Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
These things are linked. Probably nothing is wrecking the MAGA coalition more than his inability to find a way out of the war. You can see other signs that MAGA media is completely lost on how to deal with Trump’s total impotence. None of this was supposed to happen. So we’re trying to parse where MAGA goes now with New Republic contributing editor Virginia Heffernan, who’s been writing really well on the MAGA crack-up. Virginia, thanks for coming on.
Sargent: So Marjorie Taylor Greene is almost like a MAGA oracle at this point, or maybe like MAGA’s Greek chorus or something. She posted this video on TikTok about the midterms. Listen to this.
Sargent: When Marjorie Taylor Greene says the coalition is falling apart, all these voters feel betrayed by you, Mr. President—she isn’t just making a prediction. She’s essentially saying to these voters, you know, you shouldn’t show up for this guy because he fucked you, right? That’s what she’s really saying. And it’s true. She’s right about it.
And the way she describes those earlier voters, so his, like, diehard supporters in both 2020 and 2024—she says that they are basically the people that she’s often standing with. Women who care about affordability, but these are the women who may have been anti-vax, who may have been open to RFK, who may have even supported QAnon, the Marjorie Taylor Greene stuff. But then, on the more sane side of things, also really don’t want war.
And then the affordability piece, which brings together household management and kind of feeding my children and how much do groceries cost. And when Marjorie Taylor Greene points out, when he called affordability a quote, “Democrat hoax,” when he called Epstein a Democrat hoax, that really touched a nerve with this population that she believes—and I think maybe rightly—is crucial to keeping Trump in power.
Now, Virginia, The New York Times pointed out aptly that he isn’t specifying which countries he’s actually willing to punish, which could be countries like China. And it also pointed out that this is going to be a really complex and time-consuming thing to enforce on other countries, even if he goes through with it.
Heffernan: Part of what made the neocons for a time so effective is that they really looked like they had the inside line. When they were selling us on the fact of WMDs, and it was Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld—these people, like the architects of the war in Vietnam, they sort of had some kind of aura around them, like they had some kind of genius to them, like a sort of Elon Musk aura. That would give them clout way beyond what they were actually doing, which was incredibly destructive and misguided.
Sargent: Well, I think you’re putting your finger on a really important irony here, because remember, Donald Trump rose to power in 2016 by making the case that the Bushes and the Rumsfelds and the Colin Powells were part of this corrupt elite that said that it was going to organize the world in an effective way, but ultimately lied to the American people and ended up costing the lives of thousands of Americans abroad, in that awful extended quagmire.
Heffernan: And I think he actually was against the Iraq War, sort of, at the time. I mean, I think on Howard Stern he says, reluctantly, he supported it, but he really was against it.
Sargent: And they weren’t taking the oil.
Sargent: And we’re not going to waste young men. We’re not going to pour young men down the tubes, right?
I mean, you think, on the other side of the aisle, Graham Platner, right? Like, came back just with absolute contempt for the war machine. And so they also had this manly opposition to war. And it worked well with the kind of more feminine—I’m putting that in quotes—opposition to the war that Marjorie Taylor Greene articulates, which is, like, fear for our children, fear for people, fear for soldiers, and strong support for the military. And that combination of things had some nice heft to it.
I think this goes to what we were talking about before, Virginia, which is that a lot of these propagandists just don’t know what to do right now, because Trump is so visibly stuck, and it’s all so unpopular, and their own audiences are turning against them over their support for the war. And so can you talk about that dynamic? It seems like the propaganda now has hit this wall where there’s no audience for it anymore.
So I don’t know what Hannity thinks of the actual war in Iran. I assume he’s in favor, but whatever. But he will not talk about it if he thinks the audience doesn’t want to hear about it, which is what he’s been doing.
They too are not getting credit. They too have run into a system that doesn’t respect them. And if Trump is not getting credit for something, people might be able to find in him the, like, persecuted Trump that they like.
And of course, the funny thing is, they’re required to treat it as fact that Trump’s defeat over Iran has been absolute, that it’s been one of the greatest military triumphs in world history. They’re required to repeat that, because Trump has said it. So now, how do they explain the fact that Trump can’t impose his will on Iran?
Like, their brains feel like they’re in their component parts all around them. And they’re just going through, I believed this, I believed this, I can’t believe I believed this. I can’t believe I thought I should shoot bleach into my veins. Like, the whole thing. It’s like being lost all at once.
Sargent: Well, just to bring this back to the Republicans in the midterms, we had Mike Johnson talking about the war in a surprisingly candid way. He had this to say.
Sargent: That kind of strips away the spell in a way doesn’t it?
We have to get used to inflation. Inflation’s a small price to pay for whatever he’s doing in Iran. I don’t know why that one is where the rubber hits the road for them. I mean, you’d think that they would say—they’d have their own polls. They’d have, like, a Rasmussen gas prices, and be like, look, it’s three dollars a gallon for Rasmussen. So they’re just citing fake polls.
So I think it’s interesting to see Mike Johnson have to wrestle with that, because we are getting down to where his constituents live, which is on affordability.
Heffernan: I mean, yeah, right. What are they going to do when he’s impeached every day, as Ted Cruz once said would happen? I don’t know.
Heffernan: I think so too. I mean, we will see the Game of Thrones happening, with maybe Tucker Carlson or whoever else trying to consolidate the America First side of things. We’re not in the clear. I mean, Democrats—or the country—is not in the clear, if Democrats win the midterms, or if they even impeach Trump. Because the America First side of things is like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Just because they oppose the war, just because they talk about affordability, does not mean they don’t want a lot of toxic, toxic things.
Heffernan: That’s right.
Heffernan: Thank you.
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