Transcript: Trump’s Ugly Eruptions Over Wildfires Hint at Darker Story

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 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.

 With wildfires raging out of control in Los Angeles, Donald Trump unleashed some truly ugly and hateful attacks on California’s governor, Gavin Newsom. This might seem like Trump being Trump, and a lot of reporters will treat it that way. But we think there’s another way to look at this. It’s yet another example of how the right wing, particularly in the MAGA era, seeks to thoroughly degrade public life in every conceivable way it can and looks for every way it can find to turn Americans against each other at the most critical moments.

Today, we’re super excited to be talking about all this with Nicole Hemmer, who’s one of the best historians of the right wing out there today. She’s the author of a number of books, most recently Partisans, which traces today’s moment back to the 1990s. Nicole, thanks so much for coming on.

Nicole Hemmer: Thanks so much for having me, Greg.

Sargent: The wildfires in California, they’re just a horror. Thousands are fleeing, at least two are dead as of now. But Trump attacked the governor as Gavin “Newscum,” blaming the fires on the incompetence of the Biden-Newscum duo, as he put it. Trump said Biden was leaving him no money in FEMA and blamed the lack of water to fight the fires on California environmental policy, which Newsom’s office immediately shot down as pure fiction. In fact, Newsom has poured huge amounts of money into firefighting and forest management. What’s your immediate reaction to this from Trump?

Hemmer: It definitely is the case that this is something Trump does, right? He takes these moments, moments that used to be a time when people began to come together a little bit, at least in that period of immediate disaster when there’s shock and horror ... You and I grew up in a period where we had the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine shootings, so many different natural disasters. And they have been these moments when people found a kind of common humanity. I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture of it, but I do think that there’s something substantially different about entering that moment and saying, Actually, the person responsible for your problems are my political enemies, and instead of focusing on rebuilding, you should focus on hating them.

Sargent: Yeah. I want to try to understand this as a full-on right-wing MAGA effort to degrade public life. Everything is about seizing on every opportunity to s Spread deranged conspiracy theories, turn people against each other. When the flooding in North Carolina happened during the campaign, for instance, remember Trump and MAGA pushed all kinds of lies about the disaster response. When Trump was president during Covid, he used it to attack blue state governors and blame them. Can you talk about this impulse as a kind of broader phenomenon of the right wing today?

Hemmer: You have this desire to metastasize disasters, to make them worse than they actually are. It does strike me as something novel about the right, certainly within the last 15 years. I think it goes back a little bit further because I’m a historian and that’s what I’m going to say, but there is something that is a combination of the malignancy of Donald Trump himself, who is constantly seeking ways to be in the headlines, the media environment in which we live that really favors this outrage and negative emotion, and a conservative media ecosystem that takes that revved up let’s-make-everybody-angry dynamic and applies it directly to electoral politics.

All those things come together in order to turn everything that happens into an opportunity for a fight and into an opportunity to make everyone feel worse than they already felt. And that I think is It gets to the heart of what you’re saying about the degradation of public life, that everything just feels worse all the time.

Sargent: You wrote a book about the right wing media, called Messengers of the Right, that gets into the whole history of its evolution, gets at some of its darker impulses over the years. I think you’re getting at something critical here when you say there’s a bit of a different thing going on, and I wonder if technological change is part of it. Elon Musk is right now fanning the flames of hate around the California stuff. He essentially bought Twitter to elevate and expand and spread deranged right wing conspiracy theories, to make it a space for that. Does that make things worse? Is that something new? Is that part of what we’re seeing now?

Hemmer: It’s like we’ve reached the apotheosis or like the height of all of these different trends with both Donald Trump and Elon Musk. We certainly could go back and we could look at conservative media, which has for decades really been a site of conspiracy theorizing and partisan attacks. That’s not anything that’s new. But its combination with electoral politics is something that really started to come of age in the ’90s, and then you layer on top of it this not just anger but a kind of meanness that has become the overarching emotional scale or the emotional tenor of right-wing media. It used to be you would have to turn on Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck in order to access that, and now you just have to listen to a Republican politician and you’re going to get uncut, unmediated conspiracy theories and cruelty.

Sargent: It’s really interesting that you say that, because for a time during the talk radio era, it was a separate space. I can recall a time when older people who were seeking refuge from the modern world would turn on right-wing talk radio, and it seemed like a separate realm. And yet now the idea of a separate realm is gone; it’s all sort of merged together. All these Republican politicians are constantly tweeting out the most sick memes that you can imagine. Has there been an erosion where the private spaces or the separate spaces where this once resided are now gone? It’s all one?

