The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 22 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.
By now you’ve seen the brutal video clips and harsh reviews of President Trump’s big speech at Davos. The whole thing was an unmitigated disaster, not just for Trump, but for our country. Things got even more revealing after the speech, however, when Trump’s propagandists were forced to spin this moment as a world-historical triumph. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, as always, rose to the moment, unleashing an extraordinary stream of obsequious praise. And JD Vance wasn’t far behind. It all exposed the scam at the core of MAGA in a fresh way. So we’re talking about all of this with Mona Charen, who hosts a podcast at The Bulwark and has been a penetrating critic of Trump’s global vision and of his profound unfitness for the presidency. Great to have you on, Mona.
Mona Charen: Hi Greg, always good to see you. Does he have a vision for international affairs other than me, me, me?
Sargent: Not really, and we’re going to get deep into that. So everybody has by now seen it all: the slurring, the incoherence, the confusing of Greenland and Iceland, the angry threats, the deranged nonsense about wind power, and the racist smearing of “low IQ Somalis” before the whole world. Mona, what’s your rundown on what you saw there?
Charen: This is our mad king. We now have Caligula as president of the United States. I don’t know if you ever—you probably didn’t, it’s before your time—but there was a show on BBC decades ago called I, Claudius. And it has this fantastic depiction of the Roman senators coping with the clearly deranged, but unbelievably egotistical Caligula.
And they are forced to—because he had the power of life and death over them—say: Yes, sire, you are the most brilliant and you’re a genius, you know, military leader and... and a god-like figure, et cetera.
And you could understand the bowing and scraping of Roman senators because, as I said, he could order them to be executed. Our senators are doing basically the same thing and they have much less to lose. They are just cowards beyond belief, spineless worms.
Sargent: Well, you know the Caligula reference is useful because Karoline Leavitt really is bowing and scraping and worshipping. Let’s listen to what she said about what just happened. Here goes.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): America is back and the whole world knows it. President Trump is undoubtedly the leader of the free world. He’s also the businessman and negotiator in chief. And so there was a very long list of foreign leaders and business leaders who wanted to meet with the president today. And he’s been taking part in many of those private meetings behind closed doors.
Sargent: Well, that was really something. America is back. Trump is leader of the free world. Businessmen are lining up to meet with him. I mean, yeah, they’re lining up to lather him with fake flattery and bribe him because they know he’s susceptible to manipulation.
Charen: And further, they know how dangerous he can be. And so, you know, it really is a combination of contempt and fear. Right. I mean, contempt because he’s an obvious, deranged idiot. Fear because he managed to get himself elected president of the United States. And so they are in a horrible position, these European leaders and every leader around the world—to say nothing of us, Greg.
Sargent: Yeah, we’re in a bad spot. And by the way, I should note that Leavitt’s expression, if you watch her while she’s saying all this, it really looked like a cult follower—someone who has made the decision to kind of cross over and just accept the truth as the cult leader decrees it.
Charen: Yes, yes, yes. 100 percent. Yeah, the bright smile, the glassy eyes. Yes, it is, you know: I am going to spout complete BS, the opposite of the truth, and do it cheerfully.
Sargent: Absolutely. And then there was a moment where on Twitter she responded to someone who pointed out that Trump confused Greenland and Iceland. I’m just going to read from Leavitt’s tweet because it has to be heard to be believed.
She said this: “His written remarks referred to Greenland as a piece of ice because that’s what it is.” That’s Leavitt, right? First of all, he does use the phrase “piece of ice” in the speech, but that’s not an issue here. What’s at issue is the confusing of Greenland and Iceland.
And she seems to think that if she points out that the words “piece of ice” were in the speech, that somehow makes that conflation and confusion disappear.
Charen: Look, just as people cannot be talked out of grocery prices, you know, being high—which is one of the things Trump is attempting to do—you cannot talk people out of their sense that a president is losing his marbles.
As we saw with Biden, no amount of spinning could disabuse people of their own perception that they saw with their own eyes that the man was losing it. And for them, you know, they can go out there and say: Oh, no, no, he meant “ice” and “land” with a space between, and that’s what Greenland is.
