Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Meredith Shiner: Thanks for having me, Greg.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): We have JD, obviously. The vice president who’s great. I think Marco is great. I think... I’m not sure if anybody would run against those two. I think if they ever formed a group, it would be unstoppable. I really do. I believe that. I would I would I would love to do it. I have the best numbers ever. It’s very terrible. I have my best numbers. If you read it... am I not ruling it out? You’ll have to tell me. All I can tell you is that we have a a great group of people, which they don’t. They have Jasmine Crockett, a low IQ person. They have AOC’s low IQ. You give her an IQ test. Have her pass the exams that I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed. I took– those are really hard. They’re really aptitude tests, I guess in a certain way. But, they’re cognitive tests. Let AOC go against Trump. Let Jasmine go against Trump. I don’t think Jasmine– the first couple of questions are easy, a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe, you know. When you get up to about five or six, and then when you get up to ten and twenty and twenty five, they couldn’t come close to answering any of those questions.
Shiner: I think that I have a few reactions. First and foremost, Donald Trump is a racist. And so the idea to him that women of color could be smarter than him is unfathomable. And it should be unacceptable for him to state that assertion as fact in the way that he did.
For him to disparage AOC or Jasmine Crockett’s intelligence — that’s a sign of his racism — but it’s everything that’s happening behind that. It’s what Stephen Miller is doing across this country, where they’re disappearing people from neighborhoods, especially here in Chicago where I live, where Russell Vought is shutting down the government, and that’s disproportionately impacting Black women who make up a huge share of civil servants.
Sargent: Well, just to pick up on your point, it really does seem to me that there’s no coincidence here—that he goes after nonwhite women, specifically AOC, who obviously represents an urban constituency—at the exact same time that he’s sending troops into cities and at the exact same time that he’s kind of lording it over Democrats by saying, my budget chief, Russell Vought—the Grim Reaper, as he presented him—is cutting programs that matter to Democrats. I think all those things are connected in a very, kind of, really virulent way.
The other day, they detained for hours a night-shift manager at a comedy club because he had the balls to try to intervene with someone being taken from the streets. And when we look at the aggregate impact of that, first of all, this is the state exercising racism to the extreme. But also we have to think about the fertile ground that created the conditions where there are people who think that’s OK.
So when you hear him disparage two members of Congress in that way, that’s reflective of broader views. And it does, as you mentioned, fit part and parcel with the randomized terror we’re seeing in cities across this country right now that should be front-page news everywhere—but that’s not what they’re going to confront him on Air Force One about.
He posted a fake AI video about right-wing ‘med beds,’ a conspiracy theory that he later deleted. He claimed Portland is burning down and that there aren’t any stores there anymore. He spread nonsense about Tylenol. He keeps talking about cutting prescription drug prices by a thousand percent or more, which is mathematically impossible. He posted, right on Truth Social, his command that his attorney general prosecute his enemies. He claimed a United Nations escalator sabotaged him.
But the contrast between where we are right now, in October 2025, and where we were last year, in 2024, I think is really huge. And when you think about someone like Jake Tapper, who tried to sell a book on this idea that the mainstream media overlooked his unfitness for office—but then now we’re in this place where you’re not exploring that with this president—you can’t really square that circle.
It’s a bit of an intangible quality in press coverage. It has a lot to do with the placement of stories, the tone of headlines, the kind of relentless quality of the coverage—those types of things—which are a little hard to quantify, but they’re clear. If you look for them, you can really see them.
Sargent: A hundred percent. And I think a public editor at the New York Times could write a big piece essentially saying, look, the New York Times coverage of Biden’s age really sent a loud signal to the country that there was something really terrible to be alarmed about. Now, in a certain sense, Biden’s age was a problem. And, you know, it turned out to be a bigger political problem than people like me acknowledged at the time. And I regret that, but that doesn’t justify this gap in coverage. You don’t see this kind of alarm in coverage of Trump’s mental fitness that you saw in coverage of Biden’s age.
