In Conversation with Norm Ornstein on DSR’s “Word’s Matter” with David Rothkopf

12 March 2026

[Transcription edited for clarity, flow and length]

Mary Trump: I got a chance to join my friends David Rothkopf and Norm Ornstein over at their podcast, Words Matter. We covered everything that’s going on currently in the Middle East, America and Israel’s war of choice against Iran, and where it’s all going to lead. Luckily, these two are hysterical, so it is not all grim, but a lot of it is. Anyway, it was a fascinating conversation. Check it out.

David Rothkopf: Hello and welcome to DSR’s Words Matter. I’m David Rothkopf. I’m joined this week, as every week, by our friend, mentor, and leading light, Norm Ornstein. How are you doing, Norm?

Norm Ornstein: About as well as usual, although—

David Rothkopf: I’m sorry.

Norm Ornstein: I’m—

David Rothkopf: Sorry to hear that.

Norm Ornstein: Well, as we were saying a little bit ago, we’re all mourning the departure of Kristi Noem.

David Rothkopf: Well, I don’t want to leave our guest out of this, so please allow me to introduce our guest and our friend, Mary Trump, who is the empress and CEO of Mary Trump Global Worldwide Media, noted author, and bon vivant. How are you doing today, Mary?

Mary Trump: Empress and bon vivant. How could I not be doing well, despite the tragic news about Kristi?

David Rothkopf: Yeah, well, the tragic news, for those of you who have not heard—and I’m sure that’s zero among our readers—Kristi Noem was apparently let go from her job as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. We can discuss why in a moment. We can also discuss the spectacle of her giving a speech and apparently not knowing she was fired. That seems to be a classic Trumpian exit.

I would like to give you, Mary, since you are our guest, the first crack at commenting on this development.

Mary Trump: What to say? Can I have the plane? Because that still needs to be—

David Rothkopf: Why? You need to take a nap? You need a nap in the waterbed on that plane.

Mary Trump: I wouldn’t go near that. I wouldn’t touch that bed with a 39-and-a-half-foot pole.

So, yeah, what to say? I mean, she wasn’t exactly fired. Apparently she was given some other yet-to-be-made-up position. And it just sort of reminds me: Donald turns everything into a sinecure. Being president of the United States is now a sinecure. And now Markwayne Mullin, about whom you guys have much to say, is going to take her place. What he’s going to do as Secretary of Homeland Security is beyond my comprehension.

David Rothkopf: Well, that implies one thing, Mary. I don’t mean to interrupt you, but he does have to be confirmed by the Senate.

Mary Trump: Yeah, that’s going to be a nail-biter for sure.

Norm Ornstein: But Donald apparently doesn’t even know that because he said he will be the secretary as of March 31st.

Mary Trump: That’s right.

Norm Ornstein: So I do have to say, the best comment on this that I’ve seen so far came from our friend Denver Riggleman, former congressman, who said, “This is like replacing syphilis with gonorrhea.”

Mary Trump: The jokes just write themselves.

David Rothkopf: They really do. Norm, you’re an expert on the Congress of the United States. Markwayne Mullin, unbelievably, is a senator from Oklahoma. How would you rate him relative to the other members of the U.S. Senate?

Norm Ornstein: We have a sort of informal Olympics—the Dumbest Olympics for the Senate. And Markwayne Mullin has been the gold medal winner. And given Tommy Tuberville, Marsha Blackburn—

David Rothkopf: Amazing.

Norm Ornstein: Ron Johnson, and the list goes on, that’s quite an accomplishment. It’s a little bit like the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team emerging to win the gold in overtime, but it didn’t even take Markwayne Mullin overtime to get the title of dumbest senator.

And let’s face it, if we’re looking at why he was picked, the single reason I would say is Donald Trump wanted somebody who would follow every order given by Stephen Miller.

Mary Trump: Yes.

Norm Ornstein: And that is Markwayne Mullin. So maybe it’ll be a little bit different. I don’t think we’ll be seeing sex in the bedroom on the executive jet among the seven purchased by Kristi Noem. And I do think, because she’s getting another position, that the little button that’s going around—Justice for Cricket—will still be relevant.

David Rothkopf: Yeah, that was a nice touch from Representative Moskowitz during the hearing yesterday.

Norm Ornstein: Yeah. But I don’t think anything significant is going to change.

And let’s remember, beyond the masked thugs out on the street—another disturbing video from Minneapolis yesterday of one of them standing in the middle of the street and daring a woman who was driving to hit him, and saying he would kill her, and refusing to get out of the street—but what’s more disturbing at this point to me is what’s happening in these concentration camps.

