Fail of the century
The sledgehammer approach to Covid-19 that shut down global economies for months is one of the biggest mistakes of the 21st Century, argues former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney in a Watercooler Conversation hosted by Nick Cater.
The following is an edited transcript of the podcast.
Nick Cater:
Mick Mulvaney is a former member of the US House of Representatives who served as director of the Office of Budget Management under Donald Trump. He was acting White House Chief of Staff to former president Donald Trump, and he was appointed special envoy to Northern Ireland. He resigned from the Trump administration in reaction to the Capitol Hill riots in January 2021. Mick, welcome to the conversation.
Mick Mulvaney:
Nick, thanks for having me.
Nick Cater:
Let's go back. Last time I was in the US was December 2019. I did my own straw poll in a bar in Dallas, and I decided that Donald Trump was easily going to win the 2020 election. And then came COVID. You were in the White House at that time. Tell me how it evolved.
Mick Mulvaney:
COVID was ... We started paying very close attention to it in January of '20, right after you did your little informal poll, and quickly knew it was going to be an issue. We didn't know how big of an issue it was. We had very limited information from the Chinese, who we thought would share information about an infectious disease with us. And all they told us was it was a coronavirus, which is helpful, but certainly not determinative. We had some experience with coronaviruses in the past, SARS and MERS, both of which are very, very deadly, but very hard to transmit. And so we thought we'd had a handle on it by simply stopping transport from China into the US, which is what we did a little of back in SARS and MERS. I think we had one MERS death in the entire experience that we had there.
And then later on, shortly thereafter, actually, once the disease made its way to Italy and we actually started getting good information, that's when we found out that, yes, it was a coronavirus, but that it was very easy to transmit and that you could transmit it asymptomatically. You could transmit it before you showed any signs of being sick yourself. And that is when things really spiraled into what they turned out to be, which was a very, very, very challenging, difficult, and deadly situation. We had been screening people, for example, coming into the country from China based upon their symptoms. And when you have an asymptomatic transmission, that is completely worthless. So what happened is it got in the country, and the rest, as they say, is history. But it was extraordinarily frustrating early on sort of going into the battle with COVID with one hand tied behind our back because the Chinese simply failed to share enough information about what they were experiencing.
Nick Cater:
If you had more information at that time from the Chinese, would we have reacted in the same way?
Mick Mulvaney:
No, I don't think we ever would've shut down the economy in the way that we did. We might have shut down schools perhaps for a while, but more likely what we would've done is find a way to isolate the most vulnerable communities. Different diseases are different. I studied more than I ever care to study about infectious diseases because of the work we were doing. You look, for example, at the Spanish flu of 1918. That pandemic affected young, healthy people mostly because the disease caused your own immune system to kill you. This disease, as it turns out, was much more virulent in older people. The disease actually killed you. We didn't know that at the time. If we had known that, for example, if we had known that it wasn't as deadly as we feared ... It turned out to be much less fatal, virulent, I think is the term they use, than SARS or MERS. SARS is 15% fatal or roughly. MERS is about 35% fatal. One in three people who get it end up dying. And COVID, as deadly as it is and as terrible as it is, and it is both of those things, it has nowhere near those fatality rates. If we had known that early on, I think you would see a dramatically different response, not only from the United States of America, but from Australia and the rest of the world as well.
Nick Cater:
Were you getting good advice at that time in the White House from Dr Fauci?
Mick Mulvaney:
No, not really. I've been critical of Dr Fauci for a variety of reasons, mostly for his lack of candour. When you're an advisor to the president, you don't get to make decisions. You advise, and you give information. And when you're the chief infectious disease guy who's advising the president, you should probably tell him at some point, "By the way, Mr. President, it would be extraordinarily unusual for us to shut down the economy. In fact, on all of our tabletop exercises and practices that we do and the preparations that we do, we actually recommend against this. So this is an unusual position for us to take." That never got said to the President of the United States. That's wrong. That's someone who has made the decision that they are going to make the final call, not to allow the highest ranking elected official in my country to make the call. And I've been extraordinarily critical of Dr Fauci for doing that.
