The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 12 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.
We’ve noticed a funny thing about President Trump and his chief propagandist Karoline Leavitt. She routinely fluffs Trump with astonishingly cult-like descriptions of him to reporters—ones that portray him as powerful, calm, and completely in command of events. But then, left to his own devices on Truth Social, Trump presents the opposite picture, erupting regularly in wild meltdowns and uncontrollable hissy fits over the tiniest of slights.
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.
Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
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.
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): Let me just get to the premise of your question that both of you have raised. I think it’s frankly ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit. He left a life of luxury and a life of running a very successful real estate empire for public service not just once but twice. And again, the American public reelected him back to this White House because they trust he acts in the best interest of our country in putting the American public first. This is a president who has actually lost money for being president of the United States.
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?
Marcotte: Sometimes I wonder how his base reacts to this. I assume most of them aren’t watching this kind of thing, but it’s so obviously just for him. And I think there’s a secondary purpose, of course, which is to trigger the liberals like you and me who are like, Oh my God, that’s such an outrageous lie that it’s offensive. It’s gaslighting. They get a rise out of us—and that, I think, is part of the pleasure of this. But yeah, it’s quite wild how much to his narcissism is just … The neediness of it is just getting out of control. She got this job for two reasons. One, she looks the part. And two, she’s utterly shameless at feeding over-the-top praise to Donald Trump. Not just for her job—though especially her job—but it seems like that’s the main purpose of much of his cabinet.
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?
Marcotte: The thing that’s so fascinating is this is true about the MAGA aesthetic in every way. Every emotion is exaggerated to the maximum. They pretend to be angry at the loudest volume. They tend to be sad with the biggest droopy faces and wailing tears. Everything’s loud and garish and schmaltzy. After I wrote that piece, a lot of people on Bluesky pointed out that I overlooked the pro-wrestling angle of it, of which I kicked myself really hard because that’s exactly right. The aesthetic is borrowed directly from pro-wrestling where every emotion is both very one note and just completely over-the-top. And the way that people look is heavily exaggerated to cartoonish proportions. The plastic surgery isn’t about looking better, but about looking almost uncannily unhuman, just so exaggerated in your femininity. Then, the men, they like the roided out body. Most of them aren’t willing to put themselves through that kind of torture to get it—but you know, RFK loves to whip off his shirt in public to show off those totally natural muscles on a 70-year-old man.
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?
Marcotte: That’s the dark side of this especially. They have put out a lot of both AI-generated and real photographic imagery of over-the-top abuse of these migrants that they’ve captured and functionally kidnapped and renditioned to a foreign prison. And they shaved their heads. They made sure to like make their tattoos as garish as possible. They had videos of them bent over in these torture positions. And you see the effect that it has on the audiences at Trump’s 100-day rally. The crowd went absolutely nuts.
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.
Reporter (audio voiceover): Yesterday, the administration appears to have started dismantling the Consumer Product Safety Commission. This is the federal agency, an independent one, that does recalls and is responsible for product safety. Does the administration not believe that it’s important to keep toys and cribs—you’re a young mom—off the market?
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.
Sargent: Now, I think what got Leavitt mad there was that the reporter pointed out that she, meaning Leavitt, is a young mom. Note how Leavitt says, in essence, this decision is the right one because Trump has the power to do it. And because Trump decided to exercise his power this way—period, full stop. This is supposed to show Trump firmly in command, but it actually shows that she feels the need to satisfy his incredibly fragile ego by publicly abusing this reporter who dared to ask the Mad King to justify his policies. Again, a show for Trump, right?
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.
Narcissism is both an overblown ego and an insecurity underneath it. That tension is why they constantly need all this praise and being told they’re the greatest and the best and no one’s smarter, better, more in charge, or any of that stuff. So I think we’re going to see this get a lot worse the more his approval ratings plummet. And I worry that he’s going to end up getting even more in his bubble of believing everything he’s doing is right because everyone around him is going to escalate the praise instead of leveling with him that his policies are making him unpopular.
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.
