The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 30 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.

On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s administration rescinded the memo that instituted his disastrous spending freeze in what looks like a surrender in the face of a national outcry. Soon after, Trump went before the cameras and pushed a bizarre lie about $50 million in U.S. taxpayer money supposedly being spent on condoms for Hamas in Gaza. This kind of thing is often described as a “flooding the zone” strategy, in which Trump throws so many lies and abuses of power at us that we can’t keep up. Checkmate libs, Trump wins! But what if this chaos strategy actually isn’t all that clever after all? What if it’s more likely to backfire? Today, we’re talking about this with The New Republic’s Timothy Noah, author of a good new piece arguing that Trump’s chaos strategy is all about creating a pretext to consolidate power. Tim, thanks for coming back on.

Timothy Noah: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: Let’s start with Trump’s lie about condoms. Here’s what Trump said on Wednesday about the process of rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse that his government is supposedly undertaking now.

Donald Trump (audio voiceover): In that process, we identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas. Fifty million. And you know what’s happened to them? They’ve used them as a method of making bombs. How about that?

Sargent: Tim, MAGA is pushing this one hard. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made this claim from the White House Press podium, a State Department spokesperson also pushed it. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler looked at it and found that it’s made up. He asked Leavitt and the State Department spokes for documentation, and they had nothing. They’re really struggling to prove that their hunt for waste and abuse is yielding anything at all. What are they trying to do with this?

Noah: Yeah, it is entirely made up. Trump says things because he likes the way they sound. I do put forward this theory in my piece that the way authoritarians consolidate power is to manufacture crises. And that is clearly what the Trump team is doing. But I should add an important caveat, which is that chaos comes naturally to Donald Trump. He is a mentally disabled president of the United States—I think that’s the only way you can describe it. He has a narcissistic personality disorder that’s well documented, and he has had some decline in cognition that’s also been documented and observed by a number of medical professionals and others.

So you have this crazy guy who is president of the U.S. saying all sorts of things, and it creates mayhem. This is being channeled by his aides to, as I say, manufacture crisis and manufacture chaos, but it isn’t working.

Sargent: At least not yet, that’s for sure. The administration has now rescinded the memo instilling that massive spending freeze, which had caused chaos and confusion and threatened to have a huge impact on all kinds of government programs. It’s a little unclear what happened here. They seem to be still trying to pause some spending but this is clearly a surrender, I think. You wrote in your piece that Trump probably thinks turning off all that federal spending was also beneficial to his larger strategy of consolidating power. How would that work exactly?

Noah: I don’t believe that either Donald Trump nor Russell Vought, who is Trump’s yet unconfirmed nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget, who the White House more or less confirmed has been running this operation. I don’t think either one of them really understands what they were talking about in this memo. It concerns something called federal financial assistance. What is federal financial assistance as opposed to other kinds of spending? This is outlined in a 1977 law that doesn’t make it hugely clear.

What we know is that procurement of an object like an aircraft carrier is not federal financial assistance. However, the purchase of services is sometimes federal financial assistance, and sometimes not. As a consequence, you had every agency in the federal government switching off every switch it could because nobody really knows which falls into which category. It was utter mayhem.

Sargent: Not only that but it’s clearly illegal. I want to read a line from your piece, “No president in history, not even Trump in his first term, ever logged so many illegal actions in so short a time.” So we’ve got the purge of inspectors general, which was likely illegal designed to make it a whole lot easier to be really profoundly corrupt at the agencies. We’ve got the threat to prosecute state officials who refuse to implement Trump’s mass deportations; that was clearly legally ungrounded. And now this effort to usurp congressional power and turn off federal spending that Trump doesn’t like—clearly illegal. I really do think we haven’t seen an effort to consolidate power quite like this one, have we, Tim? Beyond the whole question of what the role of chaos is, there’s a mechanical effort to consolidate power unlike anything we’ve seen.

Noah: Right. And there’s even more impeachable offenses that you didn’t mention. You mentioned one or two that I hadn’t mentioned. As I said in my piece, it’s become kind of a parlor game. How many are there at this point, nine days in? But it looks like he’s doing more than he really is, and Trump thrives on the playacting part of being president. He says he’s done things that he hasn’t done, claims credit for things that he can’t claim credit for. And you’re seeing that here.

The main purpose, I think, of that OMB memo was to assert that the president has the power to impound appropriated funds. Trump was trying to just blunder his way into asserting this power over appropriations that he doesn’t have. It led immediately to all sorts of lawsuits, entirely foreseeable, and Trump withdrew. Trump is, I have argued, not a strong president. He is a weak president. He has authoritarian tendencies, but he’s weak. He’s mentally weak. He is subject vulnerable to all sorts of manipulation by his aides. He tries to do all sorts of contradictory things. He is not competent.

And on the evidence of this particular example, neither are his enablers. Surely, Vought have understood that this memo was going to be challenged immediately in court. He ought to have been able to anticipate that Trump could not tolerate the bad publicity surrounding it so that Trump, even before there was a court judgment, withdrew the memo. These are all signs of a weak presidency, but weakness can cause chaos too. And we’re certainly experiencing a lot of chaos, a lot of fear, and a real degradation of the ability of government to perform its functions.

Sargent: I want to get at your point about weakness and failure here. An interesting thing is how this contrasts with Trump/MAGA propaganda right now. That propaganda is relentlessly pushing the idea that Trump and his allies are ruthlessly forging ahead with his agenda. You see it all over Twitter. All of MAGA’s tweeting immense congratulations to Trump, he’s crushing the libs, he’s doing this, he’s doing that.