But it's also the lack of candour with folks like me. He told me at one of the meetings ... I ran the COVID taskforce in the early days. He said, "Look, the last thing we need is for people to go and start wearing a bunch of masks. So we need to go and the message needs to be on television, don't wear masks." Why is that, Dr. Fauci? Well, because if you're not trained in how to properly apply masks, you could actually make it worse. And if you don't have a clean mask all the time, you could make it worse. It creates an environment where the disease can grow. You are touching your face more often, which can transfer the disease more readily. So the last thing we need is for people to wear masks.
So I went on television and told people, "Don't wear masks." Of course, several months later, in fact, more than a year later, I think, he said he only did that because he knew that we had a shortage of masks, and if everybody else ran out to buy them, they wouldn't be available to healthcare workers. That may or may not be. My point then was that he didn't tell us that, and he didn't tell the President of the United States that. You don't get to make that decision when you're an advisor to the president. You go to the president and say, "Mr. President, look, it would be really good if everybody wore masks. But we can't say that right now because there's a shortage of them, and we need to focus on healthcare providers." Then the president gets to make that decision. The unelected bureaucrat, regardless of how famous you are or famous you became after the fact, you don't get to make that decision. So I think he was an extraordinarily poor advisor to the president, and that comes from somebody who … that's what I did. I was the chief advisor to the president. So I am looking forward to the investigation that will take place if the Republicans take the House of Representatives. I fully expect a full investigation into the early days of COVID and to a focus on how Dr Fauci comported himself.
Nick Cater:
Were you surprised how quickly the issue became politicised?
Mick Mulvaney:
No. Everything in my country is politicised. In fact, early on, I've taken some criticism, and in hindsight, it's probably rightly so. But in the early days, I said, "Look, this is going to be serious, but we know how to deal with this. But let's not blow it out of proportion because the media is just looking for another way to make Donald Trump look bad."
Keep in mind, the beginning of COVID correlated almost perfectly with the end of impeachment. I remember late in the impeachment process, so this is early February, maybe late January, I was getting a bunch of questions in the Chief's office from reporters about COVID. And then we finally said, "Look, we're going to have a press conference. We're going to start doing these press conferences to update you. I'm going to bring in the head of Health and Human Services, Mr. Azar. I'm going to bring in Dr. Fauci. I'm going to bring in Dr. Redfield. And you guys can ask these folks questions. You can get it straight from the people who actually know this, and you don't have to come through me."
They didn't show up because impeachment was still going on, and that's what got all of their attention. And they didn't really turn to COVID until after impeachment was over. So do I think there was a political component to it? Yeah, I do. Do I think that the death numbers were exaggerated? Yeah. People who were dying with COVID, not from COVID. That's certainly not everybody, but there was a certain percentage of people who died who happened to have COVID, and that went down as a COVID death. I think that was done to try and make the administration look bad. I know I take criticism for that. I think people think I'm a conspiracy theorist nut. But if the basic premise is, is most everything politicised in my country right now, the answer is yes. I don't think I should be taking a lot of heat for taking that position.
Nick Cater:
Well, it did, didn't it? Conventional wisdom is that Trump handled COVID badly, and that was a factor.
Mick Mulvaney:
I think there's a component to that.
Nick Cater:
Could he have ever handled it in a way that was acceptable to both sides? There was a clear difference in the states between the way red states handled it and blue states. How could he steer a middle course between that and satisfy both?
Mick Mulvaney:
But is that what you wanted? Did you want the president to steer a middle course, or did you want the president to just be a leader? And I think the challenge that Donald Trump had with COVID is that it called for a type of leadership that is just not his strength. You can't beat a virus into submission. You can't bully it into going away. You can do that in Washington, DC on other topics. You can do it on a tax code. You can just get in there and twist arms politically and get people to do what you want and pass a good piece of tax legislation. You can be the fighter for that. You can do that with your allies overseas, say, "Look, we really need you folks to start paying more money." You can fight your way through that. You can do the same thing with North Korea. You can fight your way through that. You can't really fight your way through a virus. It called for a much more empathetic type of leadership that's just not his strength. So I think he was uniquely unsuited to dealing with that because it's not what he does best.
