The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 26 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 lost it with a young female reporter who dared to ask him a tough question about his support for that vile ad that’s running in Ohio. It’s critical that the reporter was young and female, because Trump really does reserve his worst venom for such reporters, particularly non-white. We think the bigger story behind all this right now centers on Trump and MAGA’s belief that misogyny can actually help them in the home stretch of the midterms. Yet this view is even alienating some Fox News figures who are starting to cringe very visibly over it.
We’re talking about all of this with Nicole Hemmer, who’s written good books on the history of the conservative movement and the right-wing media. We’re going to get into the right’s long history of misogyny politics. Nicole, thanks for coming on.
Nicole Hemmer: Thanks so much for having me, Greg.
Sargent: All right, so everyone’s seen the ad that Vivek Ramaswamy’s running in the Ohio gubernatorial campaign. It features Democrat Amy Acton’s mother calling her a liar about her difficult past, but then it emerged that Amy Acton’s stepfather, i.e., her mother’s husband, apparently raped her. Ramaswamy, Trump, and JD Vance are all in on this now. Nicole, I just wanted to get your general thoughts on this whole thing.
Hemmer: Honestly, like, a decade into the Trump era, I didn’t think, A, anything could still genuinely shock me, the way that this ad shocked me. And B, that anything could shock Republicans as much as this ad seems to have shocked them.
One of the things that I think we’ve gotten very used to is that when something terrible happens, there might be an initial wave of Republican sort of aghastness and outrage, but then they, you know, kind of fall back into line. Trump pushes back and they end up back on the Trump train.
But in this instance, there does seem to be such a gut-level revulsion against this Ramaswamy ad that I just don’t think that we’ve seen in a long time. And I didn’t even realize we had the capacity for anymore.
Sargent: Let’s listen to an exchange between Donald Trump and NBC reporter Monica Alba. If you listen closely, you’re going to hear in the crosstalk that the reporter says, do the sexual abuse allegations mean nothing to you, sir? And you’ll hear her say, they are very serious sexual abuse allegations. Listen.
Donald Trump (voiceover): A mother is saying, don’t put my daughter there, because she’s a terrible person and she’s a liar. Why shouldn’t somebody use that?
Monica Alba (voiceover): Do the sexual abuse allegations … do the sexual abuse allegations make no difference?
Trump (voiceover): Wait, wait, wait, wait. Slow down. Who are you with? Who are you with?
Alba (voiceover): I’m with NBC, sir.
Trump (voiceover): The one of the worst networks you have.
Alba (voiceover): But these are very serious sexual abuse allegations. They make no difference to you?
Trump (voiceover): Quiet. Isn’t she a fresh person? You’re a horrible little reporter, aren’t you?
Sargent: So, Nicole, what that reporter was talking about there was the allegation that Amy Acton was raped, of course, and Trump was clearly set off by the pointed questions about the sex abuse allegations, didn’t you think?
Hemmer: Absolutely. In part because the reporter was almost giving him an out. She was like, I get that maybe this was your gut reaction to just seeing the commercial, but once you have the context, would you like to rethink your response to this?
And of course he doesn’t want to, right? A, because he never wants to. B, because he lives in this world of, like, plausible deniability. And C, actually, there isn’t anything that seems to trigger Donald Trump more than references to sexual abuse. Because he has his own past here, right?
It’s the Epstein scandal, it’s his own history of accusers and even being found liable for sexual assault before. And so that just opens up a whole world of things that he doesn’t want to speak to. And so when a young woman has the temerity to push him on that, it trips, like, three different triggers for him, and he starts lashing out.
Sargent: Right. And this is a case where the facts are ultra clear. Again, to the point where even a bunch of Republicans had to come out and condemn the ad. I think we should point out here, and maybe you could comment on this, we do know at this point that Trump is unusually triggered by young female reporters, particularly non-whites, don’t we?
Hemmer: Absolutely. I mean, Donald Trump doesn’t like to be challenged in general, but he certainly doesn’t want to be challenged by people who he does not see as his equal. And there are very few people that Donald Trump sees as his equal, and all of those people are white, male, and wealthy.
So for a young female reporter to challenge him, for someone who’s not white to challenge him—all of those things, it’s both like that he doesn’t like to be challenged, and then also, how dare you? You don’t have the right to challenge me.
