This leads me to a a 2028 question in a kind of way.

We've talked about I mean the conventional wisdom is that JD Vance, Marco Rubio would be the two obvious contenders, leading contenders for the Republican nomination.

Not clear that Donald Trump believes anyone should follow him.

Um uh but JD Vance, I guess, is the technically anointed one.

Um, but in talking about the shift in Texas Republican politics away from what we now would call the muscular over muscular interventionism of the Bush years, you know, um the Republican the Republican primary voter um especially after Iran, especially seeing where the prices are now, um it sounds like a little bit of an uphill battle for Marco Rubio to get uh to get the nomin nomination.

I I mean I you get the feeling.

I mean, you hear Rubio and Vance and all these discussions, you get the feeling we're all going to look like rather obsolete in two years.

I mean, if you think about it feels like I I have a real feeling that someone who is not one of those two will will emerge.

I mean, if we were having this conversation, um I'm going to say someone else.

Uh you know, last night, uh I thought I could trap him.

Evan mentioned Ted Cruz last night.

Ted Cruz.

No, actually Ashley mentioned Ted.

Anyway, uh that's a name of course 28.

But listen, if we were having this conversation in 2014, we'd have been talking about Jeb Bush and Chris Christie and and Rubio, the first iteration, and looking back, we would be sort of laughing at ourselves.

Right.

Right.

The other thing is that Vance like on paper is is very MAGA.

I mean, he's more MAGA than Donald Trump on paper.

Is that going to be a good thing?

But the party is Donald Trump.

Yeah.

Right now.

And the other thing he's made sure of it.

And Ashley knows this better than anyone.

Um the difference between JD Vance and Donald Trump is that and people might not believe this who haven't been directly exposed to Donald Trump but Donald Trump um has his real charms u I mean we've been directly in the Oval Office as he's trying to convince us that a chandelier would look great and hanging over the desk and that he won in 2020 and that he won in 2020 but but JD Vance um does not I'm going to try to find a way to say this.

U does not have a a personality that one associates with political popularity.

Hold him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

J and Marco Rubio does to a much greater degree.

And Donald Trump like and and what what what people who don't vote for Donald Trump don't understand is that he's tremendously charming and charismatic when he wants to be.

Exactly.

I mean, uh, JD Vance is not the political athlete that even Marco Rubio is, and certainly not that Donald Trump is.

Um, and also, we've seen that Trumpism, the the behavior, everything about him is not transferable.

I would just point you to Marco Rubio in 2016 where in the last gasps of his campaign tried to do a poor man's Donald Trump and it didn't work for him.

Right.

Either you're born an insult comic or you're not.

You can't just Yeah.

Let's talk about what happens after uh after the midterms and what Trump's last two years in office might look like.

Evan, talk about that a little bit.

I mean, an ordinary figure in the last two years of eight years total, um, you know, is a lame duck.

Uh, he might not have Congress with him at all.

Uh, and and those people sort of fade from view.

Donald Trump is not the sort of person who would allow himself to fade from view.

So what what I'm not asking for policy predictions, but what what could the relationship between a Democratic Congress and a lame duck Republican president who is Donald Trump look like?

Well, as a practical matter, if they win the House, Democrats win the House, or if they win both, then the Trump agenda could be slowed to the point of being dead in the water for the next two years.

president has shown a willingness, an enthusiasm for ignoring Congress the first two years.

He's been able to get stuff done without Congress being involved.

Congress has been unwilling to assert itself.

Surely, he would find ways to do that.

But to me, the four most important words of the post-midterm period are going to be art of the deal.

This is a guy who temperamentally likes to cut deals.

Remember that uh press conference with mom Donnie a couple of weeks ago where he was looking at mom Donnie like a a boy looks at his junior high school girlfriend, right?

With those puppy dog eyes.

Um Trump understands that there are people he has to make peace with, do business with in the way that he going back to the New York Trump that that is the guy who we're going to see potentially for the next two years if Congress flips.

But I but I also think, you know, we were talking about how the guard rails from Trump's first term are gone to his second term.

I think to I mean, this may surprise people, but to the extent that there are still guard rails in the first two years of his second term, those will be gone potentially in the final two years.

And the thing Donald Trump fears more than anything is sort of obsolescence irrelevance.

