The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 13 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.
Steve Bannon and Elon Musk have been feuding over immigration, and over the weekend, Bannon’s rage at Musk went absolutely nuclear. Bannon vowed that he will run Musk out of the MAGA movement by Inauguration Day, suggesting this battle will continue once Donald Trump is in office. This fight is about more than just these two men; it exposes some major schisms within the MAGA movement. One thing we’ve noticed is that Democrats don’t seem to be doing anything to try to exploit these divisions. Why not?
Today, we’re talking about this with Mona Charen of The Bulwark, who has a new piece arguing that the Democratic Party is already failing to function as a serious loyal opposition to Trump, something that includes going soft on Musk himself. Mona also has a new podcast coming out called The Mona Charen Show. Hey, thanks for coming on.
Mona Charen: Great. Good to be with you.
Sargent: Steve Bannon gave this interview to an Italian newspaper in which he said, “I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day. He will not have a pass to the White House … He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy.” Bannon even says it’s his personal vendetta to take this guy down. Before we get into the guts of this dispute, what do you think of this, Mona?
Charen: It’s interesting because I published a piece that you were kind enough to mention last week where I was asking: Where are the Democrats who are calling upon Trump and others in the Republican Party to denounce Musk for his open promotion of basically reactionary movements in Europe, even fascist movements and other crimes and misdemeanors? And they’ve been oddly quiescent. Then, of all people, Steve Bannon comes out and he’s going out at it hammer and tongs. He’s accusing him of also racism, which I didn’t see coming. I don’t know, did you imagine that you were going to see Steve Bannon decrying the white South Africans and their influence on the MAGA movement? That was interesting too.
Sargent: Just to clarify for listeners, that is something else that Bannon said in this interview. He decried the white South Africans, [saying] they’re real racists. Why are we letting the worst racists in human history, or something like that, dictate policy in the United States? Let’s talk a little bit about the real root of the feud between Musk and Bannon. Musk wants more high-skilled visas for tech workers, and Bannon, along with Stephen Miller, oppose this. They see big tech as part of a globalist plot to replace American workers, etc.
The details aside, Mona, there’s a meaningful schism in the MAGA coalition here. Many Trump supporters really are genuinely nativist and believe the native-born are getting replaced by third-world invaders and their language as part of that globalist plot. But on the other side, a lot of MAGA worships Musk. He’s going to come in and use his techno-genius to purge the government of wokeness and crush the liberal professional managerial class that’s supposedly the source of all our woes. So you have two genuine impulses inside MAGA colliding here. Real intellectual movements of sorts, I guess (laughs). Can you talk about that?
Charen: Sure. Well … Maybe you’re giving them a little too much credit, Greg. The great replacement theory is not exactly something that deserves respect, but you’re right that it is something that motivates a lot of MAGA supporters. They do believe that there is a plot to supplant the current population with immigrants, and they’re opposed to basically all immigration. Not just unskilled, but all immigration.
On the other side, you have Musk and Thiel and people like that who … And of course, because this is the MAGA universe, they’re doing it in the most crude and disgusting language. I hate even to repeat the language that they use: Musk retweeted someone who said that American workers are retarded, he said that people who disagreed with him on this should get fucked in the face. That’s the level at which this is taking place.
Look, the MAGA movement is an emotional impulse. It doesn’t have intellectual coherence. And for people who are opposed to it, now is an opportunity to look at those fissures and exploit them, absolutely, to highlight the fact that these are internal conflicts on their side. By all means, Democrats should be denouncing Musk. One of the things that Bannon points out—again, I can’t believe that he’s the one who’s doing this, and the Democrats have been so quiet about it—is in addition to all of his other sins, Musk is incredibly closely entwined with China. And Bannon is pointing that out. He says he never criticize the CCP, absolutely true. And here’s another fissure. The fact is that people imagine that Trump is going to be this really tough-on-China guy, and he’s going to bring these jobs back and punish the Chinese. Well, if his co-president is somebody who is entwined with the Chinese economy and whose money depends upon it as it does in Musk’s case, that’s another fissure that should be exploited.
