MAGA Dimwit Tommy Tuberville Blurts Out Awkward Truth About Trump, GOP
Transcript: Trump’s Cabinet of Sex
Abusers Is Blowing Up in His Face
An interview with Salon’s Amanda
Marcotte, who argues that Trump is expressly trying to create a Cabinet with
“sex abusers” in it to empower misogyny—and that it’s backfiring on him very
badly.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Image
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 the
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 the 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.
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 grate 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.
