The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 5 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 choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is now hanging by a thread. Politico reports that Republican senators are clearly signaling that he’s in deep trouble, and he’s meeting with them frantically in hopes of salvaging his nomination. But something interesting is happening. Powerful right-wing influencers and media figures are now rushing to Hegseth’s defense, turning this into a test of whether they can stop the liberal media from tanking a nomination so beloved by MAGA. We think that points to some clear fault lines on the right that will loom large going forward. Today, we’re chatting about all this with Matt Gertz of Media Matters who has a good new piece reporting on how Fox News is aggressively intervening in hopes of saving Hegseth. Good to have you back on, Matt. You’re becoming a regular around here.
Matt Gertz: Always a pleasure, Greg.
Sargent: Indeed. So Pete Hegseth has been rocked by all kinds of revelations: public drunkenness, alleged numerous affairs during his first marriage. Even his colleagues at Fox News, where he was an on-air personality, worried about his drinking. And now according to Politico, Republican senators are actually saying he should commit to quitting drinking if he wants to get confirmed. One said he’s in a lot of trouble. Matt, is there any way Hegseth survives this?
Gertz: I think there is. What we’re seeing right now is a test of the power that the right-wing media has within the MAGA movement. Some sort of flair clearly went up over the last 24 hours because after largely remaining passive and backing off from the nomination as all of these damning reports came out, people at Fox and throughout the right-wing media have started rallying to Hegseth’s defense. They’re being very vocal about it and they’re trying to push Republican senators to back their guy.
There’s still quite a bit of time left on the clock on this nomination. Hegseth has suggested that he does not plan to pull out as Matt Gaetz did last month. So it’s too soon to tell whether or not this nomination is dead in the water.
Sargent: It seems to me that Matt Gaetz’s statement when he pulled out sure seemed clearly like a reaction to somebody from Trumpworld getting on the phone and saying the jig is up. That’s not happening with Hegseth, right?
Gertz: It doesn’t seem to be. This is a very different pattern of events. With Gaetz, you had a really big series of news reports that were damning about his conduct; you had Republican senators saying that they did not plan to support him; and you did not see the right really mobilize in his defense. On the other hand, with Hegseth, you saw a similar pattern playing out over the first few weeks of his nomination, but now the full right-wing media machine seems to be mobilizing in his defense.
Sargent: So let’s talk about that. At first, Fox News was being quiet about the allegations against Hegseth; he worked there for a long time. They were being oddly quiet, but now you report that Fox is rallying behind him. Can you tell us specifically what you saw on Fox? What do you think prompted the shift within Fox itself?
Gertz: Over the last several weeks, what we’ve seen is Fox more or less completely ignoring all of the allegations and reporting coming out about Hegseth. If they discussed it at all, it was with incredibly vague euphemisms like Hegseth facing “problems” about his personal conduct or being “headed” for a tough confirmation without any indication of what exactly they were talking about. This is a very common pattern for the network when it doesn’t want to address the reporting that is out there that is damaging for people on the right. They will simply hide the stories from their viewers altogether. But something changed after NBC News reported that Fox News and former Fox News employees had been concerned about Hegseth’s drinking, that their concerns had been as recent as last month.
After that happened, you saw a slew of Fox News personalities come forward on X claiming that this was all lies and offering testimonials to Hegseth’s moral character. Then Wednesday morning, you saw Fox & Friends rally around him. You saw them attacking the reports about Hegseth as a media witch hunt, claiming that he was being “Kavanaughed” and that the right needed to support him to prevent this sort of thing from happening to Trump’s nominee. They also hosted his mother.
Hegseth’s mother had become a bit player in this drama because she had at one point authored an email to him that The New York Times obtained in which he was described by his mother as “an abuser of women.” She came on and made a direct appeal to Trump on Fox & Friends to stick with him and said that he doesn’t do such things, that these descriptions are just not true, especially, anymore, which not a great thing for your mother to be saying about you when you’re trying to become the defense secretary. At the same time, Pete Hegseth did an interview with Megyn Kelly, who defended him, and he has another one lined up with Bret Baier.
It’s a full-throated defense of Hegseth coming from the MAGA movement. People like Charlie Kirk, Jack Posobiec are all coming to his defense and saying that the media, which is obviously the villain here, needs to be defeated.
