Transcript: Trump’s Mental Decline Finally Becomes Big Media Story

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 16, 2024, 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.

Is the media finally figuring out how to cover Donald Trump’s profound mental unfitness for the presidency? Let’s run through some new developments. First, CNN’s Jake Tapper dressed down a Trump surrogate for whitewashing Trump’s threat to unleash the military and his enemies. Then Trump held a strange town hall at which he abruptly stopped answering questions and swayed bizarrely to a number of tunes, which generated some aggressive media coverage. And perhaps most important, Kamala Harris has directly engaged on Trump’s mental state in a newly aggressive way, compelling media attention to it. Is something new happening? Today, we’re talking to Brian Beutler, who regularly criticizes the media’s coverage of Trump on his Substack, Off Message. We’re going to talk about whether we’re crossing a new threshold, and if so, whether it’s too little, too late. Great to have you back on, Brian.

Brian Beutler: It’s great to be with you.

Sargent: OK, I assume everybody watched CNN’s Jake Tapper interviewing Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin. Tapper reads Trump’s quotes about unleashing the military on “the enemy within” directly to Youngkin, and Youngkin just dodges, insisting Trump didn’t actually say what he said. Listen.

Glenn Youngkin (audio voiceover): I don’t think that he’s referring to elected people in America. But I also—

Jake Tapper (audio voiceover): But I’m literally reading his quotes. I’m literally reading his quotes to you, and I played them earlier so you could hear that they were not made up by me. He’s literally talking about “radical left lunatics” and then one of those lunatics he addressed—he mentioned—was Congressman Adam Schiff. Criminals should be locked up, migrants who are in this country illegally, who are violent, should be locked up and deported. I grant you all of that and I am not denying that it’s happening at all.

Youngkin (audio voiceover): —So Jake, I would...

Tapper (audio voiceover): But I’m talking about Donald Trump saying that he wants to use the National Guard in the military to go after the left. That’s what he’s saying.

Youngkin (audio voiceover): I don’t believe that’s what he’s saying, but listen, you and I are going to argue about that, but I would suggest if you would also...

Tapper (audio voiceover): I played the quote and I read it to you.

Sargent: Brian, I think that for a certain type of reporter, there’s something about Trump threatening to use the military on American citizens that crosses the line in a way pretty much nothing else does. But how is it that more Republicans aren’t hounded in exactly this way. And is this something different happening all of a sudden?

Beutler: I do feel like if you go back through the whole nine years of the Trump era, you find other episodes like the one we saw with Jake Tapper and Glenn Youngkin. It’s not like that kind of thing never happens. It’s that when this is what Trump is offering the country, reasonable outside observers, whether they support Democrats or not, whether they’re liberal or conservative—I think Liz Cheney would agree with me on this—[would agree] that’s more important than just about any possible thing a presidential candidate could promise, right? It’s like we’re going to live in a different kind of country and it’s the country where journalists won’t be safe and senators like Adam Schiff, presuming he’s elected, won’t be safe. And the way that mainstream reporters tend to cover it is as if it’s a second tier issue, to me, is a little bit like if you lived in the Gulf Coast and there was a huge hurricane bearing down and the mainstream news was like, There’s a storm coming, but we got to talk about the price of eggs instead. So that’s why it didn’t strike me as such a novel development. But I do want to say one other thing, maybe anticipating where you’re headed: The timing is good. I would like to be able to go back in time, replay the Trump era where reporters are fixated on this steadily all the way through. But if they’re going to fixate on it at any moment, then right before the election is the best time. Get it into people’s heads as they’re deciding who to vote for. It matters more at that moment than it does somewhere in the long four years between presidential elections.

Sargent: Well, it’s certainly pretty good timing, and I thought Tapper did a very good job of trying to pin Youngkin down. The whole thing is so astoundingly ridiculous. You wrote a good piece recently arguing that Barack Obama, who is stepping up his campaigning for Harris now, framed the stakes around Trump’s mental unfitness for the presidency in a new way. In this case, the trigger was, among other things, Trump lying about the federal disaster response to Hurricane Helene, claiming that red areas are being abandoned in a way that actually hampered that response. Trump’s lies hampered the actual disaster response. Can you talk about why you thought that was so important from Obama? What did he say?

