Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Virginia Heffernan, a writer for The New Republic, has a great piece that plumbs deep into the MAGA psyche for clues to the state of our country. So we’re talking about all this with her today. Virginia, nice to have you on.
Sargent: So let’s start with an extraordinary exchange on Fox News. The screen is showing oil prices soaring while an anchor asks White House spokesperson Anna Kelly to comment on high gas prices. She launches into this.
Sargent: So note how spokesperson Anna Kelly says Trump is not in a rush—he’s not in a rush over these gas prices. Virginia, what I find so striking here is that the instinct is to go full cult and portray Trump as wielding total mastery over events, and accidentally she creates a potent talking point against him. Your thoughts on that?
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you, I love the distinction between dictator and emperor, but I’d probably go with despot in the end.
Sargent: Despot sort of conveys this ailing, angry, sunsetting figure. And the ailing despot image seems to capture him at these weird events where all his sycophants have to suck up to him while he’s falling asleep.
So then you just turn entirely to: we have to protect the leader. But no kings—maybe no despots, no tyrants is the right thing for us to be thinking right now, because kings—he’s not talking about building a wall. He’s not talking about outrageous policy, women’s reproductive rights. He’s so far beyond that. The ship has sailed—like, even whatever he ran on last time. He’s not even talking about, trans figures and athletes in sports. He’s talking about himself and his own majesty.
Trump can’t seem to get Iran to agree to a deal. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. That’s having a crippling impact on the global situation. And by every indication, Trump and the GOP are poised to pay a major political price for that. Can you talk about that? Anna Kelly just has no way to explain the actual situation that makes any sense to anybody.
Sargent: Trump apparently fell asleep at an event on Monday and Reuters had this absolutely crushing image of him—eyes closed—that was tweeted out by a Reuters reporter. The official White House rapid response feed responded like this: “He was blinking, you absolute moron.”
Heffernan: Yeah. Sometimes I think that—I mean, I’m just incurably hopeful about the future. I do trust the American people. I just trust them to find their way out. Not because we’re intrinsically decent, but because we are just bad at being governed by a despot or an emperor that doesn’t have popular support. We don’t even want to handle a single casualty in Iran. Bless us for that. The American people hate that war. They hate rising oil prices, and that contempt is now splashed all over Trump.
It’s opposed by 56 percent of Americans, supported by only 28 percent. Independents opposed it by 61 to 18. Working-class Americans by 54 to 28. And moderates by 64 to 16. Now, to sort of use your understanding of this—the ballroom, they’re trying to make us submit to the ballroom as almost a symbolic capitulation to his imperial and dictatorial presidency.
Heffernan: Yeah, it’s funny. A friend of mine from high school who’s been—you know, he triple-Trumped, as they say—he was MAGA, he’s been MAGA for a long time. I started to see him, as many of us do our friends, in a red cap on Facebook. And I sort of thought, he’s gone, right?
You probably know the story of Ozymandias. It’s told in a Percy Shelley poem called “Ozymandias,” and it conjures this really powerful image of a statue where it’s just two legs standing, and the pedestal says, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair”—but the statue is broken. The head is off. And that suggests—I think of that with Trump all the time.
This is an emperor, absolutely rotten, his brain—it seems tragic. And if this were a family member, he would really have to be sort of sidelined from public events. I know he doesn’t drink, but it just looks like a brain on fire and in trouble.
John Roberts (voiceover): I was talking to the president this morning. It was just before the Oval Office event. He kind of surprised me a little bit because he said, John, I just want to tell you, I’m very serious about this. So you could talk about this. I’m serious about beginning a process to make Venezuela the 51st state.
Anna Kelly (voiceover): Well, John, I won’t get ahead of what the president was comfortable sharing with you as far as those plans go. But look, this is a president who is famous for never accepting the status quo.
So it’s brought up very delicately. And then of course Anna Kelly has to respond in a way that invites everyone to just pretend not to notice how crazy this guy is. Can you talk about that? I found that to be a really extraordinary exchange.
It really just brings together the last gaspers in a cult who are still saying to the very end—but there are these people who have left MAGA, including Tucker Carlson, including Ashley St. Clair, this younger person who was involved with Turning Point, had a baby with Elon Musk, who are explaining what it looks like when you snap and when the lights come on and you say, I can’t do this anymore. And that is very, very useful for people just to provide an example of what it might look like if you could—this is from the MAGA base—if you could change your mind.
I just find this moment to be so indicative of where we are because everybody can see that this is absolute madness and that this guy has no business being president and talking that way to the country or the world. And yet that contrast between that obvious unfitness and the total maintenance of cult-like support for everything he says that we saw from Anna Kelly is just really disorienting on some level, I find.
But I think that when we think about the 30-plus percent who still say some version of they approve of him, I think we can’t mix them up with the real Smithers types—you know, Smithers in The Simpsons, like, somebody down here loves you, you know, who absolutely loves Montgomery Burns. I don’t think that the 30-plus percent who approve of him are that glued to him. And maybe they are rattled by people who are glued to him because it’s so self-abasing. It’s humiliating.
Sargent: So you wrote about this figure who was deep in the MAGA cult who left, who escaped the MAGA cult. What does it say about MAGA that there are all these escapees who are getting away from it and getting out from under it on the one hand, and just to close out, what’s going to become of MAGA when Trump is gone and there’s this gaping hole at the center of it all?
And it just looks hopeless. It looks tired. It’s been around 10 years now. It’s not witty. It’s not complicated and cool to be anti-woke. And there are no heirs to this. There are no heirs to this. And even the older people, the Tucker Carlsons are breaking with it ideologically. I just don’t think there’s much left, will be much left.
Heffernan: We have an end-state cult with the leader and some glazed-eyed people around him trying to desperately tell a story of why the emperor deserves to be treated with abasement and deference by everyone else—but we’re not buying it.
Heffernan: It’s an increasingly narrow band of people who are capable of this kind of—I’d say almost like a tradwife kind of style of deference to the patriarch. It just—I love that we’ve seen that Americans cannot tolerate this. We have a low tolerance for suffering for someone because we think he has divine powers. It’s just—we’re really, really not very good at it.
Heffernan: Greg, great to talk to you too.
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