The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 13 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.
Donald Trump’s Truth Social feed can get awfully revealing at times. He just unleashed a number of posts that open a window on a lot of negative things about the man and his presidency—the transactionalism, the amorality, and the utter buffoonish incompetence. In one, he attacked his MAGA allies in a way that accidentally revealed that he has no principles. In several others, he seemed to show that he has no real grasp on the actual nature of the problem he faces now with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. The clarity of all these missives raises a question. How do we make sense of the fact that this man is our president?
Political theorist Alan Elrod has a good piece for Liberal Currents, arguing that the election of Trump twice should prompt introspection about what we’ve become. So we’ve invited him on to work through some of this with us on a theoretical level. Alan, good to have you on.
Alan Elrod: Good to be back.
Sargent: So let’s start with your piece, Alan. You likened the national drift at this moment to the atmosphere surrounding Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech in the ‘70s. In particular, you pointed out that we’re in the middle of an energy crisis—this time created needlessly by Donald Trump, and also Iran, of course—as front and central as it was then. And we’re all reeling, as you put it, from Trump’s threat of Iranian genocide. The mere fact that the American president threatened civilizational erasure and genocide, threatened to kill tens of millions of people, is itself a crisis, is it not?
Elrod: Absolutely. I mean, we can’t take it back. The elected leader of this country, who speaks for us—he’s our president, speaks for us to the world—said he was going to wipe a civilization off the map. That’s the kind of thing our allies aren’t going to be able to forget. And it’s the kind of thing that we won’t be able to forget. American presidents, for all the wars we’ve waged, even the ones that many Americans see as having been unjust, you did not have American presidents going out and publicly saying, we’re doing this so that we could just destroy as many of these people as possible.
Sargent: Former Trump allies were appalled at this. I want to highlight how Trump reacted to that. They’ve been attacking him over the war. They’ve been attacking him over the threat of genocide. And Trump unloaded with this furious tirade that went on for hundreds of words. He attacked Alex Jones this way by saying, “Alex Jones lost his entire fortune, as he should have, for his horrendous attack on the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, ridiculously claiming it was a hoax.”
Alan, that’s a reference to Alex Jones’s well-known denial that the Sandy Hook massacre ever happened. But at the time in 2015, Trump went on Alex Jones’s show and hailed him as amazing. And during Trump’s first term, Sandy Hook people begged him to denounce Jones’s conspiracy theories and Trump refused. Yet now, solely because Jones crossed him, he is suddenly willing to fault the conspiracy theorizing. It’s just an extraordinary window into this guy’s utter lack of any principles. I want to get your thoughts on that.
Elrod: I mean, to reference George Conway, who makes this argument all the time—this is what happens when you have a malignant narcissist as the president of the United States. I mean, this man is just simply not capable of thinking or feeling or conceiving really of other people beyond himself.
And so if you’re saying that he’s great, then you can do no wrong. And it doesn’t matter if you perpetuate conspiracy theories about the murder of elementary school children. And if you criticize him, then you’re a terrible person and you should die, whether you’re Alex Jones or frankly, whether you’re the entire population of Iran.
Sargent: You had a line in your piece which really struck me: “The president speaks to the people.” I want to apply that to this Sandy Hook case because we can see that Trump recognizes zero obligation of any kind to speak to all of the American people. This is really a fundamental fact about this presidency. At the time, people in Newtown, Connecticut begged Trump to exercise that option—to speak to the American people by denouncing the conspiracy theorizing about the shooting. He refused.
He only sees this sort of thing as purely transactional. If he can use a shooting like this to punish an enemy like Alex Jones, at that point, he’ll acknowledge that it’s bad to lie about the shooting, but not when it’s not in his own personal interests. Political theorists like yourself call this personalist rule. Can you talk about that dimension of this and why it essentially abdicates such a major responsibility of an American president?
Elrod: Well, I think we can add to this that Connecticut is a blue state, right? I don’t know—Trump might have actually maybe rebuked Jones earlier if we were talking about a shooting in a place that was very pro-Trump, right? In Florida or some other place that he feels more like is his people. Because that’s the other thing, right?
He not only lacks the empathy to care about or think about these victims, but if they happen to be in a place that he sees as having not voted for him, then he’s especially un-inclined. He has no interest in what happens to people. We’ve even seen data, right, that this administration has, at a historic scale, denied emergency relief to blue states.
He does not care about other people. And if you are seen by him as being in any way not with him, not worshipping him, not only does he not care about you, he’s like actively malicious toward you.
Sargent: Right. He enjoyed what Alex Jones was doing at that point. And yet now all of a sudden, because Alex Jones has betrayed him on a personal level, he just turns right around and talks about this shooting in a more human way suddenly. It’s almost staggeringly unprincipled in a way. I find I have a tough time getting my head around it.
