Transcript: Trump Press Sec Goes Full Cult as Polls Take Brutal Turn
As this presidency enters the danger zone on multiple fronts, a writer who chronicles Trumpworld explains how cultlike praise of Trump functions for MAGA at moments of political crisis.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 9 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
In this episode, we discuss this polling average showing support for the Iran war at 38 percent, this finding showing Trump’s net approval on immigration has lost 20 points since last year, and these terrible numbers for Trump on the economy.
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 an interesting pattern. Whenever the news gets particularly bad for Donald Trump, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s cult-like obsequiousness gets dialed up to 11. That just happened after Trump was hit with a brutal news cycle on multiple fronts. Those fronts include increasing signs that the U.S. might have bombed an Iranian elementary school, terrible new jobs numbers, and the firing of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Trump’s presidency is in trouble, and it’s at moments like this that his sycophants really step it up. We’re trying to make sense of all this with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who dissects Trumpworld as well as anyone out there. Amanda, always good to have you on.
Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So first, we apologize for doing two episodes in a row involving Karoline Leavitt, but we think this is really important. Here’s Leavitt’s latest. Donald Trump exploded on Truth Social insisting that the war will not stop until Iran commits to “unconditional surrender.” That sure sounds like regime change is the goal, so Leavitt tried to clean this up. Listen to this exchange.
Reporter (voiceover): What does the president mean when he calls for unconditional surrender? Is he saying that the regime has to fully relinquish control?
Leavitt (voiceover): What the president means is that when he, as commander in chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America and the goals of Operation Epic Fury have been fully realized—then Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender, whether they say it themselves or not.
Sargent: I mean, that’s just insane. The Iranian regime must fully surrender; how will we know when that has happened? Not when it actually happens—just when Dear Leader says it has happened. This is bizarrely cult-like. What do you think, Amanda?
Marcotte: I had the worst flashback to George W. Bush in his flight suit with his “Mission Accomplished” banner in the Iraq War. He made the same mistake. He put a little bit more effort into the mistake—he maybe didn’t fly completely by the seat of his pants—but he still made the same mistake, which is: If I say the war is over, if I say it’s done, if I say we have succeeded, then that will somehow make it so. And it just turns out that’s not actually true. How many years did the war drag past the “Mission Accomplished” banner? This is not how it works. You can’t just say they have unconditionally surrendered when they’re still shooting at you and throwing bombs and fighting back.
Sargent: And who knows what could happen in the aftermath of this. Of course, the United States could essentially decimate the Iranian regime and then Trump could declare a victory at that point and go home—any one of these scenarios is possible. But what’s kind of alarming is this setting of the table for Trump gets to say what reality is. That’s why I find this so disheartening and so dispiriting to watch.
You have Trump himself popping off and just tweeting out: Here’s the new war goal, the new war goal is unconditional surrender. And instead of hearing from people in the administration who know what they’re talking about, all we get is his chief propagandist telling us that that’s absolutely a brilliant way to describe what’s happening—and that he’ll get to say when it has happened. Do you know what I mean?
Marcotte: Maybe I’m just a Pollyanna, or an eternal optimist, but I can’t help but see the escalating—everything is great, nothing is wrong, Dear Leader knows everything, if Dear Leader says this one day and says [the opposite] the next day, or honestly, with Trump and the Iran war, it changes by the hour, what he claims the objectives are—they’re basically trying to assert not just that Dear Leader knows everything, but that there’s sense to be made out of this pudding-brain nonsense that’s coming out of him. The louder and the more insistent and the harder the clapping gets, the more I just feel like that’s all they have. There’s a stench of desperation coming from Karoline Leavitt.
Sargent: Let’s check out a little bit more of Karoline Leavitt here. She was asked about MAGA’s anger over the attack on Iran. MAGA, of course, is supposed to be anti-interventionist, against foreign entanglements, et cetera. Leavitt said the following:
Leavitt (voiceover): President Trump is the leader of MAGA. He’s the creator of the MAGA movement. And there is nothing more America First than taking out terrorists who have maimed and killed our own servicemen and women, who chant “death to America,” and who pose a threat to the homeland. President Trump is the leader of the “Peace Through Strength” foreign policy doctrine. He attempted peace through diplomacy, exhaustively and extensively, with the rogue Iranian regime. They have been struck with the strength and the sheer might and will of the United States Armed Forces, and President Trump has proven he’s a man of his word.
