Washington Free Beacon editor in chief Matthew Continetti appeared Tuesday on MSNBC's "Meet the Press Daily" to discuss the Senate confirmation hearings for President-elect Donald Trump's administration.
Host Chuck Todd asked Continetti whether the saying "everybody loses one" would apply to Trump's nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Rep. Tom Price (R., Ga.). Todd cited former Sen. Tom Daschle having to withdraw his name from consideration to be part of President Obama's Cabinet back in 2009 for failure to pay taxes and his lobbying work.
Continetti said that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) would probably like Price to be the one Trump nominee to be unsuccessful in his confirmation.
"I think Chuck Schumer would like to defeat this one for the reasons you spell out; it would be a blow to Obamacare," he said.
Continetti added that Price was not one of the appointments who he was concerned about, due to his good relationship with other Republicans.
"He's not the one that worries me," Continetti said. "I think he has a lot of good relationships with Republicans. He has a story, and in his defense, I don't see this turning the Republicans against Tom Price. Though if it continues to build up."
"And another thing of course, remember Peter Schweizer, who is kind of the theorist of 'draining the swamp,' he became famous for talking about stories exactly like this," Continetti continued. "His book and his appearance on '60 Minutes' years ago that led to the Stock Act, which was supposed to deal with this problem."
Continetti later explained that the two biggest goals among Trump's constituency are to keep jobs in America and "drain the swamp."
Since the Trump team knows that, Continetti said, they will have a "very low threshold" for things that are seen as counterproductive to those goals.
"Well, go back to the NBC poll that we started the show with," he said. "Right after keeping the jobs in the U.S. The second most favored agenda item was 'drain the swamp,' and I think that's extremely important to Trump's constituency. I think Trump knows that, and I think that's why I remember he connected Newt Gingrich last–at the end of last year when Newt came out of some meeting and said, 'Oh, drain the swamp is over.' And of course, President-elect Trump said, 'No, it isn't."
"So anything that interferes with that goal, I think Trump and his team will have a very low threshold for," Continetti said.