Transcript: Trump’s Angry Rants to Media Show How Bad Things Will Get
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 8 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.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump held a press conference. At it, he wouldn’t rule out using military force to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal, openly celebrated the idea that billionaire Mark Zuckerberg might have caved to his threats to put Zuckerberg in jail, and said we’re going to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Trump didn’t appear to be kidding about that.
Today, we’re going to look at these moments as efforts on Trump’s part to make this kind of talk normal, to acclimate Americans to things like malignant nationalist belligerence and naked threats to jail people without cause to force them into line. So we’re chatting with Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of rhetoric and communication at Texas A&M University, who writes about right-wing and fascist rhetorical tropes and how they really work. Good to have you back on, Jennifer.
Jennifer Mercieca: Thank you so much for having me on.
Sargent: Let’s start with what Trump said about Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He just announced that Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, will stop using third-party fact-checking. And Zuckerberg actually repeated Trump’s lies about this, saying fact-checking has proven too biased and has sowed distrust. That’s nonsense, but listen to this exchange between Trump and a reporter about Zuckerberg’s decision.
Reporter (audio voiceover): Do you think he’s directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past?
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): Probably. Yeah, probably. Probably.
Sargent: Jen, over the summer, Trump floated the idea that Zuckerberg could spend the rest of his life in prison if Trump decided that his conduct during the 2024 election merited it. So let’s be clear, Trump is saying it’s good that his threats to corruptly use law enforcement to silence dissent worked for him. Your thoughts on that?
Mercieca: That’s how authoritarians keep power. That’s how they gain and keep power and that’s how they maintain a compliant media that does and says what they want to do and say. The first thing that an autocrat does ... So someone like Mussolini taking power, someone like Hitler taking power, but not just them, all of them—the first thing they do is they want to control the media.
These guys are worried about the bottom line more than they’re worried about democracy, of course. And they were never really in the platform business because they wanted to promote and protect democracy. That was eulogistic covering for what they really wanted, which was money and power. For them, it’s not so hard to say, Well, the money and power are easier to get if I capitulate to Trump, so let’s just make sure he knows that I’m doing it.
Sargent: Let’s just say, for the moment, along the lines of the anti-alarmist take—which I don’t agree with; let’s just adopt it for the moment—let’s say Trump has no actual intention of really putting Zuckerberg in jail for life. It still seems to me that Trump is trying to get voters used to the idea that it’s not only appropriate but actually good for him and his supporters to threaten to imprison people who displease him in some way. He’s getting them acclimated to the idea that this is a legitimate and positive use of state power, that this serves his ends and theirs, meaning his supporters. To what degree is that a common authoritarian rhetorical trope?
Mercieca: Yeah, it absolutely is. The rhetorical figure is ad baculum, which is threats of force or intimidation. And it’s, of course, a form of coercion. All authoritarians use threats of force and intimidation. They coerce others. That’s how they become powerful. And you know that they do that because they’re not democrats, right? Democrats don’t do that, small-d democrats. The opposite of an authoritarian is someone who uses rhetoric, meaning that they use rhetoric to persuade. Persuasion is an invitation to think like I do. I use good evidence, I try in the best way I know how to use good argumentation, all of that kind of stuff, those skills—that’s what small-d democrats do. They’re cognitively responsible leaders, meaning that they allow people to ask questions, to hold them accountable.
Authoritarians, they don’t do that. They use propaganda. They use communication as a weapon, as a force. And they’re not cognitively responsible, meaning they want to say, Because I said so, and have that be the final answer. They don’t want to have to give good reasons. They don’t want to have to give good evidence. They don’t want to have a meeting of the minds. It’s not like that for them. They just want you to say, Yes, sir. So authoritarians use propaganda. They use coercion. They use language as coercion. That’s fundamental to what authoritarianism is. That’s its essential quality.
Sargent: And is he trying to get his voters to see this as a good thing, a normal thing, something that serves their interests?
Mercieca: Here’s the trick: His voters want that. His voters want him to do that and show that. His voters would not like it if any Democratic Party member or politician did that. They don’t want the government to do that, but they want Donald Trump to do that. And that’s because that’s what right-wing authoritarian personalities want. They want a strong leader. They want someone who’s going to come in and say, This is how it is. And if you don’t do it the way I want you to, that’s it. You go to jail or whatever.
