The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 31 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.

The knives are out for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Politico reports that White House and Pentagon insiders are increasingly questioning Hegseth’s judgment and see him as the culprit in the disastrous news that Trump’s top advisors discussed war plans in an insecure chat, a scandal that continues to shake the administration. This comes as a poll finds that 74 percent of Americans see the leak as a serious problem, including 60 percent of Republicans. And here’s another striking number: Only 42 percent of Republicans say the media is making too big a deal about the scandal, suggesting that MAGA’s effort to blame the fake news for this fiasco is going belly up even with GOP voters. Surprisingly though, there’s no indication the Trumpworld is ready for the next Hegseth fiasco—and there surely will be one. We’re talking about all this today with Jennifer Rubin, co-founder and editor in chief of The Contrarian Substack, who has a piece arguing that this scandal reveals the sheer arrogance and sense of untouchability that’s consumed Trump and his team. Jen, thanks for coming back on.

Jennifer Rubin: It’s a pleasure.

Sargent: This new Politico piece really gets at an under-covered aspect of the whole Signalgate scandal, which is the likelihood that things are going to get worse with Hegseth. As one person close to the White House puts it, “What happens when Hegseth needs to manage a real crisis?” Jen, that’s a damn good question. The immediate consequences of the Signalgate fiasco were somewhat limited, but it also revealed that Hegseth is completely incompetent. And that’s not going away, which means much more serious screw-ups are coming. Your thoughts?

Rubin: Well, first of all, we don’t know how limited it was because none of the participants on the call said, Wait a second, what are we all doing on Signal? That tells me that this was standard operating procedure over the past month or so, and goodness knows what else he discussed. One of the reasons that they are not cooperating and attempting to shift the blame to poor Jeffrey Goldberg, who uncovered the whole thing, is because they no doubt know that other conversations took place. So with that in mind, you’re right. It’s not just the way you handle the operation of your communication; it’s everything else. It’s security in general, it’s his knowledge of the military, and it’s his ability to interact well with his counterparts. 

Given this fiasco, we’re already on thin ice with our allies in terms of intelligence sharing. Who in their right mind would give us anything to share knowing that it could easily go out on a Signal channel that might be intercepted—I don’t know—in the Kremlin perhaps, where the president’s envoy happened to be? So it’s always the case that by putting a incompetent ideologue—someone with both personal and professional deficits—in a position of grave importance, you are rolling the dice. Not only Trump, but those Republicans who voted for this guy.... Joni Ernst, really? Thom Tillis, really? These people went out on a limb on the assumption that, Well, he won’t be so bad or others will keep him in check, but we don’t know that. Frankly, that’s a dangerous proposition: hoping that the secretary of defense won’t really be the secretary of defense and there’ll be somebody else actually doing the job.

Sargent: It does seem like that was the calculation. Speaking of Republicans, Senator Kevin Cramer said that this mistake or fiasco is worth two strikes, basically saying you only have one more chance. Now, I don’t take that too seriously as any threat to act on the part of Republicans—because they’re never going to act. What it does show, however, is that Republicans are very sensitive to what you just said, which is that they’re going to be on the hook for the things that go wrong now.

Rubin: I would think so. And we’ve actually seen Roger Wicker, who is a no-squish  Republican from, of all places, Mississippi, jointly request—or demand, depending on how you look at it—an internal investigation into the DOD. Now, it’s not enough for the Defense Department to investigate itself, but it is some indication, as you put it, that no one is really buying this notion that it was the press’s fault or this isn’t important or this wasn’t actually classified information.

And by the way, Hegseth simply went out and lied repeatedly that there was nothing of consequence in the information that he showed. So what is that all about? Are we now simply going to assume that whenever he opens his mouth, lying is okay for the secretary of defense? Apparently, that is the standard now.

Sargent: Apparently. One senior GOP official says to Politico the following about Hegseth, “Privately, there is a lot of concern about his judgment.” Trump allies are starting to notice that his mistakes are piling up on other fronts. And I think the key here is that this is now all fair game, right? Hegseth was the one who sent the migrants to Guantanamo; that’s now been reversed. He’s the one who screwed up in February by saying Ukraine is going to have to give up huge concessions to get peace; a big gift to Russia which Hegseth then had to walk back. That’s a pretty........

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