The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 25 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
[Editor’s note: After this episode was recorded, The New York Times confirmed the CNN report we discussed here, reporting that a classified internal assessment shows Trump’s bombing set back Iran’s nuclear program only a few months, a major blow to his ham-handed efforts to take a “victory lap.” Both reports triggered a furious response from Trump and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.]
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got into a major online battle over Trump’s bombing of Iran. AOC said Trump had committed impeachable offenses. Trump responded with a wild angry rant, daring Democrats to impeach him. And then AOC responded to that by reiterating that the bombing is illegal. What struck us about this, however, is that Trump let himself get triggered so spectacularly at exactly the moment when all his propagandists are blaring forth the message that Trump’s handling of all this has turned him into a statesman of world historical stature. This also seems like something Democrats can do more of: baiting Trump into stepping on his own message at key strategic moments. Salon’s Amanda Marcotte is one of our go-to experts on the pathologies of Trump and MAGA, so we’re talking to Amanda about all this today. Thanks for coming on as always.
Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s crazy eruption. He tweeted, “Stupid AOC, one of the “dumbest” people in Congress, is now calling for my Impeachment … The Democrats aren’t used to WINNING, and she can’t stand the concept of our Country being successful again.” Then Trump said a lot of stuff about AOC’s IQ, rambled about fake scandals involving Joe Biden, and talked about how he supposedly aced a recent cognitive test. Then he said, “Go ahead and try Impeaching me, MAKE MY DAY!” Amanda, what’s your interpretation of all that?
Marcotte: Everything with Donald Trump obviously is psychological projection—everything he accuses somebody else of is. You know him, he’s a narcissist, so he’s putting his own insecurities on other people. I think often this thing happens more when the object of his ire is a woman. Everything he’s saying about AOC could not be more just projecting his own inadequacies onto her, calling her “dumb” and “chaotic.” It’s so funny because you look at the exchange and she’s everything he’s trying to convince people he is. She’s calm, she’s intelligent, she understands the gravity of the situation, whereas he is a disorderly, stupid, mental child.
Sargent: Yeah. And by the way, a woman of color, too, really tends to trigger him more than I think even white women do.
Marcotte: Low IQ is one of his favorite go-to racist insults for sure.
Sargent: Yes, he constantly applies that to women of color. By the way, to your point about AOC being calm and measured, that’s exactly how she responded. She tweeted in response to Trump, saying, “Mr. President, don’t take your anger out on me - I’m just a silly girl. Take it out on whoever convinced you to betray the American people and our Constitution by illegally bombing Iran and dragging us into war. It only took you 5 months to break almost every promise you made.” Now, Amanda, there will be some out there who claim that Trump is cleverly attacking AOC because his base will love it and blah, blah, blah, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I think he’s genuinely set off by hearing her in particular say these things. He’s still sensitive about the two impeachments from the first term. What do you make of this?
Marcotte: I think Ocasio-Cortez has often talked about her time being a bartender and how useful it was in teaching her to be politician. And this is a really classic example, because if you’re a woman in the service industry, men taking out all their issues on you is a common experience—and she handled it with aplomb. I think that that’s obviously what’s happening. I think he’s feeling especially insecure right now because it’s clear that this Iran thing ... he wants it to be this one-and-done victory, but that’s just never going to be what it is.
I think that a lot of the people that pressured him into this bombing are not going to be satiated by that. I don’t think Benjamin Netanyahu is going to be satiated. I don’t think the evangelical right that really wants an Armageddon war with Iran or Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham who want regime change in Iran—I think that they’re not going to be satiated. And he’s probably starting to feel the heat because there is no way to please those people while also not eroding his base of power even more.
Sargent: I want to home in on what you said there about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s past as a bartender because that was on Trump’s mind. In his tweet going after her, he mentioned the fact that her district is partly in Queens and he said, “Alexandria should go back home to Queens, where I was also brought up, and straighten out her filthy, disgusting, crime ridden streets.” Now, I actually know a little something about the part of Queens where Trump grew up himself. It’s called Jamaica Estates, right? And while Trump constantly portrays himself as this scrappy outer borough guy who took on the elites in Manhattan and so forth, Jamaica Estates was the home to elites in Queens. Lawyers, judges, lobbyists, real big shots—that’s where he grew up. I think he is sensitive to the fact that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a New Yorker just like him, only genuinely with a hardscrabble background.
Marcotte: It’s funny, he can’t help but show that he is that spoiled rich kid in these moments. He talks to her like she’s the help because he just can’t help but think of her that way, because she’s beneath him in his mind in every way: female, Latina, had this working-class job. She is college-educated but she did have a working-class job. And yeah, she’s from the part of Queens he only really witnessed from inside his limousine going to and from school when he was a kid.
