The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 14 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 is reportedly in a rage over his inability to end the Iran war and bring down diesel prices. According to insiders, he’s shocked to discover that he can’t control Iran in the same way he orders around Republicans.
Meanwhile, his new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, has turned in a debut performance that was so bad that even MAGA allies and White House insiders are cringing over it.
These things are part of the same story. Trump has plainly lost a step, a big one, when it comes to raw politics, and we think his disastrous new press secretary captures how and why. So we’re talking about all of it with Mark Jacob, author of the excellent Stop the Presses Substack, which regularly dissects White House communications follies. Mark, thanks for coming on.
Mark Jacob: Thank you.
Sargent: So let’s start with Katie Zacharia, his new press secretary. She just did her first briefing. Listen to how quickly she goes full cult.
Katie Zacharia (voiceover): I am so honored to work for President Trump and the American people as the new White House press secretary. I want to thank President Trump for the trust that he has placed in me. I have wanted to work for him for a very long time. I’m looking forward to working with each of you as well, especially as we are in the middle of the midterm blitz, with energy and excitement never seen before in the history of midterms, thanks to President Trump.
Sargent: Mark, there was more like this, and it was really noteworthy, I think, that she started out by calling mostly on Trump propagandists in the briefing. Your thoughts on all that?
Jacob: Well, I mean, it seemed like she was doing the bit where you just talk to an audience of one. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, as long as you just kind of, you know, glaze the president, everything is fine.
She took questions from three people, all of whom were right-wing journalists—or, if you want to call them journalists. And I mean, it was just ridiculous. And she was also very nervous, didn’t seem to know what she was doing. And it just spoke to a lack of confidence.
Sargent: I don’t want to be too cruel about this. Like, there’s a lot of real piling on going on on the internet now. But this is important, right, Mark? Like, it matters who the press secretary is, and it matters how she understands her job. Can you explain why it’s bad for her to conceive of her job as essentially propping up the feelings of the audience of one? Like, that’s bad, right?
Jacob: Right. Well, yeah. I mean, I think people maybe have gotten used to the idea that the press secretary works for the president. But no, the press secretary works for the American people. I mean, that’s who’s paying the salary.
And the job of the press secretary is not to lie for the president, it’s to tell the truth to the American public. And unfortunately, we’re in such a horrible time that people seem to forget that.
But she’s got a job to do. She’s actually supposed to take questions about things that the people in the public want to know. And when she lies or stonewalls the press, she’s doing the same thing to the American people.
That needs to be understood—that these briefings are a way for the public to learn things, because the reporters are asking the right questions. But if she doesn’t even take the right questions, they’re not going to get any information. And it’s just—I mean, it’s really kind of North Korean telecast kind of stuff going on here now.
Sargent: Yes. And your point is very well taken that we’ve become so accustomed to this under Trump that everybody just shrugs at that part of the story, right?
Jacob: It’s its own scandal that Trump is announcing major government policies on a social media site that he owns. That’s monetizing his personal property, you know, through the White House. I mean, that alone is scandalous, but it’s, you know, number 1,265 on the list of scandals.
Sargent: Well, back to Katie Zacharia’s performance. Even some MAGA figures were rattled by it. Here’s Megyn Kelly in a clip flagged by Media Matters talking about her debut.
Megyn Kelly (voiceover): Part of it is the look. You know, she’s got very heavy makeup on. She’s got the long curls. She’s got some chest showing with the tight—like, I think she needs to dial it back. I’m just going to say, like, I know she’s auditioning for a job on Fox News. They all are. Look at Dana Perino, she was too. Like, it’s been a long line of Republican press secretaries whose real goal is to wind up on Fox News. I get it. But Roger Ailes would be the first to tell you, when you are in a job in which you need to be taken seriously, you need to present as a serious person.
Sargent: Meanwhile, White House officials leaked scalding criticism, describing her as unprepared. And one told CNN the spectacle was, “brutal.” Another official said this: “She needs to get much better fast, otherwise she’ll break Scaramucci’s record.” Mark, that’s a reference to Anthony Scaramucci, who was canned very quickly. There’s a lot of consternation out there in MAGA world about her, isn’t there?
Jacob: Right. And not only is the Scaramucci thing coming out, but there’s also the picture of her next to a head of lettuce and asking which one is going to last longer, which is a reference to the prime minister in Britain a while back.
And people are, I guess, having fun with it, but it’s not really funny. It’s really kind of sad that Trump thinks that he can foist anyone who just lavishes him with praise out there and think that they can do a really difficult and important job.
