The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 7 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.
Donald Trump will be our next president. There will be plenty of time in coming weeks to analyze what to learn from this election, but for now we’re going to start by looking at what Trump’s presidency will look like at the outset. Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt went on Fox News and flatly declared that Trump has a mandate to govern as he campaigned. That’s pretty alarming since Trump campaigned relentlessly on a platform of explicit threats of authoritarian retribution and violence. Today, we’re discussing all this with David Kurtz, executive editor of Talking Points Memo and author of a good new piece for his Morning Memo, arguing that voters chose Trump in full awareness of the cruelties he’s planning to inflict on untold numbers of people. Great to have you back on, David, I just wish it were a happier occasion.
David Kurtz: Good to be with you, Greg, I do too.
Sargent: Let’s start with Karoline Leavitt’s appearance on Fox News on Wednesday morning just after Trump won. Listen to this.
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): And the American people delivered a resounding victory for President Trump and it gives him a mandate to govern as he campaigned, to deliver on the promises that he made, which include, on day one, launching the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrants that Kamala Harris has allowed into this country. It includes “Drill, baby, drill!” and expediting permits for nuclear, for fossil fuels, for an above all energy approach that’s going to bring down the cost of living in this country. It includes, on day one, bringing Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table to end this war.
Sargent: David, I don’t think that stuff about Trump having a mandate and governing as he campaigned is just boilerplate. She’s saying that Trump clearly told us what he’s going to do and now he’s going to do it. What’s your reaction to that?
Kurtz: I think it’s right. At this point, there was no coyness. There was no doubletalk, there was nothing about this campaign or really anything that Trump has done since 2020 that is anything less than what you see is what you get. So I understand from their point of view why they see this as a green light to do whatever they want to do, both what they’ve said explicitly they’ll do and whatever else they dream up along the way. But it also, Greg, operates at a second level. There’s an intimidation factor that goes with keeping everyone on their heels about what dastardly thing they may do next or what big reaction they may provoke with their next threat or next policy move or next feint in this direction or that. So it operates at a couple of different levels to wrap themselves in the mandate that they feel like this election gave them, as well as basically say, We’re untouchable, and look out for what might come next.
Sargent: Yeah, and they’re also telling their supporters that they should be excited: around the corner as some real fireworks are coming. Note that in saying Trump will do what he promised to do, the very first thing that Karoline Leavitt cited was his vow of mass deportations, which is really the centerpiece of an authoritarian second term. Mass expulsions carried out with giant detention camps and potentially with the military. And she said it in this weirdly upbeat tone, “On day one,’” as if to say it’s time to get worked up about the cruelties and horrors we’re set to unleash. The key point, and you got at this in your piece, is that the coming cruelties are advertised. Can you talk about that component of it?
Kurtz: There was an element of all of this of that the pain inflicted on out-groups, on marginalized groups is a feature of MAGA Republicanism. It is what has been, as I described in the piece, advertised. It is what has been a fuel or an accelerant to the rhetoric and to the enthusiasm of his base. It is in many ways a feature and not a bug from that point of view. In every tumultuous period, whether there’s civil unrest or civil readjustment, the folks who are on the margins, the folks who are already bearing burdens of poverty or social [ostracism]—they bear the greater burden. That’s going to happen here just like it would in any other upheaval.
But on top of that, he has targeted specific groups, whether it’s transgender people, whether it’s immigrants, legal and illegal, by the way, both have been targeted during this campaign, people that have never been targeted before, right? The deep state government workers who were just doing their jobs or who were trying to prosecute him or trying to investigate corruption in his administration or his handling of classified documents. He’s just got a laundry list of people that he has explicitly said he’s going to go after. And there’s just this whole laundry list of folks that I think could go into this administration feeling under the gun, under siege, and uncertain as to whether the rule of law will be there to protect them.
