The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 25 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.
New Gallup poll finds that President Trump’s approval rating has dropped to 37 percent. But guess what? The White House has figured out just how to get those numbers back up: by picking a huge fight with The View. This week, Joy Behar unleashed a striking takedown of Trump on the air, mocking him mercilessly for being jealous of Barack Obama. This enraged the White House, which responded with a bunch of name-calling and also with a veiled threat. This comes as Trump’s threats are escalating on many other fronts as well. We think the logic of this is worrisome. At some point, won’t Trump and the White House have to escalate? What happens then? The outright jailing of Democrats and TV critics? Salon’s Amanda Marcotte is one of the best out there at decoding MAGA’s various cultural hatreds, so we’re talking to her about all this today. Good to have you on as always, Amanda.
Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: Let’s start with what Joy Behar said on The View. This comes as Trump has been inventing fake reasons for threatening prosecution of Barack Obama and so forth. Listen to what Behar said about that.
Joy Behar (audio voiceover): So the thing about him is that he’s so jealous of Obama, because Obama is everything that he is not: trim, handsome, happily married, and can sing Al Green’s song “Let’s Stay Together” better than Al Green. And Trump cannot stand that. It’s driving him crazy. Jealousy is not a.… Green is not a good color.
Sargent: Amanda, the one thing Trump hates more than anything—and the one thing he really suspects to be happening—is him getting laughed at and ridiculed. Seems like Behar really drew blood there, doesn’t it?
Marcotte: Nothing hurts more than the truth, right? She’s right about Trump’s particular problem, but I think she hit on something that is bigger and deeper and maybe why he thinks this is going to connect with his base: So much of the MAGA movement really is driven by this jealousy that they can’t admit to themselves. I hate to go to Hannah Arendt this early in your podcast, but her writing about Eichmann in Israel really got a lot of people misunderstand the “banality of evil” comments. But she was basically talking about that—that he was a mediocre man and his only real pathway to importance, power, whatever, is to just go Nazi.
And I think you see that come up again and again with these fascist movements, right? They are full of mediocre people who are burning with resentment and grievance toward people that they call “the elites,” who are often just people that are more excellent than they are, who are better at stuff than they are. They hate them and they just want to punish them. I don’t know if you saw, [but] Kash Patel was having FBI agents hooked up to polygraphs and was asking them if they were making fun of him behind his back. I think for the kinds of folks that listen to this show, that level of obsession is hard to wrap their minds around—but it really is obviously a huge part of the MAGA movement.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you what, I think that really explains why the responses to these types of things from the White House and MAGA are always oriented around belittling. That’s what happened here as well. The White House ran to their dutiful propagandists at Fox News, unleashed a furious statement. I’m going to read from it, “Joy Behar is an irrelevant loser suffering from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s no surprise that The View’s ratings hit an all time low last year.” Now Amanda, “The View” responded to this by saying their viewership is actually up, but note how for Trump and the White House, everything has to come back to this idea that Trump is in people’s heads. He’s in critics’ heads. He’s psychologically dominating them. You hear this garbage all the time. This megafantasy is so bizarre. They organize their entire emotional lives around the fantasy that liberals are psychically suffering torment because of Trump’s world-historical success. Can you talk about that weird tick on their part?
Marcotte: Yeah. And this is where the cultural insecurities that drive the movement blend well with Trump’s actual personality disorders. He’s a narcissist. He’s obsessed with the idea that he needs to be in people’s heads. But the problem is, he sucks. He’s not interesting. He’s not smart. He’s not anything. He’s just a mean, stupid, mediocre narcissist. So the only way he can get what he wants to be in our heads all the time—which unfortunately is true because he’s the president and we can’t ignore him—is to just be extremely awful and annoying. But getting attention from people by smacking them in the face over and over—it gets attention, but it doesn’t get the attention that he wants, which is admiration. And so he’s just in this constant hamster wheel of trying to get people to admire him when all he can ever do is.… And the admiration he gets from his base is not enough because those people, in his view, suck too. He’s really in an interesting trap.
Sargent: The problem with this is that he happens to be in control of the vast law enforcement bureaucracy under the federal government. I want to read another line from the White House’s statement to that effect: “She should self-reflect on her own jealousy of President Trump’s historic popularity before her show is the next to be pulled off air.” That’s a pretty straightforward threat. Retract the criticism of dear leader or we just might use our power to get your show canceled. Your thoughts?
