The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 23 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 looks like we’ve crossed over to a new place when it comes to President Trump’s corruption. We’ve seen a confluence of events here. Trump’s destruction of a White House building to create a ballroom for him and his rich friends. Trump demanding that the Justice Department hand over $230 million to compensate him for damages. And now, Democrats going after all this in a newly aggressive way. Meanwhile, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt issued an extraordinary new defense of Trump’s corruption that only underscores the depths of contempt that Trump and the White House have for the rule of law. We think it’s often forgotten how important corruption can be to voters. Yet this is mostly absent from the political discourse right now, and we don’t get why. New Republic staff writer Matt Ford has an excellent new piece that really centers Trump’s nakedly corrupt self-dealing as the core story of his presidency. So we’re talking to Matt about all this today. Matt, thanks for coming on, man.
Matt Ford: Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here.
Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom. For people who haven’t really paid attention to this, can you just sum up where we are on it and why it’s so utterly crazy?
Ford: Sure. Earlier this summer, Trump announced that he was going to build a ballroom where most of the East Wing currently is. The plans were kind of dismissed at the time as a little fanciful, and it was assumed that the project would take some time to complete if it followed the normal channels.
Unfortunately, Trump doesn’t follow the normal channels, and so he simply started tearing down the East Wing of the White House on Monday—and as of Wednesday, it is now almost entirely gone.
Sargent: He just started demolishing this building without any word from Congress, without any process, without anything?
Ford: Correct. The line from the White House is that the commission that oversees planning in the Capitol, which he partially controls, only oversees construction, not demolition. And so he didn’t need approval for that part, which to me is a perfect representation of how his presidency works.
Sargent: It’s just an extraordinary story in so many ways. as always, White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, made it even worse. Listen to this.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): And I believe there’s a lot of fake outrage right now, because nearly every single president who has lived in this beautiful White House behind me has made modernizations and renovations of their own. While many presidents have privately dreamt about this, it’s President Trump who is actually doing something about it. And he is the builder in chief. In large part, he was reelected back to this people’s house because he’s good at building things. He has done it his entire life, his entire career.
Sargent: Matt, note how Levitt takes this moment as an occasion not to seriously reassure the American people or to take corruption concerns seriously at all, but instead to build up the Trump cult and as always appeal to the audience of one. What do you make of that? I’ve never seen anything like this before.
Ford: Well, it’s pretty striking. I mean, the builder part is especially telling. I mean, it’s really something to say that when you’re literally destroying part of the presidential mansion. There’s not much building going on right now over there.
But more to the point, it sort of underscores the degree to which, like you say, this is an administration that is focused on one man’s whims. This isn’t a simple situation where the president is controlling or directing or guiding the executive branch.
This is a situation where the executive branch is all working toward his will. It is completely subordinated to him in a way that not any congressional law—or perhaps even court order—can staunch.
Sargent: Well, to your point, on another front, we’ve now learned that Trump is unilaterally pushing the Justice Department to hand over $230 million in payments for damages that he allegedly suffered due to the Russia investigation and his indictment for stealing state secrets.
The person who makes the decision on whether they give him this money is Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. For those who don’t know, Todd Blanche was Trump’s personal lawyer. Trump installed Todd Blanche in the Justice Department in order to function as his personal lawyer—not to function as a Justice Department lawyer in any meaningful sense.
Matt, can you talk about how crazy that is?
Ford: It’s pretty crazy. The only thing I could think of that would be more corrupt is if he walked into Fort Knox and just started pocketing the gold bars. This is just one step removed from that, because his personal lawyer is the one who gets to sign off on it. Somebody who is ethically conflicted-out because he was part of the litigation in question in the first place. I don’t see any possible way that this sort of frivolous argument can survive. It should be seen simply as just looting the treasury.
Sargent: Well it is, and I think the key to understanding this is to kind of go back and explain what the Justice Department’s role is supposed to be. It’s supposed to be an independent entity. After Watergate, a whole bunch of norms and even some laws were passed to make that. So Trump is essentially bulldozing all that. Can you give us the big picture there?
Ford: Right. So for most of American history, there was an understanding that you’re not supposed to use the prosecutorial power—the immense weight of federal law enforcement—for personal gain. Not every president has been great about this; we’ll stipulate to that to the front. But that’s been sort of the background understanding.
After Watergate, those norms were reinforced. Justice Department independence was much more seriously pursued. Attorneys General took it upon themselves to distance themselves from most of the day-to-day political operations of the White House. Obviously, you coordinate on drug busts, but not on corruption indictments.
