The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 14 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 Thursday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got confirmed as secretary of health and human services. The only Republican to vote “no” was Mitch McConnell, who issued a powerful statement citing RFK’s anti-vax conspiracy theories and crediting vaccines for saving millions of lives around the world. That prompted two unhinged, angry rants from Trump to reporters in which he savaged McConnell as a loser and a failure and suggested he had subjugated McConnell to his will. We think this Trump-McConnell rift captures a whole lot of uncomfortable truths about the GOP and the Trump era, and about where we’re headed next. We’re going to get deep into this with Norm Ornstein, a longtime congressional observer who probably understands McConnell and today’s GOP better than just about anyone else alive. Norm, thanks for coming back on.
Norm Ornstein: Always a pleasure, Greg. What a day.
Sargent: What a day. McConnell’s statement on RFK was quite powerful. McConnell ripped RFK’s record of trafficking and dangerous conspiracy theories and his success in eroding trust in public health institutions. McConnell described the vaccines as scientific miracles and warned that RFK’s ascension will lead to the relitigation of proven cures. Norm, this is a catastrophe. You know McConnell as well as anyone. Can you talk about where this is really coming from in him?
Ornstein: Here’s what we know about Mitch McConnell. One of the signature developments of McConnell’s life was not just his bout with Polio as a younger person but that the scourge of Polio has carried with him for the rest of his life. Just a week ago, he took another fall. Some of those falls have been very dangerous. They’ve led to concussions. He walks haltingly, gingerly—and he knows personally, as well as anybody else, what the polio vaccine did to prevent many, many others going through what he’s gone through.
And he’s not the only one by far among Republicans in the Senate who knows that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a serial liar. We’ve seen the videotape over and over where he’s denied that he said terrible things about vaccines, and then you cue up the videotape where he said them. We know that he is a sociopath in many ways, what he’s done with animals throughout the course of his life. We know the powerful condemnation of him as a person, as a predator coming from his relatives—in particular, most powerfully from Caroline Kennedy. We know what he has said and what he is almost certain to do at NIH, not just with vaccines but with all medical research.
And the fact [is] Mitch McConnell was the only Republican to vote against him. Susan Collins, Bill Cassidy, a physician from Louisiana who said that the proudest thing about his career as a doctor was protecting Louisiana kids from mayhem and death by getting them vaccinated, Lisa Murkowski—these people and so many more know full well and they all went along.
Sargent: At a press conference late Thursday, Trump was asked about this, and he really lost it. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): Well, I feel sorry for Mitch. And I was one of the people that led. He couldn’t. He wanted to go to the end, and he wanted to say leader. He’s not equipped mentally. He wasn’t equipped 10 years ago mentally, in my opinion. He’d let the Republican Party go to hell. If I didn’t come along, the Republican Party wouldn’t even exist right now. Mitch McConnell never really had it. I was the one that got him to drop out of the leadership position. So he can’t love me. But he’s not voting against Bob, he’s voting against me. But that’s all right. He endorsed me. You know that Mitch endorsed me, right? You think that was easy?
Sargent: Norm, note how Trump says at the very end there, I subjugated McConnell at the end. What’s your reaction to all this?
Ornstein: Donald Trump’s way is to viciously attack anybody who doesn’t do his bidding. It doesn’t matter whether they’ve helped him immensely in the past. It doesn’t matter whether they have been key to his success. He will go after you as viciously as possible if you don’t do what he wants or demands. It is a classic tactic of an authoritarian, the classic tactic of a narcissistic sociopath like Donald Trump. So no great surprise here.
What’s interesting beyond that, Greg, is that remember that Elaine Chao served as Trump’s secretary of transportation in his first term—Chao being, of course, Mitch McConnell’s spouse. When Chao said some not so nice things about him, he went after her using vicious ethnic slurs. Of course, ironically, just the other day, probably in part to try and make sure that McConnell didn’t do this sort of thing, he picked Elaine Chao as one of the people illegally chosen for the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees. But nothing will stop him from going after McConnell, or now probably removing Elaine Chao from the Kennedy Center Board.
