The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 27 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.
Donald Trump just had a physical exam at Walter Reed Medical Center. Right after it, he proclaimed himself to be in perfect health. Then Trump’s propagandists unleashed an extraordinary attack on journalists for the sin of pointing out that Trump regularly falls asleep at public events. The moral is clear: Trump world knows that the second he’s perceived as weak in any way, his whole political mystique is at risk of imploding. We think it’s not a coincidence that this comes amid new signs that Trump may emerge from the Iran war with less than a world-historical victory. Indeed, Trump exploded over this at the news media just now as well.
So we’re working through all of it with Michael Cohen, who does good work on his Substack, Truth and Consequences, dissecting both Trump’s weakness and his authoritarianism. Michael, good to have you on.
Michael Cohen: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So Trump just tweeted this: “Just finished my six-month physical at Walter Reed Military Medical Center. Everything checked out PERFECTLY.” Michael, I don’t know how his physical went, but the symptoms are constant.
There’s the bruising on his hand, which he covers with makeup, the swelling in his legs, the rash on his neck, and the constant falling asleep at official events right on live television—not to mention the constant slurring, the constant incoherence, the constant losing of his train of thought. Trump is obviously deteriorating. What do you think about that?
Cohen: I mean, there’s no question about it. You’ve seen a significant deterioration. I think one of the problems with Trump is that he’s always been somebody who has never appeared to be the most coherent individual in the world. Certainly not the healthiest person in the world, either physically or mentally. But it does seem as though he’s gotten significantly worse.
And as he’s gotten worse, the arguments that the White House is using to defend him against legitimate questions about this are even more ridiculous. I’m sure you saw this, but when he fell asleep at an Oval Office event, the White House tweeted out that he was just blinking when they caught him with his eyes closed. Like, are we that stupid?
I mean, maybe some people are that stupid in this country. But I think most Americans are not that dumb. And they realize the man’s falling asleep at public events.
Sargent: He absolutely is falling asleep. We can all see it happening right in front of us. And by the way, the White House rapid response Twitter feed did something really weird on this. It just unleashed a series of tweets that showed imagery of various journalists who appeared in the snapshots to have their eyes closed from actual blinking.
The Twitter feed then ridiculed them, saying they must be asleep and that they should be forthcoming about their health. This was directed mostly at CNN journalists like Brianna Keilar, Kevin Liptak, Kate Bolduan, and Dana Bash. For instance, one White House tweet said, in all caps, “Dana Bash falls asleep ahead of her 55th birthday next month. What is going on?”
Now, this is supposed to be mockery, but it’s just deranged. Everyone can see that the president is sleeping on camera, yet his propagandists are trying to intimidate everyone into not saying so. What do you make of that component?
Cohen: Well, I don’t think it’s going to work. First of all, I think people can see clearly that he’s falling asleep. But I think the bigger thing here is this is what happens when you have a president who is such a malignant narcissist as Trump is.
Narcissists cannot accept ever being seen as weak. They cannot accept ever being seen as not perfect. And Trump is the uber example of that phenomenon. This is why I go back to 2020—why he refused to acknowledge he lost. He can’t ever present himself as a loser. He lost that election. And so that just morphs into everything about him.
He has to seem strong—not just strong, by the way, the strongest person. Not just healthy—he’s the healthiest person. What Trump has done is surround himself with all of these people who basically their only job is to stroke his ego. And so they will make these insane comments like the ones you mentioned a second ago, because that’s what Trump cares about.
And the political fallout, the ridicule that it leads to of Trump, is almost a secondary consideration for them. Because what matters to these people is keeping the boss happy, because the boss helps them keep their jobs. It is a ridiculous situation. It is like the emperor has no clothes come to life. That’s what we’re basically seeing here.
Sargent: I want to get into another element of this, which is the degree to which it really resembles an authoritarian cult. It’s also obvious that Trump and the White House are only drawing more attention to his health and his physical and mental state by insisting, like a bunch of lickspittle North Korea propagandists, that his health is absolutely perfect and his strength and virility will be unquestioned.
But they clearly understand something about Trump’s mystique, which is that if he’s seen as weak, or if there are any cracks in the facade of any kind, for a non-insignificant swath of his following, suddenly that’s a real problem. Where do you think this comes from? It really is authoritarian cult stuff, isn’t it?
