The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 7 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.
Officials are leaking word that Donald Trump is privately raging at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, claiming he’s been misled about shortages in munitions that are now apparently limiting his options in Iran. Trump then went out on Truth Social and exploded in wild fury all over again. Meanwhile, other leaks indicate that he’s feeling very sensitive about his failures on Iran, to the point of feeling humiliated.
The careful reader of these stories will note that the only thing that isn’t discussed by Trump and his top advisors is whether Trump himself bears any responsibility for what’s happening on his watch. And these new follies really expose the perils of personalist rule—the perils of having a government that’s geared solely to satisfying the whims and corrupt interests of one man. So we’re talking about all of it with one of our go-to people on Trumpian narcissism, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte. Amanda, always good to have you on.
Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So The Washington Post reports that at Camp David this week, Trump’s anger boiled over. He demanded that Hegseth explain these munitions shortages that have now kicked in. Trump vented that he thought it had all been “fixed.”
Amanda, this might explain why Trump recently canceled a planned attack on Iran. He claimed the cancellation was because of progress in negotiations on the Strait of Hormuz, the idea being that Iran was so terrified of him that they’re meekly agreeing to negotiate, so he benevolently called off the strikes.
It really looks as if the truth is much darker—that Trump doesn’t know what the hell’s going on inside his own government.
Marcotte: Whenever Trump says that there’s a deal imminent, I just tune it out at this point, because that just has never been true. But it’s clear that he either didn’t think through the idea that if you throw a bunch of bombs, that means you have fewer bombs to throw next time, or he was lied to by his advisors. In neither case is it a good look, because in neither case does he show even an ounce of what being a leader is about.
Sargent: I think you actually get an important point there with this idea about him not understanding that if you use bombs, you have fewer bombs. Because he really does believe that he’s in a position of limitless strength. He thinks America has unlimited power, but by that he actually means he has unlimited power, because he couldn’t possibly be weak in any way.
And so you can really see how he goes from there to not really paying close attention to little details like what the war that he started is doing to our weapons stockpiles, right?
Marcotte: Yeah, he has a very childish vision of what American military might is, which is, we definitely have a large military, one of the biggest and most expensive in the world, but it’s not limitless. And crucially, as we found out in Iran, it’s not unlimited in its ability to just crush enemies.
There’s a reason that we’ve never had a war with Iran before. And I wish it was just that everyone was more peaceable. But it’s also that military experts recognize that just throwing bombs at a situation is not the same thing as fixing it.
Sargent: Well, there’s another funny detail in the Post story. It says this, quote: “Hegseth defended himself and blamed his deputy for the shortages and for not ensuring Trump was fully apprised of the issue.”
Amanda, Hegseth has to blame someone below him for the fact that Trump was not on top of the situation enough to know what the hell was happening. At no point can anyone say, why doesn’t the president of the United States know what his own war is doing to our ammunition stockpiles? What do you think of that?
Marcotte: This is something that I find super fascinating, and the examples are endless. It’s the paradox of MAGA, right? Which is, on one hand, they all worship Donald Trump as this almighty leader who knows everything and can do everything and is the greatest leader of all time and blah, blah, blah.
Also, he can’t ever be expected to know anything, be responsible for anything, et cetera. Like, he’s blameless always. He is like a baby.
Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Trump goes out and he erupts on Truth Social over all this reporting. He says, quote: “The fake news is spreading false and completely unfounded rumors. Their fake reporting is treasonous.” Trump also says the U.S. has “massive” amounts of munitions, whereas all the reporting indicates shortages. And Trump even claims the leakers are now being “hunted.”
Amanda, I just think it’s funny how Trump’s child brain associates small munitions piles with a weak presidency. So he knows he must instantly say our munitions stockpiles are very, very big, which he thinks will show that he’s very, very strong. And also, when he says that the reporting is treasonous, like, he really means that anyone who dares to humiliate him is committing treason. Isn’t that what he really means?
Marcotte: Yeah, because he wants to believe he is the state. He’s said as much in many ways, right? And so he’s often conflated insults to himself with crimes or treason or betrayal and unpatriotism, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s kind of, in a lot of ways, he’s just the most predictable person in the world. What is always continuingly amazing to me is all the people that elect to be in his pathway, because you could just say no. You don’t have to work for the man.
Sargent: I think what it goes to is the core of what’s happening with MAGA in a broader sense right now. A lot of these people, I think, saw Trump win in 2024 and thought that something very big and decisive had happened in the world, right?
That he had essentially ushered in some sort of permanent and deep and important shift in American culture, that MAGA was the way of the future, that America was becoming, whatever MAGA envisions America being, and that being around Trump sort of guaranteed them, I guess, a high position in the hierarchy of MAGA, right? The firmament of MAGA going forward.
