The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 12 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.

During the campaign, Donald Trump openly advertised that as president, he’ll use the state to retaliate against his enemies in every way he possibly can. He won anyway. Now The New York Times reports that some of his advisors are urging him to absolutely make good on that threat. And right on cue, Trump erupted on social media calling for investigations into people who are supposedly spreading false rumors about his intention to sell shares of his Truth Social. What exactly is this going to look like once he has the power to install administration officials who actually can order such investigations? Today, we’re discussing this with Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker who has a great new piece arguing that Trump will be less constrained and more uninhibited than ever before. Great to have you back on, Susan.

Susan Glasser: Well, thanks so much for having me, Greg.

Sargent: Trump just raged that people who displeased him with their public comments about Truth Social should be “immediately investigated by the appropriate authorities.” He’ll be in charge of those authorities very, very soon. And now the Times reports that some of his own aides are already encouraging him to take revenge against those who investigated and prosecuted him, which, again, was done in keeping with the rule of law. What’s your reaction to all this?

Glasser: Well, first of all, deep breath ... and let’s just say, here we are again, asking the same questions: Are we going to take Donald Trump literally and seriously this time? What more needs to happen for his critics to understand that while he may not do 100 percent of everything he says, he means much of it? And if there’s one thing we know about Trump’s next term, it’s that he campaigned on a platform of revenge and retribution that is consistent, by the way, with many of the themes that he emphasized in his first term, even if he wasn’t always able to fully follow through on them. So it seems to me that a strong throughline for Donald Trump has always been the desire to use the tools and institutions of the federal government as essentially personal weapons and to make sure that they are used as instruments to punish his enemies, to punish people he views as disloyal, and to carry out his personal whims.

For example, Greg, people have not paid enough attention to the fact that even one of Trump’s transition co-chairs, Howard Lutnick, the Wall Street billionaire who is in charge of vetting personnel for the new administration, has explicitly said repeatedly that appointees in the new Trump administration will be vetted not just for their loyalty to Donald Trump’s policies but to their loyalty to the man himself. That’s always been what set apart Trump, I think, from other presidents: a view that essentially he is the totality of the government, that people should respond to him personally and are there at his pleasure rather than serving, as their oath says, the Constitution and the people of the United States. And if you don’t want to take that seriously, you’re going to misread the intentions of this new administration.

Sargent: You raised a really critical point there, which is that Trump openly and explicitly campaigned on a vow to violate his oath of office. That’s something he actually sold to his followers as a plus. To your other point, Trump tried to use the Justice Department to investigate his enemies during his first term, and mostly failed at that. But in your piece, you report, alarmingly, that Trump has actually learned how to get his way from the bureaucracy now and that he’ll be surrounded this time with loyalists—like that guy—who don’t have the qualms about abusing power that some of those around Trump the first time did. Can you talk about this? What is it likely to look like in the real world, in the context of the Justice Department and other agencies, targeting his enemies in various ways? What can we expect?

Glasser: That was my big takeaway, Greg, from doing the book—an after-action report, if you will—on the Trump first term. I wrote the book The Divider with my husband Peter Baker of The New York Times and we debrief something like 300 former Trump officials and others who observed at close range. These are essentially Republican appointees themselves of Donald Trump or nonpartisan national security officials and what they said in very clear terms is: number one, the second term will not look like a first term........

© New Republic