Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Meanwhile, at Trump’s cabinet meeting Thursday, his top advisers offered extraordinarily unctuous flattery of him. Put this all together and we’re seeing a level of sycophancy toward the president that’s unlike anything we’ve seen before. So today we’ve invited on the perfect guest to talk about what this all means, historian Nicole Hemmer, who’s written books on the right-wing media and on the Republican Party. Thanks so much for coming back on, Nicole.
Sargent: Let’s start with this bizarre Fox episode. As Matt Gertz of Media Matters chronicled, Fox personalities have gushed with praise for the tariff pause. Sean Hannity called it “the art of the deal” and “a huge win for the president.” Jesse Watters said, “Trump created maximum leverage for himself.” Laura Ingraham called it “Trump’s 3D chess move”—3D seems low, actually. But then Fox senior correspondent Charlie Gasparino said, Wait a minute, the bond market forced Trump’s hand. Listen to this, also courtesy of Media Matters.
Sargent: Nicole, I want to remind everyone here that this brilliant move that Fox personalities are crowing about undid Trump’s own policy—and by the way, only a little bit. The markets are down again as the magnitude of the trade war with China becomes clear. What do you make of all this?
Sargent: I want to ask you one question about this, because Fox has actually in recent months been somewhat willing here and there to criticize the tariffs. The thing is this was in the run-up to the actual announcement of them. You had people like Maria Bartiromo really warning Trump, Don’t do this. You had others on Fox warning, Don’t do this, it’s going to be really hard to manage, and so forth. But now that they’ve done it, they can’t really say that anymore. They’ve got to flip over to saying it’s pure genius.
Sargent: It’s true. By the way, I think we should point out that Fox, at least to some degree, is aligned with the plutocratic wing of the Republican Party. So when Fox News people are saying to Trump through the TV, Don’t do this, what they’re really saying is that major corporations are whispering in their ears, saying, This is going to be a disaster for our business stuff. And Fox has historically been aligned with that plutocratic wing, right?
Sargent: The flattery of Trump isn’t limited to Fox. I want to play some audio of Trump’s cabinet meeting on Thursday in which his top people just bubbled over in sucking up to him. First here is Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Sargent: And here’s Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler.
Sargent: Nicole, I’m not sure I’ve heard this level of sycophancy toward a president before. Am I wrong? Has it ever been like this?
Sargent: You’ve been tracking right-wing media for a long time. You wrote a good book about it called Messengers of the Right. Maybe we’ve seen something like this a little bit before with George W. Bush after September 11 and during the beginning of the Iraq War, but like you say, I don’t think it gets there. I think we’re seeing something different now. More broadly, what’s happened here? Are there structural reasons for this change that you can identify?
And in part, what is structural about it is that the audience for Fox and right-wing media [has] become so loyal to Trump themselves that when these outlets cross Trump, they lose market share, they lose their audiences. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Fox News saw real competition and lost like a million viewers until they got back in line. And that economic incentive is pretty powerful.
Hemmer: Absolutely. Fox was built on this fiction that there was a wall of church and state between its news division and its opinion division. The opinion division could go crazy right-wing, but it would have a real news gathering organization, especially on election night. They would be reliable. They would be the place that you could turn in to watch election results, that you could trust them. And what you saw after election night 2020 was Fox being forced to make a choice: choosing to report accurately what was happening in the election, paying an enormous price from it, and learning a lesson that in the future they wouldn’t be able to cross Donald Trump in that way. Again, I don’t actually think that there was that clean division between opinion and news on Fox, but 2020 was a real turning point in that whatever separation there was functionally collapsed after that.
Hemmer: It’s going to be a fascinating test. All of this is a fascinating test of exactly how firm Trump’s control over people actually is. That molten core is, as its name suggests, untouchable. You’re probably not going to be able to penetrate and actually get accurate information and accurate understanding of the world into that. That outer core, though, when it feels the pain of these tariffs, when it touches their lives personally ... What I think you’re going to see from Fox News is what you saw prior to the easing of the tariffs over the past day or so, which is it tried not to talk about it at all. It tried to feed culture-war stories into its audience to distract them, to give them something else to focus on, to give them someone else to hate.
Sargent: Yeah, it seems like we’re seeing a bit of a test of that right now. To go back to this outer core of maybe less committed Trump voters—the ones who voted for Biden in 2020 [then] moved to Trump because of the cost of living crisis, maybe farmers who have some sense that trade wars really are terrible for their bottom line—people like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters are essentially instructing these people to think Trump is brilliantly in command of everything [and] he’s entirely infallible at all times without fail. But they can see that he’s not, and that he’s just unleashing all this destructive chaos. What happens with Fox News? Does it have to speak to those people or can it just revert only to speaking to the the molten core?
This was, of course, before the 2020 election—so it was before Fox was corralled by Trump and his followers. I think that could be what we see: that in periods of extreme pain, you might have some of those voices like Gasparino come on and say, Wait just a second, this person is destroying the very basis of the modern U.S. economy and things need to get back in line. But in the long run, I think what you will see is a set of stories and conspiracy theories meant to draw people back in the same way that they were drawn back in after about six months or so of coverage of the pandemic.
Hemmer: It will. The tension will get worse. So will the economy, and so will the lives of the people who have been supporting Donald Trump. I’m reminded of something that David Roberts wrote the other day where he said, “Trauma does not tell its own story.” As things get worse, it will not automatically be clear to everyone that they are getting worse because of the choices that Donald Trump made. And the people on Fox News and throughout right-wing media are going to be pushing another story.
Sargent: I want to try to close on a slightly optimistic note, which is this: The tariff story, I think, illustrates that the press in this country actually remains robust and independent. If you look at the polls, we’ve actually seen a significant shift in public opinion against the tariffs. And the reason for that, I think, was mainly press coverage and noise from the opposition, meaning the Democratic Party. It just looks to me like the press actually did a decent job of informing the voters of what tariffs really are—that they’re actually a tax, not other countries paying tribute to Donald Trump’s greatness or whatever. So you’ve got Fox News, as you say, functioning as authoritarian state media, but at the same time, its influence is actually somewhat limited precisely because the rest of the press, despite Trump’s threats and his shakedowns and all the rest of it, has actually been informative and robust and independent. Can you talk about that a little bit?
It’s all of these different sources of the power of civil society that has not yet been blotted out, combined with something like the economy where people can open up their 401(k)s and see, Wow, I lost a lot of money over the last two weeks. That intrusion of reality, along with good reporting and an opposition actually speaking up, matters. And I think it gives us a roadmap moving forward for what we are going to need to counter not just issues on the economy but this entire political agenda that the Trump administration is pursuing.
Hemmer: That’s right. It’s not limitless. And I think that is the optimistic note, or that actually is the note of reality in all of this. Part of authoritarianism is the ability to project absolute power. And Trump has consolidated a lot of power, and Fox News has a lot of power, but they don’t have everything. In a society like ours, people still have a tremendous amount of power, and we should be using it right now, every day, at every possible opportunity. That is how you both wind that authoritarian power back and break the myth of absolute power that they’re trying to sell.
Hemmer: Thanks 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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