Transcript: MAGA Rages as GOPers Quietly Move to Sink Pete Hegseth

Gertz: Absolutely—Kash Patel, who Trump has said will serve as his FBI director, even though there is a current FBI director whose tenure does not expire with Joe Biden’s presidency. Kash Patel has said that he wants to sic government investigators on the media, the media who supposedly rigged the 2020 election against Donald Trump. That will be one avenue that they pursue. Another will be the FCC and whether Trump’s appointees there will be able to try to strip licenses from different news outlets or in some way impact their operations. You also have Trump’s new appointee to run the anti-drug division at the Department of Justice, a former Fox corporate employee who will be able to use that power to crack down on any merger attempts by different news outlets. There are a lot of different levers, a lot of different avenues that Trump can use if he wants to try to reduce the influence of the U.S. news media and crack down on the free press

Sargent: This is the thing that makes this very combustible. It starts out as bluster, right? And it’s easy to make fun of Kash Patel saying this kind of thing on Steve Bannon’s podcast, which is where he said it. But once the dynamic that you’re identifying here kicks in, you’ve got major MAGA players stepping forward; when the media actually reports facts about Trump and his administration and his administration figures and policies, MAGA will turn everything into a test of whether Republicans are on the side of the liberal media or on the side of Trump. And since Trump has spent years threatening in another administration to use the power of the state against the media, he has raised expectations among the MAGA masses that this will happen. So when these big tests start arising, the pressure will intensify on figures in the government to actually do this stuff; not just talk about it, to do it.

Gertz: And what’s more, there’s a straightforward pipeline here. What we repeatedly saw during Trump’s first administration was that people on Fox News would identify enemies for him—people that were in some way standing up against Trump—and would claim that those people were breaking the law in some way. Then Trump would respond, sometimes publicly, sometimes privately, by demanding investigations into those people, by actually trying to operationalize and weaponize the propaganda that he was receiving from Fox News and other right-wing outlets.