JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Crucial American military aid is on the way to Ukraine thanks in part to the work of the speaker of the House.
And billions in assistance are also heading for Taiwan, as well as Israel, just as pro-Palestinian protests intensify on many elite college campuses, next.
Good evening and welcome to WASHINGTON WEEK.
It's been a busy week, not only in Washington, but in New York, where the 45th president of the United States is currently on trial for alleged shenanigans related to payoffs to an adult film actress, which is a completely normal thing to say.
Mike Johnson, fresh off his legislative victory over Marjorie Taylor Greene and the isolationist wing of his party, headed to Columbia University in New York, to show his support for Jewish students, and also to remind Republicans just how much they dislike the Ivy League.
We have a lot to talk about, and here with me to discuss the week are Peter Baker, who is the chief White House correspondent at the New York Times, Laura Barron-Lopez is the White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour, David Drucker is a senior writer with The Dispatch, and Mara Liasson is a National Political Correspondent for NPR.
Welcome all.
Mara, I want to start with you.
The big funding bill for Ukraine and Taiwan and Israel and the whole TikTok issue, which we can get into now law, very interesting, not what people were necessarily expecting.
So, the big question is, can the center hold?
MARA LIASSON, National Political Correspondent, NPR: It did, which is kind of amazing for this.
And I think what this showed is that the laws of political gravity and political math have not been completely overturned.
If you have a two seat majority in an unruly conference and you want to pass something like Ukraine aid or keep the government open or stop it from going into default, you have to work across the aisle and depend on Democratic votes.
And that is considered a cardinal sin among the MAGA wing of the Republicans in the House.
But that's what happened this week.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
But the MAGA wing did not rise up and throw out, at least, as of -- MARA LIASSON: Not yet.
And they -- right now, it looks like they don't have the votes to do that.
But I want to say one other thing that was amazing about this is that Speaker Johnson, he said that one of the reasons he was going to do this is because he believed the intelligence briefings that he got, which is astounding.
Because one of the tenets of the modern Trumpy GOP is that you don't believe anything the intelligence community says or the FBI or any law enforcement because Trump thinks all those agencies are the deep state out to get him.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right, especially when your CIA director is appointed by a Democrat.
MARA LIASSON: Yes, by a Democrat.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Laura?
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ, White House Correspondent, PBS NewsHour: And that was key.
I was texting with a House Republican today who told me that that briefing with CIA Director Bill Burns that Speaker Johnson had was really crucial for him to change his mind and decide that he was going to risk his potential speakership, put this bill on the floor, even though all of the MAGA wing didn't want it, that as well as his conversations with NATO leaders, this House Republican told me were key for speaker Johnson, and then these national security house Republicans who really said to him that he needed to be on the right side of history and made that appeal to him.
And that this was not just -- you know, this was also a moral decision that he needed to make, and so then he ultimately shifted.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
So, David, what this means is either Bill Burns is the greatest briefer in history, or that the Reagan wing of the Republican Party is not yet dead, or possibly both.
But is this a return to the Reagan-style, muscular, internationalist, anti-Russian, anti-authoritarian wing of the party?
DAVID DRUCKER, Senior Writer, The Dispatch: You know, as a Cold War kid, that would certainly be the more familiar thing to see.
I think that we need to look at it like this.
As I traveled the country over the past year covering the Republican primary, what I discovered is that there is still a healthy Republican faction of the Republican Party.
âBut it is for now, at least as long as Trump is in control of the party, the minority faction, right?
But it's there.
And so I think what we saw develop in the House of Representatives in the U.S. Senate in recent days is this faction of the party that still believes in Reagan era, muscular foreign policy assert itself.
And so not only were they able to do that, they also were able to team up with a Democratic Party that 40 years ago would never have been with Republicans on that issue.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
DAVID DRUCKER: The idea that, that, that Joe Biden as president would be the one pushing for this, if we were to go back in time, is almost astounding.
And so there was a good confluence of issues and events and agreement that we don't necessarily see on other issues.
I will say too, to Laura's point, you talk to House Republicans who had to go through losing a speaker when most of them didn't want that to happen.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Kevin McCarthy.
DAVID DRUCKER: Yes.
And there's a deep, Amount of frustration at the idea that they were being spun around by a minority, and I think particularly after the mullahs in Iran decided to attack Israel directly, they looked at the national security situation globally and said, we've had enough.
