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Today on the Playbook Podcast, how much power does Donald Trump still hold over the Republican party? We'll get a big test in Indiana tonight. And the Midwest news keeps coming. It's primary day two in Ohio. And JD Vance is in Iowa. And we better talk about the war, too, because the ceasefire is creaking in the Straits of Hummus. We've got the latest on Donald Trump's strategy. Hello, I'm Jack Blanchard. And I'm Dasha Burns. It is Tuesday, May 5th. Happy Cinco de Mayo. Happy Cinco de Mayo indeed. Um, but it's more of a Midwestern flavor, I'm afraid to the Playbook Podcast today. I don't know if that's a good thing or there are plenty of Cinco deayo celebrations all across the Midwest today. Um, it's also Taco Tuesday for
some of those who celebrate. That is a very good point. We don't normally pay a huge amount of attention, Dasha, to primaries for state senate elections on this podcast because we've been spending a lot of time talking about them if we did. But it's a big deal today in Indiana because really what we're looking at is a test of Donald Trump's ability to wreak vengeance upon his enemies uh in the Republican party. I'm sure listeners will remember uh that it was eight Republican state senators in Indiana that joined with Democrats to defeat the sort of Trump-led push for redistricting in Indiana. And oh my goodness, Donald Trump was absolutely furious about it and is having them all primared. And today we get to find out how powerful he
is over a state senate level uh primary or whether you know the local power of people who've been in office a long time still holds sway. So it's an interesting one. The White House will be watching closely. Desa, the White House will be watching closely. the president um loves his revenge when he can have it and um he seeks it pretty ruthlessly when he want. I mean what $12 million spent on legislative like state level legislative races which is just mindboggling. Um and like things have gotten pretty nasty there. like the ads are brutal and against some of these like really long time I mean this we're talking Midwest nice here and like these ads are anything but and so you know kind of regardless of how
this plays out ultimately the president and his team and his um you know political backers um have been able to certainly make a lot of lives miserable for um for the folks that went against him. That's interesting, isn't it? That's often sort of seems to be the play with this vengeance thing. It's like some of the targeted prosecutions we've seen which never really felt like they were actually going to work but it's still pretty painful for the person being involved being dragged to court and spending money and all the lawyer lawyers and so on and you can see something similar here right just as you say because if you're a state level um senator member of Congress at that level
you're not used to having this barrage of very expensive TV advertising nasty TV ads advertising focused on you and that's what these guys have been putting up with for the last however many months it's been and a ton of money flooding into the state where like that is, you know, most folks running for um state legislature are not fundraising millions of dollars to do it. Um the real target here uh actually is a guy who's not standing in these primaries. Rod Bray, who's the uh the leader of the Republicans in the state senate, um he's actually not up until 2028, but uh he is the guy that Donald Trump really fell out with in a
very big way. He came to the White House and they tried to woo him to get on board with redistricting. He's not having any of it. And the idea is that if they can get enough MAGA aligned members of the state senate, then they will vote him out as leader even though he's not um he's not actually up for re-election himself. This is a guy I was looking at him dash his grandfather was a Republican member of Congress in Indiana for nearly 20 years. His father was a Republican member of the Indiana State House Representative State Senate for nearly 40 years. He's been a member Republican member of the Indiana State Senate since 2012. So he's been a member of a family which has been representing
Indiana Republicans unbroken since 1951. And here he is 75 years later fighting a Republican president in the White House for his political life. He never would have dreamed it would come to this, but this is the way Donald Trump runs his party. That's right. And um I mentioned the brutal ads earlier. I was looking at a couple of them. one of the ads against state senator Jim Buck who served in the Senate uh who served in the state legislature since 1994. They call him an old pathetic liberal. I mean, yeah, the these are Midwesterners, Indianaans who hooers if you will. I'll play Adam Ren here for a moment. who have been um who you'll hear from tomorrow on breaking down all of this. But um you know, these
guys have been in local state politics forever. And I if you ask them, I bet even 5 10 years ago, they could never have imagined the onslaught that they uh are facing right now. So, what to watch for tonight? We're expecting the results relatively early in the evening, about 8:00 p.m.ish uh Eastern time. Um what Trump's allies need is a majority of these eight seats. They won't necessarily get their people into all eight, but if they can claim five or six or seven, they can claim this is worth it. If they only get one or two or three in and they can't even get a majority within this group, then this bid to our spread doesn't look like it's going to work. And all of that money, I think it would be safe to say
has not been well spent, even if you consider the that outcome to be a good spending money. So, um that they're the sort of numbers I think we'll all be watching for tonight. That's right. Election day. Um, let me just say as well, Dasha, um, this is just the first big test for Trump power. We've got a few of these coming down the track with other primaries which are well worth watching out for. The effort to ou Massie in Kentucky is now not far away. The effort to ou Senator Bill Cassidy in Louisiana is looming uh this month as well. So, we're going to get a series of these. And of course, a few years ago, Donald Trump,
you know, total sway over the Republican party, never any doubt. Now, you know, it's not that long until he's essentially done. And so, we don't yet know whether he's still got it or not. The Massie one in particular is going to be so important to watch because he has made this fight so very public and his bulldogs online have been so clear about the um what they believe is the horrible fate that Massie is going to suffer because he's gone against uh President Trump. And if he doesn't and if he pulls out a win, that is going to be a very bad look for the president and is going to start this fury of lame duck headlines. Um, and if he is able to
trance him, um, that will keep the fear on. That's that's some future attractions for you to look forward to. Let me just flag one more fun primary uh race to watch for today, not in Indiana, but now in neighboring Ohio. Um most of the big uh races there are basically set. We know what's going to happen. But there's an interesting uh GOP primary in Ohio's ninth congressional district. You may remember Dasher Madison Shien who was one of the big ICE officials when ICE was really kicking off a few months ago. She was on telly a lot. She's only 29. She was pushing the very aggressive ICE agenda very hard and making herself the face of that very much. Yeah. Now suddenly almost out of nowhere she's running for Cong or
wants to run for Congress in Ohio and she's thrown herself into this GOP primary today. And the interesting thing about the district where she's doing it, the ninth congressional is it's the seat currently held by longerving really long-erving Democratic Congresswoman Marcy Capa. Um and this seat's been redrawn. This district's been redrawn and Republicans felt probably still feel they have a good chance of winning it in November. But the question now is whether being a bigname ICE official is helpful in a general election or is a disaster in general election. We don't know the answer to that either. But I would be quite interested to find out.
