US Midterms: Former Trump Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney on results

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

The Hard Shoulder, with Ciara Kelly and Shane Colman, on Newstalk, with Kiya.

Shane Coleman (0:08)

Before coming on air, I was joined by Mick Mulvaney, former Chief of Staff for President Donald Trump. I began by asking Mick his reaction to the sensational midterm results overnight.

Mick Mulvaney (0:20)

Yeah, I'm not sure I can say this on Irish radio, but I can say it on American radio, because I have, it was an ass-kicking. This is hard to exaggerate just how big a victory this was last night for the Democrats and how just deep rebuke of the Trump administration and the Republicans generally that this was.

I was the beneficiary of a wave election back in 2010, and never thought I'd see anything that exceeded that in my lifetime, and last night certainly put that to the test.

Shane Coleman (0:50)

What were the key factors as far as you were concerned? Was it pro-Democrat or anti-Republican?

Mick Mulvaney (0:56)

No, and that's a really good question. And I think everybody sort of tacitly acknowledges it was anti-Republican. And there's a subtle difference between those two things. Although the end result, it doesn't make any difference.

The art of politics is trying to figure out the difference between you winning and me losing because those are two different things. But at the end of the day, when folks get sworn in in the next Congress, it won't make any difference. I don't think the Democrats will govern the House and the Senate any differently than they would if they had felt like they'd won versus the Republicans losing.

But the thing it's fair to say is that it was definitely a loss for the Republicans, definitely a loss for Trump. The voters were sending a message, and if I had to sum it up, it was that they were tired of feeling like Donald Trump and his friends were getting rich while they were getting poor. This was an election about the war, about inflation, gas prices, while all the while Trump was talking about his ballroom and his reflecting pool and his helipad outside of the White House. So again, hard to imagine it going much worse.

Shane Coleman (2:03)

So when Donald Trump says if he'd been on the ballot, it would have gone much better, you disagree?

Mick Mulvaney (2:10)

It would have gone better, for sure. I mean, Donald Trump, one of the things he said, either last night or this morning, I lose track of the time, I've been up for too long, was that he was a better candidate than some of the people who are running. And he's absolutely right, he's a tremendous candidate. Would Donald, if Donald Trump had been running for Senate last night in South Carolina, would he have won? Yes, if he's running for Senate last night in Texas, would he have won? Yes, but he wasn't, and you don't get to play that game. You don't get to say, oh, if I was on the ballot, we would have won. Okay, that's fine. If I had wings, I would fly, but that doesn't really add much to the conversation.

That's mostly deflecting, and that's ignoring what the true message is, which is that the voters rejected what you were selling.

Shane Coleman (2:53)

Is there something deeper going on in American politics? And I'm not saying it was the sole cause of what happened last night. You've obviously outlined a lot of the factors quite correctly, but is there something deeper going on? I mean, the idea of the clean sweep in Texas, not just the Senate seat, but the governorship and a whole slew of positions going Democrat. What we saw in Kansas, the type of Democrat candidate that is winning as well, very much to the left of the party, moving away from the kind of Clinton centrist. Do you think something fundamental has changed in American politics?

Mick Mulvaney (3:31)

It's a fair question, but I think it's a question that you have to have the benefit of time to know the answer to. So was last night an aberration?

What is sort of a knee-jerk reaction against Trump by some of his base? Or was it Texas becoming a blue state?

I'm inclined to think it's more of the former than the latter, but you'd be sort of naive to think that you shouldn't look at the longer term. I think if you want to see it from this perspective, the Democrats, both parties have always wondered, if we elect extremists in primaries, can they win general elections? The general consensus has been that, no, that you can't. If the Republicans elect someone from the far, far right in, say, a swing state, that person can't win. And if the Democrats elect somebody from a far, far left in a swing state, they can't win. Well, that was put to bed last night because the single most progressively left socialist on any ballot won a Senate seat in Michigan, which is a swing state. So I do think it's a fair question to ask.