Transcript: Trump’s Secret War Fears Leak as GOP Panics: “Alarm Bells”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 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.Donald Trump is losing control of events to a degree that appears new, and he’s furious about it. He unleashed a series of wild Truth Social tirades over the war, at the news media, and at Democrats. He’s reportedly been very angry over gas prices, and he’s even imagining himself in the role of a Jimmy Carter–like figure. Meanwhile, Republicans are starting to sound alarm bells over prices and fear they could get killed in the midterms, according to another report.If you listen to Trump’s language, you can see that he actually did think he could rule as an autocrat who single-handedly decrees how all events will go. There’s a reason he thought this. Trump and the people around him intended his second term as the culmination of efforts to concentrate quasi-unlimited powers in the presidency. So it’s urgent that this be seen to fail. Journalist David Sirota of The Lever narrates a podcast called Master Plan, and its second season is all about that vision of the presidency. So we’re talking to him about all this now. David, nice to have you on.David Sirota: Thanks so much for having me.Sargent: So Donald Trump just exploded on Truth Social over media coverage of the war. He said this:“I’m winning the war by a lot. Things are going very well. Our military has been amazing. And if you read the fake news, you would actually think we are losing the war. The anti-America fake news media is rooting for Iran to win, but it’s not going to happen because I’m in charge.”David, note that line—“I’m in charge.” I think Trump’s been asserting he has quasi-absolute control a lot lately. Have you been noticing that?Sirota: I have. And he’s sort of shocked that he doesn’t have control, certainly of world events. But he’s gotten used to the idea that he gets to call the shots—he and he alone—not in a co-equal branch of government. He genuinely sees himself as an elected king. That’s, underneath all of this, a big part of what we’re experiencing right now. The culmination, really, of this idea that the president is the only branch of government—not just the executive branch, but he individually is the executive branch—who gets to determine everything that goes on in the country in the way that he wants. It’s an incredibly dangerous idea, but we have to understand it as a culmination of a trend and not just something Donald Trump created. Donald Trump is wielding powers that were given to him—and to the presidency—over many years.Sargent: You really got at a critical point there by saying that he really genuinely thinks of himself and himself alone as being the only arm of government that actually exists—not just that matters, that actually exists. He shows up at the Supreme Court to try and lord it over the justices. When it comes to birthright citizenship, it looks like he’s going to lose there. But him sitting there glaring at the justices as if they are showing impudence by exercising their role in the constitutional scheme is really the thing to pay attention to here. He simply does not think that Congress or the judiciary should have any say in anything.Sirota: That’s exactly right. But that is an idea that has been sold to the country for a very long time—both through our media and through political and policy decisions. We have come to this idea that the only thing that matters is the presidential election. The only thing that matters is who’s the president. The only thing that matters is the executive branch. Congress has in many ways receded from using its power, because for a lot of members of Congress, it’s just easier not to use their power. Let’s use the war as a great example here. Donald Trump wakes up one day and essentially starts World War III. There is no authorization. There’s no public sales pitch about why this war should happen. The Democrats have had to fight to try to get a couple of votes on this war. People might be asking, Why doesn’t Congress want to be more assertive here? I think underneath this particular fight is the idea that members of Congress aren’t really looking to go on record as to whether they support a war or not.The crazy thing, if you chart the trajectory of this, is it seems like the lesson from the Iraq War debacle is not that Congress should stop wars—it’s that congresspeople should simply not have to vote on these wars to create political problems for them back home. It’s a really scary deferral of power to the executive branch.Sargent: Yes, and the Republican Party has supported him in his waging of this war without congressional assent or congressional debate of any kind. For that reason—because Republicans don’t want to have to go on record—Democrats have been trying here and there to force votes on the war.