The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 21 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.
President Trump has been raging at Bruce Springsteen for days now, demanding investigations of him with an intensity that borders on the comical. It’s easy to dismiss this as the unhinged rantings of the very unwell person who just happens to be president of the United States—but in the background, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey has just charged a House Democrat, LaMonica McIver, with supposedly assaulting and impeding a law enforcement officer outside an ICE detention facility. Guess who’s bringing those charges? Alina Habba, a top ally of Donald Trump. Asawin Suebsaeng, a writer at Rolling Stone magazine, has a new piece arguing that we need to take Trump’s demands for investigations into Springsteen more seriously. And we think that New Jersey episode shows why: Little by little, Trump’s use of investigatory power against political opponents is escalating. So we’re talking to Asawin about all this. Good to have you back on, Swin.
Asawin Suebsaeng: I’m so fucking sick of this shit. I mean, not talking to you—I love coming on here whenever you invite me on. It’s awesome. But you know what I mean.
Sargent: Well, I’m really glad that my intro got a rise out of you, because that means it drew blood. So Bruce Springsteen has been criticizing Trump pretty ferociously at his concerts, calling him corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous; attacking him for siding with dictators, kidnapping foreign students off the streets, and destroying our university system. Trump has responded by getting crazier, calling Springsteen a bunch of names, but Trump also said, We’ll see how it goes for Springsteen when he returns. A veiled threat. He then said he’s calling for a major investigation of a made-up thing: that Kamala Harris somehow bought Springsteen’s endorsement by hiring him to perform. Swin, how crazy is that threat?
Suebsaeng: All Bruce Springsteen did was exercise his American constitutional right to free speech. He was doing it abroad, while on tour—but all Donald Trump was reacting to there was Bruce Springsteen using constitutionally protected free speech to say, I don’t like Donald Trump or what he is currently doing to the country. Don’t get me wrong—they were highly critical things. But they are not things that we are raised as Americans to believe are in any way whatsoever beyond the pale, in terms of what is our civic duty—especially as public figures or even private citizens—to criticize people in power. And Donald Trump’s reaction to that was to essentially issue a fatwa against Bruce Springsteen, Oprah Winfrey, and Beyoncé Knowles.
Sargent: I like the way you called it a fatwa. It’s almost as if he’s a radical cleric or something issuing a command to a whole army of followers out there. That’s what you’re getting at, right?
Suebsaeng: Right. And to talk about another authoritarian regime, when you think of a place like, say, Egypt.… That TV host—I’m blanking on his name—who’s known as the Egyptian Jon Stewart, said much rougher things about Mubarak or El Sisi than Bruce Springsteen is currently saying about Donald Trump. And he was still allowed to be on the air and broadcast his show and say hypercritical things. And that’s in a place with a much more authoritarian environment than we have in the U.S. But to Donald Trump, it doesn’t matter. Bruce Springsteen said something that pissed him off just a little bit. So he is someone who [Trump] has to threaten with a major federal investigation—a criminal investigation—and he is a head on which Donald Trump needs to bring the massive weight of the entire federal apparatus to crack down. It is a crusade that Donald Trump has been launching against the First Amendment and free expression in this country since at least his 2016 campaign. And it has only gotten worse since he became president the first time—and much, much, much worse and more bloodthirsty and more authoritarian since he’s become president the second time.
Sargent: Well, in your piece, you raised a really interesting point, which is that behind all of this is a genuine desire on Trump’s part to ramp up use of various government agencies to go after supposed campaign violations committed by political opponents, which of course really is a desire to use state power to constrain political activity by the opposition. Can you talk about that?
Suebsaeng: Sure. And like you were teasing at the beginning of this conversation, it would be a lot easier to dismiss this as a mere temper tantrum from the sitting president. It would still be bad; the president’s words, even if they’re not backed up by action, always have meaning. But it’d be easier to dismiss it if this weren’t in the context of a Trump administration that has been gleefully showing publicly that it is willing to throw people in jail based off of little more than they wrote an op-ed or they were a student who protested in a way that Donald Trump or Marco Rubio or Kristi Noem did not like.
Trump for years now has really wanted to weaponize campaign finance laws against his real and perceived enemies in the Democratic Party, in Hollywood, in late-night TV, on television, in different liberal-aligned celebrity circles. And this is something that he’s been very upfront about, including publicly. He has stated that he “believes”—aggressive scare quotes on the word believes—that a lot of things that late-night comics, who are nowadays almost to a tee liberal- and Democratic-aligned, [say], or even shows like Saturday Night Live, are an illegal in-kind contribution to the Democratic Party or Democratic campaigns; and that these things should be investigated by the FEC, the FCC, or even the Department of Justice.
