Transcript: George Conway on Why Trump Will Be Removed from Office

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 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 Trump’s own allies and many other Republicans have quietly started to fear the worst about the midterms. According to new media reports, they worry the loss of the House could be bigger than expected. They’ve even started to contemplate the possible loss of the Senate too. What’s got them rattled is there’s no sign Trump can get the focus back onto the economy. He just exploded with wild new tirades about his ballroom, about Fox News, and about judges, and there are even signs that Trump’s spin about the war in Iran is backfiring for Republicans as well.Few people understand the interaction between Trump’s derangement and GOP politics better than George Conway, the former GOPer turned Trump critic who’s running for Congress in New York City as a Democrat. So we’re talking to him about all of it. George, nice to have you on.George Conway: Nice to be on.Sargent: So just in the last few hours, Trump exploded on Truth Social because he thinks Fox News isn’t giving the California GOP gubernatorial candidate enough attention. He erupted because a judge blocked parts of his ballroom. His feud with the Pope continues. He just posted something that looked a little like opposition research about the Pope. George, anything but the economy, right?Conway: Right! And look, he is somebody who has always been marked by personal obsessions, by whatever’s bugging him, whatever he sees on television, whoever he thinks has slighted him. And in a sense, this is nothing new, but he’s reached a different stage here because, even though he was doing a lot, there were weekends where we scratched our heads and said, what’s wrong with this guy? 25th Amendment, and so on.But the difference now is that he’s less inhibited. People like him who are narcissistic sociopaths get worse over time. And in addition to that, his age—and I’m not saying he has dementia, but certainly his brain isn’t functioning as well as it ever did, even though I don’t think it really functioned that well. He’s becoming more disinhibited and he’s got fewer people around him who can tell him, don’t say that, don’t do that, please put the phone down. Not that they ever really could do it, but fewer people—basically, if you tell him no, you’re gone. And that’s something that didn’t happen as much in the first Trump term, but now he’s just not listening to anybody. And as these types of personalities—these sick people, and we’ve seen them throughout history—get more and more powerful, they get more and more detached from reality, and as a result they become more dangerous. Not only to themselves, but also to the people they supposedly serve.Sargent: There’s a Politico report that’s really striking about rising GOP anxiety about the midterms. It said Republicans are exasperated by the constant lunacy from the White House. One GOP operative said this: “Everything is made more difficult by the nonsense coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” A former advisor to Trump’s 2024 campaign said this: “The road to victory runs through a consistent economic message. Unfortunately, Trump ignores the roadmap.” George, you know how Republican politics works. What’s going on with all this? Who’s trying to communicate what to whom here?Conway: I think they’re trying to communicate something to Trump, but he’s not listening. He no longer cares. He is off in his own reality now, and the Republicans are expressing concern because they know he’s driving them off a cliff. And you see it also in a lot of the Republican influencers—the Megyn Kellys, the Joe Rogans, and the Tucker Carlsons of the world. They’re basically talking about the 25th Amendment now. And what’s happened—and I think this is happening all up and down the MAGA food chain, from the electeds who realize they’re no longer getting any usefulness from Trump, to the influencers who realize that there’s nothing in it for them anymore. And they’re getting sick of having to do the split-brain thing, where they’re saying one thing and reality is hitting them in the face with the other—the cognitive dissonance, in other words, is breaking down. And the problem for them is there’s only one way out of it, and that’s to get rid of Donald Trump. He is not going to listen to them. He is not going to tone it down. If anything, he’s going to get worse because he is completely detached from reality.And there was this report—I don’t know if you saw it, probably about a month ago—in Axios, where Ted Cruz apparently had spoken to the president privately and said, you’re driving us off a cliff, in substance, and we’re going to get killed in the midterms. And this was, I think, even before the war in Iran. And Trump just said, “Fuck you, Ted.” Literally, that’s what he was quoted as saying.