Transcript: Trump’s Angry Rant About Fox News Contains Hidden Warning
The following is a lightly-edited transcript of the September 30, 2024 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. To listen to it, click here.
This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Greg Sargent: At the rally in Wisconsin over the weekend, Donald Trump really cranked up the rage and hate speech about immigrants in a major way. He seethed at Kamala Harris over a speech she gave laying out her own vision of immigration. But something else Trump said at the rally deserves special attention. He directly attacked Fox News for the mere act of carrying Harris’s speech on the network. He said they shouldn’t be allowed to do that. This, when taken along with other things Trump has been saying lately, should be seen as a warning of sorts, a preview about what might happen to dissent if Trump wins a second term. Today we’re discussing all this with Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte, who is very good at interpreting the dangerous subtexts of Trump’s most unhinged public utterances. Good to have you on, Amanda.
Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: At his rally in western Wisconsin, Trump said that migrants will “walk into your kitchen and cut your throat.” He called Kamala Harris “mentally impaired.” He said migrants will transform every American town into a “third-world hellhole.” This is a way of getting the MAGA masses excited about the bloody mass deportations and detention camps to come if he’s elected. You wrote recently in your newsletter that Trump’s language is getting more violent to create permission to persecute enemies within. Is this more of the same?
Marcotte: Yeah. It’s getting to the point of fantasyland, right? We saw that going on with the cat- and dog-eating accusations. It’s convincing people to live in a mental space that’s outside of their normal reality. You see in history that this has been very effective at getting people to think about committing violence and doing acts of violence that are outside of what they would normally be willing to put up with. It’s going to cause hate crimes, there’s no doubt about it, but it’s also about accepting any kind of violence that’s coming. It’s putting people in this space of the unimaginable and keeping them there. It’s telling people to think in a sense that, Look, you can just invent a whole alternate world where all this is OK, meaning the violence toward migrants.
It’s very much reminiscent, and I’m not the first person to say this, of the satanic panic in the 1980s where the level of accusations against daycare workers and other people, that heavy metal musicians and stuff just got completely out of control, that they were engaging in human sacrifice, that they somehow had murdered thousands and hidden it and things like that. A lot of that was about justifying the religious right’s grab for power, their crackdown on music, their censorship, other things that I think previous to that would have been not allowed in American society. They work themselves into a frenzy of moral justification by imagining enemies that were so bad, so evil that everything was justified in stopping them.
Sargent: You just gave me a flashback to Stranger Things, which is also set in the ’80s where there’s this witch hunt for this one guy who’s called a freak because he wears a denim jacket that has a heavy metal logo on the back.
I want to play a specific quote from Trump at the rally. He talked about the speech that Harris gave Friday night, laying out her plans for stricter border security and comprehensive immigration reform. Then he said this:
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): And then I have to sit there and listen to her bullshit last night. And who puts it on Fox News? And they shouldn’t be allowed to put it on. It’s all lies. It’s all lies. Everything she said is a lie.
Sargent: Amanda, this is really unhinged. Trump just said Fox News shouldn’t be allowed to air the opposition’s criticism of him. You have to take that along with his recent threat to prosecute Google if elected, for no reason other than it carried stories that criticize him. Amanda, does this also fit into your frame in that it creates a permission structure for persecution of the media for criticizing him later?
Marcotte: Absolutely. Trump has long held the opinion that one of the most important benefits of power is silencing people who criticize you. And he’s getting louder and louder about it and more and more obnoxious about the double standard that he holds, which is if you say things I like, then that’s free speech, and if you say things I don’t like, then that should be criminal, right? Trying to hold him to any legal or morally consistent standard is ridiculous because his only standard is if I like it, it’s good and legal, if I don’t like it, it should be criminal. The scary thing here is that that narcissism is spreading out across the supporters.
Elon Musk is a good example. He’s somebody who calls himself a free speech warrior because he lets Nazis run rampant on Twitter. He published the “Twitter files,” which were all these interior communications at Twitter under the guise of free speech. But then what happened was a journalist got his hands on a dossier that the Trump campaign had made up about J.D. Vance that was supposed to be private, published it, put it on Twitter, and Elon Musk censored that. The only consistent standard here is if it’s for Trump, he’s for it, and if it’s against Trump, he will censor it. He doesn’t even try to be consistent anymore.
Sargent: I want to pick up on that because I think it’s crucial for people to understand that the explicit declaration of a double standard is the thing here. That is the thing that Trump is promising. He’s saying, We no longer have to be consistent. Everything should be rigged in our favor. Elections that we lose are illegitimate. Elections that we win are legitimate. The media is being fair when it criticizes our opponents. The media is being unfair when it criticizes us. He is essentially selling a liberation from consistency and neutrality to his supporters.
