Post-Election Updates: Everything You Need to Know

lev radin / Shutterstock.com

Renowned Journalist Greg Sargent from the The New Republic sat down with MeidasTouch co-founder Ben Meiselas to discuss the recent post-election developments. Meiselas outlines the major developments and their implications.

Here is a lightly edited transcript of the interview:

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Two big things just happened with major implications for the future of Donald Trump’s agenda. Trump has tapped Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general, and a number of Republican senators are reportedly aghast at the pick. On another front, Republican senators elected John Thune as their next majority leader, passing over Rick Scott, who was the first choice of MAGA influencers. And this has some MAGA personalities screaming that the GOP has already betrayed Trump.

These two things raise a question: How bad will the splits between the GOP establishment and MAGA really get? Today, we’re chatting about this with Ben Meiselas, the co-founder of MeidasTouch Network, who has been closely tracking the MAGA response to all these developments and is a good chronicler of MAGA madness in general. Good to have you on, Ben.

Ben Meiselas: Good to be here, Greg.

Sargent: Ben, here we are. Already Trump has tapped Matt Gaetz, of all people, as his choice for attorney general. Senate GOP aides are telling Politico’s Andrew Desiderio that there’s no way Gaetz gets confirmed. CNN’s Melanie Zanona reports that House Republicans literally ran away from her when she tried to get comment on Gaetz. This shows right off the bat that MAGA chaos is going to rain. Gaetz pushed false flag conspiracy theories about Trump’s insurrection and has been a big defender of Trump supporters who attack the Capitol. What do you think of all this?

Meiselas: Well, as I’ve been telling people, the best case scenario over the next four years is absolute chaos, total drama, utter incompetence, and hardship. That’s the best case scenario, knowing that Trump’s going to be Trump. He’s not out there [saying], This is my legacy. No, he’s going to do what he said: retribution, vengeance, rule like a dictator. Those are the things that he said he was going to do. In the best case scenario, he does the things he says—2,000 percent tariffs, appointing the people like he is doing right now, bloody mass deportations, chaos, drama, all caps posts. That’s your best case scenario.

Your more likely scenario, and worst case scenario, is that he effectively implements these things, and we see America turned into something out of our worst nightmares. I’m not trying to be hyperbolic. I’ve always tried to be leveled and measured when the corporate media was pretending that this was all normal and we were saying it wasn’t. Now everything that we said was going to happen is happening. Now I hear people are Googling, Can I take back my vote? What’s a tariff? Are the deportations going to impact me? Yeah, too late.

Sargent: They are. Some on the left are pointing out that Gaetz has some good qualities to him. On surveillance issues, for instance, maybe he has spoken out against abuses. Fine, granting that; but at the same time, this is not a pro–rule of law pick. This is somebody who is going to try to carry out Trump’s vendetta against his enemies. It’s pretty clear that he’s somebody who’s going to try to prosecute enemies without cause. I’d love to be wrong about that—and if I’m proven wrong about that, I’ll be the first to say so. But I want to say one thing here, Ben. Maybe the one good thing about this is that it forces an immediate debate over whether Trump’s attorney general should carry out those prosecutions that he has threatened and force Republicans to go on record and defend it right off the bat. Why not, right?

Meiselas: I’ve had this conversation with a lot of people that I know where I said, You know what, part of me wants him just to rip the Band-Aid off, do all of those things so that America could understand the pain and harm it’s going to cause. Both my own self-reflection, and often what people will tell me when I go through that hypothetical exercises—someone will say to me, Hey, Ben, I don’t want that to happen. I have a gay person in my family. I have a trans person in my family. I have a family member who’s been working here for 30 years who doesn’t have their papers, but paid taxes and contributed to society. So you go through that hypothetical exercise, it’s going to cause a massive amount of pain to human beings.

And Greg, we went from a period of having record GDP growth, low unemployment for record amounts of times, record-breaking stock markets, energy independence. You go through the list, America was leading the world in all of these things—very stable financial markets—to now we’re talking about the self-imposition of varying degrees of suffering.

