Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Brian Beutler: Good to be back with you.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): “I don’t take questions from ABC fake news after what you did with Stephanopoulos to the Vice President of the United States. I don’t take questions from ABC fake news. Brian, go ahead.”
Beutler: Only on the planet where the only way that the ruling party and its loyalists will treat a media organization as something worth being treated with respect is if they decide to engage in regime propaganda alone. Anything that fails to meet that standard gets essentially blacklisted.
And now they’re having hissy fits at reporters who want better, clearer, fuller answers from the administration about what actually happened there. And so, I don’t think that from an external vantage point, the way they’re handling ABC or trying to punish George Stephanopoulos for answering this question is, like, a good look for them—or something that people are going to be impressed by.
So I think that that’s, like, the short and long answer to your question. The only thing ABC can do to get Trump to stop doing this is to become essentially like Fox News. And they need to decide if they’re going to do that or not, I guess.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): “Take a couple of questions from the news. I’m sure they’ll be extremely not hostile and friendly. Like JD went through a very friendly interview with George Stephanopoulos. So he was nice enough to pay me $16 million. Last time we came, he had to pay $16 million to me.”
Beutler: Yeah, I mean, I think, I think that the hidden hand here is that so many of the outlets that have caved to him are corporate-owned or otherwise have business before his government. And so he’s been able to divide and conquer when he has gone after individual outlets for individual heresies that actually turn out to just be normal journalism.
And so they’re doing what press corps are meant to do. They’re meant to gather together and use their collective power to assert the imperatives of a free press. But if you look at the individual outlets that fear him, whose corporate overlords fear him, it’s just been embarrassment after embarrassment, right? ABC paid the $16 million—Trump is still singling out ABC. He’s essentially singling out every network, every network news hub that isn’t CBS, which has been purchased by an ally of his who installed a loyalist to oversee CBS News.
You see NPR has been— you know, Republicans have defunded public media, but NPR is sort of antagonizing its audience by continuing to do a style of both-sides press coverage as if, like, that will keep further punishment from being visited upon them.
And what does Trump do? He complains about the cover art because it emphasizes the waddle—the old-man waddle Trump has on his neck. And so there’s, like, there’s no, there’s no value in trying to appease him because there, there is no amount of appeasement that will work short of turning yourself into a lapdog.
Sargent: Well, you’re going to make me read from Donald Trump’s Truth Social post about Time Magazine because you brought it up and I didn’t. So here it goes. “Time Magazine wrote a relatively good story about me, but the picture may be the worst of all time. They disappeared my hair and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one. Really weird. I never liked taking pictures from underneath angles, but this is a super bad picture and deserves to be called out. What are they doing and why?” Brian, that’s someone who’s confidence in his ability to turn his entire universe of supporters against a news outlet for something absurdly petty is almost bottomless. That confidence is almost bottomless. It’s endless.
But the question is, is Time going to bend further? Is Benioff going to produce more covers that he preys on Trump and try to pick better photographs to please the Mad King? You know, I guess we will see. But the trend for these outlets has been poor. They’ve shown very little cognizance of the fact that this incremental form of concession gets them nowhere, and that they really need to go all in on just becoming right-wing propagandists—or return to their actual core mission of doing journalism—and just let Trump try to harass, you know, like, let the chips fall where they may.
Sargent: And they won on Jimmy Kimmel when they were forced to resist, which let’s be clear, they had to do it because there was such an enormous outcry out in the country that they really had no choice. I want to go through some of Trump’s other unhinged moments at this presser. At one point, he ignored a question from a female reporter while saying he likes to watch her talk, then called her darling with this big hyper-masculine smirk. He openly boasted of shutting down programs Democrats like while saying they’re not cutting Republican programs.
Sargent: And he threatened to cut funding to New York if it elects, quote unquote, communist Zoran Mamdani as mayor.
Sargent: Brian, I think what’s going on here, he’s come back from the Mideast thinking he’s a world historical figure now. He actually has said that in very recent days that he’s going to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest president ever to exist. And it’s emboldened him to be even more of a mad dictator.
