Transcript: Trump Erupts as GOP Leaks About His Sunsetting Get Worse: The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 2 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.
We’re one day out, and the Republican leaks have become a flood. There’s a lot of the usual panic, but something else jumped out at us. Republicans are privately coming to terms with Donald Trump’s sunsetting, and beginning to contemplate a world where his influence has dramatically waned.
This comes as Trump grew angrier with a reporter than we’ve ever seen him, and tellingly, it involved his slipping power. Meanwhile, Republicans are sharing humiliating details about his rallies too, which is striking given that the rallies are so central to his power and movement.
So we’re sorting through all of it with our go-to interpreter of MAGA pathologies, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte. Amanda, good to have you on.
Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So Politico talked to over a dozen Republican lawmakers and found a lot of anger at Trump, and a very strong sense that if Trump presides over a major loss, things will really change. Politico reports this: “Granted anonymity to speak frankly, many said they believe his days of dictating outcomes with Truth Social posts and late-night phone calls could be coming to an end.”
Amanda, do you think a big enough defeat will finally break Trump’s spell?
Marcotte: What else do they have, right? They may not want—like, they haven’t wanted to be under Trump’s yoke for a long time, if ever, but it’s not like they have anything else going on. It’s not like there’s some Trump alternative that they can turn to.
I think that we’ve seen it this campaign cycle, where he’s objectively bad for a lot of candidates. Like, if he goes and he rallies for them or he campaigns for them, it’s actually hurting them in the polls. And yet they won’t say no. And then he shows up in their states and is mean to them.
He calls… https://newrepublic.com/article/217428/transcript-trump-erupts-gop-leaks-sunsetting-get-worse