I mean, unfortunately that’s his pattern. You see the same—I mean, Hegseth has no business being defense secretary. Or RFK Junior is, like, the opposite of what a decent HHS secretary would be. So this is just part of the whole same thing, this kind of enshittification of the U.S. government.
Sargent: Yeah. One thing we say on here a whole bunch is that Donald Trump, and a lot of his more fascistic advisors, and really just about anybody who works for him—none of these people have any conception of the presidency or the White House as a public thing, as something that the public owns.
It’s the property of the public. He is merely a steward of it. He doesn’t understand it in those terms. He thinks that her job is to glaze him. That’s what he actually thinks.
Jacob: Right. And another thing that I think may mean that her expiration date comes up really fast is that she’s got her own scandal. I mean, there’s no proof that she ever passed the bar exam in the U.S., and she’s claimed to be a lawyer repeatedly.
She was asked that question, initially, and we didn’t get a very good answer. Some bizarre thing about how that happened before she went to China, because she worked in China for a couple of years.
Sargent: If her staying power is short, if she is fired, which seems pretty likely, it will have absolutely nothing to do with her honesty, or the degree to which she’s informing the public or informing journalists. It’ll only be about her embarrassing Donald Trump. And again, that’s just not something we should accept. It shouldn’t be that way.
Jacob: Well, we shouldn’t accept members of the Cabinet being chosen merely because they’re good on TV, supposedly. I mean, that’s how you get the treasury secretary talking about the war repeatedly. And you’ve got people whose only job seems to be going on Fox News, and they’re in charge of major departments in the federal government.
I mean, what we’re seeing is a complete kind of artifice of a presidency, where all the important stuff is not being done, or is being done, you know, in an excruciating and disastrous way—like the Iran war is a good example, or the attempt to get inflation under control, or the supposed attempts to end the Russia-Ukraine war, which have ended up looking like the U.S. is Russia’s best friend.
And so all of this is going on because he’s totally incompetent. Trump is incompetent, but he’s got wholly incompetent people around him. And the only thing that they care about is, I guess, if they could just say something snotty on Fox News every day.
Sargent: Well, as Megyn Kelly said, this is all an audition to appear on Fox News. To your point about how this implicates all these other failures, The Atlantic reports that with diesel prices soaring, Trump’s inability to end the Iran war has left him both incensed and paralyzed, per two sources close to him that leaked word of this.
One advisor said that Trump is, “used to snapping his fingers and having the whole world—Republicans, world leaders, the media—come to attention, and he is losing his mind that Iran won’t listen.”
And Mark, of course, this is grounded in his deep anger about the course of the midterms. The war is a big cause of GOP woes, due to diesel prices driving everything up. He just is not capable of fathoming that he is losing control of everything, really.
Jacob: Well, I mean, he’s just getting weirder. And he was weird to start with. But I mean, at a rally in Ohio, he’s talking about Senator Jon Husted’s ass. I mean, he used the word—he’s talking about, he’s admiring the senator’s ass. So I mean, it’s crazy town.
I mean, he announced the other day that there was an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. And of course, unfortunately—you know, my job partly is to criticize the news media, and a lot of them came out with their “Trump says” headlines, which they should know better than to do. And so people finally got a hold of Zelensky. He said it’s the first he’d ever heard of it. The Russians were attacking energy sites in Ukraine hours after Trump announced it.
And then they asked Trump and said, hey, nobody seems to be following this ceasefire, why did you say you had an agreement? And he responded that he told them that they needed to come to an agreement, and that was enough. So he has these bizarre delusions of grandeur, where he thinks he can just kind of magically transform reality into what he thinks it should be.
Sargent: Well, I think that this Atlantic reporting of his private rage over the Iran war is a very good example of Trump being genuinely baffled by his own ebbing powers. And the thing about this is, he went into that conflict believing he had the power to command Iran to do whatever he said, in the same way he commands Republicans to do whatever he says.
He never stopped to wonder if there are limits to his powers. And that, I think, is revealed very neatly by this Atlantic reporting, which is quite extraordinary, really—to hear that he’s in this fury over feeling powerless and paralyzed.
Jacob: Well, I mean, I think that the Republicans, because they are such, you know, cowards, and so interested only in their own money and power, and really betraying their constituents—the Republicans in Congress, I think that they set him up to feel that way. I mean, they just fell like bowling pins.
I’ve got to tell you, Greg—and I wrote this in this week’s Stop the Presses newsletter—you know, all Trump’s weakening power is really good for America. But this is when authoritarians are dangerous. When they see their powers ebbing and they don’t know why, and all these sycophants who were on their side suddenly disappear on them—this is when they’re really dangerous.
