The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 14 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Editor’s note: After we recorded, Trump’s MAGA-fied Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, joined the anger against “No Kings,” and MAGA influencers chimed in.
Greg Sargent: This is the Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
It has become very clear that President Donald Trump is really, really worried about the No Kings protests that are scheduled for October 18. Suddenly, multiple Republicans are all using the same disgusting talking point about the protests, referring to them as agitators and terrorists. It sure looks coordinated. They’re all using the same vile language. This really displays extraordinary contempt for our whole political system. Yet we think it’ll backfire. It’ll only prompt the protests to get larger, and there’s nothing Trump hates more than seeing big crowds arrayed against him. Today we’re talking about all this with writer Jill Lawrence, who has a new piece for The Bulwark on Trump’s hatred of our system and of democratic voters. Jill, thanks for coming on.
Jill Lawrence: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Sargent: So the No Kings protests are set for next Saturday. Let’s listen to what House speaker Mike Johnson had to say about this.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (voiceover): “This ‘Hate America’ rally that they have coming up for October 18. The antifa crowd and the pro-Hamas crowd and the Marxists, they’re all gonna gather on the mall. We got some House Democrats selling t-shirts for this event. It is an outrageous gathering for outrageous purposes.”
Sargent: So there you heard Johnson talk about antifa, pro-Hamas, Marxists, Jill. These are American citizens, millions of them exercising their right to peacefully protest. Your response to what you heard there from Johnson?
Lawrence: Well, I’m not surprised. And this is traditional, this is constitutional, this is a right, and they’re trying to turn it into something really evil. But that’s because they’re scared of it, and they know that it turns public opinion.
The problem here is that people like Johnson and the Republicans in Congress aren’t doing their jobs. They’re not putting any checks and balances on the president, and they’re not upholding American values or even American constitutional rights.
So this is where we are. The people have to protest, and I don’t really see this working out the way they hope.
Sargent: Well, they clearly hope for some sort of violence, which either will allow them to respond with violence of their own—state violence—or to demonize the protests as terrorism and extremism. You know, the funny thing about this is, as you alluded to, the more people show up, the more other people feel supported, and it really is a sort of snowballing effect that can take place in these situations. And I think that’s what really worries them.
Lawrence: I think they should be worried, because nothing they’re doing is popular. And people who may support them generally on issues like crime and immigration are seeing how they carry out these policies. And he’s down on his best issues in polls, and the midterms—if they go ahead fairly and freely—will put a check on Trump, at least through the House. So that’s the problem. And the more momentum the protests gather, and the more peaceful they are, and the more it’s obvious that there are troops hanging around with nothing to do except maybe provoke people, then the worse it’s gonna get for them.
Sargent: Well, let’s listen to some more GOP rhetoric about this. Here’s representative Tom Emmer.
Representative Tom Emmer: (voiceover) “This is one, this is about one thing and one thing only: to score political points with the terrorist wing of their party, which is set to hold as leader Scalise just commented on, a ‘Hate America’ rally in D.C. next week.”
Sargent: And here’s Senator Roger Marshall.
Senator Roger Marshall: (voiceover) “And then October 18 is when the protest gets here. This will be a Soros paid-for protest where his professional protestors show up. The agitators show up. We’ll have to get the National Guard out. Hopefully it’ll be peaceful. I doubt it.”
Sargent: So, Jill, now not only are they calling protestors “terrorists,” but they’re talking about having to bring in the National Guard to suppress dissent. What do you make of that?
Lawrence: Well, we have the National Guard in D.C. because we don’t have control of our National Guard. And theoretically it’s here to keep people safe. But it’s never a great idea to have armed troops in the middle of an urban area or any area. I mean, we are a civil society. We are not a police state, and, you know, this is just a recipe for tensions. So no, I’m not a fan, and I think it could end badly no matter how peaceful the protesters are. I mean, we’ve all seen what’s going on in Portland and in Chicago—priests getting hit in the head with ammunition.
