Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Michael Tomasky: I guess you ran out of other guests. Happy to be with you.
Tomasky: None whatsoever. Complete extortion and shocking behavior by Trump, but what else is new? Incredible behavior by Paul Weiss, a longtime, large, respected [firm]. I wrote about this Friday, and I went to the Paul Weiss website just to see what they had to say about themselves. And it turns out that The American Lawyer, a respected legal magazine, named them Law Firm of the Year in the United States in 2024. I doubt they’re going to repeat. We can at least bet on that.
Sargent: And I think there’s a way to look at this: as a clear warning to other firms out there. You’re going to get shaken down if you dare get crosswise of me.
Sargent: It is. And Trump actually said straight out what the game is. Let’s play some audio of Trump talking to reporters about this whole saga. Listen.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): Well, the law firms all want to make deals. You mean the law firms that we’re going after that went after me for four years ruthlessly, violently, illegally? Are those the law firms you’re talking about? But then, they’re very sophisticated people. Those law firms did bad things. Bad things. They went after me for years.
Tomasky: No. And of course, it would never occur to any other president in the modern history of the U.S. to do something like this. Even Richard Nixon would tell his guys, Go audit some partners tax returns for a few years, maybe harass them a little bit. Even he wouldn’t try to shake them down. It’s just another staggering thing that is going to fade in a day or two, and that in other circumstances would have been utterly shocking news.
Tomasky: Yeah, yeah. That’s the only reason. There’s no pretense at any other reason. No pretense.
Tomasky: Right. Saying it straight out, I guess, makes you be able to get away with it, at least if you’re Donald Trump. He doesn’t try to hide any of this. That’s the one thing we have to say: He doesn’t try to hide any of this. He thinks he ought to be able to behave like a monarch or a potentate or an authoritarian ruler of some backward country—and if he just does it out in the open, he does get away with it.
Reporter (audio voiceover): President, do you think you have the authority, the power to round up people, deport them, and then you’re under no obligation to record, to show the evidence against them?
Sargent: He claims, “That’s what the law says,” meaning the law says he can deport people while showing no evidence against them. Now, we should stressed that his most prominent deportation efforts lately are using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and another statute allowing the secretary of state to remove alleged foreign policy threats. In these cases, what’s at issue is whether the laws can be applied the way he’s applying them. He basically says straight out he’s got free rein to apply them this way, that it’s good not to have to show evidence. Your thoughts on that, Mike?
Sargent: And as you say, it hasn’t been used in any other setting.
Sargent: I was really struck by that quote from Trump because he says straight out that he doesn’t want to give due process to the people he’s removing. He says it straight out.
Sargent: Reminds me a little bit of Ron DeSantis flying all his migrants up to Martha’s Vineyard on false pretenses. I guess this is a hallmark of MAGA.
Sargent: In your piece, you get at this question of what happens if the Supreme Court, which will inevitably hear this, does side with Trump in the end. I think that there’s a reasonable chance that the court actually won’t in this case, that it will say it matters whether we’re actually at war or not. But if the Supreme Court were to say that the president has the authority to simply say we’re at war and then say that these are gang members or terrorists and that’s good enough, then all of a sudden you do potentially, I think, open up the door to the types of scenarios you’re talking about.
Sargent: I would think so. In your piece, you say that these deportations under the Alien Enemies Act and the surrounding things that Trump is trying to do are a straight up attempt at dictatorship. Can you talk about that?
Sargent: Indeed. And I think, by the way, that we shouldn’t necessarily write off the possibility that voters will care about this kind of thing. I want to read a quote from James Blair, the White House deputy chief of staff for Political and Legislative Affairs. He says Democrats are “running angry and riled up,” and that this can be a challenge politically at the ballot box, meaning in the midterms. Mike, we keep hearing from certain Democratic consultants and data analysts—you know who I’m talking about—that Dems can’t spend too much time defending our institutions because voters don’t care about that sort of thing. Allowing that maybe the particular word “institutions” is maybe not politically potent, it seems clear that this lawlessness, deportations without due process of people who have a soccer tattoo that can be relabeled a gang tattoo as they did, has got the Democratic base very angry and agitated. How should Dems try to harness that, do you think?
There are a lot of Democrats. There are 215 in the House of Representatives, and 47 in the Senate, whatever that adds up to. I’m bad at math. Surely, among all those 262, I guess, they can find some who want to try and reach low-income swing voters or low-information swing voters, and they can find others who want to talk to the base, and they can find others who want to take a stand for history’s sake and make sure the Democratic Party is on the right side of history. They should be able to do all three of those things at the same time. It shouldn’t be that hard.
Sargent: It does. I also want to say, though, that there is some virtue in just making a lot of noise about Trump’s lawlessness. Now again, maybe you don’t use the word “institutions,” but what has to be portrayed vividly to the country is that something’s very profoundly wrong, that we’re really off the rails. This is something the right does relentlessly. Democrats think that they have to shape everything around what the median 53-year-old noncollege white guy sitting at his kitchen table thinks, but it’s not all about issues necessarily. It’s not all about just picking and choosing popular issues and unpopular issues. Again, that stuff’s important; but making noise about lawlessness, chaos, disruption signals to swing voters who don’t pay attention that something’s wrong and breaks through the clutter to them a little bit. Don’t you think?
Sargent: Yeah. I was going to ask you about that. In fact, where do you see this all going? It seems to me that the internal logic of the situation leads inevitably to defying court orders, more deportations without a shred of due process, more people in foreign gulags. What do you think?
If this goes up to the Supreme Court, this particular case, and Trump defies and they rule against Trump as you suggested, let’s say Trump defies the Supreme Court and just keeps doing this. Then, where are we? And will that break through to the low-information swing voter? Will they finally say, This is a problem?
Tomasky: Of course they’re kidding themselves. He may come back and ask for more. He’s not going to have them to the White House Christmas party, that’s for sure. So Judge Boasberg is a lesson in how you can take a stand and take a position that history will reward. He’s doing it in the face, I’m sure, of a lot of difficulty, but he’s doing it without fear, and he’s very much to be admired.
Tomasky: Sure, yeah. I’m happy to do it. Great way to spend the afternoon.
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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