The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 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.
Donald Trump’s own allies and many other Republicans have quietly started to fear the worst about the midterms. According to new media reports, they worry the loss of the House could be bigger than expected. They’ve even started to contemplate the possible loss of the Senate too. What’s got them rattled is there’s no sign Trump can get the focus back onto the economy. He just exploded with wild new tirades about his ballroom, about Fox News, and about judges, and there are even signs that Trump’s spin about the war in Iran is backfiring for Republicans as well.
Few people understand the interaction between Trump’s derangement and GOP politics better than George Conway, the former GOPer turned Trump critic who’s running for Congress in New York City as a Democrat. So we’re talking to him about all of it. George, nice to have you on.
George Conway: Nice to be on.
Sargent: So just in the last few hours, Trump exploded on Truth Social because he thinks Fox News isn’t giving the California GOP gubernatorial candidate enough attention. He erupted because a judge blocked parts of his ballroom. His feud with the Pope continues. He just posted something that looked a little like opposition research about the Pope. George, anything but the economy, right?
Conway: Right! And look, he is somebody who has always been marked by personal obsessions, by whatever’s bugging him, whatever he sees on television, whoever he thinks has slighted him. And in a sense, this is nothing new, but he’s reached a different stage here because, even though he was doing a lot, there were weekends where we scratched our heads and said, what’s wrong with this guy? 25th Amendment, and so on.
But the difference now is that he’s less inhibited. People like him who are narcissistic sociopaths get worse over time. And in addition to that, his age—and I’m not saying he has dementia, but certainly his brain isn’t functioning as well as it ever did, even though I don’t think it really functioned that well. He’s becoming more disinhibited and he’s got fewer people around him who can tell him, don’t say that, don’t do that, please put the phone down. Not that they ever really could do it, but fewer people—basically, if you tell him no, you’re gone.
And that’s something that didn’t happen as much in the first Trump term, but now he’s just not listening to anybody. And as these types of personalities—these sick people, and we’ve seen them throughout history—get more and more powerful, they get more and more detached from reality, and as a result they become more dangerous. Not only to themselves, but also to the people they supposedly serve.
Sargent: There’s a Politico report that’s really striking about rising GOP anxiety about the midterms. It said Republicans are exasperated by the constant lunacy from the White House. One GOP operative said this: “Everything is made more difficult by the nonsense coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” A former advisor to Trump’s 2024 campaign said this: “The road to victory runs through a consistent economic message. Unfortunately, Trump ignores the roadmap.”
George, you know how Republican politics works. What’s going on with all this? Who’s trying to communicate what to whom here?
Conway: I think they’re trying to communicate something to Trump, but he’s not listening. He no longer cares. He is off in his own reality now, and the Republicans are expressing concern because they know he’s driving them off a cliff. And you see it also in a lot of the Republican influencers—the Megyn Kellys, the Joe Rogans, and the Tucker Carlsons of the world. They’re basically talking about the 25th Amendment now.
And what’s happened—and I think this is happening all up and down the MAGA food chain, from the electeds who realize they’re no longer getting any usefulness from Trump, to the influencers who realize that there’s nothing in it for them anymore. And they’re getting sick of having to do the split-brain thing, where they’re saying one thing and reality is hitting them in the face with the other—the cognitive dissonance, in other words, is breaking down.
And the problem for them is there’s only one way out of it, and that’s to get rid of Donald Trump. He is not going to listen to them. He is not going to tone it down. If anything, he’s going to get worse because he is completely detached from reality.
And there was this report—I don’t know if you saw it, probably about a month ago—in Axios, where Ted Cruz apparently had spoken to the president privately and said, you’re driving us off a cliff, in substance, and we’re going to get killed in the midterms. And this was, I think, even before the war in Iran. And Trump just said, “Fuck you, Ted.” Literally, that’s what he was quoted as saying. So they have a huge problem.
They have a guy who—they’ve overlooked his mental disorders in the past, dismissed them. They’ve overlooked his lies, they’ve overlooked his depravity. They’ve overlooked the fact that he is basically an adjudicated sexual abuser, that he’s a convicted criminal. They overlook these things because it served their purposes. It no longer serves their purposes.
