‘McConnell Was Booed and Tucker Was Cheered’: Manu Raju Dishes on RNC and Trump’s GOP Takeover

CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju has covered Capitol Hill for more than twenty years. Yet this week’s news cycle has been unlike any Raju has seen. He’s been at the Republican National Convention all week in Milwaukee, witnessing the GOP rally around Trump after the assassination attempt against the former president on Saturday.

“I have never seen the Republican Party this united under Donald Trump in my entire time covering him,” revealed Raju to Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin on this week’s episode of Press Club . He pointed out that speakers at this year’s RNC included Amber Rose , Hulk Hogan , and Tucker Carlson , while representatives of the “Reagan-philosophy GOP” continue to be drummed out of the party.

“Not too long ago, it was Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in the Senate basically accusing Tucker Carlson of derailing efforts to try and help Ukraine, and then blaming him pointedly for the problems in the U.S. response to Ukraine. And what happened at the RNC? Mitch McConnell was booed and Tucker Carlson was cheered,” said Raju.

Raju also spoke about the audience reaction to Trump’s rambling 90-minute speech, the bitter feud between former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and panic within the Democratic Party over President Joe Biden ’s re-election prospects. Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube , Apple Podcasts , or Spotify . Read a transcript of the conversation, edited below for length and clarity.

Aidan McLaughlin: Manu Raju is CNN’s indefatigable chief congressional correspondent. He’s also the host of Inside Politics on Sundays, and just spent the week anchoring and reporting from the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Manu Raju, thanks so much for coming on the show. How are you doing?

Manu Raju: I’m doing great. It’s great to be back in DC. It has been a lively week.

I can imagine. Thanks for taking the time. I want to start with your impressions of the crescendo of the convention, former President Donald Trump’s big speech on Thursday night. What did you think of it?

It was long. The memorable moment, of course, will be him talking about the assassination attempt. I think that was a very riveting moment, him discussing how he almost died, and I think the audience was really with him there. And then he devolved into a long, rambling Trump rally speech. That may have lost a lot of viewers.

If you’re a Republican, you’re probably okay because he hit the strongest points of the speech early on in the speech. And if you’re an average viewer, maybe that’s all you are watching, and you change the channel and watch something else. So perhaps that’s okay.

But the idea that this was going to be a different type of Donald Trump, which was kind of the idea that was being pushed by some people around him going in, that there’d be more of a unifying message. It really was not. Ultimately, it was an attack. There were lots of attacks against Democrats and he went back to a lot of his old talking points and rhetoric that we often hear. You heard a lot of Republicans say maybe he should have capped it at 30 minutes rather than 90 minutes, and that would have been a much more effective speech. But at the end of the day, Republicans are still feeling pretty good about where things are headed into November.

I want to get into Trump’s attempt at a new tone in a second. I saw people reporting in the room that the prompter would stop every so often, and Trump would spend the next ten minutes talking about Kid Rock’s crowd sizes or something like that. I also saw some reporting that even the Trump diehards at the front started getting a little restless towards the end. What was the reception like in the room?

The crowd was really amped up. At the time of his speech, I was out of the room, I was not watching everything going down. But I can tell you from what my colleagues were saying is that towards the end, people were getting pretty restless. And that’s actually not uncommon in a Trump rally. Oftentimes those people are there waiting for hours and hours and hours to get in. They get in. Trump is late, and then he goes on for an hour to 90 minutes. And by the end of it, I think people want to go home. They’re a little tired.

No matter how much of a fervent supporter you might be, it’s hard to listen to anyone drone on and on like that for so long. But I would say that there was so much anticipation in the whole week building up to that speech and a lot of people eager to hear him speak, but maybe not for so long.

What did you think about the tone of the speech? You noted that all of the reporting leading up to it suggested that at least the Trump campaign was signaling that Trump had ripped up his speech after the assassination attempt, wrote a new one that emphasized unity, that didn’t mention the current administration, that was aimed at bringing the country together.

Then we had the speech. It seemed like he tried to do that a little bit. In the prepared remarks, he talked about bringing the country together, but then devolved into a rally speech. He attacked Nancy Pelosi, called her crazy. He accused Democrats of cheating in elections. He spent much of the speech railing against what he called “illegal aliens” ravaging our cities with crime. What did you make of the tone and how it contrasted with what the Trump campaign was trying to signal before the speech happened?