Sargent: That too is just so crazy. MAGA is whatever Trump says it is. Any legitimate aspirations or fears that Trump voters or MAGA influencers have about excessive foreign military adventurism can just be wiped out by a mighty fatwa from the movement leader. And then of course there’s the bizarrely obsequious way she keeps circling back to praise of Trump himself. What did you make of this one?
Marcotte: It’s really interesting. Once again, I smell desperation. And a lot of the dynamics—the palace intrigue, but also what’s going on in right-wing media—can point to what the larger problem they’re facing is, which is that it’s increasingly clear to everyone in the MAGA movement that Donald Trump is not going to be there for another term. It’s not only illegal—he’s turning 80 this year, he’s in poor health, he has this vile rash on his neck, he has total pudding brain. His hands—we all know he’s not looking good. He sounds terrible. And he’s probably just not going to be able to run again, even if it was legal.
Everyone is trying to figure out what MAGA looks like after Donald Trump. But from Donald Trump’s perspective—or from the perspective of Karoline Leavitt, who needs to make him feel good to keep her job—we have to keep up this illusion that he’s going to live forever and that this debate about what happens next is not even happening, because Dear Leader will live forever. I think that’s what’s going on. You don’t live forever. Biology catches up with you. He’s not going to be able to tamp down these tensions within the party for that long.
Sargent: I hadn’t even thought about it this way, but the constant drumbeat of “Trump is invincible, Trump is strong, Trump is powerful, Trump is the great leader of MAGA” and so forth—it is also about the very visible signs of Trump’s physical decline, his mental decline, and his mortality, isn’t it. That is the thing that’s hovering over all this. He’s not going to be there forever. He’s on his way out. This is a last hurrah. He’s getting to blow up a bunch of things—cool, great, he’s very powerful and strong. But that’s what’s lurking behind all this obsequiousness.
Marcotte: To a large degree. It’s really profound in this particular issue because you have JD Vance, who I really do think did not want this Iran war. He was shut out of the decision-making about whether it was going to happen. He’s trying to make himself seem powerful by saying he has some say in how it happened. But he’s also trying to make clear—through background conversations with reporters—that he didn’t want this, because he believes—and I think there’s good reason to believe this—that the future of MAGA runs through this America First isolationist concept. They were actually able to cobble together a coalition with some swing voters by saying no more wars. This is bad for that. This is very bad for JD Vance.
So he has a real incentive to distance himself from Trump. But he also has a fear that if he does that too much, Trump is going to cut him loose. So he’s in a weird position. I have to assume that Trump is aware of these tensions, that he’s aware that a lot of people are circling and think they’re going to be next—and he does not like it.
Sargent: Well, all this comes after some pretty bad news for Trump. An elementary school was bombed in southern Iran—175 people were killed, mostly children. The New York Times did this devastating video analysis showing that the U.S. was conducting strikes right in that area at the same time as the bombing of the school. And Reuters reports that U.S. military investigators think it’s likely that the bombing was done by U.S. forces. None of this is definitive, but it raises the possibility that the U.S. just carried out the worst atrocity toward civilians in decades. Now, there’s nothing apologetic coming from Trumpworld at all. Do you hear anything like that?
Marcotte: No, and I have a small amount of optimism that this is going to break through to voters. There is sometimes a tendency to tune out the carnage that the U.S. government has inflicted on other people. Not always—I mean, [in] the Iraq War, a lot of the time the war crimes, Gitmo, the terrible things that happened broke through and people got angry about it. But in this case, it’s little girls. And that’s always tough to swallow.
It’s also because this is happening at the same time that they were waging war at home on their own residents and citizens, many of whom are also children. The assault on Minneapolis was understood as an assault on children. We have that little kid with his little bunny ears being hauled off to a detention center. We have that woman holding up a baby for the cameras in El Paso. And we’re beginning to see that the racist and fascistic policies of the Trump administration harm children. And that is getting through to people. There’s serious evidence I’ve seen that especially some Republican-voting women are starting to feel awfully queasy about inflicting so much death and destruction on children.
Sargent: That’s really interesting. There is definitely a through line there. And the other through line, of course, is unshackled state violence. I want to float an actual polling number as well. G. Elliott Morris, the data analyst, averaged together a bunch of polls on Iran—he took the high-quality ones—and found that an average of only 38 percent approve of the Iran war or Trump’s handling of it. Those are bad numbers. You take that along with this news about the school, and this is going badly for them politically.
