The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 19 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.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, and he faced a really striking takedown from Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin. At one point, she grilled him on whether he had given an order allowing members of the military to shoot unarmed protesters if necessary. She also pressed him on whether the military has the authority to arrest protesters. In both cases, Hegseth stonewalled and obfuscated. Which got us thinking: Why exactly does Hegseth feel reluctant to reassure Democrats and the broader public about the military’s intentions toward civilians? Why does he feel like he can’t do that? We think it’s because Trump would perceive it as a sign of weakness and in some sense as a betrayal of him. And that itself reveals something deeply unnerving about the threat Trump and MAGA pose. Moira Donegan, a columnist for The Guardian, has a great new piece that discusses how important the appearance of authoritarianism, the trappings of fascism are to the Trump project. So we’re talking to her about all this. Thanks for coming on.
Moira Donegan: Thank you so much for having me.
Sargent: Let’s start by listening to audio of Senator Elissa Slotkin questioning Pete Hegseth today. It’s a bit long, but it’s worth it. Audio is courtesy of Aaron Rupar. Listen to this.
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—
Pete Hegseth (audio voiceover): What is that based on? What evidence would you have that an order like that has ever been given?
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?
Hegseth (audio voiceover): Senator, I’d be careful what you read in books, and believing it, except for the Bible.
Slotkin (audio voiceover): Oh my God. So your former predecessor, I guess that’s not enough for you. Okay. On Iran—
Sargent: So whatever the truth is here, whatever order Hegseth did or did not give, what’s striking to me is that Hegseth feels like he cannot say, No, I didn’t give that order. And also note that he defaults immediately to defending Trump against what Hegseth’s predecessor, Mark Esper, said about Trump inquiring about shooting people in the legs. Your thoughts on this, Moira?
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.
Sargent: What drives me crazy about this is that the appearance of capitulating to Democrats is on his mind as well. Answering a question directly from a Democrat is capitulation, and Trump would hate that. You know what I mean?
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.
Sargent: Right, it’s fight, fight, fight. That’s always been the Trump mantra of going back to around the 1980s and the Roy Cohn phase really, when it comes down to it.
Donegan: Yeah, the hostility as constant as breathing really seems to be the model that they’re operating on.
Sargent: Exactly. So something similar happened when Elissa Slotkin questioned Hegseth about whether the military has been granted authority to arrest people. Listen to this.
Slotkin (audio voiceover): Do they have the ability—the uniform military—to arrest and detain protesters currently today?
Hegseth: I—
Slotkin (audio voiceover): It’s a yes or no thing, authority.
Hegseth (audio voiceover): It’s sort of a bit amusing the extent to which the speculation is out there. These troops are given very clear orders.
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?
Hegseth (audio voiceover): All of these orders and what they’re sent there to do are public. They’re—
Slotkin (audio voiceover): OK, So say it. So say it. Yes or no.
Hegseth (audio voiceover): I’d like to.
Slotkin (audio voiceover): Please. Yes or no.
Hegseth (audio voiceover): As I’ve said time and time again through interruption, they’re there to protect law enforcement, ICE officers—
Slotkin: (audio voiceover): Do they have the ability to arrest—
Hegseth (audio voiceover): —who are trying to do their job deporting illegals who were allowed in by the previous administration.
Slotkin (audio voiceover): OK. So they cannot arrest and detain citizens of the United States—the uniform military. Is that right?
Hegseth (audio voiceover): As we’ve stated, if necessary, in their own self-defense, they could temporarily detain and hand over to ICE. But there’s no arresting going on.
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?
Donegan: Yeah, it was really striking for its almost peevish evasiveness. I think you’re right, Greg, that all of these Republican men are very, very conscious of what Donald Trump is thinking of them. I think that might be particularly top of mind for Pete Hegseth, who, of course, has been very embattled at the Defense Department—[which] seems to be hemorrhaging talent—and whom a lot of people seem to be circling above like vultures looking for that job. There’s a presumption that he is not long for the defense secretary spot. So he’s looking particularly to shore up the things about him that Donald Trump likes, which are the way he looks and the way he can project a quasisadistic masculine indifference to other kinds of authorities. He is a guy who looks like a G.I. Joe action figure and who wants to make the military into a site of great fearsomeness, of great power, of great ability to intimidate Donald Trump’s enemies, particularly domestically. And that’s what I think he set out to do in this hearing.
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?
Donegan: Yeah. I think Donald Trump is a person with a great talent for the media. He, of course, came up in his second career as a reality television star, and he does have a peculiar genius—I do think you have to give him credit for this—for creating imagery that conveys the message that he wants to send about himself. And this has been a great characteristic of his presidency and his domination of American politics over the past decade, this fusion of the political and the aesthetic. He is very, very in command of images, or at least he tries to be. And one of the reasons I believe that he sent the military and the National Guard into Los Angeles to combat these, by all accounts, pretty mundane and not at all threatening protests against ICE activity is because he wanted images of protesters being intimidated by the military, by these armed men who were there on his behalf.
