The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 10, 2024, episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
In recent days, Donald Trump has dramatically escalated his attacks on CBS News, raging at the network because of something they supposedly did involving Kamala Harris’s interview on 60 Minutes. Trump has now stated repeatedly that CBS should lose its broadcasting license. We think this deserves attention not as just another unhinged rant but as a clear warning sign of the presidency he will run if he wins the election. We’ll see a marked turn toward using government power to squelch dissent and silence aggressive reporting on his administration. As it happens, Project 2025, the blueprint for an authoritarian Trump presidency, is very explicit on this point. Today, we’re talking to Michael Sozan, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and author of a new report that gets deep into this very thing. Great to have you on, Michael.
Michael Sozan: Greg, thanks for having me on.
Sargent: Trump has been targeting CBS News relentlessly in recent days. He unleashed a wildly crazy rant on Truth Social, calling Harris a “moron” and claiming that CBS should lose its license for corruptly replacing one of her real answers in the 60 Minutes interview somehow with a fake one in order to “conceal her stupidity.” And then, in a speech on Thursday, he said this.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): They take it out, throw it away, and put in a totally different answer in order to protect her and they get caught. CBS should lose their license. You know they have a license. They have a license which is worth billions of dollars and they pay nothing. All of these networks are all crooked as hell. You saw that with ABC.
Sargent: Michael, all that seems to have happened here is that CBS released one longer Harris quote online, and then had an edited one in their final interview that aired on the network. Is that a scandal?
Sozan: No, it’s not a scandal. This is what private media companies and journalists do all the time. This is what the First Amendment allows them to do. CBS is allowed to interview who they want. They’re allowed to edit those interviews. They’re allowed to choose a political viewpoint if they want to. If anything, Trump is lucky that CBS did not fact-check the vice presidential debate several days ago, other than one time. That worked very much in his favor. If anything, a lot of media companies and journalists are bending over backward to benefit Trump and his campaign.
Sargent: It’s a really good point. This is the same CBS that actually gave JD Vance largely a pass for all his lies throughout the vice presidential debate. We should also note that the real reason Trump is pissed at CBS is that they did a segment explaining why Trump backed out of his own 60 Minutes interview. Scott Pelley told viewers that the Trump campaign had initially agreed to do an interview. Then Pelley said this.
Scott Pelley (audio voiceover): Then, a week ago, Trump backed out. The campaign offered shifting explanations. First, a complain that we would fact-check the interview. Later, Trump said that he needed an apology for his interview in 2020.
Sargent: I want to be as clear as possible about this, Michael. Trump and MAGA are angry at CBS for telling the truth about why he wouldn’t submit to an interview. This isn’t a dispute. It’s Trump and MAGA raging at the media for performing their institutional role of truth-telling.
Sozen: That’s why his arguments are ridiculous and also dangerous for democracy. This is what authoritarians do. As we know, Trump is trying to stifle anyone who dares to question his lies, which are central to how MAGA operates. And one thing I’ll point out is that one of his favorite news networks, of course, is the far-right Fox News. If I recall correctly, a few years back, Tucker Carlson, who then had his number one–rated show on Fox News, did a long interview with Kanye West, who was known for saying extremely antisemitic and dangerous, disturbing things. After Carlson aired that interview, it came to light that several things were edited out by Carlson and his staff, several things that were incendiary and not politically helpful, perhaps. And you didn’t hear President Biden calling for Fox News to lose its broadcast licenses or to be punished for that, right? That would be a violation of the law and political norms.
Sargent: Yeah. This is a case where only one side attacks the press for telling the truth. We need to say here that no matter what you think of CBS’s handling of the Harris interview, it was fine. But even if you don’t think it was fine, this idea that it should be punished via government action should be covered as a scandal. It should be a scandal that one of the leading presidential candidates keeps saying this. It’s a clear window into what a second Trump term would be like. You have a new report out on how Project 2025 would essentially enable an imperial presidency, and a big part of the report is all about how an unshackled executive could go after the media in exactly this way. You talk about how Project 2025 creates a channel for the president to use the Federal Communications Commission toward that end. Can you talk about how that would work?
Sozan: Absolutely. This is a new report I wrote for the Center for American Progress with my coauthor, Ben Olinsky. We cover several different ways that Project 2025 would really tear down checks and balances, and one of the ones we really wanted to focus on was the intentional weakening of the news media. As you said, one of the ways that Project 2025 envisions allowing a president to manipulate the levers of the media is for him to manipulate the Federal Communications Commission, perhaps in conjunction with the Department of Justice or other governmental entities. This would allow them to assail media companies and their licensed outlets after journalists dare to report negatively about a president. For example, as we write about, an FCC that could be controlled by an authoritarian president could revoke the broadcast licenses of channels affiliated with major networks like CBS, like NBC. These are networks that Americans rely on for their news. In addition, the DOJ and a newly nonindependent FCC or Federal Trade Commission could launch dubious investigations, antitrust investigations, for example, into media companies that criticize the president.
