Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Mona Charen: Hi Greg, always good to see you. Does he have a vision for international affairs other than me, me, me?
Charen: This is our mad king. We now have Caligula as president of the United States. I don’t know if you ever—you probably didn’t, it’s before your time—but there was a show on BBC decades ago called I, Claudius. And it has this fantastic depiction of the Roman senators coping with the clearly deranged, but unbelievably egotistical Caligula.
And you could understand the bowing and scraping of Roman senators because, as I said, he could order them to be executed. Our senators are doing basically the same thing and they have much less to lose. They are just cowards beyond belief, spineless worms.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): America is back and the whole world knows it. President Trump is undoubtedly the leader of the free world. He’s also the businessman and negotiator in chief. And so there was a very long list of foreign leaders and business leaders who wanted to meet with the president today. And he’s been taking part in many of those private meetings behind closed doors.
Charen: And further, they know how dangerous he can be. And so, you know, it really is a combination of contempt and fear. Right. I mean, contempt because he’s an obvious, deranged idiot. Fear because he managed to get himself elected president of the United States. And so they are in a horrible position, these European leaders and every leader around the world—to say nothing of us, Greg.
Charen: Yes, yes, yes. 100 percent. Yeah, the bright smile, the glassy eyes. Yes, it is, you know: I am going to spout complete BS, the opposite of the truth, and do it cheerfully.
She said this: “His written remarks referred to Greenland as a piece of ice because that’s what it is.” That’s Leavitt, right? First of all, he does use the phrase “piece of ice” in the speech, but that’s not an issue here. What’s at issue is the confusing of Greenland and Iceland.
Charen: Look, just as people cannot be talked out of grocery prices, you know, being high—which is one of the things Trump is attempting to do—you cannot talk people out of their sense that a president is losing his marbles.
Obviously, that’s not what happened. And they assume levels of credulity and stupidity on the part of their viewers that I don’t think even the most crazed or devoted Trump acolyte is going to be able to accept.
Donald Trump (voiceover): They’re not there for us on Iceland. That I can tell you. I our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So Iceland’s already cost us a lot of money.
Charen: Utterly clear. You know, he... he’s almost 80. He makes these mistakes. And you know what? Frankly, I wouldn’t even dwell on it if he hadn’t been so vicious about Biden’s mental lapses and... and verbal slips, you know, where... where he was just as cruel and as contemptuous and terrible as you could possibly be, one human to another. Yeah, no mercy.
But for Trump to smear Somalis in such racist terms before the entire world and for Trump to just lie his ass off about wind power before the entire world, these are more than just embarrassments. These are just declarations that the United States just can’t be counted on. That’s what I fear. I fear that people just look at the United States and say, you know, it’s over.
You know, the fact is everybody in the world understands—and I highly commend Mark Carney’s address in Davos, if you haven’t read that, if people haven’t read that yet, it’s very powerful—where he says: We’re not going to pretend anymore that the United States is the world leader and the leader of the free world. That’s over. It’s gone.
And all of us and our children, our grandchildren—I now have a grandchild—they’re going to pay the price because we’re not going to have the kind of security or prosperity that we came to rely on as our birthright. We’re destroying it unilaterally by suicide.
Charen: Oh, thank you for that.
Charen: Yeah, look, I will admit that before the 2024 election, I suffered from a lack of imagination, Greg. I was arguing that he would destroy NATO, but I thought he was going to do that by abandoning Ukraine and possibly reducing America’s contribution to our collective defense and signaling that he might not come to the aid of countries if they were attacked by Russia.
He is quite mad, but not quite mad enough for people to recognize it. You know, it’s... he’s right on the cusp of being a complete lunatic, but not quite.
Sargent: Well, I guess the one bright spot, if you can call it that, is that Trump seemed to confirm that he’s not going to launch a ground invasion of Greenland after all.
