President Trump's successful campaign to end the congressional careers of Republicans he deems insufficiently loyal may be backfiring.

These lawmakers now comprise the so-called YOLO caucus, happy, even eager to defy Trump and vote against his legislative agenda.

And they're going to be in Congress for another 6 months.

Tonight, is the president losing his grip over the Republican controlled Senate?

That plus the latest on Nazi tattoos next.

This is Washington Week with the Atlantic.

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Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

So, back in the day, N. Gingrich understood something that Donald Trump doesn't understand.

Gingrich's speakership was short and tumultuous and ultimately unsuccessful, but he knew that there was more than one flavor of Republican Congress, and so he famously gave moderate and progressive Republicans some running room and some forgiveness when they disagreed with him.

But President Trump values only loyalty.

And Senators Tom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, and John Cornin apparently didn't give him enough of that.

Now they're on the way out of the Senate, and they owe nothing, less than nothing really, to the president.

Already they've been showing signs of defiance.

Joining me tonight to discuss this and more, Steven Hayes, the CEO and editor of the Dispatch.

Annie Linsky is a White House reporter at the Wall Street Journal.

Michael Sheer is a staff writer and a White House correspondent at The Atlantic.

makes you sound very busy.

And Nancy Ysef is a staff writer at a Pentagon correspondent at the Atlantic.

Also very busy.

Thank you all for joining me.

We're going to do this is going to be like one of those Jeopardy poperri.

It's going to be a lot of stuff.

So, we're going to get to a lot of stuff tonight.

Um Steve, let's start with you.

The president got his immigration bill through, but he's having more and more trouble uh keeping Republican senators in in line.

What gives?

Well, I mean, the first point that has to be made and that we've discussed on this very show many times, this is not this is not new frustration with Donald Trump.

It's emerging frustration with Donald Trump.

Like, a lot of these Republicans who are now voicing their frustration and willing to speak out have been frustrated with him behind the scenes in some cases for a decade.

They're not just more willing to talk about I think there are two primary reasons.

One, they're deeply offended by Trump's choice to endorse Ken Paxton in Texas over John Cornin.

They like John Cornin.

They raised money for John Cornin.

and they've known him for years and they think he was going to win.

They're worried about Ken Paxton.

They know that it makes it less likely that Republicans will keep the Senate because that money is going to be flowing to other states, going to be sucked to Texas instead of flowing to other states.

And then the second thing is he's asking them to publicly defend more and more preposterous things.

this, you know, whether it's the ballroom and the changing of funding on the ballroom, firing the parliamentarian, whether it's um the the slush fund, $1.776 billion dollar of a slush fund that they know was going to go at least in part to the people who attacked the capital and tried to attack them on January 6th.

Nobody wants to defend that.

They're sick of it.

They're done.

So, between those two things, I think they're sort of let's let's go.

Let's talk.

What is done?

I mean, Annie, what what does Dunn look like in the next six months?

How far do these YOLO guys go?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, one thing I will say is one major thing that changed is three of those members, three of those Republicans that have suddenly become quite eager to voice publicly and vote against the president in some cases have been pushed out by the president.

And that's a group that, you know, some people are in DC called the YOLO caucus.

It turns out um in the Senate they call themselves the Wounded Bear Caucus.

dangerous.

Wounded bear is very dangerous.

A wounded bear is very dangerous.

I call him the Janice Joplain.

Oh, okay.

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.

Oh, I love it.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

But they're they're they have, you know, the next six months they're they have the ability to make life difficult for Donald Trump, particularly around his nominations.

I mean, he may want to replace some cabinet members.

In fact, he has wanted to replace some cabinet members and they suddenly have a um sort of more they can be a little more uh demanding in what they want.

What else can they do?

Michael, when the president put out budget this year uh for 2027, there was $10 billion for the Interior Department for DC beautifification.

10 billion with a B. When the House just referred the bill up, the appropriators, they had zero for that.

I mean, there's a lot of spending stuff that's going to be happening.

Um, and it like we saw with the with the uh uh the fund for the Justice Department.

I think Cassidy and Cornin know the Senate.

They know the rules.

We haven't mentioned Mitch McConnell who's on his way out knows it better than anybody else.

He's a permanent yolo now, right?

We have Susan Collins.

We have Lisa Marowski.

We have Ran Paul on foreign policy.

I mean that like it's it's a big group and we're talking about a Senate with just a a very small margin.

And then we haven't talked about the House.

the the House had a vote this week where four Republicans broke with the president, basically a symbolic vote saying that he needs an authorization for use of force in Iran if he wants to go back back to fighting that war.

