The Republicans’ Candidate-Quality Problem

Republican leaders are scrambling to avoid a government shutdown after the House failed to pass a funding bill this week. These events have led to renewed questions about Speaker Mike Johnson’s leadership and his ability to keep his party members in line.

Facing pressure from the Freedom Caucus, Johnson put forward a bill to fund the government for the next six months alongside an additional bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Now his speakership may be under threat: Johnson’s “political headaches aren’t going away,” Zolan Kanno-Youngs said last night on Washington Week With The Atlantic.

Beyond Washington, Republicans are facing a candidate-quality issue. A CNN report this week said that North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson has referred to himself as “a Black Nazi” in addition to making a long history of other racist and anti-Semitic comments. Robinson, who is also the Republican candidate for governor, has denied the comments and insists he will continue his campaign.

Robinson’s story is a microcosm of forces that have been at work in the Trump-era Republican Party, McKay Coppins said last night: Donald Trump “has had this mass desensitizing effect on the electorate … People have a much higher tolerance for inflammatory and incendiary rhetoric.”

And in the fallout of the former president’s comments about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, Trump continues to campaign using increasingly xenophobic rhetoric. “This isn’t a spectrum of escalation about becoming harsher against immigration in an imaginative way,” Caitlin Dickerson said. “When he points to people from the Congo, the Middle East, and Asia and then says they’re destroying the fabric of our country, what is the fabric meant to refer to? It refers to whiteness.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Leigh Ann Caldwell, the anchor of Washington Post Live; staff writers for The Atlantic McKay Coppins and Caitlin Dickerson; and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent for The New York Times.

Watch the full episode here.