The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 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.
Donald Trump has been furious at Fox News for many months now, and he just raged at the network again this week. But his fury is backfiring. We’re now learning that the White House and senior Republicans waged a behind-the-scenes campaign to get Fox to stop covering Abdul El-Sayed the way it had been, because it was making him into a stronger candidate. That’s humiliating enough, but it also captures a lot about Trump and MAGA right now: the belief that Fox should function as their twenty-four-seven propaganda operation, the shock that many voters aren’t perceiving El-Sayed in accordance with MAGA smears, and the ways in which all these manly MAGA men devolve into pathetic whiners when the going gets just a little hard.
Jennifer Rubin, editor in chief of The Contrarian, has a good piece all about MAGA whininess today, so we’re talking to her about all of it. Jen, always good to have you on.
Jennifer Rubin: It’s great to be here, Greg.
Sargent: So Trump’s been in a fury with Fox News for months. He hates their polling, which shows Democrats on the cusp of winning Senate races in deep red states. This week Trump raged as follows: “Fox News spends more time covering the jihadist and Democrat candidates than they do the good old-fashioned Republicans. All they talk about is Democrat jihadists like El-Sayed.”
Trump slammed Fox’s Martha MacCallum for a softball interview, and he also slammed Fox for not covering his rallies to his liking. Jen, your thoughts on all that?
Rubin: Well, Trump is very upset that Fox is trying to save him from himself, and trying to save the Republicans from this grossly unpopular president. It is true. They are madly cutting away from his rallies, because they are so nuts. They are so discordant.
He is blowing up New York and San Diego. He is railing on unregulated data centers, which is the kiss of death for candidates. He is going off on veganism. He is so nuts, so out of control, that Fox does not want to put him on. Their rationale is, we’ve got to elect Republicans. We can’t have them seeing our crazy commander in chief.
Sargent: Yeah, what’s funny about that is that Trump is completely incapable of imagining that showing Trump’s rallies might hurt Republican candidates. That to me is really amusing. In Trump’s head, all attention is good. You’re winning when you’re the center of attention. But he is the kiss of death for many of these candidates now.
Rubin: Exactly. His poll numbers have fallen off the cliff. And on all of these issues that he keeps repeating—if Republicans adopt them, they go down in the polls and they get killed. Data centers, not popular. Trump insisting affordability is not a real issue. If Republicans say that stuff, they get laughed at.
And you know who thinks Trump is bad? JD Vance. JD Vance is no longer using the world’s-greatest-economy line. He is beginning to tiptoe away and say, well, we know things are hard, give us another shot. He can see the writing on the wall.
He may be a radical racist, but he’s not stupid. He can read the polls. And with Trump’s demise and the demise of the Republican Party, he can see his own 2028 prospects evaporating.
Sargent: Here’s where the stuff about Fox News gets really rich. Axios reports that Republicans have privately griped to Fox for months over their coverage of El-Sayed. They say this helps El-Sayed, complicating their efforts to portray him as out of the mainstream. And White House officials privately reached out to Fox this week to complain about that interview of him.
Jen, let me translate this. What they really mean is, if Fox lets El-Sayed talk, it becomes a lot harder to smear him as a scary radical jihadist, because people see who he actually is, right?
Rubin: That’s right. And this is the beauty of candidates like El-Sayed, like Pete Buttigieg, who can go on Fox, because they debunk the lies and the smears. So you’re right. It wasn’t that it was a particularly softball interview. It was just that he steamrolled right over her.
And all the lies that they live with, the crazy conspiracies, the smears—when they hit reality, when you actually see the candidate, when you hear the candidate, anybody, even a Fox viewer, can tell that this is just a lie.
Sargent: There’s another great detail from this reporting. Top GOP operatives repeatedly contacted Fox executives and producers, complaining that Jesse Watters of Fox had commented on El-Sayed in a way that could allow him to portray himself as moderate. Again, translation: by all means, Fox News, don’t tell the truth about this guy. We can’t win the election if you do that. I just love it.
Rubin: It also shows, by the way, the degree to which not even Fox can keep up with the lies and the smears. Trump is so far out of reality, and the MAGA view of Democrats is so divorced from reality, that they can’t possibly construct any kind of, quote, news program that follows the plot. It’s impossible.
The Democrats have, I think, been so down on themselves and on their brand that they failed to realize how utterly insane and incapable the Republicans are of constructing a narrative that makes any sense.
