Transcript: Trump’s Private Rage at “Traitors” Reveals Dark 2025 Plans

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 9 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.

The New York Times reports that Donald Trump is telling advisers that his biggest regret from his first term was that he appointed “traitors.” Not traitors to the country, of course; traitors to him. As a result, his transition team is grilling prospective officials to gauge their loyalty to Trump; that is, loyalty to the person. Is there some way for Democrats to explain how absurd and dangerous all this is in a manner that gets through to the public? We’re talking about this today with Brian Beutler, author of the excellent Substack Off Message, who’s been arguing that Dems need to get more aggressive with their communications about all this right now before Trump takes office. Thanks for coming back on, Brian.

Brian Beutler: It’s always good to be with you.

Sargent: The New York Times reports that he’s privately telling advisors that his biggest first-term regret was appointing traitors. Importantly, traitors are those who came to see Trump accurately as a threat to the system: Chief of Staff John Kelly, Defense Secretaries Jim Madison, Mark Esper, and even Attorney General William Barr, who was relentlessly loyal up to the very last minute. That’s his regret, appointing people who describe the threat he poses accurately. Brian, in some sense, this isn’t a surprise, but it’s rarely reported quite this clearly. Your thoughts?

Beutler: It’s inauspicious. And it probably portends some conflict between him and the Senate insofar as the people that he’s vetting are going to be appointed to positions that require Senate confirmation. That’s because, as I understand, the loyalty test as reported in the article is not just, Do you support Donald Trump? Do you support the MAGA movement? Do you support its policy goals?—it’s really, Do you believe Donald Trump won or lost the 2020 election? If they acknowledge the truth that he lost, they’re out, they’re not going to get the nomination.

And similarly, with questions like, Do you think January 6 was good or bad? Do you think it was something that Donald Trump is responsible for? Are these patriots or are they insurrectionists?, if you answer that the wrong way, you’re not getting the job. And insofar as anyone who answers the way Trump wants them to answer has to go before the Senate. Well, it’s going to raise questions for both Democrats and Republicans in different ways.

Democrats are going to have to decide whether those are red lines for them that they won’t cross. If Trump finds somebody who’s qualified as in their resume is good, that they’re credentialed to do the job he’s appointed them to, but they’re also supportive of the Big Lie or they think that the insurrection was OK, will Democrats look past that to say, Well, at least you’ll know how to do the job that you’re being appointed to do? I would like Democrats to say there will be zero Democratic votes for any nominees who take that loyalty test. And if they do that, then it will fall to Republicans.

Are 50 out of 53 Republican senators willing to take that vote? An ancillary benefit of Democrats drawing a hard line here is that’ll be really tough for them because there are still at least a handful of Senate Republicans who don’t support the Big Lie, who won’t repeat it, and who think the people who peddle it are real threats to democracy. Then we’ll find out whether they just decided, You know what, Trump won, so it’s revisionist history all the way down now.

Sargent: His use of the term traitors in his conversations with his advisors, which shows that he’s still seething with anger about those who refuse to go along with his rewritten history: This is one of the keys to understanding what he really intends with current picks like Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, Kash Patel as FBI director, and Pam Bondi as attorney general. It won’t be that hard for all Democrats to oppose Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel, but I’m not sure all Democrats will oppose Pam Bondi.

You had a piece arguing that Democrats need to think through now how to communicate all this. Your argument was Dems can stand for the proposition that if Trump and Republicans destroy the rule of law, Dems will be prepared to establish the rule of law again after he’s gone and impose accountability for crimes committed during Trump’s second term. What’s your idea here in starting to articulate that message now? How does it connect to how the confirmation hearings should be handled?