It’s a powder keg, and that is what Donald Trump wants. And so now he’s got it. And while this is happening, you know, the government is shut. They’re laying people off. They’re doing more and more things that people don’t like, and nothing’s undercover. Everyone knows what’s going on. It’s just so overwhelming that it’s hard to know how to fight, where to put your attention. You know, what’s the best way you can try to stop this?
Sargent: Well, to your point about them wanting something like a police state, or at least the searing civil tensions that are getting unleashed by what Trump is doing, I can’t help but notice that now that Trump is sending in the National Guard to deal with fake emergencies in multiple American cities. It’s now becoming just a casual and routine thing for Republicans to say, “OK, well if you’re going to oppose Donald Trump, well we’re gonna send in the military.” That seems like an ominous development that really shows what’s happening with this party and the Trump era. What do you think?
Lawrence: Well, it’s tremendously ominous, and it’s so different, well, from the Nixon era—which is what I wrote about for The Bulwark. There were not enough Democrats in the Senate to convict Nixon at an impeachment trial, but there were going to be 85 out of 100 votes to convict him. We didn’t pay enough attention when it was happening.
There were a lot of people who weren’t born when it was happening the first time—they never knew about it, they never lived through it. And so now, you know, we have depended on good character in presidents for a couple of centuries, and it hasn’t always worked out very well. And now we’re in a situation where it’s not working out at all, and it may be the end of the republic as we know it.
And so this calls out for huge structural reforms and lots of guardrails, and I’m not sure most Americans realize that this is necessary and what it will take to get them. I’m not sure most politicians even realize that.
Sargent: Well, since you brought up your piece, I wanna read a great line from it. “Nixon was driven by an enemies list and a quest for revenge. In the end, it crushed him. Now we have a president who thrives on hate and vengeance, whose enemies list extends beyond individuals to entire blue states and cities filled with Democrats.”
That’s really nicely done. This is the hallmark of MAGA and Trumpism, really, which is that they fundamentally treat large swaths of the United States as an enemy country within. Can you talk about that?
Lawrence: This was happening during his first term. And maybe Republicans liked that he was treating Democrats badly. Maybe they liked the way he talked about Democratic governors and said, if you’re not nice to me, I won’t give you COVID supplies. I mean, it was really obnoxious. Did they like the way he threw towels at Puerto Ricans after Hurricane Maria?
You know, it was just—he never made a secret of being on his own team and playing against the other team. And it was such a contrast to Barack Obama and the whole, there’s no red America and no blue America, there’s the United States of America. So it was this whole different, very overt partisanship. And if you don’t vote for me, and if you’re not nice to me, I’m gonna cut off your projects. And so we see that—I want to say on steroids, which is a cliché—it’s even worse than that.
I mean, he’s stopping projects in blue states that would lower costs for electricity and other types of expenses. And he is putting tariffs on everything and sending away crop workers and immigrants who pick our fruit and vegetables. And in that respect, some of what he’s doing is broad brush because, you know, you can’t get more agricultural than Iowa, and he wrecked their soybean market last time around. And now he is doing wholesale tariffs across the country and across many, many products, not just agricultural.
So the economy is gonna be tanking, before long. We’re gonna be going back to some—one century, two centuries, three—you know, our research is being cut. And now we have RFK Jr., who—you know, the irony of some of these steps that he’s taking, as I mentioned, is that it’s the red states that are gonna be hurt the most. It’s the red states that are gonna listen to RFK Jr. talk about how vaccines could hurt you, you know, or even kill you. It’s the red states that are the agricultural states. So, I mean, it should by all rights backfire, and yet too many people have too big a stake in it all.
Sargent: Well, I wanna pick up on what you said there, because it really gets at another hallmark of MAGA, which is that they are absolutely screwing over their own people every which way—from the tariffs, to the government shutdown, to the ACA subsidies expiring. In every conceivable way, they’re screwing the shit out of their people.
But they are selling to their people the notion that they’re making Democratic areas suffer. So you really see this with Trump’s budget chief, Russell Vought. He’s now crowing about the fact that he’s going to pursue layoffs. He’s canceling the funding for programs and projects that are in Democratic areas.
