Transcript: Obama’s Brutal New Trump Takedown Reveals an Awful Truth

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 21, 2024, episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

At a rally in Nevada over the weekend, Barack Obama offered a blistering new takedown of Donald Trump. Obama warned that Trump’s threats to persecute the enemy within should be taken with deadly seriousness, and made the case that Trump’s latest displays are not just unhinged, but deeply dangerous in someone who could soon be president with no guardrails left. Yet even now, there does seem to be a sizable subset of voters who just don’t take what Trump is saying all that seriously. And time is running out. Veteran political strategist and analyst Michael Podhorzer has a good new piece on his Substack, Weekend Reading, warning that because of this and other dynamics, we may be “sleepwalking toward fascism.” Pretty much exactly what Obama was warning against. Today, we’re talking to Podhorzer about what can be done to turn this all around before it’s too late. Good to have you back on, Michael. 

Michael Podhorzer: Great to be back, Greg, and really impressed with all your valuable reporting on this. 

Sargent: Appreciate it, Michael. Let’s start here: Barack Obama spoke at a rally in Nevada on Saturday, and he said this. 

Barack Obama (audio voiceover): When Donald Trump repeatedly lies or cheats or shows utter disregard for our Constitution or just insults people, when he calls service members who died in battle “losers,” or fellow citizens “vermin,” or “the enemy within,” people make excuses for it. They say, Well, he’s not serious. Everything a president says is serious. Everything that somebody who’s aspiring to office is listened to.

Sargent: Michael, note that Obama took real care to highlight Trump’s comments about persecuting “vermin” and “the enemy within.” That’s the language of dictators, authoritarians, and fascists. And Obama said clearly, Trump means this, people. Are Democrats saying this often enough and effectively enough, Michael? 

Podhorzer: The challenge is that there’s a limit to the impact that just Democrats saying it will have at this point because the voters who don’t believe it by definition are not taking what Democrats say seriously. Anybody who believes that Democrats are credible are already voting for Kamala Harris. The challenge are the people who’ve tuned out of politics, the people who think politicians just really do blah, blah, blah on both sides. They need the people they trust to do what Barack Obama just did for that rally in Arizona. They need to say this is real. This is as real as Dobbs. This is as real as all the other things that you should be concerned about. 

Sargent: Mike, don’t you think that Obama is a very good messenger for some of this? Yes, obviously he’s a politician, but he’s an ex-politician. The American people often, maybe in some cases unjustifiably, give ex-presidents a certain level of stature and hear them differently than they hear other currently operating politicians. What do you think of that? Is Obama a good messenger, particularly for the types of voters that this has to reach? 

Podhorzer: He is a good messenger, but I actually think that the way alarm works in our society is a little bit indirect. Again, not many of the voters we’re talking about are listening to what he’s saying at that rally. In a very subtle but powerful way, the media defines what most of us feel comfortable saying to each other day to day. If you think back four years ago, it was very easy to talk about how alarmed we were about what Trump might do if he lost the election. That’s in part because The New York Times and other outlets were blasting that on their front pages every day. Also at that time, a lot of civil society leaders, and by that I mean religious leaders, and others who have credibility in their communities and aren’t part of politics, had just mobilized around Kids in Cages, or around the George Floyd summer, and were really much more comfortable making the case of how dangerous it would be if Trump had another term than they have been so far this year.

Sargent: I would add that because Trump was in office and voters in 2020 were living through the awful consequences of his unfitness for the presidency in the form of the Covid crisis, people could really connect the chaos and sense of danger that had been loosed in American society to the president who was there. That’s maybe one reason that the media, as you put it, was able to tell that story much more urgently and vividly than they seem to be able to do now. Voters also could connect it themselves.

Podhorzer: Right. Both are true. Absolutely. But that doesn’t alleviate the responsibility to just report what is true, right? You were talking about his comment, Trump’s comments about “vermin” or about “the enemy within.” I don’t know anybody in the media industry who would disagree that if any major party presidential candidate other than Donald Trump in American history had said those things, they wouldn’t be front page, top of the evening news for a week or more. And yet, in almost no major outlets was that the case. 

