Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Tom Malinowski: Great to be here.
Scott Bessent (audio voiceover): Could we be seeing that this economy that we inherited starting to roll a bit? Sure. And look, there’s going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending. The market and the economy have just become hooked. We’ve become addicted to this government spending and there’s going to be a detox period.
Malinowski: Well, I thought Trump actually had a great response to all of the market turmoil in a tweet yesterday. He said, We should make Greenland rich again, which is another way of saying that he is trying to distract us with all kinds of crazy shit. But it’s not working—because the tariffs are exactly what every economist says they are. There are tax on American consumers. There are tax on American manufacturers. They are a declaration of war on the countries that account for most of the trade that leads to productivity in our economy. And the markets are responding accordingly. And this is even before tariffs have actually been imposed—or he imposed them for about 24 hours before he chickened out, but then threatened to impose them again. And so the uncertainty is creating the turmoil.
Malinowski: Yeah. I think it’s partly because he has isolated himself in a cocoon populated by people even crazier than himself. I tend to connect foreign policy to domestic policy a lot, and it’s interesting looking at his interactions with Zelenskiy in the Oval Office. Remember what Zelenskiy’s great crime was: He had the temerity to contradict the president of the United States. And for that, Ukrainians are being punished. Their aid has been denied. They’re dying in larger numbers.
Sargent: You even got some House Republicans saying DOGE is great, but just don’t do it in my district. On Tuesday, the House is expected to vote on a continuing resolution funding the government through the fall. It would cut some nondefense spending while increasing spending on defense and on deportations. Another key issue here is that the C.R. is far less specific about its directives to fund particular programs and priorities. Democrats are pointing out that this would actually increase Elon Musk’s flexibility to slash spending and shutter government programs. Can you talk about that element of it?
Sargent: Right. No more lawbreaking. Period. Basically, what’s happening is Trump and Musk are saying, Let’s just pass this thing that emasculates you, Congress. And Republicans are saying, Absolutely. Democrats should say no to that. I want to talk about the Senate in a second; meanwhile, Hakeem Jeffries is whipping Democrats in the House to vote against the C.R. That’s good to see. I think that suggests the Democratic opposition is waking up. I want to ask you about this. You talk to a lot of House Democrats. You know how they think. You were one once. Is there a perception, a growing sense among them now that Trump is in some political trouble given what we’ve seen on so many fronts?
And I also want to back up a little bit here to emphasize just how existential this debate is. We’ve got a lot of cases in court challenging various things that the Trump administration has done, and Trump is losing more than he’s winning. Hopefully, he’ll respect the court decisions, especially if they come from the Supreme Court. Maybe he will, but maybe he won’t. There are a lot of people on the right who are daring Trump right now to defy the courts, so we have to ask ourselves this question: What happens if he does that? Well, there’s no constitutional police. The chief justice cannot send federal marshals to the White House to compel Trump to obey the Supreme Court. He is immune to impeachment because the Republicans will not impeach him even if he shoots a man on Fifth Ave. He can’t be prosecuted while he’s president, and he probably thinks he can’t be prosecuted after he’s president too. So what’s left?
Sargent: So let’s talk about the Senate because I think there are some reasons for not being sure that they’ll do the right thing. I do assume that House Republicans will be able to pass the C.R. with very few or no Democrats helping them. But in the Senate, Republicans will need eight Democrats to get past the filibuster. Some good signs: Senator Patty Murray, a senior appropriator, just derided the C.R. as a slush fund for Elon Musk. That’s a key tell. It means Senate Democrats are really inclined against handing Musk this power. Senator Tim Kaine, who’s pretty moderate and very respected, says he’s a “hell no.” Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a swing state Dem, seems inclined against it due to the flexibility it gives to Musk. All that again suggests Dems are waking up. But are you confident right now that there won’t be eight Senate Dems for the C.R.?
Sargent: I agree with you. It looks to me like the case is politically strong for Senate Democrats to deny Republicans the votes they need. Trump will try to blame Democrats for any shutdown. We’ll hear the usual voices insisting that Dems must be the “adults in the room.” But I don’t think Democrats need to worry that much about that. If this chaos continues, I don’t think voters will say, Why won’t Democrats be the adults in the room? What they’re seeing now is that the guys in charge are completely losing control. Markets sliding; Musk hacking away at the government in a wildly indiscriminate and destructive way; town hall meetings hitting Republicans—not Democrats—with blowback. Wouldn’t voters slot perceptions of the government shutdown into that frame? Why not let them keep sinking?
Sargent: That’s a really critical point you’re raising there, which is that we’re in a context where Trump and Musk are essentially knocking over government agencies like toddlers playing around with towers of blocks. We’re hearing day in and day out Elon Musk heaping vicious disdain, vacuous empty-headed bullshit, on government agencies, saying things like USAID needs to die. They’re spewing endless bullshit propaganda about government functions that people actually value. That seems to me to be the context that this is happening in. I would think voters will say to themselves, The reckless people here are the ones trying to destroy the place.
Sargent: Are you talking to members of Congress and senators? And what are you hearing back when you say that to them?
Sargent: OK. Do they?
Sargent: You served in the State Department in previous administrations. I want to pick your brain a little bit about that. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, had something to say on Twitter early Monday morning. He said, “After a six-week review, we are officially canceling 83 percent of the programs at the U.S. Agency for International Development. The 5,200 contracts that are now canceled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve the core national interests of the United States.” It’s all so ridiculous. First of all, these programs do serve the core interests of the U.S.—I’d like you to talk a little bit about that. Also, this is like a tiny fraction of the budget. Why would any Democrat read that tweet and then vote for the C.R.? The secretary of state has said explicitly, Whatever you pass in your budget, we are canceling it. That’s what he just said, right?
He has been a big champion, in particular, of the U.S. standing with and assisting folks in dictatorships from Venezuela to Iran to Russia to China, helping them stand up to their dictatorial governments, helping journalists publish in those closed societies, helping people expose corruption in those societies. And part of his legacy will be the dismantlement of everything he stood for when he was in the U.S. Senate. It’s absolutely not in the U.S. national interest. It is very explicitly in the Russian and Chinese national interest. And the Russian government has been gleefully praising and expressing gratitude to the Trump administration, particularly for taking down USAID—because they see it as a threat.
Sargent: It certainly seems like they’re directly attacking the foundations of American power in really critical ways that Russia has to be really happy about. Just to come back to the stocks again: The more these stocks continue to be in turmoil, I think the harder it is for Trump and Republicans to get through this shutdown fight intact, don’t you? Where do you see this going? If the tumult remains, will Senate Democrats see that and say, This guy’s in real trouble, we’re not letting up now, we’re not going to bail him out?
Sargent: No, clearly not. And I think Senate Democrats know that. I still worry that on some level they feel like Trump has got his finger on the pulse of the country in a way that they don’t, and they’re going to be reluctant. I hope I’m wrong. What do you think, Tom?
I am more optimistic about this, though, than I was a couple of weeks ago, because more people are seeing just how devastating Trump’s policies are—not just on a day-to-day economic level, but in terms of the threat to the Constitution, to our place in the world, to our identity as Americans—and, hopefully, because Trump’s stumbles are giving them greater confidence.
Malinowski: Of course. Thank you, Greg. Anytime.
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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