Lulu Garcia Navarro

From The New York Times, this is The Interview.

I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro.

Since the founding of our democracy, there's been a separation of powers.

The Senate, in particular, was created to act as a stabilizing force with its own important responsibilities.

But after almost a year of the second Trump presidency, during which time he's pursued an aggressive agenda, the Senate is arguably weaker than ever, with some critics and senators saying it is abandoning its role in checking presidential power.

So today I'm having a different kind of conversation than we usually do on the show.

A roundtable about the state of the Senate with three lawmakers who all decided to leave it.

Jeff Flake, a Republican, represented Arizona and left office in 2019, warning that the influence of Trumpism on the GOP would be corrosive to his party.

Joe Manchin represented West Virginia, first as a Democrat who frequently voted with Republicans and later as a registered Independent.

He left the Senate at the start of this year.

And Tina Smith is a Democrat who currently represents Minnesota and earlier this year announced that she won't be seeking reelection in 2026.

I wanted to gather these three to get their read on the state of the Senate and our politics and democracy more broadly.

So here's my conversation with Senators Flake, Manchin and Smith.

I want to thank you all for being here.

It is a great pleasure to have you here on this sort of gray winter day in Washington, D.C.

You are all three former or soon to be former senators and you all left at different periods of the last 10 years.

And I'm hoping, frankly, that because you are leaving or have left, you will feel a little bit more unleashed in being able to discuss your true feelings and thoughts.

So I want to start by asking you all to give me a word or a sentence, something brief, that describes the state you think the Senate is in right now.

And I want to start with you, Senator Smith, because you are actually sitting in said body.

Senator Flake?