Hemmer: It is all one big mass, and all one big mess. It is an erosion that’s been happening over time. I really would root this in the 1990s when the lines between politics and entertainment began to erode, and also when Republican politicians really began to take their cues from right-wing media. I think about the suicide events, Vince Foster in 1993, and the conspiracy theories around his suicide, this idea that the Clintons had him murdered. This was extremely popular in right-wing media, but it very quickly jumps over into Republican politicians. You had one member of Congress, Dan Coats, who talked on the floor about going into his backyard, getting a melon and a handgun and proving, he said, that Vince Foster couldn’t have shot himself, that it had to be a murder. That almost right-wing radio cosplay is happening in the ’90s. And now we see it not just in a one-off representative from Indiana, but in almost the entirety of the Republican caucus. That’s what feels different: that erosion of any separate sphere for some of the craziness, that it has infected the entire party. It’s also infected all of us. We can’t escape from it either.

Sargent: The use of these moments to degrade public life and make people dumber also has a history. You write about Pat Robertson in your book, Partisans. He seized on natural disasters to cast them as punishment for social liberalism. In a way you can see MAGA’s conduct as an updated, secularized version of this in the sense that disasters are always cast as a failure of Democratic governance. Or in other cases, with Covid’s initial spread in blue cities, it was attacked as a sign that cosmopolitan urban areas are corrupted and infested and diseased. Is there a through line from that Pat Robertson religious right stuff right through to the way MAGA does it today?

Hemmer: I think there is. There are two ways that conservatives got to natural disasters as political opportunities. Certainly, it comes up through the religious right. Pat Robertson is saying that everything, from hurricanes to earthquakes to tornadoes, these are all God’s punishment. And even in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina happened, there was a pastor, John Hagee, who said, Well, have you been to New Orleans? You see the way that they are. You see what sinful people they are. God has sent this as punishment against them. So you have that history and that rhetoric.

I also think that Hurricane Katrina is a really important moment here because Hurricane Katrina was badly mismanaged by the Bush administration. That was something that benefited Democrats, because Americans hated the way that Bush responded to Katrina, and Republicans took from that. Not that they should be better at responding to natural disasters, but that you could seize on a natural disaster to injure the Democrats.

When Barack Obama takes office, they first take the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and they try to turn that into Obama’s Katrina. You have Republican politicians who are, on the one hand, talking to the administration and getting all sorts of help from the administration, and then going on Fox News and talking about how terrible and unresponsive the Obama administration is. You see it in Superstorm Sandy. You’ll remember that Chris Christie was persona non grata for years because he accepted aid from the Obama administration. So I think that’s an important turning point because Republicans realized that they could make political hay from natural disasters. And then you get to Donald Trump, and he’s like, Hey, every time a natural disaster happens, I can make political hay out of it. Whether it is a hurricane in Puerto Rico or fires out in California, what you get is a purely partisan political response to what’s happening. 

Sargent: There’s another good example of this as well. Remember when the chemical train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, MAGA figures tried to cast it as proof that liberal elites were deliberately abandoning a virtuous white  working class community. They actually racialized this. JD Vance even did a little bit of that. If you’ll recall on Twitter and in social media, these pictures of these huge clouds rising up out of East Palestine were everywhere, and right-wing politicians were pushing them. They all coalesced behind this story in which the white working class was being abandoned and getting poisoned by liberal elites. I see a lot of that in there.

Hemmer: Absolutely. This does seem to me to be one of those places where the mode of politics and the media really combine with one another. That East Palestine story was not only the headlining story on all of these right-wing media sites but, of course, it was on social media sites like X and it would combine with all sorts of fake images and fake stories. It all becomes this stew where you might not even really know what happened in East Palestine but you walk away with this feeling that something went horribly wrong, people are very angry about it, and you just feel worse about your country and the people in it when you hear about that story. That brings us back to Donald Trump and the degradation of everything. There’s no space for a story of hope or renewal to emerge. It’s all just awfulness and destruction.

Sargent: That’s exactly it. The explicit game plan here is to just fill everybody with hate and rage and, critically, confusion.

Hemmer: Yeah. Remember Steve Bannon’s saying that the strategy of the Trump administration—he was saying this back in 2015, 2016—was to flood the zone with crap, right? Just put so much bad stuff out there, make people feel terrible all the time, and while people are feeling terrible, you can go over here and amass all of this political power and use it for whatever you want. And we are still living in that world. 