We've had enough of being twisted by this minority of our conference, and we've had enough standing down and not doing what the United States is supposed to do.
And it all came together to produce this grand compromise that happened in the middle of an otherwise horribly dysfunctional Congress.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
I want to, I want to come back to Speaker Johnson and what this means for his career and staying power in a minute.
But I want to stay on the, the subject of the Republican Party writ large.
Peter, do you think that is this more of a blip and that the MAGA wing, the isolationist style wing of the party is going to assert itself?
PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Well, I think we should be careful with overinterpreting one, one moment, of course.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That's what we do on this show.
We over interpret moments.
PETER BAKER: Until next week, and we -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Until next week when we reinterpret, yes.
PETER BAKER: But it is worth remembering that a majority of the Republicans, or more Republicans in the House voted against the Ukraine aid than voted for it, right?
I mean, so yes, it was a strong bipartisan vote majority, 300-some votes, you know, the votes better than I do, very impressive in that sense.
But of the Republicans, most Republicans, more Republicans voted against than the vote for.
So, we can't write them off obviously.
And that tells you something about the evolution of the party.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, what David's point is so fascinating is the Democrats are the stalwart, cold warriors to borrow your term.
Yes, Mara.
MARA LIASSON: But to say something else Donald Trump kind of stood down Yes, he was a real anti Ukraine guy.
He got impeached the first time for pressuring Zelenskyy to open up an investigation of Joe Biden.
He's still an anti Ukraine guy.
He's been very sympathetic and kind of showed a lot of affection for Vladimir Putin.
But he didn't insist that Republicans vote against this -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Why?
MARA LIASSON: -- in the end.
There's a lot of explanations.
One is I don't know if he wanted to have a big mess in Europe on his hands if he became president.
PETER BAKER: I think the other thing is, to, to David's point too, about the Iran-Israel fight over the previous weekend is that the Republicans realize that their case against Biden rests in part on portraying him as weak, right?
He is a weak leader.
And it's awfully hard to make that case if they're the ones who are holding up aid to Israel and Ukraine.
And so they had to get that off the plate in order to make that case.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Laura, what does this mean for the speaker and his staying power?
What have you learned about Speaker Johnson in the last couple of weeks?
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Well, he's safe momentarily.
I mean, I think next week we are going to see a potential effort by the MAGA wing of the party to potentially raise a motion to vacate.
Now, the Democrats I've spoken to say that -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Motion to vacate means a vote to -- LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Motion to vacate means a vote to oust him.
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: And now, of course, it doesn't look like they have the support to actually oust him the way they did for Kevin McCarthy, because this time around, Democrats have told me that a lot of them are willing to put up the votes to protect Speaker Mike Johnson.
They feel as though he operated in good faith on Ukraine with this vote.
They aren't going to necessarily do that for free though.
They want to see some more compromises out of him and some more ability to have power over what actually comes to the floor and the types of bills that comes to the floor.
And it remains to be seen if he's going to actually engage with them.
MARA LIASSON: What is an example of something they would want?
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Well, power sharing on the Rules Committee.
Now this is getting a little weedy, but it has control over what ultimately gets to the floor.
And so they want to have more ability and power to say, we want votes on more bills that we think would get big bipartisan votes that wouldn't necessarily reach the floor otherwise.
DAVID DRUCKER: You know, Jeff, George Shultz used to say that trust is the coin of the realm when you're talking about how you do things in Washington.
I think what the speaker did was prove to Democrats he was trustworthy.
And in an initial motion to vacate attempt, I think Democrats will do what they said they would do what they said they are going to do, which is to protect him from that.
I think if this keeps coming up over and over, that's when Democrats start to say, okay, what else is in it for us?
By the same token, however, House Republicans broadly do not have an appetite for this.
And if Speaker Johnson were actually vacated, they're not going to get Speaker Jordan or Speaker fill-in-the-blank.
You're going to end up with a unity speaker of some sort or a centrist Republican, because nobody wants to go through this and reward the malcontents.
And I think the people that are thinking through the motion to vacate that want to bring it, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, and some others, are hearing this.
And so I'm curious to see if they actually act.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You know, it's so interesting, one of the underrated aspects of Johnson's performance is that he is generally liked.
And and Kevin McCarthy, not so liked.
