The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 20 episode of The
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Editor’s note: After we recorded this episode, Trump kept raging about protests in Minneapolis. He seethed about jailing Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. He shared video about supposed “anti-ICE anarchists.” And he exploded about Minnesota politicians allegedly wanting criminals in their state, showing his fury over the protests is on full boil.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
A few days ago, Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to send in the military against protests in Minnesota over the ICE shooting of Renee Good. Then he suddenly dialed it back a tiny bit, but still reiterated the threat. This, even though damning new info shows even more clearly that her killing was entirely unjustified. On another front, Trump just threatened to levy tariffs on countries that don’t go along with his desire to seize Greenland. In this case, he didn’t walk it back, but the coverage it got treated as just Trump being Trump. What struck us about all this is how the insanity of Trump’s threats almost carves a path for more to come, numbing us with the sheer constancy of it. Mark Follman, a writer for Mother Jones, has a good new piece that gets at some of this, talking about how Trump normalizes violence and depravity over time. Mark, good to have you on.
Mark Follman: Good to be here. Great to see you, Greg.
Sargent: So let’s just start with Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act. Here’s what he said:
“If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of ICE, who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State.”
Mark, how seriously do you take that threat and what’s your reaction to it?
Follman: I think it’s very serious and it’s worth looking at as part of a much longer pattern of how he does this kind of threatening behavior, whether it’s on social media or how he talks with the press.
And I think the notion that there’s ambiguity in it—I mean, that’s something that he plays with too. And that’s also, I think, intentional. But clearly we’re in an environment right now where there’s escalating tension and violence, particularly in Minneapolis. And this is very much directed at that. And I think it’s quite serious.
Sargent: Yeah, I think there’s no question about it. And I want to get into that broader pattern a little bit later. But first, let’s listen to this. Trump weighed in again on it in an exchange with the reporters.
Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, the Insurrection Act, which has been used by 48 percent of the presidents as of this moment, the Insurrection Act also, if you look at it, I believe it was Bush, the elder Bush. He used it I think 28 times. It’s been used a lot and if I needed it I’d use it. I don’t think there’s any reason right now to use it but if I needed it I’d use it. It’s very powerful.
Sargent: So this is being covered as a big walk-back on his part, but Mark, what’s striking about it is that he’s still threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act with those quotes. Which would be an extraordinary abuse of power given what he intends to do with the military—i.e., send it in to quell protests.
He still made the threat again and all of a sudden this has been recast in the media as “not all that crazy.” What do you make of that?
Follman: Yeah, well, I think it’s also worth noting that he does his very common technique of using numbers and stats and sowing confusion around it too, right? I think he said that the elder President Bush used it 28 times.
What is he talking about there? That’s no one’s ever heard anything about that as far as I know. And I think more importantly, he’s toying with the idea, right?
And trying to keep, I think, people guessing, and particularly the media kind of guessing about what his intentions are. But look at the pattern again of what he says and does. And I think it’s quite clear.
Sargent: And it’s crazy, right? Like, let’s just be clear that invoking the Insurrection Act in this context would be an enormous abuse of power.
Follman: I think that’s right. I mean, you have to have an insurrection to use it, right? In theory. And if you look at what’s going on in Minneapolis, there are tense protests and there’s violence, but most of that violence, from what I’ve seen in all the reporting—and we have reporters there too working for Mother Jones, everything that I’m seeing from on the ground there—most of that violence is at the hands of ICE and Border Patrol. It’s not the protesters.
People are upset, and rightly so, but there’s not a lot of violence going on there coming at them. And that of course is part of the narrative that the Trump White House is trying very hard to establish, that ICE is under siege, that Border Patrol is under siege from some violent conspiracy, which is part of what I wrote about today in my piece.
Sargent: ICE are the ones inflicting violence on the local population. It’s largely a one-way thing. It is a tense situation. All these types of events, this type of turmoil tends to attract all sorts of different people who have different agendas and so forth.
