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 just saw a particularly unsettling version of this tension play out. Leavitt went full North Korea with a number of worshipful monologues about Trump to reporters. Yet around the same time, a reporter’s criticism of Trump caused him to explode in a wild triggered fury. This doesn’t seem like a good way to run the executive branch of a great nation. So we’re going to try to dig through all this with Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte, who knows how to read MAGA pathologies—particularly male ones—like nobody else. Amanda, thanks for coming on.
Sargent: Let’s start with Karoline Leavitt. At the press briefing on Friday, Leavitt was asked if Trump will visit some of the sites of private real estate deals that his company has made in the Middle East during his upcoming trip there. Then this happened.
Sargent: Now Trump is easily the most corrupt, self-dealing president ever to occupy the Oval Office. He’s ripping off the place relentlessly. But that aside, Amanda, note how Leavitt starts by portraying Trump as this humble, self-sacrificing figure, but then immediately segues into this unctuous, obsequious, hilariously over-the-top flattery of him—because she knows that’s what he wants to hear. Your thoughts?
Sargent: Well, speaking of being over-the-top, you had a piece recently for Salon in which you talked about the MAGA aesthetic and the degree to which it turns on wildly exaggerated imagery of all kinds—Trump’s gold-plated tastelessness, as you put it. Then there’s also the Mar-a-Lago face, the really crazy plastic surgery jobs and crazy makeup jobs on prominent MAGA women; the steroided-out bodies which are sometimes attached to Donald Trump, which I find funny because that guy is McDonald’s from top to bottom. This is not a fit guy and they just stick that body on him. And same with Pete Hegseth, right? They show him in the same way. It occurs to me that this Leavitt performance that we see regularly is a little similar to that. As you say, she looks the part. She got the job partly because of that. But it’s the exaggeration of the praise that’s the key, right? The over-the-top nature of it, that’s the key. Can you talk about that?
Sargent: It occurs to me that when Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, went down to El Salvador, she posed in front of all these, again, exaggerated images of dark criminals in the background. She was very decked out for that, right?
Sargent: Let’s go to another Leavitt moment. She was asked about another Trump policy, his effort to gut the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Listen to this exchange.
Leavitt (audio voiceover): It’s a federal agency within which branch? It’s the executive branch. Who’s the head of the executive branch? The president of the U.S. He has the right to fire people within the executive branch. It’s a pretty simple answer.
Marcotte: Yes. And it shows that I think there’s a lot of people that are asking the question: Why isn’t anyone standing up to Donald Trump inside the White House on this tariff policy? Now that question was about consumer safety, but I think this is incredibly related because the tariff policy is going to create massive problems for him politically. It already is. And then when people actually start seeing the empty shelves and rising prices, it’s going to be a serious problem. But we see with Leavitt’s behavior that everyone around Trump—their only job is to make him feel good about himself. And he’s a narcissist, so that’s just this constant nonstop struggle.
Sargent: I think you put your finger on why there’s this cringe-worthy quality to it. This combination of the need to constantly praise him and treat him as this world-historically great figure and, at the same time, it’s so obvious they’re ministering to this deep, unslakable insecurity. It’s that tension that makes it so cringe-worthy, almost car wreck-like.
Sargent: It’s interesting that you say that because it literally is what his people say to him, that he’s the greatest ever. They say that during the cabinet meetings. They say “greatest president ever,” even though everybody knows that that’s a complete joke. They say it anyway. I want to switch to one more Leavitt moment. Reporter Andrew Egger of The Bulwark asked about Trump’s ongoing crypto grift. Listen to this.
Leavitt (audio voiceover): Look, the president is abiding by all conflict of interest laws. The president has been incredibly transparent with his own personal financial obligations throughout the years. The president is a successful businessman. And I think, frankly, it’s one of the many reasons that people reelected him back to this office.
