The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 9 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.
Over the weekend, Donald Trump erupted in crazed fury at NBC’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. What enraged him is that she dared to ask him for evidence to back up his many lies, in this case about elections in California allegedly being rigged against the GOP candidates. But we think this episode deserves a deeper deconstruction. A big reason Trump is so angry, we think, is that the MAGA online disinformation universe has been unable to entirely reinvent reality and use propaganda to inflate the GOP candidate’s strength into something it isn’t. In a sense, then, this saga is really about the failures of MAGA propaganda.
So we’re talking about all of it with Gil Duran, a tech writer who’s based in California and tracks all this stuff. Good to have you on, Gil.
Gil Duran: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So in two big races in California, the GOP candidates are struggling as the votes get counted. In the Los Angeles mayoral race, Democratic incumbent Karen Bass leads, and progressive candidate Nithya Raman has pulled ahead of Republican reality TV star Spencer Pratt for second place and a chance to go to the general election.
In the California governor’s race, Republican Steve Hilton is vying with Tom Steyer for second place. Gil, can you just tell us a little bit about Spencer Pratt and Steve Hilton and why the online right is so heavily invested in them?
Duran: Sure. Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt are right-wing D-list celebrities who are desperate enough for attention to run for office in California, where they have virtually no chance of winning. Both of them have backgrounds mostly as entertainers.
Spencer Pratt was a reality TV star, a sort of villainous character on a show called The Hills for many years. And Steve Hilton has a political background in the U.K. where he was an advisor to David Cameron, but most recently since coming to the United States has been a Fox News host.
And he went from being a guy who was sort of what we would have considered a moderate Republican to being a complete right-wing lunatic during his time at Fox News. I know this because I actually met with Steve Hilton when he moved to the U.S. in 2014 and he was a totally different guy than he was a few years later on Fox News.
And so both of them are trying to parlay their status as sort of right-wing low-level celebrities into political office in California, but that’s not very easy to do.
Sargent: Just to be clear, what this means for Spencer Pratt is that if he gets edged out of second place by the progressive, Nithya Raman, then he doesn’t get to go to the general, correct? And so what’s really at stake here is, as the votes get counted, it’s really possible Spencer Pratt gets knocked out of contention. Is that what the situation is?
Duran: Yeah, and it looks like it’s pretty certain that he’s now knocked out of contention. In the LA mayor’s race and in the California gubernatorial race, the top two vote-getters get to go to the general election. And in the gubernatorial race, it looks pretty clear that Steve Hilton will probably be in the general election. He’s edging out billionaire Tom Steyer for votes. Looks like Steyer is going to come in third place. So it’ll be Hilton versus Becerra. You’ll have a Republican and a Democrat in the gubernatorial race.
But the LA race is nonpartisan. And LA is heavily Democratic by voter registration—LA is 52 percent Democratic voters compared to 19 percent Republicans. So with Spencer Pratt running with the MAGA endorsements as the right-wing reality TV guy, it’s not a big surprise that he wouldn’t make the top two. In fact, the polls showed him in third.
What happened though is that in California, the early votes tend to be the more conservative ones. And so there was this idea that maybe he would make it, and that turns out to be a false prediction or false assumption. And most people familiar with the process knew that was a likely outcome.
Sargent: So that’s the context for Trump’s blowup with NBC’s Kristen Welker. Here’s what happened. Trump first lied his ass off about the 2020 election being rigged. She challenged that. Then he brought up the California races and said those are also rigged. Kristen Welker challenged that as well. She said, look, your candidates—meaning the two Republicans we’re discussing here—look, they’re doing well. And then Trump said, well, no, they’re not. They’re dropping fast. And Trump meant by this that they’re dropping fast as the votes are getting counted. Listen to how it went south from there.
Donald Trump (voiceover): They’re dropping fast because it’s a rigged election. Let me tell you, it’s four days and they aren’t even close to coming up with—
Kristen Welker (voiceover): But that’s how they count the votes in California.
Trump (voiceover): You know why they’re doing that? Because they’re cheating on the election.
