“Milbank & Lewis” is a weekly podcast featuring Washington Sun Perspectives columnists Dana Milbank and Matt K. Lewis debating the five biggest political stories of the week. You can download or listen here.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Dana Milbank: Hello, I’m Dana Milbank, and welcome back to “Milbank & Lewis,” the podcast in which I respectfully listen to my conservative colleague Matt Lewis’ views and then politely inform him that he is a stone-cold loser. In this week’s episode, Dems in disarray — already? Why the GOP won’t win in 2028. The unimpeachable Pete Hegseth. The administration’s China virus. And why Donald Trump is going to hell. Five topics, three minutes each.
Matt, what have you got for me?
Matt Lewis: We’re about 10 days out now from the election, and the victorious Democrats are already fighting amongst themselves. House Dems are finger-pointing after screwing up two votes this week. Knives are out for Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, and some are talking about torpedoing a short-term spending bill. Dana, what’s wrong with these guys? And should they return Schumer and Jeffries as their leaders?
Milbank: Matt, I wish I knew the answer to that. Historic win. Ten days, and already they’re at each other’s throats. I’m really concerned that they’re headed into the Freedom Caucus route. And we saw where this led the Republicans over the last four years.
It’s very hard after a big win for a party to turn around and say “get lost” to the horses that they rode in on. I don’t see that very likely happening here.
Schumer, I think there’s a much bigger appetite for removing him. He’s a generation older and been around a long time. But come on, Jeffries is the guy who took over after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Joe Crowley, who was the heir apparent back in 2018. So, it’s a big climb and I’m just not sure that’s the distraction they need right now.
Lewis: Dana, I think I agree with you actually. If you win the Super Bowl, you don’t fire the coach the next year. I think Chuck Schumer, give him two years. He won. He recruited a lot of these guys and gals who ended up going on to flip the U.S. Senate. Like, give him at least two years, come on.
Milbank: I think the best thing that Chuck Schumer could do is say, “I’m gonna do this for the next two years, and then I’m retiring. I’m going off into the sunset. Or perhaps AOC will retire me forcibly.”
***
Lewis: All right, what else you got, Dana?
Milbank: Matt, you write this week that Democrats are likely to win the presidency in 2028. From your lips to God’s ears. You list eight reasons. Please tell me more.
Lewis: Donald Trump’s not gonna be on the ballot. Republicans can’t win if Trump’s not on the ballot, it seems. And it’s not like JD Vance, Ron DeSantis have a lot of charisma. So that’s one factor. I won’t go through all eight, but Dems now have this crop of fresh-faced young rising stars, Jon Ossoff among them.
But the other thing, Dana, is history. Outside of death or resignation, it is highly rare for a president to be replaced by a successor of the same party. And that’s basically what would have to happen in 2028. So I just think if you add all this up, it’s the Democrats’ race to lose.
Milbank: That’s exactly what worries me, because Democrats are capable of taking a race that is theirs to lose and doing it. Given the infighting that we were just talking about and potentially having 20, 30 Democrats on a stage together, I see plenty of opportunity to screw it up.
Lewis: Are the Democrats gonna have problems? Yes. Could they be organized enough to show up and vote to impeach Pete Hegseth this week? No, they got stuck in traffic. But compared to Donald Trump and the Republicans, it’s like Karl Rove and Machiavelli gave birth to a political party.
***
Lewis: Dana, this is a great segue. You wrote this week about how Donald Trump and the Republicans are just committed to making the same mistakes over and over again.
Milbank: Yes, let’s go through these things. We mentioned the Hegseth impeachment. Tom Massie is the only Republican in the House to take that off-ramp and to vote for impeachment and in essence to create some distance from the administration on the Iran war. Trump put Stephen Miller in at the White House. House Republicans installed Jim Jordan, who is tightly bound to Trump and perhaps the most pugilistic member in his caucus. Republicans, speaking of returning their traditional leaders, bring the very nice guy John Thune back in the Senate — that’s not signaling change either. Trump is now threatening Democratic cities and states. He’s back to declaring fraud in the election, he’s blaming voters for the election and, of course, he’s doing the same old insults he has already done. So I see them as not necessarily picking up on all of the lessons from the election.