PETER BAKER: If you listen to House Democrats, they say were very respectful things about Johnson that they didn't say about McCarthy, even though Johnson is far more to the right and far further away from Democrats ideologically than McCarthy was, right?
But they believe that he dealt with them in a straight and up front way and McCarthy didn't.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Peter, I'm going to stay with you for a minute and the actual subject of importance Ukraine and its new found ability, or whether it has a newfound ability, to actually win and reverse the tide.
Russia hasn't punched through the lines in a significant way, but everybody in Washington, the analysts in Europe believe that the Ukrainians are on their back foot.
Does this change the picture?
In a dramatic and ongoing way for Ukraine's chances?
PETER BAKER: It changes the picture.
It's not quite clear yet.
Obviously, they lost a lot of momentum because it took so long to get this money.
They've been going for months without enough artillery rounds, for instance, to simply have a proper battle, in effect.
But the most important thing that came along with this $60 billion is also the decision by the Biden administration to give them the long range ATACMS.
These are missiles that can fire up to 190 miles away, which the Ukrainians have wanted for a long time.
Biden was reluctant to give it to them, gave it to them.
And within hours, the Ukrainians put them to good use.
Now, the question is, can those be used to take out some of these radar and the other facilities that the Russians have been using to launch missiles at Ukrainian targets.
So, they can take out the Russian ability to whack the infrastructure and civilian targets in Ukraine, they might be able to make a difference.
But the expectation is, these next few months are about holding the line, and then to see if in the fall, the delivery of weapons has reached a point where they can actually make a meaningful move forward.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Are we going to be back in this crisis again, when this current tranche of money, current tranche of weapons is run through?
PETER BAKER: This should run through this presidency.
The real question here is not money at this point.
The real question is the November election, okay?
Who wins an election?
If it's Trump, then they know it's over because they're not going to get any more money.
They're certainly not going to get any support.
He's already told the world, he's willing to give Russia all the territory he's taken.
How do you even negotiate a peace settlement at that point when you've given everything away at the front end?
And the Ukrainians know that and the Europeans know that.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Let me switch subjects, it's Speaker Johnson, so it's the same subject.
But another thing that Speaker Johnson did in the last couple of weeks is visit Columbia University, hostile territory for Speaker Johnson.
If you want to watch this for one second, you'll see what I mean.
REP. MIKE JOHNSON (R-LA): Anti-Israel encampments are popping up at universities all across this country.
The madness has to stop.
I am here today, joining my colleagues, and calling on President Shafik to resign if she cannot immediately bring order to this chaos.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: David, what is the speaker trying to accomplish at Columbia?
DAVID DRUCKER: Well, number one, this is an issue that Republicans are up in arms about.
I mean, just Republican voters are watching what's going on on college campuses across the country.
And it's no longer just Ivy League campuses.
It's all over the country.
And they're upset about it.
They want to see Republicans act.
Secondly, it's a win because we were talking about this earlier, when you have all the right enemies these days, that's just a political win.
So, he's getting booed and booed by all the right people.
But I'd say this, too.
There are a lot of Democratic Congressmen that are super upset about this, that have traveled to the Ivy Leagues to show solidarity for the Jewish students that feel threatened, that are threatened, because of these encampments.
And so what Johnson is doing, number one, bolsters his standing within the Republican conference.
They want to see action, but it doesn't hurt him with up the broad number of Democrats and does not hurt him or his relationship with House Minority Leader Jeffries.
And so it's just good politics, but also to the extent that Americans and voters are looking at this and they don't like what they see, I know some do, but to the extent that many don't.
And they want to see the federal government active.
It shows that he's leading.
And I think one of the biggest developments to come out of the past couple of weeks with Johnson is that he led.
He showed a minority in his conference that he wasn't going to be twisted around.
And now they see him active, and that tends to reflect well on you.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Mara, was this was this visit to Colombia where -- I mean, it's sort of extraordinary.
MARA LIASSON: I call this the B roll.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, this speaker of the House going to a university to call for the resignation of its president.
It's sort of like below his pay grade in a lot of ways.
MARA LIASSON: Yes.
But it's to generate B roll.
And these -- you'll see this -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And by B roll, you mean like, oh, he has all the right enemies is what David was talking about?
MARA LIASSON: Yes.
But what I mean by B roll is this is going to be B roll in ads.
MARA LIASSON: You know, when you're going to see in the fall are -- this is the Republicans equivalent of the George Floyd, I mean, protests.
