The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 14 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.

Two big things just happened with major implications for the future of Donald Trump’s agenda. Trump has tapped Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general, and a number of Republican senators are reportedly aghast at the pick. On another front, Republican senators elected John Thune as their next majority leader, passing over Rick Scott, who was the first choice of MAGA influencers. And this has some MAGA personalities screaming that the GOP has already betrayed Trump.

These two things raise a question: How bad will the splits between the GOP establishment and MAGA really get? Today, we’re chatting about this with Ben Meiselas, the co-founder of MeidasTouch Network, who has been closely tracking the MAGA response to all these developments and is a good chronicler of MAGA madness in general. Good to have you on, Ben.

Ben Meiselas: Good to be here, Greg.

Sargent: Ben, here we are. Already Trump has tapped Matt Gaetz, of all people, as his choice for attorney general. Senate GOP aides are telling Politico’s Andrew Desiderio that there’s no way Gaetz gets confirmed. CNN’s Melanie Zanona reports that House Republicans literally ran away from her when she tried to get comment on Gaetz. This shows right off the bat that MAGA chaos is going to rain. Gaetz pushed false flag conspiracy theories about Trump’s insurrection and has been a big defender of Trump supporters who attack the Capitol. What do you think of all this?

Meiselas: Well, as I’ve been telling people, the best case scenario over the next four years is absolute chaos, total drama, utter incompetence, and hardship. That’s the best case scenario, knowing that Trump’s going to be Trump. He’s not out there [saying], This is my legacy. No, he’s going to do what he said: retribution, vengeance, rule like a dictator. Those are the things that he said he was going to do. In the best case scenario, he does the things he says—2,000 percent tariffs, appointing the people like he is doing right now, bloody mass deportations, chaos, drama, all caps posts. That’s your best case scenario.

Your more likely scenario, and worst case scenario, is that he effectively implements these things, and we see America turned into something out of our worst nightmares. I’m not trying to be hyperbolic. I’ve always tried to be leveled and measured when the corporate media was pretending that this was all normal and we were saying it wasn’t. Now everything that we said was going to happen is happening. Now I hear people are Googling, Can I take back my vote? What’s a tariff? Are the deportations going to impact me? Yeah, too late.

Sargent: They are. Some on the left are pointing out that Gaetz has some good qualities to him. On surveillance issues, for instance, maybe he has spoken out against abuses. Fine, granting that; but at the same time, this is not a pro–rule of law pick. This is somebody who is going to try to carry out Trump’s vendetta against his enemies. It’s pretty clear that he’s somebody who’s going to try to prosecute enemies without cause. I’d love to be wrong about that—and if I’m proven wrong about that, I’ll be the first to say so. But I want to say one thing here, Ben. Maybe the one good thing about this is that it forces an immediate debate over whether Trump’s attorney general should carry out those prosecutions that he has threatened and force Republicans to go on record and defend it right off the bat. Why not, right?

Meiselas: I’ve had this conversation with a lot of people that I know where I said, You know what, part of me wants him just to rip the Band-Aid off, do all of those things so that America could understand the pain and harm it’s going to cause. Both my own self-reflection, and often what people will tell me when I go through that hypothetical exercises—someone will say to me, Hey, Ben, I don’t want that to happen. I have a gay person in my family. I have a trans person in my family. I have a family member who’s been working here for 30 years who doesn’t have their papers, but paid taxes and contributed to society. So you go through that hypothetical exercise, it’s going to cause a massive amount of pain to human beings.

And Greg, we went from a period of having record GDP growth, low unemployment for record amounts of times, record-breaking stock markets, energy independence. You go through the list, America was leading the world in all of these things—very stable financial markets—to now we’re talking about the self-imposition of varying degrees of suffering.

Sargent: I want to move on, speaking of major mistakes: Tulsi Gabbard is Trump’s first pick for director of national intelligence. I don’t even know where to begin with that. I was trying to come up with an equivalent that a Democratic president-elect could pick for DNI that would be anything like that, and nothing........

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