Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Few people understand the interaction between Trump’s derangement and GOP politics better than George Conway, the former GOPer turned Trump critic who’s running for Congress in New York City as a Democrat. So we’re talking to him about all of it. George, nice to have you on.
Sargent: So just in the last few hours, Trump exploded on Truth Social because he thinks Fox News isn’t giving the California GOP gubernatorial candidate enough attention. He erupted because a judge blocked parts of his ballroom. His feud with the Pope continues. He just posted something that looked a little like opposition research about the Pope. George, anything but the economy, right?
But the difference now is that he’s less inhibited. People like him who are narcissistic sociopaths get worse over time. And in addition to that, his age—and I’m not saying he has dementia, but certainly his brain isn’t functioning as well as it ever did, even though I don’t think it really functioned that well. He’s becoming more disinhibited and he’s got fewer people around him who can tell him, don’t say that, don’t do that, please put the phone down. Not that they ever really could do it, but fewer people—basically, if you tell him no, you’re gone.
Sargent: There’s a Politico report that’s really striking about rising GOP anxiety about the midterms. It said Republicans are exasperated by the constant lunacy from the White House. One GOP operative said this: “Everything is made more difficult by the nonsense coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” A former advisor to Trump’s 2024 campaign said this: “The road to victory runs through a consistent economic message. Unfortunately, Trump ignores the roadmap.”
Conway: I think they’re trying to communicate something to Trump, but he’s not listening. He no longer cares. He is off in his own reality now, and the Republicans are expressing concern because they know he’s driving them off a cliff. And you see it also in a lot of the Republican influencers—the Megyn Kellys, the Joe Rogans, and the Tucker Carlsons of the world. They’re basically talking about the 25th Amendment now.
And the problem for them is there’s only one way out of it, and that’s to get rid of Donald Trump. He is not going to listen to them. He is not going to tone it down. If anything, he’s going to get worse because he is completely detached from reality.
They have a guy who—they’ve overlooked his mental disorders in the past, dismissed them. They’ve overlooked his lies, they’ve overlooked his depravity. They’ve overlooked the fact that he is basically an adjudicated sexual abuser, that he’s a convicted criminal. They overlook these things because it served their purposes. It no longer serves their purposes.
But at some point they’re going to have to be afraid of something else, which is people who used to be Trumpers who are now mad at Trump, moderate voters who are swing voters who have basically voted for Trump once or twice, maybe even three times, and have now turned on him. And that’s happening.
Sargent: Your ad got at this in an interesting way. You had an ad in your congressional candidacy that pulls together dramatic imagery of January 6th, ICE’s paramilitary violence, the blowing up of supposed drug boats in the Caribbean, Trump’s alliance with Putin, the Iran War, and rising inflation—all of that is montaged throughout the ad in a fairly dramatic way. Then we hear this.
Sargent: George, I’m interested in the line about this not being an ordinary time. Now you’re running in Manhattan, so obviously it’s a very liberal audience, but I have to think that this sense that Trump has unleashed just sheer horrors on an unimaginable scale in America weighs a lot on a lot of different voters. What’s the theory of the ad here?
We have higher grocery prices, higher gasoline prices. He actually stopped this project that’s right out my window here—the Hudson River Tunnel Project, the rail project that he stopped because he stopped the funding for it, although a court enjoined him because he wants Penn Station named after him. You name it.
Congress has to start reasserting its constitutional powers—and not just the power of the purse the way they did to stop ICE from being funded, but the impeachment and investigative powers. Basically, my campaign is about: we need to talk about impeaching and removing Trump. We can’t survive another 33 months of what we’ve seen for the last 15.
Conway: All of the above. And Congress has to go into maximalist investigation mode. And that’s Congress’s job. Congress is a legislature, to be sure, but one of its important powers is to investigate and to impeach and to remove criminal public officials.
This is how you hold executive officials to account. And this is what the Framers gave us to deal with a president who is failing at his job—not just because he is incompetent, which he is, not just because he’s crazy, because he is, but because he’s fundamentally a criminal who defies the law.
Sargent: Of course.
Sargent: A lot of things have to be on the table beyond just the kitchen table stuff as you mentioned before, I think impeachment of a number of different Trump officials has to be on the table.
Conway: I’m for that. It’s basically one of the two things I—this is the reason why I’m running. I want to be Jamie Raskin’s wingman. I want to spend a term on accountability. I never wanted to hold public office, and I think I can only do this for two terms because I’m getting too old.
