GOV310 – In The News: A look at national politics through the eyes of Texas, March 30, 2016

In the news.

Welcome to IN THE News for American in Texas government. I’m Eric McDaniel. And I’m Jim Henson. Well, we have quite a

bit to talk about. Of course, we’re going to start off with a discussion of the primaries. So other three

caucuses this weekend, he had Alaska, Hawaii and Washington, and he did well

in all three. And, you know, he’s continued his streak of furthering the impression

that he’s very good with the caucuses. Better than that and very good in states with a large white

population, which all three of those have, I think. So, you know, he didn’t he cut he made

up a little bit of ground or he gained some delegates. But Hillary Clinton sells a pretty big lead in that

race. Not a lot of news coming out of that race. I think a lot of the news was really both international

and on the other side in the last week, chief of which was the attack in the terrorist attack

in Brussels. Over 30 people dead, also carried out by ISIS. And it really

set the stage for a week. And we expect in which we expected a lot of discussion

of foreign policy and foreign policy to dominate both races on the Democratic side.

Hillary Clinton did give a very serious conventional but conventional

in the sense of being somber in tone and very direct in

talking about foreign policy issues in a in a very serious way. There was a little

bit of that at the outset on the Republican side, but it didn’t last very long, did it? No, it did

not at all. You know, you had Trump based on my clothes on

the border. Cruz talked about patrolling Muslim neighborhoods. And you had case

it was like, look, you know, let’s take a step back. Which is interesting because I don’t think my

case is coming off as the soft spoken, well mannered guy.

But anybody who knows this, that’s not who we are. That’s not the case. Who is this guy? Yeah. And so it’s

really interesting to see how he’s basically try to be the voice of calm

when when historically he’s known for being a pretty grumpy guy. But

this has really forced a lot of a lot of thinking in regards to this. And so we have a slide

regarding the timeline of the terrorist attacks. Right. So what we’ve seen I mean, this is from The New York Times

and it’s just we have to go through this kind of beat by B. But what it does underline

is why a lot of people that are serious about foreign policy and and thinking

about counterterrorism underline the fact that this ought to be taken pretty seriously.

We’ve seen a string of attacks going back over the last year or so

spread around the world, including one in the United States, the San Bernardino attack.

And so this seemed to set the stage. You know, once again, for

a kind of end to some of the things in the Republican race that people have thought of as borderline absurd

and not serious and just call it what it is, that that somehow Donald Trump’s dominance

of the discourse and in particular his shallow understanding of foreign policy

would somehow be displaced by a more serious discussion. Now, you know, I think we expected

that after Paris it didn’t happen. We expected it after San Bernardino. It didn’t happen.

We expected it possibly after Brussels. It hasn’t happened. And instead, what we got

was a really crazy week in the campaign. And we say that all the time. And it just

gets gets crazier as the candidates turn to focus not on Brussels, not

on counterterrorism, not on foreign policy, despite the best efforts of elites, but

rather Donald Donald Trump and Ted Cruz got into a big spat

that involve making fun of each other and saying mean things or implying mean things

about each other’s wives. Yeah. And that’s where you don’t go. I mean, one

of the things about it is, you know, Ted Cruz can upset Mitch McConnell. He doesn’t go home to Mitch McConnell.

All right. So that’s one place where you don’t start a fight. So

this is extremely interesting. Again, the fight started and we mentioned this last week

when a political action committee posted a picture of Donald Trump’s

current wife, which basically said, you know, meet me, Melina Trump,

you’re your next first lady. Or you could vote for Ted Cruz. And this is actually,

say, paid for by Make America awesome, not authorized

by any candidate or candidate committee. So they separate themselves from us. But Trump

immediately said no, because Ted Cruz’s name is in this like Ted is activist. This is

what Ted had done. And so you see a series of they took to Twitter and

which I think it was a place of nice, harmonious agreement. Again, I’m new to the Twitter

and I’ve been told that this goes on quite a bit. And so you get a basic a back

and forth between them. So like Ted Cruz just used the picture Molina from a GQ shoot

and his ad. Be careful line. Spilled the beans on your wife. Now, that threat was really

interesting because it’s it’s basically, you know, sort of the Trump campaign and Trump

signaling that they have oppo or negative things on Ted Cruz’s wife.

