The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 8 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.
This week, after Donald Trump won the presidential election, Jeff Bezos issued an extraordinary tweet. He didn’t just congratulate Trump on his victory, he also went out of his way to hail Trump’s extraordinary political comeback. We think this is a bad sign of what’s coming. People in key institutional positions going out of their way to curry favor with Trump in advance. How bad is that going to get and what will the consequences be? Will Bunch, national columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote a very good column about this, arguing that this bended knee to Trump suggests the beginning of America’s strongman era. So we invited Will on to talk about it. Good to have you on, Will.
Will Bunch: Hey, Greg. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
Greg Sargent: First, I want to read the tweet from Jeff Bezos, who is in the top five richest people in the world and owns The Washington Post, where I used to work (laughs). It said this, “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th president on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing Donald Trump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.” Well, the line about Trump’s extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory is telling; that’s going out of his way to unctuously suck up to Trump by fluffing his comeback narrative, which Trump loves. What’s your reaction to all this?
Bunch: You’re right, Greg. It was an extraordinarily fawning tweet coming from a man who ... Obviously, first and foremost, he’s the founder of Amazon and that’s where his wealth comes from. But he’s the owner of The Washington Post, and he knows with the Post comes this watchdog responsibility to cover the new administration fairly. It’s something he’s aware of. He talked about it when he bought the paper back in 2013. You can question the wisdom of sending any tweet at all, but this just sounded so over-the-top.
And it’s fascinating because it comes in the wake of a big controversy, as probably lot of your listeners know about: The Post has been generally making endorsements in presidential races since Watergate, since 1976, and the editorial staff had prepared an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. They’d worked on it for a long time. At the last minute, Jeff Bezos told them not to publish it, [saying] that Hey, we decided we’re going to get out of the endorsement business. The timing raised a lot of eyebrows, but especially because, as it turns out, Amazon, the main source of his wealth, does a lot of business with the federal government. You wouldn’t necessarily think so, but they’re in the cloud computing business, and they have a large cloud computing business contract with [the federal government], among other things.
Jeff Bezos also, like his fellow billionaire Elon Musk, has this space venture called Blue Origin. It actually came out, and it may have been a coincidence–it probably was—but on the very day that Bezos told his editors not to publish the endorsement, some of these executives from Blue Origin actually met Trump at an event down in Austin, Texas.
One reaction to authoritarian regimes is people tend to not even take orders, but just in advance on their own, take actions that they think will please the authoritarian leader. Timothy Snyder from Yale calls this “obeying in advance.”
Sargent: He does. I want to bring up some other signs of our institutions getting weak-kneed in the face of Trump, both before the election and after. We just learned that the Department of Justice may be winding down its cases against Trump. It comes after the Supreme Court delayed Trump’s trial for his insurrection, enabling him to kick it until after the election, which will let him cancel prosecutions of himself. He viciously attacked media organizations in the run-up to this election. Whether this is the reason or not, some of them capitulated. We saw some networks, for instance, doing a soft pedal at some of these debates by not fact-checking. I think it’s pretty clear that Trump sees that and says to himself, You know, it’s working. What more do you anticipate coming along these lines once Trump gets into power?
Bunch: The Wall Street Journal reported that the national archivist actually changed the historical exhibit to do things like take out Martin Luther King or take out references to treatment of Native Americans out West because she was worried, apparently, that any negative portrayals of American history would offend Republicans next year, and correctly anticipating (this was a month or two ago or a few months ago, and staff members leaked this to The Wall Street Journal), as it turns out, Republican control of the government. It’s throwing history down the memory hole, to use another Orwellian phrase.
Any institution that we consider to be a possible check and balance on unbridled power; Congress, for example, but the media definitely, the courts—there’s all sorts of places to look for people, and in unlikely places like the National Archives, making decisions of saying, I don’t want to get in trouble. I don’t want to say something that’s going to get me in trouble with the Trump administration.
