The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 8 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump’s threat to obliterate Iranian civilization entirely has prompted some surprisingly powerful pushback from his own former allies in the MAGA movement. Some have even suggested it’s time to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. We’re recording this before the Tuesday night deadline that Trump imposed for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face total civilizational erasure. But whatever happens on that front, the conversation about Trump’s undeniable unfitness to serve as president has now been opened in a fresh way. The media is now covering this question. How do we keep it going? We’re talking about this with Jennifer Rubin, editor in chief of The Contrarian, who has a good new piece laying out that Trump is a madman who cannot remain in office. Jen, good to see you.
Jennifer Rubin: It’s lovely to be here.
Sargent: So just to reiterate, listeners will be hearing this after we find out whether Trump decided to wipe out a country of 93 million people. The Trump tweet that threatened this, as you all know, read as follows: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
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?
Rubin: It sure did. And let’s be clear, the threat itself is a violation of international law. The threat of genocide is not allowed. So even if we don’t get the worst of the worst, having made the threat, he has put us in a position in which the United States is essentially threatening to do what we have condemned Russia for doing in Ukraine. And in invoking this apocalyptic religious kind of fervor, he has ironically mimicked the Islamic fundamentalism and translated it into his weird Christian white nationalist view of the world.
Sargent: Yeah, I think the fundamentalists turn out to be us, right?
Rubin: Yes, exactly. I’m sure the Iranians are scratching their head wondering what happened here.
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.
Alex Jones (voiceover): How do we 25th Amendment his ass?
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.
Alex Jones (voiceover): So what do we do?
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.
Sargent: So Jen, I’m going to try to use this as a verb now. I think that 25th-amendment-ing his ass is in fact a good idea. What did you think of that?
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.
Sargent: We did have a few other MAGA types—former Trump allies—calling for removal in response to Trump’s threat. Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted this in response to Trump: “25th AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.”
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.”
It’s true, he has gone insane. And it’s true, they are all complicit. Jen, I don’t think it’s a small thing that someone with as large a following as MTG said this. I think I can see the outlines of a large coalition behind removal. Let’s call it the 25th Amendment Coalition.
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.
And my fear is if we do not wind up in an apocalyptic situation, everyone will reset and we’ll go back to normal. And the same kind of excuse-mongering and rationalization will take hold and Trump will get credit for not blowing up the world, as opposed to these people beginning to carry through on their constitutional obligations—the 25th Amendment, impeachment, simple oversight, simple control of the power of the purse and the power to declare war. How about starting there?
Sargent: Well, absolutely. And I think there’s a real danger of the whole world moving on past this.
Former Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci also joined the 25th Amendment train. He tweeted this: “Wake up. He is calling for A NUCLEAR STRIKE. Seek his removal immediately.” Now here again, we’re recording this before Trump’s deadline of 8 p.m. on Tuesday night. So we don’t know whether he’s going to obliterate Iran right now, but either way, I think it’s probable that he won’t use nukes. If he doesn’t use nukes, he’ll get credit for that, which is sort of deeply perverse in another way.
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.
Sargent: That’s basically the size of it. And Tucker Carlson, who had a really interesting way of talking about this as well. He was responding to Trump’s talk about bombing all of Iran’s power plants and bridges. Listen to Tucker here, courtesy of Aaron Rupar.
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.
Sargent: So Jen, Tucker isn’t quite invoking the 25th Amendment, but he’s suggesting that Trump was talking about giving illegal orders and urging people inside not to obey them because Trump is unfit is the strong implication from Tucker. Now here again, there’s the possibility of broad coalitional agreement. A number of Democrats have urged military officials not to obey illegal orders, just as Tucker did.
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.
Rubin: This is why they went so nuts when those six Democratic congressmen and senators made the video saying exactly what you just said, because they want the military to be obedient to them to be docile, to simply salute and follow orders. That’s why Hegseth has fired a whole slew of JAG people while he has excused war crimes, while he has excused bad behavior, while he has advanced this view of war that the rules of engagement and the laws of international humanity are somehow flawed and a hindrance to us. That’s how we got to where we are.
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.
They clearly know what Trump’s intent is and they know what the results of that action would be. And there will come a time—maybe it will be a new set of Nuremberg trials, maybe it will be military discipline down the road—but there will be a time of reckoning where these people have to be held responsible for what they did and what they said. And they never should have crossed the line the first time when Trump ordered extrajudicial killings on the high seas. Had they said no then, we likely would not be where we are now.
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.
And by the way, just to go back to a theme we brought up earlier—and which Trump kind of gets graded on this curve—now that he went out there and he said, I want to erase a whole civilization, people are going to sort of move on and forget about the fact that he just talked about blowing up bridges and power plants, which itself is a war crime. You can’t blow up civilian infrastructure like that.
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?
Rubin: I do. And I think they’re kidding themselves if they think Trump is going to pardon everyone, particularly those people who have left their offices prior to the time Trump leaves. So they’re banking [on] what, a pardon? A pardon so broad that it extends not only to civilian criminal prosecution, but military justice? Really? That’s what they’re banking on? And how far down the chain of command is it going to be? Does it extend beyond the Joint Chiefs? What about the generals? What about the colonels? All the way down.
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.
Sargent: That I think is basically not in doubt. And by the way, I will point out that some Democrats have come out and suggested that there will be prosecutions. For instance, Representative Ted Lieu had this amazing tweet. He tweeted this right at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He said, “Eradicating a whole civilization constitutes a war crime. You must disobey that order. If you commit war crimes, the next administration will prosecute you.” And I’m going to read one more from Senator Ron Wyden: “Republicans who don’t stop him will have blood on their hands, and anyone who carries out an order to bomb civilian targets will be complicit in war crimes and will be held accountable.”
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?
Rubin: I think they’re very serious. Whether that will be possible, what Trump will do in terms of pardons, we don’t know. But it is very important that they say that. And it would be awfully nice if some Republicans other than Marjorie Taylor Greene would echo that. Where is Mitch McConnell, the guy who said, we don’t really have to impeach and exclude him from office because the criminal law will take care of him? Where are the Republicans who are supposed to care about constitutional order and the rule of law? They’re nowhere to be seen. It would sure be helpful if they showed up one day.
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.
But the more talking about it, the better. The more voters are talking about it, the better. The more Democrats are talking about accountability in the future, the better. We’ve got to keep this on the burner. It’s got to keep going. That’s the basic bottom line here. We can’t have a backslide out of this. We’ve got to keep focus on it.
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.
I hope it will be so for voters when they consider who they trust to hold offices in November. But this has to be a wake-up call for all of us. Trump is a pathological narcissist. He has no idea what he’s doing. He’s got no plan. And he would come right up to—and maybe over—the brink of really cataclysmic war.
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.
Hence then, the article about transcript trump ex allies join call for removal he s gone insane was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Trump Ex-Allies Join Call for Removal: “He’s Gone Insane” )
Also on site :
- James Patterson Thriller Among 'Best Honeymoon Books' List on Goodreads
- A hacker has allegedly breached one of China’s supercomputers and is attempting to sell a trove of stolen data
- Los niños ya representan la mitad de las pandillas en Haití. Están a punto de enfrentarse a una nueva fuerza extranjera