The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 17 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.
President Trump seems even more angry at the media than usual. His lawyers just filed a batshit insane lawsuit against the New York Times that’s literally chock full of crazy rants that sound like they were dictated by Trump himself. And on two other occasions on Tuesday, he snapped at reporters in ways that seemed strange even by his standards. Is Trump angry because his magical political powers are failing him? That’s the argument that Paul Waldman made recently on his Substack, the cross section. And in fact, a new poll just landed that reveals a surprisingly steep drop for Trump among independents, a key metric for gauging political strength or weakness. So we’re talking to Paul about all this today. Hey, Paul, good to see you, man.
Paul Waldman: Good to see you too, Greg.
Greg Sargent: So let’s start with some audio of Trump. A reporter asked him if it’s appropriate to engage in so much business activity while in office. Trump said his kids are running the business, but then Trump asked for the reporter’s nationality and the reporter answered that he’s Australian. Then this happened.
Trump (voiceover): In my opinion, you are hurting Australia very much right now. And they want to get along with me. You know, your leader is coming over to see me very soon. I’m going to tell them about you. You set a very bad tone.
Sargent: So Trump actually threatened to tell Australia’s prime minister about this reporter’s impudent question. But Paul, what struck me about this is that Trump thinks his self-dealing should be beyond question and that he simply believes that this reporter would actually have to fear reprisal from Australia’s leader. What did you make of this odd threat?
Waldman: Well, I think there are a couple of things going on at the same time. On one hand, when he comes out either on the lawn of the White House or in the Oval Office and kind of spars with reporters, which he does all the time, it’s supposed to be a show. You know, he is the main character and all of the reporters are like little bugs who are pestering him. And he’s going to show how strong and agile and smart he is by deflecting all their questions and turning things around on them and making these kind of dominance displays to show that he’s the one with the power. And they can’t impede him in the realization of his will. So there’s something very performative about it.
But it’s also true at the same time that his emotions do come through. And I think he does genuinely believe that nobody has the right to ask him any kind of impertinent question. And I think it is worth saying just from the standpoint of substance, that the stuff that he is doing in terms of using the office of the presidency to enrich himself is absolutely unprecedented to orders of magnitude greater than anything we’ve ever seen before, including what we saw in his first term.
I mean, there was just a piece in The New York Times, I think yesterday, and we’ll probably talk about his lawsuit against The New York Times. There was a piece there that went into great detail about what can only be described as something akin to a bribery scheme involving the United Arab Emirates and channeling money through various crypto firms to give him and his family tens of millions of dollars in fees. It’s rather complicated and it has to do with chips used [in] artificial intelligence and this complicated network of crypto companies. But the net result is that foreign governments are essentially putting money in his family’s bank account in order to get the kind of policy outcomes that they want.
Sargent: It’s funny though that he actually thinks it’s a defense to say his kids are running the company as if that somehow rebuts the charge that the company is profiteering off of his presidency. And also, I just want to underscore the vision that it reveals on Trump’s part of how the press is supposed to function, that he says, I’m going to tell the prime minister of Australia on you.
Waldman: Yeah, and I think that he believes or hopes that in other countries, he can dictate how they’re going to have relations with their own press, even in democratic countries like Australia, that he can essentially, as you say, tell on this reporter and that somehow that will mean that the reporter will get punished by his own prime minister. So he does have this desire to kind of make this into a kind of performance of dominance, but he also really doesn’t think that anyone should ask him any kind of question that would really reflect poorly on him.
Whenever he gets a really challenging question, one of the things that he does is he quickly dismisses the substance of it, and then he turns it into an attack on the reporter. And this is actually a pretty effective technique because it’s alarming to everyone in the room and to people watching at home. If he’s saying to a reporter, you you’re a terrible person, how dare you ask a question like that? It’s not the kind of thing we normally see from presidents. And still, even at this late date, it has the power to shock. when you watch it, you almost forget about the thing that the person asked the question about, and you’re drawn into this conflict between him and the reporter. So in that case, it’s pretty shrewd.
Sargent: Yeah, I think it works in a way, especially for his supporters. And you mentioned that lawsuit that Trump filed against the New York Times. It is indeed crazy. It concerns several articles in a book by Times reporters that looked skeptically at Trump’s business success. No one should dare ever question that, of course. Now, first amendment lawyers are calling this lawsuit an utter complete joke, but that aside, again, there’s this anger. The lawsuit accuses Times reporters of deliberately trying to inflict maximum damage on Trump. It accuses them of repugnant distortions and fabrications about Trump designed to help the Democratic Party says the reporters couldn’t stand the thought of Trump winning the election. And it even says the reporters hate Trump in a deranged way. The lawsuit is chock full of crazy stuff like that. And then Trump announced the lawsuit with an explosion of fury on Truth Social, in which he called the Times “the most degenerate of newspapers in the history of our country.”