Sargent: To your point earlier about how there’s no way the story of Trump bombing Iran is going to simply be settled right now as a done matter, CNN had an important report on Tuesday afternoon. Three sources tell CNN that an internal intelligence assessment found that Trump’s bombings left core components of Iran’s nuclear program largely intact and only set it back a few months. Now, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reacted furiously to the report, telling CNN that this was leaked by a “low-level loser,” is “flat-out wrong,” and that the leak was designed to “demean” Trump. Amanda, that word “demean” jumped out at me because she’s literally mimicking Trump’s exact language. He himself used the word “demean” the other day to describe the press’s efforts to ask hard questions about the Iran strikes. She really knows how to shore up his flagging psyche.
Marcotte: Yes. If I may pimp my own stuff for a minute, My YouTube show Standing Room Only—our last episode was very much about Trump’s narcissism and how it really predicts his behavior in these kinds of situations. And this is a classic example of how narcissists defeat themselves, right? They try to act tough. They try to impress people, but they don’t have the goods. They can’t actually accomplish what they’re trying to do, especially someone like Trump who’s lazy, stupid, and cowardly. He has no skills to achieve the things he wants to do. And so they end up failing and then they’re humiliated. They’ve made it worse for themselves. And he really has with the situation. I think a lot of people, especially Netanyahu, got in his ear. And you could tell from the way he was talking about this before the bombing that he was operating under this assumption that Iran was laughing at him, and the way to get his ego back would be to throw bombs at them. And now he failed to do what he said he was going to do.
Sargent: Trump’s Truth Social feed is absolutely glutted with propaganda. He’s tweeting out the work of other people treating him as this world historical figure. For instance, he pushed out this piece by Hugh Hewitt which said Trump has changed “the trajectory of the history of the Middle East.” Now, this is someone who clearly is not feeling like that is how it’s being perceived. And by the way, it isn’t being perceived that way. New CNN poll finds that 55 percent of Americans oppose the bombing and an equally large percentage actually don’t trust Trump to use force properly in Iran. So I think that really goes to your core point here, which is that there’s just no filling this deep pit that exists inside Trump, is there?
Marcotte: No. None. I think everybody that is praising him right now is trying to get something out of him. It’s clear that a lot of the people that are lavishing praise and calling him this world historical figure, [like] that text that he got from Mike Huckabee that he published where Mike Huckabee implied that he’s a prophet of God and that’s why he was saved by an assassin’s bullet, are trying to convince Trump to escalate the war with Iran, which he knows in his gut is a bad idea, I think. [He knows] that it’s going to hurt him for the reasons that you say; these polls show that it’s a wildly unpopular thing.
Back to the narcissism thing, they can’t make a decision based on facts or evidence, much less what’s right or what’s wrong. It’s just reading a room and deciding what’s going to impress people the most—or what you think will. And he is in this situation right now where more than half the country believes that he’s going to humiliate himself if he continues down this path with Iran. But then he also has people who understand his psychology who are like, But you’re chosen by God and you’re the greatest man who ever lived. And the way you prove it is getting into war with Iran. And he’s just like, Where can I get that need for admiration filled? and it’s not possible. This is actually a hellish nightmare for a narcissist, and honestly couldn’t have happened to a better person.
Sargent: Right. Well, let’s talk about the Democratic side of this because I thought AOC raised a bunch of interesting questions about this. You had a piece recently on California Governor Gavin Newsom who’s taking on Trump over his sending of troops into L.A. Newsom, who has played footsie with Trumpism a little bit, has suddenly discovered that waging a major political war against MAGA is popular not just with the base but with a fair amount of people in the middle of the electorate as well. I wonder whether more Democrats could pick up on this. Maybe not do it exactly the way AOC does, but each Democrat could find their own way to do it. What might that look like?
Marcotte: Well, one of her strengths is that she speaks like a normal person. She talks like somebody who has not triangulated her views to a focus group before she expressed them. She doesn’t make everything a fundraising pitch. She put out this email denouncing Trump, calling for his impeachment, did not ask for money, did not ask for people to sign up for a listserv. She didn’t do all the things that make people feel like they’re being grifted. And that’s why people like her. She also is very clear-eyed about what she believes and speaks from the heart on this. I think that you don’t have to have her exact views necessarily, but if you do the same thing—if you just speak to the public like you speak to your friends, like you speak to normal people— you’ll find that people react well to that because I think that people’s radar for phoniness has been on the rise in recent years for many reasons.