I don't think it was a question of taking the middle ground. I happen to think that the red states that remained open did extraordinarily well economically. And I don't think there's any hard evidence yet, maybe there's some I'm not familiar with, that they did that much worse from a healthcare perspective. The death rates were similar in New York and Florida. The infection rates were similar. The outcomes were similar from a health perspective in the states that stayed open versus the ones that closed. And I'll be curious to see how history tells that story, curious to see how the data continues to come in, because we're still dealing with COVID. So I don't think it's a question of steering a middle course as much as it is, could he provide the type of leadership that was needed on that issue. And I think that's where he struggled.
Nick Cater:
But at this stage, we await the inquiry, but would your view be that shutting down the economy in the way we did, both in the States, here, Europe, almost everywhere, was a bad idea?
Mick Mulvaney:
Terrible mistake. I think it'll go down as one of the worst mistakes of the 21st century. I hope it does. I hope we don't make any bigger mistakes than that. I think it was a terrible mistake. And as the data comes out, they're just starting to talk now in my country about the impact of school kids missing a year or two and what that's going to do to the overall education level, the IQ levels in my country, that we'll be paying the price for this literally for generations in education, in mental health, certainly in the economy, the debt that we ran up as a result of shutting the economy down. So no, I do not think we handled it well. I blame the Chinese for that primarily because we did not have good information. I also blame the folks who were advising the president, who I don't think were completely honest with him.
Nick Cater:
Let's jump ahead to the election. It became clear that once he'd lost Arizona and a few other things were going against him, that he'd lost. Did Donald Trump realise he'd lost at that point?
Mick Mulvaney:
That's a good question. I think it depends on who you talk to. I think there's probably an element that he might have realised early on that things didn't go well. The thing more interestingly is that we have a chance ... We know elections are troublesome in my country. There are lawyers who do nothing but do election law. The first time I ran for the state House of Representatives, a position that represents 35,000 people in my home state, I think we had four lawsuits over that tiny election, or at least going to court four times. You know this is what's going to happen, and I don't think the campaign was prepared to defend themselves. And if you're bringing lawsuits a week after the election, you've lost.
You talk to the folks who ran Florida for George Bush Junior, George W. Bush in 2000, they will tell you they expected a problem in Florida because of the way the ballots were counted. They had lawyers on the ground for six months ahead of time. They had a dozen lawsuits filed before the day of election, a couple of lawsuits on election day, maybe another lawsuit the day after. But they were proactive in defending their rights as a candidate. And I think the campaign of Donald Trump failed miserably at that.
I think there was actually one decision handed down in Wisconsin in one of the lawsuits. It was a Trump appointed judge. And I'm going to butcher this, but I'll paraphrase. It said, "Look, if you had brought this lawsuit before the election, the outcome here might be different. But you brought it after the election, and my hands are tied. Case dismissed." That's a mistake by the campaign. Every candidate needs to be able to defend themselves legally when it comes to protecting their interests in an election, and I think the Trump campaign failed that. Everything had to go wrong for Donald Trump to lose that election, and everything did go wrong, including not preparing for election day from a legal perspective.
Nick Cater:
So when did his mind harden? When did he become convinced that he hadn't actually lost, that it had been stolen?
Mick Mulvaney:
I think in the days after the election, the more and more that what I call the crazy people were advising him, the people who said, whispering in his ear every day, "Oh, they stole this from you. Oh, this is terrible, Mr. President. Oh, what are you going to do about this? Are you going to stand up and defend yourself," et cetera, I think that had an impact on him. I think if all you ever heard all day was that this was the very best show in the world, and you never do anything wrong with this show, and you just keep on doing what you're doing, are you ever going to get any better? Probably not. You might actually start to believe that after a while.