Elrod: Well, yeah. And it’s not like Donald Trump suddenly magically found the morally correct position on Sandy Hook. He’s not doing this because he discovered his compassion, right? He’s mad at Alex Jones for criticizing him. He does not suddenly care about these people in a way that he didn’t before this week. That’s not what’s happening.
Sargent: I want to highlight a couple more Trump posts about the Strait of Hormuz. Trump is mad because Iran has not reopened it to his liking, and he says he stopped bombing Iran on the understanding that Iran would stop. He posted this: “Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable, some would say, of allowing oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have.” Then he posted this: “The Iranians don’t seem to realize they have no cards other than a short-term extortion of the world by using international waterways. The only reason they are alive today is to negotiate.”
Alan, he keeps saying he’s the one with all the leverage because the U.S. military is powerful. And again, because he’s apparently willing to wipe out their entire civilization, including tens of millions of people. But he doesn’t appear able to force Iran to reopen it. And I don’t know that he understands that. Does he get the situation at a basic level here or not? It seems like he doesn’t.
Elrod: No, he doesn’t. And I mean, I’m not the first to say this. Other people have observed Donald Trump’s entire idea of deal-making is subterfuge and bullying and gaining usually some kind of maybe even illegal leverage over someone and then using that.
Iran’s leverage in the strait isn’t short-term—geographically they’re there forever. I mean, they have it as long as they can apply military force. And it’s clear that we haven’t been able to take that capability away. Again, I guess if he wants to use just massive destruction, if he wants to nuke Iran, he can do that.
And I will say, I don’t encourage people to talk about Trump sort of TACOing on this. One, it’s not settled—he’s president for another, you know, more than two and a half years. And two, he clearly is a psychopath and a narcissist and I don’t put it past him to unleash millions of deaths on Iran.
Sargent: Well, I want to remind people as well that Donald Trump was briefed on exactly this situation. He was told about the Strait of Hormuz’s difficulties, its inherent challenges, its geographic challenges, and he just brushed it off, essentially saying, you know, we’re so strong, we can just overcome anything. And that’s what he’s discovering is not true.
Elrod: Yeah. He doesn’t have any understanding of the limits of raw military force and neither does his secretary of defense.
Sargent: Well, that’s exactly right. Now, here’s where we get to the big questions. We’ve got pure transactional amorality, a personalist presidency that orients all decision-making around his personal interests and corruption, a sociopathic willingness to threaten to kill tens of millions of people, and staggering incompetence that’s just so bad that Trump doesn’t even know how incompetent he is. You wrote this in your piece: “We cannot pretend that we are well as a nation. No morally healthy country would put this man in power twice. We have become a morally insane, civically disordered, and self-regardingly decadent country.” Why don’t you make that case? Go ahead.
Elrod: Well, part of it, I think, is a little bit self-evident. Donald Trump is a bad person and he didn’t hide that. He was a candidate in 2016 who bragged about wanting to use force and bragged about his sexual harassment of women and really in every way laid out that he was a terrible human being. And you could write off 2016 perhaps as a blip, as an accident of people thinking Hillary had it in the bag and then some tiny marginal votes here and there in swing states and, you know, the electoral college is weird. Okay. And then we did it again, right?
Donald Trump was president. He presided over a catastrophic mismanagement of a global pandemic. And then he led an insurrection to try to overthrow the election he lost. And then we put him back in power again. And in his reelection campaign, he wasn’t any more secretive about who he is. He was just as frank. I think it was just as clear who he was. And, did he win with just amazing majorities? No, he didn’t win 60 percent of the vote, but he won and this time he actually won the popular vote.
So what I’ve tried to say in this part of the piece is yes, that is damning. It’s damning of the Americans who voted for him, but it’s also more generally damning—and I’m sure you want to get into this—of just where the country is as a whole, that this kind of person has been able to dominate our politics for a decade, and that so many Americans are in a place to be, I think, persuaded and seduced by the politics he’s offering.
Sargent: Right. So I think we suck pretty bad right now. I don’t contest that, right? We are a shithole country in many ways, as he would put it. But let me just sort of offer a slightly different take on this, which I think a lot of political scientists might go for. Okay, point one is voters have always been poorly informed—but this is just a fact about politics, it’s always been the case. Voters often vote on identitarian grounds.
Point number two is that it was an extremely strange and unique situation in which incumbent parties around the world went down to defeat precisely because of the post-COVID shock. Voters just weren’t really thinking very clearly about exactly who was to blame for what. It was just a purely anti-incumbent sentiment.
Point number three, a lot of the young people and a lot of the non-white working-class people—the types that Trump was able to win over—these were just low-information voters and they actually had a reason to be pissed about inflation. And they weren’t thinking beyond, get the people out who are there right now.
Point number four, Biden was a weak communicator. He was in many ways a weak public figure. And point number five is that it was an incredibly close election, closer than in other countries where incumbent parties went down to defeat. I just want to point out that there’s something of a risk in overreading the meaning of his election. It plays into his hands in certain respects.