Sargent: I want to move on, speaking of major mistakes: Tulsi Gabbard is Trump’s first pick for director of national intelligence. I don’t even know where to begin with that. I was trying to come up with an equivalent that a Democratic president-elect could pick for DNI that would be anything like that, and nothing comes to mind. What do you think of this?

Meiselas: It is horrifying. Hillary Clinton warned several years ago. She said that she believes—her words—that Russia was grooming individuals to implement their agenda, and many people believe she was referencing Tulsi Gabbard directly there. Tulsi Gabbard has made posts that word-for-word parrot Russian propaganda about Ukraine, talking about bio labs and why the bio labs justified Russia invading Ukraine. Just word for word stuff. And this is our security apparatus. And then you talk about your secretary of defense being a Fox News host who, granted, had served in the military, but still an individual who has zero experience. We’ve went from the most qualified people and stability to the least qualified people and potentially overtly antagonistic to our national interests.

Sargent: You brought up Ukraine, so I want to bring up John Thune. Senator John Thune, who is now going to be Senate majority leader, has been a vigorous proponent of aid to Ukraine. Some MAGA types angrily pulled up his statements on this to point at the fact that Thune supports Ukraine, so he’s a betrayer of MAGA. Thanks for being so clear about it, guys, but the key in these statements from Thune is that he forcefully described a Putin victory in Ukraine as a potential long-term threat to NATO and our allies. That’s very much anathema to the MAGA worldview. Donald Trump Jr. recently had that disgusting tweet in which he said we were going to cut off Zelensky’s “allowance.” So I got to think, we’re seeing this Gaetz and Gabbard stuff, but over here on the other side, there’s at least a glimmer of a possibility that Senate Republicans might put up some resistance to a pro-Putin agenda by Trump. What do you think the prospects for that are? Might there be some resistance?

Meiselas: Yeah. Look, the fact that we’re talking though—in terms of a glimmer of a possibility that an ally like Ukraine and our allies like NATO would get the support from the United States—speaks to how far we’ve all fallen especially. Not we per se, but as a nation, where we have to hope that a Republican from South Dakota can be the grownup in the room and push back against the most gross excesses and anti-American aspects of Trump’s agenda while compromising with other aspects. Just the very framing of the question talks about the dire position. How did we even get to the point where supporting our allies either makes you a RINO or a lefty or a liberal? By saying, Hey, NATO is an important alliance, that that’s under attack?

Sargent: You’ve been documenting the MAGA reaction to Thune. Can you talk about that? We’re seeing a lot of he’s a RINO. We’re seeing a lot of this is a betrayal. We had some significant figures in the MAGA universe object. Laura Loomer, Charlie Kirk, Representative Anna Paulina Luna, they all reacted very badly to Thune’s victory. Other big players like Fox News’s Sean Hannity had endorsed Rick Scott as the true MAGA candidate. Can you tell us why specifically Thune’s win is getting MAGA so angry right now?

Meiselas: Well, because they believe that that’s part of Mitch McConnell, who served as the leader of the Republicans in the Senate for 18 years, the longest in history—part of McConnell’s legacy. Trump hates McConnell. He thought that McConnell was undermining parts of his agenda, even though if you think about it from the other perspective, Mitch McConnell is someone who literally allowed the Supreme Court to be reshaped in the way it did [and] handed Donald Trump all of these victories. But that was not MAGA enough for them, for not passing the purity test. The MAGA world views this as a McConnell handoff, to extend McConnell’s legacy to John Thune and that John Thune is not going to be a 100 percent Trump MAGA purist. Today, you’ve had a number of MAGA Congress members who were interviewed in various media outlets who said, If Trump tells us to jump, we jump. If he tells us to scratch our head, we scratch our head. We don’t decide anything on our own. We take orders. That’s what our job is to do.

Sargent: Ben, you referred to a quote from a House Republican. I want to read the whole thing so people can actually hear it because it’s so amazing. GOP Representative Troy Nehls said to reporters today after meeting with Trump—Republicans met with Trump—If Donald Trump says jump three feet high and scratch your head, we all jump three feet high and scratch our head. Now, according to Melanie Zanona, the reporter for CNN, he was wearing a Donald Trump tie while he said this. What I think this actually meant is it wasn’t an observation of Republican subservience to Trump, like a critical observation, which it sounds like. What actually happened here is Troy Nehls is reassuring Trump and MAGA that if you say jump three feet high and scratch your head, we will, sir, we will.

