Transcript: Raging Trump Erupts On the Air for Unnervingly Dark Reason
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 9 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.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 Gil Duran, a tech writer who’s based in California and tracks all this stuff. Good to have you on, Gil.Gil Duran: Thanks for having me.Sargent: So in two big races in California, the GOP candidates are struggling as the votes get counted. In the Los Angeles mayoral race, Democratic incumbent Karen Bass leads, and progressive candidate Nithya Raman 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 Steyer for second place. Gil, 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?Duran: Sure. Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt are right-wing D-list celebrities who are desperate enough for attention to run for office in California, where they have virtually no chance of winning. Both of them have backgrounds mostly as entertainers. Spencer Pratt was a reality TV star, a sort of villainous character on a show called The Hills for many years. And Steve Hilton has a political background in the U.K. where he was an advisor to David Cameron, but most recently since coming to the United States has been a Fox News host. And he went from being a guy who was sort of 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 U.S. 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 sort of right-wing low-level celebrities into political office in California, but that’s not very easy to do.Sargent: Just to be clear, what this means for Spencer Pratt is that if he gets edged out of second place by the progressive, Nithya Raman, then he doesn’t get to go to the general, correct? And so what’s really at stake here is, as the votes get counted, it’s really possible Spencer Pratt gets knocked out of contention. Is that what the situation is?Duran: 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 Steyer for votes. Looks like Steyer is going to come in third place. So it’ll be Hilton versus Becerra. You’ll have a Republican and a Democrat in the gubernatorial race.But the LA race is nonpartisan. And LA is heavily Democratic by voter registration—LA is 52 percent Democratic voters compared to 19 percent Republicans. So with Spencer Pratt running with the MAGA endorsements as the right-wing reality TV guy, it’s not a big surprise that he wouldn’t make the top two. In fact, the polls 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.Sargent: So that’s the context for Trump’s blowup with NBC’s Kristen Welker. 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 Welker challenged that as well. She said, look, your candidates—meaning the two Republicans we’re discussing here—look, they’re doing well. And 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.Donald Trump (voiceover): They’re dropping fast because it’s a rigged election.