Now, that theory, if you can even call it that, is stupid. We don’t have time on this episode to describe exactly how stupid it is, but I think your listeners can figure it out—given that just saying it, I think we all got a little bit dumber on this podcast. But this is something that he “believes” or at least wants to pretend to believe so he can harness the weight of the federal government against certain high-profile enemies. And this is something that he has spoken about during the 2024 campaign and during his current administration with lawyers and political advisers who he’s very close to. According to our sources who are talking to us for this story at Rolling Stone, some of those people—those lawyers and those political lieutenants—are now working at very high levels in the second Trump administration. So this is not something where Donald Trump is just ranting and raving about it all alone out there on an island. This is something where heavy hitters in the MAGA elite and in the Republican elite, even if they don’t really believe it on an intellectual level, are willing to give Trump space to cook and to be like, Let’s see how far we can take this. Let’s threaten an investigation. Let’s maybe lay the groundwork for launching an actual formal investigation. And it’s not a good place we’re at right now.
Sargent: I’ll say. Let’s talk about Representative LaMonica McIver, who was just conducting oversight in an ICE detention facility in Jersey. DOJ is saying she assaulted federal agents in the course of trying to protect Newark’s mayor from getting arrested. She flatly denies any such assault. What’s your take on what happened there, Swin?
Suebsaeng: You have seen the video that they’re talking about, right? That DHS itself days ago put out publicly saying, This is our evidence for this so-called assault? I’m always leaving the door ajar to there being something I don’t know or a piece of footage or evidence that I’m not seeing, but based on the evidence—or so-called evidence—that the Trump administration has put out there saying, Here’s the video, here are the photos.... You can watch it for yourself and judge it for yourself, but all I’m seeing is that it says almost the polar opposite of what they’re claiming. And yet, even with that, Trump’s Justice Department—his Department of Justice—and the Trump White House, which is controlling both of those supposedly independent entities, feel more than comfortable—more than comfortable—using our taxpayer dollars to launch what I am sure is a series of expensive investigations and criminal charges against this Democratic elected official. Even though the evidence they’re putting out there seems to cut against everything they’re saying, they feel emboldened enough to mount this crusade against this woman. And that is the thing that is, I think, objectively rather chilling.
Sargent: It certainly is. I want to try to get at what I think they’re really doing here. DOJ was talking about bringing charges against the Newark mayor before, [then] decided not to. I think what’s really going on here is that DOJ is feeling pressure from Trump to escalate the law enforcement operations against Democrats. Clearly, DOJ is trying to find ways to do this. That’s what I think is so alarming. Look how they’re moving from one Dem to the next, looking for something that will stick. It’s ominous. Trump wants an investigation that results in a genuine, real-life prosecution of the Democrat. DOJ knows that, and they’re going to find one.
Suebsaeng: You are absolutely correct that Trump and his senior White House lieutenants are leaning on different parts of the administration, particularly the Department of Justice, to do their bidding. They’re not even hiding it. They’re not even pretending that there is some patina of independence between the Oval Office and Main Justice.
Numerous sources in and close to the administration who we’ve been speaking to for weeks have been telling us, even before these things that you’re talking about started happening, they kept telling us over and over again, No, no, the lawyers and the senior administration officials in this second Trump administration are 1,000 percent serious about arresting and potentially prosecuting sanctuary city mayors, Democratic mayors, Democratic electeds and congresspeople who we believe are standing too much in [the] way of the Trump administration and the Trump agenda, particularly with regard to immigration. We have drawn up the battle plans for it, so to speak. We’ve drawn up the blueprints and the legal justifications, and what we need you to do right now—
And this next part is my words, not theirs, but what they seemed to be conveying to me—especially with how gleeful and enthusiastic they seemed about these things—really did seem like another stepped-up version of the MAGA edition of “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” They are incredibly geared up to do this. And as you point out, the Trump White House is putting a lot of pressure on the rest of the administration to get it done. And they want nothing more than this. Nothing more.
