The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 9 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 unleashed a barrage of crazy posts over the last few days, spraying angry threats in all directions. But we noticed a pattern in all these outbursts. He keeps threatening to do things that he’s never, ever going to actually carry through, or things that backfire on him right away. In one sense, all this reveals fresh levels of contempt for MAGA voters. In another sense, all it does is make Trump look weaker.
And it occurs to us that he may be entering a new phase in his presidency. We’re getting a preview of what it’ll look like if he loses the midterms and Democrats can place some real limits on him. His threats will look increasingly empty, buffoonish, and desperate. We’re talking about it all with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who has a new piece today on how the entire GOP establishment is now propping up Trump’s delusions of grandeur. Good to have you on, Amanda.
Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: OK, so Trump unleashes all these crazy Truth Social posts in the last few days. The worst one might have been his post depicting all of North America, including Canada and Mexico and many other places, as the United States of America.
Amanda, this is all supposed to titillate MAGA somehow, because it looks like a threat to annex all this new territory or whatever, but he can’t even get Canada to roll over in the trade wars he started. Your thoughts on all that?
Marcotte: Yeah, I mean, I suspect this is how Trump has worked his whole life, right? Which is, he is both a bully and a coward. So he’ll only pick on somebody smaller, and only if it’s an easy fight. Jamelle Bouie is often pointing out it’s a rapist mentality. And I’ll just say, civil court has found that E. Jean Carroll was telling the truth about Trump.
So yeah, but I think that there is kind of a hope there that being a loud, threatening, scary monster is going to be the same thing as actually following through. But he’s never had any follow-through. Trump has always lived his life as if the illusion is the thing.
It’s one thing to do that on television when you’re the host of a reality TV show. It’s another thing when you’re like, no, we’re going to annex Canada, and Canada’s like, nope.
Sargent: Yeah, it doesn’t look strong. It doesn’t look powerful, it doesn’t look imposing. And it’s just crazy and disgusting, obviously, to even post the image in the first place. We should be clear on that. Like, even the mere hint in that direction is itself morally abhorrent in just about every conceivable way, right?
Marcotte: I feel like the crazier Trump gets, the harder it is for the media to cover it. There’s just this sense that grandpa at the nursing home is ranting again. And it almost feels a little impolite to be like, grandpa, we’re not going to annex Canada, sorry, grandpa. That thing about Mexico being a new colony, it just—that’s in your head, sorry, grandpa. Like, it feels mean. Just let grandpa have his delusions, and we’ll just all ignore him, I think, tends to be a lot of people’s stances. But to your point, he is actually the president of the United States. This is a problem. This is a problem, that gramps is losing his mind.
Sargent: Right, it’s a story in and of itself. Like, the unraveling is the story. It’s not something that should be ignored, no matter what.
Trump just rage-posted a threat to ban all sales in the U.S. by Bombardier, which is a Canadian aerospace company. But it turns out that Bombardier’s U.S. headquarters is in Wichita, Kansas, and GOP Senator Roger Marshall, who faces an unexpectedly tough challenge from a Democrat in Kansas, had to quickly distance himself from what Trump said. And Bombardier has workers all over the country, in the United States, and its supply chains are deeply entangled with a lot of American companies.
So he’s not going to actually do this. But again, the president of the United States said he was going to ban sales by this company. The level of contempt for MAGA voters is, like, hard to fathom, I think.
Marcotte: I think a lot of the time, what I see when I go to Truth Social is that a lot of the responses that he’s getting to these kinds of threats are actually people that aren’t reading what he’s saying, and instead just post a lot of “you go, Mr. President” memes and other nonsense. They clearly aren’t engaging with what he’s saying. And I think a lot of them are bots.
And I think that goes to what the larger problem here is, which is, he is not doing well, and he’s also completely surrounded himself with yes-men and robots and AI and Natalie Harp and all these things, and people that exist just to prop up his insanity.
Sargent: Yeah, and we should probably point out that it isn’t just bots, in the sense that you’ve got these MAGA influencers who really are, I think, real people. As far as I can tell, they’re real people. And when he does things like rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” all these influencers just rush out and say that this was the most epic own of a foreign adversary that has ever happened in world history. And you’ve got to wonder, like, what’s going through their head? Like, again, he can’t get Canada to do his bidding in the trade wars, right?
So all he’s giving them is a renamed lake, which doesn’t even mean anything in real life. It just means that, you know, a few sources will call it what Trump says to call it, and the rest of the world won’t.
I want to know what he thinks he’s getting his voters to essentially process here. Like, he must have some kind of set of thoughts about this. His influencers must have some kind of set of thoughts about how this all works. What do you think it is?