Of course, the president is ultimately responsible for the people who advise him. But I think the people that were advising him in those days after the election were some of the poorest advisors that he ever had. Donald Trump made a name for himself in business and industry, in the casino business, in the real estate business, for surrounding himself with some of the smartest people around. He's always had the best lawyers and best accountants. When the administration started, we had Rex Tillerson, who I didn't care for personally, but he was the CEO of Exxon Mobil, as Secretary of State. They had Gary Cohn, the president of Goldman Sachs, as the national economic advisor. This was top tier people. At the end of the administration, he had a guy who sells pillows for a living, and that's not an exaggeration. So I think that there is a reason that you saw what you saw on January 6th, and in large part, it falls to the terrible advice and the terrible advisors that were around the president.
Nick Cater:
January 6th was the moment for you. Tell us, why did you make that decision you did to leave?
Mick Mulvaney:
Yeah. I was actually at the Capitol that morning. People forget that was the first day of work for many members of Congress. And I had been asked to come speak to a group of freshman Republican lawmakers. I knew a couple of them from state legislatures and so forth. I'd crossed paths. And say, I'll talk to these folks. I was there in the morning. I was going to stick around in the afternoon and watch the count on the House floor because I'm allowed to do that. I have the ability to continue to go on the floor after I've left office. And I thought that'd be interesting to see. But I went home and had lunch and figured the security was pretty tight, so I would just watch it on television. And I was watching a hearing on TV in the Senate when it started to decay. And I kept waiting for the president to come out and say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop this."
By the way, I don't blame him for the incitement. The rally in my mind is very similar to a hundred other rallies I had seen. The liberal press especially was always quick to say, "Oh, Trump is going to come speak in Minneapolis tonight and there'll be violence. Oh, Trump is going to speak in Grand Rapids and there'll be violence." And there was never violence. And the speech he gave that day was similar to the hundred other speeches he's given, so I don't think the speech was a critical element in it.
But once it started, I wanted the president to come on and say, "Hey, hey, hey, hey. Stop. This is not what we are about. We are the party of law and order. This is not right. We need you guys to come back down. Now, don't stay in the Capitol. This is wrong. I want you to stop." And it took him several hours to do that, and I think that was a failing. That was a failing at the highest level because it's very rare that a country needs its leaders to really be leaders. On a day in, day out basis, you're a manager. But every now and then, it's time to step up and really lead. And we needed that in those couple of minutes and hours when the riots had started, and the president didn't do that.
And I think my resigning was the only protest I had left to make. I wasn't chief of staff anymore. I was in a relatively small position, but it's the only position I had. I can defend to the death our policies on taxes, our foreign policy, even the money we didn't send to Ukraine that gave rise to the first impeachment. I can defend that all day long and have. But I can't defend this, and I don't want to be associated with this. If this was what it means now to be a Republican, to be a Trump person, I want nothing to do with that. And I still think it was the right decision for me.
Nick Cater:
Seems to me the test of a country is not whether things go wrong or badly, because things always go wrong or badly. It's what happens next. It's how you recover. And of course, the liberal or the democratic narrative around this is that this was just a disaster. It was one step away from destroying democracy altogether. I draw completely the opposite conclusion, the fact that something as serious as that happens and the country recovers.
Mick Mulvaney:
It did.
Nick Cater:
The institutions recover.
Mick Mulvaney:
And that's what I tell folks here in Australia when I've been visiting now for a couple weeks and talking to different groups. And they're like, "Oh, things are getting ready to go really badly." I'm like, "No, I don't think so." I think we had the biggest challenge to our constitutional process certainly in my lifetime, and maybe in 100 years. And it worked. It held up. The constitution won. And the transfer of power happened. The Democrats are in charge now. Mike Pence in my mind is a national hero, and I hope history treats him as such. But it just goes to show you that our constitution is strong enough to take even the type of challenge that would be raised by an assault on the Capitol for the purpose of stopping a transfer of power.