Obviously, that’s not what happened. And they assume levels of credulity and stupidity on the part of their viewers that I don’t think even the most crazed or devoted Trump acolyte is going to be able to accept.
Sargent: Well, just for fun, let’s listen to Trump conflate Greenland and Iceland. Check this out.
Donald Trump (voiceover): They’re not there for us on Iceland. That I can tell you. I our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So Iceland’s already cost us a lot of money.
Sargent: So there you have it. It’s as clear as day, right, Mona?
Charen: Utterly clear. You know, he... he’s almost 80. He makes these mistakes. And you know what? Frankly, I wouldn’t even dwell on it if he hadn’t been so vicious about Biden’s mental lapses and... and verbal slips, you know, where... where he was just as cruel and as contemptuous and terrible as you could possibly be, one human to another. Yeah, no mercy.
Sargent: Right, I don’t want some of the really serious things here to get lost in the shuffle because it’s really easy to sort of point and laugh and I guess point and grimace maybe and point and cringe at what’s becoming of our country.
But for Trump to smear Somalis in such racist terms before the entire world and for Trump to just lie his ass off about wind power before the entire world, these are more than just embarrassments. These are just declarations that the United States just can’t be counted on. That’s what I fear. I fear that people just look at the United States and say, you know, it’s over.
Charen: Utterly. And look, this is such a pivotal moment because Trump is so unfit and his fantasies that he spins out in front of the whole world and his insecurities that he reveals to the whole world, admitting that he’s... he’s petulant about not getting the Nobel Peace Prize and therefore he doesn’t have to be concerned about peace anymore. I mean, it’s the rationale of a three-year-old, really. And yet he is unbelievably powerful.
You know, the fact is everybody in the world understands—and I highly commend Mark Carney’s address in Davos, if you haven’t read that, if people haven’t read that yet, it’s very powerful—where he says: We’re not going to pretend anymore that the United States is the world leader and the leader of the free world. That’s over. It’s gone.
And he’s absolutely right because even if we get a very reasonable, internationally minded, traditional Democrat in office in 2028, the world now knows that we are capable of doing the Trump thing. And because of that, their confidence in us is cratering. And rightly so; we are not the country we had been. We never will be again, in my opinion.
And all of us and our children, our grandchildren—I now have a grandchild—they’re going to pay the price because we’re not going to have the kind of security or prosperity that we came to rely on as our birthright. We’re destroying it unilaterally by suicide.
Sargent: Well, congratulations on the grandchild.
Charen: Oh, thank you for that.
Sargent: And by the way, I think it’s worth going back to what Leavitt said in that audio that we listened to, because she’s clearly sensitive to the criticism that you just made, which is that this is not the leader of the world speaking in any sense. And that’s why she went out of her way to declare that what you saw isn’t what you saw. And he actually did function as “leader of the free world” in her words.
Charen: Yeah, look, I will admit that before the 2024 election, I suffered from a lack of imagination, Greg. I was arguing that he would destroy NATO, but I thought he was going to do that by abandoning Ukraine and possibly reducing America’s contribution to our collective defense and signaling that he might not come to the aid of countries if they were attacked by Russia.
I thought all of that was very likely. I never saw that he was going to threaten our allies directly and threaten to take their territory by force. I mean, this is so much like a Twilight Zone episode that it is just unbelievable for us. We cannot wrap our heads around it.
He is quite mad, but not quite mad enough for people to recognize it. You know, it’s... he’s right on the cusp of being a complete lunatic, but not quite.
And so there are still all these legions of people who will go out and—not just the Karoline Leavitts of the world, but more serious people—who will go out and say: Well, this is the art of the deal. And this is actually a very four-dimensional chess move. And, you know, but we can see the truth.
Sargent: Well, I guess the one bright spot, if you can call it that, is that Trump seemed to confirm that he’s not going to launch a ground invasion of Greenland after all.
Charen: He did. Well, because he does respond to one thing: market fluctuations. If the market drops by 800 points, it gets his attention. And that’s what happened here again, just as it did after Liberation Day with his absurd tariffs. When the markets go down, he backs off.
And I almost felt like putting up a skywriting or something to the Europeans saying: Don’t back down, don’t flatter him anymore, don’t appease him. I think we’ve learned that appeasement is a bad policy, Europe, haven’t we? If you stand up to him, he backs down, but that’s the only way. And that and the markets.
