Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Mark Jacob: Well, thanks for having me.
Jacob: Well, you don’t hear that from anyone other than Trump. I think in a lot of ways, almost every day he’s coming out with something that’s fairly unhinged. It’s a bit of a scandal that the news media isn’t writing more about how mentally unfit he is. And the thing about that is that they wrote so much about Biden. Jake Tapper was flogging his book about Biden. Biden’s old news. It’s really not what is front and center in 2025. Yet the news media, they don’t seem to want to focus with big umbrella stories that put everything together and ask the hard question about why Donald Trump is acting the way he is and how embarrassing he is to the world and how scary he is for anyone who cares about this country’s well-being.
Jacob: Right. I wrote about Trump’s mental and fitness a year ago in my newsletter, and it seems like it’s only gotten worse. It keeps on getting worse, but they keep on.… The news media doesn’t focus on it. The internet, MAGA—everyone seems to be accepting the fact that the guy who is in charge of our nuclear arsenal has a screw loose, or three or four.
Jacob: Yeah, yeah. But he loves to talk about his uncle at MIT because that’s supposedly the great genes in his family. And the thing about him talking about genes all the time is that I think it’s a coded white supremacist message he’s sending—that, Oh, we have good genes here, and we don’t want it bad genes coming in from overseas, that kind of thing. So yeah, he loves to talk about his uncle for sure.
Andrew Feinberg (audio voiceover): Ted Kaczynski was not identified as the Unabomber until 1996, 11 years after John Trump passed away. It would have been impossible for John Trump to have ever discussed the Unabomber with the president. What was he talking about? And I have one follow-up.
Sargent: Mark, note that Leavitt there snaps at this reporter for asking what she characterizes as a frivolous question—but it’s not frivolous. This is the president of the United States. If he’s going to tell stories that are pure fiction and that seem to raise questions about his mental fitness, that’s legitimate. And by the way, to your point about how much Trump likes to talk about his uncle and the nefarious reasons for that, she slipped in the little line for Trump’s ears on that very point—that his uncle’s a very brilliant guy.
Sargent: Well, I think that goes to your point about why Trump likes to talk about his uncle. This is something Karoline Leavitt clearly had on her mind. She understands the president. It’s almost like she was talking to a child. She knows the child president wants to hear this stuff about the uncle going to MIT. I just thought the whole thing was bizarre. Really, really odd.
Sargent: Well, I think that’s an important point you raised there because to return to this audience of one theme, which she really is speaking to Trump from that podium a lot of the time, the abuse of the press is intended for Trump’s ears. She thinks that will thrill Trump. She thinks that will make Trump feel like she’s fighting on his behalf. And I think she’s right about that. By the way, I do think she’s killing it if dishonesty is the metric we’re looking at this by, and if ministering to the audience of one is the metric we’re looking at this by. She’s really, really dangerously good at gaslighting, but also at speaking to Trump’s pathologies.
Sargent: Yes, that’s a good point. There’s another moment at which Leavitt lost her temper, this time about the focus on Epstein. Listen to this.
Sargent: So Mark, note that she goes out of her way to slip this in and she always slips these things in [like] “the president has been working so hard.” What’s striking to me about that is there’s just no planet on which there’s any truth to that, for one thing. But also, this is Leavitt speaking directly to Donald Trump, really trying to keep that ego pumped up, don’t you think?
Sargent: Mark, I think you capture something dark about the ways in which she plays to Trump’s psyche. As you said, this press conference was really about, to some degree, Trump’s health. We’ve seen all the stuff about his hand; you’ve seen that. But then there’s also this new announcement that we’ve got that Trump has developed swelling in his legs due to a condition involving veins. She had to explain some of that. But what’s striking is, as you say, she was going out of her way to say that he’s vigorous and manly. She said he’s working so hard and he came back and he was making calls at eight o’clock. This is just so strange. It’s often said that Trump is a personalist ruler. Everything revolves around him. It’s not an administration anymore; it’s just one person and so forth. I think you see that displayed with unusual and unsettling clarity in these moments with Leavitt.
Sargent: What’s striking about what you’re saying is also the degree to which this is seeping down into every crevice of the party and its media apparatus. So you had this kind of adulation directed at the audience of one on Thursday from many different quarters. I’m going to read a few of them. Republican Congressman Randy Fine said this about Trump’s Epstein problem: “I trust President Trump’s judgment completely on this. I think he’s been the most transparent president we’ve ever had.” All right. So on the questions about Trump’s health, one Fox News personality said, “I’ve shaken the man’s hand. He gives a very vigorous handshake.” Then you had Republican Congressman Tim Burchett, who was asked to respond to Trump calling his own supporters “stupid weaklings” for caring about Epstein. Burchett said this, “He has a strategy in all this, and I suspect it will play out because he wins every time.” There’s just an over-the-top quality to this that I just find so unnerving, this cult-like behavior creeping down to every last level of the party [and] deep into Fox News and the right-wing media. It’s just all pervasive. It’s really alarming.
Sargent: It really is, as you say, sort of this mass surrender, this turning over of people’s brains to Donald Trump. We have this new poll from the Associated Press. Let me read some findings from it. Only about one quarter of Americans say that Trump’s policies have helped them. Half of Americans report that Trump’s policies have done more to hurt them since the second term began than helped. He’s under 50 percent approval on every issue.
Sargent: Yes, even immigration. He’s down to 43 percent on his handling of immigration. That’s a drop of six points from March. We’ve seen that in a number of other polls, some of which are even worse for him on immigration, which I take as a sign of deep underlying weaknessg iven that it’s a central issue. And on top of all that, Trump’s approval on the economy is down to around four in 10, and 56 percent say that the phrase “understands the problems facing people like you” is a phrase that doesn’t describe Trump well. That’s just terrible stuff, and it’s mirrored by a lot of other polls. I think you have this weirdly proportional effect where the worst things get for Trump—whether on the polling and out in the country and on these all these other issues—the more the adulation from all these different voices swells and tries to prop them up.
We’re at this dangerous point where he’s becoming less popular but his power is increasing. And so there’s going to come a breaking point where we have to see whether the people power—what the American people actually want—can go up against the autocratic power of Trump.
Jacob: Greg, it’s who they’re most scared of. I think most of the Republicans in Congress are real cowards. And the question is whether they’re more scared of the voters or of Trump. And another thing that.… I hate to say this, but I think we have to, every time I hear on TV someone say, Well, in the midterms we’re going to, I shout at the screen and say, If there are midterms—because we’ve got a guy in the White House now who doesn’t believe in democracy, tried to overturn the 2020 election results, and is now in charge of the military and in charge of power. And if he wants to invent a crisis or exploit a crisis, you have to wonder whether he would try to prevent the midterms from happening. So I think that the really important thing to do is for people to stay loud, to protest, and to really show that they’re not going to put up with that. And so I think that the real weapon against Trump’s autocracy or his ambitions of autocracy is people power. People need to get out there and do things.
Jacob: Thank you.
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