The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 19 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’s public events on Thursday were very strange. At one point, he seemed to nod off. At another, he claimed it was a great honor that the Kennedy Center has now been named after him, even though this was done by his own allies on its board. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s announcement of this great honor was bizarrely obsequious. We think there’s a confluence of things here worth noting. The combination of his glaring unfitness for the presidency on one side and the extraordinary sycophancy directed at him on the other has become truly jarring. Indeed, all this comes as a new Fox News poll has terrible findings for Trump, suggesting even Fox now finds it hard not to acknowledge how off the rails this presidency has gone. Moira Donegan, a columnist for The Guardian, has a great new piece taking stock of Trump’s overall unfitness and worsening decline. So we’re parsing through this strange moment with her today. Moira, nice to have you on.
Moira Donegan: Thank you for having me.
Sargent: So Trump’s latest public appearances were really bizarre. He was visibly nodding off at one point while people in white coats stood in the background. They were there for a medical event, but the symbolism of it was hard to avoid. And here’s what Trump said about the news that the Kennedy Center has now been named the Trump Kennedy Center.
Reporter (voiceover): Board members of the Kennedy Center voted unanimously to rename it the Trump-Kennedy Center. What was your reaction?
Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, I was honored by it. The board is a very distinguished board, most distinguished people in the country. And I was surprised by it. I was honored by it. You know, we’re saving the building. We saved the building. The building was in such bad shape, both physically, financially and every other way. And now it’s very solid, very strong.
Sargent: So that’s really something. He was very surprised and honored. Yet the board of trustees is made up of his allies, including Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, second lady Usha Vance, and a few others. I think this vote might have been rigged. What do you think?
Donegan: I suspect that there was not a genuine contest when the question of renaming the center in honor of dear leader Trump came up.
Sargent: Yeah, I mean, I thought that was just remarkable because for him to go out there and just sort of pretend that this was a great honor and he was humbled by it was really To me, just the most perfect encapsulation of his megalomania I’ve seen in a while. What did you think of it?
Donegan: Yeah, there’s a few of these gestures that the Trump administration has made that clearly seem intended to bolster Trump’s ego in part by giving him the trappings of dictatorship, right? A lot of the visuals of dictatorship—I’m thinking of the deployment of the National Guard to Washington, D.C., where there’s a very visible presence even still of troops where Trump can see them. I’m thinking of the giant poster of his face that was hung off of the side of the Department of Labor.
And I think, you know, adding the word Trump to this very prestigious but not very politically substantive institution that is the Kennedy Center will now, like, give him another boost, another sense of his own importance. That definitely seems like something that the people around Donald Trump are very eager to assure him of.
Sargent: It does seem like that. And in fact, I want to read from Karoline Leavitt’s announcement about this:
“I have just been informed that the highly respected board of the Kennedy Center, some of the most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center the Trump Kennedy Center because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building. Congratulations to President Donald J. Trump. The building will no doubt attain new levels of success and grandeur.”
Moira, she’s echoing his language there, using phrases like “highly respected” and saying “Donald J. Trump” exactly the way he does all the time. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she’s slathering him with this obsequious praise just after he was mercilessly mocked for his terrible speech to the nation the other night. What do you think?
Donegan: Yeah, I think that there is a real sense in Trumpworld that Trump needs to be bolstered, right? That he needs encouragement or sort of reassurance in public of his importance. There is a sense, I think, definitely in the pundit class and in the Beltway, and I think this is inevitably beginning to penetrate the White House itself, that Trump is kind of on his way out.
And that’s partly because of his really cratering poll numbers, even on issues like the economy and immigration that used to be his strongest polling issues. He’s now underwater in a lot of these returns. It’s about the, you know, Democratic sweep of the special elections in November.
It’s about the fracturing within his coalition, which has really intensified following the death of Charlie Kirk. And it’s about his, like, visible aging, his visible physical decline, which is becoming harder to ignore and really conspicuous after he made such a big deal in the 2024 cycle over the age and infirmity of President Joe Biden.
