Podcast extra: Rachel Maddow talks with Nicolle Wallace about Trump's early Cabinet picks AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Rachel Maddow Show

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Episode: Podcast extra: Rachel Maddow talks with Nicolle Wallace about Trump's early Cabinet picks

Author: Rachel Maddow, MSNBC
Duration: 00:20:13

Episode Shownotes

From the November 14 episode of Deadline White House, Rachel Maddow talks with Nicolle Wallace about Donald Trump's clown car of Cabinet picks and how they fit into his broader authoritarian project, and what Americans who care about democracy should keep an eye on as the second Trump administration takes

shape.

Summary

In this episode of The Rachel Maddow Show, Rachel Maddow talks with Nicolle Wallace about Donald Trump's early Cabinet selections, emphasizing a disturbing shift towards appointing loyalists rather than qualified individuals. This trend poses threats to democratic norms, with a focus on key appointments in national security. The conversation further examines how these choices reflect an authoritarian agenda aimed at weakening U.S. government institutions and consolidating power. The need for public vigilance and media scrutiny regarding these developments is highlighted, as they signify a potential erosion of respected democratic principles.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Podcast extra: Rachel Maddow talks with Nicolle Wallace about Trump's early Cabinet picks) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_01
Today, we have added the Secretary of State, the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, the NASA Administrator, the head of the Forest Service, and the President's personal assistant. We have gone to the big wall in three columns.

00:00:15 Speaker_01
Anybody else going tonight? There needs to be a new director of the CIA, as well. And now, tonight, the National Security Advisor is out, too. And so, yeah. We're gonna need another wall soon.

00:00:32 Speaker_02
Hi again, everybody. It's 5 o'clock in New York.

00:00:34 Speaker_02
One of the hallmarks of the first Trump administration was our friend and dear colleague Rachel Maddow and her wall, her giant wall, keeping tabs on and listing all of the many, many, many, many people who left the White House under Trump, often under duress, often fired after a blowup.

00:00:55 Speaker_02
many of them unceremoniously fired on Twitter by the ex-president himself for not giving him exactly what he wanted.

00:01:04 Speaker_02
We share that blast from the past, that time capsule with you, because this time, it's not clear that Rachel's gonna need a wall, and maybe not one that big, because Donald Trump is now surrounding himself with the kind of people who would never have any tension with him, the kind of people who only say yes.

00:01:24 Speaker_02
People whose only qualification for the kinds of jobs they're getting are that feature, that fact, that they're loyal only to him, not the Constitution, not the expertise. Once associated with the agencies, they've been tapped to lead.

00:01:38 Speaker_02
Just take the most recent cabinet picks, a Fox News weekend morning show anchor to head the Department of Defense, a former Democratic congresswoman who publicly spreads Russian talking points.

00:01:51 Speaker_02
who has been now tapped to lead the nation's spy agencies, and a man who was the target of a years-long federal sex trafficking investigation to lead the Department of Justice.

00:02:02 Speaker_02
And of course, the breaking news we just brought you in the last hour, a world-famous anti-vaccine activist, Robert Kennedy, Jr., to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

00:02:13 Speaker_02
Of course, the choices still have to come to pass, either bypass Senate confirmation or, by some ultimate humiliation of the Republicans in the Senate, be confirmed by the Senate.

00:02:26 Speaker_02
But as the New York Times editorial board writes, quote, Trump clearly expects the Senate to simply roll over.

00:02:32 Speaker_02
and ignore its responsibilities, he wants to turn the leaders of major important agencies into his deputies, remaking the federal government into a Trump, Inc. org chart entirely subordinate to him.

00:02:45 Speaker_02
He recently demanded that the Senate give him the ability to make recess appointments, a way of bypassing the Senate's consent process when the chamber is adjourned for 10 days or more.

00:02:56 Speaker_02
And it's not just the positions at the top of the agencies that Trump is filling with unqualified yes-men and women. He has threatened to purge these departments of civil servants who he believes are not loyal enough to him.

00:03:12 Speaker_02
The Republican Party has already demonstrated over the last nine years that they almost always let him have his way with whatever his attention demands.

00:03:24 Speaker_02
Here's Congressman Troy Nels of Texas yesterday, right after Trump spoke to the House Republican Caucus.

00:03:31 Speaker_00
Donald Trump, he was in there. Everybody loves listening to him. He could have sat in there for another hour, two hours, three hours, and we'd all be listening attentively. He's the greatest thing since sliced bread.

00:03:43 Speaker_00
If Donald Trump says jump three feet high and scratch your head, we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That's it.

00:03:51 Speaker_02
Please stay admitted now, year nine. It is sort of a helpful feature. So we're going to forget about the Constitution, the guiding principle of the country and the Republican Party. and replace it with Donald Trump.