And there is a thing that’s been out in the public domain that Ted Cruz’s wife had

a kind of a bout of like depression or something that involved kind of an incident in Austin several

years ago where she was found sitting by the highway, kind of distraught.

I think a lot of people looked at that and saw it as something that could happen to anybody nonetheless. It was

a very kind of nasty wave increases direction. So of course, on Twitter,

Cruz replied relatively quickly within an hour, less than an hour.

Hey, that pic of your wife was not from us. Donald, if you attack, if you try to attack, Heidi, you’re more of a coward

than I thought. And then hashtag that classless. I’m glad I haven’t followed up

on the classless hashtag. And so they were off to the races. So very quickly. There was another

exchange within, you know, not very long. Donald Trump

retweeted a gif with a relatively

unflattering picture of Heidi Cruz, with a very airbrushed

picture of Melania Trump, with a tag saying no need to spill

the beans. The images are worth a thousand words were in the gif once again. Donald

Trump, as he said in the forum last night, getting in trouble, not for heat. What he tweeted about, what he read,

what he retweeted. Cruz responded on Twitter

with a kind of attempt to say, hey, you know, if he says real men don’t attack women, you know, essentially

both our wives are lovely. Trump doesn’t really take the olive branch. It doesn’t really

take it as a as an opportunity to de-escalate, because he doesn’t really do that

and says, I didn’t fight. I didn’t start the fight with like Ted Cruz over the the GQ, the GQ cover

of Melania. He did. He knew the pack was putting it out. Why? And Ted? Now,

beneath this, there’s also one slight academic point which, you know, the superPACs

that are and that the surrogates that are putting this out give the candidates a certain amount of

plausible deniability in situations like this. And as you know, like or not like

Donald Trump, every now and then, he does sort of say

the things that nobody else will say, which is that, look, in this case, we know that candidates

are, at least in campaigns, very likely aware of what the superPACs are doing. That’s not

universally true, but it’s very plausible in the public eye and very plausible even to elites

that, you know, the the degree of division between the campaigns and the superPACs vary

a lot. It’s very hard to control exactly how those relationships work.

Well, that all seem like it was absurd enough. And then still later in the week, we had another

weird intrusion of what we think of as old media into this new media Twitter fight in the campaign.

The National Enquirer, which I think some young people probably may or may not even know

what it is, tabloid journalism. They ran a story saying that Ted Cruz

had had five secret mistresses. Now the story was completely unsourced.

When you come right down to it, it was really a reporting of rumor. The Cruz campaign,

of course, went ballistic. Cruz won the party in a very rare scripted

press conference in which he accused the Trump campaign of planning the story,

in part because the Trump campaign and Trump personally has a close relationship with the Enquirer. Cruz

issued a kind of Trump issued a kind of non-denial denial in which he said, hey,

I don’t control this thing. And, you know, I hope it’s not true. But, you know, if it is, you know, lying,

Ted has a problem. And The Enquirer, by the way, was right about, you know,

some other things like John Edwards in particular in what was at 92.

Is that right? NITI no. Two thousand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So John Edwards

was a senator from North Carolina who ran for president, had a mistress. And

and that was revealed by the Enquirer. It’s fair to point out that the Enquirer has

been wrong about almost all of the U.S. foes, as far as I know, about the two headed

babies. They’re wrong. Ninety nine percent of the time. And so

now, again, people, if I could try to follow up on this, they’ve accused one of Ted Cruz’s aides. Somebody is actually

actively working his campaign of doing this. And so she’s on TV defending Ted Cruz. Like, well, you’re

you’re accused of this, too. Obviously, she has to backpedal now. But again, the most shocking thing

on this tabloid Enquirer, on the national choirs, again, that Blake is cheating on, Gwen. I

thought they would make it. But this is again, you know, Blake has

nice men, so they seem so well, like well suited. Yeah. Gwen? Yeah. I mean, I have

I had no idea they were together. But once I found out, I was like, oh, like hard way to end at nine women gets

the main spot in five. Just going to get the top you to some up the game, Ted.

