Transcript: Trump’s Losing Streak Takes a Truly Humiliating Turn

The Supreme Court struck down his tariffs and will probably rule against him on birthright citizenship. He failed to prevent Virginia from passing a referendum adding House seats for Democrats. And that’s only a partial list. For the MAGA base, however, the illusion must always be sustained that Trump is in total mastery of events and forever has his enemies on the run. So his team is now leaking word that he’s going to seriously ramp up the prosecutions of enemies. And in one case, his press secretary tried hard to placate the audience of one in an amusing way.Asawin Suebsaeng, senior political correspondent at Zeteo, has been writing well about how the cult of Trump prohibits any truth-telling about all this losing. So we’re talking to him about all of it today. Swin, always good to have you on.Asawin Suebsaeng: Thank you so much for having me back.Sargent: Well, let’s start with the first big one. Trump’s Justice Department has dropped its effort to prosecute Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for supposedly lying to Congress about a renovation of Fed headquarters. This thing was always a joke. One federal judge blasted it as an effort to harass Powell, primarily over Trump’s hatred of him. And The New York Times reports that prosecutors admitted that they didn’t have evidence of any crimes by Powell, but wanted to press forward anyway. Swin, that’s not how this is supposed to work, is it?Suebsaeng: Okay, something that really pisses me off about this stuff is if you go down the roster of the names that are publicly available of the lawyers at DOJ who are conducting this—these are not always people who used to be on Donald Trump’s personal legal team. There are a good number of them who have been there for a while, throughout multiple administrations, not just this one. So these hugely corrupt authoritarian efforts are not just defined by the pure-blooded Team Trump individuals. It is populated also by people who have been in the system for a long time and continue to stick with it when they could very well just do the ethical thing and resign. So there are a lot of people who got blood on their hands on this stuff.But the good news is, even if these people don’t face the sort of professional consequences that you or I would think would be appropriate for doing something so brazenly corrupt and authoritarian, when you get before a judge—in some cases, even occasionally, sometimes a Trump-appointed judge—you have to make an argument that kind of occasionally amounts to one plus two does not equal 11teen. And a lot of these lawyers are waltzing into court trying to, with a straight face, convince these judges that of course Donald Trump’s effort to punish all of his enemies is built on math in which one plus one equals 11teen. How could you possibly say that’s fictitious, Judge?Sargent: Yeah, I mean, we have a whole track record that bears out what you’re saying on two fronts. One is they’ve lost—these efforts to prosecute Trump’s enemies have mostly failed. They’ve mostly imploded in buffoonery, really. And point two, we’ve actually seen a lot of resignations and a lot of consternation from the professionals at DOJ. So yes, these people who are doing this stuff could be following their colleagues out the door and could be doing the principled thing, but they’re not. Suebsaeng: And it’s completely embarrassing because so many of these prosecutions against Trump’s real and perceived political enemies—like your audience, I’m sure, has looked at some of the indicting documents or some of the details and read some of the transcripts online. It has been a year and a half of absolute, like most bush-league, most farcical stuff in a court of law that a lot of people—not just me, but actual legal experts, actual distinguished lawyers—when they look at it, they have nothing else to say other than I have never fucking seen anything like this.Sargent: And yet, in spite of all that, in MAGA world, you’re not allowed to say Trump has lost ever in any sense. So the U.S. attorney for D.C., Jeanine Pirro, is now saying the investigation will be picked up by the Fed’s inspector general. Now, listen to this from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): As you saw, Judge Jeanine Pirro—or former Judge Jeanine, U.S. Attorney Jeanine now—put out a statement saying that the cases are not necessarily dropped, it’s just being moved over to the inspector general who has critical tools at their disposal to continue to look into the financial mismanagement at the Fed. This has obviously been a priority for the president. If you drive by the Fed building, the president has a point. This is a project that’s been going on for a very long time. It’s costing taxpayers billions of dollars and I think it’s in the best interest of the taxpayer to get to the bottom of it. So the investigation still continues. It’s just under a different authority.Sargent: Swin, note how Leavitt has to pretend that Trump cares about the details of the renovation and that he’s just got the best interests of the taxpayer at heart. I don’t know which is worse here—the absurdity of that, like the insulting absurdity of it, or the need to reassure the audience of one that he’s winning. They’re both bad.Suebsaeng: There are some people who get a little bit annoyed with you as a political journalist or political commentator if you compare Donald Trump’s Washington to Donald Trump’s Pyongyang, because they say to themselves, well, this is a very uniquely American authoritarianism, and why do you default to comparing it to foreign despotism? Isn’t there a little bit of an implicit racism in that? I completely disagree—as an Asian guy, if anybody wants to Google image my name—I completely disagree with that criticism. In part because if you’re talking about the way the Republican Party elite treat Donald Trump and Trumpism, the way they talk about their supposed God-emperor and how he can never fail, he can only be failed—I’m sorry, it reminds me of literally only one other government on the face of the planet. And that’s the one that exists in North Korea’s Pyongyang and how they treat their totalitarian dictator.I mean, it’s not an exaggeration at all