So yeah, it was a terrible, terrible thing. And again, I resigned over it. But the system worked. We bent, but we didn't break. And if you can put up with that, you can put up with a lot of other stuff. So I'm very confident. I know, listen, people throw the words around, threat to democracy now, everything. If I get up in the morning, it's a threat to democracy. I signed a deal with CBS News in my home country, and people were saying that's a threat to democracy. Everything's a threat to democracy. That's the new catch phrase. It's not. Was that a threat to democracy on the day? Yes. But the system worked, and the threat was defeated. And I think that's something to be proud of.
Nick Cater:
Your system works despite a poor president. You've got Joe Biden now. I think you and I will agree, he's not the most impressive president you've had, and yet the country works. And from Australia's point of view, we can still sign a deal as important as the AUKUS agreement, even with an administration like that.
Mick Mulvaney:
Yeah.
Nick Cater:
That's impressive.
Mick Mulvaney:
Our country succeeds despite the government, not because of it. But at the end of the day, especially on foreign policy, we are no longer where we were, say 20 years ago, where politics ends at our nation's borders. We don't do that anymore. Politics does extend to foreign policy, and to a certain extent it always has. But that's not to say that you're going to see wild swings in foreign policy, especially with our friends and our allies like Australia. Just because Donald Trump is in office and it goes to Joe Biden, things are not going to change that dramatically.
The threats about Donald Trump pulling us out of NATO were manufactured in large part by the media. Did he want NATO members to meet their obligations on their defence spending? Yes, he did. That is a reasonable position to take. I can defend that one as well, along with all the other policies. That's the right position to take on behalf of the American taxpayers. If UK is supposed to be spending 2% on GDP and they're not, they need to be called out about it. If you want the benefits of the NATO agreement, you have to live up to the obligations of the NATO agreement. That's just right. When you push people on that, it doesn't mean you're a bad ally, and it doesn't mean you're not going to live up to your obligations under, say, article five of the NATO treaty. So I'm very confident that despite the shortcomings of this administration, and they are legion, and the weaknesses of this particular president, that the relationship goes beyond any one or two or five or 10 people. It's an institutional, historical, cultural relationship that remains strong.
Nick Cater:
The Biden administration of course insists that the inflation that the US is experiencing is all as a result of Vladimir Putin. But if that's the case, why is inflation so much higher in the US than almost anywhere else? In the end, inflation is a monetary issue, isn't it? It always is.
Mick Mulvaney:
I got asked about that. The Putin price increase is what they call it now. It's what the Democrats call it. And I get asked about it. I scratch my head and go, "I don't know." If I'm still chief of staff and I'm advising the president, and we got eight and a half percent inflation and we have no idea what to do about it ... I don't think we'd be in that situation, but if we were, the first thing I'm going to say is, "Let's find somebody else to blame this on and see if it works." And that's what they did. I just don't think it's working. Americans don't follow foreign policy that closely. They understand a little bit about oil being a global market and all that. But what they really understand is that things are a lot more expensive and they don't like it. And that's what's driving a lot of the politics right now in my country.
It's a monetary issue. I phrase it differently, Nick. I call it a supply and demand issue. I used to study economics a long, long time ago. But prices are simply just a function of the supply and demand of goods, goods and services, right? And if you have too much money and too much demand and not enough supply, then prices are going to go up. The example I give, if a cup of tea is for sale, and you have $10 and I have $10, then that cup of tea probably goes for a dollar. If that cup of tea is for sale and you have a million dollars, and I have a million dollars, that cup of tea is probably going for more than a dollar.
It's too much money chasing too few goods. And the Biden administration just either doesn't want to or can't bring themselves to admit they need to make it easier to get more goods and services to market. They're talking about raising taxes. That won't bring new goods and services to market. The Fed is talking about tightening monetary policy. That doesn't bring new goods and services to market. The Biden administration is reregulating what the Trump administration deregulated. That will bring fewer goods and services to market. So we are in a supply driven inflationary spiral right now, and raising taxes doesn't solve that. Tightening monetary policies doesn't solve that. Might you see some impact on inflation over the long term? Sure you would. If you raise interest rates enough, then it will drive down demand. But it doesn't touch the supply side of the equation, and that's where we need to be looking.
