The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 28 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.
On Air Force One, President Donald Trump unleashed a bizarre, angry, rambling rant about the possibility that he might run for a third term and about the cognitive test he supposedly aced this weekend. Things got even worse when he compared himself cognitively to two Democrats who both happened to be nonwhite women. In addition to the naked race baiting on display here, Trump is clearly very sensitive about perceptions of his mental decline. Yet broadly speaking, mainstream media organizations still refuse to cover what’s obvious. He’s plainly unfit for the job and getting worse daily. Of course, it’s also true that this unfitness hasn’t impacted him politically in the past as much as we think it should. So is there any way to make this issue matter more? What could Democrats do in that regard? Should they do more? We’re discussing all this with writer Meredith Shiner, a contributing editor at The New Republic, who regularly critiques media coverage of the current administration. Meredith, nice to have you on.
Meredith Shiner: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Sargent: So let’s start with what Trump said to reporters. The topic was whether he’ll run for a third term. He said there are good Republican candidates for 2028 and then things kind of went awry. The whole thing is worth listening to.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): We have JD, obviously. The vice president, who’s great. I think Marco is great. I think ... I’m not sure if anybody would run against those two. I think if they ever formed a group, it would be unstoppable. I really do. I believe that. I would—I would, I would love to do it. I have the best numbers ever. It’s very terrible. I have my best numbers. If you read it ... am I not ruling it out? You’ll have to tell me. All I can tell you is that we have a a great group of people, which they don’t. They have Jasmine Crockett, a low-IQ person. They have AOC’s low-IQ. You give her an IQ test. Have her pass the exams that I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed. I took—those are really hard. They’re really aptitude tests, I guess in a certain way. But, they’re cognitive tests. Let AOC go against Trump. Let Jasmine go against Trump. I don’t think Jasmine—the first couple of questions are easy, a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe, you know. When you get up to about five or six, and then when you get up to 10 and 20 and 25, they couldn’t come close to answering any of those questions.
Sargent: So Meredith, I’m reasonably sure that both AOC and Crockett could do much better on a cognitive test than Trump did. What’s your reaction to what you heard there?
Shiner: I think that I have a few reactions. First and foremost, Donald Trump is a racist. And so the idea to him that women of color could be smarter than him is unfathomable. And it should be unacceptable for him to state that assertion as fact in the way that he did.
I think it’s also troubling that he continues to field these questions about a third term as if that’s normal or that that would be legal and right. I understand that people are trying to get headlines, but in the process of trying to get those headlines, I think that they are corroding our national understanding of what a proper and normal and legal administration is.
For him to disparage AOC or Jasmine Crockett’s intelligence, that’s a sign of his racism. But it’s everything that’s happening behind that. It’s what Stephen Miller is doing across this country, where they’re disappearing people from neighborhoods, especially here in Chicago where I live, where Russell Vought is shutting down the government, and that’s disproportionately impacting Black women, who make up a huge share of civil servants.
And what we’re seeing from him is sort of the tip of the iceberg. And that’s one of the challenges that I think we’re seeing the national media fail to confront with, is that all of these things have a much broader context. None of them are normal. And everything is undermining democracy and our government as we know it.
Sargent: Well, just to pick up on your point, it really does seem to me that there’s no coincidence here—that he goes after nonwhite women, specifically AOC, who obviously represents an urban constituency—at the exact same time that he’s sending troops into cities and at the exact same time that he’s kind of lording it over Democrats by saying, my budget chief, Russell Vought—the Grim Reaper, as he presented him—is cutting programs that matter to Democrats. I think all those things are connected in a very, kind of, really virulent way.
Shiner: Absolutely. When I think about being in Chicago right now, I think about all of our neighbors who are trying to protect other neighbors—the thousands of people across our neighborhoods who are carrying whistles at all times because ICE is attacking children at Halloween parades. They are sweeping parking lots and Home Depots. They are taking landscapers from white, affluent neighborhoods, predominantly white, affluent neighborhoods on the North Side of Chicago.
The other day, they detained for hours a night-shift manager at a comedy club because he had the balls to try to intervene with someone being taken from the streets. And when we look at the aggregate impact of that, first of all, this is the state exercising racism to the extreme. But also we have to think about the fertile ground that created the conditions where there are people who think that’s OK.
And I think about the way that Fox News has covered our cities and the idea that all urban life, to them, must be corrosive, it must be violent, it must be toxic. And to me, that’s based in a baseline xenophobia and a baseline racism. And there’s this feedback loop between the president, who consumes all of that content and also probably believes those things himself, and how this is being exercised across the country.
So when you hear him disparage two members of Congress in that way, that’s reflective of broader views. And it does, as you mentioned, fit part and parcel with the randomized terror we’re seeing in cities across this country right now that should be front-page news everywhere—but that’s not what they’re going to confront him on Air Force One about.
