The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 13 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.
This week, after Christopher Wray resigned as FBI director, Donald Trump unleashed a long angry rant on Truth Social, describing this as a moment of great exoneration for him. Trump hailed his pick, Kash Patel, as someone who will restore the rule of law which under Wray had allegedly been weaponized against him. Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that MAGA figures are furious with GOP senators who dare to question Trump’s nominees, and are ramping up the pressure on them. That’ll have big implications for whether Patel gets confirmed.
Trump has the story exactly backward. The investigations and prosecutions of him were in keeping with the rule of law, and he’s picking Patel to abuse the law against his enemies. Along those lines, Will Saletan had a good new piece for The Bulwark arguing that we can’t lose sight of the basic truth that Trump simply has not been exonerated of his crimes, no matter how hard it may be to maintain that truth. Today, we’re talking to Will about all this. Thanks for coming on.
Will Saletan: Happy to be with you, Greg.
Sargent: Let’s start with Trump’s epic rant. He says that the investigations and prosecutions of him were illegal; that Chris Wray corrupted the Bureau very deeply; that Kash Patel will restore its greatness. But tellingly, he says, We’re going to get our FBI back. Apparently it will be his and MAGA’s property again. I’d say that’s ominous. Will, what do you think?
Saletan: Absolutely. When Trump talks about our FBI, he loves to divide the FBI into the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys are the so-called agents, the people who support Trump politically. That’s how he defines it. He thinks of it as a conflict between people who support him and people who don’t. The actual conflict is between people who support a man, Donald Trump, and people who support the mission of the FBI, which is to enforce and honor the laws of the United States.
Sargent: Yes. For Trump, the second thing is not an admirable end in any sense.
Saletan: Right. I would say he actually confuses the two. The thing is, Trump is such a narcissist that he thinks l’état, c’est moi—he is the United States. Anyone who is loyal to him is loyal to the United States, and anyone who crosses him, who does something he disapproves of—for example, searches Mar-a-Lago—is a traitor to the United States. That’s why he thinks of Kash Patel as a model FBI director, and Chris Wray and Jim Comey as traitors to the United States.
Sargent: You had a tweet in response to Trump’s rant. I want to read it: “This is what happens when a criminal takes control of law enforcement. All of this is lies. A party that repeats such lies is an authoritarian party. And a country that accepts such a regime of lies is an authoritarian country.” Alarming. You expand on that in your piece. The basic fact of the matter is that the law was being applied legitimately to Trump, and you argue that we can’t let ourselves forget this. Can you talk about that?
Saletan: We are living in a very strange upside-down world, and it’s going to be a challenge to all of us to keep our heads screwed on. What has happened here is that Trump is just as evil as he always was, except now he’s been restored to power. The first time, we didn’t know exactly what he was going to do. Now we know he attempted to overthrow the U.S. government to stay in power against the will of the people. So he is, first of all, a sworn enemy of democracy in that respect. Secondly, he has been prosecuted, convicted in at least one case; had four co-defendants plead guilty in another—the Georgia case; and has two federal cases suspended. He is both a criminal and an authoritarian, and yet Americans have decided to reelect him.
So we’re going to have to keep our heads screwed on insofar as we have to keep in mind both that he is the legitimately elected president, and a constant threat to democracy and a pathological liar. It’s going to be really hard to hold all of that in our minds at the same time.
Sargent: Making that even worse and more difficult, the Times reports that figures like Steve Bannon and JD Vance, behind the scenes in particular, are in a frenzy of anger over GOP senators who are exercising their advice and consent role and scrutinizing Trump’s nominees as they’re supposed to. These MAGA figures are operating from the premise that Trump can’t afford a defeat now, so they’re whipping up the rage of the MAGA masses at these senators. And there are signs that it’s working with opposition softening to the insanely unfit Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary. The same thing is going to happen with Kash Patel, but he is being picked expressly to put Trump above the law and use the law against his enemies. Will, where are Republican senators going to come down on that? Will they be just fine with it?