Sargent: Well, speaking of the polls, the Fox News poll that came out this week is really striking. I’m just going to read some findings. Seventy-two percent say economic conditions are not so good or poor. Only 39 percent approve of his handling of the economy. His approval on tariffs is only 36 percent. Fifty-eight percent say he’s focused on the wrong things. 59 percent are unhappy with the direction of the country, and 90 percent of voters are concerned about inflation and high prices. Those are terrible numbers, and that’s a Fox poll, Moira. What do you think of that?
Donegan: Yeah, I think there are some things that are peculiar about the Trump phenomenon but might be, like, more illustrative about American politics in general. One of which is that Trump always is a lot more powerful when he’s out of office than when he’s in office. People love Donald Trump when he’s not the president, and they tend to hate him when he’s the president. Or about half of people like him when he’s not the president. And very few like him when he is the president, right?
So this was something that he had a lot of advantage with in 2016 and in 2024 when he was running against people who were not incumbents but had sort of the burdens of incumbency. Kamala Harris in 2024 and, of course, Hillary Clinton in 2016. And he was able to cast himself then as an outsider and as a rebuke to the systems of power.
Now he’s in his second term. He is the president. His claim to being a challenge or sort of an outsider to Washington hegemony is sort of wearing thin when this guy has dominated American politics for a decade. And I think that people are noticing, you know, prices aren’t going down. My wages aren’t going up. My standard of living still seems circumscribed. America does not, in fact, seem great again. In fact, living here, it’s starting to really feel like a nation in decline.
And he has not delivered on his promises. What he’s doing is a lot of stuff that people don’t like. People hate the immigration crackdown and the kidnapping of innocent folks who are just living ordinary lives. They hate the posturing against wokeness, which delivers more social media content than improved living conditions for actual Americans.
So they see Trump’s use of his executive power for the bolstering of his own ego and for the bolstering of these kind of, like, niche cultural grievances of his base, and they don’t see their own lives getting better.
Sargent: Well, that’s for sure. Just to your point about how it’s really hard for him to sort of position himself as an outsider. I mean, he’s now the chairman of the Kennedy Center’s board. Sorry, he’s the chairman of the Trump Kennedy Center’s board, which doesn’t exactly sort of scream outsider. It’s pretty elite.
Donegan: Trump was for a long time pretty successfully able to pitch himself to members of his base, but also to sort of, like, disaffected voters without perhaps very strong political commitments in any direction. As a challenger to a corrupt elite, as somebody who is going to take down these systems of favoritism and sort of decadence and, principle-free greed, right, that seem to sort of characterize the leadership of a lot of political and institutional life in the U.S.
And that is, you know, not a pitch he can make as this crusader taking down the elites when, you know, there is this really slow but consistent drip, drip, drip of continuously revealed information about how just, just how close he was to Jeffrey Epstein; just how often Jeffrey Epstein seems to have asserted that Donald Trump “knew about the girls”; just how often women who are coming forward about Jeffrey Epstein testified that they were abused at parties that Donald Trump was attending, as was revealed on today, December 18, and in The New York Times.
This picture that is emerging after 10 years of Donald Trump at the center of American politics, after, you know, going on now six years of national attention paid to the Epstein scandal, it doesn’t seem like he’s a noble outsider challenging these corrupt elites. It seems like he is a corrupt elite, perhaps, you know, the most corrupt elite, the most corrupt and the most elite that Americans get.
Sargent: Yeah, he’s probably the most corrupt member of the elite of modern times. I would say, I think it would be hard to come up with someone who contests him in that regard.
I want to highlight another number from the Fox poll because it’s very heartening. A 53 percent majority opposes the U.S. military using deadly force against Venezuelan quote-unquote drug trafficking boats. That’s up from 47 percent last month. To your point about Trump’s longtime ability to sell himself as a foil to the elites, as a traitor to the elite class, as it were—this is really part of it, right?
His mystique was long sort of fortified by his willingness to say that the Iraq War was a disaster, right? So he was not just taking on financial elites, but also taking on the whole defense establishment in D.C., the swamp as it were. Now we’ve got a Fox poll finding that a majority doesn’t think he should use deadly force against these boats, the bombings.
