The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 28 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
After we recorded, Trump again did a ban, yet this time it was only CNN and it was more narrow, excluding it from Air Force One. But’s unclear whether that will last.
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 is in a fury because news organizations have joined together to resist his effort to ban some of them from the White House. He exploded over this, but in the process revealed something important. Collective institutional resistance to Trump actually works.
Unfortunately, this lesson has been learned kind of late, after a whole lot of elite capitulation has already happened. But still, it’s good to see, and we’re wondering now if this will steel the media to go after Trump harder on things that it’s mostly avoided, like his deteriorating mental state.
Paul Waldman’s been writing well on Trump’s waning power on his Substack, The Cross Section. So we’re talking to him about all of it. Paul, thanks for coming on.
Paul Waldman: My pleasure.
Sargent: So a quick recap. Donald Trump banned CNN, Politico, and MS Now from the White House grounds in a fit of tyrannical rage. And then the White House pretended it had something to do with national security. A judge has blocked this, and it appears the news organizations are now allowed back in.
Paul, what are your general thoughts on this whole thing?
Waldman: Yeah, it’s really hard to see what Trump thought this would accomplish. I mean, what did he really have to gain by doing this? Maybe he didn’t realize that the other news organizations were going to rally behind their colleagues. But is one more fight with the media really something that is good for him at this point? Does it do anything for him? Does it make Republicans any less likely to lose the midterms? It’s really hard to see.
And I think there’s a clue in the news organizations that he chose. Sure, MS Now is liberal. CNN, he’s long hated. But Politico—like, that’s not some kind of liberal organization. It seems like it was very impulsive.
And as time goes on, I think more and more of his impulses are going to get translated into action and policy. And that’s never good for anybody.
Sargent: Yeah, that’s where it’s going to be heading, I think. So here’s where it gets funny and revealing. As you mentioned, news organizations banded together. They did this by agreeing to suspend the pool coverage. And as a result, participating networks didn’t end up covering Xi Jinping’s arrival at the White House.
Before we get into the guts of this, Paul, what do you think of that decision by all these news organizations? It seems like Trump wasn’t anticipating that. He just assumed he’d divide and conquer them, right?
Waldman: Yeah, you’d have to think so, because this was really the worst outcome possible for him. I mean, he lives to be on television. Right. And you can just imagine how infuriated he must have been when this state visit from Xi Jinping—that he had been so looking forward to, and he was going to show off his helipad that he must have made sure was going to be finished in time for Xi to get here, and they rolled out a literal red carpet, and all this was going to make for great TV.
Trump loves to put on a show. And then it wasn’t broadcast, and all these news organizations did reports on it with, you know—TV news did reports on it with still photos, because they didn’t have audio and video, because the pools weren’t there. And that must have just killed him.
So it’s hard to imagine that there was really well-thought-out strategy at work here. And maybe he just didn’t even contemplate the idea that the other news organizations would say, you know, we’re not going to tolerate this. But that’s what they did.
Sargent: And in fact, Trump did explode in rage over the failure of networks to carry the arrival at the White House. He posted this:
“CNN and MS NOW refused to cover one of the biggest and most beautiful events to take place in many years, the arrival at the White House of the highly respected president of China...the event was magnificent, but because they’re Fake News, and because they didn’t want credit to be given to Trump, they refused to be there.”
Trump also claimed that the media refuses to give Trump credit for his world historical successes and for his popularity. Paul, what do you make of that explosion from Trump?
Waldman: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a reflection of his genuine sentiment. You know, he’s always had this kind of back-and-forth with the media that was in part strategic. He starts fights with them, but then he is quick to make up.
He wants their attention. But he also wants to be in this kind of conflict with them. That’s been the story since he was a young real estate developer in New York, trying to get onto the gossip pages of the New York tabloids.
And this sort of push and pull, back and forth, is something that, when you’re the president, it has to be done with some subtlety. And Trump doesn’t have a lot of subtlety. And so he just went too far this time. And the news organizations said, you know, we’re not going to do it.
And I think that this also reflects a realization that he’s in a weak position. And, you know, this may not be in the conscious mind of any reporter, but I think that they’re more willing to be tough with him when he is perceived as politically weak. And he is extremely weak right now.
He’s headed for a big defeat. His poll numbers are in the toilet. And that can kind of stiffen the spines of reporters who are willing to stand up to him in a way they might not have been in a different place and time.
Sargent: I think there’s no doubt that that was going through at least some of these media executives’ heads. But for now, let’s credit this. Let’s point out here that by banding together, the media actually revealed something important, which is that Trump needs their attention really badly. He needs them. What enraged him so much is that the news organizations refused to be divided against each other and agreed to stick together in defense of press freedom.
I think Trump was hoping that some of them would act in their own very narrow conception of self-interest and sell out freedom of the press, and sort of, you know, shrug at what was happening to CNN, Politico, and MS Now.
And this is where the logic of collective resistance comes into all this. And this is how institutions should resist an authoritarian, right?