Not coincidentally, because he is such a weak and pathetic figure, all of that turns out to have been a ridiculous overread. And now they’re all like those cartoon characters who run off of a cliff and then look down and realize there’s nothing under them anymore.
Marcotte: Yeah. So I recently covered this, writing about Markwayne Mullin, but there’s been a lot of political science research that points to why there’s so many mediocre and incompetent people in authoritarian regimes. And it is because they’re the kind of people that can’t get this job in any other way, right?
Donald Trump only values loyalty and the willingness to flatter him. And so a lot of people who would never—I mean, on no planet would Pete Hegseth be the defense secretary for a competent president. Like, the man was a weekend Fox News host. He’s never been a high-ranking military official at all. He knows nothing. But because he knows how to flatter Trump, and it’s kind of his only skill, he’s got this high-ranking position that in no other universe would he ever have.
And you can just go down the list, you know. Pam Bondi was probably one of the more competent people, but even she was never going to be attorney general. Kash Patel, I mean, come on. And Markwayne Mullin, I mean, the guy pretends he was a UFC fighter. There’s no other universe where these people would have these jobs.
And so I think they convinced themselves that MAGA is here to stay, because the alternative—looking in the mirror and realizing they’re taking this job because they know this is their only pathway to success—is kind of a really painful admission, right? They all need therapy, lots and lots of therapy.
Sargent: What does the political science say about this and authoritarian regimes? I’m definitely interested in that.
Marcotte: Yeah, so I’ve got this—it was covered in May in The New York Times. It was data drawing on an extraordinary data set, I’m quoting, “from Argentina’s dirty war in the 1970s and ‘80s,” and it suggests that there’s a lot of incentive for lower- and mid-level officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms, and even basic morality.
And, like, TLDR, the people that are willing to do the bad things are often people that recognize they were never going to get a promotion otherwise. Whereas people who were promoted on their own merit are the kind of people who say, no, I’m not going to break the law, no, I’m not going to commit these crimes on your behalf.
And so I think we’re seeing this play out at the top ranks of the Trump administration, which is a lot of people who are incompetent, and their only pathway to success is through slavish devotion to this moron. And there was no other way for them to get there. So they’re willing to make those compromises.
Sargent: It’s almost like there’s a contract or a deal of sorts, right? Donald Trump knows that he can get certain types of people to relentlessly do his bidding once he kind of co-opts them into his cult. So he picks them because he recognizes in them a certain weakness of character and willingness to do whatever it takes to kind of be in the chosen charmed circle.
He’s really kind of very canny at that. Let’s give him some credit here, right? This is something Donald Trump is good at. He is perceptive about people almost in an animal-like way, isn’t he?
Marcotte: Yeah, probably because he recognizes himself in this, right? He is the person who is incompetent and has only ever succeeded in life because he was willing to break rules, lie, cheat, use deception, because he knows that he can’t actually succeed on his merits. And so I think he recognizes that in other people.
I do want to flag, though—I think we’re actually more [hopeful] than we were like a year ago or even more. We are in a much better position when it comes to these folks. Because I think that, to your point, they realize there’s no ground underneath them. And we’re starting to see a lot more Trump officials wonder if it’s worth it.
Like, if they’re going to face consequences for doing illegal, criminal, or otherwise terrible acts for him. Jeanine Pirro being a really good example. I mean, at the end of the day, she was unwilling to falsify evidence and perjure herself in front of a federal judge just to please the boss, because she knows that this isn’t going to last forever, and she’s worried about prison or disbarment.
Sargent: Well, on that score, The Atlantic reports on more leaks from inside, this time on Trump’s sense of humiliation. According to these sources, one reason he’s been raging so violently over the Reflecting Pool fiasco is precisely that the Iran debacle has been going so badly for him, and he feels humiliated, according to this report. And so you’ve got to wonder—the people who are inside and around him all the time, this almost gets at the paradox of MAGA.
They are supposed to treat him, and do, I guess, on some level see him as this real tribune of the people, this world historical figure who has done to liberal America what nobody else could ever do. No one else would have dared do it, right? And he crushed liberal America the way he has. And yet they’re seeing him pathetically rage and whine right in front of them about things like the Reflecting Pool, and making stuff up about the munitions, and refusing to take responsibility for everything. How do you think they square that in their own heads?
Marcotte: I think a lot of them really have decided that Trump has this kind of genius, this reality TV show thing that he’s got going on, where he’s able to project this might and power and brilliance and all these other things by using the trappings of it, in the way that he was able to do so on The Apprentice and other things like that.
