The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 15 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.
We’re now in day two of the extraordinary GOP meltdown over Donald Trump’s pick of Matt Gaetz for attorney general. Numerous Republican senators are strongly opposing the move, including ones who are staunch Trump allies. One is even calling for the release of a House Ethics Committee report on Gaetz that examines drug use and sexual misconduct. Yet even as this is all happening, Trump just announced that he will nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the secretary of Health and Human Services.
It’s really hard to say which of these two will be more of a disaster, but taken together, the message is very clear: We may be in some serious trouble. We’re chatting about all this with Nina Burleigh, author of a great new cover story for The New Republic called “Trump 2.0: Here Comes the Night,” which reports on how bad things are going to get. Thanks for coming on, Nina.
Nina Burleigh: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me, Greg.
Sargent: So, Gaetz first. Senators like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are sharply criticizing the idea of Gates as attorney general. Others like Thom Tillis are saying he probably won’t get confirmed. John Cornyn is demanding the release of this House Ethics Committee report, which looked into whether Gates had sex with a minor, which he denies, among other things. Gaetz has resigned his House seat, apparently to avoid the release of that report, but it might leak. Bits of it are already coming out. Nina, what do you make of all this? How real is the opposition to Gaetz?
Burleigh: Well, it’s all happening so fast. It’s hard to tell. Murkowski and Collins predictably would stand up, at least in the beginning. That’s not a surprise at all. I am a little bit surprised to see Texas Senator Cornyn asking for the Ethics report this afternoon. That’s a promising sign for sanity. Just in the last few days, with this wackadoodle clown car situation or whatever you want to call it, it’s pretty clear that shock and awe is the road that they’re going to travel. That was predicted to me, when I was working on this article that you referenced about what might happen, by the people who were predicting that—thought that—he would do shock and awe on day one, on the inauguration day when his hand came off the Bible. So what we’re seeing here is, Let’s just lay the groundwork right now. This isn’t going to be business as usual. Fuck you to the norms. The Senate, the Republican senators standing up ... Really, they’re the thin blue line for the public now.
Sargent: Right. So speaking of a “fuck you,” which was I thought a good phrase to use, while this was all going on, Trump announced that RFK Jr. will be his pick as HHS secretary. Anti-science, anti-vax, conspiracy theorist. I want to point out that on that on October 30th, just before the election, Trump’s transition co-chair Howard Lutnick went on CNN and flatly said RFK will not be in charge of HHS. They lied. They lied about everything. The contempt for voters here is just incredible. You reported on how bad things are going to get. Did you anticipate them going through with this?
Burleigh: I didn’t anticipate them going through right away with putting Bobby Kennedy into the HHS because he’s so far out in left field that it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where somebody like that actually is in charge of the public health, of millions of Americans. The anti-vaxxing aspect of RFK is of a piece with the MAGA response to Covid, which is, The government’s making us take these shots. But he’s been at it for a very long time, and he has these utterly baseless claims about what vaccines do—not just the Covid vaccine, but all the vaccines that keep babies from getting diseases that we can’t even pronounce anymore because we have basically eradicated them through the vaccine programs. He wants to toss that out.
Toward the end of the campaign, when he started talking about the issue of this nineteenth-, mid-twentieth-century paranoia about fluoridation—fluoride in the water—which is supposed to keep us from getting cavities, which apparently does protect our teeth ... It’s one of those mid-twentieth-century Cold War era tinfoil hatty paranoid beliefs—calling people pinkos and commies, which MAGAs are doing now—you thought that was left behind in this other era. It’s the Make America Great Again, which is, Let’s go back to 1950 and let’s really disinter the paranoias and the way that anti-government sentiment was expressed then; which is, Oh God, they’re putting this stuff in the water, and reinvigorating that paranoia. And here now, he’s actually announcing that he’s going to make Bobby Kennedy the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Which means that he can do things like tell the FDA to back off on things like raw milk or any warnings about quack medicine because he comes out of the fake wellness conspiracy world that, Let’s not take certain drugs are bad for you or the vaccines are bad for you. This is all going to become part of the policy of this country.
