Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Jennifer Rubin: It’s lovely to be here.
Jen, maybe by Wednesday morning, Iran will have made a deal with Trump involving his demand to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Maybe the war will escalate, but either way, Trump’s conduct in this war, along with so much else, has revealed him to be absolutely unfit to be president. It sure took people long enough to figure this out, didn’t it?
Sargent: Yeah, I think the fundamentalists turn out to be us, right?
Sargent: Well, let’s listen to some of these former Trump allies calling for Trump’s removal. Here’s conspiracy theorist Alex Jones asking: “How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Yes, he used “25th Amendment” as a verb. And his guest offers an idea. Listen.
Guest (voiceover): The problem is to get the 25th Amendment is harder than impeachment. You have to get two thirds of the House and two thirds of the Senate.
Guest (voiceover): Tackle Trump and let him pretend he’s president and publicly report that he’s going through a health issue and have Vance take over. It literally needs to be something like that. It’s that bad.
Rubin: It is a good idea, but it’s also improbable to say the least. It would require JD Vance to show some real spine and statesmanship. It would require a majority of his cabinet to go along, and they are filled with deluded toadies. And ultimately he would need Congress and JD Vance to pull this off. None of that is happening. So I think it is important to raise it because I think there has to be a greater discussion of his mental unfitness, his emotional deterioration, which the legacy media has consistently refused to confront.
You know, Jen, Marjorie Taylor Greene has actually been very powerful in her criticism of Trump. The other day she called on everyone in Trump’s administration to stop worshipping the president and intervene in Trump’s madness: “I know all of you and him—he has gone insane and all of you are complicit.”
Rubin: Exactly. And obviously there are people like Tucker Carlson and the rest of them. I think this is what happens when you fall out of the cult. Suddenly everything becomes very clear. You’re willing to abandon your idolatry. You’re willing to assess his words as they are spoken or written. And that’s what’s happened with these frankly very fringe characters. So I don’t want to attribute a great intellectual breakthrough in terms of democracy or tolerance or rule of law, but at least they see Trump for what he is. They can at least now be truth tellers about who he is, how deranged he is, and how dangerous he is.
Sargent: Well, absolutely. And I think there’s a real danger of the whole world moving on past this.
Rubin: Exactly. We are now reduced—and this is what Trump does, of course. He keeps slouching towards Gomorrah, as Judge Bork once said. This is the defining devious downward, that if he only kills thousands of people by targeting civilians illegally—he gets credit for that? That’s insanity. And this is how we got to where we are, by making excuses, by allowing Republicans to abdicate their common sense, decency, not to mention their constitutional oaths. So we’re now at the spot where the Pope and Marjorie Taylor Greene are on the same page.
Tucker Carlson (voiceover): It is vile on every level. It begins with a promise to use the U.S. military—our military—to destroy civilian infrastructure in another country, which is to say to commit a war crime, a moral crime against the people of the country. Those people who are in direct contact with the president need to say, no, I’ll resign, I’ll do whatever I can do legally to stop this, because this is insane. And if given the order, I’m not carrying it out.
I want to hear that get louder. I want to hear more people out there—Democrats, maybe the occasional Republican, whatever former MAGA acolyte wants to join, I’m good. They all have to get out there and say, don’t follow illegal orders. You don’t have to do that. You cannot do it.
Now, exactly as I wrote today and many others did, of course, this is right. The high brass, and frankly all the way down the chain of command, have an obligation not to commit genocide. In some sense, Trump made it easy because he clarified exactly what his goal is. He wants their civilization to die. That is genocide. There’s no excuse, there’s no rationalization that they can come up with now for carrying out orders to decimate civilian neighborhoods, power plants, infrastructure.
Sargent: That’s a really important point. You’re talking there about the suspected or alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea. Trump has been just blowing them up with abandon. I think at this point it’s become such a regular occurrence that it barely registers anymore. But these are basically civilians and they are suspects who got no due process of any kind and were executed in international waters. That is illegal.
You wrote in your piece, which is really good, that the last tripwire—as you put it in this situation, the last sort of set of political guard rails that could possibly exist—may be the prospect of accountability later for people in the chain of command. You seem somewhat confident that there will be accountability like that. I don’t know if I’m there yet, but can you talk me into it? Nobody in the military seems all that worried about getting prosecuted or facing accountability for the executions in the Caribbean. I mean, we’ll see what happens in this situation, obviously, but do you think there will be accountability later?
So if they feel comfortable leaving their subordinates to swing in the wind, they will continue to go forward. But at some point, they have to man up and be willing to quit, be willing to go before the national audience and say, enough, we cannot, we will not commit war crimes. And by the way, if you wanted an argument for throwing the Republicans out of power in both houses, it’s that they wouldn’t even stop him from committing genocide. That’s what toadies they are.
Jen, both of those Democrats said very clearly accountability is coming later under a future administration with a real attorney general. What do you make of it?
Sargent: It sure would. Well, Jen, any closing thoughts on this? I have to say that I think that it’s heartening that we’re seeing even these whack-job MAGA voices come out and say the obvious, which is that Trump is fundamentally unfit for office. Again, I think that there’s actually the possibility of a coalition behind this idea. I don’t know how big it is. And as you pointed out, the practical hurdles to removal are immense. It’s not going to happen, obviously, it’s just not going to happen.
Rubin: Absolutely. And the fact that we may duck one disaster does not mean we should be blind to the next one and the one after that. That’s how we got to where we are—by excusing bad and increasingly crazy behavior and rhetoric. So perhaps this will be an inflection point. I certainly hope so.
Sargent: Well, when folks listen to this, they will know more than we know now, Jen. I’m on the edge of my seat here, very literally. Jen Rubin, really awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Rubin: It’s always a pleasure, Greg. Thanks so much.
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