Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Moira Donegan: Thank you for having me.
Reporter (voiceover): Board members of the Kennedy Center voted unanimously to rename it the Trump-Kennedy Center. What was your reaction?
Sargent: So that’s really something. He was very surprised and honored. Yet the board of trustees is made up of his allies, including Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, second lady Usha Vance, and a few others. I think this vote might have been rigged. What do you think?
Sargent: Yeah, I mean, I thought that was just remarkable because for him to go out there and just sort of pretend that this was a great honor and he was humbled by it was really To me, just the most perfect encapsulation of his megalomania I’ve seen in a while. What did you think of it?
And I think, you know, adding the word Trump to this very prestigious but not very politically substantive institution that is the Kennedy Center will now, like, give him another boost, another sense of his own importance. That definitely seems like something that the people around Donald Trump are very eager to assure him of.
“I have just been informed that the highly respected board of the Kennedy Center, some of the most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center the Trump Kennedy Center because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building. Congratulations to President Donald J. Trump. The building will no doubt attain new levels of success and grandeur.”
Donegan: Yeah, I think that there is a real sense in Trumpworld that Trump needs to be bolstered, right? That he needs encouragement or sort of reassurance in public of his importance. There is a sense, I think, definitely in the pundit class and in the Beltway, and I think this is inevitably beginning to penetrate the White House itself, that Trump is kind of on his way out.
It’s about the fracturing within his coalition, which has really intensified following the death of Charlie Kirk. And it’s about his, like, visible aging, his visible physical decline, which is becoming harder to ignore and really conspicuous after he made such a big deal in the 2024 cycle over the age and infirmity of President Joe Biden.
Donegan: Yeah, I think there are some things that are peculiar about the Trump phenomenon but might be, like, more illustrative about American politics in general. One of which is that Trump always is a lot more powerful when he’s out of office than when he’s in office. People love Donald Trump when he’s not the president, and they tend to hate him when he’s the president. Or about half of people like him when he’s not the president. And very few like him when he is the president, right?
Now he’s in his second term. He is the president. His claim to being a challenge or sort of an outsider to Washington hegemony is sort of wearing thin when this guy has dominated American politics for a decade. And I think that people are noticing, you know, prices aren’t going down. My wages aren’t going up. My standard of living still seems circumscribed. America does not, in fact, seem great again. In fact, living here, it’s starting to really feel like a nation in decline.
So they see Trump’s use of his executive power for the bolstering of his own ego and for the bolstering of these kind of, like, niche cultural grievances of his base, and they don’t see their own lives getting better.
Donegan: Trump was for a long time pretty successfully able to pitch himself to members of his base, but also to sort of, like, disaffected voters without perhaps very strong political commitments in any direction. As a challenger to a corrupt elite, as somebody who is going to take down these systems of favoritism and sort of decadence and, principle-free greed, right, that seem to sort of characterize the leadership of a lot of political and institutional life in the U.S.
This picture that is emerging after 10 years of Donald Trump at the center of American politics, after, you know, going on now six years of national attention paid to the Epstein scandal, it doesn’t seem like he’s a noble outsider challenging these corrupt elites. It seems like he is a corrupt elite, perhaps, you know, the most corrupt elite, the most corrupt and the most elite that Americans get.
I want to highlight another number from the Fox poll because it’s very heartening. A 53 percent majority opposes the U.S. military using deadly force against Venezuelan quote-unquote drug trafficking boats. That’s up from 47 percent last month. To your point about Trump’s longtime ability to sell himself as a foil to the elites, as a traitor to the elite class, as it were—this is really part of it, right?
I think that suggests two things. One, a lot of voters just know he’s fundamentally unfit to be making these national security decisions. But on the other, to your broader point here, he’s become kind of a member of the blob, the foreign policy blob who’s, you know, at risk of getting us involved in foreign entanglements. The whole mystique seems to be imploding.
What Donald Trump’s great gift is, he’s quite funny for one thing, but he also has a great sense—or used to have a great sense—of how to wield grievance, right? He used to know what pissed people off or what they found annoying or what they found entitled and be able to wield that to his own purposes.
Sargent: And the public opposes just the bombings, never mind a land invasion or whatever the hell he thinks he’s planning.
And there’s also a sense that the Defense Department in particular, but like, sort of, the State Department as well, and then the foreign policy apparatus is very chaotic under Donald Trump. He seems to be handing Vladimir Putin a victory in Ukraine in a kind of, like, needless or, like, a little bit premature or somewhat bullying way.
He’s kind of absent from actual presidential leadership, and he has appointed these people who are zealots and conspiracy theorists and drunks and sort of uniformly quite reckless to make decisions for him.
Sargent: I do think it’s heartening that a majority opposes the bombings because it really strongly suggests that the emperor is very naked right now. I want to talk about your great piece. You drew this really interesting connection between the appearance of Trump’s physical weakness and also his political weakness—that one feeds off the other in a sense. Can you kind of walk us through the bullet points on what’s happening in terms of his physical and mental decline? Like, just give us the case.
But the guy keeps falling asleep in front of cameras. Kind of shockingly often right now. He has reduced his number of public appearances significantly. He has dramatically curtailed his domestic travel. He is no longer, according to a New York Times analysis of his schedule, really doing any official work before noon or usually after 5 p.m. So he has a very short workday. He’s spending a lot of time at his golf resorts and doing no walking there. He has been photographed with conspicuously swollen ankles. He tends to be sitting even when other people in the room are standing, like even when it’s a photo op in which everyone else is standing, he tends to sit. And there is some sort of persistent injury or bruising on the back of his right hand, which is alternately covered with Band-Aids or makeup.
He has also, we know, had an MRI recently, which is a pretty serious diagnostic imaging tool that is not typically used for exploratory purposes. The White House has said that this was a “preventative” measure. Other experts, including those who spoke to The New Republic, have said that an MRI would almost never be used for, like, a preventative measure. It would be used to monitor an ongoing condition, such as a heart condition or some other kind of underlying disease.
Sargent: Just to close this out on your point about the kind of confluence between his physical and political decline, we sort of opened this up by saying that a lot of the obsequiousness directed at Trump is partly to soothe him because he’s tanking so badly politically. But I really wonder whether it’s also because he’s tanking physically. You mentioned that there’s this need for his sycophants that they recognize a need to really prop him up.
Donegan: I don’t think so. I think these are some quite psychologically transparent people, right? These are not people with conundrums of inner lives. They’re pretty transparent in their motives. I will also say, I think this is one moment where there might be a distinction between the White House and the MAGA movement, right? Because one reason that Trump’s physical decline and his, like, evident physical weakness and frailty is so politically potent is not just the very recent example of Joe Biden and this sort of sense by a lot of the pundit class that they got it wrong that time and they have to sort of be on their toes this time.
So MAGA, I think, will persist in some form post-Trump. I think the virulent racism and white supremacy that he brought into the American mainstream of politics is probably here to stay. I think conspiracy theorizing as a form of political entertainment is probably here to stay, right?
Sargent: And just to bring it back to that brutal Fox News poll, that really, I think, underscores the fracturing of the MAGA coalition in a major way. It’s really falling apart or at least deteriorating pretty substantially.
Those people who were sort of keeping their mouths shut about what they didn’t like about one another—now they’ve got a decade of accumulated grievances, and they’ve got a lot of impatience, and they’re starting to go after one another. And that might be one of the best bits of good news for the Democrats going into 2026.
Donegan: Thank you, Greg. It was a pleasure.
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