The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 13 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.
At a press conference on Wednesday, President Donald Trump seemed unusually angry. He ripped into Chuck Schumer, calling him “Palestinian.” He seethed with anger at Canada and taunted the Canadians over his tariff threats. And he snapped at three different reporters at three different times. All this comes as a new CNN poll finds Trump approval deeper underwater and his numbers are even worse on the economy. Crucially, the CNN poll also finds very broad public rejection of his tariffs. Trump is trapped in an unusual dynamic right now. He’s clearly taking a beating over his tariff threats, but he’s also gotten it into his head that the tariff threats are what make him appear strong and formidable, so it’s hard for him to back out of them. Today, we’re talking about this with one of our favorite interpreters of Trump’s and MAGA’s psychoses, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte. Good to have you back on, Amanda.
Amanda Marcotte: Hey, thanks for having me.
Sargent: Trump’s mad. I think the CNN poll might have something to do with it. It finds that Trump’s approval is at 45 percent to 54 percent. Approval of Trump’s handling of the economy is worse at 44 to 56. On tariffs, it’s 39 to 61. And 57 percent say he hasn’t paid attention to the country’s most important problems. Amanda, the tariffs are supposed to be Trump’s big plan for the economy, but nobody’s buying that these tariffs will fix what’s bothering people about the economy right now. There’s a big disconnect here, isn’t there?
Marcotte: Yes, there is a big disconnect. Usually, I feel like I have a good read on what kind of delusions Trump is under, but he’s so angry and baffled that I almost wonder if he actually had half-convinced himself that tariffs were good, that they actually would do all the miraculous things that he promises they will do. It’s fascinating because everyone knows that tariffs are a sales tax. I always assumed that that was why Trump wants to impose them—because he’s a rich guy who wants to move the tax burden off of rich people and onto poor people. Maybe he’s beginning to realize, especially with other Republican pushback, that his endless and boundless faith that he can bullshit his supporters might hit a limit when their prices start going up because of a tax he imposed.
Sargent: There’s no question about it. The Republican pushback is clearly getting to him. As you say, we should talk about this just for a second because it’s not a small thing. Tariffs are a tax on consumers, and his plan is to redistribute the tax burden to poorer people from richer people, quite literally. He wants to cut taxes on the very rich—continue his tax cuts—and pay for it with the “revenues” from tariffs. He said that straight out, right?
Marcotte: Yeah, and it’s clear that his new friends in the tech bro world are feeding this delusion. They—Elon Musk’s friends—are on Twitter pushing this idea. That’s where his obsession with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is coming from. It’s coming from these people that are blowing smoke up his ass about it, saying, Yeah, tariffs were the time of this great pre-twentieth century economy. Well, no. He obviously is bad at math and doesn’t understand that you can’t just replace income taxes with a sales tax, even a really, really high sales tax for multiple reasons. The amount of revenue generated would never be even close to enough. And that’s not to say the total and absolute economic damage that comes from hitting the people who can least afford it the hardest.
Sargent: And that’s what makes it redistributive from rich to poor, the tax burden. Let’s talk about Wednesday’s presser. Here’s a key moment where Trump laid into Chuck Schumer. The context was a question about tax policy and about whether Democrats will support the continuing resolution funding the government through the fall. This happened.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): And Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I’m concerned. He’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore, he’s a Palestinian.
Sargent: This is obviously disgusting, claiming that if someone is not fully supportive of Israel’s policies, they don’t count as Jewish. Trump doesn’t get to say who’s Jewish. But putting that aside, I think this is Trump’s go-to—and this is where your understanding of MAGA psychosis comes in. When Trump’s feeling vulnerable and worried, he thinks he can project strength to his people, to his base, by abusing someone viciously as he does here. What do you think?
Marcotte: It’s telling that he was being asked about tax policy and he went off on calling Chuck Schumer “Palestinian.” And he’s getting worse about this. Chuck Schumer is confronting him on a tax policy issue and he just starts spouting this stuff because he hears the word “Schumer”; he’s almost like a bot, coming up with these insults. It might be effective to a certain extent on his base because a lot of them have also “self-botted.” It’s a series of impulses that are removed from anything like thought process or rationality, a bunch of emotions totally unorganized by anything resembling reason now, and it’s getting worse all the time. But for everyone else, it’s like, What are you talking about, man?
Sargent: So here’s another moment from the press conference. As you know, Trump is getting ready to do another version of his Muslim ban. At the presser, a reporter asked him which countries he’ll put on the list this time. Then this happened.
Reporter (audio voiceover): Can you say which countries you would target in your next travel ban?
Trump (audio voiceover): Wouldn’t that be a stupid thing for me to say? Which country am I going to target for the next travel ban? Can you believe somebody would ask that question?