But at a very fundamental level, what we’re testing here is whether Trump can essentially inflict heavily armed government militias on local populations, exert violence on those local populations. And then when things get pretty damn tense, use that as the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the military. That’s what’s being tested.
Follman: Right, what are we to expect will happen when an essentially militarized police force is going and hunting people down, going “door to door,” in the words of the administration, and trying to deport people, and inevitably, innocent people are being caught up in that.
There’s a lot of violent arrest and detainment going on. We’ve all seen the videos. And so, of course, there’s going to be chaos and some violence that results from that, but it feels very much like they’re looking for a predicate.
They want this to happen, that this permission structure that’s now been given to this federal agency to go do this in this way is very much looking for that result and that kind of escalation.
Sargent: Absolutely. It’s as clear as day. So let’s move to a fresh New York Times analysis of the video footage of the Renee Good shooting. It’s very powerful. It went frame by frame. The Times said this: “The visual evidence shows no indication that the agent who fired the shots, Jonathan Ross, had been run over.”
Mark, if anything, that undersells this analysis that they did. The footage shows the exact moment the agent shot her the first time, and he was just plainly not in front of the car at that point. It’s hard to see how he could have been in fear for his life then. What did you think of the analysis?
Follman: Yeah, I think it was very illuminating in ways that… affirming, I guess, what we could already see from the original or the initial eyewitness video that came out and had gone viral the day of this horrific killing of Renee Good. Clearly it was a dangerous situation, but it was one that I think the agent, the ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, put himself into.
We know that law enforcement is trained not to do exactly what he did, to go in front of a car the way that he did. You can also see clearly from the video that she was trying to move away; the vehicle was moving slowly. So this was not a situation where his life was in imminent danger. He was not “run over viciously” in the words of Trump and other administration officials.
I mean, that’s plain as day from the video. Even if the circumstances are tense and murky and complicated in a certain way, I think that what The Times did to really document frame by frame from multiple perspectives is that much more telling in that you can see space between Ross and the vehicle. You can see when the shots are fired exactly as the vehicle’s turning away.
Clearly he deliberately was firing at her, not in a move of self-defense. I mean, he was moving away from the vehicle to the side and she was pulling away and then he shot her twice more through an open window. I think it’s very damning.
Sargent: It is absolutely damning. And I’m glad you brought up that point about the car being turned away because I thought what this really captured with crystal clarity is you see her looking to the side and turning the car to the right.
There’s no way that anyone in good faith could look at that and think she was trying to weaponize the vehicle in any sense.
Follman: Right, it seemed clear that she was trying to evacuate from the situation, to drive down the street away from the ICE officers. So for the administration to characterize this as her maliciously, violently trying to run over or ram… or to say that she did run over an agent… I mean, this was Trump’s initial response, right? Was that he literally… that she literally ran over the officer. And that’s just obviously a lie when you look at the videos.
Sargent: Right. And the soft version that they offer, like one that you hear from people like JD Vance and Karoline Leavitt and Kristi Noem, is she weaponized the vehicle, or there’s a slightly harder version: “She rammed him.”
None of that’s true. The video is absolutely clear. She doesn’t think she’s doing anything like that. She thinks she’s turning slowly out of the situation. That’s it.
Follman: Right. And I think part of this, Greg, too, is that they… part of their strategy or these tactics they use is to have people debate this murkiness. And the bigger picture is something else. And I think that, you know, this is a key part of what I wrote in my piece for Mother Jones about how Trump uses these violent events.
They want to set the narrative instantly and chaotically in order to support a story that they want to tell that may be totally untethered from the reality, but that’s really not the point. The point is the narrative itself. And so that’s why they’re so aggressive and so quickly using these kinds of falsehoods to create a picture of something that didn’t happen.
Sargent: Absolutely. Let’s just switch to another Trump threat. Here he’s talking about tariffs and he suddenly says this.
Donald Trump (voiceover): And I may do that for Greenland too. I may put a tariff on countries if they don’t go along with Greenland, because we need Greenland for national security. So I may do that. I’ll give you a little.
