Transcript: Trump’s Angry New Tirade on Truth Social Signals Dark 2025

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 17 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.

Donald and Lara Trump are making it clear: Retribution is coming. On Tuesday, Donald exploded with fury at Judge Juan Merchan after he refused to dismiss the hush money conviction of Trump in Manhattan. Trump also filed a deeply frivolous new lawsuit against Iowa pollster Ann Selzer for getting her preelection survey wrong, suggesting more bullying of the media is coming. Meanwhile, Donald’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, suggested in a striking interview that Kash Patel is being installed as FBI director precisely for the purpose of carrying out revenge for Trump

What’s going to happen to the targets of Trump’s retribution tour? How should they defend themselves? Today, we’re talking about this with Josh Marshall, the founder and editor in chief of Talking Points Memo. Josh has an interesting new piece arguing that these targets need to band together in the face of what’s coming. Thanks for coming on, Josh.

Josh Marshall: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: I want to start with Lara Trump because it’s so brazen. She and a right-wing interviewer were talking about supposed wrongdoing by Liz Cheney during the January 6 Committee investigation. Listen to what Lara Trump said next.

Lara Trump (audio voiceover): This is just the beginning, Benny. If you think this is good, wait ’til Donald Trump gets in there. Wait ’til Kash Patel gets in there. Wait ’til Tulsi Gabbard gets in there. Wait ’til these people start shining a light at all the dark places that the Democrats and the establishment never wanted us to go.

Sargent: The January 6 Committee investigation documented extensive evidence of Trump’s incitement of violent insurrection, and Trump and MAGA have never forgiven them for it. Here you have Lara Trump basically suggesting straight out that Trump is picking Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard in part to carry out domestic spying on Trump’s enemies. Josh, could this be clearer?

Marshall: They’re totally clear. They’ve been saying this for months, even years. I really encourage everybody to be aware, sensitive to the performance art part of this. By that, I don’t mean it’s fake, I don’t mean nothing’s going to happen, but it is this spectacle they do and threat. It’s all out of the world of professional wrestling.

When people hear that, they think, OK, that’s a funny way to think about Trumpian politics. I guess it is a funny way, but it’s very real. That whole bombast is not only made to make people feel afraid, particularly the people they’re threatening directly, but to create this aura of power and uncheckable power and to knock people back on their heels and make them feel disoriented, demoralized, and all those things. We need to be aware of that aspect of what is going on here because that is a big part of it, in addition to whatever they may actually choose to do, which we have no idea what that’s going to be. It’s important to recognize that we have no idea on either side of the spectrum of possibilities.

Sargent: Right. It could actually be worse than they say. Here you’ve got Trump erupting with rage on Truth Social at Judge Merchan for not dismissing the hush-money case against him. Trump let out this tirade that went on for two long tweets. Trump said Merchan “keeps breaking the law,” called his decision “illegal,” called the whole case “illegitimate” and accused Merchan of fraud and misconduct. Josh, it looks to me like Trump is going to try to come up with some way of targeting Merchan. What do you think?

Marshall: He certainly wants to create a spectacle about it. One thing that Trump tries to do and is very good at doing is he makes all sorts of threats and demands and everything under the sun. They are intentionally over the top and bombastic, which creates a penumbra of threat around him. That, again, knocks people back on their heels. He is holding territory as it were, and he doesn’t even have to do anything. It’s typical Trump to threaten 10 things a day. And his opponents, his enemies are feeling overwhelmed with all the different threats, and he doesn’t actually have to do anything. So it is really important for people both to be prepared for him to do all sorts of crazy stuff, but also to be attuned to that spectacle, which is his greatest power.

What is he going to do? I have no idea. I will say one thing. It is a good example of how foolish and wrong the people are to write these opinion columns saying how Biden should pardon Trump’s enemies—people on his enemies list—and Trump himself. This is largely a moot case at this point—not totally, but probably—but you don’t clean the slate or turn over a new leaf or all this stuff when the person in question is still threatening extrajudicial murders or something. It’s just preposterous.

Sargent: You wrote this piece arguing that targets of Trump’s retribution tour need some way of banding together here. I want to get to the bombast side of this a bit later, but for now, taking the threats extremely seriously, as you do in your piece, this comes as Trump filed this lawsuit against pollster Ann Selzer for putting Trump behind in Iowa, whereas Trump won there. This is a real lawsuit, and it’s clearly all about putting people in the media and polling on notice that they will face real legal harassment if they anger or criticize Trump. Your thought is for a clearing house where donors can chip in to support the legal defense of people who face this harassment so they’re not alone. It sounds like a pooled arrangement. Can you talk about why this is necessary and what it would look like?

Marshall: Yeah. To be clear, a lot of people have suggested something like this. The idea is that you create some organization, probably a 501(c)(3), that can collect money, both small-donor money and big checks, and create a big pile of cash so that people who are threatened by Trump—whether it’s his private lawsuits or Kash Patel harassing people with the FBI, whichever those things are—do not have to face ruinous legal bills, let alone potentially going to prison.

