The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 15 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 Donald Trump spoke to reporters on Tuesday and he seemed more crazed and power-mad than usual. He imperiously refused to take a question from an ABC reporter as punishment for an ABC interview with JD Vance that went badly. He boasted about cutting only Democratic programs. He confirmed he supports a vile new policy restricting media coverage of the Pentagon. And he threatened to cut off funds to New York if Zohran Mamdani wins. We think all this suggests the urgency of this moment has only gotten more pronounced. Trump is clearly emboldened in a new kind of way. And we’re all going to have to get much more active if we’re going to stop him at this point. Brian Beutler has a piece up on his Substack, Off Message, laying out what he thinks a resistance that meets the moment should really look like. He’s also written well on the futility of news organizations paying bribes to Trump. So we’re talking to Brian about all this. Good to see you, Brian.
Brian Beutler: Good to be back with you.
Sargent: So over the weekend, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos sharply questioned Vice President Vance about a $50,000 bribe that Border czar Tom Homan reportedly may have accepted. The ABC anchor cut off Vance after he refused to answer his question. Here’s what Trump said about that on Tuesday.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): “I don’t take questions from ABC fake news after what you did with Stephanopoulos to the Vice President of the United States. I don’t take questions from ABC fake news. Brian, go ahead.”
Sargent: So what Stephanopoulos really did was ask about reports that Homan had accepted $50,000 in a paper bag from an undercover FBI agent and asked if Homan gave the money back. Vance said, very legalistically, Homan did not take a bribe. Stephanopoulos then pointed out that Vance didn’t answer the question, which was true. Brian, on what planet is this not a legitimate line of questioning for a network reporter?
Beutler: Only on the planet where the only way that the ruling party and its loyalists will treat a media organization as something worth being treated with respect is if they decide to engage in regime propaganda alone. Anything that fails to meet that standard gets essentially blacklisted.
Looking in from the outside, I think that these guys look ridiculous and childish, right? Like, there has been strong reporting to the effect that Tom Homan took $50,000 in cash in a paper bag as either attempting to defraud somebody he thought was a potential client or to accept a bribe from somebody he thought was a potential client. It has not been disputed credibly that he took it. They don’t even really try to say he didn’t take this money.
And now they’re having hissy fits at reporters who want better, clearer, fuller answers from the administration about what actually happened there. And so, I don’t think that from an external vantage point, the way they’re handling ABC or trying to punish George Stephanopoulos for answering this question is, like, a good look for them—or something that people are going to be impressed by.
But that’s going to be of little value to those of us who care about winning this fight for democracy if ABC proactively takes a step to, say, punish Stephanopoulos or hand over some new concession to Donald Trump after having already paid him over $10 million for an earlier dust-up with Stephanopoulos, in which Stephanopoulos did basically nothing wrong at all.
So I think that that’s, like, the short and long answer to your question. The only thing ABC can do to get Trump to stop doing this is to become essentially like Fox News. And they need to decide if they’re going to do that or not, I guess.
Sargent: Well, you brought this up. Donald Trump was able to extort ABC for a $16 million settlement for a lawsuit that ABC really might have been able to win. But here’s the thing, clearly Trump was seething about that Vance interview because at another point in the presser, I believe earlier, he said the following to reporters going out of his way to attack ABC.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): “Take a couple of questions from the news. I’m sure they’ll be extremely not hostile and friendly. Like JD went through a very friendly interview with George Stephanopoulos. So he was nice enough to pay me $16 million. Last time we came, he had to pay $16 million to me.”
Sargent: So Brian, what we’re really seeing here is that the $16 million extortion payment didn’t buy anything in return. Trump is again attacking them for asking questions that displease him. That is for committing journalism. You’ve written about this before. Why haven’t the media organizations figured out that there’s no appeasing the mad dictator and to your point can you talk about a little more this idea that they really have a choice to make at this point where they just have to decide that only full scale opposition, only full scale full throttle journalism with no fear or favor is the only way out of this
Beutler: Yeah, I mean, I think, I think that the hidden hand here is that so many of the outlets that have caved to him are corporate-owned or otherwise have business before his government. And so he’s been able to divide and conquer when he has gone after individual outlets for individual heresies that actually turn out to just be normal journalism.
