The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 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.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump unleashed a long rambling tweet that falsely blamed Ukrainian President Zelenskiy for Russia’s invasion and pushed a whole lot of other lies that sounded exactly like Russian propaganda—because that’s exactly what it was. This forced Republicans into some wild contortions that were even more transparently evasive than usual. Which raises a question: What should Democrats be saying right now about all this?
It seems like an unusually good opportunity to indict the whole GOP for its crave and embrace of Trump and all he represents. Will they seize it? We’re talking today about this to Brian Beutler, author of the great Substack, Off Message, who’s offered some of the sharpest advice to Democrats on how to proceed in the Trump era. Good to have you back on, Brian.
Brian Beutler: It’s great to be back.
Sargent: Let’s start with Trump’s tweet. He said Zelenskiy is a “dictator” who talks the United States into spending money on Ukraine’s self-defense, that Zelenskiy played Biden “like a fiddle.” He said only Trump, speaking of himself, will be able to “settle” the war, that Zelenskiy had “better move fast or he’s not going to have a country left.” He said Zelenskiy has done a terrible job and that millions have needlessly died. Brian, note the complete erasure of Vladimir Putin’s invasion as the cause of the war. The truth is Zelenskiy and Ukraine have put up a resistance that no one thought was possible. Trump wants to “settle this war” by giving Putin what he wants. Could this be clearer?
Beutler: No, I think that the way that you put it speaks to the risk, that people who are appalled by what’s happening here will want to pluck out individual falsehoods and depravities in the statement and correct the record as if this were some exercise in holding the President the United States to the truth. But we know that he is not beholden to the truth, and we know that he’s on the side of the bad guys in this conflict, which puts the country on the side of the bad guys in this conflict. So the aim has to be to use that as a wedge within his own party, and then look ahead to flipping it back so that the U.S. isn’t any longer allying with foreign autocrats and dictators against fledgling democracies.
Sargent: To your point about the capacity here for driving a wedge among Republicans on this stuff, the Republican responses to Trump’s craziness were really almost comically evasive. Senator Lisa Murkowski said, “I would like to see that in context,” meaning Trump’s quote, “because I would certainly never refer to President Zelenskiy as a dictator.” Senator Thom Tillis admitted Putin is the cause of the invasion, but on Trump calling Zelenskiy a dictator, he said, “It’s not a word I would use.” Maybe best of all, Senator Kevin Cramer described Trump as “factually wrong” about Zelenskiy, but added that Trump is a negotiator who’s always positioning himself. Brian, note that these Republicans are all treating Trump’s quotes as some error, a slip up, or alternatively that he’s got some shrewd ulterior motive at work. Do Republicans ever have to confront what you said, which is that Trump wants Russia to win?
Beutler: Not until the real consequences of flipping American foreign policy like this, upending the Western alliance without formally abrogating NATO, come home to roost. This is the mode Republicans in Congress default to whenever Donald Trump does something unpardonable: They pretend they didn’t read the remarks or see the remarks, or maybe the remarks were being misinterpreted. And that’s an indication that they know that they’re on politically infirm terrain, and that here you have an opportunity to drive the wedge, like I described before.
We have not seen that lead to mass Republican rebellion against Donald Trump in the past, and I don’t think we should expect it to now. So the question becomes, What can you hope to get out of the fact that Republicans know that there’s something deeply wrong going on here? And that comes back to Democrats describing the problem in a way that anticipates the horrible consequences that Trump is inviting, and letting Republicans know that they are going to own those consequences. It’s not just on Trump. It’s on all of them.
Sargent: Richard Blumenthal, Democratic Senator from Connecticut, did this. Here’s what he said: Trump blaming Ukraine for Putin’s cruel, bloody assault on Ukraine is a betrayal—not only of brave freedom fighters there but of European allies and America. It gives moral cover to Putin pushing forward to swallow Ukraine—and then Poland, the Baltics, and others. Finally, Republicans must speak out and stand up before Putin exploits Trump’s weak, pathetic surrender. At the Munich Security Conference, bipartisan members of Congress heard anger and apprehension from our allies, and expressed our own support for Ukraine, face-to-face with Zelenskiy.
