Transcript: Trump’s Rage Over His Sentencing Takes Dark, Ominous Turn

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 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.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump unleashed an angry new rant over the news that his sentencing for his hush money conviction will proceed on January 10. But buried in Trump’s rage was a key tell: He’s signaling that he’ll use his conviction and sentencing as a fake pretext to carry out his own authoritarian designs in a second term. Today, we’re chatting about this with Adam Gurri, the editor of Liberal Currents Magazine, who’s been making good arguments lately about Trump’s pursuit of a “personalist” form of rule, which shapes everything around the whims and needs of the personality at the center of his movement. We’re already seeing that this is where Trump’s presidency will go. Adam, thanks for coming on.

Adam Gurri: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: Judge Juan Merchan recently upheld Trump’s sentencing for falsifying business records in the Manhattan case, though he’ll probably spare Trump jail time. Trump has been raging about this; in his latest tweet, he declared, “There has never been a president so evilly and illegally treated as I.” He ranted about corrupt Democrat judges and prosecutors, and he has elsewhere falsely claimed Biden officials who hate him are behind the Manhattan conviction. Adam, this seems ominous. Trump is clearly laying the groundwork to use this sentencing to justify all manner of things he hoped to do anyway in his second term. What do you expect on this front?

Gurri: First and foremost, this is going to be his pretext for going after his own opponents: prominent Democrats, but also Republicans that aligned against him like Liz Cheney. These are all things that he’s fairly openly promised throughout the campaign. That’s my number one concern. Otherwise, depending on sentencing, we’ll see an early confrontation between the Trump administration and the legal system to the extent to which he can just ignore it, the extent to which he weaponizes it against, perhaps, state judges themselves.

There’s a lot of tools at his disposal. You have someone like Kash Patel at the FBI. And one potential is suddenly there are corruption investigations into judges that have ruled on the cases against him. Things like that, where even if he doesn’t succeed, even if the courts eventually throw it out, it can be enough to scare any of the judges in any of the cases that have been brought against him. In the long term, once they’ve tested how to scare judges and intimidate judges, judges are one of the number-one impediments to the many policies that he has promised to enact.

Sargent: Adam, you had a piece on this more generally recently for Liberal Currents, arguing that one of the big risks of the second Trump presidency is that he will entrench “personalist” rule. First, can you talk about what “personalist” rule is?

Gurri: Yeah. When people think of dictators, especially in this country, we have the most extreme twentieth century examples in mind of totalitarianism like the Soviet Union or even Nazi Germany at the height of the war. But there’s different varieties of dictatorship. One of the most common ones is the personalist dictator who doesn’t run a government that is all powerful the way a totalitarian one is but manages to make sure that such government, as there is, is completely in the thrall of this one person. The nominations already show that it is going to be worse.

Essentially, unless a GOP-controlled Senate actually pushes back on a significant number of these nominations, we’re going to get people who are loyal but not competent, and loyal but not moral. Project 2025 was already a warning sign of what might happen in a Trump administration, but his nominations so far point in the direction of he doesn’t even care about getting to those substantive policy ends, he just cares about people who will do whatever he wants them to do, whether they’re good at it or not.

Sargent: You see some of this personalism developing in Trump’s rage over his sentencing. You write that personalist rule deliberately mobilizes the emotional attachment of supporters to the leader to undermine the legitimacy of other components of the system. Here, you’ve got Trump telling his followers explicitly all these activities and verdicts about him undertaken by other parts of the system are illegitimate by definition if they reflect negatively on him or stand in his way. The added ingredient is that he’s openly said all this justifies his own threats to thoroughly corrupt the justice system to target his enemies without cause. That’s another layer of personalism, right, Adam? Beyond the turning of screws on judges that you talked about, what does all that tell us about what we’ll see in a second term?

Gurri: This is one more step in the long term project of delegitimizing all of the barriers to him personally doing whatever he wants in office. During the pandemic, we saw this a lot. He wanted every state government to follow the beat of his drum too. And where they didn’t, he was mobilizing his people. Do you remember he said liberate Wisconsin? He was tweeting to liberate Wisconsin and things like that. This is similar. He already has been spending the past few years, especially since he’s been facing legal problems, stoking up his base against the legal system—obviously, most famously, he stoked them up against the legitimacy of the 2020 election result. He’s continuing to feed this narrative to the people that are most personally attached to him that any aspect of the system that is a speed bump to him or acts against him in any way is illegitimate. It’s undemocratic, it’s corrupt, it’s evil. And you cast in those terms. In other systems, we see that one of the ways that personalists consolidate their power is through corruption charges. In China, for example, Xi has had many anti-corruption campaigns that were just pure campaigns to purge political rivals.

Sargent: Maggie Haberman of The New York Times said on CNN the other day that Trump is very angry about the hush money conviction and sentencing, and that he may want a display of fighting the sentencing in court. He’ll see this as politically useful, she suggested. I think that’s a dark and ominous turn in his anger as well. You wrote that the personalist ruler seeks to expand his charismatic authority through big public gestures of various kinds. And this fighting display is another signal that he’s going to try to mobilize his supporters against the system on his own behalf. Is that the right way to read this?