Noah: You even saw it pronounced by John Harris in Politico, which I have to say, I still haven’t gotten over reading that piece. I was deeply troubled by that piece.

Sargent: And The New York Times had an absurd piece today, essentially saying Trump has got his opponents on the run with this “flood the zone” strategy. The amount of credulousness, the portrayal of Trump’s strategy as something savvy and clever and effective, is just so deeply offensive coming from journalists, isn’t it?

Noah: Yeah, it’s a transference because it’s hard for us journalists to keep track of everything Trump is doing. But I guarantee you it is not hard for the people who are going to be making court challenges to these individual actions because each action has a different constituency that is focusing on a particular topic and is at the ready to take Trump to court when he does something illegal.

Sargent: Exactly. The real story here is that they’re actually screwing up already. The spending freeze is getting reversed. ICE is already leaking like crazy about how Trump’s demand for much higher arrest is going to create major problems. The effort to undo birthright citizenship has stopped in court. I don’t want to be too optimistic here. They’re going to do a lot of damage—already are doing a lot of damage. But clearly what we’re seeing now is that they’re not going to be able to roll over the bureaucracy and our institutions, as easily as they thought, as easily as John Harris thinks, as easily as that credulous New York Times piece portrayed, right?

Noah: That’s right. Even in the Republican Senate, Trump was only barely able to get his defense secretary choice, Pete Hegseth, through. I don’t believe he’ll be able to get Robert F. Kennedy Jr. through. His whole decision to nominate Kennedy was really a reflection only of Trump’s vanity.

One of the less attractive qualities of Trump is that he deeply appreciates seeing people who previously denounced him come crawling on their knees to him. And that endears him to such people. And in this case, he rewarded Robert Kennedy Jr. with this nomination to which Kennedy is manifestly unqualified for, argued with astonishing forcefulness by Carolyn Kennedy yesterday.

Sargent: And by Democratic senators on the Hill, on Wednesday, we should point out that a number of Democratic senators absolutely shredded RFK in the confirmation hearing. Can you tell me why you think he’s not going to get in?

Noah: Well, the basic arithmetic is you’ve got somebody who isn’t even a Republican, is up against big pharma on all sorts of bottom-line issues. Republicans don’t like, in the best of circumstances, going against the business constituency. And I think Trump’s commitment to RFK Jr. is a weak one. Vaccination and fluoridation are not issues that Trump really cares about one way or the other.

Sargent: I certainly hope you’re right about that. I was thinking that he was probably going to get RFK; after today’s hearing, I’m really not so sure. Tulsi Gabbard looks to me like she might be a very hard one for some Republican senators to support as well.

Noah: Right. And with RFK, there is a be-careful-what-you-wish-for component, which is we don’t know RFK to be committed to eviscerating Obamacare and whoever Trump nominates in RFK Jr.’s stead, I think, probably will be committed to doing that. And that’s not going to be very good news.

Sargent: I want to try to pull all this together. Going back to that ridiculous joke about condoms and Gaza, what we’re seeing here is an effort across the board to degrade public life in every way possible. Having the White House press secretary push that absurdity, having ridiculous legal rationales for immense power grabs, Trump going out there and demanding of his ICE agents that they hit arrest quotas as has been reported in The Washington Post, everything is about taking public life and turning it into a big joke.

Noah: Trump offering to buy out federal employees, give federal employees buyouts to retire. Where the money would come from is anybody’s guess.

Sargent: Right. And this idea that Trump is this wizard who can just throw us off with a magical distraction strategy, again, is constantly treated with unbelievable credulousness by the press. Let’s talk about that though. The degradation of public life is a thing that’s happening.

Noah: It is a very, very ugly and mean moment in American politics.

Sargent: You wrote about the degradation and the spreading of meanness in U.S. politics and what that means for your newsletter. Can you talk about that as well?

Noah: Yes, I have a Substack newsletter called Backbencher that I use mainly to publicize pieces I write in The New Republic. Today, I wrote about…. Well, I remember my mother telling me in 1968 after Robert Kennedy was killed—I was 10 years old and my mother said, I don’t understand what’s happening to this country. I have compared notes with other people my age and just about everybody I have asked has said yes, they had a parent say the same thing to them when they were 10 or 9 or 11.

Nineteen-sixty-eight was a terrible, terrible year. We saw the assassination of Martin Luther King and of Robert F. Kennedy. Later, we saw this awful mayhem at the Democratic convention. We saw an endless war in Vietnam. It was a time that was as dismal as can be imagined. People were saying, I don’t understand what’s happening to this country. And I think people felt that way during Trump’s first term. I think they feel it more powerfully now. And I think more and more people will feel that, many people who voted for Trump in 2024 will feel that. It’s a sad moment. For those of us who really believe in this country and believe in its government, it is devastating to see what is being done in its name.

Sargent: Well, just as happened in 2018, we could see in 2026 some similar backlash, one that is really all about reasserting decency in public life and pushing back on the degradation of it, don’t you think?

Noah: Yes, I think that there will be a route, but that’s a long way off. Even longer term … I don’t know whether you agree, this is a little out there, but I think the Republican Party is in the process of disintegrating. Liz Cheney has said that, and I think she’s dead right. Conservatives, serious conservatives are going to need to start looking for a new party to create in its stead because the Republicans have really sold out on just about every principle and have become—this is not an original thought—a cult of personality. And that isn’t easily undone.

Sargent: Well, one has to hope that you’re right about that. I’m not sure about the former piece, the idea that the Republican Party is disintegrating, but the latter piece that any principled conservative really should have no choice but to seek some alternative is clearly on. Timothy Noah, thanks so much for coming on, man. Great to talk to you.

Noah: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.