Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Pulte is best known in Washington right now for hatching bogus ways for Trump to criminally investigate his enemies. Indeed, Senate Majority Leader John Thune all but admitted that Pulte will be used to “weaponize” the Office of the DNI. Some MAGA voices in fact are openly cheering for that, rooting for him to be turned loose on the left. That’s pretty unnerving stuff.
Leah Litman: Great to be here.
Litman: It is so absurd as to be ridiculous. It was always going to be hard to find a worse, more ridiculous DNI than Tulsi Gabbard, and Trump just might have done that. Bill Pulte has zero national security experience. He spent, as you were suggesting, the last 18 or so months just digging up dirt on Donald Trump’s political enemies and made these criminal referrals in what I’ve been calling the mortgage fraud fraud—accusing people of conducting mortgage fraud by misrepresenting some house as their primary residence when, as various outlets have reported, a lot of people do this, it can be accidental. And also these criminal cases have gone nowhere.
Sargent: The director of national intelligence is a really important office. It oversees the nation’s intel agencies and it’s a really senior advisory role. It seems to me the obvious conclusion to draw is that Trump wants to do with the director of national intelligence office what he did with that obscure mortgage office.
Litman: I mean, that’s how I read it. I think it’s a similar story as happened with acting—or auditioning—Attorney General Todd Blanche. Donald Trump wants the people who are willing to be subservient to him and are completely willing to cross every single legal guardrail in the name of loyalty.
Sargent: Well, the reaction by Republican senators to Trump’s pick of Pulte was really remarkable. Senate Majority Leader John Thune was asked if he’s worried that Pulte will weaponize the DNI position. And Thune said this: “Well, we don’t need a weaponized DNI. We need professionals there.”
Litman: So I think that that is a real danger. If you saw or heard some of the right-wing universe that was actually excited about this pick—like Steve Bannon, for example, talking with Jack Posobiec—they were talking about how maybe this would allow Bill Pulte to go after domestic terrorism in addition to foreign terrorism.
Sargent: You mentioned Steve Bannon, so we’re going to listen to that audio. The first voice here is prominent MAGA personality Jack Posobiec. The second is Bannon. Listen to this.
Steve Bannon (voiceover): Oh, it has to. I think that’s one of the reasons Pulte is selected, because Pulte will go there.
Litman: Front and center. I think this was always kind of the plan. During Trump 1.0, Bannon declared that their goal was the deconstruction of the administrative state. So he has always had in his sights the targeting of institutions or individuals perceived as hostile to Donald Trump. And yes, I think that Bill Pulte is appealing for that reason.
You mentioned that a little earlier, that every one of these efforts that Bill Pulte undertook by ransacking people’s mortgages has gone belly up, has been another flop. We’ve seen Kash Patel struggle to come up with ways to go after the liberal groups in ways that he has been threatening to. None of that stuff seems to be really bearing fruit.
Litman: Yes, I think that is definitely a driving force and a motivating force. I take some small hope in the fact that what stopped these people was not a lack of will. It’s not like Pam Bondi didn’t want to go after the president’s political enemies. It’s not like Bill Pulte didn’t want to.
Sargent: Well, the firing of Pam Bondi actually fits into this narrative, right? Because Pam Bondi was fired as attorney general precisely because she wasn’t corrupt enough, precisely because she wasn’t succeeding at prosecuting Trump’s enemies. And that’s exactly why Todd Blanche is in the acting AG role, because he appears willing to do what even Pam Bondi would not do.
And yet Trump’s response in every one of these cases is to just try harder to be more corrupt and bring in even more corrupt people who will do even more corrupt things, right?
Sargent: Well, what would a fully weaponized DNI look like? In other words, if Pulte does with the DNI what he did with the mortgage agency, what happens? I want to underscore, we know Pulte is willing to do this. He’s done it for the last year and a half. What’s the nightmare scenario here with Pulte in this slot?
It’s also possible they would be able to detain someone and hold someone, even if ordinary law enforcement, police officers, FBI officers wouldn’t be able to. And so giving him access to these additional powers is just allowing him to further push the envelope and target individuals using powers that are just subject to fewer constraints and fewer limitations.
I mean, that’s the thing. It’s not just that Pulte is corrupt, although he clearly is, as we talked about with the mortgage stuff. He can’t even get the job done. And somehow Trump has decided—maybe purely because Pulte is so eager to please him—that he wants him in that role. It’s the pliability in a way that’s the thing here. Don’t you think?
And instead, they’re just completely beholden in their political careers to the leader. And Bill Pulte is absolutely someone like that. He’s a nepo baby. His grandfather started a home construction company. That was always part of his story and the reason why he was even in these circles.
You know, Leah, something tells me that this guy isn’t going to be getting a confirmation hearing anytime soon. So there’s yet another layer to all this. Todd Blanche is acting attorney general. Bill Pulte is going to be the acting DNI.
Litman: I think that that is a definite possibility. And he is always willing to ignore institutions and people that attempt to impose any kind of constraint on him, whether that is the courts, whether it is actually the Senate here, you name it.
And the White House essentially sent signals that it’s killing the plan for now. We don’t really know whether that’s a permanent state of affairs, but it has to count as a success in a way, because Republican senators really did hold the line.
Litman: Yes, completely. And this is always part of his strategy, right? Flood the zone with shit. Throw a bunch of stuff at the wall. Make them fight everything. And if some stuff gets through, that’s going to be a win.
It seems to me that Trump’s most corrupt designs are largely failing. He’s kind of not winning when it comes to his efforts to pressure law firms and universities, although getting some successes here and there. It seems like the big picture, though, is mostly one of failure. Is that too optimistic?
But as you were saying earlier, this is still a split screen. He is failing in big ways. But we can’t underestimate the danger of his continued impulse and in some way doubling down. He sees these losses and so that only makes him more desperate and want to seize those powers that he can to try to make himself look more powerful than he actually is.
Sargent: Right. And it does seem as if Republicans in Congress have crossed some sort of line here. That’s my sense anyway. There’s a critical mass of things that he’s asking them to do that they seem unwilling to accept. It really does look to me like their frustration is boiling over.
Litman: Yes. It does feel like something different is happening here. And it could be that when they stand up to him and there aren’t hugely negative consequences and fallout, that makes standing up to him easier. That’s at least one optimistic take.
The lower Trump’s approval gets, the less likely Republicans are to go along with his corrupt schemes, because they start to actually worry about voters who aren’t Trump voters. They start to worry about the rest of us—voters outside the MAGA universe.
Litman: Yes, that could be. So fingers crossed.
Litman: I really don’t know. On one hand, we have the plummeting public approval ratings and Republicans standing up. On the other hand, we have an electoral landscape that is heavily skewed toward Republicans and that Republicans are, in my view, corruptly engineering to try to make it really hard for Democrats to obtain political power.
Sargent: Well, it’s a little bit like one step forward, 10 steps back. I don’t know, but I think that’s a little too pessimistic. I think we’ve got a shot here, Leah. I really do.
Sargent: Always great to talk to you, Leah Litman. Thanks so much for coming on.
Litman: Thanks for having me.
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