And so if he feels it's slipping away for whatever reason, because his party is having a primary that he's not a part of, because Congress is investigating him and he doesn't have control, what whatever it is, he will become ever more desperate to get the attention.

So you're saying he might go onto social media and tweet crazy things.

Well, well, sure.

C certainly that um he would never.

I mean, he would.

Theoretically?

Theoretically.

Yeah.

I I mean but you're what you're saying is an intensification of the practices that we've seen already in in intensification of the practices the people who don't like his behavior already loathe.

Yeah.

Right.

And there's also going to be a wave of sort of less qualified people coming into office as we see usually in the first after the first two years you see turnover and the the fear is that also there are less qualified people that will step into the ranks and also be guiding and informing his decisions that way.

And that's also going to be problematic.

Vivian, I want to come to you to talk about what the the next two years might look like on a global from a global perspective, but let's just talk about I I don't want to scant the issue of what could happen next month during the election.

Obviously, elections are all local and distributed.

But we've gotten many signs that when Trump doesn't like the outcome of an election, he says so and also tries to manipulate uh the the systems to get the outcome he wants.

How worried should we be that let's just say there's two or three key Senate races that are very close that will decide control of the Senate.

Um, how worried should the country be uh of different kinds of shenanigans?

I mean, there's definitely there's definitely the potential for different kinds of shenanigans.

I mean, depending on what happens in the midterm elections, obviously that could hurt Congress's ability to do much.

Um, let's say in the case of Ukraine, for example, you know, if it is um if it is a if Democrats hold both chambers of Congress, for example, they could pass appropriations.

I mean, a lot of Republicans would agree to that, too.

They could pass appropriations only for Ukraine, for example, and find ways to get weapons and other things to Ukraine, but the White House has also become very skilled at circumventing sort of those norm those normal processes.

And so, that is definitely a possibility.

And especially with Steven Miller, who has basically mastered the art of circumventing the the roadblocks, um I think that that is definitely something that we're going to see a lot.

Evan, how worried are people in Texas about what I don't want to say it's inevitable that it will be a close election.

Um, but there's a really good chance that you'll have a very close race here.

Um, I'd say very worried.

Remember that the Republican candidate who may be on the losing end of a close election maybe is the attorney general who believes himself to have purview over election interference and shenanigans.

And you know, Texas has been a place where allegations have been made repeatedly disproven about non-citizens voting.

Tarant County, which is one of the largest counties in the country, that's where Fort Worth is, just cut the number of polling places in advance of election day summarily to reduce access to voting.

They say no, there's plenty of polling places, but the citizens of that community are not happy about this.

Well, what I mean, what are the chances that you wake up the morning after election day and we don't know who controls the Senate and we don't know the results here?

We don't know the results in Maine.

We don't know.

I mean, it's not insignificant.

I'll go back 26 years to when I was standing on Congress Avenue when George W. Bush and Al Gore were locked in an election that did not end on election night.

We have experience at this right here in Texas.

But look, I think it's entirely possible.

Mark, what are the chances that we actually are heading into a crisis and we're being all a little bit too bllythe about it, which is say the crisis would be if we don't even know by the time a new Congress is supposed to be seated, right, who's in charge.

Yeah.

I mean, that's the real threat here.

I mean, and there are states like Texas where I mean, by the way, it's likely we won't know who controls the Senate, even if there are no shenanigans or protests or anything because just the nature of, you know, Alaska time differences, slow counting, rank choice, rank choice.

I mean, there's going to be, you know, there that could take a while.

But I I would say there is part of me that thinks that, you know, it's it's important to be vigilant, but it probably at this point, you know, probably things will go fairly smoothly.

But at the same time, you know, January 6 kind of changed all the calculations there.

There's also I would add there's there's the actual crisis of you know the people around the president as we my colleagues of the Atlantic reported trying to get him to declare martial law right like there's the crisis of real shenanigans and shenanigans is not a strong enough word but then there is the crisis of confidence and trust good word though yeah it's a nice word but and then there's the crisis of confidence and trust in institutions which have already been eroded when you have a president who doesn't accept the results of a free and fair election in 2020 and you know talking to Democrats they're terrified are are ICE officials going to show up at the polls?

You know what?

We don't know what's going to happen.

But just point out even just the talk of ICE officials showing at the up at the polls coupled with the arrests um and some of the killings that is happening with ICE officials can have a chilling effect of a legal citizen who has brown skin saying, you know what, it it's not worth it for me, right?