And the imposition of this new—I think this new Pentagon press policy that I think violates the letter, if not the spirit, of the First Amendment—was in the works in advance. And I mean, I’m not saying Trump isn’t delusional at all, but I think he knows that the peace plan he put in place is guaranteed no longevity. It’s essentially the same phase one that was put in place that he broke down when he became president several months ago, and that it was sort of spirited to... everyone was sort of spirited to agree to it ahead of the Nobel Peace Prize announcement that he wanted—like, this to serve as, like, you know, the crowning achievement that would get him that prize.
Sargent: Right. This is the, this is the, on unslakeable narcissist theory of Donald Trump, basically, which is that he sort of exists in this universe, which where he, has sort of discovered that if he bluffs his way through life, he can make people act as if He’s really the real thing, a world historically great figure or the best, the greatest real estate developer in New York or whatever thing he’s best at at that very moment. But underneath it all, there’s no satisfying, this kind of howling void inside him.
And that, in the meantime, the Supreme Court—because they’re in his pocket—is very likely to let the policies stand while litigation works its way through the court. And so he can basically end the First Amendment at the Pentagon, and he can abuse federal spending power to crush federalism in New York, make it so that New Yorkers don’t have a republican form of government, and really harm basically everyone who lives in New York and leave them in a harmed position for months, if not years, before he gets told, you can’t do that.
Sargent: Well, so that brings us to the piece you wrote, which is very good on what the way through this is. What I found most interesting about the argument that you made was that conventional ways out of this aren’t going to cut it.
You write that it’s time to dispense with that illusion. Why is that?
But I think you do need the people who have more power than you and I to imagine a world where this all comes to a head before the election, right? That he invokes the Insurrection Act, as they keep leaking they’re contemplating. Or even just short of that—he just floods cities in swing districts or whatever with enough mass federal police that they make it impossible to have a free and fair election, because lots of people are going to feel uncomfortable coming out to the polls.
And you want lawmakers and leaders who are fighting the fight that’s actually in front of them, as opposed to trying to increase the salience of healthcare—a thing that you probably won’t be able to do anything about unless you win that election that you need to realize is actually under threat now.
Sargent: Well, I do take some encouragement from the way people are talking about the “No Kings” rallies, which are set for this weekend. Folks, turn out at those, please. It’s really important. The bigger the show, the better, because they’re treating it as a kind of emergency moment. So Brian, do you take that sort of encouragement from the “No Kings” protests? Do you sort of see them as a kind of major stand in letting them know that we are going to absolutely insist on free and fair elections? And could it be effective in that regard to some degree?
And I think that there’s several reasons for that. I think that one is that they want to scare off people who are legitimately peaceful protesters. And I think they want to attract a more violent element—or violence-prone elements—on both sides of the political spectrum so that there’s a greater risk of a conflagration that Trump and Stephen Miller can then use as a pretext for a greater crackdown.
I take a lot of solace in what I’ve experienced personally since Mike Johnson and the other Republicans made those slanderous remarks, which is that people feel more emboldened to show up. That this is sort of like a Streisand effect for “No Kings”—and that people who might have sat it out are like, you know what, screw you. If, like, you’re basically going to say if you oppose Trump that that makes you pro-terrorist or anti-America, then we’re all going to show up, and you can’t slander all of us.
And I think the Democrats are starting to see that too. And so, whereas for the last almost ten years Democrats have wanted to be at arm’s length with the resistance movements or the protest movements that have formed around Trump—against Trump—they’re going to start participating in these. They are going to take the things that Mike Johnson says as a call to get involved themselves.
Sargent: I’m just going to expand on your point by saying that if the turnout is very big, as I expect it to be, I also think it could have the salutary effect of pushing Democrats out of that healthcare cocoon and emboldening them to get out there and engage the stuff much more frontally. Brian Beutler, always great to talk to you, man.
Beutler: It’s always good to be back.
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