The Daily Blast: Angry Trump Storms Out of On-Air Interview For Unnervingly Dark Reason

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“Over the weekend, Donald Trump erupted in crazed fury”

at NBC's Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. What enraged him is that she dared to ask him for evidence to back up his many lies, in this case about elections in California, allegedly being rigged against the GOP candidates. But we think this episode deserves a deeper deconstruction.

A big reason Trump is so angry, we think, is that the MAGA online disinformation universe has been unable to entirely reinvent reality and use propaganda to inflate the GOP candidate's strength into something it isn't. In a sense, then, this saga is really about the failures of MAGA propaganda.

So, we're talking about all of it with Guild Iran, a tech writer who's based in California and tracks all this stuff. Good to have you on, Guild. Thanks for having me. So, in two big races in California,

the GOP candidates are struggling as the votes get counted. In the Los Angeles mirror race, democratic incumbent Karen Bass leads and progressive candidate Nithiaramann has pulled ahead of Republican reality TV star Spencer Pratt

“for second place and a chance to go to the general election.”

In the California governor's race,

Republican Steve Hilton is vying with Tom Stier for second place.

Guild, can you just tell us a little bit about Spencer Pratt and Steve Hilton and why the online right is so heavily invested in them? Sure. Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt are right-wing

de-list celebrities who are desperate enough for attention to run for office in California, where they have virtually no chance of winning. And so, both of them have backgrounds, I would say, mostly as entertainers,

Spencer Pratt was a reality TV star or sort of villainous character on a show called The Hills for many years. And Steve Hilton has a political background in the UK, where he was an advisor, David Cameron, but most recently since the coming of the United States

has been a Fox News host. And he went from being a guy who was sort of a, what we would have considered a moderate Republican to being a complete right-wing lunatic during his time at Fox News. I know this because I actually met with Steve Hilton

when he moved to the USA in 2014, and he was a totally different guy than he was a few years later on Fox News. And so, both of them are trying to parlay their status as these sort of entertainer,

right-wing low-level celebrities into political office in California, but that's not very easy to do. And just to be clear, what this means for Spencer Pratt

is that if he gets edged out of second place

by the progressive Nithia Ramen, then he doesn't get to go to the general, correct? And so, what's really at stake here is that as the votes get counted, it's really possible Spencer Pratt

gets knocked out of contention. Is that what the situation is? Yeah, and it looks like it's pretty certain that he's now knocked out of contention. In the LA Mayor's race and in the California

gubernatorial race, the top two vote getters get to go to the general election. And in the gubernatorial race, it looks pretty clear that Steve Hilton will probably be in the general election.

He's edging out billionaire Tom Styer for votes. Looks like Styer is going to come in third place, so it'll be Hilton versus Bessera. You'll have a Republican in a Democrat in the gubernatorial race. But the LA race is nonpartisan.

And LA is heavily democratic by voter registration. LA is 52% Democratic voters compared to 19% Republican. So, with Spencer Pratt running

it's not a big surprise that he wouldn't make the top two.

In fact, the poll showed him in third.

What happened though is that in California the early votes tend to be the more conservative ones. And so there was this idea that maybe he would make it and that turns out to be a false prediction or false assumption.

And most people familiar with the process knew that was a likely outcome. So that's the context for Trump's blow up with NBC's Kristen Welger. Here's what happened.

Trump first lied his ass off about the 2020 election being rigged. She challenged that. Then he brought up the California races and said those are also rigged.

Kristen Welger challenged that as well. She said, "Look, you're candid. It's meaning the two Republicans we're discussing here. Look, they're doing well." She said to Trump.

Then Trump said, "Well, no, they're not.

They're dropping fast." And Trump meant by this that they're dropping fast as the votes are getting counted. Listen to how it went south from there. They're dropping fast

because it's a rigged election. Let me tell you, it's four days and they aren't even close to coming up with and saying, "You know why they're doing that because they're cheating on the election."

"What do you have evidence?" "To support." "All I have to do is look." "All I have to do is look." "That's not it."

"But I listen." "And I listen to people." "And let's see what happens." "That's not evidence." "You think it's appropriate."

"That's how they have the votes." "You think it's appropriate." "That they have an election." "And five days later, they're nowhere close to picking it up." "Ding local officials acknowledge they are slow.

They're urging." "No, they're crooked." "They're urging the votes to be counted."

“"That's how they think it's appropriate."”

"They're crooked." "Just like you're crooked." "You're press's crooked." "And meet the press's crooked." "To be fair, I'm not crooked."

"But let's listen." "Really?" "When you play right into their hands." "That's continued." "You read the crooked or you stupid."

