Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
The attack on Biden is significant, we think, because it shows that a certain type of ugly, abusive, MAGA trolling ethic is now fully installed inside the White House. We’re talking about all this today with Salon writer Amanda Marcotte, who’s one of the best out there at deconstructing the psychology of that MAGA trolling ethic. Good to have you back on, Amanda.
Sargent: Let’s start with Karoline Leavitt’s attack on Biden. A reporter asked about the price of eggs, and this is what happened.
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): Really glad you brought this up because there is a lot of reporting out there that is putting the onus on this White House for the increased cost of eggs. I would like to point out to each and every one of you that in 2024, when Joe Biden was in the Oval Office or upstairs in the residence sleeping, I’m not so sure, egg prices increased 65 percent in this country. We also have seen the cost of everything—not just eggs—bacon, groceries, gasoline, have increased because of the inflationary policies of the last administration.
Marcotte: Yes, I think this reflects something that Donald Trump has been on about forever and ever. He really does believe that the best way to do politics is constant war. As long as he’s got Republicans on his side, he doesn’t need Democrats. It’s been alarming to me that Democrats are making noises about working with Trump and bipartisanship. No, he’s just going to want you to always be the enemy, so it would be better if you just stepped into that role and did it well because you’re going to be cast in that role no matter what. There’s no such thing as bipartisanship under Donald Trump.
Sargent: That gets at something else as well, which is MAGA’s understanding of psychological warfare, or PSYOPs. You spend a lot of time on Twitter criticizing Trump. I do. And you’re going to be familiar with this if you do: You get trolled by people saying, LOL, Trump is living rent free in your heads, as if MAGA is winning as long as you and me and people like us are upset about Trump in some way. That’s part of what Leavitt is signaling to Trump and MAGA as well. She’s going to keep rubbing non-MAGA America’s face in shit, that kind of thing. You wrote this piece saying that Trump benefits as long as non-MAGA America is really torqued up and angry and frothed up and so forth. What’s your reading of that side of all this?
And we definitely saw that during the pandemic, absolutely. It became such a culture war issue because liberals took not dying of Covid-19 seriously; therefore, it became very important for Republicans to scoff at the idea that Covid was an issue and the result was they didn’t get vaccinated, they didn’t do any protective measures and they died by the thousands for it. I cannot emphasize enough that people are willing to die to troll the libs. They’ve been so consumed by hatred and the single-minded desire to just taunt people that haven’t actually done anything to them—they’ve just been told that we’ve done things to them by Fox News. It’s a very grim reality that we’re living in. It’s scary because if dying and watching their relatives die didn’t wake them up, I don’t know what could.
Marcotte: Yeah. I’m not very patient with that entire take industry because I work so much in the feminist space. A really common version of the argument is that Gosh, men shouldn’t be voting for a a sexual assailant and cheering on sexual harassment and taking away women’s abortion rights. But gosh darn it, feminists made them by #MeToo-ing a little too hard. And I’m like, Give me one example. Yes, we see a lot of male anger at women right now. But the notion that it’s about anything but outrage over having to give up a privilege that they didn’t deserve in the first place, having to live just as equals and having to treat women with some modicum of respect, I just don’t see any evidence for that.
Sargent: You’d think it’s clarifying when you have major MAGA influencers going out there and saying things like “Your body, my choice” or things like Trump makes me feel like I can say whatever the F I want now about anybody. It’s pretty clear. They just put it right out there.
Sargent: Huge swath of programs.
Sargent: I’m glad you brought up Vought, because that brings us to another Karoline Leavitt moment at the press briefing. As everyone knows, Washington is in chaos right now because as you mentioned, Trump’s OMB put out this memo freezing federal funding. Huge swath of programs are going to be affected. Here’s what Leavitt said about this on Tuesday.
Sargent: Amanda, this is not how this is supposed to work. Congress appropriated this money. But I want to point out here how effortlessly Levitt said that, making it sound not just reasonable but well-intentioned. I think she’s dangerous.
It is designed to make this radical move that they’re taking seem reasonable. I know it’s a lot but I really would ask people to go back and read at least some of Project 2025, at least some of the intro stuff. It becomes really clear when you do so despite the fact that they’re emphasizing the pause is temporary and pretending that there are going to be exceptions if you call Russ Vought personally. You have a Stafford loan and you’re supposed to just call him up?
Marcotte: Yeah. If you read Project 2025, it’s very clear that there’s a radical worldview in here, that they really do believe that wokeism has taken over America. And they define it really broadly to the point where it basically does encompass, I’d say, most of America because they categorize basically anyone who has had a government job as part of “the great awokening” as they call it; they categorize anyone who isn’t in a heterosexual marriage as part of it. Once you’ve made the list of Americans they think are evil and part of this society of woke that they would like to burn down to the ground, it is really most of us.
Sargent: As a matter of fact, the memo that orders this freeze actually refers to wokeness. It says that “the use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars,” blah blah blah. This is the justification for freezing all these grants and loans to all kinds of conventional programs across the country. It’s being explicitly held up as a blow against cultural radicalism.
Again, they really do think that this is a cancer that goes all the way to the root. When you see how they define these terms, it becomes really clear that Marxist particularly is used to define anybody who’s ever engaged in the idea of redistributive spending. And that means: Have you gotten a social security check? Have you ever gotten Medicare? Have you paid into these programs with the expectation you’re going to get them back? Well, you’re a Marxist. Have you gotten any federal assistance for housing? Have you gotten a student loan? Well, you’re a Marxist. Very middle class benefits programs are now being talked about as Marxism. Again, Medicaid and CHIP are very much part of this federal freezing spend. That’s, as far as I know, almost 25 percent of the country.
Marcotte: It is. A lot of us, even those of us like you and me who’ve been paying very close attention to Trump and and the MAGA movement in the past four years, somewhat lost track of how shamelessly they gaslight and how little they care about anybody, including and especially to a certain extent their own voters.
Marcotte: Yes, it is. It will work on their base because again, in my unfortunately long experience with these voters, they will die rather than admit a liberal was right about something. I think that there’s going to be serious damage to the GOP brand in the next two to four years, especially if they continue to do stuff like this. All these people that think this doesn’t affect them are going to learn the hard way that it does. In the original memo, they claim they want to pull $3 trillion out of the federal spending. That’s money that goes right into the economy.
Sargent: When you watch Karoline Leavitt talk the way she did during that clip about Biden or during that clip about this insane memo, do you think that there’s any sense anywhere in the MAGA brain trust that they’re anything but invincible?
Sargent: What’s it based on?
So they’re doing this shock and awe, and they’re trying to push everything out the door as quickly as possible and hope that they can just railroad everybody into accepting it. They know that their ability to get things done is on such a short timeline that this is like their only hope. And they’re just hoping that if they yell and scream and act bold enough that we are not going to notice that what they’re doing is wildly unpopular, wildly dangerous, and is going to backfire in their faces if they continue forward with this.
Sargent: What I’m hearing here is that Karoline Leavitt is not going to be able to sweetly blame this all on Biden forever.
Sargent: I hope you’re right. The Audience of One will enjoy it though, and that really may be all that matters. Amanda Marcotte, thanks so much for coming on. Always great to talk to you.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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