Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Jennifer Rubin: It’s a pleasure.
Rubin: Well, first of all, we don’t know how limited it was because none of the participants on the call said, Wait a second, what are we all doing on Signal? That tells me that this was standard operating procedure over the past month or so, and goodness knows what else he discussed. One of the reasons that they are not cooperating and attempting to shift the blame to poor Jeffrey Goldberg, who uncovered the whole thing, is because they no doubt know that other conversations took place. So with that in mind, you’re right. It’s not just the way you handle the operation of your communication; it’s everything else. It’s security in general, it’s his knowledge of the military, and it’s his ability to interact well with his counterparts.
Sargent: It does seem like that was the calculation. Speaking of Republicans, Senator Kevin Cramer said that this mistake or fiasco is worth two strikes, basically saying you only have one more chance. Now, I don’t take that too seriously as any threat to act on the part of Republicans—because they’re never going to act. What it does show, however, is that Republicans are very sensitive to what you just said, which is that they’re going to be on the hook for the things that go wrong now.
And by the way, Hegseth simply went out and lied repeatedly that there was nothing of consequence in the information that he showed. So what is that all about? Are we now simply going to assume that whenever he opens his mouth, lying is okay for the secretary of defense? Apparently, that is the standard now.
Rubin: Listen, he’s simply not qualified for the job. He never commanded anything bigger than a small nonprofit, which he didn’t manage appropriately. So we shouldn’t be surprised that he has no clue what he is doing. And this is combined with this tech bro swagger and the look at me and the rules don’t apply to me. It’s the same attitude you see throughout the Trump gang, throughout DOGE and Elon Musk. They are simply so arrogant that they think no one else understands what’s going on. In fact, it’s they who have no conception what government is all about, whether it’s DOGE firing the people who are in charge of maintaining our nuclear stockpile, whether it’s this guy who is clearly out of his depth, or frankly whether it’s the president of the United States who didn’t seemed to know that four of our military personnel went missing in Europe.
Sargent: Yeah, I thought you got that in your piece really well, this bigger through line through everything that the Trump-Musk crew does: arrogance, contempt for people and voters and especially their own supporters, and recklessness. The DOGE cuts, as you say, are wildly destructive, almost proudly so. They’re proudly advertising how destructive this all is, and they’re indiscriminate. The Trump tariffs are also wreaking havoc already. The talk about annexing Canada and Greenland is insane. They’re ripping up our alliances with wantonness that is almost impossible to really fathom. That broader theme, I think, is the real story emerging from Signalgate and from the administration in a bigger sense.
Second thing they’re in for is revenge, and that motivates a great deal of what Trump is doing. It’s not only revenge against his persecutors as he sees them in the Department of Justice. It’s against everyone. It’s the press. It’s the functional government. It’s the military that didn’t necessarily take all of his crazy orders the first time. Anyone who has opposed him, anyone who has shown any spine, is now on his hit list. He is out to destroy—whether it’s law firms, universities, government, what have you—because it’s revenge.
Rubin: Yeah, exactly, science. Any independent source of information or data that could possibly have bothered him over the years.
Rubin: And health care. The third is that these guys are nihilists. That’s what authoritarians do. They have to drag down the whole edifice of not only democracy but functional government, because then it’s a mess, then there’s chaos, and then they come in and say, I’m going to fix it all. So they light the match, set the fire, and then show up like they’re the fire department. That’s what we have going on.
Rubin: I think he’s the worst of the lot. The rest of them are so stupid and so ignorant that they really don’t get it; they’re just playing a game or they’re following Trump or they’re trying to be with the cool kids. Rubio knows better. First of all, he was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. If anyone should know about preserving security, it’s he—and he was on that same Signal chain. He also has spent his entire life fighting communism, fighting oppression, fighting Cuba. You know what they do in Cuba? They disappear people and they throw them into a hellhole of jail. He has become the very thing that he has spent his entire career railing against. He used to be a great defender of Ukraine; now he’s instrumental in turning it over to Russia. So the glaring hypocrisy, the soullessness, the willingness to sell down the river all of the dissidents, all of the freedoms, all of the besieged countries that he once defended is really beyond the pale.
