Transcript: Trump’s Angry New Threats Hint Darkly at What’s Coming
Glasser: Well, first of all, deep breath … and let’s just say, here we are again, asking the same questions: Are we going to take Donald Trump literally and seriously this time? What more needs to happen for his critics to understand that while he may not do 100 percent of everything he says, he means much of it? And if there’s one thing we know about Trump’s next term, it’s that he campaigned on a platform of revenge and retribution that is consistent, by the way, with many of the themes that he emphasized in his first term, even if he wasn’t always able to fully follow through on them. So it seems to me that a strong throughline for Donald Trump has always been the desire to use the tools and institutions of the federal government as essentially personal weapons and to make sure that they are used as instruments to punish his enemies, to punish people he views as disloyal, and to carry out his personal whims.
For example, Greg, people have not paid enough attention to the fact that even one of Trump’s transition co-chairs, Howard Lutnick, the Wall Street billionaire who is in charge of vetting personnel for the new administration, has explicitly said repeatedly that appointees in the new Trump administration will be vetted not just for their loyalty to Donald Trump’s policies but to their loyalty to the man himself. That’s always been what set apart Trump, I think, from other presidents: a view that essentially he is the totality of the government, that people should respond to him personally and are there at his pleasure rather than serving, as their oath says, the Constitution and the people of the United States. And if you don’t want to take that seriously, you’re going to misread the intentions of this new administration.
Sargent: You raised a really critical point there, which is that Trump openly and explicitly campaigned on a vow to violate his oath of office. That’s something he actually sold to his followers as a plus. To your other point, Trump tried to use the Justice Department to investigate his enemies during his first term, and mostly failed at that. But in your piece, you report, alarmingly, that Trump has actually learned how to get his way from the bureaucracy now and that he’ll be surrounded this time with loyalists—like that guy—who don’t have the qualms about abusing power that some of those around Trump the first time did. Can you talk about this? What is it likely to look like in the real world, in the context of the Justice Department and other agencies, targeting his enemies in various ways? What can we expect?
