The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 1 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 is very very angry about a New York Times piece that carefully documents his obvious physical decline. Trump raged over the piece, letting out a stream of lies about his performance in office and even attacking the reporter who wrote the piece as ugly. This may seem typical of Trump, but we think it gets at something deeper. Trump’s entire political mystique is premised on the fiction that he’s a strong, virile, formidable figure who wields absolute mastery over his enemies at all times. His defensive eruption shows that he knows that the second his aura of strength is deflated and he comes to be seen as a shriveled, floundering figure, his whole political house of cards is in danger of collapsing. David Lurie, a lawyer who writes for the Public Notice Substack, has a good new piece developing a framework that describes Trump as a “lame duck dictator.” So we’re getting into all this today. David, thanks for coming on.
David Lurie: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Sargent: So The New York Times piece is pretty devastating. It talks about how Trump has been dozing off at events, how he’s traveling a good deal less than he used to, how he’s seen in public less often. There’s this brutal video of him embedded in the piece looking exhausted and befuddled. He comes to the Oval Office for work at 11 a.m. The piece even implied that Trump is now eyeing the great beyond. David, what did you make of this piece?
Lurie: Well, Greg, on the one hand, the piece was quite gentle to Trump because it avoided the elephant in the room, which is his very evident and advancing state of dementia. But it also was devastating for the reasons that you observed, because his sheer and pervasive state of exhaustion and his ever more inescapable showing of his age is exactly what Trump cannot abide. It’s devastating precisely because it was so factual. The video was perhaps the most devastating part of it, as was the very accurate description of the truly bizarre—I think historically bizarre—moment when a pharmaceutical executive collapsed next to Trump and he—in a state of bewilderment mixed with the apparent desire to remain the center of attention—stood up from his chair and then stared into the void. So it’s a devastating piece, and it’s devastating because of its factuality in my view.
Sargent: Well, I think you raise a really important point in saying that it, if anything, danced around the elephant in the room, which is that he is in a state of serious mental decline as well. We can all see it. It’s apparent to everybody at all times. He posted a long Truth Social rant in which he said, “The creeps at the failing New York Times are at it again.” He claimed that he won in 2024 by a landslide, that he settled eight wars, that our economy is great, that he has his highest poll numbers ever. He even called the Times’ Katie Rogers “ugly” on the inside and out. Now, David, on the substance, all of that is bullshit. He won the narrowest victory in recent memory. He hasn’t settled anything close to eight wars. Our economy is in rough shape, and his polling has hit a new low. But there’s a real hit-dog quality to the line here. Don’t you think, David?
Lurie: Well, on the one hand, it’s his greatest hits. But on the other hand, people are not imagining that Trump is becoming more out of control, that he’s becoming more misogynistic, that he lacks impulse control which causes his natural meanness and bullying tendencies to come out.
Sargent: I want to bring in something Fox News did here because it’s extraordinary. There was a recent Fox poll which had Trump’s approval on the economy at 38 percent to 61 percent disapproval, Trump’s approval on tariffs at 35 to 63, and his approval on healthcare at 34 to 64. Absolutely terrible numbers in the 30s stuck down there. He’s floundering. But then Media Matters documented that Fox personalities, after this poll came out, buried the poll and instead showered him with all the obsequious praise. Portraying him as this world-historical figure—that one of them even described him as a king whose ring people were going to kiss, literally described Trump that way. They were almost apologetic about their own network’s poll showing him really, really weak, so they had to make up for it. I think what that gets at, David, is that Trump’s own propagandists understand how important this aura of strength is to his political mystique.
Lurie: When the character image is punctured in any way, there’s a risk the whole balloon is going to lose its air. It’s the reason that the Fox News personalities recognize they have to engage in these obsequious and absurd, embarrassing demonstrations of praise, because otherwise the image is vulnerable. It’s ever more vulnerable. And when it goes, there’s really nothing left—nothing left at all.
Sargent: Exactly. You had this piece—you came up with the frame of the lame-duck dictator, which is a good way to describe this. Now, it’s common for presidents to present themselves as healthy and strong to the public. We’ve seen that over the decades. We’ve seen it for a long time. But Trump is doing something a little different here, I think. It’s more akin to those pictures of Vladimir Putin shirtless on horseback. This sort of cultishness is a hallmark of authoritarian politics, right? Do you see some of those strains in what Trump’s doing? What’s your sense of that?
