Transcript: Trump’s Sunsetting Visibly Worsens as MAGA Cult Cracks Up

As Trump’s mental decline accelerates in plain sight, the author of a piece on the tortured psychology of MAGA explains how his chief sycophants are becoming akin to an “end-stage cult.”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 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.

The cult-like defenses of Donald Trump have taken a truly creepy turn of late. Trump fell asleep at an event and the White House’s spin in response went truly off the rails. Trump floated an insane proposal involving Venezuela that drew a deeply strange defense from a spokesperson. And in one telling moment, the spokesperson was so eager to fluff up Trump that she accidentally delivered a harsh talking point against him. But when you watch all this madness, you can sense something dark underneath it. All these sycophants are plainly aware that Trump is going to be passing from the scene very soon. And it’s very hard to see what’s going to fill the vacuum within the GOP and the right wing that this will leave behind.

Virginia Heffernan, a writer for The New Republic, has a great piece that plumbs deep into the MAGA psyche for clues to the state of our country. So we’re talking about all this with her today. Virginia, nice to have you on.

Virginia Heffernan: Good to see you again, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s start with an extraordinary exchange on Fox News. The screen is showing oil prices soaring while an anchor asks White House spokesperson Anna Kelly to comment on high gas prices. She launches into this.

Anna Kelly (voiceover): Let me be very clear. Iran has been incredibly decimated, militarily. Their Navy is at the bottom of the ocean. The ballistic missiles are destroyed. Their production facilities are demolished. Now they’re being totally crippled economically by the weight of Operation Economic Fury. So the president is not in a rush. He has all the cards at his disposal because he knows that Iran is getting weaker and weaker by the day while the United States is getting stronger and stronger.

Sargent: So note how spokesperson Anna Kelly says Trump is not in a rush—he’s not in a rush over these gas prices. Virginia, what I find so striking here is that the instinct is to go full cult and portray Trump as wielding total mastery over events, and accidentally she creates a potent talking point against him. Your thoughts on that?

Heffernan: Yeah. So, I mean, we’ve talked a lot about a dictator and how he was going to be a dictator on day one. But he’s a king now. He’s an emperor. And it’s something more than a dictator because a dictator is trying to figure out how to govern. But an emperor who—any word against him constitutes what the Anglo-Saxons used to call lèse-majesté, you know this expression, right? It’s like the Thai king still—lèse-majesté is like a particular offense of “injured majesty” against the king. It’s exactly the opposite of American principles of free speech, so much that saying anything—saying oil prices are going up, or saying that Trump fell asleep, or even registering the evidence of our own eyes—is seen as wrong.

Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you, I love the distinction between dictator and emperor, but I’d probably go with despot in the end.

Heffernan: Yes. Tell me what despot buys you that the other words don’t.

Sargent: Despot sort of conveys this ailing, angry, sunsetting figure. And the ailing despot image seems to capture him at these weird events where all his sycophants have to suck up to him while he’s falling asleep.

Heffernan: Yeah, I mean, this sounds a lot like a late-stage cult, like the Moonies, when originally you have Reverend Moon making claims about the world that are somewhat liberating to participants. And then soon after he just feels persecuted, right?

So then you just turn entirely to: we have to protect the leader. But no kings—maybe no despots, no tyrants is the right thing for........

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