The following is a lightly-edited transcript of the September 30, 2024 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. To listen to it, click here.This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Greg Sargent: At the rally in Wisconsin over the weekend, Donald Trump really cranked up the rage and hate speech about immigrants in a major way. He seethed at Kamala Harris over a speech she gave laying out her own vision of immigration. But something else Trump said at the rally deserves special attention. He directly attacked Fox News for the mere act of carrying Harris’s speech on the network. He said they shouldn’t be allowed to do that. This, when taken along with other things Trump has been saying lately, should be seen as a warning of sorts, a preview about what might happen to dissent if Trump wins a second term. Today we’re discussing all this with Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte, who is very good at interpreting the dangerous subtexts of Trump’s most unhinged public utterances. Good to have you on, Amanda. Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.Sargent: At his rally in western Wisconsin, Trump said that migrants will “walk into your kitchen and cut your throat.” He called Kamala Harris “mentally impaired.” He said migrants will transform every American town into a “third-world hellhole.” This is a way of getting the MAGA masses excited about the bloody mass deportations and detention camps to come if he’s elected. You wrote recently in your newsletter that Trump’s language is getting more violent to create permission to persecute enemies within. Is this more of the same? Marcotte: Yeah. It’s getting to the point of fantasyland, right? We saw that going on with the cat- and dog-eating accusations. It’s convincing people to live in a mental space that’s outside of their normal reality. You see in history that this has been very effective at getting people to think about committing violence and doing acts of violence that are outside of what they would normally be willing to put up with. It’s going to cause hate crimes, there’s no doubt about it, but it’s also about accepting any kind of violence that’s coming. It’s putting people in this space of the unimaginable and keeping them there. It’s telling people to think in a sense that, Look, you can just invent a whole alternate world where all this is OK, meaning the violence toward migrants. It’s very much reminiscent, and I’m not the first person to say this, of the satanic panic in the 1980s where the level of accusations against daycare workers and other people, that heavy metal musicians and stuff just got completely out of control, that they were engaging in human sacrifice, that they somehow had murdered thousands and hidden it and things like that. A lot of that was about justifying the religious right’s grab for power, their crackdown on music, their censorship, other things that I think previous to that would have been not allowed in American society. They work themselves into a frenzy of moral justification by imagining enemies that were so bad, so evil that everything was justified in stopping them.Sargent: You just gave me a flashback to Stranger Things, which is also set in the ’80s where there’s this witch hunt for this one guy who’s called a freak because he wears a denim jacket that has a heavy metal logo on the back. I want to play a specific quote from Trump at the rally. He talked about the speech that Harris gave Friday night, laying out her plans for stricter border security and comprehensive immigration reform. Then he said this:Donald Trump (audio voiceover): And then I have to sit there and listen to her bullshit last night. And who puts it on Fox News? And they shouldn’t be allowed to put it on. It’s all lies. It’s all lies. Everything she said is a lie.Sargent: Amanda, this is really unhinged. Trump just said Fox News shouldn’t be allowed to air the opposition’s criticism of him. You have to take that along with his recent threat to prosecute Google if elected, for no reason other than it carried stories that criticize him. Amanda, does this also fit into your frame in that it creates a permission structure for persecution of the media for criticizing him later? Marcotte: Absolutely. Trump has long held the opinion that one of the most important benefits of power is silencing people who criticize you. And he’s getting louder and louder about it and more and more obnoxious about the double standard that he holds, which is if you say things I like, then that’s free speech, and if you say things I don’t like, then that should be criminal, right? Trying to hold him to any legal or morally consistent standard is ridiculous because his only standard is if I like it, it’s good and legal, if I don’t like it, it should be criminal. The scary thing here is that that narcissism is spreading out across the supporters. Elon Musk is a good example. He’s somebody who calls himself a free speech warrior because he lets Nazis run rampant on Twitter. He published the “Twitter files,” which were all these interior communications at Twitter under the guise