The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 12 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.
During the campaign, Donald Trump openly advertised that as president, he’ll use the state to retaliate against his enemies in every way he possibly can. He won anyway. Now The New York Times reports that some of his advisors are urging him to absolutely make good on that threat. And right on cue, Trump erupted on social media calling for investigations into people who are supposedly spreading false rumors about his intention to sell shares of his Truth Social. What exactly is this going to look like once he has the power to install administration officials who actually can order such investigations? Today, we’re discussing this with Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker who has a great new piece arguing that Trump will be less constrained and more uninhibited than ever before. Great to have you back on, Susan.
Susan Glasser: Well, thanks so much for having me, Greg.
Sargent: Trump just raged that people who displeased him with their public comments about Truth Social should be “immediately investigated by the appropriate authorities.” He’ll be in charge of those authorities very, very soon. And now the Times reports that some of his own aides are already encouraging him to take revenge against those who investigated and prosecuted him, which, again, was done in keeping with the rule of law. What’s your reaction to all this?
Glasser: Well, first of all, deep breath ... and let’s just say, here we are again, asking the same questions: Are we going to take Donald Trump literally and seriously this time? What more needs to happen for his critics to understand that while he may not do 100 percent of everything he says, he means much of it? And if there’s one thing we know about Trump’s next term, it’s that he campaigned on a platform of revenge and retribution that is consistent, by the way, with many of the themes that he emphasized in his first term, even if he wasn’t always able to fully follow through on them. So it seems to me that a strong throughline for Donald Trump has always been the desire to use the tools and institutions of the federal government as essentially personal weapons and to make sure that they are used as instruments to punish his enemies, to punish people he views as disloyal, and to carry out his personal whims.
For example, Greg, people have not paid enough attention to the fact that even one of Trump’s transition co-chairs, Howard Lutnick, the Wall Street billionaire who is in charge of vetting personnel for the new administration, has explicitly said repeatedly that appointees in the new Trump administration will be vetted not just for their loyalty to Donald Trump’s policies but to their loyalty to the man himself. That’s always been what set apart Trump, I think, from other presidents: a view that essentially he is the totality of the government, that people should respond to him personally and are there at his pleasure rather than serving, as their oath says, the Constitution and the people of the United States. And if you don’t want to take that seriously, you’re going to misread the intentions of this new administration.
Sargent: You raised a really critical point there, which is that Trump openly and explicitly campaigned on a vow to violate his oath of office. That’s something he actually sold to his followers as a plus. To your other point, Trump tried to use the Justice Department to investigate his enemies during his first term, and mostly failed at that. But in your piece, you report, alarmingly, that Trump has actually learned how to get his way from the bureaucracy now and that he’ll be surrounded this time with loyalists—like that guy—who don’t have the qualms about abusing power that some of those around Trump the first time did. Can you talk about this? What is it likely to look like in the real world, in the context of the Justice Department and other agencies, targeting his enemies in various ways? What can we expect?
Glasser: That was my big takeaway, Greg, from doing the book—an after-action report, if you will—on the Trump first term. I wrote the book The Divider with my husband Peter Baker of The New York Times and we debrief something like 300 former Trump officials and others who observed at close range. These are essentially Republican appointees themselves of Donald Trump or nonpartisan national security officials and what they said in very clear terms is: number one, the second term will not look like a first term because of the lack of guardrails and in particular the change in focus on who will serve in a Trump administration. For someone like Donald Trump—and for all administrations, but particularly for Trump—personnel is policy in effect.
And you’re alluding to this very chilling interview that I had with a former very senior national security official who spent a lot of time in the Oval Office with Trump himself, who told me not long after Trump’s term ended, that this person viewed Trump as the velociraptors in the first Jurassic Park movie. You remember the children run to hide from the velociraptors in the kitchen and they think they’re safe because they’re behind the locked door, and then click, they hear the door handle turn because the velociraptor has learned how to open the door. They’ve learned how to adapt while hunting their prey. The point was Trump understands far better what’s needed to have an administration and a White House that does his bidding rather than having people around him who saw themselves as guardrails against his own inclinations.
In particular, even people like his Attorney General Barr, who went out and endorsed Donald Trump and went along with many of his excesses—even he was a break on Trump, not only coming out publicly in December 2020 and saying there is no rigged election, there’s no evidence of this, but even before that. People didn’t understand, but our reporting suggested he had actually tried to put the brakes on Trump’s efforts to prosecute Joe Biden. People forgot this, Donald Trump publicly called for the Justice Department to indict Joe Biden in a tweet before the 2020 election. If there hadn’t been somebody like Barr there at the Justice Department, who knows? Maybe that would have gone forward. And there are many other examples from his term in office.
