Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) joined me this morning:

Audio:

01-08hhs-sasse

Transcript:

HH: I’m joined now by Senator Sasse. Good morning, Senator.

BS: Good morning, Hugh.

HH: What is your assessment of the President’s intention and his culpability for the insurrectionists and the rioters breaking into the Capitol and murdering a Capitol Policeman?

BS: Well, the people’s Capitol, which is obviously the greatest symbol around the world of freedom and liberty and self-government, there’s polling all over the world that the dome of the Capitol is literally the most identifiable symbol of freedom, and it was ransacked by a mob that was incited by the President of the United States. While blood was actually being shed in the Capitol, and I was in the Senate chamber, and the Secret Service was trying to rush the Vice President to safety, at those exact moments, the President is rage tweeting against the Vice President. Why? Because Mike, because Vice President Pence had the audacity to fulfill his oath of office to the Constitution. It’s a big deal. Lies have consequences.

HH: Now I am curious about the word incite. It has a legal meaning. I know you’re not a lawyer, but incite means to act with the purposeful intention to cause. That’s why I asked you the question I did. Do you think he intended the mob to break into the Congress?

BS: You are right that I am not a lawyer, so there probably are 15 sub-definitions of incite. But the President had a rally hours before this happened where he is telling them to go to the Capitol and to go wild. This is a part of a pattern. The guy is addicted to division. This is a deep brokenness in his soul. You and I have talked about it multiple times. Donald Trump is a guy who hurts. And I hurt for him at an anthropological and a human level, but at a level of his oath of office to the Constitution, the duty of the president of the United States is to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. And the President is addicted to social media and to television, and to division, and he’s been lying to the American people for eight straight weeks and planned it long before. No matter what was happening in any state, he was going to say the election was being stolen, and the people needed to rise up.

HH: So Senator…

BS: But Wednesday morning, he said repeatedly to go wild when you get to the Capitol. And they went to the Capitol, and well, let’s be clearly, Hugh, there are 30,000 people here. The vast majority of them are honorable, freedom-loving people. The vast majority of them, but not all of them.

HH: Do you, I’ve got to land the plane, though, Senator. Do you think he intended for the riot and the occupation, the insurrection to happen?

BS: I think Donald Trump wanted there to be massive divisions, and he was telling people there was a path by which he was going to stay in office after January 20th. That was never true. And he wanted chaos on television. I don’t have any idea what was in his heart about what he wanted to happen once they were in the Capitol, but he wanted there to be chaos, and I’m sure you’ve also had conversations with other senior White House officials, as I have.

HH: I have.

BS: As this was unfolding on television, Donald Trump was walking around the White House confused about why other people on his team weren’t as excited as he was as you had rioters pushing against Capitol Police trying to get into the building.

HH: That said…

BS: That was happening. He was delighted.

HH: That’s it. Should he be impeached and removed?

BS: I think that there are a lot of questions that we need to get to the bottom of about why the National Guard was not deployed, why was it delayed. So that’s what I’ve been working on last night and this morning. I want to understand more about why the National Guard wasn’t deployed when there had been clear calls for it, and then why that delay happened. So there are more things that I need to understand before I get to a conclusory judgment about that. But I think that the question of was the President derelict in his duty, that’s not an open question. He was.

HH: Now you know that the history of the Roman Revolution from 60BC to Augustus Caesar is a progressive cycle of iterations away from the norm. A rushed impeachment would be yet another iteration away from the norm. Would that not itself be terribly damaging?

BS: So I think you raise a really good point, and it’s why I think there’s a distinction between the objective question of was the President derelict, and the prudential judgment of what is the best way to take America forward. Donald Trump’s not going to be in office in 13, 14 days, whenever the right count is. I don’t care much, again, at a human level. You know, I’ve built a relationship with the President as we had to work together over the last four years. And I’m sad for much of who Donald Trump is. But I don’t really care at the level of American Constitutional health where Donald Trump is in 2023. I do care a lot about where the American people are. And there are many, many, many great Americans who voted for Donald Trump, because they didn’t like the alternatives. They didn’t like Hillary Clinton in 2016. They didn’t like the failure of so many, not all, but so man in the Democratic Party to push back against AOC’s agenda to drive the Democratic Party farther to the left. So I understand, I didn’t vote for Donald Trump, but I understand why lots of people did in my state and across the country. And what I want us to be doing is moving forward with 85, 90, and 95% of the people wanting to reaffirm a Constitutional system of checks and balances where you don’t have the Article II leader trying to incite action against the Article I branch and the people’s House. So I am with you that the prudential questions about what’s good for the American people in 2023 and 2033. Those should be the most important questions right now.