And in terms of what happens in the U.S. Senate—which we can get back to, and why that matters, of course—the Senate is full of cowards. The Republican senators are cowards and they’ve been afraid of Trump.
But at some point they’re going to have to be afraid of something else, which is people who used to be Trumpers who are now mad at Trump, moderate voters who are swing voters who have basically voted for Trump once or twice, maybe even three times, and have now turned on him. And that’s happening.
And so I think at some point a consensus is going to arise—because he’s going to get worse—that he has to go. And I think what has to be done is we have to start talking about that and preparing for that moment when everybody has had enough and the guy has to go.
Sargent: Your ad got at this in an interesting way. You had an ad in your congressional candidacy that pulls together dramatic imagery of January 6th, ICE’s paramilitary violence, the blowing up of supposed drug boats in the Caribbean, Trump’s alliance with Putin, the Iran War, and rising inflation—all of that is montaged throughout the ad in a fairly dramatic way. Then we hear this.
George Conway (voiceover): Just when you think it can’t get any worse—it does. It has to stop. We must make it stop. I’m George Conway. I’m running for Congress to take the fight right to Trump on your behalf. This is no ordinary time and I will not be an ordinary member of Congress. I’m George Conway and I approve this message.
Sargent: George, I’m interested in the line about this not being an ordinary time. Now you’re running in Manhattan, so obviously it’s a very liberal audience, but I have to think that this sense that Trump has unleashed just sheer horrors on an unimaginable scale in America weighs a lot on a lot of different voters. What’s the theory of the ad here?
Conway: The theory of the ad is we have a lot to do in this country that people want fixed—affordable healthcare, not just Democrats, but Republicans as well, affordable housing, infrastructure, all sorts of things that need to be improved to improve people’s lives that are actually getting worse because of Trump.
We have higher grocery prices, higher gasoline prices. He actually stopped this project that’s right out my window here—the Hudson River Tunnel Project, the rail project that he stopped because he stopped the funding for it, although a court enjoined him because he wants Penn Station named after him. You name it.
All these issues that people want to talk about and that affect people’s daily lives—how are you going to fix that? You can’t fix it in any significant way until he’s gone. He’s making everything worse. And he’s a criminal and the courts can’t fix it. So whose job is it to fix it? It’s Congress.
Congress has to start reasserting its constitutional powers—and not just the power of the purse the way they did to stop ICE from being funded, but the impeachment and investigative powers. Basically, my campaign is about: we need to talk about impeaching and removing Trump. We can’t survive another 33 months of what we’ve seen for the last 15.
Sargent: Okay, so you get into Congress. Would you immediately start pushing for impeachment articles to be drawn up? Would you be prepared to do things like recommend the criminal prosecution of people like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others who potentially broke laws—referrals to DOJ?
Conway: All of the above. And Congress has to go into maximalist investigation mode. And that’s Congress’s job. Congress is a legislature, to be sure, but one of its important powers is to investigate and to impeach and to remove criminal public officials.
And in fact, if you go back to the Federalist Papers—Hamilton and Madison and Jay talked about the impeachment power as being a grand inquest on behalf of the nation. They borrowed that phrase from Parliament.
This is how you hold executive officials to account. And this is what the Framers gave us to deal with a president who is failing at his job—not just because he is incompetent, which he is, not just because he’s crazy, because he is, but because he’s fundamentally a criminal who defies the law.
And the point I’m trying to make to people in this district is, let’s say we agree, we work out compromises on how to improve the affordability of healthcare, housing, groceries, building more infrastructure—let’s figure out all the different things that people have on their laundry list of things to do and put it into one big bill and call it the Everything Is Better Bill. Who’s going to sign that bill?
Sargent: Of course.
Conway: And then if you trick him into signing it somehow by saying Putin told you to sign it—who’s going to enforce that bill?
Sargent: A lot of things have to be on the table beyond just the kitchen table stuff as you mentioned before, I think impeachment of a number of different Trump officials has to be on the table.
I think referrals to the Department of Justice—even though obviously the current DOJ wouldn’t do anything with them except wipe their asses with them, essentially—but I do think Democrats in Congress, if they have a majority in the House and possibly the Senate, need to start really laying the predicate here for a major accountability agenda. And the start of that—they have the power right at the outset to start referring things for criminal prosecution that puts down on paper what it is that all these people are doing wrong. Are you for that?