Sargent: Very possible. McConnell also voted against Tulsi Gabbard who just got confirmed as director of national intelligence and against Pete Hegseth for defense secretary. Norm, McConnell knows the immense dangers that all these nominees pose to the country, but I think we need to remind people that Mitch McConnell had the chance to prevent Trump from becoming president again. He probably could have gotten the Senate to convict Trump after the second impeachment over January 6. He didn’t. I think that could go down as one of the most consequential failures of any U.S. public official in our lifetimes. Is that overstating it, Norm?
Ornstein: It is not overstating it, and it’s not too blunt to say that Mitch McConnell will have blood on his hands for that decision. Now, why did McConnell, who immediately after January 6 went on the Senate floor and just eviscerated Trump and said that he was responsible for this, turn around then and protect him from being convicted, from running again?
I would say Mitch McConnell, more than anything else during his tenure as majority leader, Republican leader in the Senate, was protecting or trying to secure the majority. And he believed this was a ruthlessly pragmatic judgment with a lot of Republicans up in a party that still had as a cult—the vast majority of Republican voters being pro-Trump—that if he had pushed this, it would have divided Republicans and probably cost him the majority, so he sacrificed the country for this.
Now, whether McConnell is voting against these nominees because he feels guilty about what he did, because he is trying to make up for his past miscreants, because he is, as he prepares to lead the Senate, trying to alter his judgment in history, which I am convinced that he will go down as one of the top four or five villains in the decline of American culture and democracy, I don’t know. I don’t know what the reasons are. I’m happy he’s doing it, but anybody who gives him a pass because he’s voting against these nominees, especially since they’re all being confirmed anyhow, is making a mistake.
Sargent: I want to play some more audio of Trump at his press conference. He was asked by a reporter about Mitch McConnell’s bout with Polio as a young person, as you mentioned earlier. Here’s what happened.
Reporter (audio voiceover): He had polio, obviously.
Trump (audio voiceover): I don’t know anything about he had polio.
Reporter (audio voiceover): Are you doubting that he had polio?
Trump (audio voiceover): I have no idea if he had polio. All I can tell you about him is that he shouldn’t have been a leader. He knows that. He voted against Bobby. He votes against almost everything now. He’s a very bitter guy. And we have a very strong party. And he’s almost not even really a very powerful member. I’d say he’s not a party, he’s lost his power.
Sargent: Norm, we can joke about how crazy Trump is, but there’s something deadly serious going on here. He’s putting everyone on notice now, in a forward-looking way, that anyone who bucks him in the slightest will face absolutely savage public humiliation. That’s the game plan here, really, right? It’s all about what’s going forward. He knows that the Republican coalition is going to come under strain. There are lots of contradictions in the MAGA agenda, lots of conflicts there that are bubbling beneath the surface. He’s going to start to lose Republican support, and he’s letting people know you will get roasted, you will get raked over the coals in the most brutal way possible.
Ornstein: It was interesting, Greg, to take it in a slightly different direction. I watched slack, odd, and appalled when Trump did his press conference after the deadly airplane helicopter crash at a national airport. And it was 30 seconds of the boilerplate that had been written for him offering condolences to those that had been lost, and then it moved into yet another sociopathic rant. Republicans in Congress watching this knew it as well.
What they know is that he has no regard for people going through difficulties, for human life, basically. That may be the definition of sociopath, and public humiliation is an important part of it. But it’s public humiliation that can also lead to violence. We know what’s happened to others who have bucked Trump in the past, Republicans in Congress who ended up resigning because they were getting death threats. We know that he pardoned the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the most vicious among those who brutalized and murdered police on January 6, who went after Mike Pence, who went after members of Congress, many of whom thought they would not live through that day. They take these death threats seriously. And he’s got a group of people now, a vigilante force that could well go out there and threaten the lives or wellbeing of any members of Congress, judges, or others and their families who take him on.