We’re in a position right now where the farms out west are testing cows and humans for bird flu. Right now, today, there’s stories about how many people they’re now testing for bird flu. We’re on the verge of potentially another pandemic. So we’re headed into this position where it’s surreal.
Sargent: HHS secretary is confirmable by the Senate. We’re actually seeing a little bit of backbone from Republican senators when it comes to Gaetz. RFK is at least as crazy and potentially destructive as Gaetz. Do you think that we’ll see Senate opposition among Republicans to him? At the very least, there’s going to have to be a confirmation hearing at which his views are really aired out. And I’ve got to think a lot of Republican senators don’t want that. I don’t know where they’re going to choose their battles and so forth, but clearly this is not something that’s good for the Republican Party, is it?
Burleigh: They’re probably going to stand up against Gaetz because of the criminal behavior, criminal charges, or criminal allegations against him. Bobby, the whole wackadoodleness of it just seems like something they wouldn’t want to have themselves tagged to. On the other hand, there is this sentiment out there, and it’s very strong in the Trump voters—not just MAGAs, but Trump voters—about the government telling people to take these jabs. Look, a lot of those red districts were very anti-mask. They were very anti-Covid vaccine, even though they created the mRNA on lots of money that Trump gave the companies. Those people are opposed to having the vaccines. At some level, there would be less opposition, even though he seems like a nutball, than the Gaetz confirmation and the Tulsi Gabbard confirmation as well.
Sargent: I still think that Republican senators are going to have a really tough time once the confirmation hearings actually start to expose in a very high-profile way the views of this nut. This is going to be a moment where we’re going to actually have a national discussion about whether he should oversee public health. That’s terrible for Republicans. Trump’s victory makes people think that they have magical powers and they can just win any debate no matter how crazy their positions. And I get that. I understand why people think that. But this is a tough one. People really care about their children’s health and public health. Republicans are going to have a tough time explaining this.
Burleigh: I think they are too. Traditionally, what the conservatives do when they get in charge of the executive with the HHS is they put people in there who are anti-choice. They put the evangelicals in there because they use HHS to police morality really, to police the bodies, right? So that’s probably who the Project 2025 people would have wanted. They want somebody like that in there. Somebody who’s a known anti-choice fanatic. Bobby isn’t really that, but all bets are off. I honestly don’t know how much of the clown card they’re going to attach themselves to and want to be affiliated with, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Sargent: It’s a really interesting point in a way that shows the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party. Whereas before they would use HHS to police morality, now they’re using it to police vaccines. There will be tons and tons of morality policing in keeping with the religious right going on under the Trump administration. And in some ways they’ll get worse. But here’s a very high profile example of them just putting in an anti-vax conspiracy theorist in a position that otherwise would have gone to a morality cop.
Burleigh: We have to look at the Bobby nomination in the context of this larger project: the autocracy’s need for a population that is divorced from fact. What you see in Russia or places where people just don’t anymore believe in any expertise because they’ve been fooled and lied to so many times. That’s what part of this is: continuing to serve [the project]. It’s like a fog machine, a smoke machine so that people just can’t see anything. They can’t see their way out and they’re blinded. And the only way they can feel like they can get to safety is by having the golden autocrat hold their hand and lead them to the light. That’s what’s going on here. It’s really about the smoke machine. Bannon’s flood the zone with shit. He’s flooding the zone with shit here and destroying the administrative state.
Sargent: I want to point out to expand on what you said there that Gaetz is really about turning the Department of Justice into a weapon against Trump’s enemies. RFK is about destroying the administrative state from within in a certain respect. The justice system and public health system—those are real achievements—they’re already telegraphing that they want to destroy them both.
Burleigh: Yeah. This is what MAGA has done and this is what they signed up for when they refused to impeach him the second time and let him flourish for four years within their communities instead of more than two of them standing up and saying, No, this is absolutely wrong. This guy’s a circus barker and he’s making fools out of us and he’s bringing a clown car into Washington. Are you really surprised that he’s bringing the clown car? He’s a circus barker.