Sargent: Well, I think there’s also a way to discuss his mental decline through the frame of the, kind of, mad king really gone amok—because that’s really what’s happening right now. Mark Jacob had a good rundown of Trump’s mental decline on his Substack. Here’s a quick list:
He posted a fake AI video about right-wing “med beds,” a conspiracy theory that he later deleted. He claimed Portland is burning down and that there aren’t any stores there anymore. He spread nonsense about Tylenol. He keeps talking about cutting prescription drug prices by a thousand percent or more, which is mathematically impossible. He posted, right on Truth Social, his command that his attorney general prosecute his enemies. He claimed a United Nations escalator sabotaged him.
Shiner: There were a lot of reporters in the national media who, after the 2024 election, really tried to cash in on this idea that they had been duped by Biden administration officials and that he wasn’t really fit for office or competent for office. And I’m not one of those people who loves to engage in the idea of, like, what if Barack Obama had taken a bulldozer to the White House—although Republicans would have lost their minds. And I think the national media would have treated it more seriously and less inevitable.
But the contrast between where we are right now, in October 2025, and where we were last year, in 2024, I think is really huge. And when you think about someone like Jake Tapper, who tried to sell a book on this idea that the mainstream media overlooked his unfitness for office, but then now we’re in this place where you’re not exploring that with this president—you can’t really square that circle.
Sargent: The media knows how to let people know that there’s something to be alarmed about when it wants to. The New York Times’ coverage of Joe Biden’s mental fitness really sort of sent a very loud signal to the world that there was something to be alarmed about.
It’s a bit of an intangible quality in press coverage. It has a lot to do with the placement of stories, the tone of headlines, the kind of relentless quality of the coverage, those types of things—which are a little hard to quantify, but they’re clear. If you look for them, you can really see them.
Shiner: Especially when all of our major outlets get rid of their public editors—so they eliminate that function of transparency and accountability they used to have to the public. That’s the hill I will die on, Greg. So I just wanted to insert that there before you finished your point.
Sargent: A hundred percent. And I think a public editor at the New York Times could write a big piece essentially saying, look, The New York Times’ coverage of Biden’s age really sent a loud signal to the country that there was something really terrible to be alarmed about. Now, in a certain sense, Biden’s age was a problem. And, you know, it turned out to be a bigger political problem than people like me acknowledged at the time. And I regret that, but that doesn’t justify this gap in coverage. You don’t see this kind of alarm in coverage of Trump’s mental fitness that you saw in coverage of Biden’s age.
Shiner: So I want to attack this question from a reverse angle, which is: for the past several weeks, as Trump’s DHS, and ICE, and CBP have escalated their attacks in Chicago, what we’ve seen here is a commensurate increase in local news coverage that is properly conveying the severity of what we are experiencing—whether it’s the Chicago Tribune, the Sun-Times, WBEZ, a constellation of incredible, incredible independent outlets, from Block Club Chicago to The TRiiBE to Unraveled Press.
What they are doing is documenting holistically what is happening to our neighbors. When a 40-year-old father is taken away from his 15-year-old daughter, who’s dying of cancer, by the federal government—when he’s disappeared, when that family no longer has a breadwinner and his teenager is on the verge of death—those are stories that are being covered here.
And when you look at how many people in Chicago showed up to the No Kings rally, which was probably one of the most significant turnouts of any city in the country—estimates are at 250,000–300,000 people—when you see all of these people out in their neighborhoods, putting up anti-ICE signs, creating systems like whistle systems, with whistles we all keep in our bags to make sure that everyone knows that ICE is present, I actually think that that is a huge reflection not only of the things we are now seeing with our own eyes but of the way the media has covered it.
And so, in this little test sample, we’re seeing what happens when quality coverage that expresses seriousness and urgency, that doesn’t create a both-sides issue, informs the public in a way that I think is radically, radically shifting their perspective on what this administration is doing and what it means for our neighbors, our friends, our city, the people who work in our restaurants.
And so you’re seeing the power of that in a really positive way. And the coverage in D.C. is completely on a different planet. And so there is agency in the national media. One of my recent essays is actually about Democratic congressional leadership and how they’re not connecting the dots between the shutdown and all of the illegal activities being undertaken by this administration that are deeply unpopular.
And so, for everyone in this ecosystem—this media-industrial complex in Washington, this political media–industrial complex—to really evaluate their priorities, how they talk about things, what they talk about. They do have agency, even in this choose-your-own-adventure media landscape, to start shaping national perception. And they’re just choosing not to do it.
Sargent: You know, I think that seeps into the coverage in another sense as well. The media is very sensitive to political weakness, generally speaking. The savvy reporters—they know when someone’s really kind of tanking in the polls or losing arguments and stuff—and they’re usually pretty quick to point it out.
And yet, in the case of Donald Trump, they really don’t point out his obvious weakness. And Trump, by the way, is super sensitive to this. He unleashed this truly unhinged rant on Truth Social, claiming he has his best polling numbers ever. He raged about ads from the radical left—by which I guess he means Democrats—that talk about his low polling and said these ads shouldn’t be allowed to run.
But it’s just true that Trump’s polling is in the toilet. His approval is at a low point, and he’s deeply underwater on major issues—importantly, including the economy.
Do you think there’s a presumption of Trump’s strength built into the media that really leads them to refuse to cover the true state of his weak grip on public opinion right now?