A lot of people have proposed something like that, and I think it’s a great idea. I’m really hoping people who are in this line of work will come together and start doing it. You start with an idea that there is resources—legal resources, money resources—that for each person who gets targeted, this organization can swoop in and say, Hey, don’t worry about the legal bills. We got it. We’re all over this. We’ve got unlimited money. We’re going to fight this, etc. There’s a lot of people who’ve talked about that great idea. What I think I was adding that’s a little different is this needs to be a little more than a lot of money and really sharp lawyers. It needs to be something a little beyond a souped up 2025 version of a public interest law firm.

I mentioned before that Trump has this way of creating these penumbras of fear and menace and confusion around these threats and lawsuits he makes. As you said, he did actually file this lawsuit. For someone who has Trump’s resources, filing a lawsuit is the easiest thing in the world. You can file it and then un-file later, it doesn’t matter. But what this does, in addition to what lawyers Ann Selzer might have to hire, is creating this moment for people where they say, Wait a second, you can’t do that. You can’t sue a pollster. That’s crazy. And yet he is doing it. It creates this climate of confusion, of you can’t do that, but he is doing that. Do no rules apply to him? It creates, again, this climate of fear and confusion and helplessness.

When I said before about be attuned to the spectacle, I’m not saying it’s a spectacle, there’s nothing real. I’m saying there’s two very real things, and to think about them each as real things that need to be countered. In addition to the money and the lawyering, what I think you want is: Every time this happens, you have an organization that can swoop in and say, Nope, that’s not how it works. That is total BS. Look, you want to do it, you want to humiliate yourself and want us to make fun of you, great. Tell us when the court date is. We’ve got limitless money, we can’t wait.

And in addition, do what Judicial Watch used to do back in the Larry Klayman days—and I guess they kind of do it with that new joker who they got, which is fine. They sued Ann Selzer and they’re doing this? Hit them with a million discovery things, get creative lawyering to say, OK, you’re suing? Well, clearly we need to look and we need to investigate; we need all the data about your Iowa campaign; and what communication did you have with Lara Trump?

This is, again, a world of professional wrestling. This is when you’ve got the one wrestler tearing off his shirt and flexing his muscles signaling I’m going to do this and do that and the other guy doing the same. Only too often in this world we’re in right now, it’s just Trump doing that. There’s no other side doing the same taunts. And that may seem silly and childish, but that is the language of the politics that we are in today. People who don’t like what Trump is doing to our politics, don’t like what he is doing on everything he’s doing, need to be able to talk in that language. They’re not doing enough of it now, and I want people to start thinking in those terms.

Sargent: I want to pick up on one element of that, this idea that the absurdity of these threats is the whole point of them. The basic idea is to put everyone on notice that Trump can do this, even if, or especially if, it’s completely baseless. That’s the whole point. He can do it even if it has no basis. It’s essential ...

Marshall: Seems like a superpower.

Sargent: Right. In addition to flexing, it’s also essential to trying to terrorize everyone into watching their step a little more, refraining from criticizing Trump or aggressively reporting facts about his presidency. If he can sue a pollster, well, he can sue me for quoting him accurately. I better be careful about that, right? I want to add that you can actually see Donald and Lara Trump basically flaunting the absurdity of their threats in the two examples that we highlighted earlier. They’re reveling in it, right?

Marshall: Yeah, it’s that penumbra of threat. I watched that video. You see Benny Johnson, you see Lara Trump, and for a moment, you were trying to understand what this great crime that Liz Cheney had done. And obviously, there was a point of diminishing returns because it doesn’t matter what they’re saying.

In the world of professional wrestling, they have words to talk about this stuff. It’s talk and bombast. They never have to follow through on any of that. Again, I’m not saying that they won’t do anything dangerous or damaging; it’s that they can worry later what crime Liz Cheney has supposedly done. It’s talk and menace. That’s the world we’re living in, and we have to be able to speak that language. I mentioned this in the piece, it’s important to think about this not just as a defensive maneuver because everything in the world of Trump is about dominating and the dominated. It’s a very binary world that Trump lives in. We all know this. There’s the person dominating and the dominated person. And so it’s not just a matter of we don’t want people to be personally bankrupted and you want to cover their legal defenses and protect them against legal harassment, I want it to be more aggressive. I want, when he does something this absurd, to go on the offense and embarrass him.

Sargent: Go after the lawyers, right? Go after the lawyers as well.

Marshall: All of these things are baseless, but most of these things are so baseless that you want to embarrass them. That’s the language they understand. Outrage and very normal and understandable reactions, that’s what they’re looking for. It’s the whole cry-more world. They want people to be outraged: How can you do this? This shouldn’t be possible. And I hope that a group like this, and the opposition to Trump more generally, can cultivate a degree of bring it on. Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s do it, dude, because you will be embarrassed and we love embarrassing you.

