The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 11 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.
By now you’ve heard that President Trump supposedly “paused” his tariffs. In reality, we still have a 10 percent tariff on most global imports; the tariffs with China are through the roof; and the trade war with China has gotten worse, causing markets to plunge once again. Fox News has been struggling to spin Trump’s so-called pause as some form of brilliant 11-dimensional chess. But then a Fox Business correspondent told the truth: Trump got spooked by the bond markets. This shattered Fox’s own spin.
Meanwhile, at Trump’s cabinet meeting Thursday, his top advisers offered extraordinarily unctuous flattery of him. Put this all together and we’re seeing a level of sycophancy toward the president that’s unlike anything we’ve seen before. So today we’ve invited on the perfect guest to talk about what this all means, historian Nicole Hemmer, who’s written books on the right-wing media and on the Republican Party. Thanks so much for coming back on, Nicole.
Nicole Hemmer: Thanks so much for having me, Greg.
Sargent: Let’s start with this bizarre Fox episode. As Matt Gertz of Media Matters chronicled, Fox personalities have gushed with praise for the tariff pause. Sean Hannity called it “the art of the deal” and “a huge win for the president.” Jesse Watters said, “Trump created maximum leverage for himself.” Laura Ingraham called it “Trump’s 3D chess move”—3D seems low, actually. But then Fox senior correspondent Charlie Gasparino said, Wait a minute, the bond market forced Trump’s hand. Listen to this, also courtesy of Media Matters.
Charlie Gasparino (audio voiceover): If you have a mass sale of bonds, that means people are losing confidence in the U.S. economy on the ability to do deals with us. And from what I understand, this is what forced the hand of this 90-day reprieve.
Sargent: Nicole, I want to remind everyone here that this brilliant move that Fox personalities are crowing about undid Trump’s own policy—and by the way, only a little bit. The markets are down again as the magnitude of the trade war with China becomes clear. What do you make of all this?
Hemmer: It is fascinating to see Fox move from state TV to outright North Korean television. At this point, they’re just chasing whatever Trump does and trying to provide cover as much as possible. When the tariffs were in place, they were his manly tariffs, People were going to feel pain, but they were going to get better afterward. And now that the tariffs have been changed—not removed, but changed—it is this celebration of “the art of the deal.” And it will be interesting to see how often [Gasparino] is invited back on or whether his message attenuates some, because as Fox has gotten more and more [about] running cover for Trump, the amount of dissent allowed on the network has really dropped. So we will see how they chase this ball of the tariffs and the economy in coming days.
Sargent: I want to ask you one question about this, because Fox has actually in recent months been somewhat willing here and there to criticize the tariffs. The thing is this was in the run-up to the actual announcement of them. You had people like Maria Bartiromo really warning Trump, Don’t do this. You had others on Fox warning, Don’t do this, it’s going to be really hard to manage, and so forth. But now that they’ve done it, they can’t really say that anymore. They’ve got to flip over to saying it’s pure genius.
Hemmer: It’s such an interesting example of what happens when you are performing for an audience of one. When it’s still a potential policy, you understand that Donald Trump is watching and you have an opportunity to potentially sway him one way or the other; he watches tons of Fox News and absorbs quite a lot from the network. But once a policy is in place, he has to be a genius. He has to have made the right decision because, again, he’s still watching. And if you get out of line, then there will be retributions against the network.
Sargent: It’s true. By the way, I think we should point out that Fox, at least to some degree, is aligned with the plutocratic wing of the Republican Party. So when Fox News people are saying to Trump through the TV, Don’t do this, what they’re really saying is that major corporations are whispering in their ears, saying, This is going to be a disaster for our business stuff. And Fox has historically been aligned with that plutocratic wing, right?
