The Daily Blast: Trump’s Fury at NYT Explodes amid Fresh Concerns about Mental Decline

The DSR Network

Chris Cotnoir

Government

4.5 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2025

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

President Trump dreads being seen as weak. He exploded in a long, crazed rant about a harsh new piece in The New York Times about his ongoing decline. Though the piece documented his deterioration in careful detail, Trump insisted in all kinds of ways that, no, really, he’s as physically energetic and cognitively sound as he’s ever been. We think this gets at a bigger story: The illusion that Trump is strong, powerful, and wields absolute mastery over foes is essential to his political mystique. As his wildly unhinged overreaction to the piece demonstrates, he knows this better than anyone. Yet that eruption only confirmed the thesis: The whole fracas even got medical professionals to weigh in on his obvious mental decline. We talked to David Lurie, who writes for the Public Notice Substack, about his new piece depicting Trump as a “lame duck dictator.” We discuss the collapse of Trump’s aura of strength, how the combination of his political debilitation and consolidation of authoritarian power poses new dangers, and the importance of depicting him as the naked emperor figure he truly is. Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio 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.
0:34.1	President Trump is very, very angry about a New York Times piece that carefully documents his obvious physical decline.
0:39.6	Trump raged over the piece, letting out a stream of lies about his performance in office, and even attacking the reporter who wrote the piece as ugly. This may seem typical of
0:46.4	Trump, but we think it gets it something deeper. Trump's entire political mystique is premised on the
0:52.6	fiction that he's a strong, virile, formidable figure
0:55.9	who wields absolute mastery over his enemies at all times. His defensive eruption shows that he
1:02.6	knows that the second his aura of strength is deflated and he comes to be seen as a shriveled,
1:08.0	floundering figure, his whole political house of cards is in danger of
1:12.0	collapsing. David Lurie, a lawyer who writes for the public notice substack, has a good new
1:18.3	piece developing a framework that describes Trump as a lame duck dictator. So we're getting into
1:24.3	all this today. David, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, Greg.
1:28.9	So the New York Times piece is pretty devastating. It talks about how Trump has been dozing off at events,
1:35.2	how he's traveling a good deal less than he used to, how he's seen in public less often.
1:40.5	There's this brutal video of him embedded in the piece looking exhausted and befuddled he comes to the
1:47.0	Oval Office for work at 11 a.m. The piece even implied that Trump is now eyeing the great beyond.
1:53.9	David, what did you make of this piece? Well, Greg, on the one hand, the piece was quite gentle to Trump because it avoided the elephant in the room, which is his very evident and advancing state of dementia.
2:13.3	But it also was devastating for the reasons that you observed.
2:19.8	Because his sheer and pervasive state of exhaustion and his ever more inescapable showing of his age is exactly what Trump cannot abide.
2:43.0	And it's devastating precisely because it was so factual.
2:50.5	The video was perhaps the most devastating part of it,
2:54.8	as was the very accurate description of the truly bizarre,
	...

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