The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 17 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.
As you’ve heard by now, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles gave 11 interviews to Vanity Fair in which she was way too candid about, well, everything. To our mind, though, the most interesting thing she did was to admit that Trump’s prosecutions are about “retribution” against enemies. We think this gets at a bigger story, which is that this entire effort on Trump’s part is just falling apart. And it’s happened with astonishing speed. On top of that, what Susie Wiles just said is surely going to make it even harder for Trump to carry out his lawless efforts to jail his opponents. And right on cue, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went full cult in response, making the whole spectacle even uglier. Asawin Suebsaeng, a political reporter for Zeteo, has a new piece coming out today explaining all this, so we’re talking to him about the implosion of those prosecutorial efforts. Swin, always good to have you on.
Asawin Suebsaeng: It is always a pleasure to be here to talk to you about America’s ongoing democratic backsliding.
Sargent: It is lurching backwards at a furious rate. And so we had Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, saying in these interviews that she had reached a loose agreement with Trump early on for him to stop going after opponents with law enforcement. Now, clearly that didn’t work too well.
Wiles also admitted that what Trump is really up to with these prosecutions is clear. “In some cases it may look like retribution,” she said. And then even more directly, she allowed that the prosecution of New York attorney general Letitia James did seem like retribution. Swin, there you have the chief of staff in the White House all but admitting that Trump’s prosecutions are not rooted in the law. Your reaction to that?
Suebsaeng: Well, not just admitting that this is retribution—or I guess you could say it looks a lot like retribution—but saying on the record to a reporter working for Vanity Fair: Look, I tried to get him to stop. I tried to limit it to three months.
So, like, why were you trying to get him to stop unless there was something gravely wrong with it? So look, obviously the White House—from Susie Wiles to everybody else in the communications operation and also all across the vast expanse of the Trump administration, including Pete Hegseth at the Department of Defense—are trying to propagandize the American people that, look, this was a hit piece, it was missing some vital context, or certain quotes were taken out of context. And, look, it’s no big deal. In fact, we’re laughing about it. Donald Trump gave an exclusive interview to the New York Post on Tuesday, basically stressing that point, like, I actually think it’s funny. Nobody here is upset. Susie didn’t do anything wrong.
So there’s a wall-to-wall administration communication strategy right now to kind of say, This is a nothingburger, this is no big deal, please don’t pay attention to it. In fact, everybody loves and adores Susie Wiles and we really, really, really adore Donald Trump.
I don’t think this will come as a shock to that many of your listeners, but there is a large screen of bullshit covering that in the sense that they’re trying to make it seem like Susie Wiles slipped on the banana peel and she meant to slip on the banana peel.
What they are not saying in her and other statements saying, This is out of context, allegedly, is the part that she is not allowed to say publicly, which is—and this is something we have heard from a variety of our sources in the know and in the administration who would be in a position to know about this—[that] she did not expect a lot of what she said and what Christopher Whipple got on tape to end up in the published product.
She thought she was off the record or on background. There are a bunch of things in the two Vanity Fair pieces that we know she didn’t want her name publicly attached to, but she didn’t know she was on the record.
So this whole thing about, like, It’s missing context, this is a hit piece—you just can’t publicly admit that you fucked up and that you thought for much of this you weren’t going to have your name attached to it. So that’s what’s going on.
Sargent: Right. And so that’s why they’re going after the reporter and Vanity Fair really hard. Wiles put out a statement calling it a disingenuous hit piece. Then on Fox News, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to spin it all this way.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): I would just echo my boss, Suzy Wiles, who is the best chief of staff in our nation’s history, working for the greatest president in our nation’s history. And that this was unfortunately another attempt at fake news by a reporter who was acting disingenuously and really did take the chief’s words out of context. But I think most importantly, the bias of omission was ever present throughout this story. The reporter omitted all of the positive things that Suzy and our team said about the president in the inner workings of the White House. And as Suzy said today, it’s deeply unfortunate that happened, but it won’t distract us from making America great again.
Sargent: Swin, let’s take this in two parts. First, note how she went full cult: “Susie Wiles is the greatest chief of staff ever. Trump is the greatest president in U.S. history.” Have you noticed that whenever the news gets really bad, Leavitt and other propagandists always go out of their way to go full North Korea with Trump?