But at the same time, it turns out that vulnerable House Republicans are seeing some projects canceled in their districts. It’s almost comic, in a way—if it weren’t so disgusting. The way, the fundamental approach of MAGA is to say, “Oh, don’t worry about how badly we’re fucking you, because we’re making the people we’re telling you to hate suffer.”
Lawrence: You know, it’s very interesting. I don’t know if you saw the other day that Vivek Ramaswamy—he used to be in the inner circle and now is running for office in Ohio—said, let’s stop owning the libs. He said, you know, essentially that’s not enough for a political party, you know. He said, let’s be less confrontational.
It was amazing to me. I mean, I guess now he doesn’t owe anybody anything anymore, so he can say what he wants, but he did say that. I’m not saying this is gonna be a sea change here—it’s just him so far—but maybe people are gonna realize that that shouldn’t really be the point of your political policies.
Sargent: Trump is deeply unpopular. He’s failing on multiple fronts. His presidency is a disaster. The economy is is on the skids. The tariffs are a catastrophe. He’s admitting, and his own agencies—the Labor Department is admitting—that his mass deportations are screwing the economy in various ways. He’s underwater on his big issue of immigration. He’s underwater on the economy. He’s underwater on everything. He’s got a really low approval rating.
And MAGA and Republicans aren’t allowed to acknowledge that, so any sign of opposition to Trump has to be immediately put in the box of, oh, these are just terrorists and extremists. ’Cause nobody’s allowed to admit that, that the despot is failing.
They’re obviously gonna try and supercharge tensions around these peaceful protests to whatever degree they can. I think they’re likely to fail. We’re gonna see very large, peaceful demonstrations.
But it just occurs to me that Trump and MAGA and the right-wing media, and the MAGA media figures in that whole ecosystem—they just don’t care about being perceived as arrayed against Americans. It just—it’s only a positive in their bubble. And that seems like a really, really serious place to be.
Lawrence: They’ve successfully turned everything inside out because, you know, their line is that these are ‘Hate America’ rallies. These are people who hate America, when they’re the ones who are destroying it. And they’re the ones who are applying labels to people. I mean, they—they’ve been burying for years, since Trump’s first term, any reports or indicators that right-wing violence is the greatest danger, that right-wing extremism is the most common kind of violence in this country. And they don’t want to admit it, and they won’t let their supporters learn about it.
Sargent: Yeah. Well, so how do you see this all playing out in the end? I expect largely peaceful protests. I suppose—God forbid—there could be incidents here and there, but my suspicion is that the story will be that the Republican warnings were just all pure bullshit.
The problem, though, is that in their media ecosystem they will just seize on some little incident to make it true that these protests were violent. So there’s no point at which they ever, ever are held accountable—not by their own media sources, anyway. The only conceivable way we can hold them accountable is with enormous turnout at these rallies and then with a victory in 2026, right? Is there any other way out?
Lawrence: Well, we see what’s going on in Portland, with all the sort of cartoon-character costumes being depicted as violent extremists. And, you know, it’s almost laughable, as you said. But they have people believing—as Trump said recently—that there are no stores with regular windows in Portland, that everything is boards in the windows. Well, that’s not how Portland sees it. They go shopping all the time at stores with windows. But, you know, you’re up against a lot here. You’re up against a president not only with a bully pulpit, but with a bunch of people who believe everything he says. So I think you’re right: In numbers, there can be evidence.
What makes me very upset—and I don’t want to make this any more depressing than it already is—but, I mean, we’re coming onto the 250th anniversary of our country, when all of these rights were defined and set out and thought to be permanent—as permanent as we could make them. And so I really hope that these protests work out, that people keep their heads—and I include the National Guard troops and anyone else there in a law-enforcement capacity—because they can’t be happy about having to do this, most of them. So hopefully everyone is calm, and we get through this, and it’s a great demonstration of opposition to the administration.
Sargent: Folks, the right answer to them calling you terrorists is to turn out in as much force as you possibly can. Jill Lawrence, thanks so much for coming on with us today.
Lawrence: Thanks for having me, Greg.