The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 2 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.
We’re one day out, and the Republican leaks have become a flood. There’s a lot of the usual panic, but something else jumped out at us. Republicans are privately coming to terms with Donald Trump’s sunsetting, and beginning to contemplate a world where his influence has dramatically waned.
This comes as Trump grew angrier with a reporter than we’ve ever seen him, and tellingly, it involved his slipping power. Meanwhile, Republicans are sharing humiliating details about his rallies too, which is striking given that the rallies are so central to his power and movement.
So we’re sorting through all of it with our go-to interpreter of MAGA pathologies, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte. Amanda, good to have you on.
Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So Politico talked to over a dozen Republican lawmakers and found a lot of anger at Trump, and a very strong sense that if Trump presides over a major loss, things will really change. Politico reports this: “Granted anonymity to speak frankly, many said they believe his days of dictating outcomes with Truth Social posts and late-night phone calls could be coming to an end.”
Amanda, do you think a big enough defeat will finally break Trump’s spell?
Marcotte: What else do they have, right? They may not want—like, they haven’t wanted to be under Trump’s yoke for a long time, if ever, but it’s not like they have anything else going on. It’s not like there’s some Trump alternative that they can turn to.
I think that we’ve seen it this campaign cycle, where he’s objectively bad for a lot of candidates. Like, if he goes and he rallies for them or he campaigns for them, it’s actually hurting them in the polls. And yet they won’t say no. And then he shows up in their states and is mean to them.
He calls Ken Paxton ugly. He makes fun of Jon Husted, or he harasses him, you know, sexually harasses him in front of his audience. And these guys just have to stand there and grin and take it. And I feel like, if things aren’t already bad enough for you to say no to that, what is your limit?
Sargent: I think what you’re getting at there, Amanda, is that nobody really has the key yet to accessing that Trump base.
Trump raged wildly at a reporter over the question of whether he was going to cancel his final rallies in red states. First Trump canceled them, and then a reporter asked why this was happening, why he was canceling them, asking about his health, and then this happened.
Donald Trump (voiceover): [at first mimicking reporter] ‘What’s the reason for this, sir? That you’re not going to Kansas?’
You know the reason is? I don’t feel I have to go to Kansas. I’m going to Florida tomorrow, and I’ll do, if something else comes up. ‘But,’ he said, ‘you’re not going to Kansas, sir. Are you feeling well?’
You’ve been following me for two weeks. I feel perfect. You are disgusting. Put yourself in shape. You look like hell.
Sargent: Amanda, he subsequently reinstated the rallies, which we’ll get to, but wow, was he angry there. And I think it’s telling, because he knows any perception that he’s canceling the rallies because his power is waning in some way is absolutely lethal to his whole mystique. It just blew him up.
Marcotte: The perception that he’s weak, the perception that he’s tired, the perception that he’s unpopular, he cannot stand it. And I mean, the New York Times last week had this amazing article that was about how much he has really shut out anybody giving him bad news, and he’s just got Natalie Harp and a couple other hangers-on who just feed him lies all day about how he’s the most popular, beloved president of all time. And so I think he’s just in a real fragile state, narcissism-wise.
Sargent: It’s an interesting nuance, because even as he’s being kind of cloistered in this bubble by his top people, including Natalie Harp—I guess she’s one of his top people now—you do have Republicans on some of these campaigns and in some of these states struggling to get a message through to the White House political operation and the political thinkers around Trump, to the effect of: We really don’t want him around very much. He’s killing us with the middle of the electorate.
Marcotte: I mean, you have to think about it from their point of view in the White House, right? Which is, on one hand, they want the Republicans to win, and that means keeping Trump close at home.
On the other hand, that means having to have Trump in the White House, breathing down your neck, going on his narcissistic tirades. And I’m sure that they’ve been enjoying the peace and quiet at the White House while he’s been on the road. So, I mean, what a struggle, truly.
Sargent: And also, he actually is sated by the rallies, right? Like, it’s a real obvious psychological thing you can see unfolding in plain sight in real time. He’s in a fury until he gets up there and gets lots of applause, then he thinks all of America’s applauding for him.
Marcotte: Yeah, it kind of reminds me of the before-and-after yoga Amanda.
Sargent: Oh my God.
Marcotte: But, like, sick as opposed to normal.
Sargent: We should do a podcast. We’ll do a before-yoga Amanda, followed by an after-yoga Amanda, and let listeners compare.
Marcotte: Yeah. I don’t rage at people, but you know, you’re a bundle of nerves, you’re stressed out, and you do it, you feel better. It’s just him, but he needs applause.
Sargent: Right. Well, the leaks are getting really bad. Republicans also told Politico that they’re bracing for once unthinkable losses. One senior Republican says this: “It could be quite a brutal evening. Once the dominoes start falling, it becomes hard to stop them.”
Now, I want to stress again that these Senate races could still go either way. But I have to say, this sort of leaking from Republicans is unusual in my experience. Their usual game is to profess absolute confidence right up until the end, even when they’re losing.