And we know why, right? Because he is in a fury inside the White House. Never mind what he said to the New York Post or whatever. He’s raging at them for letting this happen. He’s throwing things against the wall. And the only way they think they might be able to soothe him is to call him the greatest president in U.S. history on Fox, right?
Suebsaeng: Right. Whatever these things happen, there is … and look, it can sometimes feel like it’s getting old that we constantly reference Pyongyang. But given how garrulously cultish the entirety of the Republican Party elite is right now, and how they treat the so-called God Emperor Donald Trump, it is really hard to get around the idea that when you visit official Washington nowadays, you are not in Donald Trump’s Pyongyang.
Like, it looks like that with the way that they’re trying to physically make it that way at every stretch, not just at the White House, but beyond. And also the way that everybody in the Republican Party, whether they’re on Capitol Hill, in state parties, or working in the bowels of the West Wing, has to just say, Donald Trump is the greatest. There has never been a leader as loving and generous and gracious and cool and sexually charismatic, and nobody hits a better tee ball than Donald Trump.
Like, literally everything. It’s all they do. It’s their only play whenever he or someone else in their orbit fucks up. And it’s just astounding because, look—well, I mean, it’s not just astounding, it’s kind of horrifying because it underscores the militarized authoritarianism that Trumpism is now trying to spread across our once-great country.
But it is also hysterically funny in a perverse sense because nobody is buying this bullshit. His approval rating is in the shitter. It keeps hovering somewhere between 36 and 39 percent in a bunch of very reputable polls, and it would be one thing if you were trying to say this about a president who had an approval rating in the high 50s or the mid-60s. It’s another thing to say this about someone who is in “you are going to get slaughtered in the midterms” electoral territory.
Sargent: That is such a good point. There really is an extra set of layers of absurdity to it when you consider how badly he’s tanking. I mean, these Cabinet meetings in particular. Whenever the news is bad, they just slather him with the most ridiculous and obsequious praise, one after another, and they don’t care how ridiculous it looks to normal human beings. That’s the thing I can’t get around, Swin.
Suebsaeng: Right, and also, you and I both know—your listeners, I think, are all familiar with the fact—that he is a raging narcissist. Like, to exist in Donald Trump’s mind palace is to exist in a place where comparing him to a really decadent Roman emperor or totalitarian dictator living on the other side of the planet is not a stretch. They exist in different democratic or non-democratic contexts, but they have very similar minds in terms of how they’re wired.
Even factoring in that very obvious, terrifying premise, I still cannot imagine living in my own head, being surrounded by sycophants—whether I work at a magazine or Zeteo or in the literal fucking White House—and having people slobber over me in such a shamefully ignorant fashion, and not think to myself: I am doing something wrong here.
Sargent: Swin, what is a mind palace? I mean... A mind ballroom maybe is what he’s in.
Suebsaeng: Yes, yes, that is a much better way to put it than I did. Just, like … every once in a while, I like to sit between phone calls and between stretches of reporting and just think to myself what it must be like to exist in Donald Trump’s brain, where all this stuff can happen to you and you actually enjoy it. Any normal person would think to themselves: They are treating me like a baby. I am not a baby. Stop patronizing me.
Sargent: Right, this is embarrassing, guys, stop. Well, let’s take the second piece of what Leavitt said in that audio: this idea that Wiles was taken out of context. Her words just stand on their own, but note how Leavitt seems to suggest that the media has this duty to echo their propaganda about Trump. She literally says it straight out: “They didn’t print all the glowing things we said about Trump, how dare they? And that shows they’re fake news.”
But of course, they’re not obliged to print the glowing stuff about Trump. That’s not how it works. Isn’t that pretty revealing of essentially their understanding of the role of the Fourth Estate in the Trump despot reign?
Suebsaeng: Yes. And also, like, if you actually read the lengthy Vanity Fair stuff—and there could be more to come, we’ll see. And also he’s got tapes, he says, of this stuff. Hopefully we will be fortunate enough one day to hear at least some of the reams of tapes on this.
But if you actually read the stuff in Vanity Fair, not all of it is hyper, hyper negative. Like, they’re clearly quoting an abundance of material here, and some of it involves the senior officials complimenting Donald Trump, complimenting each other.
So yes, they are upset the whole thing 110 percent didn’t make him look resplendently wonderful. But the idea that there is nothing in there that they would think is positive is absolutely ridiculous. Having said that, yes, news flash: The news outlet is going to print the stuff that is newsworthy.
