The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 18 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.
President Trump suddenly seems to be running into more trouble than usual. The Jeffrey Epstein files are killing him with the base; his mental state is getting mocked due to a bizarre story he told about the Unabomber; he’s sinking in many polls with a new Associated Press survey finding him cratering on many issues; and his health seems to be deteriorating. We’ve noticed that when things go badly, Trump’s sycophants go out of their way to say things that aren’t just adulatory. They’re things they believe Trump himself wants to hear, as if what’s at issue is boosting his flagging spirits. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did some of this at the latest press briefing. She snapped at a reporter and was unhappy about a question that seemed to probe Trump’s mental state via his strange Unabomber story. Leavitt is the perfect window through which to understand what’s going on in Trumpworld, so we’re talking about her briefing today with Mark Jacob, the author of the Stop the Presses Substack, who has done good work digging into Leavitt’s particular form of dishonesty. Mark, thanks for coming on.
Mark Jacob: Well, thanks for having me.
Sargent: So let’s start with this bizarre Unibomber story. At an event in Pennsylvania, Trump recounted that his uncle John, who he described as a genius professor at MIT, had Ted Kaczynski as a student. Trump then said he used to ask his uncle, What was it like to teach the future Unabomber? But this can’t be true. First, Trump’s uncle died in 1985, more than a decade before Kaczynski was revealed as the Unabomber. So Trump couldn’t have had that conversation with his uncle. Also, Ted Kaczynski didn’t go to MIT. Mark, that’s the president talking. Have you ever heard anything like that?
Jacob: Well, you don’t hear that from anyone other than Trump. I think in a lot of ways, almost every day he’s coming out with something that’s fairly unhinged. It’s a bit of a scandal that the news media isn’t writing more about how mentally unfit he is. And the thing about that is that they wrote so much about Biden. Jake Tapper was flogging his book about Biden. Biden’s old news. It’s really not what is front and center in 2025. Yet the news media, they don’t seem to want to focus with big umbrella stories that put everything together and ask the hard question about why Donald Trump is acting the way he is and how embarrassing he is to the world and how scary he is for anyone who cares about this country’s well-being.
Sargent: It’s funny you put it that way, Mark. It just occurred to me that maybe this is an exaggeration, but it’s almost as if the press has spent more time on Biden’s mental state with Trump in the White House—at the time that Trump is in the White House—than they spend on Trump’s.
Jacob: Right. I wrote about Trump’s mental unfitness a year ago in my newsletter, and it seems like it’s only gotten worse. It keeps on getting worse, but they keep on.… The news media doesn’t focus on it. The internet, MAGA—everyone seems to be accepting the fact that the guy who is in charge of our nuclear arsenal has a screw loose, or three or four.
Sargent: That story was bizarre, don’t you think? That was something that just was absolutely fictional from top to bottom.
Jacob: Yeah, yeah. But he loves to talk about his uncle at MIT because that’s supposedly the great genes in his family. And the thing about him talking about genes all the time is that I think it’s a coded white supremacist message he’s sending—that, Oh, we have good genes here, and we don’t want it bad genes coming in from overseas, that kind of thing. So yeah, he loves to talk about his uncle for sure.
Sargent: Well, the fact that he loves to talk about his uncle was clearly on Karoline Leavitt’s mind during the briefing. She was asked about this very story. The reporters question’s pretty loaded in fairness and really does seem to suggest that Trump is losing it. The reporter’s tone really seemed to suggest that. Leavitt reacted badly to that, though she tried to make it syrupy. Listen to this.
Andrew Feinberg (audio voiceover): Ted Kaczynski was not identified as the Unabomber until 1996, 11 years after John Trump passed away. It would have been impossible for John Trump to have ever discussed the Unabomber with the president. What was he talking about? And I have one follow-up.
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): Andrew, with so many issues going on in the world, I’m a little bit surprised you would ask such a question—although I’m not, sometimes, coming from you, I will say. But I’m willing to give you an answer nevertheless. The president’s uncle did, in fact, teach at MIT. He was a very intelligent professor. The president’s very proud of his family. In fact, the president has a letter from his uncle on the MIT letterhead that sits in the Oval Office dining room. Maybe we’ll let you see it sometime.
Sargent: Mark, note that Leavitt there snaps at this reporter for asking what she characterizes as a frivolous question—but it’s not frivolous. This is the president of the United States. If he’s going to tell stories that are pure fiction and that seem to raise questions about his mental fitness, that’s legitimate. And by the way, to your point about how much Trump likes to talk about his uncle and the nefarious reasons for that, she slipped in the little line for Trump’s ears on that very point—that his uncle’s a very brilliant guy.
Jacob: Yeah, the thing about Leavitt’s response that I was most interested was that she insists that there’s proof that his uncle taught at MIT. We have stationary and things. We can prove that he taught at MIT. That’s just about the only thing that wasn’t in dispute. So it’s a real press secretary trick to say, Well, this is true and we can prove it, when nobody questioned whether his uncle taught at MIT. They’re just questioning whether his uncle taught at MIT and taught Ted Kaczynski, who didn’t go to MIT and who wasn’t revealed until the uncle was dead for a decade.