Sargent: Well, yes, I want to get at another thing about this whole debacle, and JD Vance’s tweet, I think, really captured it. Here’s what he said. He called this a “historic speech in the heart of the lion’s den.”
Now Mona, so the MAGA mythology holds that Davos elites, globalist elites are, you know, the scourge of working Americans and that MAGA populism is about essentially avenging the wrongs that were done to American workers by those people in Davos.
Now I’m offended by this deeply because first of all, how many people at Davos are getting a big fat tax cut because of Trump and Vance’s “populist” agenda? But that aside, this whole argument is a scam. And I was hoping you could talk about that. Is there any sense in which the Trump MAGA agenda actually challenges Davos elites in a way that matters?
Charen: You know, there should be a cartoon with Trump threatening tariffs by holding a gun to his own head because the... but not his head, but his supporters’ heads, because who pays the tariffs? Who pays?
He’s threatening to impose tariffs on Europe, which is really imposing tariffs on Americans—and mostly lower-income Americans who can least afford it because the goods that are being tariffed are not Mercedes-Benzes and yachts. They’re ordinary things that regular people have to buy, including food, electricity, shelter, all of those things. He’s making all of that more expensive.
And so the supposed populism is such a sham. I completely agree with you. And Trump loves nothing more than to hobnob with the wealthy, and he has done nothing but serve their interests. If you are connected to Trump, he will pardon you. He will give you deals. He will get your company in on shares of major companies where he’ll say the United States will take a share.
Who knows, Greg, what is happening to the money that is coming from the sale of Venezuela’s oil now, where they’re opening up accounts in Qatar? What is that about? Who’s going to have access to that?
That is beyond the reach of America’s banking laws or any disclosures. This is like a private income stream that Trump is creating for himself and his pals, potentially. It is just beyond belief, the levels of corruption and foul self-dealing that we are seeing with this presidency.
Sargent: That’s so critical. He and his family are using the presidency to engage in extraordinary corruption and self-dealing. They’re just scooping in money from globalist elites all over the place. So there’s that, right?
But also, if you think about it, the nonsense about windmills and so forth and wind power is also, in a way, a scam perpetrated on his own voters who in the long run may end up with higher energy costs. And by the way, Trump is ceding the future of green energy to China. And how is that MAGA? How is that taking on the globalists?
Charen: Exactly. Of course, all of his recent actions—alienating all of our friends, imposing tariffs on everyone—all of this is driving our former friends and trading partners into the arms of China. Because as much as they may not love China, at least China is presenting itself as stable and reliable at this point. And we, as we know, are unbelievably unstable and unpredictable.
And so it is totally to the benefit... the trade stuff is completely to the benefit of China. And the blowing up of the NATO alliance, the most successful military, economic, and diplomatic cooperation engine that the world has ever known... who does that benefit? It’s Putin’s wet dream. I’m sorry, he’s been wanting this forever.
On the one hand, Xi is getting everything he wants in terms of trade and economic success. Putin is getting everything he wants in terms of the destruction of NATO. Trump is the best thing to happen to our chief adversaries.
Sargent: Yeah. Way to take it to the Davos elites on behalf of working Americans, right? Well, here’s another good one as well. Listen to this exchange between a reporter and Mike Johnson concerning Trump’s claim at the speech that we’ve gotten nothing out of NATO.
Reporter (voiceover) What say to our American allies after President Trump said that what we have gotten out of NATO is nothing?
Mike Johnson (voiceover): I haven’t seen the President’s speech. I look forward to seeing it. And I’m not going to give comments on something I haven’t seen yet.
Sargent: If this speech were a world-historical triumph, you know, I think Mike Johnson would have taken care to point that out. But Mona, what strikes me here—to your point earlier about the senators and Caligula—is that Republicans are just marching off this anti-NATO cliff for this guy, and they know it’s all complete bullshit.
Okay, yeah, here and there you hear Republicans objecting, but the vast majority of Republicans are just going along with it. And I don’t know what to make of that.
