Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
This comes as Trump grew angrier with a reporter than we’ve ever seen him, and tellingly, it involved his slipping power. Meanwhile, Republicans are sharing humiliating details about his rallies too, which is striking given that the rallies are so central to his power and movement.
Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
Amanda, do you think a big enough defeat will finally break Trump’s spell?
I think that we’ve seen it this campaign cycle, where he’s objectively bad for a lot of candidates. Like, if he goes and he rallies for them or he campaigns for them, it’s actually hurting them in the polls. And yet they won’t say no. And then he shows up in their states and is mean to them.
Sargent: I think what you’re getting at there, Amanda, is that nobody really has the key yet to accessing that Trump base.
Donald Trump (voiceover): [at first mimicking reporter] ‘What’s the reason for this, sir? That you’re not going to Kansas?’
You’ve been following me for two weeks. I feel perfect. You are disgusting. Put yourself in shape. You look like hell.
Marcotte: The perception that he’s weak, the perception that he’s tired, the perception that he’s unpopular, he cannot stand it. And I mean, the New York Times last week had this amazing article that was about how much he has really shut out anybody giving him bad news, and he’s just got Natalie Harp and a couple other hangers-on who just feed him lies all day about how he’s the most popular, beloved president of all time. And so I think he’s just in a real fragile state, narcissism-wise.
Marcotte: I mean, you have to think about it from their point of view in the White House, right? Which is, on one hand, they want the Republicans to win, and that means keeping Trump close at home.
Sargent: And also, he actually is sated by the rallies, right? Like, it’s a real obvious psychological thing you can see unfolding in plain sight in real time. He’s in a fury until he gets up there and gets lots of applause, then he thinks all of America’s applauding for him.
Sargent: Oh my God.
Sargent: We should do a podcast. We’ll do a before-yoga Amanda, followed by an after-yoga Amanda, and let listeners compare.
Sargent: Right. Well, the leaks are getting really bad. Republicans also told Politico that they’re bracing for once unthinkable losses. One senior Republican says this: “It could be quite a brutal evening. Once the dominoes start falling, it becomes hard to stop them.”
Remember in 2012, they did that. I’ve not heard Republican leaks like this in my lifetime, and I don’t know what to make of it. Do you know?
Well, I know that a lot of people in the White House are very worried about what’s going to happen when Democrats take the House, and certainly if they take both the House and the Senate, which is—it’s accountability season, right?
And I know that Jamie Raskin and Ro Khanna have already started to get their ducks in a row for investigation. So I think that there’s reason, if you’re a Republican right now, especially if you’ve been coloring outside of the legal lines, to start to worry about the future. And I wonder how much of this is just them trying to get in a better position before that happens.
So maybe the anxiety is about that. It’s about what happens when this kind of cushion of electoral support vanishes out from under us, and all of a sudden only woke, crazy blue America is in the driver’s seat. Then what?
Marcotte: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think that regardless of what happens in this particular election, Republicans have every reason to be worried that they’re losing their grip on the culture. I think there was a period right after Trump’s election where there was this belief that culturally the country had swung to the right. And that just has gotten disabused very quickly.
And I think that the Republican Party could recover the MAGA coalition without Trump, if they were able to sort of continue to generate, like, a coherent bigoted ideology that was able to hold that coalition together. But right now, they don’t know how to do it. And there’s a lot of competing reasons for that.
And without that, I do wonder, like, the Christian right and then, like, your dirtbag right, they are not natural allies in a lot of ways, right? And Trump was able to bring them together. And obviously the business class. And they are going to be facing a real dilemma on that.
Like, so to your point about how Republicans feel like, or Fox News feels like, they don’t really know exactly how to prosecute the culture wars anymore, that’s going to really be a blow to them as well, if the trans stuff completely goes belly up.
They really haven’t run a whole lot of ICE ads. They haven’t run ads about abolish ICE, which is a striking thing. The dog didn’t bark, kind of. And it’s because ICE is so unpopular, and they kind of lost the cultural battle over that stuff.
Marcotte: I just want to linger on that number for a minute, of $500 million. If you wrote every trans person in the country a check, that would be what, like a thousand dollars? I mean, there’s just not that many of them.
Marcotte: Anyway, yes, I agree. Like, so my colleague Sophia Tesfaye, she wrote a piece last week, or a couple of weeks ago, about Fox News just sort of bouncing around and they don’t know what to do. They tried to make the French protest the thing, and no one cares, because that’s France, right?
With the WNBA stuff, it’s very clear to me that a lot of the anti-trans panic is them trying to find a way to talk about larger gender panic in this country. They’ve lost track of the culture wars in a lot of ways. I think when you and I were younger, it was a little bit easier for Fox News to just be very aggressively sexist.
But it’s incoherent, because it’s falling apart. Like, everything is so coded right now, and they just can’t ever say what they mean.
OK, he had the “cat lady” ridiculousness and all that, but there’s, like, an actual argument underneath it all. Which is, We want to make it easier for young men to have more traditional male lives. And that did seem to appeal to a lot of young men in 2024.
Because you’ve written about this really well. Trump has lost that kind of magic with young men that he had very temporarily. And I think that’s a real problem for the Republican Party going forward, because they’re not going to be sure how to get those voters back. And they had come to rely on them after 2024, I think, right?
And then they hold out these images of trad wives as this fantasy that they’re promising you that they can give you, right? And when it’s just vibes, that’s great. You know, that can win people over, as gross as it is.
Sargent: They don’t have a way to empower young men. I think that’s really the essence of this. That was sort of what Trump and Vance were promising: we will empower you, we’ll give you control over your lives again.
I think that it was just because they’re so economically disempowered, it was easier to blame women for, like, a hot minute than it was to think about some of the real issues here.
Sargent: That’s why I think it’s really important that figures like James Talarico and Jon Ossoff are kind of modeling an alternate liberal version of manhood, of masculinity. And I think they’re doing that quite consciously, don’t you, Amanda?
Marcotte: I certainly hope so. I have always felt that this hyper-masculinity that we’ve been served by social media algorithms for, like, a few years now is exhausting. I think that a lot of young men are starting to get tired of the chest thumping, gym bro, super sexist, like, constantly about money and cars and appearances and, you know, treating women like trash. Those things are empty.
And that the Republicans have no answers for you.
So that’s why I think it’s just important that we’re seeing a sort of new kind of Democratic politics emerge here.
Amanda, he’s going to screw them one last time, right? Like, he is going to be the reason—if again, if there’s a big Republican loss, he’s why. And he’s going to fuck them with his own voters, with his own people. He’s going to tell his own people it was all their fault. I just love it.
Sargent: Absolutely. And I guess a big question is whether he can kind of take his voters with him and away from other Republicans in a scenario like that.
Now, is there someone else who can come in and fill that role? No, I don’t think so. Not that I see. But, you know, weirdly, I kind of think there’s a stasis that could be gone back to, a pre-Trump one, where there’s still a lot of Republican voters, they’re loyal to the party, but they’re just not as fired up as they used to be.
Marcotte: Yeah, thank you for having me. It’s always a pleasure.
Hence then, the article about transcript trump erupts as gop leaks about his sunsetting get worse was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Trump Erupts as GOP Leaks About His Sunsetting Get Worse )
Also on site :
- Tokyo’s First Animated Competition Title ‘Magic Atlas’ Was Sun Xun’s ‘All-In Moment’
- Sharjah Film Festival Takeaways: ‘Atlas of the Universe’ Takes Top Prize, Pitching Platform Doubles and Audience Award Debuts
- The anti-Skydance: How a Nike billionaire’s backing lets Laika spend a reported $100 million on ‘Wildwood’