Sargent: It’s absolutely clear. During the first Trump administration, there was almost a joke out there that Trump needed his Roy Cohn, right? That was a line that came from Trump himself, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” We all joked about that, but now he’s got a whole army of Roy Cohns that are working for him. We joked about how during the first Trump administration, he would call DOJ lawyers “my lawyers,” as if they’re his personal lawyers. Guess what? Alina Habba, who’s the U.S. attorney from New Jersey, was Trump’s personal lawyer. Now she is a prosecutor. She’s the one who’s carrying this out in New Jersey. I don’t know, man. That looks pretty bad to me.
Suebsaeng: The attorney general was one of Trump’s lawyers in his defense team for one of his impeachments. The Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was also one of his personal lawyers. Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary, which is an incredibly important job in the West Wing, was one of his personal lawyers. We can go down the list. It is a government stacked full of Trump’s personal legal armada. And that is by design because he has never believed—and really right now does not believe—that there should be any daylight between what the supposedly independent FBI and Justice Department and other federal departments and agencies are doing and what he sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office wants.
Sargent: This is a 50-year setback because the idea of DOJ independence emerged after Watergate as an answer to the Nixon scandals. A whole bunch of post-Watergate reforms were put in place—but what also happened was a norm set in, in which the Department of Justice and the FBI and federal law enforcement didn’t function as an arm of the president. That was a norm. The idea of prosecutorial independence is something that developed. It’s a good thing. It’s something we want. It’s now just getting wiped away with a sweep of Trump’s hand.
Suebsaeng: Yeah. And Nixon, for all of his massive, historic, grotesque abuses and flaws, at least tried to hide some of those things—or a lot of those things—including with regards to trying to sic the IRS on members of his enemies list. Donald Trump is going out there publicly saying, The IRS needs to be sicced on my enemies, including at that decrepit place near Boston known as Harvard University. It’s not just rolling back this hard-won progress that you’re talking about. It’s rolling it back with a smile on his face, very gratuitously and very publicly, as if he is asking and daring the American public and the court system to try to stop him when he knows that they absolutely cannot because he controls the power of the executive branch.
In fact, for one of our stories from what feels like a million years ago but was probably just three months ago or something like that, we wrote about the prevailing legal principle of the second Trump administration. And there was one conservative lawyer we talked to—who’s very close to Donald Trump, who helped design a lot of this—who simply told us bluntly, albeit anonymously, when we asked him, OK, what’s the legal principle this time around when it comes to how Donald Trump wields power and helps make policy and things like that? They used one sentence, which was, “What are you going to do about it?”
Sargent: That’s amazing. Swin, experts in what’s called competitive authoritarianism will say that one of the telltale signs of this encroaching on us is that the party in power starts using the state to slowly constrict the political activities and maneuvering room of the opposition until there’s not really a level playing field in any meaningful sense anymore. It seems like we’re seeing this now pretty clearly—not just with the obvious things like the army of Roy Cohns going out to arrest Democrats and stuff but with the stuff like we saw with Bruce Springsteen, the stuff you’re reporting on—the use of federal agencies in all kinds of ways to constrict and intimidate Democrats into not doing politics. That’s really the name of the game here. It’s competitive authoritarianism, and it’s upon us, isn’t it?
Suebsaeng: Yes, but the other equally important component of it to me is that he is cowing his own party in a way that we really have not seen, I don’t think, in our lifetime. A political party in the vast majority of time that you and I have been alive and been aware of American politics is not supposed to allow its leader, even if he or she is the president of the U.S., to publicly declare a crusade and potential criminal investigations against a rock star simply because that rock star said something that pissed the president off. Not even something beyond the pale—just something politically critical that the president of the U.S. didn’t like. For most of the time that you and I and your listeners have been alive, a political party has been there to constrain its leader, even if they’re the sitting president, from acting in a way that is so brazenly corrupt and authoritarian.
Right now, Donald Trump is doing all of these things with a pat on the back and a chortling smile from the entirety of the Republican Party, conservative media apparatus, and the conservative movement. So that, I think, is just as massive a problem as the things that you were talking about earlier, because we are being plunged into reality where the GOP and Donald Trump are giddily working overtime to rig the system against their opposition—even when Donald Trump’s second term ends. But at the same time, they’re elevating his cult of personality to a level that, look, if people on the internet or critics of the president want to start comparing it to places like North Korea, I’m not going to stop them.
Sargent: It is the North Korea–ification of the Republican Party. There’s no question about it. It really is nothing more than an authoritarian cult. Asawin Suebsaeng, on that cheery note, let’s call it a day, man. Thanks for coming on. Always great to talk to you.
Suebsaeng: See you in Pyongyang.