Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Yet there’s something sobering about it all. Placing limits on Trump has required immense effort. Paradoxically, the more he’s thwarted, the more dangerous he’s becoming. And in constraining Trump, our institutions are still on a knife’s edge, with the endgame still too murky to predict.
David Kurtz: Hi, Greg, good to be with you.
Kurtz: Sure. It’s really a remarkable series of filings in the Comey case last night, where they’re making a claim that this is the second vindictive prosecution of him—meaning that Trump has directed DOJ to go after him because he’s one of Trump’s political foes. And so this is the politicization, the weaponization of DOJ that we’ve all been covering for so long.
Sargent: So Comey’s lawyers are trying to say, we have smoking gun evidence that this prosecution is a vindictive one and therefore should be thrown out. And the smoking gun evidence is that Donald Trump is micromanaging the prosecution of Comey in real time, demanding to know exactly what happened in these interrogations as they happen.
They can set broad policy parameters, but they’re not supposed to be directing individual prosecutions. And they’re certainly not supposed to be conjuring up prosecutions as bogus as this one out of thin air—or for any reason, frankly, in order to target political foes for any reason that goes to their personal interest, to their political interest, and isn’t in the interest of justice.
Sargent: Yeah, and it looks to me as if this revelation is yet another sign that this prosecution is likely to really fall apart. And on that front—on the front of Trump becoming more and more aware of the limits on his power—The Atlantic had this interesting report on his deliberations over Iran.
That’s a real admission. He doesn’t have the power to force Iran’s hand, and he’s acknowledging that Iran has leverage over the global economy. And it’s, of course, because of what he did, right?
So, I think what’s interesting, Greg, is it’s hard to look at all of these data points and see a single common thread. I think there’s some things—in this case, it’s like a geopolitical limitation he’s running into. In other instances, it’s like the limits of the powers or the abilities of his people.
Sargent: And making this even more buffoonish on the Iran front, these revelations about Trump holding back because he knows he can’t really force Iran’s hand come even as he just said to Fox News the following: “We are going to beat the effing shit out of them, and we will be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating.”
Kurtz: Well, Greg, this all comes after—didn’t we declare victory in this war like a month or two ago? I mean, we’re just at a point where I think one of the dynamics of the whole Iran fiasco has been that it’s revealed the perils of trying to narrate this kind of conflict through a president when the president is like a Donald Trump.
And so, taking a long view on it, I think it’s been an ongoing conflict this whole time. There’s been ebbs and flows to it, but I don’t think it really matches in any way what we’ve heard from the White House in terms of an accurate description, a reliable narration of what has happened. And so, I hope we’re at a point now where they see some of those limits and take those into account.
Like, there’s a million ways here in which this could still go wrong. And the way this has been so erratic and unpredictable and in fits and starts the whole six months we’ve been engaged in this, I think it’s just representative of him and the underlying strategy that epitomizes him. It’s an extension of this personality, is what I’m trying to say.
But still, I agree with you a hundred percent, because when he talks about bombing, all of Iran’s power plants, as he’s been saying lately, that would be a threat of a massive war crime and serious atrocities. And it’s not hard to see him going down that road if he can’t force Iran’s hand, just in order to appear like he’s doing something. And of course, Iran will just absorb the pain that is inflicted on its own people, and it won’t do anything.
And part of it too, as you suggest, is that it’s not just Iranian interests versus U.S. interests. It’s like this triangulation of Iranian interests, U.S. interests, regional interests, Trump’s own personal political interests. And there’s no way for him to sort of do a 3D chess move on any of that. I mean, this is beyond his capability. It’s beyond how he even thinks, right? Negotiation for him is a zero-sum game. And I think the longer Iran holds out, the harder it is for him to figure out how to make sense of it, given the prism he looks at this through.
We should note that Pulte is the person who previously used his federal housing agency perch to fabricate pretext to prosecute Trump critics like Adam Schiff and so forth. Those have all failed pretty badly as of now as well. And now here we are with Pulte boasting about taking on the deep state in ways that might not even be real. Talk about revealing the limits on Trump’s power. Can you explain this one?
Now, there’s been a fair amount of reporting that Pulte was doing that, but this most recent reporting suggests that part of it may be performative. Which speaks to what the incentives are that Trump puts in place for people to do the things that he wants them to do—or at least to pretend to do the things he wants them to do. It has a very “emperor with no clothes on” sort of vibe to it.
Kurtz: Yeah, that’s right. And it’s not out of character, in the sense that none of the mortgage fraud cases were real mortgage fraud either, right? Which is what he was drumming up around Adam Schiff and Letitia James and others. So it is consistent with his MO to this point.
Kurtz: Yeah. So there have been a number of examples, in LA, in Chicago, in Minnesota, where it seemed clear that the White House was directing sort of a maximal response to protesters who were protesting ICE in their cities—either at raids themselves or at ICE facilities within those metro areas. And the charges that DOJ brought were in some cases way over the top, in other cases utterly unsupported by the evidence.
Sargent: So let’s tie all this together. Trump is running the most imperial, most corrupt presidency in modern memory, and it’s not even close. No president has abused his powers the way Trump has. And yet in key ways he really is being constrained, and he’s really angry about it. But that, again, paradoxically, means the areas where he wields less fettered powers are ones we really need to worry about. What’s your overall reading here? Are we holding him back or not?
I’m thinking about things like the high-seas strikes on drug smuggling boats. I’m thinking—you talk about areas with unfettered power—I’m thinking special operations activities around the globe. I’m thinking other military actions or activities we might not know about. And I’m not suggesting some dark, hidden conspiracy, I just mean we don’t know. And so while we are trying to gauge how well things are going, I suspect that we may be spending the next several decades unearthing things that happened during this period that we just didn’t know about.
But the turmoil, the emotional cost, the financial cost to people of this—and I think this is really key, Greg—the sense that it creates of fear in the populace, of fear in other officials, and fear in people who would oppose Trump. That’s real damage, right? And it’s real damage that’s done to the institutions of government that are being abused. It’s going to take us decades to recover from.
Sargent: I just want to try to salvage one optimistic note from all this, while acknowledging everything you just said is right there. I can’t help but feel like there’s a pattern of resilience that we’re seeing. The backlash to ICE that we saw in places like Minnesota and Chicago—huge numbers of people banded together in really creative and unexpected ways to defend immigrants against heavily armed paramilitary goons at great risk to themselves.
And I think nobody’s going to be dissuaded by Trump’s efforts to persuade everybody that voting can’t work. Nobody’s going to be persuaded by that. I think we’re going to see tremendous turnout in the midterms. We’ve seen this in two dozen special elections, huge outpourings of political energy. I really hate to sound Pollyannaish, but it seems like there’s a pattern of resistance and resilience that’s worth talking about.
I think it’s given people a sense that there are avenues here towards protest, towards resistance, towards pushing back, and just sort of living our civic lives in a full way, that makes a difference. And people feed on that. And so I think it can build on itself as well.
Kurtz: Great. Thank you, Greg.
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