Hemmer: Not that we need more oligarchs talking to Donald Trump, but there’s certainly a very wealthy, Wall Street Journal–ish part of the party. [It] makes a lot of sense—it’s Rupert Murdoch’s network; Rupert Murdoch owns The Wall Street Journal—that they would be pushing this message, and that that has been a fraught space in Republican politics over the past decade because tariffs are not on Rupert Murdoch’s list of things he would like to see. So there is this pressure. And I think that’s what makes the quick capitulation so interesting: because there are real differences. There is a live debate. And all of the big money is lined up on the anti-tariff side of this debate but you have Donald Trump on the pro-tariff side. It is interesting to watch the intermediaries try to balance both what their bosses want and what their real boss, Donald Trump, wants.
Sargent: The flattery of Trump isn’t limited to Fox. I want to play some audio of Trump’s cabinet meeting on Thursday in which his top people just bubbled over in sucking up to him. First here is Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Pam Bondi (audio voiceover): You are overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority. The U.S., Americans want you to be president because of your agenda, and the courts are ruling that you have the authority to determine how the money of this country will be spent.
Sargent: And here’s Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler.
Kelly Loeffler (audio voiceover): Mr. President, on behalf of America’s manufacturers, I want to thank you for standing up to the Chinese Communist Party and fighting for our main streets, for our workers, and for those that make things in America.
Sargent: Nicole, I’m not sure I’ve heard this level of sycophancy toward a president before. Am I wrong? Has it ever been like this?
Hemmer: We heard a little bit in the first Trump term, but that would be the only precedent for it. Certainly cabinet members have praised the president that they serve under, but this level of over-the-top ... Again, there are few examples better than North Korea for this type of: We must flatter in the most extreme terms this president because that’s what he responds to, and that’s how you get into his good graces and stay in his good graces. It was one thing in the first term where it was something novel. It was one of those things where you’re like, People are sucking up to Trump. But combined with Trump’s consolidation of executive power [and] the way that he is ruling as an authoritarian, that actually casts this flattery in a different light—because it is combined with this unprecedented use of executive power.
Sargent: You’ve been tracking right-wing media for a long time. You wrote a good book about it called Messengers of the Right. Maybe we’ve seen something like this a little bit before with George W. Bush after September 11 and during the beginning of the Iraq War, but like you say, I don’t think it gets there. I think we’re seeing something different now. More broadly, what’s happened here? Are there structural reasons for this change that you can identify?
Hemmer: Right-wing media—which I’ve tracked back [to] the 1940s and ’50s; it’s been around in the United States for a long time—got closer and closer with the Republican Party in the ’90s and 2000s, as you rightly point out. There is something different. Is it structural? It’s structural in the way that Donald Trump being president makes it structural. He has been this not polarizing but almost congealing force within the Republican Party. He has become its new center. And for ideological media that were trying to pursue a certain set of policies, a certain worldview that he doesn’t quite match, what it has done is it has functionally transformed a place like Fox News from an organ of right-wing politics into an organ of Trumpian politics. Those might seem the same but they’re actually different. One is a set of policy preferences, and one is a cult of personality.
And in part, what is structural about it is that the audience for Fox and right-wing media [has] become so loyal to Trump themselves that when these outlets cross Trump, they lose market share, they lose their audiences. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Fox News saw real competition and lost like a million viewers until they got back in line. And that economic incentive is pretty powerful.
Sargent: I’d like to clarify for people what you’re saying there. After the 2020 election, when Trump started really contesting the outcome, Fox News got in trouble because on election night, they correctly called Arizona for Joe Biden. That’s when they really started to lose market share to Newsmax. And we saw in the lawsuit brought by Dominion against Fox News that top Fox News personalities were in a rampant panic about what was happening—that the network had erred by telling the truth to Fox viewers about Trump and the 2020 election. In retrospect, that really looks like a turning point, doesn’t it? Where we crossed over into this new cult-like adulation of Trump that wasn’t quite there before? Can you talk a little bit about that?