Sargent: Somebody actually did a mock-up of a headline, a New York Times front page that really told the story very well. General Mark Milley, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has now been revealed to think Trump is “a fascist to the core,” and somebody did a New York Times front page mock-up which had an enormous type, “Top General Warns Trump is ‘Fascist to The Core’.” When you saw that visual, you really understood what it would mean if the press was actually telling people to be alarmed by this. 

Podhorzer: Right. And it just needs to accurately report what’s happening, right? There are some who think the media should, or needs to, advocate, or put spin on it, or [cover this] like this was a sports competition. For me at least, that’s not the point. The point is: If they just accurately reported what we all know to be true and is much more important than what is being reported right now, that’d be enough, because the fact is that a majority of Americans don’t want that. 

Sargent: Right. I’d like to throw a nuance into this discussion here, which is: It actually requires more than just telling readers what the news organization has decided is true. News organizations make decisions about how, and whether they are going to signal whether readers and viewers should be alarmed by something, should take it seriously, should think it’s a big deal. I don’t think that you see that with the press enough on Trump’s authoritarian threats, and his clear unfitness for the presidency. You’ve criticized this before, but the top guy at The New York Times, Joe Kahn, continues to evade criticisms along these lines by saying, Oh, they’re just trying to tell us to be partisan. But that’s not what anyone is asking, or at least that’s not what you and I are asking and what a lot of liberal critics are asking. We’re saying, You made a decision to tell readers and viewers that they should be alarmed by Biden’s age, well, make the same decision about Trump’s authoritarianism. 

Podhorzer: Absolutely. To me, it’s like an incredible disjunction between the below the headlines, what’s being reported by New York Times reporters about what’s going on, and how those are headlined and where they’re put in terms of priority. It’s as if they’re not even reading their own newspaper. 

Sargent: Right, volume and placement matter. It’s not a demand to side with the Democrats. It’s a demand for appropriate volume and placement given the subject matter. I want to move to something you said in your piece about what you call “soft supporters of Kamala Harris”—people could very well decide this election. You looked at data showing that these voters are less likely to believe Trump will follow through on his various threats. For instance, far fewer of them seem worried about Trump’s stated intention to unleash the military on American citizens. Can you talk about who this demographic is, why they matter, and what it means that they don’t take Trump’s threats too seriously? 

Podhorzer: There’s a way in which the media has interpreted the people who say they’re undecided or who seem to be in a “middle” as people who might vote for Harris or might vote for Trump. But what you see is that there’s a pretty substantial group of Americans who are not enthusiastic about Harris, but are as negative about Trump as those who are enthusiastic about Harris, and who have the same concerns as those who are strongly for Harris, but are 15 to 20 points on almost every issue less likely to believe that Trump will do the things they’re concerned about. [They’re], very disproportionately, younger people and folks of color, exactly the population that we keep hearing all these stories about realigning to Republicans. If you think about most people who came into the workforce after The Great Recession, it has been a really rough road, right? The nature of work has changed dramatically. It’s much more precarious; you don’t know what you’re going to be doing two, three years from then. You have variable hours. You don’t have as stable an income as most of the rest of us are used to experiencing, and you get the sense that politicians in both parties are out of touch with that reality. In most other countries when that happens, people don’t vote. Here, they’re voting because over the last few years, Trump has made it clear that it could get even worse if he’s elected. 

One of the really important things to understand about how Joe Biden won in 2020 is that it wasn’t because people who were regular voters, people who had voted in 2016, switched sides. It was because there was a literally unprecedented increase in turnout, and that was disproportionately against Trump. In exit polls, they asked people whether they were voting for their candidate or against the other. About half and half for Biden said they were voting for him or against Trump. Among Trump voters, 80 percent said they were voting for him. All these voters who really turned out in 2020 to defeat Trump were just doing that, defeating Trump. If those voters don’t turn out again, then we go back to something like 2016, where it’ll be close in those electoral college states but could go the other way. 

Sargent: You’re saying that these voters that really need to get flushed into the electorate by fears of a Trump second term are the voters who are younger, nonwhite, and very disillusioned with the system because it really  looks like a fundamental failure to them. 

Podhorzer: That’s exactly what it is. 

Sargent: I think Obama was trying to reach some of these people at his Nevada rally over the weekend. Let’s listen to this. 