Sargent: It’s interesting that they are using the verb Kavanaughed here because what you’re going to see is Hegseth is going to appear on Fox News with Bret Baier on Wednesday night—by the time you all listen to this that will have aired. And of course, one person who will be watching that interview is Donald Trump. And I can guarantee you that Hegseth is remembering what happened with Kavanaugh, which is that he, rather than being contrite in any way, fought, fought, fought. And that was the key to Donald Trump’s heart, right? Fight, fight, fight; never concede an inch. This Brett Baier thing will be the platform for him to try to do a Kavanaugh against being “Kavanaughed,” as it were.
Gertz: That’s right. That’s the direction that he’ll move in, and that then you’ll see the right lining up behind him to basically make Republican senators choose whether they want to stand with MAGA and with Pete Hegseth or exercise some independence.
Sargent: Right. You brought up Charlie Kirk. Yes, some big right-wing players are jumping in to defend Hegseth. Let’s listen to this from Kirk.
Charlie Kirk (audio voiceover): These Republican senators need to stand up and be counted. And if you are going to oppose Pete Hegseth, then we want to know your names and your states because we’ll be visiting a neighborhood near you. You see, the American people did not vote for old bull Senate Republicans to get in the way of President Trump’s mandate.
Sargent: Matt, this is MAGA power players stepping in and making this a test for the “GOP establishment.” Will they stand by President Trump or not? What else are you seeing out there from the very big players? Is there more like that?
Gertz: There is, absolutely. I want to hone in on one particular aspect of that. Kirk says in that clip, we’ll be visiting a neighborhood near you, which is a pretty explicit threat against Republican senators; that they may have quite a lot to fear from that MAGA movement. One of the things that Romney said last year was that many of his colleagues did not speak out about Donald Trump because they were literally afraid for their lives and for their families, and that they would be jeopardized if they did so. That is what Kirk is trying to stoke there.
Sargent: And you’ve got Elon Musk potentially waiting in the wings to threaten any Republican who dares challenge the MAGA agenda or doesn’t absolutely act as a mindless robotic rubber stamp for Trump, hitting them with primaries that will be backed by an avalanche of Musk money. Now, I don’t know how real that is, but these Republican senators are facing a situation where if they exercise any independence against Donald Trump in any way, they’re potentially facing threats of violence, enormous sums of Musk money behind primary challenges and what have you. Of course, there’s the Twitter propaganda machine also, which will be put to use full throttle against anyone who dares get in Donald Trump’s way.
Gertz: Yeah. It’s worth pulling back a second because this is not a fight over some mid-level government position. This is the Pentagon. This is a position that oversees more than three million United States service members, as well as civilian officials, as well as a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Pete Hegseth is not remotely qualified for that position. This is a position that goes to heavy hitters, generals, people who’ve worked in the Pentagon for a long time, U.S. senators with long records overseeing the Department of Defense. And Trump is trying to hand it off to someone whose TV hits he likes, because he appreciates the propaganda that Pete Hegseth provides for him. If Republican senators are really going to kneel on that one, it’s really hard to imagine where they won’t.
Sargent: When you step back, it’s absolutely mind-blowingly crazy. This is a guy who engaged in serial infidelities allegedly, bouts of insane public drunkenness, including reportedly chanting kill all Muslims. His own mother had to vouch for him after an email from her saying that he had serially abused women. All of a sudden, the MAGAworld is deciding to make this the hill that they’re going to require Republican senators to die on. And it’s the Pentagon. It’s an amazing turn in what’s happened to the right.
Gertz: They’re trying to move someone from Fox & Friends’ weekend show to sixth in line to the presidency. And this is not a total aberration. Donald Trump has at least sought out people that he likes from his television, likes from Fox News, for big roles in his administration. Hegseth is the one who’s looking at the most prominent role, but there are 11 other former Foxers as of Wednesday evening when we’re taping this—there could be more tomorrow—meaning twelve total former Foxers have planned roles in the future’s Donald Trump administration. That’s cabinet secretaries, his director of national intelligence, top White House positions, U.S. ambassadors, top figures in the medical bureaucracy; all because Donald Trump saw them on television and thought they did a good job.
Sargent: It’s crazy. And of course there are nine billionaires and counting right now in the Trump administration, if they survive as well. It’s an administration of billionaires and Fox News personalities, which is the perfect encapsulation of today’s GOP, if you think about it.
Gertz: Billionaires and buffoons. That’s the coalition.
Sargent: There you go. That’s it. Now, if you step back in another way, you see something else, right? This gives us an indication of where some of this is going to go. In cases where the media reports aggressively on something involving Trump, reports facts as they’re doing with Hegseth here, the big MAGA players are going to turn that into a big test of whether Republicans are going to let the liberal media win. Facts will be erased from the equation entirely. Everything will be reducible to who’s winning: Trump or the libs. I don’t know where that goes.