But but I think it's breaking down in the House as well.

And and the amazing if you talk to Senate Republican leaders, uh they will just be amazed at how unforced this error was.

you know, he didn't need to put himself at this sort of premature lame duck status at this point in his right.

Well, that's the point about giving people a little bit of room to maneuver, but that's not I mean, you you you both cover this guy every day.

I mean, that's not his move.

Absolute loyalty is the move, right?

Right.

I mean, he has held a grudge against Cornin for quite a while now.

and um you know he had signaled that he was going to endorse Cornin.

I think that's what makes it so much more difficult for Cornin's colleagues is it the signal was there that Cornin was going to have the endorsement and then for Trump to um go ahead and go with Paxton was just this big sort of nuclear bomb that went off in this Senate which still is collegial and that that caused just this uh you know heart ringing for days and days and it's not just those yolo members as well.

I mean, you know, John Thun, who's not going to ever go nuclear the way that Tom Tillis, for instance, did has made very clear that he's not happy with some of the things the president has done in his very understated way, like, oh, I'm just learning about this.

This is new to me.

I don't understand what the purpose of the slush fund was.

Or Tom Cotton when he was asked about this nomination of Bill Py to be the acting director of national intelligence, Cotton, who's chairman of the intelligence committee said, I have no observations on this matter.

um that he didn't say a lot.

He didn't need to go sort of nuclear, but he made very clear what he thinks.

Yeah.

Nancy, I think it's notable though on the Paxton um support that that came after it was clear that he was going to win and and a signal of Trump trying to show his continued influence on the party, even though the the the the race was already going the way it ended up going.

So, it's interesting that he's both affecting Were you 100% sure that Paxton was going to win without that endorsement?

I don't I I think it was going Yeah.

So, he was you're just saying he was just getting on the winning horse.

Well, I just think it's interesting that he's both sort of creating these fissures within his party and at the same time trying to show that he has influence anytime he can leverage um that sort of message whether it's actually affecting the outcome of the elections or not.

But ultimately ultimately it means Republicans are going to have to defend you know Paxton and that is what Republicans some Republican strategists are calling it like a hundred million dollar mistake.

like they will have to put a lot of money into.

Right.

Right.

Nancy, go back to the point uh being made earlier on the war powers.

U how does this loosening of loyalty affect the Iran war and whatever Cuba, Greenland, whatever he's planning in in the near future?

Well, Michael's right.

The vote itself was largely symbolic, but it comes at a time when the president is trying to negotiate with Iran, has really struggled to reach a deal.

And the idea that we're starting to see fissures within his own party, I think potentially gives Iran some leverage in terms of pushing for um a deal that is more favorable to them.

What's been interesting throughout this is that we've seen the president really toggle between trying to end this war as quickly as possible and also um get some wide reaching headline grabbing um outcome out of it.

And so if you're the Iranians and you're seeing these these splits start to happen within the president's own party, they might see that as an opportunity to push for things like greater control over the straits or um greater economic relief.

Right.

Um Annie, before I I I I jump to Iran because I want to talk about the current status of the war.

Not that anybody understands the current status of the war, but we're going to try.

Annie, I just wanted to ask you very quickly.

Um what is what does a Trump presidency look like if the House does go Democratic or the Senate goes Democratic?

We've we've talked about this too.

This idea of Democrats having a subpoena cannon ready to go.

I mean, those subpoenas and the investigations are coming if the Democrats win.

I mean, my sense is they are drafted and there's a very clear target list for Democrats.

So, it becomes a very different Washington for for Trump.

He's had two years of being in full control and um he's going to have a much nastier legal fights and so are his allies which also makes things harder.

Right.

Um let's go to the war um and I want you to watch uh what president had to say about the new supreme leader of Iran.

And we've heard you want to meet with the new the new supreme leader.

I don't want to meet but if if I did meet I'd be honored to meet him.

I'd like to see if we make a deal, but if we make a deal, it's possible that I would meet him.

I'd be okay with it.

I would say I'm not his favorite person, but with that being said, he's probably a prof.

I don't know him.

He's probably a professional.

In some circles, he has a very good reputation.

Actually, you know, sometimes some people say bad, but a lot of people say bad about me.

It's totally false, of course.

My first question is in what circles does much have a good reputation like your bowling league PTA I I don't I I can't.

So Nancy make make that make sense.

I'll try.

I mean I'll remember remember that um that this was someone he called the lightweight.