Welker (voiceover): What, do you have evidence to support—
Trump (voiceover): All I have to do is look. All I have to do is look. And I listen. And I listen to people. And let’s see what happens.
Welker (voiceover): But sir, that’s not evidence. That’s how they count the votes in California.
Trump (voiceover): Do you think it’s appropriate—Do you think it’s appropriate that they have an election and five days later, they’re nowhere close to picking—
Welker (voiceover): State and local officials acknowledge they are slow. They’re urging the votes to be counted quickly.
Trump (voiceover): No, they’re crooked. Just like you’re crooked. Your press is crooked and Meet the Press is crooked.
Welker (voiceover): To be fair, I’m not crooked, but—
Trump (voiceover): Really? Well you play right into their hands. You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.
Sargent: So according to Trump, Welker is crooked because she won’t simply accept Trump’s word that the elections are rigged. Note how Welker said, what evidence is there of rigging in the California races? And Trump said, all you have to do is look. In other words, he gets to dictate what reality is. He doesn’t have to show any facts or evidence. Your reaction to all that?
Duran: Well, this is typical Trump. He’s been doing this for years and years. He tries to create his own version of reality and insist that other people agree with it. The main enemy, the main challenge that Republicans have in California is called simple math.
There was a very low likelihood that Spencer Pratt was going to make it out of the LA mayor’s race to the general, out of the primary. And Steve Hilton has a better chance of making it to the general in the gubernatorial race, but he has zero chance of winning the election, because the Republican Party is only 25 percent of California voters, whereas Democrats have like 45 percent. So you don’t really have a math that adds up to a Republican victory.
But this is important to Trump because Trump’s brand is about winning. He can’t accept that his party and his politics are so unpopular in California. So in order to maintain his winning image, he creates this counter-reality in which it’s all because of fraud on the part of the Democrats and that he would have actually won. He said actually in 2020 that he would have won the race if Jesus had been allowed to count the votes, whatever that means.
But he’s long been on this idea that the only reason California is a Democratic state is because of cheating. And there’s zero evidence of that, but they are continuing to push this mythology because the reality is too painful to face—which is that, as Arnold Schwarzenegger said in 2007, the California Republican Party is dying at the box office.
Sargent: Right. I think that Trump is clearly much more angry about the Spencer Pratt situation here. I believe he’s separately already said that the election is rigged against Spencer Pratt. And as you say, it looks like Spencer Pratt is less likely to get into the final round, whereas Steve Hilton really could. And so what Trump is really raging over here is that as the votes are getting counted, the candidate that Trump endorsed is not getting into the final round.
Duran: The earliest returns are always the most conservative because conservatives vote on election day because they’ve been taught that vote by mail is evil. And so in the early returns, you always see a more conservative trend. But as the votes are counted—which in democracy you have to count the votes—those Republican margins slim down and the Republicans often fall into a much lower place.
And so what Trump is doing is exploiting this simple, very well-known mechanism. We all knew that the Republican numbers go down. [He’s exploiting it] to create a false narrative for the MAGA audience, to continue this kind of complaint of fraud and thievery that he’s so fond of. That’s all it is. It’s a very simple mechanism. You take the early returns, you claim that any deviation from those early returns is evidence of a crime of some kind. And that’s pretty much it.
He doesn’t believe it. I don’t think most Republicans believe it. This was also being pushed by Ron DeSantis and other Republicans. But they know that people in their audience will believe it. And that’s how they keep this flame of aggrieved Republican anger going—that everywhere they look, there’s fraud, even California’s being stolen from them. And it’s just completely bunk.
Sargent: Well, let’s listen to a little bit more of Trump and Kristen Welker. It really goes off the rails after that exchange we heard earlier. Listen to this.
Trump (voiceover): Your elections in this country, we’re like a third-world country. Your elections are crooked and you’re crooked and Meet the Press is crooked. And so is ABC and CBS and CNN. You’re one-sided, crooked networks. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time.
