Transcript: Another Fiasco for Trump as His Pick for Pentagon Implodes

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 18 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.

Last week brought us the fiasco of Matt Gaetz for attorney general. Now Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is running into serious trouble as well. The Washington Post reports that Hegseth paid a woman who claimed he sexually assaulted her as part of a nondisclosure agreement with her, though Hegseth insists the encounter was consensual.

This and other revelations about Hegseth that we’ll talk about suggests we’re looking at another personnel fiasco for Trump, with one source even describing internal frustration over the failure to vet Hegseth in advance. Are things getting out of control for Trump already? And what does that portend about what lies ahead? Today, we’re talking about all this with Rick Wilson, the leading NeverTrump strategist who’s launching a new effort to conduct opposition research on Trump and his most prominent allies. Rick, great to have you back on.

Rick Wilson: Greg, great to be with you.

Sargent: Pete Hegseth paid an undisclosed amount to this woman who filed a complaint against him with authorities alleging sexual assault back in 2017. Hegseth denies it but entered into the NDA because he feared the allegations would cost him his job at Fox News. Hegseth was already under fire, Rick, because of his lack of managerial experience, anger at the Pentagon over the pick, and his grotesque claim that women in combat are less capable than men, which denigrates their heroism. What do you make of these latest revelations now?

Wilson: Look, Pete Hegseth is a guy who is a definitional lightweight. He is not a serious person. This is not a guy who you would pick to, as I like to say, run a Waffle House, much less run the Department of Defense. DoD is an enormously complex and difficult situation to manage on the best possible day. A guy like Hegseth who does not have managerial or experience beyond reading a teleprompter on Fox. And yes, I will grant you, he served in the national guard. He ran a platoon of 28 men. OK, God bless you. That’s great. That’s about like running a McDonald’s in terms of the number of the head count. I’m not denigrating his service, but it is most certainly not the same level of engagement that you would think you would need.

If you’re picking somebody to run a $980 billion a year operation and picking someone who is going to be at the center of enormously consequential policy decisions about our national defense, about our coming confrontations with places like Iran and China—for all that the Republicans always play this role of we’re the ones for national defense, the ones who are serious about this, these are fundamentally unserious choices they’ve been making so far. And that’s Matt Gaetz, that’s Tulsi Gabbard, all of these people they’ve chosen so far have been either dangerous or unqualified or some combination of both.

Sargent: Yeah, you’re talking here about a range of institutions that are all about supposedly, anyway, law and order and national security and national intelligence. These are not just on serious picks; these are actively destructive ones. They almost seem like who you would pick if you were trying to harm these institutions, doesn’t it?

Wilson: And look, let’s be very clear. Trump is trying to harm these institutions. Donald Trump does want to destroy these institutions. He believes that they are in opposition to him in some capacity or another. And he may be right in some of these cases because they believe in these things called the Constitution and the rule of law and all the other boring backbone of America type things that Trump sees as obstacles to his success and in reshaping America in his image, which is, as we all know, authoritarian, aggressively autocratic, oppressive, all of these things. None of the reasons here that Trump has such surprise anyone. They’re very explicable. They’re grotesque, but they’re explicable.

Sargent: Rick, I got to say, when you’re on here, you just make me want to rant. I don’t know what it is about you, man, but I’m going to rant for a second. The Times had a headline the other day that said something like Trump is assaulting the deep state because he sees this as an obstacle. The implication was that he’s taking on these elite sclerotic institutions that are getting in the way of the people’s will. And he’s really going to remake them. Things like our intelligence services and DOJ. The reason Trump hates them is because they tried to hold him accountable for his malfeasance, not because he thinks in any way about what the national interest requires in this situation.

Wilson: Correct. That’s exactly right, Greg. He does not believe that he has a fundamental disregard and disrespect for institutional norms and guardrails. All those things we talked about in the first administration where people said, The center will hold, no problem. We all know, at the end of the day, the center did not hold, it was a problem. And none of this is normal or correct or right or, or safe. For a country that faces big and consequential challenges in the world, do you really want to have a guy like Matt Gaetz running the justice department? Do you really want to have a guy like Pete Hegseth at the top of the department of defense? None of it makes any sense. And they know it doesn’t make any sense. They understand that it’s a foolish and pointless joke on the American people.