Sargent: I think there’s actually some continuity here between his vicious abuse of female reporters in general on the one side, and the politics around this vile ad itself. It’s kind of all a bet that misogyny is somehow a winner in the closing stretch of this election.
It’s all a bet that this type of politics can get out a certain type of voter that they don’t think they can get out any other way at this point, especially without Trump on the ballot. Can you talk a little bit about that? Do you think that’s what they’re up to?
Hemmer: Yes, absolutely. I mean, misogyny has been one of the key political appeals of the Trump campaign. It is not a coincidence that the two elections that he won, he won against women. If you were at the 2016 RNC, it was like a misogyny fest.
All of the attacks on Hillary Clinton were not attacks about her policies, but they were attacks about her as a woman, right? Or the attacks on Michelle Obama for being a man, or Kamala Harris. This misogyny has been part of the bargain with Trump from the very beginning.
The Access Hollywood tape, the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court—like, all of this has been saying, we not just, like, don’t care about women and feminism, but we’re actively trying to mobilize misogyny, because we want to mobilize, in particular, like, young disaffected men who we think are going to be drawn to that appeal.
And so that MAGA voter, particularly that MAGA voter who is, like, the non-traditional voter, like the low-propensity voter, they think that misogyny is the tool for bringing them out. And not just for bringing out white men. That has been the key for drawing Black men and Latino men into their coalition. And so that’s been something that they have pressed on again and again, because it’s their way to sort of, like, a rainbow coalition on the right.
Sargent: I want to pick up on that point about bringing in all these different types of men into the MAGA coalition, because I think in some really fundamental sense, what we’re seeing here is that Trump is still sort of in the headspace of 2024. I mean, this was a really heady thing for Trump. Obviously it was this miraculous comeback, and it was very heady times.
If you think about the inroads that they were making with young men in 2024, there was something special happening in the culture for them, I think. For MAGA in some very general sense, and for Trump in particular, they felt like they had unlocked some sort of magic power, I think. Some sort of magical, I don’t know, phenomenon of some kind. And I feel like they’re almost trying to recapture that a little bit.
Can you talk about that?
Hemmer: Right, to recapture the magic of past moments of glory. And those past moments of glory have been so connected with misogyny. They’ve been so anti-woman. And that coalition has been just drenched in misogyny as a way of inspiring and bringing that out.
But I do think that there is something—in some ways you can see Trump’s response to the Ramaswamy ad as almost like a take two on the response to the Access Hollywood tape, like, eight—gosh, 10 years ago now. That idea that, like, he had sort of apologized a little bit for the Access Hollywood tape, and there had been this intense Republican backlash to the Access Hollywood tape initially, and then everybody coalesced.
And you kind of get the sense that Trump just wants to skip past that. He thinks that he’s powerful enough at this point that he can just, like, skip past the part where everyone pretends to be sad about something he said, and then just sort of muscle his way forward and, like, get to the part where everybody celebrates him for being such an unconventional person.
And so I think that’s part of it. Trump is always looking back to the glory days, right? That’s Make America Great Again, but it’s also wanting to recapture the high points of his political career. And it’s no wonder he’s trying to do that in 2026, when he is at frankly one of the low points of his career, right?
His approval numbers are pretty weak. His support among Republicans is much weaker than we’ve seen, even among white working-class Republicans. It’s just not as strong as it was. So him trying to, like, call upon that old magic—no wonder he’s trying to mobilize that in this moment, because it’s been around elections that he’s largely been able to tap into that in the past.
Sargent: Absolutely. Well, let’s listen to some Fox News figures who are now turning on this. These are all flagged by Media Matters. Here’s Fox contributor Mary Katharine Ham commenting on Trump and Vance supporting the ad.
Mary Katharine Ham (voiceover): I disagree with the president and Vance. As soon as I saw that ad, I thought, normal moms are going to watch this ad and go, a mom trashing her daughter straight to camera, they better have the goods. That’s actually what I thought when I first saw it. And it doesn’t appear that they do have the goods, because she has a really good response to it, which is, like, she had this very hard childhood.
Here’s a Republican consultant and commentator on Fox.
