Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Ryan Enos: Yeah, thank you. I’m glad to be here talking about this.
Reporter (audio voiceover): Tulsi Gabbard has submitted a criminal referral to the Department of Justice. From your perspective, who should the DOJ target as part of their investigation, what specific figures in the Obama administration?
Sargent: Ryan, what makes all this so preposterous is that a Republican-led Senate committee concluded that Russia sought to interfere on the 2016 election to help Trump as well. Your reaction to all this?
Sargent: Well, just to bear down a little on the facts here, Gabbard’s charges are snake oil. She mixes up two different claims, one that Russia hacked the votes and the other that Russia tried to swing the election. As The New York Times points out, Gabbard holds up a supposed admission by an Obama official that Russia failed to successfully hack the votes as proof that the whole claim about Russia is made-up, but the Obama administration never claimed Russia successfully hacked the votes. The whole thing is made-up, as the ranking Intelligence Committee Democrat Mark Warner notes. Ryan, isn’t the brazenness of the swindle itself almost the cause for concern?
Again, we can go back to these examples over and over again—where, when opposition politicians have been arrested in other countries, it’s often on using preposterous claims. And when Donald Trump trots something out that is so preposterous, it gives us a concern that he doesn’t care about the facts. Now, of course, we should say that Donald Trump either believes or acts like he believes all kinds of conspiracy theories, ones that are convenient for him like that he won the 2020 election. So one interpretation is that Donald Trump just doesn’t have a command of reality. But that, of course, is concerning as well.
Enos: Yeah. When [people] talk about the breakdown of democracy or the breakdown of democratic norms, when people are commenting on it, they will often use these terms such as a “test” or a “trial balloon” or something like that. And what they mean is that somebody is trying something and seeing whether they can get away with it, essentially. And it’s never clear how much somebody doing something like that actually has that logic going through their head. But if you’ve ever raised children, for example, you know that they take signals from what they can get away with to understand what they can get away with next.
Sargent: Just to tease that out a little more, if I understand you correctly, you’re basically saying that Trump is testing both the Republican Party but also, in an important respect, testing his underlings. If he just preposterously invents pretexts for prosecuting opponents, will his underlings go along? Well, here it sure looks like Tulsi Gabbard, one of those underlings, is very much going along. I don’t know what DOJ will do, but if we understand what Trump is doing as a test, the absurdity of the claim, the absurdity of the pretext tests whether the underlings will carry out lawless actions based on them, correct?
But for all the different reasons that we’ve seen unfold in the last six months, that has gone away. And he was able to stock things like the Department of Justice—and this is very concerning when you think about it for the rule of law—with people that seem to be more loyalist than anything else. So when he puts out these orders that a person that believes in democracy would say, I will not carry out, he is testing to see if people will carry him out. This, again, is part of the problem: He’s putting these things out there and see if people will oppose them. And he’s shown a very open willingness to fire people that he considers insufficiently loyal. That increases the probability that whoever’s left after everybody has been fired, people like Tulsi Gabbard and all these other folks that we have running these places now and the people that under them, will carry out orders even if they are illegal and damaging to democracy.
Trump (audio voiceover): This is like proof, irrefutable proof that Obama was seditious, that Obama was trying to lead a coup. And it was with Hillary Clinton, with all these other people, but Obama headed it up. This is the biggest scandal in the history of our country.
Enos: Yes. And we could dwell on the more technical components of this as well, which, of course, is the case that the sitting president of the United States—which I think is the claim, that Obama did this when he was the president—looking into the attack on the election integrity by a foreign government is not something that could possibly be seen as treasonous. That would seem like actually one of his duties. So there’s something convoluted about it anyway, but I think in many ways that is also important because it shows how this claim of treason—something where somebody is making an attack on not just the office holder or something like that but an attack on the country itself, doing something that’s un-American [and], in some ways, treasonous—is something that is symptomatic of what happens in other countries during democratic breakdown.
