The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 3 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.
This week brings a confluence of events that all tell the same story. On a number of fronts, we’re seeing really vividly that sheer unbridled sadism courses through just about everything President Trump and his administration are doing. The examples are everywhere. Trump just unleashed a vicious hateful rant about Somali immigrants. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just tweeted out a deeply sadistic cartoon about his murders in the Caribbean Sea. A prominent MAGA personality just declared that she wants to see the people Trump is bombing suffer and “bleed out.” A pop star denounced the White House for using her song in a truly hateful and disgusting video. Paul Waldman has a good new piece on his Substack, The Cross Section, looking at how this sort of hate and bloodlust undergirds everything coming out of this administration. So we’re talking to him about all this. Paul, good to have you back on.
Paul Waldman: Thank you, Greg.
Sargent: So let’s start with pop star Sabrina Carpenter. This is a good one. The White House posted a video of people getting arrested, pinned to the ground and handcuffed. And it overlaid that footage with Carpenter’s song, which is called, Have You Ever Tried This One? Paul, that’s a sexually charged song. And so the White House video takes almost a perverted pleasure in this imagery of people suffering. And Carpenter responded with this, “This video is evil and disgusting.” She called it “inhumane” and said she wants no part of it. What do you make of all that?
Waldman: Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the reaction that the administration was hoping for. But one of the things that we’ve seen is that on their social media, they really do seem to be highlighting the cruelty of a lot of their policies, especially their immigration policies. And they do it in a couple of different ways, through different formats, using different sorts of genres, and it really is quite a comprehensive strategy.
On the one hand, they want you to kind of luxuriate in the sadism and the suffering of the people in the videos. And a lot of them are sort of like hype videos. They’ve got propulsive music, and they’re cut together with quick cuts. There are a lot of them that use kind of a first-person perspective taken from body cams of the immigration officers who are chasing people down and handcuffing people. It looks very much like a first-person shooter video game like Call of Duty or a hundred other video games. So they want you to kind of get excited about it, get your adrenaline pumping. And they also have a lot of sort of content that’s intended to be humorous, where they want you to laugh at those people, to kind of exult in their suffering and the violence that is being perpetrated against them.
So they want you to be kind of pumped up, but also to find it funny. And that really is reflective of a kind of a sadism that’s driving that.
Sargent: A White House spokesperson responded to Sabrina Carpenter with this:
“We won’t apologize for deporting dangerous criminal, illegal murderers, rapists, and pedophiles from our country. Anyone who would defend these sick monsters must be stupid, or is it slow?”
Paul, again, the seething hatred and rage is the thing here. This is a White House spokesperson speaking. Clearly, this is all meant to please the audience of one and sate his bloodlust, but there’s actually a through line here, right? We actually saw in this video that the White House put out that they are celebrating the pinning of people to the ground, the suffering of people getting arrested and so forth. It really is the story.
Waldman: Yeah, and the “is it stupid or is it slow” is a reference to one of Sabrina Carpenter’s lyrics. And so they try to be very much kind of like tuned in with the sort of cultural space in which they’re operating. But one of the things that’s so different about this administration from administrations before it is that the people who deal with the media or have any kind of public-facing role, they’ve abandoned the kind of propriety that we always saw. There was an incident where a reporter asked a White House spokesperson who had given instructions for some kind of official action, and the reply they got in their email was, “Your mom.” This is the way that the people who are official spokespeople for the United States government are acting.
It’s intentionally juvenile. It’s meant to be abusive toward members of the media. It’s supposed to be as provocative as possible. And I think this is kind of a reflection of the sort of trolling mindset that so many of these people, especially the younger people in the administration, have grown up with. And they brought that into the government. Rather than saying, Well, there are certain kinds of ways that you’re just expected to act. And it’s just a matter of kind of taking this job seriously and the role that you have as a representative of the United States government seriously, their attitude is No, we’re just going to be like the worst 4chan troll because we think that’s funny and we think people will respond to it and like it and our base will like it when we’re being abusive to people. And when it comes to people like immigrants—that we’re being literally sadistic to them—that we want people to enjoy their suffering.
Sargent: Well, on another front, let’s listen to what Trump said to reporters during a cabinet meeting on Tuesday. Here he’s talking about Somalis in Minnesota. Listen.
President Trump (voiceover): Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions every year, billions of dollars. And they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88 percent. They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country. I’ll be honest with you. Somebody said, that’s not politically correct. I don’t care. I don’t want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks. We’re gonna go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.
Sargent: Right now, it’s being reported that Trump’s stormtroopers are going to start arresting Somalis in Minnesota. So I think with this he’s kind of priming the MAGA masses, ginning up their bloodlust, letting them know that the spectacle of arrests is coming and they should get their popcorn ready. Again, the through line with that White House video where they were celebrating people getting pinned to the ground and handcuffed—the spectacle of suffering is the oxygen that they breathe, basically. What do you think, Paul?