Conway: I’m for that. It’s basically one of the two things I—this is the reason why I’m running. I want to be Jamie Raskin’s wingman. I want to spend a term on accountability. I never wanted to hold public office, and I think I can only do this for two terms because I’m getting too old.
First term would be accountability—exactly what you’re talking about. Impeaching and removing executive branch officials, creating a record for criminal prosecutions, including state criminal prosecutions, because remember, a lot of this stuff could also be prosecuted. The corruption aspects of it could be pursued—whether it be front-running on war news or anything like that.
We need to create the record for this kind of accountability, both accountability by Congress in the impeachment process and accountability in the criminal process, whether it be federal or state. And then the second thing we have to do is to make sure it never happens again. Mostly it’s going to have to be statutory because it’s so hard to enact constitutional amendments, but there are a whole variety of things that we can do.
Sargent: What’s on your list?
Conway: My list would include—there are bills that have been thrown into the hopper on restoring the integrity of the Justice Department. I think we need to codify a lot of the practices that developed but weren’t codified after Watergate, that Trump has simply blown through. I think we need to put more teeth on restricting executive officials from not spending the money they are authorized and required to spend by law. It’s the Impoundment Act—as it exists, it isn’t strong enough.
We need to, basically, I think we need to possibly even put criminal sanctions in place for people who refuse to spend the money in accordance with Congress’s will. And there’s also—I talked about this even before I launched the campaign—we need to create that advisory body to act as the judge of whether the president is fit to continue in office, and replace the cabinet. And that’s something that’s authorized under Section 4 of the 25th Amendment. Something that Nancy Pelosi once proposed, and now Jamie Raskin this week, to his great credit, has put it back on the table once again. And there are so many things like that.
Sargent: Let me throw a few out there and see what you think of them. I think a real revision of the War Powers Act so no president can do this shit again—what he is doing with Iran. Major reforms to the pardon power, because he’s just dangling pardons there for people so that they break the law for him. And then I think transforming ICE, or defunding it, or essentially ending it and creating a whole new bureaucracy to deal with immigration—maybe along the lines of, I think, Ben Rhodes’s good proposal in The New York Times. Are you for all those things as well?
Conway: I’m absolutely for all of those things. And absolutely, I think ICE has to be completely replaced. It’s rotten to the core. Sometimes you just have to take the functions of a dysfunctional organization—you just can’t replace any part of it and expect it to work now because it’s been so corrupted up and down the line.
Sargent: Yeah. And we can’t go back into this situation where a president can create private militias out of immigration enforcement. That has to be the guiding idea here, I think.
Conway: Yeah, absolutely. And the other things you mentioned are absolutely necessary.
Sargent: Okay. I just want to flag one other thing from that Politico report, back to the congressional races. It says White House allies now fear the Senate is in play. A GOP operative says this: “Everyone is focused on doing what we can to hold the Senate because people are very worried about that.” Amazing stuff.
This operative said it’s crazy that this is even a worry. It is. George, you’re obviously focused on the House, but if the Senate is really in play, then we could be looking at a bigger midterm rout than we expect. The Senate map is tough, but—
Conway: I think the Democrats are going to win the Senate.
Sargent: You do?
Conway: I do. And I think the extent of this wave—it’s going to be unimaginable. Because he’s getting—it’s bad enough now. People have had enough. Now you see him cratering in the polls. Now you see how he’s lost—he had this surge among young people in 2024, and among Hispanics, and it’s all gone now.
I don’t think you can [overstate] how precarious some of these Republican senators are. I think you get to 53 or 54, quite possibly. I think you could see Senator Talarico. I think you could even see a Senator Andrews in South Carolina. I think this is going to happen. Because I don’t see Trump turning it around. I don’t think he’s psychologically able to do that. I think he is in such a state of denial and unreality that he is not going to respond to these pleas to basically behave like a normal human being.
I think he’s going to double down. That’s what he always does. He may even invade Cuba, for example. Who knows? We don’t even know what crazy things he’s going to do between now and November. But he’s getting much worse. And that’s the one thing you can depend on with Donald Trump. I remember I was talking to a friend of mine—a journalist—in 2023 or 2024, and we were having dinner in New York and I said, he’s just going to get worse. There is no bottom with this guy.