Obama (audio voiceover): He said January 6 was a day of love. Said it ... don’t boo. Said it was a day of love. But this is coming from somebody who wants unchecked power, wants the most powerful office on earth with the nuclear codes and all that. The point is we do not need to see what an older, loonier Donald Trump looks like with no guardrails. 

Sargent: Michael, Obama’s trying to bridge a key divide here. Voters seem very willing to see Trump as crude and disgusting and even somewhat unhinged, but they don’t connect this to what a second Trump term would look like. Why do you think there’s this failure in a lot of voters minds to link these two things, especially given what you just said, which is that in 2020, they were able to link these two things in their head. They were saying to themselves, We can’t stand another term of this guy, so we’re going to get out and vote. Why aren’t they in that same frame of mind now? 

Podhorzer: Well, there are a few reasons. First, especially among the youngest voters, remember, they’re coming of age. They didn’t have the same experience that you’re talking about. The media has not made clear that the guardrails that barely kept Trump in check for the first four years are gone. When you think about, for example, the pushback some of his actions got from the judicial system ... back then, there were zero Trump judges, there were zero Aileen Cannons, there were zero Kacsmaryks. He appointed 200 of them already that are going to be judging him in the second one. And a third of this Supreme Court, he appointed. 

Sargent: Absolutely. I want to pick up on what you said there about these very younger voters because this is a crucial demographic. I have heard Democratic strategists talk about this privately to me. They will say, Look, voters who are in their early twenties right now were in high school during Trump’s first term. They don’t remember any of that. 

Podhorzer: That’s absolutely right. And even beyond that, when you survive something, it’s pretty easy to try to put it in the rearview mirror if you can. That’s why it’s especially important that alarm be raised right now to pull people back there. One of the things that is easy to not see is that the voters we’re talking about really have no interest in paying attention to politics. They’re interested in other things, they have their lives to do. There’s a way in which we unconsciously expect others to tell us when it’s a break-glass moment, right? They may hear some of the things that Trump’s saying and actually think, Well, boy, that sounds pretty dangerous. But then no one else is agreeing with that. And so they just figure, Well, maybe not. That’s a big part of the dynamic that’s been going on. 

Sargent: For sure. I do think we’re also talking about a fairly large number of voters who did live as adults through Trump’s first term. A lot of resources are going into getting right-leaning independence, Republican-leaning women, who still seem to think Trump was better on the economy—I don’t know why they think that, but they do. They seem to have forgotten what happened in Trump’s first term, and seem to have erased from their minds 2020, in which Trump drove the economy into the ground, something that was directly linked to his derangement. How did voters forget that part of it? 

Podhorzer: To be fair, part of human nature is a thing called recency bias, which is that you really over-index on what just happened over what happened in the past. For many, what happened recently was rising prices. So it’s not rational, but it is pretty wired into human nature that you are much more cognizant and care more about what just happened than what happened in the past. The other part of it is that the people you’re talking about, that you’re bewildered at that they think Trump was better on the economy, only think that because a survey-taker asked them. It’s not like those people spend their time analyzing who was better on the economy. And even with that, and this is an important criticism of polling in general, there’s not even a follow-up question to think, Well, do you think Trump was good, as opposed to just better than whatever you think Harris is, and do you think that being better on the economy in this vague question actually matters. 

Sargent: It’s a really good point. By the way, I harp on this all the time, but pundits get it very wrong when they say that the economic metric that matters is who do you trust to manage the economy better. In 2012, speaking of Obama, his advisors were telling anyone who had listened, Look, Mitt Romney is beating us on that narrow question, who’s more trusted to manage the economy, but we’re going to win because we are seen as the candidate who’s on the side of ordinary people who understands their needs and concerns. You’re seeing Kamala Harris’s campaign really try to build that side of her up as well, and that’s why I don’t personally take the “Who do you trust on the economy?” numbers as seriously. You’ve been in the trenches of this stuff for a long time. What are your thoughts on how that all works? 

Podhorzer: What you’re saying is right. Pundits basically declare what’s important with no substantiation behind it. If you look at Biden’s approval on the economy and then, a month later, Harris’s approval on the economy—which was much higher—that is not a rational change of heart. She hadn’t done anything on the economy. Most people hadn’t heard what she said about the economy. It’s a silly question to obsess about. 

