The Interview: Politico Playbook Team Dishes on The GOP Power Struggle, Pissing Off Both Sides, and Not Ignoring Trump
Photo by Tony Powell
One day before Joe Biden was sworn in as president of the United States, a new team took over Playbook, Politico’s highly influential newsletter. Now more than 100 days into the new administration, as well as their tenure at the helm of the unofficial guide to Washington D.C., the new Playbook team — Ryan Lizza, Rachael Bade, Eugene Daniels and Tara Palmeri — joined me on The Interview to talk about everything from a Republican Party power struggle to what it’s like covering a new regime in D.C. during a pandemic.
We spoke on Tuesday, as House Republicans prepared to boot Liz Cheney from her leadership position over her continued criticism of Donald Trump. Playbook has tracked every development in this rift within the GOP, and explained that the purge all comes down to the Minority Leader and his tenuous relationship with Trump.
“This is fundamentally about one man’s ambition,” Bade said. “It’s about Kevin McCarthy’s ambition to be speaker.”
McCarthy’s strategy of appeasement has required some selective discipline. While Cheney, a Republican Party mainstay, was punished for her criticism of election lies, more controversial lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz have been given free rein.
“They need them,” Palmeri said of the fringe members. “They bring out the base. They really haven’t divorced themselves from QAnon and the conspiracy theories, they still say the election was stolen. So how can they really get rid of someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz? What moral ground do they stand on?”
Noting that McCarthy declined to punish Greene or Gaetz for their continued indiscretions, Bade said, “It looks like McCarthy has made his bed when it comes to this wing of the party. And he’s going to be with them. And the Cheney types are going to be the ones he punishes.”
I also asked the Playbook team about taking the over the newsletter as the Biden administration replaced Trump’s, and what they make of criticism from partisans on both sides of the political aisle.
“Good and effective journalism means you’re going to piss off the right sometimes, it means you’re going to piss off the left sometimes,” Bade said. “I take it as a metric of success that we’re driving the conversation.”
“There’s always going to be something to piss off one of the Pod Bros or Richard Grenell on a daily basis,” Lizza said. “At the end of the day, that’s not really the audience.”
As for covering Trump in the wake of the Capitol attack, the Playbook authors said they see no reason to turn a blind eye to Mar-a-Lago, given that the former president continues to exert a tremendous amount of power over the Republican Party.
“We are constantly calling it the Big Lie. We’re constantly calling the insurrectionists bad people who did a bad thing,” Daniels said. “Sometimes it’s not super clear what people want, other than for us to ignore these parts of politics.”
Lizza rejected the argument that Playbook should adopt “a sort of censorious, lecturing tone about Trump’s lies or the January 6th insurrection or the misinformation that spread after the election.”
Readers, he said, are “not looking to read Playbook every day for further resistance lecturing about what a liar Donald Trump is,” he said. “That’s embedded in the reporting.”
That said, Lizza argued they understand the perils of both sides journalism, and when it comes to the big moral questions facing reporters covering U.S. politics, the Playbook authors “never flinch from talking about those things in a very plain matter.”
Listen to the full episode now, and subscribe to The Interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
