The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 4 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.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified before the House Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. An extraordinary extended exchange took place between Rubio and Democrat Ted Lieu, and it was all about Trump’s tendency to fall asleep at public events. Ted Lieu cornered Rubio on this and forced him to lie to Congress about what all of us can see with our own eyes. That might seem trivial, but the way Representative Lieu handled this moment captures something essential about how our politics works today. And it shows why Democrats need to relentlessly center Trump’s ongoing physical and mental decline.
We’re talking about this moment with Brian Beutler, because he writes regularly on his excellent Substack, Off Message, about the need for Democrats to fight the information wars aggressively. And this Rubio moment raises some important issues related to that. Brian, always good to have you on.
Brian Beutler: Great to be back.
Sargent: OK. So this moment started when Representative Ted Lieu got to question Rubio. First, Lieu played video of Rubio talking at a recent Cabinet meeting with Trump slumbering away right beside him. Then Ted Lieu asked Rubio about that. Listen.
Ted Lieu (voiceover): Secretary Rubio, have you been at more than one meeting where President Trump has fallen asleep?
Marco Rubio (voiceover): That’s false. That’s false. I’ve never seen him fall asleep. On the contrary, the guy doesn’t sleep, which is a big problem because he calls me at two in the morning. He calls me at five in the morning. And, you know, I like to sleep a little bit.
Sargent: Brian, just to start off, Rubio is actually undercutting himself here because he’s admitting that Trump is up at all hours of the night. And that’s part of the problem, since it’s another symptom of his ongoing decline. But otherwise, what do you make of this move by Lieu here?
Beutler: Part of the reason he’s falling asleep in Cabinet meetings is that he’s this erratic person who is outraged all night, stays up all night tweeting, and then is too exhausted for the work that he actually finds boring—the work of the president that happens during mostly normal business hours.
But I think that the point here is to put Rubio, or whoever happens to be testifying before Congress, in a bind and make them say ridiculous things under oath that are contradicted right there by video evidence, so that they make the rounds on social media and you and I talk about them on this podcast. What Lieu is saying is, I know that you know the truth and you are here misrepresenting it to the public—and just putting a lot of pressure on Rubio. Because somewhere deep down in Marco Rubio, one assumes, is a conscience, is somebody who is in character, and the character will break down under enough pressure.
Sargent: Right. Well, let’s listen to more of the exchange. It continues this way. After Rubio had denied that Trump falls asleep at the meetings, Lieu played more video that showed Trump sleeping away right next to Rubio. And then Lieu said this. Listen.
Lieu (voiceover): You are literally talking about issues of war and peace and Donald Trump is sleeping right next to you. If Donald Trump cannot stay awake at these important meetings where the cameras are rolling, imagine what he’s like when the cameras are not there. So I’m going to ask you—have you been at classified meetings where Donald Trump has fallen asleep or had trouble staying awake?
Rubio (voiceover): I’ve never been at any meeting where he—the things you’re showing me now, he was not falling asleep.
Lieu (voiceover): So you’re lying again. You’re consistently lying to Congress. You’re lying to Congress, Secretary Rubio. So I’m going to show you another video in a moment. The president’s inability to stay awake on the job has caused other countries to perceive him differently. They mock him. They see he is weak and he is feeble.
Sargent: Brian, what interests me about this is Rubio’s trying to plead that this is too trivial a matter to be discussed before the Foreign Relations Committee. But Lieu just doesn’t let himself get knocked off course by that. Everything here is all about Trump’s fundamental unfitness for the job, about how he shouldn’t be making these decisions and he shouldn’t have this power and that this is a disaster for America and the world. Your thoughts on that?
Beutler: Yeah, I mean, in a way—obviously it requires a bit of explication and Lieu couldn’t interrupt himself in the five minutes or whatever that he had to question Rubio to point this out. But there’s an almost obvious contradiction here where Rubio is on the one hand saying he wasn’t asleep, but also, if he was asleep, it’s no big deal.
And in a more normal context, a president slipping—they’re in office for four years, there’s cameras everywhere. They might trip and fall. They might nod off in one meeting. They might accidentally hit post on a tweet before they finish typing it. And that would be ridiculous to home in on in a Foreign Relations Committee meeting because it is trivial.
But there’s a pattern here with Trump. This is elemental to his presidency. It’s gotten us into a war that Trump can’t get himself out of. It has inspired mockery around the world. It makes foreign leaders and even domestic counterparties kind of know how to manipulate Trump.
His not just—not the fact that he’s old and tired, but the fact that he’s unwell, erratic, susceptible to flattery. These are all part of one thing. And it is a crisis. It is relevant to the work of the Foreign Affairs Committee and multiple other committees of Congress.
Sargent: And I think part of the story here that gets at the unfitness you’re talking about is that Lieu is trying to bait Rubio into revealing himself to be kind of an unprincipled, sycophantic dirtbag, basically.
Beutler: He has a lot of experience at shape-shifting at this point.
Sargent: Yeah, he certainly does. Well, let’s listen to a little bit more of Ted Lieu and Rubio. Here, Lieu broadens the indictment out to Trump’s mental state in a bigger sense.
