Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Chris Murphy: Thanks for having me.
Murphy: Well, you have to assume that that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Kash Patel’s number one qualification is that he will do anything and everything Donald Trump tells him to do. He has, in fact, made his career off of an advertisement that he believes anybody who’s opposing Donald Trump politically should be prosecuted. He said, The people who tried to stop Donald Trump from becoming president in 2020—those are the people that accurately reported the results of the election—should go to jail.
I do not think that we can overhype the potentially fatal damage that that will do to American democracy. It is important that we not normalize this. It is important that we talk about the gravity of the challenge, right now, before it is too late and everybody just goes back to business as normal.
Murphy: Can we just spend one second on the substance of the allegation piece? I think it’s important because if you actually read mainstream news reporting on the referral that the House made, you would believe that there was substance to it. I read most of the headlines. The headlines were standard boilerplate headlines: House refers Liz Cheney for criminal prosecution. You had to dig really deep to find out that it’s literally made up.
It is a bogus claim on the merits, and it is also unenforceable under the Constitution, but that will not stop Kash Patel from acting on it. That will not stop the DOJ from acting on it. And if they find the right judge, potentially in a jurisdiction where the right grand jury is seated, then there’s nothing to stop her from going to jail. That, in and of itself, would have a chilling effect.
Sargent: I love the way you connected all this to the media angle as well. Trump just secured a $15 million settlement with ABC News in a libel lawsuit that ABC might have won. Trump followed up on that by suing Iowa pollster Ann Selzer for getting her preelection poll wrong. Clearly, he’s going to try to cow media organizations into submission. And as you write, there are signs that they’re starting to fold.
Murphy: I don’t think there are signs that the media is folding. They are folding. They are. We’re watching them fold. I don’t exactly know why Elon Musk decided to fold his entire operation into the White House, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that he got rich off of government policy, whether it be tax credits on electric vehicles or subsidies for his space business. He’s just much better off being integrated into power. I don’t know why Comcast decided to sell MSNBC, but maybe it has to do with the fact that they decided they don’t want to get crosswise with Donald Trump because they have lots of business interests that intersect with the government. I don’t know why Jeff Bezos, for the first time ever, told The Washington Post not to endorse, but maybe it’s because his bread is often buttered by government policy. I don’t know why ABC decided to settle a bogus lawsuit, but maybe ...
I don’t think this is hypothetical two years from now; we may be living in a very restricted democratic space in January. We have to understand that if we don’t raise that in the context of these nominations, if we don’t put up a fight as political leaders, then we are signaling to the American public that it’s not a big deal.
Murphy: No. No. And I’ll give you another example. Having watched Trump during his first term, when nothing was real, when everything was a faint or a fake—it was never infrastructure week; he was never serious, after Parkland, about doing gun control—why do we, all of a sudden, decide to take this government efficiency task force seriously? Why are we acting as if this is legitimate?
So yes, on nominations, I don’t think enough Democrats are sounding the red alert on this government efficiency racket. And when regular people see Democrats treating all of this as normal, they start to believe it’s normal. It’s not normal, and we have to start telegraphing that to people.
Sargent: A hundred percent. It seems to me like the Democratic Party’s understanding of things right now is deeply problematic. Democrats seem to think that because Trump won in spite of their warnings of the threat Trump poses to the system that voters can’t really be reached with an argument about those things. The only thing that reaches them, Democrats think, are promises on the economy. But Senator, Democrats can’t use that as an excuse not to communicate with voters about what Trump is actually doing to threaten ...
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