Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Moira Donegan: Thank you so much for having me.
Elissa Slotkin (audio voiceover): Have you given the order to be able to shoot at unarmed protesters, in any way? I’m just asking the question. Don’t laugh. Like the whole country.... And by the way, my colleagues across the aisle—
Slotkin (audio voiceover): It is based on Donald Trump giving that order to your predecessor, to a Republican secretary of defense, who I give a lot of credit to because he didn’t accept the order. He had more guts and balls than you because he said, I’m not going to send in the uniformed military to do something that I know in my gut isn’t right. He was asked to shoot at their legs. He wrote that in his book. That’s not hearsay. So your pooh-poohing of this—it just shows you don’t understand who we are as a country, who we are. And all of my colleagues across the aisle, especially the ones that served, should want an apolitical military and not want citizens to be scared of their own military. I love the military. I served alongside my whole life. So I’m worried about you tainting it. Have you given the order? Have you given the order that they can use lethal force against [unarmed protesters]? I want the answer to be no. Please tell me it’s no. Have you given the order?
Slotkin (audio voiceover): Oh my God. So your former predecessor, I guess that’s not enough for you. Okay. On Iran—
Donegan: Yeah. So we see, I think, with Hegseth in this hearing something we see with a lot of Trump appointees when they go on television: They’re really performing for an audience of one. So at the top of Hegseth’s mind might not be the needs of Americans who are watching this on TV. It might not be the truth in his ability to perjure himself or not. I think what he is really most conscious of in this moment is how he is going to appear to his boss Donald Trump, right? And we see Pete Hegseth doing what a lot of Trump appointees and a lot of Trump allies try to do on television, which is not just to defend Trump personally but to project a masculine domination, a refusal of engagement with either the premise of the question, as we see in this exchange with Elissa Slotkin, or with the idea that there might be other authorities other than Donald Trump to whom they owe some deference or fealty or even just good-faith engagement.
Donegan: Yeah. There needs to be almost an obsessive combativeness in this performance, partly because all these people know that they’re going to be clipped and circulated on television and on social media. To get these very short-form video dunks is a big incentive there. But also, I think you’re right that even simply answering a question that is asked, even responding in good faith is seen as excessive, almost emasculating deference or at least a failure of an opportunity to dominate.
Donegan: Yeah, the hostility as constant as breathing really seems to be the model that they’re operating on.
Slotkin (audio voiceover): Do they have the ability—the uniform military—to arrest and detain protesters currently today?
Slotkin (audio voiceover): It’s a yes or no thing, authority.
Slotkin (audio voiceover): Then what is the order? Then list it out for us. Be a man, list it out. Did you authorize them to detain or arrest? That is a fundamental issue of democracy. I’m not trying to be a snot here. I’m just trying to get the actual ... Did you authorize them to do that?
Slotkin (audio voiceover): OK, So say it. So say it. Yes or no.
Slotkin (audio voiceover): Please. Yes or no.
Slotkin: (audio voiceover): Do they have the ability to arrest—
Slotkin (audio voiceover): OK. So they cannot arrest and detain citizens of the United States—the uniform military. Is that right?
Sargent: So there, Hegseth ultimately answers the question at the very end and it’s not a great answer. But that aside, here again, he plainly felt constrained from saying anything remotely reassuring to the public and Democrats. I think every one of those guys goes into these hearings terrified of Trump’s opinion. As you say, it’s the audience of one, but they really worry on a very profound level that he will see them as weak in some sense. And that is the one thing, the cardinal sin from MAGA. What did you think of that particular answer, Moira?
Sargent: So you had a good piece about all this using Trump’s sad military parade as a way into it. You argued that Trump is always thinking about how to come across as a dictator. You took care to point out that, in many ways, this is the real thing. Authoritarian rule is upon us, but spreading fear and terror through imagery is absolutely central to the Trump-MAGA project. Can you talk about that?
I think this is a very similar impulse to why he commanded this military parade on his birthday this past weekend. He wanted an image of a masculine, powerful, heavily armed, heavily disciplined body that was entirely in deference to him and at his command. He wanted this extension of his own power in the form of these men and these tools. Whether he always gets that is, I think, a different question. He’s very good at imagining the image he wants to project. Sometimes, reality gets in the way. And I think what he got this past weekend at his military parade was, in his own terms, quite disappointing. I don’t think it quite lived up to the photo opportunity that he was thinking and hoping to get.