Sargent: So note that Trump is just treating this as something ordinarily within the scope of his powers. I might do a tariff. That’s basically but it isn’t within the scope of his powers to impose tariffs unilaterally in order to coerce other countries to help him annex another country’s territory. Yet everyone just yawns at this stuff now, Mark.
Follman: Yeah, if you step back and look at this, he’s been doing this kind of tactic for a long time, whether it’s with foreign affairs or domestic politics or anything in between. Some people will look at this and say, Well, this is a negotiating tactic. And there may be some truth to that.
I think he’s, you know, positioning himself. But the notion that he could do these things that he’s saying is almost beside the point. He wants to, I think, ultimately project total power, total control. And to a large extent over the first year of his second term, he’s been able to do that and get away with it. There’s really no serious check on his power thus far. And so I think we’ll see him continue to behave this way.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about your piece. It’s very good. People should check it out. You wrote about this interesting dynamic where the threats themselves and the violence almost builds up a kind of permission structure for Trump to get worse and worse. Can you talk about that dynamic?
Follman: Yeah, so what I wanted to take a look at was the kind of rhetoric that Trump and his top cabinet officials all use after these kind of big traumatic events. We’re talking about political assassinations, mass shootings, of course, the ICE killing of Renee Good on January 7.
And there’s a very clear pattern if you go back and look at what he and the others say and what they do in the immediate aftermath, really with an intention, I think, to control the narrative as we were talking about. And one of the things I look at is how this is really a very, I think, distinctive method.
People often point to Trump’s behavior and his rhetoric and it’s often very appalling and outrageous, right? He’ll say terrible things that are true, that are demeaning, that are debasing. And people get very caught up in that. Especially in an emotional moment of national trauma. And that’s intentional. That’s part of what I’m talking about in this piece.
When you see some of the ugliest things he says in these instances, whether it’s the killing of Good or the mass shooting at a church last fall or the killing of Charlie Kirk. They’re trying to establish that it’s all about a far-left radical conspiracy. Whether there’s any truth to that at all doesn’t matter.
And I think that they’re also trying to reiterate that there’s a divided country that he’s in charge of. I mean, it’s a very divisive message and this is unique. I mean, most presidents don’t do this. If you look back at our recent history, politics is always contentious, but to have a president respond to killings, to mass attacks, to assassinations in this way is pretty unique.
And it’s intentional. It’s not unhinged in the sense that he’s acting from no place of control or no place of forethought. I think that’s what’s important here. You can look at it from a standpoint of moral judgment and say, Yeah, that’s crazy. That’s totally unhinged, the stuff he’s saying. But he’s doing it very intentionally by design to create this effect.
Sargent: I want to bear down on what it is that he’s doing in another sense. You talked about how unusual this is in a president. I think there’s a dimension of this that even some reporters and media figures kind of overlook, which is the deliberate nature of the desire to pit Americans against each other in a violent way.
I think there’s at this point no way to deny that the Trump MAGA project is really fundamentally about unleashing ethnic hatreds, maximalizing those ethnic hatreds and supercharging antagonisms among Americans, American versus American—violent antagonisms as well. They don’t even try to hide that anymore. Is that an overstatement or not?
Follman: Yeah, well, I know you’ve been writing about this recently as well. I think that the intentional divisiveness is very clear. Whether or not, I mean, Trump will sort of generally or categorically denounce violence and his aides will do that too. I think that there have been moments over the years where his response to violence has suggested that he welcomes it in terms of the political dividends it pays for his agenda.
That’s maybe a little bit different than saying he wants violence to happen or he’s trying to actively make it happen. But certainly his response to it is not to try to tamp it down. And that in and of itself, I think, is very telling. We can’t read Trump’s mind, but we can watch his behavior, we can watch his language, and look at the pattern of it, which is what I did with this piece.