Hemmer: Absolutely. Fox was built on this fiction that there was a wall of church and state between its news division and its opinion division. The opinion division could go crazy right-wing, but it would have a real news gathering organization, especially on election night. They would be reliable. They would be the place that you could turn in to watch election results, that you could trust them. And what you saw after election night 2020 was Fox being forced to make a choice: choosing to report accurately what was happening in the election, paying an enormous price from it, and learning a lesson that in the future they wouldn’t be able to cross Donald Trump in that way. Again, I don’t actually think that there was that clean division between opinion and news on Fox, but 2020 was a real turning point in that whatever separation there was functionally collapsed after that.
Sargent: Unbelievable. It seems to me we’re in this weird place though where the sycophancy can’t really hold. The Bulwark Sarah Longwell just reported that she’s done focus groups of people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and moved to Trump in 2024. There’s a lot of angst about the tariffs. These voters just don’t understand the point of them. Then there’s new reporting that farmers are getting more panicked about a protracted trade war with China, which is where they export a lot of their product. The president of the American Soybean Association said, “If this lasts long-term, we’re going to have a significant number of farmers going out of business.” These types of voters are on the periphery of MAGA in a sense. They’re like the less committed outer tier, whereas the molten core of MAGA is the Fox audience and its sycophants. But at the same time, some of these on the outer tier are also Fox’s audience, right? So how does Fox manage this? Can it hold everything together?
Hemmer: It’s going to be a fascinating test. All of this is a fascinating test of exactly how firm Trump’s control over people actually is. That molten core is, as its name suggests, untouchable. You’re probably not going to be able to penetrate and actually get accurate information and accurate understanding of the world into that. That outer core, though, when it feels the pain of these tariffs, when it touches their lives personally ... What I think you’re going to see from Fox News is what you saw prior to the easing of the tariffs over the past day or so, which is it tried not to talk about it at all. It tried to feed culture-war stories into its audience to distract them, to give them something else to focus on, to give them someone else to hate.
And that is going to be the challenge for that outer edge that is going to be feeling the pain of the Trump economy in the months and years ahead. Can journalists and activists and liberals and Democrats get the story of the cause of that pain into that outer core? Or will Fox be able to win them over by selling them a story that isn’t true but feels good enough that they will stick with Trump?
Sargent: Yeah, it seems like we’re seeing a bit of a test of that right now. To go back to this outer core of maybe less committed Trump voters—the ones who voted for Biden in 2020 [then] moved to Trump because of the cost of living crisis, maybe farmers who have some sense that trade wars really are terrible for their bottom line—people like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters are essentially instructing these people to think Trump is brilliantly in command of everything [and] he’s entirely infallible at all times without fail. But they can see that he’s not, and that he’s just unleashing all this destructive chaos. What happens with Fox News? Does it have to speak to those people or can it just revert only to speaking to the the molten core?
Hemmer: I’m not sure how it’s going to navigate this because we didn’t have a crisis of quite the scale.... Maybe around Covid we had a crisis of the scale. The people needed real information about the world, and Fox needed to give it to them, even as the president was saying inane and wild things in his press conferences on a regular basis. That, too, is instructive, because for a while, there was good information that was getting out. Fox decided that it was going to give people good information from the CDC and the NIH about health.
This was, of course, before the 2020 election—so it was before Fox was corralled by Trump and his followers. I think that could be what we see: that in periods of extreme pain, you might have some of those voices like Gasparino come on and say, Wait just a second, this person is destroying the very basis of the modern U.S. economy and things need to get back in line. But in the long run, I think what you will see is a set of stories and conspiracy theories meant to draw people back in the same way that they were drawn back in after about six months or so of coverage of the pandemic.