Sargent: It’s so true. By the way, he’s also behind these deportations to the El Salvadoran gulag.
And the words are just shocking. They’re not here to become social activists. What? Apparently they’re supposed to check their First Amendment rights at the door? And in which case, why bother coming here? What kind of modeler are we for the world if the message to the world is come here and you’ll be muzzled, just like you were in your home country? This is Marco Rubio, and this is why he is so repugnant.
Rubin: I suspect that most of those Democrats who voted to confirm him—you remember, it was 99 to nothing—are having second thoughts. And this, by the way, is an important thing. None of these guys should be graded on the curve. Because he is not as stupid and as incompetent as Pete Hegseth was no reason to vote for him. As soon as these people started acknowledging that they weren’t going to follow the law, that they wouldn’t promise to refuse an illegal order, that they would act on their convictions, that was the telltale sign. You confirm none of these people. And if every one of them was going to get through anyway because it was a 53 to 47 vote, fine. Let the Republican Party take responsibility—sole responsibility—for every single one of them.
And if they’re simply afraid to be challenged in a primary or to have some mean tweets put out about them, then they aren’t fit for public office, then they have acknowledged they are morally, intellectually incapable of upholding their oaths. And they should get out of town, frankly. They should let people who have some spine, who have some conscience, run for those offices. But they won’t, of course. They thrive in the limelight. They couldn’t get nearly as impressive jobs out there as they have now. They are big man and big woman on campus. They get lots of pats on the back at the country club when they go home. So they’re not about to sacrifice any personal advancement for, what? The sake of the country? Democracy? Eh. They’ll just get along, go along.
Rubin: Well, the lawsuit concerns the requirement that you preserve records. By definition, using Signal, which evaporates the message either in a day or a week depending upon how you’ve set it, does not preserve documents. Aside from the fact it was on a platform that was not secure, there are laws that say you have to preserve the documents. So apparently they are flouting that, and a good government group sued to enforce this statute. Judge Boasberg, who was, of course, the judge also hearing the deportation case under the Alien Enemies Act, said, No, you got to preserve this stuff.
Sargent: Well, they say that openly, yeah. I think what you’re getting at here is that the likelihood is exceptionally high at this point that a lot of communicating like this had gone on up to the point of the scandal—and maybe even after given how arrogant they are. So a big question is going to be what is preserved of those conversations.
Sargent: I think that’s a good strategy for Democrats in the midterms. We’re starting to see it, and I expect that once bigger mistakes start coming along, the case will be even easier to make. I want to try to go big picture and get at this. I think what this all shows is that there are limits to a damage control strategy that’s entirely about appealing to the audience of one and nothing else. Hegseth has tried to adopt the familiar never-admit-error posture that everyone around Trump knows he wants. Hegseth lashed out furiously at the media—also something Trump wants. But the facts about Hegseth’s incompetence are so overwhelming that they just render all these defenses ineffective. There’s even a limit on how far it can work with Trump himself. And this is what I want to ask you. Once things start reflecting badly on Trump, which this fiasco really is doing now, that takes precedence over everything. What do you think is going on in Trump’s head right now over this? How much longer can Hegseth last?
You raise an interesting point about the old habits of the MAGA folks. First, you deny. Second, you blame the media. Third, you say it’s a witch hunt. We’ve gone through all of these, but there’s a point at which reality does matter. It matters if you’ve lost your job. It matters if the farmer’s crops are not being purchased by USAID. You can’t conceal it all when the effects are patently obvious. When you next go to the car lot and say, Why is this car $6,000 or $7,000 more than it was last week? the car dealer is going to tell you. And another thing that doesn’t lie is the markets. You see the stock market going down, and consumer sentiment is really crashing. Today, you see, again, elevated inflation.
There is a sign that at some level they get that they’ve screwed up pretty big, so they’re just going through the litany of their go-to moves: distract, new shiny arguments, yell at the press, blame someone else, make bizarre statements on other things and hoping the media will scamper after that. But at some point you come back to the reality and that is these guys are playing fast and loose with the lives of American service people and the national security of the U.S.
Rubin: Oh, it’s a delight, Greg. Happy to be here.
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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