beat. peggy nunan and professor at harvard s kennedy school of government. thanks to both of you for being here. i want to get to the developing news. joy reed has this brand-new interview with speaker pelosi. here is some news coming out as pelosi puts the heat on trump to fix the shut down. one of the things you talked about yesterday in your acceptance speech was the power of congress. as the first branch of government. mitch mcconnell, your counterpart in the senate has made it clear that even those these were senate bills passed by republicans that he won t put them back on the floor unless the president approves of them. how do you get around this if the other half of the first branch of government will only act at the behest of the president? what mitch mcconnell is doing and i say this as respectfully as possible, is saying we are not needed.
candidates. it s going to be much harder for republicans to recruit decent candidates. and then there s going to be a fair number of members of congress who are looking at this, looking at john boehner and saying, wow, he looks really happy to me. i need this in dealing with all these crazy people like i need a hole in the head. i m out of here. and not for nothing. when you look at the election, in the last 118 years only three times has the incumbent president s party picked up seats in the first midterm. they ve lost seats in every other midterm. so even if donald trump was doing well, he s structurally facing some real significant headwinds coming into the race. wow. joe. you know, peggy, also it seems this election was election once again where voters went out and didn t so much vote for a party or for a candidate than
the base, but peggy s right. republicans can t win their primaries without donald trump. and they can t win competitive general elections with donald trump. so what do you do if you re a republican? you prepare other than retire. you prepare to lose. the dye is cast here, joe. there is no more time on the clock. paul ryan said yesterday, we re with trump. and thus the dye is cast. oh, god. but you look at the special elections, the georgia six race, tom price s previous elections had been at about 66%. the republican who wins the special election before price resigns in disgrace and the committee spends $50 million to save the seat, he wins with 49%. math is an underappreciated virtue in politics. so what you have coming into 2018 is this, you have 100% of the democrats, you have about
seem to be forming. it is a 33% coalition, peggy. and at best sometimes maybe a 40%. and that doesn t win you elections. it didn t on tuesday. it won t next year. yeah. look, what happened if the republicans think about this right, what happened on tuesday will be for them bracing and defining. i spent a lot of time on wednesday talking to activists who politicos and regular normal humans in virginia. and one of them said the smartest thing to me. i said just explain to me what happened. and she said what happened is the republican party is caught in what i call trump catch-22. we can t win with him, we can t win without him. you cannot let one man at this point a man so divisive,
steve schmidt, columnist for the wall street journal and political contributor for nbc news and msnbc, the great peggy nunan. and great political reporter of the washington post and moderator on pbs, robert costa. and former congressman harold ford jr. with us this morning. joe, what a great table we have this hour and so much to talk about. steve thought you were talking about him, schmidt. no, no, i m talking about steve bannon who obviously watches the show. we thank you for watching, steve. and also doesn t seem like you watch a lot. you just mention it all the time. no, he watches it. that s good. somebody else watches it. somebody else still watches it too even though he won t admit it. so, peggy, the wall street journal editorial, the anti-trump wave, seems that the bottom line they bring out and it is it s critical for republicans to understand, a trump majority coalition doesn t