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THE DAILY BLAST with Greg SargentTrump’s Ugly, Hateful Eruptions Over CA Wildfires Hint at Darker Story
THE DAILY BLAST with Greg SargentTrump’s Ugly, Hateful Eruptions Over CA Wildfires Hint at Darker Story
Trump’s Ugly, Hateful Eruptions Over CA Wildfires Hint at Darker Story
Update: 2025-01-09
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With wildfires raging in Los Angeles, Donald Trump unleashed some ugly and hateful tirades on Truth Social. He attacked California Governor Gavin Newsom with a vile slur, blamed the fires on him and President Biden, and even scapegoated environmental protections, which Newsom’s office dismissed as pure fiction. We think this is best seen as another example of how the MAGA right wing seeks to thoroughly degrade public life at every conceivable opportunity. We talked to Nicole Hemmer, a leading historian of the conservative movement and the right wing media. She explains how today’s MAGA derangement traces its lineage back many decades, and discusses how we should respond. Listen to this episode here.
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00:00:00
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00:00:54
[MUSIC]
00:01:04
This is The Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.
00:01:10
I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
00:01:12
[MUSIC]
00:01:22
With wildfires raging out of control in Los Angeles, Donald Trump unleashed some truly ugly and hateful attacks on California's governor, Gavin Newsom.
00:01:31
This might seem like Trump being Trump, and a lot of reporters will treat it that way.
00:01:36
But we think there's another way to look at this.
00:01:39
It's yet another example of how the right wing, particularly in the MAGA era, seeks to thoroughly degrade public life in every conceivable way it can, and looks for every way it can find to turn Americans against each other at the most critical moments.
00:01:54
Today we're super excited to be talking about all this when Nicole Hammer, who's one of the best historians of the right wing out there today.
00:02:01
She's the author of a number of books most recently Partisans, which traces today's moment back to the 1990s.
00:02:08
Nicole, thanks so much for coming on.
00:02:10
>> Thanks so much for having me, Greg.
00:02:13
Okay, so the wildfires in California, they're just the horror, thousands are fleeing at least two are dead as of now.
00:02:20
But Trump attacked the governor as Gavin Newsom, blaming the fires on the incompetence of the Biden Newsom duo as he put it.
00:02:29
Trump said Biden was leaving him no money in FEMA and blamed the lack of water to fight the fires on California and environmental policy, which Newsom's office immediately shot down his pure fiction.
00:02:40
In fact, Newsom has poured huge amounts of money into firefighting and forest management.
00:02:45
What's your immediate reaction to this from Trump?
00:02:48
>> It definitely is the case that this is something Trump does, right?
00:02:53
He takes these moments and moments that used to be a time when people began to come together a little bit, at least in that period of immediate disaster when they're shocked and horror.
00:03:08
You and I grew up in a period where we had the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine shootings, with so many different natural disasters.
00:03:17
And they have been these moments when people found a kind of common humanity.
00:03:23
And I don't want to paint a too rosy picture of it.
00:03:26
But I do think that there is something substantially different about entering that moment and saying actually the person responsible for your problems are my political enemies.
00:03:36
And instead of focusing on rebuilding, you should focus on hating them.
00:03:40
>> Yeah, I want to try to understand this as a full on right wing mega effort to degrade public life.
00:03:46
Everything is about seizing on every opportunity to spread, deranged conspiracy theories, turn people against each other.
00:03:54
When the flooding in North Carolina happened during the campaign for instance.
00:03:58
Remember, Trump and Maga pushed all kinds of lies about the disaster response.
00:04:02
When Trump was president during COVID, he used it to attack blue state governors and blame them.
00:04:08
Can you talk about this impulse as a kind of broader phenomenon of the right wing today?
00:04:14
>> Yeah, this desire to metastasize disasters, to make them worse than they actually are.
00:04:22
It does strike me as something novel about the right certainly within the last 15 years.
00:04:29
I think it goes back a little bit further because I'm a historian and that's what I'm going to say.
00:04:32
But there is something that is a combination, I think of the malignancy of Donald Trump himself, who is constantly seeking ways to be in the headlines,
00:04:44
the media environment in which we live.
00:04:47
That really favors this kind of outrage and negative emotion and a conservative media ecosystem that takes that revved up,
00:04:59
let's make everybody angry, sort of dynamic, and applies it directly to electoral politics.
00:05:06
And I think all those things come together in order to turn everything that happens into an opportunity for a fight.
00:05:15
And into an opportunity to make everyone feel worse than they already felt.
00:05:20
And that, I think, gets to the heart of what you're saying about the degradation of public life.