Sargent: Yeah. It’s important to underscore for listeners that bureaucratic harassment is the thing that would be used here. We constantly talk about how Trump would prosecute his enemies and I think he probably would try to do that. I don’t know how far he’d get, because you need the cooperation of judges and grand juries and things like that. But what a president can do with executive power is a form of bullying via harassment that’s really problematic and could really create problems for these media companies. Can you talk a little bit about that? Even if they don’t get that far with something like this, the simple act of investigating, threatening to take licenses, that thing creates problems for media companies that could essentially lead them to self-censor, correct? Can you talk about how that would work?
Sozan: A lot of what Project 2025 and [what] Donald Trump try to do is to wear down their opponents by bullying them, and in that process, have the news media, have their opponents relent. That is definitely the aim of Project 2025 when it comes to the news media. Another aspect that is actually proposed in the plan—it hasn’t gotten as much attention—is that it explicitly states that the president should “re-examine the long tradition of providing workspace for reporters on the White House campus.” As you know, for decades, reporters have been able to work there on the White House grounds as a way of disseminating news quickly and really speaking truths to power, holding presidents and their administrations accountable. Project 2025 says “no legal entitlement exists for the provision of permanent space for media.” Even if a president were not to follow through with that on day one, the chilling effect is there. The reporters who work in the White House every day know that this could be hanging over their head, that their workspace could be taken away, they’d be banished outside of the White House grounds and have it much harder to do their jobs.
Sargent: That’s a really fascinating detail in your report. Trump absolutely would start banishing media that’s critical of him from the White House. We should point out that, in fairness, he didn’t really do this in his first presidential term, but now he’s telegraphing explicitly that he will target the media in all kinds of aggressive new ways. So it’s reasonable to surmise that this would be one of them. That really would make it hard for reporters to do their job, right? This would be an actual problem for them.
Sozan: Yes, it would be a real impediment. It would put a barrier in between them and the White House and the staff and officials that they’re used to having access to. And sure, a lot of Americans might say, Well, I don’t really understand why that would make a big difference. Well, it does make a big difference. It makes it much harder to expose any wrongdoing or even report about things that are going well. These are things that are important to Americans, to communities. This is important to democracy to be able to get these facts. The reporters need to be able to function in that way to do their jobs.
Sargent: I think we’re looking at a future White House press corps that’s made up of OAN, Newsmax, and a bunch of far-right MAGA-pilled bloggers. I don’t even know if Fox News would make the cut, judging by how often Trump rages at Fox when it dares to tell the truth these days, right? We’ve actually seen some of this in real life. Fox News, when they called Arizona correctly for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, they lost viewers. Even Fox News would have to be worried that they could lose access and alienate audiences if they told the truth about a President Trump.
Sozan: Yes. You could almost imagine, Greg, that it could ping pong on a daily basis. Fox News gets its credentials yanked one day, suddenly it’s back in the good graces of the president the next day. Again, [it’s] really destabilizing to an independent, vibrant news media. But this is by design. I feel like, and you’ve talked about this, a lot of the guard rails are going to be off in a Trump second term. He’s not going to be surrounded by staff, by attorneys, by others who have told him in the past that it would be illegal or norm-breaking or just not politically sensible to do certain things. I think that Trump is going to be much more untethered if he were to get a second term.
Sargent: To your point, you’ve got people like Stephen Miller, still a close advisor to President Trump, Kash Patel, who theoretically would probably have a very high level role in law enforcement in a Trump administration. They’re out there explicitly saying, We need people who will ignore the guard rails. Come to us if you’re willing to ignore the guard rails. People who will actually stick to rules and norms need not apply for a second Trump term. So they’re explicitly going out there and they’re basically saying, That’s what we need this time around, not people who will try to rein us in when we break the law.
Sozan: That’s why this point about the media, the mistreatment of the media that could ensue, is tied to the other points in the report and that people are starting to pay more attention to. Again, what Project 2025 is about and what Trump’s been espousing is tearing down the traditional checks and balances and creating an easier path for authoritarianism. One of the ways that Project 2025 and Trump want to do this is what’s known as Schedule F. Generally, what they want to do is they want to get rid of a lot of the civil service and others who neutrally apply the law, who give neutral advice, and they want to install loyalists instead. Political lackeys who will say ‘yes’ to what Trump and and his top advisors want to do. That’s one of the theories of the case here. They want to create many more political positions throughout the government. This allows them to weaponize government against enemies. And honestly, they can do this against everyday Americans as well.