I’m kidding. But the key thing here is, you know, there’s no

support for this. But the whole idea of Ted Cruz having mistresses was actually started by the Rubio

campaign is right. So it’s not just Trump doing this, but Rubio the Rubio campaign

started this. But this idea of but also this idea of Ted Cruz doing

dirty politics isn’t new either. So Rubio is accused them of this. Ben Carson accused

Mizo like Cruz and Ben Carson had to have like a meeting in a broom closet before debate to hash

things out. So this idea of Ted Cruz doing dirty tricks has already been put out there.

And so whether this is true or not and be truthful, you know that the PAC Make America

awesome doesn’t even exist. You know, takers like I’ve no idea what’s going on.

But the problem is the seed of Ted Cruz being devious things that has already been planted.

And, you know, Trump can run with this. Yeah. I mean, I mean, the Trump campaign is always is

to find this it’s essential portrayal that they’re trying to

put out there about Cruz. That’s the lion Ted thing. And this really just drops right into that.

And so they can continue to mine it, as Trump did last night in the forum. You know, I think broadly,

I mean, for thinking about how campaign works, this is one of those insider things that

people don’t. That doesn’t see the light of day quite so much, but it’s essential to campaigns

when you’re running a campaign. You have what’s called an opposition research team and they dig both

real and potential negative stories out through research on their opponents

and then wait to use them and and look at those files and figure out how they

can construct the negative portrayal of their opponents. And that’s not to say that this is

the digital. So far, there’s not a shred of evidence in the public domain that this is true about Cruz,

but it fits into this broader portrait

that they’re painting. As you were saying, it’s an extremely interesting and this is where you

going. People getting really upset about the current state of the campaign that you think,

OK. You know what? The hand jokes and things like that. And, you know,

everything’s fine downstairs. Okay. Oh, OK. We’ve hit a new low. No, no, no, no.

It’s gone. There’s there’s room to go. So.

So this really does, you know. I mean, it was really interesting how this all popped out when it did.

Given that, as we said earlier, there was a real expectation that, you know, as we

were saying, even in the last podcast, that the Brussels attacks would would, in

a sense, turn the campaign in a different direction. And clearly that

there was an effort at that. Donald Trump, for example, gave two significant interviews, one to The Washington

Post, one to The New York Times, both of which were keyed on foreign policy and both

of which were panned. And if you think about the timing of this, these came a few days

after they were actually going on as the the spat over the wives

was was breaking out. And Trump did a pretty terrible job in these and raised a bunch

more doubts about foreign policy, at least among foreign policy experts and and

elites, whether that was going to trickle down to the public or not. Open question. But

it did give us a chance to once again see how effective Trump is at changing

the subject. So, you know, where in, you know, all things being equal, one might

have expected the week to be dominated by Donald Trump, saying that the United

States should really reduce its commitment to NATO, his high tolerance of Newt,

of this of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Lots of things that are really at odds with

with fundamentals of U.S. foreign policy. And what we can’t think of his liberal internationalism, the

idea that the US has a central and active role in the world order.