Sargent: He snapped at two other reporters as well. He said, “That’s enough,” to one of them who asked about the markets—also telling. And he angrily asked another reporter who brought up Trump’s discussion of removing Palestinians of Gaza, “Who are you with?” When she said Voice of America, he angrily said, “No wonder.” MAGA is really angry at Voice of America right now, but again, these are reasonable questions to ask Trump. I keep asking myself, how is this supposed to appeal to any swing voter or moderate voter who’s worried about the chaos they’re seeing in Washington? I know Trump thinks he’s got magical propaganda and magical lying powers, but he’s got to sense that this is not going to reassure people, no?
Marcotte: That’s why I think he’s freaking out, right? My sense of what’s going on with him is that he’s more sheltered from outside information than he ever has been before. It seems increasingly clear to me, especially when you look at his schedule, that he’s spending a lot more time sheltered in a little bubble surrounded by friends and advisers who are doing a North Korea–style everything-is-good-news thing because nobody wants to give him the bad news. When he’s confronted with certain realities, like this is not going well, people do not like Elon Musk, you’re going to cause a recession and there’s no way you can hide that fact, I think he’s starting to sweat it because the cognitive dissonance is probably worse than ever before with him.
Sargent: Well, supporting your point, a Trump adviser told Axios recently that the stock market feels like something over which they have no control. I really do think that Trump stakes his emotional well-being on what he sees in charts. When charts go down, he feels bad; when charts go up, he feels strong and powerful. Here’s a case where those market charts are really going down. And he sits there watching TV a lot, as you know. He absorbs stuff off of Fox News. Even Fox News is freaking out about the markets, and he’s seeing chart after chart after chart and visual after visual after visual showing markets tanking. That’s got to get to him.
Marcotte: There’s two modes on Fox News; Media Matters had a really good article about this. You have some hosts on Fox News who are, again, working like palace advisers of a North Korean or other totalitarian government, telling fragile dear leader that there’s nothing wrong, that recession fears aren’t real, that everything’s great, that his plans are perfect, nothing is ever going to go wrong. Then you have other hosts who recognize that the one thing you can’t BS people about is inflation and crashing stock markets and things like that, and they’re on TV basically begging him to stop. Laura Ingram had a segment where she was saying, Please, please don’t do this, knowing that talking to him through the TV is the only way to get his attention.
It’s really striking because I think that there’s a self-interested aspect [to] this. What’s interesting about what he’s threatening to do to the economy will hurt almost everybody very badly—not just working class people but everybody, including rich people [who will] lose a lot of money when the stock market crashes. There’s a self-interest aspect there with the Fox News host, but I also think that they recognize that the Republican Party could be in very real danger if they continue down this path.
Sargent: I want to highlight another number out of the CNN poll that goes to the point you made a little earlier about how the tariffs really are not going to be perceived well by his base, especially the lower income consumers. It finds that Trump’s approval on the tariffs among noncollege graduates is 41 to 59. That means 59 percent of noncollege voters disapprove of the tariffs. Among Republicans, there’s actually 20 percent who disapprove. So we’re talking real chunks of his base right there. I’ve got to think that this is a real threat to the coherence of the MAGA coalition. If there’s anything that can really start to split the MAGA coalition that elected Trump this time, which has got all these noncollege voters, both white and nonwhite in it, it’s this stuff. Don’t you think?
Marcotte: Yeah. In fact, I even want to put some nuance into the concept of the MAGA coalition because one of the problems is that Trump and the media played a terrible role in this. That election was such a shocker that I think a lot of the coverage has treated it like the American people really backed Donald Trump, that it was this overwhelming victory, and that people love him and everything—whereas the actual data says very differently. We have fewer than 50 percent of Americans voted for him that voted at all. You do have the faithful, the people that love Donald Trump, but then you all have another huge segment of the people that voted for him reluctantly.
They are low information voters, they tend to be more working class. They were frustrated by inflation and they thought they’d take a gamble on the other guy. And it wasn’t any deeper than that. They don’t love Donald Trump. A lot of them would tell pollsters that they actually hate the guy, but they’re just really are hoping that he can fix inflation like he said. And those people, he can definitely lose.
Sargent: I want to highlight another big moment from the press conference. Trump was talking about how he had threatened Canada with huge tariffs to get them to back off threatened surcharges on electricity for American customers. Some tariffs has gone forward, some haven’t. Anyway, this is what happened.
Trump (audio voiceover): Just like when Ontario charged us, everybody said, Oh, they just charged us. This will be won in one hour. And I announced what we were going to do, and they withdrew their little threat. The dairy products, they charge our farmers 240, 250, 270, and 400 percent, OK? Think of that, for dairy product. And we charge them like peanuts. And you know why? It’s because we’ve been improperly run for so many years. I have that all settled in my first term, but of course, Biden, you know. He let everything go to hell.
