The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 29 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 Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt gave her first media briefing in the White House. It was pretty ugly. Levitt unleashed a really sleazy, gratuitous attack on Joe Biden’s age, dodged responsibility for the rise in egg prices on Trump’s watch, and even defended Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship.
The attack on Biden is significant, we think, because it shows that a certain type of ugly, abusive, MAGA trolling ethic is now fully installed inside the White House. We’re talking about all this today with Salon writer Amanda Marcotte, who’s one of the best out there at deconstructing the psychology of that MAGA trolling ethic. Good to have you back on, Amanda.
Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: Let’s start with Karoline Leavitt’s attack on Biden. A reporter asked about the price of eggs, and this is what happened.
Reporter (audio voiceover): Egg prices have skyrocketed since President Trump took office. So what specifically is he doing to lower those costs for Americans?
Karoline Leavitt: Really glad you brought this up because there is a lot of reporting out there that is putting the onus on this White House for the increased cost of eggs. I would like to point out to each and every one of you that in 2024, when Joe Biden was in the Oval Office or upstairs in the residence sleeping, I’m not so sure, egg prices increased 65 percent in this country. We also have seen the cost of everything—not just eggs—bacon, groceries, gasoline, have increased because of the inflationary policies of the last administration.
Sargent: Amanda, I think this was deliberate. First, Leavitt is setting the terms of the debate with reporters, declaring upfront that she’s there to satisfy the Audience of One: Donald Trump and no one else. Second, there will be absolutely no effort to reach out to Democrats or blue America. What do you think?
Marcotte: Yes, I think this reflects something that Donald Trump has been on about forever and ever. He really does believe that the best way to do politics is constant war. As long as he’s got Republicans on his side, he doesn’t need Democrats. It’s been alarming to me that Democrats are making noises about working with Trump and bipartisanship. No, he’s just going to want you to always be the enemy, so it would be better if you just stepped into that role and did it well because you’re going to be cast in that role no matter what. There’s no such thing as bipartisanship under Donald Trump.
I hope this was a clarifying moment because it was also very clear from that answer that she gave that they think that the way to get out of Trump’s failures—and his failures have already started—his abuse of the American public, his terrible things he’s going to do to people is to just constantly blame Democrats. They say to the Trump base, Maybe you don’t like the fact that inflation is back, and maybe you don’t like the fact that all your federal grants got cut off, and maybe you don’t like the fact that you can’t get your Medicaid anymore, but don’t you hate Democrats so much though? (laughs) And I think Trump thinks that worked for him in the first term, so I’m not surprised they’re going back to that well.
Sargent: That gets at something else as well, which is MAGA’s understanding of psychological warfare, or PSYOPs. You spend a lot of time on Twitter criticizing Trump. I do. And you’re going to be familiar with this if you do: You get trolled by people saying, LOL, Trump is living rent free in your heads, as if MAGA is winning as long as you and me and people like us are upset about Trump in some way. That’s part of what Leavitt is signaling to Trump and MAGA as well. She’s going to keep rubbing non-MAGA America’s face in shit, that kind of thing. You wrote this piece saying that Trump benefits as long as non-MAGA America is really torqued up and angry and frothed up and so forth. What’s your reading of that side of all this?
Marcotte: I think that’s right. Many, many years ago, I really grasped the idea— and this was even before Trump—that what was driving a lot of what you called Tea Party Republicans back then was this resentment, hatred, jealousy of liberals. And it’s taken on this patina of willingness to do anything or suffer any indignity as long as you’re inflicting it harder on this group of people that you’ve been instructed for years to hate. It’s like they will live in a mud hut as long as they can make you sit in a shit pile.
And we definitely saw that during the pandemic, absolutely. It became such a culture war issue because liberals took not dying of Covid-19 seriously; therefore, it became very important for Republicans to scoff at the idea that Covid was an issue and the result was they didn’t get vaccinated, they didn’t do any protective measures and they died by the thousands for it. I cannot emphasize enough that people are willing to die to troll the libs. They’ve been so consumed by hatred and the single-minded desire to just taunt people that haven’t actually done anything to them—they’ve just been told that we’ve done things to them by Fox News. It’s a very grim reality that we’re living in. It’s scary because if dying and watching their relatives die didn’t wake them up, I don’t know what could.
Sargent: I guess we should acknowledge that there’s a whole takes industry out there that has developed the idea that, in some intellectualized way, liberals are to blame for MAGA being mad at them. There’s a whole different set of justifications for the idea, whether it’s liberal cultural hegemony or liberal elites not caring about the hollowed-out industrial heartland. There’s five or 10 different versions of this story. I think that it’s OK for us to acknowledge that we’ve got to grapple with that to some degree. But when you see Trump and MAGA and Karoline Leavitt operating in the real world, you got to say to yourself, those theories really don’t hold up against the imbalance that we actually see between liberals and anti-liberal MAGA.