Cohen: It is. And by the way, I think for the record, even the North Koreans are like, guys, take it down a notch. It’s a little much. Honestly. I think it is partly what you said—it is a sort of authoritarian mindset of the administration where they have to project strength all the time. But I think it’s also a product of just his particular psychology, and not healthy psychology.
But again, I think the bigger problem for this White House is that nobody is believing it. I mean, look, maybe the 80 to 90 percent of MAGA supporters who continue to be supportive of Trump—maybe they buy it. And I actually suspect that they will buy whatever Trump tells them at this point. But I really do think that it is opening Trump up to so much ridicule because it is so obvious. We don’t live in an authoritarian society, right?
We are able to get contrary points of view that point out that in fact the man was falling asleep, the man’s not the healthiest person in the world. He can’t outrun that. You can’t run the authoritarian playbook in a society that isn’t fundamentally authoritarian, at least not yet. So I just think that it’s not an effective political strategy.
And to me, what it does is make Trump’s political problems worse, because I think you see this discrepancy between what he is talking about, what the people around him are talking about, and the reality of what Americans are actually seeing.
Sargent: It’s interesting that you say that they really understand themselves to be trying an authoritarian strategy and that this can’t work in a society that’s still, at least to some degree, a free society. Because they very consciously, I think, did try to run this playbook right at the outset of the second term in a way that they really didn’t during the first term, as bad as it was.
You had Stephen Miller out there essentially speaking like a totalitarian propagandist very regularly. You had the demonization of enemies and immigrants and the tanks in the streets, the imagery, the trappings of totalitarian dictatorship kind of oozing out of just about every public event. They really did think they were running this playbook.
And at this point, it should be pretty damn obvious that it has failed, and yet they continue to do it anyway. I find that a little tough to understand. Why do you think they do that?
Cohen: Look, I think it’s, to your point—I think it’s very interesting. I hadn’t thought about this before, but you’re absolutely right. A lot of the early things the administration did, whether it was trying to intimidate law firms that had had lawyers who’d worked on some investigation against Trump—they were trying to impose their will.
And there were a lot of people, to be honest, in the corporate world especially—all the social media folks, Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos—who sort of played into it and kind of fell for it. But as time has gone on, that effort has largely, I think, failed. The so-called vibe shift we talked about in January, February 2025 has long gone.
As to why they keep doing it, I think it’s just because they know that’s what Trump wants to hear. I just think this is the bottom line. Trump doesn’t care about one thing and one thing only—his image, his ego. He needs validation constantly. He needs the people around him to tell him how great he is.
This is why you had a great article in The New York Times over the weekend looking at how cabinet members talk about Trump. And they described him as though he is saving the country—the most glowing terms imaginable. They know that’s what Trump wants to hear.
And I think a lot of Republicans have come to this realization that in order to keep Trump happy, in order to maintain their own political standing, they need to, for lack of a better term, smooch Trump’s derrière. And that’s what they’re doing on a daily basis.
But again, I think there is this huge gap between doing that and the reality of what people see. And to bring up one point here, you see this in some of the Republican primaries. Trump’s word remains golden. If Trump says vote against Thomas Massie, Kentucky voters are going to vote against the guy who’s been a congressman for several years and they’re going to pick the person Trump supports.
And so within the Republican Party, he still has this hold. But outside the Republican Party, that hold has disappeared completely. Among independents, his numbers are just atrocious. And I think you see this gap between the people who love Trump, which is a very small minority of the country at this point, and those who loathe Trump, which is a majority of the country.
Sargent: Yeah, and not only that, I think his support is actually slipping among elite Republicans as well, because he’s now jammed them into a position where they have to just play along with the authoritarian cult worship in a way that now is exposing them to really serious political liabilities in the coming midterm elections, right? It looks to me like MAGA world is cracking up in a new way over this.
So for instance, Trump endorsed MAGA whack job Ken Paxton in the Texas GOP primary, and allies of incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn are furious. Now, by the time people listen to this podcast, we’ll have a result in that primary.
Don’t know what it’s going to be—maybe Paxton’s going to win, it looks like—but right now we don’t know who’s going to win it. Still, the fury among Republicans is really notable, because what’s got them ticked is that Cornyn was mostly loyal to Trump yet Trump screwed him anyway.
One Texas Republican had this really eye-opening quote to Politico. It was this: “No matter what we do for you, you will still stab us in the back.” Michael, this guy is really on to something. No amount of loyalty to Trump is ever enough for him. And it is now at the point where they’re just not willing to take it anymore.
