Transcript: Trump’s America Is Deeply Unwell, and It’s Time to Say So

As Trump reveals his unfitness in stark new ways, a political theorist argues that our election of this man to the presidency twice should prompt deep introspection about what we’ve become.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 13 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’s Truth Social feed can get awfully revealing at times. He just unleashed a number of posts that open a window on a lot of negative things about the man and his presidency—the transactionalism, the amorality, and the utter buffoonish incompetence. In one, he attacked his MAGA allies in a way that accidentally revealed that he has no principles. In several others, he seemed to show that he has no real grasp on the actual nature of the problem he faces now with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. The clarity of all these missives raises a question. How do we make sense of the fact that this man is our president?

Political theorist Alan Elrod has a good piece for Liberal Currents, arguing that the election of Trump twice should prompt introspection about what we’ve become. So we’ve invited him on to work through some of this with us on a theoretical level. Alan, good to have you on.

Alan Elrod: Good to be back.

Sargent: So let’s start with your piece, Alan. You likened the national drift at this moment to the atmosphere surrounding Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech in the ‘70s. In particular, you pointed out that we’re in the middle of an energy crisis—this time created needlessly by Donald Trump, and also Iran, of course—as front and central as it was then. And we’re all reeling, as you put it, from Trump’s threat of Iranian genocide. The mere fact that the American president threatened civilizational erasure and genocide, threatened to kill tens of millions of people, is itself a crisis, is it not?

Elrod: Absolutely. I mean, we can’t take it back. The elected leader of this country, who speaks for us—he’s our president, speaks for us to the world—said he was going to wipe a civilization off the map. That’s the kind of thing our allies aren’t going to be able to forget. And it’s the kind of thing that we won’t be able to forget. American presidents, for all the wars we’ve waged, even the ones that many Americans see as having been unjust, you did not have American presidents going out and publicly saying, we’re doing this so that we could just destroy as many of these people as possible.

Sargent: Former Trump allies were appalled at this. I want to highlight how Trump reacted to that. They’ve been attacking him over the war. They’ve been attacking him over the threat of genocide. And Trump unloaded with this furious tirade that went on for hundreds of words. He attacked Alex Jones this way by saying, “Alex Jones lost his entire fortune, as he should have, for his horrendous attack on the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, ridiculously claiming it was a hoax.”

Alan, that’s a reference to Alex Jones’s well-known denial that the Sandy Hook massacre ever happened. But at the time in 2015, Trump went on Alex Jones’s show and hailed him as amazing. And during Trump’s first term, Sandy Hook people begged him to denounce Jones’s conspiracy theories and Trump refused. Yet now, solely because Jones crossed him, he is suddenly willing to fault the conspiracy theorizing. It’s just an extraordinary window into this guy’s utter lack of any principles. I want to get your thoughts on that.

Elrod: I mean, to reference George Conway, who makes this argument all the time—this is what happens when you have a malignant narcissist as the president of the United States. I mean, this man is just simply not capable of thinking or feeling or conceiving really of other people beyond himself.

And so if you’re saying that he’s great, then you can do no wrong. And it doesn’t matter if you perpetuate conspiracy theories about the murder of elementary school children. And if you criticize him, then you’re a terrible person and you should die, whether you’re Alex Jones or frankly, whether you’re the entire population of Iran.

Sargent: You had a line in your piece which really struck me: “The president speaks to the people.” I want to apply that to this Sandy Hook case because we can see that Trump recognizes zero obligation of any kind to speak to all of the American people. This is really a fundamental fact about this presidency. At the time, people in Newtown, Connecticut begged Trump to exercise that option—to speak to the American people by denouncing the conspiracy theorizing about the shooting. He refused.

He only sees this sort of thing as purely transactional. If he can use a shooting like this to........

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