Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Amanda Marcotte: Hey, thanks for having me.
Marcotte: Yes, there is a big disconnect. Usually, I feel like I have a good read on what kind of delusions Trump is under, but he’s so angry and baffled that I almost wonder if he actually had half-convinced himself that tariffs were good, that they actually would do all the miraculous things that he promises they will do. It’s fascinating because everyone knows that tariffs are a sales tax. I always assumed that that was why Trump wants to impose them—because he’s a rich guy who wants to move the tax burden off of rich people and onto poor people. Maybe he’s beginning to realize, especially with other Republican pushback, that his endless and boundless faith that he can bullshit his supporters might hit a limit when their prices start going up because of a tax he imposed.
Marcotte: Yeah, and it’s clear that his new friends in the tech bro world are feeding this delusion. They—Elon Musk’s friends—are on Twitter pushing this idea. That’s where his obsession with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is coming from. It’s coming from these people that are blowing smoke up his ass about it, saying, Yeah, tariffs were the time of this great pre-twentieth century economy. Well, no. He obviously is bad at math and doesn’t understand that you can’t just replace income taxes with a sales tax, even a really, really high sales tax for multiple reasons. The amount of revenue generated would never be even close to enough. And that’s not to say the total and absolute economic damage that comes from hitting the people who can least afford it the hardest.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): And Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I’m concerned. He’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore, he’s a Palestinian.
Marcotte: It’s telling that he was being asked about tax policy and he went off on calling Chuck Schumer “Palestinian.” And he’s getting worse about this. Chuck Schumer is confronting him on a tax policy issue and he just starts spouting this stuff because he hears the word “Schumer”; he’s almost like a bot, coming up with these insults. It might be effective to a certain extent on his base because a lot of them have also “self-botted.” It’s a series of impulses that are removed from anything like thought process or rationality, a bunch of emotions totally unorganized by anything resembling reason now, and it’s getting worse all the time. But for everyone else, it’s like, What are you talking about, man?
Reporter (audio voiceover): Can you say which countries you would target in your next travel ban?
Sargent: He snapped at two other reporters as well. He said, “That’s enough,” to one of them who asked about the markets—also telling. And he angrily asked another reporter who brought up Trump’s discussion of removing Palestinians of Gaza, “Who are you with?” When she said Voice of America, he angrily said, “No wonder.” MAGA is really angry at Voice of America right now, but again, these are reasonable questions to ask Trump. I keep asking myself, how is this supposed to appeal to any swing voter or moderate voter who’s worried about the chaos they’re seeing in Washington? I know Trump thinks he’s got magical propaganda and magical lying powers, but he’s got to sense that this is not going to reassure people, no?
Sargent: Well, supporting your point, a Trump adviser told Axios recently that the stock market feels like something over which they have no control. I really do think that Trump stakes his emotional well-being on what he sees in charts. When charts go down, he feels bad; when charts go up, he feels strong and powerful. Here’s a case where those market charts are really going down. And he sits there watching TV a lot, as you know. He absorbs stuff off of Fox News. Even Fox News is freaking out about the markets, and he’s seeing chart after chart after chart and visual after visual after visual showing markets tanking. That’s got to get to him.
It’s really striking because I think that there’s a self-interested aspect [to] this. What’s interesting about what he’s threatening to do to the economy will hurt almost everybody very badly—not just working class people but everybody, including rich people [who will] lose a lot of money when the stock market crashes. There’s a self-interest aspect there with the Fox News host, but I also think that they recognize that the Republican Party could be in very real danger if they continue down this path.
Marcotte: Yeah. In fact, I even want to put some nuance into the concept of the MAGA coalition because one of the problems is that Trump and the media played a terrible role in this. That election was such a shocker that I think a lot of the coverage has treated it like the American people really backed Donald Trump, that it was this overwhelming victory, and that people love him and everything—whereas the actual data says very differently. We have fewer than 50 percent of Americans voted for him that voted at all. You do have the faithful, the people that love Donald Trump, but then you all have another huge segment of the people that voted for him reluctantly.
Sargent: I want to highlight another big moment from the press conference. Trump was talking about how he had threatened Canada with huge tariffs to get them to back off threatened surcharges on electricity for American customers. Some tariffs has gone forward, some haven’t. Anyway, this is what happened.
Sargent: Amanda, the funny thing about this is the market’s tanked on this news, right? The market’s tanked when this scuffle happened, yet he’s holding it up as proof of his strength and power. This, to me, is the disconnect.
We see this all the time with Trump, and I think this is a really good example. He thought he was going to do something smart and powerful by starting this trade war. I guess he didn’t realize Canada can punch back and they can actually cause political pain for him, which is what they did. Instead of learning his lesson and be like, Maybe I shouldn’t be so aggressive for no good reason to our neighbor, he’s doubling down. He’s escalating because he doesn’t know what else to do. We saw the same behavior with E. Jean Carroll. She sued him—and instead of admitting that he had gotten himself into some serious hot water by sexually assaulting this woman, he just kept doubling down and insulting her and defaming her, racking up more things they could sue him for.
Marcotte: He has, in the past, been convinced to save face by backing down when he gets into these spirals. Especially in the last term, there were people who understood that his strongest desire is to save face. As long as he had some face-saving excuse like Oh, I won the tariff war, declare victory, let’s move on, he would do that. He’s a lot older now. He was never an emotionally continent person to begin with, obviously, and it’s getting worse. It’s definitely getting worse. I’m not a doctor, I couldn’t say, but this happens to a lot of people as they age. Their impulse control gets much worse, and he doesn’t have as many people around him to steer him in the right direction. On the contrary, he seems to be spending all his time with Elon Musk, who is taking advantage of this entire situation to manipulate the old man.
Marcotte: Yeah. He obviously doesn’t believe in God or anything like that, so I don’t know where he would get the idea that he’s been magically imbued with these powers. He’s also not a very smart man and he’s a narcissist, so he might not actually have some causal relationship in his head between I can do whatever I want [and] I live without consequences. He’s probably just high on the supply of having escaped prison, having escaped death, having escaped all these nooses that he had worked himself into.
Sargent: And I would argue that the dynamic is exacerbated by the fact that the people around him who are thinking are really pretty hardline MAGA ideologues who have some twisted vision of tearing down the American state and tearing up the Western alliances and replacing it with some populist/theocratic form of governance that’s aligned with the world’s dictators and strongmen.
Their ideas are incredibly radical. They basically want to end democracy and replace it with neofeudalism. He obviously doesn’t understand any of that, but he does understand, as a narcissist, being told that he could be the most important president that ever lived. It’s obvious to me that that’s what’s being whispered in his ear to get him to just sign onto stuff that he in the past would have understood was politically damaging in the extreme.
Marcotte: I don’t mean to make everything super dark [laughs]. Thank you for having me.
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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