Now I don’t think you’re doing that, but just as a general matter, I worry that if we read too much into the meaning of that election, we sort of head down some bad intellectual paths. Am I wrong about that?
Elrod: So I don’t think that I would say you’re necessarily wrong, because I think it’s important that we don’t say that Americans are necessarily, as a majority, intellectually committed to Trumpism. But I do think that there’s also on the other side of this a chance of underreading. And what I mean by that in the essay is that if we don’t take seriously some of these more underlying problems—that we are a deeply isolated and lonely and distrustful country that is focused on material wellbeing and status and is more dislocated and civically apathetic than maybe we’ve ever been—that we’re going to get more Trumps, because that’s just fertile breeding ground for people like him.
And so it’s not so much that I think there’s just 50-something percent of the country that is committed to Trumpism. But I do think there’s just a huge amount of the country that is not doing well—and I mean that in an emotional way, I mean that in a political way, civically. And so I think those conditions, so long as they persist, continue to make us vulnerable to more cycles in the future of this kind of politics.
Sargent: Right. People are very easily manipulated, I think, is the baseline point we can agree on here, don’t you think?
Elrod: Yeah, they are.
Sargent: You see it as a social crisis of some kind.
Elrod: I do. I see it as a social crisis. I think it comes down to a combination of the continuing crisis of social capital that people like Robert Putnam have talked about for, at this point, decades—that people aren’t joining clubs, they’re not getting involved, they don’t know their neighbors. When that’s true and you combine it with the age of the smartphone, with increased, I think, kind of conspicuous consumption and sort of preoccupation with envy and status, then I do think you create a world where people are kind of constantly being rubbed raw by resentments and they are constantly feeling dissatisfied and they are not getting the kind of things that nurture good civic health because those opportunities are declining where they were.
Sargent: Well, I will say I’m a little skeptical of social crisis mongering on some very big level, but I want to grant your point and bring it back to the Newtown, Connecticut situation because in a funny way that sort of bundles a lot of this stuff together. If you think about mass shootings in general and gun violence in the country—this is one of the things that makes the United States stand out as a really fucked up place, right? I think a lot of people agree on that.
And so when something as horrible as the thing in Newtown happens, that’s the sort of moment where you think you can actually hope for a little national cohesion and some civic health in a sense, like some kind of outpouring of solidarity among people. And it’s at moments like that, when you have conspiracy theorists start to really screw around with stuff, and you have presidential candidates like Donald Trump was in 2015, fueling those conspiracies, that you really throw up your arms in despair, right? The fact that he would do that at a moment when the country just is so traumatized by a moment like the killing of 20 children in an elementary school—it’s just, that makes me despair a little bit. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that problem in the broader context of what you’re talking about.
Elrod: Yeah. I mean, I think that problem is also related to QAnon. On the one hand, it is a crisis of empathy, people being able to see events like this—that they’re consuming a lot of times through digital media—as being about other human beings. But I also think it goes back to the sort of dislocation and loneliness I mentioned, because I see these things as deeply intertwined. And really they are, right? Because one of the major proponents of Sandy Hook conspiracism is Alex Jones. He’s also really one of the major kind of vectors of QAnon conspiracism. And I think that this goes back to that social crisis.
One of the books that I have found really interesting in this moment is this excellent book—I didn’t cite it in the piece, but it’s wonderful—called The Quiet Damage by Jessalyn Cook. And it is about people whose family members have fallen into QAnon and many of them who have not come back from it. And just the damage that it wreaks on their lives, their relationships.
And I think that moments of sort of high conspiracism—because America has always had a paranoid tendency in its politics—but I think moments of really heightened conspiracism are indicative of broader social problems, because I do think people are more attracted to them when we are struggling through these sort of serious deficits of connection and social capital. And so I don’t think we can separate it. But I also think the phone is a big problem too, because I think the digital age makes these things just more potent.
Sargent: Well, so just to wrap this up—in the Sandy Hook case, we had Trump show the very worst of himself, and we just had him show the very worst of himself again, by actually paradoxically allowing that there actually was a mass shooting, not indulging the conspiracy theorists. What are your parting thoughts on all this? Do we have a way out civically, other than just organizing and winning the next election or two?
Elrod: You know what? I think organizing and winning the elections are great. I think doing things in your community is more important. This is a generational fight. And beating Trump and beating MAGA at the polls is great. But if you don’t get out there and know your neighbors, if you don’t get out there and try to fix the social capital problem we have—a book club, start a movie night club, do something like that—if you don’t do those things and engage in those kinds of face-to-face interactions that really revive civic life around you, where you are, then I don’t think that this is a problem that we’re going to get out of anytime soon. That’s my hopeful message, actually, because I am hopeful about it. But winning an election is actually the short-term fix. Doing this stuff is the long-term.
Sargent: Well, Alan Elrod, that was all very beautifully said. It’s pretty dispiriting, got to say though. Alan, thanks so much for coming on.
Elrod: Thanks for having me.