Sargent: There’s an irony to this in the current context, by the way. If Trump were president right now, he’d be using the wildfires and he’d be withholding federal help to extort political or even personal favors from Gavin Newsom. In fact, you may recall that Politico reported that as president, Trump temporarily withheld wildfire aid from California until he established whether the relevant areas had voted for him. And the funny thing about it is that MAGA sees that as a positive thing, and that’s especially getting worse now that Trump keeps doing it over and over, whether he’s politicizing or spreading conspiracy theories around the flooding in North Carolina, or spreading lies about California. He’s just telling his supporters, This is what we should be doing, we should take every opportunity to try to grind blue America and non-MAGA America into the dirt.

Hemmer: It is absolutely his strategy. He did it with the ventilators too, during the early days of Covid. And it really is not just about negotiation and power plays, although that’s how it’s often framed in Trumpworld—he’s a master negotiator, he’s getting these people to bend to his will. It’s actually this deeper fascistic strategy of “us” versus “them.”  And what do you do with “them”? You punish them at every opportunity. If you have power, you use that power to protect your own and to harm others. And that is absolutely the philosophy of the Trump administration that just becomes very clear in these moments of crisis.

Sargent: You could argue in a way that these types of natural disasters are a real threat to the MAGA project because they actually encourage people to unite and come together and to start to believe that government is there to help them. This is really anathema. To go all Carl Schmitt on you, MAGA requires politics always to be about the enemy, and there can be no point at which politics is not about the enemy. That, I think, is what explains a lot of this. Can you talk about that?

Hemmer: Absolutely. That is the ethos behind MAGA. You have to have somebody who you’re fighting against, somebody who you’re railing against. Moments like in the face of disaster, I was mentioning earlier Oklahoma City and Columbine, 9/11 ... Glenn Beck used to have something called the 9/12 Project, and it was tethered exactly to this idea that in this moment after national tragedy, what happens? We put aside our differences, we come together, we recognize our common humanity, and we want to get back to that kind of feeling. And that is a danger to a divisive movement. People look at one another and they see that they’re not actually all that different, that they are devoted to a common project. That common project could just be keeping their communities safe and whole, and making sure people have a place to sleep and that they’re safe from the storm—and that is probably the biggest threat to the MAGA project. It’s why these moments have to be turned into moments of division.

The same thing is true for the right in a way that kind of predates Donald Trump. The big problem of Katrina was not just that it hurt the Bush administration, but it proved the lie of the most dangerous words in the English language are I’m from the government and I’m here to help. What did people want? They wanted the government to show up. The government was doing good things. That, too, is a dangerous message.

Sargent: That happened in North Carolina too. Republicans had to step forward and say, I’m sorry, MAGA, but the truth is that the federal response is actually very good. 

Hemmer: Right. Then instead, you also have these stories then of people who could really use the help of the federal government not wanting to interact with FEMA, or waving their guns when FEMA shows up. In these moments of real crisis, it cuts people off from the things that would make their lives better. That is both part of the MAGA project and part of the conservative project: to take away from people the things that might make their lives better. That seems like it should be easier to counter, but those affective ties that MAGA voters have to Donald Trump are proving to be very difficult to overcome. 

Sargent: So Nicole, what’s the answer to this stuff? It seems to me that for MAGA and for MAGA media, a lot of this stuff festers and doesn’t really penetrate to the broader culture really. But at the same time, as you point out, in some cases it does where some people were duped by the attacks on the federal responders during North Carolina, and that was a terrible thing. Is the answer for Democrats and liberals and small-d democrats and people who want a sane public life to just marginalize and ignore that stuff and count on common humanity to assert itself? Or is that not enough? Do we have to call this stuff out for the derangement that it really is?

Hemmer: It seems like hoping that it goes away is not working, so I wouldn’t recommend that as a strategy going forward. I do think that there is real value in calling it out, right? Talking about the fact that it is weird and cruel to respond to a forest fire or to flooding or to a hurricane with this vitriol and these wild conspiracy theories. There is real value in that, and so I definitely think that people should be doing that.

That can’t be all people do. The other thing that people have to do is model the world that they want to be part of. It means being the person who shows up for your neighbors. It means being the person who helps gather supplies to send people who are hurt. It means modeling a humane response to disasters when they happen. And so I think that it’s both end. It is both pointing out and making clear how terrible this is, and then proving that there’s a better way to do it right, a better way to move forward. You can’t do that everywhere all the time, but it is something that I would hope that all of your listeners are thinking about: how they can in their communities respond to pain and loss and crisis and deprivation in ways that make their communities better. I actually think that is the generational road out of a lot of this.

Sargent: Nicole Hemmer, that was beautifully said, and I really hope you’re right that that’s where the true impulse of the American public lies. Thanks so much for coming on with us today.

Hemmer: Thank you so much for having me, Greg.

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.