Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.
Shephard: Well, first of all, there are no apes in The Lion King. So it was always a ridiculous defense to begin with. But I think more to the point, you see this happen all the time now—that there is this, like, real rush, particularly within the administration, whenever Trump does something vile or racist, to just back it fully to the hilt before they can do anything to change it or to reverse course.
But I think one of the differences between this administration and the prior or the previous Trump administration is that, like, you have these Karoline Leavitt figures that just go out there and say, “Actually, it’s good that he did this.” We’re just going to make up all this ridiculous stuff about this racist nonsense and say why it’s good that he posted it. And then they have to back down. And I think it makes him look significantly worse.
Sargent: I think you’re getting at an important dynamic here, which is that people like Karoline Leavitt and others around the president now really are a whole lot more bought into this kind of ethos where you “never back down” because the “liberal enemy” will just take what it can get from you.
Also, I think he is also just a unique figure in American politics, right? And I think he is a uniquely charismatic figure in a way that JD Vance, for instance, is not. But another, I think, point that is not worth letting go of is that when it comes to depicting the first Black president and his wife as apes in a video, even a, you know, a historically charismatic president who is historically shameless can’t get away with that.
John from New Mexico: I voted for the president; I supported him. But I really want to apologize. I mean, I’m looking at this awful picture of the Obamas. What an embarrassment to our country. All this man does is tell lies. He is not worthy of the presidency. He takes bribes blatantly, and now he’s being a racist blatantly.
Sargent: Note how he doesn’t just denounce the racist attack on the Obamas. He also strongly criticizes mass deportations and how they’re not going after criminals—they’re going after kids and non-criminals. Alex, we always talk about how there were signs saying “Mass Deportations Now” at the GOP convention. But a lot of people clearly didn’t think through what this meant. What’s your reaction to this man’s amazing tirade?
I think that we’re not even close to seeing the bottom here yet, but it’s really, really starting to break. I think Minneapolis kind of—to my surprise—is one of the things that really helped do it. And I think, especially as the administration keeps trying to push to deport five-year-old Liam Ramos, it’s only going to get a lot worse.
Senator Tim Scott said, quote: “It’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” close quote. Representative Mike Lawler called it “wrong and incredibly offensive.” And Roger Wicker said: “This is totally unacceptable. The president should take it down and apologize.”
Shephard: No, I think that one of the big shifts is that there was this idea in the last election—”Let Trump be Trump”—sort of pushed by Susie Wiles in particular, currently the chief of staff. That, essentially, the president knows best and that what he’s doing may seem kooky and off the wall and irrelevant to politics as usual, but pursuing that kind of stuff is what people like about him and you should just let him do it.
And so I think what we’re starting to see now is an increased willingness for politicians to call this kind of stuff out. But it sort of just returns us to, I think, one of the biggest fictions of Trump I: which is that Trump can stop doing all of this stuff; that he can somehow not post a fake, racist Lion King video and maintain the aura of being Trump. “Trumpian greatness” will come when he drops all that stuff. That’s who he is. The core of Trump’s political appeal is, like, walking right up to the line where he posts a racist Lion King video.
Shephard: Everything always makes me feel ancient now when I talk about Trump, the first Trump... Trump... but there was the moment in the fall of 2015 where he had also posted a racist video and took it down and said, “ was made by a young intern who’s sorry about it.” And you’re like, “Well, he’s obviously lying then. He’s obviously lying now.” There is—it’s a White House where no one can be accountable because the president’s not accountable. And again, this is going to happen again. And it may happen again on Monday after the Super Bowl, right? Or Sunday night.
And I guess Rogan is kind of MAGA-adjacent, you might put it, and a lot of these young male figures are MAGA-adjacent, but they’re pretty fluent in “MAGA-ese” to some degree, right? If that’s the right way to put it. But you know, it’s worth pointing out that it’s precisely figures like Joe Rogan who are now breaking with the president over the ICE war on Americans. He’s been relentless in criticizing the ICE stuff, and he’s caught a lot of flak from MAGA for it as well. I really do think that you’re getting at something important there. There has been a move in a way by some on the right to make some progress in the culture, but they’re kind of throwing it away with what they’re doing.
There was just this sort of larger sense that supporting Trump was kind of “cool” among certain, like, young men in particular. And that was, I think, reinforced in large part or pushed by podcasts like Rogan, who you mentioned, or Theo Von, the sort of Nelk Boys kind of... nihilistic Canadian pranksters. And I think what we’ve really seen over the last few months is that all of these figures, I think, regret their support of Trump in some way. You’re just not seeing kind of open—the open embrace of Trump anymore.
And again, the halftime show there is being supported, among criticism from the MAGA base, by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell—one of the least “woke” people in human history. [It] will be a kind of anti-Trump bonanza with Green Day and Bad Bunny. There’s going to be a huge culture war backlash against it. But I think what we’re seeing is that that backlash is going to make MAGA people look even more ridiculous. Right? Normal people are watching the Super Bowl. The sort of MAGA base is having this kind of Turning Point USA-themed “alternative” halftime show with Kid Rock and a few country singers named Colton. And you know, no one’s gonna watch that, right? Like, normal people are gonna watch Bad Bunny.
Even just a few months ago, the amount of hubris about the culture and MAGA and its cultural dominance was really quite pronounced, to the point where they could really say, like: “You know, we don’t care if you hate ICE. We’re going to swarm them all over the Super Bowl.” And now that’s been quietly canceled. And you’re not going to see ICE at the Super Bowl because Trump and Kristi Noem cannot afford a moment where ICE is booed. I couldn’t guarantee that that would happen at the Super Bowl—I don’t really know—but it’s certainly likely, or at least possible, that they would receive a pretty hostile reception. And that’s not something Trump and MAGA and Noem can stand.
And I think, you know, as we turn the corner into 2026, you just see no evidence of that at all. Trump can’t show his face at the Super Bowl. Whether he attends a World Cup match this summer, I think, is an open question. But the truth of the matter is that if they go anywhere, they’re met with massive public resistance and backlash. You see it at the Grammys. You see it at the Super Bowl. You see it in the streets of Minneapolis. You see it all over the country. And I think there was this brief moment where it seemed like we were entering into a kind of “new era” defined by hard-edged, right-wing culture, and that everything had changed. And all of that power that they had a year ago? It’s just already gone now.
Shephard: I always appreciate it.
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