If you look, by contrast, at how the news outlets in general have handled this attempt to lay down new rules for Pentagon reporters that are highly restrictive and abnormal and would actually basically prevent independent journalism surrounding anything that the Department of Defense does, you see the solidarity there. It’s basically all the major news outlets, including the conservative ones—except, I think, maybe for OANN, which is like a very right-wing network.
And so they’re doing what press corps are meant to do. They’re meant to gather together and use their collective power to assert the imperatives of a free press. But if you look at the individual outlets that fear him, whose corporate overlords fear him, it’s just been embarrassment after embarrassment, right? ABC paid the $16 million—Trump is still singling out ABC. He’s essentially singling out every network, every network news hub that isn’t CBS, which has been purchased by an ally of his who installed a loyalist to oversee CBS News.
So that leaves ABC and NBC News exposed, and he’s always putting them on notice that if he’s not happy with their coverage, there’s going to be a price to pay. But every outlet that has paid a price has then gone on to be embarrassed. And it’s not just the network broadcasters. Like, CNN antagonized its own audience by agreeing to call the Pentagon the Department of War, because that’s what Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump want to call it now—even though, by statute, that is still the Department of Defense.
You see NPR has been— you know, Republicans have defunded public media, but NPR is sort of antagonizing its audience by continuing to do a style of both-sides press coverage as if, like, that will keep further punishment from being visited upon them.
And then the funniest example is that Marc Benioff, I think is his name, was—you know, he was a progressive guy for like a minute in the first Trump administration. But now he wants to curry favor with Trump. So he’s, he’s rallying behind Trump. He’s calling on Trump to send troops into San Francisco. He gave Trump a fawning write-up in Time magazine just this week for the end of hostilities in Gaza.
And what does Trump do? He complains about the cover art because it emphasizes the waddle—the old-man waddle Trump has on his neck. And so there’s, like, there’s no, there’s no value in trying to appease him because there, there is no amount of appeasement that will work short of turning yourself into a lapdog.
And so they—all these outlets—have to choose whether they want to go that way or not. And if you go halfway, you need to realize that you’re basically going to lose everyone. And The Washington Post, I feel like, is the poster child for this. They have not gone all the way toward sheer pro-Trump propaganda, but they’ve gone about halfway—and it’s cost them essentially everything.
Sargent: Well, you’re going to make me read from Donald Trump’s Truth Social post about Time Magazine because you brought it up and I didn’t. So here it goes. “Time Magazine wrote a relatively good story about me, but the picture may be the worst of all time. They disappeared my hair and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one. Really weird. I never liked taking pictures from underneath angles, but this is a super bad picture and deserves to be called out. What are they doing and why?” Brian, that’s someone who’s confidence in his ability to turn his entire universe of supporters against a news outlet for something absurdly petty is almost bottomless. That confidence is almost bottomless. It’s endless.
Beutler: I mean, you could call it confidence. I, as somebody who does not work for Time magazine, I think it’s hilarious. Like, he looks—he sounds ridiculous. He sounds like a baby, you know? And, you know, the funny thing is he didn’t even emphasize the thing about that picture which is the most embarrassing, which is the extent to which his neck resembles, like, a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. It looks like a vagina. And I think that that’s probably what’s actually bugging him about it.
But the question is, is Time going to bend further? Is Benioff going to produce more covers that he preys on Trump and try to pick better photographs to please the Mad King? You know, I guess we will see. But the trend for these outlets has been poor. They’ve shown very little cognizance of the fact that this incremental form of concession gets them nowhere, and that they really need to go all in on just becoming right-wing propagandists—or return to their actual core mission of doing journalism—and just let Trump try to harass, you know, like, let the chips fall where they may.
If Trump comes for them, resist. If he does something illegal, sue. Don’t kick Jimmy Kimmel off the air. Just let them hyperventilate. And that will leave you better off than trying to find this middle ground that doesn’t exist.
Sargent: And they won on Jimmy Kimmel when they were forced to resist, which let’s be clear, they had to do it because there was such an enormous outcry out in the country that they really had no choice. I want to go through some of Trump’s other unhinged moments at this presser. At one point, he ignored a question from a female reporter while saying he likes to watch her talk, then called her darling with this big hyper-masculine smirk. He openly boasted of shutting down programs Democrats like while saying they’re not cutting Republican programs.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): “And now we’re closing them up. And we’re not going to let them come back. The Democrats are getting killed. And we’re going to have a list of them on Friday, closing up some of the most egregious, socialist, semi-communist, probably not full communist, we’re saving that for New York, but semi-communist programs. And we’re closing them up. We’re not closing up Republican programs because we think they work. So the Democrats are getting killed.”