Sargent: The other really alarming point you make, and it’s related to all this, is that this time Republicans in Congress will be even less inclined to act as any check on Trump in addition to the lack of guardrails internally, if and when the serious abuses of power do start. Put it this way, is there anything at this point that we can imagine that Trump might plausibly do that they would actually object to?
Glasser: Look, Republicans are divided on some of these issues. There’s no question about that. For example, aid to Ukraine. I’m sure there are still Republican supporters of Ukraine on Capitol Hill in both the House and the Senate, but you have seen really a transformation in the elected national Republican Party since Trump’s first term. And it’s much more Trumpified. It doesn’t have the institutional memory of opposition to Trump. It doesn’t have the leadership to oppose Trump.
Remember that when Trump was first sworn into office in 2017, there was not only Mitch McConnell there who was an enabler of Trump’s in some respects, but also privately a constrainer of Trump’s, especially on foreign policy issues. But it wasn’t just McConnell. John McCain was still there. After he passed away, Mitt Romney came there. There were well-known leaders who opposed Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and there was essentially majority of the Republican conference, at least in the Senate, that was much more what you would call old-style Republican establishment types, at least on some issues such as free trade or foreign policy.
That’s just not the case anymore. Many of those who remain like Marco Rubio have remade themselves into hardcore MAGA; Rubio bucking for an appointment from Donald Trump as secretary of state. He’s even endorsed now Donald Trump’s favorite candidate—or I should say the favorite candidate of Trumpworld—we’ll see if Trump himself endorses Rick Scott in the Senate majority leaders race. All of which is to say that it’s not the same Republican Party who [is] likely to pressure Trump, even if there still are fault lines within the Republicans on the Hill and also in the new administration. Republicans will fight with each other heatedly about many of these issues because Donald Trump always encourages division and infighting. That’s been a constant in any role he’s been in his life. So I certainly anticipate infighting over some of this stuff, but on core Republican ideas, those don’t stand a chance versus Donald Trump’s most important priorities.
Sargent: Let’s say we do start to see investigations or even prosecutions of political opponents without any real basis in law—IRS investigations, that sort of thing, various types of retaliation through the bureaucracy against critics who anger him. Will Republicans on the Hill say anything at this point?
Glasser: [laughs] Well, I wouldn’t expect a deafening noise of opposition. That’s for sure number one. Number two, there’s another factor in addition to the Trumpified Republican Party. There’s another very important factor right now that wasn’t the case in 2017 when Trump was first sworn into office, and that is the Supreme Court, which has been not only remade by Trump’s three appointees, giving it a very, very solid 6–3 Trump majority, but there’s also this pretty sweeping presidential immunity decision that the Supreme Court issued last term and that will now be tested in effect by Donald Trump.
When the Supreme Court says that a president has nearly unlimited immunity, it strikes me that the very first president who’s going to test that proposition is going to be Trump himself, the man who generated this opinion by challenging the Biden Justice Department’s indictment of him.
Sargent: Susan, people didn’t really notice this, I tried to make a big deal out of it, but I didn’t get a lot of takers: Recently, when he told Hugh Hewitt that he’s going to “fire Jack Smith in two seconds,” he also said, “We just got immunity at the Supreme Court.” So he was just basically saying straight out that he understood that as giving him free rein.
Glasser: Yeah. Look, it’s really amazing to me that the Supreme Court made such a sweeping decision in a case where legal experts said, Look, they could have ruled in a much more narrow way, but because they issued this very broad language there, it’s going to fuse with a president, Donald Trump, who already takes a maximalist interpretation of his powers.
Remember that in his first term in office, Donald Trump would go around, he would go to events ... He spoke at an event, for example, in the summer of 2019 in which he literally said, The Constitution gives me the power to do anything I want. So he already believed that even before this immunity decision and it’s quite possible that Trump will pick various fights, because that’s what he does in any role that he’s ever been in, and then say, Here, I’ve gone very, very far out on a limb because who’s going to stop me? Who’s going to stop me? And the way the slow pace of litigation works in this country, he may establish facts on the ground by taking sweeping executive actions that his opponents think they’re going to stop or claw back eventually in the legal system and then the legal system just isn’t there to do that or is not within the constraints of one four-year term.
That’s the thing that I’ve been trying to call attention to even before the election. That’s what I was trying to say to Trump’s opponents and Trump’s critics is that it’s not just that he was at a real risk of winning, which I thought for a long time, but also that he is very likely to move very, very rapidly to create new facts on the ground while his opponents are just busy fighting with each other over their ideological priors.
My husband and I were correspondents [in Russia] in the first few years of Putin’s term, and Putin moved with extraordinary speed and focus to dismantle the fledgling institutions of Russian democracy. That has been the template and the playbook for other would-be authoritarians who are working within a democratic system. The speed and rapidity with which Trump can make very big changes in our system has been an under-appreciated aspect that I think is now going to kick in.
