Transcript: Trump Press Sec Seethes at Media as Epstein Fiasco Worsens

Sargent: What’s striking about what you’re saying is also the degree to which this is seeping down into every crevice of the party and its media apparatus. So you had this kind of adulation directed at the audience of one on Thursday from many different quarters. I’m going to read a few of them. Republican Congressman Randy Fine said this about Trump’s Epstein problem: “I trust President Trump’s judgment completely on this. I think he’s been the most transparent president we’ve ever had.” All right. So on the questions about Trump’s health, one Fox News personality said, “I’ve shaken the man’s hand. He gives a very vigorous handshake.” Then you had Republican Congressman Tim Burchett, who was asked to respond to Trump calling his own supporters “stupid weaklings” for caring about Epstein. Burchett said this, “He has a strategy in all this, and I suspect it will play out because he wins every time.” There’s just an over-the-top quality to this that I just find so unnerving, this cult-like behavior creeping down to every last level of the party [and] deep into Fox News and the right-wing media. It’s just all pervasive. It’s really alarming.

Jacob: Right. Well, it is really giving over your own rationality to somebody else. There was another congressman who said, Well, he wrote the art of the deal. He knows how to make a deal. Well, obviously, he’s really made a mess of the whole tariff thing so far. So just deciding that … somebody ghostwrote a book for him a couple of decades ago really is not a reason to crash our economy. I think that, to a large extent, support for Trump has been a call on people to put aside what they believe in, or their demand for facts to support their beliefs, and instead made an emotional appeal to people to just go with the cult leader, just accept what he says. And Greg, you also see this with the NATO guy. The guy who’s in charge of NATO realizes that the way to appeal to Trump’s ego is to call him daddy and to say and act like, Well, he knows better than we do about how to take care of all of us. And the NATO guy doesn’t believe that a bit—you know that—but he’s appealing to Trump’s ego and to Trump’s followers because he wants them to fund the Ukrainian defense against the Russian invasion. So it’s all this appeal to emotion and this surrender to it—and it’s not fact-based. To me, the last decade has been people surrendering to where they don’t believe in facts anymore. They are just subject to propaganda, and they decide who’s telling the truth. And whether they are or not, they don’t assess what they’re hearing. What they do is they just pick who is going to tell them the stuff that they want to hear—and then they listen to it and they just exclude all other evidence that’s out there. It’s really frightening, and it’s not American. It’s not the way our system of government was set up.

Sargent: It really is, as you say, sort of this mass surrender, this turning over of people’s brains to Donald Trump. We have this new poll from the Associated Press. Let me read some findings from it. Only about one quarter of Americans say that Trump’s policies have helped them. Half of Americans report that Trump’s policies have done more to hurt them since the second term began than helped. He’s under 50 percent approval on every issue.

Jacob: Even immigration, right

Sargent: Yes, even immigration. He’s down to 43 percent on his handling of immigration. That’s a drop of six points from March. We’ve seen that in a number of other polls, some of which are even worse for him on immigration, which I take as a sign of deep underlying weaknessg iven that it’s a central issue. And on top of all that, Trump’s approval on the economy is down to around four in 10, and 56 percent say that the phrase “understands the problems facing people like you” is a phrase that doesn’t describe Trump well. That’s just terrible stuff, and it’s mirrored by a lot of other polls. I think you have this weirdly proportional effect where the worst things get for Trump—whether on the polling and out in the country and on these all these other issues—the more the adulation from all these different voices swells and tries to prop them up.