00:04:06 Speaker_02
Liz Cheney warned us we are slow walking into autocracy, although at the rate this week is going, it looks more like we are running.

00:04:15 Speaker_02
It's where we start the hour with the host of The Rachel Maddow Show right here on MSNBC, New York Times bestselling author, my colleague and dear friend, Rachel Maddow's here. Rachel, where to start? You go.

00:04:32 Speaker_01
Well, I don't know. I don't know where to start.

00:04:34 Speaker_01
I mean, I do feel like, Nicole, that you, maybe more than anyone, has been very clear-eyed about what was coming and about what was being promised here and that there was no reason to expect this to be moderated or normal or that this is going to tack back toward the center or towards anything that looked like traditional American politics.

00:04:57 Speaker_01
I mean, you did your Autocracy in America series. Listen, we saw what was going to happen, and now it is happening.

00:05:05 Speaker_01
And so I do feel like this is a moment for people to get real and for people to stop saying, like, oh, this is going to end up being much more moderate than anybody expected.

00:05:15 Speaker_01
When are you going to start apologizing for saying that democracy was threatened? I mean, I think it's time to get real and realize that this is really what we're up against. But I also think the fact that we all feel a little bit

00:05:28 Speaker_01
I don't know if flummoxed is the right word, sort of rocked by the increasing incredulity of these choices, is that it is meant to shock us. It's meant to adjust our sense of what is normal, what is possible, and to sort of

00:05:45 Speaker_01
so disorient us as to what it counts to propose governance in the United States, that we're ready for the most radical pronouncements and actions. And I do think we're supposed to feel the way that we do right now. I think that's part of this.

00:06:01 Speaker_01
It's a shock and awe campaign against American traditions and mores. And that's, I think, how most of the country feels about it.

00:06:08 Speaker_02
I mean, I think to sort of sustain the military analysis, the Iraq war starts with a shock and awe bombing campaign. The war is a catastrophe. I mean, it doesn't connote competence.

00:06:18 Speaker_02
It doesn't signal that he will succeed in successfully demolishing American democracy. It does mean that we as a press still every single time, chase the shiny object. And this week, the shiny objects are named Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK Jr.

00:06:35 Speaker_02
Next week, they'll be named, or maybe by 9 o'clock, they'll be named Steve Bannon and Kash Patel, and they may be running the FBI. Those are the shiny objects.

00:06:44 Speaker_02
But the movement is propelled by this hatred of the Democratic Party and the media elites, but also a promise, a promise to deliver. on the economy, on immigration.

00:06:56 Speaker_02
And the people in charge of those two things, one of them is an alleged child sex trafficker, and the other is, by her own telling, a dog killer. I mean, the competence may be where he gets sort of bollocked up.

00:07:12 Speaker_01
I think that the idea of the authoritarian promise is that everything shrivels in government other than the will of the leader, right? So you don't necessarily put a Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

00:07:30 Speaker_01
in charge of HHS because you're hoping for great things from HHS. I mean, Matt Gaetz, among all the other things we can say about Matt Gaetz, he has explicitly proposed abolishing

00:07:42 Speaker_01
the Justice Department, not specifically just abolishing the FBI and the ATF, but talking about abolishing the Justice Department. I mean, Tulsi Gabbard, as the Director of National Intelligence, is, I mean,

00:07:56 Speaker_01
The idea that Tulsi Hubbard, in a normal circumstance, could get a security clearance to be like a Walmart-style greeter at any U.S. intelligence agency, let alone get past the security barriers, is insane.

00:08:12 Speaker_01
So you do that because you want the worst for these agencies, because you want the worst for the U.S. government, because you think that the U.S. government is worthless. That's part of consolidating power, to make the U.S.

00:08:24 Speaker_01
government nothing other than the leader and people who will do what he says. And there not being any repository of expertise, let alone just general day-to-day know-how anywhere.

00:08:38 Speaker_01
So it's a sort of, I mean, as Steve Bannon used to say, it's a sort of Leninist project, right? Destroy the state. This is the cabinet that you nominate not to run the U.S. government to do anything, but to destroy the U.S. government so that the U.S.

00:08:53 Speaker_01
government can be fundamentally reimagined as something much more like a unitary, authoritarian, or autocratic, for lack of a better term, system.

00:09:04 Speaker_02
What are you looking at as the friction points? I mean, in the first Trump presidency, it was the firing of Jim Comey after he refused to, quote, see to it to let Mike Flynn go. Let Mike Flynn go. Comey says no.

00:09:16 Speaker_02
Trump embarks on a four-year-long crusade against the FBI and the Department of Justice.

00:09:23 Speaker_02
He's, I mean, to your point, Matt Gaetz is gonna be in charge of the department, and an as-yet-named person expected to replace his last hand-picked head of the FBI, Christopher Wray.

