Trump Press Sec’s Dimwitted Spin Implodes as RFK Firing Fiasco Worsens

THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

The New Republic

News, Politics

4.4 • 798 Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2025

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The White House is trying to fire Centers for Disease Control director Susan Monarez for opposing Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine policies. This has sent the CDC sliding into chaos. On Thursday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt struggled to spin what’s happening. She said Monarez had never been subject to a vote—but the Senate voted to confirm her. Leavitt insisted the White House had fired Monarez—but Trump’s direct word appears to be required, and as of this recording, he hadn’t spoken. Leavitt pretended Trump is defending the integrity of our vaccine system—but RFK is destroying it. We talked to the University of Michigan’s Don Moynihan, author of a good Substack called “Can We Still Govern?” We discussed how Trump will struggle to defend this move, how the American people will recoil at the looming loss of a professionalized bureaucracy, and how all this is sowing the seeds for catastrophe later. 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.
0:16.5	I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
0:30.5	The White House is saying that the director of the Centers for Disease Control,
0:35.7	Susan Menares, has been fired, ostensibly because she opposes Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s anti-vaccine policies.
0:39.5	This has prompted an extraordinary walkout at the CDC, which seems to be slipping into chaos as we record.
0:47.4	At Thursday's media briefing, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt tried to spin this in a highly strange way.
0:56.3	She tried to imply that this represented democracy in action, but she mangled key facts and couldn't even explain in any serious
1:02.5	way why this woman is being fired. We think this is revealing. It shows that the White House knows
1:09.2	its position on vaccines is profoundly unpopular.
1:13.1	Yet Trump has hitched himself, and sadly the rest of us, to an utter lunatic who's trying to
1:19.1	destroy one of the pillars of public health in this country. This will get worse for the White
1:24.1	House. We're talking about all this with the University of Michigan's Don Moinehan,
1:28.9	who writes a good substack called Can We Still Govern? Don, thanks for coming on. So happy to be here.
1:36.6	So CDC director, Susan Menares, has been pressed for days by Kennedy and others internally
1:41.9	if she would support rolling back some of the approvals for
1:45.3	COVID vaccines, according to the Washington Post's reporting. She apparently was not willing to do that.
1:51.4	So the White House has said she's fired, but then her lawyers said, only the president can fire her.
1:57.4	And Don, as of now, he hasn't done so publicly. Maybe by the time people listen to this, it might have happened.
2:03.5	So let's assume for this discussion, she's likely out.
2:06.8	Can you catch us up on the basics of this?
2:09.6	Yeah, it was pretty extraordinary what happened last night.
2:15.2	And so initially, the first we heard of this is HHS posts a tweet,
	...

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