The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 29 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.
Sargent: Two Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski, have now called for the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. This angered Donald Trump greatly. He lashed out at them as “losers” and “terrible senators.” But in truth, Noem’s tenure suddenly does look very shaky. A new review of the killing of Alex Pretti undercuts Noem’s initial account. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has declined to express confidence in Noem. And Stephen Miller even undercut her. It’s very clear this whole thing has gotten away from Trump and his advisers and has taken on a momentum that is now highly unpredictable. We think this is just the beginning of GOP panic. So we’re talking to New Republic contributor Virginia Heffernan, who’s been documenting the backlash against ICE among ordinary people about where this is all going. Virginia, nice to have you on.
Virginia Heffernan: I’m so glad to be here, Greg. I’m a fan of the show.
Sargent: Thank you very much. Well, Senators Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski both called for Noem to step down this week. Others, like Susan Collins, are calling on her to pause the surging of enforcement in Minnesota and Maine. A number of other Republicans are calling for a real investigation into the murder of Alex Pretti, and some are admitting that the video is damning.
Virginia, something seems to have broken here among Republicans in a way that even the murder of Renee Nicole Good, as horrific as it was, didn’t seem to. What do you think happened here?
Heffernan: I think that this is a story about guns and video. The fact that Pretti’s phone—the fact that his camera—was first described as a gun by Kristi Noem is kind of no accident. And the fact that there’ve been intimations that protesters will not be allowed to use cameras, or that when they pull out their phones, that that’s a provocation.
So why is that important? That’s important because everybody saw the many videos from many different angles of this murder of Alex Pretti, and they would not accept Noem’s ludicrous propaganda. I mean, she didn’t bother to extenuate it even the way the LAPD did when they beat up Rodney King. Like, she didn’t seem to have watched the video before she invented her story about it.
She was told to call him an “assassin” by Stephen Miller. They regularly blamed—they blamed him as a “terrorist,” as they had Renee Nicole Good. And we had just been through this with the Renee Nicole Good video. And people do not like when they watch the video—and you know how people are on TikTok, Reels—they do close analysis of the video. No one who looked at that video thought that anything had happened except that a guy with a phone, who was trying to protect someone, was wrestled to the ground and then shot in the back.
Sargent: Well, we had Trump erupt over all this. He called the two senators “losers.” Then he said: “They’re terrible senators. One is gone and the other should be gone. Murkowski is always against the Republicans anyway. And Tillis decided to drop out. So he lost his voice once he did that.”
Virginia, that last reference is to Tillis retiring. I don’t know—Trump doesn’t really seem to have his fastball here. My strong sense is that he’s having trouble defending Noem, and he knows he’s having trouble defending Noem as well. What do you think?
Heffernan: Yeah, I mean, it’s just been the cascading problems for him. And it’s true that he maybe doesn’t have his fastball. It’s not even clear that he would know how to throw a ball if he had it in his hand right now. mean, his... know, lunacy, dementia, whatever it is, like, there’s a clearly a mad king who’s falling apart, who’s in decline in this central place. And he ever since, you know, the Epstein files turned some Republicans against him, his refusal or failure to release them and lies around them. And now up to Tillis and Murkowski with very little to lose, Tillis especially. I mean, Tillis is very sharp. He sounds very witty right now.
Sargent: Yeah. And in fact, let’s listen to how Tillis responded to this whole thing, to Trump labeling him a loser.
Reporter (voiceover): The president called you a loser, I believe.
Senator Thom Tillis: I am thrilled about that. That makes me qualified to be Homeland Security Secretary and Senior Advisor to the president.
Sargent: Tillis also ripped the incompetence of Miller and Noem and said they’ll make officers’ jobs more dangerous. Virginia, you don’t often hear Miller described as “incompetent.” Extreme, fascist, racist, yes—but not incompetent.
Yet I think it is clear that Miller has catastrophically miscalculated. And I’ve got to say, Miller is more responsible than any human being alive for Trump completely throwing away his advantage on the immigration issue. I think there should be a public conversation about Miller’s incompetence and his recklessness and his endangering of officers and the public, no?