Republican consultant (voiceover): It is not a new phenomenon to use family members that have a problem against candidates in political ads. But if you do that, you better darn well know the whole story and know that it’s not sympathetic to the intended target. And of course, what we found out about this is it is, in the absolute worst possible way.
And here’s Fox & Friends host Lawrence Jones talking about Ramaswamy’s decision to air the ad.
Lawrence Jones (voiceover): I thought this was just stupid. He’s already struggling in Ohio. I just don’t understand why he would do this.
Sargent: So those are all interesting, but I thought Mary Katharine Ham’s intervention is particularly pointed, because she directly calls out Trump and Vance for elevating the ad in a way that she says will alienate ordinary women. What did you think of that?
Hemmer: I think that’s right. And I think that it points to the part of the reaction that I have found so surprising, is that there has been a real reluctance to criticize Trump. You know, normally the criticisms fall to people under Trump, like, he’s been advised inappropriately. Vance, who has been seen as, like, the next hope of the MAGA movement—there’s been some reluctance to criticize him as well.
But in this case, I mean, I think that Ham is hearing from the people that she talks to how rattled Republicans were by this ad, particularly Republican women. In part because Republican women aren’t necessarily on board with feminism.
They have by and large not been on board with the #MeToo movement. They’ve been very skeptical of claims about sexual abuse, whether it’s against Kavanaugh or against Trump, or even in the recent case of the Cornell 7.
But in this particular case, when we are talking about the rape of a child—she was only 12 years old when she was taken from her mother because of these accusations—we’re talking about the rape of a child by a stepfather, and a mother choosing the stepfather over the child.
It is absolutely a bridge too far for ordinary people who are seeing this. And I keep using the word repulsed and disgusted, but there’s something gut-level and emotional about people’s response to this that you can’t, like, MAGA your way out of.
Sargent: You can’t MAGA your way out of. I like that a lot. They really think they can MAGA their way out of pretty much anything, don’t they?
Hemmer: Well, they have in the past. There’s a good reason why they believe that. And so I think perhaps they’re even surprised by the response to this.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about some polling here. The New York Times national poll, in the generic congressional ballot matchup, had Democrats winning women by 56 to 37. That’s a 19-point edge. The gender gap is enormous in this election.
It seems to me like Donald Trump and JD Vance are, again, to return to this idea of being in the 2024 headspace, somehow deciding that female voters just don’t really exist in this election.
I think a lot about a tweet that Stephen Miller sent during the 2024 election. It was on election night, when everything was really hanging in the balance. It looked very close. Do you recall this? Stephen Miller sent this tweet out where he said basically something like, men, get out to the polls. It was something like that. It was as clear-cut as that. It was like, we know that if women vote, we’re screwed, but we need men to vote.
And a midterm election is a different animal from the type of presidential election that their head is still in, I think. To return to a point you made earlier, I don’t understand why they don’t get this, right? A midterm electorate is going to be highly engaged. It’s going to have, you know, fewer young, sporadic voters, fewer of the young male type voters that they were relying on.
There are going to be a whole lot of women voting in this election. Fifty-six to 37. What do you make of all that? Do they just erase that from their minds, and what’s going on?
Hemmer: He just returns to what’s comfortable for him. And it’s part of the reason why the more establishment Republicans, the kinds of people who do know the difference between a midterm and a general election, are so wary about this particular incident.
It’s because, precisely as you’re saying, like, the Stephen Miller quote was very much about, we know that there is this, like, batch of voters that we are very good at turning out when Trump is on the ballot. And they are young men, and they do make the margin of difference. And they’re very, very unlikely to turn out in a midterm election.
And so trying to mobilize them—this is not going to get young men to the polls, especially at a moment when the economy is doing so poorly. Like, you’re not offering anything in this case. But Donald Trump doesn’t have, like, a wide range of tools in his tool belt. He has misogyny. And that’s kind of what he keeps returning to, because it’s one of the only things that he has, other than racism.
Sargent: Well, to your point, the Harvard Youth Poll came out just a few days ago, and it confirms your point to a T. It says that among young men, men under the age of 30, nearly 70 percent disapprove of his performance in his second term.