Charen: Well, they have had 10 years to practice being completely without principle and spineless toadies. And so at this point, at the end of 10 years, the ones who did have any kind of principles or conscience have departed or been defeated. The ones who are left, you know... there are a few who still stand up to Trump and try to do what’s right.
I think of Lisa Murkowski. And it’s very notable that Lisa Murkowski is given the freedom politically to do that because Alaska has ranked-choice voting. So that disempowers the right-wing primary voters in Alaska. And so she has been much more reasonable.
And that’s really something that we need to consider as a country: how much our primary system is distorting and damaging us on both sides, honestly, but more on the Republican side. And open primaries might be a very good reform to think about if we get through this in any sort of reasonable shape.
But yeah, the Republican Party has become a sort of prostrate bunch of men and women who simply echo the party line. Karoline Leavitt, back to her, right? I mean, that plaster, glazed-eyed, Yes, Master. That’s what they look like.
Sargent: Right. And so after the speech—just want to bring this up as well—Trump really wanted to show that all this is having an effect. After it was over, he tweeted this:
“Based upon a very productive meeting that I have had with the Secretary General of NATO, we have formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic region. This solution, if consummated, will be a great one for the United States of America and all NATO nations.”
He also said he’s not going to impose the tariffs he’s threatened because I guess everybody’s listening to him. Now, I think it’s worth reminding people here that we can already get what we want from Greenland. So it’s possible that these talks will just create some fig-leaf way of saying that Trump is getting big concessions, though obviously we can’t know for sure yet what this entails. What do you expect from that, Mona?
Charen: Yes, that’s exactly what I expect. There will be some cosmetic thing that Trump can point to as [a] big victory, but this is a total climb-down on his part. And it’s going to be dressed up as something else.
But you know, that’s unimportant. The fact is the very process by which he brought us to this point is what matters because that is what has destroyed the NATO alliance. There can be some face-saving sort of non-deal deal here, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that every European country now and Canada now knows that NATO is dead. NATO’s dead. It was killed at Davos this week.
Sargent: Is there any way to come back?
Charen: I can’t read the future. I just think it is possible to imagine a world in which the Europeans align themselves with other like-minded nations around the world, including Canada and others, and try to pursue some of the more reasonable policies. But it’s going to be the work of at least a decade because the fact is the U.S. was for so many decades a very reliable ally.
We did shoulder a huge military burden that let the Europeans spend more on their health care plans and other things because we were spending more on defense. Look, Europe has roughly as large a GDP as the United States does. But it’s going to be a struggle for them to gear up their defenses.
And where does that leave the United States? It leaves us no longer the first nation in an alliance of other strong nations; it’s going to leave us much weaker, where we have to rely completely on ourselves. And so the world is going to get more dangerous for us too.
Sargent: Well, just to close this out, I just want to point out that the coverage of this was absolutely brutal for Trump. So all the spin in the world of Karoline Leavitt can’t cover it up.
I’ll just read something from CNN as an example. They say that the crowd “grew more restless and uncomfortable as the speech wound on, sitting largely in silence and offering only tepid applause at the end of the marathon remarks.”
A number of journalists and others have relentlessly pointed out the conflation of Greenland and Iceland and not let Leavitt get away with the spin. Still others have pointed to the hideous racism and the absurd discussion of the West getting polluted by foreign cultures. Another disgusting thing.
Charen: He had to say the thing about “low IQ” people... you know, obvious. I mean, it’s just the most blatant racist stereotyping of Somalis. Unbelievable stuff. So cringing.
Sargent: Yeah, it’s just an absolute horror show for America for him to say that.
Charen: It is. And for him to be the president... and we did this to ourselves. Nobody did it to us. I mean, as Lincoln said, if we will perish, it’ll be by suicide.
I’m not saying we’re going to perish. I’m just saying that this is a complete abdication of world leadership and respect. And so for us, it will require a long time to climb back into respect. I think it’s also for us at home.
All of us have a sense of this country’s institutions having failed, obviously. We are going to have to figure it out for ourselves what kind of a country we’re going to be going forward. How can we reform? How can we rebuild? And it’s going to... it’s going to be a rough go.
Sargnet: Well, the work begins now. Mona Charen, really, really wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much for all that.
Charen: Thanks, Greg.