Saletan: Greg, I used to be, at The Bulwark, the pony guy, which meant that I was always looking for the pony under the pile of you know what. So I was the optimist, and I’ve been cured of that. I’ve been thoroughly cured of it by, among other things, the election we just had. The behavior of Republican elites, of Republican politicians, senators in particular—I don’t think there is anything in the track record of these people on which to base any optimism about their behavior.
This is fundamentally now an authoritarian party. It has successively abandoned all of the elements of what used to be the Reagan Republican platform—these were whether you agreed with them or not, they were principles, they were ideas. And it has become the party of doing whatever Donald Trump wants. So this pressure from Bannon and others to approve any nominee Trump puts forward is part of that.
It is notable that the message is not necessarily anything in particular about the qualifications of a given nominee. It is simply that Donald Trump chose this person. They can be a Fox News host with no administrative experience and a serious drinking problem who is in denial about his drinking problem. They can be a guy like Patel who has expressly declared that he is going to prosecute and punish Donald Trump’s enemies. To put that guy in charge of law enforcement is an insane proposition, but the ethos of today’s Republican Party—and I’m sorry to say, including just about all of the senators—is do whatever Donald Trump wants. That’s what we’re seeing.
Sargent: Well, you could even add to that. Another reason that MAGA is pushing for these figures is because some of them are pro-Putin, and a third reason that they’re pushing for these figures is because they will put Trump above the law. It’s not just that Trump has said, I like that person. It’s also that MAGA believes that they can be trusted to put Trump above the Constitution and to carry out whatever orders he and, by extension, MAGA through the MAGA god/king want carried out, right?
Saletan: Right, absolutely. I fully agree with that, Greg. The term that codes for that in Republican parlance is deep state. And you hear deep state as you the bureaucrats who don’t serve the people. Well, in Republican terminology and Republican ideology today, serving the people means serving Donald Trump. The fact that Donald Trump just got reelected unfortunately reinforces this narrative, so the idea is anyone who stands up to anything Donald Trump says is part of the deep state, and those people have to be purged, those people are in the way. Somehow they have a mandate to do whatever this guy says because he was elected, and that’s pretty much what they’re going to pursue in every agency.
Sargent: You’ve also written a lot about public opinion on this stuff, and I want to ask you about that. Yes, Trump won the election. It was an exceptionally narrow victory, but it was a popular vote victory nonetheless. Not a majority of plurality, very narrow, but he won. No denying that. But do you think that voters, particularly swing voters, the undecided ones we all obsessed over for months, really understand that what they were voting for was the justice system not carrying to its conclusion the cases against Donald Trump? I don’t think that the voters really understood that. And to me, that was never really drawn out in media coverage clearly enough. What do you think?
Saletan: What happens in politics, and you have lots of experience in this, is the politician says what they think will get them elected, then they get elected, and then they claim that people voted for them for whatever reason suits them after the election. The reality is that Donald Trump was the out party candidate at a time when, as you know, there’s been populist uprisings in every country, including our own. People were unhappy with the state of things under the Biden administration, so they voted for the out party.
They also thought Donald Trump had done a good job as president. Go figure, Greg. A lot of people thought that—but they certainly were not voting for the agenda that Trump now claims they were voting for. The evidence for that is there were actual exit polls done. There was the network exit poll. There’s the AP vote cast poll, which Fox News among others used and funded. What they actually did in those polls was they asked people who were voting for Trump, among others, Why did you do this? What were your concerns? What do you want him to do? And those answers simply don’t correspond to the Trump agenda.
To your question, in terms of Trump’s personal status and whether he should be cleared of charges against him, that’s just not what they were thinking about. Greg, it’s fully legit to say that the voters were indifferent to that. And I’m horrified that they were indifferent to electing a felon, but that certainly isn’t why they voted for him.
Sargent: I think we can draw a pretty clear distinction here. Probably what happened with a lot of these swing voters is they didn’t really fully process the degree to which Trump would be able to erase all of the cases against him, which is something different from being indifferent to him being a felon and a criminal. It’s more, OK, well, if he’s running, then he must have been exonerated, right? How on earth could we be letting someone run for president who committed serious crimes against the country? That’s the thought process I’m imagining they went through. You know what I’m saying, Will? We suffer from a real problem here, which is that it was just never made clear to the electorate that Trump running for office didn’t mean that he had been exonerated.