We need to create the record for this kind of accountability, both accountability by Congress in the impeachment process and accountability in the criminal process, whether it be federal or state. And then the second thing we have to do is to make sure it never happens again. Mostly it’s going to have to be statutory because it’s so hard to enact constitutional amendments, but there are a whole variety of things that we can do.
Conway: My list would include—there are bills that have been thrown into the hopper on restoring the integrity of the Justice Department. I think we need to codify a lot of the practices that developed but weren’t codified after Watergate, that Trump has simply blown through. I think we need to put more teeth on restricting executive officials from not spending the money they are authorized and required to spend by law. It’s the Impoundment Act—as it exists, it isn’t strong enough.
Sargent: Let me throw a few out there and see what you think of them. I think a real revision of the War Powers Act so no president can do this shit again—what he is doing with Iran. Major reforms to the pardon power, because he’s just dangling pardons there for people so that they break the law for him. And then I think transforming ICE, or defunding it, or essentially ending it and creating a whole new bureaucracy to deal with immigration—maybe along the lines of, I think, Ben Rhodes’s good proposal in The New York Times. Are you for all those things as well?
Sargent: Yeah. And we can’t go back into this situation where a president can create private militias out of immigration enforcement. That has to be the guiding idea here, I think.
Sargent: Okay. I just want to flag one other thing from that Politico report, back to the congressional races. It says White House allies now fear the Senate is in play. A GOP operative says this: “Everyone is focused on doing what we can to hold the Senate because people are very worried about that.” Amazing stuff.
Conway: I think the Democrats are going to win the Senate.
Conway: I do. And I think the extent of this wave—it’s going to be unimaginable. Because he’s getting—it’s bad enough now. People have had enough. Now you see him cratering in the polls. Now you see how he’s lost—he had this surge among young people in 2024, and among Hispanics, and it’s all gone now.
I think he’s going to double down. That’s what he always does. He may even invade Cuba, for example. Who knows? We don’t even know what crazy things he’s going to do between now and November. But he’s getting much worse. And that’s the one thing you can depend on with Donald Trump. I remember I was talking to a friend of mine—a journalist—in 2023 or 2024, and we were having dinner in New York and I said, he’s just going to get worse. There is no bottom with this guy.
Sargent: Well, CNN had a really interesting nugget of reporting on all this as well. It said that Republicans are panicked about the midterms but aren’t shifting their approach yet because Trump keeps promising that the Iran war will end soon, and his assertions along these lines have trapped the GOP in a holding pattern, as CNN puts it.
Conway: Yeah, I think they’ve lost—I think they just realize they’re in trouble. They’re in paralysis. And at some point, but not yet, I think they’re going to basically—and I think the thing about it now is that in the middle of this war, he keeps telling them, oh, it’s going to turn around, it’s going to get better, it’s going to end. And they want to believe that. Even though it’s hard to see a positive resolution to this situation, right?
Sargent: So just to close this out, George—a lot of former Republicans who have broken with the party over Trump, or ones who are still Republicans but are never-Trumpers or whatever you want to call them, there’s a school of thought among them which tries to portray Trump as this kind of aberration. Like he somehow took conservatism in a dramatically new direction, took Republicanism in a dramatically new direction.
Conway: Yeah, I mean, I don’t view him as conservative, right? I think there was this cancerous body within the right, or within the Republican Party, that has taken root and has basically destroyed the party. But—
Conway: Predating Trump, long predating Trump. It was always there. But it never took over the way it did during the Trump years. But is it conservative to impose these tariffs? Is it conservative for the government to own 10 percent of Intel? Is it conservative for the government to be controlling, to be determining winners and losers of auctions or takeovers from media companies?
We only have one political party that is actually trying to do things to help people and trying to have the government perform the functions it’s supposed to be performing, and only one political party committed to democracy now. And that’s a very unhealthy situation. But we have to go through this until there’s some kind of more permanent political change.
Sargent: The question of whether conservatism led to Trump is a big one. There are some indications that it did, but that’s a big conversation for another podcast. George, just to close out—you’re essentially saying the Republican Party has to be broken, otherwise we’re—
Sargent: —it has to be broken and driven out of business.
Sargent: George Conway, pleasure to talk to you. Good luck with your congressional run.
Conway: I’ll talk to you later.
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