Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Garrett Graff: Thanks for having me again, Greg.
Graff: Tweets like this from Trump, I think, are indicative of what has really worried me over the course of this month, which is we have seen this continual escalation and ratcheting up of the hostility and aggression and posture of the D.C. federal takeover in a way that, again, felt different. There was a version of this in early August where I was like, Maybe this is one of those weird performative things where they’re going to be a couple of nights of a couple of extra FBI patrols through the city and maybe some National Guard troops posted at the National Mall.
Sargent: Trump also threatened several others in similar fashion. He threatened Chris Christie. After Christie criticized his corruption of the Justice Department, Trump tweeted that the feds might investigate a matter related to the 2013 closing of George Washington Bridge lanes to punish a Democratic official. Trump said this, “[P]erhaps we should start looking at that very serious situation again?” And after Maryland governor Wes Moore criticized Trump on TV, Trump threatened to send in the military to Baltimore to “clean up crime.” He said, “I will send in the ‘troops’.” And he threatened to pull funding for the city’s Francis Scott Key Bridge after Moore criticized Trump for militarizing cities. Now note, Garrett, that in all these cases, Trump is making threats to silence those who are calling out the abuses of power, calling out the authoritarianism. It sounds to me like an open and explicit demand for acquiescence and surrender. What does history tell us about this? Is this a step down the slope? What do you think of what Trump did there?
His craziest tweet of the weekend to me was him trying to dictate that Major League Baseball immediately induct Roger Clemens into the Hall of Fame because he played golf with Roger Clemens and, boy, Roger Clemens is just a great guy. This idea that there’s one true vision for America—and it is Donald Trump’s personal vision for what our life and our culture and our society should be—is to me the most clear example of authoritarianism that we could see.
Graff: Complete surrender on all fronts: in politics, in sports, in culture, in business. Part of my essay today was this insanity of Trump capitalism we have seen in the last couple of weeks where Tim Cook from Apple came to Washington D.C. to hand Donald Trump literal pieces of gold in the Oval Office to curry favor. We’ve seen Donald Trump having the government take 10 percent of Intel over because Donald Trump just believes he should have 10 percent of Intel. Nvidia is paying a literally unconstitutional export tax because Donald Trump decreed that if they wanted to sell chips to China then they had to pay this export tax of 15 percent straight to the U.S. government, which I’m sure somewhere will get laundered around to end up in Donald Trump’s presidential library like all of these other fees and fines. But this is just insanity, and it is nothing like any version of America that we have seen in modern times.
Graff: Yes. And again, the reason presumably he’s getting more comfortable is so far everyone is capitulating. One reason he feels that he can go after these networks and their FCC licenses is because he has pretty continually extorted media organizations since winning the presidency with frivolous lawsuits and holding up the Paramount merger until they paid what their own board of directors believe is a bribe to Donald Trump in order to get their merger through. There was reporting that what really held up the Paramount settlement with Donald Trump was the board of directors being concerned that they were opening themselves up to a future bribery investigation by a subsequent administration. And I’m not a lawyer, but one thing that I generally believe to be true is that if you believe that you are paying a bribe, you are probably paying a bribe.
Graff: Not at all. One of the things I was trying to do in my essay this week was we’ve warned for so long—not just in the last couple of weeks and months but the last couple of years—of the creep of Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. And I think many Americans wrongly believed that there was going to be one clear unambiguous moment, like a light switch going on or off, where everything before this moment is a democracy, everything after this moment is an authoritarian fascist regime. And of course, that’s not what it was going to be like. That’s not what Germany was like in the 1930s. That’s not what Hungary was like in the 2000s. It’s a creeping incremental process—and that there’s a blurring of lines here, there’s a norm destroyed there, a presidential diktat that goes unchallenged. And then you wake up one morning and the country is different.
Sargent: Garrett, now that you said that, let’s play that audio.
Sargent: Well, there you go. He said it. He said he didn’t want to be a dictator. He said he’s not a dictator. But he said some people want him to be a dictator. I think that’s best seen as a trial balloon, a test run, another tiny step on the incremental slope.
What I think we’re going to see and what I think we should be on alert for is the way that all of these Republican plots—all of these Trump plots and plans and schemes and tweets—are geared toward subtly shaping who shows up to vote in 2026, in 2028. You don’t need to cancel the 2026 elections if in every minority-heavy district in America, you just have voting day. You make everyone vote in person, and then on voting day have everyone have to run a gauntlet of ICE checkpoints and National Guard checkpoints in order to get to the polling place. Think about the way that voting looks in a country where next year there are 10,000 more ICE officers than there are in the U.S. right now. Think of what it looks like if there are 15 cities in the country that are being governed by military authorities and there are routine immigration checkpoints set up all across the city on voting day. All of this to me is about how the Republicans consolidate power around this authoritarian vision and regime and then lock in through the normal tools of our democracy—an illegitimate claim to power going forward.
Graff: Thanks for having me again, Greg.
Hence then, the article about transcript trump s fury erupts at many targets as expert fears worsen was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Trump’s Fury Erupts at Many Targets as Expert Fears Worsen )
Also on site :
- My Big Family Once Formed the Backbone of My Life. Then, We Discovered My Sister’s Horrific Actions. Now Nothing Is the Same.
- Royal Caribbean Extends Pause at Private Caribbean Resort Through 2026—Here’s What Cruisers Are Getting Instead
- HomeGoods' Gorgeous New Valentine's Glassware Has Shoppers Saying: 'I Need It All'