What we’re actually seeing here are the immediate fault lines that are developing in the Republican Party over those who want absolute subservience to Trump, want the Republican Congress to be nothing more than handmaidens to Trump, and some others who maybe feel a little bit less like that, like John Thune and so forth. So I’m hopeful that there’s actually a genuine impulse to try to hold back the MAGA tide here among some of these Republicans. I’m just not that optimistic.

Meiselas: He’s a man wearing a tie with another man’s face in it, from a co-equal branch of government while wearing like these ridiculous Trump fake gold sneakers. Again, if you saw this type of stuff in North Korea, you would be like, That could never happen here. You remember the movie, Sacha Baron Cohen, the emperor or whatever it was—he came through New York and he was on the camel and then he would run in the Olympics, but he would have his gun and he would shoot the competitors so that he would always get in first place and he would surround himself with just ... It was based off like a combination of Gaddafi, Kim Jong Un, and Saddam Hussein and that type of dictator. That’s what we have here in the United States right now. It exists. It’s happening now. We have Republicans wearing ties with the guy’s face on it. This is all bizarre. This should not be a political thing. This should just be like, What the hell is going on? I see people in the country—more people are wising up to it—just going about their day. And I’m just thinking to myself, Do y’all realize what’s about to happen in this country? Do we all realize what’s going on right now?

Sargent: I want to read a tweet from Hussein Ibish, a writer, about all of this that’s going on: “He promised madness, looting, revenge and autocracy. And he got a mandate for them. Here we go. This is indeed the American Brexit: a devastating self-inflicted wound that will take at least a generation to heal.” Now I don’t know whether it’s going to amount to that or not, but the earliest signs right now, maybe with the exception of the Thune pick in the Senate, really do point to an interpretation of this election that’s somewhat like that, that this is probably going to shape up as a very serious act of self-sabotage by our nation.

Meiselas: I couldn’t agree more. It’s really unfortunate because we were at the precipice of something great. I’m not trying to be a fanboy for Joe Biden and say he’s the greatest guy, but look, he inherited crap. He did, based on the objective criteria that we used to hold people accountable, the job that he was hired to do. If you were a religious person, he was somebody who went to church regularly. If you’re a family-oriented person, you don’t get more family oriented than someone like a Joe Biden. Regardless of any personal or religious views, he is a man of high moral character who got the job done that he was hired to do, brought us to a point where we had endless opportunities to expand freedoms, to continue to expand upon a booming economy without saddling it with tariffs and the type of debt that Trump’s about to impose upon us all. For all of the workers and union workers who voted against their interest, Biden had for the first time policies that were bottom up, middle out, that actually focused on their jobs: brought back their jobs, protected unions and collective bargaining and put the right people at the national labor relations board so that they got a fair shake and a fair shot.

We were given this A/B test of someone who was a decent man, high moral character, high performing at the work, got results and did it without drama. That’s the A side. And then on the B side, we were actually given the worst possible choice from every aspect, from someone who’s convicted of crimes to someone found liable to severe sexual assault, who’s on tape and camera bragging about sexually assaulting women. Somebody who said that he does not support NATO. Someone who’s bankrupted lots of businesses in the past, who’s selling watches from China for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Sargent: Ben, can I just jump in and say he ran the economy into the ground? He inherited a good economy from Barack Obama and he ran into the ground because, or at least partly because, his pathological refusal to take the biggest crisis this country has faced in a long time seriously. His refusal to take it seriously hampered our response and made the crisis much worse than it had to be. To your point also, Ben, Biden had reoriented the country maybe away from its neoliberal drift, at least to some degree—his is the most pro-worker administration in decades. He had really started up the climate transition; he was unleashing major investments all throughout the heartland in green energy manufacturing, moving us toward a cleaner economy, getting us on that trajectory. And now Trump may just repeal all that, or at least do it immense damage, throw our effort to manage the climate transition into sharp reverse. He’ll make immigration much, much, much worse than it has to be. On every front right now, things look really grim.

