The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 29 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, press secretary Karoline Leavitt gave her first media briefing in the White House. It was pretty ugly. Levitt unleashed a really sleazy, gratuitous attack on Joe Biden’s age, dodged responsibility for the rise in egg prices on Trump’s watch, and even defended Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship.

The attack on Biden is significant, we think, because it shows that a certain type of ugly, abusive, MAGA trolling ethic is now fully installed inside the White House. We’re talking about all this today with Salon writer Amanda Marcotte, who’s one of the best out there at deconstructing the psychology of that MAGA trolling ethic. Good to have you back on, Amanda.

Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: Let’s start with Karoline Leavitt’s attack on Biden. A reporter asked about the price of eggs, and this is what happened.

Reporter (audio voiceover): Egg prices have skyrocketed since President Trump took office. So what specifically is he doing to lower those costs for Americans?

Karoline Leavitt: Really glad you brought this up because there is a lot of reporting out there that is putting the onus on this White House for the increased cost of eggs. I would like to point out to each and every one of you that in 2024, when Joe Biden was in the Oval Office or upstairs in the residence sleeping, I’m not so sure, egg prices increased 65 percent in this country. We also have seen the cost of everything—not just eggs—bacon, groceries, gasoline, have increased because of the inflationary policies of the last administration.

Sargent: Amanda, I think this was deliberate. First, Leavitt is setting the terms of the debate with reporters, declaring upfront that she’s there to satisfy the Audience of One: Donald Trump and no one else. Second, there will be absolutely no effort to reach out to Democrats or blue America. What do you think?

Marcotte: Yes, I think this reflects something that Donald Trump has been on about forever and ever. He really does believe that the best way to do politics is constant war. As long as he’s got Republicans on his side, he doesn’t need Democrats. It’s been alarming to me that Democrats are making noises about working with Trump and bipartisanship. No, he’s just going to want you to always be the enemy, so it would be better if you just stepped into that role and did it well because you’re going to be cast in that role no matter what. There’s no such thing as bipartisanship under Donald Trump.

I hope this was a clarifying moment because it was also very clear from that answer that she gave that they think that the way to get out of Trump’s failures—and his failures have already started—his abuse of the American public, his terrible things he’s going to do to people is to just constantly blame Democrats. They say to the Trump base, Maybe you don’t like the fact that inflation is back, and maybe you don’t like the fact that all your federal grants got cut off, and maybe you don’t like the fact that you can’t get your Medicaid anymore, but don’t you hate Democrats so much though? (laughs) And I think Trump thinks that worked for him in the first term, so I’m not surprised they’re going back to that well.

Sargent: That gets at something else as well, which is MAGA’s understanding of psychological warfare, or PSYOPs. You spend a lot of time on Twitter criticizing Trump. I do. And you’re going to be familiar with this if you do: You get trolled by people saying, LOL, Trump is living rent free in your heads, as if MAGA is winning as long as you and me and people like us are upset about Trump in some way. That’s part of what Leavitt is signaling to Trump and MAGA as well. She’s going to keep rubbing non-MAGA America’s face in shit, that kind of thing. You wrote this piece saying that Trump benefits as long as non-MAGA America is really torqued up and angry and frothed up and so forth. What’s your reading of that side of all this?

Marcotte: I think that’s right. Many, many years ago, I really grasped the idea— and this was even before Trump—that what was driving a lot of what you called Tea Party Republicans back then was this resentment, hatred, jealousy of liberals. And it’s taken on this patina of willingness to do anything or suffer any indignity as long as........

© New Republic