Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Timothy Noah: Thanks for having me.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): In that process, we identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas. Fifty million. And you know what’s happened to them? They’ve used them as a method of making bombs. How about that?
Noah: Yeah, it is entirely made up. Trump says things because he likes the way they sound. I do put forward this theory in my piece that the way authoritarians consolidate power is to manufacture crises. And that is clearly what the Trump team is doing. But I should add an important caveat, which is that chaos comes naturally to Donald Trump. He is a mentally disabled president of the United States—I think that’s the only way you can describe it. He has a narcissistic personality disorder that’s well documented, and he has had some decline in cognition that’s also been documented and observed by a number of medical professionals and others.
Sargent: At least not yet, that’s for sure. The administration has now rescinded the memo instilling that massive spending freeze, which had caused chaos and confusion and threatened to have a huge impact on all kinds of government programs. It’s a little unclear what happened here. They seem to be still trying to pause some spending but this is clearly a surrender, I think. You wrote in your piece that Trump probably thinks turning off all that federal spending was also beneficial to his larger strategy of consolidating power. How would that work exactly?
What we know is that procurement of an object like an aircraft carrier is not federal financial assistance. However, the purchase of services is sometimes federal financial assistance, and sometimes not. As a consequence, you had every agency in the federal government switching off every switch it could because nobody really knows which falls into which category. It was utter mayhem.
Noah: Right. And there’s even more impeachable offenses that you didn’t mention. You mentioned one or two that I hadn’t mentioned. As I said in my piece, it’s become kind of a parlor game. How many are there at this point, nine days in? But it looks like he’s doing more than he really is, and Trump thrives on the playacting part of being president. He says he’s done things that he hasn’t done, claims credit for things that he can’t claim credit for. And you’re seeing that here.
And on the evidence of this particular example, neither are his enablers. Surely, Vought have understood that this memo was going to be challenged immediately in court. He ought to have been able to anticipate that Trump could not tolerate the bad publicity surrounding it so that Trump, even before there was a court judgment, withdrew the memo. These are all signs of a weak presidency, but weakness can cause chaos too. And we’re certainly experiencing a lot of chaos, a lot of fear, and a real degradation of the ability of government to perform its functions.
Noah: You even saw it pronounced by John Harris in Politico, which I have to say, I still haven’t gotten over reading that piece. I was deeply troubled by that piece.
Noah: Yeah, it’s a transference because it’s hard for us journalists to keep track of everything Trump is doing. But I guarantee you it is not hard for the people who are going to be making court challenges to these individual actions because each action has a different constituency that is focusing on a particular topic and is at the ready to take Trump to court when he does something illegal.
Noah: That’s right. Even in the Republican Senate, Trump was only barely able to get his defense secretary choice, Pete Hegseth, through. I don’t believe he’ll be able to get Robert F. Kennedy Jr. through. His whole decision to nominate Kennedy was really a reflection only of Trump’s vanity.
Sargent: And by Democratic senators on the Hill, on Wednesday, we should point out that a number of Democratic senators absolutely shredded RFK in the confirmation hearing. Can you tell me why you think he’s not going to get in?
Sargent: I certainly hope you’re right about that. I was thinking that he was probably going to get RFK; after today’s hearing, I’m really not so sure. Tulsi Gabbard looks to me like she might be a very hard one for some Republican senators to support as well.
Sargent: I want to try to pull all this together. Going back to that ridiculous joke about condoms and Gaza, what we’re seeing here is an effort across the board to degrade public life in every way possible. Having the White House press secretary push that absurdity, having ridiculous legal rationales for immense power grabs, Trump going out there and demanding of his ICE agents that they hit arrest quotas as has been reported in The Washington Post, everything is about taking public life and turning it into a big joke.
Sargent: Right. And this idea that Trump is this wizard who can just throw us off with a magical distraction strategy, again, is constantly treated with unbelievable credulousness by the press. Let’s talk about that though. The degradation of public life is a thing that’s happening.
Sargent: You wrote about the degradation and the spreading of meanness in U.S. politics and what that means for your newsletter. Can you talk about that as well?
Nineteen-sixty-eight was a terrible, terrible year. We saw the assassination of Martin Luther King and of Robert F. Kennedy. Later, we saw this awful mayhem at the Democratic convention. We saw an endless war in Vietnam. It was a time that was as dismal as can be imagined. People were saying, I don’t understand what’s happening to this country. And I think people felt that way during Trump’s first term. I think they feel it more powerfully now. And I think more and more people will feel that, many people who voted for Trump in 2024 will feel that. It’s a sad moment. For those of us who really believe in this country and believe in its government, it is devastating to see what is being done in its name.
Noah: Yes, I think that there will be a route, but that’s a long way off. Even longer term ... I don’t know whether you agree, this is a little out there, but I think the Republican Party is in the process of disintegrating. Liz Cheney has said that, and I think she’s dead right. Conservatives, serious conservatives are going to need to start looking for a new party to create in its stead because the Republicans have really sold out on just about every principle and have become—this is not an original thought—a cult of personality. And that isn’t easily undone.
Noah: Thanks for having me, Greg.
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.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Trump’s Chaos Strategy Is Already Blowing Up in His Face )
Also on site :