Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Matt Ford: Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here.
Ford: Sure. Earlier this summer, Trump announced that he was going to build a ballroom where most of the East Wing currently is. The plans were kind of dismissed at the time as a little fanciful, and it was assumed that the project would take some time to complete if it followed the normal channels.
Sargent: He just started demolishing this building without any word from Congress, without any process, without anything?
Sargent: It’s just an extraordinary story in so many ways. as always, White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, made it even worse. Listen to this.
Sargent: Matt, note how Levitt takes this moment as an occasion not to seriously reassure the American people or to take corruption concerns seriously at all, but instead to build up the Trump cult and as always appeal to the audience of one. What do you make of that? I’ve never seen anything like this before.
But more to the point, it sort of underscores the degree to which, like you say, this is an administration that is focused on one man’s whims. This isn’t a simple situation where the president is controlling or directing or guiding the executive branch.
Sargent: Well, to your point, on another front, we’ve now learned that Trump is unilaterally pushing the Justice Department to hand over $230 million in payments for damages that he allegedly suffered due to the Russia investigation and his indictment for stealing state secrets.
Matt, can you talk about how crazy that is?
Sargent: Well it is, and I think the key to understanding this is to kind of go back and explain what the Justice Department’s role is supposed to be. It’s supposed to be an independent entity. After Watergate, a whole bunch of norms and even some laws were passed to make that. So Trump is essentially bulldozing all that. Can you give us the big picture there?
After Watergate, those norms were reinforced. Justice Department independence was much more seriously pursued. Attorneys General took it upon themselves to distance themselves from most of the day-to-day political operations of the White House. Obviously, you coordinate on drug busts, but not on corruption indictments.
Sargent: That’s clever Matt. Can you explain it?
But suffice it to say that if the president wanted to release the Epstein files, he could just tell the Justice Department to do so. He’s bulldozed its independence. The fact that he is no longer doing so shows how convenient it can be, and how politically important it could be, to maintain it separately.
Sargent: Right. He’s basically saying, this is up to Attorney General Pen Bondi and up to FBI Director Kash Patel. It’s not my decision.
Sargent: So Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House, had something to say about the $230 million shakedown that Trump’s attempting. Listen to this.
Sargent: Matt, you don’t often hear Democrats talk quite this way, but it seems essential to me to point out that crimes are happening to let the American people know that they are being looted and pillaged. What do you make of what you heard there from Jeffries?
And I think that when you look at that, you have to consider, obviously, that there’s the immunity decision in Trump v. United States. But the scope of that decision—how far it extends down to supporting officials in the executive branch, what counts as a core power versus something more amorphous—there’s a lot to tease out there.
Sargent: Right. I think Democrats need to be saying very forcefully right now that anybody who’s carrying out a corrupt or illegal order for Donald Trump needs to prepare to face accountability later. I want to return to Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general here. We have a piece up on this at TNR.com. Please check it out. But basically, Todd Blanche is at the nexus of a lot of decisions by the Justice Department that are arguably among their most corrupt, whether it involves prosecuting Trump’s enemies or things involving illegal deportations, Tren de Aragua, all that sort of stuff. Todd Blanche is going to be in a position where he might need a pardon from Trump. And yet at the same time, Trump is essentially saying, hey, Todd, sign me a check for $230 million. How does Todd Blanche say no to that under these circumstances?
He was going to weaponize the Justice Department to go after his political enemies on frivolous or pretextual grounds, and that he was going to use it for his personal political gain. And so far—promise kept.
But I think it’ll be an important temperature check of just how corrupt this administration is—to see whether or not he even bothers with that.
Ford: That’s right. I mean he his experience with the with his first term shows that recusal is something that he takes not as a matter of ethics, but as a personal insult. You’re just supposed to do what Trump says. Unfortunately for Trump, the legal system, the Anglo-American legal tradition, to put it more broadly, doesn’t really work like that. You’re supposed to recuse yourself from these things, and to not do so is highly problematic.
Senator Chris Murphy (voiceover): Well, listen, there’s a lot of history that has taken place in the East Wing and it was just destroyed without any conversation in the American public, without any consent of Congress. It was absolutely illegal. And yeah, that visual is powerful because you are essentially watching the destruction of the rule of law happen as those walls come down. It is just a symbol about how cavalier he is about every single day acting in new and illegal ways.
Ford: I mean, that’s a really good way for him to put it. And I think it’s a really important point to hammer home that this is the people’s house. It does not belong to the president. He does not own it. He is not leasing it. He has no property-right claim over it whatsoever.
It belongs to the National Park Service because it’s a national heritage site. It’s a place of history; it’s a place of meaning. I don’t know how many of the listeners will have ever had the chance to tour it, but if you tour it, you do get the sense of the weight of America’s history when you walk through there.
Sargent: Well, that gets to the core idea in your piece, which I want to talk about. It’s that appallingly corrupt self-dealing is at the very core of the Trump presidency. It’s like the throbbing lifeblood of this national moment. I think a lot of Trump voters tune this stuff out because they assume that whatever is good for the president is good for them. He’s masterfully seduced them into thinking that. But this looks like something different. What we’re seeing now is Trump directly taking their money, taxpayer money, putting it in his pocket, or at least trying to, and building a huge vanity project for himself. This is why I think we’re at a Rubicon crossing moment of sorts. How do we make that break through a bit more?
Whenever you bring up that somebody is corrupt, a partisan will often reply, well, so-and-so is corrupt too. But I think we can firmly say that nobody has ever torn down the East Wing of it for their own self-gratification and their own ego.
And we have to hope that Americans will realize and act accordingly, in understanding that this is beyond the pale for any president to consider, let alone execute.
Ford: Yeah, the lawlessness is important, and it’s certainly an important aspect of it. But what really stands out to me is the utter negation of the American civic tradition—the idea that public service is a service. The idea that you temporarily put aside your private interests, you act in the public good, and then you return to private life after serving a term subject to the people’s will.
I mean, we talk about, you know, our sites of democracy as sacred. Congress is sacred. Well, the president defiled that when he sent a mob to disrupt the electoral count four years ago. The White House is a historical site for our history. The president is demolishing it at will. He’s paving over the Rose Garden. He’s gilding it to make it look like some cheesy casino—Atlantic City casino, not a Nevada casino. Those are classier.
Sargent: It will be taught in civic textbooks for many, many generations. Matt Ford, thanks for explaining that this is so much more than Trump just being a cheese ball. Really well said stuff today, man. Thank you.
Ford: Thank you so much for having me.
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