Lieu (voiceover): Donald Trump’s inability to stay awake on the job shows that there’s something very wrong with his health or cognitive abilities. In fact, on a number of occasions, Donald Trump will contradict himself in literally the same meeting or interview.
Sargent: Lieu then plays more video of Trump and then says this. Listen.
Lieu (voiceover): So, Secretary Rubio, instead of holding North Korean–style Cabinet meetings where everyone goes around the room kissing Donald Trump’s ass, I’m going to ask you to come clean with the American people and the White House as well. There’s something wrong with Donald Trump’s health or cognitive abilities. There’s a reason he keeps going to the hospital and they keep giving him cognitive tests. We have not seen the president in eight days. The American people deserve the truth. I yield back.
Rubio (voiceover): I don’t even know how to respond to that. Other than to tell you that it’s absurd and ridiculous. And I can’t believe we’re in a Foreign Affairs Committee meeting in front of the House at an important time in American foreign policy.
Lieu (voiceover): Just keep lying. Just keep on—
Rubio (voiceover): With supposedly someone who thinks he’s a medical expert—
Sargent: So Rubio goes on to spin a bunch of bullshit about how youthful and vigorous and superior to everyone around him Trump is. But the thing is, Brian, what strikes me about this is Rubio’s forced to deny what we can all see as true. And it seems to me Democrats don’t do this kind of hand-to-hand combat enough. They don’t make Republicans deny what’s true about them. They spend—meaning Democrats spend—their time denying Republican lies about them. What do you make of that?
Beutler: Yeah. We in the writers community have this phrase, or this cliché, “show, don’t tell,” which can be effective for writing in an evocative way or making people think. But in politics, especially today, I think it’s more important to tell, not show—or tell and show.
I think Democrats have had a hard time shaking the habit of assuming that what is true will be made clear to people when they watch television or when they read the newspaper, that the mediating institutions will do this work for them. They don’t need to say, hey, why has Donald Trump been to the hospital so many times to take so many cognitive tests? Why is Donald Trump falling asleep in all of his meetings? Does it have something to do with him being up until 3 a.m. tweeting libel all the time?
And what Lieu recognizes is that if you want to make that something that the public thinks of as a big, discrete problem, you have to tell them that it is a big, discrete problem and then connect the dots for them. And it would be better if more members of the Democratic caucuses on Capitol Hill had picked this up the way Lieu has.
Sargent: Agreed. And just to broaden out what we’re really talking about here, some people might watch these exchanges and listen to what you and I are saying and conclude, this is just TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome. They’re just obsessing over Trump. It’s not focused on what people really care about.
Brian, you spend a lot of time focused on this idea of what people really care about. So I’m going to set you up here. This just seems to misunderstand how politics works these days. Now, I’m not going to say that talking about Trump’s unfitness is all you need to do. Of course not. You do have to explain to people how you’re going to make their lives better and so forth.
But it’s just factual that Trump is the center of our political universe. And it’s precisely when voters forget how unfit he is that he does well, that Republicans do well. It’s when voters understand and see glaringly how unfit he is that he and Republicans lose. What’s your big theory on all this?
Beutler: Well, I do want to say that I think that the public is more willing to overlook this stuff when things are going better. So when Trump is in some sense insulated from the substantive consequences of his unfitness for office—which was essentially the case for the first three years of his first term—he was never popular then, but his economic approval ratings were high. And it was very easy for people who either supported him fully or were willing to tolerate him to say, look, I don’t like all the insane tweeting or whatever, but things are basically going OK. So that’s not a big deal.
And I think that does suggest that there is some balance that you need to strike between trying to make issues and trying to appeal to people on the basis of regular concerns. I never want to overstate the case and say forget about kitchen-table issues, don’t have healthcare plans and stuff. That stuff is important.
But people can be made to care about all kinds of things through persuasion of a different kind, where people of influence behave in a way that suggests this is important, people need to care about this, and make consumers, voters, in essence think: huh, whatever I want the government to be doing for me, I really can’t have my president be like this.
Sargent: Trump would absolutely agree with our understanding of how politics works. And here’s why. He runs everything through a strong-versus-weak frame. Everything is about his dominance, his virility, his masculine strength, his big crowds, his big ratings. And everything is always also about how weak his enemies are, how they’re failing, how they get low ratings, how they have low energy.
And he lashes out with particular vitriol at those who question those narratives about his dominance and strength. He knows that if he’s seen as flailing or floundering or not in control, that it’s deadly for him. What are your thoughts on that? What can we conclude from that about how our politics works these days, do you think?
Beutler: Yeah. I mean, even before Donald Trump kind of took it to this insane level where everything he says about his opponent you can count on to be a lie and abusive and maybe libelous—with the goal being to make them look small and easily squashed like a bug, and he’s the strong person who’s setting the terms of the political argument—Republicans would do this.
They did this to John Kerry in 2004. He was a war hero. And so they said, nah, you faked your injuries and you didn’t deserve your Purple Heart. And the idea wasn’t just to convince people of the lie. It was to put Kerry in a bind, to make Kerry reveal that he didn’t know how to fight back, to defend himself, and thus appear weak.
