Transcript: Trump’s Losing Streak Takes a Truly Humiliating Turn |
Transcript: Trump’s Losing Streak Takes a Truly Humiliating Turn
As the president’s losses pile up, the author of a piece on the GOP cult of Trump explains why his propagandists must forever maintain the illusion of his infallibility at all costs.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 27 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.
Donald Trump has been losing on a lot of fronts lately. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. His attack on the Fed chair failed. The Supreme Court struck down his tariffs and will probably rule against him on birthright citizenship. He failed to prevent Virginia from passing a referendum adding House seats for Democrats. And that’s only a partial list. For the MAGA base, however, the illusion must always be sustained that Trump is in total mastery of events and forever has his enemies on the run. So his team is now leaking word that he’s going to seriously ramp up the prosecutions of enemies. And in one case, his press secretary tried hard to placate the audience of one in an amusing way.
Asawin Suebsaeng, senior political correspondent at Zeteo, has been writing well about how the cult of Trump prohibits any truth-telling about all this losing. So we’re talking to him about all of it today. Swin, always good to have you on.
Asawin Suebsaeng: Thank you so much for having me back.
Sargent: Well, let’s start with the first big one. Trump’s Justice Department has dropped its effort to prosecute Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for supposedly lying to Congress about a renovation of Fed headquarters.
This thing was always a joke. One federal judge blasted it as an effort to harass Powell, primarily over Trump’s hatred of him. And The New York Times reports that prosecutors admitted that they didn’t have evidence of any crimes by Powell, but wanted to press forward anyway. Swin, that’s not how this is supposed to work, is it?
Suebsaeng: Okay, something that really pisses me off about this stuff is if you go down the roster of the names that are publicly available of the lawyers at DOJ who are conducting this—these are not always people who used to be on Donald Trump’s personal legal team. There are a good number of them who have been there for a while, throughout multiple administrations, not just this one.
So these hugely corrupt authoritarian efforts are not just defined by the pure-blooded Team Trump individuals. It is populated also by people who have been in the system for a long time and continue to stick with it when they could very well just do the ethical thing and resign. So there are a lot of people who got blood on their hands on this stuff.
But the good news is, even if these people don’t face the sort of professional consequences that you or I would think would be appropriate for doing something so brazenly corrupt and authoritarian, when you get before a judge—in some cases, even occasionally, sometimes a Trump-appointed judge—you have to make an argument that kind of occasionally amounts to one plus two does not equal 11teen.
And a lot of these lawyers are waltzing into court trying to, with a straight face, convince these judges that of course Donald Trump’s effort to punish all of his enemies is built on math in which one plus one equals 11teen. How could you possibly say that’s fictitious, Judge?
Sargent: Yeah, I mean, we have a whole track record that bears out what you’re saying on two fronts. One is they’ve lost—these efforts to prosecute Trump’s enemies have mostly failed. They’ve mostly imploded in buffoonery, really. And point two, we’ve actually seen a lot of resignations and a lot of consternation from the professionals at DOJ. So yes, these people who are doing this stuff could be following their colleagues out the door and could be doing the principled thing, but they’re not.
Suebsaeng: And it’s completely embarrassing because so many of these prosecutions against Trump’s real and perceived political enemies—like your audience, I’m sure, has looked at some of the indicting documents or some of the details and read some of the transcripts online. It has been a year and a half of absolute, like most bush-league, most farcical stuff in a court of law that a lot of people—not just me, but actual legal experts, actual distinguished lawyers—when they look at it, they have nothing else to say other than I have never fucking seen anything like this.
Sargent: And yet, in spite of all that, in MAGA world, you’re not allowed to say Trump has lost ever in any sense. So the U.S. attorney for D.C., Jeanine Pirro, is now saying the investigation will be picked up by the Fed’s inspector general. Now, listen to this from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): As you saw, Judge Jeanine Pirro—or former Judge........