Transcript: MTG Humiliates Trump over Reiner as MAGA Crackup Worsens

It’s just another way to say, Hey, guys, the base is in a real bad place for us right now. And it looks like they’re not going to do anything to extend the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies, which absolutely clobbers the base. It’s no accident, Alex, that this is one of the early things that Greene fastened onto—the subsidy issue, right? And so there’s just no sense whatsoever that I can detect that they’re trying to pull out of this tailspin. What do you make of what the pollster said?

Shephard: Yeah, I mean, I think that the sort of top-line thing, the diagnosis is totally right. It’s just, how do you fix it? There’s nobody worse who can talk about the economy right now than Donald Trump, who said that affordability is a made-up conspiracy by the Democrats.

Part of the issue, I think, though, is that it gets at a problem that Republicans have had since 2016, which is that the party is Trump. Like, they need him to motivate voters who only come out for him. But they also need him to articulate whatever it is that they’re supposed to be doing, because otherwise they don’t really have anything. He sort of has this sort of veto power over the entire policy program of the party, including, like, if the government should be open and functioning or not.