So Trump challenged that severely in his first term. It didn’t completely collapse. But now we’ve seen it wash away like a sandcastle on the beach. There’s no cognizable difference between the White House and the Justice Department at this point that we’ve been able to see—other than, with the notable exception of releasing the Epstein files, suddenly there seems to not be a unitary executive when it comes to the Attorney General’s discretion to do that.
Sargent: That’s clever, Matt. Can you explain it?
Ford: Well, you know, under the unitary executive theory, the president has absolute command over the White House. Whether or not that’s what the framers intended is heavily disputed—I’ll put it that way, and I’ll set it aside for a future podcast appearance.
But suffice it to say that if the president wanted to release the Epstein files, he could just tell the Justice Department to do so. He’s bulldozed its independence. The fact that he is no longer doing so shows how convenient it can be, and how politically important it could be, to maintain it separately.
Although, in this case, he’s using that separateness—or the image of it—to further his own personal goals.
Sargent: Right. He’s basically saying, this is up to Attorney General Pen Bondi and up to FBI Director Kash Patel. It’s not my decision.
Ford Yeah, the buck stops somewhere else, is the motto.
Sargent: So Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House, had something to say about the $230 million shakedown that Trump’s attempting. Listen to this.
Congressmen Hakeem Jeffries (voiceover): And we’re also fighting to clean up corruption in Washington, D.C., where we have an American president behaving like an organized crime boss, stealing taxpayer dollars in real time in front of everyone in plain sight. And the Republicans have nothing to say about the emerging crime scene at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Sargent: Matt, you don’t often hear Democrats talk quite this way, but it seems essential to me to point out that crimes are happening. To let the American people know that they are being looted and pillaged. What do you make of what you heard there from Jeffries?
Ford: Well, I think it’s a noteworthy escalation in how Democrats talk about this stuff. And Democrats, for the large part, have not really been shy about what they think of the president. But to define this as criminal activity is important to me because it suggests future consequences.
And I think that when you look at that, you have to consider, obviously, that there’s the immunity decision in Trump v. United States. But the scope of that decision—how far it extends down to subordinate officials in the executive branch, what counts as a core power versus something more amorphous—there’s a lot to tease out there.
And I think the cudgel of potential prosecution, the deterrent effect that it could have, is still an important factor in what Democrats can do to deter this.
Sargent: Right. I think Democrats need to be saying very forcefully right now that anybody who’s carrying out a corrupt or illegal order for Donald Trump needs to prepare to face accountability later. I want to return to Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general here. We have a piece up on this at TNR.com. Please check it out. But basically, Todd Blanche is at the nexus of a lot of decisions by the Justice Department that are arguably among their most corrupt, whether it involves prosecuting Trump’s enemies or things involving illegal deportations, Tren de Aragua, all that sort of stuff. Todd Blanche is going to be in a position where he might need a pardon from Trump. And yet at the same time, Trump is essentially saying, Hey, Todd, sign me a check for $230 million. How does Todd Blanche say no to that under these circumstances?
Ford: Well, I mean, the question is whether he even wants to say no. I mean, this is not—not to prejudge the man too much—but he knew what he was signing up for. I’ll give Trump some credit for this: He made abundantly clear on the campaign trail that this was what he was going to do.
He was going to weaponize the Justice Department to go after his political enemies on frivolous or pretextual grounds, and that he was going to use it for his personal political gain. And so far—promise kept.
Blanche, you know, I’m very curious to see what he does next. Obviously, we’re very far out of the range of normal activity here. But in theory, he would recuse himself, since he was involved on the other side of this as a lawyer in private practice.
But I think it’ll be an important temperature check of just how corrupt this administration is—to see whether or not he even bothers with that.
Sargent: Well, it’s a really good point I want to jump in and say that Trump is not gonna want Todd Blanche to recuse himself and this gets at what I was trying to say before which is why Trump puts someone like Todd Blanche there he sees recusal as a betrayal of him, since he openly and explicitly sees Todd Blanche as his own lawyer, not a lawyer for the United States.
Ford: That’s right. His experience with the—with his first term shows that recusal is something that he takes not as a matter of ethics, but as a personal insult. You’re just supposed to do what Trump says. Unfortunately for Trump, the legal system, the Anglo-American legal tradition, to put it more broadly, doesn’t really work like that. You’re supposed to recuse yourself from these things, and to not do so is highly problematic.
Sargent: Well, let’s listen to Senator Chris Murphy, another Democrat who’s engaging pretty forcefully on this. Check this out.
Senator Chris Murphy (voiceover): Well, listen, there’s a lot of history that has taken place in the East Wing and it was just destroyed without any conversation in the American public, without any consent of Congress. It was absolutely illegal. And yeah, that visual is powerful because you are essentially watching the destruction of the rule of law happen as those walls come down. It is just a symbol about how cavalier he is about every single day acting in new and illegal ways.
