The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 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.
After Jack Smith released his final report on Donald Trump’s insurrection, Trump erupted in fury on Truth Social. He called Smith deranged, and gloated over the failure to prosecute him. Meanwhile, Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, had some truly alarming moments at his confirmation hearing; yet Republicans signaled that he’s on a path to likely confirmation. Take this all together, and it’s easy to get very dispirited because let’s face it, Trump looks invulnerable right now. He got away with many crimes against the country, and now he may get all of his most dangerous nominees confirmed, but historian Julian Zelizer has a good piece in The New Republic that offers some much needed perspective. George W. Bush looked invulnerable in 2004, and two years later the tide had turned dramatically. Today, we’re talking to Julian about what lies ahead right now. Thanks for coming on, Julian.
Julian Zelizer: Thanks for having me. It’s great to join.
Sargent: Jack Smith’s report was very powerful. It showed at great length why prosecutors thought they could win a conviction for insurrection-related crimes. Trump erupted over this. He gloated that Jack Smith had failed, that the prosecution was illegal, that he was totally innocent. And he said, “Jack Smith is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election.” “The voters have spoken,” Trump said. Julian, your immediate reaction to this?
Zelizer: Well, that’s not what the report said. The report actually pointed, again, as we’ve seen many times over the last year, to very serious charges about what the now president-elect did with not just January 6 but the entire election. Did he avoid having some bad outcome politically? Yes, that’s true. But the substance of the report does not say that. He’s not exonerated.
Sargent: Absolutely. It’s worth pointing out here that Trump was largely able to avoid facing trial before the election partly because the Supreme Court helped him do it. So it’s true that the voters picked Trump, but that happened in part because the voters didn’t get a chance to hear a jury’s verdict on his effort to overthrow democracy—which Trump celebrated. It’s particularly perverse and disgusting for Trump to hail that as a democratic outcome. This doesn’t reflect well on our democracy in a larger sense, does it?
Zelizer: No, it doesn’t. Just stepping back to go to the big question and big picture, his being reelected with such significant numbers in our modern age despite everything that has happened, everything that has been documented, everything that was seen with people’s own eyes, says a great deal about the state of the democracy. And it’s not all good. And then to avoid any accountability over the last couple of years is not what we want in a country that often privileges law and order.
Sargent: The Substacker Michael Podhorzer, who’s a longtime political organizer, made a really powerful point. He walked through what really happened: The Supreme Court disabled the insurrection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, meaning he could run for office despite committing insurrection. It helped him avoid standing trial before the election for trying to overturn a previous election, and it prevented his criminality from being presented in full view of the electorate to a jury. As Podhorzer said, “In any other country, we would understand that as part of an autocratic takeover, not a democratic victory.” That tweet from Trump captures that sentiment. He basically said this, I got away with it.
Zelizer: He’s very direct, the president-elect, and often says exactly what he thinks. There’s a lot to be said for that analysis—the role of the courts, the delays—but there are two other important factors. One is our era of political information and news does allow for a lot of disinformation, partisan spin, manipulated data to get out there and either confuse the public or sway the public. I do think that was part of the last few years since 2021. The second is that significant parts of the electorate, certainly within the GOP, didn’t consider this significant. A lot of them knew about what had happened and ultimately didn’t decide that is determinative in deciding who should be president. In some ways, it’s the third part of that that might be the most troubling about where we are as a country in this year.
Sargent: Yes. An entire political party decided, a, an insurrection attempt by violence was not disqualifying in a future president, and b, that it would do everything possible to soft pedal and cover it up for the electorate.
Zelizer: The president-elect doesn’t stand alone, he stands with the GOP. So this is a story as much about the Republican Party as it is about Republican president-elect Donald Trump. They are one in the same. It’s not simply a takeover; it’s loyalty, it’s a sense that this is the best thing for the party to maintain power. And they made a collective decision almost entirely that this is not a defining issue or an important one.
