Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Will Stancil: Glad to be here.
Stancil: I think he’s doing the right thing. He is being honest about the moment. He’s being honest about what’s happening in Texas. He’s not beating around the bush or pretending that he’s advancing some lofty procedural goal. He’s saying we’re here to win. We can’t let these guys win, so we’re going to do what we can to try to win. And honestly, it kills me to say this—because I’ve not traditionally been a big Gavin Newsom fan—but I’ve been waiting a long time to hear Democrats talk like this.
Stancil: Yeah. He’s being very blunt about the potential risks of a Trump presidency. Obviously, we’ve seen a lot of those, but even greater ones lie ahead. And he is responding in the way that you would respond if you truly believed that these things lay in our future.
Gavin Newsom (audio voiceover): I said that what’s happening in L.A. and the federalization of the National Guard, sending of the United States military, the Marines—700 of them, 4,700 in total—is a preview of things to come across this country. What you saw happen with the border patrol and ICE is a preview of things to come in front of voting booths. They’re going to try to suppress voting this November. This is existential, this moment. He’s trying to rig this one by literally shutting down mail-in voting. This is happening. Everyone, wake up. Wake up. He’s militarizing American cities. This is Putin’s playbook. This is authoritarianism. It’s happening.
Stancil: I totally agree. I think that what Newsom is doing is he’s finally doing what Democrats should have been doing for a decade. There is a singular factor in American politics since probably 2015 or so, and that’s Donald Trump. He’s defined American politics since 2015. And what we have seen, especially since Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, is that Democrats have been afraid to talk about it directly. They beat around the bush. They talk about how they want to work with Trump. They talk about how they want to focus on kitchen-table issues, they want to lower prices. They’re afraid of being accused of having Trump derangement syndrome. They’ll be afraid of being accused of focusing on nothing else. They’re afraid of being accused of abandoning the working man.
Sargent: When you say it’s working, what are you referring to?
Sargent: I want to bear down on this thing you said a little earlier about how Newsom is not afraid to act as if Trump is at the very center of everything. Newsom’s own evolution is kind of interesting here. After Trump won, when Trump took over in January, Newsom started out in the wrong way, I think. He was really playing footsie with MAGA and playing footsie with Trumpism. He did all that podcasting with the right-wingers. I think there’s still a little bit of that going on, but less. And at the center of what Newsom was doing then was this media-friendly reading of Trump and the Trump phenomenon, which essentially said right-wing populism is a very durable force in our politics. It’s shaping everything right now. The only way for Democrats to succeed is to essentially feed that phenomenon in their own way, find their way to reconcile themselves to it. That was a disaster for Newsom, right? It’s only when he actually forgets about that and accepts this idea that MAGA is a singularly destructive force in American life through Donald Trump that he actually starts to succeed. What do you think of that?
Now I’m going to do a little self-promotion here because in some ways I’ve been writing on this for seven years now—
Stancil: Yeah, go ahead [laughs]. No, but seven years ago I wrote an op-ed in The Atlantic saying that Democrats need to focus solely on opposing Trump. That the nature of American politics right now is about Trump. The largest coalition available to Democrats is the one that opposes Trump. An anti-Trump coalition unites all of the factions that the Democrats can conceivably get. And if you’re not in the anti-Trump coalition, you’ve got no chance of getting them anyway. And the Democrats need to stop worrying so much about being saying they’re obsessed with Trump and just understand this is the reality of the time. Focus on attacking him, on bringing Trump down, and then we’ll work it out after he’s gone.
Sargent: It is working, and the media is taking notice. And in an irony, the media is actually coming up with a way to describe this that downplays the threat of Trump as well. They’re diagnosing why Newsom is breaking through right now by saying things like he’s tweeting in all caps, right, just like Trump does. They point to his trolling of Trump or his using of Trump-like memes. Brian Beutler, who to his great credit has been way out front on all this stuff, had a good piece arguing that Newsom is acting as an antidote to “the dead-enderism of liberal rectitude politics,” as he put it. I think that’s right. The trolling and the social media stuff—that’s not what’s allowing Newsom to break through, although it probably helps. It’s that Newsom is saying two things. First, we’re not going to let Republicans play by different rules anymore. And second, we are going to use our power however we can, no matter what The New York Times editorial board says about it, to prevent Republicans from getting away with that anymore.