I think that suggests two things. One, a lot of voters just know he’s fundamentally unfit to be making these national security decisions. But on the other, to your broader point here, he’s become kind of a member of the blob, the foreign policy blob who’s, you know, at risk of getting us involved in foreign entanglements. The whole mystique seems to be imploding.
Donegan: Yeah, I mean, think: In his 2016 primary run, his willingness to contradict the party doctrine and say that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a catastrophic mistake, that lent him a lot of credibility. It seemed like he was sort of clear-eyed or at least more willing to be honest with the American people on that issue, if maybe not on some others. And that did give him a lot of credibility. And he really understood popular sentiment.
What Donald Trump’s great gift is, he’s quite funny for one thing, but he also has a great sense—or used to have a great sense—of how to wield grievance, right? He used to know what pissed people off or what they found annoying or what they found entitled and be able to wield that to his own purposes.
Now he’s way more out of touch. He is pursuing a needless war of regime change kind of because it seems like he needs his poll numbers up, and he’s doing what a lot of aspiring and actual authoritarians do when they’re losing power domestically, which is try to win what they are being told will be a quick and speedily triumphant foreign war, right?
Sargent: And the public opposes just the bombings, never mind a land invasion or whatever the hell he thinks he’s planning.
Donegan: Yeah, there’s absolutely no appetite for a regime change war, right? And they not making really any effort to persuade the public or manufacture consent for such.
And there’s also a sense that the Defense Department in particular, but like, sort of, the State Department as well, and then the foreign policy apparatus is very chaotic under Donald Trump. He seems to be handing Vladimir Putin a victory in Ukraine in a kind of, like, needless or, like, a little bit premature or somewhat bullying way.
He’s not delivering as he promised he would a meaningful resolution to the Israeli war in Gaza. And now he seems to be picking a fight and committing murder or allowing his underlings to commit murder, which brings me to my other point, which is it’s not actually clear that Donald Trump is making or approving these decisions, right?
He’s kind of absent from actual presidential leadership, and he has appointed these people who are zealots and conspiracy theorists and drunks and sort of uniformly quite reckless to make decisions for him.
And that’s another source of the disapproval, I think, is this notion that tremendous power has been invested in the executive. Trump’s theory of executive power is even more expansive. But the actual executive seems kind of absent. He seems pretty out to lunch.
Sargent: I do think it’s heartening that a majority opposes the bombings because it really strongly suggests that the emperor is very naked right now. I want to talk about your great piece. You drew this really interesting connection between the appearance of Trump’s physical weakness and also his political weakness—that one feeds off the other in a sense. Can you kind of walk us through the bullet points on what’s happening in terms of his physical and mental decline? Like, just give us the case.
Donegan: Yeah. So I think any discussion of this needs to begin with the disclaimer that we don’t know what’s going on with Donald Trump’s health, right? And I can’t diagnose him from here. I’m not a doctor, and I’m also not in the room with the guy. I will say we can’t speak authoritatively about what’s going on with Donald Trump’s health, partly because the administration and Donald Trump’s, you know, doctors and representatives are giving very little information about his health, and what they are giving is not entirely credible, right?
But the guy keeps falling asleep in front of cameras. Kind of shockingly often right now. He has reduced his number of public appearances significantly. He has dramatically curtailed his domestic travel. He is no longer, according to a New York Times analysis of his schedule, really doing any official work before noon or usually after 5 p.m. So he has a very short workday. He’s spending a lot of time at his golf resorts and doing no walking there. He has been photographed with conspicuously swollen ankles. He tends to be sitting even when other people in the room are standing, like even when it’s a photo op in which everyone else is standing, he tends to sit. And there is some sort of persistent injury or bruising on the back of his right hand, which is alternately covered with Band-Aids or makeup.
Press pool photographers now sort of make a point of photographing it every time he appears in front of them. And this has been going on for months, right? No, I’ll bet you that gets him very angry when they do that. Karoline Leavitt offered that his hand is bruised from “shaking too many hands,” which I honestly do not find credible.
