Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Asawin Suebsaeng: It is always a pleasure to be here to talk to you about America’s ongoing democratic backsliding.
Wiles also admitted that what Trump is really up to with these prosecutions is clear. “In some cases it may look like retribution,” she said. And then even more directly, she allowed that the prosecution of New York attorney general Letitia James did seem like retribution. Swin, there you have the chief of staff in the White House all but admitting that Trump’s prosecutions are not rooted in the law. Your reaction to that?
So, like, why were you trying to get him to stop unless there was something gravely wrong with it? So look, obviously the White House—from Susie Wiles to everybody else in the communications operation and also all across the vast expanse of the Trump administration, including Pete Hegseth at the Department of Defense—are trying to propagandize the American people that, look, this was a hit piece, it was missing some vital context, or certain quotes were taken out of context. And, look, it’s no big deal. In fact, we’re laughing about it. Donald Trump gave an exclusive interview to the New York Post on Tuesday, basically stressing that point, like, I actually think it’s funny. Nobody here is upset. Susie didn’t do anything wrong.
I don’t think this will come as a shock to that many of your listeners, but there is a large screen of bullshit covering that in the sense that they’re trying to make it seem like Susie Wiles slipped on the banana peel and she meant to slip on the banana peel.
She thought she was off the record or on background. There are a bunch of things in the two Vanity Fair pieces that we know she didn’t want her name publicly attached to, but she didn’t know she was on the record.
Sargent: Right. And so that’s why they’re going after the reporter and Vanity Fair really hard. Wiles put out a statement calling it a disingenuous hit piece. Then on Fox News, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to spin it all this way.
Sargent: Swin, let’s take this in two parts. First, note how she went full cult: “Susie Wiles is the greatest chief of staff ever. Trump is the greatest president in U.S. history.” Have you noticed that whenever the news gets really bad, Leavitt and other propagandists always go out of their way to go full North Korea with Trump?
Suebsaeng: Right. Whatever these things happen, there is … and look, it can sometimes feel like it’s getting old that we constantly reference Pyongyang. But given how garrulously cultish the entirety of the Republican Party elite is right now, and how they treat the so-called God Emperor Donald Trump, it is really hard to get around the idea that when you visit official Washington nowadays, you are not in Donald Trump’s Pyongyang.
Like, literally everything. It’s all they do. It’s their only play whenever he or someone else in their orbit fucks up. And it’s just astounding because, look—well, I mean, it’s not just astounding, it’s kind of horrifying because it underscores the militarized authoritarianism that Trumpism is now trying to spread across our once-great country.
Sargent: That is such a good point. There really is an extra set of layers of absurdity to it when you consider how badly he’s tanking. I mean, these Cabinet meetings in particular. Whenever the news is bad, they just slather him with the most ridiculous and obsequious praise, one after another, and they don’t care how ridiculous it looks to normal human beings. That’s the thing I can’t get around, Swin.
Even factoring in that very obvious, terrifying premise, I still cannot imagine living in my own head, being surrounded by sycophants—whether I work at a magazine or Zeteo or in the literal fucking White House—and having people slobber over me in such a shamefully ignorant fashion, and not think to myself: I am doing something wrong here.
Suebsaeng: Yes, yes, that is a much better way to put it than I did. Just, like … every once in a while, I like to sit between phone calls and between stretches of reporting and just think to myself what it must be like to exist in Donald Trump’s brain, where all this stuff can happen to you and you actually enjoy it. Any normal person would think to themselves: They are treating me like a baby. I am not a baby. Stop patronizing me.
But of course, they’re not obliged to print the glowing stuff about Trump. That’s not how it works. Isn’t that pretty revealing of essentially their understanding of the role of the Fourth Estate in the Trump despot reign?
But if you actually read the stuff in Vanity Fair, not all of it is hyper, hyper negative. Like, they’re clearly quoting an abundance of material here, and some of it involves the senior officials complimenting Donald Trump, complimenting each other.
You guys saying that Donald Trump commands the stars, the moon, and the skies, and that the fate of the republic rises and falls on how irritated or not he is while watching television—no, I’m sorry. That’s not massively newsworthy to hear you slobber [over] that stuff.
