We’ve noticed that whenever the news is bad for Donald Trump, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dials up the cultlike obsequiousness to 11. She just let out a strange rant basically declaring that Iran will have entered into “unconditional surrender,” as Trump wants, whenever he merely says it has. In another really odd moment, she dismissed widespread MAGA criticism of Trump’s war by essentially declaring that MAGA is whatever Trump says it is. The two displays really went full North Korea in other ways, too. That’s no accident: an average of the latest high quality surveys now shows that support for his Iran war is at 38 percent, perhaps the lowest initial support for a war ever. Another analysis finds Trump’s net approval on immigration has dropped by 20 points since last year. And his economic numbers are awful. We talked to Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, a skilled decoder of MAGA. We discuss how this presidency is in trouble on many fronts and the role of cultlike praise in managing the base at difficult moments. We also discuss how his physical decline, and the prospect of a world without Trump, is hovering in the background of all of it. Listen to this episode here.
