The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 3, 2024, episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it 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 vice presidential debate on Tuesday night, the CBS news moderators fact-checked JD Vance a single time. Once. That was all it took to trigger Donald Trump and his MAGA allies, who fanned out and hammered CBS relentlessly for that enormous transgression. All this opens a window on a larger story: the degree to which Trump’s campaign is built on top of an immense superstructure of endless and shameless lies. Bullying the media into not fact-checking Trump and Vance is essential to that larger project. Today, we’re talking about all this with Jamison Foser, who writes regularly about media capitulation to the right wing on his Substack, Finding Gravity. Thanks for coming on, Jamison.

Jamison Foser: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: At the debate, JD Vance exaggerated wildly about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, an obsession of his, suggesting that they’re here illegally. CBS’s moderator pointed out that they’re actually here legally on temporary protected status. Vance objected saying, “Hey, the rules were that you’re not supposed to fact-check.” That triggered MAGA. Trump erupted on Truth Social. Other Republicans jumped in. Here’s audio of Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt on Newsmax:

Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): When they fact-checked Senator Vance and shut off his mic, I thought that was pretty alarming, especially since the rules they agreed to were not to fact-check the candidates on the stage, but they just could not help themselves because I think they were getting triggered by Senator Vance speaking the truth so powerfully and so eloquently.

Sargent: Jamison, I guess CBS maybe violated its rules, but still it was one extremely minor correction. What’s your reaction to all this?

Foser: Yeah, extremely minor is exactly right. The moderator literally just said, “To clarify for our viewers, there are Haitian immigrants in Springfield who are here legally.” Vance then flipped out, and first we have to acknowledge just how pathetic he sounded saying, “The rules were you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” I immediately thought of that old Saturday Night Live skit in which Chevy Chase is playing a befuddled Gerald Ford in a debate and says, “It was my understanding that there’d be no math involved.” It was just ridiculous. He looked small and weak and dishonest. That was my first reaction. But we have to understand this objection Vance had in the moment and the reaction since that you’ve highlighted from his fellow conservatives, that it’s extremely just completely insincere, right? They don’t actually believe that the moderators were biased against them.

They were going to attack the moderators no matter what happened. It’s what they do after the Trump–Harris debate. Trump attacked the moderators claiming they were biased against him, even though they gave him five minutes more speaking time than Harris and routinely let him interrupt both them and Harris and break the rules. It’s just not a sincere objection. That’s the first thing everybody should understand. We shouldn’t treat it as such. We shouldn’t treat it as a legitimate complaint.

But there is a piece of it that I do think that they really do believe, and that’s that JD Vance and Donald Trump fundamentally think they should be able to do and say whatever they want, whenever they want, and nobody should even question them. It’s just a very fundamentally authoritarian worldview that shows up in small ways like this and in large ways like talking about jailing journalists and others who say and do things they don’t like.

Sargent: To highlight a point you made, Trump and MAGA know the ability to lie with impunity—and that’s the essential thing, impunity—is absolutely central to the success of their political project. The debate really showed this in a new way. Vance lied about everything. The borders are open when in fact crossings are down. Immigrants take Americans jobs when in fact they’re helping grow the economy and labor force. Trump tried to protect people on the Affordable Care Act when in fact he tried to destroy it. Trump’s economy was uniformly fantastic when it actually ended in Covid-fueled catastrophe. Biden and Harris have decimated energy production when in fact oil production has soared. It’s really endless. Now Jamison, we all recall George Bush, Karl Rove, and the making of their alternate reality. Is what we’re seeing now something different?

Foser: I think it’s something different in kind of a hyperinflation of it. What we’re seeing now in terms of how the Republican candidates and the conservative movement are behaving and how the media reacts to it are trends that have been in place for decades and that many of us have been talking about and highlighting. I know you have been, and I have been for a very long time. What’s happened in the current MAGA era and the Trump era is the natural conclusion of those trends continuing unchecked. They’re just going to grow. It’s not hard to see the........

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