Sargent: Amanda, the funny thing about this is the market’s tanked on this news, right? The market’s tanked when this scuffle happened, yet he’s holding it up as proof of his strength and power. This, to me, is the disconnect.
Marcotte: What’s funny is right before we recorded this, I was reading some of the psychological research in masculine insecurity. The overwhelming research would actually predict exactly this reaction, which is that when men who are really engaged in toxic masculinity stereotypes feel their masculinity threatened, they lash out, they become more violent, become more threatening, and they try to prove themselves through chest thumping.
We see this all the time with Trump, and I think this is a really good example. He thought he was going to do something smart and powerful by starting this trade war. I guess he didn’t realize Canada can punch back and they can actually cause political pain for him, which is what they did. Instead of learning his lesson and be like, Maybe I shouldn’t be so aggressive for no good reason to our neighbor, he’s doubling down. He’s escalating because he doesn’t know what else to do. We saw the same behavior with E. Jean Carroll. She sued him—and instead of admitting that he had gotten himself into some serious hot water by sexually assaulting this woman, he just kept doubling down and insulting her and defaming her, racking up more things they could sue him for.
Sargent: Yes, and I think that gets to the dynamic that I suggested at the outset. He’s getting hammered over the tariff threats right now. The markets are tanking over them. He hates when markets tank; his mental well-being is very tied to the direction that the market charts are going. He’s also gone into his head that the tariff threats are what make him look strong and formidable, so he can’t back out of them.
Marcotte: He has, in the past, been convinced to save face by backing down when he gets into these spirals. Especially in the last term, there were people who understood that his strongest desire is to save face. As long as he had some face-saving excuse like Oh, I won the tariff war, declare victory, let’s move on, he would do that. He’s a lot older now. He was never an emotionally continent person to begin with, obviously, and it’s getting worse. It’s definitely getting worse. I’m not a doctor, I couldn’t say, but this happens to a lot of people as they age. Their impulse control gets much worse, and he doesn’t have as many people around him to steer him in the right direction. On the contrary, he seems to be spending all his time with Elon Musk, who is taking advantage of this entire situation to manipulate the old man.
Sargent: And Elon Musk is very good at that. Elon Musk really knows how to pump up Trump. And I wonder whether the assassination attempts that he survived as well as the comeback, which was really startling, reinforced the sense in him that he can basically get away with whatever he wants. And yet here again, there’s a nuance, right? He clearly is getting very angry that he can’t get away with whatever he wants.
Marcotte: Yeah. He obviously doesn’t believe in God or anything like that, so I don’t know where he would get the idea that he’s been magically imbued with these powers. He’s also not a very smart man and he’s a narcissist, so he might not actually have some causal relationship in his head between I can do whatever I want [and] I live without consequences. He’s probably just high on the supply of having escaped prison, having escaped death, having escaped all these nooses that he had worked himself into.
Obviously, it wasn’t his fault that somebody tried to assassinate him, but everything else that was about to come down on him in terms of legal consequences was absolutely his fault. He’s escaped all of it. Him thanking John Roberts for the immunity decision at the State of the Union was quite a moment on that. But I think that he’s obviously garble-brained now. He doesn’t really know what to do next. I suspect that his entire motive during the campaign was avoiding prison above and beyond everything else; he didn’t actually think about what would happen past escaping the handcuffs. Now he’s in there and he’s just throwing stuff at the wall and there’s nobody around him to suggest, Maybe we don’t do that.
Sargent: And I would argue that the dynamic is exacerbated by the fact that the people around him who are thinking are really pretty hardline MAGA ideologues who have some twisted vision of tearing down the American state and tearing up the Western alliances and replacing it with some populist/theocratic form of governance that’s aligned with the world’s dictators and strongmen.
Marcotte: Yeah. Sometimes, Trump will say stuff—I can’t think of anything right off the top of my head right now—and it’s super clear that he’s repeating ideas that he heard from Elon Musk and Peter Thiel that are very radical, very strange. And he doesn’t really understand them, so it’s always a weird twisted watered-down version. It’s clear that they have pumped him up with the idea that he could be this historical figure who changes society to look like what they consider a utopian vision but is obviously a dystopian vision for nearly all people of the future.
Their ideas are incredibly radical. They basically want to end democracy and replace it with neofeudalism. He obviously doesn’t understand any of that, but he does understand, as a narcissist, being told that he could be the most important president that ever lived. It’s obvious to me that that’s what’s being whispered in his ear to get him to just sign onto stuff that he in the past would have understood was politically damaging in the extreme.
Sargent: Well, I’ll say this got a little darker than I thought it would—I thought we were just going to be talking about Trump raging at his presser—but that’s why we have you on, Amanda. Thanks so much for coming on.
Marcotte: I don’t mean to make everything super dark [laughs]. Thank you for having me.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.