Sargent: Well, the Post also reports that there’s this internal debate in Trump world over what to do about Hegseth, with Trump supposedly standing behind him for now. There’s also this frustration internally with one source claiming Hegseth hasn’t been properly vetted. There’s no reason Trump had to rush this, but putting aside what appear to be openly destructive intentions toward these institutions, he seems to not think it even matters what emerges about his nominees, as if he’s absolutely certain that he won’t face opposition from anyone in his party at this point, no matter what happens. Can you talk about that? Should we read these latest machinations as a sign that people internally want to take Hegseth out of contention? And is his confidence misplaced? Are Republicans going to tolerate this?

Wilson: Look, Republicans are going to pick their battles here in my view. They’re going to try to find one or two of these people. Maybe it’s Hegseth because he’s a low hanging fruit on this thing, and maybe it’s RFK where they’re going to say, We can’t go this far boss. We love you, but we can’t quite do this much for you. That’s a possibility. I don’t know though—if you end up with Matt Gaetz in the justice department, it has a greater consequential and terrible outcome than if you get your Kristi Noem at DHS. Kristi Noem isn’t great. Nobody’s going to wake up and go, Wow, this was a superb choice. But it’s also not as profoundly threatening and dangerous to the country as Gaetz running the Trump revenge operation at the Department of Justice.

Sargent: Right, and RFK Jr., as you point out, is someone who’s anti-vax, a conspiracy theorist, a loon. This is someone, in addition, who’s also really going to be out to destroy public health, which is also a fairly valuable thing.

Wilson: Yeah. One of those things that was a great success story for America for generations, and now RFK’s goal explicitly is to break that entire system that has saved so many millions or hundreds of thousands or millions of lives, however you want to look at it, over the generations and to replace it with what? We have no idea. That’s part of what I found consistently troubling: It’s not that MAGA has a real separate conception of what the world should be. They just don’t want today. They don’t want the world that we live in now. They want some Donald Trump, some ideal fantasy on that Trump may have in his head somewhere, but it’s not a country that looks like one that’s prosperous or healthy or peaceful. It’s one that looks incredibly distorted from the reality that we actually live in.

Sargent: Rick, I will say all these things that we’re seeing right now, Gaetz, RFK, Hegseth—all this really suggests that your new effort is gonna be operating in a very target-rich environment. It’s called the Two Plus Two Coalition. Can you tell us about your new venture?

Wilson: Yeah, I’m still doing the Lincoln project course, but I’ve been talking with a lot of folks who have looked at the infrastructure problem on the left and the center. That infrastructure problem is real and it is highly problematic, and the other side is ahead of us all the time on things they shouldn’t be ahead of us on. Part of it is that they know what the targets are. They’re after them from the very beginning of the day.

They wake up in the morning and say, How can we wreck X or Y person or movement or organization? You’ve got groups like Fox with this massive disinformation overhang that they’ve gotten away with for so long. And Two Plus Two is going to try to mitigate some of that and to go out and give the center and the center-left some tools to face up to this frankly grotesque movement that’s out there.

Sargent: There’s really no question that this election, among many other things, reveals how screwed up our information environment really is, and the degree to which MAGA has really hacked it is really something else.

Wilson: Absolutely. That’s a great way of putting it, Greg, by the way. It’s not that they’ve done something so remarkably clever and built something so clever. It’s that they’ve hacked the systems that existed now into something very distorted and weird and terrible.

Sargent: By the way, this has been something you’ve talked about before, but the propaganda apparatus on the right exerts heavy gravitational pull on the “MSM,” which also is a major problem.