Waldman: Yeah, absolutely. They do have power, and they have to use it in ways that are responsible. But as long as they stick with kind of the fundamental principles on which the free press is based, then it’s fine for them to exercise that power collectively.
And we had discussions about this when the whole thing with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner happened. And I think a lot of people felt like it was wrong of them to invite him at all.
And now I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of reporters took that criticism to heart and said, you know, we are not going to become an outpost of the resistance. But what we do have to stand up for is the kind of foundational principles that undergird our own profession and the function that we serve in a democracy.
There’s a reason that the free press is in the First Amendment to the Constitution. It’s because the founders understood how important it was. And so they—I think they understand that the more authoritarian Trump gets, it’s not just a threat to them personally or professionally.
It’s a threat to the whole system. And if they’re going to have that privileged position, then there are going to be times when they have to just stand up and say, this is a line you can’t cross.
Sargent: Right. And I think by doing this, they found a kind of Achilles’ heel on Trump’s part. It’s when institutions decide that Trump’s power is not going to roll over them, that things actually turn against Trump. That is the way to disarm Trump. And if you return to early 2025, when it became obvious that Trump was going to use retribution and threats to get institutions to bend the knee—at the time it seemed like some of these institutional elites really misread the moment, kind of along the lines of what you’re saying, right?
They, I think, concluded that he was like this colossus who was kind of, you know, bestriding the United States, culturally and politically dominant and so forth. It seems like at that point the law firms, the universities, the news organizations—including one you and I used to work for—decided the price in getting on Trump’s bad side was too great. But now, in light of this sort of stuff that we’re seeing, it really looks like that was a very serious miscalculation, doesn’t it?
Waldman: Yeah. And you can understand the logic at the time, in early 2025, that maybe if you were a university president, you could say they have this power over us, that they could stop all these millions of dollars in grants we get that are so important for our research, and they could retaliate against us in other ways. And I, as a university president, am just going to, you know, take one for the team and try to protect the institution, as painful as it might be.
And now, when we look back, we realize that that was really a mistake, that the institutions that did bend the knee to him—they didn’t get the protection they were after. He kept coming after them, because that’s what bullies often do. When you show them that you’re weak and you’re willing to bow down before them, they just keep hitting you. They weren’t able to negotiate some kind of a semi-permanent détente with him and his administration. So what was the point?
And I think that that understanding is now pretty widespread. You may not be able to stand up to the administration if you’re one of these institutions in all cases, but there are certain moments when you really don’t have much of a choice. And if Trump had gotten away with banishing these three news organizations from the White House, everybody knows that he would not have stopped there.
The whole point, or one of the points, I think, was to create fear in the rest of them. And so, especially since the bill of particulars against these institutions was so weak—they didn’t reveal any terrible state secrets or anything like that, there were, like, some articles that he didn’t like—that, if it worked, would have meant that every other White House reporter was going to be thinking twice when they filed a story or had a meeting with a confidential source.
If I write this story, is he going to kick me out of the White House? Am I no longer going to be able to do my job and report there? And had that been effective, then he would have kept on kicking more and more news organizations out.
And so I think it was important for those reporters—and I wouldn’t be surprised if they had these conversations among themselves—that it had to be stopped right at the outset. You couldn’t let him kick out three and then five and then 10 news organizations. The first time he tried this, the other organizations had to band together and say, no, we’re not going to stand for this.
Sargent: Let’s talk about how weak Trump is right now, since you referred—you wrote a good piece about this the other day, how his power is just really dribbling away. He had this crazy line in that screed that he wrote, in which he described news organizations this way: “They only write badly about a man who won the election in a giant landslide, winning all seven swing states, the popular vote, and 86 percent of the counties, and whose popularity has grown because of the unprecedented success our country is having.”
So, Paul, let’s just go through some data points right now. In the polling averages, he’s now sunk below 35 percent approval. NBC’s new average of midterm polls finds that Democrats are nine points ahead in the generic ballot matchup. Other averages are finding Democrats at around eight or nine.
It’s clearly a growing lead. Red state Senate races are all really slipping into the toss-up category. In addition, Cook Political Report has shifted 15 House races in the Democrats’ direction. Astoundingly, they are now rating some races in districts that Trump won by as many as fifteen or seventeen points as toss-ups. This is not someone whose popularity has grown, Paul, is it?
Waldman: No, absolutely not. And if you look at the historical polls, what you find is that, to find a president who is at this level, you’ve got to go back to either Richard Nixon in the depths of Watergate, not long before he resigned, or George W. Bush at the end of his term, when we were in the midst of a historic financial crisis and the Iraq War was a disaster.
And then you get this self-reinforcing cycle, where Trump is low in the polls, and Republican candidates start looking at that and saying, well, you know what, maybe it’s in my interest to kind of back away from him. Even if I’ve been right at his side for 10 years, I’m going to be in trouble.
I may already be in trouble. And if I don’t show the voters in my district that I’m not going to be a rubber stamp for him, then I’m going to lose. And so what we’ve seen just really in the last week is a bunch of Republicans taking different kinds of steps to sort of edge away from him. Maybe it’s just on the Iran war, or maybe it’s just on prices, but different ways in which they’re saying, well I don’t agree with this or that, or I’m going to be my own person.
