Transcript: Republican Senator’s Surprise Takedown of Trump Shames GOP

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 21 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.

Earlier this week, Donald Trump confirmed in a 4 a.m. tweet that he will be using the military to carry out mass deportations. He also confirmed that he’ll declare a national emergency to do so. All this prompted a sharp response from a Republican senator, Rand Paul of Kentucky. He denounced the idea as a “huge mistake,” and he said it would send a “terrible image” to the country and the world. But Rand Paul is a fringe figure in the GOP. Why is it left to someone on the fringe to denounce Trump’s vile threats? Where are the rest of Republicans on this? How far will Trump get? We’re chatting about all this—and why it poses such a menace to the country—with Atlantic writer Tom Nichols, who’s one of the best critics out there on the MAGA-fication of the GOP. Great to have you back on, Tom.

Tom Nichols: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: This week, a conservative tweeted that Trump will “declare a national emergency” and will “use military assets” to deal with immigration “through a mass deportation program.” Trump responded at around 4 a.m., “TRUE!!!” Tom, I think it’s a little unclear what he means, but Stephen Miller, who’s now going to have a high-level White House role, has said that military funds will be used to build giant camps to detain migrants before their mass removals. What’s your broad sense of what Trump’s really proposing here?

Nichols: Wow. It’s hard to say. So much of what Trump’s trying to do in terms of capturing the government for his own ends and his own protection and his own profit is pretty easy to follow. This may just be red meat thrown at the MAGA faithful, and it’ll be like the wall that didn’t get built, that Mexico didn’t pay for. The problem is that so many institutions in American government are going to resist this. The military hates domestic missions. They hate it. They don’t see that as part of their professional ethos. Where are you going to put these camps? Who’s going to build them? How long will it take? What states are going to accept them and not accept them? How much transportation? It’s the kind of thing that sounds great when you’re at a sweaty rally at 11 o’clock at night somewhere.

With that said, he’s the president. If he says it, it’s a policy, and somebody’s going to try and do it.

Sargent: Well, Senator Rand Paul is clearly taking this very seriously. Here’s what Paul had to say about this. In an interview with Newsmax, he stressed that he supports a crackdown on undocumented immigrants, but doesn’t want the military used. Listen to this.

Rand Paul (audio voiceover): I will not support an emergency to put the army into our cities. I think that’s a huge mistake. I’m not for the army marching up and down our streets. I think it’s a terrible image to send the world. It’s a terrible image for us as citizens. And so I hope he will think twice about trying to use an emergency edict to have the army patrolling our country. There is, to my mind, some question of the people—the housekeeper who’s been here 30 years, I don’t see the military putting her in handcuffs and marching her down the street to an encampment. I don’t really want to see that.

Sargent: Tom, that’s quite a harsh takedown. What does it say that it required a figure like this in the GOP to say this? Are you hearing anything like this from other Republicans?

Nichols: The other Republicans seem to be headed off into the tall grass about this stuff because anybody with experience in government knows this is going to be tough to do.

Rand Paul’s an interesting case because for all that fringe kookery that he’s associated with, he does have this consistent anti–big government, anti–overarching executive power approach. It’s interesting to say Rand Paul is actually defending this conservative Republican tradition of saying, No, the president can’t just declare an emergency and set up giant camps and unleash the military in the streets of the United States. I have had a lot of bad things to say about Rand Paul, but I’m sitting here going, The guy’s right about this.

Especially, as a Republican idea, this is so against everything Republicans had ever stood for in the past. Only Paul seems to be saying, Hey, technically I’m still a Republican and we would never have gone for this with anybody else.

Sargent: You’ve written incredibly eloquently about the MAGA-fication of the GOP. It does seem very clear that senior Republicans are conspicuously not condemning something that really is a heinous threat to the U.S. in many ways. Shouldn’t they be telling the public that this is not going to happen?

Nichols: Let’s imagine that we’re strategizing for a senior Republican Senator or a senior House member. If you come out against it, you’re going to get dogpiled by Trump’s minions and by the hottest MAGA trolls. You’re going to get angry phone calls and threats and letters, and all kinds of crap will rain from the skies on your head. If you support it, the last few people in your district or state who might have thought that you were a reasonable politician are going to freak out and say, Wow, you know this is crazy, and you know you’re just signing on to something nuts.

If I were advising a non-MAGA Senator—and there are plenty of them; they play at the MAGA stuff—I’d say, Listen, he wants to do this, there’s nothing good to be said either way about this. Let them get out there. Let the whole idea fall on its face.

When they come to the House or the Senate for funding, then we start asking some hard questions like, again: Where are you going to put the camps? How many people do you have? You don’t have the constitutional authority to use the military this way. Then when the whole thing falls apart, those guys are going to shrug and say, Well, I understood his frustration with immigration, and then let him take the stink bomb for it. Let it all fall on him. That’s the political approach.