That’s Blumenthal saying that Republicans should be on the side of Ukraine and our allies, and they’re not. Is that coming close to what we need to see?
Beutler: There’s a bit in the middle there about Republicans need to do this before the bad thing happens—before Putin seizes on Trump’s obvious toadyism and uses it to push further into Ukraine than he already is and maybe even beyond. The point needs to be a little sharper.
Senator Blumenthal, all the Democratic senators, can be a little less homed in on Trump’s verbiage. You can write it off as just shit talking: We’re used to Donald Trump lying and abusing weaker people, and we don’t expect anything better of him, but you guys, if this leads to World War III, you’re owning that right now. You are making that possible right now, and we’re not going to let the world forget it.
That’s the psychologically manipulative political tactic that might ultimately give some of the marginal members with real misgivings about what’s going on here impetus to do something meaningful about it. There are Republicans with control over the defense budget, control over the State Department budget, who can make it very difficult for Donald Trump to fully capitulate here. They are more likely to go along with him if they’re not worried that they might pay a price down the line for capitulating to.
Sargent: It seems very clear that Republicans actually do worry about being perceived that way, don’t you think? You often hear them talking about the importance of the Western alliance and the consequences of what could happen if it’s broken up and if we don’t stand by Ukraine against Russia. Clearly, they are aware of the potential consequences and want to be perceived as aware of them as well. They want to be perceived as being mindful of them and trying to avert them, don’t you think? That makes me think that there really is an opportunity for Democrats to press that point harder.
Beutler: Yeah, I agree with that. I think Democrats have been running their opposition, in general, largely through the courts. And I’m not talking about obviously Russia-Ukraine here, I mean across the board. And that’s for better and worse. They just don’t have a lot of power in Washington, so it makes sense that you’d have Democrats in the state suing to slow Trump down or overturn some of his policies. I don’t think that option is really available to them here. So they have congressional process, and they have mass politics that they can use to try to stymie this reordering of the global order.
One of the places that they can do that is in committee hearings. Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth are eventually going to have to come testify to Congress when it comes time for budgeting. That will create opportunities for Democrats to make viral moments like, Hey, Marco Rubio, you said you were committed to NATO. What about this? Listen, here’s all the things you said about Vladimir Putin and his war on Ukraine. Why are you walking away from all of that? I mentioned they might have some leverage with Republican senators who control the budgets of those agencies.
There’s more options too. Do you remember back when Barack Obama was first negotiating the nuclear deal with Iran? Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas back then wrote a letter to the Ayatollah, telling him essentially, Think twice about cutting this deal because Democrats aren’t the only game in town. And if Republicans come to power in the near future, we’re going to just rip up the deal.
It was a huge controversy at the time because there was this informal agreement that that members of Congress wouldn’t intervene in foreign policy and at the executive branch level. But the precedent has been set, and Democrats can do something similar now. Generate publicity around this betrayal and the fact that it doesn’t define America’s character by writing a letter of their own that says to Putin that you may walk away with ill-gotten gains from having launched this war, but if you think that that means that there’s a new axis on the world stage, you should watch your step because there’s more than one party in the United States.
Sargent: That’s a really critical point. Democrats need to be saying right now that this doesn’t have to be a permanent shift in U.S. alignment, that at the end of the day, Trump is not going to be in power forever, we think, and that he’s mortal, we think. And as a result, the Democratic Party, when it comes back into power, is going to realign itself with NATO and the Western alliance.
Beutler: Absolutely. If only for their own sense of self-dignity and pride, and then having something to feel like they’re rallying toward as opposed to always being on the hind foot in fights against Republicans. The Western alliance wasn’t under this exact threat during George W. Bush’s presidency because he wasn’t nearly as corrupt as Donald Trump, and he didn’t have pretensions about throwing NATO in the trash and aligning with foreign dictators; his whole thing was democracies. But he did because that led him into war with Iraq. That created a lot of tension with what he referred to at the time as old Europe, like France and Germany. That’s yesterday’s news, and we’re with new Europe and they’re more supportive of our foreign policy adventures abroad.