Marcotte: It’s very explicitly this end-of-liberal-democratic ideals, right? And replacing them with fairly classic fascist ideals, “blood and soil” notions. J.D. Vance’s speech at the RNC was very clear on this, that what makes you an American is that you’re born here and your ethnicity and your history here. And he played a little around the edges to imply that there was some allowance for racial diversity in there, but we all heard what he was saying, which is Americans are an ethnic group and that ethnic group is obviously a white one and a conservative one and a Christian one and all these other things.
Once you’ve redefined American-ness in those lines, you can redefine the law and who is in and who is out. And the consistency here is not that we have free speech for all citizens or all people actually. It’s that the in-group are real Americans and they have all the rights and privileges and the out-group are not real Americans and they deserve nothing.
Sargent: The bigger context here though is CBS News just announcing that its moderators won’t be fact-checking the vice presidential candidates at this week’s debate. Remember, ABC News did fact-check Trump and Harris at their debate. And as a result, Trump and top MAGA propagandists attack ABC relentlessly for weeks. Trump even said ABC should lose its license for telling the truth about his lies. Is it fair to read this and the attack on Fox News for merely airing Harris’s criticism of him as a clear advertisement of what a President Trump would try to do to dissent with executive power in a second term?
Marcotte: Absolutely. He’s made it very clear what he thinks the new order should be. It’s interesting to me, too, that Fox News continues to do right-wing propaganda in the old-fashioned way, which is they create the appearance of a news network so that it legitimizes what is actually just right-wing propaganda. It shows that they’ve long believed, and I think correctly, that conservatives want to view themselves as engaging in a liberal democracy just with a different value system and a different set of beliefs. They would mimic what that would look like while not actually doing that. Trump is saying we don’t need that anymore, that everyone’s on board with just straight-up fascist views on how government should run, how society should be run, that, for me and my friends, everything, for the opposition, nothing, right?
Sargent: Persecution.
Marcotte: Yeah, persecution. I don’t know that he is as right as he thinks he is. He goes to his rallies and people cheer him on when he says things like this. I think he has it in his head that this is the majority view on the conservative side. And I think that that’s not true…
Sargent: Right.
Marcotte: …that the kind of people that go to MAGA rallies are just full blown fascists. But there are a lot of people that don’t really want to accept that this is what they signed on to. And they like the comfort blanket of being told that Trump is a normal Republican. This is a normal political party. We’re still engaging in liberal democracy. And that’s how they tell themselves how to sleep at the end of the day.
Sargent: Right. It’s a little hard to say exactly what MAGA rally attendees believe. I think certainly some of them are there for the authoritarian display. Whether all of them are, I don’t know. I will tell you, there was some really interesting polling from the Public Religion Research Institute that found that something like high 60s, low 70s percent of people who view Trump positively agree with the statements that migrants are “poisoning the blood” of America as Trump has put it, and agree that immigrants are invading our country in a way that eradicates our culture. By the way, Trump started using that word “culture” at this rally as well. What do you think of that? That’s really a euphemism, isn’t it? “Culture”? In other words, it’s a euphemism when Trump says they’re a threat to culture.
Marcotte: Western civilization, Western culture, these have been euphemisms that have been used by the “alt-right.” I consider them fascists for years now. It is basically creating an in-group out-group and denying a lot of things that are just objectively true. One of which is that immigrant communities do assimilate into American culture, and they change it. That what we consider American culture is the result of waves and waves and waves of immigration changing our culture. It’s very easy for a lot of people to tell themselves a story that the way things were when they were a kid is the way things have always been and should always be.
When I was at the RNC, my videographer and I went around asking people when they thought America was great again. What we found was really fascinating: no matter how old or young they were, they would say that America’s greatness peaked when they were around 15 years old. It was fascinating. If they were a boomer, it was in the early ’60s. If they were my age, it was in the ’90s. It just tells you that it’s this delusion, a very narcissistic delusion, that the culture that you came of age in is the real American culture. Trump is an adult-brain old man, but he still has an ability to plug into that. What’s really scary is he came of age obviously in the ’50s. That’s the great America he wants.
Sargent: That’s absolutely clear. I want to bring up the effect Trump’s threats have, particularly the threats and attacks on the media. In terms of CBS’s announcement that they won’t be fact checking the vice presidential debate, the Associated Press explicitly wrote that the network “wants to take a step back from the heat generated” by calling attention to candidates’ falsehoods. That formulation drove me nuts because what the AP won’t say directly is that CBS is afraid of the fallout of fact-checking Trump and Vance in particular. They’re not afraid of the fallout of fact-checking both candidates, both sides, because Democrats and the Harris campaign simply don’t attack the media and threaten it for telling the truth, whereas Trump and MAGA do.