Remember in 2012, they did that. I’ve not heard Republican leaks like this in my lifetime, and I don’t know what to make of it. Do you know?
Marcotte: I mean, you’re giving me hope here that maybe they’re actually beginning to worry that the balance of power is tilting in a way that’s dangerous for them.
Well, I know that a lot of people in the White House are very worried about what’s going to happen when Democrats take the House, and certainly if they take both the House and the Senate, which is—it’s accountability season, right?
I know that Pete Hegseth is worried about being impeached. There’s been reporting that Stephen Miller is worried about going to prison when all this is over.
And I know that Jamie Raskin and Ro Khanna have already started to get their ducks in a row for investigation. So I think that there’s reason, if you’re a Republican right now, especially if you’ve been coloring outside of the legal lines, to start to worry about the future. And I wonder how much of this is just them trying to get in a better position before that happens.
Sargent: You know, it may be that this anxiety about Donald Trump’s sunsetting is related to something deeper here, right? So if we go back to this idea that really only Donald Trump knows how to access these constituencies that Republicans have now come to rely on—without him there, they maybe lose the constituency.
So maybe the anxiety is about that. It’s about what happens when this kind of cushion of electoral support vanishes out from under us, and all of a sudden only woke, crazy blue America is in the driver’s seat. Then what?
You see what I’m saying? It’s like there’s a deeper anxiety about this kind of shifting in the country. I’m not trying to get ahead of ourselves here. Democrats could still not win the Senate. But in the event of a big blowout, I think those anxieties start to kick in in a deeper sense, right? Can you talk about that deeper shifting?
Marcotte: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think that regardless of what happens in this particular election, Republicans have every reason to be worried that they’re losing their grip on the culture. I think there was a period right after Trump’s election where there was this belief that culturally the country had swung to the right. And that just has gotten disabused very quickly.
I mean, I think the Bad Bunny Super Bowl situation put a nail in that particular coffin. And you can kind of see it watching Fox News these days, like, they don’t know what culture war thing to make an issue out of. They’re kind of lost.
And I think that the Republican Party could recover the MAGA coalition without Trump, if they were able to sort of continue to generate, like, a coherent bigoted ideology that was able to hold that coalition together. But right now, they don’t know how to do it. And there’s a lot of competing reasons for that.
And I think that Trump—perversely, one of his superpowers was he was perversely able to smooth out a lot of differences between these kind of little subcategories of conservatives with this cult of personality.
And without that, I do wonder, like, the Christian right and then, like, your dirtbag right, they are not natural allies in a lot of ways, right? And Trump was able to bring them together. And obviously the business class. And they are going to be facing a real dilemma on that.
Sargent: And it’s worth thinking about as well, if Republicans lose fairly big, they will have done so after running, I don’t know, $500 million in anti-trans hate ads, right?
Like, so to your point about how Republicans feel like, or Fox News feels like, they don’t really know exactly how to prosecute the culture wars anymore, that’s going to really be a blow to them as well, if the trans stuff completely goes belly up.
They’re running out of ways of demonizing us.
They really haven’t run a whole lot of ICE ads. They haven’t run ads about abolish ICE, which is a striking thing. The dog didn’t bark, kind of. And it’s because ICE is so unpopular, and they kind of lost the cultural battle over that stuff.
So where do they go then? If $500 million in anti-trans ads didn’t do it, and they couldn’t attack abolish ICE because of ICE thuggery, where do they go?
Marcotte: I just want to linger on that number for a minute, of $500 million. If you wrote every trans person in the country a check, that would be what, like a thousand dollars? I mean, there’s just not that many of them.
Sargent: Yeah, no, it’s kind of crazy.
Marcotte: Anyway, yes, I agree. Like, so my colleague Sophia Tesfaye, she wrote a piece last week, or a couple of weeks ago, about Fox News just sort of bouncing around and they don’t know what to do. They tried to make the French protest the thing, and no one cares, because that’s France, right?
They’ve been riding the WNBA, but in a sense they can’t quite ever get a fix on what they don’t like about the WNBA. They say, well, trans players—well, there aren’t any. Black women get to foul on white women, and apparently that’s a problem. And, like, it’s very easy to be like, well, then if white women can’t hang, they shouldn’t play basketball, I don’t know.
With the WNBA stuff, it’s very clear to me that a lot of the anti-trans panic is them trying to find a way to talk about larger gender panic in this country. They’ve lost track of the culture wars in a lot of ways. I think when you and I were younger, it was a little bit easier for Fox News to just be very aggressively sexist.
And now it’s hard for them to be quite as ugly to women, and it’s hard for them to be quite as ugly to gay people. And so they’ve kind of taken this extremely small minority of people and they use them as a scapegoat for, larger anxieties about women’s equality, larger anxieties about gay equality.
But it’s incoherent, because it’s falling apart. Like, everything is so coded right now, and they just can’t ever say what they mean.
Sargent: It’s interesting, because JD Vance is going to inherit this problem, and he’s been the guy who is trying to speak to young men in some sort of new way. He’s, like, the most sort of intellectualized version of all this stuff.