Instead, we saw that the cable news dominated by the to and fro that we just described,

um, and it really did underline just how effective Trump is

at changing the subject using material that you might not expect was usable like, for example,

the firing of his campaign manager or the indictment of his campaign manager, the charges

of assault being filed against him. He hasn’t fired him. Yeah. So I mean one of the recurring themes with

Trump rallies is the use of violence. And so you had Trump aide was accused

a while back of assaulting a reporter. And there’s actually video of him kind of grabbing him and

being somewhat somewhat rough with her. So he’s actually being charged with assault. I mean, there

were bruises that were there. There’s actually been a lot of fallout within Breitbart who

who the reporter worked for regarding this. And Trump has actually come out and, you know, supported

his life, you know, said, well, how do we know the bruises weren’t there already? You know, she

she may have been trying to attack me. You know, all kinds of other things. He was there for security reasons. And

so this has raised some concerns. And you have the more recent

one that came out yesterday, about a 15 year old, 51 woman who was was pepper

sprayed at a Trump rally. And so, you know, so what degree? You know, she was

assaulting someone else isn’t really clear. But the idea that these things are going on and this kind

of changes, you know, you may get him on one thing, but he changes something else. And so you’ve been basically,

you know, almost like my you know, my six year old, whenever you corner, we’re doing something wrong, you know,

say, oh, look, there’s a bird out the window. What? But no, is this the subject? But he’s pretty good

at distracting people. And for some strange reason, the press seems like, you know, he didn’t he. Jingles.

Keys from the. No, I. Oh, okay. Just completely forget about what they were talking about before. I love the jangly

look at the shiny object. Yeah. Yeah, there’s something to that. So, you know, I think one of the one of the things

to think about there, too, is that if you look at, you know, what we have been calling wife gay,

if you look at the fact that, you know, they’ve charged they have filed these assault charges against Corey

Lewandowski. Trump doubled down last night, denying that it really does speak to

the ongoing discussion about gender and what women voters are gonna do

in the fall election. And speaking of the fall election, we mentioned. Trump really doubled down in

defending his campaign manager and in some ways that were hilarious, frankly.

Nonetheless, he did use that pretty effectively to change the subject after another

kind of rocky performance in response to some questions on foreign policy. The real headline out

of that out of that forum last night, though, was that Trump, following

on Ted Cruz and John Kasich, both beginning to hedge on everybody’s pledge

a few weeks ago to support the Republican candidate in the general election, no matter who it was.

Trump himself, who was really the core of that whole subject, because there’s always been a worry that

Trump would run as an independent if he didn’t get the nomination. Trump, basically.

Hedged on his promise to support the GOP candidate, whoever it was, in the fall. So let’s hear some sound

on that. More than six months ago, you pledged to support the Republican nominee, whoever that may

be. A lot has changed since then. It sounded when I was pressing Senator Cruz on, it sounded

like he was saying he’d have a hard time supporting somebody who when I say he doesn’t have to support me,

I’m not asking trist support. I don’t want to people support. Do you continue to pledge whoever

that nominee is? No, I don’t. Any way you look. You don’t know. We’ll see who it is. You won’t

promise. Just support the Republican nominee who is essentially saying the same thing. Let me just say, he

doesn’t have to support me. I have tremendous support right now from the people.

I’m way over 2 million votes more than him. So the pledge he took is null and void. The

idea I have been supporting whoever the Republican nominee is. You say you will no longer guaran have been

changed to blaring unfairly. Look, I won the state of Missouri. Right now I have

to choose people. I’ve been treated. I’ve been treated very unfairly.

I’ll give you an example. Fairly. By who? I think by basically the RNC, the

Republican Party, the establishment. So, again, you see the populism here. Again, with the idea

that the establishment is attacking me. The people love me. The elites hate me. This is a very

strong arm. And again, the idea of him running as a third party candidate is is really worrisome to

the GOP. But the idea that this pledge, you know,

we all made this pledge. But here’s like, look, you treat me fairly. I’ll stay. But, you know, if you treat

me wrong and Ted Cruz at a point is like worse, that this man has personally attacked my family. So you tell

the media to go out and support a man who’s personally attacked my family is somewhat problematic. And John

Casey can say, you know, look, these these individuals are so ideologically

far from me that I can’t see myself supporting them. Now, you know,

again, this the idea of a heated campaign that’s become a personal campaign up for the most part. You know,

the fight is between Trump and Cruz. Akasaka on on the outside. It can be really interesting to see

what happens when Texas actually gets thrown into the fight. So right

now, it’s a two man fight with, you know, a guy on the side saying, come on, guys. But

there what happens if case it gets involved? Does all of a sudden the nice Jon case

we’re seeing go to the Jon case that everybody expected of being somewhat gruff.