Sargent: In fact, they made a collective decision almost entirely that in order for them to be politically viable going forward, they had to protect Trump and keep him as their vehicle.
Zelizer: That’s exactly right. In the next few years, that’s going to be quite significant how much that holds together, how much that feeling remains intact, because ultimately that’s the foundation of Trump’s political power.
Sargent: That gets to your piece, in which you reminded people what things looked like after George W. Bush won the 2004 election. He seemed invulnerable. His command over the Republican Party was unshakable. The Republican Party was in lockstep behind the Iraq War. Bush’s mastery over the electorate’s opinions about the Iraq War seemed unassailable, his propaganda seemed bulletproof. Then things turned. Katrina undermined him. The Iraq War went south. Republicans got embroiled in some corruption scandals. Then in 2006, Democrats got aggressive and campaigned against all that stuff, and won both houses. Are there similarities to this moment?
Zelizer: Yes. The election itself did convey that feeling, certainly for many Democrats in 2004. As the results came in, many Democrats were despondent. They couldn’t understand how, despite all the revelations of the war, he had been reelected. And the next few years actually didn’t turn out so great. Some of the problems after 2004 did stem from problems with President Bush and his policies—continued problems with the war in Iraq, the continued problems with the war on terrorism, the effects and fallout and devastation of Katrina, and much more.
Part of it, though, was about Democrats, before 2006, on Capitol Hill making a decision: They were going to stay united under Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and in the Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. They were going to be united. And when President Bush threw certain policies at them, such as trying to privatize Social Security, they were a barrier and ultimately led to his failure. So it wasn’t simply about President Bush and his own problems, it was about the ability of Democrats to act as a strong party and to use the power of partisanship, even as a minority, to their advantage, which culminates in the 2006 midterms.
Sargent: As you point out in your piece, it’s not clear Democrats are going to remain united right now in the face of Trump, which is a real difference between now and the aftermath of 2004 in many respects. We’re seeing Democrats pretty much caving on this awful Laken Riley Act, the immigration bill. Democrats seem to be almost in a worse place than in just after 2004. Maybe it’s because Trump came back from such a ridiculous position, whereas George W. Bush just won reelection, that it has gotten Democrats to think that Trump is even more formidable than Bush was at the time. What do you think?
Zelizer: It’s a danger that the party decides this is the moment for lots of bipartisanship, and ends up simply handing the president-elect victories on key issues, undermining their own excitement among voters and any sense of what the Democratic Party is about. Nor will they really get much credit for doing what the new administration wants in the end. That’s a myth. The Republicans will get credit for it. So I do think there’s a danger.
Look, strong partisanship does involve priorities, and they will have to decide certain issues they’re not going to focus on. Ultimately, the answer to a very partisan, very united Republican Party is a very united Democratic Party that stands firm and uses its role on Capitol Hill to cause problems for the new administration and to set an agenda that’s different than what the Republicans are trying to do.
Sargent: Are you seeing any reason for optimism right now that Democrats get that?
Zelizer: The one fight where we saw it early on was on funding the government. This was in December, of course, and Democrats stood firm and essentially forced Speaker Johnson into doing what a lot of the caucus didn’t want to do. Now we start the year with the immigration bill, and it’s moving the other way. I’m enough of a historian to see there’s still time and we’ll see how the party moves, but I do think you’re 100 percent right: It seems there’s a lot of pressure within the caucus to enter into a game of bipartisan concession rather than a tough partisan fight.
Sargent: Just because things aren’t already dark enough, let’s talk about Pete Hegseth’s Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday. I want to highlight a key moment at which Senator Mazie Hirono questioned him about whether he’d carry out an order to shoot protesters in the legs. Listen to this.
Senator Mazie Hirono (audio voiceover): In June of 2020, then-President Trump directed former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to shoot protesters in the legs in downtown D.C., an order Secretary Esper refused to comply with. Would you carry out such an order from President Trump?
