The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 28 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.
After a heavily armed man tried to breach security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, apparently to kill Donald Trump or others in his orbit, Trump and Republicans immediately started blaming Democratic rhetoric about Trump for the incident.
Unsurprisingly, Karoline Leavitt was more disgusting on this score than just about anyone else. Some media figures did fall for some of this, but really, this moment should drive home some fundamental truths for the media. Each side does use incendiary rhetoric about the other, but only one of the two parties is correct in describing the other as extreme and profoundly dangerous. Only one of the two parties is fundamentally hostile to liberal democracy and fundamentally hostile to the mission of the free press itself. Democrats should make this plain. We’re talking about all this with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, who has long been an observer of the media’s inability to cover that basic reality fairly. Matt, good to have you on.
Matt Gertz: Good to be back.
Sargent: So as of this recording, Cole Thomas Allen of California has been charged with a plot to assassinate Trump. This came at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night. Matt, can you explain the bigger context here—how this dinner is a gathering of the elite of the elites, with media figures perhaps being too willing to be cozy with Trump, given his attacks on liberal democracy and the press itself?
Gertz: Typically, the president of the United States is invited. He and members of his administration show up, and the president himself typically speaks. It’s generally a combination of lighthearted jokes and at some point, the president tends to talk about the importance of the freedom of the press, the importance of the First Amendment in our country.
When Donald Trump is president, this really takes on a new level, because of course Donald Trump doesn’t believe in the freedom of the press. He cannot convincingly give a paean to the First Amendment. He cannot recite the sort of pleasant clichés that you would expect in a situation like that. The idea of inviting him to an event like this should be anathema, but sadly hasn’t been.
Sargent: It certainly hasn’t. Well, let’s quickly go through what Republicans are saying. They’re fanning out to claim that Democrats are to blame for this alleged assassination attempt. Let’s listen to Karoline Leavitt.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): Nobody in recent years has faced more bullets and more violence than President Trump. This political violence stems from a systemic demonization of him and his supporters by commentators, yes, by elected members of the Democrat Party and even some in the media. This hateful and constant and violent rhetoric directed at President Trump day after day after day for 11 years has helped to legitimize this violence and bring us to this dark moment.
Sargent: Note that Leavitt appeals for calm and then immediately throws it all away by insisting that the primary cause of political violence in this country comes only from Democrats. Matt, you want to respond to that?
Gertz: Yeah, I mean, this is the sort of cynical, pathetic, cry-bully nonsense that I think we’ve come to expect from people like Leavitt. But if the White House is really concerned that the rhetoric has gotten out of control, then they could do something about how the president of the United States has referred to Democrats as traitors seven times in one week. It was last week.
This is the sort of rhetoric that we’ve come to expect from the president of the United States. And the idea here appears to be that the president can say whatever he wants and that all of his critics can say whatever he wants as well.
Sargent: I think there’s another imbalance that we should home in on for a second, and the media is uncomfortable with saying this. I believe it’s this: Trump and Republicans just don’t condemn political violence when it comes from their side with anything close to the vehemence that Democrats do when it comes from their side.
Trump and Republicans have a history of excusing political violence against Democrats and even at times joking about it. I mean, we all remember January 6th—Trump pardoned hundreds and hundreds of people, many of whom committed serious political violence against the United States. Matt, can you just talk about that history of Trump and Republicans essentially kind of hand-waving away political violence when it’s directed at Democrats and liberals?
Gertz: Yeah, I mean, I can give a couple of quick examples. You’ll recall back in October of 2022, a deranged person broke into the home of Nancy Pelosi, then the Speaker of the House. She wasn’t there, but her husband was. And the man beat him brutally—he was hospitalized in critical condition. And the response from Republicans and conservatives was twofold.
You had, on the one hand, people claiming that this was some sort of gay tryst that went badly for Paul Pelosi, a really deranged conspiracy theory on that level that was kind of ported across Fox News and other outlets. And then you had people just sort of joking about the whole thing. Donald Trump on the stump repeatedly would make jokes about Paul Pelosi’s brutal beating.
Then again, you had the tragic situation where two Minnesota legislators were shot, one killed alongside her husband. And again, the response there from the right-wing media, from senators, was to joke about the whole thing and suggest that this was all some sort of conspiracy overseen by Democratic Governor Walz. So the thing that Republicans tend to do when there is political violence committed against Democrats isn’t to call for the temperature to be turned down. It’s to pretend it’s not happening or suggest that if it has happened, it’s really funny.