Saletan: I’m torn about this. On the one hand, I want to argue with you because I’ve become much more pessimistic and dark about the part about how it wasn’t made clear. Let me argue both sides of this.
First of all, the negative side, the dark side of this. I thought that Americans would not accept putting a convicted felon in the highest office in the land. And I thought certainly that when everybody saw January 6, everybody saw the guy try to overthrow the government, there was a threshold that Americans wouldn’t cross. And in retrospect, I was naive. This is still, I’m sorry to say, the country of slavery, of segregation, of internment, of McCarthyism. Americans have done lots of terrible things, and I just overestimated the character of Americans in terms of what they would tolerate. So that’s the dark side.
Sargent: That’s the dark side. And you’re telling me that there’s a bright side here. What is it?
Saletan: The bright side of it is ... Look, I have a couple of colleagues who think that Americans voted for worst than Donald Trump. Americans voted for Trump because they’re racist. Americans voted for Trump because they like to hurt other people, and Trump would hurt them. I don’t think it’s that simple. And in fact, I probably could put this together from the exit poll data and from polls generally.
It’s not that Americans wanted the evil; it’s that Americans were focused on their own pocketbooks or were focused on chaos in the immigration system or were just generally unhappy with things. As you know, the wrong track numbers were terrible. I just think they set these aside—it’s not affirmative, it’s just indifference. I wanted to come back to the point you made about how Americans concluded that Trump must have been exonerated—exonerated by running, by being nominated, and now by being elected. That is a natural inference that somehow he’s been exonerated, and that is just going to be a real challenge. The fact that Donald Trump is president again and that he’s got foreign leaders—Justin Trudeau flying in, Emmanuel Macron—treating him like a legit guy. It’s just hard to remember. Nothing that Trump did that was evil has been erased. That’s all still real and it’s still who he is.
So to that extent, I agree with you that there’s been this must-have-been-exonerated idea. It’s a natural thing for people to think even though it’s false.
Sargent: It’s not actually that crazy for people to conclude that because I’m pretty sure there’s some document somewhere that says that if you commit insurrection, you’re disqualified from running for president.
Saletan: Right. And I feel stupid, Greg, because I was one of the people who said, Look, it’s just cheap to try to disqualify somebody from the ballot, let’s defeat this guy. I thought Americans would be like we’re going to beat this guy in the election, and I thought also we’re going to convict him in court. Clearly, I was wrong. He wins the election, and then all the cases are dropped. It’s not clear whether after the statute of limitations lapses they’ll be able to bring them back. So none of the justice that I was counting on has happened.
Sargent: Will, I want to go back to your big point about how we can’t forget this. Let’s go big picture. As you write, Trump was not exonerated in any sense. In fact, the administration of justice is not being permitted to run its course. A jury won’t actually hear the evidence against him and pass judgment on it. So he’s not exonerated because we didn’t get the process.
Here’s what’s disturbing. Trump has the story exactly backwards, as we said, but in a very real sense, he gets to say what the story is. His victory ends the prosecutions of him prematurely, and he can just say that he was exonerated. He will pardon who knows how many of the January 6 rioters. He’s going to just rewrite it all as an outpouring of patriotism. January 6 as we understand and know it, as a violent criminal insurrection against the country, is just getting disappeared. Do we have any recourse here?
