The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 25 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
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 Monday afternoon, Donald Trump angrily tried to put a positive spin on the deepening fiasco around Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. He defended Musk’s insane email instructing federal employees to list their accomplishments. This has been defied by numerous top officials from Trump’s own administration, but Trump said the idea was “great” and then spread more confusion about it.
All this comes as Trump is getting hit by more terrible poll numbers, this time on the economy. Trump had some spin to offer on the polls as well. Which raises a question: Does there come a point at which these bizarre contortions and ramblings undermines support for Trump among the voters who still, for some reason, see him as a strong, competent, and decisive leader? Writer Susan Milligan has a new piece for The New Republic looking at how Republicans have been portraying Trump lately as a strong “daddy” figure, so we’re talking to her about why this portrayal is looking more more absurd by the second. Thanks for coming back on, Susan.
Susan Milligan: Glad to be on. Thanks for having me.
Sargent: To catch people up, Musk sent this email over the weekend telling federal employees to list their last week’s accomplishments and then said that failure to reply would be taken as resignation. Trump was asked about that on Monday, and then this happened.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): He wanted to know what you did this week. You know why he wanted that, by the way? I thought it was great, because we have people that don’t show up to work and nobody even knows if they work for the government. So by asking the question, Tell us what you did this week, what he’s doing is saying, Are you actually working? And then if you don’t answer, you’re semi-fired or you’re fired, because a lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist. That’s how badly various parts of our government were run, especially by this last group.
Sargent: Note how angry he is at being questioned on this. FBI Director Kash Patel, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and numerous other agency officials have told their employees that they don’t need to respond to this email. Yet here Trump seems to suggest that it might be live policy, spreading more confusion. It doesn’t sound like he knows what’s actually been happening with the idea, or the pushback it’s received. What do you think, Susan?
Milligan: He does not understand the pushback, and he gets very, very angry when anybody challenges him. And I think he especially doesn’t like it when the attention goes to Elon Musk, and he doesn’t like it when Elon Musk screws up. He likes being in charge, and he does not feel in charge at the moment.
Sargent: There was one moment a few days ago where Trump said something like, Elon Musk is doing a great job, but I’d like him to be even more aggressive. And what he really meant by that, very plainly, is that Elon’s got to start showing the goods already, because he’s not coming up with anything.
Milligan: No, they’ve put out some numbers—though that, I think, are preposterous. Trump said something today along the lines of hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud and abuse [are] being identified, which is just absurd. The email situation was ridiculous because Trump tried to cover for it today by saying that they’re just trying to figure out who was really working. So if you didn’t respond to the email, then you weren’t working and maybe you didn’t really exist—but they were sent on Saturday. I don’t know what they thought, that 2.3 million federal workers across the country would be checking their work emails on a Saturday afternoon. That really blew up in his face.
Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. And Trump is a bit ticked off about the polling right now. CNN analyst Harry Enten highlighted some remarkable numbers from Gallup’s latest economic confidence index: Only 20 percent right now say the economy is good or excellent, and 59 percent say the economy is getting worse. Susan, it seems to me that if this continues, negative perceptions of the economy could color how the public sees all of Musk’s massive cuts and firings. Trump is desperately trying to portray Musk as on top of things, as rooting out waste and fraud and making everything hum like a machine—but negative perceptions of the economy will lead voters to be more likely to see everything as going off the rails. What do you think?
Milligan: I think that’s absolutely true. And we’ve seen that in some town halls in Republican districts where residents have gotten very upset about some of the cuts and people they know who lost their jobs. I don’t know why they didn’t think that the cutbacks would affect them somehow, but of course they have and they will continue to do so.
There’s a fundamental problem here. Musk and Trump have this idea that the government is like a business—and that you can run it as some profit-making enterprise and cut this here and cut this here and increase the bottom line—when it’s an institution that provides services to people. So even the people in red states who say they’re upset about spending and waste want government services, and now they’re starting to realize that they may not get them.
Sargent: Speaking of trying to portray this as stern, tough-minded business thinking, in your piece you detail how Trump propagandists have pushed this idea of Trump as the stern “daddy” businessman who administers tough love. Tucker Carlson said a while back that Trump winning the election would mean “daddy comes home and he’s pissed.” Mel Gibson, who’s MAGA now, recently said of Trump, “I’m glad Trump’s here. It’s like daddy arrived and he’s taking his belt off.” Why anyone would be glad about that, I don’t know, but maybe Mel Gibson has some reason for that. You write that this idea has a long history and punditry about the GOP. Can you talk about that?
Milligan: Yes. There’s this idea that the Democrats are [of] the “mommy” party and they want to nurture. They want to help the people who are underserved in some way with health care, with education, with housing, that sort of thing. And Republicans are [of] the “daddy” party, and they want to protect you from evil outside forces and so forth. Still, both of them are rooted in the idea that the government is doing something for you.
