Debate: Will Trump’s executive action work?

We spoke to Navin Nayak who was director of opinion research for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign; and the Republican strategist Kristin Davison.

Matt Frei: You heard Marco Rubio there, and I remember when he gave his testimony on Capitol Hill, he was quite measured in his tone and his analysis of the problems that America faces. How does that tally with the kind of stuff that we heard from Trump yesterday?

Navin Nayak: I think there is a real distinction between someone like Marco Rubio, who was approved 99 to zero by the US Senate, someone who really is seen as a bipartisan consensus pick.

Matt Frei: You’re encouraged by him?

Navin Nayak: I think it’s a very different pick than the rest of Donald Trump’s nominees. Marco Rubio has a pretty sober reality of the challenges and wants to work with allies to make this world safer for Americans. It’s unclear where a lot of other Trump nominees’ loyalties lie.

Matt Frei: Kristin, you have Donald Trump yesterday in his inaugural address, menacing Panama, more or less declaring war on Panama unless you hand it over, but there’s going to be trouble. Is that the kind of tone you want to adopt?

Kristin Davison: I think that’s probably a little bit of an exaggeration. This should not be a surprise. It’s not like we had a brand new person up there yesterday. He ran a campaign and he’s already been in office. This is what Americans voted for. Americans are tired of the media of, frankly, the far left taking our country down a road they don’t want to go. And that’s who they elected. And I think the president delivered exactly what he said he would.

Matt Frei: They may be tired of that, but half the country doesn’t like the new America that Trump has embraced. And he wasn’t really reaching out in terms of unity, was he, in his speech yesterday?

Kristin Davison: He didn’t really have to. It wasn’t like 2016. It wasn’t like 2018, 2022, it was a resounding victory. It was very clear where he won all of the swing states. He got really, really close in the popular vote. We’re not talking about a small victory. There are Democrats who crossed over because they were tired of the Democrat Party failing over and over again to deliver and focusing on things that, frankly, didn’t solve problems at their kitchen tables.

Matt Frei: Although he did call it a landslide repeatedly and it wasn’t a landslide.

Kristin Davison: When you’re focusing on seven states that decide the election and they were not close. Not close at all, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, these are states that Democrats thought they had in the bag and it was not close at all.

Matt Frei: But in the popular vote, it was relatively close.

Kristin Davison: Well we are elected by the Electoral College.

Matt Frei: We’ve got lots of things to discuss. Navin, we just heard that large scale raids will start in several US cities to basically extract illegal migrants, those with criminal records, and shove them across the border. What kind of disruption will that cause in this society? And given the fact that these people are supposed to be criminals, isn’t it right for them to be sent back?

Navin Nayak: I think that’s actually a place where you’ll probably see a lot more agreement, depending on how Donald Trump approaches this, I think the problem obviously is Donald Trump is attacking all immigrants. Right? One of the executive orders yesterday was to end birthright citizenship for everyone in the future.

Matt Frei: Challenged by 18 states already.

Navin Nayak: Of course challenged, it’s unconstitutional. And that is part of the point here, is Donald Trump is not actually interested in solving problems. He’s interested in getting attention and he’s very effective at getting a lot of attention. What the American people did hire him to do is solve problems. Did you see an executive order capping costs yesterday? No, there was not that. He was willing to break the Constitution to attack immigration and immigrants. But the real problem Americans kind of elected him to deal with, inflation, was nowhere to be seen in any of his executive actions yesterday. And so, I think he continues to get distracted by what the American people actually elected him to do. Good example, the most controversial thing he did, he just pardoned 1,600 individuals who broke the law, beat up cops, were convicted of crimes, and that is not what the American people elected him to do.

Matt Frei: Kristin, there are a lot of Republicans who are very upset about that. These are insurrectionists who basically tried to kill or beat up law enforcement officers. You’re the party of law enforcement.

Kristin Davison: So here’s the thing, Biden really ruined the argument for everyone who wants to make that. We can complain, we can talk about that all day long, but Joe Biden gave clemency to an individual who executed two FBI agents. So, both parties here, you can’t stand here and say ‘how dare Trump absolve 1,500 people, broad pardon’ and then still be okay that Biden, a minute earlier, pardoned his entire family for crimes that we don’t even know about.

Matt Frei: That is a good point, isn’t it?

Navin Nayak: No. It’s a terrible point.

Matt Frei: It’s a different magnitude. But still, he pardoned members of his own family.

Kristin Davison: For what? We don’t know.

Navin Nayak: We pardoned them, and I’m not defending this, he pardoned them because the president coming in continued to attack them and say he was going to prosecute them for no cause. I actually think we should have let Donald Trump go and attack these people since there’s no case to make and he’s willing to violate the Constitutional norms to do this.

Matt Frei: That is also a good point, he has said that he would go after his opponents. The new head of the FBI, he said he will go after his opponents.

Kristin Davison: President Biden pardoned his siblings that most Americans didn’t even know existed because Donald Trump’s never talked about them. Why? We should know why.

Matt Frei: Let’s not beat around the bush here, is the problem that you are facing and that the rest of the world is facing, that the republic of America as we know it is over?

Kristin Davison: I don’t really know what that means, per se. I think that this election was a choice…

Matt Frei: Rule of law, transparency, all these things.

Kristin Davison: I totally disagree with that. I think that you see right now, there were two directions this election was going to go. It was going to go the path that would have actually taken America down the road that we don’t recognise it anymore. Where we cave to China, we cave to foreign interest, we cave to the radical left that had five genders instead of two. Instead, we have stayed the path. The focus is on America as the greatest country in the world. And that is what Donald Trump’s policies were, what he promised is what he’s delivered, and it’s what his executive actions on day one showed.

Navin Nayak: I think the Constitution is going to be much more resilient than four more years of Donald Trump. But I think there’s no question that Donald Trump, like he did yesterday, is going to undermine the Constitution. In every case.

Kristin Davison: If Democrats take this entire presidency complaining about the Constitution and hyperbolic things, they will lose again.