Next Up with Mark Halperin
Dems in More Trouble Than They Think, Biden Still in Denial on The View, Inside the Trump Cabinet
Thu, 8 May 2025
Mark Halperin lays out why the Democratic party is in even worse shape than you - and they - think, the truth about polling on the Dems, the weak presidential field for 2028, and more. Then VA Sec. Doug Collins joins to discuss how the left and media are falsely spinning DOGE cuts at his department, the truth about what the Trump cabinet is really like, and more. Then Batya Ungar-Sargon joins to discuss Joe and Jill Biden on The View, the denial the former president is still displaying, and more.
Chapter 1: Why are Democrats in more trouble than they think?
We want to grow big and fast, so please, if you haven't done those things, do it. Today, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. I'm going to tell you what smart Democrats and some disaffected former Democrats tell me is the real explanation of why the party might be in big trouble.
I'll also have a conversation with the Secretary of the Veterans Department, Doug Collins, the gentleman from Georgia. We'll talk about his pledge that he's made about making sure veterans are taken care of, even as Doge tries to make the department more efficient. All of that plus a look at Joe Biden here on this episode. Again, grateful to have you with us.
So I'm going to start by telling you the honest truth that I've heard from conversations with people across the country. Smart Democrats, some still Democrats, some disaffected Democrats who say that the party has to address some really tough questions. I haven't heard anybody with a list like this.
And it's a list that I put together getting kind of the consensus view of a number of very smart people.
some of whom have left the party as i said but some of whom really want the democrats to be able to not just win the white house back but to build the kind of a sustained coalition or kind of movement that donald trump has built to try to figure out how things have gone the real problem that these democrats see is not that the party is weak in every way we'll talk about that the real problem they see is the party has its head in the sand enabled by the people in what i call the dominant media
who are not wanting to ask the hard questions because they're hard and they're embarrassing in some cases, they're difficult. Instead of doing that, they just have their masks and their shields on, their Trump derangement syndrome inside their blue bubble. And they're not even asking the right questions, let alone trying to figure out what the answers to those questions are.
So again, these aren't my questions. These are the questions that really smart people who have been involved in democratic politics at the highest levels, at the grassroots level are saying, the party has to face. It's a fact the Democratic Party has moved to the far left, farther left than it's been in our lifetimes.
And that is a big part of the challenge the party faces to figure out what does it mean now to be a Democrat and how they can compete with Donald Trump. Donald Trump's poll numbers are down, but the Democrats' numbers are not good either. The state of the Democratic Party is not good.
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Chapter 2: What are the key challenges for the Democratic Party?
As weak as Trump is, most of the things that have happened good to the Democrats, most of the things that they're anticipating in the spring, summer, and fall and into the midterm year, are because they're expecting Donald Trump to mess up. That's not good enough for a lot of the Democrats I'm talking to. They say the problems are too big to count on Donald Trump and the Republicans messing up.
There's the Democratic brand, which is extremely weak. If you look at all the polling that's been done, this is not fake news or Republican polls, as bad as Trump's numbers are now compared to how he started his presidency. The Democratic brand is not seen favorably. Democrats' performance and trust on a number of important issues is still not very good.
Part of that, I think, is the Democrat black ideas. You look at Bill Clinton and other Democrats who've been able to make a big splash nationally. They've had distinctive ideas that appeal to voters. The party really does not. You think about where do they stand on the economy? Where do they stand on tariffs? Where do they stand on immigration, education?
The lack of original ideas, Democrats say, is a big problem. Lack of leaders in Congress who really are breaking through with the wider electorate. Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, not seen as strong leaders.
The presidential field, you're already seeing that vacuum of lack of leadership in Congress being filled by some people, like the governor of Kentucky, Governor Beshear, the governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker. These folks are out there, but I continue to say not to run these folks down as individuals, but it's a weak presidential field. It's an overrated field.
And the energy in the party where you see big crowds and a lot of attention, continues to be with people like Bernie Sanders, AOC, college protesters. There's clearly a need for the Democratic Party to have that enthusiasm. But most Democrats I talk to say that's not a majority. That's not enough.
It's not even a majority within the Democratic Party, and it's certainly not a majority to win back the country. But again, these are maybe symptoms of the problem. What the Democrats I talked to this week have said that the real problem is The failure to ask the right questions and to come up with answers.
Now, some of these questions are backward looking in one sense about what happened in the 2024 election. but they're relevant today because the failure to grapple with the recent past shows some of the weaknesses the party has. Let me give you some examples, okay? Some of these legacy questions from 2024. For instance, one that I heard from several Democrats I talked to, Bobby Kennedy.