And I almost felt like putting up a skywriting or something to the Europeans saying: Don’t back down, don’t flatter him anymore, don’t appease him. I think we’ve learned that appeasement is a bad policy, Europe, haven’t we? If you stand up to him, he backs down, but that’s the only way. And that and the markets.
Now Mona, so the MAGA mythology holds that Davos elites, globalist elites are, you know, the scourge of working Americans and that MAGA populism is about essentially avenging the wrongs that were done to American workers by those people in Davos.
Charen: You know, there should be a cartoon with Trump threatening tariffs by holding a gun to his own head because the... but not his head, but his supporters’ heads, because who pays the tariffs? Who pays?
And so the supposed populism is such a sham. I completely agree with you. And Trump loves nothing more than to hobnob with the wealthy, and he has done nothing but serve their interests. If you are connected to Trump, he will pardon you. He will give you deals. He will get your company in on shares of major companies where he’ll say the United States will take a share.
That is beyond the reach of America’s banking laws or any disclosures. This is like a private income stream that Trump is creating for himself and his pals, potentially. It is just beyond belief, the levels of corruption and foul self-dealing that we are seeing with this presidency.
But also, if you think about it, the nonsense about windmills and so forth and wind power is also, in a way, a scam perpetrated on his own voters who in the long run may end up with higher energy costs. And by the way, Trump is ceding the future of green energy to China. And how is that MAGA? How is that taking on the globalists?
And so it is totally to the benefit... the trade stuff is completely to the benefit of China. And the blowing up of the NATO alliance, the most successful military, economic, and diplomatic cooperation engine that the world has ever known... who does that benefit? It’s Putin’s wet dream. I’m sorry, he’s been wanting this forever.
Sargent: Yeah. Way to take it to the Davos elites on behalf of working Americans, right? Well, here’s another good one as well. Listen to this exchange between a reporter and Mike Johnson concerning Trump’s claim at the speech that we’ve gotten nothing out of NATO.
Mike Johnson (voiceover): I haven’t seen the President’s speech. I look forward to seeing it. And I’m not going to give comments on something I haven’t seen yet.
Okay, yeah, here and there you hear Republicans objecting, but the vast majority of Republicans are just going along with it. And I don’t know what to make of that.
I think of Lisa Murkowski. And it’s very notable that Lisa Murkowski is given the freedom politically to do that because Alaska has ranked-choice voting. So that disempowers the right-wing primary voters in Alaska. And so she has been much more reasonable.
But yeah, the Republican Party has become a sort of prostrate bunch of men and women who simply echo the party line. Karoline Leavitt, back to her, right? I mean, that plaster, glazed-eyed, Yes, Master. That’s what they look like.
“Based upon a very productive meeting that I have had with the Secretary General of NATO, we have formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic region. This solution, if consummated, will be a great one for the United States of America and all NATO nations.”
Charen: Yes, that’s exactly what I expect. There will be some cosmetic thing that Trump can point to as [a] big victory, but this is a total climb-down on his part. And it’s going to be dressed up as something else.
Sargent: Is there any way to come back?
We did shoulder a huge military burden that let the Europeans spend more on their health care plans and other things because we were spending more on defense. Look, Europe has roughly as large a GDP as the United States does. But it’s going to be a struggle for them to gear up their defenses.
Sargent: Well, just to close this out, I just want to point out that the coverage of this was absolutely brutal for Trump. So all the spin in the world of Karoline Leavitt can’t cover it up.
A number of journalists and others have relentlessly pointed out the conflation of Greenland and Iceland and not let Leavitt get away with the spin. Still others have pointed to the hideous racism and the absurd discussion of the West getting polluted by foreign cultures. Another disgusting thing.
Sargent: Yeah, it’s just an absolute horror show for America for him to say that.
I’m not saying we’re going to perish. I’m just saying that this is a complete abdication of world leadership and respect. And so for us, it will require a long time to climb back into respect. I think it’s also for us at home.
Sargnet: Well, the work begins now. Mona Charen, really, really wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much for all that.
Charen: Thanks, Greg.
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