Transcript: Trump Rage at Fox Backfires as Cringe Motive for It Leaks

As the embarrassing roots of Trump’s fury at Fox News come to light, the author of a piece on MAGA manliness marvels at how whiny Trump-MAGA have become as the election nears.

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........

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