Heffernan: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it may begin with his just outlandish promise that he would arrest, detain, and deport 3,000 people a day—that that’s what the administration would do.
I just want to talk about numbers a little bit because the president keeps saying—to explain why they’re in Minneapolis and doing this surge and why it’s so important—that they’ve taken (and this is quoted uncritically by ABC News and other places) thousands of, he says, “hardcore criminals,” something like “hardcore, stone-cold criminals,” off the streets, including murderers in Minneapolis.
And then he thinks that Walz and the people of Minnesota should thank him for their amazing job getting the thousands of stone-cold criminals. I just decided right before we talked to look up on DHS’s own page who these “thousands of stone-cold criminals,” including murderers, are. They list—and this is their propaganda—they list eight people.
Of those eight hardened criminals: two are thieves, one had a DUI, one wrote a bad check, there’s a child endangerment case, and one is admittedly a registered sex offender, meaning he’s in the system. And all of them are undocumented, which as we know is not a criminal offense. All of them have been arrested. That is eight people.
Sargent: Well, I just want to underscore what you said there, because it’s really important and it’s sort of an obsession of mine as well. They want to get the numbers up. The most important thing to Stephen Miller is removing as many immigrants from the country as possible because he’s doing an ethnic re-engineering of the country in his own head.
And the only way you get the numbers anywhere near what Miller wants them to be is to go after the non-criminals. It’s the only way to do it—both because there aren’t enough criminals, right? But also it’s a lot easier to scoop up a bunch of guys at a Home Depot parking lot than it is to go after a hardened criminal that you’ve been targeting. And so all of this that we’re seeing here is the direct result of this ethnic-engineering obsession of Miller’s. It all flows from the effort to get those numbers as high as possible, every last bit of this.
Heffernan: Yeah, I’m glad we’re aligned on this because there is a numbers game that you see in fascism generally, which is, like, it’s clicking through his brain, you know: what the population is, how many white people there are, what the replacement numbers are, all that eugenics stuff. And that’s how you get to numbers and not people.
What’s amazing to me—and Greg, I don’t know if you are equally shocked—I actually thought that they could busy themselves for six months, a year, 18 months, by finding actual people who had committed crimes: child abuse, like those kinds of things, like actual just crimes, right? Maybe not murder, but crimes who are also undocumented. I know that the administration has trouble finding people when it’s tried to single out people, but if they had ICE, all the surveillance of Palantir, I was sure they would find a lot of them. And they promised they would find a lot of them.
Sargent: Maybe Miller really is incompetent. Maybe that’s the story that everyone’s missing. So a few other quick things here showing that Noem is on shaky ground: DHS put out an initial review of the shooting of Pretti that didn’t mention any gun or any intention to “massacre law enforcement,” as Noem had claimed.
Stephen Miller also undercut Noem, saying that the Customs and Border Protection officers involved in this might not have followed protocol and saying, in effect, that DHS was responsible for initial assessments that led him and others to smear Pretti. Virginia, no honor among fascists.
Heffernan: I mean, they are going to turn into a circular firing squad like they always do, and Kristi Noem, it does look like her time is up. I mean, as much as Trump—he’ll be 1,000 percent behind her until he isn’t.
Sargent: Virginia, I want to go to your piece now because I think the serious story here is that Miller and Trump came into all this brimming with hubris. They thought they had this absolute lock on public opinion on this issue. Miller could just shriek that immigrants are criminals, and he could put up mugshots of immigrants along the White House driveway and the public would accept anything, no matter how authoritarian, that Miller and Trump did.
But the persistence of ordinary people has turned this debate around and proven that to be false. You wrote about that. You talked about the “wine moms” and white women who are horrified by this whole thing. And the white female vote is a tricky topic for sure. But what you got at there is what I’m talking about, which is that this amazing heroism and courage and persistence is really becoming a big story.
Heffernan: Yeah, I mean, I think Dahlia Lithwick wrote recently—maybe even today or yesterday in Slate—that, you know, for a long time (and she and I worked together at Slate for a long time), most of us in the media, when asked what to do to defend democracy, said something she says was somewhat bloodless. We spoke kind of in legal terms about opposing gerrymandering and this and that.