00:09:35 Speaker_02
He's sort of threatened Jerome Powell, who said it's illegal for him to replace me. I mean, where do you expect any friction between Trump 2.0 and the institutions that stand?

00:09:49 Speaker_01
Well, the first one is gonna happen over the question, not of the appointment of any particular nominee, not of the confirmation process for any particular nominee, but whether there will be a confirmation process for nominees, right?

00:10:04 Speaker_01
The first point of confrontation is going to be between Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate, and it's going to be over the basic question of whether or not the Senate has any role in confirming any of these nominees, right?

00:10:16 Speaker_01
Trump will have to go to very arcane, very, very unusual and untested corners of the Constitution and precedent to find any way that he can shut down the House and the Senate himself.

00:10:31 Speaker_01
He's going to tell Republicans in Congress to shut themselves down. thus marginalizing themselves as one of the three supposedly co-equal branches of government so that he can set up the executive branch himself without anybody having a say about it.

00:10:47 Speaker_01
Now why would you want to do that rather than just have all of your nominees confirmed by the Senate, which I'm sure the Republicans in the Senate would be happy to do.

00:10:56 Speaker_01
You want them not to have a role in the confirmation process because you want the legislative branch to shrivel.

00:11:04 Speaker_01
You want the legislative branch to go away, because what authoritarians do is they consolidate power both within the executive and then in the person of the authoritarian leader.

00:11:13 Speaker_01
And so that's why it's an advantage to get a recess appointment rather than a Senate-confirmed appointment, even if he's guaranteed Senate confirmation for even the craziest of these folks.

00:11:24 Speaker_01
And I think that confrontation will be first as to whether or not Congress essentially folds and becomes something like what Troy Nels wants, rather than what the founders intended, which was a co-equal branch of government that has a say in how we run the place.

00:11:38 Speaker_02
You said shriveled twice, so I'm going to go there.

00:11:41 Speaker_02
We have an alleged child sex trafficker as Trump's pick for DOJ, an adjudicated sexual abuser in the president-elect himself, and a man who believes that a violent marriage is better than a divorce and women should stay into it.

00:11:57 Speaker_02
Of all the post-election analysis that is undisputed, Joe Rogan's influence is clear.

00:12:04 Speaker_02
The massive audience, I think I saw somewhere that Trump's interview there was seen by 34 million people, and Vice President Harris' podcast appearances were seen by maybe hundreds of thousands of people.

00:12:16 Speaker_02
What role do you think the manosphere influencers have in saying, no, that actually isn't masculinity in America? In the words of a Republican senator, J.D.

00:12:30 Speaker_02
Vance, quote, crushed ED medicine, chased it with an energy drink so he could go all night, end quote. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that Republicans are saying about Matt Gaetz. the pig to BAG.

00:12:42 Speaker_02
And to your point about shock and awe, I mean, how much can we sort of clinically ask the people who influenced more Americans than maybe anybody else to either own these kinds of men and this definition and this example of masculinity, or say, maybe not?

00:13:04 Speaker_01
I mean, I don't think you ask those folks for what you're asking. I mean, one of the things that we know from looking at the rise of authoritarians in other countries and throughout history is that there's almost always a machismo play, right?

00:13:21 Speaker_01
There's almost always a performative masculinity and dominance. sort of pageant that goes along with it. And it's always ridiculous, right?

00:13:31 Speaker_01
I mean, you get like a schlub like a Berlusconi or you get a schlub, frankly, forgive me, like Donald Trump, you know, or you get Robert F. Kennedy who's like 160 years old and he's like juiced to the gills and talking about how we need to get all the chemicals out of our food.

00:13:49 Speaker_01
And it's like, yeah, dude, could you say that? I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the biceps. You know, in your seventh decade. Yes, I think he does push up.

00:13:59 Speaker_02
Very Putin-esque, though, right? Who also rides horses in the winter without his shirts on.

00:14:05 Speaker_01
Yes, exactly. It's a very shirtless vibe, despite the type of man who does it. And that's part of it, right? That's their performance of dominance. And that's why there isn't a female dictator who we put in the list of all of these things, right?

00:14:20 Speaker_01
This is part and parcel of how you sell strongman leadership. I don't need process. I don't need rules. I don't need traditions. I don't need anybody else who knows anything.

00:14:31 Speaker_01
I don't know anything, but that's what you love about me because I'm just going to, you know, flex until my shirt sleeves fall off and get it done. And that's part of the, that's the sale.

00:14:41 Speaker_01
And so asking guys who have been selling this their whole lives, like Joe Rogan, right? Look at what his career has been up until the point where he got into his podcast.

00:14:50 Speaker_01
Looking at the people who have themselves been profiting off that kind of salesmanship in terms of what they have to offer. They're all sort of proudly dumb, right? Like, I don't know, but I know I don't know, and I know I could do a better deal.