Marcotte: Yeah. I’m not very patient with that entire take industry because I work so much in the feminist space. A really common version of the argument is that Gosh, men shouldn’t be voting for a a sexual assailant and cheering on sexual harassment and taking away women’s abortion rights. But gosh darn it, feminists made them by #MeToo-ing a little too hard. And I’m like, Give me one example. Yes, we see a lot of male anger at women right now. But the notion that it’s about anything but outrage over having to give up a privilege that they didn’t deserve in the first place, having to live just as equals and having to treat women with some modicum of respect, I just don’t see any evidence for that.
The fact of the matter is: A lot of men don’t feel that way. A lot of men voted for Kamala Harris. A lot of men are feminists. If women are inflicting some great pain on men that men just have to act like complete jackasses in response, then why aren’t liberal men feeling that pain? It is, I wouldn’t say, imaginary; it’s just unjustified.
Sargent: You’d think it’s clarifying when you have major MAGA influencers going out there and saying things like “Your body, my choice” or things like Trump makes me feel like I can say whatever the F I want now about anybody. It’s pretty clear. They just put it right out there.
Marcotte: I have a piece going up at Salon soon about Russ Vought. He’s the head of OMB and he’s behind this new move by Donald Trump to pause, as far as I can tell, almost all federal grants and loans right now, which includes Medicaid, possibly SNAP, everything else.
Sargent: Huge swath of programs.
Marcotte: Yeah, huge swath of programs. And Russ Vought is one of the architects of Project 2025. He’s definitely behind this decision. And if you read his writings and you read Project 2025, what is so striking is his absolute and total obsession with what he calls “transgenderism” or “the transgender contagion.” And at a certain point, I have to wonder, When did a trans person hurt you, man? Why are you so singularly obsessed with this group of people that you don’t really know anything about, that hasn’t done anything to you, that is just trying to live their lives? And most of them are trying to do so very quietly.
Sargent: I’m glad you brought up Vought, because that brings us to another Karoline Leavitt moment at the press briefing. As everyone knows, Washington is in chaos right now because as you mentioned, Trump’s OMB put out this memo freezing federal funding. Huge swath of programs are going to be affected. Here’s what Leavitt said about this on Tuesday.
Leavitt (audio voiceover): I also spoke with the incoming director of OMB this morning, and he told me to tell all of you that the line to his office is open for other federal government agencies across the board. And if they feel that programs are necessary and in line with the president’s agenda, then the Office of Management and Budget will review those policies.
Sargent: Amanda, this is not how this is supposed to work. Congress appropriated this money. But I want to point out here how effortlessly Levitt said that, making it sound not just reasonable but well-intentioned. I think she’s dangerous.
Marcotte: Very, very dangerous, especially like the notion that Biden ... Again, blaming it on Biden spending like “a drunk sailor.” These are programs that have existed for decades. These are programs like the federal housing, if you’ve ever had an FHA loan. These are programs like Stafford loans. These are programs like food stamps. The notion that Biden somehow just invented decades of federal spending is such a wild lie.
It is designed to make this radical move that they’re taking seem reasonable. I know it’s a lot but I really would ask people to go back and read at least some of Project 2025, at least some of the intro stuff. It becomes really clear when you do so despite the fact that they’re emphasizing the pause is temporary and pretending that there are going to be exceptions if you call Russ Vought personally. You have a Stafford loan and you’re supposed to just call him up?
Sargent: It’s just crazy. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.
Marcotte: Yeah. If you read Project 2025, it’s very clear that there’s a radical worldview in here, that they really do believe that wokeism has taken over America. And they define it really broadly to the point where it basically does encompass, I’d say, most of America because they categorize basically anyone who has had a government job as part of “the great awokening” as they call it; they categorize anyone who isn’t in a heterosexual marriage as part of it. Once you’ve made the list of Americans they think are evil and part of this society of woke that they would like to burn down to the ground, it is really most of us.
So it makes sense that they are happy. They want to nuke the federal government. There’s a very radical purge mentality here. They tend to view America as a place that has been corrupted by demonic or woke, or whatever they want to call it, forces beyond salvation, and that the only way to “save” the country is to destroy it. Vought is very much at the forefront of this mentality.
Sargent: As a matter of fact, the memo that orders this freeze actually refers to wokeness. It says that “the use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars,” blah blah blah. This is the justification for freezing all these grants and loans to all kinds of conventional programs across the country. It’s being explicitly held up as a blow against cultural radicalism.