Marcotte: Well, I think a lot of MAGA influencers, their incentive structure is getting traffic, getting money, and getting attention, right? And so in the past, these kinds of trolling antics were really useful, because I think a lot of MAGA followers are kind of in the same psychological spiral as Trump, which is, they made a mistake in voting for Trump. They made a mistake in getting a MAGA hat and making their whole identity that they love Trump, and now they’re just, like, the most shameful kind of human being.
And so instead of going to therapy and dealing with that, they are clinging to any evidence that they can find that they were right, and that they’re owning the libs. Like, owning the libs is a huge part of the rationalization of it.
And so I think that, in the past, Trump was really successful at throwing out these kinds of ridiculous, like, distractions. And these—I hate the word “distraction,” but it’s useful in this particular case—which is, like, you don’t want to think about the fact that he’s failed, so he’ll throw a fake thing out. And then, crucially, a crucial part of this process is that liberals get really outraged, right?
Liberals go, how dare you do this? And then the emotional gratification of owning the libs is supplied. And so the MAGA base continues to—it’s kind of cult-leader tactics, right? It’s just sort of giving a lot of instant gratification, so that people don’t have to think about these longer-term issues.
That said, I kind of think it’s not working as well as it used to, because, in no small part, liberals have learned to break the cycle by not actually providing the outrage. Like, when he renamed Lake Ontario, people were like, well—I, you can’t see me, but I am, in my voice, making the jerk-off motion.
Sargent: Gotcha, yeah.
Marcotte: So—but you know, the point is, like, people were just like, I don’t care. It’ll be renamed when somebody sane is back in office. So this doesn’t matter. None of this matters. And I think that—I’d be curious how much traffic those MAGA influencers are getting with this now. But they just don’t know what else to do.
Sargent: Right. The renaming of stuff is really deeply bizarre. There’s another Trump post, of a map of New Mexico where he crosses out “Mexico” and replaces it with “America.” And this one is, like, just perfect in its ineffectualness and its seething contempt for MAGA. He’s literally not targeting Mexico here. He’s targeting a U.S. state. And, you know, owning Mexico by removing the word “Mexico” from it.
And of course, I guess part of this is that New Mexico leans a little bit blue, and so he’s owning Democrats, and he can just impose his will on a Democratic state or whatever. Like, I know this is all memes and shitposting, and that MAGA politics really functions to a large degree in that arena of unreality, but I think it’s significant in the sense that this is really all Trump has left at this point, is this type of show.
I mean, I don’t want to overstate it—like, the midterms are still going to be very hard. But presuming that Democrats do win, then this is kind of like a preview of more of what we’re going to see, right?
Marcotte: Yeah, I think, insofar as politics is, like, as much about the cultural milieu and, like, the attitude of the country—I think, even regardless of what happens in an election that’s very gerrymandered, that’s experienced a lot of voter suppression, everyone can sense that whatever MAGA thought that they were, like, culturally ascendant, was an illusion at best, and is completely collapsing right now. And that was always the most important thing to his base, because I think a lot of them are driven by insecurity.
They’re driven by anger at, like, cosmopolitan progressivism, which is increasingly defining American culture. And they want it to be them and not us, basically. And I think that we’re seeing that kind of reaction here. And he doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know how to troll like he used to, I think.
He’s maybe cut himself off from the feedback that maybe sharpened his instincts a little bit. He’s being surrounded by bots and yes-men. And so there’s not a lot of there there anymore.
And again, maybe he thinks that’s not true, because the New Mexico thing, there were a ton of headlines about it. And maybe he was like, headlines, libs-owned stamp for the day, right? But when you actually read the story, it’s just, they’re laughing at him.
Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. It’s very hard to follow where this gets him in his head. Another tweet from Trump, listen to this one: “Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping, when we win the war with Iran. Three dollars a gallon, but ultimately below two dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. MAGA.”
But Amanda, like, the thing is, the whole world is watching Trump fail to force Iran to do his bidding. Like, that’s happening in the real world. And a lot of MAGA figures are even turning on Trump over the war. All this does is highlight his inability to impose his will on Iran. What on earth? Can you explain it?
Marcotte: I mean, yeah, when I saw that post, I laughed, and then I thought, you know, he actually got away, for a long, long time, with this kind of obvious lie. How many bankers was he able to grift and talk into giving him money based on what were likely equally empty promises, like laughably empty promises?
Con artists are effective. Like, the rest of us who aren’t being conned were like, come on, it’s obviously a scam. But for whatever reason, this man’s been a scammer his whole life. He’s been able to pull it off. He scammed his way into the White House twice. So I do try to remind myself of that.