HH: Do you want members of the Cabinet to resign in protest? And if so, who?

BS: I would say that I’ve had conversations for four years straight with members of the Cabinet who see behavior that they regard as not just morally disgusting, though that, but just totally confusing about an adult who supposed to be shepherding this great gift that we’ve inherited as the Constitutional system, that we pass it onto our kids. And many people have asked my advice over three and a half years about whether or not they should stay or resign. Typically, my advice has been to stay, that the administration has done many, many wonderful things. You and I have talked about it. Some of the things that Mike Pompeo has been doing over the course of the last couple of years, really exceptionally good work. And so there are a number of members of the Cabinet who have done work at the level of policy implementation. And there have been a lot of people from the senior White House staff and in the Cabinet who have also done very good work in restraining some moments when Donald Trump was inclined to do some really crazy stuff. And so in general, I’ve urged people to stay and to try to do the best they can. You’re not serving the man, you’re serving the American people by serving that office. Right now, I have a couple of other conversations going, so I don’t want to discuss those in this context, but in general, my advice has been to people to stay and serve the American people through their callings and in that office. Again, when you work, when you take an oath of office as a Cabinet official, you’re taking the oath not to a man. The crap we saw at the Capitol where a United States flag at one point came down and a Trump flag went up instead, that’s not what people are taking an oath to. They’re taking an oath to the flag of the United States that people for 240 years have bled and died to protect. And when they take that oath and serve in the Article II branch, they’re doing it under the authority of the person who’s the chief executive, the presider, which is what the word, as you know, president is supposed to mean. It’s not supposed to be a kingly title. They’re not doing it to a man. They’re doing it to the American people and the office. And so in general, I think the right choice is for people to serve as stability.

HH: So that’s the Cabinet. There are three key staff members – the chief of staff, the White House Counsel, and the National Security Advisor. Do you want those three to stay and serve through the transition?

BS: I think all three of those, I can’t remember if you said White House Counsel or not…

HH: I did.

BS: But I would add him to your list. Okay. I think all of those, the American people would be best served by them staying in their offices.

HH: Ronna McDaniel is likely to be elected unopposed to a third term of the RNC today. She’s a Trump selection. Do they need a new chair? Tommy Hicks, by the way, is co-chair, running for reelection, but he has challengers. What is your advice to the Republican National Committee about both of those offices?

BS: The Republican National Committee is not a healthy organization. As you know, in the 2016 campaign, I campaigned for almost everybody not named Donald Trump. And it became pretty clear that the RNC as a structure was, you know, akin to a fueled up 747 sitting on a runway that could be hijacked by almost anybody with a big brand. And that’s what happened. And I’ve made it pretty clear that I think it’s pretty dangerous for the party of Lincoln and Reagan to become a party of, you know, a lot of QAnon nonsense and a lot of TV obsession and a lot of narcissistic trolling. Our party needs to be bigger than one personality, and I hope that the Republican National Committee is thinking hard about how we serve our kids by trying to put forward an argument that can speak to 70%, and frankly that could speak to 90% of America. And right now, we don’t do that. I mean, you saw that in Georgia.

HH: So do you want a clean sweep? Do you want a clean sweep of the RNC?

BS: You know, the RNC doesn’t ask my advice on how they govern the place. There is a lot of yes man and yes womanism inside the RNC. It’s not a place that’s primarily about ideas right now. It’s been a cult of personality for some time, and they don’t ask my advice. So I’m not going to comment on a specific election there, but I think the RNC needs to have lots and lots of change. We need to be making a case why we want to be the party of gratitude, not the party of grievance. You know, America isn’t a tribal war forever. And if you listen to most of the crap that comes out of the RNC, these are a bunch of people obsessed with whatever some random Democrat said that day, and they want to scream about it.

HH: If I can, Senator, I want to move to the other end of the spectrum.

BS: Sure.