Pete Hegseth (audio voiceover): Senator, I was in the Washington D.C. National Guard unit that was in Lafayette Square during those events holding a riot shield on behalf of my country …
Hirono (audio voiceover): Would you carry out an order to shoot protesters in the legs, as directed to Secretary Esper?
Hegseth (audio voiceover): … I saw 50 Secret Service agents get injured by rioters trying to jump over the fence, set the church on fire, and destroy statues.
Hirono (audio voiceover): Again … You know what, that sounds to me that you will comply with such an order. You will shoot protesters in the legs.
Sargent: Julian, what do you think of that?
Zelizer: Well, it’s reminiscent of moments in the first administration during the protests although, this time, the nominee is saying it with a certain level of confidence because he feels the same empowerment that the president-elect feels and knows that Trump has his back. Trump has applied immense pressure to the Senate Republicans to make it very clear he wants this to go through, but there are the guardrails, falling away. It’s one more instance of hearing a nominee saying whatever he wants and not really fearing the political repercussions. That’s going to be an aftershock, in some ways, of the 2024 election.
Sargent: This is often analyzed by commentators as Hegseth is doing something akin to Justice Kavanaugh during his hearing. What Trump wants to see is fight. What Trump wants to see from his nominees is people who won’t back down one inch in the face of Democrats. They will fight, fight, fight, fight, fight as Trump constantly says. The darker way to view this is what you just said, which is that Hegseth knows that Trump really wants him to be as corrupt as possible publicly, to say, I will empower the president to do all kinds of horrible things. He knows that Trump wants to hear that, and he thinks that it doesn’t matter what voters think about it.
Zelizer: And, of course, the position matters too. Here we’re talking about a nominee to head defense who’s talking about using violence, or not answering a very clear question, against protesters here in the United States. Soon we’ll have hearings involving the Department of Justice and the FBI. So yes, it’s both that there is a sense that they are doing what the president-elect wants and that they will be protected for saying what they say and also particular agencies and institutions not just stretching the rule of law but in some ways saying that’s not going to be any barrier in terms of what they do. That’s why many people, and certainly many Senate Democrats, were concerned about some of these responses.
Sargent: We’re in a situation here where Robert F. Kennedy could be soon the head of HHS. Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary. Pam Bondi, whose loyalty to Trump seems unquestioned, as attorney general. Is he going to get all of his nominees, including Tulsi Gabbard in an intelligence role even though she’s clearly pro-Putin?
Zelizer: Well, historians are bad predictors, but I would think that he’s going to get a large number of them. Maybe one will fall away—although thus far, none of the people you mentioned are inevitably not going to get confirmed. And that says a lot. Even when the names rolled out, many political experts, people who follow this for a long time, were in a state of disbelief; now we’re in a state where we’re talking about who won’t make it, if anyone. The president-elect has really shifted the terms of this confirmation, and my guess is he’ll get a lot of them.
Again, it comes back to the pressure he is applying on the party, and the party’s listening to the pressure because they see that as valuable. So we’ll see how the hearings unfold, but thus far, the fact is he’s in a pretty comfortable spot. Even in the hearing, [doubling] down on the most controversial statement says a lot about the mindset of the majority, and it is the majority that can confirm.
Sargent: They can. One point about the minority, to go back to what you said earlier about the need for Democrats to realize that they’ve got some power here, the one bright spot of the Hegseth hearing was that we had senators like Hirono very, very aggressively questioned Hegseth. We had Jack Reed do an extended takedown, which was a thing of beauty. Couldn’t Democrats take from that that that’s how they should prosecute the opposition more generally?
Zelizer: No, absolutely. Back in 2005, when President Bush then was pushing the Social Security, Reid and Pelosi really went after him. Not only did they keep the party united, they were really specific in terms of what privatization of Social Security would mean to average people. They forced the Republicans essentially to defend something that was not popular. The hearings today are a way, in the next few days, to do that again. They showed a little partisan muscle during the hearings, so for Democrats, that would be a sign that there is still possibly a fight left in the party.