I mean, he is very good at using imagery to create the illusion of things that aren’t there. And the Reflecting Pool is a really good example of where that fixation goes. Because his view was, I can fail as a president, but if the Reflecting Pool looks nice and the pictures look nice, it will get enough people to believe the lies, right?
It’s just—I mean, in a lot of ways, it’s not the most brilliant insight in the world. I mean, all authoritarian propaganda sort of works on this Potemkin village ideology. But I think a lot of the people that have cleaved onto him believe that he is just a master at it. And so when they see him obsessing over image over reality, they too are like, this is the way, this is the way. Because again, they also know they’re incompetent. So they benefit if they can believe that faking it is the same thing as making it.
Sargent: Yeah, and I think they look at him as someone who has been able to accomplish something that no other Republican has been able to accomplish, right? This crushing of liberal America that I’m talking about. And the marshalling of imagery, fascist imagery—well, George Bush had “mission accomplished,” and they had reality is what we say it is, and so forth. They had the American empire and all that.
But Trump really has taken it to a more fascistic level. And on some very profound level inside these people around him, that’s the thing that they respect. And that’s the source of his power over them—that he’s willing to go full fascist, basically.
Marcotte: Yeah, and your point about triggering the liberals is really, really important here, because we cannot underestimate how much these people are motivated by this bitter, sad, angry resentment about liberals that laugh at them. And so, to your point, like, the thing about the Bush administration is they really did try to do the propaganda in kind of the old-school style, where it looked mighty, it looked amazing in a lot of ways.
Whereas Trump actually uses, like, gross AI art and UFC fights at the White House and stuff that is sort of designed to be so crass that it will cause pearl-clutching in liberal circles. And so it is a little like spitting in the face of, you know—I think in their mind they are the guys in Animal House making the dean look bad, right? To age myself on my references there.
Sargent: There’s really a lot of signs, as you pointed out, that the MAGA paradox isn’t sustaining itself in the minds even of some people around him. Can you talk about why the MAGA paradox, on some level, might be beset by such deep contradictions that it’s going to just eventually crack up, sort of inevitably at some point?
Marcotte: Yeah, I think a lot of these people have a lot of practice squaring what is hard for us to square. And, in part, to be very feminist about it, it’s patriarchal, right? Male authority flows from God and isn’t justified by competence. You’re supposed to put all your faith and trust in the leader simply because he is your patriarch, not because he’s earned it in some way. So I think they have a lot of practice.
And Donald Trump has taken advantage of this, right? He’s the leader. So what he says goes, and it’s not to be questioned. And in fact, the fact that he’s so bad at this is excused away every day.
But he is the president of a democratic system, which is just a different system, where there’s accountability. And I think a lot of us are frustrated because there hasn’t been enough accountability. And with the immunity, he’s not going to get enough accountability.
But at the end of the day, these systems depend on some buy-in from the public. And that faith is really being eroded pretty quickly, because most people—they voted, they actually feel like they have a role to play in this, and they want to see results from their leaders, not just, trust me, you know, on my word, and what I say goes, and never question dear leader.
Sargent: I want to close on an optimistic note about that, then, because I think that a lot of these people around Trump, and Trump very much himself, and the more fascistic advisors like Stephen Miller, really counted on the public being a lot more pliable. And I think that the polls actually rattle them very deeply, even though they project all this outward confidence that they’re made up and all that. The polls really have shaken the MAGA paradox to its core, because it shows that his power is extremely limited, right?
Because just to go back to what we were saying before, a big source of the power was this idea that he had kind of tapped into some very deep source that would enable him to do what no other Republican president had been able to do before, which is march the country into fascism. And the vehemence of the rejection of all that, I think, shakes up the situation very profoundly, and shows, I think, real democratic resilience as well. What do you think of all that?
Marcotte: Yeah, I think that one thing that a lot of these people really did fully believe in their heart of hearts is that the only true persuasion is violence and power. And that if you just pound somebody hard enough, they will submit. It is interesting, because a lot of them have evidence in their personal lives that that’s not true, but the faith just never was wavering.
And so I do think they had this view that, A, they’d get in by tricking people into electing them, and then once in, they’d just pound us into submission. And as I often say to my friends who roll their eyes at me, we’re Americans, goddammit. It doesn’t work like that.
I think this is just generally true of the human condition—people tend to resist more than authoritarians think they will. But especially this country, with its long, long tradition of believing of ourselves as a democracy, of people who are independent thinkers.
Sargent: Well, we’ve gotten very far afield from Donald Trump raging at Pete Hegseth, but I think that’s really the essence of it. Amanda Marcotte, always a great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Marcotte: Thanks for having me.