I think maybe part of what’s going on here is that the cultural moment that made 2024 possible is just gone. It’s not here anymore. And they don’t know that, I don’t think. That cultural moment was, there really was this kind of massive disaffection out there among young men, men more generally, you know—I don’t know, wokeness or whatever, whatever it is, but it was mostly, I think, probably economic in a lot of ways, and things just felt kind of adrift after the pandemic, maybe.
And so Trump was essentially telling all these men, I will give you purpose, right? And the stuff you’re talking about, the promise not to go to war, the promise to get inflation under control—these are all basically ways of saying I will empower you, men. You’ll have control of your lives again.
And now that he’s in the White House, he hasn’t delivered that empowerment, right? And so he’s got no real way to appeal to them anymore, I don’t think. Can you talk a little about the lapsing of the 2024 cultural moment?
Hemmer: Yes. And it is exactly as you say, that there was an appeal that he was able to make because he was able to make promises based in some ways on a bit of a fantasy. And he was able to make them while he was in a race against a Black woman, which made it much easier for him to leverage that polarization and to leverage misogyny and racism in that election.
What I would say is that we have not seen the end of the mobilizing of this idea of a crisis of men for reactionary politics. Like, that is going to be with us for a very long time. It has been part of U.S. politics for a very long time.
It’s something that we saw, for instance, in the 1992 campaign when Pat Buchanan was running. He was constantly attacking feminism and women as being kind of the enemy of white working-class men, right? They’re taking your jobs, they’re feminizing our culture.
And that has been a strain of right-wing politics for a very long time. It will continue to be a strain of right-wing politics, particularly because this idea of the crisis of men is now so embedded in both conservative and, frankly, liberal politics as well. So I don’t think that that’s over.
But I think Trump as the avatar of that position, or Trump as the most persuasive proponent of that position—he’s fallen on hard times, because what voters have seen and what young men have seen is that Trump is raking in the cash for himself while the economy flounders, while they can’t find jobs, while they’re fighting inflation and not able to pay for things.
They’re seeing Trump start wars that they’re worried that they’re going to have to fight in. And so that sort of imaginary version of Trump that has mobilized so many male voters, it has come into conflict with the reality of Trump. And they’re not going to go vote for Democrats, but they’re very unlikely to go vote at all this election.
Sargent: That’s fascinating stuff. Just to close this out, let’s talk a little about JD Vance. I think he’s calculating that that energy is still there in some sense. You know, he goes out there and he says, stop whining, Republicans. He’s very tough and he’s dressing down the wimpy Republicans, and he’s saying manly politics requires that we stand by this ad and grind the female candidate under our heels into the dirt, basically. I mean, that’s what he’s saying, right, Nicole?
And so he seems to be calculating that he can kind of maneuver his way around, I think, the broken promises that you’re talking about, by kind of leaking here and there that he was a skeptic of the war, but then also going full misogyny with this ad.
How do you sort of see his trajectory playing out when it comes to this kind of, you know, male-baiting reactionary politics?
Hemmer: This is Vance’s only play, is to lean into the kind of cultural grievance, to lean into the I’m just one of the guys kind of politics, to lean into the Trumpian look-at-me-saying-the-things-that-I’m-not-supposed-to-say kind of politics, trying to play the tough guy against the beta male and the feminist and the women out there.
The problem is, he has a really hard time selling it. Vance is not Trump. And he actually has, in this scenario, right—we have Trump, we have Vance, we have Vivek Ramaswamy, and Vance is so much more like Vivek Ramaswamy than he is like Donald Trump. And he has the same kinds of problems that Ramaswamy has, which is they’re both very off-putting every time they open up their mouths. They’re smarmy, you don’t quite believe them when they talk.
And they both have a problem with the core Trump base. In Vivek’s case, it’s because he’s Indian. And in Vance’s case, it’s because he’s married to an Indian woman. And so he’s got a problem with the racist base of the Trump coalition. And by the time Trump’s done with his presidency, that might be the only part of the MAGA coalition left.
So Vance can’t play to that part of the base. He can play to the misogynist part of the base, but I don’t know that he is convincing as the alpha male of the Republican Party, and that’s going to be a big problem for him going forward.
Sargent: Nicole Hemmer, so awesome to talk to you. Folks, if you enjoyed this, check out Nicole’s books. They’re really good. One is called Partisans, another is called Messengers of the Right. Nicole, always a great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Hemmer: Lovely to chat with you, Greg.