Cohen: I mean, if only there was some indication previously over the past 10 years if this is who Trump really is. I mean, what’s crazy is, is anyone surprised by this? So my pet theory as to why Trump came out in support of Paxton is because he wants to be associated with the winner of this runoff election, and that’s likely to be Paxton.
He doesn’t want to be seen as the loser—like Cornyn—even though endorsing Cornyn is better for the party, better for him actually, because it increases the likelihood that if Cornyn’s the nominee, the Republicans hold the Senate in November. This is, I think, where his psychology gets in the way of this.
But the thing is, I was struck by how many Republican senators were just so frustrated with Trump that he endorsed Paxton. And again, my response is, how are you surprised by this? You have carried water for this guy over and over and over again for how many years? And when the, you know what, hits the fan, are you really surprised that he is going to sell you guys out? Because that’s what he always does.
But the problem for Republicans now is that a lot of them have already gotten past the primary, so they don’t have to worry about a primary challenge. But if you’re a Republican in a safe seat—or even more likely, a seat that’s in danger of losing—do you want to risk getting on the wrong side of Trump and maybe Trump saying something bad about you online, or possibly cutting off funding for you from one of his PACs?
No Republican wants to take that risk because no Republican can win without strong Republican support and they will lose that Republican support—or they risk losing it—if they come out against Trump.
I look at Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania. He’s an example of this. He clearly has made the calculation that he’s willing to piss off Trump in order to shore up his standing with non-Republican voters. I’m not sure it’s going to work, because I think Trump’s going to go after him with both barrels, because he’s basically trying to shut down this slush fund that Trump has created with the Department of Justice.
But this is the problem for Republicans. They are caught between an unpopular president—a deeply unpopular president—who, however, remains popular within the party and will basically get Republican voters to do whatever he asks them to do.
Sargent: A hundred percent. So I want to switch to another front because it deepens the portrait here. Trump erupted on Truth Social on Tuesday afternoon. He said that even if Iran surrenders completely in every way, the media won’t admit it.
He tweeted this: “The failing New York Times, the corrupt and now irrelevant CNN, and all other members of the fake news media will headline that Iran had a masterful and brilliant victory over the United States of America. The Dumocrats and media have totally lost their way. They have gone absolutely crazy.”
Michael, this is just self-pitying nonsense. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, though, that it’s coming even as Trump’s grip on the Republican Party is loosening and even as his physical and mental deterioration is obvious to the world.
He’s clearly aware that there’s a confluence of slippage here working against him—slipping health, slipping control of the GOP, his inability to force Iran to do his bidding. It really feels very clear to me that things have crossed a new threshold of him not really being able to control events anymore.
Cohen: Well, I think this is the thing about narcissists. They always try to create their own reality. And that’s what Trump has constantly done. I think Trump truly believes if he says it enough times—this was a war, the war with Iran has been a success, and it truly is not a success—then it becomes a success. And I think certainly among his supporters, there’s a belief that if he says it enough times, they will actually agree with him. I think that has proved itself pretty true over the past 10 years or so.
I just think the problem again is that Trump is unpopular. He’s at 37, 38 percent. He can keep saying these things that clearly are not true, and it’s just going to further erode the support that he has. He’s lost Democrats. He’s lost independents at a pretty large margin. He still maintains Republican support, although some recent polls suggest even that’s slipping. I mean, how much longer can he even maintain that support if he is describing things that are completely counter to reality?
I think this is the problem. No one around him is going to say to the president, you need to stop saying stuff like this, you’re hurting yourself. Nobody. This isn’t like his first term, where there were people around him who had the guts to at least try to sway him from bad ideas. No one in his inner circle will do that.
And so I just think that this, to your point, is going to get worse, because there is just no check on what he is doing and saying. And again, the gap between what he is doing and saying and the reality—what Americans are dealing with, whether at the gas pumps, whether what they’re seeing in the news—you can’t square the circle on these things. You just can’t.
Sargent: Well, that’s another experiment they’re running. They’re going to try to essentially tell us what to think and try to just completely hoodwink the entire electorate. But it seems to be failing pretty miserably. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Michael Cohen’s Substack, Truth and Consequences. He gets into this kind of stuff regularly. Michael, nice to have you on. Thanks so much.
Cohen: Great, my pleasure. Great to be here.
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