Sargent: Absolutely. And I want to play an ad from Mike Rogers, who’s the Republican opponent of El-Sayed in Michigan. Listen to him talking here about Trump’s tariffs and his trade war with Canada. This is Mike Rogers, the Republican.
Mike Rogers (voiceover): Drinking a Labatt and watching the Red Wings, man, it just doesn’t get any more Michigan than that. And here in Michigan, we know that Canada is not our enemy. We need to end this tariff war.
Sargent: That’s really remarkable stuff, Jen. He says straight out that interdependence with Canada is a good thing, and Canada is not the enemy that Trump is depicting. Of course, you might note something here, which is that Mike Rogers doesn’t happen to mention who is starting this trade war with Canada, who’s conducting this trade war with Canada.
He forgot to mention that part. It’s his party that’s doing it. It’s the leader of his party. But still, that is a real sign of Trump’s toxicity, if in a Midwestern state the Republican has to aggressively become Mr. Globalist all of a sudden.
Rubin: Exactly. And this is happening all over the place. Look at the Republicans who are running against the war that they’ve repeatedly voted to give Trump a blank check to operate. So now they want the war to end. Now they don’t like the trade war. What’s next? Saying the big bad bill was a rotten thing?
I mean, this is what happens. They are now caught in what you and I have been saying all along. These positions are politically untenable. They’re not just untenable in blue areas. They’re untenable in red states, in red districts. No one’s in favor of these policies, and they’ve backfired.
So what’s next? I want to get out of the war because Trump has driven up gas prices? Well, that would be honest, but unfortunately they haven’t voted that way.
Sargent: Well, yeah, I mean, a number of them are essentially trying to adopt that as their position. In your piece, you identified a pattern in which a lot of manly MAGA figures are getting quite whiny as this election approaches. One example you gave is JD Vance begging voters to give Republicans a second chance. You also pointed out that Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate candidate in Texas, recently complained that he’s not in charge of his own campaign. As you pointed out, James Talarico is supposed to be the low-T guy, but Paxton’s claiming he’s helplessly controlled by others. That’s just crazy.
Rubin: And Trump is the worst of them. Now his favorite complaint is, there are reports—and we’re going to throw these reporters in jail—for saying there are empty seats at my rallies. He says, no, people are moving down to fill in the seats. Wait a second. How do you fill in a seat if it’s not empty? That logic escapes him.
But this is what happens when the, quote, strongmen meet reality. Suddenly they are humiliated. They are perceived as weak, as unpopular, and they are becoming unglued. And we are seeing this. So now they whine. They complain. They go running to Fox.
I’m sorry, but maybe the reason that a lot of white men are no longer turning out is that they don’t like all this crybaby activity. His own ability to respond to the criticism is so degraded, because his mind is turning to shit, that he is unable to even mount any kind of comeback. No wonder Fox won’t put him on the air.
Sargent: So you mentioned the strongman dimension to all this, and I want to pick up on that. Like, you see this same dynamic at play with all these depictions of Donald Trump as this manly, virile young figure—like all these memes that paste these young muscular bodies on Trump’s head.
And meanwhile, he’s falling asleep at meetings. I mean, that is like the perfect example of the sort of weirdly brittle strongman politics. The image of it is always so brittle and shaky, and just cracks up at the slightest bit of probing, right?
Rubin: And that’s why they have freaked out at the criticism over Natalie Harp. She is there to try to boost his ego, to keep him, I don’t know, on track, or to keep him from completely losing it. But now she looks like a nursemaid. She’s there to kind of soothe him and keep him going, pat him on the head, make sure he doesn’t lose control.
This is the complete devolution of a party that, as I say in the piece, has marinated in toxic masculinity for years. They have gone after trans kids. They’ve slammed Democrats for feminizing the country and for feminizing the military. But who sounds like a bunch of whiny little girls? And I want to apologize to whiny little girls, because they don’t sound this bad.
Sargent: Well, Pew had a new poll that we should talk about, because it sheds a lot of light on this. It finds Donald Trump’s approval rating now at 30 percent, which is the lowest of his second term.
Jen, I think we’re getting into the twenties maybe pretty soon here. What do you think?
Rubin: I think we’re getting into George Bush territory. Not only are his poll numbers low, but he is dragging down the entire party. This particular poll has the generic lead for Democrats at eight. We’ve seen other polls where it’s double digits. And even more frightful for Republicans is the enthusiasm gap.
