The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 3 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.

This week brings a confluence of events that all tell the same story. On a number of fronts, we’re seeing really vividly that sheer, unbridled sadism courses through just about everything President Trump and his administration are doing. The examples are everywhere. Trump just unleashed a vicious, hateful rant about Somali immigrants. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just tweeted out a deeply sadistic cartoon about his murders in the Caribbean Sea. A prominent MAGA personality just declared that she wants to see the people Trump is bombing suffer and “bleed out.” A pop star denounced the White House for using her song in a truly hateful and disgusting video. Paul Waldman has a good new piece on his Substack, The Cross Section, looking at how this sort of hate and bloodlust undergirds everything coming out of this administration. So we’re talking to him about all this. Paul, good to have you back on.

Paul Waldman: Thank you, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s start with pop star Sabrina Carpenter. This is a good one. The White House posted a video of people getting arrested, pinned to the ground and handcuffed. And it overlaid that footage with Carpenter’s song, which is called [“Juno”]. Paul, that’s a sexually charged song. And so the White House video takes almost a perverted pleasure in this imagery of people suffering. And Carpenter responded with this, “This video is evil and disgusting.” She called it “inhumane” and said she wants no part of it. What do you make of all that?

Waldman: Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the reaction that the administration was hoping for. But one of the things that we’ve seen is that on their social media, they really do seem to be highlighting the cruelty of a lot of their policies, especially their immigration policies. And they do it in a couple of different ways, through different formats, using different sorts of genres, and it really is quite a comprehensive strategy.

On the one hand, they want you to kind of luxuriate in the sadism and the suffering of the people in the videos. And a lot of them are sort of like hype videos. They’ve got propulsive music, and they’re cut together with quick cuts. There are a lot of them that use kind of a first-person perspective taken from body cams of the immigration officers who are chasing people down and handcuffing people. It looks very much like a first-person shooter video game, like Call of Duty, or a hundred other video games. So they want you to kind of get excited about it, get your adrenaline pumping. And they also have a lot of content that’s intended to be humorous, where they want you to laugh at those people, to kind of exult in their suffering and the violence that is being perpetrated against them.

So they want you to be kind of pumped up, but also to find it funny. And that really is reflective of a kind of a sadism that’s driving that.

Sargent: A White House spokesperson responded to Sabrina Carpenter with this: “We won’t apologize for deporting dangerous criminal, illegal murderers, rapists, and pedophiles from our country. Anyone who would defend these sick monsters must be stupid, or is it slow?”

Paul, again, the seething hatred and rage is the thing here. This is a White House spokesperson speaking. Clearly, this is all meant to please the audience of one and sate his bloodlust, but there’s actually a through line here, right? We actually saw in this video that the White House put out that they are celebrating the pinning of people to the ground, the suffering of people getting arrested and so forth. It really is the story.

Waldman: Yeah, and the “stupid, or is it slow” is a reference to one of Sabrina Carpenter’s lyrics. And so they try to be very much kind of like tuned in with the cultural space in which they’re operating. But one of the things that’s so different about this administration from administrations before it is that the people who deal with the media or have any kind of public-facing role, they’ve abandoned the kind of propriety that we always saw. There was an incident where a reporter asked a White House........

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