Donegan: It is a political movement that has the ethos of internet trolls, you know? So on the one hand, they are doing really terrible things. And that is—it is not to say that they don’t actually believe in these terrible things that they’re espousing—to say that they’re also trying to get a rise out of you. The provocation and the desire to provoke and upset the imagined audience of liberals is not actually really distinct from a sincere investment in the reactionary politics, right? This is, I think, something we learned in 2015 and 2016 with the rise of the alt-right, which had a very ironized white supremacist politics. They were both joking and serious at the same time. And that’s a real attention that has been foundational to Trumpism that honestly makes him hard to write about from a pundit’s perspective. Because when you say, This guy’s a dictator, this is fascism, you are both describing the truth and giving him what he wants, right? It actually does put the liberal pundit in a double bind.
Donegan: You see a little bit of that with Slotkin, actually. I was interested in her posture in that questioning. At one point, she tells Pete Hegseth that he doesn’t have the balls that some other people do. There’s almost an attempt by some on the liberal or left or the anti-Trump—vast anti-Trump political sphere—to adopt a countermasculinity or counterdomination tactic. I think there’s some virtues to that. There’s virtues to being able to laugh back at the trolls or to point out their weakness. I think one reason that Donald Trump put on this parade is because he’s a profoundly insecure small man in a way that is contemptible and that I do think a lot of us can look down on and point and mock. And there’s a lot of material there, right? These are guys who make asses on themselves a lot, and I don’t think they’re terribly difficult to laugh at.
Sargent: I don’t have one, but I will say this. What I also found fascinating about Slotkin’s handling of that, in the spirit of what you’re saying here, is that she really went in there without committing the fallacy of pleading with him to be nice to her or pleading with him to follow norms. And she somehow punctured his masculinity, went on offense, but without appearing too Trumpy about it. She didn’t look like she was trying to out-Trump [Trump] or out-MAGA MAGA, if that makes sense. She really went in there saying, I’m going to take this guy on head to head and I’m not going to beg him for mercy. I’m going to point out what a piece of shit he is. To me, that’s as close as I can come to a formula.
She couldn’t go in and dominate the guy she says tried to rape her when they were teenagers. She had to go in and plead for mercy and dignity from a body that she acknowledged had more authority [than] her. Like she was a postulate, and he was the aggrieved threatening male. So the feminine posture of pleading for moral feeling is, I think, one that has exhausted its possibilities in the Trump era. People—and by people, I very much include women—need to be taking what they deserve and occupying a place that does not require moral capitulation or a shared moral universe from the Trump right. Because this “Have you no decency, sir?” that worked with Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn in the Red Scare is not going to work with these guys in 2025.
Donegan: Right, no, they’re proud of having no decency. It would be a sign of their emasculated weakness to defer to something like decency, right? So you can’t make an appeal to an offstage moral cause or value. What you have to do is just dominate them back. I think that seems to be what’s working best. I think that’s not a permanent or universal prescription, right? That’s a mode that has its own limits, but I don’t think you can ask somebody like Pete Hegseth to start acting like a respectable grown man and get very far.
Donegan: I did feel for her there.
Donegan: Yeah, I think we’re going to see security services be deployed more and more against Democratic elected officials—like they were against Alex Padilla at that Kristi Noem press conference, like they were against Brad Lander in New York City this week. I think there is a way in which Donald Trump is trying to demonstrate and signal that state and local authorities and that co-equal branches of government will not be able to check his authority, and that to be a Democratic elected official is an illegitimate position under his regime, right?
Sargent: Ultimately, what I think we’re talking about here is that they went into this with “shock and awe,” as Tom Homan, the border czar, put it. The whole idea was to terrify everyone into submission, unleash the deportation machine, the blitzkrieg. Everyone was going to roll over and accept it all, but that hasn’t happened. And I think they’re losing the middle of the country. The Trumpists are losing the middle of the country on this stuff, and I find it endlessly frustrating that certain centrist liberals and some Democrats really keep telling us not to take this stuff on. It’s just so baffling to me because what I see is these displays of law enforcement being unleashed, the military being unleashed on civilians—there’s no way the middle of the country is OK with this. There’s no way moderates and independents are OK with it. And it’s something we should talk about as much as possible in my view. Where are you on that?
But these public support for Trump’s immigration policies has dropped as he has overplayed his hand; as he starts to look more dictatorial; as he starts to look like he has contempt for due process, contempt for the rights of cities and states; as he starts to look like he has more and more inclination toward violence. These are signs of his weakness in some ways, and they are ways that ... they are political issues that can be weaponized against him. People are listening to information in their environment. They are consuming media. They can be persuaded and influenced by counterarguments, but those counterarguments have to be made. And they have to be made by people who seem like they believe in something, who seem like they have a vision for what this country can be and should be. There’s only one side articulating a clear vision of that right now, and I think the Democrats have to step in and start playing the game.
Donegan: Thank you, Greg, I had fun.
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