You guys saying that Donald Trump commands the stars, the moon, and the skies, and that the fate of the republic rises and falls on how irritated or not he is while watching television—no, I’m sorry. That’s not massively newsworthy to hear you slobber [over] that stuff.
Sargent: Exactly. Well, let’s step back and look at the broader sweep of Trump’s prosecutions, which you’ve reported a lot on. He’s tried to make these bogus mortgage fraud charges stick against Senator Adam Schiff, against the Fed’s Lisa Cook, and against Letitia James. His prosecution of former FBI director James Comey has imploded.
Swin, importantly, a lot of this has failed because career prosecutors are holding the line. They’re sticking to the facts and the law, refusing to do Trump’s corrupt bidding. You’ve done a lot of work on this. What do you make of that bigger picture of how badly it’s all going?
Suebsaeng: Well, I think there’s a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B, because yes, they are increasingly hitting roadblocks because of some degree of internal resistance in the DOJ, which typically involves people being purged or them resigning and then other people being slotted in to do Trump’s dirty work for him. They’re experiencing resistance in the courts from judges—even Republican-appointed judges—who are looking at this stuff and saying, like, “Okay, we cannot, like, subsume literally every part of the judiciary into Trump’s personality cult. That is just not … that’s not part of the job.”
Are you sure they can’t do that? Well, if you ask Judge Cannon in Florida, she’ll have a different prescription and legal analysis of it than you or I or somebody else would. But having said that, there is some degree of resistance. And yes, there is quite a bit of face-planting because some of it is just so blatant that it’s hard not to get it laughed out of court.
Now, in the other column, a few points. Number one, your point about the Comey prosecution imploding. I would not say that any of Trump’s political nemeses who are being vindictively and selectively targeted for prosecution are out of the woods just yet. The administration can make something else up. They can find other ways to try to bankrupt people, harass them, try to put them in jail. So not just with Comey, but a [lot] of other people, I wouldn’t say that they are out of the woods at all.
Like, the first year of Trump 2.0 isn’t even up yet. And the administration has signaled heavily—we’ll see which ones of Trump’s enemies they follow through with on this, but they’ve signaled heavily that they’re not giving up. And I think we should take them at least largely at their word.
Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s fair. But, Swin, what Susie Wiles said here, admitting all this openly and on the record, it’s going to give the defense attorneys for these people some new ammunition in these cases, isn’t it?
Suebsaeng: My phone lit up on Tuesday with exactly what you’re talking about there. We have some new reporting at Zeteo about how multiple members of legal defense teams for several high-profile targets of Donald Trump’s and his Department of Justice saw what came out of Vanity Fair on Tuesday morning with Susie Wiles apparently on tape saying that, yes, this is—or this very much looks like—political retribution.
I tried to walk Donald Trump back from it, at least trying to come to him with some sort of weird agreement that only for a quarter of a year would he do really bad, authoritarian, selective prosecutions where he’d direct the DOJ to go after his political enemies because he was mad and wanted vengeance. But I failed, and he’s obviously still doing it.
I’m lightly paraphrasing here, but it’s the literal chief of staff of the White House saying that if the president of the United States gets mad enough, he’ll pick someone and, boom, there’ll be retribution.
Sargent: They’ll prosecute. They will criminally prosecute that person if Trump’s mad at them.
Suebsaeng: Exactly. So when lawyers for all of these different targets—whether they are charged yet, in between charges potentially, or not yet charged, but are being investigated and having their lives turned upside down by Trump’s government right now—a lot of these lawyers across the board were saying to themselves and having meetings on Tuesday that this series of interviews that Susie Wiles gave to Vanity Fair and Chris Whipple will inform what we do in our legal filings and our motions for the coming months, if not weeks.
It will inform potentially what to subpoena, who to try to depose, and some of the arguments we will make. The reason that is going to be the case, according to the sources with direct knowledge of this who I spoke to, is because motions to dismiss on claims of selective and vindictive prosecution are incredibly difficult to win in court and before a judge. So every little bit counts. Every little shred of Trump or one of his minions saying or doing something—whether on paper or verbally or whatever—that helps underscore an argument that this is selective, vindictive prosecution and therefore you should throw it out, just throw it out wholesale, is helpful to them.
Sargent: And how often do you get something like this—a bombshell like this—in an effort to prove selective or vindictive prosecution? I would say never. You never get something as good as this, you know, to make your case, do you?