So my newsletter was kind of a combination of optimism, because of what the polls are showing about the midterms, but also caution that he could do all kinds of horrible stuff. I mean he’s raided the home of Ilhan Omar, and they’re trying to charge Cassidy Hutchinson.
They may take—and they’ve got ICE showing up near polling places. I mean, we have to really be vigilant about what’s going on here, and insist on a fair election, and not let them do all the crazy stuff they’ve been doing.
Sargent: By the way, to your point about how Republicans, by kind of caving constantly to Trump, persuaded him that he is infinitely powerful—our institutions did the same thing by surrendering early on to Donald Trump. They, I think, helped persuade him of his invincibility.
And what’s striking to me about what you’re saying here is, it sort of puts a finger on something else, which is that Donald Trump is genuinely and truly shocked when other people, other leaders, institutions aren’t as corrupt as he is.
And they’re genuinely shocked when people and institutions and other countries don’t capitulate to him. And so, as dangerous as this moment is, it’s quite gratifying to see the emperor’s clothes ripped off so violently, don’t you think?
Jacob: Yeah. I mean, his idea of making a deal was just this thought that everyone had a price. And it is gratifying to see that some people don’t have a price. And also just to see that the lies aren’t working anymore.
I mean, I don’t think that—his promise to give people five thousand dollars if the Republicans win, which is just so deeply corrupt that it blows my head off—that is not really working. At least the polls don’t seem to show any movement based on that. You know, and he’s sending, like, $90 checks to Medicare people. I mean, he’s trying to bribe us with our own money, and it doesn’t really seem to be working.
I just feel like—I think that it is, yeah, finally, after a decade, you’re starting to see a little more feistiness out of some people in the major press. But still not much. And I don’t think I’ll ever forget that White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which was just, you know, capitulation to a dictator, and just shockingly horrible.
But not everyone’s going that way. This whole thing with him trying to kick out news organizations, and some of them refusing to be in the press pool, shows just, you know, a sliver of feistiness. And we just need more of it.
And back to what you were saying—yes, when law firms and universities cave, it encourages more law firms and universities to cave. And when more stand up, it encourages more to stand up. And I mean, this kind of resistance to tyranny is contagious. And that does give me hope in these times.
Sargent: I will say, the next White House Correspondents’ Dinner, how the press behaves toward that is going to be a really key tell. And I’m going to predict it’s going to be a lot harder for them to do what they did last time. At least I hope.
Let’s just close by talking about Trump’s ebbing powers in another sense. He’s really lost a step. I mean, in many ways he is politically an extraordinarily formidable figure. I think it would be hard to deny that.
He’s got special types of political talents, and he’s got his own very unique kind of charisma, and let’s face it, he’s very good at political theatrics, right? But it does sort of seem to me like his step is gone right now.
The two big October surprises we’ve seen—and credit to Rick Wilson for making this point—but the two big October surprises that we’ve seen here are Trump making this big, quote-unquote, deal with Russia to bring in diesel there. There’s that.
And then there’s this spreading of this absurd myth about James Talarico getting confined to a mental institution. Both of those are just imploding in his face. And that to me is a sign of someone who’s really losing those powers.
Jacob: Well, yeah. And he’s getting really oddly desperate. The thing that gets me is that they’re not focusing on any of the stuff that would actually help them now. I mean, Trump is still, like, talking about the helipad. He’s still talking about the ballroom. And he’s still in a big fight with a federal judge over cutting down trees in, you know, a park in D.C.
I mean, the Reflecting Pool still looks like crap. So all this stuff—I mean, it’s really as if the house is burning down and he’s measuring the drapes. It’s crazy. And it comes across that way.
And his inability to talk about things that voters want to hear is shocking. I mean, it’s shocking kind of political malpractice from somebody who seemed to have some sort of, you know, magic dust that turned regular voters into sycophants and gullible people who believed everything.
The fact that you had so many people who thought that Trump was going to fix the economy in 2024, and that he was going to make sure we didn’t go into foreign wars and all that stuff—and they believed all that stuff. I don’t know why, because his track record was just of falsehoods here and there.
But they’re not believing him anymore. I mean, I think the vast majority of people—I mean, he’s not even doing well with people who voted for him in 2024, according to the polls. I mean, his approval rating has gone from 95 percent at the start of this term with his voters to something like 67 percent.
People go to the grocery store, and people drive by the gas station every day, and they see the prices. And he’s still, oddly, he’s still lying about all that crap. He’s talking about how he’s brought prices down and all this junk. And it’s not working anymore.
Sargent: Mark Jacob, really good to talk to you. Folks, for more of Mark Jacob, make sure to check out his Substack, Stop the Presses. It’s great work. Mark, good to have you on.
Jacob: Thanks a lot.