On the flip side, I do kind of have optimism that even his followers are starting to realize that they’ve been scammed, and they are trying to quietly walk away. There was a great article in The Wall Street Journal—did you see this, about the merchandise sales falling off? The MAGA merchandisers are like, yeah, we’re not doing that anymore. No one’s buying Trump stuff anymore. And, like, that’s a pretty good sign that it’s not cool anymore to be MAGA.
Sargent: Right. And that’s the kind of shift of the culture against MAGA, which you alluded to earlier. I really still think, on some level, that story hasn’t penetrated into the mainstream media in any real sense. And I just want to say, like, screw you, mainstream media, for overreading the 2024 election right out of the gate and saying that it portended this enormous cultural shift. And also screw you for, like, not correcting it now that all that’s been revealed to be a mirage.
That error, by a lot of pundits and media organizations, was really catastrophic for this country. It gave Trump the sense of having a lot more running room to implement his agenda. We saw, with the unleashing of ICE, the craziness around the tariffs, the threats to annex whole countries and annex allies.
I don’t know if that would have happened to the same degree if there hadn’t been kind of, like, a roar of punditry interpreting his one-point-five-point win as an enormous, seismic cultural shift. Do you?
Marcotte: No. Yeah. Especially, like, the universities and the media companies that struck deals with him to avoid lawsuits and whatnot—like, it turns out that if they’d fought back, they would have won. Then they didn’t want to, because they didn’t want to be on what they thought was the wrong side of public opinion. And I—even then, I was like, yes, we were all a little surprised about the win in some ways, but at the end of the day, I don’t know. My parents voted for Trump. They are the least cool people.
I’m like, the notion that our culture—maybe I’m an optimist, maybe I’m a gnarled hipster, but the notion that our economy, our culture, is going to be captured by the least cool people in it—that’s never been true. I just can’t, like—the future is with what the younger, cooler people are doing. And, you know, maybe it’s not woke one anymore, but it is woke two.
Sargent: It is. It is. Amanda Marcotte, why don’t you talk to us a little bit about what your piece says? It’s out today. And it goes into how, like, the entire Republican establishment has to pretend to agree that all this stuff is real.
Marcotte: So the RNC convention starts Wednesday. I’m sure that a lot of listeners forgot about that. I know that a lot of my coworkers did—which I think is not a good sign for it being a blockbuster event, that, and it’s up against the NFL’s opening games.
But what’s interesting to me about it is that Trump obviously just forced this thing into being. Absolutely no one else wants it but President Trump. And it doesn’t help anybody, it doesn’t do anything, it is a waste of time and money. But it will make him feel good to get up on stage and have people applaud him. And that seems to be the only purpose of it.
And I keep thinking about how much—he has, I don’t mean to keep harping on Natalie Harp, but the man has a full-time aide whose entire job is to praise him all day. Like, he posts AI images of himself riding horses with George Washington and leading an evil villain robot army. This is just the facts. And the entire GOP establishment has just sort of surrounded him with this bubble. And they’re putting on a whole fake convention. It’s a fake convention. It’s not a real convention. There won’t be any delegates there. There’s no voting on anything.
They’re putting on a fake convention so that the president can have his fake attention. And all these Republican officials are trying to find a way to not show up at what is, like, a fake event that’s all about big boy having an extra birthday party. It’s sad. And I think it’s going to backfire, because the ratings are going to be in the toilet. And if he finds out about that, it’s just going to be more narcissistic spiral.
Sargent: Yes. And just one last thought to close this out. That sort of backfiring, I think, is really important in the midterms, in the following way. I think Trump and his influencer pals and their kind of bot generals or whatever have a theory of the case, which is something a little bit like: as long as we can create the impression that we’re the ones who are acting in the world, we’re the ones who are doing big things, it just becomes marginally harder for some of these middle-of-the-road voters to vote against us. We’re the ones in power, we’re the ones who are in the driver’s seat. You want to be with us, you want to be with winners.
And so, to the degree that people like us can point out that it’s all “emperor has no clothes” stuff, I think that really cuts deep at their strategy, in a kind of profound way. If we can actually get it out there, what a failure it all is. And of course, if this convention is a total fiasco, I think that is a real, real disaster for them, in a deeper way, in the elections. What do you think?
Marcotte: Yeah, I agree. I think, yeah—the authoritarian sort of gets their power from this sense of inevitability and strength. And I couldn’t agree more. Like, if we can laugh at them, we should. And whenever I say that, I get a lot of criticism, because they are doing real damage, and they’re hurting real people, and we need to keep that in mind.
And there’s no doubt that we should hang on to our moral center there. But to your point, strategically, it’s way more important to point out that these are baby men pretending to be big men. And every time we can show evidence of that and sort of undermine them, it’s helpful.
Sargent: Absolutely. Well said. Amanda Marcotte, always a great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Marcotte: Thanks for having me.