The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 6 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.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump unleashed an angry new rant over the news that his sentencing for his hush money conviction will proceed on January 10. But buried in Trump’s rage was a key tell: He’s signaling that he’ll use his conviction and sentencing as a fake pretext to carry out his own authoritarian designs in a second term. Today, we’re chatting about this with Adam Gurri, the editor of Liberal Currents Magazine, who’s been making good arguments lately about Trump’s pursuit of a “personalist” form of rule, which shapes everything around the whims and needs of the personality at the center of his movement. We’re already seeing that this is where Trump’s presidency will go. Adam, thanks for coming on.

Adam Gurri: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: Judge Juan Merchan recently upheld Trump’s sentencing for falsifying business records in the Manhattan case, though he’ll probably spare Trump jail time. Trump has been raging about this; in his latest tweet, he declared, “There has never been a president so evilly and illegally treated as I.” He ranted about corrupt Democrat judges and prosecutors, and he has elsewhere falsely claimed Biden officials who hate him are behind the Manhattan conviction. Adam, this seems ominous. Trump is clearly laying the groundwork to use this sentencing to justify all manner of things he hoped to do anyway in his second term. What do you expect on this front?

Gurri: First and foremost, this is going to be his pretext for going after his own opponents: prominent Democrats, but also Republicans that aligned against him like Liz Cheney. These are all things that he’s fairly openly promised throughout the campaign. That’s my number one concern. Otherwise, depending on sentencing, we’ll see an early confrontation between the Trump administration and the legal system to the extent to which he can just ignore it, the extent to which he weaponizes it against, perhaps, state judges themselves.

There’s a lot of tools at his disposal. You have someone like Kash Patel at the FBI. And one potential is suddenly there are corruption investigations into judges that have ruled on the cases against him. Things like that, where even if he doesn’t succeed, even if the courts eventually throw it out, it can be enough to scare any of the judges in any of the cases that have been brought against him. In the long term, once they’ve tested how to scare judges and intimidate judges, judges are one of the number-one impediments to the many policies that he has promised to enact.

Sargent: Adam, you had a piece on this more generally recently for Liberal Currents, arguing that one of the big risks of the second Trump presidency is that he will entrench “personalist” rule. First, can you talk about what “personalist” rule is?

Gurri: Yeah. When people think of dictators, especially in this country, we have the most extreme twentieth century examples in mind of totalitarianism like the Soviet Union or even Nazi Germany at the height of the war. But there’s different varieties of dictatorship. One of the most common ones is the........

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