Sargent: Right. There’s actually a key thing that happened during the campaign that really underscored what you’re getting at here, which is when Trump and JD Vance and MAGA started attacking Haitian immigrants for “eating pets” and so forth in Springfield, Ohio, they were essentially saying also those immigrants are not actually legal. Now, of course they were actually legal. Many of them are here on temporary protected status. So they were legally in the country and they were working, they had joined communities, they were contributing to them. They were actually contributing to American life, and part of American life legally. But what Trump was saying there is, I can revoke your legality. And this goes to your point about people feeling on really thin ice in every way and feeling if the rule of law isn’t going to be there to protect them; he can just revoke it.
Kurtz: Whipping up this furor and whipping up this highly emotional, highly agitated response to immigrants and all the different groups that we’ve talked about is going to be an ongoing feature of this administration in the same way that it was the first administration. In the sense, the campaign never ends, because you always need an enemy. You always need an other. You always need someone to target. Whether it’s continuing to go after Biden, continuing to go after Harris, continuing to go after these groups, it’s all part of an ongoing thing. That’s what I meant when I said earlier that, in a way, it’s not a means to an end, it’s an end unto itself to have this whipped up furor going all the time.
Sargent: That’s how they keep their people in line and at the ready, stand back and standby. I want to read a line from your piece, David, it went like this: “The campaign was fought directly over the issues of democracy, rule of law, basic decency and respect and protection for the marginalized.” And you also write that those of us who oppose Trump argued against “hurting others as blood sport.” And our argument lost, David. Is it fair to say that it was very much on the ballot whether it’s okay to inflict wanton, sadistic, retributive state violence on others or not?
Kurtz: Look, I can see there being some value in pretending that that’s not true because you’re not wanting to give a Trump through presidency a mandate to do all of the things that we’re talking about. I don’t want to ratify that. But there is a danger in not recognizing that the campaign was fought on these terms. It was central to the campaign. It wasn’t a side light to Harris’s closing argument, the argument around fascism, John Kelly’s interviews and remarks late in the campaign really fueled that entire narrative. So this wasn’t something that just we kind of backdoor-ed our way into. This was really central, especially to the end of the campaign. It’s just important to recognize that that won anyway, and so that the mountain that we have to climb now to return to something that approximates what we had pre-Trump is probably higher than we thought it was. It’s going to take longer to get there. And I argue in the piece that at a certain level, these are cultural changes that need to happen before our politics is going to change. I don’t know if you can impose these changes through politics as much as you need to change an underlying cultural that embraces these values and principles that frankly have just not, outside of very specific historical corridors, been a part of our public life in quite some time.
Sargent: Just to clarify for listeners, in your piece you discussed the idea that in order to get back to a pre-MAGA or I guess post-MAGA world, it requires culturally people just accepting and acting on the premise that it’s not okay to inflict sadistic violence on others, and it’s not okay for public figures to relish talk of violence toward others all the time the way he does, right?
Kurtz: That’s exactly it. And that there are structural and legal elements that you can put in place to offer protections against these kinds of things. But those things only last so long, and we’ve seen this over the last few years, those things only last as long as there is a continuing cultural organic support for them. They can’t substitute for that. They can’t replace that. And they can’t exist long without a cultural consensus around those things as well. And the most sobering thing, not just about the results last night, but about the last eight years, has been the dawning realization that we may just not have a cultural consensus around these things in a way that we thought we did, which goes a lot deeper than Trump and goes a lot deeper than the Republican Party. There’s a problem here that’s more core to who we are and what we’re about.
Sargent: At the Republican National Convention, when they were holding up signs saying mass deportation now, the vicious and sadistic attacks on Haitian immigrants—all that stuff really suggests that MAGA is really corroding American life in a very profound way. I want to get to some other things that the Trump spokesperson promised in that interview. One was “Drill, baby, drill!” The other was getting Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table to work out a peace deal. Let’s translate that. Trump is going to throw our efforts to fight global warming into sharp reverse and basically tell the Ukraine the jig is up, you’re going to have to accept peace on Vladimir Putin’s terms, which is going to unleash a whole other set of horrors on the Ukrainian people. What do you make of all that? This is basically Trump saying or Trump spokesperson saying, we’re going to make the world safe for petrol oligarchs and kleptocrats and dictators, right?
