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: Thank you, Greg.
Waldman: Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the reaction that the administration was hoping for. But one of the things that we’ve seen is that on their social media, they really do seem to be highlighting the cruelty of a lot of their policies, especially their immigration policies. And they do it in a couple of different ways, through different formats, using different sorts of genres, and it really is quite a comprehensive strategy.
So they want you to be kind of pumped up, but also to find it funny. And that really is reflective of a kind of a sadism that’s driving that.
“We won’t apologize for deporting dangerous criminal, illegal murderers, rapists, and pedophiles from our country. Anyone who would defend these sick monsters must be stupid, or is it slow?”
Waldman: Yeah, and the “is it stupid or is it slow” is a reference to one of Sabrina Carpenter’s lyrics. And so they try to be very much kind of like tuned in with the sort of cultural space in which they’re operating. But one of the things that’s so different about this administration from administrations before it is that the people who deal with the media or have any kind of public-facing role, they’ve abandoned the kind of propriety that we always saw. There was an incident where a reporter asked a White House spokesperson who had given instructions for some kind of official action, and the reply they got in their email was, “Your mom.” This is the way that the people who are official spokespeople for the United States government are acting.
Sargent: Well, on another front, let’s listen to what Trump said to reporters during a cabinet meeting on Tuesday. Here he’s talking about Somalis in Minnesota. Listen.
Sargent: Right now, it’s being reported that Trump’s stormtroopers are going to start arresting Somalis in Minnesota. So I think with this he’s kind of priming the MAGA masses, ginning up their bloodlust, letting them know that the spectacle of arrests is coming and they should get their popcorn ready. Again, the through line with that White House video where they were celebrating people getting pinned to the ground and handcuffed—the spectacle of suffering is the oxygen that they breathe, basically. What do you think, Paul?
But they also want to do it in a way that’s a big show. And what they want to communicate is their own willingness to commit acts of brutality on behalf of, supposedly, white people. And they don’t use the word white, but that’s who we’re really talking about. So we now have an asylum policy where asylum claims are not being accepted from any oppressed group anywhere in the world except for one: white South Africans. This is really explicitly white supremacist.
Honestly, I’m kind of surprised it took him so long to get around to Somali Americans, which is a group that I’m sure most Americans haven’t really thought of. They’re not the biggest immigrant group in the world. Trump always has hated Ilhan Omar, the congresswoman from Minnesota, for a long time. And he says the most despicable, bigoted things about her in particular. And he did mention her a couple of times in that Cabinet meeting. But now he’s saying that everyone from the community that she comes from—none of them deserve to be here. And we are going to go start rounding people up, and everyone should applaud.
And here’s another one. At the very outset of the administration, when they really started ramping up the mass deportations and they started talking about how they were going to switch to military planes to remove people, they would kind of frogmarch the migrants onto these planes in this really showy way and take pictures of it and take video of it. And these people were in manacles, right? They were filming them in manacles and parading them before cameras for MAGA to get thrilled by.
Waldman: Yeah. And we do have these kind of competing narratives playing out in social media because on one hand you have the things that the administration is putting out, which is—you say—show the immigrants who are being arrested as though they are—the phrase that the administration always uses is the “worst of the worst.” And of course, when we actually find out who they are, it turns out none of them have criminal records—or very few of them anyway—but they want to portray them as though every single person that’s being arrested is Hannibal Lecter.
That is an entire counternarrative that is also playing out on social media. And that one is less produced. It’s more candid. It’s faster. There’s an even greater volume of it because it’s coming from all different kinds of people and not just the official accounts. And we don’t really know yet which one of those is really kind of predominant in people’s minds. But I think that this is a real sort of arena of media contestation and the social media that so many of us are kind of marinating in these days—that despite all of the administration’s efforts, there are a lot of people who are putting up resistance using the same kind of tools and trying to fight back that way.
Waldman: I think maybe they are. And you know, the theory at the heart of what the administration is doing and what Trump’s entire career is based on is that we should all be our worst selves, that our kind of darkest impulses should be the ones that reign. We should be the most bigoted, the most corrupt, the most angry and hateful—that that’s our truest self is our worst self. And if you look at who is in this administration, it is a collection of the worst people from top to bottom. And the implicit argument is that we should all be that way. And we should cheer when people get brutalized. And we should laugh when we see the corruption because everybody is corrupt and everybody is sadistic. And that’s who we ought to be. And the truth is that that’s not who most people want to be.
Megyn Kelly (voiceover): So I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time. So that they lose a limb and bleed out a little.
Waldman: Yeah, it really does just kind of take away the veil of normalcy and propriety. And I think that most people react against that. You know, one of the things that social media does is it pushes us to kind of engage in that kind of thing. It makes us not just polarized, but also kind of want to indulge in those kinds of thoughts. Again, I think most people like, it’s not that we may never have the thought, but once we do, there’s something that causes us to say, You know what, that’s not who I really want to be. But part of the way you get clicks if you’re Megyn Kelly and get people to listen to your podcast is to really kind of get down in the nastiest parts of your own thoughts.
Sargent: I think maybe the through line here is what you might call the joy of dehumanization. For MAGA, that’s a great, joyous occasion. Anytime that they can dehumanize whoever is sort of the subject of the two-minute hate of the moment, it’s time for a party. You had this piece at Public Notice, a Substack as well, where you drew a through line from the goons kidnapping people off the streets, the edgelords crafting the social media strategy, the disgusting lies about immigrants, and then you tied that all to what we’ve been hearing lately about all these mid-level Republican staffer types giggling in their Nazi group chats, as you put it. They’re all kind of participants in this broader MAGA project.
Waldman: I really don’t think so. And I don’t want to say there’s going to be a return to normalcy. I think that would be naïve. But one of the things that Trump offered his movement was that if you’re really hardcore MAGA, it’s fun and they want to make it fun. It’s got its own merch. It’s got this kind of excitement. Trump makes a lot of jokes, and there is a kind of a liberatory thrill in not having to feel like you’re constrained by the norms of society anymore. And if you want to let your bigotry have full rein, then you can do that. And it feels exciting to do that. And there was always a kind of element of fun that drew people into Trump’s movement. And that was always a minority of people.
Sargent: Trump really is one of the most charismatic politicians in modern times. He’s up there with Barack Obama, but in his own twisted, crazy way. He’s a deep, really seriously talented politician, and he knows how to talk to all these disgusting impulses in people. Paul Waldman, always great to talk to you, man. Folks, if you like this discussion, make sure to check out his Substack. It’s the Cross Section. Paul, thanks for coming on.
Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.
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