What you suggested is the statesman-like patriotic approach of leveling with the American people about what a terrible idea this is. But the way Congress and the way politics works, a lot of these guys are stepping back and saying, No, not me. You’re not going to get me to touch this thing.

Sargent: To your point, it seems to me that Rand Paul does understand the larger implications of this. Number one, he gets what it means for the military to carry out the president’s domestic agenda, and the message that would send to the American people and to the world. He also gets what it’ll mean to have the military forcibly removing longtime residents who have become part of communities here. You wrote a great cover story getting at some of this: It’s going to strain the military to be asked to do it; some in the military might feel as if they’re being pushed to be loyal to Caesar and not to the Constitution of the country. Can you talk about that part of this?

Nichols: Sure. I’ll just remind people that I spent 25 years teaching senior military officers at the Naval War College. Traditionally, the military, as an institution, hates domestic missions. They just don’t like it. Their professional credo is that they defend us from foreign enemies. Of course, we all—federal employees, civilian and military—swear to defend the Constitution, but by and large, the military sees its role as protecting us against our enemies in away games, not pointing their guns at American citizens.

The danger will come if Trump gets a handful of cronies at the top of the Defense Department under, God help us, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and maybe a handful of senior officers who, with more ambition than principle, issue what they’re going to tell the rest of the military are, in fact, legal and constitutional orders.

They won’t be, but that will have to get hashed out in court. Then the chain of command will kick in, and you’re going have a lot of people at the lower level saying, Until someone tells me this is an illegal order or this is unconstitutional, it’s not up to me to make that decision. So you could have all kinds of hair-raising things happen here.

Greg, curse you for making me say nice things about Rand Paul, but in this one instance, there is an ideological consistency to a guy who has always said, Eliminate the fed, reduce the size of the government, and cut all these departments. If you truly are a small government libertarian type like Rand Paul, this idea of militarizing the country and putting soldiers into the streets to carry out presidential orders is among your worst nightmares. And it should be for any American.

Sargent: I do want to pick up on what you said about Pete Hegseth there. You can almost see a reason for Trump to pick a totally unqualified Fox News personality to head the Defense Department if he’s actually entertaining Fox News-ish fantasies like using the military to deport people. This is a guy who exists in that MAGA information universe, this place where anything can happen if Trump wills it, institutions don’t matter, etc. Can you talk about that? It sounds like you’re suggesting a scenario which could actually bring some pretty serious strains to the military.

Nichols: That’s why he’s choosing all of these [people]. Some of his appointments have been fine in the sense of what you’d expect from a right-wing presidential administration. Nobody’s whining about Marco Rubio or even Mike Waltz. But with these others ... In his first term, there were people in all these places who said no to him. And he is not going to risk people saying no to him this time.

When he was talking about firing on protesters in the streets of the U.S., he had people like Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and General Milley, the Chairman of Joint Chief, saying, You can’t do that. We’re not going to do that. That’s a bad idea. He wants somebody like Hegseth who’s going to say, Hey, that’s a great idea. I’ll go on TV and talk about it.

So that’s why he’s picking him. It’s not accidental. He doesn’t want anybody that he thinks is going to “plot” with other parts of the government to thwart him about things. I’ve been saying all along that the most important two departments he needs to capture are Justice and Defense. If he gets the lawyers in the courts and he gets the military, then he goes for the only other people with any coercive ability, which is the Intelligence community. If he manages to put the folks he’s got nominated there, he’s got the trifecta.

Sargent: He actually is choosing some of these people precisely because they’re willing to put his whims above the Constitution of the U.S. That’s the reason for picking them. Someone like Matt Gaetz, clearly as attorney general—that would be essentially his portfolio to carry out prosecutions of Trump’s enemies without cause. During Trump’s first term, I want to remind everybody, we actually had senior military officials feeling the need to go out and re-pledge their loyalty to the Constitution over Trump. This is the thing he doesn’t want to happen again.

Nichols: Right. And he doesn’t want it to happen with the lawyers at the Justice Department or the people that are responsible for keeping our national secrets. By the way, if this happens, if these people are appointed, start watching for even more dangerous or more concerning appointments below that because there are Senate confirmed positions for deputy secretary, undersecretaries, and so on. Those are the people that will actually be carrying this out. Pete Hegseth wouldn’t have the first idea of what he’s doing when he gets to the Pentagon.

Sargent: Trump and his advisors seem to be looking at some use of the Insurrection Act, maybe not exactly to send troops marching into cities, to suppress dissent from American citizens—at least one hopes—but more to allow the military, and possibly National Guards, to carry out domestic policies specifically on immigration. Can you get specific here? What do you really anticipate this looking like? What are they going to try specifically?

Nichols: That’s such a good question because I don’t think they’ve thought it through. During the first Trump term, and again now, I always think of that great line about Watergate, which is: “These aren’t very bright guys and things got out of hand.”