Sargent: It’s amazing because there’s a real opportunity to undermine Musk in the eyes of the public. Just to talk a little bit more about the ways that Democrats could exploit the split in the MAGA coalition more effectively, one way would be Democrats could say, Well, if Trump is serious about expanding high-skilled visas, let’s also broaden legal pathways for guest workers to fill our labor shortages. Then that would trigger Bannon to say, Look, Musk is helping Democrats, the enemy, undermine MAGA. Or Democrats could, I don’t know, highlight the fact that Bannon and Miller are trying to impose a virulently nativist veto on everything involving immigration. I guess the big picture here is Democrats do need to educate voters about what’s really driving MAGA, and there are these big opportunities that Dems are missing.
Charen: Absolutely. And again, I do think that the Democratic Party … Look, I spent most of my career as a Republican before it became MAGA. There are a lot of areas where Democrats need to rethink. I think they need to be more tough on crime. I think they need to leave the wokeness behind, be less beholden to what everybody calls the groups, who are advocates for particular constituencies who have outsized influence on Democratic politics. So I’m for all that, and I think that would be great and healthy, but let’s not take our eyes off the ball at the same time.
The Democratic Party, for all its faults, is the only bulwark against the MAGA movement now. They have to remember that that’s their chief job. And to the degree that they can do that job better by reforming some of their policy position is great, but also pay attention to what the Republicans are doing and talk about it and highlight it.
Sargent: Absolutely. You make a related point in your piece that I want to get at. In fact, Musk is increasingly allied with rising global authoritarian and fascist movements, despite Bannon painting him as some turncoat when it comes to authoritarianism and MAGA fascism or whatever. And even though Musk is allied with all these fascist movements abroad, Democrats haven’t called him out for it in any significant way. Why not put pressure on Trump to repudiate Musk’s endorsement of far-right leaders in Europe, for instance?
Charen: Precisely. Precisely. Now, this is an area where Bannon is on the wrong side. Bannon also loves these fascist-adjacent movements in Europe. And he has even said, regarding Musk, Well when it comes to this, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. He’s in favor of all the things that Musk is doing to sidle up to, for example, the Alternative for Germany party and others; the things that Musk is attempting to extend his influence to Great Britain, spreading lies about the British government. They did have a scandal about eight years ago with rape gangs that were mostly Pakistani men who were preying upon white girls in England. It was disgusting. But there were commissions of inquiry, and Musk is spreading really incendiary lies about it to discredit Keir Starmer.
In any event, that is where Democrats need to find their voice and just say, This is repelling, it’s un-American. We fought the Nazis, thank you very much. That’s not our team. And further, wherever there are governments in Europe that are Putin-friendly, the Democrats should be highlighting the ties between those governments and MAGA people, specifically Viktor Orbán. It’s a target-rich environment.
Sargent: It sure is. And there’s another point in your piece that illustrates the depth of the failure on the part of Democrats here: A lot of voters who pick Trump because he’ll magically bring down costs or whatever probably didn’t sign up for annexing Greenland or turning Ukraine over to Vladimir Putin or purging the government of competent civil servants and prosecuting and jailing Trump’s enemies and whatever else he’s threatening, but Democrats aren’t highlighting the large story here of what’s coming at us as effectively as they might be. Just to get a little specific, what would you like to see Dems do more of on that front?
Charen: For one thing, the urge to take it lightly and laugh is very understandable. I’ve done it myself [with] the idea of we’re going to annex Canada … This is candidate who ran on no foreign wars. The minute he gets elected, he starts saber-rattling not against our enemies, mind you, and we have plenty of those, but against our friends, against our allies. He’s threatening Panama, Canada, Denmark, which owns Greenland. The theory is that we have too many friends in the world and we need to make enemies out of them.