Sargent: You can also see potential bright spot down the line in what we’re seeing right now as well that’s also similar to 2004. Let’s say Trump gets all or most of those awful nominees. You could see a situation where, given their grotesque in qualification for these big jobs, you have something almost like 2004, 2005 where things start to unravel. The public starts to see incompetence, which was a very big part of what undid Bush in 2005 and 2006. Is there a possibility there for something like that?
Zelizer: There’s a possibility. I’m not saying this is inevitable because I think we’ve learned it can go the opposite way. But yes, competence really did matter. With Katrina, it was in large part the competence of FEMA in dealing with the whole issue, or the incompetence that really became a huge political problem. Similar, with the war in Iraq, there were lots of reasons people opposed it, but some was just the chaos on the ground of how this all unfolded.
So yes, these are high-risk nominees that president-elect Trump is putting into place, and that risk remains if they are successful. And the risk is, in part, the policies they will pursue, and we’ll see how controversial that becomes. But the risk is they literally can’t handle the jobs, and they create problems, some of which we saw during Trump’s last year with Covid and handling of it that become very problematic. Many people, yes, are tuning out now and they don’t want to engage in politics—but if government really starts to drop the ball as crises unfold, if they do unfold, that’s when people will pay attention. And that’s when not just the next administration but also Republicans as a party could start feeling that they are going to pay a cost. That is when the problems will really amount for the White House.
Sargent: I will say, though, in the short term, the combination of Trump gloating about the Jack Smith report and Hegseth just unabashedly rubbing people’s faces in the plans that he’s got or his willingness to do pretty much whatever Trump wants him to do as defense secretary, that really makes things look a bit dark.
Zelizer: From the perspective of right now, the president-elect is in good position. He has the support of his party. He is moving his party in the direction that he wants, and they’re joining him. Everyone is pretty much on the same page. And Democrats are really struggling, even with signs of the fight, to figure out what they’re going to do in the next couple years. Just all this added together with the fact he won reelection despite what Smith had been investigating says positive things for his political standing at the moment. But at the moment is different than in a year. And that’s part of what we’ll watch how it plays out.
Sargent: This is why we need the long view of people like you, Julian. It’s been said before—Jamelle Bouie said it very well, and some others did as well—Trump’s victory was pretty damn narrow, and his hold on power is actually rather fragile when you really think about it. Maybe more fragile at this moment, at least in numerical terms, than George W. Bush’s was in 2004. Is that overly optimistic? And what do you think of the prospects for that fragility to become a real thing going forward?
Zelizer: It’s very important. It’s not all about Trump. We live now in an era with this very rigid map. So even when you have an election that is dramatic—and I do think it was a dramatic result—it still happens with very narrow electoral majorities, and in Congress, equally important, very slim majority. Democrats not only have to be strong, but one of the things they can do is create very small fissures in the House Republican caucus, for example, and it will cause immense problems for the Republicans to be able to do anything. That is going to be a challenge for Trump and the GOP moving forward, and that’s exactly what Democrats, if they want to be successful, have to figure out how to exploit. It is harder today than in 2004, and 2004 was already harder than 1985, when Reagan started his second term. We live in this era of very narrow and unstable majorities.
Sargent: Folks, Julian has a new book out just today. It’s called In Defense of Partisanship, and it’s about exactly this topic, which is the need for parties to exercise partisanship in a judicious way in the national interest. There’s a big opportunity to do that right now, isn’t there, Julian?
Zelizer: There is. It’s what Democrats need to be thinking of, to really understand the value that partisanship can have when not done in the way Republicans have done it. They have to deploy that power in the coming years.
Sargent: Julian Zelizer, thanks so much for coming on with us. Folks, check out his new book.
Zelizer: Thanks for having me.
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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