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.
Sargent: I want to get to that in a sec, but I want to bring up another element of this desire for that imagery that you just touched on. A big part of this for people like Trump and for Hegseth is that they want liberals like you and me to squeal about it. That is absolutely central, right? It’s the sound of submissiveness, they think. In their heads, when liberals squeal in protest about the military beat walking down Pennsylvania Avenue, it’s just a sign of submission, weakness. It’s a sign of Trump dominating us.
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.
Sargent: I agree 100 percent. I think maybe the answer to it is to talk about these things in a way that doesn’t smack up weakness. We go into this saying, open eyes, We know what you’re all about, Trump and MAGA. We know that you’re fascists. We know that you’d be throwing all of us into foreign gulags if you could, but we’re not afraid of this. We’re going to take it on directly. I think that’s the tone to try to find for the “Resistance 2.0.” And it’s not always easy to find it because, as you say, there is a reality to what they’re doing that’s really quite frightening. So conveying that while also not conveying fear seems to me to be the essence of the project that’s upon us, in a way. What do you think?
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.
On the other hand, I think an ethos of domination is much more at home on the political right, right? Because if you believe in a hierarchy of persons, if you believe that there is an order of human value, then it makes a lot more sense to be asserting that you’re at the top of it. Something about the left or liberal worldview that is more invested in equality and equal dignity is that it does provoke you more or guide you more, I think, into a posture of gentleness or welcomeness and humility. And so there’s some ways in which I think some people are becoming a little more Trump-like in their efforts to find a rhetorical posture that can defeat Trump. And I think that’s a genuine tension. I don’t have a prescription for how to resolve it. If you do, I’d be interested to hear it.
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.
Donegan: Yeah, I’m thinking now about something you mentioned before we started recording, which is Brett Kavanaugh, who, like Pete Hegseth, really went into his confirmation hearing following the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford with an idea that he was going to perform masculine rage and perform wounded, aggrieved entitlement for this audience of Donald Trump. And he really debased himself screaming about beer; he got all red in the face. It was not a dignified performance, but it was a performance of masculine domination, right? And that was a rhetorical mode that by no fault of her own—because of the way that the media treats women, because of the rhetorical structures that constrain #MeToo stories— somebody like Christine Blasey Ford really didn’t have access to.
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.
Sargent: Right. That’s so critical. I was actually thinking about that very thing, “Have you no decency?” They really can’t be shamed is the essence of this. And sometimes Democrats try too hard to be outraged and shaming, and it just misses the point entirely. Because that whole posture—that is something that they think is good and powerful.
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.
Sargent: She was very artful the way she just said, Please make the answer not crazy and not fascist. You know?
Donegan: I did feel for her there.
Sargent: Right, but she did it without that pleading submissive, begging for a shared moral universe, as you put it. I want to switch to the right-wing media for a sec. New York City mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested by ICE. Fox News host Brian Kilmeade loudly cheered this saying, “I love that ICE cracked down on him.” And he also said that Lander “deserved” to be charged. So it seems to me an essential piece of all this is that in the background, MAGA media keeps this drumbeat of support for unleashing the military and law enforcement on Democrats and liberals. You wrote that the political world, or components of the political world, actively want us to tip into authoritarianism. I think this is a good example of that. What do you think?
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?
And I think what is interesting about these cases is that in both cases—these assaults against Senator Padilla and against Comptroller Brad Lander in New York City—both of these assaults of these men by Trump-aligned security forces were caught on video. And both of these men were accused of threatening or assaulting Trump-aligned persons, be it the ICE forces in New York or Secretary Noem in Los Angeles, in a way that was just straightforwardly contradicted by the video evidence. And I think what we’re seeing in this assertion that no, no, no, these guys totally lunged at Secretary Noem or he assaulted an ICE officer [is] this is a lie that is not supposed to be convincing. It is a lie that asserts domination over the truth. It is a lie that asserts that they do not actually need an excuse. They can come up with something so ostentatiously flimsy and false as a pretext for asserting their domination. That itself is an expression of power, right? It’s the power to bullshit.
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?
Donegan: I tend to agree. I think there is a sense of awe at Trump’s power among some forces of the Democratic leadership that assumes that his support is stagnant and unfixable and that public opinion exists outside of political influence and cannot be changed by political work. And I think messaging, persuasion—these are lost arts in the Democratic Party. They try to move to where they believe public opinion is, which is always somewhat further to the right of where they have been previously, and then they come across as insincere. They come across as weak. They come across as unprincipled. And it seems like the Republicans are the ones who actually believe in something, right?
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.
Sargent: A hundred percent. Really, really beautifully said. Moira Donegan, thank you so much for talking to us. It was really, really great stuff.
Donegan: Thank you, Greg, I had fun.
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