Sargent: Gil, I’ll tell you, fascists really hate it when you challenge their absolute right to dictate reality, don’t they?
Duran: Definitely. That’s one of the 10 main points of fascism. It’s called unreality. You create a complete opposite reality for your followers so they don’t know who or what to believe. As Hannah Arendt said, the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.
And so that’s what they’re doing here. They’re creating a situation where their followers are in a constant state of panic that everything is being stolen from them. And Trump really can’t handle the reality. And by storming out, he assured that those false claims got a lot more attention than they would have otherwise. He creates this drama around it.
Now, they had been arguing before that about the weaponization of government. He was just angry that he wasn’t getting his way. But they clearly sought to create the idea on social media that the celebrity of Spencer Pratt—where he was being pushed by right-wing accounts with AI videos and tech billionaires like Sergey Brin and Joe Lonsdale, right-wing tech billionaires funding his campaign—that he really had a chance of victory, that he was going to win.
And they often do this. He’s going to win no matter what, even though it doesn’t really make sense to people familiar with LA politics. And so when that expectation they’ve built up gets upset by reality, they have to attack with a fake narrative. They can’t accept that they were dumb or that they made a false promise. It has to be someone else’s fault that they lost.
Sargent: You mentioned that Spencer Pratt is an enormous online presence and that he’s pumped really aggressively by the online right. Let’s talk a little bit about that. Renée DiResta, who’s a researcher on disinformation, laid out some of this on her Substack.
The basic story here is that he’s just everywhere on X, Elon Musk’s X anyway, and on TikTok. He’s a fixture. He’s got over a million followers on X. And there are all these AI videos going around casting him as Batman and Karen Bass, the Democratic incumbent, as the Joker, according to DiResta, that got more than five million views.
And so this is really a creation of the extremely online fascist MAGA right, isn’t it? He is a creation of these influencers.
Duran: Definitely. No one was really paying too much attention to Spencer Pratt before this election, but actually he popped his head up because his home burned up in the fires. And there he started gaining an online following for being this sort of angry right-winger condemning the Democratic government, because there was a big fire that burned everybody’s homes.
Well, California has a lot of natural disasters. So do Republican states. You generally don’t see everybody blaming Republicans when there’s a disaster there, but in California, it always gets politicized. So he kind of made himself a political figure by dramatizing his own experience losing his home in the fire. And that was just enough to give him sort of enough of a profile to step into the void of being the right-wing sacrificial lamb in the LA mayor’s race.
Because generally what you have in California is Republicans run for governor or for mayor of LA knowing they won’t win. So you end up getting an attention hound whose job is just to put on a show and create some spectacle of a fight and try to cause as much damage as possible and bring in Republican and right-wing money to really just screw with Democrats—because they’re not going to win. They’re really just screwing with Democrats. So they hope, I guess, that it’s a Hail Mary pass—maybe people will be angry enough or enthused enough about a Republican candidate who’s popular online to win.
What they find, however, is that being viral online is not necessarily the same thing as being popular in the real world. Twitter especially, and TikTok to some degree, create these alternate realities where you think these things are really big and everybody’s talking about them, but most people have very different concerns about their city.
They’re not on TikTok or Twitter all day. They don’t know what Spencer Pratt just tweeted or what Elon Musk tweeted about him. And so when that reality hits, they’re very upset because they gin themselves up into believing that this candidate’s going to win.
And what they’re all going for really is the model that Trump set when he won. He sort of became the biggest character in American politics using Twitter, also came from a reality TV background like Spencer Pratt, and was able to become president. But just because you can do something once doesn’t mean you can always do it.
And even before Trump, we had Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was the last Republican governor of California, who only became governor because he was a world-famous actor. And so he was able to do it. But then that was the last Republican we ever had. Arnold left with like a 27 percent, maybe less, approval rating. So even if you do win, it can be bad news.
So they tried to make fetch happen. They try to create what DiResta calls the “red mirage”—this idea that a Republican’s about to win California. Everybody knows it because it’s happening on X and TikTok. But when the votes get counted, it turns out that virality is not the same thing as votes, and they lose. And so then they immediately pivot to calling it fraud because they are sore losers and big man-babies in reality.