You know, they want to show the campuses are in chaos because part of making Biden look weak is to say he can't do anything about the chaos in the world, the chaos on campus.
And you're going to see these pictures.
DAVID DRUCKER: But I just want to add that, that Republicans pull these stunts all the time and people look at them and they say, this is a stunt, but this is actually a situation where many people across the political spectrum, people that will never vote for Republicans, believe this is a problem and don't necessarily see this as a stunt.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: People like stunts sometimes.
I want to hear Laura on this, yes.
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Yes.
I mean, I guess, yes, it's true that there are some across the political spectrum that would be happy with what Speaker Johnson did, but I am kind of questioning what voters actually he thinks he might be winning over.
Does this rally the base?
Yes.
Does this win over young voters?
No.
Does it win over -- you know, polls have shown that a majority of Americans actually think that Israel has gone too far in their actions against Gaza.
And so that's why you've seen President Biden start to shift his rhetoric over the course of the last few months.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That is true, but I want to mention this poll, a very interesting poll from the Institute of Politics at Harvard.
It shows that the Israel-Palestine issue -- this is a poll of 18 to 29-year-old voters.
Despite what we're seeing on some campuses, it's not ranking high in their list of interest.
If you look at the list, these voters are more interested and more preoccupied with gun violence and protecting democracy and reproductive rights, abortion issue, education, immigration, jobs, all these come out ahead.
So, the question is, are we -- part of me wonders if we're paying so much attention to Columbia because half the journalists in America went to Columbia, right?
And it's easy access, easy access to the media in midtown, but, yes.
PETER BAKER: There was another poll this week and it was a poll of House Democrats.
And they voted five to one for.
And then the Senate, only three Democrats, I believe, voted against the overall package.
And that means that, yes, they're visible pictures, it's very combustible, it's a remarkably volatile moment on campuses.
But among the elected Democrats, they are five to one in favor of unconditioned aid for Israel.
Now, that package also include $9 billion of humanitarian aid for Gaza.
So, a lot of Democrats who might be concerned with how far Israel is going can say, look, I voted for that because I want the money to get the humanitarian aid.
But in any case, it's interesting that the division among Democrats on Israel was not nearly as deep as one might have thought it would be.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: And just on young voters, I was just in Michigan and I spoke to a group of young voters across the spectrum.
And so watch NewsHour next week because we'll have that on our air.
But, you know, yes, there was one voter who Biden has clearly lost.
She voted for him in 2020.
She goes to Michigan State University.
She says she's not going to vote for him again because of Gaza.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Who's she going to vote for?
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: She may not vote or she may just protest vote.
She's not going to vote for Donald Trump.
And then there are the other young voters who say that, yes, they are concerned about Gaza and Israel and Hamas, but that their main issues are, to that poll that you showed, Jeff, are abortion, it's democracy, it's economy, it's a range of other issues, which I think might be getting lost a bit in D.C. because of what's what we're seeing play out across college campuses.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
David, you also were traversing Michigan recently.
DAVID DRUCKER: We waved.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, you waved.
And I'm wondering what you found in terms of the relative importance of this issue compared to other issues.
DAVID DRUCKER: It was really interesting.
In conversations I had with Democrats and Republicans, insiders working to elect their respective nominees, the first issues they would mention to me were bread and butter issues.
For Republicans, it was inflation and immigration and the problems we're having at the southern border with the gaming of the asylum process.
Democrats were talking about abortion rights, reproductive rights and issues like democracy and the concerns about Trump.
And then I would say, oh, and what about president's policies vis-a-vis Israel and the war in Gaza.
Oh, yes, and then they would get into that and talk about that.
But they didn't necessarily see those issues as deciding.
Now, I will say that Republicans look at the problem that the president is having with, having with Arab-American voters in Michigan.
And they believe that a serious depletion of votes from his coalition could cost Biden the state, ultimately.
But they don't think that the president is at any risk of losing the Jewish vote, no matter how much his rhetoric were to shift on Israel.
And what I heard from Arab-Americans was, well, his rhetoric may have shifted, but his policy certainly has not.
And they noticed that.
And so, ultimately, I think the president has to make a decision about exactly what kind of campaign he wants to run.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Quickly for the both of you, is Michigan the toughest swing state right now for Biden?
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: I believe it is.
DAVID DRUCKER: Hands down.
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Yes.