The way he reacted to a mass shooting at a church in Michigan, the way that he reacted to the assassination of Charlie Kirk is kind of a paramount example, right? The way that they quickly turned him into a persecuted martyr and used it as a predicate to say, We are now going to go after what they called a vast left-wing radical conspiracy in the country, as if some organized conspiracy was responsible for Charlie Kirk’s killing when in fact we know from law enforcement authorities and evidence that’s come out in the case so far that this was a lone individual acting on his own.
That’s what they’ve said. There’s been no evidence to the contrary that has emerged in the four-plus months since that horrific tragedy. And yet they’ve established this narrative that there is this vast “radical left conspiracy” in the country that they now have to eradicate.
That’s literally what Stephen Miller said talking to JD Vance from the White House five days after Kirk was murdered, right? We are going to unleash the “full fury and power of the federal government” now to respond to this.
Sargent: By the way, where is that? I haven’t seen any evidence that they’re actually cracking down on anybody. I wouldn’t want to say this is an empty threat because I think Miller is scouring every corner of the law right now to find ways to put leftists in jail. But there’s kind of a bullshit element to it too, right? Like Miller’s kind of full of shit, isn’t he?
Follman: Well, I think you can look at it a little more broadly too, right? Like it’s creating, again, a political narrative that provides cover to do a lot of these kind of, you know, extreme actions and policies. I mean, I think I talked with Matt Dallek, political historian for my piece, and I think he put it well when he said, in part, this is justifying after the fact these extremist policies that they’re carrying out.
So that would include the way they’ve unleashed ICE and Border Patrol in blue cities and states, right? That if people accept the idea sort of vaguely in the background that there’s this vast radical leftist conspiracy that’s going to go around killing people just because they are MAGA or support Trump, if people buy into that in any way, I think it sort of softens the field for them to do some of these other things they’re doing too with the way that they’re trying to handle immigration and deportation of people in the country.
Sargent: Just to close this out, I think the way I would put that is that they think the supercharging of all these violent tensions and malignancies among Americans, among ethnic group against ethnic group, American against American, creates the conditions for their type of politics to take hold.
I don’t know whether Trump really thinks it through that way, but I’m reasonably certain that Stephen Miller very much does. At bottom though, I think Miller clearly wants Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. There’s some video out there that never gets talked about where, and I think this is the only time Miller has been asked this. He was asked a number of months ago: Have you discussed invoking the Insurrection Act with Donald Trump? And he just kind of hemmed and hawed and wouldn’t answer the question.
I’m not in his head, as you say, but I’m pretty sure that he is quietly whispering in Donald Trump’s ear that the time has come to invoke it. And so you can hear in Miller’s rhetoric, he uses all sorts of language that really is deeply kind of shaped around the idea of getting Trump to that place. And he’s trying to get Trump to invoke it, and Trump hasn’t done it yet, but it is something that Miller wants and he thinks this sort of turmoil creates the conditions for that.
Follman: I think that’s right. I think that that it is a very serious possibility and something that that Miller and others around Trump perhaps want to see happen, really ultimately, I think, as a furtherance of maximizing his power and his control, this idea of maximizing the unitary executive theory that Trump’s in charge. You know, Congress is no longer in charge, the courts are no longer in charge, no one else has a say, he’s the president, he can do whatever he wants.
And so using the Insurrection Act would be another expression of that predicated on, I think, this kind of rising tension and violence and chaos that we’re seeing, largely perpetrated by the operations that they’re carrying out with ICE. So in that sense, yes, I think if we look at what they’re doing, if we look at the pattern of rhetoric, we can say this is a very serious prospect now that they’re considering.
Whether or not they’ll take that step, I don’t know. I mean, it is an extreme thing to do and it will cause a lot of knock-on effects and I think unknown effects and they can’t ultimately control what they may unleash if they do that. So hopefully they won’t, but we’ll have to see.
Sargent: I agree 100 percent, Mark Follman. I really think it’s a very reasonable possibility that they’ll go for it. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Mark’s work over at Mother Jones, including his new piece. Mark Follman, great to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Follman: Yeah, thanks for having me. Enjoyed it.