And he’s going to take the Republicans with him unless they get smart. I think he’s going to take a lot of Republicans with him this year. And I think at some point next year they’re going to want to be done with him before 2029. And I think that we’re going to be able to make the case for impeachment and removal of the president.
Sargent: Well, CNN had a really interesting nugget of reporting on all this as well. It said that Republicans are panicked about the midterms but aren’t shifting their approach yet because Trump keeps promising that the Iran war will end soon, and his assertions along these lines have trapped the GOP in a holding pattern, as CNN puts it.
Now, I’ve got to say, that made me laugh because it’s Trump’s lies about the Iran war backfiring badly for Republicans. And that plus the fact that they just keep coming up with reasons to not change their approach with this guy—because on some level they just know that. It’s like they’ve thrown up their hands in some sense, or they’ve eagerly embraced him in every which way as well. What do you make of all that?
Conway: Yeah, I think they’ve lost—I think they just realize they’re in trouble. They’re in paralysis. And at some point, but not yet, I think they’re going to basically—and I think the thing about it now is that in the middle of this war, he keeps telling them, oh, it’s going to turn around, it’s going to get better, it’s going to end. And they want to believe that. Even though it’s hard to see a positive resolution to this situation, right?
We have essentially taken away our leverage—we’ve shot our wad, so to speak. The threats that we can make—what are we going to do? Impose sanctions on them? We did that. Bomb the hell out of them? We did that. So what incentive do they have to not do what they used to not do, which was control the Strait of Hormuz or enrich uranium? Basically we took away their incentive to cooperate with us and we don’t have any leverage over them anymore. And that’s a problem.
Sargent: So just to close this out, George—a lot of former Republicans who have broken with the party over Trump, or ones who are still Republicans but are never-Trumpers or whatever you want to call them, there’s a school of thought among them which tries to portray Trump as this kind of aberration. Like he somehow took conservatism in a dramatically new direction, took Republicanism in a dramatically new direction.
You’ve been willing to challenge that, I believe, and I wanted to give you a chance to. In many ways, Trump really represents the culmination of a lot of basic trends that were underway in the Republican Party and in conservatism, right?
Conway: Yeah, I mean, I don’t view him as conservative, right? I think there was this cancerous body within the right, or within the Republican Party, that has taken root and has basically destroyed the party. But—
Sargent: Predating Trump though.
Conway: Predating Trump, long predating Trump. It was always there. But it never took over the way it did during the Trump years. But is it conservative to impose these tariffs? Is it conservative for the government to own 10 percent of Intel? Is it conservative for the government to be controlling, to be determining winners and losers of auctions or takeovers from media companies?
It’s just unfathomable to me that all of this has happened. But it’s not conservatism in any sense of the word. It’s nihilism, radicalism, fascism, authoritarianism. And it’s just a terrible—it really is just a complete collapse of sense on the right. And we don’t have a two-party system anymore. We don’t have a healthy two-party system anymore.
We only have one political party that is actually trying to do things to help people and trying to have the government perform the functions it’s supposed to be performing, and only one political party committed to democracy now. And that’s a very unhealthy situation. But we have to go through this until there’s some kind of more permanent political change.
And I think we’re on the verge of a political transformation that I hope in the end turns out all right, where you end up with a sensible second party replacing the decrepit and depraved Republican Party, in the way that sometimes that has happened—the Whigs gave way to the Republicans in the past. And I don’t know. But that’s a long way away. And right now we have to survive, and I don’t know that we can survive over the 33 months with what we’ve seen over the last 15.
Sargent: The question of whether conservatism led to Trump is a big one. There are some indications that it did, but that’s a big conversation for another podcast. George, just to close out—you’re essentially saying the Republican Party has to be broken, otherwise we’re—
Conway: It is broken.
Sargent: —it has to be broken and driven out of business.
Conway: I think Trump’s going to destroy it. I think Trump is well on his way to destroying it because you can see the fractures as we speak.
Sargent: George Conway, pleasure to talk to you. Good luck with your congressional run.
Conway: I’ll talk to you later.