The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 13 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
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 cult-like defenses of Donald Trump have taken a truly creepy turn of late. Trump fell asleep at an event and the White House’s spin in response went truly off the rails. Trump floated an insane proposal involving Venezuela that drew a deeply strange defense from a spokesperson. And in one telling moment, the spokesperson was so eager to fluff up Trump that she accidentally delivered a harsh talking point against him. But when you watch all this madness, you can sense something dark underneath it. All these sycophants are plainly aware that Trump is going to be passing from the scene very soon. And it’s very hard to see what’s going to fill the vacuum within the GOP and the right wing that this will leave behind.
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.
Virginia Heffernan: Good to see you again, Greg.
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.
Anna Kelly (voiceover): Let me be very clear. Iran has been incredibly decimated, militarily. Their Navy is at the bottom of the ocean. The ballistic missiles are destroyed. Their production facilities are demolished. Now they’re being totally crippled economically by the weight of Operation Economic Fury. So the president is not in a rush. He has all the cards at his disposal because he knows that Iran is getting weaker and weaker by the day while the United States is getting stronger and stronger.
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?
Heffernan: Yeah. So, I mean, we’ve talked a lot about a dictator and how he was going to be a dictator on day one. But he’s a king now. He’s an emperor. And it’s something more than a dictator because a dictator is trying to figure out how to govern. But an emperor who—any word against him constitutes what the Anglo-Saxons used to call lèse-majesté, you know this expression, right? It’s like the Thai king still—lèse-majesté is like a particular offense of “injured majesty” against the king. It’s exactly the opposite of American principles of free speech, so much that saying anything—saying oil prices are going up, or saying that Trump fell asleep, or even registering the evidence of our own eyes—is seen as wrong.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you, I love the distinction between dictator and emperor, but I’d probably go with despot in the end.
Heffernan: Yes. Tell me what despot buys you that the other words don’t.
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.
Heffernan: Yeah, I mean, this sounds a lot like a late-stage cult, like the Moonies, when originally you have Reverend Moon making claims about the world that are somewhat liberating to participants. And then soon after he just feels persecuted, right?
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.
Sargent: Right. And I want to bear down on the fact that there’s a serious situation underneath that weird Fox News moment. Trump and the GOP are getting some redistricting wins and those are serious. But the underlying brutal situation remains.
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.
Heffernan: Yeah, I mean, you think of Pam Bondi, RIP, who responded to quite meaningful exposure of Trump along every axis by saying “the Dow is at 50,000, right?” It just doesn’t track. So the defense is always either to attack the questioner—and we see Pete Hegseth do this on Iran—and when there’s no excuse for Iran, they just say, like The Manchurian Candidate, he is the finest man I’ve ever known. He is magic. He can do no wrong. If he did it, it’s right.
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.”
The rage is the thing here, Virginia. I mean, it looked like he was asleep—putting aside, I mean, he falls asleep all the time. Like, there’s no way they can spin their way out of that. But either way, note how Trump’s propagandists are really keenly aware that any hint of Trump as sunsetting or weak or enfeebled just instantly cracks his mystique, and they just have to lash out furiously at anyone who dares to point out what everyone can see at the end of their own nose—which is that this guy is on his way out.
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.
Sargent: I think you’re putting your finger on an important point, which is that the American people are reacting badly to the trappings of despotism and tyranny and all the visuals of it. So the ballroom is a really good example of this. The Washington Post poll on this—taken before and after the recent shooting incident—found the ballroom to be deeply unpopular.
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.
And people are just reacting badly to it. The imagery of Trump tearing down the people’s house, the White House, and replacing it with a monument to himself is triggering for a lot of people, I think, on a deep level.
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?
Sometime recently, he emailed me and said when he saw the destruction of the East Wing, he knew that something was gravely wrong. And he is now trying to repent, and he started something called Christians Against Trump in Florida.
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 a guy saying, I’m going to annex another state, I’m going to build a ballroom, I’m going to build an arch to Trump. I am the greatest, biggest, all-powerful Oz, or all-powerful Ozymandias. And, you know, Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. And his head has rolled off. Like, we can see this isn’t just the emperor with no clothes.
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.
Sargent: So you brought up Trump’s new proposal, or whatever you call it, to do with Venezuela. I want to talk about another weird moment on Fox News involving that. Anchor John Roberts reports on a conversation he had with Trump about Venezuela. And then he asks spokesperson Anna Kelly about that. Listen.
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.
Now there’s a rich history in this nation of taking territories and absorbing them into the United States. Puerto Rico is one that people talk about. But this would be the first time in my knowledge that a sovereign country was ever invited to join the United States of America. How would that work?
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.
Sargent: This seems like a really perfect example of what you’re talking about. Basically, Fox News—who’s generally obviously very, very loyal to Trump, a major Trump booster—is dancing around what’s obviously the elephant in the room, which is that this guy has completely lost it in just about every way and is completely unfit for this job.
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.
Heffernan: It is, and you almost—I wouldn’t say feel sorry for—but I remember when NXIVM was breaking up and you just saw that there were these hangers-on who still, you know, gazed at Keith Raniere, the cult leader of the sex cult NXIVM, gazed at him the way Nancy Reagan used to gaze at Reagan, right? And you just wonder. And I will say a lot of them are women, right? They gaze at him and block and tackle for him.
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.
Sargent: Well, I want to bring up some of the mockery that met that exchange between John Roberts and Anna Kelly. One person tweeted out an image of a North Korean propagandist talking about dear leader and just drew the likeness directly to what Anna Kelly had said there. Another person, Norm Ornstein, the congressional scholar, said, “The mental decline is accelerating.”
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.
Heffernan: I think that’s absolutely right. There were still some people when Keith Raniere went to prison—right near me, Brooklyn House of Detention, which is now closed—that stood outside beaming up with flashlights and singing support to him. So there will be people who are still with him to the end. But it is, as you say, absolutely unnerving to imagine they’re still here for him.
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.
Why would someone stand by him? You think of the Mike Pences of the world that stand by him until they’re cast aside and vilified. And the humiliation—it must be this crazy double consciousness where it used to seem manly to support him and now it seems pathetic.
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?
Heffernan: Yeah, I mean, there’s just not a lot of people to pick up the pieces. So Ashley St. Clair, she left MAGA. She was right in the center of it with Turning Point. She had a baby with Elon Musk. And after she was creamed with revenge porn with Grok, right? She just blew the lid off it and really showed how the sausage was made with MAGA, and that it wasn’t cool and that it wasn’t interesting to be anti-trans.
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.
Sargent: And so we have an end-stage cult.
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.
Sargent: I will say the glazed-eyes thing is real. Anna Kelly has it. Karoline Leavitt has it. Senators like Katie Britt have it when they talk about Trump. And these are U.S. senators, right? People who were elected to statewide office.
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.
Sargent: I want this to be a positive story and I hope it ends positively. Virginia Heffernan, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on.
Heffernan: Greg, great to talk to you too.
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