Beutler: Hearing you ask the question, an analogy came to my mind between this confirmation process and the way Democrats do elections versus Republicans. Republicans have stood up basically a 24/7, 365-day-a-year campaign that’s mostly run through media. There’s big media like Fox News; there’s smaller media like these very partisan podcasts. They end up building enormous reach, and by the time an election rolls around, the voting public is already very primed with pro-GOP ideas that they pick up through these media. Whereas Democrats, they stand up a pop-up messaging apparatus through the campaign. They raise a billion dollars, inundate swing states, and hope to basically catch up to where Republicans are because Republicans have been galloping ahead the whole four years.

The confirmation process is similar. I don’t want to wake up one day in January or February and find that Democrats are now starting to talk about how Pam Bondi or Kash Patel are unsuitable nominees, but Republicans have quietly rounded up 50 votes for him and now it’s too late. The question of defining these nominees is live right now, so Democrats should begin the process of defining them.

Sargent: Democrats have to tell the public what it is Republicans are actually voting for. I don’t see any reason to simply presume that the public understands well that Kash Patel, for instance, is explicitly threatening to prosecute all sorts of “enemies of Trump and MAGA” without any cause at all. And I’m not sure people understand how unqualified for the basic job of defense secretary Pete Hegseth is. Dems have to explain to the public what it is Republicans are willing to foist on the country in order to stay in Trump’s good graces, right?

Beutler: That’s right. Democrats seem to be playing an entirely inside game at the moment. As information about candidates or nominees like Hegseth and Patel bleeds out into the press, it’s putting pressure on Republicans. They already deep-sixed one of Trump’s nominees, Matt Gaetz, his first attorney general nominee. Democrats are acting like, Well, let’s see if we can do that again, because the most important thing is to make sure these people who are unqualified and dangerous aren’t confirmed. And that’s more important than them having this issue to bandy about: that Trump is nominating these bad actors, that Senate Republicans aren’t willing to stand up to him. And they think instead of waging war on that, let’s just try to make sure that these people don’t get 50 votes in the Senate.

I don’t think it’s a binary choice. They can have both. They can simultaneously appeal in private and through the media to the handful of Republican senators of good faith who know that these people shouldn’t be confirmed to do the right thing. They can also wage a broader partisan battle to make it clear to the public that after winning the election on a variety of sometimes contradictory campaign promises—basically going to every corner of the country and telling people what they want to hear so that they’d vote for him—Trump is now trying to use the government to wage vendettas. That’s what he was really interested in all along, and it’s wrong and Democrats are going to try to stop it.

Sargent: I want to bring up this concept of loyalty for a second. It’s often said in the press, and this Times piece says it: Trump wants loyalty from his new picks and from Republicans and so forth. I’m starting to think that that’s actually an inadequate frame. I think voters could hear that and say, Well, of course he wants loyalty. So what? What leader doesn’t want loyalty from the people around him? The thing that needs to be conveyed more precisely is what that actually means, which is that Trump is expressly picking people precisely because they’ll put him above the law and the Constitution and the country when his corrupt authoritarian rule by fiat really gets rolling. Brian, is the press conveying that clearly, or is that basic reality getting lost now?

Beutler: It might be. It’s interesting because if you’re sophisticated about politics, about democracy, about how the U.S. system is supposed to work, you understand why a president who prizes personal loyalty above all else is anathema. When you tell me Trump wants to appoint all these loyalists to powerful positions, I understand why it’s bad because in a democracy, even the people who work underneath the president are supposed to work for the American people. They’re supposed to carry out his policies, but not be faithful to him as an individual over the country. That’s why personal loyalty as a job qualification is so rotten. It’s so anti-American. So I get it.

But as you say, the word loyal carries this other meaning, which is just you’re loyal employee to your boss. How is that like a character flaw? So the flip side of it is: What are they being loyal to Trump for? It’s to carry out these vendettas, is to place him above the law. That’s corruption. The coverage of these Trump nominees, the way mainstream reporters talk about him often, speaks in this high-minded voice about these nominees and doesn’t make so clear that the purpose of them being appointed to these jobs is corrupt.

