Transcript: Trump Ex-Allies Join Call for Removal: “He’s Gone Insane”

As even some of Trump’s former top MAGA supporters start admitting he’s unfit, Jennifer Rubin of The Contrarian explains how we can keep the removal talk on the front burner.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 8 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.

Donald Trump’s threat to obliterate Iranian civilization entirely has prompted some surprisingly powerful pushback from his own former allies in the MAGA movement. Some have even suggested it’s time to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. We’re recording this before the Tuesday night deadline that Trump imposed for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face total civilizational erasure. But whatever happens on that front, the conversation about Trump’s undeniable unfitness to serve as president has now been opened in a fresh way. The media is now covering this question. How do we keep it going? We’re talking about this with Jennifer Rubin, editor in chief of The Contrarian, who has a good new piece laying out that Trump is a madman who cannot remain in office. Jen, good to see you.

Jennifer Rubin: It’s lovely to be here.

Sargent: So just to reiterate, listeners will be hearing this after we find out whether Trump decided to wipe out a country of 93 million people. The Trump tweet that threatened this, as you all know, read as follows: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

Jen, maybe by Wednesday morning, Iran will have made a deal with Trump involving his demand to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Maybe the war will escalate, but either way, Trump’s conduct in this war, along with so much else, has revealed him to be absolutely unfit to be president. It sure took people long enough to figure this out, didn’t it?

Rubin: It sure did. And let’s be clear, the threat itself is a violation of international law. The threat of genocide is not allowed. So even if we don’t get the worst of the worst, having made the threat, he has put us in a position in which the United States is essentially threatening to do what we have condemned Russia for doing in Ukraine. And in invoking this apocalyptic religious kind of fervor, he has ironically mimicked the Islamic fundamentalism and translated it into his weird Christian white nationalist view of the world.

Sargent: Yeah, I think the fundamentalists turn out to be us, right?

Rubin: Yes, exactly. I’m sure the Iranians are scratching their head wondering what happened here.

Sargent: Well, let’s listen to some of these former Trump allies calling for Trump’s removal. Here’s conspiracy theorist Alex Jones asking: “How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Yes, he used “25th Amendment” as a verb. And his guest offers an idea. Listen.

Alex Jones (voiceover): How do we 25th Amendment his ass?

Guest (voiceover): The problem is to get the 25th Amendment is harder than impeachment. You have to get two thirds of the House and two thirds of the Senate.

Alex Jones (voiceover): So what do we do?

Guest (voiceover): Tackle Trump and let him pretend he’s president and publicly report that he’s going through a health issue and have Vance take over. It literally needs to be something like that. It’s that bad.

Sargent: So Jen, I’m going to try to use this as a verb now. I think that 25th-amendment-ing his ass is in fact a good idea. What did you think of that?

Rubin: It is a good idea, but it’s also improbable to say the least. It would require JD Vance to show some real spine and statesmanship. It would require a majority of his cabinet to go along, and they are filled with deluded toadies. And ultimately he would need Congress and JD Vance to pull this off. None of that is happening. So I think it is important to raise it because I think there has to be a greater........

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