Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Unsurprisingly, Karoline Leavitt was more disgusting on this score than just about anyone else. Some media figures did fall for some of this, but really, this moment should drive home some fundamental truths for the media. Each side does use incendiary rhetoric about the other, but only one of the two parties is correct in describing the other as extreme and profoundly dangerous. Only one of the two parties is fundamentally hostile to liberal democracy and fundamentally hostile to the mission of the free press itself. Democrats should make this plain. We’re talking about all this with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, who has long been an observer of the media’s inability to cover that basic reality fairly. Matt, good to have you on.
Sargent: So as of this recording, Cole Thomas Allen of California has been charged with a plot to assassinate Trump. This came at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night. Matt, can you explain the bigger context here—how this dinner is a gathering of the elite of the elites, with media figures perhaps being too willing to be cozy with Trump, given his attacks on liberal democracy and the press itself?
When Donald Trump is president, this really takes on a new level, because of course Donald Trump doesn’t believe in the freedom of the press. He cannot convincingly give a paean to the First Amendment. He cannot recite the sort of pleasant clichés that you would expect in a situation like that. The idea of inviting him to an event like this should be anathema, but sadly hasn’t been.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): Nobody in recent years has faced more bullets and more violence than President Trump. This political violence stems from a systemic demonization of him and his supporters by commentators, yes, by elected members of the Democrat Party and even some in the media. This hateful and constant and violent rhetoric directed at President Trump day after day after day for 11 years has helped to legitimize this violence and bring us to this dark moment.
Gertz: Yeah, I mean, this is the sort of cynical, pathetic, cry-bully nonsense that I think we’ve come to expect from people like Leavitt. But if the White House is really concerned that the rhetoric has gotten out of control, then they could do something about how the president of the United States has referred to Democrats as traitors seven times in one week. It was last week.
Sargent: I think there’s another imbalance that we should home in on for a second, and the media is uncomfortable with saying this. I believe it’s this: Trump and Republicans just don’t condemn political violence when it comes from their side with anything close to the vehemence that Democrats do when it comes from their side.
Gertz: Yeah, I mean, I can give a couple of quick examples. You’ll recall back in October of 2022, a deranged person broke into the home of Nancy Pelosi, then the Speaker of the House. She wasn’t there, but her husband was. And the man beat him brutally—he was hospitalized in critical condition. And the response from Republicans and conservatives was twofold.
Then again, you had the tragic situation where two Minnesota legislators were shot, one killed alongside her husband. And again, the response there from the right-wing media, from senators, was to joke about the whole thing and suggest that this was all some sort of conspiracy overseen by Democratic Governor Walz. So the thing that Republicans tend to do when there is political violence committed against Democrats isn’t to call for the temperature to be turned down. It’s to pretend it’s not happening or suggest that if it has happened, it’s really funny.
Sargent: It really is unable to point that out. And here’s another way that that asymmetry manifests itself. I want to just ask you this question pretty straightforwardly, Matt. Is there an organized movement of political violence on the left? And is there an organized movement of political violence on the right?
If we’re talking about linking rhetoric to killings, how about describing a vast swath of the left as vermin, as the president has done?
Let’s listen to a little bit more of Karoline Leavitt. Check this out.
Sargent: Matt, what’s so troubling about this is that when Democrats and/or liberals call Trump a fascist or an authoritarian, it’s based on an actual assessment of what he’s doing to the country. Like, you don’t have to agree that those labels apply—I think they absolutely do—but even if you don’t agree that those labels apply, you can’t deny that there’s an actual intellectual case behind the use of them.
Gertz: I think that’s right. And I think just to add to it that it’s not just liberals and Democrats who use language like that to talk about Donald Trump. John Kelly, who was White House chief of staff during Trump’s first term—a retired general—says that Donald Trump is a fascist who wants to rule like a dictator. Jim Mattis has agreed with that statement. Mark Esper, another former defense secretary from Trump’s first term, has also said that it’s hard to argue against the idea that Donald Trump is a fascist. Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs, called him “fascist to the core.”
I’ll agree that it does seem like very harsh language to use. At the same time, I think we do have to reckon with the reality that this is not a president like any other. It is one who is willing to use state power in ways that no other modern president has done. And because of that, he does get tagged with unusual descriptors for an American president.
Trump’s White House has also tried to punish outlets for not following his decree that they use terms like “Gulf of America.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tried to strong-arm news organizations into signing away their independence. He’s opened the Pentagon’s press room to rank MAGA propagandists. So it’s not just that the media is failing to recognize that one party is fundamentally fascist or authoritarian and the other isn’t. It’s that they won’t even point this out when they themselves are the targets of it, Matt.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Look, the Trump war on the press has been one of the major through lines of his political rise, of his terms in office. He was sort of clumsy about some of these efforts during his first term, but approached the second with a real dedicated plan to try to use the levers of state power to cudgel the press into line.
Sargent: Matt, there’s another dark element to this that I think we should address as well, which is that when Donald Trump and Republicans call Democrats things like Antifa or communists, and when they attack Democrats for using harsh rhetoric about the president, they’re not just making a rhetorical case—they’re laying the groundwork for more use of state power against Democrats and liberals.
Gertz: Yeah. I mean, I think the repression is already underway. As we speak, Joe diGenova, who is a crackpot Republican lawyer, one who’s often appearing in right-wing media to run with various conspiracy theories, has been appointed by the Justice Department to oversee what they’re calling a grand conspiracy case down in Florida.
But the full power of the Justice Department is now behind attempting to make a federal case out of what basically looks like 10 years of Sean Hannity monologue stuck in a blender. It’s the sort of thing that would be very funny except for how dangerous it really is. And of course, the sort of waste of resources that that sort of thing entails.
We’ve seen it with Jerome Powell, who was investigated basically because Donald Trump thought that he was doing a bad job at the Fed. And they sort of trumped up an investigation to get him, and a whole host of other cases like this that this Justice Department is trying to spool out.
And so that’s good. But on the other hand, you still can’t get the press to level with the American people about what we’re talking about here, which is that one party does not function as an actor in a liberal democracy, and the other fundamentally does. So where do we go from here, Matt?
And yes, I think the narratives that get woven by the sort of political journalism elite often do not fully take that information into account. But the information still gets out, right? What I worry about with things like the CBS takeover by David Ellison, the possibility that CNN will come under his thumb again—this billionaire who’s a major Trump supporter—is that you’ll see a bit of a tone shift from the kind of on-air, chattering-class stuff.
Sargent: Yeah, Democrats, if they take back one or both houses of Congress, are going to have to have a defend-the-media agenda in essence. But let me tell you something, Matt—even if Trump’s authoritarianism does constrain the press in some major way, hey, at least we’ll still have those White House Correspondents’ Dinners.
Sargent: Apparently not. Matt Gertz, awesome to talk to you as always. Thanks so much for coming on.
Gertz: Always a pleasure.
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