Sargent: So there Murphy is talking about Trump and the ballroom. I thought what’s critical is Murphy saying that the American people never agreed to this and the building belongs to the American people. This is another good example of Democrats highlighting the sheer crime-ing that we’re seeing here and critically who the victims are, which is us.
Ford: That’s a really good way for him to put it. And I think it’s a really important point to hammer home that this is the people’s house. It does not belong to the president. He does not own it. He is not leasing it. He has no property-right claim over it whatsoever.
He is simply crashing there for four years because of his job. We don’t have to let him stay at the White House. It’s not obligated in the Constitution. Congress is not required to provide him with a residence—it’s a convenience, and I think it should be viewed as such. And because of that, it’s a public trust.
It belongs to the National Park Service because it’s a national heritage site. It’s a place of history; it’s a place of meaning. I don’t know how many of the listeners will have ever had the chance to tour it, but if you tour it, you do get the sense of the weight of America’s history when you walk through there.
And you might think, well, the East Wing is not the West Wing, it’s not the Oval Office, it’s not the Executive Mansion itself. But the recklessness with which he pursued this suggests that all that history could be at risk. There’s no evidence that he did any documentation, any cataloging, any preservation efforts whatsoever.
Sargent: That gets to the core idea in your piece, which I want to talk about. It’s that appallingly corrupt self-dealing is at the very core of the Trump presidency. It’s like the throbbing lifeblood of this national moment. I think a lot of Trump voters tune this stuff out because they assume that whatever is good for the president is good for them. He’s masterfully seduced them into thinking that. But this looks like something different. What we’re seeing now is Trump directly taking their money, taxpayer money, putting it in his pocket, or at least trying to, and building a huge vanity project for himself. This is why I think we’re at a Rubicon-crossing moment of sorts. How do we make that break through a bit more?
Ford: Well, I think that the American people are going to have to realize that this is not—I hate the phrase, this is not normal—but I feel like there’s a certain understanding among Americans of, I guess, a background radiation-level of corruption in Washington.
Whenever you bring up that somebody is corrupt, a partisan will often reply, well, so-and-so is corrupt too. But I think we can firmly say that nobody has ever torn down the East Wing of [the White House] for their own self-gratification and their own ego.
And I think the $230 million payment being considered by the Justice Department is an even more egregious example of this. This is not a matter of back-scratching or doing a favor for somebody, or the more sort of expected forms of corruption. This is just looting. There’s no reason for it whatsoever. It’s purely on pretextual grounds.
And we have to hope that Americans will realize and act accordingly, in understanding that this is beyond the pale for any president to consider, let alone execute.
Sargent: I think maybe the big story here as well is that the MAGA movement doesn’t have a conception of the public interest. It’s really just about Trump and MAGA and nothing else. Anything else that stands in the way of them is the enemy, even millions and millions of Americans. And so I guess I want to bring this back to Karoline Leavitt’s weird diatribe. When she makes it all about Trump, when she hears objections to the people’s house getting destroyed and decides that that’s a moment to engage in more cultish worship of this one man, she really underscores how lawless this all is, how it’s really all about this one person. Can you talk about that a bit?
Ford: Yeah, the lawlessness is important, and it’s certainly an important aspect of it. But what really stands out to me is the utter negation of the American civic tradition—the idea that public service is a service. The idea that you temporarily put aside your private interests, you act in the public good, and then you return to private life after serving a term subject to the people’s will.
This is not like high-minded, college-level political science. This is basic stuff. This is elementary school civics. And to see it so completely flouted and ignored and replaced with this sort of cultish devotion to one man—you know, a landlord from Manhattan—it’s not only unseemly, it’s almost blasphemous.
I mean, we talk about, you know, our sites of democracy as sacred. Congress is sacred. Well, the president defiled that when he sent a mob to disrupt the electoral count four years ago. The White House is a historical site for our history. The president is demolishing it at will. He’s paving over the Rose Garden. He’s gilding it to make it look like some cheesy casino—Atlantic City casino, not a Nevada casino. Those are classier.
And I think it just shows the deprivation and depredations to which this administration will succumb in terms of furthering whatever the president wants. It’s the sort of thing that 10, 20, 30 years from now is going to look absolutely disgusting.
Sargent: It will be taught in civic textbooks for many, many generations. Matt Ford, thanks for explaining that this is so much more than Trump just being a cheeseball. Really well-said stuff today, man. Thank you.
Ford: Thank you so much for having me.