00:05:24
That everything just feels worse all the time.
00:05:28
>> You wrote a book about the right wing media called messengers of the right, gets into the whole history of its evolution, gets it some of its darker impulses over the years.
00:05:38
I think you're getting it something critical here when you say there's a bit of a different thing going on.
00:05:43
And I wonder if technological change is part of it.
00:05:46
Elon Musk is right now fanning the flames of hate around the California stuff, which, you know, he essentially bought Twitter to elevate and expand and spread deranged right wing conspiracy theories to make it a space for that.
00:06:06
Does that make things worse?
00:06:08
Is that something new?
00:06:09
Is that sort of part of what we're seeing now?
00:06:12
>> It's sort of like we've reached the apotheosis or like the height of all of these different trends with both Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
00:06:20
We certainly could go back and we could look at conservative media, which has for decades really been a site of conspiracy theorizing and partisan attacks.
00:06:30
That's not anything that's new.
00:06:33
But it's combination with electoral politics.
00:06:37
I think that's something that really started to come of age in the 1990s.
00:06:41
And then you layer on top of it this kind of, not just anger, but a kind of meanness that has become the overarching sort of emotional scale or the emotional tenor of right wing media.
00:06:58
It used to be you would have to turn on Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck in order to access that.
00:07:03
And now you just have to listen to a Republican politician and you're going to get sort of uncut, unmediated conspiracy theories and cruelty.
00:07:13
>> It's really interesting that you say that because for a time during the talk radio era, it was a sort of separate space.
00:07:20
I can recall a time when older people who were sort of seeking refuge from the modern world would turn on right wing talk radio and it seemed like a separate realm.
00:07:33
And yet now the idea of a separate realm is gone.
00:07:37
It's all sort of merged together.
00:07:40
All these Republican politicians are constantly tweeting out the most sick means that you can imagine.
00:07:47
Has there been sort of an erosion where the separate spaces where this once resided are now gone?
00:07:55
It's all one.
00:07:57
>> It is all one big mass and all one big mess.
00:08:01
And it is an erosion that's been happening over time.
00:08:04
I really would root this in the 1990s when the lines between politics and entertainment begin to erode.
00:08:11
And also when Republican politicians really begin to take their cues from right wing media, I think about the suicide events faster in 1993.
00:08:21
And the conspiracy theories around his suicide, this idea that the Clintons had him murdered.
00:08:27
This was extremely popular in right wing media, but it very quickly jumps over into Republican politicians.
00:08:34
You had one member of Congress, Dan Coats, who talked on the floor about going into his backyard, getting a melon and a handgun.
00:08:43
And proving he said that Vince Foster couldn't have shot himself, but it had to be a murder.
00:08:48
And that kind of almost right wing radio cosplay is happening in the 1990s.
00:08:55
And now we see it not just in a one off representative from Indiana, but in almost the entirety of the Republican caucus.
00:09:03
And I think that's what feels different is that that sort of erosion of any sort of subred sphere for some of the craziness.
00:09:12
That it has infected the entire party, but it's also infected all of us, right?
00:09:16
We can't escape from it either.
00:09:18
>> The use of these moments to degrade public life and make people dumber also has a history.
00:09:24
You write about Pat Robertson in your book, "Partisons."
00:09:28
He seized on natural disasters to cast them as punishment for social liberalism.
00:09:33
I guess in a way you can see Magas conduct as kind of an updated secularized version of this.
00:09:39
In the sense that disasters are always cast as a failure of democratic governance, profligacy, or in other cases with COVID's initial spread in blue cities.
00:09:50
It was attacked as a sign that cosmopolitan urban areas are corrupted and invested and diseased.
00:09:56
Is there kind of a through line from that sort of Pat Robertson religious right stuff right through to the way Maga does it today?
00:10:04
>> I think there is.
00:10:05
I mean, I do think that there are two ways that conservatives got to natural disasters as political opportunities.
00:10:13
Certainly it comes up through the religious right.
00:10:15
Pat Robertson is saying that everything from hurricanes to earthquakes to tornadoes.
00:10:20
These are all God's punishment.
00:10:22
Even in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina happened, there was a pastor John Hagee who said, "Have you been to New Orleans?
00:10:32
You see the way that they are.
00:10:33
You see what sinful people they are.
00:10:35
God has sent this punishment against them."
00:10:38
You have that history and that rhetoric.
00:10:41
I also think that Hurricane Katrina is a really important moment here because Hurricane Katrina was badly mismanaged by the Bush administration.
