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During the transition last year and several times since, Donald Trump repeatedly pushed Joe Manchin to switch parties and become a Republican, the West Virginia senator revealed in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast.


He said no—“I said, ‘You need more Democrats like me, you don’t need Republicans,’” Manchin explained.

So Trump asked Manchin to support repealing Obamacare, and then the Republican tax bill.

He said no to those, too.

Manchin should be the most endangered politician in America, followed closely by the nine other Senate Democrats running in states Trump carried last year, many by wide margins. And they all should have been poachable votes for the White House, if the president’s outreach to red-state Democrats had worked, and if the agenda Republicans have chased in search of something to call a win hasn’t consistently proved so unpopular with voters—the tax bill has a 26 percent approval rating, according to a Monmouth University poll out Monday, with 50 percent of people saying they believed it would raise their taxes.

“I was an easy pickup. Very easy pickup,” Manchin said. “And a couple, two, three other Democrats would have been easy pickups, if they had just made an effort.”

Not one of those Trump-state Democrats has budged on Obamacare repeal or taxes, to the surprise of Democrats themselves, who entered the year with their brains and confidence scrambled by Trump’s win.

For all the lunches at the White House and trips Trump’s made on Air Force One to needle them back home, Democrats are heading into 2018 complaining loudly about Trump-led Republicans abandoning what he stood for in secret, stealthy ways. Even the very not-viral Montana Sen. Jon Tester made a viral video yelling into the camera and mocking the handwritten changes in the margin of the tax bill.

And as Manchin heads into his own reelection campaign as the Senate Democrat from the most Trump-friendly state—the president carried West Virginia by 42 points, and even persuaded Gov. Jim Justice to switch parties in August—he said he’s feeling just fine about his choices, and his chances.

“I’m not worried at all,” Manchin said. “Not one iota am I worried.”

Manchin did, as he likes to point out, win by 24 points in 2012 the same day Mitt Romney carried his state by 27 points, winning every county along the way, which he credits to a personal brand he’s spent 35 years in politics building.

He’s comfortable telling Elizabeth Warren directly—and saying publicly—that Washington Democrats “don’t hold anybody accountable and responsible for anything.” He says his colleagues who have called for Trump to resign are “foolish” and nakedly political. He’s frustrated by his fellow Democratic senators calling for Al Franken to resign before the Ethics Committee completes its investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against him, and calls their treatment of Franken “the most hypocritical thing I’ve ever seen done to a human being.”

And he proudly ripped in to National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Cory Gardner of Colorado, whom Manchin confronted on the Senate floor two months ago, complaining about super PAC attacks on Manchin’s daughter being the CEO of the drug company Mylan, which manufactures some products with opioids, aiming to undercut the hard line he’s taken against opioids as the epidemic has ravaged his state.

“I said, ‘Be a man enough to go after me. Don’t be chicken shit.’ And that’s what they are. I said, ‘Cory, that’s not you,’ I said—Cory’s a good guy; I like him,” Manchin said. “No different than the DSCC [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee], too, they all do it. I despise that. Their name’s not on the ballot; my name’s on the ballot. OK. If you want to go after somebody, go after me, not after my family.”

The NRSC, the Republicans’ Senate campaign arm, points out that Manchin never complained so publicly about the DSCC roping Missouri Republican Roy Blunt’s wife into its attacks last year, though in the interview, Manchin said he didn’t like that either, insisting, “Democrats are as wrong as the Republicans. Someone’s got to stop this. Cory’s a good enough person to stop it. OK?” (Gardner declined to comment.)

Manchin believes West Virginians will see the tax bill like he does: a closed process that explodes the deficit in ways Ronald Reagan would never have allowed, helps the rich and makes little impact in the paychecks of the people in his state.

“Whenever you are upside down and you’re robbing Peter to pay Paul, and you can’t find Peter anymore ...” he says, then offers an even more homespun West Virginia version about his grandfather, the owner of a small grocery store: “‘Joe,’ he says, ‘indebtedness—which is basically uncontrolled debt, unmanaged debt—will make a coward out of the decisions. You’ll be cowardly in your decisions.’ He was exactly right, and we’re doing it now.”

Click here to subscribe for the full podcast to hear Manchin's response to Bernie Sanders supporters who call him a fake Democrat and his rundown on each of the three Republicans running to take him on next year.

The GOP take on Manchin is, as NRSC spokesman Bob Salera put it, that he’s “rejected all opportunities to work across the aisle.” Salera dinged him for voting against Obamacare repeal and the Republican tax bill despite Trump’s appeals for him help: “Manchin turned his back and voted with Washington Democrats.”

In Manchin’s populist blasts against the tax bill, DSCC Chair Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said he sees a message that will resonate across the map—in states where Democrats are defending, in states where they’re trying for pickups, and in states like Mississippi or Utah where Democrats are nursing aspirations that seem slightly less like fantasies since Doug Jones won in Alabama. (“It was clear to me this year there’s a very, very dramatic shift,” Jenny Wilson, the Democratic candidate in Utah, said on the afternoon after the Alabama surprise.)

Take Missouri, Van Hollen said, where Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill is presumed to be in major danger against state Attorney General Josh Hawley, a top recruit of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Pointing to assessments of the GOP tax plan tilted in favor of the wealthy at the expenses of the middle class, Van Hollen said, “Trump promised an economic populism during his campaign, but his proposals have been all about big Republican donors. They’ve been all about giveaways to big corporations and the very wealthiest in this country. And that is not what Trump voters bargained for.”

With Jones arriving in the Senate, Manchin has new dreams of a middle-of-the-road nucleus, along with fellow centrist Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), and from the Republican side, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), retiring Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). Add in “that independent free spirit” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Manchin said, and he thinks they might be able to reshape what happens.

As for Trump, Manchin said, he doesn’t how to break through to the president.

“When he says he’s not a politician, I agree. I understand that,” Manchin said. “But he’s allowing politicians to set an agenda that he ought to let his gut set. He is more comfortable wanting to do a bipartisan deal than he is wanting to do a partisan deal, I can tell you. I can feel it, OK? But he gets pushed right into this partisan rhetoric: ‘Democrats are all bad.’”

It’s debatable just how hard Trump has to be pushed to be partisan, but ever since he rushed to Trump Tower during the transition to toy with bolting the Senate to become energy secretary, Manchin’s been a Trump favorite, chatting on the phone regularly with the president and sidling in for photo-ops.

“‘Hey, Joe, I want you to know this is not going to be a tax cut for the wealthy and rich like me. This is going to be for the working people that got left behind,’” Manchin remembers Trump saying to him at one of their meetings a few months ago. “I said, ‘Mr. President, that’s perfect. That’s a wonderful starting point. That’s where we should be.’”

Manchin’s office worked with the Wharton School of Finance, the president’s alma mater, and the Third Way centrist Democratic think tank to develop alternative proposals that they submitted to the White House in draft form. They never heard back.

“It shows you where their values are. Their choices were that the corporations get the greatest cuts, the wealthiest get the greatest benefits, and on top of that, theirs is all permanent. The people that get the least amount and the unknown is, the people that get the temporary are the people that needed it the most,” Manchin said. “So I said, “Guys, wait a minute. Aren’t we off-base a little bit here?’”

I asked him whether he said that to the president.

“I didn’t see it then,” he said, adding, “I haven’t been back.”