Swin, importantly, a lot of this has failed because career prosecutors are holding the line. They’re sticking to the facts and the law, refusing to do Trump’s corrupt bidding. You’ve done a lot of work on this. What do you make of that bigger picture of how badly it’s all going?
Are you sure they can’t do that? Well, if you ask Judge Cannon in Florida, she’ll have a different prescription and legal analysis of it than you or I or somebody else would. But having said that, there is some degree of resistance. And yes, there is quite a bit of face-planting because some of it is just so blatant that it’s hard not to get it laughed out of court.
Like, the first year of Trump 2.0 isn’t even up yet. And the administration has signaled heavily—we’ll see which ones of Trump’s enemies they follow through with on this, but they’ve signaled heavily that they’re not giving up. And I think we should take them at least largely at their word.
Suebsaeng: My phone lit up on Tuesday with exactly what you’re talking about there. We have some new reporting at Zeteo about how multiple members of legal defense teams for several high-profile targets of Donald Trump’s and his Department of Justice saw what came out of Vanity Fair on Tuesday morning with Susie Wiles apparently on tape saying that, yes, this is—or this very much looks like—political retribution.
I’m lightly paraphrasing here, but it’s the literal chief of staff of the White House saying that if the president of the United States gets mad enough, he’ll pick someone and, boom, there’ll be retribution.
Suebsaeng: Exactly. So when lawyers for all of these different targets—whether they are charged yet, in between charges potentially, or not yet charged, but are being investigated and having their lives turned upside down by Trump’s government right now—a lot of these lawyers across the board were saying to themselves and having meetings on Tuesday that this series of interviews that Susie Wiles gave to Vanity Fair and Chris Whipple will inform what we do in our legal filings and our motions for the coming months, if not weeks.
Sargent: And how often do you get something like this—a bombshell like this—in an effort to prove selective or vindictive prosecution? I would say never. You never get something as good as this, you know, to make your case, do you?
But again, even something like that, when you are arguing before a judge that this needs to be thrown out because my client is being selectively and vindictively targeted by the president of the United States or by the Justice Department or by whoever, it is a really tough nut to crack and a case to prove, even when the president of the United States is doing boneheaded stuff like that. So now they have Trump. Now they have other shreds of him campaigning profusely in 2024 about coming back and jailing or prosecuting all these different enemies just because he’s mad and out of personal vendettas. And now they have, according to Vanity Fair—they don’t have it in their possession, I’m assuming, but somewhere out there in the world there is a literal tape of Donald Trump’s top White House official basically saying, Yeah, you got me. This is a retribution campaign.
But this is something that I think your listeners should pay more attention to just because the stakes are so fucking high on this. I’ll read you right now a text that Abbe Lowell sent me on Tuesday afternoon. Lowell is, as your listeners probably know, one of the top attorneys for people like Letitia James and several others who—look, he’s the lawyer right now who, if you are a top political target of Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s Justice Department, you call this guy. So he texted Zeteo on Tuesday:
Sargent: Swin, I will say that is extremely powerful. And just to wrap this all up, I want to return to what you said at the very beginning. You got at this notion that Susie Wiles was admitting that there was something wrong with the prosecutions. And that, I think, is an added piece to this. And yet it also gets at something very dark about it all, which is that people like Susie Wiles, who have been around a very long time and understand how things work, are going along with this shit, even though they know how depraved and how contrary to the rule of law it really is, right?
I do not say what I am about to say lightly at all. People like Susie Wiles are a terrific example of how something as bad as Nazism actually happened. When it comes to the old guard or the establishment of any political order in any country that is experiencing an authoritarian wave, there are not enough Stephen Millers in it or in any political party’s mainstream to carry the project the whole way.
In essence, there is no difference in practice between her and Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller just has the self-restraint not to go on a tear to Christopher Whipple about it over the course of, like, 10 months or however long it was. But she is a perfect emblem of [how] the authoritarian rot of any once-great or at least non-authoritarian country comes about.
Suebsaeng: Group therapy. It’s a blessing.
Sargent: Indeed. And you’re good at it.
Hence then, the article about transcript trump press sec goes off rails as susie wiles mess worsens 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 Press Sec Goes Off Rails as Susie Wiles Mess Worsens )
Also on site :