Why did he leave the Democratic Party, run as an independent, and then join the Trump administration? And what are the sources of his appeal? It's kind of an incredible story that the press didn't cover. They blackballed Bobby Kennedy at their urging and insistence of Democrats. They didn't give him access to the ballot to run as a Democrat.
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Chapter 3: How did Bobby Kennedy's departure affect the Democrats?
They didn't give him access to the media airways to get his message out. Blackballing him from the ballot, from the media, left caused him to leave the party. And he left the party with a lot of energy. I'm not sure Donald Trump would have won the election without Bobby Kennedy's support. Kennedy, Democrat, right?
must have taken an extraordinary turn of events to drive a Kennedy out of the Democratic Party, and yet they did. So again, why did he leave? What's the source of his appeal? Another set of things involves issues that clearly were potent for Donald Trump and Republicans, the issue of trans athletes and women's sports, the issue of the open border and immigration.
Again, why didn't the Democratic Party see or act on The obvious impact that those were going to have on the election. Those are pretty big errors to let those issues hang out there for the entirety of the Biden administration.
And there's something wrong with the Democratic Party that they didn't have the ability before it was too late to get the Democratic Party to change its point of view on issues. OK, next, Kamala Harris. Why didn't she win? What was wrong with her as a candidate? Why couldn't she beat Donald Trump, someone who the Democrats think has no business being president, particularly after January 6th?
I've seen no serious public discussion and even privately very little analyze it. Why'd she lose? What was wrong with her? And then what are the lessons for the party of the failure to get Joe Biden off the ticket in time to have a strong nominee? Okay. There were plenty of people, including me saying for years that Joe Biden was a real threat to Donald Trump's reelection.
If he ran for reelection himself and yet the party did not have the capacity to force him off the ticket until the very last minute when plenty of these Democrats and others will say it was too late. How and why did that happen? Okay. Those are backward looking, but the Democrats I've talked to say they have to be addressed. There has to be a conversation about it.
So recently, some Democrats have started to been asked this question. What happened with Joe Biden? How did the party not act on what seemed apparent, his mental decline? Here's Elizabeth Warren being asked that question.
Do you regret saying that President Biden had a mental acuity? He had a sharpness to him. You said that up until July of last year.
I said what I believe to be true.
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Chapter 4: What issues are Democrats failing to address?
And you think he was as sharp as you?
I said I had not seen decline.
I'm not singling her out because very few Democrats want to grapple with it. Because to grapple with it is to acknowledge, A, that Biden had declined, that they all saw. And they didn't have to see it in private. They could have seen it in public. And to grapple with the question of how could a party commit that kind of malpractice?
Here is Bernie Sanders grappling with the same question on Fox News.
I want to play a clip from this BBC interview from former President Biden. Take a listen. It was a hard decision, but... Regrets, though?
No, I think it was the right decision. I think that the... Well, it was just a difficult decision.
But you shouldn't have taken it earlier?
Well, I don't think so. I don't know how that would have made much difference. So should President Biden have gotten out of that race earlier?
But I'm not going back a year.
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Chapter 5: How is the Democratic Party perceived by Latino voters?
Well, he's right that that's a fundamental issue. But the Democrats I've talked to say, if you fail to grapple with it, You don't have credibility with the public and you don't understand the dynamics of the Democratic Party. Now, it's not like in 2028 they're going to face the exact same issue.
But the Democrats, again, who some in the party, some who've left the party, say it's an embarrassment and it gets away from an authentic discussion. All right. Those are the backward looking ones. Now I'm going to tell you some of the ones that are germane right now that these Democrats say must be discussed, not just privately, but out in the open.
If the party is going to have a chance to have a revival and a strong chance to win the White House. The first one has to do with the media and what kind of information Democrats are taking in. What are the sources since about 2015 that Democrats have relied on to say, what do we know about the world? What do we know about Donald Trump's appeal? What do we know about how our party is doing?
And these Democrats say if they continue to stay in their blue bubble, it's not just about Pete Buttigieg going on a podcast that Donald Trump's going on. It's about consuming programs, including programs like this, that try to find the truth about the party rather than just relying on things that keep them from the truth. It's pretty fundamental.
Now, I'm sure some people on the left will say, well, that's what the Republicans do. They're just watching conservative media. They see plenty of things like CBS News.
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Chapter 6: What are the Democratic Party's challenges with young voters?
that they can take in and understand what's going on on the other side so that's one then there's another one again these are hard questions to grapple with gender what kind of party does the democratic party want to be regarding men and women and what some democrats said to me this week one in particular with a fair amount of emotion is are strong men men who are strong by traditional definitions or roles are strong men welcome to the democratic party
Or is the Democratic Party does not want to be welcoming to strong men? It's a tough question conversation to have because there are plenty of people in the party who would say they don't want traditional gender roles to play a role in the party. So that's a tough one. Here's another one about speech.