Yeah, they said that he really was not gonna focus at all on Joe Biden. It was going to be about bringing the country together. And as you noted, there were significant sections of the speech that he just riffed. He just said whatever was on the top of his mind. Calling Nancy Pelosi “Crazy Nancy” may speak pretty well to the Republican base, but maybe not to the Democratic or Independent voters who you’re trying to win over here in an election. Or suggesting without evidence, as he’s done for the last four years, that the election was stolen and that the Democrats had cheated in the election, and that’s why Joe Biden is president.

That’s one of the things that you hear from Republicans all the time saying, “Let’s not talk about that.” Let’s focus on the future. Let’s focus on Joe Biden. Let’s make this about why Joe Biden does not deserve to be reelected, not about relitigating something in the past that led to everything in the run-up to January 6th, and the reason why so many voters were ready to be done with him in the aftermath of January 6th.

Trump just can’t help himself. That is the real issue here. Once he starts talking, he continues to talk. He thinks he feels the audience in the room. He thinks they want to hear that kind of thing. But that plays really well with his 30-35%. Does that play as well with another 10-15% that he needs?

Democrats came out after just an absolutely brutal past 3 to 4 weeks of this campaign, thinking that was good for them. They were happy that he devolved the way he did because I think that helps shapeshift the conversation a little bit back towards Trump, even if they have their own major problems.

But one other thing is that people will consume this speech, not necessarily by watching the whole hour-and-a-half speech, but really by the snippets they see on social media. And what are they going to remember? Maybe the assassination attempt and then Hulk Hogan pulling his shirt off. So that’s probably what they’re going to end up remembering, so all this other stuff may not really even matter.

He also leaned into stolen election conspiracy theories. He suggested the Democrats cheat in elections. You’re going to be covering this obviously for the next couple of months. Does that rhetoric concern you, and how do you think about covering it? Because obviously in the last election, those kinds of claims were not only a massive challenge for the media — Fox News embraced Trump’s election lies and ended up paying a steep cost for it — but it also inspired the January 6th riot at the Capitol. And now I think it’s a bigger challenge for the media because it’s not just Trump saying these things. You have massively influential people like Elon Musk who are also embracing the stolen election theories. How do you look at covering that?

I think you have to say what the actual facts are. Whenever Trump says something like that, it’s that the election was not stolen. There were multiple investigations that happened at the state level, federal level, that didn’t show any sort of widespread fraud that caused the election to be stolen or rigged in any way. And even Trump’s own Justice Department, led by Bill Barr, made that conclusion after their own probe. That happened right after the 2020 election. And not to mention court after court after court rejected any attempt by the Trump team to try and bring that into the legal system, including an effort to the Supreme Court, as everyone remembers, in the aftermath of 2020.

So our job as the media is to remind people when those claims are made that they’re not true. So you don’t have to be passionate or angry or emotional about it, but to say it factually that there were investigations that happened, there was no widespread fraud. And Trump is saying what he’s saying despite not having any evidence to back it up. Hopefully, viewers and readers can make their own decisions about that.

Tucker Carlson spoke before Trump and he had a notable speech in which he really fawned over the former president. And that struck me because we know, thanks to the Dominion lawsuit, which revealed his private texts, he said that he hates Trump passionately, among other things. But I’m curious, how did that speech go over in the room? From what I saw, Tucker Carlson was received as one of the biggest stars of the RNC.

I think that exemplifies the shift under Trump about where this Republican Party is right now. I remember not too long ago, it was Mitch McConnell in the Senate basically accusing Tucker Carlson of derailing efforts to try and help Ukraine, and then blaming him pointedly for the problems in the U.S. response to Ukraine and beating back Russia. And what happened at the RNC? Mitch McConnell was booed and Tucker Carlson was cheered. Not just because of Ukraine, but that shows you the philosophy within the GOP right now, and who is being promoted and who is being pushed aside.