Kurtz: And that was part of what sounded very campaigny, right? Those are code words that have very clear signifiers to their base. They have clear signifiers, and I think your interpretation of it is exactly right. But as I said before, there’s also an element of storing everybody off-balance. What is he going to do next? It all goes to power being personal. There’s no rules. It’s arbitrary. It’s capricious. It’s random. It’s impulsive. And the more uncertainty that is in the air, the more issues, areas—whether it’s foreign policy, domestic policy, energy policy, what have you—everyone is then beholden to him. What is he going to do? I hope I don’t get targeted by this. I hope my industry isn’t harmed. I hope this policy change doesn’t affect me. There’s a way in which by putting everything up in the air, you only enhance everyone’s obligation to you in hopes that you are treated with benevolence. Even though he has demonstrated it again and again that that’s benevolence is not the not the currency he operates with.
Sargent: A hundred percent. A big question about all this is to what degree did voters understand the choice they faced in the terms that you framed here. You can squint and see that a certain type of swing voter, low-propensity voter just heard all the threats from Trump and coded them as he’s an outsider and disruptor of the status quo which they dislike due to post-Covid trauma and inflation and so forth. And yet on the other side, surely many in the MAGA masses did understand perfectly that Trump is promising to unleash wanton mass cruelties on the various enemies of MAGA. How bad is it that a majority voted for the promise of cruelty? Isn’t there a group in the middle that just doesn’t maybe understand it in those terms, or am I being too optimistic?
Kurtz: No, I think both can be true: that there are people that voted for Trump for reasons that might not go to the core pro-democracy or anti-democracy issues that we’ve been talking about, and at the same time, there is a core group of Trump rabid supporters who voted for him for exactly that same reason. The point I was trying to make is that there is a risk in dismissing the results of an election that was fought on exactly these grounds as being, Well, it’s not really about that, or they didn’t really mean it. And it’s almost like a denialism of the reality of it. And in a way, whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter in the sense that Trump is going to act on it. I had written about this for weeks, that if he prevails after this kind of campaign, he is going to feel like he’s got a mandate to be as extreme, as unpredictable, as punitive as he wants to be. And I think that he is going to take this and run with it. There’s no reason you would expect him not to. It’s really sobering.
Sargent: Where does that leave us? We’re going to be heading into a new Trump term in a few months. Civil society, the American people who don’t support this mass cruelty inflicted on enemies, people who support decency in American life and don’t think public figures should engage in overt endorsements of political violence and so forth, what can we all do, do you think? How can we fight this?
Kurtz: I’m not an expert on the erosion of democracy and nascent authoritarianism, but what I think experts have said and have observed in other countries, that there’s a spectrum on which this occurs and we’re in the early stages of it still. I don’t think it necessarily means that we’re going to wake up on January 21 and be in authoritarian country. But in the same way that you might prepare for a flood or a natural disaster, we know that there are certain elements of civil society that are more vulnerable than others. Some that will be more easily washed away first. And so there’s ways in which we’re to need to sandbag what those institutions which are most in need of protecting, make sure that we have a good strong sense of where the threat is most clear and work over time. I’m talking years or decades to continue to revitalize and shore up the institutions that we depend on. And what am I talking about? What do I mean when I talk about civil society institutions? It’s the press, it’s the courts, it’s the whole array of nongovernmental organizations and institutions that create that cohesion at the center of our public life.
And Trump has no interest in that. He sees those as a threat to power. And that’s a long historical pattern that any outside power source is seen as a threat. That’s where we’ll need to be looking, and that’s where the threat long-term is greatest, that those just continue to erode over the next four years and they become harder and harder, as we’ve seen in other countries, to revitalize and replenish once they’ve been eroded.
Sargent: David Kurtz, you’ve certainly made it very clear that we’re heading for some really dark days ahead. Thanks for coming on, man.
Kurtz: I appreciate it, Greg. Talk to you soon.
Sargent: 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.