Waldman: Yeah, and it’s not as though this is the first time that Trump has said racist things or tried to gin up hate against some particular ethnic group or national origin group. But it really does seem like it’s got a harder edge. He says there that he thinks that Somali Americans are basically worthless and that he thinks they shouldn’t belong here. And you’re right that he’s preparing people for a spectacle. And so much of the whole immigration policy is about spectacle. Yes, it’s about something particular and pragmatic—that they do want to actually remove millions of people from the country.
But they also want to do it in a way that’s a big show. And what they want to communicate is their own willingness to commit acts of brutality on behalf of, supposedly, white people. And they don’t use the word white, but that’s who we’re really talking about. So we now have an asylum policy where asylum claims are not being accepted from any oppressed group anywhere in the world except for one: white South Africans. This is really explicitly white supremacist.
The whole immigration raids and this broader policy of going in in a very kind of highly visible way where you don’t just go in and arrest a bunch of people, but you do it with the cameras in tow and you create highly produced videos out of it. And then you send those out across social media in this kind of triumphant, jokey way to get people excited and to think that, like, This is great. This is the kind of show I want to watch.
Honestly, I’m kind of surprised it took him so long to get around to Somali Americans, which is a group that I’m sure most Americans haven’t really thought of. They’re not the biggest immigrant group in the world. Trump always has hated Ilhan Omar, the congresswoman from Minnesota, for a long time. And he says the most despicable, bigoted things about her in particular. And he did mention her a couple of times in that Cabinet meeting. But now he’s saying that everyone from the community that she comes from—none of them deserve to be here. And we are going to go start rounding people up, and everyone should applaud.
Sargent: Well, I want to add a couple data points to this idea that the immigration raids are part spectacle. One is that they have the Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, actually filmed in front of prisons with a lot of dark people with tattoos in the background. We have seen this. This is absolutely deeply sick shit, right? They are almost sexualizing the Homeland Security secretary’s posing in front of people behind bars.
And here’s another one. At the very outset of the administration, when they really started ramping up the mass deportations and they started talking about how they were going to switch to military planes to remove people, they would kind of frogmarch the migrants onto these planes in this really showy way and take pictures of it and take video of it. And these people were in manacles, right? They were filming them in manacles and parading them before cameras for MAGA to get thrilled by.
Then on top of that, your point about how when they go into these housing projects in places like Chicago, they have dedicated camera people who are explicitly tasked with capturing the excitement on film of people getting frogmarched out of their homes and into the streets in zip ties and handcuffs. It’s all so disgusting. It’s like impossible to get your head around.
Waldman: Yeah. And we do have these kind of competing narratives playing out in social media because on one hand you have the things that the administration is putting out, which is—you say—show the immigrants who are being arrested as though they are—the phrase that the administration always uses is the “worst of the worst.” And of course, when we actually find out who they are, it turns out none of them have criminal records—or very few of them anyway—but they want to portray them as though every single person that’s being arrested is Hannibal Lecter.
And at the same time, you have on social media just thousands of regular people who are creating their own counternarrative that shows ICE agents ripping families apart, showing up at schools so they can get the parents when they’re there to pick up their kids, with the crying children as their parents are being taken away, with ordinary people—housekeepers, landscapers—who are being wrestled to the ground and brutalized.
That is an entire counternarrative that is also playing out on social media. And that one is less produced. It’s more candid. It’s faster. There’s an even greater volume of it because it’s coming from all different kinds of people and not just the official accounts. And we don’t really know yet which one of those is really kind of predominant in people’s minds. But I think that this is a real sort of arena of media contestation and the social media that so many of us are kind of marinating in these days—that despite all of the administration’s efforts, there are a lot of people who are putting up resistance using the same kind of tools and trying to fight back that way.
Sargent: Well, I think in a sense, you could even argue that they’re losing the war over social media spectacle because all the polls are showing very clearly that there’s widespread revulsion and rejection of the mass deportations. Trump has completely thrown away whatever advantage he had on the broader immigration issue. Thank you, Stephen Miller, for doing that. He has really wrecked his standing on the issue with all these deportation raids and so forth. And I think they almost weren’t prepared for it in one critical sense, which is funny because they sort of pose as very savvy in terms of social media and the cultural stuff. The counternarrative that you’re talking about has been a much larger cultural phenomenon than the story they’re trying to tell. All over the country, ICE is becoming a pariah agency. People are taking out their phones, filming these things. They go wild on social. So what do you make of that? I think it’s fair to say that they’re losing the spectacle wars, no?
Waldman: I think maybe they are. And you know, the theory at the heart of what the administration is doing and what Trump’s entire career is based on is that we should all be our worst selves, that our kind of darkest impulses should be the ones that reign. We should be the most bigoted, the most corrupt, the most angry and hateful—that that’s our truest self is our worst self. And if you look at who is in this administration, it is a collection of the worst people from top to bottom. And the implicit argument is that we should all be that way. And we should cheer when people get brutalized. And we should laugh when we see the corruption because everybody is corrupt and everybody is sadistic. And that’s who we ought to be. And the truth is that that’s not who most people want to be.