Sargent: And he threatened to cut funding to New York if it elects, quote unquote, communist Zoran Mamdani as mayor.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): “It comes through the White House, the funding for New York and for every place comes through the White House. And I’m very generous and I was always very generous with New York, even when you had opposition there. But I was always very generous. But I wouldn’t be generous to a communist, guy that’s going to take the money and throw it out the window.”
Sargent: Brian, I think what’s going on here, he’s come back from the Mideast thinking he’s a world historical figure now. He actually has said that in very recent days that he’s going to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest president ever to exist. And it’s emboldened him to be even more of a mad dictator.
Beutler: So maybe. I don’t know that I buy that he’s actually so high on his own supply. Because several of the things that you just mentioned were things that he’d hinted at before the past couple of weeks—before the past week. He’s been threatening to cut off funds to New York if they elect Mamdani ever since Mamdani won that primary.
And the imposition of this new—I think this new Pentagon press policy that I think violates the letter, if not the spirit, of the First Amendment—was in the works in advance. And I mean, I’m not saying Trump isn’t delusional at all, but I think he knows that the peace plan he put in place is guaranteed no longevity. It’s essentially the same phase one that was put in place that he broke down when he became president several months ago, and that it was sort of spirited to... everyone was sort of spirited to agree to it ahead of the Nobel Peace Prize announcement that he wanted—like, this to serve as, like, you know, the crowning achievement that would get him that prize.
So, you know, I think Trump is as much, like, convinced of his own greatness as he is aware of his own mediocrity. You know, like, he knows that none of this is real—that he’s just, like, trying to put on the best show possible to make him seem like a real-deal peacemaker, kingmaker, all-powerful figure—but that it’s all smoke and mirrors, ultimately.
Sargent: Right. This is the, this is the, on unslakeable narcissist theory of Donald Trump, basically, which is that he sort of exists in this universe, which where he, has sort of discovered that if he bluffs his way through life, he can make people act as if He’s really the real thing, a world historically great figure or the best, the greatest real estate developer in New York or whatever thing he’s best at at that very moment. But underneath it all, there’s no satisfying, this kind of howling void inside him.
Beutler: Yeah. And so what he’s doing is—I don’t think that his, like, increasing assertion of dictatorial power is something that he has convinced himself is righteous and, like, the way things ought to be under the Constitution. He’s just power mad. And he has the Supreme Court behind him, and he knows when he does things that are illegal or unconstitutional—even if he doesn’t quite understand them in those terms—but that he’s being predatory and he’s abusing people, and he’s trying to extort them or blackmail them or whatever—is that it’s going to take months, if not years, for the Supreme Court to finally sort out, like, the legality of each of these individual moves.
And that, in the meantime, the Supreme Court—because they’re in his pocket—is very likely to let the policies stand while litigation works its way through the court. And so he can basically end the First Amendment at the Pentagon, and he can abuse federal spending power to crush federalism in New York, make it so that New Yorkers don’t have a republican form of government, and really harm basically everyone who lives in New York and leave them in a harmed position for months, if not years, before he gets told, you can’t do that.
And that’s the thing that’s feeding the increasing abuses of power. It’s not that he thinks that the abuses of power are paying off or that he’s cloaked in glory now and the people are behind him. I think that there’s more awareness of the frailty of his political position than he’ll ever let on on the surface, and he’s just aware that, in raw power terms, he’s got a lot of running room.
Sargent: Well, so that brings us to the piece you wrote, which is very good on what the way through this is. What I found most interesting about the argument that you made was that conventional ways out of this aren’t going to cut it.
You can kind of squint at the situation and understand why some House Democrats might say to themselves, okay, well, if we kind of resist to the degree that we can on every front—in the courts, you know, et cetera—we can sort of slow them down. Meanwhile, we spend most of our energy focused on how to win the House. And then we can actually operate as a check on him.
You write that it’s time to dispense with that illusion. Why is that?