Shiner: I can’t speak for the incentive structure of all of the people who write newsletters for insider D.C. publications. But what I can say is that I feel like so much of the coverage of public policy has been divorced from the “public” piece—that the impacts of policy, that the impacts of actions, aren’t being covered.
I think I came on a few months ago and we talked about my DNC piece and the idea of pundit brain, and how when D.C. reporters and the cable-TV apparatus [try] to explain something that looks different from what’s in front of people’s eyes, they’re effectively hurting their own credibility.
And so the more extreme this administration gets, the more everyday people will see it—and they’ll see it in their neighborhoods, they’ll see it in a real way. They’ll see some of these clips where he can’t put coherent sentences together.
And regardless of the assumptions that the media makes, I think that their actions don’t align with reality in a way that really hampers their credibility, and really puts a roadblock between the average person’s willingness to engage with that sort of content in order to better understand the news.
Sargent: Yeah, there’s a huge, huge gulf between the reality of our politics right now and the overall picture of it that appears in the media. I think maybe for political reporters and D.C. Democrats alike, there’s kind of a sense that the issue of his mental unfitness is moot—that it’s kind of not worth trying to target Trump with it.
Usually the story goes like this: Well, Hillary tried to make an issue of Trump’s mental unfitness, that failed. Trump’s unfitness is “baked in” for many voters—to use that awful cliché, “baked in.” Voters have seen it for years, they don’t care.
I think that’s bullshit. But even if you accept it for a sec, we’re seeing his mental unfitness manifest in a different kind of way. He just hiked tariffs on Canada by 10 percent after an ad ran featuring Ronald Reagan criticizing tariffs. He’s talked endlessly about invading Canada. The tariffs are obviously reflective of a disordered mind, and the impacts of them are hitting people really hard.
He posted the imagery of a plane shitting on Americans even as he sends troops into cities. This is the thing, Meredith—he’s really much more of a visible mad-king figure than ever before. Isn’t there a way for Democrats to press that case a little more?
Shiner: Well, I’m not in charge of Democrats’ messaging. And in fact, they don’t really like most of my thoughts or writing or opinions. So I can’t speak for what’s going on in Chuck Schumer’s or Hakeem Jeffries’s minds.
But here’s what I will say—and if I were them, this is what I would think about. It is apparent to everyone that Donald Trump is not the person who is calling the shots and running the federal government in a real way. And the thing that is terrifying about that is that the people who are running the country—the Cabinet he put in place this time—look different from the Cabinet he put in place the first time.
Like, I can’t believe I’m wistful for corporate pharmaceutical executives, having seen RFK Jr., right? And so there are no checks, even internally. The people who fill the void are those who have the most hateful, destructive views of this country.
The idea that, in Trump’s absence—when he’s focusing on his ballroom or doing whatever he does on social media—that Stephen Miller is getting to exercise his xenophobic fever dreams and terrorize communities, to me, if I were a Democrat, that’s what I would talk about. Because at this point, I don’t really care how Donald Trump does on a cognitive test. I care about what his government is doing to people. And Democrats should care more about that, too.
And the people who are making decisions in his absence—the people who are exercising this vision, which I think could even be more extreme than he might have naturally done if he were more present, as he was maybe in the first term—all of those things leave a lot of questions about who’s actually driving this train.
If Republicans in Congress aren’t doing anything, if the Supreme Court is completely beholden and basically intends to give the executive unlimited power, and he’s filled the executive with racist stooges—who is designing the policy that is breaking this country in a way that it can’t quickly be undone? There is no bouncing back. There’s no going back.
Exploring some of those big questions, calling into question these unpopular people—like, no one elected Stephen Miller. That guy is the least likable guy in the history of the world, and the idea that you aren’t actually highlighting or asking these questions, and connecting them to the destruction people are feeling, that’s the thing that seems like political malpractice to me.
Sargent: Well, I think that the mad-king question is sort of a window into this, right? Donald Trump is completely out to lunch—he’s indulging his craziest fantasies on a daily basis. And as a result of that fundamental unfitness, that has created this vacuum for really, really serious fascists—basically, authoritarians—to run the place. And I think there’s a way to connect those cases.
Shiner: Yes. And this goes back to one of the pieces I published earlier this year, just this idea that ever since Ronald Reagan’s election, Democrats have been defensive on the idea that government is good. They’ve talked about, well, if we’re going to have this argument of binary, and Republicans are going to be limited government and we’re a little bit more government at the margins, that that’s going to be significant to people.
And in that choice—their strategic choice—they’ve abdicated the field on what the value of government can and should be. And in this moment of absolute failure—I mean, this is, I think, the biggest government failure I’ve seen in at least my lifetime, holistically—to not be telling that story, to not be saying that there’s no one driving this bus, or at least no one elected driving this bus, and we’re driving off the cliff—like, these things should be easy.
This man bulldozed the East Wing of the White House, and that is a symbolism for literally everything. And he’s not the one who’s driving the bulldozer—but his lackeys are.
Sargent: Meredith Shiner, it’s always great to talk to you. Thanks for that big picture look at things.
Shiner: Thanks for having me, Greg.