Transcript: Trump’s Cabinet of Sex-Abusers Is Blowing Up in His Face

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 6 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 loyalists are engaged in wild new contortions to defend his manifestly unfit nominees. On Thursday, Senator Tommy Tuberville actually said Trump is a better judge of his choices than the Senate is, never mind the upper chamber’s advice and consent role. Two other GOP senators are dismissing allegations about Trump’s choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, because they come from anonymous sources. But Hegseth entered into a nondisclosure agreement to secure one accuser’s silence.

This stuff just isn’t working. Hegseth still hangs in the balance, his fate uncertain. What’s going wrong for Trump here? Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has a new piece offering a simple explanation: Trump wants to elevate people who heinously abuse women to empower misogyny, and it’s so egregious that it’s backfiring on him. Is it possible Trump can’t do whatever the hell he wants? Are there limits after all? We’re talking to Amanda Marcotte about all this right now. Thanks for coming on, Amanda.

Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: Let’s start with this Tommy Tuberville thing because it’s so crazy. Listen to this.

Tommy Tuberville (audio voiceover): Who are we to say that we’re a better vetter and picker of people than Donald Trump?

CNN’s Manu Raju (audio voiceover): Isn’t that your job? Advice and consent. That’s your job.

Tuberville (audio voiceover): Advice and consent, but that’s more the Democrats. Donald Trump did all the vetting they needed to do on Pete Hegseth. And I just can’t believe we even have people on our side saying, Well, I’ve got to look at this, I’ve got to look at that. What they’re doing is they’re throwing rocks at Donald Trump. They’re not throwing them at Pete Hegseth. They’re throwing them at Donald Trump because they’re saying, Well, we don’t believe you did the right vetting, and we don’t believe he can do the job. Wait a minute, that’s not our job to do that.

Sargent: Amanda, Tommy Tuberville accidentally said the quiet part out loud there. GOP senators are supposed to go through the motions of vetting Trump’s picks and then put through whichever ones they can get away with, even if they’re totally unfit. But Tuberville says straight out that they should just rubber-stamp all of them with no oversight at all. Your thoughts on that?

Marcotte: It’s interesting to me how many of these people are revealing that they just really want a king. They want to believe that a king has been granted to them by God and they think that would just be a lot easier than all this thinking and vetting and work. He was supposed to be a good football coach, but he obviously prefers a job that’s ceremonial and has no real responsibility.

Sargent: I got to think other senators see that and think, Tommy, come on, man. You’re not supposed to tell people how it works.

Marcotte: [laughs] Some of them. There’s still a couple of holdouts who actually do wish that they could exert more power over these picks and are looking for their spots.

Sargent: No question. In fairness, a number of Republican senators are actually trying to show at least a little spine. A bunch of them brought down Matt Gaetz, who was also completely unfit for the job of attorney general. It looks as if some senators objected and got the Trump team to agree to some FBI background checks. But here we are. Pete Hegseth’s fate is still uncertain after allegations of public drunkenness, of serial infidelities against his first wife, and even his own mother who said he abused women regularly but then took it back. Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who seems to be another one who wants to play some role here, is still withholding her support. Axios reports that Trump isn’t working the phones for Hegseth, which surprised me. Where do you think things really stand for Hegseth right now?

Marcotte: I’m cautiously optimistic that he’s going to go down and they’re just trying to give Trump a face-saving method of pulling the nomination or having Hegseth pull out rather than actually take it to the mat. They’re smart to do so because that would be a better way for them and obviously for Trump; he can be manipulated in this way because he wants to save face as well. Honestly, though, the other part of this that we need to think about is: Republicans live in this country too. You don’t want somebody at the head of the largest military in the world who can’t even show up to work without being drunk on the job, at a Fox News show.

Sargent: That brings me to your piece, which is grappling with why it is that Trump is picking these people who are so flagrantly, ridiculously unmatched for this kind of job. You write that Trump is very deliberately trying to assemble what you call an anti-#MeToo cabinet, meaning his choices are expressly designed to honor his tacit promise to his bro supporters to empower misogyny. Matt Gaetz, we talked about allegations of sexual trafficking; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for HHS, allegedly committed sexual assault in the 1990s. Now all the Hegseth stuff. You argue that this appeals to Trump in some lizard-brain way; it normalizes his behavior. Can you talk about that big picture a bit?

