By The Daily Blast,The Daily Blast With Greg Sargent

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Waldman: Yeah, and I think that he believes or hopes that in other countries, he can dictate how they’re going to have relations with their own press, even in democratic countries like Australia, that he can essentially, as you say, tell on this reporter and that somehow that will mean that the reporter will get punished by his own prime minister. So he does have this desire to kind of make this into a kind of performance of dominance, but he also really doesn’t think that anyone should ask him any kind of question that would really reflect poorly on him.

Whenever he gets a really challenging question, one of the things that he does is he quickly dismisses the substance of it, and then he turns it into an attack on the reporter. And this is actually a pretty effective technique because it’s alarming to everyone in the room and to people watching at home. If he’s saying to a reporter, you you’re a terrible person, how dare you ask a question like that? It’s not the kind of thing we normally see from presidents. And still, even at this late date, it has the power to shock. when you watch it, you almost forget about the thing that the person asked the question about, and you’re drawn into this conflict between him and the reporter. So in that case, it’s pretty shrewd.

Sargent: Yeah, I think it works in a way, especially for his supporters. And you mentioned that lawsuit that Trump filed against the New York Times. It is indeed crazy. It concerns several articles in a book by Times reporters that looked skeptically at Trump’s business success. No one should dare ever question that, of course. Now, first amendment lawyers are calling this lawsuit an utter complete joke, but that aside, again, there’s this anger. The lawsuit accuses Times reporters of deliberately trying to inflict maximum damage on Trump. It accuses them of repugnant distortions and fabrications about Trump designed to help the Democratic Party says the reporters couldn’t stand the thought of Trump winning the election. And it even says the reporters hate Trump in a deranged way. The lawsuit is chock full of crazy stuff like that. And then Trump announced the lawsuit with an explosion of fury on Truth Social, in which he called the Times “the most degenerate of newspapers in the history of our country.”