The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 31 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
The knives are out for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Politico reports that White House and Pentagon insiders are increasingly questioning Hegseth’s judgment and see him as the culprit in the disastrous news that Trump’s top advisors discussed war plans in an insecure chat, a scandal that continues to shake the administration. This comes as a poll finds that 74 percent of Americans see the leak as a serious problem, including 60 percent of Republicans. And here’s another striking number: Only 42 percent of Republicans say the media is making too big a deal about the scandal, suggesting that MAGA’s effort to blame the fake news for this fiasco is going belly up even with GOP voters. Surprisingly though, there’s no indication the Trumpworld is ready for the next Hegseth fiasco—and there surely will be one. We’re talking about all this today with Jennifer Rubin, co-founder and editor in chief of The Contrarian Substack, who has a piece arguing that this scandal reveals the sheer arrogance and sense of untouchability that’s consumed Trump and his team. Jen, thanks for coming back on.
Jennifer Rubin: It’s a pleasure.
Sargent: This new Politico piece really gets at an under-covered aspect of the whole Signalgate scandal, which is the likelihood that things are going to get worse with Hegseth. As one person close to the White House puts it, “What happens when Hegseth needs to manage a real crisis?” Jen, that’s a damn good question. The immediate consequences of the Signalgate fiasco were somewhat limited, but it also revealed that Hegseth is completely incompetent. And that’s not going away, which means much more serious screw-ups are coming. Your thoughts?
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.
Given this fiasco, we’re already on thin ice with our allies in terms of intelligence sharing. Who in their right mind would give us anything to share knowing that it could easily go out on a Signal channel that might be intercepted—I don’t know—in the Kremlin perhaps, where the president’s envoy happened to be? So it’s always the case that by putting a incompetent ideologue—someone with both personal and professional deficits—in a position of grave importance, you are rolling the dice. Not only Trump, but those Republicans who voted for this guy.... Joni Ernst, really? Thom Tillis, really? These people went out on a limb on the assumption that, Well, he won’t be so bad or others will keep him in check, but we don’t know that. Frankly, that’s a dangerous proposition: hoping that the secretary of defense won’t really be the secretary of defense and there’ll be somebody else actually doing the job.
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.
Rubin: I would think so. And we’ve actually seen Roger Wicker, who is a no-squish Republican from, of all places, Mississippi, jointly request—or demand, depending on how you look at it—an internal investigation into the DOD. Now, it’s not enough for the Defense Department to investigate itself, but it is some indication, as you put it, that no one is really buying this notion that it was the press’s fault or this isn’t important or this wasn’t actually classified information.
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.
Sargent: Apparently. One senior GOP official says to Politico the following about Hegseth, “Privately, there is a lot of concern about his judgment.” Trump allies are starting to notice that his mistakes are piling up on other fronts. And I think the key here is that this is now all fair game, right? Hegseth was the one who sent the migrants to Guantanamo; that’s now been reversed. He’s the one who screwed up in February by saying Ukraine is going to have to give up huge concessions to get peace; a big gift to Russia which Hegseth then had to walk back. That’s a pretty serious screwup on Hegseth’s part. What do you think?
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.
This is an avid display. You couldn’t be more certain that these people are not interested in reforming government and making it better, or in reforming America; they are simply destroying functional government. They want to bring it all crashing down. They don’t know what they’re doing. And in particular, now that we’ve cut off USAID, people are dying overseas—and other people will die. We’ve already seen immense economic harm, political harm, social harm that they’re enacting, and they’re simply on a search-and-destroy message. And that mission is search and destroy democracy and our functional federal government.
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.
Rubin: Absolutely. The notion that these people even want to govern well is farcical. There are three motives, as far as I can see, that apply to these guys—and they apply to any authoritarian regime. First is the grift. What can they get out of it? What profits can they garner? So when you have tariffs that disproportionately hit other car companies but not Tesla, that’s grift. When you have the president of U.S. going into the crypto business, that’s grift. Never underestimate the pure greed and financial avarice of these people.
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.
Sargent: Science.
Rubin: Yeah, exactly, science. Any independent source of information or data that could possibly have bothered him over the years.
Sargent: And health care.
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.
Sargent: I think this hubris and arrogance is really contagious inside MAGA world. I want to bring up Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who you didn’t discuss in the piece but belongs under the rubric of this theme here. Just the other day, Rubio was incredibly cavalier and contemptuous of the law in discussing the disappearances of these foreign students that are happening right now. He just basically said, Yeah, we’re going to do this to hundreds of them. And the statute doesn’t even really allow that. The statute that they’re using is supposed to be applied sparingly and judiciously and not in cases of punishing speech. So this gets at what you’re talking about: this cavalier flippant arrogance, this fuck you to everything—the law, norms, rules. [It’s this] we’re in charge now [attitude]. And Rubio is supposed to be one of the slightly better ones. I feel like he’s been infected by this arrogance and hubris and recklessness that you’re talking about.
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.
