Transcript: Trump Allies Trade Insults as His Latest Pick Rattles MAGA

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 25 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 still have months to go until Donald Trump takes office, but according to The Washington Post, Trump’s top allies are already at war with each other over the transition. On top of that, Trump just tapped an anti-Islam extremist, Sebastian Gorka, to a top national security role; that’s unnerving even some in MAGA. It’s becoming clear that Trump is so certain he won a massive mandate in the election that he doesn’t need to even bother running a smooth transition or take care to avoid appointing wildly extreme people to top roles. Today, we’re checking in with political scientist Julia Azari, co-author of the Good Politics/Bad Politics Substack and author of a great new piece on why delusions about mandates can produce terrible governing outcomes. Welcome back on, Julia.

Julia Azari: Thank you so much for having me.

Sargent: So it’s getting crazy. Elon Musk is privately raging at Trump lawyer Boris Epshteyn, accusing him of leaking to the media and having too much power over the transition. Meanwhile, Trump just appointed Sebastian Gorka as senior director for counterterrorism. This is a guy with wildly crazy extreme anti-Islam views. The Post quotes a source saying that Trump’s national security transition team views Gorka as a clown. Julia, Trump clearly thinks he can govern however he wants to. What’s your reaction to all this?

Azari: I think that’s right. He’s selecting people for the administration that clearly aren’t meant to build a broad coalition and that clearly are going to come into conflict with each other. That’s pretty typical mandate overreach, when presidents think that they have this public approval for whatever they’re doing or even a personal mandate that that becomes a recipe—especially for a second term overreach.

Sargent: I’m interested in this idea of personal mandate. Let’s come back to that. You wrote this great piece about presidential mandates. Trump is declaring that he has this massive mandate. It’s nonsense. He didn’t even win a popular majority. It’s a very slim victory. But regardless, as you wrote, claims like this of mandates have historically been linked to big expansions of presidential power and to unchecked presidencies. And we’re looking at an unchecked presidency right now about to hit us. Can you talk about all this?

Azari: Yeah. One of the arguments that I made in the piece, which is based on a book that I published in 2014, is that when presidents start talking about how they have the approval of the electorate for what they want to do, this tends to be associated with not just policy but with the expansive claims about what the president can do.

Essentially, the idea of an electoral mandate is something that’s designed to run roughshod on checks and balances, whether those be from the other branches of government or from the electorate, the media. Mandate claims often are invoked in a situation where presidents are experiencing some pushback and they go on the defensive and they say, Well, my critics are promoting this scandal—that was Nixon and Watergate—or my critics are asking me too many questions because they don’t believe in the mandate that I won. My point in the piece is to be very wary of these kinds of claims.

Sargent: It seems interesting to me that there’s an added nuance with Trump. As you mentioned, presidents invoke mandates as a way to push back against resistance to their agendas—institutional resistance, whatever it is. In this case, we’re in a unique situation because he’s coming back into power after having had a presidency, of course.

In that presidency, he was reigned in by his own people. So now, he’s picking all these people who will not reign him in. He’s essentially running roughshod over the very idea that he should have anyone internally that acts as a check. Clearly, that’s related to this concept of a personal mandate, right? He must really be besotted with that idea. Can you talk about that particular confluence: him really coming in and being adamantly devoted to not having internal checks, and also thinking he has a personal mandate? That’s unique, right?

Azari: It is a little bit unique. The book leaves off with Obama and it veers into a lot of the things I talk about in the piece to do with presidents taking more of our prime ministerial role and stepping into more of a partisan mandate. We saw that a lot with George W. Bush and Barack Obama. With Trump, we see an interesting wrinkle on that because it is very much a partisan and ideological mandate that he’s trying to claim—a mandate for MAGA values. But we get to a point where that’s very difficult to distinguish from Trump the person and Trumpism the idea.

Presidents winning a second term almost always win more votes than they did the previous time. Also, people have a sense of what they’re about. That can be a double-edged sword. You now have a larger coalition and you now feel empowered to say, Here’s what I’m about, here are our priorities, and that can be in tension with a larger coalition. That is something that will be interesting to see Trump wrestle with, now that he has a more diverse coalition that does not necessarily square with the more pure and distilled approach to MAGA. And as a second term president, we’ll see if he cares.

We’ll see if he cares if he starts losing coalition, but you’re already seeing this in the administration, as you’ve pointed out, and in the new appointees. They’re all saying different things about what their priorities are, and Trump will soon learn the limits of what he can personally do.

