The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 6 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.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is very, very angry at the media for reporting on the six American troops who have been killed in Donald Trump’s war against Iran. She says the press is trying to make Trump look bad, as if Trump isn’t responsible for the fact that his war of choice is already producing terrible outcomes. This comes amid clear signs that Republicans are growing nervous about the politics of Trump’s war. Right now, they’re angling to avoid getting too closely tied to it. We’re talking about all this with Tori Otten, a deputy editor at The New Republic who’s been writing well about how Trumpworld is plainly trivializing matters of war, which is making the politics worse for them. Tori, nice to have you on.
Otten: Greg, I’m thrilled to be here.
Sargent: So let’s start with Karoline Leavitt. The background here is that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested this week that the media is making American troop deaths in Iran front-page news to make Trump look bad. Now listen to this exchange between Leavitt and CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
Collins (voiceover): Given what Secretary Hegseth said this morning, is it the position of this administration that the press should not prominently cover the deaths of U.S. service members?
Leavitt (voiceover): No, it’s the position of this administration that the press in this room and the press across the country should accurately report on the success of Operation Epic Fury and the damage it is doing to the rogue Iranian regime that has threatened the lives of every single American in this room. If the Iranian regime had their choice, they would kill every single person in this room. And so we can all be very grateful that we have an administration and that we have men and women in our armed forces who are willing to sacrifice their own lives for the rest of us in this room.
Sargent: Leavitt then actually said that Hegseth didn’t make the suggestion that he plainly made. She absurdly accused Collins of being disingenuous. And then Collins pointed out that the media has a responsibility to cover troop deaths. Then this happened:
Leavitt (voiceover): We expect you to cover that, as you should, Kaitlan, but you and your network know that you take every single thing this administration says and try to use it to make the president look bad. That is an objectable fact.
Collins (voiceover): I don’t think covering troop deaths is trying to make the president look bad.
Leavitt (voiceover): If you’re trying to argue right now that CNN’s overwhelming coverage is not negative of President Donald Trump, I think the American people would tend to agree and your ratings would tend to disagree with that as well.
Sargent: So Tori, that is remarkable stuff. Leavitt is suggesting that the media is covering U.S. deaths to make Trump look bad. I mean, everything has to be all about Trump at all times.
Otten: It seems that way. And also the reality of the situation is things are not going according to plan—because as Hegseth was making those comments, a report came out that Pentagon officials are actually pretty worried about U.S. air defense systems holding up against Iranian drone strikes. And we just saw some reports today that said CENTCOM is planning on the war potentially lasting until September, which is far longer than the four-week timeline Donald Trump has set out.
Sargent: So just to be clear on what actually happened with Hegseth, I’m going to read his quote—the one that prompted all this. He said, “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it. The press only wants to make the president look bad. But try for once to report the reality.” He then goes on and says we’re succeeding brilliantly and all that. But there’s just no doubt that Hegseth absolutely did say what he said.
Otten: Yeah. In fact, one of the reporters who was in the room—I believe it was Nancy Youssef with The Atlantic—said that when he said that, his own aides looked stunned and lowered their heads, and someone, she didn’t identify who, but someone just sort of generally said, “That was the most insulting thing I’ve ever heard.”
Sargent: I think when you see Leavitt do one of these little outrage parades, you know things are going badly inside the White House as well, because these shows are always for the audience of one. Abuse the press, and then that’s going to make the despot feel a little better about things. The truth is things are going roughly for them right now. And politically, we’re seeing signs that Republicans are getting anxious about it.
Punchbowl News had a remarkable report that says Republicans really don’t want Congress to have to authorize Trump’s war—which the Constitution requires—because “Republicans would prefer to keep their hands clean on the conflict for as long as possible, especially given the uncertainty over how long this could last and how it’ll play politically.” Tori, that really explains why Republicans don’t want Congress to vote on this.
Otten: Yeah, and in fact it’s more than just trying to play hot potato with responsibility for the war. Some Republicans are actually openly speaking against it. Representative Warren Davidson, a couple of days ago, said “the country is sick of forever wars.” Then Wednesday night on the House floor he goes, “Recall that Democrats needed help answering what is a woman. Unfortunately, Republicans now want to claim they can’t answer what is a war”—which is a nice little one-two punch of culture war for him there. But they’re really not supportive of this war, and I think they know that their constituents aren’t either.
Sargent: In fact, Punchbowl also reports that Republicans “want to keep the war in Trump’s hands for as long as they can without requiring further congressional action.” Now that really illustrates what’s going on in the heads of Republicans right now. They just want it to be Trump’s war. They will obviously back the commander in chief and all that, and they would never criticize anything Trump’s doing, but they want it squarely understood as Trump’s and maybe not as much theirs.