Marcotte: It’s so frustrating because it should be part of being a journalist. Journalists often pride themselves on being able to take criticism, being able to take heat. But apparently it only is something to be proud of if you’re getting it from the left and you withstand it. Folding to the right is ridiculous. What’s doubly frustrating about this to me is there’s many other reasons that you could say that that might have to be the way things are. Like Vance is a better liar in many ways than Donald Trump, so fact checking him could be a much more difficult proposition during a debate. He’s going to say untrue things, but he’s going to say them in this way that creates plausible deniability, very legalistic. I could see that. Don’t even bother, it’s just going to turn into a nightmare.
The other thing is Vance is aching to be attacked by a reporter so he can whine and flip out and say, This is what the media always does, blah, blah, blah. He wants to make the debate against the moderator so he doesn’t have to debate Walz. These are all good reasons to be cautious about fact-checking him in real time, but it’s very frustrating that the actual reason is that they don’t want people to yell at them on Twitter.
Sargent: It’s worse than that, right? They don’t want a President Trump to threaten to take away their license and make it so that they are not allowed to say these things.
Marcotte: Well, that’s so dumb, too, because there’s nothing that they can do that’s going to make him not go after them if he thinks he has the power to do so. The entire point of this is squelching anything that he considers opposition and that’s any factual reporting. So either they give up entirely on doing journalism or they’re going to be feeling the heat if Trump is president again.
Sargent: Let’s talk a little bit about sane-washing, which is how the media softens, peddles Trump’s authoritarian threats. As press critic Mark Jacob pointed out, one news outlet, I think Bloomberg, had a tweet saying Trump “sharpened his criticism” of Harris during this rally. This is how Bloomberg describes Trump’s wildly unhinged claims about migrants slitting people’s throats and turning every American town into third-world hellholes and describing Harris as “mentally impaired.”
Where does this leave us? I think we actually made some progress by pushing The New York Times to actually render the reality of Trump’s quotes and public utterances and to stop sane-washing them as the saying goes. But then there’s just this constant backsliding that happens: a quick blow up happens over one particularly absurd act of sane-washing, media figures seem to recalibrate a bit, they do a few pieces that do show the reality of Trump’s profound mental unfitness for the presidency, but then we backslide. What do we do about that?
Marcotte: I guess we have to keep the heat up because that’s inexcusable. It’s inexcusable in so far just from a writing perspective. There’s a tendency to want to make sense out of what you’ve seen, but you can do that very easily without misleading people. You can say Trump told a bunch of lies, falsely accusing migrants of being murderers. He then told some more lies falsely accusing Kamala Harris of being mentally impaired. Simple, easy. You don’t have to get into what I would write as an opinion writer, which is that Trump is clearly engaging in off-the-charts psychological projection. Every finger he points out needs to be pointed at himself.
The only person in this equation that’s unleashing, that has unleashed, violence against the United States is Donald Trump. The only person who’s clearly feeling a way about his own mental impairment is Donald Trump. They don’t have to do that. That’s engaging in analysis and opinion about him. They could just say he lied. End of story.
Sargent: I’d like to see a whole series of news analysis pieces doing precisely what they did when Biden was pronounced mentally unfit for the presidency due to age and that sort of thing, news analysis pieces which treat Trump’s mental unfitness for this job as the story.
Marcotte: There was a series of articles all across the media where they would speak to medical professionals who would say that Biden was showing symptoms of Parkinson’s and other things like that, which I didn’t think was unfair because he was. The thing is, Trump is also showing symptoms of some decline related to his age. If anybody’s ever been around a mean old person who is going into dementia or Alzheimer’s or something like that, they recognize this behavior, which is increasingly their inhibitions are collapsing and they’re just becoming just meaner and nastier and more unhinged. The difference is that when somebody is a nice person and they start to fall off the cliff a little, they don’t become meaner. But if you were already a mean person, and Trump was always a mean person, it just gets worse.
Sargent: Yeah. You don’t even have to get into the clinical aspects of this. Following the model that was used on Biden. By the way, that was legitimate to cover Biden’s fitness for the presidency aggressively. That was fine. But following that model, you would just look at Trump’s pathological lying, his constant verbal abuse, his tendency to just attack in the most vile and vicious and deranged ways possible. You could isolate those qualities and then ask the same question that was asked about Biden. Does this person belong in the presidency with these traits?
Marcotte: Yes, and they’re getting worse. They’re objectively getting worse. He’s disinhibited for whatever reason and it’s terrifying. Either he’s feeling his power, he’s got some age-related decline, any combination of the two. His stress from all of his criminal trials, all of this is probably weighing on him. He is already acting like a deranged fascist leader at the end of their tenure, but he’s unfortunately still gunning for power and has a very good chance of getting it.
Sargent: Well, let’s hope that it actually is the end of his tenure and that the sun is about to set on MAGA for good. Amanda Marcotte, thanks so much for coming on with us.
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.