to say that the two things are comparable. If you put the sound clips beside each other in both instances, whether it’s Karoline Leavitt or some apparatchik in North Korea—the dear leader deserves the sun, the moons, and the stars and commands all the heavens, and anybody else who says otherwise must be dealt with swiftly and aggressively. Sargent: It really is as bad. If you listen to Karoline Leavitt or Sean Hannity, you can map it almost directly onto North Korean propaganda. Suebsaeng: It’s a one-to-one, a thousand percent.Sargent: Well, let’s sum up a few other losses. Trump lost before the Supreme Court on tariffs and he’s likely to lose on birthright citizenship. And let’s remember—in this latter case, Trump showed up at the court to pressure the justices with his fearsome presence. Trump also commanded Republicans to gerrymander as many states as possible, but he couldn’t stop Virginia from adding seats, which will be in the Democratic column, maybe as many as four, though that one’s still before the courts. That’s a very clear case of Trump picking a major war—this redistricting arms race—that, as of now at least, he’s probably losing. Your thoughts on all that?Suebsaeng: Well, whether it’s in the Middle East or all the way to the mainland United States, Donald Trump cannot seem to stop starting wars that he very quickly starts getting his ass kicked in. Look, he’s trying to rig upcoming elections in his and the Republican Party’s favor on a multitude of fronts. This is one of them—in which he pressured the Republican Party in a variety of states, most notably Texas, to do redistricting at a time when they typically don’t do it, so he could try to dilute Democratic seats and advantages for the 2026 midterm elections. Now, Democrats—as you and I are used to pointing out—often have an instinctive inclination to try to take the high road. or at least pretend that they’re doing that, and have a problem with either literally or proverbially fighting back or punching back. This time, to some of the Democratic Party leadership’s credit in different states, they decided that, okay, we’re not going to unilaterally disarm on this. If Donald Trump is going to try to rig an election, we need to try to establish deterrence for the future so that we can at least try to send a message to the Republican Party that if you keep doing this, it is going to turn out poorly for you. And so far, at this current state in the arms race—because of what happened under Gavin Newsom’s leadership in California and others in California, and because of what happened in Virginia very, very recently—it seems like it’s basically a universally accepted premise here that Donald Trump and the Republican Party are currently on the losing end when you do the very basic math. Sargent: Authoritarians like Trump thrive on the expectation that everybody’s going to roll over for them. And in case after case here, Trump keeps getting surprised when people fight back. Suebsaeng: It’s classic bully behavior. I mean, it’s classic bully behavior. It’s the stereotype of every single school bully—at the moment you shove them a little bit and they lightly fall off the jungle gym, suddenly they’re the victim, they’re the aggrieved party. How could you do that? Why are you being so mean to me? That’s exactly what you have in the political character of a Donald Trump.Like, I’m not at all trying to downplay—I never would downplay the severity of the damage that he and his gang are causing and are likely to continue causing, on historic levels, between now and whenever they’re out of office. I’m not downplaying that at all. Having said that, they are losing more—and in some cases a lot more—than they and their cult would ever publicly admit, or especially President Donald Trump would ever be willing to admit, otherwise his ego would cave in on itself. And also, at the same time, there is a pathetic weakness and massive gaping hole of insecurity that undergirds all of this MAGA authoritarianism. I would feel sorry for all of them if they weren’t so despicably cruel on a multitude of fronts. I really would. I have to suppress that part of my brain and my heart that makes me want to feel sorry for these people.Sargent: Well make sure to keep that suppressed, Swin. I think you’re putting your finger on sort of the structural position of the Republican Party in a funny way, too, because the Republican outcry over Democrats doing the very same thing that they do—but doing it to their own advantage—is essentially an objection to the fact that anybody’s fighting back against them. Republicans quite literally and explicitly expect that the way this is supposed to work is that they get to rig elections and Democrats roll over and take it. That’s their position.Suebsaeng: Yes, openly. Openly. I mean, that has always been the position of not just Trumpism, but a lot of these other more quote-unquote older-school Republicans who have now, of course, just been completely subsumed into the ideological project of the cult of Trump. But yes, their position has always been like, it is morally crooked or maybe even illegal if you do a tenth of something. If we do nine tenths or a hundred percent of something, we get to do it just because it would hurt our feelings if you said we didn’t get to do it. And by the way, the Roberts Court agrees with us. So ha ha, check the scoreboard.Sargent: So Trump just exploded on Truth Social over the tariff loss—now that the U.S. is reimbursing businesses for the tariffs they paid before they were invalidated. Trump said this: “People and companies that have taken advantage of our country for decades because of the horrible and ridiculous United States Supreme Court decision on tariffs are now supposed to be given back 159 billion.” Look, Trump has gotten his way out of the Supreme Court a lot. There’s no denying that. But he’s also losing some big ones, and he’s trapped in the dynamic that you just identified where he keeps shrieking with fury at the court and it isn’t working. He’s here again, picked a fight that he’s not winning, right?Suebsaeng: The Supreme Court is such a glorious example of how the bully Donald Trump got everything he wanted. The spoiled brat, rich kid bully got basically what he wanted. Look, he