00:15:04 Speaker_01
It's all the same shtick. And this goes back to gladiator times. This has been around for a very long time. So no, I don't think those guys are going to have a conscience about it and suddenly decide to cash in against their own monetary interests.

00:15:19 Speaker_01
I do think that most people have critical thinking skills, right? And I think that most Americans are capable of answering to our better angels.

00:15:28 Speaker_01
And so I think there's an alternative to asking people to sign up for the sort of Dana White, Joe Rogan model, Hulk Hogan model of masculinity.

00:15:39 Speaker_01
And it's a matter of one side sort of prevailing over the other, not asking the other side to have a conscience.

00:15:47 Speaker_02
I still believe that, too, that people, if the better angel, you know, reaches them when they're home and they're not on their phones, that they can be reached. Why do you think that didn't happen in this election?

00:15:57 Speaker_01
I don't know. I mean, I feel like my electoral politics antenna have always been about yay long and not very well-tuned. I don't feel like I ever know who's going to win an election or why. But it does feel like, you know, I mean, some of the

00:16:16 Speaker_01
Some of the global forces at work here that have caused every governing party in every industrialized democracy to lose in every election that's happened in recent years. I think some of those global forces are at work here.

00:16:32 Speaker_01
I also think that America is is willing to go for the strongman promise.

00:16:39 Speaker_01
And I think that the same way that it worked in lots of other countries, both in our own time and in previous generations, it worked here for all the reasons that it always works.

00:16:49 Speaker_01
And it never works because you think that this guy is secretly competent at something that looks like governance. It never wins because you think this guy is gonna be more normal than you expected.

00:16:59 Speaker_01
It wins because this guy says, I'm gonna get in there and break everything. I'm a real man, I'm a strong man, nobody else is worth anything, I alone can do it. It's the same pitch from every other guy. And why can I alone do it?

00:17:10 Speaker_01
It's because there's an enemy within and we have to use force and violence against them and this is an emergency and it's been, you know, we're in decline and we need to make ourselves great again by defeating the enemy within and we're gonna have to be ruthless and crush them and I can do that because I'm the one who's willing to break all the rules.

00:17:26 Speaker_01
I mean it's the same stupid preachy pitch going back for more than 100 years in industrialized democracies, and it always ends the same way. But it doesn't make it less appealing to voters.

00:17:42 Speaker_01
And that's why most of these guys do get into power by the choice of the people. Then, once they're there, it's also the choice of the people whether they stay there.

00:17:50 Speaker_01
And in the very short term for us, it's the choice how much they get away with, how much pushback they're gonna get, and honestly, what they find difficult to do.

00:17:58 Speaker_01
People who oppose what they're doing right now owe it to the country to make what they're doing right now hard. If it's easy, they're going to do it, and more. If it's hard, they're going to do less of it. And that's where we are right now.

00:18:09 Speaker_01
That's the clarity of purpose that we all have in how to try to save the country from further autocratic slide.

00:18:15 Speaker_02
Just quickly, your New Yorker piece is also about a defining feature of all autocrats. They fleece you. They rob you blind. Talk about how that might be a rub.

00:18:27 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, this is, I think, just something for us in the media to keep in mind, but also something for us to be aware of in terms of what we can learn from other countries, what we can learn of American experiments with this kind of governance in the past.

00:18:42 Speaker_01
Autocrats would be authoritarians. always crooks, they always steal. I mean, why bother getting rid of the rule of law if you can't then steal from the country blindly? I mean, it just always happens every time.

00:18:55 Speaker_01
And it's happened with all of our American demagogues throughout history. They've all been incredibly corrupt and have stolen from the people who they've, in some cases, persuaded to vote for them.

00:19:05 Speaker_01
So there's no reason to expect that this will be any different, particularly the way the run up to this next term for Trump has gone.

00:19:12 Speaker_01
And it's worth being aware of that both in terms of self-protection, you know, watch your wallet, but I think it's also worth us being focused on as the fourth estate in terms of looking out for kleptocratic stuff, looking out for the establishment of an American oligarchy that isn't just sort of scary because it's unaccountable power, but it's scary because it's stealing the country out from under us.

00:19:35 Speaker_01
They do it in every country. They do it everywhere. And I don't think the American people are going to like it if it's well documented. It's our job to document it.

00:19:42 Speaker_02
Rachel, our North Star on and off the air, and also someone who says every time we talk on and off TV that these jobs are such a tremendous privilege. I've thought about that.

00:19:54 Speaker_02
I've repeated that to my team and my staff and myself more than a few times over the last 10 days. Thank you very much for the privilege of getting to talk to you at the top of this hour. It's great to see you.

00:20:06 Speaker_01
Thanks for having me. I'll be back anytime you want me, Nicole.

00:20:08 Speaker_02
Any day, any day. Stay free, you know where I am.