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, senior political correspondent at Zeteo, has been writing well about how the cult of Trump prohibits any truth-telling about all this losing. So we’re talking to him about all of it today. Swin, always good to have you on.
Sargent: Well, let’s start with the first big one. Trump’s Justice Department has dropped its effort to prosecute Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for supposedly lying to Congress about a renovation of Fed headquarters.
Suebsaeng: Okay, something that really pisses me off about this stuff is if you go down the roster of the names that are publicly available of the lawyers at DOJ who are conducting this—these are not always people who used to be on Donald Trump’s personal legal team. There are a good number of them who have been there for a while, throughout multiple administrations, not just this one.
But the good news is, even if these people don’t face the sort of professional consequences that you or I would think would be appropriate for doing something so brazenly corrupt and authoritarian, when you get before a judge—in some cases, even occasionally, sometimes a Trump-appointed judge—you have to make an argument that kind of occasionally amounts to one plus two does not equal 11teen.
Sargent: Yeah, I mean, we have a whole track record that bears out what you’re saying on two fronts. One is they’ve lost—these efforts to prosecute Trump’s enemies have mostly failed. They’ve mostly imploded in buffoonery, really. And point two, we’ve actually seen a lot of resignations and a lot of consternation from the professionals at DOJ. So yes, these people who are doing this stuff could be following their colleagues out the door and could be doing the principled thing, but they’re not.
Sargent: And yet, in spite of all that, in MAGA world, you’re not allowed to say Trump has lost ever in any sense. So the U.S. attorney for D.C., Jeanine Pirro, is now saying the investigation will be picked up by the Fed’s inspector general. Now, listen to this from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Sargent: Swin, note how Leavitt has to pretend that Trump cares about the details of the renovation and that he’s just got the best interests of the taxpayer at heart. I don’t know which is worse here—the absurdity of that, like the insulting absurdity of it, or the need to reassure the audience of one that he’s winning. They’re both bad.
I completely disagree—as an Asian guy, if anybody wants to Google image my name—I completely disagree with that criticism. In part because if you’re talking about the way the Republican Party elite treat Donald Trump and Trumpism, the way they talk about their supposed God-emperor and how he can never fail, he can only be failed—I’m sorry, it reminds me of literally only one other government on the face of the planet. And that’s the one that exists in North Korea’s Pyongyang and how they treat their totalitarian dictator.
Sargent: It really is as bad. If you listen to Karoline Leavitt or Sean Hannity, you can map it almost directly onto North Korean propaganda.
Sargent: Well, let’s sum up a few other losses. Trump lost before the Supreme Court on tariffs and he’s likely to lose on birthright citizenship. And let’s remember—in this latter case, Trump showed up at the court to pressure the justices with his fearsome presence. Trump also commanded Republicans to gerrymander as many states as possible, but he couldn’t stop Virginia from adding seats, which will be in the Democratic column, maybe as many as four, though that one’s still before the courts.
Suebsaeng: Well, whether it’s in the Middle East or all the way to the mainland United States, Donald Trump cannot seem to stop starting wars that he very quickly starts getting his ass kicked in. Look, he’s trying to rig upcoming elections in his and the Republican Party’s favor on a multitude of fronts. This is one of them—in which he pressured the Republican Party in a variety of states, most notably Texas, to do redistricting at a time when they typically don’t do it, so he could try to dilute Democratic seats and advantages for the 2026 midterm elections.
This time, to some of the Democratic Party leadership’s credit in different states, they decided that, okay, we’re not going to unilaterally disarm on this. If Donald Trump is going to try to rig an election, we need to try to establish deterrence for the future so that we can at least try to send a message to the Republican Party that if you keep doing this, it is going to turn out poorly for you.
Sargent: Authoritarians like Trump thrive on the expectation that everybody’s going to roll over for them. And in case after case here, Trump keeps getting surprised when people fight back.
Like, I’m not at all trying to downplay—I never would downplay the severity of the damage that he and his gang are causing and are likely to continue causing, on historic levels, between now and whenever they’re out of office. I’m not downplaying that at all.
And also, at the same time, there is a pathetic weakness and massive gaping hole of insecurity that undergirds all of this MAGA authoritarianism. I would feel sorry for all of them if they weren’t so despicably cruel on a multitude of fronts. I really would. I have to suppress that part of my brain and my heart that makes me want to feel sorry for these people.
Suebsaeng: Yes, openly. Openly. I mean, that has always been the position of not just Trumpism, but a lot of these other more quote-unquote older-school Republicans who have now, of course, just been completely subsumed into the ideological project of the cult of Trump.
Sargent: So Trump just exploded on Truth Social over the tariff loss—now that the U.S. is reimbursing businesses for the tariffs they paid before they were invalidated. Trump said this: “People and companies that have taken advantage of our country for decades because of the horrible and ridiculous United States Supreme Court decision on tariffs are now supposed to be given back $159 billion.”
Suebsaeng: The Supreme Court is such a glorious example of how the bully Donald Trump got everything he wanted. The spoiled brat, rich kid bully got basically what he wanted. Look, he might be very well on the way to roughly half of the Supreme Court being Trump-appointed. When was the last time that has happened with any American president—especially when Alito retires sometime soon? And he got three—an incredible number for any president—in his first term.
Sargent: So Swin, this is where it gets a bit darker, I think. Trump, of course, fired his old attorney general, Pam Bondi, and she’s been replaced by acting attorney general Todd Blanche, a former Trump defense attorney and maybe a current one as well. But now Blanche and his people are leaking word that they’re going to be seriously ramping up the prosecutions of Trump’s enemies where Bondi failed.
Suebsaeng: Over the past six months or so, I’ve been talking to a variety of prominent Trump allies—both on the legal and political and advocacy side, on the outside, some of whom have been furiously upset, including some on the record—that the Stephen Miller-led war on terror against the left in the United States, particularly in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, did not materialize in the hyper-aggressive way that they wanted. And a lot of these people put the blame squarely at Pam Bondi’s feet, because, you’ve got to blame someone. Somebody’s got to be a scapegoat.
However, as you pointed out, that’s not entirely her fault. It’s not like she wasn’t a super-MAGA Trump loyalist who hated a lot of these same people. The issue was, even though these guys are committing a ton of democratic backsliding and pulling America in that direction, they do have to deal with democratic institutions and also a political party that is accountable to the voters.
And then when Donald Trump looks out at his DOJ and FBI and gets antsy about why we’re not rocketing as quickly as he would like to in that direction, he’s got to blame someone. And just because you got rid of Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche is not a wizard. He’s not going to get you your Reichstag fire moment in a week and a half. It’s just not going to happen.
Suebsaeng: Right. They are governed entirely by a republic of fear right now—fear of what will happen if you go against Trump too much, or say the wrong thing about him on live TV or behind closed doors to his face, or into the ear of somebody who’s super close to him. And when it comes to the dynamic—whether it’s the Iran war that a lot of the Republican elite on Capitol Hill are freaking out about, particularly with regards to the gas prices and the U.S. economy and about how if Trump doesn’t basically surrender in that and admit defeat, and if the war keeps going, it could screw so many of their midterm election chances come November.
So you know what? They are two peas in a pod—Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican Party, who absolutely deserve each other and whatever goes on electorally between now and November. God bless them.
Suebsaeng: Thank you for having me.
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