He has also, we know, had an MRI recently, which is a pretty serious diagnostic imaging tool that is not typically used for exploratory purposes. The White House has said that this was a “preventative” measure. Other experts, including those who spoke to The New Republic, have said that an MRI would almost never be used for, like, a preventative measure. It would be used to monitor an ongoing condition, such as a heart condition or some other kind of underlying disease.
Sargent: But he passed it with flying colors, right? Didn’t he say that? Well, he claimed on Air Force One that he did not know what they were looking for. He said, “I don’t know what I was looking for, but I had the best results they’d ever seen.” And I was like, OK, sure. Or I’m sorry. He said, “I don’t know what they were looking for, but I had the best results they’d ever seen.” He also has, we know, had several cognitive tests administered in the past year. Which, those he said he aced with flying colors. I mean, it’s just the amount of evidence of his decline is just really staggering and almost impossible to avoid commenting on at this point.
Sargent: Just to close this out on your point about the kind of confluence between his physical and political decline, we sort of opened this up by saying that a lot of the obsequiousness directed at Trump is partly to soothe him because he’s tanking so badly politically. But I really wonder whether it’s also because he’s tanking physically. You mentioned that there’s this need for his sycophants that they recognize a need to really prop him up.
And I just, I’ve got to think that, you know, they’re around him all the time inside the White House, at least between 12 and 5 or whatever. Right. And so they’re seeing this physical decline up close, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they’re seeing his unhappiness about that physical decline. And I do wonder whether the sycophancy is about kind of lifting his spirits about that as well. Is that overreading the situation or do you think that’s plausible?
Donegan: I don’t think so. I think these are some quite psychologically transparent people, right? These are not people with conundrums of inner lives. They’re pretty transparent in their motives. I will also say, I think this is one moment where there might be a distinction between the White House and the MAGA movement, right? Because one reason that Trump’s physical decline and his, like, evident physical weakness and frailty is so politically potent is not just the very recent example of Joe Biden and this sort of sense by a lot of the pundit class that they got it wrong that time and they have to sort of be on their toes this time.
I think it’s also that Trump’s command over the Republican Party is beginning to fracture, right? He is no longer a uniformly commanding presence. You have a number of Republicans choosing to break with him over Epstein. You have a number of once very loyal Republicans choosing not to run for reelection or even leaving office like Marjorie Taylor Greene, sort of seeing the writing on the wall that Trump is not forever and that if they want to position themselves for further ascent in politics after he exits the stage, they should probably start doing so now because it’s not gonna be that long, right?
So MAGA, I think, will persist in some form post-Trump. I think the virulent racism and white supremacy that he brought into the American mainstream of politics is probably here to stay. I think conspiracy theorizing as a form of political entertainment is probably here to stay, right?
But what Trump made was a very specific political coalition held together by his charisma, and he no longer has the strength or stamina to wield that charisma the way he once did. And we’re starting to see the effects of what happens when Donald Trump can no longer have the Trump effect on the Republican Party.
Sargent: And just to bring it back to that brutal Fox News poll, that really, I think, underscores the fracturing of the MAGA coalition in a major way. It’s really falling apart or at least deteriorating pretty substantially.
Donegan: Yeah, you know, these are people who actually have contradictions within their coalition, right? They don’t all agree with one another. We’re starting to see rivalries that I think were successfully tamped down by perhaps figures like Charlie Kirk, who’s now not, like, operative and holding the MAGA coalition together, or, you know, by Trump himself when he was more powerful.
Those people who were sort of keeping their mouths shut about what they didn’t like about one another—now they’ve got a decade of accumulated grievances, and they’ve got a lot of impatience, and they’re starting to go after one another. And that might be one of the best bits of good news for the Democrats going into 2026.
Sargent: Absolutely. I think this fracturing both of the MAGA movement and more broadly the MAGA coalition is real trouble for them in the midterms. Moira Donigan, thank you so much. It was so great to talk to you.
Donegan: Thank you, Greg. It was a pleasure.