Sargent: In fact, that shows how absurd that narrow focus is. All of a sudden, this much more energetic figure steps forward and magically she’s got the economic approval higher. Maybe it has to do with the initial perceptions of the public figure, right? 

Podhorzer: Right. Either way, there’s an even more absurd dimension to this, which is that when you think about how much her approval ratings went up and are higher than Biden, and any other one of the super important metrics that pundits tell you to look at, the race basically hasn’t changed since 2016. I mean, we’re basically at the same point, right? 

Sargent: You mean in the sense that Trump, Trump is at 47 percent, maybe 48 percent, the Democrat is maybe at 48 percent, 49. What matters now is that tiny stripe in the middle. 

Podhorzer: Right. And who shows up. What matters is who shows up. 

Sargent: Well, let’s talk about that, Michael. You’ve been a devoted proponent of the idea, as have I, that there is this thing called an anti-MAGA majority out there. The question becomes, Can you mobilize that majority to defeat Trump? Can you mobilize that majority behind the Democratic candidate? Where are you on this question? What do you think is going to happen at this point? This is an extremely close race. Maybe Harris has the slight edge numerically in some of the polling average, but in some of the polling averages, it’s really imperceptible. Where do you see this playing out and how do you get that last point or two to Harris’s camp? 

Podhorzer: Sure. The first thing that I really think has to anchor everything as we go into the next couple of weeks and that week after Election Day while votes are being counted—and who knows what kind of disinformation is out there: Almost certainly, for the third time, a majority of Americans will show up and say they don’t want Trump to be president and they don’t want a MAGA agenda. It is only because having more votes doesn’t count in this country that we are even having this conversation right now.

Sargent: Well put.

Podhorzer: That is really important for us to all remember when we think about, How could America do this? Well, America could do this because of the Electoral College. Really, he’s about to be a three-time loser, and he lost the three midterms where it mattered. So that is the grounding fact about America right now. In those five or six states, it is a much closer question. And in a lot of ways, the 2022 midterms really is the roadmap that answers your question. In those states, people were sufficiently alarmed about the prospect of a Kari Lake or whatever, that they turned out in as large numbers as they had in 2018, the highest midterm in history. But around the rest of the country, where people didn’t see the threat, turnout went down and Democrats lost the House in California and New Jersey and New York. 

 Think about Wisconsin. In Wisconsin in 2016, Trump won by 20,000 votes. In 2020, Biden won by 20,000 votes. That’s what this is coming down to, the margin of effort on our side. What gets those 20,000 to be on our side rather than the other side is the extent to which Wisconsin voters really understand that, if Trump’s elected, there’s a national abortion ban or fill-in-the-blank with the other policies that we’ve been talking about that are enormously unpopular.

Sargent: Or the persecution of “the enemy within” and the “vermin” 

Podhorzer: If they believe that’s really what is coming, Harris is going to win all of those states again. If people feel like, Yeah really not much of a threat, that’s where we have to hold our breaths.

Sargent: Obama seemed to be jarring people, or at least tempting to jar people, into an awareness of the latter. 

Podhorzer: We need more of that. A lot more of that over the next two weeks.

Sargent: Well, I don’t know what to think. You said “we’re sleepwalking toward fascism.” Does that mean you’re pessimistic that that 20,000 will not come out for Harris? 

Podhorzer: I think you know me well enough now. I’m not optimistic or pessimistic. That’s actually one of my biggest critiques of all this forecasting is that if there’s a knowable outcome, then it doesn’t matter what we do, right? And it’s obviously not true. You can’t know what’s going to happen because you don’t know what we’re going to do. You don’t know if we’re going to rise to the occasion or not. So instead of worrying about it, we all just need to do everything we can to make sure everybody we know is sufficiently informed about the stakes of this election. Then, I’m confident he can’t win. 

Sargent: Well said. In essence, it’s really up to us, and I think that the real story here is that each person should go out and get 10 other people to vote, and each one of those people should go get 10 other people to vote. 

Podhorzer: Exactly. That’s the ball game, isn’t it? 

Sargent: Absolutely. It comes down to that. Michael Podhorzer, thank you so much for coming on with us today, man. 

Podhorzer: Thank you.