Wednesday on the RealClearPolitics radio show — weeknights at 6:00 p.m. on SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel 124 and then on Apple, Spotify, and here on our website — Andrew Walworth, Tom Bevan, and Phil Wegmann break down how the shockwaves of the Trump-Musk breakup are rippling through Washington. *** First up, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defined the moment with a quip that “the girls are fighting.” What does the Trump-Musk rift mean legislatively and for the future of the Republican Party? “My default position on all this is to wait and see,” Tom Bevan commented. “I get it, it’s the world’s richest man vs. the world’s most powerful man, sniping at each other on Twitter. Lines were crossed, stuff was said, and it was happening in real time.” “I would not put reconciliation, in the personal sense, beyond the pale for Donald Trump and Elon Musk,” Wegmann commented. “Elon Musk, like a lot of business guys, showed up to Washington and thought, ‘I alone can fix this.’ But he ran into bureaucracy and politics,” Phil Wegmann also said. “I think this is a tantrum; we’ve already seen Musk back off from his promise to take his SpaceX rockets and go home.” “Musk put this thing out talking about ‘The 80% of us who want to operate in the middle,’ and then he cited cutting Social Security. Dude, come on. Really? For a smart guy, that’s not good politics,” Bevan added. “I don’t know if that is trolling or fantasy, but it is certainly not the reality of our political situation.” *** In the next segment, starting at minute 12, the Democrats have launched a new $ 20 million research and outreach project to understand why they lost young men in the last election. “This reminds me of the Republican autopsy after 2012 that said Republicans have to be more inclusive to win Hispanic voters — and it turns out it was the opposite,” Tom Bevan commented. “I think Democrats’ problem isn’t messaging, it’s ideology,” Phil Wegmann said. “You can’t paper it over with a 30-second clip of trucks and beer. For the better part of the last decade, we’ve seen Democrats talking about toxic masculinity. Young men heard it, and then they voted.” “It strikes me that trying to view men, or young men, as an interest group or a victims group to focus on the way they talk about other groups kind of misses the mark,” Walworth added. “If Democrats view the whole world as a collection of individual groups, identity politics if you will, that is going to keep them from crafting a coherent message for the fuller body politic.” *** After that, at timestamp 20:30, the weekly “You Can Not Be Serious!” segment, running down some of the most ridiculous headlines of the week. Tom Bevan nominated Vermont Democratic Rep. Becca Balint who actually said out loud that the U.S. needs illegal immigrants or “we won’t have anyone around to wipe our asses.” Hopefully, she was referring to far-future assisted living nursing homes. *** In the next segment, at minute 23, Andrew Walworth and Carl Cannon speak with Tevi Troy about the 81st anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Europe, the legacy of President Eisenhower, and President Trump’s meeting yesterday with the German Chancellor. Troy is a presidential historian and senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center. He is the author of five books on the presidency, including “The Power and the Money: Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.” “It was really a spectacular thing that happened,” he said about D-Day. “That young men from across this great country got together, risked their lives, and many of them indeed lost their lives in fighting for America, for freedom, and for Western civilization. And we should still honor their memories and the debt we owe them.” Carl Cannon added, thoughtfully: “We should also mention that the Russians had something like five million men in the East, and that’s one of the reasons Normandy was softer than we thought it’d be… On D-Day, we should also remember our Russian allies, which is what they were then.” “And Stalin made that point often to Roosevelt,” Tevi Troy quipped. “Eisenhower was not just a deft politician, he was also a logistical genius… smoking three or four packs of cigarettes a day, dealing with the stress of it. And eventually, he would have a heart attack during his presidency.” *** In the final segment, at minute 34, RCP contributor Charlie Stone talks to Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal about his new book, “On Character: Choices That Define A Life” *** Don’t miss a single episode of the RealClearPolitics weeknight radio show – subscribe at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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