Lewis: Or any of them. Bill Clinton, famously after the 1994 Republican revolution, triangulates — he talks about ending welfare as we know it, “the era of big government is over.” He clearly got the message. Now there may be some Democrats who didn’t like the fact that he co-opted the Republicans’ slogans and platform in some cases, but from a political standpoint, it was effective. He heard the voters, he made changes, he listened to them. Donald Trump is going in the opposite direction.
Milbank: The most perplexing thing to me is the Hegseth impeachment. They hate this guy, they want distance from the war, they want distance from the administration. Massie was saying he was offering them a life raft off the Titanic. He was doing them a favor. And they said, no, no, no, we’re gonna stick with the Titanic. And Hegseth rewarded their loyalty by going to Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day and acting like a hooligan at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
***
Milbank: Alright, that’s about all I can stand talking about Pete Hegseth. But our next topic is also about doing favors, specifically the Trump administration’s favors for the Chinese Communist Party.
Officials, reportedly, including Trump, knew about the Nvidia boss Jensen Huang’s affair with a Chinese spy last year, but they did nothing about it. Meanwhile, they took his advice on selling powerful chips to China despite national security concerns. Now Matt, you’re a free market guy, but what happens when laissez-faire becomes laissez-affair?
Lewis: I think we’ve learned a couple things from this experience. First, if you’re a middle-aged guy and a hot young lady is complimenting your black leather jacket, she’s probably a spy, so run the other way.
Donald Trump came out and said the CEO of Nvidia was “an honorable guy.” I mean, Trump just keeps handing his adversaries ammunition to use against him. Trump is on the wrong side of every issue and Republicans are gonna keep getting dragged down, I think, as long as he is.
Milbank: It’s not just Trump. His entire administration seems to be intent on walking the plank with him. You’ve got Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick protecting Megaspeed, which is the company that the spy was actually involved with. Lutnick got into a fight with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at the White House over this.
There are two things that are perplexing here. First, the administration’s inexplicable affinity for China and the Chinese Communist Party. But it’s also this: I mean, don’t you think that in these elections we heard something from the voters about responding to the billionaire class, responding to Big Tech? And the administration, just like a moth to a flame, says, no, we’re gonna tie ourselves even more closely to these guys.
Lewis: Yeah. Like whether you’re a national security China hawk, or whether you’re a populist anti-tech oligarch, Trump’s on the wrong side of this. And it’s really hard to understand, other than money, why he would be.
I’d like to know, where is Tom Cotton? Where are these conservative national security hawks who care deeply about the threat of China? Because I think if Barack Obama had done or said something like this, we might have heard about it.
***
Lewis: This leads us to our final topic. Donald Trump is probably going to hell. This, according to Donald Trump himself. What do you think of that, Dana?
Milbank: I’m gonna admit it. I really had decided that CBS was not gonna work out, but wow, let’s give Ross Douthat some credit. That was a hell of an interview and some uncharacteristic honesty from Donald Trump, saying that even if it meant not crossing the pearly gates, he was not gonna give up on hating Nancy Pelosi.
Lewis: Everyone’s rightly talking about Trump saying he won’t forgive his enemies. But I was struck when Douthat pushed back a little bit and Trump said, if I did that, “I wouldn’t be real.”
This struck me as very telling, Dana. What Donald Trump is saying is that rather than striving to be more like Jesus — to transcend the carnal, fleshly nature that we all have — that doing that makes one a phony, a fake. I found that to be the most interesting, weird part about it. I don’t know if a lot of Christians are watching and paying attention, but this is not the first time he has said something like “2 Corinthians” that raises some questions about his authentic worldview.
Milbank: White evangelical Christians are the one group that didn’t abandon him in the elections? How do you think they see lines like that?
Lewis: One of the big stories of this midterm is the rise of the so-called religious left, whether it’s Adam Hamilton in Kansas or James Talarico, who’s a seminarian down in Texas, or the latest candidate out of Mississippi, Scott Colom, who is not a pastor but is a believer who talked in his victory speech about the importance of prayer. As Donald Trump continues to butcher Christian theology, these Democrats are, albeit from a more liberal perspective, talking more about their faith.
Milbank: As a member of the aforementioned religious left, I’m glad to see that we’re getting a little more respect these days. That is all the time we have left today for our discussion of the afterlife. But come hell or high water, we’ll be back next week.
More Perspectives:
Matt K. Lewis: Eight Reasons a Democrat Will Win in 2028
Milbank & Lewis Podcast: Will the GOP Finally Dump Trump?
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