Sargent: To your point about the open sadism of all this, let’s listen to Megyn Kelly. She’s a big MAGA superstar, formerly of Fox News. Here she’s talking about Trump’s bombings in the Caribbean Sea. Listen.
Megyn Kelly (voiceover): So I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time. So that they lose a limb and bleed out a little.
Sargent: So on top of that, you’ve got Defense Secretary Hegseth tweeting out this cartoon about killing people in the Caribbean. It’s all a big joke to them, you see. It’s all fun. Between this, the White House response to Sabrina Carpenter and Trump’s raging about Somalians, you’re really seeing a real full throttle hate moment here, don’t you think? What did you think of the Kelly thing?
Waldman: Yeah, it really does just kind of take away the veil of normalcy and propriety. And I think that most people react against that. You know, one of the things that social media does is it pushes us to kind of engage in that kind of thing. It makes us not just polarized, but also kind of want to indulge in those kinds of thoughts. Again, I think most people like, it’s not that we may never have the thought, but once we do, there’s something that causes us to say, You know what, that’s not who I really want to be. But part of the way you get clicks if you’re Megyn Kelly and get people to listen to your podcast is to really kind of get down in the nastiest parts of your own thoughts.
Because there are certainly enough people who do think that way—who have been taught to feel that the people who oppose them, whether it’s their political opponents or people they don’t think should be in the country, are subhuman. And that too is a big part of Trump’s rhetoric. He’s always describing immigrants as vermin. It’s the kind of language that’s been used preceding every genocide in human history, but Trump uses that kind of dehumanizing language to say that it’s OK. You don’t have to feel bad. You don’t feel bad when you put out a mousetrap and catch a mouse and it snaps his neck, right? So you don’t have to feel bad when we’re just blowing up like five guys on a boat that, you know, maybe they’re actually bringing drugs or maybe they’re not, but whatever, Pete Hegseth decided he’s going to kill them and then he’s going to put out a cartoon about it because it’s all so funny and cool. And they want you not to feel bad about that, but I think that it’s important for us to understand why we should feel bad about some things. And it’s not actually fun. And that’s what they don’t want us to think about.
Sargent: I think maybe the through line here is what you might call the joy of dehumanization. For MAGA, that’s a great, joyous occasion. Anytime that they can dehumanize whoever is sort of the subject of the two-minute hate of the moment, it’s time for a party. You had this piece at Public Notice, a Substack as well, where you drew a through line from the goons kidnapping people off the streets, the edgelords crafting the social media strategy, the disgusting lies about immigrants, and then you tied that all to what we’ve been hearing lately about all these mid-level Republican staffer types giggling in their Nazi group chats, as you put it. They’re all kind of participants in this broader MAGA project.
Where do you think this is going, Paul? Trump is not going to be on the scene forever, obviously. And there are already signs that the MAGA movement is breaking up. You’ve got JD Vance, who’s positioning himself to inherit it all. And you can kind of see all these strands in what JD Vance is doing. He’s trying to be that same type of hateful, thuggish figure that Trump is being, but he’s just not going to be able to corral all the fury and bloodlust the same way Trump does. Only Trump can really corral it, right? Is there anyone else who can?
Waldman: I really don’t think so. And I don’t want to say there’s going to be a return to normalcy. I think that would be naïve. But one of the things that Trump offered his movement was that if you’re really hardcore MAGA, it’s fun and they want to make it fun. It’s got its own merch. It’s got this kind of excitement. Trump makes a lot of jokes, and there is a kind of a liberatory thrill in not having to feel like you’re constrained by the norms of society anymore. And if you want to let your bigotry have full rein, then you can do that. And it feels exciting to do that. And there was always a kind of element of fun that drew people into Trump’s movement. And that was always a minority of people.
The other thing is that it really does rely on his particular brand of charisma. Like, there’s nothing fun about JD Vance. I don’t think there’s anybody else who kind of captures that spirit in the way Trump does. As much as liberals like you and me might dislike him, he is compelling and he does attract people. And I just don’t see who else can kind of duplicate that. And we’ve seen figures like Ron DeSantis try to offer Trumpism with sort of a different face. And it just never worked because they’re not the same kind of politician, the same kind of character that he is. So it has to be something different. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’s got to be something different.
Sargent: Trump really is one of the most charismatic politicians in modern times. He’s up there with Barack Obama, but in his own twisted, crazy way. He’s a deep, really seriously talented politician, and he knows how to talk to all these disgusting impulses in people. Paul Waldman, always great to talk to you, man. Folks, if you like this discussion, make sure to check out his Substack. It’s the Cross Section. Paul, thanks for coming on.
Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.