The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 27 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.
On Friday night, President Donald Trump fired at least 15 independent inspectors general in a late-night massacre that appeared to have been illegal. Yet since then, that story has only gotten worse. First, Trump subsequently defended the purge by calling it “very standard,” which is clearly an effort to normalize lawlessness. Second, some Republicans quickly signaled that they will be just fine with this, confirming once again that he will be largely unbound in his second term. We’re talking about all this with Jennifer Rubin, whose new Substack The Contrarian has already been doing a good job tracking Trump’s implementation of an authoritarian government. Jen, good to have you on.
Jennifer Rubin: It’s lovely to be here.
Sargent: Trump has now purged the inspector generals at numerous departments including defense, state, health and human services, the EPA, and many others. Yet the law requires that the president provide a substantive rationale for the removal to Congress at least 30 days in advance. Independent inspection generals are a bulwark against corruption and waste and fraud at agencies. Jen, it sure looks like what Trump did is illegal. Your thoughts?
Rubin: It is absolutely illegal and I do not expect these inspector generals to go quietly. This is what they do. They enforce the rules. They are the watchdogs. And in order for them not only to preserve their personal dignity and reputations but the institution of inspector general, I fully expect that many, if not all of them, will object. It will be very interesting if on Monday, they show up to work because they have not been legally fired; they can show up. And a Republican senator or congressman or other toady of this administration saying, Fine with me, is really irrelevant. The law is the law, and this is going to be litigated.
They know much of what they are doing is illegal. They know there is a very good chance it will be reversed in the court, but they hope to plow ahead and do their damage before the law can catch up to them. And that is the great danger.
Sargent: Trump has now defended this move by arguing that “Some people thought that some were unfair or some were not doing their job,” meaning the inspectors general. Then he said, “It’s a very standard thing to do.” I think this makes it even worse. Although the law requires a real rationale, he just flippantly declares, Oh, someone somewhere thought they were unfair. In Trump speak, of course, unfair means that they might actually hold him and his agencies accountable to the law in an independent way and are not beholden to him. But putting that aside, he’s giving a fat middle finger to the very idea that he should explain himself as the law requires and calling it standard. What are the broader implications of that?
Rubin: Well, it is emblematic of many things he has done, whether it’s a executive decree that attempts to repeal birthright citizenship, which is in the Constitution, or it’s violating the inspector general’s rule, or it’s coming up with the DOGE, which is not legally constituted. He does all of these things because he thinks he can get away with it. And because he thinks, ultimately, if it ever reaches the Supreme Court, he has them in his back pocket.
Now, the latter may be very true. Our current Supreme Court is corrupt, partisan; the majority, at least, is going to go along with much of what he does under the so-called unitary executive theory, meaning the president is in charge of anybody and everyone in the executive branch and no one can tell him what to do. However, there are many steps before that, and we’ve already seen court challenges filed—some within the very hour of his inauguration on DOGE, on birthright citizenship. We’re going to see litigation on Schedule F. We’re going to see litigation on this. And there are lower and intermediary courts that will stop him, that will issue injunctions. We’ve already had one.
Sargent: So you see a legal challenge to this particular move. What does that look like? How does it unfold?
Rubin: Anyone could—any single IG or a group of IGs, there’s also an IG association—go into federal court and say, This is violative of the law, we want a restraining order preventing me from being fired, allowing me to return to my office, and we’ll then litigate until final conclusion. That becomes tricky because they can let them back in the office and then lock the door, turn off their phone and all the rest of it. So when you have these personnel issues, it becomes a battle of the wills: Are they going to let him back in? Are they going to do his job?
They can certainly prevent further firings, but you’re going to see some very immediate litigation. And it’s not just litigation. It’s very important that these people who normally operate behind the scenes are not public figures, are not publicity hounds, come out and explain themselves to the American people. Why should the average person care about this? They don’t even, most likely, care or know to care what an IG is. And the answer is: These are the people who keep government from doing illegal, corrupt things. These are the people who stop bad things from happening to the American people. And it is very important. It is literally like taking the police off the streets and expecting the criminals to behave themselves. They won’t. It’s dangerous. And once they do these bad things, it’s very hard sometimes to undo the damage.
Rubin: Do you expect a lawsuit to be filed?
Sargent: Absolutely. One or more actually, and they are going to litigate it. Inspector generals are sticklers for the rules—that’s why they’re there. And I fully expect them to enforce it and, I would hope, to explain themselves publicly, because as you know, the corporate billionaire media doesn’t necessarily do a great job of explaining the context, the significance of this. Many of them reported simply they were fired. Well, he tried to fire them illegally. Let’s see how that comes out.
Sargent: Excellent point, Jen. Let’s move to Senate Republicans for a second. They’re going to roll over for all this. Senator John Barrasso was asked if the firings concerned him, and here’s what he said.