Waldman: Yeah, if you actually read the lawsuit, it It reads like something that was produced by the North Korean Department of Propaganda. I mean, it’s incredible, just full of praise for how extraordinary Donald Trump is and how his win in 2024 was the greatest achievement in American history. And as you said, it sounds like he dictated it. And if you look back at the history of Trump and lawsuits against media organizations, he’s used them for a long time. And for most of time, it’s been just kind of an intimidation tactic. He sues all kinds of people. Sometimes it’s with the intention of actually getting some kind of money, but often it’s just to sort of put people on their heels because he would oftentimes, in his pre-political, life sue people when they were less wealthy or less powerful than him and they wouldn’t have the ability to sustain the legal fees in the way that he could. And so that was an effective intimidation tactic for him.
That included a lot of lawsuits against news organizations and individual reporters. And it is an effective technique because except for really the biggest news organizations, it’s very difficult to pay all those legal fees. And sometimes people are motivated to just settle it or issue some kind of an apology or whatever. And having everyone know that Trump is going to sue you if he doesn’t like something that appears in your newspaper or on your television station is itself a kind of intimidation.
But then something different happened in his second term, which is that he realized that this could actually be kind of a method of quasi-legal bribery. He could file a really an absurd lawsuit and it didn’t matter how absurd, but he could intimidate these news organizations into settling with him and giving him many millions of dollars for his presidential library, if such a thing ever actually comes into being, or in some other way that they’re going to have to pony up money. And they’re so intimidated that even though the lawsuits are all completely frivolous and he never had any chance of prevailing in court, that it was actually something very effective.
Sargent: Well, I got to think that him doing this with the New York Times really ups the ante in a major way. I can’t tell whether it’s a sign of hubris or not. It’s sort of smacks of that. Now, as you mentioned, ABC News settled a big lawsuit with Trump. So did CBS. They both had reasons for doing so that didn’t really seem on the up and up. Their parent companies seemed to want to settle. And Trump essentially extorted them through that method. But it’s a little difficult to see the New York Times going down that road, which means he’s going to have to actually litigate this insane lawsuit over time. What do you think he’s thinking there, if thinking’s the right word for it? The Times can’t let itself get extorted in the same way ABC and CBS can, can it? And what does that mean over time?
Waldman: I don’t think they can. And the Times is still the most important news organization in America. And one of the differences is that if you look, for instance, at CBS, well, CBS’s parent company Paramount needed to get a merger approved. That was clearly the subtext of everything that was going on there. Trump was essentially demanding tribute and they ponied up the money and then they got their merger approved. But the New York Times isn’t asking for anything from the federal government in the same way. And they’re a very wealthy company and they have plenty of lawyers and they’re perfectly able to fight this in court and the suit is so preposterous that you would think it would get thrown out on its first contact with the judge, but you never know.
So, I don’t think that the Times is going to pony up any kind of a settlement. I think it’s just a way of kind of sustaining the narrative that he likes, that he is at war with the media, that the media are unfair to him, and he can just keep feeding that. And what does it really cost him? He dictates some things to his lawyers that he wants them to do. They file this preposterous suit. It doesn’t really cost him very much money, at least not given the billions by which his fortune has expanded over the course of the last year with all the different ways people are looking to put money in his pocket. And so, you know, there’s no cost to him. It can be essentially a PR move. But the Times, I think, would be very, in a very bad position among their peers, among their audience, if they actually were to knuckle under and give him any money at all.
Sargent: Yes, it seems very unlikely. Well, here’s another really strange rant from Trump. A reporter, apparently from ABC News, asked about Attorney General Pam Bondi, who recently threatened to prosecute people for hate speech, which is a bullshit threat. Then Trump said this.
Trump (voiceover): You should probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe they’ll come after ABC. Well, ABC paid me $16 million recently for a form of hate speech, right? Your company paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech, so maybe they’ll have to go after you.
Sargent: So what’s funny is that Pam Bondi subsequently had to walk back her ridiculous threat to prosecute hate speech anyway, so the question was perfectly legit and reasonable. That aside, Paul, note how he rubs it in, that he extorted a big settlement out of ABC News. You mentioned that this is all a dominance display. That was about as clear as you could possibly want it. He’s basically saying, you reporters are a bunch of bugs that I am squashing under my heel pretty regularly. Your thoughts on that?
Waldman: Yeah, it really is. He wants to remind the reporters and himself and his own supporters of what he considers a great victory over one of his main enemies, the news media. And this was a very interesting little episode, both regarding him and Bondi, it was as if they both kind of forgot what the term hate speech represents and what it represents to the right, including his own supporters. For a long time, it was progressives who talked about hate speech and made the argument that in some cases, certain kinds of speech constitute an action that you could take [legal] action against, that it’s not just speech, it can do real harm to people in the right context. And that was something that conservatives have for years have been very angry about and have argued against. And then Pam Bondi kind of got over her skis a little bit.
He has sparred with Jonathan Karl, that ABC reporter, a lot over the years. And Karl wrote at least one book, if I’m recalling correctly, that Trump didn’t like. And so he sees him and remembers who he works for and says, this is a chance for me to take him down. And so it’s very, very personal. It has that kind of utility as a part of the show that he can demonstrate dominance to his supporters. But it’s also something, I think, that’s very personal for him. He likes that being able to show that he can really stick it to somebody that he doesn’t like. And with Trump, that’s always going on at the same time. Simultaneously, there’s an aspect that is strategic in what he’s trying to present to the public and there is also his own emotional impulses that are always at work.
