The Daily Blast: Trump Press Sec Goes Full Cult in Odd Rants as Polls Take Brutal Turn

The DSR Network

Chris Cotnoir

Government

4.5 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2026

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We’ve noticed that whenever the news is bad for Donald Trump, Karoline Leavitt dials up the cultlike obsequiousness to 11. She just let out a strange rant basically declaring that Iran will have entered into “unconditional surrender,” as Trump wants, whenever he says it has. In another odd moment, she dismissed widespread MAGA criticism of Trump’s war by essentially declaring that MAGA is whatever Trump says it is. The two displays really went full North Korea in other ways, too. And that’s no accident: an average of high quality surveys now shows that support for his Iran war is at an abysmal 38 percent, perhaps the lowest initial support for a war ever. Another analysis finds that Trump’s net approval on immigration has dropped by 20 points since last year. And his economic numbers are awful. We talked to Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, a skilled decoder of MAGA. We discuss how this presidency is in trouble on multiple fronts and the role of cultlike praise in managing the base at such difficult moments. We also ponder how his physical decline, and the prospect of a world without Trump, is hovering in the background of all of it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.
0:16.4	I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
0:28.6	We've noticed an interesting pattern.
0:32.4	Whenever the news gets particularly bad for Donald Trump,
0:40.4	White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt's cult-like obsequiousness gets dialed up to 11. That just happened after Trump was hit with a brutal news cycle on multiple fronts. Those fronts include increasing signs
0:46.5	that the U.S. might have bombed an Iranian elementary school, terrible new jobs numbers, and the
0:53.5	firing of Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noem.
0:57.3	Trump's presidency is in trouble, and it's at moments like this that his sycophants really step
1:02.9	it up. We're trying to make sense of all this with Salon's Amanda Marcotte, who dissects Trump
1:08.4	world as well as anyone out there. Amanda, always good to have you on.
1:12.9	Thanks for having me.
1:14.6	So first, we apologize for doing two episodes in a row involving Caroline Levitt, but we think this is really important.
1:21.9	Here's Levitt's latest.
1:23.2	Donald Trump exploded on truth social, insisting that the war will not stop until Iran commits
1:29.1	to unconditional surrender.
1:32.0	That sure sounds like regime changes the goal.
1:35.2	So Caroline Levitt tried to clean this up.
1:37.5	Listen to this exchange.
1:39.3	What does the president mean when he calls for unconditional surrender?
1:42.3	Is he saying that the regime has to fully relinquish
1:44.9	control? What the president means is that when he, as commander-in-chief of the U.S.
1:49.4	armed forces, determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America
	...

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