It is the mark of a dictator. So much of what we see in what Trump is doing, the playbook is right out of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, goes beyond public humiliation and that’s something, crazy as it is, they have to worry about. I know people who have gotten death threats. I know from pretty reliable sources that Bill Cassidy, the senator from Louisiana, the physician who knows full well how dangerous RFK Jr. is to his own constituents in Louisiana, has a primary challenge from the right when he’s up in 2026. We know that Elon Musk—President Musk we can call him or deputy president, or whatever you want to call him—and other billionaires have said that they will put huge sums of money into these primary challenges, but what I’ve also told is that he and his family have gotten death threats.
So that’s the world we live in. Mitch McConnell is not fazed by that right now, and good for him, but the public humiliation in two separate statements from this press conference are a pretty big signal.
Sargent: Norm, if you step back and look at the broader contours of all this, McConnell’s opposition to Hegseth, Gabbard, and RFK shows that he understands what Trumpism really is. He gets that it poses a fundamental threat to the Western alliance: Gabbard and Hegseth are to one degree or another favorably disposed towards Putin; Hegseth just essentially said Ukraine can forget about reclaiming its territory. McConnell also gets that Trump could badly cripple some of the things that make the country great like science, public health, vaccines, etc. Norm, you know Republican senators, many of them privately agree with McConnell about all this, right? It seems like McConnell’s path here says something about the Republican Party. They know this guy is a threat to the country and to the future, but they’re just letting it happen.
Ornstein: Greg, I’ve been around the Senate for well over five decades, immersed in it. I’ve known fairly well the majority of senators who served during that entire time. I worked with a lot of them. I worked closely with a lot of Republicans. This is different. And many of them, if you had parachuted them back, used the hot tub time machine, taken them back 30–35 years, would have been responsible, policymaking, problem-solving people. Sure, with their own conservative ideology, whether you agree or not, but institutionally minded and decent. The ones who are there now who would have fit that category don’t anymore.
There is no backbone. Look at the fact that Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins ended up bending the knee and voted for these characters. I look at what also happened today, which is the vote in the Judiciary Committee in the Senate on Kash Patel. Right before they took that vote, Dick Durbin indicated, something that he had said publicly before, that he had ironclad evidence that Kash Patel had lied under oath to the Judiciary Committee in his confirmation hearing, saying that he had nothing to do with this campaign to fire FBI agents and top figures.
We have whistleblowers now who make it clear that he had everything to do with it. So here’s a man who not only was involved in awful stuff to dismantle the FBI as we know it and turn it into an SS force for Trump, but he lied right to the face of these senators. And what happened after that? Every Republican on the Judiciary Committee voted him out favorably to head the FBI.
I’m absolutely certain that even though you have on that committee some of the most deplorable members of the Senate, many of them know full well that Kash Patel is not qualified or capable of doing what the nation expects at the FBI, and they still voted for him. And that tells you where this party is. And it tells you that while Trump will continue to do things to send signals that they’d better toe the lie, they would better do what he says no matter how outrageous, they better be muted in their criticisms, there’s no moral backbone that any of them have.
And for Mitch McConnell, I am still hesitant to call it a moral backbone because of the immoral and amoral things that he has done over his arc as a leader in the Senate. I do believe that Mitch McConnell cares about foreign aid. I believe that he is anti-Russian and pro-Ukraine. I believe he’s appalled by what he sees with Hegseth, who soiled himself and the country over in Brussels with NATO, and he knows what a terrible figure he is for the Department of Defense. He certainly knows full well how dangerous it is to have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the position that he’s in. What his motives are beyond that, I’m not going to venture a guess. I know that many of his colleagues are right where he is but they were too cowardly to vote the way he did.
Sargent: Well, Norm, the die is cast now. It’s on. Thanks so much for coming on with us today. I hope it doesn’t get as ugly as it looks like it’s going to.
Ornstein: Well, every day brings more appalling outrages.
Sargent: Thanks, Norm, for coming on.
Ornstein: We’ll be back, I’m sure, Greg, talking about more outrages to come.
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.