The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 21 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.

Earlier this week, Donald Trump confirmed in a 4 a.m. tweet that he will be using the military to carry out mass deportations. He also confirmed that he’ll declare a national emergency to do so. All this prompted a sharp response from a Republican senator, Rand Paul of Kentucky. He denounced the idea as a “huge mistake,” and he said it would send a “terrible image” to the country and the world. But Rand Paul is a fringe figure in the GOP. Why is it left to someone on the fringe to denounce Trump’s vile threats? Where are the rest of Republicans on this? How far will Trump get? We’re chatting about all this—and why it poses such a menace to the country—with Atlantic writer, Tom Nichols, who’s one of the best critics out there on the MAGA-fication of the GOP. Great to have you back on, Tom.

Tom Nichols: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: This week, a conservative tweeted that Trump will “declare a national emergency” and will “use military assets” to deal with immigration “through a mass deportation program.” Trump responded at around 4 a.m., “TRUE!!!” Tom, I think it’s a little unclear what he means, but Stephen Miller, who’s now going to have a high level White House role, has said that military funds will be used to build giant camps to detain migrants before their mass removals. What’s your broad sense of what Trump’s really proposing here?

Nichols: Wow. It’s hard to say. So much of what Trump’s trying to do in terms of capturing the government for his own ends and his own protection and his own profit is pretty easy to follow. This may just be red meat thrown at the MAGA faithful and it’ll be like the wall that didn’t get built, that Mexico didn’t pay for. The problem is that so many institutions in American government are going to resist this. The military hates domestic missions. They hate it. They don’t see that as part of their professional ethos. Where are you going to put these camps? Who’s going to build them? How long will it take? What states are going to accept them and not accept them? How much transportation? It’s the kind of thing that sounds great when you’re at a sweaty rally at 11 o’clock at night somewhere.

With that said, he’s the president. If he says it, it’s a policy, and somebody’s going to try and do it.

Sargent: Well, Senator Rand Paul is clearly taking this very seriously. Here’s what Paul had to say about this. In an interview with Newsmax, he stressed that he supports a crackdown on undocumented immigrants, but doesn’t want the military used. Listen to this.

Rand Paul (audio voiceover): I will not support an emergency to put the army into our cities. I think that’s a huge mistake. I’m not for the army marching up and down our streets. I think it’s a terrible image to send the world. It’s a terrible image for us as citizens. And so I hope he will think twice about trying to use an emergency edict to have the army patrolling our country. There is, to my mind, some question of the people—the housekeeper who’s been here 30 years, I don’t see the military putting her in handcuffs and marching her down the street to an encampment. I don’t really want to see that.

Sargent: Tom, that’s quite a harsh takedown. What does it say that it required a figure like this in the GOP to say this? Are you hearing anything like this from other Republicans?

Nichols: The other Republicans seem to be headed off into the tall grass about this stuff because anybody with experience in government knows this is going to be tough to do.

Rand Paul’s an interesting case because for all that fringe kookery that he’s associated with, he does have this consistent anti–big government, anti–overarching executive power approach. It’s interesting to say Rand Paul is actually defending this conservative Republican tradition of saying, No, the president can’t just declare an emergency and set up giant camps and unleash the military in the streets of the United States. I have had a lot of bad things to say about Rand Paul, but I’m sitting here going, The guy’s right about this.

Especially, as a Republican idea, this is so against everything Republicans had ever stood for in the past. Only Paul seems to be saying, Hey, technically I’m still a Republican and we would never have gone for this with anybody else.

Sargent: You’ve written incredibly eloquently about the MAGA-fication of the GOP. It does seem very........

© New Republic