What they are doing is documenting holistically what is happening to our neighbors. When a 40-year-old father is taken away from his 15-year-old daughter, who’s dying of cancer, by the federal government—when he’s disappeared, when that family no longer has a breadwinner and his teenager is on the verge of death—those are stories that are being covered here.
And so, in this little test sample, we’re seeing what happens when quality coverage that expresses seriousness and urgency, that doesn’t create a both-sides issue, informs the public in a way that I think is radically, radically shifting their perspective on what this administration is doing and what it means for our neighbors, our friends, our city, the people who work in our restaurants.
And so, for everyone in this ecosystem—this media-industrial complex in Washington, this political-media-industrial complex—to really evaluate their priorities, how they talk about things, what they talk about: they do have agency, even in this choose-your-own-adventure media landscape, to start shaping national perception. And they’re just choosing not to do it.
And yet, in the case of Donald Trump, they really don’t point out his obvious weakness. And Trump, by the way, is super sensitive to this. He unleashed this truly unhinged rant on Truth Social, claiming he has his best polling numbers ever. He raged about ads from the radical left—by which I guess he means Democrats—that talk about his low polling and said these ads shouldn’t be allowed to run.
Do you think there’s a presumption of Trump’s strength built into the media that really leads them to refuse to cover the true state of his weak grip on public opinion right now?
I think I came on a few months ago and we talked about my DNC piece and the idea of pundit brain, and how when D.C. reporters and the cable-TV apparatus try to explain something that looks different from what’s in front of people’s eyes, they’re effectively hurting their own credibility.
And regardless of the assumptions that the media makes, I think that their actions don’t align with reality in a way that really hampers their credibility and puts a roadblock between the average person’s willingness to engage with that sort of content in order to better understand the news.
Usually the story goes like this: well, Hillary tried to make an issue of Trump’s mental unfitness—that failed. Trump’s unfitness is ‘baked in’ for many voters—to use that awful cliché, ‘baked in.’ Voters have seen it for years; they don’t care.
He posted the imagery of a plane shitting on Americans even as he sends troops into cities. This is the thing, Meredith—he’s really much more of a visible mad-king figure than ever before. Isn’t there a way for Democrats to press that case a little more?
But here’s what I will say—and if I were them, this is what I would think about—it is apparent to everyone that Donald Trump is not the person who is calling the shots and running the federal government in a real way. And the thing that is terrifying about that is that the people who are running the country—the Cabinet he put in place this time—look different from the Cabinet he put in place the first time.
The idea that, in Trump’s absence—when he’s focusing on his ballroom or doing whatever he does on social media—Stephen Miller is getting to exercise his xenophobic fever dreams and terrorize communities—to me, if I were a Democrat, that’s what I would talk about. Because at this point, I don’t really care how Donald Trump does on a cognitive test. I care about what his government is doing to people. And Democrats should care more about that, too.
If Republicans in Congress aren’t doing anything, if the Supreme Court is completely beholden and basically intends to give the executive unlimited power, and he’s filled the executive with racist stooges—who is designing the policy that is breaking this country in a way that it can’t quickly be undone? There is no bouncing back. There’s no going back.
Sargent: Well, I think that the mad-king question is sort of a window into this, right? Donald Trump is completely out to lunch—he’s indulging his craziest fantasies on a daily basis. And as a result of that fundamental unfitness, that has created this vacuum for really, really serious fascists—basically, authoritarians—to run the place. And I think there’s a way to connect those cases.
And in that choice—their strategic choice—they’ve abdicated the field on what the value of government can and should be. And in this moment of absolute failure—I mean, this is, I think, the biggest government failure I’ve seen in at least my lifetime, holistically—to not be telling that story, to not be saying that, like, there’s no one driving this bus, or at least no one elected driving this bus, and we’re driving off the cliff—like, these things should be easy.
Sargent: Meredith Shiner, it’s always great to talk to you. Thanks for that big picture look at things.
Shiner: Thanks for having me, Greg.
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