Marcotte: You hear the word “narcissist” flung around a lot on the internet, but narcissism is actually a pretty rare condition. And any psychologist will say Trump is just a very obvious example of it, but I think it’s hard for most of us to understand what it’s like to be in the shoes of somebody who has this particular set of personality disorders. Most of us would be embarrassed to have somebody praise us like that because we know it’s not true. If somebody came up to me and was like, Amanda, you’re the greatest writer of all time, I would be scared of them. I would want to run away. I’d be ashamed. That would make me feel bad. But he just needs it to just be constantly coming into his ears. And it’s getting worse as he ages for various reasons. Any psychologist will also tell you that when narcissists are feeling insulted or they’re feeling their insecurity rise up often because their approval ratings are coming down or they’re otherwise failing, their need to be told they’re the greatest just continues to go up.
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.
Andrew Egger (audio voiceover): The president posted another ad this week for his Trump meme coin. The group that’s running that coin is encouraging people to buy in order to win a dinner this month with the president. Why is the president planning to attend a dinner for the top investors in his coin?
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.
Sargent: So Amanda, we’re back to the idea that Trump is an absolute paragon of public integrity—but note that here again, Leavitt has to slip in the fawning about Trump being a hugely successful businessman. What do you think?
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.
Sargent: Well, your point about the reality of Trump brings us to the finale here. MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle did a segment on Friday criticizing Trump’s tariffs, and he exploded. He tweeted: “I just watched an exhausted, highly neurotic Stephanie Ruhle spew LIES about Tariffs, as do many others, in order not to give me the Victory that they all see coming. Few people know Stephanie Ruhle, but I do, and she doesn’t have what it takes. We’re going to make a fortune with Tariffs, only smart people understand that, and Stephanie was never known as a ‘High IQ’ person.”
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?
Marcotte: I agree with you. To, I think, normal people, to people who didn’t vote for Trump, we’re like, He is a emotionally incontinent child. He can’t control his temper. He can’t control his feelings. He flips out at the slightest provocation. He’s got the thinnest skin I’ve ever seen in a human being. But one of the most fascinating things that has emerged about the MAGA aesthetic is that they’ve really repositioned the childish temper tantrum as almost a show of strength. So you see—and I wrote about this at Salon—a lot of really performative temper tantrum throwing from Trump acolytes. Brett Kavanaugh, I think, obviously was the most famous early example of somebody who realized, If I just get this screaming, spittle rage on national television, that’s going to read to Trump like I’m a firm leader in control of the situation.
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.
Sargent: I think a lot of this has to do with Trump coming of age in the media in the 1980s and ’90s in New York. I grew up in New York, and I was around that tabloid culture. I actually spoke to Trump back in the day when I worked at another newspaper in the ’90s. He was the same person but without the darkness, without the dark fascism. He was just a relentless pitch man. And this was a guy who knew how to play the tabloids. He knew how to set up conflicts with people like Al Sharpton. He really understood that type of aesthetic. And I wonder if that is the precursor to this. What we’ve got in a way is a mixing of ’80s tabloid New York and full-blown fascist authoritarian imagery. Is that maybe the way to think about it?
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—
Sargent: And a buffoonish one.
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.
I think the other really important thing to understand about these very loud aesthetics is they’re about turning off your brain. They overwhelm you with emotions so that you just can’t think. If you’ve ever been to a Trump rally—and it’s a miserable experience, it’s earsplittingly loud, they play this schmaltzy music at top volume—you really do have to leave in order to think. I always end up not writing on location because there’s just no way. I can’t put two thoughts together in that environment—and that’s the point of it. People who are thinking are not into fascism. They start to realize some of the flaws.
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?
Marcotte: Big question. I do think people get sick of it. When I’m dealing with zoomers on social media, people that have this nihilistic view, I do remind them that fascist governments tend to collapse under their own weight if nothing else. And I really hope it doesn’t get to that point. I think that it would be nice to not have our society have the economic and human rights collapses that that process has happen. But I think that it is true that people … Loud music can be fun for a while, but you do need to turn it off eventually.
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.
Sargent: I agree. I do think it requires something close to an economic collapse to overcome the structural obstacles there are to winning against this movement. Amanda Marcotte, it’s really a great pleasure to talk to you as always. Thanks so much for coming on.
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.
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