Right. Could be helpful in a primary and disastrous in the general which um therein lies the primary problem frankly for both parties. So indeed you bet. Um last bit of Midwest news for you today. Uh just further down the road. Um, speaking of Ohio, JD Vance, former senator, is he's not he's in Iowa today and he's trying to help the uh the local Republican candidates there. Oh, I see. From Ohio. We did Indiana, Ohio, now Iowa. All right, we're doing a full Midwest tour. That's not bad for one brief morning podcast, is it? This is interesting to me because Jay Vance, obviously big Midwestern guy, classic sort of
spokesman for the Trump administration in the Midwest, but the message is getting more challenging even for him with the war still ongoing, gas prices still going up, just about to hit $450 a gallon as we said, and you know, the sort of simple Vance message over there has become a lot more complicated now. He has to sort of defend the war and all the rest of it. Well, there's there's been, you know, some criticism of Vance even from within the Republican party of, you know, he's he's not doing enough to sort of hold the coalitions together. He's not out there enough or he's out there too much. I mean, there's Vance has been kind of getting it from all sides and he really has been put um into
into a tough spot given the issues that this administration is tackling that are not necessarily perfectly aligned and catering to his um to his politics and his skill set. Um but if he is going to be sort of the next uh bearer of the MAGA mantle, this is the challenge that whoever is doing that has to contend with, right? Like how do you answer to the different factions uh that are split along demographic lines of age, along lines of class, along just lines of general political ideology that Trump had strung together and now are threatening to break apart. And so it's a challenge for Vance. If he can figure out a way to thread that needle, then that's that's going to be a
huge cell to um to Republicans as they look toward 2028. Is he somebody that can do this? Because that is what the Republican party needs. Um but it's it's a massive challenge. And you know, I have some reporting with my um colleagues Megan and Alex about the pivot to going negative that a lot of Republican operatives are recommending to um to candidates and to the party at large, to the president, to members of Congress, to you know, in this moment, this is the time to really create a contrast with Democrats, on the economy, to, you know, to blame President Biden, to um point the finger at the left, at the at their opponents for um you for the challenges that Americans are facing right now. Now, whether that's a message that voters
will buy remains to be seen, but it is a classic political move, right? When your party's in a tough spot, when maybe um things aren't going the way that you want with the administration, point the finger at the other guys and you're going to start to see a lot more of that. When they're doing well, you go low essentially. Um yeah, would not be surprised to see that happening at all. Um, as well as hearing from Vance today, we'll hear from his potential 2028 rival, Marco Rubio, back here in DC. He's taking the White House press briefing this afternoon. Um, and of course, Marco Rubio gets another job. He's the new press secretary.
Just kidding. It's just one briefing. Uh, I love it. Marco Rubio on Cinco de Mayo is good as well, isn't it? Um, but I'm sure most of the questions are going to be about what is going on in the Strait of Hmoose. We will also hear from uh Pete Exa, the defense secretary at one of those 8 a.m. press conferences that he likes doing possibly or possibly not because it coincides with prime time breakfast viewing on Fox News. Um the ceasefire is clearly sort of teetering on the edge uh given what Donald Trump started to do uh in the Straight of Hormuse yesterday. But it feels like the president knows he needs to do something, you know, that he can't just let it just drag on and on any
longer. And so it escalation does feel possible, right? just because so many people are saying to the president, you can't just leave it like this. We're getting closer and closer to the elections. Escalation seems totally possible. He also needs to have escalation as a real possibility to, you know, to have that leverage and to hold that over Iran. And we I mean we are just again seeing that whiplash. there were moments in the day yesterday um when he was blowing off the idea that um there was anything serious any serious threats from the Iranians and that there was anything to be concerned about. Um and then in another part in the day he said if they you know if they
mess with us we're going to hit them hard again. So, um, you know, it's the messaging on it is still all over the place. And sometimes, you know, you have got people saying he's saying one thing to please the markets, he's saying another thing to threaten Iran. And, you know, Trump does like to sort of play um play those games. Um, and that leaves uh really all possibilities open, which is how his um you know, foreign policy team likes to operate. Um, but where this is headed, I mean, there aren't a ton of options left. Indeed. I don't think any of us really know. We will be tracking it closely all this week. That's all I can say. Um, and that's all we got time for. Uh, we got loads more news analysis in today's
playbook newsletter, as you know. We can find that at politico.com/playbook. We're going to let you have a morning off, Dasha. And, uh, and Adam's going to talk us through. I will leave it in the very capable hands of our friend Adam Rudd. All right. I'll see you tomorrow. Have a great day.