Sargent: Pathological impulses, in fact. What I find striking about that exchange is that on the one hand, he’s citing this settlement with ABC News as proof that he’s crowned the media under his heel. And yet he’s simultaneously angry that he can’t actually control the lines of questioning from reporters.
This is the funny thing about Trump’s authoritarian presidency. He can win these symbolic victories, maybe getting a huge company to hand over an extortion payment to him, but he can’t actually control things. And it’s driving him into a fury. He himself knows his control is hollow, that it’s mostly a sham. I find that a strikingly revealing moment in that way,
Waldman: Yeah, I think so. You know, he’s always had this extremely complicated relationship with the media. He despises reporters, but he’s desperate for their approval. He wants to be the main character of American politics and wants still to see himself on the TV news. He wants to see his name in the headlines and the paper. He knows that he has this symbiotic relationship with the press. And even though it is antagonistic, he’s always kind of pushing them away and then pulling them back. And that’s been who he has been for decades. And that doesn’t change, even though he would like to be able to dictate every headline and the slant of every news story, he knows he can’t do that. And he has all kinds of ways that he tries to get the news coverage that he wants, but he still is desperate to be in their sights, to be the focus of their attention. And he’s never going to be able to control it in the way that he wants to.
Sargent: That’s for sure. So now this new poll, which underscores the point even further, it’s from The Economist. Thirty-nine percent of Americans approve of Donald Trump’s performance as president. Fifty-seven percent disapprove. Among independents, that’s an absolutely abysmal twenty-eight percent to sixty-four percent. And on the economy, his approval among overall Americans is thirty-five to fifty-seven. On inflation and prices, it’s thirty to sixty-four. That is actually really, really terrible for him. And I think goes to the point you made in your piece the other day, which is that his magical powers are actually failing him. You wanna talk about that a bit?
Waldman: I think because Trump is so ubiquitous, it’s easy to fall into the belief that he must be persuading people. And he repeats the same things over and over, often the same kinds of lies. And you can look at that and say, you know, he won the last election, people must be buying this stuff. And that isn’t necessarily true. mean, his approval ratings were low during his first term. They are very low now. And, you know, he tops out, it seems, at about forty percent. And given the polarization that we have in our country, where almost everybody in any president’s party is going to say they support them and almost everybody in the other party is going to say they don’t, you know, you’re not going to do much better than forty percent. And you’re not going to do much worse than that.
But I think that what’s really striking in some of the polls we’re seeing now is that Trump is doing really poorly, especially on the economy, jobs and inflation. And people are starting to see some prices rise. We don’t know where that’s going to go yet. But Trump spent months trying to convince the country that tariffs were going to bring an age of prosperity that we had never seen the likes of before. And there was kind of an education that went on, a lot of people, I think a year ago, if you had asked people how tariffs work, most people wouldn’t have been able to tell you. But there was a lot of news coverage of both what Trump was saying and about how tariffs actually work. And people did get an education. And if you look at polls, what you see is that most people don’t think tariffs are a good idea, despite how hard Trump tried to convince everyone of that. So I think there are real limits to how he can persuade people, not only because most Americans just generally don’t really approve of him and so are not necessarily inclined to believe things that he says, but even when he has something very specific he’s trying to convince people of, oftentimes it just doesn’t work.
Sargent: Well, just to close this out, I think that really gets to the core of why he’s in such a fury with the media right now, sort of separate from the specifics that he’s pretending to be angry about. The argument over tariffs, in a way, is one of the areas where the media was actually successful. There was really good reason to believe at the outset of this presidency that Trump could actually win the argument over tariffs. It’s, you know, not that hard to sell them just say, I’m trying to protect Americans from global economic forces and all those Democrats don’t protect you from them. And I think there was reason to assume that people might sort of, you know, lose track of the details and see it in those terms, but the press actually covered the issue with great, I think, penetration and really in an informative way. And the result, as you say, has been that The polls are showing that people really understand how tariffs actually work. And Trump, no matter how many times he uses his magical lying powers to say that other countries are paying the tariffs or whatever, it just isn’t really offsetting the actual knowledge that the American people have developed on this issue. And I think that’s a weirdly heartening thing among all the terrible news we’re seeing these days.
Waldman: Yeah, you know, Trump spent his whole life trying to kind of bring reality into being by speaking it, you know, telling people that he was the richest guy around, that he was the biggest developer in New York, which was never true, that, you know, he was the embodiment of success even when he was going bankrupt. And a lot of the time it worked. He could convince people of a lot of things. He is a gifted marketer and showman, but there are real limits to how much he can convince people to believe in a world that is contradicted by what they see in front of them. And I think we’re seeing that now in his second term in a way that he is really frustrated by. And it’s kind of a puzzle that he can’t quite figure out how to solve, other than getting himself in our faces more and more every single day and repeating the same things over and over. But that doesn’t seem to be enough.
Sargent: Well Waldman, really well said. Folks, Check out Paul’s book, White Rural Rage. Great title. Paul, always great to talk to you, man. Thanks so much for coming on.
Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.
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