One thing they could do is that they could try to do a proof of concept by going to a red state with a friendly governor where they get them to activate the National Guard, and they round up a bunch of people and they see how that goes, trying not to invoke the Insurrection Act or any of the legal machinery that they’d need to do if they were sending in the regular army.

Again, I’m not sure they’ve figured it out. He’s said a lot of things on a lot of stages over this past couple of years. How they’re going to make that happen, I don’t know. But that they will try and do something? Yes, just like he did with the wall.

Sargent: I think that’s a very realistic scenario. You could easily see them doing a test run in a red state.

Nichols: Right, and a place where they could use local forces instead of the regular army with the acquiescence of a red state governor who says, I’ve got an emergency here in the state of wherever, and let’s start knocking on doors—just to get people used to the idea.

Sargent: Stephen Miller, of course, has actually talked about trying to use red state National Guards to go into blue states. That’s fantasy stuff, at least—although the boundaries for what fantasy is are really expanding at a very rapid pace, unfortunately.

Nichols: This is a place where people need to take a deep breath and be a little bit stoic. A lot of this stuff is thrown out there to get Trump’s critics and blue state voters to get their hair on fire—

Sargent: No question.

Nichols: —and to freak out and to run around in circles and scream. One thing at time. One of the ways that you handle people like this who are trying to flood the zone is that you don’t react to every single thing. The election was only a couple of weeks ago, and we’re all exhausted already. That’s the point.

Sargent: For sure. They want to exhaust us. They also want to create an aura of terror in blue states.

Nichols: And inevitability, like this is going to happen, you can’t stop it. There’s nothing you can do. You might as well just stand over our way. In fact, they’re the ones that are going to be setting up a lot of Hail Mary passes, having Matt Gaetz investigating people and a lot of stuff like that. They’re trying to make it seem like this is a steamroller and you just can’t do anything about it, but it doesn’t help if people are running around freaking out about stuff that really isn’t going to happen. Or things that are unlikely and difficult to get done, let’s put it that way.

Sargent: I want to endorse this 100 percent. It really isn’t clear how far he’ll get either with the mass deportations or with the prosecutions of enemies. You could see intermediate scenarios, along the lines of what you suggested, with test runs in red states. Then of course footage will be leaked to Fox News to make the MAGA masses think that a big shock and all campaign is underway, and everybody should be really, really impressed by how Stephen Miller is acting with lightning speed and force and so forth. Propaganda is going to be a big, big, big part of all this.

Nichols: Look at how many times they screwed the pooch on the Muslim ban when they came into office.

Sargent: Yeah. They got it done in the end though.

Nichols: They got it done in the end, but the net effect wasn’t particularly noticeable to a lot of Americans. It made life very difficult for some people from some countries. But this notion of we’re just going to shut down people coming in the U.S. till we know what the hell is going on didn’t happen. They kept sending it up and it kept getting sent back by the courts and they’d send it up—until basically they came up with something that was bad but face-saving.

This is a time to measure out your mental energy about this stuff day-by-day. Otherwise you’re walking right into the trap that’s being set for you, which is to be overwhelmed, exhausted, and supine because you feel like it’s just all inevitable and nothing can be done.

Sargent: Absolutely right. I do want to close this out though with a somewhat less sanguine thought. We are going to see Republican senators tested in a major way. There are going to be times when they are going to have to decide whose side they’re on: the Constitution and the country or the cult of Donald Trump. What do you anticipate happening there?

Nichols: Many of them will fail that test. They may finally link arms on at least Gaetz, which I think isn’t going to happen. Gaetz is not going to become attorney general, but I could be wrong. I suspect Gabbard isn’t going to make it. [It’s] interesting that the right-wing New York Post today said, Not these two.

But the problem is—and this is why, in a recent piece, I argued the Senate leadership should go to Trump right now and say, Listen, there’s four of them on block that are not going to make it, so let’s just get past that right now and get working on other nominees—Trump wants to fight them out one by one by one with a giant crap storm with each nominee.

That means that, after Gaetz, he may get what he wants. One thing that won’t ... I shouldn’t say this because I hate to speak it into existence, but it does seem like the senators are digging in about recess appointments, because what Trump was asking them is: take a walk, just take a walk. Senators have ... I worked in the Senate—the only place where you get egos to match the White House is down the street in the Senate.

Telling a bunch of senators, Take a walk and ignore what I’m about to do, does not go over well with a lot of these guys, even the ones that love him. It’ll work with Tommy Tuberville, guys like that who don’t take their job seriously, but most of these senators are not just going to say, OK, your lordship. But on the other hand, I’ve learned never to say never when it comes to the Republicans now.

Sargent: I fear that you’re going to prove right in suggesting that they’re going to fail a bunch of really big tests. Maybe not all of them, but a bunch of them that really count. Tom Nichols, thanks so much for coming on with us, man. It’s great to talk to you as always.

Nichols: Thanks, Greg.

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.