HH: Steve Schmidt, who is the leader of the Lincoln Project, has planned a brutal campaign against companies, trade associations, CEOs that serve as financiers of the authoritarian movement that attacked the U.S. Capitol. It’s a time for choosing. It’s America or autocracy. There’s going to be a public discussion about it, of course, Steve Schmidt of the McCain campaign who selected Sarah Palin to be his vice president. What do you make of the Lincoln Project’s sort of anti-Trumpism? Is it opportunism? Or is it principle?

BS: I think there’s an insane amount of money that’s been made by people laundering Republican or formerly Republican brands to raise money from Democrats and for Democratic causes. So I don’t spend a lot of time on the Lincoln Project, but I think a lot of the work they’ve done is very, very sad, very destructive. But again, I think the more important thing than me complaining about the Lincoln Project is talking about the party of Lincoln and who we want to be. America doesn’t work if we’re going to hate each other. America can’t do big things if we just talk about how much we hate each other. I’m the third or fourth most conservative member of the Senate by policy, by voting record. But I’m just not that partisan, because I care more about my neighbors than I care about people in D.C. who live on social media to attack the other party. It’s not very many of Americans who really care about that crap.

HH: People think it was a cliché when I quoted Lincoln. We must not be enemies, we must be friends, we must not be enemies.

BS: Amen.

HH: But it’s not cliché.

BS: It’s not cliché. People call me naïve for saying I’m still optimistic about America. Fine, call me naïve. Politics has enough cynics. At the end of this rot, we’ve got to love our neighbor. I mean, the point of America is about coming together to affirm a Constitutional system. Why? Is the Constitution the end? No. The Constitution is a means. It’s Washington’s silver frame to get to the golden apple at the middle, which is the communities where we work and where we raise kids and where we worship and where we love.

HH: Which is freedom.

BS: Which is where you build freedom from so that freedom, too, government gets this freedom from. Government isn’t the end. Government gets its freedom from so we can get to freedom to actually build crap with the people God has called us to live next to, and next door to, and to break bread with.

HH: So I have to close, though, Senator, by asking you about this cycle which began in 2016 with cable’s wall to wall coverage of the President, and with James Comey and Andrew McCabe’s decision to investigate the President without telling me. It proceeded through Mr. Mueller and the Steele dossier. It’s proceeded through a faux impeachment, now being debated a real impeachment. And TDS enraged pundits on various cable channels talking with complete Trump apologists on various cable channels. There is a lot to go around here.

BS: Yeah.

HH: What is your assessment of everything?

BS: So all that you said is true, Hugh. I agree with all of it, and yet we should also recognize that the amount of, the number of Americans that are paying attention to the stories that are on cable every day, less than 14%. Less than 14% of the American people are watching politics on a daily basis. 86% of our neighbors say I don’t want that crap to be the center of my consciousness. Politics is not meant to be constant horse race substitutes for sports, for the Buckeyes and the Indians and the Browns. I mean, the reality is the places where people live should, they should do their work by being an engaged citizen for 10-30 minutes a day so they can get back to coaching Little League. Like you’re right. The rage crap of lots of MSNBC, the sort of capitulation of the New York Times editorial page to the progressive woke mob, it’s really gross. But at the end of the day, MSNBC has like, what, 1.8 million viewers? It’s like half a percent of America. I mean, you’re saying something that’s true, but we have to be for something before we’re just against all that crap. And right now under Donald Trump, my party hasn’t been for very much. It’s just been against.

HH: My very last question, Senator. I heard from a lot of callers yesterday. They want to do whataboutism. But that’s really an appeal for one standards, not double standards. And every time a double standard is employed, they lose faith in the people employing it. What is your comment to them about one rule, the rule of law?

BS: Great point. So we should be against violence no matter who’s bringing it about. The truth of the matter is the state, the one thing that it’s really fundamentally supposed to do is have a monopoly on violence in the public square, to maintain order so Americans can fight out their differences with debates and with persuasion and with entrepreneurship. And so when you think, when we’re angry because somebody is employing a double standard on the other side, the answer by us cannot be to say yeah, well since they did it, we’re also going to have a double standard. It should be to reaffirm the standard, apply it to ourselves and apply it to the other side. But if you believe in a principle, advance the principle. Your principle doesn’t collapse just because somebody on the other side is unprincipled.

HH: That is well said. And Senator, I thank you for your times this morning. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, come back often.

BS: Thanks, Hugh.

End of interview.