Sargent: I really think you’re putting your finger on something crucial there. The whole plan, when it comes to Schedule F, dovetails with the broader goal of creating a government of loyalists and weaponizing the government against enemies. If you can place civil servants on thinner ice, if they fear getting fired more easily, that creates this snowballing dynamic where they’re even less likely to blow the whistle when they see the political appointees—the top-tier loyalists that are really installed to carry out the authoritarian presidency—really start breaking rules and laws.
Sozan: That’s right. And that links to another interrelated point in the report, which is the plan under Project 2025 to weaken the independence of independent agencies. We were talking a few minutes ago about the Federal Communications Commission. Congress set that up explicitly as an independent agency. As your listeners probably know, there are rules governing how those agencies must remain independent. They’re supposed to have commissioners who can only be removed for cause, not for political purposes. Project 2025 proposes reducing, stripping those independent agencies of that independence. They want to even go after a recent Supreme Court case that had upheld the independence of those agencies. They are being unabashed about it in Project 2025. That’s another way that they really want to be able to take over the complete machinery of government, and then, through that, be able to implement their backward-looking oppressive agenda.
Sargent: They’re explicitly saying agency independence is bad, that it should only answer to the president’s whims, political or otherwise. The other point you make in your report is that this bullying of the media and this constraining of it via governmental and bureaucratic harassment is a standard tactic of authoritarians like Viktor Orbán. The American right these days and Trump himself are very open in describing Orbán as a model for a second Trump presidency. Can you talk about what these authoritarians abroad do specifically to the media and how it could be mapped here? Also, there are a lot of protections here that would make that hard, no?
Sozan: Yes, there are a lot of examples of what we call backsliding democracies. These are nations around the world that, in recent years, were democracies, and have now become autocracies for the most part. One of the themes that we try to get across in our report is it could happen here. Too many Americans think, No, it can never happen here. We have checks and balances, etc. But we can look at other countries that also had checks and balances that were torn down. You’ve mentioned, for example, Hungary, where the president and his allies have been so effective at weakening and controlling the media, including by packing their media regulator with their political cronies. We’ve seen that as well in India where the authoritarian regime now targets and prosecutes journalists with whom it disagrees. I’ll even say we could look to Florida where the far-right Governor Ron DeSantis drove legislative efforts to make it easier to sue reporters for defamation when they criticized him. So there are examples of this going on right now.
Sargent: Yeah. Speaking of foreign authoritarian countries, Florida is a good example (laughs).
Sozan: Yeah, Ron DeSantis has definitely taken a lot from his hero Viktor Orbán. Orbán has become a hero of the far right and you’re exactly right. We’re starting to see states like Florida resemble many authoritarian regimes.
Sargent: Absolutely. By the way, there’s a real problem here. Trump types all these things out in crazy all-caps tweets. He sounds like a wildly crazed lunatic at these rallies when he says this stuff. The result is that, I think, people get lulled by it into just thinking it’s more unhinged ranting, more craziness. But there are very clear signals about a second-term agenda here. The more he types it out in full caps or whatever, the less we focus on that.
Sozan: Too many people, even people that I sometimes think are very sophisticated in politics, easily dismiss what Trump says as just being the lunatic ranting, or he really doesn’t mean that, or he’s just a showman. All of this is actually very intentional. These are things he’s clearly hearing behind-the-scenes from his advisors and people he hangs out with. We know that he’s very close with many of the key authors of Project 2025, and we know that the president of Heritage Foundation, which has spearheaded and written Project 2025, specifically talked about the fact that ... In his words, the President of Heritage Foundation’s words, there’s a second American Revolution coming and that political violence may be necessary to effectuate their authoritarian blueprint. This is all pretty well choreographed. It’s part and parcel of an authoritarian game plan. We all act at our own peril if we just dismiss Donald Trump’s rantings as somehow just unhinged from anything that he might actually do in a second term.
Sargent: Really well said, if alarmingly said. Michael Sozan, thanks so much for coming on with us today man.
Sozan: I appreciate you having me on. Thank you, Greg.
Sargent: Folks, please make sure to check out some great new stuff we have up at tnr.com: Timothy Noah arguing that it looks like Harris may finally be breaking through to the most critical voters in this election. And Thom Hartmann looking at Jill Stein, the grifter who may hand Trump the White House again. And tune in to the latest episode of Deep State Radio, where John Della Volpe joins Riley Fessler and Minnah Stein to explain why Gen Z is a make-or-break voting block for the Harris campaign. We’ll see you all next week.
You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.