Trump Press Sec Goes Full Cult as Spin on Mental State Flies Off Rails

THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

The New Republic

News, Politics

4.4 • 800 Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2025

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Under persistent questioning about President Trump’s unfitness for office at his latest cabinet meeting, White House press secretary offered one of the ugliest defenses we’ve ever seen. She singled out Trump’s vile racist attack on Somalis, and praised it as an “epic moment” that put an “exclamation point” on that meeting “for the whole world to see.” Never mind that Trump appeared to fall asleep there, and in that rant about Somalis, called them “garbage” who “contribute nothing” and suggested he wants them all out of our country, even though many are American citizens. We talked to Vedant Patel, a former State Department and White House official. We discuss what it means that Leavitt went full cult in giving White House sanction to his ugly bigotry, why the targeting of Somalis is so ghoulish, and what Trump really intends when he threatens denaturalization and “remigration,” as he is now doing. 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 episode is brought to you by Vanta.
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0:46.5	I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
1:00.6	President Donald Trump has now set his sights on Somali immigrants.
1:07.5	He's been ranting furiously about them, calling them garbage, and saying he wants them all to get out of our country.
1:12.0	And he's even talking about stripping citizenship from immigrants in order to remove them. White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt reacted to this with obsequious praise,
1:19.0	calling it epic. We thought this was a telling moment. The Trump cult has gotten so out of
1:24.8	control that his propagandists now go out of their way to deliberately
1:28.8	highlight his most racist and disgusting moments and pump those up into moments of heroism and
1:35.3	triumph. Meanwhile, almost no Republicans had anything critical to say about any of this. In fact,
1:42.4	J.D. Vance pounded the table in agreement with Trump on Somalis.
1:47.0	How far is this madness going to get? Today we're talking about all this with Vedant Patel,
1:52.5	a former State Department official who worked on immigration issues under Joe Biden. Vedant, good to
1:57.8	have you on, man. Really good to be with you. Thanks for having me.
	...

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