That poll had some very frightful numbers about how strongly people in the two parties feel about getting out to vote, how important it is for their party to control the House. And once those numbers drop off and Republicans don’t show up, a whole slew of seats then come into play. If they don’t show up, they can’t win.
And that’s why the DCCC—that’s the group that elects Democratic House members—keeps expanding the map. That’s why independent analysts like Charlie Cook now have Kansas as a true toss-up in the Senate. The wheels come off the bus.
We talked about this a few weeks ago, Greg. The self-fulfilling prophecy of negativity, of doom and gloom, of embarrassment, that Donald Trump is hitting your party. And I think this Pew poll shows that in spades.
Sargent: So you brought up the enthusiasm numbers in the Pew poll. I’m just going to cite those. Pew finds that Democratic supporters are 14 points more likely than Republican supporters to say they’ve given the election a lot of thought. They’re seventeen points more likely to say they’re extremely motivated to vote this year.
These dynamics are all connected to one another. The Trump rallies going off the rails—I think that that’s really starting to get a lot of Republican voters to sort of say, you know what, man, I can’t do this anymore. This guy is too nuts.
Now, I think we should probably acknowledge that that door wouldn’t have been opened if he hadn’t fucked up the economy so badly with the tariffs and the war and everything else, and if he hadn’t screwed up everything so badly.
But that door is open now. Now that he’s screwed that all up, Republicans are now willing to take a bit of a harder look at Trump. I think that’s what’s happening here.
And I don’t want to overstate this. I don’t think the percentage of Republicans that are willing to look frankly at Trump is all that high. But there is a non-trivial number out there that are going to this place.
In fact, a recent Fox News poll found in Texas that non-MAGA Republicans actually disapprove of Trump now, and they are also demobilized. They’re not that enthusiastic about voting. So these are real dynamics, Jen.
Rubin: And you’re beginning to see coverage in the legacy media that Republicans don’t want to go out and knock on doors. Republicans don’t want to volunteer. We’re not talking about the mega-donors. We’re talking about ordinary people who make up the backbone of a party.
If you don’t have people who, a month before, want to listen to the news, let alone volunteer, you’re going to have some real trouble. And there are going to be people who look like they’re in safe seats now, because the numbers don’t look so dire. But if 5 percent, 7 percent more Republicans don’t show up, that’s going to sweep in a whole bunch more Democrats.
Sargent: It is. And just to wrap this up, your piece went very big picture on this by tying this to strongman politics as a general matter. As you pointed out, what we’re seeing here is kind of like a microcosm version of what you see with authoritarian movements—when the sort of facade of strength and power starts to crack, it really starts to fall apart rather quickly. Can you talk about those dynamics?
Rubin: Absolutely. You know, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who has looked at strongmen in her book about fascism, really makes the point that there’s a moment in which the wheels come off the bus, the lies don’t work, the mistakes become too apparent, and as a result you see this kind of crack-up.
Two things happen, and they’re both happening now. On one hand, the leader becomes unglued and starts saying a bunch of crazy shit. And the other thing is, they become much more aggressive, much more confrontational.
Now we hear that there are more people he wants to arrest. Cassidy Hutchinson is now on the potential list of indictees. He is coming after people because they are frustrated. There are reports that FBI agents are very upset because they, quote, want indictments. Indictments for what? Around what crimes?
So it is this frenzy of panic that has overtaken the Trump regime. On one hand, they become whiny, crybabies, desperate, saying all kinds of absolutely batshit, nutty stuff. But they also become much more aggressive, much more violent, much more prone to misuse law enforcement. So Democrats—and I know they are preparing—but they’d better be ready for election day, because we’re going to see, I am sure, all kinds of legal shenanigans. They’ve already begun.
Sargent: Absolutely, Jen Rubin. And I’ve got to say, you know, with a little luck, Fox News will get bullied by Donald Trump into covering his rallies a whole lot more, right?
Rubin: Please, please, twenty-four-seven. And you know what? He shouldn’t just go to Red America. This Democrat is pleading with him. Please go to some purple districts. Go to more states that are in play. Please let us all see him. The great leader needs to get out more where it matters.
Sargent: Exactly. Jen Rubin, it’s always a great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Rubin: It’s fun, Greg. Thanks so much.
