During his first term as president, Donald Trump bitterly clashed with a long list of conservative Republicans who served in his administration — including those he chose for secretary of state (Rex Tillerson), national security adviser (John Bolton) and White House chief of staff (John F. Kelly). Trump fired his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and his third White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, ended up giving Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris an enthusiastic endorsement at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
But President Trump, during his second term, is making a concerted effort to surround himself with MAGA loyalists.
In an appearance on The New Republic's podcast "The Daily Blast" posted on March 13, Salon's Amanda Marcotte argued that Trump living a "bubble" could be why he's been lashing out at journalists so much in recent press conferences. According to Marcotte, Trump is only listening to by sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear — meaning reporters questioning policy sometimes catch him off-guard.
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Marcotte told "Daily Blast" host Greg Sargent: "My sense of what's going on with him is that he's more sheltered from outside information than he ever has been before. It seems increasingly clear to me, especially when you look at his schedule, that he's spending a lot more time sheltered in a little bubble surrounded by friends and advisers who are doing a North Korea–style everything-is-good-news thing because nobody wants to give him the bad news. When he's confronted with certain realities — like this is not going well, people do not like Elon Musk, you're going to cause a recession, and there's no way you can hide that fact — I think he's starting to sweat it because the cognitive dissonance is probably worse than ever before with him."
The Salon journalist told Sargent when Trump is pushing a really bad idea — such as steep new tariffs on major U.S. allies— his "new friends in the tech bro world" are "feeding this delusion."
"They — Elon Musk’s friends — are on Twitter pushing this idea," Marcotte explained. "That's where his obsession with the late 19th and early 20th Century is coming from. It's coming from these people that are blowing smoke up his a-- about it, saying: Yeah, tariffs were the time of this great pre-20th Century economy. Well, no. He obviously is bad at math and doesn't understand that you can't just replace income taxes with a sales tax — even a really, really high sales tax — for multiple reasons."
Marcotte added, "The amount of revenue generated would never be even close to enough. And that's not to say the total and absolute economic damage that comes from hitting the people who can least afford it the hardest."
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Trump is known for watching Fox News a lot, and Marcotte observed that the pro-Trump messaging on the right-wing cable news outlet is coming in different forms.
Marcotte told Sargent, "There's two modes on Fox News; Media Matters had a really good article about this. You have some hosts on Fox News who are, again, working like palace advisers of a North Korean or other totalitarian government, telling fragile dear leader that there’s nothing wrong, that recession fears aren’t real, that everything’s great, that his plans are perfect, nothing is ever going to go wrong. Then you have other hosts who recognize that the one thing you can't BS people about is inflation and crashing stock markets and things like that, and they're on TV basically begging him to stop. Laura Ingraham had a segment where she was saying: Please, please don’t do this, knowing that talking to him through the TV is the only way to get his attention.
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Listen to Greg Sargent's full interview with Salon's Amanda Marcotte for The New Republic at this link or read the transcript here.