Amna Nawaz:
To discuss the fallout from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting and another state’s push for mid-decade redistricting, we turn now to our Politics Monday duo. That is Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR.
It’s great to see you both.
Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:
Hello.
Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:
Good to be here.
Amna Nawaz:
We covered at the top of the show Saturday night’s events.
And I know, Tam, you were there as well. We saw President Trump in that press conference after the attack call for unity. The press secretary today started to talk about a call for unity, toning down the rhetoric, and then blamed a number of Democrats for their rhetoric and leading to the violence.
I want to point out too the president had joked his speech that he was going to deliver at the dinner was going to go after the press very hard. I just want to get your reaction to all of this, especially someone who, as the former president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, had to arrange this dinner.
Tamara Keith:
Yes, not this one.
Amna Nawaz:
Yes.
Tamara Keith:
A past dinner. And I’m very grateful that this was not my year, because this has been so challenging.
I went into the dinner Saturday night with a feeling of dread, but it was about — it was a fear of what the president might say about the press, about the potential reputational damage for an organization that stands up for the First Amendment and a free press and a free and independent press to then have the president just tear into us, as he has done repeatedly through his presidency, punishing reporters for asking questions he doesn’t like, news organizations for publishing stories he doesn’t like, the lawsuits, all of this.
So that was what I was afraid of. And we didn’t ever get to that point because of this attempted act of political violence. And it was just a real-time reminder that this is a very real and present problem in the country right now.
Amna Nawaz:
Amy, what do you make this?
Amy Walter:
Yes, it is — to me, the most surprising thing was learning about this — I was at a different event — and not being surprised, right, that we now have become almost numb to the fact that it’s not simply that it’s political violence, as Tam points out.
But you can’t go a day in this country without getting some sort of alert that there has been a mass shooting or an attempt at a shooting in a public place, at a school.
The other thing I will note, that this isn’t just something that is happening to the president. Obviously, he was a target of this attempt, but we have seen in the last year Capitol Hill police saying more than 15,000 credible reports of violence against members of Congress or their staff.
The DHS, Homeland Security, recently put a briefing out saying that the harassment of federal judges has been surging. So this is something that, if you are engaged in politics at all — now, it’s always been a business where there was a risk to you in deciding to be a public figure in politics.
Today — and I have talked to people who have said, I would like to run, but I will not do that to my family and put myself at that risk.
(Crosstalk)
Tamara Keith:
I would just…
Amna Nawaz:
Go ahead, Tam.
Tamara Keith:
What Amy’s saying makes me think about one of the things that just isn’t on my mind permanently, which is, as I was underneath the tables, as we all were, waiting to see if it was safe, and I looked up and I saw Majority Whip Steve Scalise being escorted out the center aisle of the room.
And he walks with a little bit of a limp because he survived a politically motivated shooting in 2017 at the Congressional Baseball Game. And so that’s just seared into my mind seeing him going through another scare.
Amna Nawaz:
Yes.
Amy Walter:
Yes.
Amna Nawaz:
Meanwhile, Tam, you know the president’s calling for this dinner to be scheduled within 30 days. Do you see that happening?
Tamara Keith:
It causes me great stress even thinking about the possibility of it happening, because I’m just thinking about all of the logistics that went into planning the dinner that I planned.
Finding a date on the calendar at the Hilton or another ballroom in Washington, D.C., is very challenging, plus all of these security considerations, the after-actions that are still happening, although the deputy attorney general — or acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said the security worked the way it was supposed to.
Amna Nawaz:
Yes.
Tamara Keith:
I think it exposed all of the vulnerabilities that exist when you have a really large event, whether the president is there or not.
Amna Nawaz:
Meanwhile, I need to ask you both about what we reported earlier on, Florida entering this mid-decade redistricting fight today.
Governor Ron DeSantis has shared proposed maps, Amy, as you saw, that could potentially help Republicans gain four seats. He says it’s necessary due to population changes. And, of course, we also know that the Virginia map that voters passed just last week is now being challenged in court.
Amy Walter:
Right.
Amna Nawaz:
What do you make of all this, especially the fact that it doesn’t sound like Republican state legislators are particularly behind this?
Amy Walter:
Well, I think the worry among some of the state legislators is that it would impact their districts. This is just a federal map. There is also concern from federal Republicans that, in order to create four new districts for Republicans, it would put their own districts at risk.
At this point, if you look at the 2024 numbers, how Trump did in those districts and compare them to this new map, there’s not one district in this that is a Republican district in which Trump did not get at least 10 points or more, win that district by 10 points or more.
And the Democratic districts are just overwhelmingly Democratic, so they basically packed all the Democrats into these four spots, and the rest, they spread their conservative voters, Republican-leaning voters, into these districts.
Look, it’s the tit for that we talked — we have been talking about for a while now. Virginia’s map, that nets Democrats four seats. This potentially nets, potentially — we still haven’t had an election, but potentially nets Democrats four seats in Virginia. Potentially, Republicans net four seats in Florida.
You had the Texas map, which was a plus-five R. Then we went to California, which is plus-five D, and we are going to, at the end of the day, look at basically a wash on all of this. However, we do know that this is not the end of the story.
We know that the Supreme Court is going to come out probably this summer with a ruling on the Voting Rights Act, which could then lead to more redistricting in the South. And then I suspect, if that happens, we are going to have conversations in states like Colorado and New York, who do also have ballot initiatives that put redistricting on the ballot, to go back and potentially undo those.
Tamara Keith:
And yet, when you have more and more extremely safe seats, you have more races that are basically decided by the primary.
Amy Walter:
Yes.
Tamara Keith:
You have lawmakers who are less accountable to their entire electorate because they basically just have to make it through the primary.
And, generally, in a primary, it is not — the more extreme voice is the one that wins in a primary. And so you move away — you move further and further and further polarized in the country. At some point, people are going to get sick of this, you would think.
Amy Walter:
They are sick of it, but it keeps happening.
Tamara Keith:
But it keeps happening, yes.
Amy Walter:
Yes.
Tamara Keith:
Yes, people do say they hate how divided the country is.
Amy Walter:
Yes.
Amna Nawaz:
I feel like we’re going to be talking about this some more at some point.
Amy Walter:
Probably.
Tamara Keith:
Yes.
Amna Nawaz:
Tamara Keith, Amy Walter, thank you so much.
Amy Walter:
You’re welcome.
Tamara Keith:
You’re welcome.