Someone whose father he killed someone whose family members he killed someone whose country he invaded and said his regime and that of his father um needed to fall and that the US was ready to do anything to make that happen.

Putting that all aside, I actually think that these kinds of comments hurt the US in their negotiating because again what it's signaling that the US really wants a deal.

And so it it at a time when the Iranians are closing the straits and and can sustain that for months while the US it's much harder to keep that straight closed.

It it it creates a ticking time bomb in terms of the impact on the global economy.

So, I think it hurts the the deal itself that they're trying to reach and also it goes against the the the stated um objectives of this war and what Israel wanted to see out of this war, the the US partner during the invasion and the attacks itself.

Right, Steve?

You you and I have covered Middle East wars for 30 years.

Um th the these latest round of comments from the president strike me as a kind of a guy who walks into a car dealership and says, "I'm not leaving here without a car."

And the salesman are like, "Great.

Yeah, super.

We can we could we could do that."

Uh I I mean where where is this is this heading?

And has he turned um America's allies in the Middle East, not just Israel, but UAE and other Gulf allies into kind of suckers here?

I mean, I'm glad you asked me where this is heading because I know exactly and I'm prepared here to tell you exactly where if we had commercials, I would say after the commercial break, Steve is going to tell us how the war ends.

Nice tease.

You're a TV pro.

Look, I don't have a clue where this is heading.

I mean, I think part of the problem is the president will say one thing one day and he'll say something entirely different the next day.

you know, ear earlier this week he said that he couldn't care less about the negotiations at all.

He was bored of them.

He didn't care where they were going.

He was sort of done with it.

And then he had this, you know, blow up with Benjamin Netanyahu because he believes that Israel is threatening the success of the negotiation.

So on two different days, he's saying two completely different things.

And that I think is basically what we're seeing with his approach to the entire war.

I mean, we're we're waging a war that he said today wasn't really a war.

We're engaged in a ceasefire ceasefire.

That's not actually a ceasefire.

We wanted regime change.

We haven't changed the regime.

And now he wants to meet with the leader of the new regime, which is basically the same as the who's the wounded son of the previous leader.

Yeah.

I mean, it's just incoherence all around.

And we can try to make sense of it, but we're probably better off saying, you know what, it's just incoherence.

Yeah.

Let's talk about this Netanyahu Trump relationship because the one thing that Nancy, you know, this is a Middle East correspondent.

One thing an Israeli prime minister up for re-election can't be seen as is a is a sucker in his population.

And it and it seems like Trump is yelling at Netanyahu now in a way that he did.

No.

Yeah.

I mean, he confirmed it um in a way that no previous president ever spoke to Netany.

He's been around for a long time, obviously.

What do you make of where this relationship is going and how does this actually affect Netanyahu's own standing in his own country?

Well, you'll, as you know, the the um Israeli parliament dissolved itself um in preparation for elections.

So, we know that they're coming up soon in a matter of weeks.

And Netanyahu now finds himself in a position stuck between an American um ally that wants to see this war end quickly and and an Israeli population that wants to see um resolution um in these various um Iranianbacked factions posing a threat to him.

And so, he's stuck in between.

And I think you've seen in the polls in Israel itself the the waiting support.

It's one of the reasons the parliament was dissolved.

And so um it is again another reason where I think it makes negotiations harder when you have this seemingly strong alliance being fractured over how to end the war that they had started together with such lofty aims.

Michael, I mean put all of his chips on Trump.

He kind of maybe the Democrats were leaving the Israel cause behind anyway, but he accelerated that.

Uh where does this where do you think this heads?

Well, I think in the short term it gives Iran more leverage because this is one of Iran's goals to split these two powers away from each other.

So why make a deal now?

I mean, if you've got the the leader of Israel and the leader of the United States fighting o with o with with each other over what's going on every day in Lebanon, like why make a deal?

is a perfect situation for them to draw out.

Um Netanyahu's been on thin ice with American administrations for what a decade.

I mean like more.

I mean like like he he is he has upset every president I've covered and even before this Iran invasion um you know I was talking to White House officials who were who were constantly complaining about the bad behavior of Netanyahu.

And so he was always walking this fine line.

And I think I you know he's a survivor.

I don't know what's going to happen and I don't know is Israeli politics very well.

But um but I think you know it's safe to say that like the the the the bipartisan unity behind supporting the US relationship with Israel that has reigned for decades in the United States is basically reset now.

And I don't see in the short term a clear path for it to be rebuilt.

Definitely in the Democratic party and I think increasingly in the Republican party.

Before we get to main oyster farming, I want to ask you, Nancy, one more question about the Iran war.