Sargent: There’s another type of voter out there: low-propensity, nonwhite, young, economically anxious. We’ve talked about this on the show before, but just repeating it in this context. Maybe those voters didn’t really listen to the authoritarian talk, don’t really care much about it. Maybe they think, OK, I want someone who’s strong, who will use his power to bring down prices or whatever. To what degree is there an effort here to acclimate those people to this tactic?
Mercieca: That’s a great observation. Right, not everyone is a right-wing authoritarian who already wants this. You could think of what Trump’s doing as moving the Overton window, right? Getting people used to something that would normally seem completely outrageous, completely abnormal. Normalization is a process by which someone like Trump moves us from that is so bizarre, I can’t believe that, it’s shocking, it’s outrageous to that’s, of course, common sense. If you’re thinking about that audience, then yes, that’s what Trump’s doing. He’s conditioning them to accept an even stronger strong man persona than he’s given them before.
Sargent: Trump has also been threatening to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal. At his presser, a reporter asked him if he’d rule out using military or economic coercion to secure those goals. Listen to what happens then.
Trump (audio voiceover): I can’t assure you. You’re talking about Panama and Greenland. No, I can’t assure you on either of those two, but I can say this. We need them for economic security. The Panama Canal was built for our military. I’m not going to commit to that now. It might be that you’ll have to do something.
Sargent: Jen, note that he says we need those things for economic security. That seems to justify pretty much anything, like using force to seize whatever he says we “need.” What’s your reaction to that?
Mercieca: It was a very interesting exchange, especially because of that justification. The “Well, we need it. We need it for ...” That was exactly what I was thinking. We need it? Why do we need it? It was fascinating. And then his followup explanation that there’s these ships that are going through, these Chinese and Russian ships. So he’s very concerned, in this press conference, about shipping routes and who controls them, and he wants control of them. And that seems to be the framework by which he is going to justify all kinds of illegal empire building. I don’t know how people are going to frame this, but really bizarre land grabs it sounds like.
Sargent: Right. I want to try to highlight another aspect of that. There’s a certain type of observer out there who has tried to put a soft spin on Trump’s nationalism by calling it populism or “neo-populism,” as one New York Times writer put it, or saying Trump is just speaking to people’s desire for community and national social cohesion or to see national sovereignty strengthened, that kind of thing. I think we’re seeing Trump experimenting here with overtly malignant and expansionist nationalist rhetoric. Is that a fair way to understand this? What’s the real goal with that?
Mercieca: Yeah. I think of what Trump does is faux populism because he does use appeals to ad populum. He’s constantly praising the wisdom of his followers and using them as a cudgel to justify his action, using them as a cudgel to attack his opponents. He’s constantly cultivating that relationship with his followers, praising them and talking about how they’re the real Americans and how much he loves them and all of that. At the same time, he wouldn’t really do anything for these folks. He fleeces them of their money and uses them to fund his legal battles and things like that. He doesn’t really help them in the end. So I think of it as faux populism.
I had a chance to go back and look at his inaugural address from last time. What I saw there was that ... I was interested in: How does he define the role of the presidency? And what does he think the president’s job is? If you reread that speech—it’s a dark speech—what you’ll see is that he thinks that the president has one job, and that is to defend the nation’s border. That’s what he had run on in 2016. And that is essentially what he ran on again in 2024. There’s a little bit of an element of that in the we need to defend our economic interests, as if that’s contained in the border. But the really interesting thing is that if he really is talking about expansionism, then he’s talking about redefining the American border, and he’s talking about including a lot of people in the United States of America that are not American, which seems to be incredibly dissonant with everything he’s ever said before about what the job of the president is and about the sanctity of the national border.
Sargent: I want to play another clip. Here Trump talks about renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Listen to this.
Trump (audio voiceover): So we’re going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring that covers a lot of territory. The Gulf of America, what a beautiful name. And it’s appropriate. It’s appropriate. And Mexico has to stop allowing millions of people to pour into our country. They can stop them.
Sargent: Jen, I don’t know what to make of this. Is he just saying to the world that he can do this because he can and if you don’t like it, suck it? What’s the message? What’s the message to his supporters supposed to be here?