Sargent: In a way, that brings back your rolling critique of Democrats for really not conveying these realities themselves. This is actually really becoming particularly clear now with this question of whether Trump will pardon the January 6 rioters. He was asked in an NBC News interview what he’ll do. Here’s what he said.

Donald Trump (audio voiceover): I’m going to be acting very quickly.

Kristen Welker (audio voiceover): Within your first 100 days? First day?

Trump (audio voiceover): First day.

Welker (audio voiceover): First day. To issue these pardons?

Trump (audio voiceover): These people have been there ... How long is it? Three or four years.

Sargent: Brian, that leaves a lot of questions unanswered, but clearly here’s an example of how we’re going to face some major challenges ahead in how this is covered. Once the debate starts to really happen about Donald Trump’s pardoning, whoever he ends up pardoning from the January 6-ers, there’s going to be a strong push in the press to say, Well, why won’t Democrats move on? Shouldn’t we turn the page? How should Democrats handle that?

Beutler: It’s a fair question for anybody who Trump nominates to a job that’s even adjacent to the justice system or to the security services; to pin them down on this question of whether the January 6 rioters should be pardoned; and then to basically say that they won’t vote to confirm anybody who believes that the rioters should be pardoned.

They can go even further than that. I am reminded often of my days covering the Affordable Care Act—these things do tie together, I promise. Near the end of the process when it was clear that Democrats were going to be able to enact that legislation and reform the healthcare system, Mitch McConnell, who was the Senate minority leader at the time, didn’t say, Well, it’s over. Let’s let bygones be bygones. I remember one press conference in particular where he warned Democrats ahead of this vote that you might think that this vote puts the issue to rest and that the worst will be behind you, but the worst will be in front of you. We’re not going to stop campaigning against you and trying to make the public understand that you did this horrible thing to the healthcare system.

Everything that Trump wants to do, at least the big-deal nefarious stuff, Democrats can tackle in just that way. If Donald Trump insists on pardoning the rioters, Democrats, who are in the minority, can demand investigations of the pardon process, or they can ask for oversight hearings where they bring Justice Department officials in to see on what basis the rioters were pardoned.

Sargent: Yeah, make them defend it.

Beutler: The explicit, not implicit idea, should be: If these violent insurrectionists get out of prison and go commit more crimes, that’s going to be on you. The worst is going to be in front of you. And the same goes for other things that aren’t necessarily about January 6 or the 2020 election that Donald Trump wants to do. He wants to tear down or render dysfunctional entire cabinet level departments of the government.

Democrats can either say, Woe is us; all that hard work over decades and decades to build functioning government institutions is over, and we lost. Or they can say, If you strike me down, we’ll come back more powerful than you could ever imagine; if you do this, it’s not the end of the game, you’re just going to suffer politically for it; when we come back to power, we’re going to rebuild bigger and better than we were before.

There’s personal integrity or dignity in resisting whatever Republicans intend to do that way, but it also is a good message for Republicans to keep in mind. Is it really worth it for me to take this vote? Is it really worth it for me to support this bad deed, the pardon of the January 6th rioters? They might gain or sense or feel a brief victory over Democrats, but it will be fleeting and there will be recriminations to them for having done the wrong thing. And it might not actually be in their best interest to do it. But they need to be told that.

If what they see is that they’re aligning to do a bunch of crazy bad things that, if you were on the other foot, Democrats would pay a huge political price for, and Democrats are curled into the fetal position, they’re going to say there’s no consequence coming for this. Those people aren’t going to impose consequences on us for doing something that we know is wrong, so why not just do it?

Sargent: Just boiling it down: Democrats have to get out there and very loudly and in unison essentially say, What you’re about to do is going to cause catastrophe, major consequences for the country, and we will make you own every bit of it.

Beutler: Absolutely.