Beutler: Sure. The crux of this part of Obama’s speech, right at the end, was to summarize the way Donald Trump has intentionally lied about the federal response to Hurricane Helene, which has had the effect of placing FEMA workers under threat and also convincing Trump supporters who are affected by the storm that the government’s not there to help them. And Obama’s question, the question he asked in the speech was, When did that become okay to abuse people when they’re at their most vulnerable, and place first responders under threat? The essential critique there is that that’s debased behavior and can cause real consequences. And in the days since, FEMA workers have been literally placed under threat. So it was effective because of its essential truth. I will admit that it hit me at a deep level, even though this basic question is one that I’ve been asking in one form or another for nine years, as have you and other journalists. It’s effective as a piece of of persuasive political rhetoric because, in the speech, he directs the question at Republicans, but it’s a question just as easily directed at members of the media and swing voters—

Sargent: Yes.

Beutler: —which is, Did we lose sight of what basic decency is and why it’s important in society? And you can see in something like Glenn Youngkin’s answer to Jake Tapper’s question that Republicans really have lost their rooting in any sense of decency. They will make excuses for it. They will pile on to Trump’s lies about it to make the lies Trump tells seem less severe than they are. The bet that Obama’s making is that, outside the world of people who will apologize for anything Donald Trump says, they’ll remember that that stuff really does matter, and that it matters in some ways more than the policy consequences of an election.

It reminded me, as I wrote my piece, of the line Joseph Welch delivered to Joseph McCarthy, At long last, sir, have you no sense of decency?, which in hindsight is cited as the thing that made the public fixate on McCarthy’s rotten behavior and made him a political pariah. I’m not here to say that Barack Obama has succeeded in finally making Donald Trump the political pariah that he probably should be. But putting it that way, especially at this time now when people are making the most critical decisions they’ll make in this election—for reporters, How do we cover this? What do we say about it?, and then for voters, Which bubble do we fill in on our ballots?—it was a really well-timed and well-executed piece of persuasion. I was gratified to see that other people, other journalists, noticed it and thought that it resonated. It had power to them.

Sargent: Well, there might be a reason for that. To your earlier point here about Obama really just identifying a pivot moment, Trump lying about the disaster response also got the media’s attention in a new way because it’s so manifestly and pathologically inappropriate in someone who wants to lead the country. And importantly, talking about disaster response is the thing that doesn’t trigger journalists’ internal alarm bells about sounding partisan, right? As you’ve written, Trump is overtly campaigning on a promise to abandon blue areas of the country and actively persecute those areas himself, including, to go back to the earlier point, sending in the military to pacify those areas. I just wonder, is the truly malicious nature of all this and the centrality of malice and degradation and venality to how Trump and MAGA do politics finally getting through to the media? It seems like it is to some degree. The Times had a big cover story on just how completely deranged Trump has gotten. It’s not the crusading coverage we’ve seen on Joe Biden’s age, but I feel like some critical mass is getting close to materializing here. Am I being too optimistic?

Beutler: I do think that in the last couple of days maybe, there’s been a change of tenor. And this has happened a few times over the years. Some particularly egregious thing Donald Trump does—January 6 is the obvious example, but there have been others—where the inherent degeneracy of his conduct becomes too hard to deny even to reporters who really feel uncomfortable reporting in a way that makes it clear that the parties are different and they’re led by different kinds of people with different degrees of ethics, right?

Sargent: They hate pointing that out.

Beutler: They do.

Sargent: They hate admitting it, I should say, Brian.