Sargent; Absolutely, and they actually had a real opening to get rid of Trump once and for all because he had just tried to overthrow the U.S. government with violence. He was on his way out of office anyway. That was the time to do it. They failed. They own every little last bit of this. Whether they get held accountable or not, I don’t know.
Burleigh: Yeah. Who can say? The voters, they wanted a change. And I see that that’s what they’re getting here. There are a lot of the voters are just sitting there going, Yes, burn it down. They’re angry. They didn’t get any help from the Democrats for decades. The things that would have made a difference—national health care, minimum wage—did not get carried out, carried through. The body politic was ripe for this, right? It’s been softened up and now they’re angry and they’re probably cheering this on. They’re cheering on and cheering on the mayhem and the chaos that he’s bringing there with the idea that if the government just evaporates or collapses, that everybody will have a better life. I don’t know how that’s going to happen.
But it also is, Greg, as you know, you’ve been around long enough, the anti-government rhetoric that goes all the way back to Reagan. At least in my lifetime, maybe before. The growing, the seething rage at government, and at the federal government especially, has been seeded for decades. Now you’re seeing the flourishing of what was planted by gingers and everybody else between from Reagan on.
Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s right. You got to wonder though, there’s a certain type of undecided and swing voter, at least undecided up to Election Day. Swing voters, maybe Latinos who just associate Trump with a good economy wrongly. But there it is. A lot of these voters, maybe they just see Trump as a disrupting figure, an anti–status quo figure. You can see from their perspective why they think that. In 2020, when Trump was in office, he got voted out because he was in office. And somehow, maybe partly because the law is rightly after Trump, he reconfigured himself yet again as an outsider despite being president one time and as a disruptor of the status quo, which obviously everybody dislikes. That sort of superficial understanding of what Trump represents is now looking like it’s going to be really disastrous. Don’t you think?
Burleigh: Well, it depends on what or how you define a disaster. It may be that the seeds of his demise are being planted right here and right now with this stuff, with this overreach, and that there is going to be that somebody. The Senate will say, Let’s get with the Democrats and get this guy out of here. You know what I mean? There may be such an uproar. Again, we haven’t talked about Tulsi Gabbard, but the intelligence community is going to go nuts. They’re going crazy over this. And the defense department with the Fox News slash war criminal cheerleader, Pete Hagseth ... Maybe they’re more comfortable with that kind of a person, but Gabbard and Bobby, they’re going to have a problem attaching themselves to people like that.
There’s a possibility that the disaster is going to be a boomerang and back on them. The problem is, of course, to me, anything that the Senate tries to do, they’re going to come up against his autocratic instinct to just do stuff without their input. Who knows what if it comes down to the Senate versus the president? What’s the Supreme Court six going to say, right? They want to give him kingly powers or they were ready to. So it’s going to be a wild ride and we’re not even a weekend in here. We’re not even a weekend. We’ve got months to go before the inauguration. I suspect that Harris’s warning that he’s unhinged and unstable is going to start to look more and more perceptive and important in retrospect.
I’m really hoping that sooner rather than later people start to really reconsider what they’ve done here. Voters can reconsider, but there’s nothing they can do about it. It’s now up to the Senate and the House, but I don’t think the House is going to do anything with it. It is really up to those men in the Senate and the Republican women who are obviously not going to be on his side.
Sargent: Well, look, Nina, I guess we’re going to have to hope that those Republicans are really going to rise to the occasion. I’m pretty damn skeptical myself. Thanks for coming on, Nina Burleigh.
Burleigh: Anytime, Greg.
Sargent: Folks, make sure to check out some great new content up at tnr.com: Matt Ford explaining how a federal court just upended decades of environmental regulation and Timothy Noah arguing that Trump should be jailed for one week. And listen to the latest episode of Words Matter on the DSR Network as Norm Ornstein and Kavita Patel take stock of our post-election situation and ask the question: Where do we go from here? We’ll see you all next week.
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.