The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 21 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, who’s very angry over the Iran war, just unleashed more crazed threats at a host of new targets. He vowed economic warfare against anyone that helps Iran, but news organizations are struggling to figure out what on earth this is supposed to accomplish. This comes as Marjorie Taylor Greene just issued a stark warning to Republicans, claiming that Trump’s coalition is imploding, portending a GOP disaster in the midterms.
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.
Virginia Heffernan: Thanks for having me, Greg.
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.
Marjorie Taylor Greene (voiceover): Let me explain to you guys how this is actually going to work. ‘26 midterms and the ‘28 presidential race is not going to be anything like 2024, where there was so much support for MAGA. The coalition came in. You want to know why ‘26 and ‘28 is going to be different? Because Donald Trump broke his big, big campaign promise of no more foreign wars, and actually has got us embroiled in a war with Iran, a war that should not be happening, and he’s not backing off of it. And it will probably get worse. So that has fed the affordability crisis. That’s why people can’t afford gasoline. That’s why people’s bills keep going up. Food prices are still going up. Beef is at all-time high. It’s ridiculous. You know what you should have done? You should have stuck to your campaign promises, and you should have delivered for the people that put you in office, not the ones writing you the big fat checks.
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.
Heffernan: She is absolutely right. And I think she also mentioned a tweet of Trump’s, where he said, sometime around the Epstein files, when she and Thomas Massie were agitating for the release of them—Trump is quoted as saying he doesn’t care about his old voters. And she and lots of people took that very personally.
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.
War is never very popular with women, going back to times when women were worried about their sons being killed. They don’t like this idea of a deployment. They don’t like the idea that we don’t really know the number of American casualties in Iran. And women are keeping that issue top of mind, and connecting it to the Epstein class’s exploitation of children.
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.
Sargent: Yes, and on Iran, Trump is utterly stuck. He raged wildly on Truth Social. Here’s what he said: “Today I am announcing the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country. This will be economic warfare and isolation on an unprecedented scale.” Trump then also said that any country that acts in any way to interact economically with Iran will itself face “tremendous” economic consequences.
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.
It just seems like Trump is desperate at this point to create the mere perception that he’s acting. We’re, like, well beyond him having any actual plan. It’s all about just looking as if he’s doing something. What do you make of all that?
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.
But Trump doesn’t—there is no genius halo around either Trump or Hegseth, or really anyone who is bringing us into this disaster. They just don’t get that pass from us. Nobody is, like, trying to sell this to us. He just does not care what the American people think of what the Pentagon is doing. And that has become very clear, and Americans on the right and left don’t like that.
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.
And so I think maybe the rebellion against Donald Trump now is partly rooted in that, right? In the sense that MAGA actually bought this idea that Trump was a different kind of elite.
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.
I don’t think he was against it because he’s a peacenik at heart. I think he was against it because he thought it was spending a lot of money, right? Money that probably he thinks should be his.
Sargent: And they weren’t taking the oil.
Heffernan: And they weren’t taking the oil, like in Venezuela. Right, they weren’t taking the oil. People were being boneheaded and stupid and just spending money abroad. So in a weird way, he started to create this kind of manly opposition to war that was more about, like, waste, more about just overspending, more about, like, the world not being grateful to us or not paying us enough, or NATO, not kissing our palms enough or whatever. And also, like, keeping the money here, keeping the money in America.
Sargent: And we’re not going to waste young men. We’re not going to pour young men down the tubes, right?
Heffernan: I mean, I’m not sure that he cared much about our soldiers, but yes, that definitely would appeal to people. The other thing is, there are a lot of veterans in his base, and veterans had come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, often multiple tours, with PTSD, strongly anti-war.
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.
Sargent: Yeah. So he’s, like, repeating the elite folly, but just telling everybody to suck it up, in a way that, like, no other previous president would have done. So Matt Gertz of Media Matters caught something interesting as well. Fox News’ Sean Hannity, who’s probably Trump’s most devoted propagandist, has largely gone silent about the Iran war in recent weeks. He only just broke his silence to say that Trump isn’t getting enough credit for his successes in Iran.
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.
Heffernan: I think Giuliani today said you have to give up everything you believe to work at Fox News. And that’s absolutely right, because you have to sync with the audience. They only want to hear what they want to hear, right? You’re not a propagandist leading the way. You’re following ratings.
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.
The only thing he can talk about is an old refrain of Trump’s, the sort of, like, Rodney Dangerfield, “I don’t get no respect”—the, like, that Trump doesn’t get enough credit, or Trump’s always persecuted. This is something that does appeal to the MAGA base, because they, I think, identify with being—he’s sometimes described them as forgotten, overlooked.
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.
Sargent: Yeah. And I think a lot of these Fox and MAGA figures are bumping up against another problem. They don’t know how to talk about Trump and the Iran war, because in their minds, Trump’s might and power and ability to impose his will on his enemies was always unquestioned.
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?
Heffernan: I do, by the way, think that figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and maybe wiser people, are kind of reevaluating everything through a different lens. I mean, you know, I don’t know if you see some people testifying to basically falling out with MAGA, or deconstructing their experience with MAGA. And they’re in shambles.
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.
And if we undo things like some of the language, like hoax or fake news, and understand that they were strategies by this very increasingly powerful person—until he’s the most powerful person in the world—to subjugate people, then you start to be able to, I don’t know, to, like, imagine how we could rebuild, you know, this broken country.
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.
Mike Johnson (voiceover): The Iran conflict has been a cause, of course, of gas prices going up. It’s drug on.
Sargent: That kind of strips away the spell in a way doesn’t it?
Heffernan: I mean Trump has at times said we have to get used to inflation, inflation is a small price to pay for whatever he’s doing in Iran. So they don’t exactly, they don’t just lie and say that inflation will come down, but it’s not down yet, or gas prices, I mean, will come down. Yeah, for some reason they are not able to call inflation a hoax.
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.
They don’t do that. Inflation—there’s something about inflation that it’s just such a populist issue. It really gets to someone: the Fed, the war machine, the elites, whatever, are raising prices to make my life unaffordable. And you just don’t mess with it as an issue, partly because Trump ran on the idea that Biden had created all this inflation, and that he was going to bring inflation down, and it would be, you know, to record lows in two weeks or whatever it was. And here we are.
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.
Sargent: Just presuming for now that there’s a pretty decisive Democratic win—next year, Donald Trump is a lame duck. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s prediction about MAGA cracking up and scattering and splintering will have come true. I don’t think we’re prepared for how weak and disorganized MAGA might look at that point. Can you talk about that?
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.
Sargent: Yeah, when he faces, like, serious oversight, and he’s just, like, this, you know, raging figure who’s kind of tied down by Democrats in Congress, at least to some degree. Obviously, he’s going to abuse his powers in all sorts of horrible ways, but it will be trench warfare more than mighty Trump ruling over his domain, right? And so he’ll look weak, and he’ll look constrained, and he’ll look like he’s struggling, and people will be talking about JD Vance and what’s next. And I think MAGA will look really kind of disorganized and shattered at that point, is my prediction.
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.
Sargent: Yeah. And so, you know, we talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene as this oracle now, but maybe we’ll regret it later.
Heffernan: That’s right.
Sargent: Virginia Heffernan, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much for all this.
Heffernan: Thank you.
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