That old guard Republican Party, the establishment, the people who really represent the Ronald Reagan philosophy of where the United States places in the world, the George W. Bush philosophy, that’s very much in line with the Mitch McConnell philosophy. Those people are being drummed out of the party, and it is the Trump philosophy which is more isolationist, which is more protectionist — critics would say his immigration policy is more nativist — all this really defines the Trump America First agenda. And that is not in line with a lot of the more free-trading, globalist, neoconservative type people who have dominated the Republican philosophy for the past, generation or two generations.

So you’re seeing the shift within the GOP. Tucker Carlson being totally emblematic of that shift, as with Marjorie Taylor Greene, and her elevation in speaking at the RNC as well. So it has just really been something to watch in the last eight years or so. Just how much this party has shifted. It is truly Donald Trump’s party.

Yeah, that is definitely the biggest story of the convention. And it’s been a story years in the making: The shift of the Republican Party from, let’s call it, the party of Reagan to the party of Trump. Absent from the convention this year was George W. Bush, Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. Hulk Hogan and Amber Rose were headliners. So this is a different Republican Party than we’ve ever seen before. Did it feel different from other conventions that you’ve covered in that sense?

Yeah, absolutely. I have never seen, honestly, the Republican Party this united under Donald Trump in my entire time covering him. Since he became a candidate until now, this party has been divided over him. All his rhetoric, his controversy, immigration, Muslim bans, indictments, impeachments, you name it. There have been a lot of members who are very uneasy about Trump. The 2016 convention, we all remember Ted Cruz essentially urging people not to vote for Donald Trump. Him getting booed out. I was on the convention floor when that happened. That was an incredibly, incredibly tense scene. His wife, Heidi Cruz, had to be escorted out. Mike Lee was bullying Donald Trump. It was a totally different scene.

You run up to 2020, the party is in a real difficult spot as we were in Covid. It was a different convention then. While Republican criticism of Trump was much more muted, there was still a lot of unease about him as the party’s nominee. And it was very clear. People in swing states, swing districts, candidates were staying away from Trump as much as possible.

Shift to 2024, the down-ticket candidates were speaking at the convention. Wisconsin Senate candidates, Michigan Senate candidates, there were New York House Republicans who are from swing districts in attendance cheering Trump, giving interviews. These are people who could very well lose in another election cycle, they would have been running away from Trump. They would want nothing at all to do with Donald Trump, to be anywhere near him. They are absolutely tying themselves to Donald Trump. And I asked the Senate GOP campaign chairman, Steve Daines, about that this week. I asked him, “Is it a good philosophy for your candidates in swing states and in purple states to tie themselves to Trump when he has been convicted of a felony of 34 counts, found liable for sexual abuse, tried to overturn an election, all those controversies? Is it a good idea for them to tie themselves to Donald Trump?” What Steve Daines gave us was, “Absolutely.”

And the argument really is that at the end of the day, the base is going to matter hugely in this election. It does not help to be crosswise with your party’s nominee, especially if it’s Donald Trump who goes after you. And ultimately, it’s the Democrats who are in complete disarray and they’re showing the division within the Democratic Party right now. It’s something that Republicans are reveling in. So if they show some unity, perhaps that helps them by a few points in the polls, while Democrats are at war with each other and running away from each other, that creates a narrative that will ultimately hurt them in November. So there has been such a shift that we have seen over the past month and really over the past several election cycles.

I think you just perfectly explained how we went from January 2021 when the leaders of the Republican Party said, “Trump is done, we are never going back to that to now.” And now we saw a unified Republican Party over the course of the RNC, but it’s because they purged all the dissenters of Trump and Trumpism from the party. The only little bit of conflict that we saw was between Kevin McCarthy and Matt Gaetz, two Republicans who have become bitter enemies and had a little verbal tussle on the floor of the convention. You had a great interview with McCarthy afterward. Tell us what he said about Matt Gaetz and about the little rivalry they have brewing.

It is not just a rivalry, it is bitter, personal.

Sorry, searing hatred.

This all stems back to the fact that Kevin McCarthy became the first speaker ever ousted by a vote on the House floor. That happened last fall. Of course, Matt Gaetz led the charge. Only one member could initiate a vote. Matt Gaetz initiated that vote. Eight Republicans ultimately voted with the Democrats to kick out McCarthy. That led to disarray. So McCarthy flatly blames Matt Gaetz for all of this.