What Trump is being is he’s not being a “daddy”; he’s being bad dad, he’s being abusive dad, he’s being belligerent dad. As I said, he’s the dad at the Little League game who berates the umpire and makes his own kid cry for dropping a fly ball. This is not the dad that you want in charge. And it’s all about him, and how it makes him look. And he’s remaking the party, though, in this way, unless they push back.
Sargent: Well, the “daddy” mystique does break apart when all this incompetence comes to the fore. It’s worth noting that there’s a really creepy cultish quality to all the “daddy” talk about Trump. That aside, there’s something deadly serious going on here, which is that Trump has staked a lot on Musk and DOGE, very prominently deputizing Musk to find waste, fraud, and corruption in the government. And the story has uniformly been that Trump is finding nothing. The whole thing has been a comedy of errors.
Milligan: Yes. And the fact that he brought Elon Musk in, and Musk has outshone Trump in many ways. We’ve all seen the memes out there that make it look like Trump actually is reporting to Musk. But with Musk screwing up in this way—not finding waste, fraud, and abuse; firing nuclear safety people and then going, Oops, I guess we need them to protect the country, maybe we can hire them back—it was just this really haphazard effort to cut the government, and it’s just not working. And they’re getting a pushback already.
Sargent: I want to talk about this other moment during Trump’s press conference today when he tried to put a positive spin on the polling. He talked about a Harris poll, which supposedly found that large majorities support what Trump and Musk are doing. Listen to this.
Trump (audio voiceover): That was also part of the Harvard poll. Do you agree with what President Trump is doing with Elon and others that are looking for the waste, fraud, and abuse? And the numbers were staggering. It was like 70 percent to 2 percent. Everybody wants to find out. They don’t like it.
Sargent: Susan, what do you think of that?
Milligan: I looked at that Harvard/Harris poll, and it’s completely different from every other poll that I’ve seen. It’s an outlier at the least, but he likes to do that. He likes to pick the poll that looks good for him. He likes to call on the reporter—and I put little air quotes around that—when that looks good for him. At one press conference, he called on someone who was actually supposedly a reporter for X, Elon Musk’s social media site. And, of course, he won’t let AP in the room. So he’s trying to find a way to convince everyone that the country thinks as highly of him as he thinks of himself. But I don’t know how long that’s going to work.
Sargent: It really seems like things are going south rather quickly for these guys, doesn’t it? We did have a bit of a honeymoon. There was some good polling for him at the outset, but then a number of polls found majority disapproval of Trump’s performance, never mind Musk’s, which polls even worse. It seems to me that this whole thing has really gotten out of hand very quickly. And I don’t understand where Trump’s political team is. They seem to be completely absent. These are obviously pretty hardheaded people like Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, who were on the campaign and frankly did a pretty damn good job. I hate to admit it, but they did. I don’t know where they are on this. It seems like they’re just completely MIA.
Milligan: Yes, I wondered about that myself. We can talk about the Russia developments as well. The United States siding with Russia today at the United Nations was pretty embarrassing. And I agree that most people are going to be more moved by the economy and whether they lost their job or family member lost her job because of DOGE, but it’s a pretty dramatic thing. And when they had a meeting in the Oval Office and invited the press in—well, except for the AP—Macron actually took Trump’s arm to correct him when Trump said, You made loans, you’re going to get paid back, and we’re not going to get paid back. Macron took his arm and interrupted him and said, No, and corrected him and talked about how they paid for 60 percent of the effort.
There was another scene in that meeting that was weird and creepy where Trump actually put his hand on Macron’s knee and Macron picked it up and moved it over to Trump—and Trump kept trying to push it back. I don’t know whether that was trying to make it look like they were besties or what, but it was a really weird dominating scene.
Sargent: Is that something stern “daddy” does?
Milligan: That’s something creepy “daddy” does. One of the kids in the street, their parents tell them, Don’t go to that guy’s house for Halloween.
Sargent: Yeah. To be serious for a second, it really seems to me that that type of moment where Macron stepped in and corrected Trump on some basic facts about the situation regarding Europe and Ukraine also really undercuts this mystique of him as someone who’s really in charge and strong and with an unshakable mastery of events.
Milligan: I think we have two things going on with Trump. In general, sometimes when people come from the business world and they’ve been a CEO, it’s a hard adjustment for them to come into government where they can’t just dictate something and it gets followed. It doesn’t work that way in government, not even when you’re the president of U.S.
Barack Obama used to talk about how only when you become president do you realize how little power you actually have, how many ways people can undo the things that you want to do. But you add on to that the narcissism that Trump has, his rage when he’s criticized or questioned in any way, and his willingness to just make up stuff. For example, the prosecutor resigned in New York, and he interrupted the reporter to say, No, no, no, she was fired, she was fired. She wasn’t fired, she resigned.