Beutler: I have an article on Wednesday that’s about like ... If you and I had a private roundtable with a randomly selected group of mainstream political reporters who cover this election, they would agree with us. They would say that what we’re saying about Trump and the bad acting at the heart of it is true. They have generally been unwilling to treat that as an emergency on the level of having a private email server or being old, right? And we’ll see, I suppose, if that changes, but one thing that would help change it is if people at the level of Barack Obama or Kamala Harris kept hammering away at the point that he made in his speech. Because it was after that speech that Donald Trump went—it’s like a flip switch—from pretending to be mad that FEMA was supposedly, but not actually, abandoning Republicans in North Carolina to saying, When president, he will abandon Californians unless Gavin Newsom swallows a bunch of right-wing policies. There could be an earthquake or a major firestorm, and too bad Californians, your government’s going to abandon you because your governor wouldn’t agree to put a migrant camp near the California-Mexico border. The bad faith is evident. You can’t be a consistent ethical person and tell the one lie and pretend to be mad about it and then say you’re actually going to do that, right?

Sargent: To your other point about Kamala Harris maybe making these points more aggressively, she just did start engaging Trump’s mental state in a new way. At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, the Harris campaign played video of Trump threatening to unleash the military on his enemies, and she had lot of quotes at the rally like this one.

Kamala Harris (audio voiceover): Why does his staff want him to hide away? One must question. One must question: Are they afraid that people will see that he’s too weak and unstable to lead America? Is that what’s going on? So folks, for these reasons and so many more, it is time to turn the page.

Sargent: Brian, I think the beauty of this is that it’s not just a Resistance-y message that Trump is unhinged, that also ties in the fact that he ducked a second debate with her, it goes hard at undermining the idea that he’s strong, and it brings in the notion that it’s time to move beyond the era of Trump craziness. What do you think of all this? Do you think it’s partly about corralling the media, as you said, into covering his deteriorating mental state? The way to get that coverage is for Democrats to highlight it, as you have pointed out a whole lot, and I wonder if they’ve gotten that memo.

Beutler: Yes. I think it’s almost exclusively a subtle and implicit way of making the media pay attention to what’s actually happening at these Trump rallies. She’s been going around saying to voters, Watch his rallies if you want to. And I think she means that. She thinks that if people got unvarnished Trump instead of the Trump that the media conveys, they’d be more alarmed because, as I think you’ve covered on this show and I’ve covered in my writing, a lot of what the press produces when it covers a Trump rally is “sane-washed,” which is the term we’ve adopted for it. It takes a two hour rally that’s filled with unhinged behavior and all kinds of lies and says, Trump goes to swing state to talk about jobs or whatever. So when Harris did that at her Monday rally, what I instantly thought was it was her way of saying to the mainstream media, If you’re not going to cover this stuff, if he’s going to have a rally and you’re going to ignore this stuff, then you’re going to cover my rally. And by covering my rally, you’re going to have to cover it because I’m going to make it part of my rally. And now you can’t ignore it. It’s clever and it worked. It clearly worked.

The outlets that might have otherwise glossed over the fact that Donald Trump is talking about siccing the military on liberal and progressive and left-wing Americans [made it] a big story, at least for a day. And that’s important. But the situation is dire and urgent enough, and that the media’s conduct over many years has been well-established enough by intelligent critics, that she and Obama and Democratic politicians at that level could be more explicit about it and just say—repurpose Obama’s plea to Republicans, When did that become okay?—to reporters directly, When did that stop being news?

Sargent: Yes. I love that idea. By the way, there’s actually another reason to do this, which is that this kind of message doesn’t necessarily appeal just to the Democratic base. It’s telling that she did this in Erie, Pennsylvania. Erie is the ultimate swing county. Trump won it by a hair in 2016. Biden took it back by a hair in 2020. Harris is very aggressively contesting it. They’re really aiming hard at GOP-leaning independents with this stuff, especially women. And we have a thing in our discourse where if you ever talk about how Trump is crazy and threatening and menacing and a debased ethical character and so forth, you’re just appealing to the base because real Americans don’t care about that. But I think a lot of real Americans do care about it.

