Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on the response to Trump’s escalating violent rhetoric

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• Amna Nawaz:

  For more on Donald Trump's escalating violent rhetoric, how lawmakers are responding, and the political headlines driving the week, we turn now to our Politics Monday team.

  That is Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR.

  Great to see you both, as always.

• Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:

  Good to see you.

• Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:

  Yes.

• Amna Nawaz:

  So, you saw Geoff's report earlier on that very violent rhetoric we're hearing from former President Trump.

  Even after Mr. Trump is confronted about the fact that some of his language echoes, the language of Hitler in an interview, he doubles down. This weekend, he said there would be a bloodbath if he didn't win.

  Amy, I don't want to ask you about what he said, though. I want to ask you about what Republicans have said since then.

• Amy Walter:

  Yes.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Senator Bill Cassidy, who has not yet endorsed him, said his comments were on the edge.

  Speaker Mike Johnson said that Mr. Trump was just referring to the auto industry, and that he's 100 percent correct and Americans agree with him. The decision by fellow Republicans to not unequivocally call out violent rhetoric, what does that say to you?

• Amy Walter:

  Though I will point out the one person who did say something, which was Mike Pence, his former vice president, who has announced that he's not endorsing him.

  Now, when pushed, he's not saying whether he would vote for him or not. But he says he will not endorse him. And he came right out, and he said, look, I think the fact that, first of all, you have the president claiming that the January 6 defendants are hostages, at a time when we have actual hostages, American hostages in Gaza, is really beyond the pale.

  And he said — I think the word he used about — he said, I will never diminish it, the — January 6, he's saying, that the people moving through the system, they are not hostages; they are defendants. And he said his remarks were unacceptable.

  Now, that is one…

• Amna Nawaz:

  That is what Mike Pence said.

• Amy Walter:

  That's what Mike Pence said.

  If you are on the ballot this year, that is not likely something that you're going to say. Bill Cassidy is not as well, but he also has not endorsed him yet.

  I think this is the gamble that Trump has been making really since he came down the escalator in 2016, that, fundamentally, he has a base of voters that are going to stick with him, no matter what, there is a bigger coalition of them than anybody appreciates or understands, and that he does not have to worry about alienating everybody else, including people who are in the middle, because his coalition can overtake them.

  And that is what he's — and he's looking at the polls right now, and so are other Republicans, that see that the president — the former president's leading the current president right now in polling, and thinking, well, maybe this time there will be enough of those voters, and so we don't want to put our own political opportunities at risk and our own campaigns.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Well, what about those people in the middle? Because the Biden campaign came out very quickly with an edited video featuring those comments, past comments he's made, refusing to defend white supremacists.

  Are they trying to reach those voters in the middle, those — are there persuadables who look at this and say, maybe I won't vote for him now?

• Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:

  The Biden campaign absolutely believes that there are persuadable voters. They look at the voters who voted for Nikki Haley in the Republican primaries, and they say at least some share of those voters could be persuasion targets.

  There are — I was talking with people who were out knocking on doors and campaigning in Waukesha, Wisconsin, this weekend. This is a red county, but that has gotten more purple, and they believe that those voters, some of those voters, obviously, not all of them, but some of them could be reachable.

  And it's not just the Trump violent rhetoric that the Biden campaign intends to use. Certainly, they are highlighting it and doing everything they can to highlight it, but they really believe that messaging around abortion and reproductive freedom and reproductive rights, that that is where some of those same voters would be persuadable.

  The same people that are turned off by the violent rhetoric or the tiptoe — the footsie with violent rhetoric are also concerned about abortion rights.

• Amna Nawaz:

  I do want to ask you, Amy, because Mr. Trump was in Ohio at a campaign event for businessman Bernie Moreno, who is one of three Republicans vying for the Senate nomination.

  This is a state Mr. Trump won by eight points in 2020.

• Amy Walter:

  Yes.

• Amna Nawaz:

  It is winnable by Republicans, but the Democrat incumbent, Senator Sherrod Brown, remains very popular. How should we look at this and what can we learn from this about November?

• Amy Walter:

  Well, this is one of the handful of states where there actually is a competitive Republican primary.

  Republicans actually took something from the '22 election to heart, which was they stayed out of these primaries, and the candidates that endorsed — Trump endorsed ended up winning in almost all of those primaries. Those candidates ended up failing in November.

  And so the approach this year was by the Republican Senate Committee, which is the campaign arm, was to go in and try to clean out these primaries and make an alliance with Donald Trump, instead of trying to fight him or let him do whatever it is that he was going to do, to try to maybe bring him into the tent, say, these are the candidates we think are the strongest. These are the candidates we think you should endorse.

  Ohio is one of the places where that really didn't work out. And we have another battle between the sort of old pre-Trump party, which is this candidate that is the closest to the candidate that — Trump, in terms of the polling, so that wing of the party endorsed by the former Senator Rob Portman.

  And then you have the candidate that Trump has endorsed, who's also campaigning with people like Kari Lake and J.D. Vance, who's the new senator there. So — and the campaign on this side, the Trump-endorsed candidate, is campaigning explicitly on, I am the answer as the anti-establishment.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Right.

• Amy Walter:

  I will defeat the establishment.

  So I think that is really much more of the story about whether you're going to see the side that is the more traditional win or the more Trumpified candidate win, which has really been the story, right, for the last five or six years in Congress.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Tam, how do you look at this?

• Tamara Keith:

  In much the same way.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Yes.

  (Laughter)

• Tamara Keith:

  I think we will definitely be watching to see whether the Trump endorsed candidate in the Senate race ends up being the one who emerges. But, in Arizona, for instance, you have Kari Lake has basically cleared the field.

  She's someone who failed in her last race, who many establishment Republicans thought was a disaster. She has been a leading election denier and has been out campaigning with Trump. And, ultimately, the establishment kind of folded and said, OK, it's Kari Lake in Arizona.

  I think Democrats are generally pleased to have that. And I think, in Ohio, Democrats want Moreno to be the candidate who the Republicans elevate.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Before I let you go, I need to ask you about other news today, which is a call between President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, their first call in a month, the first call since Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took to the Senate floor and basically called for regime change in Israel.

  This has been a private rift that's now out in the open. What does this mean for the White House relationship with Israel right now?

• Tamara Keith:

  Israel is now going to send a delegation to the U.S. to have high-level meetings about its plan for Rafah.

  The issue that the White House has is, the president has drawn something of a red line, but it's not a really hard-and-fast one, which maybe means it isn't a red line, about a potential Israeli invasion of Rafah, saying not that Israel can't do it, but that Israel shouldn't do it unless there is a credible plan for getting civilians out of harm's way.

  And so this meeting is ostensibly about figuring out whether there is a credible plan in having that discussion. But President Biden continues to be in a bind between his progressive left and other voters who do support him who are more pro-Israel. And the Biden administration is trying to make this distinction that Benjamin Netanyahu is not Israel, Netanyahu, who is much more closely allied with Republicans.

  But the politics here are just incredibly challenging for Biden.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Already a busy week.

  Tamara Keith, Amy Walter, always good to see you both. Thank you so much.

• Amy Walter:

  You're welcome.

• Tamara Keith:

  You're welcome.