might be very well on the way to roughly half of the Supreme Court being Trump-appointed. When was the last time that has happened with any American president—especially when Alito retires sometime soon? And he got three—an incredible number for any president—in his first term. And he is still not happy with it. And is constantly seething about it whenever they go up against him here and there, even though on probably more than 90 percent of things, they agree and co-sign all of his bullshit with him and the Republican Party. They even gift-wrapped him the torqued-up presidential immunity that he’s now benefiting from, that he obviously benefited from during the 2024 race. You could argue that they are the reason he is not in prison.Sargent: So Swin, this is where it gets a bit darker, I think. Trump, of course, fired his old attorney general, Pam Bondi, and she’s been replaced by acting attorney general Todd Blanche, a former Trump defense attorney and maybe a current one as well. But now Blanche and his people are leaking word that they’re going to be seriously ramping up the prosecutions of Trump’s enemies where Bondi failed. Now, I don’t think Blanche is going to be more successful because, as you point out, there are juries and judges that they have to deal with. But this is still just disgusting. He’s going to wield the machinery of justice improperly or even unlawfully against Americans who are innocent, solely because the ailing despot who’s falling asleep during press conferences can’t stand the notion that he isn’t winning or whatever. It’s just vile.Suebsaeng: Over the past six months or so, I’ve been talking to a variety of prominent Trump allies—both on the legal and political and advocacy side, on the outside, some of whom have been furiously upset, including some on the record—that the Stephen Miller-led war on terror against the left in the United States, particularly in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, did not materialize in the hyper-aggressive way that they wanted. And a lot of these people put the blame squarely at Pam Bondi’s feet, because, you’ve got to blame someone. Somebody’s got to be a scapegoat. And this rippled its way all the way up to Donald Trump himself. Trump had been bitching for weeks, if not months, ahead of Pam Bondi’s ouster that one of his top complaints with her—and he had a long, wandering list of complaints—but one of the top complaints was, and I’m obviously paraphrasing here, that she was not wielding the Department of Justice aggressively enough to jail as many of his political enemies and personal enemies at the clip, at the rate, that Trump wanted. She was not shoving enough of his nemeses behind bars. So he basically fired the very MAGAfied Pam Bondi for not being aggressively authoritarian or corrupt enough.However, as you pointed out, that’s not entirely her fault. It’s not like she wasn’t a super-MAGA Trump loyalist who hated a lot of these same people. The issue was, even though these guys are committing a ton of democratic backsliding and pulling America in that direction, they do have to deal with democratic institutions and also a political party that is accountable to the voters. So it takes a lot of time, effort, skill, and intelligence—emphasis on the words time and patience—to actually create a genuinely authoritarian structure where a guy like Donald Trump could sit atop the federal apparatus and actually just throw anybody he wanted—whether it was Rosie O’Donnell or John Bolton or James Comey or whoever—in jail, and take away their citizenship, just on a whim and just because he wanted to. As bad as things are in the United States of America right now, we are not there yet.And then when Donald Trump looks out at his DOJ and FBI and gets antsy about why we’re not rocketing as quickly as he would like to in that direction, he’s got to blame someone. And just because you got rid of Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche is not a wizard. He’s not going to get you your Reichstag fire moment in a week and a half. It’s just not going to happen.Sargent: So Swin, you made a really interesting point in your piece, which is that this dynamic is pervading the entire GOP precisely because Republicans are not allowed to question Trump. They’re actually constraining themselves from, number one, trying to get him to course-correct, and number two, from breaking with him. The funny thing I’d add to that, Swin, is that they’re the ones who are paying the price for this. He doesn’t pay any price. They do.Suebsaeng: Right. They are governed entirely by a republic of fear right now—fear of what will happen if you go against Trump too much, or say the wrong thing about him on live TV or behind closed doors to his face, or into the ear of somebody who’s super close to him. And when it comes to the dynamic—whether it’s the Iran war that a lot of the Republican elite on Capitol Hill are freaking out about, particularly with regards to the gas prices and the U.S. economy and about how if Trump doesn’t basically surrender in that and admit defeat, and if the war keeps going, it could screw so many of their midterm election chances come November. Whether it’s that or other elements of the Trump regime agenda, including their mass deportation policies that have become woefully unpopular with normal Americans—these are things that the Republican Party elite would kind of like some more public relations manicuring on, so they can try to get away with certain things with the normal average voter in the upcoming elections. But at the same time, they are inextricably tied to these things either because they really do want to get the end results from them because they believe in the project, or because they’re simply just not allowed to cross Trump. So you know what? They are two peas in a pod—Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican Party, who absolutely deserve each other and whatever goes on electorally between now and November. God bless them.Sargent: Very well said, Asawin Suebsaeng. It’s always great to talk to you, man, even if it’s going to require Trump passing from the scene before we get even a tiny bit of relief from any of this. Swin, good to talk to you.Suebsaeng: Thank you for having me.