Transcript: Trump Accidentally Reveals His Contempt for MAGA Voters

As fresh Trump outbursts expose what he really thinks of his supporters, a skilled decoder of MAGA explains the role of sheer unreality in Trumpian politics—and why it betrays deep political weakness.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 9 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.

Donald Trump unleashed a barrage of crazy posts over the last few days, spraying angry threats in all directions. But we noticed a pattern in all these outbursts. He keeps threatening to do things that he’s never, ever going to actually carry through, or things that backfire on him right away. In one sense, all this reveals fresh levels of contempt for MAGA voters. In another sense, all it does is make Trump look weaker.

And it occurs to us that he may be entering a new phase in his presidency. We’re getting a preview of what it’ll look like if he loses the midterms and Democrats can place some real limits on him. His threats will look increasingly empty, buffoonish, and desperate. We’re talking about it all with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who has a new piece today on how the entire GOP establishment is now propping up Trump’s delusions of grandeur. Good to have you on, Amanda.

Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: OK, so Trump unleashes all these crazy Truth Social posts in the last few days. The worst one might have been his post depicting all of North America, including Canada and Mexico and many other places, as the United States of America.

Amanda, this is all supposed to titillate MAGA somehow, because it looks like a threat to annex all this new territory or whatever, but he can’t even get Canada to roll over in the trade wars he started. Your thoughts on all that?

Marcotte: Yeah, I mean, I suspect this is how Trump has worked his whole life, right? Which is, he is both a bully and a coward. So he’ll only pick on somebody smaller, and only if it’s an easy fight. Jamelle Bouie is often pointing out it’s a rapist mentality. And I’ll just say, civil court has found that E. Jean Carroll was telling the truth about Trump.

So yeah, but I think that there is kind of a hope there that being a loud, threatening, scary monster is going to be the same thing as actually following through. But he’s never had any follow-through. Trump has always lived his life as if the illusion is the thing.

It’s one thing to do that on television when you’re the host of a reality TV show. It’s another thing when you’re like, no, we’re going to annex Canada, and Canada’s like, nope.

Sargent: Yeah, it doesn’t look strong. It doesn’t look powerful, it doesn’t look imposing. And it’s just crazy and disgusting, obviously, to even post the image in the first place. We should be clear on that. Like, even the mere hint in that direction is itself morally abhorrent in just about every conceivable way, right?

Marcotte: I feel like the crazier Trump gets, the harder it is for the media to cover it. There’s just this sense that grandpa at the nursing home is ranting again. And it almost feels a little impolite to be like, grandpa, we’re not going to annex Canada, sorry, grandpa. That thing about Mexico being a new colony, it just—that’s in your head, sorry, grandpa. Like, it feels mean. Just let grandpa have his delusions, and we’ll just all ignore him, I think, tends to be a lot of people’s stances. But to your point, he is actually the president of the United States. This is a problem. This is a problem, that gramps is losing his mind.

Sargent: Right, it’s a story in and of itself. Like, the unraveling is the story. It’s not something that should be ignored, no matter what.

Trump just rage-posted a threat to ban all sales in the U.S. by Bombardier, which is a Canadian aerospace company. But it turns out that Bombardier’s U.S. headquarters is in Wichita, Kansas, and GOP Senator Roger Marshall, who faces an unexpectedly tough challenge from a Democrat in Kansas, had to quickly distance himself from what Trump said. And Bombardier has workers all over the country, in the United States, and its supply chains are deeply entangled with a lot of American companies.

So he’s not going to actually do this. But again, the president of the United States said he was going to ban sales by this company. The level of contempt for MAGA voters is, like, hard to fathom, I think.

Marcotte: I think a lot of the........

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