Wilson: Absolutely. They play the refs great. They play the refs brilliantly and they do it every day of the week. And I can say this folks because I was one of the people that played the refs for a long time. I admit it, that’s my past life. That idea of being out there to manipulate the outcomes of an election by screaming into the faces of mainstream media every day and saying, You’re liars. You’re distorting everything. You’re liberal. You’re biased. You’re terrible—even though they know it’s not entirely true, it’s really tough to resist it. It’s really tough to push back on it after a while. And Republicans have relied on just pure fatigue on the part of reporters for a long time. And they’ve been so, so good at breaking their spirit, that it’s important at this point that we recognize how to mitigate that.

Two Plus Two—part of our goal is to go out there and provide allies and reporters and other folks that are fighting these cases and fighting these forces with information, with intelligence, with media, with communications assistance, with context for what’s happening. Because a lot of folks just get worn down; they just get exhausted, worn down, flattened out. And it’s really tough for them to start from scratch every day, have to get up every day and say, OK, now we got to fight this battle again. Meanwhile, you’ve got hundreds of right-wing outlets screaming bloody murder every minute of the day about bias, about deception, about prejudice. It’s all playing the ref. It’s all a game to them.

Sargent: Everybody, I want to be sure that you understand what Rick Wilson is saying here. Rick Wilson, for those of you who don’t know, used to be a Republican operative. He’s basically saying that he knows from the inside that Republicans deliberately work the refs by falsely attacking them as biased against Republicans and biased against conservatives. This is someone who actually did this himself, folks. Rick Wilson did this himself. He attacked reporters as biased against conservatives, knowing that it wasn’t really true in order to get them to rig the coverage in their favor. Rick, is that excessive or is that right?

Wilson: Greg, that’s precisely correct. That is exactly the thing we would do. Look, there is a grain of truth sometimes, in that reporters tend to come from the Northeast and they tend to be more liberal overall than the median. But it’s not true that they’re all part of a vast conspiracy to harm America. It’s not true that they’re part of some fantasy coalition of George Soros–shills who wake up every day trying to break the heart of Americans and to bring full communism to the U.S.

Sargent: Right, and also Rick, the other part of the lie is that the coverage isn’t actually biased against Trump. It tells the truth about him. That’s the thing that they hate.

Wilson: Right. That is a particular angle that drives them beyond the valley of insanity. When they hear the truth about Trump, they become offended by it. They become angry about it. That’s because the truth about Trump is terrible. The truth about Trump is that he is a danger to this country. He’s a horrifyingly bad human being in every dimension. There’s nothing good about this guy. So people who play these games with the commentary, and play these games with the imaginary enemy, the imaginary demons, I call it, that supposedly the left wing is beholden to, they know what they’re doing. They know it’s crap. They know it’s garbage, but they persist.

Sargent: Absolutely. And it works. Back to Hegseth for a minute. On top of all of what we discussed before, The Associated Press reports that when he was in the National Guard, he was flagged as a potential inside threat by another service member over a tattoo that potentially has white nationalist overtones. It’s a tattoo that says “deus vult.” Hard to know what to make of this one. The imagery seems to have been in long time use by Christians, but people like former Homeland Security official Olivia Troye are pointing out that it’s been co-opted by white nationalist groups with the phrase deus vult, meaning God wills it, being used by Christian crusaders in the Middle Ages against Islam. Where are you on this one, Rick?

Wilson: Look, there’s an argument that’s said, He’s just trolling. It’s just for fun. It’s just to trigger the libs. In this case, you have to ask yourself if that just trolling, just triggering the libs, just having some good clean fun, if that was a serious answer, he would be more willing to address the question. It’s instead been the usual Republican, Go f- yourself, we’re not answering to you, etc.

Sargent: What do you think of the underlying suggestion that it might be a white nationalist or even white supremacist code?

Wilson: It was very popular with the alt-right in the beginnings of the Trump era. And I’m going to take it as an alt-right, a nod and a wink to the alt-right. I just don’t believe that it’s as simple an answer as he’s just trolling. I just don’t buy it.

Sargent: Right. JD Vance is already throwing a little fake fit about all this. He attacked the AP for supposedly engaging in anti-Christian bigotry simply because it reported on this whole affair. Are Vance and Trump’s allies really going to tell us that a discussion about what Trump’s pick for defense secretary believes or really means by this tattoo, that’s off limits now?