I’m sure that in the long run, if he keeps this up, there will be efforts—or with things he attempts to break through—which he doesn’t expect. There’s also going to be some stuff that falls flat. That’s just the nature of this. No one can predict in advance what’s going to work. But part of the reason that that energetic try-everything politics works is that you don’t know, and so you find stuff that is effective. Republicans do this relentlessly. This is the key, in my opinion, to a lot of their success, to a lot of MAGA’s success. MAGA does a lot of stuff that is unbelievably stupid and goes nowhere. Many of Trump’s more authoritarian efforts to procedurally game the system or overturn laws or destroy the federal government have fallen flat. But he has still gotten a long way down the field by just trying everything and finding things that are working out better than you might have expected. And so it is immense relief to finally see a Democrat who is erring on the side of action instead of erring on the side of caution.
Stancil: Vaguely. Yeah.
Stancil: The thing about being a Democrat is that dealing with Republicans operating like this is overwhelming. The stuff that they are saying coming out constantly, new fake scandals, new fake outrages every day—as a liberal, your response sometimes is, Let’s refute this line by line. But by the time you do that, there’s six new things. And the effect it has on the information environmental line—where it’s just this flood on one side and the other side is people so far behind trying to catch up and refute things point by point—really distorts how our politics functions. And there’s no reason we can’t do this ourselves. In fact, there are a lot more things to be legitimately outraged by on our side, [things] that Trump’s truly doing that are really outrageous, that are offenses to the entire American Constitution and our system and our laws. But we just don’t operate like this. We just don’t want to operate like this. For some reason, we’re afraid to try it. And I really think that if we try it, there is a lot of power here that we can potentially exploit to first win the public opinion, win hearts and minds, persuade people and ultimately win elections and take electoral power.
Stancil: That’s correct. And I think that there was a time when you would say things like, Trump’s an authoritarian, Trump’s a fascist, and people would say, Calm down. Let’s not get overheated here. Let’s stick to the real things. He’s cutting taxes for the rich. But what’s interesting is that as those charges have become more demonstrated in the fact of what he’s doing, as he’s behaved in ways that are straightforwardly authoritarian and anyone would have said so 10 years ago, Democrats have not really upped their rhetoric to match. They stayed focused on these issues that they feel are safe to talk about. And sometimes they’ve even left those issues and retreated to even more boring issues when they felt like that the kitchen-table issues—taxes or crime, whatever—had become too controversial.
Sargent: And by the way, a lot of people might object to what we’re saying here by pointing out that, Well, don’t Democrats have to focus on what’s popular? What about moderate Democrats in difficult areas? I’m sensitive to all that. I think an approach like this can coexist with your typical swing district Democrat maybe wanting to do things a little differently. There just has to be some sense among all the institutional players in the party that they need to make more noise of the type that we’re talking about. And if moderates want to go in certain directions in their states or districts, I think that’s OK. Do you think that’s a hard balance to strike, Will?
Sargent: I agree 100 percent with that. And by the way, there’s one other objection we should probably deal with. This is something I think I’ve seen you tackle before, but there’s a sense out there that if a number of Democrats in safe areas do stuff like this, it taints the overall party in some sense and paints the party as a larger entity as not being in touch with what real people think about and feel on a daily basis. I feel like that’s a problematic way of thinking about politics. I just don’t really buy that there’s this real calculation on the part of voters, where they see that type of conduct from Democrats in non–swing districts and say, Well, the whole party isn’t interest in my pocketbook or my wallet. What do you think, Will? What do you think the answer to that is?
The vast majority of Democrats are Democrats because the larger value set that Democrats represent: the rule of law, democracy, an open pluralistic country, economic prosperity, helping people in need. Those values appeal to Democrats.
Stancil: Something that Democrats and liberals generally, and I think it’s even includes a lot of journalists, do when it comes to Republicans is they feel compelled to give them the benefit of the doubt. And so every story, every outrage, every scandal is framed in a way that is most favorable to the Republican—because they’re afraid of being accused of overreaching, of being biased. So Trump would do something—Trump would put troops in D.C. Insane—[he] puts armed troops in D.C. and you see people say, Well, is this really the best crime fighting remedy? No, that is not the concern with putting armed troops in D.C. The concern is that it is an authoritarian outrage that would be inconceivable in American politics even six months ago.
It’s really completely transformed his ability to talk about Trump. Suddenly, he doesn’t have these restrictions on how he talks. He can just describe it in plain language like a normal human being would do, and it’s been revelatory to see.
Stancil: Absolutely. Yeah, thank you.
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