Pete Wehner on Democratic Party Challenges and the Rise of Populism

Transcript:

Michael Medved:
We are joined by Pete Wehner, who is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. His material also appears frequently in the New York Times. He is a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. He was formerly a speechwriter for George W. Bush and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His most recent column, "Joe Biden Tries to Calm the Waters." And the question: Will Donald Trump do the same? Pete, thanks very much for joining us. And I know there's been a lot to watch. You watched last night the Joe Biden interview with Lester Holt on NBC. You also watched some of the convention, didn't you?

Pete Wehner:
I did. I sure did.

Michael Medved:
You probably noticed that people were making a big deal of President Trump with his ear bandaged and sitting with Tucker Carlson, among others. The idea was this was a different Trump. This was a more calm, more unifying, less partisan Trump. Somebody who, because of his close brush with death, apparently is going to be showing us a different side of his personality. Do you buy it?

Pete Wehner:
I'm open to it in the short term. I don't think it's going to have a long-term impact. Just to unpack it a little bit, he seemed to me—just in observing, obviously from afar— to be somewhat more vulnerable and restrained than he usually is. And I thought from the Republican perspective, it was a kind of an electrifying moment for a political convention, for all the obvious reasons. I say that as someone who's been a fierce Trump critic and remains so, but I'm not such a critic of his that I can't see reality. And the way in which he reacted on Saturday and the moment yesterday at the RNC is obviously going to help him. I wouldn't be averse to the notion that this was a real trauma and that it's caused a bit of self-reflection for him and that he may well feel that it was a miracle that he was saved. That said, I have long believed and continue to believe that he's sociopathic in a clinical sense and a man of extraordinary corruption and unrestrained in his negative emotions. I think that he's going to revert to type. If he doesn't, that's great. I would be delighted to see him change and to say that he changed. We just don't have enough time passed to make that judgment as definitive, by any means.

Michael Medved:
Speaking with Peter Wehner of Trinity Forum and Atlantic Magazine. The unofficial Trump campaign song, which we played on the air several times, is called "The Chosen One." What do you say to people who believe that the deliverance of Trump from this near-death experience is a sign that he has been anointed, that he has been chosen, that he does enjoy special protection from the all-powerful God that both you and I believe in? How do you answer people who say that this is proof of Trump's chosenness?

Pete Wehner:
I think that's confused theology. I mean, the obvious rejoinder would be, was Adolf Hitler the chosen one when he survived an assassination attempt during World War II? And a number of other brutal and awful leaders throughout American history? The effort—and people like Al Mohler have been making this—a lot of them are evangelicals, Christian conservatives, many of them Southern Baptists, Calvinists. They're very selective, Michael, in what they choose to ascribe to God and the things that they avoid. I was upset when I read Al Mohler's post on that, and my immediate response was, if that was God's good providence in saving Trump, what does he say to the widow of the man who is dead because a bullet went through him? Was that God's good providence as well? Is a Rwandan massacre God's providence? Is a tsunami?

So this is a habit that a lot of Christians, quite honestly, get into. And it's more evidence, in my estimation, of the subordination of faith to politics, to partisanship, even to human psychology to so selectively use faith to advance things that they want for reasons quite apart from faith.

I'm a believer in God, as you know, I'm a person of the Christian faith. I think it's a very complicated question, and the very short answer, I think, is found in the Hebrew scriptures in Job, which is the limitations of human understanding. But God never gave Job an answer to his questions, even though in my estimation, Job asked completely legitimate questions. It's not ours to know, and I think that that's a better response, more biblical response, than to go around pointing to particular acts and saying this is God doing this or this is God ignoring that.

Michael Medved:
You know, I think of this and I speak of this and I probably should write something about it now. But I have two books, "God's Handle on America" and "The American Miracle," both of which look for incidents that do demonstrate providential protection for the United States. And one of the points that I make, and it relates to a very important passage in the book of Exodus in chapter 30, where Moses asks to see the face of God, and God won't let him. He only allows Moses to see his back. And one of the traditional Jewish interpretations of that is that you can see the work of God or the cause of God, the direction of God, the indication of what he is trying to do after the fact. After history has passed. In other words, to look back at history and say, look at this, here was the hand of God. It's possible for human beings to do that. But as an event is happening, it's much more complicated and much more, in fact, impossible.

Pete Wehner:
Yeah, that's a very good insight, Michael, and I'm very much open to it. I will say, and I struggle with this, I'm actually, I think, going to write an essay on this topic because it's one I've given some thought to. So, it makes sense to me that you can go back in your own life or the life of a nation or history in general and be able to say, I think this was Providence. I think this was the hand of God. What I struggle with, though, is what about the horrors of history? And there are as many horrors in history as there are glories in history. And was that not the hand of God? Was that God channeling or determining the outcome of events? Did he will evil? Presumably not. Did he just pull his hand away in some situations, but intervene in others? Possibly. But how are we to know? You know, you take someone, let's say in American history, Abraham Lincoln, who I think you could arguably make as the most manifest individual in terms of Providence—that he became president, how he became president. At the same time, was it providential that he died and that he wasn't there for the aftermath to heal America? It's a complicated question. I'm glad you're thinking about it, and I'll continue to do the same.