"So according to Trump, "Welker is crooked because she won't simply accept Trump's word that the elections are rigged." "No doubt, Wilker said, "What evidence is there of rigging in the California races?"

And Trump said, "All you have to do is look." In other words, he gets to dictate what reality is. So he doesn't have to show any facts or evidence. He reactioned all that. "Well, this is typical Trump.

He's been doing this for years and years. He tries to create his own version of reality and insist that other people agree with it. So the main enemy, the main challenge that Republicans have in California is called simple math.

Right? There was a very low likelihood that Spitzer Pratt was going to make it out of the LA mayor's race to the general, out of the primary. And Steve Hilton has a better chance of making it to the general in the, in the, in the editorial race,

but he has zero chance of winning the election because the Republican Party is only 25% of California voters whereas Democrats have like 45%. So you don't really have a math that adds up to a Republican victory,

“but this is important to Trump because Trump's brand is about winning.”

He can't accept that his party and his politics are so unpopular in California. So in order to maintain his winning image, he creates this counter reality in which it's all because of fraud on the part of the Democrats and then he would have actually won.

He said actually in 2020 that he would have won the race if Jesus had been allowed to count the votes. Whatever that means, but he's long been on this idea that the only reason California is a democratic state is because of cheating.

And there's zero evidence of that, but they are continuing to push this mythology

because the reality is too painful to face,

which is that as Arnold Schwarzenegger said in 2007, the California Republican Party is dying at the box office. Right, I think that Trump is clearly much more angry about the Spencer Pratt situation here. I believe he's separately already said that the election

has rigged against Spencer Pratt. And as you say, it looks like Spencer Pratt is less likely to get into the final round where Steve Hilton really could. And so what Trump is really raging over here is that

as the votes are getting counted, the candidate that Trump endorsed is not getting into the final round. The earliest returns are always the most conservative, because conservatives vote on election day because they've been taught that vote by mail is evil.

And so in the early returns, you always see a more conservative trend, but as the votes are counted,

“which in democracy you have to count the votes,”

those Republican margins slimmed down and they were Republicans often fall into a much lower place. And so what Trump is doing is exploiting this simple, very well-known mechanism. We all knew that the Republican numbers go down to create a false narrative for the Maga audience,

to continue this kind of complaint of fraud and the theory that he's so fond of. And so that's why it's the very simple mechanism.

You claim that any deviation from those early returns

is evidence of a crime of some kind. And that's pretty much it. He doesn't believe it, and I don't think most Republicans believe it. This was also being pushed by Ron DeSantis and other Republicans,

but they know that people in their audience will believe it.

“And that's how they keep this flame of a grieved,”

Republican anger going that everywhere they look, there's fraud, even California's being stolen from them, and it's just completely bunk. Now, the cheeset. A new kind of legacy of the Kirstlich-Lachkaise smacked. Now, the Kirstlich-Lachkaise smacked.

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“The basic story here is that he's just everywhere on X, Elon Musk's X anyway.”

And on TikTok, he's a fixture. He's, you know, he's got over a million followers on X. And there are all these AI videos going around casting him as Batman and Karen Bass, the Democratic incumbent as the Joker, according to Duresta, Renee Duresta, that got more than 5 million views.

And so, this is really a creation of the extremely online fascist maga right. Isn't it? He is a creation of these influencers. Definitely, no one was really paying too much attention to Spencer Pratt before this selection. But actually, he popped his head up because his home burned up in the fires. And there, he started gaining an online following through being this sort of angry right-winger,

claiming the Democratic government because there was a big fire that burned everybody's homes. Well, California has a lot of natural disasters. So, to Republican states, you generally don't see everybody blaming Republicans when there's a disaster there.

But in California, it always gets politicized.

So, he kind of made himself a political figure by dramatizing his own experience, losing his home in the fire. And that was just enough to give him sort of enough of a profile

Because generally what you have in California is Republicans run for governor, for mayor of LA, knowing they won't win.

“So, you end up getting an attention-hound whose job is just to put on a show and create some spectacle of a fight”

and try to cause as much damage as possible and bring in Republican and right-wing money to really just screw with Democrats. Because they're really, they're not going to win. They're really screwing with Democrats. So, they hope, I guess, that, you know, it's a Hail Mary Pass. Maybe people will be angry enough for enthused enough about a Republican candidate who's popular online to win.

What they find, however, is that being viral online is not necessarily the same thing as being popular in the real world. Twitter, especially, and TikTok to some degree, create these alternate realities where you think these things are really big and everybody's talking about them, but most people have very different concerns about their city. They're not untick-talk or Twitter all day. They don't know what Spencer Pratt just tweeted or what Elon Musk tweeted about them, etc. And so, when that reality hits, they're very upset because they jing themselves up into believing that this candidate's going to win.