of free speech. But then what happened was a journalist got his hands on a dossier that the Trump campaign had made up about J.D. Vance that was supposed to be private, published it, put it on Twitter, and Elon Musk censored that. The only consistent standard here is if it’s for Trump, he’s for it, and if it’s against Trump, he will censor it. He doesn’t even try to be consistent anymore. Sargent: I want to pick up on that because I think it’s crucial for people to understand that the explicit declaration of a double standard is the thing here. That is the thing that Trump is promising. He’s saying, We no longer have to be consistent. Everything should be rigged in our favor. Elections that we lose are illegitimate. Elections that we win are legitimate. The media is being fair when it criticizes our opponents. The media is being unfair when it criticizes us. He is essentially selling a liberation from consistency and neutrality to his supporters. Marcotte: It’s very explicitly this end-of-liberal-democratic ideals, right? And replacing them with fairly classic fascist ideals, “blood and soil” notions. J.D. Vance’s speech at the RNC was very clear on this, that what makes you an American is that you’re born here and your ethnicity and your history here. And he played a little around the edges to imply that there was some allowance for racial diversity in there, but we all heard what he was saying, which is Americans are an ethnic group and that ethnic group is obviously a white one and a conservative one and a Christian one and all these other things. Once you’ve redefined American-ness in those lines, you can redefine the law and who is in and who is out. And the consistency here is not that we have free speech for all citizens or all people actually. It’s that the in-group are real Americans and they have all the rights and privileges and the out-group are not real Americans and they deserve nothing. Sargent: The bigger context here though is CBS News just announcing that its moderators won’t be fact-checking the vice presidential candidates at this week’s debate. Remember, ABC News did fact-check Trump and Harris at their debate. And as a result, Trump and top MAGA propagandists attack ABC relentlessly for weeks. Trump even said ABC should lose its license for telling the truth about his lies. Is it fair to read this and the attack on Fox News for merely airing Harris’s criticism of him as a clear advertisement of what a President Trump would try to do to dissent with executive power in a second term? Marcotte: Absolutely. He’s made it very clear what he thinks the new order should be. It’s interesting to me, too, that Fox News continues to do right-wing propaganda in the old-fashioned way, which is they create the appearance of a news network so that it legitimizes what is actually just right-wing propaganda. It shows that they’ve long believed, and I think correctly, that conservatives want to view themselves as engaging in a liberal democracy just with a different value system and a different set of beliefs. They would mimic what that would look like while not actually doing that. Trump is saying we don’t need that anymore, that everyone’s on board with just straight-up fascist views on how government should run, how society should be run, that, for me and my friends, everything, for the opposition, nothing, right? Sargent: Persecution. Marcotte: Yeah, persecution. I don’t know that he is as right as he thinks he is. He goes to his rallies and people cheer him on when he says things like this. I think he has it in his head that this is the majority view on the conservative side. And I think that that’s not true…Sargent: Right.Marcotte: …that the kind of people that go to MAGA rallies are just full blown fascists. But there are a lot of people that don’t really want to accept that this is what they signed on to. And they like the comfort blanket of being told that Trump is a normal Republican. This is a normal political party. We’re still engaging in liberal democracy. And that’s how they tell themselves how to sleep at the end of the day. Sargent: Right. It’s a little hard to say exactly what MAGA rally attendees believe. I think certainly some of them are there for the authoritarian display. Whether all of them are, I don’t know. I will tell you, there was some really interesting polling from the Public Religion Research Institute that found that something like high 60s, low 70s percent of people who view Trump positively agree with the statements that migrants are “poisoning the blood” of America as Trump has put it, and agree that immigrants are invading our country in a way that eradicates our culture. By the way, Trump started using that word “culture” at this rally as well. What do you think of that? That’s really a euphemism, isn’t it? “Culture”? In other words, it’s a euphemism when Trump says they’re a threat to culture. Marcotte: Western civilization, Western culture, these have been euphemisms that have been used by the “alt-right.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186494/transcript-trumps-angry-rant-fox-news-contains-hidden-warning