Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Elizabeth Saunders: My pleasure. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Saunders: It’s a very interesting development because we’ve certainly seen some pretty shocking reversals among Republican senators that expressed deep unease based on their subject matter expertise with some of Trump’s nominees for cabinet positions. I’m thinking here of Joni Ernst and her concerns about Hegseth at the Pentagon and Bill Cassidy’s concerns as a doctor with RFK Jr., just to name two. In the beginning, it seemed as though the focus would be on these nominees. The Musk story is penetrating, which I think is very interesting [because] it’s not coming from the traditional sources, which would be debates within the Congress. It’s coming from real voter concern and activism—all these calls to members of Congress. I also think these televised appearances that the Democratic members have made in front of some of these agencies has really been very, very, very important.
Saunders: Yes. And some of the things that I study in my academic work that seem like long-ago irrelevant historical examples really show the dangers of letting this go too long. The Vietnam War—Lyndon Johnson had basically cleared the field of any dissent, and that allowed the war to expand and expand. It wasn’t that there weren’t people who were opposed among the public, but there was no expression of the dovish arguments in the media until it was too late. It was not until there was dissent about the war from Democrats in the media that you began to see the consensus break.
Saunders: First of all, assurances from the administration have a really strong Susan Collins is concerned vibe [laughs]. All of these constituent letters [saying] we’re really concerned, we’re on it, trust us—it’s hard to put much stock in that at all. But I do think it is indicative of their concern. They do know that something’s up.
Saunders: Yes, that is true. These constituent letters are very interesting. They’re getting picked up by the media now, and it’s very interesting that CNN and The Bulwark have analyzed them, but they’re not the first line of getting these sentiments into the public discourse. If you wanted to do that, you would make a speech on the Senate floor, you would give a press conference, and you would make sure that it got on the six o’clock news; or you would go on CNN during prime time or a Sunday show and give a quote live on TV that would then be repeated elsewhere. That’s a much more effective way to do it if you want everyone to hear it all at once. This is a little bit on the down low.
Saunders: Government is not something that when you find a problem with it, you just unplug it and plug it back in a minute later. This isn’t a unplug-and-plug-it-back-in situation. By the time everyone really wakes up to this, it is possible that people will have been severed from the government in a way that makes it really hard to reconnect them. People will die.
Saunders: It’s important not to buy into this notion that this is about reforming government. It’s a difficult problem because it plays well politically. And that’s one reason why I think the pointing out of all these Republican down-low concerns is an interesting development because they could sell it at that way. And they still are when they go on CNN or any cable news. It plays well to take the auditing the federal government, but that is not what is happening here.
Sargent: So you raised a really interesting point there, which is that Republican spin about all this is that Oh, the voters hired Trump to disrupt things and shake things up. It sure looks to me like voters are quite alarmed by this shake-up, which is surprising to me because voters tend to like that talk about reform and so forth. Which makes me think that the hubris among Musk and Trump and their whole crew of sledgehammer wielders is so pronounced that they just think they can do anything and they can sell anything. I don’t know how far they’re going to get with public opinion that way, but it’s pretty clear that we’re already seeing a voter backlash to the type of “reform” that they’re trying.
The fact that they’re talking about it at all at this other level is important, as you say, but if that’s their safety valve and it’s effective enough, they’ll just keep saying the other arguments at the national level. You really have to get them on the record at the national level in a way that breaks through for it to lead to a mass change in Republican opinion. And nothing that Trump has done up to and including January 6—which is to me the breaking point; it’s not a policy difference, it’s an attack on the government and the Constitution—has led them to say, enough.
Saunders: Well, I think there’s going to be a breaking point, and it may be defiance of a court order or a Supreme Court ruling. The other place I’d be looking is the military. That could also precipitate a real confrontation, as it almost did in the Lafayette Square case. One question that keeps coming up when you read things is, Well, nobody would think of history, because when I write about old cases—the Vietnam War and the Korean War—the people who actually do speak up and turn on even president of their own party get a lot of play in the cases and the history books that I read. So you do wonder, at a certain point, when they would think of history. And maybe that’s the moment when they will, but by then, arguably, it will be too late.
Brian Schatz gave an interview to The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner the other day where he said, “I think you can’t be a senator in private. At some point, you have to do something.” And how much damage this is going to do to the government, to our institutions, to our norms, to the Constitution is going to depend on, he says, “at some point.” Where is that point for congressional Republicans?
Saunders: Thank you. I wish it was under better circumstances.
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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