And that, I think, is the sort of split that we see in situations like that, because Democratic officeholders respond to political violence from the right by criticizing it, by saying that it’s not acceptable, by pointing out that it is the sort of thing that will spread and continue to spread. But again, this is just a case where there isn’t symmetry. And the press, unfortunately, sometimes is unable to point that out.
Sargent: It really is unable to point that out. And here’s another way that that asymmetry manifests itself. I want to just ask you this question pretty straightforwardly, Matt. Is there an organized movement of political violence on the left? And is there an organized movement of political violence on the right?
Gertz: I mean, I think there is obviously no organized movement of political violence on the left. And on the right, you do have a series of sort of street gangs that have, if not the full approval of Donald Trump and others in the Republican Party, then at least a sort of wink and a nod—you’ll recall him talking about the Proud Boys needing to stand back and stand by back during a presidential debate. I think those are the types of people that certainly take that quite seriously.
If we’re talking about linking rhetoric to killings, how about describing a vast swath of the left as vermin, as the president has done?
Sargent: And great replacement theory actually inspired multiple acts of major political violence, and Trump and the Republican Party—at least much of the Republican Party and much of the MAGA movement—are full devotees of great replacement theory. That is clearly something that has inspired violence and they react very badly when you point that out.
Let’s listen to a little bit more of Karoline Leavitt. Check this out.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): People listen. And when you have mentally disturbed individuals across the country who are listening to this crazed rhetoric about the president day after day after day, it inspires them to do crazy things. And unfortunately, it’s not just the media. It is the entire Democrat Party has made their pitch to voters across the country that Donald Trump poses an existential threat to democracy, that he is a fascist and that they compare him to Hitler. These are despicable statements that the American people have been consuming for years and so many mentally perturbed individuals are led to believe these words are truth and then are inspired to act on it.
Sargent: Matt, what’s so troubling about this is that when Democrats and/or liberals call Trump a fascist or an authoritarian, it’s based on an actual assessment of what he’s doing to the country. Like, you don’t have to agree that those labels apply—I think they absolutely do—but even if you don’t agree that those labels apply, you can’t deny that there’s an actual intellectual case behind the use of them.
Democrats and liberals have debated for years whether these terms apply and gotten into intense back and forth. You’ve seen them all over how far to go in describing what Trump is doing as authoritarian or fascist. An actual intellectual case exists for doing it. Whereas when Republicans and Trump call Democrats Antifa or communists or enemies of the people, which they apply to Democrats as well, there’s zero connection to any policy reality of any kind. And I think there you have another difference that the media can’t get its head around.
Gertz: I think that’s right. And I think just to add to it that it’s not just liberals and Democrats who use language like that to talk about Donald Trump. John Kelly, who was White House chief of staff during Trump’s first term—a retired general—says that Donald Trump is a fascist who wants to rule like a dictator. Jim Mattis has agreed with that statement. Mark Esper, another former defense secretary from Trump’s first term, has also said that it’s hard to argue against the idea that Donald Trump is a fascist. Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs, called him “fascist to the core.”
And so these are people who served at the highest levels of Donald Trump’s administration, many of them former military. They’re the ones who are using language like this to talk about the man who’s sitting in the White House right now. If you can’t echo Donald Trump’s former chief of staff on the descriptors for the president, then what exactly are you supposed to do?
I’ll agree that it does seem like very harsh language to use. At the same time, I think we do have to reckon with the reality that this is not a president like any other. It is one who is willing to use state power in ways that no other modern president has done. And because of that, he does get tagged with unusual descriptors for an American president.
Sargent: Well, not only that, but he has used those powers in that fascistic and/or authoritarian way on members of the media themselves. So Trump regularly describes the media as the enemy of the people. He’s corruptly used all these baseless lawsuits to extort media companies into doing his bidding and even turning over large piles of cash to his favored causes. He’s openly urged the Federal Communications Commission chair, his lackey, to wield government power against media outlets that displease him.
Trump’s White House has also tried to punish outlets for not following his decree that they use terms like “Gulf of America.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tried to strong-arm news organizations into signing away their independence. He’s opened the Pentagon’s press room to rank MAGA propagandists. So it’s not just that the media is failing to recognize that one party is fundamentally fascist or authoritarian and the other isn’t. It’s that they won’t even point this out when they themselves are the targets of it, Matt.
