Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Asawin Suebsaeng: I’m so fucking sick of this shit. I mean, not talking to you—I love coming on here whenever you invite me on. It’s awesome. But you know what I mean.
Suebsaeng: All Bruce Springsteen did was exercise his American constitutional right to free speech. He was doing it abroad while on tour—but all Donald Trump was reacting to there was Bruce Springsteen using constitutionally protected free speech to say, I don’t like Donald Trump or what he is currently doing to the country. Don’t get me wrong—they were highly critical things. But they are not things that we are raised as Americans to believe are in any way whatsoever beyond the pale in terms of what is our civic duty—especially as public figures or even private citizens—to criticize people in power. And Donald Trump’s reaction to that was to essentially issue a fatwa against Bruce Springsteen, Oprah Winfrey, and Beyoncé Knowles.
Suebsaeng: Right. And to talk about another authoritarian regime, when you think of a place like, say, Egypt ... That TV host—I’m blanking out his name—who’s known as the Egyptian Jon Stewart, said much rougher things about Mubarak or el-Sisi than Bruce Springsteen is currently saying about Donald Trump. And he was still allowed to be on the air and broadcast his show and say hypercritical things about it. And that’s in a place with a much more authoritarian environment than what we have in the U.S. But to Donald Trump, it doesn’t matter. Bruce Springsteen said something that pissed him off just a little bit. So he is someone who [Trump] has to threaten with a major federal investigation—a criminal investigation—and he is a head on which Donald Trump needs to bring the massive weight of the entire federal apparatus to crack down. It is a crusade that Donald Trump has been launching against the First Amendment and free expression in this country since at least his 2016 campaign. And it has only gotten worse since he became president the first time—and much, much, much worse and more bloodthirsty and more authoritarian since he’s become president the second time.
Suebsaeng: Sure. And like you were teasing at the beginning of this conversation, it would be a lot easier to dismiss this as a mere temper tantrum from the sitting president. It would still be bad; the president’s words, even if they’re not backed up by action, always have meaning. But it’d be easier to dismiss it if this weren’t in the context of a Trump administration that has been gleefully showing publicly that it is willing to throw people in jail based off of little more than they wrote an op-ed or they were a student who protested in a way that Donald Trump or Marco Rubio or Kristi Noem did not like.
Now, that theory, if you can even call it that, is stupid. We don’t have time on this episode to describe exactly how stupid it is, but I think your listeners can figure it out—given that just saying it, I think we all got a little bit dumber on this podcast. But this is something that he “believes” or at least wants to pretend to believe so he can harness the weight of the federal government against certain high-profile enemies. And this is something that he has spoken about during the 2024 campaign and during his current administration with lawyers and political advisers who he’s very close to. According to our sources who are talking to us for this story at Rolling Stone, some of those people—those lawyers and those political lieutenants—are now working at very high levels in the second Trump administration. So this is not something where Donald Trump is just ranting and raving about it all alone out there on an island. This is something where heavy hitters in the MAGA elite and in the Republican elite, even if they don’t really believe it on an intellectual level, are willing to give Trump space to cook and to be like, Let’s see how far we can take this. Let’s threaten an investigations. Let’s maybe lay the groundwork for launching an actual formal investigation. And it’s not a good place we’re at right now.
Suebsaeng: You have seen the video that they’re talking about, right? That DHS itself days ago put out publicly saying, This is our evidence for this so-called assault? I’m always leaving the door ajar to there being something I don’t know or a piece of footage or evidence that I’m not seeing, but based on the evidence—or so-called evidence—that the Trump administration has put out there saying, Here’s the video, here are the photos ... You can watch it for yourself and judge it for yourself, but all I’m seeing is that it says almost the polar opposite of what they’re claiming. And yet, even with that, Trump’s Justice Department—his Department of Justice—and the Trump White House, which is controlling both of those supposedly independent entities, feel more than comfortable—more than comfortable—using our taxpayer dollars to launch what I am sure is a series of expensive investigations and criminal charges against this Democratic elected official. Even though the evidence they’re putting out there seems to cut against everything they’re saying, they feel emboldened enough to mount this crusade against this woman. And that is the thing that is, I think, objectively rather chilling.
Suebsaeng: You are absolutely correct that Trump and his senior White House lieutenants are leaning on different parts of the administration, particularly the Department of Justice, to do their bidding. They’re not even hiding it. They’re not even pretending that there is some patina of independence between the Oval Office and Main Justice. Numerous sources in and close to the administration who we’ve been speaking to for weeks have been telling us ... Even before these things that you’re talking about started happening, they kept telling us over and over again, No, no, the lawyers and the senior administration officials in this second Trump administration are 1,000 percent serious about arresting and potentially prosecuting sanctuary city mayors, Democratic mayors, Democratic electives and congresspeople who we believe are standing too much in our way of the Trump administration and the Trump agenda, particularly with regards to immigration. We have drawn up the battle plans for it, so to speak. We’ve drawn up the blueprints and the legal justifications and what we need you to do right now.
Sargent: It’s absolutely clear. During the first Trump administration, there was almost a joke out there that Trump needed his Roy Cohn, right? That was a line that came from Trump himself, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” We all joked about that, but now he’s got a whole army of Roy Cohns that are working for him. We joked about how during the first Trump administration, he would call DOJ lawyers “my lawyers,” as if they’re his personal lawyers. Guess what? Alina Habba, who’s the U.S. attorney from New Jersey, was Trump’s personal lawyer. Now she is a prosecutor. She’s the one who’s carrying this out in New Jersey. I don’t know, man. That looks pretty bad to me.
Sargent: This is a 50-year setback because the idea of DOJ independence emerged after Watergate as an answer to the Nixon scandals. A whole bunch of post-Watergate reforms were put in place—but what also happened was a norm set in, in which the Department of Justice and the FBI and federal law enforcement didn’t function as an arm of the president. That was a norm. The idea of prosecutorial independence is something that developed. It’s a good thing. It’s something we want. It’s now just getting wiped away with the sweep of Trump’s hand.
In fact, for one of our stories from what feels like a million years ago but was probably just three months ago or something like that, we wrote about the prevailing legal principle of the second Trump administration. And there was one conservative lawyer we talked to—who’s very close to Donald Trump, who helped design a lot of this—who simply told us bluntly, albeit anonymously, when we asked him, OK, what’s the legal principle this time around when it comes to how Donald Trump wields power and helps make policy and things like that? They used one sentence, which was, “What are you going to do about it?”
Suebsaeng: Yes, but the other just as equally important component of it to me is that he is cowing his own party in a way that we really have not seen, I don’t think, in our lifetime. A political party in the vast majority of time that you and I have been alive and been aware of American politics is not supposed to allow its leader, even if he or she is the president of the U.S., to publicly declare a crusade and potential criminal investigations against a rock star simply because that rock star said something that pissed the president off. Not even something beyond the pale—just something politically critical that the president of the U.S. didn’t like. For most of the time that you and I and your listeners have been alive, a political party has been there to constrain its leader, even if they’re the sitting president, from acting in a way that is so brazenly corrupt and authoritarian.
Sargent: It is the North Korea–ification of the Republican Party. There’s no question about it. It really is nothing more than an authoritarian cult. Asawin Suebsaeng, on that cheery note, let’s call it a day, man. Thanks for coming on. Always great to talk to you.
Suebsaeng: See you in Pyongyang.
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