John Barrasso (audio voiceover): Sometimes inspector generals don’t do the job that they are supposed to do. Some of them deserve to be fired. And I think the president is going to make wise decisions on those, some that he decides to keep, some that he decides to remove it. He is moving forward aggressively across all areas of government.
Sargent: Jen, some other Republicans expressed concern. But come on, have you heard anything from any Republican that sufficiently denounces this and signals any real response from their end?
Rubin: Interestingly enough, Chuck Grassley, who has long been a friend of inspector generals, sounds like he might be a little bit upset about this. Let’s see. Let’s see what he does. Let’s see if he speaks up. Let’s see if he holds a hearing. Let’s see if he calls up the White House. The problem with the Republicans, as we have seen from day one, is they will come up with any excuse not to confront this president. They will say, I never heard it. I don’t know. I don’t have all the facts. Did that really happen? I don’t know. We’ll have to look into that. It’s the dog ate my homework in 50 different ways.
And if Chuck Grassley, who has long been a defender of inspector generals when Democrats were in office, actually wants to take this up, he’ll have plenty of support. And frankly, I’ll give him a round of applause because any Republican at this point who is willing to do anything, anything to speak up, deserves some support.
Should they have been opposing him long before he got to this point? Should they not have been endorsing him? Should they have removed him from office? Should they have voted guilty in the impeachment? All those things are true. The reason we have Donald Trump is because we have all those spineless wonders in the Senate and in the House. Be that as it may, if we can get any of them to start objecting, to start opposing, then slowly the power and the capital will drain out of Donald Trump.
We forget he is a lame duck, and he actually admitted for the first time he was a lame duck the other day. He said, No, I’m not going to have a third or fourth term. I’m just going to have two. Well, praise be the Lord, we’re only going to abide by that part of the Constitution. I’m sure he’ll change his mind; but be that as it may, we have to understand that every time he loses one of these, it’s not just a victory on that particular issue. It slows down the train and it disrupts this aura of invincibility, this canard that he can do whatever he wants to do. And it will be a thousand cuts that finally bring him down or slow him down. When he does something so blatantly, so clear, it’s a gimme for the courts, for Democrats, for democracy defenders, because they’ve got a winner. He’s not going to ultimately win in violating the law.
Now, maybe he’ll go back, he’ll come up with some BS reasons for firing the inspector generals. Maybe he’ll give notice but he can’t do it this way. And it’s important to lay down the marker. He can’t do whatever the hell he wants.
Sargent: I 100 percent agree. Dealing out defeats to Trump is essential as a much larger project in slowing him down. I want to ask you about something you said earlier about IGs and their basic role, which is to protect the American people from, uh, corrupt or illegal behavior on the part of government agencies. You could see an interlocking scheme here, where Trump really starts to use the government in corrupt ways like relying on loyalists he installs to produce “government information” that’s really propaganda. The government produces a whole lot of information—he’s going to corrupt that thoroughly to its core. Then on top of that, the purge of independent civil servants leaves fewer people in place to either resist that kind of corruption or blow the whistle about it. The purging of IGs looks like a step in that direction. It has to be seen in this broader context where he’s going to convert the government to kind of an instrument of his own will and his propagandistic needs.
Rubin: Absolutely. This is the Trump game plan to hollow out government, to strip it of competent, trustworthy people, and install his cronies, his loyalists. This is Tammany Hall of old. You get jobs not because you’re qualified but because you’re a friend of somebody in power or because you will do his bidding. And it does several things.
First of all, you deprive the American people of information. Just the basic data. The next time we get a report on the jobs from the Department of Labor, everyone is going to scratch their head and think, Hmm, I wonder if this is actually right? Because when you systematically destroy faith in institutions, faith in the government, then that is when an authoritarian comes forward and says, The only person you can trust is me. No one else is trustworthy or almost as bad. You can’t trust anything. You don’t know whether it’s true or not, but you can believe me. So when you get rid of, as you said, the decision-makers and the fact makers and the experts in government and you fill them with cronies, and then you take away the watchdog that is supposed to happen, you begin to see the unraveling and the corruption of government.
And you will notice what they have been doing. They stopped all communication coming out of the National Institutes of Health. That’s messages to doctors. That is messages to hospitals. We are seeing, in plain daylight, the most grotesque conflict of interest in corruption already. Look what Trump did in the crypto world. He just rolled out a new cryptocurrency. He’s going to legalize crypto, we think, or make it much easier to use in ordinary transactions, which will benefit him and the people who paid hundreds of millions of dollars to get him elected, the very people who were sitting on the stage behind him. This is something out of Russia, this is something out of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
Sargent: I want to try to get at another way in which the stakes are very big here. Inspectors general are a key part of the apparatus that Congress put in place after the Watergate scandals, which involved another Republican president who was lawless and out of control. All kinds of important reforms were installed. But it’s clear that the post-Watergate architecture is really in danger of failing in the face of Trump, right? You mentioned earlier that we need a more concerted and vocal response from Democrats. Defending that order seems to me to be a key place to start, don’t you think?
