The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 20 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.
According to new reports, Republican senators are privately telling Donald Trump that they believe Matt Gaetz has little chance of being confirmed. And as Politico puts it, they’re hoping Trump doesn’t make them “walk the plank.” This seems to mean they don’t want to have to make the decision one way or the other, because it might mean bucking tremendous pressure from Trump to do what he wants. All this suggests something sobering.
It’s becoming very clear that one of the only bulwarks we’re going to have against an authoritarian Trump second term is going to be the GOP Senate. I’ve got to say, this doesn’t inspire much confidence. Today, we’re chatting with writer Jill Lawrence, who has a new piece for The Bulwark arguing that Trump is in effect putting together a “team of outlaws” to run the new administration, and if the GOP Senate doesn’t stop this, it’s really unclear what happens then. Good to have you back on, Jill.
Jill Lawrence: Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here.
Sargent: The Politico piece is pretty alarming, although I don’t think GOP senators intended it to be. Many of them are telling Trump and his people that they don’t want to vote for Matt Gaetz. But instead of this leading Trumpworld to conclude that maybe Gaetz is a bad idea, Trump seems to want the fight. When Republican senators say they don’t want to “walk the plank,” what they really mean is they don’t want to be in a position to do what Trump doesn’t want them to do. What do you make of this, Jill?
Lawrence: One thing that is depressing to me is that we’re only talking about Matt Gaetz. If you look at some of the other nominees, they are almost more cosmically dangerous, literally life-and-death dangerous. Matt Gaetz is very dangerous to the rule of law. He’s incredibly flawed.
It’s very difficult to take on Trump. It’s very dangerous, even physically, legally. You can get yourself in a lot of trouble if you cross Trump and MAGA and his allies. Trump has all kinds of mythology grown up around him: the two assassination attempts; sent by God. There’s just a lot going on that can reach people who might have guns and who might be disturbed, who might make threats.
Mitt Romney actually said this in a piece; he told a journalist he’s spending huge amounts of money to keep his family safe after taking on Trump, voting to convict him in an impeachment trial. This is what these people are up against. Most of them don’t have the money that Mitt Romney has. They get terrified when people call their wives and threaten their wives’ lives. It’s just beyond the pale.
Sargent: We’re going to see a lot of that. In your piece, you write that a willingness to bend or break laws is what Trump actively wants in his selections for his administration. They’re not even disguising it. Trump believes that Gaetz is just the person to “fix the Justice Department.” Nobody even points out that Trump has no affirmative vision for fixing DOJ beyond canceling prosecutions of himself and turning DOJ loose on his enemies. How is it possible that anyone, anywhere would credulously accept that Trump has some sense of how he wants to fix DOJ?
Lawrence: When he says he wants to fix it, he believes that it has been an instrument of persecution and prosecution against him and conservatives and Republicans in general. What he means by fixing is sticking in on Democrats and people within the Republican Party who are taking him on. The most traditional critique you can make of any of these nominees, or potential nominees, is that they have no management experience. We’re talking about huge, huge management responsibilities of the entire military, 18 intelligence agencies, health agencies, the FDA, prosecutors all over America, an army of lawyers.
I’m not sure who is scarier [of] all four of these figures that I talked about in my story. Tulsi Gabbard to run intelligence agencies, Matt Gaetz as attorney general, Pete Hegseth running the military, and RFK Jr. running all of our public health and health research—I would never in my wildest dreams have thought even Trump would go to these places. They’re very, very dangerous for America.
Sargent: Yeah. You’ve got Elon Musk now weighing in on the side of Gaetz. He tweeted that Gaetz is “the Judge Dredd America needs” to put powerful bad actors in prison. He will be our “Hammer of Justice,” something like that. There’s a dimension of this we haven’t even discussed yet, which is, if and when the efforts to prosecute Trump’s enemies without cause begin, will Musk’s Twitter be weaponized toward that end? I think it will be, and I don’t think we know what that even looks like. Have we even seen the full extent of Musk’s degeneracy and corruption yet?
Lawrence: I don’t think so. He knows nothing about government, except maybe the agencies that either enrich him or regulate him. I’m sure that we are going to see his agenda playing through all of our government agencies, [though] he has no position here. In fact, he was an illegal immigrant when he was first here. The whole thing is just overlaid with ironies and threats.
Sargent: What you’re referring to there is the fact that Musk is going to be overseeing this body that’s going to advise Trump and Republicans in Congress on how to cut government—supposedly only advisory. On what you said earlier about Republican senators having to worry about crossing the MAGA masses because they’re so radicalized—well, you’re gonna have Musk’s Twitter, which has become a MAGA disinformation machine, helping to radicalize people against any Republicans who oppose Trump’s agenda. I think that could get extremely ugly.
Lawrence: It could, and, to some extent, it already is. I guess the question is: Who will have the guts, nerve, the courage to fight back? Democrats have been wiped out to some extent. That “government efficiency commission,” it’s not an agency, even though it has a silver medallion on Twitter, which is what government agencies get.
To me, it’s more like these deficit commissions and things like that, which go nowhere. Once they put their cuts to Congress, who’s going to ... Why cut one third of Social Security? No, you can’t do that. These people in Congress have constituents. Trump made promises. Of course, he makes all kinds of promises on the campaign trail, but he said, This benefit won’t be cut, that benefit won’t be cut. There won’t be a national abortion ban. Who knows if he’ll keep any of his promises, but I sincerely doubt that the Department of Government Efficiency, will get anywhere.