I'm I'm not going to take time off of my job to show up and maybe get hassled by ICE and and get shot in a parking lot when I'm a citizen.

And Ashley just mentioned eroding agencies.

That's also true for the agencies right now that monitor and combat uh foreign interference in our elections where they have been really uh watered down to bare bones and that is something that officials are very concerned about as well.

The FBI is not that interested in what Russia does in America at least compared to the way it used to be interested in what Russia Well, they believe it's a hoax.

Actually, it's actually even worse than that where they believe it's a hoax and so they think that that is an under a narrative meant to undermine Donald Trump.

Vivian, I want to talk in the last few minutes that we have, I want to talk about the way the world could shake out.

Um, I alluded at the top of the show to the to the idea that um we're already in World War II.

We just don't recognize it as such.

And and the the reason I say that is you have a war in Ukraine.

Uh Russia has invaded Ukraine.

Russia is using North Korean troops and Iranian missiles to suppress a NATO backed Western country.

America has been supplying and been the main source of intelligence and weaponry at least until now more or less.

Um but we're in this moment when our allies, America's allies don't necessarily believe that America will come to their rescue.

South Korea.

I'm thinking of Japan, Lithuania, the B the rest of the Baltic states, Poland.

Canada.

Well, our notorious enemy, Canada.

Um but but but Canada, the only threat to Canada is the United States.

The the the the threat to um Arab countries in the Gulf is Iran.

The threat to South Korea is North Korea, obviously, China, Taiwan.

So the question is if the president going back to this theme that the president's views are actually kind of stable in a way he is a quasi isolationist.

The next two years can be very very strange and very very frightening because America's adversaries might be able to guess that Donald Trump is not going to come to the rescue of our traditional friends.

Um there there is a increasing belief especially across Europe but elsewhere in the world as well um Japan you mentioned South Korea that the president will not come to their rescue as you say I mean a perfect example of it was about two months ago um the US was uh preparing to do their annual joint military exercises with South Korea and President Trump out of nowhere just uh put the kibash on it said we're not going to do them anymore because he didn't want to offend North Korean leader Kim Jong with whom he has a deep long-standing romance.

So, you know, they they they completely pulled back on it.

They blow hot and cold though.

Yeah, this is true.

This is true.

And so, but this was shocking to the South Koreans, but also to allies across the region who saw that as signaling to North Korea like it it's open it's open season at this point and this is something that is deeply concerning across the world.

I Mark I mean we always talk about the question of loyalty in the context of the Trump presidency.

Is there any loyalty at all to the principles that Democrats and Republicans have previously adhered to when it comes to the organization of the world, the postw World War II liberal international order?

Is there any sign there or did that die with Lindsey Graham?

Maybe.

Um, it it's certainly dubious at this point.

I mean, certainly the NATO countries, you know, in Canada obviously and and Ukraine, I mean, they have learned, I think, this lesson not not just over the last year.

here.

I mean certainly I mean probably towards the end of the first administration um and certainly now I mean I think they have in some ways learned how to stand on their own two feet in ways that I think has emboldened them in some degree and um you know maybe is healthy in the long run but certainly not for the purposes of the United States and their alliances.

Right Ashley maybe uh next to last question to you on this question.

Canada came up in a in a joking manner but it's not a joke.

Neither is Greenland.

um the things that he thinks about he always thinks about, right?

It it never I always think of it as kind of a a lazy Susan where the issue is just the brain is a lazy Susan and it just comes around.

Um so so talk about a president under duress under investigation by a a Congress.

We we've kind of hit this point, but I think it's worth underscoring.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean again what what he is so focused on now um even under duress is is the ballroom is is physical tangible monuments to himself.

And I I say that to answer the Canada and Greenland question because he is a quasi isolationist except he he is very focused on physical tangible expansion particularly in the western hemisphere.

He sort of truly believes Canada should be a 51st state.

When Greenland pointed out you get all the advantages he's like but but it's not the same.

I want to own it.

Right.

And and we may see that going forward.

Right.

Right.

Well, we're going to find out if Canada remains independent and we're going to find out who the next senator from Texas is.

I think we're going to find out soon.

We're going to have to leave it there.

I I want to thank our panelists for joining me.

And thank you at home for watching.

And a special thank you to Austin PBS for hosting us.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good night from Austin, Texas.