The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 17 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.
This week, Donald Trump uncorked an epic tirade on Truth Social, in which he singled out numerous Republicans who have crossed him. Trump ranted that no one with ties to those Republicans should bother seeking jobs in his new administration. The inclusion of Nikki Haley among them got the most attention, because after she lost her primary against Trump, she bent the knee and endorsed him with obsequious praise. It didn’t do her much good. Her reward for it is that she’s now getting humiliated by Trump in pretty thorough fashion. But there’s another story here worth focusing on as well. This is best seen as a warning from Trump to future critics in Republican circles: If you criticize him, you risk being on the outs, with no way back in.
Today, we’re chatting about this with Casey Michel, a reporter who covers lobbying and influence peddling and wrote a good piece for The New Republic on the coming resurgence of kleptocracy in the Trump era. Thanks for coming back on, Casey.
Casey Michel: Yeah, Greg, it’s great to be back with you.
Sargent: In his rant, Trump said this, “It would be helpful if you would not send, or recommend to us, people who worked with, or are endorsed by ...” and then he listed a number of people. He cited Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and Mike Pence, of course, and “birdbrain” Nikki Haley and a bunch of others. He accused them of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and so forth. Casey, everyone laughed at this, but it actually seems to send a pretty serious message: Criticize Trump and you might be on the outs forever, no matter how anxiously you suck up to him later and repent like Nikki Haley now. Is this a warning?
Michel: Absolutely it is. This is all downstream from the fact that it is absolutely clear that the thing Trump prizes most is loyalty, is fealty. It is not even specific policy positions or broader specific strategic recommendations; it is simply loyalty to the man. Whatever he says, whatever he does, whatever he pursues, and of course, whatever benefits him personally. You’re either with him or you’re against him. And there’s no coming back as Nikki Haley now well knows.
Sargent: Yes. On this weekend, Trump will have his inauguration where we’ll see D.C. absolutely overrun with the most obsequious loyalists you can imagine. We’re already learning some pretty awful stuff. The chief executive of TikTok has been invited to sit on the dais, and all these tech oligarchs will have positions of honor—Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos. All the parties for inaugural weekend are like a big coming-out moment for the tech oligarchy and the Silicon Valley elite. Lots of companies are pouring millions of dollars into Trump’s inaugural committee. What do you make of Trump openly giving a place of honor to these elites this way, Casey?
Michel: Well, Greg, you and I were talking off-mike that one of the key differences emerging in the second Trump administration versus what we saw in the first is clearly this relationship with other deep-pocketed donors, who were generally considered to be of at least liberal or potentially even centrist bent now racing to be the first to visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago and, of course, support him in the inauguration. And I have no doubt [they’ll] continue to support him for months and months to come.
What we see is, for lack of a better term, truly an oligarchy emerging in the United States of America. And I don’t think it’s any surprise that that is really the term of art we have seen bandied about so much since Trump’s election victory. I wasn’t even necessarily surprised to see our current President Biden, in his farewell address, warn about the rise of this new oligarchic class, because that is really the key distinction for what we are seeing buttressing Trump this time around.
Sargent: I want to ask you about that Biden speech for a second. It seems like it actually is a way to say to Democrats.... On Biden’s part, he’s saying, Democrats, you should now start indicting this oligarchy, you now need to talk about what’s happening in this country. You’re someone who’s covered this stuff for a long time. It’s pretty opaque to a lot of people. Is there a role for Democrats to start actually defining this oligarchy, saying how it works, why it’s such a menace?
Michel: Yes, absolutely, there is. There’s a wide opening that’s getting bigger and bigger by the day. Again, much of that is related directly to the actions of the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Jeff Bezoses and, of course, the Elon Musks of the world, leading them wide open to the criticism that is right there for the taking if only Democrats lean in on it. The farewell address that we saw from Biden was right on the money, warning about this emerging class of oligarchs and the threat they pose to democracy in the U.S. and, frankly, around the world at this point as well. This was something that I wish we had seen from President Biden months, if not years, before, but I do think this is one of those speeches that folks are going to be talking about for a long, long time, especially as the threat of this oligarchic class only grows more salient, both domestically as well as internationally.
