Amna Nawaz:

Well, joining us now with an insider's perspective is Doug Heye. He's a Republican strategist with experience operating within the White House, Capitol Hill's leadership circles, and on the campaign trail.

Great to see you, Doug.

Doug Heye, Republican Strategist:

Good to be with you.

Amna Nawaz:

So it looks like the president is playing hardball with his own party's Senate majority leader. What's going on here?

Doug Heye:

Look, Donald Trump wants to be in control of everything.

And what I have seen today and throughout this week as I hit refresh on Punchbowl pretty much every day is that that's causing a lot of problems within the Senate conference. I talked to Senate leadership staffers today, who said, we're constantly out of the loop.

And that's been the problem for the president on so many things, if we're talking about Senate Republican reaction to Iran, obviously with the memorandum of understanding. They have been out of the loop on what the plans are, how we define success. It changes every day.

Amna Nawaz:

Yes.

Doug Heye:

And, certainly, they woke up this morning to find once again plans have changed and they're out of the loop. It means that we have said for well over a year now that Mike Johnson has the hardest job in Washington. It might be that John Thune does.

Amna Nawaz:

Well, there's the sort of discussion about this among senators. But just in terms of getting the president's agenda in place, John Thune had a plan, right, to get his nominee confirmed, to move forward with authorization of FISA.

Mr. Trump has now blown that plan up. What does John Thune do now?

Doug Heye:

I don't think that their team really knows.

And the reality is, they had all their ducks lined up in a row. And we always try and focus on what leadership is doing wrong, because we all think that we could do it smarter or better. Probably not. But they had all their ducks lined up in a row that they were -- so they were going to move this nomination really quickly and then pass FISA.

Everything looked good and we were going to see a productive Senate. The reality is, Donald Trump rolled the bowling ball, knocked all the pins down.

Amna Nawaz:

I want to ask you too about the earlier story we reported, the big story about this Iran deal, because we have already seen some criticism from some Republican lawmakers. They wanted to see details of this bill before they would sign off on it.

From what we reported and what we have seen, is this a deal that Republican lawmakers can get behind?

Doug Heye:

You are going to hear a lot of noise against it, in part because we have heard Ted Cruz be really strongly against this.

Obviously, some senators are looking to run for president in a couple of years. That will certainly have an impact.

But the reality is also, again, they have just not been included in these decisions and discussions that the White House have made. When the president spoke at the State of the Union address, it was a great opportunity for the president to tell Congress, Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate, but also the American people, here's what we're trying to do, here's how we define success.

He didn't take that opportunity and really hasn't used any time since then to do so. So, Republicans have very real questions. And now we're starting to find out what some of the answers are, and they don't like them.

Amna Nawaz:

All right, I want to tap into your expertise to get your take on some election results and turn to the primaries and run-offs that we were tracking last night.

In Alabama, in Georgia and in Oklahoma, the Trump-backed U.S. Senate candidates all won, but also in Georgia, Trump's picks for governor and secretary of state both lost. In Oklahoma, the candidate he was backing came in second, is now heading to a run-off in August.

I know we often look at these and say, what does it tell us about the state of the party and about the president's influence in these elections? How do you look at it?

Doug Heye:

I got a call from a New York Times reporter a couple weeks ago who talked about Donald Trump's dominant grip on the party and how none of the Trump-endorsed candidates ever lose.

And I said, well, I'm in Asheville, North Carolina and you may remember Madison Cawthorn represented that district. Trump endorsed him, doubled down on the endorsement the day before the election. His candidate lost the next day.

The reality is, yes, any president endorsing in a primary is a huge benefit for that campaign. Trump does it more than, say, Biden, Obama, Bush and so forth. But the reality is, candidate quality still matters and how those candidates campaign matters.

So if we're talking in 2026, I would tell you that John Cornyn and Janet Mills, the Democrat in Maine, both had something in common that was just poison for 2026. They are senior citizens with a long track record of incumbency. That's not what voters are looking for in 2026.

Amna Nawaz:

While I have you on, take a closer look at Georgia in particular, because we know Republicans have been eying winning back those Senate seats after the surprise Democratic wins back in 2020.

When you look at the Republican, Representative Mike Collins, how do you think he stacks up against the Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff there?

Doug Heye:

It's Georgia. It's going to be a very close race. Those races have now been close for a while.

But if I'm a Republican in Georgia, I'm nervous because I know that they have two Democratic senators that were basically made senators by Donald Trump by really own goal, to use a World Cup term, really own goal mistakes by Trump that really put Ossoff and Warnock in the Senate.

And Republicans in Georgia, while they want to be as close as they can to Trump, they have real frustrations.

Amna Nawaz:

We love a good World Cup tie-in any time, by the way.

(Laughter)

Amna Nawaz:

Doug Heye, always great to see you.

Doug Heye:

Thank you.

Amna Nawaz:

Thank you so much for being here.