Nick Cater:
Energy policy. Governor Newsom came to power in California, I think hinting that he was going to hasten the closure of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. Now he's appealing to the feds for money to keep the thing running. Has something dramatic happened in the energy debate in the US?
Mick Mulvaney:
Not yet. I've followed that. It's interesting. It parallels what I think you saw in Germany as well. The Green Party came out and said they were going to sort of tweak their climate change and energy policy in reaction to what was happening in the Ukraine, and more specifically, with Russian gas. You'd like to think that was happening in my country. It's not yet. The fact that Newsom is doing it is a bellwether. It really is, because the Democrat party in my country sort of follows California. So if that's where they're going, then good for them, and I think that's the right decision.
Go back to what I would be doing if I was advising the president. The president just gave his State of the Union speech a couple months back, and it was a perfect opportunity for him to stand up and say, "Look, I believe in climate change as much as anybody else. I want to stop fossil fuels as much as anybody else. I've got policies that prove it. But right now we need a temporary change for 12 to 18 months to allow us to make as much energy as we can domestically. It weakens Russia, it helps our European allies, and it helps our families. And I'm going to do it for 18 months, and then we'll go right back. After the emergency has passed, we'll go back to our original policies." That would've been a unifying message for the president to take. He didn't take it. I think he missed an opportunity. But we'll see if Gavin Newsom's work augers a new sort of outlook from the larger Democrat party.
Nick Cater:
So politics, you've got the midterms coming up in November. Will Roe v. Wade save the Democrats?
Mick Mulvaney:
No.
Nick Cater:
Is that the issue on which they can campaign and make ground?
Mick Mulvaney:
No, in fact, and they know it. I've seen some Democrat polling, and they've got a problem politically with this in that while their voters think abortion is important, it doesn't motivate their voters nearly as much as the pro-life movement motivates Republican voters. So the Democrats are sort of in a pickle. The more they talk about abortion and make abortion the issue, the more likely they are to simply motivate the folks on the other side. And in my country, voting is not compulsory, and a large part of what you do when you campaign is focus on ways to get "your people" to show up. And Republicans will show up to vote on abortion. Democrats won't. If you see the Democrats talking about it, it's because they don't have anything else right now to talk about because inflation is the number one, two, and three issues.
By the way, I saw four recent national polls. I think they were Gallup. They might not all have been Gallup, where abortion was the most important issue on fewer than 1% of the ballots. So it's an issue that everybody talks about and they say, "Yes, this is important to me." It's not what moves the needle. And the Democrats know it, and they've got a real conundrum.
I've said this in a couple places. I was surprised I had to say this, but I've not seen the Australian media coverage of Roe. I'm still reading the media from back home. And the decision does not ban abortion. I think it's important that folks realise that. All it does, in Roe v. Wade, the US Supreme court, back in 1972, created this federal right to an abortion out of, they call it the penumbras of the amendments of the constitution. I think it was the 14th or 15th. I can't remember. It sort of created it to invalidate a bunch of states' rules against abortion. And all that would be happening here is that would be going away. And so individual states, it would be up to them as to whether or not they want to allow it or not allow it.
The federal government could still come in and pass a law that says abortion is legal in the United States, and that would trump the state laws. They could also come in and pass a law that says abortion is illegal in the United States, and that would trump state laws to the contrary. But the federal Congress has never passed a law saying abortion is legal or it's illegal. They've always relied on that Supreme Court decision, which is why conservatives like myself have never liked Roe. Take the policies aside. This is something that should be decided by the legislature. This is a law. And it's not been decided by the legislature. It's been decided by the courts, and that's not their job. They're supposed to interpret the law, not make it. So we think a dramatic right is being wronged here, not just in terms of the morality of it, but in terms of the process of it. I think that's the way our system is set up and should be set up.