Sargent: It seems to me that all these elites this weekend, with the inauguration and beyond, are doing something more than the usual influence peddling. It’s almost a celebration of the idea that oligarchy and kleptocracy are set for a particularly big moment now under Trump. Trump ran openly on a vow to govern in a way that will enrich wealthy elites who supported him with campaign donations. He made open quid pro quo demands of big oil executives and wealthy investors. He won. Now all these people are partying expressly about the fact that they won on those terms, right? How do you understand that aspect of this moment as someone who’s tracked this stuff for so long?
Michel: It’s a culmination of trends that were years, if not decades, in the making: the lifting of caps on things like campaign spending, the opacity surrounding so much political money swirling around Washington. It’s worth highlighting the fact, though, that it’s frankly not just these American oligarchs that are celebrating Trump’s return to the White House. This is part of a global cast of characters of generally authoritarian regimes with their oligarchic proxies that are now salivating at the prospect of a new administration. They will not be targeted with sanctions. They will not be prosecuted. They will not be investigated. And frankly, they can use their money as much as these American oligarchs are in terms of influencing and accessing the Trump White House. This is really what it portends: an opening to any deep pocketed individual, whether American or not, to the White House, to the highest rungs of American power.
Sargent: In your piece for The New Republic, you point out that foreign agents are rising higher in Trump’s orbit than before. Susie Wiles, who will be his chief of staff, and Pam Bondi, who will almost certainly be his attorney general, were both registered foreign lobbying agents. Jared Kushner and the Trump Organization are doing all these deals in the Mideast, as we discussed before. There are now these new, very clear and wide-open channels to channeling bribes to the president. What is this new Trump kleptocracy that’s emerging here? It’s a new kind of beast, isn’t it? It’s both more public, more explicit, more self-celebratory in ways I don’t think we’ve seen before, have we?
Michel: No, Greg, and that’s a key point. We have never seen something like this before. Of course, the common refrain is that, yes, we have seen these plutocratic elements and things like the Gilded Age with robber barons in American history, but we have never seen such a singular cohort of so many deep-pocketed individuals with direct access to the White House. And beyond that, we have certainly never seen a president like Donald Trump who completely blurs and dissolves the lines between private interests and public policy.
This is not a surprise to you or to listeners that so much of Trump’s policy, whether domestic or increasingly foreign, is predicated on what benefits him, his inner circle, his family, and, of course, the Trump Organization itself. And it’s worth highlighting that the Trump Organization has come forth and said that they do have an ethics pledge. All they say is they won’t do any deals with foreign officials or foreign governments, but that leaves the door wide open to doing deals with foreign individuals, foreign companies, or any other proxies for these regimes. And, of course, these regimes can do this in seconds; they can set up a company themselves that is nominally independent that the Trump Organization can then work with. That is little more than a cutout for x dictatorship or y autocracy or whatever the interests may be.
Sargent: Yeah. I want to try to go back and go big picture in another way. In 2016, Donald Trump ran as the guy who knows that elites are corrupt. He ran as the guy who was a member of the corrupt elite. He had seen corruption from the inside. He understood how double-dealing worked. He would put his knowledge of inside corruption to work on behalf of the American people. It occurs to me that we’re not even hearing him say that now. At this point, what he’s basically saying is, We’re just going to have a big party and loot the place blind from top to bottom. There’s not any explicit declaration of why all this dealing with elites, all this deal making in public, why it will help the American people or the country. Is there?
Michel: No, certainly not that I’ve seen. And Trump is also coming in with, frankly, more confidence than he’s ever had. Of course, he has both houses of Congress. He has an entire political party completely at his feet, at his beck and call. I don’t even know why it would necessarily be in his interest to pay any lip service to any of those similar talking points that we saw in the first term. We did see in the first term that that knowledge of these illicit financial channels, of these open areas of access to foreign influence did benefit someone, but it certainly wasn’t the American public. It was the then, and now future, President Donald Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization.
Sargent: It’s funny, when we see the inauguration this weekend and we see Zuckerberg and Musk and Bezos up there on the dais—all of those three people have explicitly and obsequiously paid tribute to Trump. Musk spent $250 million or something like that to help him get elected; Zuckerberg recently just canceled fact-checking at Meta in keeping with what Trump wants, using Trumpian language about fact-checking; and Bezos canceled the editorial endorsing Kamala Harris and defended it with complete bullshit. They’re all just celebrating the fact that they’ve got their MAGA king, and they’re going to pay tribute to him in public. And it’s all good, everybody wins.
