Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Paul Waldman: Good to see you too, Greg.
Trump (voiceover): In my opinion, you are hurting Australia very much right now. And they want to get along with me. You know, your leader is coming over to see me very soon. I’m going to tell them about you. You set a very bad tone.
Waldman: Well, I think there are a couple of things going on at the same time. On one hand, when he comes out either on the lawn of the White House or in the Oval Office and kind of spars with reporters, which he does all the time, it’s supposed to be a show. You know, he is the main character and all of the reporters are like little bugs who are pestering him. And he’s going to show how strong and agile and smart he is by deflecting all their questions and turning things around on them and making these kind of dominance displays to show that he’s the one with the power. And they can’t impede him in the realization of his will. So there’s something very performative about it.
I mean, there was just a piece in The New York Times, I think yesterday, and we’ll probably talk about his lawsuit against The New York Times. There was a piece there that went into great detail about what can only be described as something akin to a bribery scheme involving the United Arab Emirates and channeling money through various crypto firms to give him and his family tens of millions of dollars in fees. It’s rather complicated and it has to do with chips used [in] artificial intelligence and this complicated network of crypto companies. But the net result is that foreign governments are essentially putting money in his family’s bank account in order to get the kind of policy outcomes that they want.
Waldman: Yeah, and I think that he believes or hopes that in other countries, he can dictate how they’re going to have relations with their own press, even in democratic countries like Australia, that he can essentially, as you say, tell on this reporter and that somehow that will mean that the reporter will get punished by his own prime minister. So he does have this desire to kind of make this into a kind of performance of dominance, but he also really doesn’t think that anyone should ask him any kind of question that would really reflect poorly on him.
Sargent: Yeah, I think it works in a way, especially for his supporters. And you mentioned that lawsuit that Trump filed against the New York Times. It is indeed crazy. It concerns several articles in a book by Times reporters that looked skeptically at Trump’s business success. No one should dare ever question that, of course. Now, first amendment lawyers are calling this lawsuit an utter complete joke, but that aside, again, there’s this anger. The lawsuit accuses Times reporters of deliberately trying to inflict maximum damage on Trump. It accuses them of repugnant distortions and fabrications about Trump designed to help the Democratic Party says the reporters couldn’t stand the thought of Trump winning the election. And it even says the reporters hate Trump in a deranged way. The lawsuit is chock full of crazy stuff like that. And then Trump announced the lawsuit with an explosion of fury on Truth Social, in which he called the Times “the most degenerate of newspapers in the history of our country.”
That included a lot of lawsuits against news organizations and individual reporters. And it is an effective technique because except for really the biggest news organizations, it’s very difficult to pay all those legal fees. And sometimes people are motivated to just settle it or issue some kind of an apology or whatever. And having everyone know that Trump is going to sue you if he doesn’t like something that appears in your newspaper or on your television station is itself a kind of intimidation.
Sargent: Well, I got to think that him doing this with the New York Times really ups the ante in a major way. I can’t tell whether it’s a sign of hubris or not. It’s sort of smacks of that. Now, as you mentioned, ABC News settled a big lawsuit with Trump. So did CBS. They both had reasons for doing so that didn’t really seem on the up and up. Their parent companies seemed to want to settle. And Trump essentially extorted them through that method. But it’s a little difficult to see the New York Times going down that road, which means he’s going to have to actually litigate this insane lawsuit over time. What do you think he’s thinking there, if thinking’s the right word for it? The Times can’t let itself get extorted in the same way ABC and CBS can, can it? And what does that mean over time?
So, I don’t think that the Times is going to pony up any kind of a settlement. I think it’s just a way of kind of sustaining the narrative that he likes, that he is at war with the media, that the media are unfair to him, and he can just keep feeding that. And what does it really cost him? He dictates some things to his lawyers that he wants them to do. They file this preposterous suit. It doesn’t really cost him very much money, at least not given the billions by which his fortune has expanded over the course of the last year with all the different ways people are looking to put money in his pocket. And so, you know, there’s no cost to him. It can be essentially a PR move. But the Times, I think, would be very, in a very bad position among their peers, among their audience, if they actually were to knuckle under and give him any money at all.
Trump (voiceover): You should probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe they’ll come after ABC. Well, ABC paid me $16 million recently for a form of hate speech, right? Your company paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech, so maybe they’ll have to go after you.
Waldman: Yeah, it really is. He wants to remind the reporters and himself and his own supporters of what he considers a great victory over one of his main enemies, the news media. And this was a very interesting little episode, both regarding him and Bondi, it was as if they both kind of forgot what the term hate speech represents and what it represents to the right, including his own supporters. For a long time, it was progressives who talked about hate speech and made the argument that in some cases, certain kinds of speech constitute an action that you could take [legal] action against, that it’s not just speech, it can do real harm to people in the right context. And that was something that conservatives have for years have been very angry about and have argued against. And then Pam Bondi kind of got over her skis a little bit.
Sargent: Pathological impulses, in fact. What I find striking about that exchange is that on the one hand, he’s citing this settlement with ABC News as proof that he’s crowned the media under his heel. And yet he’s simultaneously angry that he can’t actually control the lines of questioning from reporters.
Waldman: Yeah, I think so. You know, he’s always had this extremely complicated relationship with the media. He despises reporters, but he’s desperate for their approval. He wants to be the main character of American politics and wants still to see himself on the TV news. He wants to see his name in the headlines and the paper. He knows that he has this symbiotic relationship with the press. And even though it is antagonistic, he’s always kind of pushing them away and then pulling them back. And that’s been who he has been for decades. And that doesn’t change, even though he would like to be able to dictate every headline and the slant of every news story, he knows he can’t do that. And he has all kinds of ways that he tries to get the news coverage that he wants, but he still is desperate to be in their sights, to be the focus of their attention. And he’s never going to be able to control it in the way that he wants to.
Waldman: I think because Trump is so ubiquitous, it’s easy to fall into the belief that he must be persuading people. And he repeats the same things over and over, often the same kinds of lies. And you can look at that and say, you know, he won the last election, people must be buying this stuff. And that isn’t necessarily true. mean, his approval ratings were low during his first term. They are very low now. And, you know, he tops out, it seems, at about forty percent. And given the polarization that we have in our country, where almost everybody in any president’s party is going to say they support them and almost everybody in the other party is going to say they don’t, you know, you’re not going to do much better than forty percent. And you’re not going to do much worse than that.
Sargent: Well, just to close this out, I think that really gets to the core of why he’s in such a fury with the media right now, sort of separate from the specifics that he’s pretending to be angry about. The argument over tariffs, in a way, is one of the areas where the media was actually successful. There was really good reason to believe at the outset of this presidency that Trump could actually win the argument over tariffs. It’s, you know, not that hard to sell them just say, I’m trying to protect Americans from global economic forces and all those Democrats don’t protect you from them. And I think there was reason to assume that people might sort of, you know, lose track of the details and see it in those terms, but the press actually covered the issue with great, I think, penetration and really in an informative way. And the result, as you say, has been that The polls are showing that people really understand how tariffs actually work. And Trump, no matter how many times he uses his magical lying powers to say that other countries are paying the tariffs or whatever, it just isn’t really offsetting the actual knowledge that the American people have developed on this issue. And I think that’s a weirdly heartening thing among all the terrible news we’re seeing these days.
Sargent: Well Waldman, really well said. Folks, Check out Paul’s book, White Rural Rage. Great title. Paul, always great to talk to you, man. Thanks so much for coming on.
Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.
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