DAVID DRUCKER: I mean, other than the Sunbelt states.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Wait, do we have a total consensus around the table?
MARA LIASSON: Of the blue wall, yes.
But Arizona and Georgia.
DAVID DRUCKER: Although, ironically, there are problems in the Sunbelt.
But the blue wall states -- PETER BAKER: He needs to win Michigan to win.
But it was interesting that there -- I was in Michigan as well.
And her -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: What going on in Michigan this week?
Is there a meeting that nobody invited me to?
Yes.
No, it's like I missed something.
PETER BAKER: What I was told was, of the hundred thousand Democrats who voted uncommitted in that primary as a protest or what have you against Biden, Democrats, they are worried about a half of them won't come back to him.
Now, they're not going to go to Trump.
You're right.
They're not going to go to Trump.
Do they stay home or do they vote for -- MARA LIASSON: That's the same thing as a vote for Trump as far as the Biden campaign is concerned.
PETER BAKER: Of course.
But having said that, there was a poll this week that said, of the swing states, Trump was leading in all of them except for Michigan, the only place Biden was ahead by two points.
So, it's early to say.
And the other thing is, in terms of the war, you know, it depends on what happens with Rafah.
Right now, there's actually not a lot of war going on compared to where it was.
If this were to somehow cycle down, if they got a deal, that's a big if, you know, by September, when people are voting, it's possible people are looking at other issues as more acute at the moment.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: There's a lot of energy in Israel now.
There was a new video of an Israeli hostage who people thought might have not been healthy but is there.
He lost an arm, but that's caused another kind of round of, we got to get a deal, which obviously militates against -- PETER BAKER: And the Biden administration made clear this week that they think it's Hamas, not Israel right now that is blocking that deal.
That's an important statement for them to make.
But still people want to see this over, and the question is, can they make it happen.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Let us leave Michigan, if you can bear it, and come back to New York just to talk about the trial, the first week of testimony in the first trial ever, criminal trial of an American ex-president.
Mara, what did we learn so far?
MARA LIASSON: Well, we learned that the prosecution has a very elaborate story to tell, and they're telling it about how all these people helped Trump.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: There's a lot of spit on that ball.
MARA LIASSON: Yes.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: When you say, elaborate, you mean hard to sell?
MARA LIASSON: Well, I think it's complicated, but the job for the prosecution is not just to explain what catch and kill is, which is where you pay somebody to not go to the press and tell their story, but also how those things were illegal or supported an illegal scheme.
And that's what they have to do.
And the judge doesn't seem to be very happy with the Trump lawyers or with Trump himself.
He keeps on violating the gag order.
But overall, this case has been considered the weakest one, and I still think it is.
We have a long way to go.
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Well, one thing that's striking about the case to me is just how much, when you talk to prosecutors and other legal experts, that Trump is being treated differently than any other defendant that would be in a similar case, which is that the amount of gag orders he's facing, the amount of reprimands from the judge for attacking, you know, prosecutors for attacking family members of the judge, all of that, you know, a similar defendant would probably already be in a cell, in jail, and Trump isn't at all.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Peter, we'll end it on this question.
Do you think that this might actually be the only Trump trial we see before November?
Obviously, there's Supreme Court issues that we're watching.
But is this it?
PETER BAKER: I think as we end the week, that's what it looks like.
This is the one trial we're going to have completed by Election Day.
And the Supreme Court's deliberations this week were very interesting, very important.
We can talk about that.
But the core takeaway from that is it's likely to continue to drag out before -- long before the election.
We won't see a trial on that one until next year.
MARA LIASSON: Look, Trump's tactic is delay, and on that one, he's succeeding.
His strategy is also to undermine faith in the justice system, and I think he's probably making some headway there.
But, look, Democrats have a deus ex machina problem around Trump.
They think that Robert Mueller was going to save them.
Now they think, you know, Jack Smith will save them.
Prosecutors and judges are not going to determine Trump's fate.
Voters will.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And voters know Trump.
MARA LIASSON: Yes.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And voters are deciding based on what they know already.
No, it's a very good point.
It's been a great conversation.
Thank you very much.
Unfortunately, we need to leave it there for now.
I want to thank our panelists for joining us and for sharing their reporting.
And you can read Eleina Plott Calabro's profile of Speaker Mike Johnson at theatlantic.com.
I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.
Good night from Washington.