I mean, I think they’re in some ways Trump saying that he’s not. He’s changed his mind on this

is maybe the most unsurprising news of the week. On the other hand, there are two things to really notice.

They’re classic Trump in that. On one hand, we didn’t have the segment of Cruz for reasons

of time. But Cruz was was very careful and didn’t you know, wouldn’t

quite say that he wouldn’t support Trump. His

line in the week has said, you know, you can’t support somebody who you have to really have second thoughts about somebody

who would insult your wife and your family. But then when asked directly, so does that mean you wouldn’t support him?

He just said, well, what it means is that I don’t think he’s going to be the candidate and there would be problems. So he stepped

right up to the edge without directly saying he wouldn’t support him. And so in

classic Trump style. Two things. One, he just gets in front of that and tells

Cruz, you know, it sounds to me like you’ve already you’re being mealy mouthed and you’re not going to support me

anyway. And I don’t care. I don’t need your support, you know? And then second

and the key word and he does this very purposefully is when he makes that argument that he was treated unfairly.

If you go back to when Trump very publicly, after getting a lot of questions several months

ago about whether he would support the GOP candidate if it wasn’t him, he said,

I will do it as long as I’m treated fairly. If I’m treated fairly, it’s fine. So the extent that he’s going

back to this argument that the party establishment is treating him unfairly, that resonates

with his audience, who has negative views of the party as an organization any way.

And it lays the predicate for him saying, look, I’m just doing what I said. But also, I mean, this whole idea

of making a pledge is a little bit weird because you didn’t have you don’t have that on the Democratic side. You know, like

everybody raise your right hand and promise me, you know. And so it’s it’s also unfair

to the GOP to stick to this pledge idea because it asks for the Democrats. And

I really I really wasn’t happy with the pledge because it’s like this. We’re not five.

Well, it’s I think on one hand. That’s right. But on the other hand, what it is. I mean, I think what’s important about it is that

it underlines just how divided they are. And we’ve talked a lot about that division,

the division. We’ll talk about it more, I think, in coming weeks. I’m sure there’s a real division mainly between

the kind of traditional elite of the Republican Party, you know, who

Trump is constantly thumbing his nose at both in language and in Paul,

his policy declarations and the base of the Republican Party that is resonating with

the. Both Trump and Cruz. I mean, it’s not a surprise that both of these guys are the candidates.

So on one hand, the pledge is kind of stupid and seems pro forma. On the other hand,

it’s a real symptom that people are fundamentally worried about the Republican

Party blowing apart in general terms and more specifically that if Trump is somehow

denied the nomination, that he’ll go his own way and definitely sink their chances in the general election.

Yeah. So. So we’ll talk more about this next week in kind of the outcomes.

So in particular, talking about the SCOTUS nomination, how that’s developing along with some of the issues going on

the state level as we talk about the state of the GOP over the next the next coming weeks on closing.

I want to take this time to congratulate the women’s basketball team for making to the lead.

I know it didn’t end the way they wanted to, but I think Coach Karen asked their staff for basically

bringing Utah women’s basketball back to national prominence. It’s beautiful. It’s been a beautiful thing to watch

and I can’t wait for for next year. You’ve recruited great athletes, great students

and great people in general. So, again, thank you on that. Thank you so much for that successful season.

So we will see you all next week. Have a good week. I guess I would say hook him here. Yeah, OK.

All right. Hook him.

The government’s three term in the news podcasts is hosted by doctors Jim Hansen and Eric muqdad

and is produced by the Liberal Arts US Development Studio and the Department of Government and the College

of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.