Those things coming together—narcissism and the frustration over not being able to run the U.S. government like it’s The Apprentice or something—really unnerves him.
Sargent: Speaking of Trump’s rage, he also got really ticked with Macron when Macron was going through all that stuff about how the financing of the Ukraine war really works. He was shaking his head—I think what was going through his head was something like the Europeans are just scamming us. They’re scamming us. They’re scamming us. It’s all bullshit. It’s all made up. It really, really ticked him off very profoundly to be corrected by Macron there.
Milligan: And it also says something that Macron felt comfortable openly dressing down the president of U.S. in his house. That does something. That’s a subtler message, but it is still a very powerful message right there that he felt that that was OK to do. That says something about Trump’s standing in the world.
Sargent: I would think that got stern “daddy” very angry.
Milligan: Yes. He didn’t take his belt out, fortunately.
Sargent: Yeah. So I think there’s a really serious thing here, too, which is they’re embarked on this project of breaking laws in a serial way, trying to essentially dismantle the government piece by piece, almost like kids picking legs off a spider. They’re bullying press organizations by casting them out if they won’t repeat Trump’s propaganda verbatim. That literally happened. That’s what’s happening with the AP. They’re trying to acclimate people to authoritarian autocratic rule. And when it looks like a shit show, it becomes a big problem for them.
The whole point of Trump’s authoritarianism is to essentially say, You’ve been frustrated by the failures and incompetence of the previous administration. Here comes a strong leader to set everything right. And then in their calculus, that will get people acclimated to and accepting of authoritarian rule and so forth, but it’s all been just a catastrophe so far. It’s just been a real mess, and I don’t see how they’re able to bridge those two things. It seems like the chasm between those two things is a major problem for them.
Milligan: It is. Look, there’s always about a third of the public worldwide that wants an authoritarian leader, alarmingly. You can look at Erich Fromm and read that and see it as the tension between the struggle to be free and the desire to be led, but another common thread is that people who want that never think that they will become the victims of the authoritarian. They think that they are the ones who will benefit.
So very quickly, quicker frankly than I had anticipated, you’re seeing people who were Trump supporters who were behind this waste, fraud, and abuse program finding that they’re getting hurt by it, saying, I voted for Trump and my daughter just lost her dream job working for this agency. What happened? Or the Venezuelans who voted for Trump and are seeing their neighbors who are undocumented being deported. I’m not sure what they thought was going to happen, but apparently they didn’t think it was going to happen to them.
Sargent: There was actually polling that showed that among Latino voters in particular, large percentages thought that when Trump was talking about deporting people, he wasn’t talking about them.
Milligan: Well, I think they’re finding out now that he was. And I’m curious to see what will happen with the Latino vote in the midterms. Of course, the Latino vote is not monolithic, but Trump made some substantial inroads in that vote in 2024. And I think he may lose it.
Sargent: Just to bring this back to Musk and DOGE, where do you see this going? Does there come a point at which Trump really does have to rein Musk in? It’s looking to me like it’s becoming a major problem for the Republican Party.
Milligan: I think it is, especially because Musk himself is the embodiment of this very narcissistic autocrat. And the way he ran his companies [was] he did the same thing: He offered people this voluntary resignation and he’d give you a payout, and then it turns out they didn’t get the money. It’s just very bad P.R. for the administration, and he’s not even a cabinet secretary. He’s not the vice president. I think he’s going to need to find some way to rein him in without making it look like that’s what he did, making it look like it was Elon’s idea.
They’re up against forces that they thought that they could just quash and they can’t. The federal workforce—these people have been around for a long time. It’s like what they say about roaches in your apartment: They live there, you just rent. It’s the same thing when it comes to the federal workforce—not that they’re roaches. They’re a permanent institution. There are people who have been in the federal workforce and have worked under a lot of different presidents, and they just adjust to it. Trump does not understand they don’t work for him, that they work for the U.S. government, that they work for the American people. I’m not sure he’s ever going to fully accept that, and that’s going to be a problem.
Sargent: That’s exactly why he thinks he can just bark, “You’re fired,” or have Elon Musk bark, “You’re fired,” and then it’ll just happen. He doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of civil service protections in any way. Where do you see the perceptions of Trump going? Do you expect there to be a real downturn and perceptions of him as a strong leader going forward?
Milligan: I think if the economy really tanks—and we’re already seeing some problems there—and if people are losing their jobs, and if people are not getting the government services that they’ve just taken for granted even as they thought that there was this big bloated bureaucracy, then yes. That will damage him. And honestly, even though we all believe that people do not vote on foreign policy, you can’t ignore what the Russia-Ukraine stuff has done to the U.S. image overseas. And it was obvious today when Macron dressed him down in his house.
Sargent: Definitely a real key tell there. Susan Milligan, thanks so much for talking to us today. Good to talk to you.
Milligan: It’s great to talk to you.
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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