What worries me more about Musk is his freelance associating with foreign leaders, discussing American foreign policy, and just showing up as a representative of the U.S. government. He’s not elected, he’s not appointed, his candidate hasn’t even been inaugurated, he’s not even in office. This is just usurping the official functions of government by someone who is a very questionable character. He’s rich. I know. That’s about it.
Sargent: Yeah. There’s no chance that Donald Trump tries to rein in stuff like that, if and when Musk does it. I want to play some audio of Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. Here’s what he said on the House floor about Trump’s appointments.
Jim McGovern (audio voiceover): These are like beyond insane. Someone who is credibly accused of having sex with an underage girl. Someone who sucks up to foreign dictators and has attracted major concern that they can’t be trusted to protect America’s secrets from our adversaries. Someone who paid hush money to cover up a sexual assault accusation to lead our military. He’s picked because Donald Trump likes him on Fox News? Someone who says that tap water turns kids gay? I mean, this is the dream team?
Sargent: Jill, Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg had a good point about this. He said, Every single Dem has to talk like this every day. And it’s true, Democrats just do need to do much more to communicate the sheer derangement, venality, and malicious intent toward the country and its institutions that we’re seeing from Trump and his appointments. What do you think? What should the counter messaging look like here?
Lawrence: It’s really difficult to keep thinking of new ways to talk about how crazy and damaging all of this is. Maybe the best thing that can happen is continuing to hammer at the lack of qualifications and the dangers of all four of these people that we’re talking about.
Every time something actually happens—if the Department of Government Efficiency proposes something next year—just absolutely be all over it. In real life, there are going to be outrages every day. Just hammer them. And now, because they’re not in office, we’ve got the proposed appointments to the cabinet and to the White House staff. That’s what we’re working with. People ought to hit on it every day.
It doesn’t matter if it’s repetitious. If you can’t think of a new way to do it, it doesn’t matter. That’s how the Republicans have succeeded all these years. Just hammer it, hammer it, hammer it. People seem to get their information in little tiny bits: a clip here, a video there, a social media post somewhere, or a podcast that they only hear 10 minutes of. There’s just got to be ways to do this and bite-sized ways to get it across that we are in a precarious time.
Sargent: To return to your piece, what I think is emerging with sudden force is the basic idea that the line against authoritarian rule, at least one of the most important lines here, is going to be the Republican Senate. That’s alarming. They didn’t convict him when they had the chance. This was when he was on his way out of office and had literally marshaled a mob to attack them violently. And that wasn’t enough for them to just put him out to pasture for good. And now the Senate is, if anything, more magnified. So I’m not feeling too optimistic about where this is headed.
On the one hand, we’re seeing some signs of resistance to people like Gaetz, and I’m pretty sure there’s going to be real resistance to RFK. What Republican Senator wants to sit through a confirmation hearing with that whack job, right? That’s just not good for the Republican Party; someone’s going to step up and start to say that. But on the other, like I said, they’re out there saying, We don’t want to walk the plank, which means, We don’t want to put ourselves in the crosshairs of MAGA. That’s not a good sign, is it, Jill?
Lawrence: It’s a terrible sign. Even if Mitch McConnell has some regrets about his pastoral and decides to be the conscience of the Senate now, he told somebody he’s not going to be a heat shield. He doesn’t need to be a heat shield next year. So we’ll see what happens. But he also may not have any influence. It may be too late for him to have any impact. I’m sure he’ll have things to say about RFK Jr. He got polio 11 years before there was a vaccine. He did a very affecting ad in Kentucky for urging people to get Covid vaccines and talking about his experience with polio. But he isn’t going to be a majority or minority leader anymore, he’s not going to be the leader of the caucus. He’s not really going to have much impact. We’ll see about that.
Again, it’s not just those two nominees. It’s not even just the incompetence, the inexperience, and the complete craziness of some of these people. It’s the cronyism and the corruption. Elon Musk—who’s to say he’s not going to recommend big cuts in agencies that regulate many of the industries, or environmental things that would benefit his company, or military budgets that could benefit his internet, his satellite company?
He’s got so many interests that are intertwined with the government, and he’s so inside Trump’s head and inside his circle. I’m sure he’ll be inside the White House, unless there’s some kind of bro split. I just don’t see that happening though. He’s too rich. He’s too powerful. Trump will keep him around. And there’ll be others like that who are just getting what they can.
I had spoken to Noah Bookbinder last week who heads Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. He said, The whole crypto situation and the social media—his Truth Social company—open up whole new avenues for people to try to bribe him or punish him by threatening to sell stocks so that he’ll do what they want. It’s going to be new horizons that you’ve never seen.
Sargent: We’re looking at a period of unparalleled right-wing oligarchic corruption. We had a piece the other day arguing that the conditions are very ripe for right-wing elites to just really loot the place from top to bottom. Musk is really only the beginning of that.
Lawrence: That’s right. The Harris campaign and maybe some of the allied PACs were trying to get at that, that Trump is out for the rich. He’s going to help the rich. He’s not worried about you. The focus was on the tax bill that they passed last time, and that has to be renewed now. It’s just hard to get people to focus enough and to believe it enough. I don’t know why. I really don’t know why. I thought that the Harris-Walz ticket was about as good as we could get, as good as we can imagine, so I wrote this piece. It’s the first one I’ve written since the election that really was angry. The question is: How long can all of us keep this up?
Sargent: Well, I guess we’re going to find out soon enough. Jill Lawrence, thanks so much for coming on with us.
Lawrence: Thanks for having me. It was great.
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.