Otten: They’re certainly trying to talk their way around it, at the very least, jumping through all of these major hoops to avoid saying that it is a war, or to try and take [it] back when they do accidentally admit what it is.
Sargent: I’m glad you brought that up, because that’s another sign of rising Republican anxiety about the war. CNN has this great montage of Republicans doing what you just said, which is struggling to avoid calling our attack on Iran a war. Listen to this.
Congressional Republicans (voiceover): Nobody should classify this as war. This is combat operations. I wouldn’t call this a war as much as I’d call it a conflict that should be very short and sweet. I don’t know if this is technically a war. We have not declared war. So if we haven’t declared war, I don’t see that. The president hasn’t asked us to declare war yet, but they have declared war on us. Do you consider it a war? It’s a significant military operation. Strategic strikes are not war. They have declared war on us. I don’t believe in the semantics. We’ve talked about the language this morning. We’re not at war right now. We’re four days in to a very specific, clear mission and operation.
Sargent: Those are all congressional Republicans. And what’s funny—or maybe not so funny—is that Trump and his officials have been calling this a war themselves nonstop. Tori, Republicans don’t want to call this a war for two reasons, I think: because it would reveal their own craven abdication of the responsibility to authorize it, but also because, as Punchbowl showed, they’re worried about where it’s all going. Your thoughts on all that?
Otten: Largely, this war is very unpopular, and it’s incredibly hypocritical considering Trump ran on being the peace president and getting America out of forever wars. But maybe he thinks because he stopped eight wars, he can start one of his own as a treat.
Sargent: Well, you get at something important there, which illustrates another reason they’re trying to avoid calling it a war. It’s because the MAGA base—or at least some of the main MAGA influencers—are really in an uproar over this, and they’re basically saying that it was a broken promise. Trump, MAGA is supposed to be all about opposition to forever wars and no foreign entanglements, and making sure that all of our military arsenal is focused on the enemy at home—immigrants and their U.S. citizen allies—and not on foreign adventures.
Otten: He and his team are trying to make this as palatable to his base as possible by pushing that this is actually about all of the goals that he says he has, which is about strengthening America, stamping out foreign invaders, tackling—we saw Stephen Miller use the word “savages” earlier today—so really trying to push the same messages that he has been pushing about a lot of the initiatives he’s been making at home, such as mass deportations, trying to shut down the border, targeting people of color, things like that.
Sargent: Yeah, I thought JD Vance’s tap dancing on this was pretty interesting. He was out there basically saying, OK, we did run against forever wars, but those past forever wars were ones that were launched by stupid presidents and this is a smart president.
Now, putting aside the absurdity of that, no one’s going to be fooled into thinking that Trump has really strategically thought this through in a very smart way, especially since at the exact same time that Vance is saying that, they’re giving 15 different rationales for—or definitions of—what success would look like.
Otten: Yeah, it’s hard when the administration itself doesn’t seem to have created a cohesive message for what this war is about and why we’re doing it. You saw Marco Rubio just a few days ago saying that we entered the war because we knew Israel was going to, and so we may as well have struck first. That’s paraphrasing quite heavily, but the gist of it was we entered the war because Israel was planning to. And then the very next day, he said he hadn’t said that at all. And in fact, when a reporter asked him about it, he said, “You weren’t there yesterday when I explained it.” And the reporter said, “Yes, I was. I asked the question that prompted that answer.”
Sargent: In fact, that gets at another reason Republicans are getting anxious. Trump just isn’t even bothering to try to create what you’d call a cohesive message or a coherent story about what they’re doing. He’s just not bothering. And that’s something you would expect Trump to be doing since there’s a midterm election coming up, but he’s just not.
Adding to the anxiety among Republicans might be just how fundamentally unserious the White House is being about this in another way. We just saw the White House Twitter feed post this absolutely disgusting video which presented footage from the war—bombings and so forth—but packaged it as a video game, complete with dramatic music and the trappings of a video game visually on the screen. It’s just awful.
And so you’ve got on the one side Leavitt protesting that no, we’re not trivializing American troop deaths by making them all about Trump—but then you’ve got them absolutely trivializing what the troops are going through. You wrote a piece about this broader tendency of Trumpworld to reduce everything to a kind of video game fantasy realm. Can you talk about all that? What did you make of that video, and what’s the broader context?
Otten: Yeah, that video—it actually is footage of the conflict spliced with animation scenes from a Call of Duty video game. And it includes little point counters on the screen whenever the U.S. lands a strike in the conflict footage.