Rubin: Absolutely. And in fairness, we’re only about 36 hours into the firing or the attempted firing of the IGs, but I must say the response from Democrats has been sporadic, inconsistent. You have the usual formidable voices, someone like Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who has been a star, who has come out and denounced it. You have a group of phenomenal House members; Jamie Raskin is always in the lead. But where is the Senate minority leadership? Where is a united front? Why are they not en masse going forward. And why, as this is unrolling, are they simultaneously continuing to process the Trump nominations? The inspector generals go, and then the next morning we wake up and dog-killer Kristi Noem has been confirmed as Homeland Security secretary.
They are in the minority, but they are not powerless. They can speak up, they can use the bully pulpit. And I have said this until I’m blue in the face and I’m sure he doesn’t like hearing it for me for the umpteenth time, but we need a stronger chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senator Durbin is a very nice man. We need someone far more aggressive. And frankly, Senator Schumer needs to do a better job of communicating. How many of the Democratic committees are actually on Bluesky? It’s a small little thing, but that’s where the Democrats are. That’s where the engaged public is. It has 27, 28 million used or something like that? It’s malpractice for Democrats not to be on all of the relevant social media platforms to explain themselves and to come out. And it is very demoralizing for people out there in the country who are trying to mount a defense or are just trying to keep their spirits alive, frankly, to see such a sporadic, ineffective, nonexistent response from Democrats.
So I certainly hope they get their shit together, excuse my language. I would hope, come next week, we see regular, consistent messaging. I interviewed Governor of Maryland Wes Moore—and that interview will be up at the Contrarian—and he said two things. What you need in a crisis is unified command, meaning everybody saying the same thing together to create unity and volume. And the other is constant communication. You have to tell people what is going on. You have to tell them what you are doing. You have to tell them what progress is being made. If you don’t, you lose the public. And I don’t see either of those things being done by Democrats on the Hill right now. I realize it’s hard when you don’t have the White House. But frankly, when they had the White House, they weren’t that great at messaging either.
Sargent: I want to endorse that 100 percent. It’s very, very clear that one of the key projects for people like you and me and for Democratic and small d democratic and liberal voters across the country will be to get both our media and the Democratic Party to step up to this moment to hold Trump accountable, and communicate what they’re doing in that regard and communicate why Trump is so dangerous. This all has to be explained to people. Trump is the one who’s doing all the explaining. He’s just saying, OK, well, they did a crap job, they couldn’t really be trusted. Where’s the counternarrative, right? It’s really clear to me that Trump and MAGA are using all their media outlets effectively to just portray him as a disruptor, as a reformer. And again, we see this here—John Barrasso said that essentially. He said, Oh, well, you know, he’s reforming the place. He’s knocking heads together. He’s breaking the furniture.
That’s going to be the story. And that’s something that the American public will like to hear unless someone explains that what they’re actually doing is not reforming the place in any meaningful sense. They’re making it much more prone to Trumpian corruption.
Rubin: Absolutely. It’s interesting. If they would just explain a few of the things that inspector generals have done over the years to save the taxpayer money, to reveal corruption, to improve the service of government, people would understand these are not “the deep state.” They’re the eyes, the ears, the watchdog of the American people. We would not know, and this is why he wants them out, of many scandals, many misuses of government power, many instances of sheer incompetence. And some of these are in areas, frankly, that Republicans themselves should care a lot about. Do they want the Social Security Administration to operate better? Do they want these programs that they said are rife with waste, fraud, and corruption? They always say that. Well, who’s going to find it if you don’t have these people?
He maybe shouldn’t have messed with these people because these people are used to being the truth tellers. These people are used to saying these are the rules. You’re not following them. So my hope would be that we get a reaction out of them and that they would then respond. And I would certainly hope that members of the house.... Remember, they are having committee hearings on nominees. They will be having oversight committees. At every one of these, Democrats have the opportunity to ask questions to demand answers, and they can effectively hijack a confirmation hearing, whether it’s for the secretary of Homeland Security or it’s the secretary of Labor or whomever, and start asking hard questions. Start asking, Will you insist that the inspector general be returned? Will you cooperate with oversight? Will you follow the law, even if you’re given a clearly illegal order? Those are the questions they have to ask.
Sargent: Jen Rubin, thank you so much for coming on with us. Very well said. Everybody, check out Jen’s new Substack The Contrarian. Good to talk to you as always, Jen.
Rubin: Thank you so much, Greg, for having me.
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.