Sargent: Right. I just want to clarify for listeners what Josh meant by “cry more.” There’s this constant refrain from MAGA, which is whenever you get outraged or pissed off about whatever it is Trump’s doing, you get hit by a thousand MAGA tweets saying, Cry more, or Trump is living rent free in your head, LOL. And really to them, that’s itself a win. It’s itself a sign of Trump’s power.

Marshall: Your outrage, your distress, your perception of unfairness, those are all signs that you are in the process of being defeated by Donald Trump’s or MAGA’s power. We as people interested in the important values of democracy and the rule of law and all these things have to be sensitive to the literal things we say and the metamessages we send by the way that we say them.

For anybody who’s familiar with the world of opera, there’s the libretto and then there’s the score. The libretto is these little words along the top; it’s maybe superficial. The score is where the action is; it’s the music. And you get the emotional content in the music. Often, people—right-minded, upstanding Americans like ourselves who believe in American values—find ourselves getting really focused on the libretto and not focused on the score. And a lot of what I’m talking about here is: focus on the score because that’s where the action is happening, and that’s where a lot of our politics today is really contested.

Sargent: And Trump and MAGA know this in a way that maybe liberals and Democrats don’t quite know as well. Basically, it’s a matter of making noise. You’ve got these people in the middle—whether they’re young, nonwhite, working class, or very low-propensity voters who are now the battleground—reacting to noise and conviction and shows of strength. Democrats have to get in that game a little more. And that’s what you’re talking about when it really comes down to it.

Marshall: Absolutely. This is something that was a key dynamic in our politics going back a long time. I wrote about this during the 2004 election—dating myself here a bit—with the swift boat stuff. For people who remember that election with all the swift boat things, the key there was not the factual content of these accusations against John Kerry. It was basically a spectacle in which you take someone—you may disagree with John Kerry, but he was fighting in a real war that he probably could have gotten out of—and you take something like that and attack him as a coward and a liar. You create this spectacle. In the language of gangsterism, in the language of power, if you hit someone and they don’t hit back ... We know the gendered language that that’s about, I hit you and you can’t hit back. I’m powerful, you’re weak. This is something that goes way back in our politics; Trump put it on steroids where everything is about that now.

Sargent: Exactly. What that really shows is if we can get away with punching John Kerry in the face and he’s not going to punch us back, how can you trust him to be president? So another thing worth pointing out about it is that this terrorizing is designed to make the targets feel defenseless and alone. It’s really worth stressing that the Trumpists don’t have to prosecute people to pull this off. They don’t need grand juries or judges. Mere investigations will compel targets to spend potentially years and enormous resources defending themselves.

That’s what Lara Trump is saying in that clip. She’s saying, You better be ready. We’re going to start poking around and you’re going to find your legal bills going through the roof. You better damn be careful. That itself will chill criticism and dissent. So your idea or the idea of a collective fund is critical to maintaining a real opposition to Trump.

Marshall: Yeah. Again, I want to be crystal clear that when I say there may never be a case, I’m not saying there’s nothing to worry about; I’m saying that this is not fundamentally about putting people in jail. Putting people in jail may help them get to where they want to go. It’s about creating a country where everyone is cowed. And there’s lots of ways you can cow people. Actually, coming up with bogus charges against a Liz Cheney and getting a jury to convict, getting a judge to go along with it, that’s hard. That’s difficult to do. Maybe it’ll happen, but it’s not easy to do.

However, when you control the law enforcement agencies, just getting subpoenas and going through someone’s life and making their life hell, making them run up legal bills, that’s easy. Theoretically, a target can go to a judge and say, I’m being harassed, but man, that is such a heavy burden, that’s never going to happen.

We need to think big picture. What is the big goal here? It’s creating a population of cowed people. One way you do that is to actually jail people, but there’s a lot of different ways you do that. A lot of this is have the money for the actual court stuff, but also have what is in essence a public communications campaign that is contesting the ground where a lot of this is going to be taking place. You don’t personally need to be subpoenaed or called into a courtroom to make the decision in your head, Man, I better lay low because a lot of bad stuff is happening. You need people who are fighting that fight in the public square, not just in the courtroom.

Sargent: And extracting a price from lawyers who play these games.

Marshall: Yes.

Sargetn: Folks, I should say, for full disclosure, I worked for Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo way back in the day. I am definitely privileged—still feel privileged—to have been part of that at an early period, man.

Marshall: Yeah, we have such an illustrious roster of TPM alums at so many places doing so much amazing work. You are at the top of that list. So yes, absolutely one of the revered elders in the TPM Talking Points Memo Hall of Worthies.

Sargent: It could not be a higher honor. Josh Marshall, it’s great to talk to you again, man. Thanks for coming on.

Marshall: All right. Thanks a bunch.

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.