So when Barack Obama became president, he had to restitch together the Western Alliance, even though it hadn’t actually fully exploded yet. And Democrats should see that as a model for the challenge they will face, but treat it as something that they can do. They’re not going to return to power in four years or whenever and have nothing to work with, that the treaty will be fully abrogated and Europe won’t be interested in getting back into it. They’re just going to treat this as an aberration, like America under hostile occupation for another four years, and then we’re going to get right back to being the leaders of the free world. That’s a good attitude to have.
Sargent: Yes, agreed. You raise a really interesting point in comparing this to George W. Bush and Democrats of the time. It’s worth stressing that in a way, Democrats are in a slightly better position toward Trump than they were toward George W. Bush during the invasion of Iraq. As you’ll recall, September 11 had just happened. Democratic Party was badly split. Half of it was endorsing the war in Iraq as of response, even going along with the fiction that it was in some sense a response to 9/11; the other half, meanwhile, wasn’t.
Right now, interestingly, you actually have some real unity among Democrats when it comes to their stance vis-a-vis Trump. They’re not worried that Trump’s position—I don’t think anyway—on Russia and Ukraine is the popular ones that they have to maneuver around it. They seem to be fully united behind the idea that the Western alliance matters, that defending Ukraine matters. Now, the big question is how they prosecute the case and whether they do it with enough aggressiveness and effectiveness, right? It’s not as if they’re in a position where they’re on their back heels politically on this.
Beutler: No. After 9/11, George W. Bush’s popularity shot up to something like 90 percent. It was crazy, right? And he held on to more than majority support for years. All the freedom fries stuff happened when he was popular, and Democrats were divided and Republicans were united. Right now, Donald Trump, depending on which poll you look at, is either treading water or a little bit below water. And he’s getting less popular. And on this issue of Russia-Ukraine, Democrats are united and Republicans are divided. That’s recipe for preventing Donald Trump from doing fatal damage to the Western alliance and maybe even fatal damage to Ukraine.
A key is that Donald Trump still has Republicans—even the ones who disagree with him on this are too scared to do anything about it. And the only way that changes is if Donald Trump becomes significantly less popular. So it would behoove Democrats to, not necessarily with this issue per se or this issue alone but with the whole suite of issues available to them, wake up every day trying to think of how to make Donald Trump less popular. How do you make Americans who don’t know what we’re talking about, what we already know, know it so they go from telling pollsters, Thumbs up on Trump, or I don’t really know what to think about Donald Trump, to Donald Trump sucks? And if you can get him back to his first term lows—high 30s, mid 30s maybe— then you can imagine the floodgates opening and Congress essentially saying, Obviously we don’t control foreign policy directly, we can’t make battlefield commands, we’re not the commander-in-chief of the armed forces; but we can defund your effort to sell out Ukraine.
Sargent: It’s interesting. In a way, Democrats also benefit from another difference between now and that time, which is in addition to George W. Bush being super popular as you said, the culture, the American people were really behind the invasion because of September 11. Now the main thing that reigns nationally is apathy. I don’t think that there’s this intense public opposition to spending money on defending Ukraine and keeping the Western alliance together. Do you?
Beutler: No, I don’t think that there’s much appetite in the U.S. for rocking the boat dramatically in any of the ways Trump has already done or is flirting with doing. He didn’t have the guts to do what Elon Musk is doing, so he just gave Elon Musk the keys to the government and said, You go crazy. He doesn’t have the guts to pull the trigger on the tariffs that he said were coming because he knows that starting recession in the U.S. would be a bad idea. And I think he also knows that whatever bluster he tweets, about making Canada the 51st state or taking over Greenland, the way to get the U.S. population firmly against him would be to commit American troops to something.
I don’t imagine the country rallying for him to capitulate to Vladimir Putin. I don’t imagine the country rallying for him to make the errors that could send the world spiraling into war, and then America would have to take a side in that war. So he doesn’t have much room to maneuver. He has plenty of room to talk shit, and he does that very well, but that’s about it. And I don’t see how he makes what he’s doing here as slimy and backstabbing as it is popular, something that Democrats feel that they have to get in line with. Certainly not something that all Republicans feel they have to get in line with, or they wouldn’t be talking the way they are.