Look, I would love to see a Democrat to answer your question directly. I would love to see a Democrat say, I was worried when Trump ran that he would represent a threat to NATO, I did not anticipate that he was going to threaten a NATO ally directly with military action. What kind of a world are we living in? Are we the leader of the free world? Are we allied with the enemies of freedom? Are we now an imperialist power? Is that where we’re going? He’s taking us back to the nineteenth century? Those are obvious questions to ask.
Sargent: Right. To get at your point in your piece, there’s really an opening to peel off that chunk of voters who just said to themselves, OK, well, Trump is crazy and all, and he tried to overthrow the government by force, but never mind. We need a strong man, at least to the degree that he’ll control prices and control the border. There’s an opening here to grab at those voters who don’t really share in the MAGA authoritarian worldview and probably didn’t know what they were signing up for.
Charen: I started the column by saying that one of the interpretations of 2024 that is hardening in the public mind right now is that it was a huge victory. It wasn’t. It was very narrow. At one and a half percentage point victory, it was the narrowest margin of a winning candidate since 1960. There was an even narrower margin in the popular vote in 2000, but the winner of that election was not the candidate who won the electoral college. So it was unbelievably narrow. It’s important to bear that in mind.
Yes, the Democrats lost the Senate, but they reduced their margin in the House. The Republicans lost seats in the House. It was very, very narrow. And a lot of Americans were … If you believe the exit polls, I think they’re mostly right, it was just an anti-incumbent reaction. They were saying, I don’t like that the prices are so high, and I am distressed about interest rates, so throw the bums out. It’s very important that Democrats not overread the results of 2024. Bear in mind there are a lot of voters who were voting on pocketbook issues like inflation, and they’re going to be up for grabs the next time. Start thinking about that.
Sargent: Absolutely. To bring this back to Bannon and Musk, one of the real causes of Bannon’s rage is that people like Bannon really think that their big moment is here. They think, OK, far-right forces are rising in Europe, Putin is on the verge of carving up his section of the globe however he wants. Trump and the U.S. right are about to have their way here, carrying out forced removals of millions, jailing liberal elites who stand in their way. Bannon isn’t going to let some globalist cuck like Musk screw up this opportunity by letting more third-worlders come in here. Mona, is Bannon right in a sense? Is it their moment to do all this?
Charen: Well, they are in danger of overreading this election as well, and going too far. Most victors do overread. In 2020, Joe Biden, who also won a very narrow victory, decided that he was the second coming of FDR. And that’s a common mistake. But in the case of Trump, it is more than he has these plans for domestic policy that are unappealing. He has a view of the world that is truly scary because he believes in spheres of influence, that Putin should be allowed to do what he wants in his sphere of influence and we should be allowed to do what we want in our sphere of influence, and we should behave like the neighborhood bully.
That is not the image of America. That is not the reality of America that most of us grew up with or believe in. So it is as serious as a heart attack that this is the world they’re seeking to create in this moment, and it’s Bannon’s dear wish. By the way, we shouldn’t discount entirely the possibility that some of what we’re seeing here isn’t necessarily ideological but it’s also jockeying to be a kind of court politics of who’s going to be closest to the big man—that could be a piece of this too. But Bannon’s view of the world is that we are in a moment of rising right-wing authoritarianism and he’s for that. And he’s not wrong. Right now in Austria, there’s a possibility of a very right-wing chancellor coming in. You do have a movement in Europe and in other countries; we saw it in Brazil. There is a rising right-wing authoritarianism that is out there. So if things go badly, it could very well signal a new era for the fascists. The stakes are very, very high.
Sargent: And Democrats aren’t traumatizing those stakes to the degree that they should be.
Charen: No, they are not. Now, maybe they’ll get a second wind and get over this, but as I said in the piece, it’s time for them to get over their torpor and pull up their socks and start saying what needs to be said.
Sargent: A hundred percent agree. Mona Charen, thanks so much for the very cheery thoughts this morning.
Charen: My pleasure, Greg. Good to be with you.
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.
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