Lurie: Well, first of all, I think we’re past the point of having a strain of authoritarianism. It doesn’t mean that we are Putin’s Russia. In fact, it’s because we’re not that we’re seeing the kind of displays that you pointed to. It’s because Trump—and his acolytes and, in the case of Fox News, the businesses that depend on the media-slash-political industry that he is the center of—all depend on Trump appearing to be like Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin—his regime depends on him appearing to be something he’s not. Well, Trump, it’s even more the case, right? Here we are in—Trump is, and his people are, trying to append a dictatorship to the United States. And yes, it appeared for some time that they were going to succeed. I mean, Trump has been functioning as a dictator in many respects, but the problem is, of course, that it’s a vulnerable dictatorship. Virtually none of these abuses are popular with the American people. And unlike in Russia, where you can—the dictator can—actually kill a million Russians or send a million Russians into their death at a pointless war, in the United States, presidents, even those who aspire like Trump to be a dictator, do things that are wildly unpopular—their political impact. And it’s coming home to roost for Trump, in my opinion.
Sargent: Well, I want to home in on your point about how this illusion of strength is necessary for masking the weaknesses of this presidency, the structural, deep weaknesses. You see White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt constantly talking about how energetic Trump is. You see his doctor’s reports on his glowing health becoming something almost comical. We’ve all seen these Cabinet meetings where one after another of these figures functions as a North Korea–style propagandist for him, obsequiously bowing down to him, talking about how strong he is, how powerful he is, how—and this is important—what a world-historical figure he is. This is an essential piece of a lot of it. And I think we see with Trump’s reaction to this Times piece that he and they all know how important that illusion of strength is, right? But what his crazy response reveals is that the only way to prop up that illusion is with a lot of lies, and also what’s revealed is that they know how dangerous it is for him to be perceived as weak and diminished. Hence the absurd overreaction.
Lurie: When the image of strength is the linchpin of a leader’s political success, and then all it takes is a puncturing of the image for the success to start to dissipate. And then all of the tools that have been used in the past to promote Trump’s image—some of which you were just referring to, right? The praising of him in the weird Cabinet meetings, they actually end up weakening him. And that, I believe, is the dynamic.
Sargent: I want to close on what I think is a real tension in this situation. It’s between Trump’s political weakness on the one hand, his unpopularity on the one hand, and, on the other hand, his consolidation of authoritarian power. He is a lame duck, as you put it, right? He’s politically weak. He’s unpopular. He’s physically and mentally declining in pretty much every way. And it’s right out there for the country to see the emperor’s clothes have fallen off. And so, given that tension, they have another reason to try to prop up this illusion of strength, mastery, virility, et cetera. It’s so that people don’t resist—they see his triumph over them as inevitable. I thought your piece got at this. In essence, what we’ve got is people not accepting the emperor as he’s being presented to us. And that’s essential, right? It’s essential that they’re not accepting the strong-emperor fiction.
Lurie: It’s now becoming clear that actually having communities organized, through churches and other community organizations, is really, really impairing the invasions on a local level. When they went into North Carolina, particularly through the Catholic Church, communities were immediately organized as soon as they got there. And what had taken a number of weeks to start to organize in Los Angeles, in a shorter period of time to organize in Chicago, took a much—even that much—shorter time to organize in North Carolina, which I believe must have surprised Bovino and Trump. I think they thought they were going into an easy target. At the same time, it’s a much longer conversation, but I think that we’re seeing that his weakness in Washington is developing in a multiplicity of ways. It’s not just the “crack-up of MAGA.” And it’s not just the effectiveness of the ACA strategy that the Democrats implemented. It’s that when the resistance is effectuated and when it’s shown to have a base of popularity, the things that it starts to bring to the fore—that Trump’s not a populist leader—politicians start—including Republicans start—to get worried that if they go along with it, they’re going to pay a price, which is not something they for whatever reason recognized months ago. It was the perceived power of Trump that has been the key to the “success” that he’s realized to this point. And it is the diminishment of that appearance of power that is actually the key to the diminishment of his actual power. I think that’s really what we’re getting at.
Sargent: To sum up, David Lurie, he’s a lame duck dictator and he’s getting a lot lamer, which is going to make him get more dictatorial, but it’s going to fail for him. David Lurie, thank you so much for coming on, man. Great stuff.
Lurie: My pleasure.