If you step back and keep that in your head and then listen to Karoline Leavitt go full cult the way she does over and over, you can see what’s really going on there. They are full culting in order to drown out the bad news. That’s what I think is going on as well. Both to keep it from Dear Leader’s ears, obviously, but also to drown it out in the public realm. If Trump is just eternally strong and invulnerable and invincible, then there can’t be bad news by definition.
Marcotte: 38 percent is such a fascinating number, because that’s the number that for a decade now we know is basically the MAGA die-hards—the people that really are in the cult, the people that really will never, ever, ever admit that Trump is wrong about anything. 38 is where he fell after the Virginia riots in 2017. 38 was kind of where he fell during the worst parts of COVID. 38 percent is where [he landed] after January 6th. Those are the people that are in the cult—American fascists who will never change.
And what he needs is a little bit more than that. But the fact that they’re doing only base management, that they’re strictly trying to remind their base: remember, if you admit that Trump did something wrong, the liberals were right, and we can never allow that—that says to me that they’re afraid they can’t even keep that 38 percent.
And on this, they may not be wrong. Because one of the things that allowed Trump to win in the first place was that he really held himself out as absolution for all the people that voted for George W. Bush and had residual resentment, guilt, and shame over what happened there. Trump was a different kind of Republican, so they could trust that he was never going to shame them like Bush did with the Iraq War. And that’s what he’s doing now—doing exactly the same thing, except more ham-fistedly and stupidly.
Sargent: Well, the base management element is really interesting. If I understand you correctly, you’re basically saying that when Karoline Leavitt goes out there and says MAGA is what Trump says it is, she’s saying to the base: don’t let the liberals be right.
Marcotte: At the end of the day, the most important psychology that keeps these people on board is just that: That admitting that Trump is bad or wrong or a failure is admitting that all those people who for a decade have been telling you that you made a mistake were right. And what’s weird is the longer this drags on, the harder it is for them to let go without some kind of off-ramp. And if there ever was an off-ramp, I do think the Iran war might be it—because again, they don’t want another Bush. Trump ran pretty explicitly the first time as: I am not another Bush. He made fun of the Bush that was in the race, and here he is, another Bush.
Sargent: All other Republicans are losers. That’s the crux, right?
Marcotte: Yeah. So he lied to them pretty directly. If they want to take that, they can use it as their way out—which is to say, Well, I thought I was voting for no more wars, and I was lied to.
Sargent: And [Leavitt] is trying to say you can’t do that. We also just learned that the economy lost 92,000 jobs in February, which caps a stretch in which job creation was significantly worse on Trump’s watch than on his predecessor’s watch. Trump’s polling on the economy has been absolutely brutal of late. The tariffs are completely underwater and his general economic approval is also completely underwater. So if you take that along with the 38 percent who support the Iran war, you’re looking at a presidency that’s on very shaky ground, aren’t you?
Marcotte: And that’s before the midterms. We need to understand that if Democrats win both the House and the Senate, Trump is in very real danger. For one thing, the thing he’s been trying to avoid for a year now—which is the full release of the Epstein files—is coming down on him. And all sorts of other accountability could be in play.
Sargent: His economic approval is in terrible shape, he’s losing ground on national security, and his immigration numbers are upside down. Harry Enten of CNN just put out new numbers where he said Trump has lost 20 points on net approval on immigration in the last year or so. You’ve got something that may be unprecedented, in which a Republican president is losing ground and throwing away the traditional Republican advantage on three different things—the economy, immigration, and national security. You’ve got all this bad news coming out. To what degree do you think that’s linked directly to these kinds of displays of obsequious cultishness from Leavitt?
It seems to me like there are several layers to it. One layer is that she just wants to make Trump feel better. Then there’s the other dimension, which is that he is physically in decline and all of MAGA world knows that they are looking at a world beyond Trump after he’s passed. Passed from the scene, maybe passed from this earth as well. You really can see the psychology of MAGA sort of in the raw when they go out there and hail his greatness the way they do at moments like this. What’s your basic thought on all of it?
Marcotte: I agree that her first and foremost motivation is making her boss feel good so she keeps her job. I would love to look inside her head and see if she actually thinks it makes a difference to say these obsequious, laughable things—if she thinks she’s actually persuading anybody, or if it’s just ... managing her boss’s feelings, because it might just be that.