Sargent: That’s the critical thing. In the background, though, there’s almost like a worry among Democrats about the grassroots. You’ve touched on this in some of your pieces so I want to ask you this. A big question right now is whether there’s going to be an energetic grassroots response to all this stuff. Again, the media coverage here is really almost rushing to declare democratic energy about all this to be diffused and exhausted. You suggested that a pro-democracy movement might emerge from hibernation once Trump really gets going. I can see a pessimistic scenario where he pardons the January 6-ers, Democrats punt; they say, Well, I don’t really want to take this on anymore. Trump won, after all, right?

And it’s a hard thing to explain to the public why they should care about the pardoning of January 6-ers. It’s not easy to explain, but Democrats do have to explain it. If they don’t, you could see a situation where there’s not really much of a grassroots response to that type of thing. What do you think is going to happen?

Beutler: It will absolutely depend on how aggressive Donald Trump is in his efforts to corrupt the government. Let’s just stick with the January 6th rioters. Does he really intend to pardon all of them, even the ones that were beating police officers with hockey sticks and stuff like that?

Sargent: Brian, let me jump in and say there’s a question for some of these nominees at the hearings. Look, Democrats suck at political theatrics some of the time, but other times, especially on January 6, they’ve been very good. They could learn from this. I would advise Democrats to, at Pam Bondi’s confirmation hearing, put up video.

Beutler: Yeah, they have the video clipped. They have it.

Sargent: Put up video of cops being attacked violently and then say, If Trump pardons that man right there—you see that guy swinging that thing—would you support that?

Beutler: Absolutely. And obviously, if that’s what he goes and does, the chances that it will galvanize pro-democracy Americans to protest or take to the streets or organize or start ... If he pardons a particularly violent rioter, it’s fair game for an advocacy organization to basically track that person’s future activities. If they commit more violent political acts, then they can say that’s the guy that Donald Trump pardoned, he’s responsible for subsequent acts of violence that that person committed.

There’s all kinds of ways people can become galvanized because of what Donald Trump does. That’s why I say it depends how aggressive he is. Here’s the case for optimism: Donald Trump is very serious about trying to do a bunch of very dastardly things. So people will be motivated to reconvene a real opposition. Once he gets into power, if he starts abusing that power, people are going to take notice and they’re going to want to do something about it.

Sargent: So Brian, what can Democrats do to soften the ground, as it were, to make it more likely that this pro-democracy movement does reconstitute in the face of some of the abuses that are coming?

Beutler: What I’m concerned they’re going to do is what you alluded to, which is that they’re going to, in some sense, hector the most activist elements of the big D and small d democratic base in the country and say, Elections have consequences, more people should have voted, and take the wind out of the sails of any new resistance to Trump. What I think they should say is: Elections do have consequences, but they don’t entitle anybody to break the law. They don’t entitle anybody to violate the Constitution, and they don’t entitle anybody to encourage political violence against the opposition.

If that’s the attitude that they take, then the public at large will see them as natural allies to a ground level resistance to Trump. But it’s not just as simple as saying that. It’s acting like it. It’s acting like, Yes, you won the election, but that doesn’t mean that you get to appoint a fascist to run the FBI. I find it a little bit mystifying and a little bit concerning that they’re trying to let news cycles essentially defeat these nominees instead of trying to defeat them themselves.

If they want to see an energized electorate rise up against the incoming Trump administration, they need to act like there’s something to get energized about. They’re currently not really doing that. But again, we’re in this transition period after Trump won the election outright. There’s some reason to suspect that that more stiff-spined opposition politics is just going to wait until we’re closer to confirmation votes, to Trump issuing executive orders that are clearly illegal or corrupt or immoral. That’ll be the moment when we know which way things are going to go.

Sargent: Brian Beutler, I really hope they listen to you this time. It couldn’t be clearer what’s happening, and yet Democrats don’t seem to want to engage it the way they should be. Thanks for coming on, man.

Beutler: It’s always great 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.