Marcotte: The left is always accused of doing “identity politics” when they try to address inequalities, and certain people being left behind, and trying to find ways to get more equality. This is actual identity politics that Trump is playing because he can’t actually do the things that he implied he could to his bro supporters, which is to somehow roll back women’s independence, somehow make women be your girlfriend and make you a sandwich, somehow get women to shut up. Those are the things they want.

They can’t get those things. He can’t actually do those things. So instead, Trump is substituting this completely empty identity politics where they get a lot of symbolic … Misogynists get a lot of symbolic representation like we can’t make your girlfriend come back to you because you wouldn’t do the dishes but we can put a bunch of sex abusers in high office and you can look at them and feel good about yourself.

It’s supposed to demoralize feminists and make us feel like we’ve lost a lot of ground. But as I argue in the piece, what’s actually happening is that it’s become a reminder of why #MeToo was such an important movement to begin with. We have this MAGA movement attempt to make misogyny just seem like a fun sport—just like guys being guys; it’s no big deal; it doesn’t mean anything; women are hysterical; it’s the woke mob, they just are oversensitive Karens. And what #MeToo did was go, Well, actually this is what happened to me; when I dealt with this attitude in person, I was violently assaulted, I’m traumatized for life. These guys attack women over and over again, and it’s not cute and it’s not fun; it’s scary. And it often causes women to lose their jobs, to suffer, again, great trauma.

The impacts are huge, and that had a very sobering effect on a lot of people, which was to say, Yeah, there’s actually a human cost to misogyny, and women pay it. That’s burned out a little because we’ve all told those stories and it feels repetitive to keep doing it. And it’s very hard, especially for survivors, to just keep talking about their trauma over and over again. It always re-traumatizes you a little. But by picking these guys, Gaetz and Hegseth, and then forcing the details of what they’ve been accused of into the public eye, we’re getting a little reminder again of why that has so much power. Matt Gaetz particularly portrays himself as a good time guy, but it’s actually gross and upsetting the details that leaked out in those eight days between when he was nominated and when he withdrew. Seventeen-year-old? Ugh.

Sargent: It’s really interesting. The same thing with Hegseth. The serial infidelities he’s accused of, the abuses of women he’s accused of—this stuff is fun and games for the bros for a while, but when the world actually sees the details, people really recoil. That’s the core of your argument, right? That he’s humoring the bros and trying to essentially launder misogyny by putting all these people in these high-profile roles, making it OK to treat women that way. I guess in his mind, that’s what that looks like. But in reality, the details are making it very hard for some of these senators to get to yes. Gaetz went down, Hegseth hanging in the balance. That’s the argument, right?

Marcotte: Yeah. Hegseth also draws out another issue that we need to think about, which is that violence against and abuse of women is very rarely contained to just men and women. Usually, the kinds of guys that are abusers of women, as Hegseth’s mother called him, tend to have this toxic masculinity that manifests in all sorts of really negative ways. You really see this with Hegseth.

He’s racist to begin with. He has this virulent hatred of Muslims that’s downright terrifying, especially from Muslim service members, I have to imagine, facing the possibility that he would be their boss. And he belongs to Christian nationalist church and their worldview is very domineering. They believe that the federal government exists to force their version of Christianity on not just all Americans but the whole world. There’s a tendency and a link between that misogyny and authoritarian sadistic worldview in general.

Also with him, we need to consider the drinking as well. It’s very well known that men who are abusive toward women often do drink a lot. In a lot of cases, it’s so that they can have the will to do that or suppress the guilt inside from it.

Sargent: It really paints an ugly picture when you think about the possibility that these things actually appeal to Trump. It’s very clear that that’s the case, right? He clearly feels simpatico with these types.

Marcotte: It is true that he feels attacked because people keep saying it’s wrong to sexually assault women. I really do recommend that you watch or rewatch the clicks from Trump’s deposition during the E. Jean Carroll trial; it’s very, very telling. He’s so defensive, so angry, and so entitled. He cannot believe; he obviously thinks it’s ridiculous that anybody would say that what he did to her was wrong, that anyone cares about her, that anyone would think that that wasn’t just a rich man taking what was his. I think he genuinely believes that.

A lot of men that ate that misogyny are not as sociopathic and so maybe have more mixed feelings about it inside. But for Trump, he wants to surround himself with people that are going to reaffirm his belief that this is just what men do, especially rich men, and how dare anyone say we shouldn’t.