Mercieca: I think that’s definitely part of it. I imagine a Trump supporter who’s like, Wait a minute, I never thought of that. Why is it called the Gulf of Mexico? It should be called the Gulf of America. Damn right. I can imagine there’s a person out there who’s like, Yeah, why do we let them get away with that?
A thing that you might not remember from his first term is that they took Mount McKinley and they turned it into Denali. And it’s a thing that irritates him; he’s always bringing it up. He wants to return it back to McKinley because, for him, it’s the golden age of tariffs and whatnot. This is kind of like that. He’s going to use his Sharpie, he’s going to change the map.
I’m not ego involved. It’s not part of my self concept if it’s called the Gulf of Mexico or if it’s called Gulf of America, but Donald Trump seems to think that it matters, to have the power to do these kinds of things. He might be trolling us, he might not be. He might be very serious about it. To me, it doesn’t matter. He’ll go away, and it’ll be the Gulf of Mexico again. It’s fine.
Sargent: You mean eventually he’ll go away? To your point about the power of renaming, which he seems to sense here, the power of the gesture. He constantly talks about the renaming of confederately named forts as well. That’s also a very similar impulse on his part, I think.
Mercieca: Absolutely. It’s one of those things that authoritarians and autocrats do. They try to create a cult of personality. They do that through naming practices, so naming buildings, naming arenas, towns, schools, etc. Donald Trump hasn’t had a lot of that. He hasn’t been the benefactor of lots of new schools and streets—I think George Washington is the most named president in streets and schools, for everything like that. He hasn’t received a lot of that kind of stuff. He would very much like to receive that kind of stuff, so he’s trying to show the power that he has rhetorically, to call something into being and to change its name and to make it his.
Sargent: It really is a gesture of power. I want to highlight one other thing about that clip. Trump went on to say that Mexico isn’t stopping migrants from traveling north to our southern border. That’s a lie. In fact, due to Biden’s diplomacy, Mexico has been doing a great deal to stop migrants. And that’s a key reason the more recent border apprehension numbers have gotten relatively low of late. I’ve been calling this tactic the secondary lie or the subordinate lie. After he says the outrageous thing about the Gulf of America, he slips in a big lie along with it, and because the crazy thing gets all the attention, the other lie gets smuggled into our discourse without any scrutiny. Is that a tactic that you’ve encountered before with authoritarians and fascists? How does this work?
Mercieca: That’s a really keen observation. It’s a fire hose of lies strategy, where it’s lies all the way down—it’s also called a Gish gallop sometimes—where you’re unable to fact-check each and every point that is made. It becomes very difficult to even say what happened because as you’re saying what happened, you have to say, Well, this was a lie, and this was a lie, and this was a lie. By the time you’re at the end of that, you haven’t really told much of a story.
Authoritarians use just that fire hose model of lying to create unreality. They create this sense that nothing is true, create nihilism in a population. Everything is a lie. None of it matters. Again, authoritarians are cognitively irresponsible, if you have one takeaway from our conversation. That means that they want the power, an unquestioned power, to say what is true, to say what is real, to say what is good, what is bad, who is a friend, who is an enemy, and they don’t want anyone to ever question them. One strategy is to lie so much that people just give up.
Sargent: That’s clearly what’s going on with him, whether he is very conscious of it or not. OK, final question. You watched that press conference. You saw all these things. I think that suggests things are going to get pretty damn dark when he takes over. What do you expect?
Mercieca: I expect it to be dark. I believe him when he says he’s going to be a dictator on day one. I do not believe him when he says he’s not going to be a dictator on day two. I don’t think, in the world history, we’ve seen an example of someone assuming dictatorial power and then giving it up willingly. That’s never happened, especially not someone like Donald Trump, who is an unaccountable leader by nature, who wants that power. We’ve put a very dangerous person in office. He plans to use his power in whatever way he can and however he wants, and I don’t see how we’re going to stop him from doing that.
Sargent: Jen Mercieca, I guess we’re going to see soon enough how far he’s going to get, and how big a mistake voters made. Thanks so much for coming on with us.
Mercieca: Thank you. It’s a pleasure.
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.