Nick Cater:
Well, it's always seemed to me that one of the reasons why it's so much more heated as an issue in the United States is because it's been decided by the courts. In this country, it was decided by state parliaments and there was rigorous debate, sometimes fierce debate, but you end up at a position where people recognise it as democratic.
Mick Mulvaney:
That's a great example, and I'm going to steal that from you because that's a great ... I tell people this all the time is that the big decisions, they should not only be legislator decided. You'd like to have them have fairly big margins. Many states, for example, there's some concern now on the left that if Roe is gone and there's no right to privacy that was established in Roe, that the next thing to go will be gay marriage. Okay, maybe. Except many states have passed laws permitting gay marriage, and I don't know of any move in any state right now to ban gay marriage. It's sort of, the needle has moved culturally in my country to where gay marriage is sort of one of those things ... By the way, it failed in California of all places within the last 10 years. So things have changed dramatically to the point where if you want to have gay marriage, the states either already have addressed it and passed a law or can address it and can pass a law. And you're right. I think if people recognise they had their chance, they voted, their elected officials debated, they lost that debate, that's different than having unelected judges tell you what the law should be.
Nick Cater:
It seems to me that the Democrats now are habitually picking the wrong issues. In Florida, for instance, Ron DeSantis has stuck with his laws banning transgender education for K-3 kids, had strong opposition from the Disney corporation, which seems bizarre to me, and the Democrats. That's not a winning position, is it, out there in the public?
Mick Mulvaney:
No. Ron's a friend of mine. He had a great line. He's like, if Disney wants to get involved with politics, I think that's great. I think the guy ... I can't remember the guy's name. I think he should run for governor of Florida against me on let's teach six years old about transgender issues. And that really, it is picking the wrong issues. It's interesting. The Virginia election was the Virginia governor's race. There's no reason for you folks to have followed it down here, but it-
Nick Cater:
We did.
Mick Mulvaney:
Did you? It's often a bellwether for us, that and New Jersey, because it's one of our rare odd year elections. And so for example, the outcome there in 2009 sort of presaged the tea party election. The 2021 governor's election was interesting in that one of the top issues for the voters at that time ... Because keep in mind, this is really before the war and before serious inflation. Inflation was an issue, but it was not as bad as it is now. One of the top issues was education. Typically, when one of the top issues is education, Democrats do well. They do well if the most important issues are healthcare and education. Republicans do well, generally speaking, if the top issues are the economy, law and order, or foreign policy. But this was a race where education was a big issue, and the Democrats still lost. And I think that scared them to death more than just losing by itself because that says that now, what do they talk about? If education is driving our voters away from us, what have we got left? And I think you're going to start to see a lot more talk about healthcare for just that reason.
Nick Cater:
Trump 2024, yes or no?
Mick Mulvaney:
Yeah, if Biden runs, I think Donald Trump will run for sure. He won't be able to pass up the concept of a rematch. That being said, I think he'll wait as long as he possibly can to make a decision. And that includes up to 2024 itself and maybe as late as after the first couple of primaries, because the way our system is set up, you really don't have to win the first four states to get enough delegates to be the nominee of either party. And Trump could wait until Super Tuesday, which I think is March or April or something like that, to make up his mind. So you can expect Donald Trump to manage the media attention as well as anybody. He is a master showman. And if he can drag this out as long as he possibly can and earn all the free media over it, he's going to do exactly that.
He said the other day ... He gave an interview. I think it was on the Piers Morgan show in the UK, where he said, "Well, I've made a decision. I'm not going to tell you what it is, but I can tell you when I tell people, it's going to make a lot of people very happy." And I had to laugh because it's classic Trump of saying things without actually saying anything, because if he announces that he's going to run, then a lot of Republicans are going to be very, very happy. If he announces he's not going to run, a lot of Democrats are going to be very, very happy. So he's toying with folks when he makes comments like that. He's one of the best media personalities I've ever met.
Nick Cater:
Mick Mulvaney, thank you for your insights, and thank you for joining us for this conversation.
Listen to the podcast recording of this Watercooler Conversation on Apple Podcasts.
