This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the ...
I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
“White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt is very very angry at the media for reporting”
on the six American troops who have been killed in Donald Trump's war against Iran. She says the press is trying to make Trump look bad as if Trump isn't responsible for the fact that his war of choice is already producing terrible outcomes. This comes amid clear signs that Republicans are growing nervous about the politics of Trump's war. Right now, they're angling to avoid getting too closely tied to it.
We're talking about all this with Tory Otten, a deputy editor at the New Republic who's been writing well about how Trump world is plainly trivializing matters of war, which is making the politics worse for them. Tory, nice to have you on.
Greg, I'm thrilled to be here.
So let's start with Caroline Levitt. The background here is that Defense Secretary Pete Heggseth suggested this week that the media is making American troop deaths and Iran front-page news to make Trump look bad. Now listen to this exchange between Levitt and CNN's Caitlin Collins. Given what Secretary Heggseth said this morning, is it the position of this administration
that the press should not prominently cover the deaths of U.S. service members? No, it's the position of this administration that the press in this room and the press across the country should accurately report on the success of Operation Epic Fury and the damage it is doing to the Roguranian regime that is throughout the lives of every single American in this room. If the Iranian regime had their choice, they would kill every single person
in this room. And so we can all be very grateful that we have an administration and that we have men and women in our armed forces who are willing to sacrifice their own lives for the rest of us in this room. Levitt then actually said that Heggseth didn't make the suggestion that he plainly made. She absurdly accused Collins of being disingenuous and then Collins pointed out that the
media has a responsibility to cover troop deaths than this happened.
“We expect you to cover that as you should Caitlin, but you and your network know that you”
take every single thing this administration says and tries to use it to make the President look bad. That is an objectable fact. I don't think covering troop deaths is trying to make it. If you're trying to argue right now, that CNN's overwhelming coverage is not negative. A President Donald Trump, I think the American people would tend to agree. And your ratings would tend to disumer your
thought as well. Satori, that is remarkable stuff. Levitt is suggesting that the media is covering US deaths to make Trump look bad. I mean, everything has to be all about Trump at all times, right? It seems that way and also the reality of the situation is things are not going according to plan, because as Heggseth was making those comments or report came out that Pentagon officials
are actually pretty worried about US air defense systems holding up against Iranian drone strikes. And we just saw some reports today that said, Sendcom is planning on the war potentially lasting until September, which is far longer than the four week timeline Donald Trump is set out. So just to be clear on what actually happened with Heggseth, I'm going to actually read Heggseth's quote, the one that prompted all of this. He said this quote,
"When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, its front page news, I get it. The press only wants to make the President look bad, but try for wants to report the reality," close quote. He then goes on and says, you know, we're succeeding brilliantly on all that, but there's just no doubt that Heggseth absolutely did say what he said, right? Yeah, in fact, one of the reporters who was in the room, I believe it was Nancy Yusuf
with the Atlantic, she said that when he said that his own aides looked stunned and lowered their heads and someone she didn't identify who, but someone just sort of generally said, "How is the most insulting thing I've ever heard?" Yeah, and I think when you see Levitt do one of these little outrage parades. You know,
things are going badly inside the White House as well, because these shows are always
for the audience of one, right? You know, abuse the press, and then that's going to make
“the despot feel a little better about things. The truth is, things are going roughly”
for them right now, and politically we're seeing signs that Republicans are getting anxious about it. Punchbowl news had a remarkable report that says Republicans really don't want Congress to have to authorize Trump's war, which the Constitution requires, because, quote, Republicans would prefer to keep their hands clean on the conflict for as long as possible,
Especially given the uncertainty over how long this could last and how it'll ...
Close quote. Tory, I mean, that really explains why Republicans don't want Congress to vote on this, right? Yeah, and in fact, it's more than just they're trying to play hot potato with responsibility for the war. Some Republicans are actually openly speaking against it. Representative Warren Davidson, a couple days ago, he said the country is sick of forever wars, and then Wednesday night on the House floor, he goes, recall that Democrats needed help
answering what is a woman. Unfortunately, Republicans now want to claim they can't answer what is a war, which is a nice little one-two-punch of culture war for him there. But they're
“really not supportive of this war, and I think they know that their constituents aren't either.”