They don’t have any other tools—I think is probably a piece of this. The traditional tools that MAGA has used to sort of bamboozle a lot of people in the past are falling apart on them. And I don’t think that they know what to do.
We’re seeing a lot of people who are behaving like they don’t know what to do. They don’t know what’s going to happen next. They’re at the whims of a mercurial boss who may not be remembering super well what he said one minute to the next. There is no plan here. I think that they’re just winging it in the most ridiculous way.
It makes me happy because I don’t think that that’s a sustainable plan, but I don’t know that there’s much more to it. I definitely don’t think Karoline Leavitt is going out there and talking to cameras like she’s Baghdad Bob because she thinks that that’s going to turn the tide in any way.
Sargent: I don’t think she thinks she’s going to move the middle, but a lot of this is base management. Can you wrap up your thoughts on that? The base is being bombarded by a lot of mixed signaling. They’re sort of in this propaganda bubble to some degree, but then on the outer edges of the MAGA base, you’re going to see people who get pretty damn upset about the kid getting thrown into detention with the child’s hat, and they’re going to get pretty damn upset about people getting shot in their cars on the street by Stephen Miller’s paramilitary goons, and pretty damn upset about the bombing of a school.
It’s almost like going out and then saying to those people this man is invincible and perfect, is another insult, but they don’t see it that way. You know what I mean? That’s where it breaks down for me. If you’re trying to hold MAGA together, why are you telling the people who are going to be upset by these horrors that this man is of unquestionable greatness? I don’t get it.
Marcotte: It’s foolish. I watch Fox News sometimes, and other right-wing propagandists who are more effective at this stuff, like Tucker Carlson, or Candace Owens, or the people that the MAGA base actually is putting their trust in more and more every day, that’s not how they play this.
When Trump is fucking up and ... they can’t defend it, their strategy is to say the left is worse, the left is dangerous, the left is chaotic, the left is demonic, they’re the bad guys. You know, the problem with Renee Good and Alex Pretti getting shot is that these people won’t stay in their houses, that they won’t stop fussing with ICE. The problem is the protesters are violent. The problem is blah, blah, blah.
Whataboutism is their most effective strategy. And then you look at the White House themselves, and they have abandoned what has traditionally been their most effective strategy of distraction and like deflection, and instead are just saying, “shut up, Trump can’t do anything wrong.” Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe these people are so deep in the cult that there’s not even going to be defectors.
But traditionally, even in cult psychology, you find that a lot of people, when they’re told to shut up and just obey the cult leader—maybe they do, because they don’t have any other choice when they’re in an actual cult, when they can’t leave—but they actually do question, and they do resist, and they do internally field outs. The thing with MAGA voters is they don’t have nearly as many constraints on their ability to leave as somebody who’s actually living in Jonestown.
Sargent: Yeah. We should probably clarify that none of this necessarily means Democrats win the House. Obviously they are favored for the House right now, but Trump could rehabilitate himself. Stranger things have happened. You could see him reaching some sort of point in this war pretty soon where he essentially declares victory in some way that’s not completely nuts. You could see something of an economic rebound. Maybe you could see them dial back the paramilitary executions of Americans in U.S. cities.
You could see him come back a little bit, and you could see the House being way more contested than it looks right now. That’s all possible. But right now it seems like his presidency is in some trouble. What are your final thoughts on that?
Marcotte: I agree. The firing of Noem is a good leading indicator. They had a no-scalps policy in the White House because they didn’t want to give their enemies the satisfaction. And now they have decided that they have to sort of take some of the blame for these political failures, stick it on somebody, throw [them] overboard, and hope that that helps. It shows that they’re running out of options.
And I agree with you, they could rebound. I wouldn’t just say this is a done deal. My biggest fear is that Trump just pulls out of Iran, declares victory, and hopes that nobody notices the fallout, which is totally possible because Americans don’t pay a ton of attention to foreign policy.
But at this point in time, they aren’t doing very well. I don’t think that they have any idea of how to make things better. If things improve, it might just be by luck for them. But I don’t know that we’re looking at people that know how to fix the shit show they’ve gotten themselves into.
Sargent: They are certainly not acting as if they are in the middle of a shit show, and they are in the middle of a shit show. It’s just obvious to the rest of the world. Amanda Marcotte, wonderful to talk to you as always. Thank you so much for coming on.
Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