And what they're all going for really is the model that Trump said when he won. He sort of became the biggest character in American politics using Twitter. Also came from a reality TV background, like Spencer Pratt, and was able to become president.

But just because you can do something once, doesn't mean you can always do it.

“And even before Trump, you had Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was the last Republican governor of California, who was only became governor because he was a world famous actor, right?”

And so, he was able to do it. But then that was the last Republican we ever had, Arnold left with like a 27%. Maybe less approval rating. So, even if you do win, it can be bad news. So, they tried to make Fetch happen.

They tried to, it was this, what Deresta calls the Red Mirage. This idea that a Republicans about to win California, everybody knows it because it's happening on X and tick-tuck. But when the votes get counted, it turns out that virality is not the same thing as votes. And they lose and so then they immediately pivot to calling it fraud because they are sore losers and big man babies in reality. And Donald Trump, essentially, imbibed what's going on in the right wing bubble on this.

He internalized this picture of Spencer Pratt as this very powerful figure in the context of Los Angeles politics.

And so you can kind of see his eruption of fury at Kristen Welker as his bubble bursting, right? He looks at the situation. He says, well, this can't be happening. He can't be falling behind in real life because the online universe told me that he was going to win.

“So, that's what's really going on here with this whole Kristen Welker confrontation, I think.”

Trump's bubble bursting and him wrestling with the reality that his candidate is not actually going to become the mayor of Los Angeles. And this is very personal for Trump because the idea that he won the 2020 election, the lie that he won the 2020 election, is a central part of his mythology now. There was no way he could lose. He was supposed to be the winner, yet he lost. And that's this unresolved issue that we're all going to have to deal with at some point because Trump seems to believe that he's owed for that.

Maybe owed an extra term. And if you remember 2020, I seem to recall Trump was arguing that the vote should stop counting at a certain time, like the day of the election, well, he's ahead.

So, he has a very childlike corrupt view of what politics is. He should always win, is basically his fascist argument.

And, you know, there are people who agree with him, a very small number of people in the country, but that's the audience he has to keep behind him because other people are starting to peel off as it becomes more and more in popular. Spencer Pratt is also the candidate of at least some tech people. Can you talk a little bit about that? Definitely, we've seen this right word shift in Silicon Valley over right word shift. I would argue there's always been some right wing politics there. But whenever you get a spectacle like this of a right wing type of person running for office, you can now count on the billionaires of Silicon Valley to throw in money and try to make it a real thing.

So Spencer Pratt had money from a surrogly brain of Google, who's now pretty much a right-winger, Joe Lonsdale of Palantir, who's completely off the charts for a right recently called for public executions in the United States. And so you can always count on having them throw in some money. On the state level, a lot of the right-wing guys, right-wing tech guys got behind the candidacy of Matt Mayhen, the mayor of San Jose, who was trying to run as a moderate. People weren't buying that, so we can expect the right-wing tech money now to go behind Steve Hilton if he makes the general. Again, they're not betting on victory, they're betting on disruption and chaos.

So how does this all unspool from here? Basically, the most likely scenario is that Spencer Pratt gets bumped out of contention for LA mayor.

“And Steve Hilton goes on to the general for governor and most likely loses at the end of the day to save you the Sarah, right?”

Oh, definitely Steve Hilton is almost guaranteed to lose to Bessera, who's not a particularly strong Democrat, but California is so democratic that even if her very receiver were dead, he would still beat Steve Hilton in general election. I mean, there's just no path really for Hilton to win.

“Pratt seems mathematically impossible for him now to regain the second slot, so he probably won't be in the race.”

He has said that if he lost, he would move out of Los Angeles, which is a pretty loser thing to say, you don't really hear people who want to be the mayor or want to be the governor say I'm going to move out of the state. You're supposed to act like I'm going to stay here no matter what and continue to work to help my community and then run again in four years when your challengers unpopular if they win.

“So again, it's just that they're going to fold up their tents and go on to the next thing after this. I mean, I think that Steve Hilton is probably just trying to get another show on Fox.”

His was canceled because no one was watching it, so this is for him an audience building exercise more than anything.

Although there was a piece in the financial times over the weekend where these three brits said, it's amazing that he's the front run and he's had this major political turnaround.

These are people with no idea of California politics. He's just simply the guy who's desperate enough for attention that he's willing to lose the governor's race to get it. And that's exactly what's going to happen. Well, I sure hope so, Gilderan, folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Gild's new book. It's coming out in mid August. That's called the Nerd Reich. Silicon Valley fascism and the war on democracy.

Gild, always great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me.