The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 15 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.

We’re now in day two of the extraordinary GOP meltdown over Donald Trump’s pick of Matt Gaetz for attorney general. Numerous Republican senators are strongly opposing the move, including ones who are staunch Trump allies. One is even calling for the release of a House Ethics Committee report on Gaetz that examines drug use and sexual misconduct. Yet even as this is all happening, Trump just announced that he will nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the secretary of Health and Human Services.

It’s really hard to say which of these two will be more of a disaster, but taken together, the message is very clear: We may be in some serious trouble. We’re chatting about all this with Nina Burleigh, author of a great new cover story for The New Republic called “Trump 2.0: Here Comes the Night,” which reports on how bad things are going to get. Thanks for coming on, Nina.

Nina Burleigh: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: So, Gaetz first. Senators like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are sharply criticizing the idea of Gates as attorney general. Others like Thom Tillis are saying he probably won’t get confirmed. John Cornyn is demanding the release of this House Ethics Committee report, which looked into whether Gates had sex with a minor, which he denies, among other things. Gaetz has resigned his House seat, apparently to avoid the release of that report, but it might leak. Bits of it are already coming out. Nina, what do you make of all this? How real is the opposition to Gaetz?

Burleigh: Well, it’s all happening so fast. It’s hard to tell. Murkowski and Collins predictably would stand up, at least in the beginning. That’s not a surprise at all. I am a little bit surprised to see Texas Senator Cornyn asking for the Ethics report this afternoon. That’s a promising sign for sanity. Just in the last few days, with this wackadoodle clown car situation or whatever you want to call it, it’s pretty clear that shock and awe is the road that they’re going to travel. That was predicted to me, when I was working on this article that you referenced about what might happen, by the people who were predicting that—thought that—he would do shock and awe on day one, on the inauguration day when his hand came off the Bible. So what we’re seeing here is, Let’s just lay the groundwork right now. This isn’t going to be business as usual. Fuck you to the norms. The Senate, the Republican senators standing up ... Really, they’re the thin blue line for the public now.

Sargent: Right. So speaking of a “fuck you,” which was I thought a good phrase to use, while this was all going on, Trump announced that RFK Jr. will be his pick as HHS secretary. Anti-science, anti-vax, conspiracy theorist. I want to point out that on that on October 30th, just before the election, Trump’s transition co-chair Howard Lutnick went on CNN and flatly said RFK will not be in charge of HHS. They lied. They lied about everything. The contempt for voters here is just incredible. You reported on how bad things are going to get. Did you anticipate them going through with this?

Burleigh: I didn’t anticipate them going through right away with putting Bobby Kennedy into the HHS because he’s so far out in left field that it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where somebody like that actually is in charge of the public health, of millions of Americans. The anti-vaxxing aspect of RFK is of a piece with the MAGA response to Covid, which is, The government’s making us take these shots. But he’s been at it for a very long time, and he has these utterly baseless claims about what vaccines do and not........

© New Republic