The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 19 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.

President Trump’s public events on Thursday were very strange. At one point, he seemed to nod off. At another, he claimed it was a great honor that the Kennedy Center has now been named after him, even though this was done by his own allies on its board. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s announcement of this great honor was bizarrely obsequious. We think there’s a confluence of things here worth noting. The combination of his glaring unfitness for the presidency on one side and the extraordinary sycophancy directed at him on the other has become truly jarring. Indeed, all this comes as a new Fox News poll has terrible findings for Trump, suggesting even Fox now finds it hard not to acknowledge how off the rails this presidency has gone. Moira Donegan, a columnist for The Guardian, has a great new piece taking stock of Trump’s overall unfitness and worsening decline. So we’re parsing through this strange moment with her today. Moira, nice to have you on.

Moira Donegan: Thank you for having me.

Sargent: So Trump’s latest public appearances were really bizarre. He was visibly nodding off at one point while people in white coats stood in the background. They were there for a medical event, but the symbolism of it was hard to avoid. And here’s what Trump said about the news that the Kennedy Center has now been named the Trump Kennedy Center.

Reporter (voiceover): Board members of the Kennedy Center voted unanimously to rename it the Trump-Kennedy Center. What was your reaction?

Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, I was honored by it. The board is a very distinguished board, most distinguished people in the country. And I was surprised by it. I was honored by it. You know, we’re saving the building. We saved the building. The building was in such bad shape, both physically, financially and every other way. And now it’s very solid, very strong.

Sargent: So that’s really something. He was very surprised and honored. Yet the board of trustees is made up of his allies, including Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, second lady Usha Vance, and a few others. I think this vote might have been rigged. What do you think?

Donegan: I suspect that there was not a genuine contest when the question of renaming the center in honor of Dear Leader Trump came up.

Sargent: Yeah, I mean, I thought that was just remarkable because for him to go out there and just sort of pretend that this was a great honor and he was humbled by it was really, to me, just the most perfect encapsulation of his megalomania I’ve seen in a while. What did you think of it?

Donegan: Yeah, there’s a few of these gestures that the Trump administration has made that clearly seem intended to bolster Trump’s ego in part by giving him the trappings of dictatorship, right? A lot of the visuals of dictatorship—I’m thinking of the deployment of the National Guard to Washington, D.C., where there’s a very visible presence even still of troops where Trump can see them. I’m thinking of the giant poster of his face that was hung off of the side of the Department of Labor.

And I think, you know, adding the word Trump to this very prestigious but not very politically substantive institution that is the Kennedy Center will now, like, give him another boost, another sense of his own importance. That definitely seems like something that the people around Donald Trump are very eager to assure him of.

Sargent: It does seem like that. And in fact, I want to read from Karoline Leavitt’s announcement about this:

“I have just been informed that the highly respected board of the Kennedy Center, some of the most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center the Trump Kennedy Center because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building. Congratulations to President Donald J. Trump. The building will no doubt attain new levels of success and grandeur.”

Moira, she’s echoing his language there, using phrases like “highly respected” and saying “Donald J. Trump” exactly the way he does all the time. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she’s slathering him with this obsequious praise just after he was mercilessly mocked for his terrible speech to the nation the other night. What do you think?

Donegan: Yeah, I think that there is a real sense in Trumpworld that Trump needs to be bolstered, right? That he needs encouragement or sort of reassurance in public of his importance. There is a sense, I think, definitely in the pundit class and in the Beltway, and I think this is inevitably beginning to........

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