Gurri: Trump has promised a lot of very big, extreme things over the last year. Most prominently, I would say, deporting 20 million people—there’s simply no way that in our system as it’s currently constituted that would be logistically possible. So in order to get there, he’s going to need to get a lot more compliance from people in a lot of political jurisdictions he doesn’t have direct power over. One way to do that is to mobilize his most motivated supporters out in the public to support him, to see any impediment to him as illegitimate. We see this with the post about the cases with Haberman’s analysis. This is a theater, a stage for him to show the corruption of the system to his supporters in order to delegitimize it in their eyes, to mobilize them in his defense politically.

Sargent: One example of this that’s pretty clear is his borders czar is threatening to prosecute local officials who stand in the way of the deportation.

Gurri: Right. They made noises about in the first term but it never really went anywhere. This time around, he’s consolidated his control over the GOP, both at the state and and the federal level in terms of they feel they have to support him. MAGA has just become this cultural force beyond what it was four or five or six years ago. We tend to forget that the deep blue states like California and New York are deep blue in a winner-takes-all electoral college situation. There’s essentially no political situation where they’re going to go Republican, but there’s still millions of Republicans that live there, many of whom are big fans of Donald Trump. So even in a fairly blue states, there could be, especially within specific jurisdictions, people that are mobilized to apply pressure to cooperate with the government. If the government then also uses its tools to apply pressure through the DOJ or otherwise—it has a lot of leverage, a lot of levers it could use to apply pressure—many officials in Democrat areas may feel that they are better off cooperating, even just quietly doing so without announcing it.

What’s really alarming to me, frankly, is the number of officials that are already saying that they will cooperate. People like Mayor Adams, who makes little sense given his legal problems, but even Kathy Hochul saying that she’ll absolutely send immigrants that commit crimes to ICE or whatever her quote was.

Sargent: One big question will be whether Trump actually can succeed in neutering other components of the system via this personalist rule. You wrote in another piece that Trump ran an explicitly fascist campaign, expressly promised to either thoroughly corrupt or outright roll over laws, rules, and governing institutions that act as a check on his power and agenda. Many MAGA people voted expressly for this, but Adam, there’s this other kind of voter—low propensity, young, some nonwhite, economically anxious—who maybe saw this in somewhat different terms, like they wanted a strongman but only to the degree that he’ll control inflation and make the economy better, for instance.

Do you worry that there’s an opening for those types of voters, the ones who have that softer picture of what Trump is really about, to stealthily get converted to supporting authoritarian governing means?

Gurri: That’s certainly a danger. He got more voters to vote for him this time than ever, which is very depressing given how much worse this campaign was than anyone he’d even done before. There’s no telling ... It absolutely could happen. My feeling is that if you voted for him this time around, then the authoritarian stuff is probably not going to be what scares you off next time, and maybe some of people do get converted by that. The things that I think are most likely to lose him some of that extra 3 million or so that he got since 2020 are things that will actually impact people directly: if someone they actually know is deported that they don’t think deserved it, if costs continue to go up. I don’t think they’ll care about him prosecuting his opponents or opening cases up against judges. I don’t think they’ll care about that at all.

Sargent: In fact, I could offer you a scenario that’s really depressing. Maybe Trump doesn’t get all the tariffs he wants. Maybe he can’t really carry out all the deportations he wants. And he simultaneously benefits from the good economy that he’s inheriting from President Biden. And so those voters think that Trump is actually succeeding, and they are even more inclined to overlook the explicit authoritarian stuff. Doesn’t that seem like a scenario that’s pretty upsetting, but plausible?

Gurri: Yeah, I do think so. There’s a lot of different possible scenarios. In a scenario where Trump doesn’t get to do what he wanted or decides he doesn’t want to bother cause he doesn’t want to risk it politically, he does some of the same stuff from his first term, which was quite terrible in its own right but we still end up able to have free and fair elections in two years and in four years and in two years after that—that’s still a relatively good case scenario compared to what we could get, I think. He could do a lot of damage.

Now the scenario you’re getting at is one where he does a lot of the democratic damage but not a lot of the economic damage. Maybe he doesn’t do some of the outright fascist stuff like deporting millions of people, and maybe he doesn’t get his economic program so people don’t feel the sting of it and things just keep getting better like they already were. Then he gets benefit from that and people don’t care about the fact that he’s wrecking all the checks and balances on the keeping free and fair elections. That would definitely be a bleak scenario. I definitely am worried about that. It’s a scary scenario where he doesn’t do the big, scary fascist things, but he just chips away at the democratic constraints.

To some extent, that’s the personalist path for him. Maybe he picks a war with someone. Maybe he does something like that to stoke up his popularity as well. He leaves the economy more or less alone, but then he prosecutes his political opponents. He prosecutes any judges or anyone in the legal system that was either personally working against him in the sense of cases against him but also politically working against him in the sense of saying that administrative actions are illegal, and he consolidates his personal control. And most of the 77 million people who voted for him just don’t care about that because it doesn’t affect them personally.

Sargent: I think that’s an all-too-real possibility. Adam Gurri, thanks so much for coming on with us, man.

Gurri: Oh, thank you again for having me.

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.