And now she says on the streets of Minneapolis—or the Twin Cities, I should say—we’re actually seeing the amendments to the Constitution defended in real time, including sort of the First, Second, and Fourth—those, right? And it’s almost like seeing it rebuilt before our eyes by actual people, including Renee Nicole Good, including Alex Pretti, including everyone there.
Because Minnesota has this great tradition of these kind of Tocqueville-like associations, it’s just incredible to see how quickly they ramped up this capacity to protect people in schools, to get food to places, to do mutual aid, to do these kind of comical protests with brass bands, and use the weather to their advantage.
And all that plays very well on these videos and is so different from what you could have heard from Stephen Miller. It just looks—it looks American. It looks American. The people look American and they are a standing reprove to the idea that no one is virtuous or that no one cares about democracy.
I wish it didn’t have to come down to bloodshed, right? I wish that they had listened to what someone derisively called the “pussy hats” 10 years ago, saying that this was fascism and we needed to oppose this because we might have stood in the way. I mean, the second most of us heard “grab him by the pussy,” you were like, I don’t want that guy ruling the country, running this country, right? It was so easy.
There are people before that who said, Well, the Central Park Five or the discrimination lawsuit in the 1970s—I’ve seen everything I need to know that this person should not be president. But lots of people apparently didn’t see anything, everything they needed to see. But I think that’s changing, as you said.
Sargent: Yeah, I think the wine moms deserve enormous credit. They’re constantly sneered at by people all over the ideological spectrum, each camp having their own dumb reasons for sneering at the wine mom. But the wine moms really got Trump right. I think in a way that a lot of people did not.
And just to your point about how this all looks very American: I do think that when you see these kinds of very diverse crowds turning out and showing great courage and heroism and putting themselves at risk, it just looks like an affirmation of American constitutionalism, in a sense.
What we’re seeing from Miller—the kind of mind-numbing propaganda, the up-is-down propaganda, the secret police, the masked police, the military vehicles parading through urban boulevards, the snatchings, the demanding of papers—that all looks totalitarian to ordinary people.
Heffernan: I mean, I wish it never had to come to this, obviously. And they have overplayed their hand so much on the aesthetics. Bovino walking around like Il Duce in the streets of Minneapolis is just—that’s going to bother anyone with any memory or who’s ever seen a movie set in the twentieth century.
Sargent: And their lunatic base sees the video of Bovino striding along and, you know, they have these camera crews recording these Black Hawk Down moments where they’re just going in with blazing guns and knocking down doors, and then they just pull out a couple of immigrants and some kids.
Heffernan: They pull out the children, and then there are all these images that make him look very short and small, and he’s easily parodied. And then also, if you haven’t ever seen a movie about Mussolini—there are another group of conservatives, especially out west and in and around those red states, who remember Ruby Ridge, or they remember Waco, or they remember the threat that jackbooted government thugs would come.
Why do so many of them have guns? Because of this constant kind of threat that’s been kindled online and has been unrelentingly kindled by the NRA and other groups. And now, it’s coming back to bite them.
Sargent: Well, just to close this out, what do you think is going to happen with the Republicans? It’s very clear that the discomfort is extremely palpable. I think a lot of it is political, obviously, because they now see that this is a catastrophe potentially for them in the midterms. Do you think this gets worse among Republicans for Trump, or do you think there will have to be actual changes or not?
Heffernan: Epstein, Venezuela, and now Minneapolis are the real losing subjects for Trump. So I think if Republicans see a center of gravity that has switched so that these are the loser subjects—these are the subjects that make them look like they have blood on their hands, and maybe also that they have a hard time morally squaring.
You know, it’s like when you said Trump didn’t seem to have his fastball—sort of look to people who do have their fastball, and Thom Tillis and Marjorie Taylor Greene still are making sense when they talk. They don’t sound like doublespeak Soviets trying to explain things. They sound like they have a clear vision, and that suggests it’s something worth sticking with, I’ll say.
Sargent: Well, Virginia Heffernan, thanks so much for coming on. Folks, if you really enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Virginia’s Substack, Magic and Loss. Virginia, great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.
Heffernan: So good to talk to you, Greg. Thanks.