Marcotte: Yes, they say that because he’s not. He’s a total failure. It does show that this MAGA over-the-top aesthetic is performed for him to feed his narcissism. But it does give me insight into the way that this over-the-top ... I don’t want to say campiness of MAGA because camp is fun and joyful and this is just gross. But the over-the-top nature of it, I think, weirdly does affect certain people by convincing them ... I don’t think Trump’s voters, even his biggest fans, think he’s the greatest president ever; the person with the most integrity via all time; no person has ever been anything more thing than Donald Trump ever has. I don’t think they would agree with that, but the constant repetition of things like, He’s the greatest businessman of all time, [unconsciously reinforces] the idea that he was at least a successful businessman, when the opposite is true. He was a failure. He bankrupted his company over and over and over again. If it wasn’t for the constant bailouts from his father and his rich friends, he would just be nobody. And I think that we get very similar vibes with a lot of the other over-the-top praise that is offered to him. It teaches and coaches his voters to think, He must be at least somewhat good or else these people would just burst into flames from the shame of this. But that’s just not how any of it works.
There was a lot more like that. Amanda, it’s worth noting that in her segment, Stephanie Ruhle cited the fact that a lot of prominent and very male businessmen have said Trump’s tariffs will crush us economically. But just note the misogyny in his wild rant. He sounded hysterical. I think this cuts against the North Korea state TV image that Leavitt worked so hard to cultivate. What do you think?
It’s funny to me because all these people always talk about John Wayne, or Trump has been talking about Sean Connery a lot, the movie idols that they think of as masculine or calm, in control—the person that Leavitt is describing. But on TV, it’s actually performed as volume to 11, red face screaming. And Trump’s Truth Socials are in the same aesthetic. It’s a weird contradiction. I do think that’s why the pro-wrestling metaphor was so good because no one in pro-wrestling is an understated, calm, collected, silent leader.
Marcotte: Yeah. And I would add reality TV, where he also has a lot of experience, into the mix. This is not the zone of subtle emotion. These are the spaces where everything is about grabbing people’s attention and shaking them by the lapels. That’s always been a part of American culture. I don’t even necessarily hate it. I think bombast and over-the-top ridiculousness can be really fun in a lot of situations. And I think one of the reasons Donald Trump was fun in the ’80s and ’90s and seemed harmless to people was that he was in this clownish aesthetic. But it’s also true that traditionally fascism embraces an over-the-top aesthetic. It does so—
Marcotte: Yes. People think of Nazis goose-stepping in the streets, and that’s supposed to be intimidating. But it was also received at the time as ridiculous because it was so over-the-top and in contrast with the way, in the ’30s, most people’s aesthetic was a little bit more calm. There were Hollywood musicals [and] all that, but people thought Hitler was a clown, Mussolini a very clownish figure. Fascist leaders in general are loud, buffoonish; they have stupid hair. Look at the autocrats around the world, they all love a bad haircut. And one of the reasons is you can’t look away. It’s the car crash mentality of getting attention.
Sargent: It’s funny, Trump very early on—and I’m still staggered that this is not part of the dialogue—I think pre-2016, said something to a room full of people that was along the lines of, I’m going to get in and the whole world’s going to go crazy. They won’t be able to write about anyone else. Something like that. And his instinct and insight was right. It did hack our politics in a way that we’re still stumbling around to get our heads around and cope with. Is there a way out? What’s the way out?
I do think people get sick of it. That’s my hope because he’s very one note. We’re already seeing some changes start to happen. During his first campaign and his first administration, there really was an inability of anyone to look away from him. And you and I both are on the side of people who can read ratings and Chartbeat and other things, and we can see that the interest at least in the left and in the center of this country in reading and looking at Donald Trump news is really declining because they’re just like, OK, blah, blah, loud clown being loud again. And I think that it’s just a matter of more and more people getting sick of this guy and getting sick of the nonstop over-the-top outrage.
Marcotte: 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. Read More Details
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