Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Jennifer Rubin: It’s lovely to be here.
Rubin: It is absolutely illegal and I do not expect these inspector generals to go quietly. This is what they do. They enforce the rules. They are the watchdogs. And in order for them not only to preserve their personal dignity and reputations but the institution of inspector general, I fully expect that many, if not all of them, will object. It will be very interesting if on Monday, they show up to work because they have not been legally fired; they can show up. And a Republican senator or congressman or other toady of this administration saying, Fine with me, is really irrelevant. The law is the law, and this is going to be litigated.
Sargent: Trump has now defended this move by arguing that “Some people thought that some were unfair or some were not doing their job,” meaning the inspectors general. Then he said, “It’s a very standard thing to do.” I think this makes it even worse. Although the law requires a real rationale, he just flippantly declares, Oh, someone somewhere thought they were unfair. In Trump speak, of course, unfair means that they might actually hold him and his agencies accountable to the law in an independent way and are not beholden to him. But putting that aside, he’s giving a fat middle finger to the very idea that he should explain himself as the law requires and calling it standard. What are the broader implications of that?
Now, the latter may be very true. Our current Supreme Court is corrupt, partisan; the majority, at least, is going to go along with much of what he does under the so-called unitary executive theory, meaning the president is in charge of anybody and everyone in the executive branch and no one can tell him what to do. However, there are many steps before that, and we’ve already seen court challenges filed—some within the very hour of his inauguration on DOGE, on birthright citizenship. We’re going to see litigation on Schedule F. We’re going to see litigation on this. And there are lower and intermediary courts that will stop him, that will issue injunctions. We’ve already had one.
Rubin: Anyone could—any single IG or a group of IGs, there’s also an IG association—go into federal court and say, This is violative of the law, we want a restraining order preventing me from being fired, allowing me to return to my office, and we’ll then litigate until final conclusion. That becomes tricky because they can let them back in the office and then lock the door, turn off their phone and all the rest of it. So when you have these personnel issues, it becomes a battle of the wills: Are they going to let him back in? Are they going to do his job?
Rubin: Do you expect a lawsuit to be filed?
Sargent: Excellent point, Jen. Let’s move to Senate Republicans for a second. They’re going to roll over for all this. Senator John Barrasso was asked if the firings concerned him, and here’s what he said.
Sargent: Jen, some other Republicans expressed concern. But come on, have you heard anything from any Republican that sufficiently denounces this and signals any real response from their end?
And if Chuck Grassley, who has long been a defender of inspector generals when Democrats were in office, actually wants to take this up, he’ll have plenty of support. And frankly, I’ll give him a round of applause because any Republican at this point who is willing to do anything, anything to speak up, deserves some support.
We forget he is a lame duck, and he actually admitted for the first time he was a lame duck the other day. He said, No, I’m not going to have a third or fourth term. I’m just going to have two. Well, praise be the Lord, we’re only going to abide by that part of the Constitution. I’m sure he’ll change his mind; but be that as it may, we have to understand that every time he loses one of these, it’s not just a victory on that particular issue. It slows down the train and it disrupts this aura of invincibility, this canard that he can do whatever he wants to do. And it will be a thousand cuts that finally bring him down or slow him down. When he does something so blatantly, so clear, it’s a gimme for the courts, for Democrats, for democracy defenders, because they’ve got a winner. He’s not going to ultimately win in violating the law.
Sargent: I 100 percent agree. Dealing out defeats to Trump is essential as a much larger project in slowing him down. I want to ask you about something you said earlier about IGs and their basic role, which is to protect the American people from, uh, corrupt or illegal behavior on the part of government agencies. You could see an interlocking scheme here, where Trump really starts to use the government in corrupt ways like relying on loyalists he installs to produce “government information” that’s really propaganda. The government produces a whole lot of information—he’s going to corrupt that thoroughly to its core. Then on top of that, the purge of independent civil servants leaves fewer people in place to either resist that kind of corruption or blow the whistle about it. The purging of IGs looks like a step in that direction. It has to be seen in this broader context where he’s going to convert the government to kind of an instrument of his own will and his propagandistic needs.
First of all, you deprive the American people of information. Just the basic data. The next time we get a report on the jobs from the Department of Labor, everyone is going to scratch their head and think, Hmm, I wonder if this is actually right? Because when you systematically destroy faith in institutions, faith in the government, then that is when an authoritarian comes forward and says, The only person you can trust is me. No one else is trustworthy or almost as bad. You can’t trust anything. You don’t know whether it’s true or not, but you can believe me. So when you get rid of, as you said, the decision-makers and the fact makers and the experts in government and you fill them with cronies, and then you take away the watchdog that is supposed to happen, you begin to see the unraveling and the corruption of government.
Sargent: I want to try to get at another way in which the stakes are very big here. Inspectors general are a key part of the apparatus that Congress put in place after the Watergate scandals, which involved another Republican president who was lawless and out of control. All kinds of important reforms were installed. But it’s clear that the post-Watergate architecture is really in danger of failing in the face of Trump, right? You mentioned earlier that we need a more concerted and vocal response from Democrats. Defending that order seems to me to be a key place to start, don’t you think?
They are in the minority, but they are not powerless. They can speak up, they can use the bully pulpit. And I have said this until I’m blue in the face and I’m sure he doesn’t like hearing it for me for the umpteenth time, but we need a stronger chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senator Durbin is a very nice man. We need someone far more aggressive. And frankly, Senator Schumer needs to do a better job of communicating. How many of the Democratic committees are actually on Bluesky? It’s a small little thing, but that’s where the Democrats are. That’s where the engaged public is. It has 27, 28 million used or something like that? It’s malpractice for Democrats not to be on all of the relevant social media platforms to explain themselves and to come out. And it is very demoralizing for people out there in the country who are trying to mount a defense or are just trying to keep their spirits alive, frankly, to see such a sporadic, ineffective, nonexistent response from Democrats.
Sargent: I want to endorse that 100 percent. It’s very, very clear that one of the key projects for people like you and me and for Democratic and small d democratic and liberal voters across the country will be to get both our media and the Democratic Party to step up to this moment to hold Trump accountable, and communicate what they’re doing in that regard and communicate why Trump is so dangerous. This all has to be explained to people. Trump is the one who’s doing all the explaining. He’s just saying, OK, well, they did a crap job, they couldn’t really be trusted. Where’s the counternarrative, right? It’s really clear to me that Trump and MAGA are using all their media outlets effectively to just portray him as a disruptor, as a reformer. And again, we see this here—John Barrasso said that essentially. He said, Oh, well, you know, he’s reforming the place. He’s knocking heads together. He’s breaking the furniture.
Rubin: Absolutely. It’s interesting. If they would just explain a few of the things that inspector generals have done over the years to save the taxpayer money, to reveal corruption, to improve the service of government, people would understand these are not “the deep state.” They’re the eyes, the ears, the watchdog of the American people. We would not know, and this is why he wants them out, of many scandals, many misuses of government power, many instances of sheer incompetence. And some of these are in areas, frankly, that Republicans themselves should care a lot about. Do they want the Social Security Administration to operate better? Do they want these programs that they said are rife with waste, fraud, and corruption? They always say that. Well, who’s going to find it if you don’t have these people?
Sargent: Jen Rubin, thank you so much for coming on with us. Very well said. Everybody, check out Jen’s new Substack The Contrarian. Good to talk to you as always, Jen.
Sargent: 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.
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