Yeah, and in fact, punchball also reports that Republicans, quote, want to keep the war in Trump's hands for as long as they can without requiring further congressional action. Close quote. Now, that, I think, really illustrates what's going on in the heads of Republicans right now. They just want it to be Trump's war. They will obviously back the commander and chief
and all that, and you know, they would never criticize anything Trump's doing, but they want
it squarely understood as Trump's and maybe not as much theirs, right? Yeah, and they're certainly trying to talk their way around it at their very least, going jumping through all of these major hoops to avoid saying that it is a war or to try and take back when they do accidentally admit what it is. Yeah, in fact, I'm glad you brought that up because that's another sign of rising Republican anxiety about the war. CNN has this great montage of Republicans doing what you just said,
which is struggling to avoid calling our attack on Iran a war. Listen to this. Nobody should classify this as war. It is combat operations. I wouldn't call this a war as much as I'd call a conflict that should be very short and sweet. I don't know if this is technically a war. We have declared war. So if we have declared war, then I don't see that. The president
“asked us to declare war yet, but they have declared war on us. Do you consider it a war?”
It's a significant military operation. Strategic strikes are not war. They have declared war on us. I don't believe in the semantics. We've talked about the language this morning. We're not at war right now. We're if four days in to a very specific clear mission and operation. Those are all congressional Republicans and what's funny or maybe not so funny is the Trump and his officials have been calling this a war themselves. None. Stop. Tory Republicans don't want
to call this a war. For two reasons, I think, because it would reveal their own crave and abdication of their responsibility to authorize it, but also because as punch balls showed, they're worried about where it's all going. Your thoughts on all that? Largely, this war is very unpopular and it's incredibly hypocritical considering Trump ran on being the peace president and getting America out of forever wars. But maybe he thinks
because he stopped eight wars, he can start one of his own as a treat.
“Yeah, right. Well, I think you get at something important there, which illustrates another”
reason they're trying to avoid calling it a war. It's because the MAGA base is or at least some
of the main MAGA influencers are really in an uproar over this and they're basically saying that
it was a broken promise and Trump MAGA is supposed to be all about, you know, opposition to forever wars and no foreign entanglement and making sure that all of our military arsenal is focused at the enemy at home within immigrants and their U.S. citizen allies and not maybe on foreign adventures. He and his team are trying to make this as palatable to his base as possible by pushing that this is actually about all of the goals that he says he has, which is about
strengthening America. This is about stamping out foreign invaders. This is about tackling. We saw Steven Miller use the word savages earlier today. So really trying to push the same messages that he has been pushing about a lot of the initiatives he's been making at home, such as mass deportations and trying to shut down the border, targeting people of color, things like that. Yeah, I thought JD Vance's tap dancing on this was pretty interesting. He was
out there basically saying, okay, we did run against forever wars, but you know those past forever
wars were ones that were launched by stupid presidents and this is a smart president. You know, putting aside the absurdity of that, it's like no, you know, no one's going to be fooled into thinking that Trump has really strategically thought this through in a very smart way, especially
Since at the exact same time that Vance is saying that they're like giving 15...
for or definitions of what success would look like, right? Yeah, it's hard when the administration itself doesn't seem to have created a cohesive message for what this war is about and why we're doing it. You saw Marco Rubio just a few days ago saying that we entered the war because we knew
Israel was going to and so we may as well have struck first. That's paraphrasing quite heavily,
but the just of it was we entered the war because Israel was planning to and then the very next day he said he hadn't said that at all. And in fact, a reporter, when a reporter asked him about it, he said you weren't there yesterday when I explained it and the reporter said yes, I was I asked
“the question that prompted that answer. To stay up to date on all the news that you need to know,”
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Nutella for guests. It's right out. It's made this on him list before we have the month one. No Nutella, it's Nutella. Yeah, in fact, that kind of gets it another reason Republicans, I think, are getting anxious.
“Trump just isn't even bothering to try to create what you call the cohesive message or”
or like a coherent story about what they're doing. He's just not bothering like, that's sort of something you would expect Trump to be doing since there's a midterm election coming up, but he's just not adding to the anxiety among Republicans might be just how fundamentally on serious the White House is being about this in another way. We just saw the White House Twitter feed post this absolutely disgusting video, which presented footage from the war,
bombings, and so forth, but packaged it as a video game, complete with dramatic music, like and and like the trappings of like a video game visually on the screen. It's just awful. And so you've got like on the one side, love it, protesting that no, we're not trivializing American troop deaths by making them all about Trump. But then you've got them absolutely trivializing what the troops are going through. You wrote this piece about this broader
tendency of Trump world to reduce everything to a kind of like video game fantasy realm.
“Can you talk about all that? Like, what did you make of that video and in that broader context?”
Yeah, that video actually is footage of the conflict spliced with animation scenes from a call of duty video game. And it includes little point counters on the screen whenever one of the
U.S. whenever the U.S. lands a strike in the conflict footage. And this isn't the first time
that the administration has sort of portrayed attacking foreigners shall we say as a video game. There was a campaign to promote the Department of Homeland Security that used the phrase "destroy the flood", which is a tagline from the video game Halo. In Halo, you're trying to get rid of a literal sort of outer space alien hoard. Obviously, this Homeland Security Department is trying to get rid of immigrants. And I wrote this piece with our political reporter Grace Seegers.
