And so depending on how you figure it, we have anywhere from 6 million to 10+ million in the country that weren’t here when Trump left office.

So the rhetoric wasn’t about a big, beautiful wall as in the first year of the first term … it was about mass deportations in the first year of the second. The border is sealed. The issue is what to do about the many millions that have been added. And that’s gotten complicated. How do you assess the administration’s performance following through on that campaign promise?

BAKER: Well, first of all, sealing the border has been an impressive feat. This has been for a very long time, a porous border with people moving back and forth, and in more recent years, people just coming across and not going back, and instead sort of staying here and sending back money. And so it's had a big impact on the labor force in the United States, and probably what blue collar workers have been able to be paid because of that massive addition to the labor force, not to mention the general chaos that comes from having millions of people in the country who are not documented and are not necessarily paying taxes and present certain challenges to healthcare and law enforcement. So sealing the border very impressive. Now is for the even harder part, which is, how do you deal with the millions who are here? And you saw George W. Bush try to deal with this, with the idea of a general amnesty, and that did not sell in the United States. And so we have this situation where people don't seem to want an amnesty, but they also don't necessarily have the stomach for this kind of mass deportation. So the President has got a big challenge there.

MAST: You know Hunter, leading up to the Inauguration a year ago there seemed to be a real appetite for the work that would be given to DOGE–the Department of Government Efficiency. But within months, both of its leaders–Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy–stepped away. And it’s not clear just how much more efficient the government is or will become as a result of its work.

And yet we end the year with reports of massive waste and fraud coming out of Minnesota. Here’s a bit of a documentary by the young online personality Nick Shirley about what he uncovered there:

SHIRLEY: These groups are setting up these daycares, these child care centers, getting money from the government, but there's no kids?

DAVID: No kids. Never, at any of them. They're all fraught with violations. And even though they had these violations, they're still an operation and they're still getting money. And it's millions of dollars for every one of them every year.

Hunter it appears fraud and waste continue into 2026–so what’s to be done and who do you see addressing it going forward?

BAKER: Well, speaking as somebody who has been concerned about the massive public debt for a long time, I was very excited about DOGE because I very much did hope that they could identify a lot of fraud and waste. I think that that effort ran out of steam, because we cannot simply cut the budget from the executive end. Congress allocates the money, and then the executive is supposed to preside over the spending of that money and the implementation of the policies. So DOGE kind of hit a dead end, but what has happened in Minnesota shows that the government needs to address the question of how money is allocated and spent. We love, we love to give out tons of grant money and lots of political support comes with that. But what we've seen in Minnesota, and I guarantee you, this is all over the country, especially in the wake of COVID and sort of the gusher of spending there is just gigantic fraud. And I hope that this is going to draw enough attention to kind of get people focused in more, more than a way that a dog follows a squirrel, on having some sort of permanent answer to this waste of resources. We are, we are much too far in debt not to figure out how to deal with this, and this presents a ready platform to somebody who wants to run on it. The Republicans are looking at a tough midterm. Maybe they'll pick up dealing with waste, fraud and abuse as one of their main issues.

EICHER:Let’s finish out our time today where we began, remembering those we lost this year. We don’t have time to talk about the full impact of all the leaders who died in 2025, but I’d like to get a brief take from you on what impact they left on the political landscape of the country.

We lost a few top-level former leaders this year. Let’s start with former Vice President Dick Cheney.

BAKER: Some people who are old enough may remember that when Ronald Reagan was running for president in 1980 that there was a push for him to have Gerald Ford as his running mate, and that they would have been kind of a co-presidency. Well, it turns out that Gerald Ford's chief of staff, did have a kind of a co-presidency with George W. Bush. Bush was the successful governor of Texas, and then he brought on the old hand at foreign policy and defense with Dick Cheney, and together, they ran the country. Now we all know that there was, there was a lot of interest and momentum as they tried to take the American experiment to the Middle East as an answer to 9/11. But to date, we would have to say that it didn't really pan out. And that's, that's the way Dick Cheney ended his life as somebody who was seen as the author of an ambition. Policy in the Middle East that did not really succeed along with him.

We might look at figures such as Richard Armitage, who started in Vietnam, really formed his identity there. Ultimately became an important aide to Robert Dole and reached the position of the number two man at the State Department. And for those of you who are sort of news oriented, he was the one who revealed the identity of Valerie Plame that resulted in that huge controversy during the Bush administration, and maybe a couple of other figures from that time, William Webster, he passed away this year as well. He was a federal judge. He headed up the FBI, and then headed up the CIA. He is the only person to have run both. Had an incredible reputation for integrity in office.

And finally, on that front, David Gergen, who is sort of the kind of guy that we might think of as a spin doctor who did that job for a lot of different politicians, Republican and Democrat. He passed this year.

EICHER: From Reagan to Clinton.

BAKER: Yeah, yes, that's right.

MAST:Hunter, what about on the House and Senate side? A few former Senators and Congressmen died in 2025 as well.

BAKER: Yes, some significant names there too. On the Democrat side, there's Charles Rangel, who actually replaced the legendary Harlem congressman, Adam Clayton Powell, who once reigned in the house, major, major figure, who was really sort of supplanted by Martin Luther King, Jr. But Rangel was the first African American to reach the position of chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. Was there for a very long time in in Congress, not as chair of that committee. Went down with with an ethics violation, but had a long and storied career.

Alan Simpson from Wyoming in the U.S. Senate. Simpson may be remembered for his book about his battles with the media, Right in the Old Gazoo. He was a tall, rangy guy with a lot of personality, socially moderate, but he liked conservative Supreme Court nominees.

Christopher “Kit” Bond, who served in the Senate, also as governor of Missouri, tremendous. One of, probably one of the most successful politicians that state ever saw. I think that he was elected statewide something like seven times, part of that Reagan class of senators.

Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Cuban American congressman who was very well known for fighting the battle against the Castro regime in Cuba. And finally, Mike Castle, who was both governor and a House member from Delaware. One of those typical Northeastern Republicans who had a lot of fiscal discipline but was socially moderate.

EICHER: Before we go, let’s end essentially where we started, with political architects. Charlie Kirk had Turning Point USA and Ed Feulner was one of the founding trustees and longtime president of The Heritage Foundation. We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention Feulner’s dying this past year, and what a year for Heritage.

BAKER: It certainly has been kind of a big year of controversy for Heritage, with the sort of happenings between Kevin Roberts and Tucker Carlson and resignations of people like Robert George from the board. And actually whole parts of Heritage breaking off to join with Mike Pence's Advancing American Freedom. Feulner is just a huge deal. He really represents his founding of the Heritage Foundation, along with Paul Weyrich, really represented maturation of the conservative movement to start up really a serious policy shop that, starting with the Reagan administration, had a huge impact on policy, and really has ever since.

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

BAKER: Thank you.

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