What these Democrats said is for a lot of people in our party, if somebody says something we don't like, if we find it to be offensive or negative or not consistent with our worldview, we call it hate speech or we call it racism or misinformation or fascism.
Is that the way to deal with dissenting voices, to make it a big, broad party, to make it a stable party and to adapt to changing circumstances? These Democrats see an intolerance in the party for dissent, and they think that's not a good way to build a party. All right, another one about coalitions, okay? How to build the biggest possible tent, how to draw people in.
And what some Democrats say is they're deliberately excluding people. They're taking groups of people and saying, we don't want that group in the party. And one prominent example is people in big tech. Big tech, and this is a huge irony, big tech was instrumental in helping, trying to help Hillary Clinton win in 2016. Instrumental in helping Donald Trump, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in 2020.
And yet now you see lots of tech leaders saying they don't feel welcome in the Democratic Party. And they're taking their influence, their money, their capacity to affect public policy conversations. And they're saying, we don't love everything about Donald Trump, but we're welcome in the Republican Party.
Democrats have said to too many groups in the view of the people I talk to, not just that we're not gonna court you aggressively, but that we think it's a positive to kick you out of the party, that we are better off as a party to exclude rather than include. And that is seen by my sources as a real problem.
Next, can Democrats appeal to Latino voters if they're not honest about how Donald Trump improved his standing and support with Latino voters, including on the issue of immigration? For years, Democrats told themselves If we're tough on the border, we'll alienate Hispanic voters. We can't do that. Better call them Latinx and say we're for the Biden policies on the border.
Well, the data is pretty clear, and you can see it in focus groups and polls. A lot of Latino voters who are in this country legally, they don't want an open border. And so it turns out for at least some of those voters, the democratic theory of the case was exactly backwards. That supporting tougher policies on illegal immigration actually can appeal to Hispanic voters.
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Chapter 7: How is Doug Collins addressing concerns at the Veterans Department?
Parties that lose, particularly a party that loses to someone like Donald Trump, who they detest and don't understand, have to have a full conversation. They can't have their head in the sand or their face up against the TV screen watching MSNBC. They have to have the conversation. This isn't an anti-Democrat conversation I'm talking about here.
In fact, it's a pro-Democrat conversation because if the Democrats don't have it, they'll lose again. I've seen lots of aftermaths in all the elections I've covered. Whenever one party loses the White House, there are postmortems, there are conversations, there are meetings.
The gap, again, between the conversation the Democrats need to have in the view of my sources and the one they're having is massive. And if they can't figure out how to fix that, it's going to be very difficult for them to turn things around. Coming up in just a moment, my conversation with the Secretary of the Veterans Department, Doug Collins, next up.
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And now next up, the Secretary of the Veterans Department, gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Doug Collins, Congressman, Secretary, welcome to NextUp. Hey, it's good to be with you, Mark. I've watched so closely how you've run the department, and it is such an important job because our veterans need to be taken care of.
And there's been a huge focus on veterans' healthcare, and we'll talk about that, but it's not all the department does. And you've got a broader brief than that. And You've been caught up as much as any secretary, I think, in this question of what actually are you doing?
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Chapter 8: What are the media's perceptions of Doug Collins' actions?
And that stayed about constant. And, you know, there's been some discussion that, well, we had a lot that added on during PAC DAC and other things. Well, we also have to remember that we also lose about 400,000 veterans every year just to natural death and causes. So our numbers aren't changing.
In that regard, what is changing is that some of those veterans are now getting more benefits, the same veteran getting more benefits because of the PACT Act and others, and some new ones coming in who had not been getting benefits before.
The day you started as the Secretary of the Veterans Department, how many employees did you have?
Well, that's a great question because the day I started, I didn't know the answer because my Human Resources Department couldn't give me a figure. It took about a week and a half for us to figure it out that we're somewhere right around 470,000 people.
Okay. And how many are there now?
Okay.
So I've covered the VA throughout my career because it's a big and important story. Sometimes you hear people say it's the best health care in the country. It's better than Medicaid. It's better than Medicare.
And then, as you know, sometimes there's these horror stories about not just it's disrespectful to our men and women who've served, but just as a matter of government inefficiency, long lines to see, long waits to see doctors, horrible facilities. What is your description of VA care today?
Is it a crown jewel of the American health care system, or is it a disaster and an embarrassment, or somewhere in between?
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