The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 26 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.
It’s becoming clear that in recent days, President Trump has reached a new level of emboldenment when it comes to his ongoing authoritarian takeover. He’s venting his rage at news organizations that displease him and threatening government retribution against them. He’s responded to multiple different high-profile Democrats and politicians who criticized him by threatening to send troops to their cities or unleashing state power against them in other ways. There’s a brazenness to Trump’s latest round of threats that crosses over into something new. Journalist and historian Garrett Graff has a great new piece on his Substack, Doomsday Scenario, arguing that we really are seeing the advent of American fascism right before our eyes. But critically, Garrett also explains that the process by which a transformation like this takes place is incremental and often hard to recognize while it’s happening—with multiple potential endpoints. So we’re going to work through all this with him right now. Garrett, thanks for coming on.
Garrett Graff: Thanks for having me again, Greg.
Sargent: I want to start with Trump’s quote about the mayor of Washington, D.C. He said this, “Mayor Muriel Bowser must immediately stop giving false and highly inaccurate crime figures, or bad things will happen, including a complete and total Federal takeover of the City!” Garrett, I want to stress here that Trump made this threat—the threat of a total federal takeover of the city—against the will of its leaders and its residents in response to speech, in response to her trying to inform constituents about the very thing he’s lying relentlessly about: the level of crime in D.C. Your response to all that?
Graff: Tweets like this from Trump, I think, are indicative of what has really worried me over the course of this month, which is we have seen this continual escalation and ratcheting up of the hostility and aggression and posture of the D.C. federal takeover in a way that, again, felt different. There was a version of this in early August where I was like, Maybe this is one of those weird performative things where they’re going to be a couple of nights of a couple of extra FBI patrols through the city and maybe some National Guard troops posted at the National Mall.
But what I think we saw over the course of last week was this rising level of aggression of the federal interference in D.C.—up to and including ICE officers and agents of this weird amalgamated federal task force of various agencies coming together to fight nondescript crime of some kind in D.C. literally shouting, Papers, please, to people getting off the metro in D.C. on their way home from work and forcing people to show ID to walk out of a transit station. We saw a 14-ton up-armored MRAP patrolling the streets of D.C. slam into and T-bone a civilian car. And now, as of this weekend—as of Sunday night—the National Guard are now authorized to be carrying weapons. We can see now that this is an occupation by the U.S. military on domestic soil that is being done to a population and not in support of them. They’ve tried to have this fig leaf of, We’re out there protecting D.C. But what you actually see in DC is deserted streets, deserted monuments, restaurant reservations cratering—because people don’t want to go out on the street and risk these interactions with the armed agents of the state that are there.
Sargent: Trump also threatened several others in similar fashion. He threatened Chris Christie. After Christie criticized his corruption of the Justice Department, Trump tweeted that the feds might investigate a matter related to the 2013 closing of George Washington Bridge lanes to punish a Democratic official. Trump said this, “[P]erhaps we should start looking at that very serious situation again?” And after Maryland governor Wes Moore criticized Trump on TV, Trump threatened to send in the military to Baltimore to “clean up crime.” He said, “I will send in the ‘troops’.” And he threatened to pull funding for the city’s Francis Scott Key Bridge after Moore criticized Trump for militarizing cities. Now note, Garrett, that in all these cases, Trump is making threats to silence those who are calling out the abuses of power, calling out the authoritarianism. It sounds to me like an open and explicit demand for acquiescence and surrender. What does history tell us about this? Is this a step down the slope? What do you think of what Trump did there?
Graff: Well, it’s not even just political opponents. And this is, I think, an important part of this. It is part and parcel again of this worldview that Trump has brought into office this time where “the state is me”—the old French king line—where it’s not just that Donald Trump doesn’t like being criticized by domestic political opponents. It’s that Donald Trump thinks that he personally and his taste should dictate what is in our museums with his attacks on the Smithsonian. He believes that his taste should dictate what is performed in our theaters with his takeover of the Kennedy Center. He believes that his taste and his personal preferences should dictate what books people should read as we have seen him go after things like the Naval Academy library.
His craziest tweet of the weekend to me was him trying to dictate that Major League Baseball immediately induct Roger Clemens into the Hall of Fame because he played golf with Roger Clemens and, boy, Roger Clemens is just a great guy. This idea that there’s one true vision for America—and it is Donald Trump’s personal vision for what our life and our culture and our society should be—is to me the most clear example of authoritarianism that we could see.
Sargent: I want to underscore, Garrett, though, that he’s directly demanding complete surrender.
Graff: Complete surrender on all fronts: in politics, in sports, in culture, in business. Part of my essay today was this insanity of Trump capitalism we have seen in the last couple of weeks where Tim Cook from Apple came to Washington D.C. to hand Donald Trump literal pieces of gold in the Oval Office to curry favor. We’ve seen Donald Trump having the government take 10 percent of Intel over because Donald Trump just believes he should have 10 percent of Intel. Nvidia is paying a literally unconstitutional export tax because Donald Trump decreed that if they wanted to sell chips to China then they had to pay this export tax of 15 percent straight to the U.S. government, which I’m sure somewhere will get laundered around to end up in Donald Trump’s presidential library like all of these other fees and fines. But this is just insanity, and it is nothing like any version of America that we have seen in modern times.