Sargent: Right. This is all becoming so glaringly obvious that Republican senators are having trouble doing what Tommy Tuberville said is their duty, which is to do nothing and just put them all through. But meanwhile, Trump supporters are now engaged in these wildly contorted defenses of this. Lindsey Graham and Rick Scott are both arguing that the allegations against Hegseth don’t count because they’re based on anonymous sources—but he paid a woman who had accused him as part of a nondisclosure agreement to be quiet. We should add again that his own mother said he had regularly abused women.

This is what I don’t quite get. Why is Lindsey Graham doing that? He’s supposed to be a defense hawk. He knows Hegseth has no business running the Pentagon. It’s extremely disturbing to see someone like Lindsey Graham defend someone like Hegseth.

Marcotte: Again, I would like to ask Republican senators to consider the fact that they have to live here too. I really wish they think about the same thing with RFK. We went through this in 2020 with the Covid pandemic. These people are in positions where if something bad happens, they have to be the decider. Do you really want somebody you can’t even trust to watch a five-year-old for 10 minutes?

I do think he picked Hegseth in part because Hegseth is very good looking. He looks like a Tom of Finland character, but that’s not the reference point that Trump would probably make. He looks like a movie star from the ’50s, there’s no doubt about it. Trump just wants to look at a guy like that all day and think that it reflects well on him because he still thinks he’s very handsome. Now it’s going to be hard to look at Hegseth and not just think about him being drunk and being dragged out of the Louisiana strip club.

Sargent: I got to think that that sort of thing really does great on Trump. Let’s bring this back to Tuberville for a minute. What’s the big picture here? What do we think the prognosis is? Are Republican senators behaving the way Tuberville says they should behave as rubber stamps or not? What do we think?

Marcotte: They desperately want to, and Trump is making it very hard for them to do that. We’re still six weeks away from inauguration and if Hegseth goes down, Gabbard and RFK might be next in the hopper for the media firestorm around them. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot more of the soft powers coming into play because Trump does need Republicans behind him.

Because he’s gotten so old and so addled and all of his personality malignancies are getting so bad, my only question is if he’s possibly forgotten that you need to actually have some coalition, that you can’t just always rule by force and fear. There’s always a possibility that he doesn’t change course, but in this first term, he seemed to understand that he had to do a little bit of carrot, not all stick with Republicans. Either way, it’s a good thing that they’re showing a little spine because if he does decide to go all force and fear, he’s going to break apart his coalition pretty quickly. They’re going to become immobile and I don’t think they’re going to get much done, honestly. You just can’t get people in line if you just offer them nothing but yelling at them. So all of this is making me feel a little bit better than I did on election night. That’s all I’ll say.

Sargent: Yeah? Let’s hear why. I need to feel optimistic. Why is that?

Marcotte: Because Trump hasn’t learned anything. He’s super bad about building a coalition. He just wants to intimidate people into bending the knee. Half the reason that he’s only nominating clowns to office is because no one else will work for him. All of that suggests that he’s going to come into office with a lot less competency than we’ve been threatened with. I’m not saying none; Russ Vought, the guy who he’s going to have run OMB, is a terrifying character. But if it’s going to be a lot of this palace intrigue, backbiting, infighting, and clown stuff, that’s going to slow them down and make it a lot harder to make Project 2025 happen.

Sargent: The way to think about it also is that the more he acts like that and the more incompetent he appears to be, the less easy it is for Republican senators to be Tommy Tubervilles.

Marcotte: And I don’t think they’re going to pass legislation at all. In fact, the whole point of Project 2025 clearly was this assumption that passing legislation was never going to work. So they were going to just try to turn Trump into a dictator. Easier said than done, honestly.

Sargent: Yeah. Kash Patel, I got to say he seems pretty buffoonish, even though he’s scary in his own way.

Marcotte: He also thinks that the only way to wheel power is with a big stick. That’s just not the way it is. You can threaten people with investigations, but that can only go so far if you don’t actually have an entire FBI you’ve completely restaffed with yes men.

Sargent: Well, let’s end it there since it’s about as optimistic as we’re capable of being at this moment. Amanda Marcotte, thanks so much for coming on.

Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: Folks, make sure to check out some content we have up at tnr.com: Nick Tabor explaining what states should do right now to fight climate change under Trump. Over on the DSR network, make sure to listen to the latest episode of Deep State Radio featuring former FBI assistant director, Frank Figliuzzi, to discuss Trump’s troubling Kash Patel pick. Also be sure to tune into the latest episode of Words Matter where Norm Ornstein and Kavita Patel break down the 2025 Congress, the transition process, and what the House and Senate Democrats can and should do now. We’ll see you all next week.

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.

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