The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 3, 2024, episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it 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 vice presidential debate on Tuesday night, the CBS news moderators fact-checked JD Vance a single time. Once. That was all it took to trigger Donald Trump and his MAGA allies, who fanned out and hammered CBS relentlessly for that enormous transgression. All this opens a window on a larger story: the degree to which Trump’s campaign is built on top of an immense superstructure of endless and shameless lies. Bullying the media into not fact-checking Trump and Vance is essential to that larger project. Today, we’re talking about all this with Jamison Foser, who writes regularly about media capitulation to the right wing on his Substack, Finding Gravity. Thanks for coming on, Jamison. Jamison Foser: Thanks for having me, Greg. Sargent: At the debate, JD Vance exaggerated wildly about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, an obsession of his, suggesting that they’re here illegally. CBS’s moderator pointed out that they’re actually here legally on temporary protected status. Vance objected saying, “Hey, the rules were that you’re not supposed to fact-check.” That triggered MAGA. Trump erupted on Truth Social. Other Republicans jumped in. Here’s audio of Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt on Newsmax:Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): When they fact-checked Senator Vance and shut off his mic, I thought that was pretty alarming, especially since the rules they agreed to were not to fact-check the candidates on the stage, but they just could not help themselves because I think they were getting triggered by Senator Vance speaking the truth so powerfully and so eloquently.Sargent: Jamison, I guess CBS maybe violated its rules, but still it was one extremely minor correction. What’s your reaction to all this? Foser: Yeah, extremely minor is exactly right. The moderator literally just said, “To clarify for our viewers, there are Haitian immigrants in Springfield who are here legally.” Vance then flipped out, and first we have to acknowledge just how pathetic he sounded saying, “The rules were you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” I immediately thought of that old Saturday Night Live skit in which Chevy Chase is playing a befuddled Gerald Ford in a debate and says, “It was my understanding that there’d be no math involved.” It was just ridiculous. He looked small and weak and dishonest. That was my first reaction. But we have to understand this objection Vance had in the moment and the reaction since that you’ve highlighted from his fellow conservatives, that it’s extremely just completely insincere, right? They don’t actually believe that the moderators were biased against them. They were going to attack the moderators no matter what happened. It’s what they do after the Trump–Harris debate. Trump attacked the moderators claiming they were biased against him, even though they gave him five minutes more speaking time than Harris and routinely let him interrupt both them and Harris and break the rules. It’s just not a sincere objection. That’s the first thing everybody should understand. We shouldn’t treat it as such. We shouldn’t treat it as a legitimate complaint. But there is a piece of it that I do think that they really do believe, and that’s that JD Vance and Donald Trump fundamentally think they should be able to do and say whatever they want, whenever they want, and nobody should even question them. It’s just a very fundamentally authoritarian worldview that shows up in small ways like this and in large ways like talking about jailing journalists and others who say and do things they don’t like. Sargent: To highlight a point you made, Trump and MAGA know the ability to lie with impunity, and that’s the essential thing. Impunity is absolutely central to the success of their political project. The debate really showed this in a new way. Vance lied about everything. The borders are open when in fact crossings are down. Immigrants take Americans jobs when in fact they’re helping grow the economy and labor force. Trump tried to protect people on the Affordable Care Act when in fact he tried to destroy it. Trump’s economy was uniformly fantastic when it actually ended in Covid-fueled catastrophe. Biden and Harris have decimated energy production when in fact oil production has soared. It’s really endless. Now Jamison, we all recall George Bush, Karl Rove, and the making of their alternate reality. Is what we’re seeing now something different? Foser: I think it’s something different in kind of a hyperinflation of it. What we’re seeing now in terms of how the Republican candidates and the conservative movement are behaving and how the media reacts to it are trends that have been in place for decades and that many of us have been talking about and highlighting. I know you have been, and I have been for a very long time. What’s happened in the current MAGA era and the Trump era is the natural conclusion