OK, he had the “cat lady” ridiculousness and all that, but there’s, like, an actual argument underneath it all. Which is, We want to make it easier for young men to have more traditional male lives. And that did seem to appeal to a lot of young men in 2024.
But now it sort of strikes me that there’s not really a clean way for him to make the case anymore, because all that’s gone. They’ve kind of lost their hold on young men in some deep sense. Can you talk about that?
Because you’ve written about this really well. Trump has lost that kind of magic with young men that he had very temporarily. And I think that’s a real problem for the Republican Party going forward, because they’re not going to be sure how to get those voters back. And they had come to rely on them after 2024, I think, right?
Marcotte: Yeah, I think so. It’s the difference between running and governing, isn’t it? I think one of the advantages that Trump and Vance had in 2024 for appealing to, like, the youngest male cohort was that they were able to take a bunch of dissatisfaction and blame it on women and trans people and gay people and liberals and feminism.
And then they hold out these images of trad wives as this fantasy that they’re promising you that they can give you, right? And when it’s just vibes, that’s great. You know, that can win people over, as gross as it is.
But now they’re in the driver’s seat. And I think it’s becoming very clear to a lot of young men that voted for them that they don’t actually have a way to make that vision happen.
Sargent: They don’t have a way to empower young men. I think that’s really the essence of this. That was sort of what Trump and Vance were promising: we will empower you, we’ll give you control over your lives again.
Marcotte: I think so. I think that, in a sense, the nuclear family, Leave It to Beaver fantasies they were dangling out were something of a distraction. I don’t think that a lot of these young men actually want that necessarily.
I think that it was just because they’re so economically disempowered, it was easier to blame women for, like, a hot minute than it was to think about some of the real issues here.
But now, again, we’re two years into the Trump administration. It’s both clear that they’re not actually going to be able to change the relationship between men and women in any fundamental way, and also that that wasn’t the problem in the first place. That actually what young men need are better-paying jobs, access to education, and things that the Trump administration has no interest in getting them.
Sargent: That’s why I think it’s really important that figures like James Talarico and Jon Ossoff are kind of modeling an alternate liberal version of manhood, of masculinity. And I think they’re doing that quite consciously, don’t you, Amanda?
There is a sense that there is now going to be an opening, because Trump has just flamed out so horribly and just turned out to be so profoundly depraved and all that. There’s going to be an opening to start talking to these young men again with a different model in mind. What do you think of that?
Marcotte: I certainly hope so. I have always felt that this hyper-masculinity that we’ve been served by social media algorithms for, like, a few years now is exhausting. I think that a lot of young men are starting to get tired of the chest thumping, gym bro, super sexist, like, constantly about money and cars and appearances and, you know, treating women like trash. Those things are empty.
And I think that at a certain point in your life, you’re just like, you know, I would actually just like a snuggle with a girlfriend on the couch. I’d like a real job. Like, I want normal things. And I think that hopefully we’re getting to the point where a lot of young men are beginning to realize that that’s what’s important in life.
And that the Republicans have no answers for you.
Sargent: And Talarico and Ossoff are saying things like, being good to your neighbors is real masculinity, taking responsibility for your own messes, that sort of stuff.
So that’s why I think it’s just important that we’re seeing a sort of new kind of Democratic politics emerge here.
One last great quote from a Republican speaking about a potential loss. This Republican said this: “No one expects Trump to take any blame after the election. So if he doesn’t, who does?”
Amanda, he’s going to screw them one last time, right? Like, he is going to be the reason—if again, if there’s a big Republican loss, he’s why. And he’s going to fuck them with his own voters, with his own people. He’s going to tell his own people it was all their fault. I just love it.
Marcotte: Yeah. Maybe I’m a sick person, but I’ve been watching a lot of his speeches. I’ve been reading Truth Social. And when you actually sort of take it all together, it’s clear that Trump is very fixated right now on figuring out who to blame that’s not himself. His speeches at his rallies, a lot of them are focused on who he’s going to blame that’s not himself. Truth Social, he’s blaming Fox News. You know, it’s anybody but him. We know this, this is who he is. And yeah, in a sense, like, you know, second verse, same as the first, right?
Sargent: Absolutely. And I guess a big question is whether he can kind of take his voters with him and away from other Republicans in a scenario like that.
Marcotte: That’s where I don’t know. I think that maybe some, but I also get the strong sense that because he’s a lame duck, a lot of the people that have been, like, riding for him hard for the past decade are starting to slowly peel off and go away. I mean, his rallies have gotten a lot smaller. And you can just feel the air coming out of the balloon, because he doesn’t serve a purpose for them anymore.
Now, is there someone else who can come in and fill that role? No, I don’t think so. Not that I see. But, you know, weirdly, I kind of think there’s a stasis that could be gone back to, a pre-Trump one, where there’s still a lot of Republican voters, they’re loyal to the party, but they’re just not as fired up as they used to be.
Sargent: Amanda Marcotte, we got pretty far afield this time, but that’s why we love having you on.
Marcotte: Yeah, thank you for having me. It’s always a pleasure.
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