Trump War Room
@TrumpWarRoom
🚨 President Trump announces the appointment of Devin Nunes to Chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board
https://x.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1868011699804250125
Joe Manchin: The exit interview
Burgess Everett. Dec 12, 2024.1/2.ALWAYS EXCUSES
Joe Manchin was closer to running for president than you might think.
The SCENE:
For months before the 2024 election, the Democrat-turned-Independent publicly entertained the idea of it — and behind the scenes, he was serious about a third-party run. He talked to Chris Christie and Mitt Romney about it. He liked the idea of drawing attention to his brand of political moderation, however quixotic.
The ultimate dealbreaker wasn’t the immense odds against him. It was ballot access.
“If we had a pathway forward to get on 50 ballots, oh, I’d have been a go,” the retiring senator told Semafor during a reflective interview this week as his aides began packing his office.
Another factor weighing on him: “No matter what” effect he had on the 2024 election, history would have dubbed him a “spoiler” who had “no chance of winning,” he said.
Though he never claimed that role in the presidential race, Manchin’s certainly comfortable with playing spoiler to the hilt in the Senate as his days in office grow shorter. He had no regrets about blocking President Joe Biden’s nominee labor board nominee from another term; he does have second thoughts about backing Biden’s pandemic aid bill in 2021, which he now sees as too generous.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told Semafor that Manchin’s vote against a National Labor Relations Board nominee this week was “pathetic” and against workers’ interests. Yet as much as some of the Democratic caucus looks back in frustration at their repeated clashes with him over the years, Manchin’s exit from the Capitol carries an element of fatalism for his former party.
No one else could have held his seat in a deep-red state for 14 years, and his political longevity in West Virginia is one of the leading reasons that Democrats got anything done at all for the first two years of Biden’s term.
“Joe Manchin is going to be remembered as somebody who has been difficult to work with, but got a lot of things done,” said Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., a close friend who tried unsuccessfully to persuade Manchin to change the legislative filibuster.
“There’s things we didn’t agree upon. But Joe was always willing to listen and talk and try to find common ground.”
THE BACKSTORY:
He doesn’t affiliate with the Democratic Party anymore, but Manchin says he cares about its future as much as he does the Republican Party’s. And despite all the backlash he’s faced for trying to pare back Democrats’ progressive instincts, in his telling, he could have caused a lot more trouble for them.
When Manchin held up Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in 2021 for hours negotiating over unemployment benefits, for example, his opposition ran deeper than that.
“I was going to kill the whole bill. Then the president went completely insane on me,”Manchin said, recalling that he urged Biden and Democrats to “at least draw some things back” in the bill so Americans could “get back to work quicker.”
Democrats eventually tapered off some of the pandemic relief bill’s benefits, and Manchin ended up voting for it. In retrospect, he said “I should have voted against it” based on its size. Part of the reason he voted yes, he said, was to show deference to the then-recently elected Biden.
Manchin later got closer than most of Washington knew to squashing Democrats’ second big party-line bill under Biden. He said he had told Democrats he wouldn’t participate in another unilateral spending measure before they passed the trillion-dollar Build Back Better Act in December 2021; after he sank that, he was perfectly comfortable doing nothing.
Until Russia invaded Ukraine, reshaping the global energy landscape. That, in Manchin’s telling, is the reason he resuscitated talks on a party-line bill that became the energy-focused Inflation Reduction Act.
https://www.semafor.com/article/12/12/2024/joe-manchin-senate-retiring-interview-biden-trump
2/2
“If it hadn’t been for the Ukraine war, you’d never have seen IRA,” Manchin said. “Never, ever.”(liar, he's a coward)
THE VIEW FROM ROMNEY
Manchin had chafed for a long time at the Democratic brand — he didn’t support then-President Barack Obama in 2012 and nearly revoked his endorsement of Hillary Clinton in 2016. His interest in a third-party run was driven by his desire for a bigger stage to talk about “common sense,” a principle he sees Democrats as having lost touch with.
His friend the Utah Republican, however, wanted no part of an independent bid for president.
“I just told him, I thought it was ill-fated from the start,” Romney recalled to Semafor.
BURGESS'S VIEW
Everyone who’s worked with Manchin has stories about him. That includes journalists, like myself, who’ve covered him closely.
He’s got a gift for shaping the news cycle and making the most of hot-button issues, but at times he gets too much attention and sours on the spotlight. One day he might pour you a shot of moonshine in his office, and on another he might tell you bluntly what he thought of your reporting.
His name is now synonymous with any single member of Congress who’s willing to hold up an entire party’s agenda. For a few months in the House of Representatives next year, any Republican could become a Manchin given the party’s 217-215 projected majority.
The man himself is doubtful that anyone in either party is willing to take that kind of pressure.
“Are there any Joe Manchins? I don’t know,” Manchin said.
ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT … FROM MANCHIN
At the same time, Manchin laid out a clear roadmap for Democrats who might want to change their party’s way of communicating after losing again to Donald Trump. And his advice isn’t as anti-progressive as some of his critics might assume.
Manchin argues that politicians should not get involved in personal lives — but Democrats are too didactic about what he calls “mainstreaming” of cultural and social issues.
“I don’t care who you love, don’t care what you want to be, genders and all that. Just don’t make me feel like I should be agreeing [with you] on everything,” Manchin said. “The Democrats feel like, ‘Oh, this is what everyone should accept. This is what should be.’ No.”
He bluntly said Democrats don’t have a shot at retaking the Senate “on the course they’re on right now,” with the caveat that the next election will be a referendum on Trump.
It’s easy to write off his comments as coming from an outlier, but his old party is looking to red- and swing-state standard-bearers who have overperformed its presidential picks, just as Manchin has in West Virginia. Manchin named two of them as Democratic bright spots: Govs. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania.
Yet he sees Democrats’ problems ranging beyond candidate quality.
They’re “more concerned about those who should be back into the system and should be participating in society” than about “the people that are paying the freight,” Manchin said.
“That’s how the Republicans were able to take over. They saw the void.”
https://www.semafor.com/article/12/12/2024/joe-manchin-senate-retiring-interview-biden-trump
Manchin is delusional