Marcotte: Yeah, I really would like to ask people who voted for Trump because they bought the idea that they were standing up for free speech against cancel culture to reflect on the fact that the White House thinks they have the power to cancel television shows and that they’re going to use it. I assume most of those people will just make up excuses and come up with bizarre rationalizations, but this is straightforward. “Cancel culture” was mostly just people being mean to you on Twitter. And he’s actually literally threatening to cancel “The View” because they’re mean to him. And he can’t—but unfortunately, as we’ve seen with the Colbert report and all these other media companies making settlements because they have business interests before the White House, he’s not wrong to think that he might be able to induce ABC to cancel “The View” in order to get some business deal approved by the FCC or FTC or whatever agency they have business in front of.
Sargent: Well, this is certainly even more alarming when you listen to Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr’s response to this whole thing. After it all happened, Fox News had Carr on and asked him if “The View” is now going to face retribution. Listen to this exchange.
Bill Hemmer (audio voiceover): Is “The View” now in the crosshairs of this administration?
Brendan Carr (audio voiceover): Look, it’s entirely possible that there’s issues over there. Again, stepping back this broader dynamic, once President Trump has exposed these median gatekeepers and smashed this facade, there’s a lot of consequences.
Sargent: What’s amazing about that is that before this question and before this exchange, Fox literally played audio of Behar attacking Trump and then went right on to ask if the administration is now targeting “The View,” basically inviting them to say yes. Fox offered the opportunity to draw this direct link between criticism of Trump and the government punishing the view, and Carr basically said, Yeah, you know, we really might do it. This is really like state TV. What do you make of it?
Marcotte: I try to not be shocked and frightened by everything that the Trump administration does in part because, as you said, they’re trying to get in our heads and they’re trying to make us afraid. But I’d be lying if I said that didn’t scare me. It scared me. The First Amendment is about as ironclad as it gets. Now, I know that the Trump administration doesn’t think anything in the Constitution is ironclad. They’ve come after birthright citizenship, which is also as ironclad as it gets. But we should all.… If anybody has any doubts that Donald Trump wants to be a fascist dictator, and I think there is still a lot of people who would call that Trump Derangement Syndrome or something like that—this is what he’s doing. He is literally saying he has the power to cancel TV show and then he’s sending out one of his minions to say that they’re going to use the federal authority that exists for legitimate reasons to regulate advertising and business interests to silence somebody because she said something that hurt the president’s feelings. I want to remind people: All she said was he’s jealous of Obama, which anybody with two eyeballs and a brain can see.
Sargent: Although in fairness, by saying Obama’s slim and happily married, she did implicitly say that Trump is fat, which is true.
Marcotte: Yeah, and not too happily married if you’re promising [your wife] you’re going to rename the Kennedy Center after her because the Epstein situation is heating up and she’s probably mad all over again.
Sargent: What you just said before got me thinking. It does seem unlikely that a confrontation this big would happen without Trump’s explicit approval, doesn’t it? Which, if I’m right about that, then what we have to entertain is the possibility that it went down like this: either Trump saw “The View” and flipped out and got on the phone and said, Time to go out and threaten them—or someone, maybe an underling, saw an opportunity for Trump in this, flagged it for Trump, and said, What do you think, sir? Should we go after them? And he said, Absolutely, and put out Carr, the FCC chair, to do it as well. I think it probably went like that.
Marcotte: Yeah, I’m sure that Trump either watches “The View” or that was flagged for him. And Joy Behar is exactly the kind of woman that almost couldn’t be more well designed to just drive him up the wall because she is exactly the smart New York feminist that has always sneered at Donald Trump his entire life.
Sargent: Yeah, exactly. Well, I want to bring up this Gallup poll as the setup to the conclusion of this conversation. Extraordinary numbers. Trump is at 37 percent approval. On immigration, he’s at 38 percent, which is absolutely abysmal for his supposedly best issue. On the economy, he’s at 37 percent. On trade, he’s at 36 percent. And on the federal budget, he’s at 29 percent. That’s after this big, beautiful or big, ugly bill passed. These are awful numbers. Now it’s risky to rely on one poll, but we’re seeing a lot of other polls finding very similar things. This is historic levels of unpopularity we’re talking about here. What do you think?
Marcotte: Yeah, he’s weak right now. And it’s not just “The View” he’s lashing out at; it’s South Park. He basically said that they’re bad. I don’t have the exact quote in front of me, but the Rolling Stone reported that he’s been calling them fourth rate or something because they put out an episode that really went after Trump hard, including a pretty devastatingly funny penis joke about him. And also [they] just made him look fat and old and weak, what he almost certainly looks like with his clothes off. And they humiliated him, but I think he loves to lash out and have these feuds with celebrities like that. I think in his mind, that would be how he’d spend all of his time anyway: just getting pressed for yelling at Rosie O’Donnell, then Joy Behar, and South Park, and whatever.