We co-authored it. Just looking at the way that this administration in particular has harnessed video game language and imagery to try and encourage people to almost distance themselves from violence a little bit in order to make it more palatable. And that's not to say that social media and video games are on their own going to make people more violent. But it is in the context of this administration and the way that they are encouraging people to
view video games and violence can create a pretty dangerous situation. Basically, if you encourage
people to see real life as a video game, then you stop thinking of other people as human beings.
You start to think of them as just players who don't act on their own.
have feelings. And it's a lot easier to become okay with removing people particularly violently
“from the country if you don't consider them human beings. And so that's why you're seeing this”
administration really encourage Americans to view people of color in particular as subhuman. And Trump and Steven Miller have used language like this before. They've obviously Steven Miller said savages today, but Trump's used the word "verman" on the campaign trail a lot. And this is something that they've been doing for a while. It's not just
Halo. It's not just Call of Duty imagery now. They have, I think, always tried to
trivialize human beings and deportations. And that's why we've seen other videos of deportations being set to popular songs or AI being used to create studio jibbly inspired imagery. You're just really being encouraged not to view these things as something that's happening in the real world. You're being told to think of it as it's all just a game. And you're going to win.
“Yeah, I think you're getting at this deep tension in maga that I just want to close on. So on the”
one hand, it's just simply true that the maga masses view a lot of this stuff as entertainment. You saw those pictures early on of the now-fired homeland security secretary, Christy Nome, posing in an almost weirdly suggestive way in front of prisons full of dark people with tattoos, migrants. Right? You see, as you said, the DHS Twitter feed is constantly pumping out this sort of, I guess you could call it violence against migrants porn or something like that. It almost is
actually like that. And so maga does thrill to the sadism of things like that. And it does thrill to the idea of blowing up things in the middle. Right? And so when they portray it like that on the White House Twitter feed, they are actually speaking to some big segments of the maga base that do view things that way. But it is happening in the real world. And when it actually becomes clear that they view this in trivial terms, it looks really terrible. And so you've got
Caroline Levitt kind of lashing out when people point out the trivialization of all this. And so they're caught in this weird place where they have to minister to a base that at least parts of it do live in the fantasy world you're talking about. But on the other hand, there's a real world that's blowing back on Republicans politically. Can you just talk about that weird tension a little bit? Yeah, I think we saw it start on the campaign trail where Trump made a very clear effort
to port voters who were young men with a sort of chronically online personality. So they listened to podcasts that really talked up men's rights. They were big fans of Andrew Tate. They
were big fans of UFC matches. And typically not always. But a lot of the time, young men like
that they tend to be very isolated, particularly after the pandemic, younger men have said they really struggle to make connections offline. And instead view online relationships as some of their most important and also most aspirational. They really view men like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan as someone is as a role model. And instead, you get these men who are encouraging really horrific views about women and minorities and anyone who is kind of not a straight white man. But when you call
and that is the audience that they're trying to appeal to now with these video game-esque videos and promotions of conflict. But when that is the main base that you've cultivated,
“you have to keep them. And you can already see their polls coming out that many of those”
young male voters are starting to get buyers remorse over the 2024 election. And so if you're trying to hold on to those voters, you are then left with the reality that you've isolated the majority of everybody else who do not like what this war is and they don't want this to happen. They didn't vote for it, they don't support it. And their elected representatives have not declared war.
Yeah, and this is a real problem for a public. And so basically there's a throughline here
between the nasty rotation campaign and all the horrific violence that's unleashed and the war,
Right?
both the nasty rotations and the war, right? Because these guys who sort of have a foot in that
weird fantasy world are suddenly confronting the reality of what it is Trump was actually
“peddling to them. And the dissonance is very profound, I think.”
Yeah, there's a real divide between what Trump said he would do and what he is currently doing.
And it's one of those weird situations where us as journalists, we saw that. We remember the first
“time we kind of knew it was coming. But he marketed himself very well on the campaign trail,”
it would seem to the right kind of people who would be fired up enough to vote for him.
And now they're really getting the short end of the stick with it.
“But what I still want to tell you, you didn't want to get the whole studio,”
the master by tag-leptor Bücher soft-behind the internet, so master is really great. But you can say that you're a hero. You're a hero, right? But you're not. Egal, it's just a failure to do. Do you just do it with this story? And if you then work, it's a chain. That's right. Save, this story.