Sargent: On that score, Will, we should keep in mind that once Trump purges the government of real civil servants—real independent civil servants—and starts replacing them with MAGA loyalists, you could be in a situation where remaining civil servants who aren’t MAGA actually muzzle themselves, both in terms of putting out good government data that contradicts the Trump propaganda line, and in terms of not letting people know, blowing the whistle, when higher-ups, MAGA loyalists types, corrupt the agency. I think that’s a big problem as well, don’t you? The example you just cited there really goes to that.
Bunch: Yeah, for all we know, that could even start happening right now. There was a lot of conversation over the last year about this Project 2025 blueprint that was drafted by the Heritage Foundation and others but had heavy involvement from people close to Trump and Trump loyalists; many people see it as the blueprint for a Trump administration. Really the linchpin of that whole plan is firing thousands of people who are now career civil servants and replacing them with MAGA loyalists. Think about it, at this point when Trump’s been elected and he hasn’t taken office yet, you’re saving up to send your kids to college or you just don’t want to be unemployed. You’re probably thinking about, How do I not get on Trump’s list?
Sargent: Will, another question here, and you wrote about this, is: Will there be meaningful popular resistance if and when Trump starts making good on his authoritarian threats such as prosecuting people without cause, the mass deportations with camps and the military, and the purging of the government we just talked about? My fear is that the public will be so fractured, and targets of this stuff will be isolated from each other that it’ll be hard to mount any genuine resistance. What are your thoughts on that?
Bunch: We’re already seeing signs, both just anecdotally and bigger than that, that the people who you might expect to resist Trump—people on the left, just base Democrats—are very demoralized. And I don’t just mean demoralized by what happened [on] Tuesday but more broadly. I’ve heard from several people in the last couple of days who were incredibly active in what became known colloquially as the Trump resistance in 2017 and 2018. People who joined Indivisible-type groups, did protests, mailed postcards to people, knocked on doors in the 2018 election. And some of these people told me that they’re out—that they’re getting off X/Twitter and disengaging from politics—and said goodbye, saying, Will, I love your columns, but I just have to take a break. I have to go for now. Or I got one email from a woman who has been emailing regularly for the last eight years about Trump and what’s going on, [and] she said she’s just thoroughly disillusioned and she’s out. She was one of the first people to join Indivisible and she’s not going to do it anymore.
To quote the famous Sherlock Holmes line, This is the dog that isn’t barking right now. At this time in 2016, there were people marching through the streets of Philadelphia and other cities and they were chanting things like, We reject the president-elect. If you remember, people had those signs, “Not my president.” High school kids were walking out of high schools to protest Trump. Lots of things were happening on college campuses and they were, in a lot of cases, encouraged by college administrators. College presidents issued statements saying they were alarmed by the possibilities of what could happen to America under Trump. Those things all happened in 2016 and into 2017; none of them are happening right now.
If you remember the hallmark event of the first month of the Trump administration: It was when he tried to impose his so-called Muslim ban. It created this situation at airports where people who were in the middle of traveling during this ban were in this Kafkaesque limbo at airports, and hundreds of resistance-type activists rushed to these airports, and they were joined by members of Congress, and they had protests. I really have a hard time imagining that happening now. Authoritarian movements thrive on this—whatever you want to call it—disillusionment, nihilism. That’s the atmosphere in which autocratic regimes do their dirty work.
Sargent: Yeah, that’s really alarming. I’m hoping that people just need a short break and that when the madness really starts, they’ll get energized.
Bunch: Yeah, maybe.
Sargent: Right? We’ll see. I want to remind everybody of a Trump quote from before the election that got weirdly overlooked. He told Hugh Hewitt that he would fire Jack Smith “in two seconds,” but he added, crucially, “We got immunity at the Supreme Court.” Trump is going into this thinking he can do whatever he wants, and he’s probably not wrong about that. How do you think about this? Are there institutional checks? What institutional checks are there?
