Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
The careful reader of these stories will note that the only thing that isn’t discussed by Trump and his top advisors is whether Trump himself bears any responsibility for what’s happening on his watch. And these new follies really expose the perils of personalist rule—the perils of having a government that’s geared solely to satisfying the whims and corrupt interests of one man. So we’re talking about all of it with one of our go-to people on Trumpian narcissism, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte. Amanda, always good to have you on.
Sargent: So The Washington Post reports that at Camp David this week, Trump’s anger boiled over. He demanded that Hegseth explain these munitions shortages that have now kicked in. Trump vented that he thought it had all been “fixed.”
It really looks as if the truth is much darker—that Trump doesn’t know what the hell’s going on inside his own government.
Sargent: I think you actually get an important point there with this idea about him not understanding that if you use bombs, you have fewer bombs. Because he really does believe that he’s in a position of limitless strength. He thinks America has unlimited power, but by that he actually means he has unlimited power, because he couldn’t possibly be weak in any way.
Marcotte: Yeah, he has a very childish vision of what American military might is, which is, we definitely have a large military, one of the biggest and most expensive in the world, but it’s not limitless. And crucially, as we found out in Iran, it’s not unlimited in its ability to just crush enemies.
Sargent: Well, there’s another funny detail in the Post story. It says this, quote: “Hegseth defended himself and blamed his deputy for the shortages and for not ensuring Trump was fully apprised of the issue.”
Marcotte: This is something that I find super fascinating, and the examples are endless. It’s the paradox of MAGA, right? Which is, on one hand, they all worship Donald Trump as this almighty leader who knows everything and can do everything and is the greatest leader of all time and blah, blah, blah.
Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Trump goes out and he erupts on Truth Social over all this reporting. He says, quote: “The fake news is spreading false and completely unfounded rumors. Their fake reporting is treasonous.” Trump also says the U.S. has “massive” amounts of munitions, whereas all the reporting indicates shortages. And Trump even claims the leakers are now being “hunted.”
Marcotte: Yeah, because he wants to believe he is the state. He’s said as much in many ways, right? And so he’s often conflated insults to himself with crimes or treason or betrayal and unpatriotism, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s kind of, in a lot of ways, he’s just the most predictable person in the world. What is always continuingly amazing to me is all the people that elect to be in his pathway, because you could just say no. You don’t have to work for the man.
That he had essentially ushered in some sort of permanent and deep and important shift in American culture, that MAGA was the way of the future, that America was becoming, whatever MAGA envisions America being, and that being around Trump sort of guaranteed them, I guess, a high position in the hierarchy of MAGA, right? The firmament of MAGA going forward.
Marcotte: Yeah. So I recently covered this, writing about Markwayne Mullin, but there’s been a lot of political science research that points to why there’s so many mediocre and incompetent people in authoritarian regimes. And it is because they’re the kind of people that can’t get this job in any other way, right?
And you can just go down the list, you know. Pam Bondi was probably one of the more competent people, but even she was never going to be attorney general. Kash Patel, I mean, come on. And Markwayne Mullin, I mean, the guy pretends he was a UFC fighter. There’s no other universe where these people would have these jobs.
Sargent: What does the political science say about this and authoritarian regimes? I’m definitely interested in that.
And, like, TLDR, the people that are willing to do the bad things are often people that recognize they were never going to get a promotion otherwise. Whereas people who were promoted on their own merit are the kind of people who say, no, I’m not going to break the law, no, I’m not going to commit these crimes on your behalf.
Sargent: It’s almost like there’s a contract or a deal of sorts, right? Donald Trump knows that he can get certain types of people to relentlessly do his bidding once he kind of co-opts them into his cult. So he picks them because he recognizes in them a certain weakness of character and willingness to do whatever it takes to kind of be in the chosen charmed circle.
Marcotte: Yeah, probably because he recognizes himself in this, right? He is the person who is incompetent and has only ever succeeded in life because he was willing to break rules, lie, cheat, use deception, because he knows that he can’t actually succeed on his merits. And so I think he recognizes that in other people.
Like, if they’re going to face consequences for doing illegal, criminal, or otherwise terrible acts for him. Jeanine Pirro being a really good example. I mean, at the end of the day, she was unwilling to falsify evidence and perjure herself in front of a federal judge just to please the boss, because she knows that this isn’t going to last forever, and she’s worried about prison or disbarment.
They are supposed to treat him, and do, I guess, on some level see him as this real tribune of the people, this world historical figure who has done to liberal America what nobody else could ever do. No one else would have dared do it, right? And he crushed liberal America the way he has. And yet they’re seeing him pathetically rage and whine right in front of them about things like the Reflecting Pool, and making stuff up about the munitions, and refusing to take responsibility for everything. How do you think they square that in their own heads?
I mean, he is very good at using imagery to create the illusion of things that aren’t there. And the Reflecting Pool is a really good example of where that fixation goes. Because his view was, I can fail as a president, but if the Reflecting Pool looks nice and the pictures look nice, it will get enough people to believe the lies, right?
Sargent: Yeah, and I think they look at him as someone who has been able to accomplish something that no other Republican has been able to accomplish, right? This crushing of liberal America that I’m talking about. And the marshalling of imagery, fascist imagery—well, George Bush had “mission accomplished,” and they had reality is what we say it is, and so forth. They had the American empire and all that.
Marcotte: Yeah, and your point about triggering the liberals is really, really important here, because we cannot underestimate how much these people are motivated by this bitter, sad, angry resentment about liberals that laugh at them. And so, to your point, like, the thing about the Bush administration is they really did try to do the propaganda in kind of the old-school style, where it looked mighty, it looked amazing in a lot of ways.
Sargent: There’s really a lot of signs, as you pointed out, that the MAGA paradox isn’t sustaining itself in the minds even of some people around him. Can you talk about why the MAGA paradox, on some level, might be beset by such deep contradictions that it’s going to just eventually crack up, sort of inevitably at some point?
And Donald Trump has taken advantage of this, right? He’s the leader. So what he says goes, and it’s not to be questioned. And in fact, the fact that he’s so bad at this is excused away every day.
But at the end of the day, these systems depend on some buy-in from the public. And that faith is really being eroded pretty quickly, because most people—they voted, they actually feel like they have a role to play in this, and they want to see results from their leaders, not just, trust me, you know, on my word, and what I say goes, and never question dear leader.
Because just to go back to what we were saying before, a big source of the power was this idea that he had kind of tapped into some very deep source that would enable him to do what no other Republican president had been able to do before, which is march the country into fascism. And the vehemence of the rejection of all that, I think, shakes up the situation very profoundly, and shows, I think, real democratic resilience as well. What do you think of all that?
And so I do think they had this view that, A, they’d get in by tricking people into electing them, and then once in, they’d just pound us into submission. And as I often say to my friends who roll their eyes at me, we’re Americans, goddammit. It doesn’t work like that.
Sargent: Well, we’ve gotten very far afield from Donald Trump raging at Pete Hegseth, but I think that’s really the essence of it. Amanda Marcotte, always a great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
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