Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on the GOP’s future after Trump’s dinner with Fuentes and Ye

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• Judy Woodruff:

  Lawmakers are back in the nation's capital after the holiday weekend and have a long list of you issues they need to tackle before the end of the year, which includes key votes on new party leadership and as well as top priorities like funding the government.

  To dive into the politics of all of this, I am joined by our Politics Monday duo, Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR.

  And it is so good to see both of you on this Monday. Welcome.

  But I do want to start, frankly, with the conversation we just heard between Laura and our two guests.

  Tam, you heard what they are saying, that Republicans who are not denouncing former President Trump are trying to appeal to the base. What does this get them politically?

• Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:

  Well, and I will say that, as members of Congress have returned to Capitol Hill, in particular, senators, they're all being asked about it.

  And many of them are saying, well, I wouldn't have had dinner with those people or Trump shouldn't have had dinner with those people.

  But Trump himself has not disavowed the dinner, has not disavowed his guests. Saying you didn't know somebody is different than saying, oh, my gosh, I can't believe I had dinner with an antisemite. I'm so sorry. That shouldn't have happened.

  And, in fact, he hasn't disavowed the ideology of the people who came to dinner at his resort and had a private dinner with him. And part of the reason for that is that they support him and they support some of these conspiracy theories that he has been promoting. Increasingly, he has been forwarding on memes that appeal to the QAnon conspiracy theory, global conspiracy theory.

  And at the root of that conspiracy theory is a whole lot of antisemitism.

• Judy Woodruff:

  For sure.

  Amy, what does this get the Republicans who are not denouncing former President Trump?

• Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:

  The big question is when — not so much when will Republican Party leaders come right out and say, stop it, no more, we're going to have no more of this with Donald Trump? When will Republican Party voters say that?

  And, right now, if you look at the data, if you look at the polling, you still have a majority of Republicans out there saying they would support Donald Trump for a 2024 bid. Yes, there's a growing group of voters saying they're looking for somebody else, and they'd like to support somebody else.

  But the only way that this goes — that the message gets to Republicans in Congress, Republican leaders, is if their voters are saying, I don't want to support this person anymore.

• Judy Woodruff:

  And is there any evidence that that might happen, just in past history?

• Amy Walter:

  Right now, there's not.

  Based on past history? Well, again, you would think, given all the hand-wringing after this past election, there would be more frustration bubbling up among the sort of rank and file. We're hearing, we're seeing reports some stories from state parties, where internally the state party chairs and others who were big Trump supporters are getting serious challenges.

  But it's much less about the belief system and the ideology of Donald Trump or who he's having dinner with, consorting with, than the fact that Donald Trump is no longer the winner that he was in 2016.

• Tamara Keith:

  And I will say that, as I was talking to voters right before the midterms, there were a lot of them who expressed reservations about Trump's baggage. They also expressed reservations about his losing.

  And he hadn't even lost the midterms yet with his — some of his candidates losing. So there is an unease. But you know what? Like, in 2015, I talked to a lot of voters who said, oh, gosh, I wish he wouldn't tweet so much. I mean, now it's, well, I wish he wouldn't put so many things on TRUTH Social and hang out with conspiracy theorists.

  It's not clear yet. And we won't know it until we see it…

• Amy Walter:

  Right.

• Tamara Keith:

  … whether this is just too much baggage.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Well, it's important to point it out and to talk about it. And then people can decide.

  Amy, Congress, it's back. At least some of it's back. Some of it's back. They have got a package. I know they have only got a few weeks to go, or less than that, even, to get a lot of work done, I mean, keeping the government funded.

  How much of this are they likely to get done?

• Amy Walter:

  So, there's a theory in lame-duck legislating, which is the time we're in right now, that it's either a time to get all of your wish list, all the things you couldn't get done during the normal time.

  It's kind of like being a student and you crunched everything into that last week of school, trying to get it done, yes. But, in this case, we know that not only is there very little time, but there's not the coordinated support for some of the pieces of legislation that, say, Democrats would like to put forward, like finally dealing with immigration and DACA or an assault weapons ban.

  That's not going to really go anywhere. The one thing that does seem to have bipartisan support, besides keeping the government open and the defense authorization legislation, is gay marriage, basically repealing the Defense of Marriage Act from 1996, and ensuring federal protection for same-sex marriage across the country.