Suebsaeng: Well, you could argue that Donald Trump accidentally posting his direct message to Pam Bondi months ago on the internet for everybody to see—saying that, Yeah, these people who couldn’t handle my Trumpian version of show me the man and I’ll show you the crime… Here’s this other person, Lindsey Halligan, who you should really appoint in there immediately so she can do my dirty work for me. Like, we need to get this done now. This is killing my credibility that I’m not jailing enough of my political enemies—you could argue that that was a little bit better.
But again, even something like that, when you are arguing before a judge that this needs to be thrown out because my client is being selectively and vindictively targeted by the president of the United States or by the Justice Department or by whoever, it is a really tough nut to crack and a case to prove, even when the president of the United States is doing boneheaded stuff like that. So now they have Trump. Now they have other shreds of him campaigning profusely in 2024 about coming back and jailing or prosecuting all these different enemies just because he’s mad and out of personal vendettas. And now they have, according to Vanity Fair—they don’t have it in their possession, I’m assuming, but somewhere out there in the world there is a literal tape of Donald Trump’s top White House official basically saying, Yeah, you got me. This is a retribution campaign.
So when that happened and all of these different sources and lawyers started to talk to me about how this is the part of the interview that we think is going to actually be the most consequential from a legal and political perspective, I started paying attention because so much of it—even though it’s fun, even though it’s revealing—a lot of it can kind of get lost in the maelstrom of political gossipiness, especially when you’re talking about a place as backbiting and as catty as the upper echelons of Trump World.
But this is something that I think your listeners should pay more attention to just because the stakes are so fucking high on this. I’ll read you right now a text that Abbe Lowell sent me on Tuesday afternoon. Lowell is, as your listeners probably know, one of the top attorneys for people like Letitia James and several others who—look, he’s the lawyer right now who, if you are a top political target of Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s Justice Department, you call this guy. So he texted Zeteo on Tuesday:
“The White House chief of staff admitting that President Trump turned the Justice Department into his weapon for political retribution against Attorney General Letitia James only confirms that this has been an improper, vindictive prosecution. The astonishing admission comes after President Trump publicly demanded Attorney General Bondi target Ms. James for doing her job and his DOJ ignoring career prosecutors and two grand juries that rejected the case. It all proves beyond any doubt that the attempts to bring charges against Attorney General James are nothing more than Trump’s political crusade. When they admit it’s not justice they’re after, but pure revenge, believe them.”
Sargent: Swin, I will say that is extremely powerful. And just to wrap this all up, I want to return to what you said at the very beginning. You got at this notion that Susie Wiles was admitting that there was something wrong with the prosecutions. And that, I think, is an added piece to this. And yet it also gets at something very dark about it all, which is that people like Susie Wiles, who have been around a very long time and understand how things work, are going along with this shit, even though they know how depraved and how contrary to the rule of law it really is, right?
Suebsaeng: Susie Wiles is someone who’s been known in various elite Republican circles for a long time as someone who, while she is a committed conservative, she is not an ideological true believer in the same way that a Stephen Miller is or someone like that. Like, she is very, very, very attuned to and comfortable with Trumpism. But if Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush had won in the primary in 2015 or 2016, she’d be comfortable in that set as well.
I do not say what I am about to say lightly at all. People like Susie Wiles are a terrific example of how something as bad as Nazism actually happened. When it comes to the old guard or the establishment of any political order in any country that is experiencing an authoritarian wave, there are not enough Stephen Millers in it or in any political party’s mainstream to carry the project the whole way.
The reason these things succeed is because you have people like the Marco Rubios, like the Susie Wileses of the world, willing to go along to get along and prop up the project despite their own personal hidden—unless you accidentally blab about it to Vanity Fair—reservations about how grotesque and depraved parts of the project are.
In essence, there is no difference in practice between her and Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller just has the self-restraint not to go on a tear to Christopher Whipple about it over the course of, like, 10 months or however long it was. But she is a perfect emblem of [how] the authoritarian rot of any once-great or at least non-authoritarian country comes about.
Sargent: Absolutely. Asawin Suebsaeng, it’s 100 percent true that the behavior of conservative establishments in the face of authoritarianism dictates a lot of what happens. Folks, make sure to check out Swin’s piece today at Zeteo.com. It’s great stuff. Swin, great to talk to you as always.
Suebsaeng: Group therapy. It’s a blessing.
Sargent: Indeed. And you’re good at it.