(Commercial break)

Michael Medved:
Pete, we were just talking about looking for the hand of Providence. I love the quote by Bismarck who says, “It is the job of any true statesman to listen for God's footsteps in history and then to grab his coattails and hang on.”

Pete Wehner:
Yeah, that's a lovely quote.

Michael Medved:
And right now it looks like we're getting all kinds of historical messages about a looming Trump landslide. Do you think that it is necessary for Joe Biden to step aside to at least have a competitive contest for the presidency of the United States?

Pete Wehner:
Absolutely. He can't win. And the odds are significantly higher that Trump will win, as you said, a landslide victory than that Biden will win. It's not just the head-to-head matchups, Michael, and it's not just the state polls. One came out today in the state in which I live, Virginia. Trump is now ahead by three points, whereas he was behind earlier this year by six. It's the numbers underneath the polling that really, really ought to disturb people in terms of the overwhelming number of Democrats that think that Biden should not be the nominee. The concerns about his age and his health, which cut across all groups, including Democrats. The fact that he's just not viewed as up to the job, mentally engaged enough, not healthy enough. There's no way that he can overcome that, and the reality is that he's tried and it's just not succeeded since that catastrophic debate, which just from a human perspective was painful to watch, whether you're pro or anti-Biden. It was a sense just of the human vulnerability and some of the ravages that age can bring and illness can bring. And he can't undo that because he can't undo his condition and the underlying reasons—it's not just age, but whatever it is he's suffering from, whether it's Parkinsonism or something else. And now you take the events on Saturday and Trump surviving, a kind of martyred figure among his supporters. Biden has to step aside, otherwise Trump will win again. Indeed, the Republicans will probably take the House and increase their margin in the Senate. This is looking to be a catastrophic election for Democrats.

Michael Medved:
And you're not a Democrat. You've always been a Republican. What's your advice in terms of persuading Joe Biden, or is there no chance of persuading him to step aside for the sake of both his party and his country?

Pete Wehner:
You know, it's a good question. I don't know if he can be persuaded. He's clearly in a silo right now, and he's not going to listen to many people. The people he's listening to are his family and Hunter Biden, which is not reassuring. I do think that at some point soon, Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, perhaps Barack Obama—that's a tricky relationship—Chuck Schumer, Chris Coons, and a couple of Biden's closest aides, Mike Donlin, Kaufman, and his sister, others, those are the ones that I think would have leverage with him.

My concern, Michael, is that Biden isn't getting the information that he needs to that this election is lost. Even if he were, I think his combination historically of both insecurity and arrogance play against him stepping aside. And if he's got his wife and his sister, who are as close as aides, and now his son telling him he needs to stay, and his advisors, you know, guarding him from information to the contrary, it's tough. But the Democrats, at some point, these silent, quiet, behind-the-scenes efforts have to stop if they're not effective. And you just have to publicly say—and you need people like Nancy Pelosi and these others to say—you've got to step aside. And it has to dawn on them that he's at war with his own party and that this catastrophe is looming.

Would that work? I don't know. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work to keep it sotto voce, behind the scenes. And as I said, I'm very, very confident that there's no way that Biden can win this election. On a human level, I understand why this would be difficult for him. But the stakes are enormously high, and Trump 2.0 is going to be worse than Trump 1.0, and it may change America in fundamental ways and in ways that are injurious.

Michael Medved:
And now you have JD Vance ready to pick up the mantle, and clearly, it's a MAGA mantle. There's no serious issue, is there, in which JD Vance seems to have a different perspective than President Trump?

Pete Wehner:
No, no. I mean, he did, obviously, in 2016. He's one of the most cynical and unprincipled figures in public life, and that's saying a lot these days. And you know, he's gone from referring to Trump as America's Hitler to being a bootlicker. But no, there's no chance that Vance, that I could imagine, would do what Mike Pence did, who himself was obsequious during the Trump era, but at least at the key moment in January 6th in the election, broke with Trump. JD Vance would not break with Trump. And I very much agree with you. Vance is 39 years old. To the degree that there's an intellectual coherence to MAGA world, it's going to come from Vance, not Trump. So the Republican Party that you and I grew up with, shaped with, and why we were members of it, which was a conservative party, a Reaganite party, that party is dead and gone. It is now a populist, angry, MAGAfied party. It's a nationalist party in the worst sense. And it's just getting worse, not better, from my perspective.

So I think the importance of the Vance pick wasn't because it'll alter the outcome of the election; it won't affect a single state. It's the effort to institutionalize the MAGA movement, and that was already going on pre-Vance. It's now further along with him as vice president.

Michael Medved:
What do you say to those who say, “Look around the world. Everywhere, populism is the rising tide: in Italy, in France, to some extent in Britain with Nigel Farage getting 14% of the vote for his new party.” What's your response to that?

Pete Wehner:
I think it's true. I think there is a rise of nationalism. In France, there was a push back against the worst on the right—that was encouraging—and in some other countries too. But there's no question that over the last decade, the populist movements in the Western world are on the rise, and it's a threat not just to individual countries but to liberalism, classical liberalism broadly, probably as we've come to understand it and cherish it.