Welcome to Beg to

Beg to Differ, thewerks weekly roundtable discussion

featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum from

center left to center right. I'm Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the Bullwork. I'm joined by our regulars

Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution and the Wall Street Journal, Linda Chavez of the Niskannon

Center, and Damon Linker of the Week.

Our special return guest, one of our favorites is Will Salitan of Slate.

So thank you one and all. Will, it's great to have you back.

Thanks, I'm hearing ready to beg.

All right, very good.

So this week, we had a fairly interesting Saturday morning where it looked for a few minutes

as if the Senate might actually call witnesses and there was a certain amount of

flurry of excitement and then that didn't happen and we know how the vote went and

in the interim now there is a lot of discussion about the what some people are

calling the new Cold War between the institutional Republicans led by Mitch McConnell and the Trump brand.

So I'm going to start with you, Will.

You've had some really, wonderful pieces lately about what Trump has meant

for the Republican Party and I want to get to that, but first, what is your sense of the relative strength of the

opposing forces here?

Well, the Trump forces have the upper hand within the party.

That's evidenced partly by the impeachment vote itself,

and partly by the refusal of Republican senators,

...