There’s also this rising hunger for authenticity, and somebody like AOC is really well-liked across the Democratic Party. I think a lot of people in power are confused about this because they’re like, Well, she’s far to the left and voters say they’re more moderate than she is, so why do they like her so much? And it’s because they don’t think she’s BS-ing them and they trust that she is who she says she is and that she’s a good person. And I think that that goes a long way.
Sargent: I want to try to get at why more Democrats don’t do this. And I think there’s a deep problem among them right now. There’s a strain among Democrats that wants to appear solicitous of right-wing populism or sensitive to its appeal. I’m not sure who the Democrats who do this are appealing to or who they think they’re appealing to. I think some of them believe that they’ll get brownie points from pundits for doing it because it makes them look like they understand that Trumpism is a real phenomenon out in the country, unlike liberal delusional leftists who don’t understand that, right? I think maybe there are some Democrats who sincerely think that this appearance of solicitousness with right-wing populism, this footsie playing with Trumpism is actually necessary to winning back working-class voters. I don’t think that, but I think one could reach that conclusion sincerely. But regardless, it gets in the way of doing the type of politics that AOC is doing, that Gavin Newsom is doing because that type of politics requires saying Trump is a fucking lunatic and I’m going to trigger him in every way I can. And that’s not something that someone who’s being very deeply solicitous to Trumpism feels free to do. You know what I mean?
Marcotte: Yeah, I think so. Especially with Gavin Newsom when he was playing footsie with MAGA, I think a lot of it was due to this belief that there was a low-propensity swing voter that was young and male and some working-class, a lot of them actually college-educated who swung hard to the right in this election, and that they need to be won back. And you listen to the podcasts that these guys listen to and there’s obsessions with trans people. They’re mad at women. There’s a lot of genuinely gross stuff. And I think that there was this perception like, If we can be a little more gross, then that will win these guys over. But in reality, I think that what a lot of them like is the perception of honesty—especially the ones you can win back. Because if they really are obsessed with hating women and hating trans people, I think you’re not getting those guys back. But I think that the ones who were drawn a little to that, what they really like about the Joe Rogans and Theo Vons and podcasters like that is the sense that they’re real and they’re having an authentic conversation. I think that’s BS. I don’t think that’s true. I think that’s an illusion of authenticity, but I do think that’s what people are seeking. And if you just try it, maybe you will actually start to be able to get those guys into a conversation and talk to them about things like why women’s rights are important.
Sargent: Yeah, you can be sincere on that topic.
Marcotte: Yeah, and I think a lot of them are.… Or trans rights—I want to be very clear, I’m saying all across the board, I think that a lot of people hold those opinions more softly than a lot of Democrats fear. And it’s just a matter of who’s talking to them in a space where they are persuadable.
Sargent: And you see Gavin Newsom sounding a whole lot more sincere now when he’s doing these “partisan things” than he did when he was reaching out to Trumpism.
Marcotte: Yeah, Gavin Newsom’s an interesting character because, as I say in my piece, before this year, when I was out in the wild just talking to normal people—the normal Democrats, moderate Democrats, people who are not crazy political junkies like us—his name came up a lot. And it wasn’t about his politics; it wasn’t about his views, of which they almost knew nothing. It was very much the perception that he’s willing to take the fight to Trump and that he was a fighter. And the fact that he was selling away the very thing that was making him appealing to normal people was surprising to me, but he’s seems like he’s getting it back.
Sargent: It really does. And just to close this out, let’s go back to AOC for a sec. There’s this drumbeat of punditry out there that says, Oh, she’s a hard-luck progressive. She’s in the progressive bubble. But again, the content of the views isn’t necessarily the most important thing. It’s the sincerity. It’s the willingness to say, I believe this, even if you don’t. Can you talk about how AOC has shown that that’s the way to do this? And is there a way forward here for Democrats?
Marcotte: Yeah, I think that part of it is when you see Democrats being hedgy or obviously using focus group–tested language, there’s a sense that normal people have that they’re hiding something. So it actually almost makes it seem like they have some secret socialist views that are so scary they can’t be said in public because they’re too bad, right?
Sargent: Right. It’s ironic, isn’t it?
Marcotte: Yeah, whereas AOC says what she believes and when she does, it becomes a little bit more real and normal and harder to argue with—or at least if you’re going to engage, you can engage like a normal person. She says, for instance, that women’s rights are important to her. I love the fact that she is a very outspoken feminist. I think that a lot of the people who hate her can’t really argue against her point because she’s making it very clearly and plainly and inarguable. So have a little faith that your values are good and that people will believe them if you just defend them. She does, and people like her for that. And I wish that more Democrats stopped acting ashamed of what they believe.
Sargent: And by the way, that is, I think, what triggers Trump. It’s very clear that what sets him off is a Democrat who is willing to speak plain truths. Amanda Marcotte, it’s always a great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.
Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
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