Gertz: Boy, Greg, when you put it that way, it really sounds like he’s not the best person to invite to your celebration for the First Amendment. I think that that is my main takeaway.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Look, the Trump war on the press has been one of the major through lines of his political rise, of his terms in office. He was sort of clumsy about some of these efforts during his first term, but approached the second with a real dedicated plan to try to use the levers of state power to cudgel the press into line.
Again, this is a case where he thinks that he can say what he wants and everyone else should also say what he wants. He does not appreciate criticism of any type and is willing to use the power of the state to try to force media outlets to only put on the type of hagiographic coverage that he gets from Fox News.
Sargent: Matt, there’s another dark element to this that I think we should address as well, which is that when Donald Trump and Republicans call Democrats things like Antifa or communists, and when they attack Democrats for using harsh rhetoric about the president, they’re not just making a rhetorical case—they’re laying the groundwork for more use of state power against Democrats and liberals.
Right now as we speak, Stephen Miller and others inside the administration are really scouring the bureaucracy and scouring the law for whatever they can come up with to prosecute liberal groups. And the stated justification for this is that Democrats and liberals are in some sense allied with a movement that favors political violence towards Trump and Republicans. So it’s not just an innocent, if wrongheaded, argument that they’re making. It’s actually a pretext for more authoritarian and fascist behavior. Can you get into that a bit?
Gertz: Yeah. I mean, I think the repression is already underway. As we speak, Joe diGenova, who is a crackpot Republican lawyer, one who’s often appearing in right-wing media to run with various conspiracy theories, has been appointed by the Justice Department to oversee what they’re calling a grand conspiracy case down in Florida.
The idea here is that all of the federal law enforcement actions that have targeted Donald Trump in recent years—the Russia probe, the Mar-a-Lago raid, the January 6th investigations—they’re all part of the same dark conspiratorial effort to get Trump and stop him from getting elected. [They thought] that Barack Obama was behind the whole thing. It’s totally bonkers, it’s crackpot stuff.
But the full power of the Justice Department is now behind attempting to make a federal case out of what basically looks like 10 years of Sean Hannity monologue stuck in a blender. It’s the sort of thing that would be very funny except for how dangerous it really is. And of course, the sort of waste of resources that that sort of thing entails.
But this is just kind of par for the course for an administration that, as we’ve seen, does not believe that any efforts to push back on it are legitimate and is willing to use law enforcement to go after it. We saw that with Mark Kelly and the other Democratic members of Congress who warned members of the military and intelligence services not to obey [illegal] orders.
We’ve seen it with Jerome Powell, who was investigated basically because Donald Trump thought that he was doing a bad job at the Fed. And they sort of trumped up an investigation to get him, and a whole host of other cases like this that this Justice Department is trying to spool out.
Sargent: Well, just to wrap this up then, there’s sort of a split-screen thing going on here, because in many ways the press has actually risen to the occasion magnificently with some of the reporting on Donald Trump and his fascist designs and machinations and policies and all the rest of it. There’s been terrific reporting, and while you can point to occasional examples of the press caving in the face of Trump’s pressure, I think the bigger story is that they aren’t getting cowed by Trump’s pressure.
And so that’s good. But on the other hand, you still can’t get the press to level with the American people about what we’re talking about here, which is that one party does not function as an actor in a liberal democracy, and the other fundamentally does. So where do we go from here, Matt?
Gertz: I think my big worry around a lot of this is that, as you say, what’s really been essential over the course of this administration is how journalists have been able to dig up information that the administration doesn’t want out there and publish it.
And yes, I think the narratives that get woven by the sort of political journalism elite often do not fully take that information into account. But the information still gets out, right? What I worry about with things like the CBS takeover by David Ellison, the possibility that CNN will come under his thumb again—this billionaire who’s a major Trump supporter—is that you’ll see a bit of a tone shift from the kind of on-air, chattering-class stuff.
But the real loss will be that that investigative reporting will stop happening, that many of those journalists who are doing the good work will lose their jobs, and that there will be more and more stories that just aren’t told about this administration as time goes forward. And I think that if Democrats want to stop that, they’ll have to think very hard about what levers they might have to try to protect the press from coming under Donald Trump’s domination.
Sargent: Yeah, Democrats, if they take back one or both houses of Congress, are going to have to have a defend-the-media agenda in essence. But let me tell you something, Matt—even if Trump’s authoritarianism does constrain the press in some major way, hey, at least we’ll still have those White House Correspondents’ Dinners.
Gertz” I guess we’ll never be rid of them, apparently.
Sargent: Apparently not. Matt Gertz, awesome to talk to you as always. Thanks so much for coming on.
Gertz: Always a pleasure.