I think he’s also especially sensitive to it right now because his polling numbers are really low and he’s weak—and he knows that when pop culture comes after you and you’re already weakened, it starts to actually reinforce the narrative with ordinary, especially low-information or not politically engaged voters, that you are a joke, that you suck. And that was one reason I started to really fear that Joe Biden was going to lose pretty early on because he was the butt of a lot of jokes on television and [comedy shows] and radio about how old and weak he was. And Trump knew it, which was why they leaned hard into that messaging. So the fact that Donald Trump is also the butt of very similar jokes—that he’s a petty narcissistic “manboy” who also is old and weak and out of touch—is going to create a snowball effect in terms of his reputation with ordinary people. He knows it, and he’s freaking out, I think.
Sargent: Yeah, and that makes me want to step back and get at the big picture here. I think something else is going on under the surface as well. Remember when Trump won the election, there was all this talk about how the culture was really turning toward Trumpism. He seemed to really have his finger on a pulse that that maybe others didn’t; that was the sense that was out there. But now his numbers are in the toilet. As I said, his approval on immigration is 38 percent in this new poll—abysmal. Clearly, the culture has turned against Trump’s immigration crackdown. The culture was supposed to rally behind authoritarianism and state-sponsored cruelties to immigrants and white nationalism and so forth. But that’s not happening.
Trump is reaching these settlements with universities, but they’re fundamentally not breaking as liberal cultural institutions. Trump is losing against some of the law firms. The culture is pushing back. We’re seeing this huge outpouring of communication from the grassroots and from the streets about the immigration stuff. The Long March through our institutions isn’t transforming them, and I think Trump and MAGA are hysterical about all that. They’re strong-arming “The View” in this ham-handed way, but they’re going to have to ratchet things up, right? What do you make of that overall reading?
Marcotte: I think that you’re right. I think they’re going to try to ratchet things up because they’re going to try to force what you can only get through persuasion, which is people to like you. This discussion is actually making me think...this second Trump election, I think, hit a lot of us even harder because it wasn’t a fluke—and it made us feel like this wasn’t the America that we thought it was. Right or left, I think most of us felt like Americans view themselves as independent, freedom-loving people.
Sargent: And not cruel.
Marcotte: Yeah, and not cruel. And I think that it was very disturbing to us to think that maybe a majority—even—of Americans are fine with being ruled by a fascist dictator who won’t even let you make dick jokes about him. It’s heartening to see that the polling shows that a lot of people.… What it was was they just weren’t paying close attention, but now they have no choice but to be reminded of who Donald Trump really is. And he’s worse this time around. That part—what I thought America always was actually turns out to be there. People are like, We don’t like ICE agents kicking in people’s doors. These concentration camps, what are they talking about? And I don’t think that cracking down on comedy and freedom of speech and Joy Behar is going to work for them. I think it’s going to make people mad because very fundamental to how Americans see ourselves is our ability to talk back to our leaders and make fun of them.
Sargent: I think what you’re getting at is really this toxic downward spiral for them. They really think that things like Alligator Alcatraz are going to be popular, right? Stephen Miller was absolutely 100 percent confident in doing things like lining the White House driveway with mugshots of Latinos and so forth would be a hit with the public—that he could provoke the press into criticizing it and that would prove that the press is elitist and out of touch. The opposite’s happening. They thought that they were going to win the argument over Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is now back here in the United States and may end up getting freed. The toxic cycle seems to me to be that when things get worse for them, they’ve really got to ratchet up stuff to make the base happy because that’s what their foundation is. But then when they do that, it further alienates the middle in the way you’re talking about. I got to say that I think they’re just going to keep going, and we may be seeing actual arrests.
Marcotte: I think they have convinced themselves that the only real Americans are the people that voted for Trump, but even a lot of them don’t like what they’re seeing. And I think honestly [they] voted against Democrats more than they voted for Trump. They don’t consider people like you and me to be real Americans. They don’t consider even a lot of the Joe Rogan audience that just voted impulsively for Trump to even be real Americans. If I was going to guess, I would say the percentage of Americans that are just straight-up authoritarians is what it always has been, which was 25 to 30 percent. It’s never really been more than that. And I think the more Trump plays to that, the more he’s going to shrink it just down to those people.
What’s funny about that is they’re the least American of Americans. I’m not going to say they’re not Americans. They’ve always been with us, but they’re not in the spirit of America in my opinion.
Sargent: Yeah. Well, I think the bottom line is that Stephen Miller and Trump believed on a very deep level that there’s a latent authoritarian white nationalist majority in this country and there just isn’t.
Marcotte: Yeah, definitely not a majority. Not even close.
Sargent: Yeah, well, let’s hope it’s as small as it’s starting to look. Let’s hope it keeps shrinking because that’s our way out of this. That’s the only way out that I can see. Amanda Marcotte, great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.
Marcotte: Thanks for having me as usual. Great time.