If you’re voter out there who said, Well, he’s crazy, but the economy was good before Covid and that wasn’t his fault, and he seems to know what he’s doing on the economy and inflation’s really bad right now. The low-energy guy can’t seem to get under control. We need someone strong, it sure looks like that was not a very good way to read the situation.

Meiselas: I agree with you. Again, to see so many groups, without naming them because we all know what happened, voting literally to cause a great deal of pain on themselves, their family members, and the country out of anger, out of whatever. But I think we have to take measure of how this happened. We have to recognize that during this election, Donald Trump and MAGA were able to seep into the culture with the right-wing podcasts that people didn’t even think, Wow, that’s a filter toward getting into MAGA, starting with getting young boys and young people with gaming into certain types of podcasts, self-health, weightlifting, sports, that then pushes them into another direction. And before you know it ... They’re more right-wing than anyone would think of Gen Z. So there are learning lessons that we can take.

I certainly hope that there are future elections that are going to exist in this country. Trump’s going to try to destroy every single guardrail and the best case scenario is that people wake up, that there’s going to be, unfortunately, mass disturbances that are going to be taking place as people wake up to the pain.

Sargent: In an optimistic spirit, you can actually envision some faultlines between MAGA and less MAGA Republicans in the Senate beyond Ukraine. It’s possible some Republicans won’t support a complete end to asylum seeking in the U.S. or might not want to dramatically roll back legal immigration or might not want to support an immense increase in spending to carry out bloody mass deportations using giant camps. On tariffs, you might also see substantial disagreements. That’s the real reason for the anger from MAGA today about John Thune becoming majority leader. They do see on some level that his agenda could run into some opposition, even among Republicans. I’m not super optimistic about it, but it’s an actual possibility.

Meiselas: Yeah. One of the things with Trump is frankly ... All he would have to do right now, given that the Biden economy will continue to grow, keep it on autopilot. Actually having like my dog, Taquito, in the White House would produce better results than Donald Trump because doing nothing is probably the best thing that can be done right now, at least when it comes to domestic economic policy and not interfering with what Biden’s created.

And then Trump could play golf and take credit for everything, but he’s incapable of that. That’s the thing about his pathology. He always needs to overcompensate and get involved and control every aspect of people’s lives. The way he said in the speech, Women, I’m going to be your protector. I’m going to be your protector. And to statements like that, What man would want another man to be the protector of his wife who’s been found liable for sexual assault?

But anyway, that’s Trump’s pathology. That’s where he goes with these things. That’s where he’s going to go with these things. I hope that they check him because he certainly is testing them right now with, Are they going to be 100 percent loyal or are they going to push back amongst his greatest excesses? He’s front-loading them. So it’s not like he’ll just trickle this out. No, no, no. He’s got to do those things. Let’s see if there’s any pushback.

Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you what, Ben, to close this out. This is a major test for those Republicans who, on some level somewhere, maybe don’t want the MAGA takeover of their party to be complete. Not apologizing for the pre-Trump Republican party; it was also terrible. Still, there are Republicans out there who don’t seem to want to end aid to Ukraine or pull us out of NATO. I’m thinking that Matt Gaetz, who’s clearly being picked by Trump in order to violate the constitution on Trump’s behalf and prosecute his enemies, and Tulsi Gabbard, who’s clearly being picked to pull us out of NATO or really deal the Alliance an immense blow ... Look, let’s make the John Thunes and other Republicans in his mold stand up and say what they think of these things right now. This is a test for them.

Meiselas: I agree. Hope springs eternal. We have to use our platforms to educate Americans to apply pressure as best we all can for democratic processes to prevail. That’s what we’re going to keep on doing here each and every day. It is not going to be an easy one, but it’s a fight that we’re ready for and prepare.

Sargent: Ben, thanks so much for coming on with us. I wish we could have a conversation about something a little less disparaging, but that’s where we are now.

Meiselas: Right. I forget if it was the Frodo-Gandalf quote, about sometimes we’re not in control of what the times thrust upon us, but we have to do what we can in the times that we live in. And so we’re all called to action right now, in our own small way.

Sargent: Absolutely. Thanks so much, Ben.

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.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the November 14 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.