Sargent: Well, I think that goes to your point about why Trump likes to talk about his uncle. This is something Karoline Leavitt clearly had on her mind. She understands the president. It’s almost like she was talking to a child. She knows the child president wants to hear this stuff about the uncle going to MIT. I just thought the whole thing was bizarre. Really, really odd.
Jacob: I feel like that she is probably doing the best job of lying of any of Trump’s press secretaries. And when you see her in action, you can tell she thinks she’s killing it. She thinks she’s doing a great job of lying. And she’s paid $180,000 a year by the taxpayers to try to inform the public. So she’s not doing the job for the taxpayers, but she’s doing Trump’s job, which is to just try to gaslight the press create these sound bites and amuse Trump by verbally abusing members of the news media when they asked legitimate questions.
Sargent: Well, I think that’s an important point you raised there because to return to this audience of one theme, which she really is speaking to Trump from that podium a lot of the time, the abuse of the press is intended for Trump’s ears. She thinks that will thrill Trump. She thinks that will make Trump feel like she’s fighting on his behalf. And I think she’s right about that. By the way, I do think she’s killing it if dishonesty is the metric we’re looking at this by, and if ministering to the audience of one is the metric we’re looking at this by. She’s really, really dangerously good at gaslighting, but also at speaking to Trump’s pathologies.
Jacob: Well, she’s not tethered to the truth at all. And that really frees you up. It’s liberating for a liar to not ever be required to tell the truth. Maybe my favorite one, Greg, was when she said that the taxpayers were paying for condoms to go to Gaza. Oh, we’re wasting taxpayer money sending condoms to Gaza. Well, turned out it wasn’t Gaza in the Middle East. It was Gaza in Mozambique, a region of Mozambique that was getting these condoms to try to fight AIDS. And she knew that. I mean, come on. And if she didn’t know it, she should be fired. And if she did know it, she should be fired. So she should be fired.
Sargent: Yes, that’s a good point. There’s another moment at which Leavitt lost her temper, this time about the focus on Epstein. Listen to this.
Leavitt (audio voiceover): The president has been transparent. He has followed through on his promises to the American people, but he doesn’t like to see Democrats and the mainstream media covering this like it’s the biggest story that the American people care about. The president has been working so hard this week. On Tuesday, he went to Pennsylvania, where he secured $90 billion in investments for the Commonwealth, for the people of that state.
Sargent: So Mark, note that she goes out of her way to slip this in and she always slips these things in [like] “the president has been working so hard.” What’s striking to me about that is there’s just no planet on which there’s any truth to that, for one thing. But also, this is Leavitt speaking directly to Donald Trump, really trying to keep that ego pumped up, don’t you think?
Jacob: Yeah. Yes. And they’re very vulnerable now. This was the same press conference at which Trump’s health problems came out. So she definitely wants to talk about “hardest working man in America” stuff. And he wants to hear that, too, even though he golfs an awful lot on the taxpayer’s dime. To me, it’s just a matter of her trying to pump him up. And the thing about it, Greg, is the rest of us don’t need that. She’s not doing a job for the American people. Why don’t they just go in a room and she can say nice things to him all the time? Frankly, these press conferences have become really meaningless. I think that your first string reporters shouldn’t even go. I think maybe you send interns in, they roll tape, and you see what’s worthwhile. Good journalists can spend their time a lot better than listening to her lie to them and mock them.
Sargent: Mark, I think you capture something dark about the ways in which she plays to Trump’s psyche. As you said, this press conference was really about, to some degree, Trump’s health. We’ve seen all the stuff about his hand; you’ve seen that. But then there’s also this new announcement that we’ve got that Trump has developed swelling in his legs due to a condition involving veins. She had to explain some of that. But what’s striking is, as you say, she was going out of her way to say that he’s vigorous and manly. She said he’s working so hard and he came back and he was making calls at eight o’clock. This is just so strange. It’s often said that Trump is a personalist ruler. Everything revolves around him. It’s not an administration anymore; it’s just one person and so forth. I think you see that displayed with unusual and unsettling clarity in these moments with Leavitt.
Jacob: Yeah, she gets that what Trump wants to be is a strongman dictator, that he likes the cult of personality. He needs it. That’s what it is. She’s not pretending that he’s just any old president who’s trying to respect the will of Congress and the power of the Supreme Court and is just trying to administer the people’s house. She doesn’t present any of that stuff. This is Il Duce. This is a guy who’s going to save America, that God has chosen. This is the kind of language they use. And it’s just undemocratic. It’s just not the way our country is supposed to work. These are people who want to glorify the idea of a strongman dictator. Therefore she’s got to pull that routine whenever she talks in the press briefings.
