Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
What’s going to happen to the targets of Trump’s retribution tour? How should they defend themselves? Today, we’re talking about this with Josh Marshall, the founder and editor in chief of Talking Points Memo. Josh has an interesting new piece arguing that these targets need to band together in the face of what’s coming. Thanks for coming on, Josh.
Sargent: I want to start with Lara Trump because it’s so brazen. She and a right-wing interviewer were talking about supposed wrongdoing by Liz Cheney during the January 6 Committee investigation. Listen to what Lara Trump said next.
Sargent: The January 6 Committee investigation documented extensive evidence of Trump’s incitement of violent insurrection, and Trump and MAGA have never forgiven them for it. Here you have Lara Trump basically suggesting straight out that Trump is picking Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard in part to carry out domestic spying on Trump’s enemies. Josh, could this be clearer?
When people hear that, they think, OK, that’s a funny way to think about Trumpian politics. I guess it is a funny way, but it’s very real. That whole bombast is not only made to make people feel afraid, particularly the people they’re threatening directly, but to create this aura of power and uncheckable power and to knock people back on their heels and make them feel disoriented, demoralized, and all those things. We need to be aware of that aspect of what is going on here because that is a big part of it, in addition to whatever they may actually choose to do, which we have no idea what that’s going to be. It’s important to recognize that we have no idea on either side of the spectrum of possibilities.
Marshall: He certainly wants to create a spectacle about it. One thing that Trump tries to do and is very good at doing is he makes all sorts of threats and demands and everything under the sun. They are intentionally over the top and bombastic, which creates a penumbra of threat around him. That, again, knocks people back on their heels. He is holding territory as it were, and he doesn’t even have to do anything. It’s typical Trump to threaten 10 things a day. And his opponents, his enemies are feeling overwhelmed with all the different threats, and he doesn’t actually have to do anything. So it is really important for people both to be prepared for him to do all sorts of crazy stuff, but also to be attuned to that spectacle, which is his greatest power.
Sargent: You wrote this piece arguing that targets of Trump’s retribution tour need some way of banding together here. I want to get to the bombast side of this a bit later, but for now, taking the threats extremely seriously, as you do in your piece, this comes as Trump filed this lawsuit against pollster Ann Selzer for putting Trump behind in Iowa, whereas Trump won there. This is a real lawsuit, and it’s clearly all about putting people in the media and polling on notice that they will face real legal harassment if they anger or criticize Trump. Your thought is for a clearing house where donors can chip in to support the legal defense of people who face this harassment so they’re not alone. It sounds like a pooled arrangement. Can you talk about why this is necessary and what it would look like?
A lot of people have proposed something like that, and I think it’s a great idea. I’m really hoping people who are in this line of work will come together and start doing it. You start with an idea that there is resources—legal resources, money resources—that for each person who gets targeted, this organization can swoop in and say, Hey, don’t worry about the legal bills. We got it. We’re all over this. We’ve got unlimited money. We’re going to fight this, etc. There’s a lot of people who’ve talked about that great idea. What I think I was adding that’s a little different is this needs to be a little more than a lot of money and really sharp lawyers. It needs to be something a little beyond a souped up 2025 version of a public interest law firm.
When I said before about be attuned to the spectacle, I’m not saying it’s a spectacle, there’s nothing real. I’m saying there’s two very real things, and to think about them each as real things that need to be countered. In addition to the money and the lawyering, what I think you want is: Every time this happens, you have an organization that can swoop in and say, Nope, that’s not how it works. That is total BS. Look, you want to do it, you want to humiliate yourself and want us to make fun of you, great. Tell us when the court date is. We’ve got limitless money, we can’t wait.
This is, again, a world of professional wrestling. This is when you’ve got the one wrestler tearing off his shirt and flexing his muscles signaling I’m going to do this and do that and the other guy doing the same. Only too often in this world we’re in right now, it’s just Trump doing that. There’s no other side doing the same taunts. And that may seem silly and childish, but that is the language of the politics that we are in today. People who don’t like what Trump is doing to our politics, don’t like what he is doing on everything he’s doing, need to be able to talk in that language. They’re not doing enough of it now, and I want people to start thinking in those terms.
Marshall: Seems like a superpower.
Sargent: Right. In addition to flexing, it’s also essential to trying to terrorize everyone into watching their step a little more, refraining from criticizing Trump or aggressively reporting facts ...
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