Michel: Look, they’re going all-in on Trump. They think it is in their interest. They think it is in their business interests—and maybe, in the very short term, it is. But again, to get back to earlier in the conversation, Greg, they’re leaving the doors wide open for Democrats to go all in on highlighting all of the threats and all of the devastating damaging impact both on American democracy as well as plenty of other interests domestically and internationally that these new oligarchs are posing. And I won’t be surprised if we begin seeing that blowback not long after the inauguration. Things are plenty rosy for Trump right now, but it’s one thing to run, and it’s another thing to govern. And we’ll see where we are in a few months time.
Sargent: There’s a history here. We’ve said this on the show before: In 2004, George W. Bush looked invincible. He looked a little like Trump does now. The Republican Party was in lockstep behind him; Bush seemed to have total control over the information environment with the Iraq War. But then after 2004, things started to unravel through a combination of incompetence and, importantly, corruption. A big part of the story of the 2006 midterm gains by Democrats was that they campaigned hard against corruption on the part of Republicans. And I don’t think Trump can actually tame the press here in the U.S. He can do them some damage—he can kill an editorial here, he can get a suck-up profile of Melania there. But we’re going to see some aggressive reporting on the emerging corruption, and that could start to really damage them.
Michel: The beauty and the curse of another Trump presidency is the fact that he brings corruption and kleptocracy front and center. There is no distinguishing him as a president or as a businessman from these corrupt networks. I have no doubt that details are going to continue to emerge. Investigations will shine a light on all of these different dark money networks that are swirling into the Trump White House, taking full advantage. We won’t know everything. We won’t learn about every single network, but he’s going to be front and center for years to come.
Sargent: I want to talk a little more about what you said earlier, about how Democrats can really go hard at this. There’s basically a skepticism or cynicism on the part of a lot of people who say, OK, everybody’s corrupt in Washington. Trump is just doing exactly what’s been done there for years and decades and so forth. And there’s probably some reason to worry that the public tunes out a lot of it. But at the same time, the public hates corruption in Washington, and it turns on the party in power. It is going to require Democrats to keep up the heat and make the case, though, to keep the spotlight shined on this stuff. How would you advise Democrats to tell people that kleptocracy and oligarchy is bad, that it matters?
Michel: Well, absolutely. It’s going to come down to using those terms, which, fortunately or otherwise, Americans across the country are becoming increasingly familiar with themselves. Again, it was wonderful to see President Biden do this, but these are the terms that Democrats are going to need to keep highlighting and hammering, as well as highlighting other examples of other countries elsewhere—especially in places like Russia—where the oligarchs really sank their teeth into a country and effectively devastated the democracy that was there in the 1990s.
It’s also about Congress. We saw some of this actually in Trump’s first term as well as in the aftermath. It’s about congressional investigations highlighting the role and realities of what the Trump administration is doing to benefit Donald Trump himself—whether it is investigations into the Trump Organization or to some of the shell companies that are operating or whatever the actual manifestation of that is. I was always pleasantly surprised by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations or the Senate Finance. Whatever it might be, congressional investigators really took the reins in guiding the American public to the corruption of the first Trump administration. They have to do that the second time around.
Sargent: Well, what has to happen again is Democrats have to take the House back in 2026. I think the public is going to want a check on the madness that’s going on, and that’s really where it could come, right?
Michel: Absolutely. It is highlighting the relationship between oligarchy, wealth inequality, and day-to-day living expenses—things getting tougher, things getting more expensive, being unable to find childcare, being unable to find elder care. This is all part and parcel of a broader messaging that has to focus on just how unfair this economy now is for those Americans on the ground with those benefiting at the top surrounding Donald Trump.
Sargent: Right. Democrats have to make a case that Trump and his cast of misfit oligarchs and kleptocrats are looting the place from top to bottom.
Michel: Yes, 100 percent. And of course, there are other elements: national security concerns, intelligence concerns, so on and so forth. But it really comes down to the bread-and-butter issues that we know move so many American voters.
Sargent: I want to link this back to the rant about Nikki Haley and Republicans. Trump is going very far in saying explicitly and openly that people who criticize him could face punishment from state power in his hands. Throughout the campaign, he said media organizations that displeased him should lose broadcasting rights. Now remember, Trump threatened to jail Zuckerberg. Then when he got the cancellation of fact-checking at Meta, Trump was asked if his threats had produced that outcome, and he said, You’re damn right they did. So the larger context here is that in every possible way, Trump is letting everyone know that it’s time to fall in line; and that for those who are loyal all the way down, the spoils will be rich and great.
