Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Julian Zelizer: Thanks for having me. It’s great to join.
Zelizer: Well, that’s not what the report said. The report actually pointed, again, as we’ve seen many times over the last year, to very serious charges about what the now president-elect did with not just January 6 but the entire election. Did he avoid having some bad outcome politically? Yes, that’s true. But the substance of the report does not say that. He’s not exonerated.
Zelizer: No, it doesn’t. Just stepping back to go to the big question and big picture, his being reelected with such significant numbers in our modern age despite everything that has happened, everything that has been documented, everything that was seen with people’s own eyes, says a great deal about the state of the democracy. And it’s not all good. And then to avoid any accountability over the last couple of years is not what we want in a country that often privileges law and order.
Zelizer: He’s very direct, the president-elect, and often says exactly what he thinks. There’s a lot to be said for that analysis—the role of the courts, the delays—but there are two other important factors. One is our era of political information and news does allow for a lot of disinformation, partisan spin, manipulated data to get out there and either confuse the public or sway the public. I do think that was part of the last few years since 2021. The second is that significant parts of the electorate, certainly within the GOP, didn’t consider this significant. A lot of them knew about what had happened and ultimately didn’t decide that is determinative in deciding who should be president. In some ways, it’s the third part of that that might be the most troubling about where we are as a country in this year.
Zelizer: The president-elect doesn’t stand alone, he stands with the GOP. So this is a story as much about the Republican Party as it is about Republican president-elect Donald Trump. They are one in the same. It’s not simply a takeover; it’s loyalty, it’s a sense that this is the best thing for the party to maintain power. And they made a collective decision almost entirely that this is not a defining issue or an important one.
Zelizer: That’s exactly right. In the next few years, that’s going to be quite significant how much that holds together, how much that feeling remains intact, because ultimately that’s the foundation of Trump’s political power.
Zelizer: Yes. The election itself did convey that feeling, certainly for many Democrats in 2004. As the results came in, many Democrats were despondent. They couldn’t understand how, despite all the revelations of the war, he had been reelected. And the next few years actually didn’t turn out so great. Some of the problems after 2004 did stem from problems with President Bush and his policies—continued problems with the war in Iraq, the continued problems with the war on terrorism, the effects and fallout and devastation of Katrina, and much more.
Sargent: As you point out in your piece, it’s not clear Democrats are going to remain united right now in the face of Trump, which is a real difference between now and the aftermath of 2004 in many respects. We’re seeing Democrats pretty much caving on this awful Laken Riley Act, the immigration bill. Democrats seem to be almost in a worse place than in just after 2004. Maybe it’s because Trump came back from such a ridiculous position, whereas George W. Bush just won reelection, that it has gotten Democrats to think that Trump is even more formidable than Bush was at the time. What do you think?
Look, strong partisanship does involve priorities, and they will have to decide certain issues they’re not going to focus on. Ultimately, the answer to a very partisan, very united Republican Party is a very united Democratic Party that stands firm and uses its role on Capitol Hill to cause problems for the new administration and to set an agenda that’s different than what the Republicans are trying to do.
Zelizer: The one fight where we saw it early on was on funding the government. This was in December, of course, and Democrats stood firm and essentially forced Speaker Johnson into doing what a lot of the caucus didn’t want to do. Now we start the year with the immigration bill, and it’s moving the other way. I’m enough of a historian to see there’s still time and we’ll see how the party moves, but I do think you’re 100 percent right: It seems there’s a lot of pressure within the caucus to enter into a game of bipartisan concession rather than a tough partisan fight.
Senator Mazie Hirono (audio voiceover): In June of 2020, then-President Trump directed former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to shoot protesters in the legs in downtown D.C., an order Secretary Esper refused to comply with. Would you carry out such an order from President Trump?
Hirono (audio voiceover): Would you carry out an order to shoot protesters in the legs, as directed to Secretary Esper?
Hirono (audio voiceover): Again ... You know what, that sounds to me that you will comply with such an order. You will shoot protesters in the legs.