Sargent: It’s interesting because he’s always thought, all through the 2024 campaign, that he doesn’t have to reach out to swing voters or particular constituencies who are outside what we think of as MAGA. He’s thought that essentially he doesn’t have to do that because he believed on some level that all he had to do is activate the latent MAGA tendencies in these constituencies and they would rally to his side.

Now, I don’t think that’s what happened. A lot of these additional constituencies like the low-propensity voters that we talk about, especially young and nonwhite that came out for Trump, maybe noncollege white, low-propensity voters—these are people who were driven more by inflation and unhappiness with the status quo and maybe post-Covid trauma than any latent MAGA tendencies that he activated. But he’s going to think that they’re all MAGA. This broader coalition you’re talking about isn’t going to give him pause. Isn’t that alarming?

Azari: This has always been a puzzle with Trump, just how responsive is Trumpland to what they perceive as public opinion? In the first term, it was very much a minority-rule situation. There were all these questions about: Well, are they responsive to public pressure? Are they just determined to delegitimize and discredit any election that they lose? That was the story of 2020.

In some ways, we’re in uncharted territory with Trump as an electoral winner, even as small as that margin is looking like it’s going to be. To me, the question actually is somewhat beyond Trumpworld. There’s this question about overreach. There’s this question about coalition management: Will Trump feel compelled to manage his coalition? And then there was this question about how will the rest of the country treat that? Specifically, how will mainstream media sources treat that? Will we have to listen to frameworks that promote Trump as having a popular mandate? That, to me, is a real area of concern.

I’ve looked into how media outlets framed his 2016 Electoral College victory, and they’re quite alarming about all these reasons why Trump won. Very few of them take into account that he actually lost the popular vote by 3 million votes in that year. So when we have a situation where he’s going to have won the popular vote by a couple of percentage points, then how will media outlets think about that? I’m concerned that it will create a cushion for him in the public mind that will enable this overreach.

Sargent: Well, we are seeing this overreach in a major way. I want to return to Sebastian Gorka for a sec. It’s worth noting how extreme he really is. He constantly talks about Islam as a threat to Western civilization; has pushed nonsense about Sharia law coming to the United States; big proponent of Trump’s first term Muslim ban; and he was pushed out of Trump’s first administration. And the Post is also reporting that Michael Anton has pulled out of contention for a top national security position rather than work with Gorka.

For listeners who don’t know, Anton is a major MAGA figure, notoriously claimed in 2016 that only Trump can save our country from catastrophe. If Trump’s new pick is too much for Anton, doesn’t that really raise major alarms about how much he’s already going down the road of overreach and governing? He’s got Elon Musk talking about immense spending cuts as well.

Azari: We’re seeing a couple of different pieces of evidence that Trump is regarding his next presidency as one where he will not be able to be constrained. Again, to bring it briefly back to the mandate question, this does have to do with a perception among Republicans that Trump has immense power over their constituents that will lead members of Congress to let him do whatever he wants. That might not be totally inaccurate.

The other piece of this that bears repeating that shows how Trump is going to take what’s happened historically and take it to a new level is that often when presidents have done this and engaged in this overreach ... The prime example in my book is George W. Bush and interpreting 2004 as a mandate for his Social Security plan, which just was a complete misread of the electorate, but that was legislation, right? He had to pursue that through Congress and his members of his own party were pretty quick to let him know that that wasn’t the direction they wanted to go.

What Trump is doing is he’s demonstrating this through extreme personnel choices and demonstrating that dominance over Congress through this recess appointment battle and through appointments of people who are really far outside of the mainstream. The same thing with the selection of Gorka that we keep coming back to. To pursue these policies through the executive branch is an overreach that’s less likely to be caught out and corrected in the way that it has been when presidents have taken it to the legislative arena.

Sargent: What makes Trump a bit different here in terms of these vows of executive overreach is that he openly campaigned on a series of extreme threats and pronouncements, right? Explicitly vowed to run essentially an authoritarian presidency; prosecuting enemies, unleashing state power on media companies that displease him; openly promised mass deportations with giant camps in the military; talked about using the military in blue areas of the country; concluded with a big rally that put virulent racism on open display and so forth. Is there an added danger here that he thinks he’s got a mandate for all of that? A lot of that can be done executively.

Azari: Yeah, that’s right. One of the things that I was trying to get out in the piece, and that you alluded to before, is that we have two things going on. One is a very distinct and clear Trumpist ideology that is very hostile to checks and balances on power, very hostile to the give and take of politics, and very nativist—very hostile to immigrants and immigration. That’s very distinct. All of us who pay a lot of attention to politics understand that that’s what that is.