Beutler: They have tornadoes in the Midwest. They have crippling blizzards and that create emergencies. And I don’t know how like essential it is to be explicit about this in Democratic messaging, but you could easily imagine Harris and her surrogate saying, Imagine you’re in a spot next summer because a tornado comes through and your neighbor’s houses get destroyed or your house gets damaged or people in your community die. Donald Trump is president and he decides that because your governor is Josh Shapiro or Tony Evers that you’re not going to get help. Help’s not on the way.

Sargent: It actually happened this way. Remember?

Beutler: He did it when he was president once, he’s promising to do it again. And the people in these swing states, the only people whose votes actually count somehow, are not just observers of what’s happening in North Carolina. They’re potentially the next people that it happens to. And who do you want to be president in that moment? The one that’s promising that it doesn’t matter who your governor is, we’re going to be there to help? Or the one who’s promising, If you’re from a Democratic state, the help’s not coming?

Sargent: Can I just point out: Another really profound perversity to all this is that Trump is casting aspersions on the federal disaster response in North Carolina and other states hit by these hurricanes—and we should point out that Republicans are adamantly denying that there’s anything amiss in the way Trump is saying—but the ridiculousness of all this is underscored by the fact that Trump made an absolute hash of the one major crisis he faced, which was Covid. He’s so confident in his ability to erase 2020 from people’s minds, and here the media is complicit too, that he actually thinks he can cast aspersions on other people’s handling of crises without this coming up as an issue to bite him.

Beutler: A lot of Trump’s behavior only makes sense when you realize that he’s internalized that the fact-police, the referees, aren’t coming. So he gets to say and do whatever he wants. If what he does fails and what he says isn’t true, everyone’s going to move on very quickly. And it’s usually a safe bet for him. So much of my work and your work over the years has been dedicated to trying to change that dynamic, so that there’s some real public accountability for that faithless and incompetent conduct.

There’s a Republican congresswoman from Florida named Anna Paulina Luna, and her district was impacted by Hurricane Milton. She’s a participant in all of these bad-faith exercises right alongside Trump and Vance and the rest of the GOP leadership. And then her district gets affected by a storm and there’s no talk from Joe Biden that he’s going to abandon Florida unless Ron DeSantis expands Medicaid. That’s just not how he operates because he’s not a bad person. He goes to Florida, he meets with her, he provides help, he provides clarity on how the recovery is going to go. And if there’s one redeeming thing about this, she goes out and she admits it. She’s like, I was very surprised because I’ve been saying that he sucks and I’ve bought into all the bullshit that we’ve been spewing. And then he comes and he’s on the ball and very helpful. And I was grateful to see that. She should lose her job. She should not be a member of Congress.

It’s a window into the ethics and the conduct and the thinking of the two parties on offer. There is no Republican governor in the United States that fears Harris’s presidency on the grounds that if something bad happens to their states, the federal government will abandon them. Ron DeSantis knows that she won’t do that, and Brian Kemp knows that she won’t do that. They all say that the federal government’s response to disasters has been good. But the same is not true the other way around. Until it becomes true again, that’s a huge story, that one presidential candidate is running to essentially be a partisan warlord on behalf of his party and defeat the people in the other half, even if it means abandoning them to a hurricane. You can’t watch that happen and not be upset when the people who put together political news decides it just doesn’t rate.

Sargent: I’ve got to say, the discomfort that we’re talking about that you alluded to earlier on the part of journalists who want to appear nonpartisan is really activated when they’re confronted with the fact that, on a very basic level, perhaps the most fundamental level, one party is made up of public servants and the other one just isn’t.

I want to go on to this town hall event in Pennsylvania where Trump just stopped taking questions, called for his handlers to play music, which went on for 40 minutes. The Washington Post covered this quite aggressively. The Times didn’t, but the Post did. Post characterized it accurately as being really bizarre, and they really captured in their coverage the degree to which Trump seemed just, well, mentally gone. Just absent, not there. Are we going to see more of this now?

Beutler: I’m a little concern that we’re not. While the Post did cover it well, ABC News turned it into like a commercial for Donald Trump. They covered it like he put on a concert for these people. Weird.

Sargent: It was very moving the way he was swaying back and forth.