Sargent: So on this point about manipulating the bureaucracy, we have this Adam Schiff matter. Trump is now claiming that Schiff committed mortgage fraud based on him identifying two different residences—one in Maryland just outside D.C. [and] the other in California as primary residences on loans. Schiff flatly denies any misrepresentation, and it’s common for members of Congress to have two residences this way. But that aside, a government entity called the Federal Housing Finance Agency produced the supposed evidence of this. We have a piece on this up at tnr.com. You can check it out. It was then referred to DOJ for prosecution. Now, that aside, here again, you have Trump using the bureaucracy to create reasons for DOJ to prosecute his enemies. Your thoughts on this one?
There’s a lot of cases of this. For example, one of the more prominent examples is Trump’s attacks on my employer, Harvard University, where he’s pulled out every stop he possibly can to think about, How can the federal government try to punish this institution that I don’t like? And you could see if it wasn’t a mortgage thing that Trump could start digging through Adam Schiff’s taxes or whatever else he wanted to do to try to find a way to punish him. As we know, if you try hard enough, I guess I should say, it’s not impossible to find reasons that somebody technically broke the law, but we have norms against prosecuting people and trying to dig up reasons to prosecute them. Trump simply ignores those because he doesn’t believe that this damage that would happen to democracy is important.
Sargent: Hugely alarming. And I think this really is underscored by Trump talking about Schiff, which we’ll listen to right now.
Sargent: Ryan, what strikes me about that is him saying that he’s staying out of the decision whether to prosecute, which is pretty hilarious given that he’s openly and explicitly urging the bureaucracy to find reasons to prosecute. Can you talk about that?
But then of course, he then goes and bulldozes right over those norms because Trump doesn’t actually believe in those. It, again, is this problem where even if nothing happens from this—even if it’s just a bunch of hot air and we never even see any attempted prosecution—imagine you’re the next Democrat that wants to run for office. [You’d] think, Well, is this really worth it? If I come into Trump’s political crosshairs and he’s going to criticize me and threatened to persecute me like that, then it just might not be something I want to do. Maybe I won’t run for office.
Enos: Well, I think it’s OK. I do wish that Democrats would more often call this what it is and point out that when you are threatening to prosecute your political opponents that we’re slipping into authoritarianism. And often, I think that people like Barack Obama maybe think they’re above the fray or something, so they don’t want to say that—or just that Democratic leaders don’t recognize this moment we’re in. And I think that’s often the problem we see coming out of many prominent Democrats in Congress and other places. So I do worry about the fact that they are not strong enough in these statements. But I do think it’s worthwhile noting that Trump, I should say, is in a remarkable moment of political weakness right now, where he is on the defensive. And it doesn’t take a lot to imagine that the reason he is putting out all these crazy things right now is because of him being on the defensive because of this Epstein stuff. And I would point that out too. I think Obama came close to saying that—that he’s trying to do this as “a distraction.” But he’s trying to do this [as a] diversion because Trump is the one that has a lot to hide at this point. And I think it’s important that Democrats are willing to point that out.
Enos: Yeah, I would agree with that. At some point, I think we have to think past the exact political calculations of it and just recognize the moment we’re in. And I should say that I think that largely, the American people do respond to these threats to our democratic norms. They respond to them negatively. And you can see this in Trump’s poll numbers. You can see this in the fact that the people that he has attacked in this authoritarian manner have largely been supported by the American people. This includes universities and things like that that have been attacked. And I think that’s because with all the faults we have as the American electorate—like we elected this guy twice—at the same time, Americans don’t take well to people that are trying to attack our democracy. At least the majority of them don’t. Of course, Democrats are thinking about the next election—but they also just have to think about the state of our democracy. And often those two things are compatible with each other. You can point out that somebody is damaging the system that we all value, and that hurts that opponent electorally. And that’s very clearly what Trump is doing in this case.
Enos: Well, as an academic, I always have to take the either-or/middle-ground type of response to that. But I would say that we’re in real trouble in the short term—fucked, if you will—in the sense that every democratic roadblock we thought we would have that would stop Donald Trump has failed us and has done so more quickly than we thought it would. One of the things that alarms me the most is how quickly all these things have fallen apart. And we could list them: from our political parties to our independent bureaucracy, to our judiciary, to many aspects of our civil society.
Sargent: Yes. And I think that the chances that we come out OK are reinforced if people stay in this and remain engaged. That is one of the most critical things here. Ryan Enos, it was an enormous pleasure to talk to you, man. It was really interesting. Thank you.
Enos: Yeah, thank you.
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