And when that happens, that sends a signal to other candidates that they can do the same thing, and it’s what’s necessary to survive. And this kind of edifice that he’s built, of fear and intimidation in his party, begins to crumble. And that’s, I think, what we’re seeing right now. And as we get closer and closer to election day, I think that’s only going to accelerate.
Sargent: And we’re finding that if institutions band together the way the news organizations did, it actually diminishes him further. I just have to say, it’s a little unnerving to think back to early 2025 and ask yourself, well, if institutions had shown a little more fortitude, a little more courage, a little more willingness to put aside very narrow short-term interest and band together sort of the way the news organizations are doing now—I think things would look a little different now.
I think the history of the last two years would have been maybe not quite as bad. But again, this sense of Trump as having won this gargantuan cultural referendum in 2024 kind of encouraged this institutional cowardice and capitulation and kind of elite softness that I just wish hadn’t happened, Paul.
Waldman: Yeah. And obviously we can’t rerun the experiment to see if things would have been different had they stood up for themselves. And you could make a case, I guess, that it wasn’t until Trump’s popularity got lower and lower that that became more possible. And after all, most of that stuff has to do with, you know, mistakes that emerged over time—the trade wars and the Iran war and all the things that have driven the voters away from him.
But, you know, even today, he’s still talking about what a landslide victory he has. And the reason is that he knows that part of his ability to intimidate people is based on the conception that he does have this power, and he does have the public behind him, and that his election victory was kind of a resounding ratification of everything that he is and wants to do. And that therefore to stand against him is to stand against the great mass of Americans.
And that’s obviously not true, but you can see how desperately he clings to that idea, because he knows that the impression that people had of his power in 2025—when that’s gone, you’re going to see a flood of people in all kinds of different contexts saying, you know, no, I don’t have to do what you want. And that is only going to get worse from here.
Sargent: Right. What triggered him, at least in part, is the clear perception that the news organizations were treating him as a weak and diminished figure and weren’t being cowed by him. And so that gets him to default to this reminder about the 2024 win, which he still sees as this kind of weapon that he can wield over his own party and everybody else.
So let’s look forward, since you just brought that up. Let’s say we see a fairly sizable Democratic win here, at least the House going to Democrats, maybe House and Senate—although Senate, I think, is still pretty damn hard, but I think doable. But let’s just say House and/or Senate, right? What do you see happening after this? Like, he’s going to become a more diminished figure. How do you see institutions and society starting to react at that point?
Waldman: Yeah, it’s going to be a pretty chaotic two years. You’re going to have the Democratic Party, which will be undergoing its own identity crisis, I guess you could say—where all these different people are going to start running for president, and they’re going to start debating, what does it mean to be a Democrat? What do we believe in? How should we act? How should we govern when we get the chance?
And you’re going to have the Republican Party, where there are going to be a whole bunch of people running for president there and trying to figure out, is this still Trump’s party, and is it going to be Trump’s party in two years, and who should lead it? And that’s going to cause a lot of internal conflict.
And I think it’s hard to see some kind of major turnaround from Trump on policy. That maybe the economy will get better in one way or another—there are a lot of variables and things that are not really in his control. But at this point, it’s hard to imagine him coming up with, like, some incredibly deft policy move that really changes how people think about him and lets him leave office with a 65 percent approval rating.
Like, that’s pretty unlikely. And as he’s in that lame-duck period, you should probably see more and more institutions, whether it is the universities or the news media or any kind of civil society, where they’re not willing to take instructions from him. And they’re finding ways to work around him and begin to prepare the ground for what happens when he’s gone, and maybe even when Democrats have power, come 2029.
And so that will then probably kick off a cycle where he’ll be even angrier and be lashing out even more and be even less likely to do kind of responsible things and be more obsessed with this ballroom and everything. It’s like everything that’s happening now is only going to be intensified once we get past this midterm.
Sargent: I think that’s exactly right. And I really hope that Democrats don’t make the mistake of thinking that, if they quote-unquote overreach, then you could see something like Bill Clinton’s comeback when Republicans overreached—because Trump is not Bill Clinton.
He’s, I think, going to be in a worse position than Bill Clinton. And Democrats can’t go into this with that kind of mindset. But of course, that is possible, isn’t it, Paul?
Waldman: Absolutely. There will be a lot of voices in the Democratic Party saying, you know, we just have to be cautious and careful and keep talking about grocery prices, and not go too far, and make sure people know that we are the responsible party. And one of the things that I’ve argued is that the voters don’t give you any credit for being responsible.
It may be a good thing in and of itself, but you cannot expect any political benefit from being responsible. That’s just not how things work. So it’s going to be its own debate among Democrats, of how aggressive they want to be.
Sargent: It’s going to get ugly on our side as well, Paul.
Waldman: I believe so, yes.
Sargent: Folks, if you enjoyed this, check out Paul’s Substack, The Cross Section. Paul, always awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.
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