of those trends continuing unchecked. They’re just going to grow. It’s not hard to see the connection between the Bush administration saying “we create our own reality” and the way Donald Trump and JD Vance are behaving right now. If they’re allowed to do that and the media goes along and helps them in doing that by treating their lies and their fabrications as legitimate topics for discussion on things we should focus on, then they’re just going to do more and more of that. Sargent: You had an interesting piece recently comparing coverage of Trump to coverage of Al Gore during the 2000 campaign. The press at that time decided that Gore was a liar and an exaggerator and they covered him that way in a concerted relentless way. Can you talk about that and how it compares to the present? Foser: A core theme of the 2000 presidential campaign coverage was that Al Gore was this fundamentally untrustworthy figure, this compulsive liar. It was based on a couple pretty trivial small examples that weren’t even true. There were ironically enough things that the media exaggerated from Gore’s comment in order to portray Gore as an exaggerator. What you had all that year was this constant through line in coverage of the campaign. George Bush was a straight talker, and Al Gore was fundamentally dishonest. It wasn’t just that they’d fact-check him in one piece when he’d say something. They’d criticize it. That was then the dominant frame through which they covered him. And that’s a striking contrast to the way the media treats Donald Trump and JD Vance. With Trump and Vance, to your point, they do fact-check some of the lies. Sometimes they even do it pretty consistently. We’ve seen in the lie that JD Vance and Donald Trump have been telling about Haitian immigrants. If you look at the articles about that, the media has actually done a pretty good job of saying, It’s not actually true, Haitian immigrants aren’t eating cats…Sargent: Or spreading diseases.Foser: ...or spreading diseases. But the way they do that actually helps further the core agenda that Trump and Vance have here. They do something that I call “privileging the lie.” This is a concept I developed about 15 years ago during the 2008 campaign. When the news media reports a lie, even if they make clear that it’s false, if they adopt the lie as the framing of their story, they’re helping the liar. They’re giving the liar the license to set the terms on the topic of discussion. All these stories about Vance’s Haitian immigrant lie, they’d point out that it’s not actually true what he’s saying about Haitian immigrants eating pets, but the whole article would then be about Haitian immigrants and the effect that they’re having on the communities in Ohio and elsewhere, and the problems that this is causing according to some of the residents and on the other hand, some of the benefits from it. That core story would be one about immigration, which is what Trump and Vance wanted. JD Vance has explicitly said he made these stories up to get that outcome. The other way of approaching that would have been the way they approached Al Gore. The story here is not immigration. The story here is that JD Vance is a fundamentally untrustworthy figure who is lying yet again—he has a long history of lying. That then becomes the story and the focus: JD Vance and Donald Trump and their history of lies, their fundamental dishonesty and untrustworthiness. If you cover it that way, you don’t privilege the lie. You don’t privilege the liar. You don’t incentivize future lies. But instead what we’ve seen is [the media] giving the Trump campaign exactly what they wanted.Sargent: Yeah, I like your coinage there. There’s another device or at least another technique that’s used by these guys, and I’ve been calling it the “secondary lie” or the “subordinate lie.” What happens is the press gets relentlessly focused on a falsehood like “Haitian immigrants are eating pets.” And understandably, it’s a pretty big story, that they went there, right? But for days and days and days, every story about that would have the fact-check of the lie about eating pets, but then underneath it, JD Vance or whoever was speaking would advance another set of lies, like Haitians are spreading diseases. Readers and viewers are seeing, OK, the pet eating isn’t true, but then they’re hearing Vance say, Well, there are these other problems, like they’re spreading diseases, and that isn’t checked. That’s a subsidiary problem to what you’re talking about. Foser: Yeah. That’s a core part of the Trump and Vance strategy, and that’s a core reason why privileging the lie and allowing… Not just allowing, because news companies have agency here, right? They’re not allowing Trump and Vance to dictate anything. The news companies are making a decision to cover the topic that JD Vance wants them to cover when he tells these lies. The consequence of doing that is you then create this story that has space for all these other lies and you can’t possibly keep up with them. You can’t possibly correct them all.
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