Beutler: Yeah. So, I mean, I do think it’s important for everyone who opposes Donald Trump to insist that there will be elections in 2026—that we will insist that they be free and fair, and that Democrats are going to take back power in that election, and that that will provide a check on him and, ideally, a source of accountability as well. You just can’t concede that he’s already made that kind of situation impossible.
But I think you do need the people who have more power than you and I to imagine a world where this all comes to a head before the election, right? That he invokes the Insurrection Act, as they keep leaking they’re contemplating. Or even just short of that—he just floods cities in swing districts or whatever with enough mass federal police that they make it impossible to have a free and fair election, because lots of people are going to feel uncomfortable coming out to the polls.
You ideally want to array the institutional resistance to be ready for a moment like that. And it’s currently not. It’s currently very atomized—just like the news outlets that we’re talking about—so that Trump can pick off an unpopular nonprofit here, a donor there. And suddenly he’s really fractured the whole liberal and progressive political network that makes Democratic Party politics viable.
And you want lawmakers and leaders who are fighting the fight that’s actually in front of them, as opposed to trying to increase the salience of healthcare—a thing that you probably won’t be able to do anything about unless you win that election that you need to realize is actually under threat now.
And so the idea is to sort of get arrayed for a worst-case scenario and realize that it is possible that we arrive at one—and that the progressive grassroots and the nonprofit world and the Democratic Party are just nowhere close to that right now.
Sargent: Well, I do take some encouragement from the way people are talking about the “No Kings” rallies, which are set for this weekend. Folks, turn out at those, please. It’s really important. The bigger the show, the better, because they’re treating it as a kind of emergency moment. So Brian, do you take that sort of encouragement from the “No Kings” protests? Do you sort of see them as a kind of major stand in letting them know that we are going to absolutely insist on free and fair elections? And could it be effective in that regard to some degree?
Beutler: Yeah, I think so. I mean, you see Republicans—very senior Republicans, including the Speaker of the House—essentially libeling or slandering the whole “No Kings” protest movement as being a hate-America movement, pro-Hamas, Antifa-funded, you know, all this nonsense.
And I think that there’s several reasons for that. I think that one is that they want to scare off people who are legitimately peaceful protesters. And I think they want to attract a more violent element—or violence-prone elements—on both sides of the political spectrum so that there’s a greater risk of a conflagration that Trump and Stephen Miller can then use as a pretext for a greater crackdown.
I also just think that they’re scared—that they saw the “No Kings” turnout in June, and they realized that that is a big political force to be reckoned with. It’s bigger than the Tea Party. And it’s much more normal than the Tea Party, right? It is the center. It is a bunch of, like, senior citizens who are insisting that their elections remain free and fair.
I take a lot of solace in what I’ve experienced personally since Mike Johnson and the other Republicans made those slanderous remarks, which is that people feel more emboldened to show up. That this is sort of like a Streisand effect for “No Kings”—and that people who might have sat it out are like, you know what, screw you. If, like, you’re basically going to say if you oppose Trump that that makes you pro-terrorist or anti-America, then we’re all going to show up, and you can’t slander all of us.
And that, I think, gets to, like, you know, the other motivation these Republicans have, which is they’re scared. They know that Trump’s king-like behavior—his dictatorial ambition—is not popular. It is generating a real and lasting pro-democracy backlash that they won’t necessarily be able to control.
And I think the Democrats are starting to see that too. And so, whereas for the last almost ten years Democrats have wanted to be at arm’s length with the resistance movements or the protest movements that have formed around Trump—against Trump—they’re going to start participating in these. They are going to take the things that Mike Johnson says as a call to get involved themselves.
And so I wouldn’t be surprised if these marches this coming Saturday are bigger than the ones in June for this reason. And that is progress. It’s momentum. And as long as Republicans don’t succeed at dragging the whole thing into street violence—and we should say that the organizers of these protests have a lot of experience now at defusing tension and running off bad elements—but if they are unable to try to drag “No Kings” into that kind of violent muck, then I think our trajectory will be toward the sort of free and fair election in ’26 that we really need to have.
Sargent: I’m just going to expand on your point by saying that if the turnout is very big, as I expect it to be, I also think it could have the salutary effect of pushing Democrats out of that healthcare cocoon and emboldening them to get out there and engage the stuff much more frontally. Brian Beutler, always great to talk to you, man.
Beutler: It’s always good to be back.