  That's probably — when I talk to folks today who watch this, that was their sense of the one thing that is most likely to make it through.

• Judy Woodruff:

  And what about…

  (CROSSTALK)

• Tamara Keith:

  It's also possible that the Electoral Count Act could make it through…

  (CROSSTALK)

• Tamara Keith:

  … because there is bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate. They need to reconcile those measures.

  If it's going to happen, it's going to have to happen in the lame-duck, because what happens when Republicans take over the House is, all of these measures that are passing on a bipartisan basis with, like, a few Republicans and a lot of Democrats, Democrats control the floor right now.

  If they don't control the floor, if Republicans control the floor, it doesn't matter that like 10 Republicans support a bill. They're not going to bring it to the floor. That's a fast track to losing your speakership.

• Judy Woodruff:

  So, a lot of change.

  Speaking of the new Congress, I mean, we're already all thinking about this, Amy, and the idea that it's — Democrats are turning it over, a new generation.

• Amy Walter:

  That's right.

  On Wednesday, for the first time in 20 years, Democrats will have a new leader of their party, most likely to be Hakeem Jeffries. No one's challenging him. He would be the first Black leader of any party for the House or the Senate. Interestingly, I was looking through this today before I came in, because that's kind of dork that I am, that, when Nancy Pelosi was elected to leadership in 2001, Democrats had essentially the same number of seats in Congress, 214. They have 213 now.

  But the makeup of Congress was so different. They had members from Arkansas and North Dakota and Mississippi. Now the caucus is more diverse. There are more women. There are more people of color, but, ideologically, geographically, much less diverse than it was when Pelosi took over.

  So, in some ways, Jeffries' job is challenging in that he's got a very diverse caucus, got to keep them together, progressives, moderates, but they kind of all come from the same place, which is very different than trying to get people who are from New York City and Southern Mississippi on the same page.

• Judy Woodruff:

  The moderates have just kind of…

• Amy Walter:

  That's right.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Sink — have sunk into the background.

• Amy Walter:

  There are very few of them.

• Tamara Keith:

  Right.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Very few of them.

  New Congress, it's a change among the Democrats. And for the Republicans, they have got a lot of figuring out to do.

• Tamara Keith:

  Right. And they have this very narrow majority. They also have more than a dozen, close to 20 Republicans who won in Biden districts or blue or purple districts.

  And so these are Republicans who may not be quite so excited about passing a partisan messaging bill or launching — approving a subpoena for a White House official or doing some of these more showy things that other Republicans, more hardcore Republicans, many of the Republicans in leadership ran on.

  And so it will be an interesting balance, seeing whether these moderates just have to go along or whether they end up causing problems for their leadership that are different problems than the leadership is worried about right now, which is their more conservative members trying to extract concessions from leadership before Kevin McCarthy or whoever it ends up being is ultimately elected speaker.

• Judy Woodruff:

  So is all this a recipe for what?

• Amy Walter:

  It's going to be quite interesting.

  Well, we have a big generational change on the Democratic side too.

• Tamara Keith:

  Yes.

• Amy Walter:

  It's really important to point that out, especially — Jeffries is in his early 50s.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Pelosi. Yes.

• Amy Walter:

  Pelosi, of course, is 80, and other members of Democratic leadership also much younger than the current members of leadership.

  The thing that is going to be the most interesting, besides what Tam pointed out, is this rift between the Freedom Caucus, more conservative Trump, and the more moderate or traditional conservatives, is what happens with the debt ceiling, right?

  And that is one where very few votes — you have got to get the Senate. McConnell also has to get his team on board. And there are a lot more Trumpy senators in the Senate now than there were a couple of years ago.

• Judy Woodruff:

  It's going to be so exciting.

• Amy Walter:

  A lot happening.

• Judy Woodruff:

  It's going to be — a lot is at stake.

• Tamara Keith:

  Yes.

• Amy Walter:

  Absolutely.

• Judy Woodruff:

  A lot is at stake in all this.

  Tamara Keith, Amy Walter, thank you both.

• Amy Walter:

  You're welcome.

• Tamara Keith:

  You're welcome.