00:10:51
And that was something that benefited Democrats because Americans hated the way the Bush responded to Katrina.
00:11:00
And Republicans took from that not that they should be better at responding to natural disasters, but that you could seize on a natural disaster to injure the Democrats.
00:11:08
And so when Barack Obama takes office, they first take the deepwater horizon oil spill and they try to turn that into Obama's Katrina.
00:11:17
And so you have Republican politicians who are on the one hand like talking to the administration and getting all sorts of help from the administration and then going on Fox News and talking about how terrible and unresponsive the Obama administration is.
00:11:31
You see it in Superstorm Sandy.
00:11:34
You'll remember that Chris Christie was persona non grata for years because he accepted aid from the Obama administration.
00:11:41
And I think that that's an important turning point because Republicans realized that they could make political hay from natural disasters.
00:11:48
And then you get to Donald Trump and he's like, "Hey, every time a natural disaster happens, I can make political hay out of it."
00:11:55
And so whether it is a hurricane in Puerto Rico or fires out in California, what you get is a purely partisan political response to what's happening.
00:12:10
I think there's another good example of this as well.
00:12:12
Remember when the chemical train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, MAGA figures tried to cast it as proof that liberal elites were deliberately abandoning a virtuous white working class community.
00:12:24
They actually racialized that JD Vance even did a little bit of that.
00:12:28
If you'll recall on Twitter and on social media, these kinds of pictures of these huge clouds rising up out of East Palestine were everywhere and right-wing politicians were pushing them.
00:12:41
They all kind of coalesced behind this story in which the white working class was being abandoned and getting poisoned by liberal elites.
00:12:51
I see a lot of that in there.
00:12:53
Absolutely, and I do this does seem to me to be one of those places where the mode of politics and the media really combined with one another because that East Palestine story was not only sort of the headlining story on all of these right-wing media sites,
00:13:11
but of course it was on social media sites like X and it would combine with all sorts of fake images and fake stories and it all becomes this stew where you might not even really know what happened in East Palestine,
00:13:25
but you walk away with this feeling that something went horribly wrong.
00:13:29
People are very angry about it and you just feel worse about your country and the people in it when you hear about that story and I think that kind of brings us back to Donald Trump and the degradation of everything.
00:13:47
It's like there's no space for a story of hope or renewal to emerge.
00:13:52
It's all just awfulness and destruction.
00:13:56
I think that's exactly it.
00:13:59
The explicit game plan here is to just fill everybody with hate and rage and critically confusion.
00:14:06
Yeah, I mean, remember Steve Bannon's saying that the strategy of the Trump administration, he was saying this back in 2015, 2016, was to flood the zone with just like with crap,
00:14:18
right?
00:14:18
Like just put so much bad stuff out there.
00:14:21
Make people feel terrible all the time and while people are feeling terrible, you can go over here and mass all this political power and use it for whatever you want and we are still living in that world.
00:14:32
There's an iron you do this in the current context by the way.
00:14:36
If Trump were president right now, he'd be using the wildfires and he'd be with holding federal help to extort political or even personal favors from Gavin Newsom.
00:14:48
In fact, you may recall that political reported that as president, Trump temporarily withheld wildfire aid from California until he established whether the relevant areas had voted for him.
00:14:59
I mean, and the funny thing about it is that MAGA sort of sees that as a positive thing and that's especially getting worse now that Trump keeps doing it over and over whether he's politicizing or spreading conspiracy theories around the flooding in North Carolina or spreading lies about California.
00:15:20
He's just telling his supporters, this is what we should be doing.
00:15:23
We should take every opportunity to try to grind blue America and non-Maga America into the dirt.
00:15:30
It is absolutely his strategy.
00:15:32
I mean, he did it with the ventilators too during the early days of COVID and it really is, it's not just about negotiation and power plays,
00:15:42
although that's how it's often framed in Trump world, right?
00:15:45
Oh, he's a master negotiator.
00:15:46
He's getting these people to bend to his will.
00:15:49
But it's actually this deeper fascistic strategy of us versus them.
00:15:55
And what do you do with them?
00:15:57
You punish them at every opportunity.
00:16:00
If you have power, you use that power to protect your own and to harm others.
00:16:05
And that is absolutely the philosophy of the Trump administration that just becomes very clear in these moments of crisis.
00:16:12
You know, you could argue in a way that these types of natural disasters are a real threat to the MAGA project because they actually encourage people to unite and come together and to kind of start to believe that government is there to help them.
00:16:30
This is really an atom.
00:16:31
I mean, if you to go all Carl Schmidt on you, MAGA kind of requires politics always to be about the enemy.