Um, stockpiles of key weapons and munitions are very low.

Iran is a third tier adversary of the United States.

Uh, how does this look right now to the rest of the world?

Well, it looks like that we are not the force that can go after multiple threats in Asia and Europe and the Middle East at the same time.

For example, Ukraine is asking for more munitions, saying we desperately need more.

And the US can't provide them, can't give them a sort of guarantee of what we're going to provide.

The munitions that the US dispensed during the war will take years to replace and billions of dollars.

They shot down um drones that were thousands of dollars and take days or weeks to build.

And that disparity is why they the US finds itself sort of limited in what it can do in terms of really being a a power that can that can stand by allies on multiple parts of the of the world.

And so it's a real problem and I think a factor in the president's inability or unwillingness to go back and do more strikes because the threats are not just to the munition stockpiles that we have but for Gulf allies who have taken the brunt of Iran's response to US strikes.

We'll talk about that in future shows.

Obviously, I want to go to Maine.

Graham Flatner, puditive Democratic nominee for Senate, has 99 problems.

Um, let's start with uh one of them.

Here he is with uh Chris Hayes talking about the small issue of the Nazi tattoo.

Let's watch that.

The Times basically reported that they they saw texts of hers in which she basically said that you had a quote Nazi tattoo and she joked about how she's going to go volunteer for Collins.

This is in August.

How does she know it's a Nazi tattoo in August of last year?

And you don't know it's a Nazi tattoo in August of last year.

Well, she certainly didn't send that text to me.

So, uh, whoever she sent it to and was talking to, that's I I I can't say why, but uh I will say that I certainly didn't know.

And, uh, and the text messages she's sending to friends who may have recognized it, uh, that's they didn't tell me that.

So, Annie, amazing.

Um, yeah, look, that's not a particularly satisfying answer to that question.

Oh, you're the master of understatement.

Yeah, I cover the My ex-girlfriend knows that my tattoo and my body is a Nazi tattoo, but I don't know that it's a Nazi tattoo, but her friends say that it's a Nazi tattoo because it's not working.

And she's to blame because she never told me.

She didn't tell me that it's a Nazi tattoo that I told her was.

This is not flying.

This is No, it's not.

Look, um, these are when when there's a major event like a major story that comes out like this, like the New York Times piece did, how a candidate responds to it and the the ensuing, you know, 24, 48, 72 hours is really important and that that was probably not his best moment in moving on from this.

I mean, the thing to look for is does he start losing support from Democrats?

Do they start um stop giving him money?

Do they start stop um appearing with him at um events?

And does more come out?

They need the Democrats need Susan Collins defeated to take the Senate.

How panicked are the Democrats right now about this continuing this this this tsunami of ridiculousness?

I think the key word there is continuing.

If this continues, it's a serious problem.

Platiner is this new breed of candidate whose whole appeal is I'm not one of them, right?

I'm I come from a different world.

I had PTSD.

I drank a lot.

I've done bad stuff, but I can talk straight to you and I'm going to give it to you like it is in a different format.

The problem is his credibility is core to that message.

And when he's on Chris Hayes giving interviews like that and saying, "Yeah, I was drinking a lot, but I never grabbed anyone's arm."

Or, you know, things like that.

If if if the if the drip drip continues, his credibility is going to be shot and that's going to undermine his candidacy.

I think if it drip drip does not continue, we're a long way from the election.

And and he is a pretty good candidate um on the trail.

Yeah.

You think what makes that problematic is this is the continuation, right?

I mean, this story broke what, six, eight, nine months ago.

So, and you had Democrat Democratic leaders Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and others endorse him after the emergence of this the initial story about this Nazi tattoo.

It's not a Nazi adjacent tattoo.

It's not a Nazilike tattoo.

It's a Nazi tattoo.

We know it's a Nazi tattoo.

He's a military history buff.

His initial denials that he didn't know what it was were preposterous, and they all chose to set those aside.

Then there was this wave of Reddit posts that he made that suggested, man, we thought the Nazi thing was bad.

These are bad, too.

And they said, we're doubling and tripling down.

And they were doing that until just the last couple weeks.

U well, I think that this is probably not the last time we'll be talking about Graham Platner and his uh various excitements.

Main politics never been this exciting, but we are going to have to leave it there for now.

I want to thank our guests for joining me, and I want to thank you at home for watching us.

Uh we hope to see you again here next week for a special 1-hour edition of Washington Week America the next 250 in front of a live studio audience.

Uh that's next Friday right here on PBS.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good night from Washington.

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