Zelizer: Well, it’s reminiscent of moments in the first administration during the protests although, this time, the nominee is saying it with a certain level of confidence because he feels the same empowerment that the president-elect feels and knows that Trump has his back. Trump has applied immense pressure to the Senate Republicans to make it very clear he wants this to go through, but there are the guardrails, falling away. It’s one more instance of hearing a nominee saying whatever he wants and not really fearing the political repercussions. That’s going to be an aftershock, in some ways, of the 2024 election.
Zelizer: And, of course, the position matters too. Here we’re talking about a nominee to head defense who’s talking about using violence, or not answering a very clear question, against protesters here in the United States. Soon we’ll have hearings involving the Department of Justice and the FBI. So yes, it’s both that there is a sense that they are doing what the president-elect wants and that they will be protected for saying what they say and also particular agencies and institutions not just stretching the rule of law but in some ways saying that’s not going to be any barrier in terms of what they do. That’s why many people, and certainly many Senate Democrats, were concerned about some of these responses.
Zelizer: Well, historians are bad predictors, but I would think that he’s going to get a large number of them. Maybe one will fall away—although thus far, none of the people you mentioned are inevitably not going to get confirmed. And that says a lot. Even when the names rolled out, many political experts, people who follow this for a long time, were in a state of disbelief; now we’re in a state where we’re talking about who won’t make it, if anyone. The president-elect has really shifted the terms of this confirmation, and my guess is he’ll get a lot of them.
Sargent: They can. One point about the minority, to go back to what you said earlier about the need for Democrats to realize that they’ve got some power here, the one bright spot of the Hegseth hearing was that we had senators like Hirono very, very aggressively questioned Hegseth. We had Jack Reed do an extended takedown, which was a thing of beauty. Couldn’t Democrats take from that that that’s how they should prosecute the opposition more generally?
Sargent: You can also see potential bright spot down the line in what we’re seeing right now as well that’s also similar to 2004. Let’s say Trump gets all or most of those awful nominees. You could see a situation where, given their grotesque in qualification for these big jobs, you have something almost like 2004, 2005 where things start to unravel. The public starts to see incompetence, which was a very big part of what undid Bush in 2005 and 2006. Is there a possibility there for something like that?
So yes, these are high-risk nominees that president-elect Trump is putting into place, and that risk remains if they are successful. And the risk is, in part, the policies they will pursue, and we’ll see how controversial that becomes. But the risk is they literally can’t handle the jobs, and they create problems, some of which we saw during Trump’s last year with Covid and handling of it that become very problematic. Many people, yes, are tuning out now and they don’t want to engage in politics—but if government really starts to drop the ball as crises unfold, if they do unfold, that’s when people will pay attention. And that’s when not just the next administration but also Republicans as a party could start feeling that they are going to pay a cost. That is when the problems will really amount for the White House.
Zelizer: From the perspective of right now, the president-elect is in good position. He has the support of his party. He is moving his party in the direction that he wants, and they’re joining him. Everyone is pretty much on the same page. And Democrats are really struggling, even with signs of the fight, to figure out what they’re going to do in the next couple years. Just all this added together with the fact he won reelection despite what Smith had been investigating says positive things for his political standing at the moment. But at the moment is different than in a year. And that’s part of what we’ll watch how it plays out.
Zelizer: It’s very important. It’s not all about Trump. We live now in an era with this very rigid map. So even when you have an election that is dramatic—and I do think it was a dramatic result—it still happens with very narrow electoral majorities, and in Congress, equally important, very slim majority. Democrats not only have to be strong, but one of the things they can do is create very small fissures in the House Republican caucus, for example, and it will cause immense problems for the Republicans to be able to do anything. That is going to be a challenge for Trump and the GOP moving forward, and that’s exactly what Democrats, if they want to be successful, have to figure out how to exploit. It is harder today than in 2004, and 2004 was already harder than 1985, when Reagan started his second term. We live in this era of very narrow and unstable majorities.
Zelizer: There is. It’s what Democrats need to be thinking of, to really understand the value that partisanship can have when not done in the way Republicans have done it. They have to deploy that power in the coming years.
Zelizer: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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