00:16:38
And there can be no point at which politics is not about the enemy.
00:16:43
And that's I think sort of what explains a lot of this in a way.
00:16:47
Can you talk about that?
00:16:49
Absolutely.
00:16:50
I mean, I do think that that is the ethos behind MAGA is that you have to have somebody who you're fighting against, somebody who you're railing against.
00:16:59
And moments of disaster, you know, I was mentioning earlier Oklahoma City and Columbine 9/11, Glenn Beck you still have something called the 9/12 project.
00:17:08
And it was tethered exactly to this idea that in this moment after national tragedy, what happens?
00:17:13
We put aside our differences.
00:17:14
We come together.
00:17:15
We recognize our common humanity and we want to get back to that kind of feeling.
00:17:21
And that is a danger to a divisive movement is that people look at one another and they see that they're not actually all that different that they are devoted to a common project.
00:17:32
And that common project could just be like keeping their communities safe and whole and making sure people have a place to sleep and that they're safe from the storm.
00:17:42
And that is probably the biggest threat to the MAGA project.
00:17:46
And it's why these moments have to be turned into moments of division.
00:17:50
And the same thing is true for the right.
00:17:52
I mean, in a way that kind of predates in Donald Trump, which is the big problem of Katrina was not just that it hurt the Bush administration, but it proved the lie of, you know, the most dangerous words in the English language are I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
00:18:06
Right.
00:18:06
What did people want?
00:18:07
They wanted the government to show up.
00:18:08
The government was doing good things.
00:18:11
And that too is a dangerous message.
00:18:14
That happened in North Carolina too.
00:18:15
Republicans had to step forward and say, I'm sorry, MAGA, but the truth is that the federal response is actually very good.
00:18:23
Right.
00:18:23
And in seg, you also have these stories then of people who could really use the help of the federal government not wanting to interact with FEMA or like waving their guns when FEMA shows up.
00:18:35
And so it is its thing that like in these moments of real crisis, it cuts people off from the things that would make their lives better.
00:18:45
And I think that that is both part of the MAGA project and part of the conservative project is to take away from people the things that might make their lives better.
00:18:54
And that seems like it should be easier to counter, but those kind of affective ties that MAGA voters have to Donald Trump are proving to be very difficult to overcome.
00:19:06
So Nicole, what's the answer to this stuff?
00:19:09
It seems to me that for MAGA and for MAGA media, a lot of the stuff sort of festers and doesn't really penetrate to the broader culture really,
00:19:19
but at the same time as you point out, in some cases, it kind of does where some people were duped by the attacks on the federal responders during North Carolina.
00:19:31
And that was a terrible thing.
00:19:33
Is the answer for Democrats and liberals and small the Democrats and people who want a sane public life to just kind of marginalize and ignore that stuff and count on common humanity to assert itself?
00:19:50
Or is that not enough?
00:19:52
Do we have to call this stuff out for the derangement that it really is?
00:19:55
I mean, it seems like hoping that it goes away is not working.
00:20:00
So I wouldn't recommend that as the strategy going forward.
00:20:02
I do think that there is real value in calling it out, right?
00:20:06
Talking about the fact that it is weird and cruel to respond to a forest fire or to flooding or to a hurricane with this kind of vitriol.
00:20:17
And these sort of wild conspiracy theories, I think that there is real value in that.
00:20:22
And so I definitely think that people should be doing that.
00:20:24
That can't be all people do.
00:20:26
Because the other thing that people have to do is model the world that they want to be part of.
00:20:32
It means being the person who shows up for your neighbors.
00:20:35
It means being the person who helps gather supplies to send people who are hurt.
00:20:41
It means modeling a humane response to disasters when they happen.
00:20:46
And so I think that it's both and, right?
00:20:48
It is both pointing out and making clear how terrible this is.
00:20:53
And then proving that there's a better way to do it, right?
00:20:57
A better way to move forward.
00:20:59
And you can't do that everywhere all the time, but it is something that I would hope that all of your listeners are thinking about how they can in their communities respond to pain and loss and crisis and deprivation in ways that make their communities better.
00:21:15
Because I actually think that is kind of the generational road out of a lot of this.
00:21:19
Nicole Himmer, that was beautifully said.
00:21:22
And I really hope you're right that that's where the true impulse of the American public lies.
00:21:27
Thanks so much for coming on with us today.
00:21:29
Thank you so much for having me, Greg.
00:21:32
You've been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host Greg Sargent.
00:21:37
The Daily Blast is a new Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler on the DSR Network.
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