Bunch: I think the best one would be, for certain things, Congress. We certainly assume that there are some things—certain types of tax cuts that he’s talked about, for example—that he would need congressional approval from. Now with slim majorities, it looks like, in both parties—we don’t know for sure about the House yet—are there enough votes to be a rubber stamp? There might be, given the way the Republican Party operates. Most people think [that] if you really wanted to mass deport hundreds of thousands, if not a few million people, you probably would have to federalize the National Guard. Would you federalize the National Guard in blue states? Is Josh Shapiro, for example, going to let the Trump federalized the Pennsylvania National Guard to do deportations?
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you what, Will. I actually did some reporting on this and Democratic attorneys general are preparing to resist any illegal orders that Trump delivers to the National Guard. We saw some encouraging signs today. California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that he’s holding a special legislative session; he’s going to try and figure out ways to Trump-proof the state from that sort of threat. J.B. Pritzker, governor of Illinois, just said today that if Trump wants to go after Pritzker’s people, he’ll have to go through him. So we’re already seeing some signs that governors in blue states are preparing to mount a real bulwark against authoritarianism.
I do think that he’s going to struggle to pull off the mass deportations because it would require a substantial expansion in resources. I don’t think he’s going to get that even from Republicans in Congress; maybe some of it, but not all of it for sure. It’s very hard to pull off something like those mass deportations. There are immense logistical and legal hurdles in the way of it.
Bunch: Radley Balko, your former colleague at the Post, did a real in-depth analysis of all the logistics of what it would take to pull off mass deportation. One of the most alarming numbers was that the cost of this operation would be at least as much, if not more, as the budget of the entire U.S. Army, some $210 billion. That was using some conservative estimates, frankly. And again, would you need Congress, and would Congress be able to approve those? Remember, Trump has also promised to cut all sorts of taxes. He has a program to cut taxes on mostly the wealthy and billionaires, and promises to cut taxes on overtime and tips. The numbers just don’t seem to add up at all.
Sargent: Yeah, it would not really be workable for him. Let’s close this out, Will. What are the prospects for resistance to some of this stuff? It’ll require pressure on the Jeff Bezos’s of the world when they capitulate, right? In other words, we have to try to bring popular pressure to bear on institutions to shore them up, right? What are the prospects for that and what’s your long-term prognosis here?
Bunch: Well, initially, the prospects look promising. The Post is a great example because when Bezos canceled, spiked that endorsement of Kamala Harris, there was a huge reaction from the Post’s customers and subscribers. The number of people who canceled their subscriptions to The Washington Post was 250,000 people, or basically one-tenth or 10 percent of all their subscribers. That’s a gigantic economic hit. It’s very unfortunate, frankly, for some of the great journalists who work there now.
So people were willing to vote with their dollars. On the other hand, you can look at it and say, Look, the customers did that and then Trump won and then here’s Bezos with this unctuous, obsequious tweet [congratulating] Trump. So he obviously wasn’t worried about losing more subscribers. But yes, there are certainly things that the average person can do. It’s hard to say two days after the election, because right now I think people aren’t thinking along those lines. These ideas about how to protest or how to resist, they tend to be viral. They tend to spread like wildfire. If you remember what happened in 2016, it was basically one woman in Hawaii, if I’m not mistaken, posting on Pantsuit Nation—it was like a pro–Hillary Clinton website—saying that, We should all go to Washington the day after Trump is inaugurated and have this march. Just from that one person’s random online comment, you have this women’s march that drew several million people. It was three to five million people all over the country in different cities.
I don’t think the conditions are quite there at the moment for anything like that this time around, but what I’m saying though is somebody could have a totally different idea about how to protest the new Trump administration that everybody’s going to fall in love with. Because I do think people are looking for hope. People do want something they can do. Nobody seems to know what that is at this point, but if somebody comes up with something that catches fire like the Women’s March did in 2016, 2017 ... We’ll have to see if that happens.
Sargent: Will Bunch, fascinating stuff, man. Thanks so much for coming on with us.
Bunch: Thanks for inviting me, Greg. I appreciate it.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.