Michel: Yes. Look, it is worth folks reading up on the history of organized crime, both in the U.S. as well as elsewhere, and the internal governance structures and governance modes that we have seen in these mafiosi organized groups. That is an absolute indication of the leadership style and governance structure we are set to see here in the U.S., and, frankly, across many authoritarian regimes around the world.
Sargent: You want to explain to listeners what the mafia state is?
Michel: The mafia state is basically exactly as it sounds. It is effectively state capture, the seizure of the levers of state power by those who either are or certainly appear to be members of organized crime groups. It is basically statewide racketeering all for the benefit of the rulers in power. Again, this gets back to the root of kleptocracy, which literally means rule of thieves. It is those in power that are the ones benefiting, while those on the ground, those voters around the country, are the ones that are suffering day in and day out without any way to actually get that government out of power.
Sargent: So what does a mafia state look like under Trump, presuming he can put one in place? It’s not exactly organized crime. It’s a bunch of organized interests that are a little different from mafiosi, but maybe not all that different. What does it really look like in the real world here?
Michel: I’m not comfortable saying the U.S. is imminently headed from mafia state status. But certainly in the longer run, if this is the governance style we are set to see for years, maybe decades to come, then folks are generally familiar with how things in Putin’s Russia currently look like: a one-party state, a dictator in power for years and years, benefiting him and the oligarchic class underneath him.
The more short-term model that folks are going to recognize is what we saw take place in Hungary under Viktor Orbán, where Orbán may not necessarily be a dictator but it is increasingly difficult year in and year out to dislodge him and his cronies. He has friends running the media. He has friends running security services. He has friends running the main export sectors, so on and so forth. All of them engaged in practices that benefit the ruling elite and Viktor Orbán himself. That is the concern, that is the model that I can see perfectly plausibly moving forward in the U.S.
Sargent: To bring it back one more time to Nikki Haley and Republicans in Trump’s weird rant: He’s basically telling people that this is going to be a government for friends that punishes enemies, right? The warning is part of what you’re talking about. It’s part of this evolution toward this not mafia state but Orbán-esque government, right?
Michel: And there’s power in the humiliation, right? This is what Trump is doing with figures like Nikki Haley, who was outspoken against him in the primary but then ended up sucking up and kissing the ring. Now he is publicly blasting her, and there’s nothing she can do about it. There’s no way that she can recover from this. It is humiliation all the way through.
And again, as you said, Greg, it is a warning and further indication that there is nothing Trump prizes more than loyalty and fealty, not to any policies but to Trump the man, Trump the president, and Trump himself. The humiliation then really is the warning itself. It doesn’t matter what you say, it doesn’t matter even how much you criticize but then kiss the ring, you are still opening yourself up for public national humiliation at the end of the day.
This is something that everyone across the board is going to realize and recognize, and there’s only one way to avoid that, and that is to stay in Trump’s good graces. You can’t criticize, you can’t investigate, you can’t reveal, and you certainly can’t oppose the president. That is the model of governance we are seeing implemented under the new Trump administration.
Sargent: Well, this is going to be a real learning experience for all of us. And Casey, you’re pretty well-positioned to capitalize because you’ve covered this stuff a long time, and you’ve got books all about kleptocracy.
Michel: I do, yes. Thanks, Greg. As a shameless self-plug, my first book was on American kleptocracy, on offshore finance and dark money in the U.S. And my second book, Foreign Agents, is on the foreign lobbying industry and how it has exploded, especially under governments like Donald Trump’s, in recent years. And I wish there was better news to share, and I wish my career wasn’t quite so relevant as it is right now.
Sargent: Not only is it going to explode, it’s going to go into supernova mode now. Casey Michel, thanks so much for coming on, man.
Michel: Thanks so much, Greg.
Sargent: Folks, make sure to check out some great new content we have up at tnr.com: Kate Aronoff arguing that if the rich really did flee L.A. and the wildfire wake, rebuilding might actually be easier, and Matt Ford on the right-wing judge who’s on a mission to destroy ESG retirement plan. And check out the latest episode of Deep State Radio on the DSR Network as Jen Rubin and Norm Eisen join David Rothkopf to discuss the future of pro-democracy media as traditional outlets further bend the knee to Trump. 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.