Sargent: It’s fascinating. I want to try to get at this deeper tension as well. As you’ve been saying, what’s happened to Fox News reflects fundamental changes in what’s happened with the Republican base. It’s now really just loyal to Trump in a way that we haven’t really quite seen before. And yet at the same time, we’re in the middle of something approaching a crisis for a lot of these very people, right? Fox News has to figure out what to do about that. And Nicole, it’s going to get worse, right? As far as we can tell, unless Trump brilliantly does some new thing, which will of course be hailed in North Korean propaganda-like terms, we’re looking at real inflationary effects, really serious turmoil in the trade war with China. Potentially Trump decides to bring back some of the other tariffs as well, if Canada pisses him off in some way. So it will get worse. The tension for Fox News will get worse, won’t it?
Hemmer: It will. The tension will get worse. So will the economy, and so will the lives of the people who have been supporting Donald Trump. I’m reminded of something that David Roberts wrote the other day where he said, “Trauma does not tell its own story.” As things get worse, it will not automatically be clear to everyone that they are getting worse because of the choices that Donald Trump made. And the people on Fox News and throughout right-wing media are going to be pushing another story.
We heard a preview of this as the stock market was tanking over the last few weeks. They said, OK, there’s a little bit of pain, but there is something beautiful on the other side, or, Yes, there’s pain now, but this pain was caused by the Democrats and their spending policies, or, This pain was caused by immigrants who were taking your jobs, or they’ll just distract with the invasion of Canada and Greenland. There are ways that authoritarian governments keep control over their people, even during periods of extreme economic crisis—and, in fact, are able to consolidate their power and their propaganda instruments in periods of extreme economic crisis. So that’s why Fox News is particularly important to watch in the months and the years ahead: They are a key source of message control for a government that is trying to control basically everything.
Sargent: I want to try to close on a slightly optimistic note, which is this: The tariff story, I think, illustrates that the press in this country actually remains robust and independent. If you look at the polls, we’ve actually seen a significant shift in public opinion against the tariffs. And the reason for that, I think, was mainly press coverage and noise from the opposition, meaning the Democratic Party. It just looks to me like the press actually did a decent job of informing the voters of what tariffs really are—that they’re actually a tax, not other countries paying tribute to Donald Trump’s greatness or whatever. So you’ve got Fox News, as you say, functioning as authoritarian state media, but at the same time, its influence is actually somewhat limited precisely because the rest of the press, despite Trump’s threats and his shakedowns and all the rest of it, has actually been informative and robust and independent. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Hemmer: The thing that has been so fascinating about the tariff story is it’s reminder that the economy is one of those issues where journalists feel like they can actually tell the truth. They won’t do it on what they see as culture-war issues. They won’t do it on what they see as purely political issues. But when it comes to things like tariffs and the stock market crashing and the structure of the global economy, they feel like they can tell the truth about that. And when they do, it matters. You also see Democrats stepping up, whether it’s talking about oligarchy or the cost of the tariffs. And I think it’s that combination.
It’s all of these different sources of the power of civil society that has not yet been blotted out, combined with something like the economy where people can open up their 401(k)s and see, Wow, I lost a lot of money over the last two weeks. That intrusion of reality, along with good reporting and an opposition actually speaking up, matters. And I think it gives us a roadmap moving forward for what we are going to need to counter not just issues on the economy but this entire political agenda that the Trump administration is pursuing.
Sargent: We’re in the middle of an unprecedented amount of power for right-wing media. But at the same time, we’re going to discover, I think, that its power is not limitless, right?
Hemmer: That’s right. It’s not limitless. And I think that is the optimistic note, or that it actually is the note of reality in all of this. Part of authoritarianism is the ability to project absolute power. And Trump has consolidated a lot of power, and Fox News has a lot of power, but they don’t have everything. In a society like ours, people still have a tremendous amount of power, and we should be using it right now, every day, at every possible opportunity. That is how you both wind that authoritarian power back and break the myth of absolute power that they’re trying to sell.
Sargent: Nicole Hemmer, it is an enormous pleasure to talk to you again. Thanks so much for coming on.
Hemmer: Thanks 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.