Marcotte: Yeah. It’s fascinating because that overheated language really shows that. On one hand, you read it and you’re like, Are these people nuts? Did A.I. write this? On the other hand, there’s actually a sick genius to it. If you yell about woke Marxist green new dealers, most Americans are going to hear that and think, Well, they’re not talking about me, and they’re not going to look any deeper into it. But then when you actually read Project 2025, you realize, Oh, they’re talking about everyone. Everyone is a woke Marxist, green new dealer.
Again, they really do think that this is a cancer that goes all the way to the root. When you see how they define these terms, it becomes really clear that Marxist particularly is used to define anybody who’s ever engaged in the idea of redistributive spending. And that means: Have you gotten a social security check? Have you ever gotten Medicare? Have you paid into these programs with the expectation you’re going to get them back? Well, you’re a Marxist. Have you gotten any federal assistance for housing? Have you gotten a student loan? Well, you’re a Marxist. Very middle class benefits programs are now being talked about as Marxism. Again, Medicaid and CHIP are very much part of this federal freezing spend. That’s, as far as I know, almost 25 percent of the country.
Sargent: And look, a huge number of Trump voters is going to be impacted by these freezes and cuts and so forth. There’s going to be spending cuts coming down the pike, which actually do pass Congress—the Republican Congress mainly, hopefully no Democrats will support it, but who the hell knows at this point. A lot of MAGA voters are going get killed by this. So when you look at Karoline Leavitt up there taking such a radical and insane and destructive policy and justifying it with just such milk toasty language that sounds so well-intentioned, it really is highly disconcerting.
Marcotte: It is. A lot of us, even those of us like you and me who’ve been paying very close attention to Trump and and the MAGA movement in the past four years, somewhat lost track of how shamelessly they gaslight and how little they care about anybody, including and especially to a certain extent their own voters.
Sargent: For her to effortlessly turn the question about the price of eggs rising on Trump’s watch back on Biden, it’s just going to be this relentlessly sweetly delivered twisting of the knife on Democrats all the time combined with this really, really reasonable-sounding defense of incredibly radical policies. That formula is scary.
Marcotte: Yes, it is. It will work on their base because again, in my unfortunately long experience with these voters, they will die rather than admit a liberal was right about something. I think that there’s going to be serious damage to the GOP brand in the next two to four years, especially if they continue to do stuff like this. All these people that think this doesn’t affect them are going to learn the hard way that it does. In the original memo, they claim they want to pull $3 trillion out of the federal spending. That’s money that goes right into the economy.
Now, I don’t know that they’re going to be able to do that, but that’s their goal. And if they get even close to it, it’s going to cause massive economic pain. You may think you never get a government check. Your local grocery store is propped up by people on SNAP; if they don’t have their money, it’s going to have all these knock-on effects.
Sargent: When you watch Karoline Leavitt talk the way she did during that clip about Biden or during that clip about this insane memo, do you think that there’s any sense anywhere in the MAGA brain trust that they’re anything but invincible?
Marcotte: I actually think a lot of their behavior right now is the result of fear. I really do. And that’s the only ray I hope I have for you today.
Sargent: What’s it based on?
Marcotte: It is true that fascist and authoritarian governments are actually always more fragile than they let on, and they have to exist by bullshitting their way through. If you collapse the economy, your base of support will disappear with it. I think that Trump learned in the first term that he basically lost steam very quickly. That’s true of most presidents, but it’s especially true when your agenda is as radical as Trump’s—it’s going to be much, much harder to push through.
So they’re doing this shock and awe, and they’re trying to push everything out the door as quickly as possible and hope that they can just railroad everybody into accepting it. They know that their ability to get things done is on such a short timeline that this is like their only hope. And they’re just hoping that if they yell and scream and act bold enough that we are not going to notice that what they’re doing is wildly unpopular, wildly dangerous, and is going to backfire in their faces if they continue forward with this.
I’m not saying that we’re not in serious danger. I think we are in serious danger. There have been fascist governments before that use shock and awe tactics to seize total power. You use these Blitzkrieg tactics because you know that it’s literally the only card you have in your hand.
Sargent: What I’m hearing here is that Karoline Leavitt is not going to be able to sweetly blame this all on Biden forever.
Marcotte: Yes, it’s been a week so she can get away with that. But outside of the people that are just completely brain-dead cultists who believe every dumb thing that Trump says, most people are going to hear her blaming Joe Biden six months from now and be like, He’s not president anymore. He hasn’t been for a minute.
Sargent: I hope you’re right. The Audience of One will enjoy it though, and that really may be all that matters. Amanda Marcotte, thanks so much for coming on. Always great to talk to you.
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.