Sargent: And by the way, reinforcing your point are the threats against the media. In two separate rants on Truth Social, Trump said ABC and NBC should have their licenses revoked by the FCC. He also said they should “pay up BIG.” Now, it’s true that Trump is botching things a bit here on the specifics of how FCC licenses work, but still the threatened action is a direct response to criticism of him. He’s explicit about this in the tweets. He says this is about bad stories about him. I just can’t help but notice that there’s a real snowballing here where we’re really seeing Trump get a whole lot more comfortable with making it a lot more explicit—this demand for absolute capitulation on every front.
Graff: Yes. And again, the reason presumably he’s getting more comfortable is so far everyone is capitulating. One reason he feels that he can go after these networks and their FCC licenses is because he has pretty continually extorted media organizations since winning the presidency with frivolous lawsuits and holding up the Paramount merger until they paid what their own board of directors believe is a bribe to Donald Trump in order to get their merger through. There was reporting that what really held up the Paramount settlement with Donald Trump was the board of directors being concerned that they were opening themselves up to a future bribery investigation by a subsequent administration. And I’m not a lawyer, but one thing that I generally believe to be true is that if you believe that you are paying a bribe, you are probably paying a bribe.
Sargent: So let’s get to the points you make in your piece about incremental movement down the slippery slope. Trump signed an executive order on Monday empowering Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to establish specialized units in the National Guard that will be specifically trained and equipped to deal with public-order issues. Look, there’s clearly an effort by Trump and Stephen Miller to acclimate voters to the sight of troops in American cities. This is ostensibly to conduct domestic law enforcement, which is itself bad, but I think the real game here is to get Americans accustomed to the use of the American military against Americans. Maybe not military violence against Americans, but the use of the military to, in some sense, corral and control constituents in an American city inside the homeland. Am I overreading this?
Graff: Not at all. One of the things I was trying to do in my essay this week was we’ve warned for so long—not just in the last couple of weeks and months but the last couple of years—of the creep of Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. And I think many Americans wrongly believed that there was going to be one clear unambiguous moment, like a light switch going on or off, where everything before this moment is a democracy, everything after this moment is an authoritarian fascist regime. And of course, that’s not what it was going to be like. That’s not what Germany was like in the 1930s. That’s not what Hungary was like in the 2000s. It’s a creeping incremental process—and that there’s a blurring of lines here, there’s a norm destroyed there, a presidential diktat that goes unchallenged. And then you wake up one morning and the country is different.
And to me, writing today, Monday, August 25, that was this morning where it really feels like we are in a country that at some point in the month of August became a very different country than everything that we have known before. And that this idea of the military being used to police American cities—not at the request of local governments but over their vociferous objection and almost in spite of their objection—is a new moment. It’s one that feels more like the British redcoats in Boston in the 1700s than it does previous incidents like we’ve seen Dwight Eisenhower calling up the 101st Airborne at Little Rock Central High School—up to and including moments like today in a press conference where Donald Trump actually was musing aloud about how he thinks some people actually do want a dictator. Some people call me a dictator, but maybe people really want a dictator. Some people really do want a dictator.
Sargent: Garrett, now that you said that, let’s play that audio.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): As you all know, Chicago is a killing field right now, and they don’t acknowledge it. And they say, We don’t need him. Freedom, freedom. He’s a dictator. He’s a dictator. A lot of people are saying, Maybe we like a dictator. I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person.
Sargent: Well, there you go. He said it. He said he didn’t want to be a dictator. He said he’s not a dictator. But he said some people want him to be a dictator. I think that’s best seen as a trial balloon, a test run, another tiny step on the incremental slope.
Graff: And you talk about America getting accustomed to the military playing a role in American cities. One of the things that I’ve been talking about over the last couple of weeks is you have to look at the bigger picture in all of this. Again, these events are not taking place in vacuums. The Texas redistricting fight, the Donald Trump musing on Twitter last week that Vladimir Putin told him that we should get rid of voting by mail and everyone has to vote in person. I have never believed that Donald Trump was going to outright cancel the 2026 election or the 2028 election. Almost every country in the world has elections. Vladimir Putin has been regularly elected president of Russia. Saddam Hussein was regularly elected the head of Iraq.
What I think we’re going to see and what I think we should be on alert for is the way that all of these Republican plots—all of these Trump plots and plans and schemes and tweets—are geared toward subtly shaping who shows up to vote in 2026, in 2028. You don’t need to cancel the 2026 elections if in every minority-heavy district in America, you just have voting day. You make everyone vote in person, and then on voting day have everyone have to run a gauntlet of ICE checkpoints and National Guard checkpoints in order to get to the polling place. Think about the way that voting looks in a country where next year there are 10,000 more ICE officers than there are in the U.S. right now. Think of what it looks like if there are 15 cities in the country that are being governed by military authorities and there are routine immigration checkpoints set up all across the city on voting day. All of this to me is about how the Republicans consolidate power around this authoritarian vision and regime and then lock in through the normal tools of our democracy—an illegitimate claim to power going forward.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you what, Garrett, Steve Bannon made this very plain. He recently said on his podcast exactly what we’re talking about here—that you’re damn right ICE is going to be monitoring voting places on Election Day 2026. There’s absolutely no doubt that MAGA sees what’s happening right now and is fully expecting a heavy military presence during the voting in 2026 and fully expects it to be designed to swing the election to Republicans. Folks, you can’t say you weren’t warned. Garrett was about as clear as possible there. Garrett, thanks so much for coming on, man. Harrowing stuff, though.
Graff: Thanks for having me again, Greg.