Gertz: The media is going to be the big enemy for Republicans and right-wing media over the next four years, at least until there is some Democratic front-runner for president. There isn’t anyone prominent enough right now to really get the right-wing grievance juices flowing on the Democratic side. Nancy Pelosi is no longer the House Speaker. They’ve never really cared that much about Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries. And there isn’t obviously a Democrat in the White House that can mobilize around. The media is going to be the big enemy. That’s where they’re going to focus all their fire. They’ve spent years, generations really, inculcating the Republican base with the idea that journalists cannot be trusted. With Trump back in the White House, that will be their primary focus over the next several years.
Sargent: And you’re going to see a major escalation and pressure on players inside the Trump administration to use the government against the media too.
Gertz: Absolutely—Kash Patel, who Trump has said will serve as his FBI director, even though there is a current FBI director whose tenure does not expire with Joe Biden’s presidency. Kash Patel has said that he wants to sic government investigators on the media, the media who supposedly rigged the 2020 election against Donald Trump. That will be one avenue that they pursue. Another will be the FCC and whether Trump’s appointees there will be able to try to strip licenses from different news outlets or in some way impact their operations. You also have Trump’s new appointee to run the anti-drug division at the Department of Justice, a former Fox corporate employee who will be able to use that power to crack down on any merger attempts by different news outlets. There are a lot of different levers, a lot of different avenues that Trump can use if he wants to try to reduce the influence of the U.S. news media and crack down on the free press
Sargent: This is the thing that makes this very combustible. It starts out as bluster, right? And it’s easy to make fun of Kash Patel saying this kind of thing on Steve Bannon’s podcast, which is where he said it. But once the dynamic that you’re identifying here kicks in, you’ve got major MAGA players stepping forward; when the media actually reports facts about Trump and his administration and his administration figures and policies, MAGA will turn everything into a test of whether Republicans are on the side of the liberal media or on the side of Trump. And since Trump has spent years threatening in another administration to use the power of the state against the media, he has raised expectations among the MAGA masses that this will happen. So when these big tests start arising, the pressure will intensify on figures in the government to actually do this stuff; not just talk about it, to do it.
Gertz: And what’s more, there’s a straightforward pipeline here. What we repeatedly saw during Trump’s first administration was that people on Fox News would identify enemies for him—people that were in some way standing up against Trump—and would claim that those people were breaking the law in some way. Then Trump would respond, sometimes publicly, sometimes privately, by demanding investigations into those people, by actually trying to operationalize and weaponize the propaganda that he was receiving from Fox News and other right-wing outlets.
The reason Donald Trump wants people like Kash Patel at FBI or Pam Bondi at DOJ is because they are loyalists. When he sees people on Fox News saying that his enemies are breaking the law and he calls up the attorney general or the head of the FBI and tells them to do something about it, he wants them to say yes. Bondi and Patel will say yes. That is why they are being positioned for those roles in the first place.
This sets in motion this pipeline from Fox News propaganda to the U.S. president to actual real criminal investigations into Democrats, into the media that we could see happening over the next four years.
Sargent: Let’s bring this home now. All this stuff is really what’s at stake right here. If Republicans don’t stand up and prevent Hegseth from getting in, if they don’t stand up to the MAGA rage, it bodes very badly for all these dynamics we’re talking about. They could really potentially be way more destructive than we expect.
Gertz: Remember that Mark Esper, the last confirmed defense secretary of Donald Trump’s first administration, was fired after Trump lost the presidential election in part seemingly because he was not willing to get on board with the idea that the election had been stolen from Trump. The Pentagon is not a place you want run by the loyal servant of a would-be authoritarian president. It is a position that gives incredible influence over the U.S. military and whether or not, say, the Insurrection Act will be used to bring in the military to put down various protests as Donald Trump sought to have happen in 2020 and has Esper reportedly pushed back against it.
Sargent: That certainly makes the stakes seem a whole lot higher. Hegseth is this buffoonish character, right? The billionaires and the buffoons, he’s from the buffoon category; but he could certainly be a very dangerous buffoon. Matt Gertz, I just want to say that we’re really glad that you’re not facing the fate that Matt Gaetz faced, and we’re always happy to have you on, man.
Gertz: Always good to be here. Thanks so much.
Sargent: Folks, make sure to check out some good new content we have up at tnr.com: Timothy Noah reporting that Biden still isn’t done fighting for vulnerable workers, and Matt Ford reporting that the Supreme Court now appears ready to deal a big blow to the rights and livelihoods of transgender Americans. We’ll see you all tomorrow.
You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.