And I find him completely revolting. Like I say, I don’t expect much more from Pete Hegseth. He’s not bright. I don’t expect more from a Tulsi Gabbard who is totally incompetent and unaware of what she is doing. Marco Rubio, however, knows better. And you can see that he knows better. Remember when he was slinking into the upholstery in the Oval Office during the Zelenskiy visit? He knows enough to be embarrassed. He just doesn’t have the spine to do something, to say something, or—for God’s sake—quit.
Sargent: It’s so true. By the way, he’s also behind these deportations to the El Salvadoran gulag.
Rubin: And I want to go back to something you said about the statute for disappearing the students. The statute says that you have to show that they are undermining our national security, our foreign policy. Writing an op-ed is not undermining our foreign policy. And even holding a rally that I personally disagree with, that I think is at odds with our value doesn’t undermine or threaten our national security. And the reason is this was a statute put in for things like spying, for things in the Cold War where someone couldn’t really prove maybe all of the crimes but they knew they were undermining our national security in a very real sense. It was made for spies. It wasn’t made to silence dissent.
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.
Sargent: It’s absolutely awful because, again, this is someone who really knows better. He personally experienced some of this stuff.
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 here, I think, we have to come back to the Senate. It’s not just Trump. It’s not just these individual people. It is a thoroughly corrupt Republican Senate. These people know better. Susan Collins knows better. Thom Tillis knows better. Roger Wicker knows better. Many of them do. We’re not talking about the Marsha Blackburns here; we’re talking about people who have been in the Senate who have behaved somewhat responsibly over the years, who maybe don’t have the policy preferences you and I do but nevertheless are grownups. They have just gone along because they are cowards. Some of them actually fear for their physical safety. And by the way, if that’s what they’re afraid of, then we really are being run by the mafia. We really are into a thugocracy if U.S. senators are afraid for their physical safety.
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.
Sargent: I want to underscore your point about Democrats. If they’re not regretting their vote for Rubio right now, then it’s absolutely shameful. Let’s go back to Hegseth and Signalgate for a second. As you know, there’s a lawsuit underway on this and Judge Boasberg has ordered administration officials to preserve all information of the text chain. What’s going to unfold here in your view?
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.
Now, since they have been skirting the orders of courts from one coast to the next, the real question is whether these are already gone because they’ve already expired in some cases and whether they actually heard the judge and understood that that means now they have to take it seriously and start preserving. So if a week or a month from now we find out that they still are not preserving these records, then we have yet another instance in which they are attempting to flout the courts because they seem to think they’re above the law and they’re beyond reproach. Why could a federal court judge tell them what to do? This is the mentality that we’re dealing with.
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.
Rubin: Exactly. Hillary Clinton got to write her op-ed saying, I told you so. She must be just exploding with fury. I give her credit for writing a well-reasoned and thoughtful op-ed as opposed to screaming into her pillow at night. But this is the hypocrisy. And of course, all the talk about but her emails, all the talk that Republicans are the only ones serious about national security, all the lather that only Republicans are making us strong—it’s all bumped. And of course, they’re making us weaker. They’re destroying our alliances. They’re putting our national secrets out there on insecure platforms. And I think Democrats have to make this case that those guys are the weaklings; those guys are the incompetent boobs; and if we don’t put some real shackles on them, they’re going to get this country in deep, deep trouble.
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?
Rubin: Well, I bet he is torn. On one hand, he doesn’t want to be seen, as he puts it, giving a hint to the media—in other words, admitting that the media caught them and they did something wrong. On the other hand, you’re exactly right. By keeping him there, Trump’s error is therefore mishandling national security. Oh, how strange it is that the guy who took documents and stuck them in his bathroom at Mar-a-Lago would be careless with national security? But be that as it may, at some point he has to decide who he’s going to throw under the bus. And interestingly, he was much more willing to do that in the first term. He threw people under the bus constantly—remember the old adage, I barely knew the guy, he was just delivering coffee. He disowned these people [before]. And now, instead, he’s owning these people, which I don’t think ultimately is going to benefit him.
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.
The economy matters, things matter; and lying and screaming and subterfuge and distraction only matter so much. By the way, that’s why I think the day after some of the worst of the Signalgate came out, he started throwing out by the fistful new edicts. He was going to make a deal with Skadden Arps. He’s going to unleash Vance on the Smithsonian to take away anti-American signage or something. And also the zoo—because the animals apparently are too woke at the National Zoo. This is how stupid this is. And on a much more serious level, [he’s] trying to ruin and throw out all of the government federal employee unions, which is patently illegal.
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.
Sargent: Look, the bottom line here, and I think this is what you’re getting at, is that Trump’s magical lying and distraction powers aren’t limitless. His magical Sharpie can’t scratch out literally everything. Jennifer Rubin, it’s always a great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
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.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Trump Text Fiasco Worsens as Knives Come Out for Hegseth )
Also on site :
- Watch Jason 'Jelly Roll' DeFord Make His Acting Debut With New Single on 'Fire Country' (Exclusive)
- Carrie Underwood's 'Dark Side' Scares Luke Bryan
- Easy Ice Finishes Q1 2025 With Two More Acquisitions