Saletan: Well, it’s going to be a challenge. Pardon me, I’m listening to you and I’m thinking, Well, when you put it that way ... It’s true that we have this ideology of democracy in this country—and all of us at The Bulwark and The New Republic fully support this—but just because you’ve won an election doesn’t mean everything you say is true. We’re going to have a difficult time getting that message out, but it is still true. This is what happens in authoritarian countries. The government puts out a message about what happened in the past; they just rewrite the history and because they control the media in that case, people just end up believing it. In all of the great literature about fighting authoritarianism, this is always one of the great struggles. I believe it was what Orwell said: To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
They are lying already about the past: the claim that Trump was exonerated; that the FBI is evil; that the raid on the search actually of Mar-a-Lago was without warrant, which is total bullshit; and especially, Greg, what you bring up about January 6. Wasn’t it in the TIME interview that he said right away he’s going to start pardoning these guys, that he’s going to try to turn upside down the story of January 6. I remember thinking during the hearings that Liz Cheney and that committee were just beating a dead horse half the time. In retrospect, those two years that they were able to tell the truth, and the documents they were able to put together, the evidence they assembled—that’s all going to be extremely important in laying a groundwork for us to maintain the little candle of truth that they’re trying to blow out with all of the lies about what happened.
Sargent: I agree 100 percent. It was really a very important moment for those reasons. Let’s finish up on Kash Patel for a sec. If there’s any hope of being able to hang on to the right-side-up story and not let it get erased and replaced by the upside-down story part of that, not all but part of it is going reside in these Republican senators. I understand that you’re very pessimistic about where that could all go. Republican senators really look as if they probably will green-light Kash Patel and probably Pete Hegseth too. I don’t know about RFK or Tulsi Gabbard. Tulsi Gabbard’s going to be a tough one, but anyway, we could really have Kash Patel. What happens when they actually start to prosecute people without cause, prosecute Trump’s enemies without cause? Can’t we make Republican senators own that at that point?
Saletan: Yeah, we can make them own it. The outer limit of the question that you’re getting at is: Is there some point at which reality intrudes? They’re going to try to do what authoritarian regimes do, which is to lie their way through everything. We have a model for what’s going to happen, which is what they did in the last few years with Jim Jordan and others tried to make the villains the heroes and vice versa. They’re going to be prosecuting the investigators and the prosecutors who looked into Donald Trump and his various accomplices. I don’t know how far Patel is going to take this, but is there a limit to the lies they’re going to be able to tell? I guess that remains to be seen, but we’re all going to have to do what we can to marshal the truth and to remind people of it because it’s so easy to forget. You and I, we’re political nerds and we keep track of this stuff, but we saw in the election that people weren’t paying attention to a lot of this. We’re going to have to just keep these stories alive.
As to your question about the Republican Party, Greg, at this point, I expect nothing from them. I honestly think that when the history of this time is written, if we are lucky, if the good guys win in the end, the Republican Party under Donald Trump will just be viewed as an authoritarian party that did whatever he wanted to. And that’s going to include about 50 of these 53 senators. I expect them to wave through Patel and Tulsi Gabbard and all the others. Maybe if we’re lucky, what happens is Patel then undertakes some assault on the rule of law that is just so obvious, or they just screw up. Let’s say they start the deportations and it’s a logistical disaster—a totally plausible scenario. At that point, did people turn against Donald Trump? I don’t know the answer to that.
The thing that worries me most is the lying and the ability of a president with an entire party behind him to spread a narrative that is just complete bullshit, and whether that will overpower all of the assembled what we used to call mainstream media and all of the truth tellers.
Sargent: Well, I’ve got to say, it seems really grim when you put it like that. We’re going to have a lot of work to do, and the truth of it is that the outcome is uncertain.
Saletan: Yeah. Sometimes, Greg, I think about what would happen. I’m not enough of a Batman aficionado, but there are various versions of the Batman story where the Joker becomes mayor of Gotham City. That’s where we are, man. The Joker is the mayor and it’s going to be a completely upside-down, bizarre world for the next four years at least.
Sargent: Sure is. Will Saletan, thanks so much for coming on with us, man. Great discussion.
Saletan: It was a blast.
Sargent: Folks, make sure to check out some new content we have up at tnr.com: Kate Aronoff arguing that Elon Musk shows us why we shouldn’t rely on CEOs as climate saviors, and Matt Ford arguing that America’s online sports betting crisis is already here. Make sure to check out the latest episode of Words Matter on the DSR Network as Norm Ornstein and Kavita Patel try to make sense of the lead-up to Trump’s impending second term. We’ll see you all next week.