Trump ‘comes out of a reality TV world,’ the Nebraska senator says. ‘And I have lots of anxiety about whether or not that kind of world is really what we want for our kids.’
Ben Sasse never liked Donald Trump. He still doesn’t like Trump. And now that he’s promoting his new book, “The Vanishing American Adult,” the freshman Nebraska senator doesn’t want to talk about whether the 45th president of the United States counts as an adult, according to the principles he lays out across 300 pages. Sasse would rather not be talking about Trump, but when pressed, he says the president is a symptom of exactly what he thinks is wrong with America.
Trump “comes out of a reality TV world,” Sasse told me in the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “And I have lots of anxiety about whether or not that kind of world is really what we want for our kids.”
Sasse, a former university president, is beloved by both the conservative intelligentsia and by bitter Democrats who agree that he’s something like the last honest man in the GOP. He has a practiced, unassuming air about everything except his intelligence, which he doesn’t try to backslap away, in person or in print (back in the days when he says he never thought about going into politics, he picked up a Ph.D. in American history from Yale, with a lauded dissertation about the rise of secularism). He’s one of the few senators who arrived without ever holding public office before, but he’s picked up most of the tricks, like talking past questions he doesn’t want to answer and picking up little bits of biography at the start of a conversation that he’ll work in later to personalize it.
These days, he’s a microcosm of many Republicans in the age of Trump — still holding close to his beliefs (whether school choice or international trade deals), wary of how the man in the Oval Office will rewrite the party’s genetic code, trying to keep some distance without making a big show of it.
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Unlike many in Congress, though, Sasse is willing to voice his criticisms of Trump out loud … sort of. When really pressed, when he can’t divert the conversation another way, when he can’t avoid saying what he really thinks. (“He and I obviously have a very different view of the world” is one of the understated deflections he landed on at one point.)
Almost as big a problem for Sasse is what the leader of his party means for Republicanism.
Asked what the GOP stands for, he says, “I don’t know.”
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Ben Sasse on what the GOP stands for in the age of Trump: "I don't know" https://t.co/9wmtU59g3h pic.twitter.com/OZDgq0Tjv9
— POLITICO (@politico) May 30, 2017
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