Sargent: What’s striking about what you’re saying is also the degree to which this is seeping down into every crevice of the party and its media apparatus. So you had this kind of adulation directed at the audience of one on Thursday from many different quarters. I’m going to read a few of them. Republican Congressman Randy Fine said this about Trump’s Epstein problem: “I trust President Trump’s judgment completely on this. I think he’s been the most transparent president we’ve ever had.” All right. So on the questions about Trump’s health, one Fox News personality said, “I’ve shaken the man’s hand. He gives a very vigorous handshake.” Then you had Republican Congressman Tim Burchett, who was asked to respond to Trump calling his own supporters “stupid weaklings” for caring about Epstein. Burchett said this, “He has a strategy in all this, and I suspect it will play out because he wins every time.” There’s just an over-the-top quality to this that I just find so unnerving, this cult-like behavior creeping down to every last level of the party [and] deep into Fox News and the right-wing media. It’s just all pervasive. It’s really alarming.
Jacob: Right. Well, it is really giving over your own rationality to somebody else. There was another congressman who said, Well, he wrote the art of the deal. He knows how to make a deal. Well, obviously, he’s really made a mess of the whole tariff thing so far. So just deciding that … somebody ghostwrote a book for him a couple of decades ago really is not a reason to crash our economy. I think that, to a large extent, support for Trump has been a call on people to put aside what they believe in, or their demand for facts to support their beliefs, and instead made an emotional appeal to people to just go with the cult leader, just accept what he says. And Greg, you also see this with the NATO guy. The guy who’s in charge of NATO realizes that the way to appeal to Trump’s ego is to call him daddy and to say and act like, Well, he knows better than we do about how to take care of all of us. And the NATO guy doesn’t believe that a bit—you know that—but he’s appealing to Trump’s ego and to Trump’s followers because he wants them to fund the Ukrainian defense against the Russian invasion. So it’s all this appeal to emotion and this surrender to it—and it’s not fact-based. To me, the last decade has been people surrendering to where they don’t believe in facts anymore. They are just subject to propaganda, and they decide who’s telling the truth. And whether they are or not, they don’t assess what they’re hearing. What they do is they just pick who is going to tell them the stuff that they want to hear—and then they listen to it and they just exclude all other evidence that’s out there. It’s really frightening, and it’s not American. It’s not the way our system of government was set up.
Sargent: It really is, as you say, sort of this mass surrender, this turning over of people’s brains to Donald Trump. We have this new poll from the Associated Press. Let me read some findings from it. Only about one quarter of Americans say that Trump’s policies have helped them. Half of Americans report that Trump’s policies have done more to hurt them since the second term began than helped. He’s under 50 percent approval on every issue.
Jacob: Even immigration, right
Sargent: Yes, even immigration. He’s down to 43 percent on his handling of immigration. That’s a drop of six points from March. We’ve seen that in a number of other polls, some of which are even worse for him on immigration, which I take as a sign of deep underlying weaknessg iven that it’s a central issue. And on top of all that, Trump’s approval on the economy is down to around four in 10, and 56 percent say that the phrase “understands the problems facing people like you” is a phrase that doesn’t describe Trump well. That’s just terrible stuff, and it’s mirrored by a lot of other polls. I think you have this weirdly proportional effect where the worst things get for Trump—whether on the polling and out in the country and on these all these other issues—the more the adulation from all these different voices swells and tries to prop them up.
Jacob: Well, there’s that. Another thing that’s really disturbing [is] this mega bill which, unfortunately, the media decided to call “one big, beautiful bill. ”Obviously the Republicans called it that, but that didn’t mean the media had to go along with the branding—but they did. But anyway, that gets passed, and that was unpopular with American people. The poll showed that that was terrible, but it didn’t stop it from happening. And I think we’ve reached this point where Trump’s numbers are sinking, and even some of his base supporters seems to be eroding on the Epstein issue, but will it matter? Because what’s happened now is you have a president who is acting like a dictator and who has really seized all the levers of power in the country beyond the American public opinion. He’s got Congress, and he’s got the Supreme Court. so the problem is, Will public opinion matter anymore?
We’re at this dangerous point where he’s becoming less popular but his power is increasing. And so there’s going to come a breaking point where we have to see whether the people power—what the American people actually want—can go up against the autocratic power of Trump.
Sargent: Maybe the through line here is this idea of surrender. You’ve got Republicans in Congress essentially surrendering as well to “daddy,” as you put it, in the sense that they are going to face the voters next year. Every House Republicans face the voters. A number of Republican senators face the voters. So do a number of Republicans in at the state level as well. And yet, by all indications, they’re just essentially turning everything over to Trump.
Jacob: Greg, it’s who they’re most scared of. I think most of the Republicans in Congress are real cowards. And the question is whether they’re more scared of the voters or of Trump. And another thing that.… I hate to say this, but I think we have to, every time I hear on TV someone say, Well, in the midterms we’re going to, I shout at the screen and say, If there are midterms—because we’ve got a guy in the White House now who doesn’t believe in democracy, tried to overturn the 2020 election results, and is now in charge of the military and in charge of power. And if he wants to invent a crisis or exploit a crisis, you have to wonder whether he would try to prevent the midterms from happening. So I think that the really important thing to do is for people to stay loud, to protest, and to really show that they’re not going to put up with that. And so I think that the real weapon against Trump’s autocracy or his ambitions of autocracy is people power. People need to get out there and do things.
Sargent: Mark Jacob, I couldn’t agree more. Thanks so much for coming on, man. It’s always a great pleasure to talk to you.
Jacob: Thank you.