Beutler: And The Wall Street Journal covered it in the same way, just very credulously. It’s almost like they weren’t sure what happened, and so they went to the Trump campaign, who offered up this extremely thin, lame excuse for why Trump behaved that way.

Sargent: What was it? It was to do with his Spotify list, right?

Beutler: No, it was that there were a couple of medical issues in this indoor rally. Look, I don’t want to be cavalier about it when people faint at political rallies, but it’s not uncommon. If you cover politics, even for one election cycle, you’ll go to campaign events. People, particularly elderly people who have to stand a long time—and they’re indoors usually, so it gets pretty hot—they’ll get faint and they’ll fall down. Typically what happens is whoever’s on stage, if they notice it, will call for a medic. Things will pause for a minute. The medic gets them to someplace safe, and then the rally resumes. That happened a couple of times at Trump’s town hall event. But then instead of just getting back to it, he was like, You know what, we’re going to end this here. His MC, who’s Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, was [saying], Sir, you said you wanted to play your walk-off music or something like that. So then this music starts and he stands there, in a trance for 40 minutes, bobbing and weaving to the beat of these weird songs. It’s very strange, but it did not ... You have the Post on the one hand treating it with the concern that I think is warranted, and then you have these two other comparably influential outlets saying it was like a happy concert. The New York Times more or less [is] ignoring it. They have long since abandoned, the 400 or 500 or so reporters and editors who comprise the mainstream political news media, any commitment to the idea that the way you cover one candidate and the way you cover the other candidate should be roughly comparable. We know that if Joe Biden in his late stages of his campaign had done anything like that...

Sargent: It would have been all about his dotage.

Beutler: Yes. And then if Harris were to do it tomorrow, they’d be like, Whoa, what’s going on with her?

Sargent: It have been covered as a sign of her being a lightweight, absolutely. Let’s end on an optimistic note here. I do think we’re seeing some stirrings. I do think Trump’s mental decline is becoming more of a story. It’s fitful and it’s not enough, but I feel like there’s movement.

Beutler: It took Biden dropping out. This never would have happened no matter how ... Trump, even in his dotage, is just more energetic, in part because he doesn’t care what he says. Joe Biden seems older and older because he’s trying to be careful with his words most of the time, and it compounds [with] the fact that he’s not energetic anymore. Trump doesn’t have that limitation. He just says whatever’s on his mind, so he seems very energetic relative to Biden. So that was a predicate for it all. With him out, it’s the backdrop for every big campaign, the debate with Harris, the refusal to do another debate with Harris, walking away from the 60 Minutes interview because they wouldn’t agree not to fact-check him. Everything is making it very hard to ignore. On top of that, the demented part of Trump’s presentation is fusing with the fascistic part of his presentation. He’s talking about “the enemy within.” He frequently includes the mainstream news as part of the enemy within. He’s threatened send the military after progressives, but he’s also threatened the licenses of CBS News and ABC News, just any news outlet that puts together a news package that he regards as unhelpful to him.

Part of the reason why I mentioned the ABC report on his strange rally or his strange town hall is that that’s one of the outlets that he’s threatened. It almost feels like they are doing what Tim Snyder would call obeying in advance. They are trying to win back favor from him so that he doesn’t come after them if he wins. I would like to see it go the other way. Now that they realize that the threat isn’t just to democratic politicians like Adam Schiff or democratically run states like California [which] might get hit with earthquakes or fires, but also to their jobs and their institutions they work for ...

Sargent: And their values. The values they cherish, that they devoted their lives to.

Beutler: ... they don’t want to be in a position where Trump does the crackdown that he’s threatening on the media, and they’re left wondering what would have happened if they had covered the threat when he was just a candidate with the appropriate degree of alarm. Would he have won the election in the end? I would hope that that idea just gets into the heads of reporters now, because there’s still enough time to make that an important part of the coverage of the stakes of the election before everyone’s voted.

Sargent: Absolutely. Very well said. Brian Beutler, it’s always a real pleasure to have you on, man.

Beutler: It’s always great to be with you.

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.