And I think in the end of that—this Swift Boat Veterans thing that I’m alluding to from 22 years ago—Kerry found his footing. But it was a perilous moment, because Kerry’s initial inability to stand up for himself was dangerous because people cared less about the attack than they did about the likelihood, the possibility that Kerry would become president and bring this unwillingness to stand up for himself to the office. And if he wouldn’t stand up for himself, how could he stand up for regular people or the country?
And that aspect of politics, while regrettable, is sort of irreducible. And it was maybe useful to Barack Obama to see John Kerry have to struggle with that, because by the time he came onto the scene in the next election, I think Democrats had at that point learned that you can’t just shrug these things off or say, that was so rude, you’ve got to apologize to me, only to be smacked in the face again.
You really have to set the terms of the debate yourself. And somewhere after Donald Trump won his first election, I think Democrats lost faith in that, or they lost sight of that insight and they lost their confidence. And things like what Ted Lieu did in the clips you played are the kind of thing that can help bring it back.
Sargent: I think it would be helpful to bring another contemporary example into this here. James Talarico and the Texas Senate race. Republicans are attacking Talarico as transgender, as someone with low testosterone, as a vegan—basically as a wimp. Now, Republicans don’t expect voters to actually say to themselves, he’s transgender and a vegan, so I’m not voting for him.
Instead, what Republicans want is for Talarico to lie down and take these attacks. That’s the main event they want. They want, again, to go back to the Swift Boat example, for one side to be seen as strong and dominant and the other as weak and submissive and unable to fight back. And these attacks are almost designed to trigger bad instincts in Democrats, I think, in a way. Can you talk about this Texas Senate race example in this context a little bit? You wrote a great piece about this. It’s applicable, isn’t it?
Beutler: I think it’s directly applicable. And I do want to say it’s both things. There are definitely voters in Texas who, absent everything, might think Ken Paxton is such a sleazebag that even though I’m conservative, I’m a Republican, I like Donald Trump, Paxton takes it too far, so this time I’m going to vote for Talarico or I’m going to stay home.
And Republicans certainly want some of those voters to think, well, if you vote for Talarico, that means you’re not a real man. And they want those people’s friends to be saying, you’re not going to vote for that Talarico guy, are you? To create a kind of peer pressure, a social environment where supporting Talarico is something that you have to be ashamed of.
But the flip side of that is that there are people who are less committed. They’re really more genuinely independent. They vote for both parties or they vote for Republicans mostly out of habit. They’re not super committed. Republicanism isn’t part of their identity. But they do value strength. They do respect people who stand up for themselves. And they do think that people who don’t stand up for themselves are weak and pathetic in some sense.
And so, irrespective of the attack—Talarico is trans—I don’t think that they particularly care about the truth or falsity of the accusation. They’re looking to Talarico to see if he’ll take an affront to his identity lying down.
Not that there’s something wrong with being trans, but that when someone lies about you in a way that’s designed to make half of the state hate you, do you say, well, that’s just a distraction from kitchen-table issues, and refuse to stand up for yourself? Or do you challenge Ken Paxton to a real debate about what it means to be a man?
And my hope—I think the best way for Talarico to thread this needle, to address the libel without either throwing trans people under the bus or anchoring the whole campaign around questions of trans rights—would be to take it head-on in that way. Like, you’re going to lie about me? Let’s have it out.
We shall see. So far, I think the Talarico campaign has done a very good job of reminding people just how scummy Ken Paxton is, but have not done a particularly good job of telling, as opposed to showing, that Talarico is the real man in this race, is the strong man in this race. And there are ways that they can do this without undercutting the more positive vision that they want to run.
Sargent: Absolutely. So just to close this out, just to go back to this Ted Lieu–Rubio exchange—what’s your general feeling about what Democrats can actually learn from an exchange like this? And what do you want to see them doing?
This is something you write about all the time, very well. Folks, check out Brian’s Substack, Off Message. It’s really good on these topics.
What do you want to see Democrats take from an exchange like that? And what do you want to see them do from here through election day, and I guess through 2028?
Beutler: I guess the through line here is that there’s a lot of political value in putting your opposition in a bind that, at least at a glance, feels impossible. I do want to say that I think Rubio, because Republicans are well versed in this, handled this exchange about as well as is possible if you work in Trump’s administration. And it’s because he understands—don’t get yourself in a bind. Think through what your opposition is likely to throw at you and how you’re going to respond.
And so this is why I write a lot about how Democrats can prepare to counter Republicans or set their own traps for Republicans. And what was so sharp about what Lieu did is, in a sort of more aboveboard and honest way, it required Rubio to make a choice: I either have to lie and debase myself, or tell the truth and lose my job.
And if Democrats on Capitol Hill grilling Republicans before committees can try to keep that binary in mind, then their questions are going to be a lot sharper, a lot better. And there will be people who aren’t quite as adept as Rubio, and they will start to flounder.
Sargent: Brian Beutler, always awesome to talk to you, man. Folks, check out Brian’s Substack, Off Message. Brian, thanks for coming on. Let’s do it again soon.