Sargent: And to your earlier point as well, melding it with this more recent point, basically he’s going to be surrounded by people who understand that that’s the goal in a more concerted way. He’s going to be surrounded by people now who actually see Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary as models for governing here.
Glasser: Absolutely. You cannot understate this as a factor in what we’re going to see in the new administration, number one. Number two, he’s already been actively engaged with Viktor Orbán, speaking with him repeatedly, both during the campaign and even since his election victory. According to The Washington Post, he’s already spoken with Vladimir Putin. Both sides deny that that call took place. Fascinating to me given that, also given the role of Elon Musk. You have Trump now surrounded, in particular on this issue of Russia and Ukraine, by a cadre of close advisors that includes not only Elon Musk but also JD Vance, his new vice president–elect, his own son, Donald Trump Jr., who have taken a maximalist version. Essentially, they’ve publicly endorsed many Russian talking points with regards to the war in Ukraine.
Donald Trump Jr., over the weekend, just sent out on social media a post in which he openly mocked Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelenskiy with the shower of money falling down on him and laughing at him and saying, basically, Your allowance from America is going to be cut off soon, guy. That tells you where it’s leaning. It was not a mistake that one of the very first personnel announcements we’ve seen directly from Trump himself, as opposed to his advisors, was an announcement over the weekend that neither Nikki Haley nor Mike Pompeo will be welcomed back into a second Trump administration. What do those two have in common? They both have been strong public proponents of Ukraine.
Sargent: It’s really, really disturbing stuff the way you put it all together. I want to return to Trump’s tweet about Truth Social for a second because it signals what’s coming in another way. Note that he just threw it out there that rumors about him selling Truth Social shares displeased him. I think this might be a template. Maybe you can picture him on the phone with his attorney general. He rages at someone who angered him on TV, says casually, I heard that guy was up to some shady stuff. Then word filters down through the bureaucracy, ambitious U.S. attorney somewhere seeking MAGA stardom starts poking around, launches an investigation, which is easier than a full blown prosecution. He doesn’t need to prosecute. He can just investigate. He goes through the target’s records, calls his associates. That kind of thing is going to put people through hell and having chilling effect on dissent. This is absolutely plausible, right? Can you talk about scenarios like this?
Glasser: Absolutely. I’m glad you pointed that out because one of the more nihilistic, but probably effective, talking points for Trump supporters in the immediate run-up to the campaign was saying, How dare you call us authoritarians, or, in the words of John Kelly, his former chief of staff, a fascist. Donald Trump was already president for four years, and he wasn’t Hitler; therefore, everything’s OK. This is a very, very nihilist argument, and it was effective as a political matter for some people. But I would point out that even what we come to think of as the Hitler regime in Germany took a number of years to unfold. We are not a one-week into the Trump era in our politics. We are eight years into his takeover of the Republican Party, his creation of a group of MAGA acolytes who signed up and opted into Trump’s agenda for himself and for the government.
That’s a very different situation than having a government where you have people who openly took the jobs like John Kelly or Jim Mattis or Rex Tillerson in order to constrain Trump or to defend the system from within. In an authoritarian system as it’s evolving, even in Russia (I mentioned my experience in Putin’s Russia), what you can do on day one, what you can do when you’re into it, is very different than what you can do after 10 years of acclimating the society to something. Even in Russia, it’s not like they shut down the independent media on day one.
What did they do? They used the pressure tech tools available to them, the leverage available to them. Owners—they pressured owners, they changed owners. They had an oligarchy system in which they basically took over these places in a variety of different ways, forcing people to sell things, forcing them to moderate their criticism in order not to lose business deals. Well, does that remind you in any way of the pressure on Jeff Bezos, for example, in the run-up to the election where he refused to endorse Donald Trump despite overruling his own editorial board, where he publicly congratulated Donald Trump?
That’s just an example. You can also go after individual critics of your government, not just by arresting them. And they’ve defined deviancy down here, that they’ll say, See, you’re overblown or you’re just hysterical if they don’t haul off Liz Cheney and Mark Milley to the gulag on day one. But that’s not how it’s going to work. They can open IRS investigations of their critics. They can pressure their employers. There’s a whole host of ways in which systems operate. That’s what we’ll see in the next few months.
Sargent: It’s worth reminding everybody that he is going to think to himself, I campaigned openly on all this stuff so I can get away with it with the public, if he even cares what the public thinks, which I don’t think he does. Susan Glasser, thank you so much for coming on. It’s going to get dark.
Glasser: (laughs) Well, Greg, people need to be clear-eyed about what’s coming. There’s no use anymore to lying to yourself and believing it. It’s important to try to be as clear-eyed about what is coming down the pike with the new administration as possible.
Sargent: Certainly is. Thanks so much, Susan.
Glasser: Thank you, Greg. I appreciate it.
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.