The whole thing that McCarthy has been saying, and he really reiterated to me, was that Gaetz had come after him simply because of a House Ethics Committee probe looking into allegations of sexual misconduct involving the Florida congressman, as well as having sex with underage girls. This is something that has been investigated by the Justice Department. They declined to pursue charges. There’ve been some other Gaetz allies who’ve been ensnared in all of this, but there is a House Ethics Committee investigation that is still ongoing on this matter, which is very serious for Gaetz. Gaetz has denied all of this.

The subtext to this is that McCarthy is trying to defeat Gaetz in his primary right now. He is maneuvering behind the scenes to try and prop up Gaetz’s primary challenger, which is later this summer. So there is so much back and forth and personal history involving these two men. And when Kaitlan Collins, my colleague, was interviewing Kevin McCarthy, that is when Matt Gaetz came in and started taunting him in the middle of that interview, and said “I’m speaking, but you’re not speaking, they would boo you off the stage.” And McCarthy ignored him during that Kaitlan Collins interview.

So when I got him on air Thursday morning, they made sure that was my first question, because that moment just went absolutely viral. He called him unhinged. He said that he might be on something. He said he should get some help. And then he said that he wants to see justice for the underage girls. Which is a pretty startling thing to say, especially to someone who had just the night before spoke at the Republican Convention. Gaetz had spoken and sat next to Trump in the box.

So that also shows you where the Republican Party is right now. McCarthy wasn’t speaking there. He’s still allied with Donald Trump, but he wasn’t speaking there. Matt Gaetz was speaking at the Republican Convention. So it is a bitter, bitter anger and hatred between the two that is going to absolutely continue to play out. And McCarthy makes no bones about it, he wants Gaetz not only to lose, but he wants Gaetz in jail. So we’ll see if any of those actually play out.

I hate to ask you a crass question, but I feel like I have to. You mentioned Matt Gaetz’s speech. Botox?

I have no inside knowledge about what was going on. I saw all the commentary online, and it looked like something was a little off. I don’t know, but maybe it was. Maybe he’ll address it when they get back to session next week.

You’re back in D.C. now. I want to talk about the steady drumbeat of pressure on Biden to drop out of the race. There’s been behind-the-scenes maneuvering for a couple of weeks now. Where does this all stand from your reporting? What is happening behind the scenes?

I can tell you from talking to so many Democrats over the last couple weeks and especially the last couple of days, there is just widespread panic right now. They don’t really know what Joe Biden is going to do, but there is so much fear that they are going to lose, and not just lose the White House, but lose Congress, and get wiped out.

Because they are in total disarray. The polls are going in the wrong direction. Joe Biden has not levitated any concerns post-debate. He is not giving enough time for a new candidate to form, to come together, or any sort of process. So even if you were to step aside, that process of replacing him would be incredibly messy. To get behind somebody, get that person nominated at the convention, build a campaign apparatus, get their messaging and ad campaigns, and get to the place where Biden has been– building a campaign machine for the past several months, more than a year.

But the other side is if he stays in, how are things going to get better? They’re losing donations. They’re losing support. Swing states are getting worse. And there is a feeling among a wide majority of voters that he’s not up for the job. So if he has a debate with Trump in the fall, is it going to get any better for him?

So that is what’s causing so much fear within the Democratic Party because they are stuck. It’s unclear what Joe Biden is ultimately going to do. All the messages coming out, as you mentioned, from people around him, his campaign team, he’s in it. But I can tell you, in covering politicians who drop out of races or resign, they’re always running until they’re not. So the second they give any sort of indication that he’s not, then all of a sudden that creates a whole different news cycle and problem for them. So that’s one thing to keep in mind in all of this. But it’s all up to Joe Biden.

So it’s not clear what he’s going to do, because even after Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi both reiterated their concerns and relayed concerns within the Democratic caucus about him continuing on as the candidate, he still went to Nevada this past week and told reporters, “I’m running.” He told people, “I’m running.” So he didn’t really listen to the Democratic leaders. So what is going to change now? Who knows? Maybe something’s changed. Maybe Joe Biden’s views have changed with his family. All of that is still up in the air. But every day that goes on makes it more likely that Joe Biden is the nominee.