Sargent: And Donald Trump essentially imbibed what’s going on in the right-wing bubble on this. He internalized this picture of Spencer Pratt as this very powerful figure within the context of Los Angeles politics. And so you can kind of see his eruption of fury at Kristen Welker as his bubble bursting. He looks at the situation, he says, well, this can’t be happening. He can’t be falling behind in real life because the online universe told me that he was going to win.
So that’s what’s really going on here with this whole Kristen Welker confrontation, I think. It’s Trump’s bubble bursting and him wrestling with the reality that his candidate is not actually going to become the mayor of Los Angeles.
Duran: And this is very personal for Trump because the idea that he won the 2020 election—the lie that he won the 2020 election—is a central part of his mythology now. There was no way he could lose. He was supposed to be the winner. Yet he lost. And that’s this unresolved issue that we’re all going to have to deal with at some point, because Trump seems to believe that he’s owed for that, maybe owed an extra term.
And if you remember 2020, I seem to recall Trump was arguing that the vote should stop counting at a certain time, like the day of the election, while he’s ahead. So he has a very childlike, corrupt view of what politics is. He should always win, is basically his fascist argument. And there are people who agree with him—a very small number of people in the country—but that’s the audience he has to keep behind him because other people are starting to peel off as it becomes more and more unpopular.
Sargent: Spencer Pratt is also the candidate of at least some tech people. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Duran: Definitely. We’ve seen this rightward shift in Silicon Valley—overt rightward shift. I would argue there’s always been some right-wing politics there. But whenever you get a spectacle like this of a right-wing type of person running for office, you can now count on the billionaires of Silicon Valley to throw in money and try to make it a real thing.
So Spencer Pratt had money from Sergey Brin of Google, who’s now pretty much a right-winger. Joe Lonsdale of Palantir, who’s completely off the charts, far right—recently called for public executions in the United States. And so you can always count on having them throw in some money.
On the state level, a lot of the right-wing tech guys got behind the candidacy of Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, who was trying to run as a moderate. People weren’t buying that. So we can expect the right-wing tech money now to go behind Steve Hilton if he makes the general. Again, they’re not betting on victory, they’re betting on disruption and chaos and providing a beachhead where Trump can continue to make his claims about the obsolescence of the democratic process.
Sargent: So how does this all unspool from here? Basically, the most likely scenario is that Spencer Pratt gets bumped out of contention for LA mayor and Steve Hilton goes on to the general for governor and most likely loses at the end of the day to Xavier Becerra, right?
Duran: Definitely. Steve Hilton is almost guaranteed to lose to Becerra, who’s not a particularly strong Democrat, but California is so Democratic that even if Becerra were dead, he would still beat Steve Hilton in a general election. I mean, there’s just no path really for Hilton to win.
Pratt—it seems mathematically impossible for him now to regain the second slot. So he probably won’t be in the race. He has said that if he lost, he would move out of Los Angeles, which is a pretty loser thing to say.
You don’t really hear people who want to be the mayor or want to be the governor say, I’m going to move out of the state. You’re supposed to act like, I’m going to stay here no matter what and continue to work to help my community, and then run again in four years when your challenger is unpopular if they win.
Again, they’re going to fold up their tents and go on to the next thing after this. Steve Hilton is probably just trying to get on another show on Fox. His was canceled because no one was watching it. So this is for him an audience-building exercise more than anything.
Although there was a piece in the Financial Times over the weekend where these three Brits said, it’s amazing that he’s the front-runner and he’s had this major political turnaround. These are people with no idea of California politics. He’s just simply the guy who’s desperate enough for attention that he’s willing to lose the governor’s race to get it. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
Sargent: Well, I sure hope so. Gil Duran—folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Gil’s new book. It’s coming out in mid-August. It’s called The Nerd Right: Silicon Valley, Fascism, and the War on Democracy. Gil, always great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.
Duran: Thanks for having me.
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