Wilson: Yeah. I’m sorry, I’m not buying it, and no one else should either. Honestly, if there was a window or a gap in the possibility space, but there’s not. This is a guy who’s part of a movement, whether he’s ... And look, I’m not going to say white supremacist, but I’m going to say that at the bare minimum, it’s a person who believes the crusader ethos, as they call it, is what should guide American policy and American politics. And I’m sorry, I don’t buy it.

Sargent: I’m going to remind everybody here, since it seems to have vanished during the campaign, that Donald Trump campaigned on a vow to restart his Muslim ban.

Wilson: Oh yeah. Among other excesses, that’s one more of his promises, which was to bring back the Muslim ban. For Donald Trump to make this promise is not shocking. It’s not surprising. It’s very much on brand for him at this point. But I do think there’s still a very strong thing in Washington’s normalcy bias in D.C. that constantly pops back up. Oh no, he’s just riffing. That’s just Trump being Trump. That’s just Trump playing to the cheap seats. It’s really not folks. This is not playing to the cheap seats. This is what he believes. This is what he has promised to do. When he tells you what he will do, you should believe him. There’s a through line there that has been sorely underscored in the entire Trump era: When he tells you what he’s going to do, he’s not generally lying about it. If he says that I’m going to do something horrible, he’s probably going to do something pretty damn horrible.

Sargent: Absolutely. Just to close this out with Pete Hegseth a bit. That pick plus RFK plus Matt Gaetz as AG—these are actually signs that he fully does intend to really undermine our institutions in a very profound way. What’s going to happen here? Which one of these do you think survives? How does it play out from here with the Republican Party? What’s your sense of it?

Wilson: Well, Greg, we’re going to end up with a lot of these weirdo characters: the Gaetzs, the Hegseths, the Noems, the Gabbards. A lot of those folks are going to have to be appointed in recess appointments. I don’t think you can sell this thing. I don’t think you can sell this thing as an act with actual appointments. I don’t think you get there. It is really hard to see how a Tulsi Gabbard or Pete Hegseth survives in a world where there’s not going to be a comfortable Senate majority. They don’t have 60 seats. They have 50 something. This is not an easy majority right now. They’re going to have to look at the map that’s coming up in 2026. They’re going to have to look at the 2028 presidential campaign. All of these things are going to start adding up in ways that make it tougher for the Republicans to just play these games and get away with this.

I don’t think you’re in the same world with the latitude that they expected for Trump, when the Senate seats are going to be making choices like, OK, I’m going to be voting for the guy who’s going to bring back measles, where kids are going to die over it. That’s a much harder place for Republicans to be than a standard set of appointments.

Sargent: So you see the recess appointments actually happening. That’s a whole other nuclear bomb, isn’t it?

Wilson: It is. It’s terrible for them. It’s very bad politics for them, but I think those are a possibility in part because there’s a Trump loves to be transgressive. He’s going to really say to himself, Well, you know what? If I can do these recess appointments as the biggest middle finger to Washington, and make these senators do what I want, I can make them compromise themselves and do exactly what I want. That’s appealing to Trump at a certain level because he is both juvenile and evil at the same time. That degree of his joy that he takes in breaking the will of the “normies” is boundless. And so I think he will do that.

He will do that at a pretty good clip, unfortunately. All the regular guys in the Senate are going to have to suck it up. They’re to swallow a very large stone if they want Donald Trump’s goodwill. I don’t think, at scale, they can really take that. I don’t think they have the ability to really, at the end of the day, say, This is a great thing for the party, Mr. President. You should keep appointing lunatics, racists, weirdos, cranks, dog killers, alt-righters, etc. I don’t think any of them are going to be able to say that with a straight face as we get into the closing act here.

Sargent: Yeah, it’s going to get really hairy for them in ways that we can’t even predict yet. Folks, make sure to check out Rick Wilson’s new project, the Two Plus Two Coalition. That’ll be rolling some stuff out pretty soon. Rick, thanks so much for coming on with us, man. Always good to talk to you.

Wilson: Anytime, Greg. Always a pleasure, my friend. I’ll talk to you soon.

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.