Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Russell Berman: Great to be with you.
Berman: Yeah, the sources that talked to my colleague, Jonathan Lemire, certainly indicate that he would be—he is angry. And he’s been publicly angry. When a reporter asked him about this, he said it was “stupid” to ask about the idea. To him, the idea that you would essentially look a gift plane in the mouth and not accept this $400 million gift from a foreign government is absurd. And to everybody else, the idea that you would accept this gift from a foreign government is absurd. He’s also firing off, as he often does, his Truth Social posts in the middle of the night, which indicates that he’s angry about this. And part of it is that, as you indicated, this is a rare issue where Republicans on Capitol Hill have dared to criticize or question the president. And they think that this could be—to borrow another idiom—not a Trojan horse but a Trojan plane.
Berman: Right. Well, again, the question is: Why would the government of Qatar do this out of the generosity of its heart? Or does it want something? And even if it’s just about whether it wants something from the U.S., that’s a big enough concern. But what if there’s some subterfuge going on? This is the most important airplane in the U.S. and certainly in the world—arguably in the world. And so I think the concerns that Republicans have raised ... Rather than talk about corruption, which is what first comes to everybody’s mind—that President Trump likes to do his corruption out in the open—Republicans have pointed to that to suggest that it’s not corruption to be taking a gift, which could be considered an emolument in violation of the Constitution. So instead of talking about this as a potentially corrupt act, they have talked about it in terms of the security concerns. And so it’s, I think, safer political ground for them to talk about the security concerns than to say out now that the president of our own party is accepting a bribe essentially.
Berman: Right. Well, the challenge for them is that this appears to be the epitome of the need of why you would have an oversight branch, or the legislative branch conduct oversight over the executive branch. And of course, when there’s been a Democratic president, Republicans are all too eager to invoke the solemn responsibility that the legislative branch has to conduct oversight. We saw that obviously with Hunter Biden. We saw that before with Hillary Clinton—and really with the Clintons—and Bill Clinton and on down the line. And yes, while Republicans have been critical or questioning of this, they’ve stopped far short of saying that they’re actually going to investigate it or conduct oversight or do anything to try to stop it.
Then he also said, I have a big enough job to do as the speaker of the House. But of course, your job as speaker of the House is partially to conduct oversight over the executive branch, whether or not the executive branch is run by a member of your own party. And he made little effort to disguise the fact that Republican or Republican-controlled Congress is really unlikely to investigate a Republican president no matter what the issue is. So when a reporter put this to him directly, he said, “Congress has an oversight responsibility, but I think, so far as I know the ethics are all being followed.” And of course, that is not the standard that he would follow if Joe Biden were president—or Kamala Harris or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. They wouldn’t say, Well, so far as I know, they’re following the letter in the spirit of the law. They would say, We’re going to look into it and we’re going to see if they’re following the letter in the spirit of the law. But they don’t seem to have any intention of doing that, at least right now. If pressure is brought to bear—by Democrats potentially but more notably by Republicans—then perhaps that would change.
Berman: No, but honestly that’s been his secret sauce: taking advantage of especially the media’s preference for reporting what happens behind closed doors as if it is worse than what happens out in the open. And whether intentionally or not, he’s recognized that—and therefore he just names what is usually unmentionable in the past. He says the quiet thing out loud as they say. And by doing so, it seems—at least to his Republican allies—that, well, if he’s talking about it and if he’s public about it, then there can’t be anything wrong with it. But that’s not how it works, right? It doesn’t matter whether ... If you announce that you are robbing a bank, it doesn’t make it any less illegal than if you go into the bank without announcing it beforehand.
Berman: Right, but we saw in his first term that there was very little accountability for when he did this—arguably less egregious, but still highly questionable ways [like] the use of his hotel, the promotion of his businesses, basically directing anybody who had interests before the U.S. government to stay at his various properties and hold golf tournaments there and all the rest. And that’s only, of course, the tip of the iceberg. The fact that there was little accountability—certainly when Republicans controlled Congress and then even when Democrats controlled Congress and they impeached him twice over different issues and he was not convicted—then, of course ... As we’ve seen across a range of areas, he has acted with impunity in his second term, knowing that he is unlikely to be stopped.
Berman: No, that’s right. And this has put Republicans in a very familiar, awkward position of defending moves that they would clearly denounce were they made by Democratic presidents. So I think it’s been interesting because you have seen more questioning and criticism by the people that you mentioned. Some of these people are the people that defend him down the line, no matter what he does.
Sargent: Do you think this goes anywhere? What happens now? Does Trump eventually end up dropping this? Is there a component of MAGA that doesn’t want him to drop it? How does this all play out?
Sargent: Well, this is the thing. It seems like this story is inevitably going to be talked about again later, because there will be more shoes to drop. He’s going to have to say at some point that he actually is going through with this; we don’t know for sure whether he will. Then there will be a focus on, as you mentioned earlier, the security implications and the costs and the logistical problems associated with it. That brings this all back up again, doesn’t it? It’s not an easy story to make disappear.
Sargent: Just to wrap this up, you guys cited a great quote from a former Air Force colonel. I want to read it, “Those of us who served in the military couldn’t accept a cup of coffee and a donut at a contractor’s site because of the appearance of impropriety. Now Trump is taking a 747 airplane from the government of Qatar for his personal use. Grift and corruption run amok.” That really captures it. There’s something about this story that, for a lot of people, neatly encapsulates Trump’s deep contempt for the very idea of public service and the obligations that come with it. Can you talk a little bit about that? You encountered that in your reporting, and you talked to others who have served the country before and felt the same way. What did you discover?
And that’s where the danger is for him, because a lot of these people are nominally in his base. If you’re talking about members of the military, for example, or really, people in the federal government, right? We talk a lot about federal employees and how they are scattered throughout the country. They are not all Democrats and they are not all progressive. Many of them are Trump supporters or would-be Trump supporters. That’s where you see this huge disconnect. And yet, because there’s so much else out there, it doesn’t seem at the end of the day to always stick to him. And that’s how he essentially can get away with it.
Berman: 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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