And you see that in the way that the campaign unfolded in which a number of former Republican officials came out against Trump. And so it looked, at the elite level, like you had this huge, broad ideological spectrum, anti-MAGA coalition.

And then we got to election night and the returns looked quite different. And even though Trump’s margin—again, we can’t emphasize enough that like most presidents in the twenty-first century, it’s a very narrow margin—there is a clear shift away from the Democrats across a lot of different groups and regions. And that seems much more consistent with a much shallower and less ideological understanding of politics, which is that essentially the electorate turns against the party in power unless things are really good, and they haven’t been.

You have on the one hand people who are upset about inflation, upset about Covid, have a rosy nostalgic view of Trump’s former presidency; we do tend to be very rosy about former presidents. It just usually doesn’t matter. And then you put that at odds with this idea of a really distinct and clear MAGA-oriented campaign that probably a lot of people weren’t paying that much attention to. That’s the tension we’re navigating.

The question is, Does Trump see this as claiming a mandate as a way to get other actors to do his legitimacy work for him? Or does he not even care about that and see this as a boon to his raw power? Are we not even playing a legitimacy game anymore? Those are really abstract questions, but they’re actually quite relevant to thinking about how to return a sense of checks and balances to this situation.

Sargent: I do want to just tell listeners what Trump actually won by. He won by around 1.65 percent of the popular vote as of Dave Wasserman’s most recent count.

Azari: This is his first really showing of having popular support. But I also want to put it in the context of other presidential victories, which is even when you do win by what would be a modern landslide, a 7 million or more vote or a 53 percent of the popular vote or whatever, I’m still skeptical of the concept.

There’s two tracks of my thinking. One is the way this specifically maps on to Trumpism that is alarming because of all the democratic flaws in Trumpism. The other is simply that presidential mandate claiming is not very small-d democratic no matter who’s doing it or what circumstances because again, it is really designed as a way to push back on institutional checks as well as a political pushback.

Sargent: In Trump’s case, he’s clearly invoking it as a way to not just keep Republicans in line in Congress, but also to let his people internally know that there’s not going to be anything standing in the way of the juggernaut.

Azari: That’s exactly right.

Sargent: Let’s just close out with a comparison back to 2004, since you brought that up earlier. George W. Bush won a popular majority in 2004. Iraq War. It seemed like the hold that Bush and Karl Rove had over the country’s discourse and media was absolutely invincible. If you remember the time, it seemed like there was no way to get a contrary message through to people. He seemed to have absolute lock on public opinion due to the war. Two years later, a combination of Bush’s incompetence because of Hurricane Katrina, the corruption of the Republican Party, Iraq War going south. And as you pointed out, the overreach with Social Security led to a massive democratic victory in the midterms. In 2006, they took back both chambers.

I’m wondering if we can see something similar shaping up here. I know it’s early days, and this is speculative, and I don’t think Democrats can get back to Senate, but it does look to me like the ingredients are there. Executive and legislative overreach is likely; so is incompetence, lots of bumbling, potentially some major governing failure if there’s another pandemic or something like that. What do you think? Is that a reasonable way to look at what might be coming?

Azari: Politics is very thermostatic, and fortunes change very quickly. The Bush-Obama years are a really good example of this. Taken as a whole, as you said, 2004, the Republicans looked very strong. By 2006, things had changed. By 2008, they’d changed dramatically. And in 2008, Obama also was claiming massive mandates, and then by 2010 his fortunes had changed dramatically as well.

There’s a lot of that. Political scientists like this term thermostatic and probably no one else likes it ...

Sargent: I like it.

Azari: ... OK, great. It just suggests that people move against whatever the prevailing power is. That’s quite likely, and it’s quite likely given what we’ve seen with Trump. The determination to consolidate power gives me some pause and some concern, but I don’t know that they’ll be able to consolidate power in a way that renders the coming 2026 midterms meaningless. That’s really the mindset that I’m bringing in.

Mandate claiming definitely comes before the fall. The extent to which a president thinks, I have really made my views clear to the electorate and the electorate has sent me with a ringing endorsement—that almost always precedes some serious midterm loss or even losing status within their party because they’ve misread what everyone in the party is looking for as well. And we’re certainly seeing signs of that even before Trump takes office in January.

Sargent: And I would say that if there’s anyone who’s even more prone to misread mandates for himself, it’s Donald Trump. Julia Azari, that is so interesting. Thank you so much for coming on with us.

Azari: Thank 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.