And this isn’t the first time that the administration has portrayed attacking foreigners—shall we say—as a video game. There was a campaign to promote the Department of Homeland Security that used the phrase “destroy the flood,” which is a tagline from the video game Halo. In Halo, you’re trying to get rid of a literal outer space alien horde. Obviously, this Homeland Security Department is trying to get rid of immigrants.
I wrote this piece with our political reporter Grace Segers—we coauthored it—just looking at the way that this administration, in particular, has harnessed video game language and imagery to try and encourage people to almost distance themselves from violence a little bit in order to make it more palatable.
And that’s not to say that social media and video games on their own are going to make people more violent, but in the context of this administration and the way that they are encouraging people to view video games and violence, it can create a pretty dangerous situation, I would say.
Basically, if you encourage people to see real life as a video game, then you stop thinking of other people as human beings and you start to think of them as just players who act on their own, they don’t really have feelings—and it’s a lot easier to become OK with removing people, particularly violently, from the country if you don’t consider them human beings. And so that’s why you’re seeing this administration really encourage Americans to view people of color, in particular, as subhuman.
Trump and Stephen Miller have used language like this before. Stephen Miller said “savages” today, but Trump’s used the word “vermin” on the campaign trail a lot. And this is something that they’ve been doing for a while. It’s not just Halo, it’s not just Call of Duty imagery now. They have always tried to trivialize human beings and deportations.
And that’s why we’ve seen other videos of deportations being set to popular songs, or AI being used to create Studio Ghibli–inspired imagery. You’re just really being encouraged not to view these things as something that’s happening in the real world. You’re being told to think of it as it’s all just a game and you’re going to win.
Sargent: I think you’re getting at this deep tension in MAGA that I just want to close on. So on the one hand, it’s just simply true that the MAGA masses view a lot of this stuff as entertainment. You saw those pictures early on of the now-fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, posing in an almost weirdly suggestive way in front of prisons full of dark-skinned people with tattoos—migrants, right?
You see, as you said, the DHS Twitter feed is constantly pumping out this—I guess you could call it violence-against-migrants porn. It almost actually is like that. So MAGA does thrill to the sadism of things like that. And it does thrill to the idea of Trump blowing up things in the Middle East.
So when they portray it like that on the White House Twitter feed, they are actually speaking to some big segments of the MAGA base that do view things that way. But it is happening in the real world. And when it actually becomes clear that they view this in trivial terms, it looks really terrible.
And so you’ve got Karoline Leavitt lashing out when people point out the trivialization of all this. They’re caught in this weird place where they have to minister to a base that—at least parts of it—do live in the fantasy world you’re talking about. But on the other hand, there’s a real world that’s blowing back on Republicans politically. Can you just talk about that weird tension a little bit?
Otten: Yeah, we saw it start on the campaign trail, where Trump made a very clear effort to court voters who were young men with a chronically online personality. They listened to podcasts that really talked up men’s rights. They were big fans of Andrew Tate. They were big fans of UFC matches. And typically—not always, but a lot of the time—young men like that tend to be very isolated, particularly after the pandemic.
Younger men have said they really struggle to make connections offline and instead view online relationships as some of their most important and most aspirational. They really view men like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan as role models. And instead you get these men who are encouraging really horrific views about women and minorities and anyone who is not a straight white man.
That is the audience they’re trying to appeal to now with these video game–esque videos and promotions of conflict. But when that is the main base that you’ve cultivated, you have to keep them. And you can already see there are polls coming out [showing] that many of those young male voters are starting to get buyer’s remorse over the 2024 election.
And so if you’re trying to hold on to those voters, you are then left with the reality that you’ve isolated the majority of everybody else—who do not like what this war is ... who didn’t vote for it, who don’t support it, and whose elected representatives have not declared war.
Sargent: Yeah. This is a real problem for Republicans. There’s a through line here between the mass deportation campaign and all the horrific violence that’s been unleashed and the war. It’s not a coincidence that you’ve got the big podcast bros turning hard against both the mass deportations and the war—because these guys who have a foot in that weird fantasy world are suddenly confronting the reality of what it is Trump was actually peddling to them. The dissonance is very profound, I think.
Otten: There’s a real divide between what Trump said he would do and what he is currently doing. And it’s one of those weird situations where us, as journalists, we saw that—we remember the first time we kind of knew it was coming. But he marketed himself very well on the campaign trail to the right kind of people who would be fired up enough to vote for him. And now they’re really getting the short end of the stick with it.
Sargent: I think that really sums it up. He’s a brilliant pitchman and an absolutely awful president. Tori Otten, it was a real pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Otten: This was fun, Greg. Anytime.