So the goal has to be to figure out ways to make them feel more liberated to join a real popular front against what Trump is doing. Maybe that can lead to legislation that genuinely stops him in his tracks.
Sargent: So there’s a paradox here, isn’t there? It’s not as if Democrats can appeal to Republicans to be on the right side. You made an interesting point the other day, which is that Democrats basically have two options open to them. One is to appeal to Republicans to be better people and put the interests of the country and the world over those of Trump. The other option is to figure out how to rally the public. The former of those pretty clearly is a hopeless thing. On the other hand, you want to create space for them to join this popular front. I think the rules should be forget about shaming Republicans into being faithful public servants, but how do you straddle that tension? How do you put all your eggs in the basket of rallying the public while also creating space for Republicans to break from Trump?
Beutler: One thing Democrats undervalue in their political communication in general is the power of just saying what you believe to be true. Both of the things you said are true. Democrats want Republicans to do the right thing, to honor the best values of America and be truthful and reject lies. And they don’t want to scare them off of that by being too aggressive in their public-facing rhetoric. So they can just say, We know from eight years that Republicans lose all their strength when Donald Trump takes a position that they don’t agree with, and because of that, they are leading the country into chaos. They’re leading the world into a very dangerous place. And if that’s where we arrive, it’s going to be on them, and we’re not going to let them forget it. But if they find their strength, the door’s open here, and we’ll work with them. Just say both things.
There’s no reason to make the antagonism the thing that closes the door to future cooperation. We’ll leave a light on for you. The water’s warm here. But we can see what you’re doing, and we’re not going to let it go unmentioned. There’s a way to merge those two things, and it’s the one that I just outlined—where Democrats don’t give them a pass, but also say, When you’re ready, if you ever find your conscience again, we’ll work with you on this.
Sargent: Just to close this out, I think you’re right when you say that the rubber is really going to meet the road when there are actual options that the Trump administration is considering. Here you have a case with this tweet where Trump’s derangement and treachery just couldn’t be clearer, but it’s still just a tweet. And what’s going to end up happening is there will be actual various paths open to the Trump administration, some of which lead to full-blown capitulation. You’ll be hearing from Europe more loudly that this is going to open the door to more Putin conquest in Western Europe and so forth. At that point, it’s going to become pretty tough for Republicans to stand by Trump, isn’t it?
Beutler: Donald Trump is doing a lot of shit talking. He is making clear that between Putin and Zelenskiy, he’s got Putin’s back—but he’s also attuned to the backlash he’s going to face for that domestically. And it’s very possible that in the medium term, he’s going to have a meeting with Zelenskiy, and they’re going to talk about how they have reached a new understanding. A lot of it’s just going to be smoke and mirrors and for show and Trump pretending that his chaos style is actually clever like a fox.
If Trump ever says anything reasonable about this, it’s an opportunity for Democrats to turn to Republicans and say, Let’s lock this in while we can. And then obviously, if it comes down to zero-sum choices and Trump is choosing the side with Putin, and so Zelenskiy goes and tries to rally European democracies to maintain an alliance with him, that’s a moment for Democrats to turn to Republicans and say, Which side are you on? You always said that you were on the side of the good guys. Now you have to really pick.
The question of what Republicans will do at that juncture is going to turn heavily on what’s happening in U.S. domestic politics. Is Donald Trump still at 48 percent approval or has he dipped down to 40 or below? And if they side with Trump, the imperative has to be to make them own the consequences when they arrive. And if they break with Trump, it has to be to work with them in good faith to bring this episode to an end and put America back on the right side of it.
It’s a obviously difficult line to walk, especially because Democrats don’t have any formal power at the moment. But in a way, that just frees them to look at the situation plainly and let their honest feelings about what’s happening drive their actions.
Sargent: Really well said. If there’s one thing we could all use, it’s a sign from Democrats, top Democrats, that they’re actually thinking this stuff through. I don’t think we have that sign. Folks, make sure to check out Brian Beutler’s Substack because he constantly talks about what Democrats could be doing better in a way that few others do. Brian, it’s always good to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Beutler: It’s great to be here.
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.