We’ve had murders. We’ve had innocent people shot by these thugs. But the number of deaths occurring in these private prison concentration camps keeps going up by the day. And now we have a major measles outbreak in one of them, where it’s not like they’re going to put people into places where they’re not going to get measles and possibly die. They’re enclosing them in this space and keeping everybody else out.

So is anything going to change with Markwayne Mullin? No. Maybe a little bit less lying when he testifies in front of Congress, but probably not much.

David Rothkopf: Mary.

Mary Trump: Yeah, I think Norm is exactly right. Nothing’s going to change.

And it’s important, I think, to remember why Noem is getting fired, because she didn’t give a Pam Bondi-esque performance in front of Congress. She actually made some concessions to Jamie Raskin that I’m sure didn’t go over well. But the fact remains that it’s all window dressing. Mullin will be as bad or worse. I think the only thing going for him—and I don’t even know if this is true—but he hasn’t murdered a puppy, so that’s, I guess, something.

But we are in really bad shape here because we know that the war of choice that Donald and Netanyahu are waging against Iran is going very badly. And at least, certainly for Donald, it is to distract us, yes, from the Epstein files, in which he’s mentioned a million times, but also from the fact that the United States government has murdered American citizens, has murdered other people on American soil without due process, and is stalking and building more gulags, concentration camps, throughout this country.

Not enough people are paying attention. Plus, of course, relatedly, as Norm mentioned, there’s a measles outbreak because the conditions are so bad there. But also, children throughout this country are getting measles because Health and Human Services is being run by a sociopath.

So all of this is of a piece with the agenda of the Trump regime: make us poor, scared, tired, and sick. And it’s actually going to plan, unfortunately.

Norm Ornstein: David, I want to add two other reasons why Trump fired Kristi Noem. One is the executive jet and the seven airplanes she insisted on purchasing for a huge sum of money. And it’s not that it’s corruption—they’re all corrupt. It’s that it was unmasked as corruption, and she had no answer for it.

And the second is another instance of grift and corruption, which came out in these hearings, which we knew anyhow: $143 million from taxpayers going to a no-bid contract to a company created eight days before it got the contract. That’s bad. That wasn’t what caused her to be fired. It was that the contract that went to her former spokesperson and her husband was used to promote Kristi Noem.

And if you are not promoting Donald Trump and instead you’re promoting yourself, he doesn’t care that they got the $143 million. If they had used that money to basically lobby for Trump to get a Nobel Peace Prize, he’d be delighted with it. It’s that nobody else should be getting any credit or any focus on themselves.

David Rothkopf: I appreciate your positive attitude here, and it’s really lifting me up today, as it does every week.

Mary, I was particularly looking forward to having you on because I have a sort of theory of the case here, and I can’t think of anybody better positioned than you to comment on it. I think 2026 has been the worst year of Donald Trump’s presidencies by a mile. Every single day, he tries to do something, and every single day it blows up in his face.

Whether it’s Venezuela or Iran or other policy moves, or even Melania’s bride-bumentary, every single thing has failed to lift his ratings, which are plummeting, failed to increase the likelihood that there’s going to be a big change in the Congress, and brought him closer, perhaps, even to some kind of accountability for his actions.

His ankles are getting fatter. His hands have bigger blotches on them. He’s got now some creeping tree rot on the side of his neck that we can’t pinpoint exactly. His head seems to be sinking gradually into his chest.

In other words, he’s physically declining, he’s politically declining, he’s a lame duck. To me, it looks like Donald Trump is having a really classic existential bout because he’s over, and he knows he’s over, and people with eyes know he’s over. The only people who don’t seem to know he’s over are the Republican Party, who keep treating him as though he were relevant. And John Fetterman—

Mary Trump: John Fetterman.

David Rothkopf: John Fetterman, speaking of people who’s over. But you have a unique perspective on this, both professionally and personally. I was just wondering what you think of this notion that Trump is really, despite all the headlines, collapsing in on himself and fading. He’s sundowning.

Mary Trump: Oh yeah. Well, I truly appreciate the description. You had me at creeping tree rot. That was quite something.

Yeah, I tweeted the other day pictures of his hand and the creeping tree rot, and I just wrote, “The portrait is out of the attic because…”

David Rothkopf: Yeah, I saw that actually. That was very funny.

Mary Trump: I mean, I’m sure it could get much worse, but please, I don’t want to see it.

The fascinating thing about where we are in this moment—and I know it doesn’t change how bad things are—but we can at least take some small comfort in knowing that Donald is miserable every second of his life, and that’s as it should be. Again, it doesn’t help us, but at least—

David Rothkopf: I’m not big enough to admit that doesn’t help me. That helps me, okay.

Mary Trump: Good. I mean, it doesn’t change anything, but it should make us feel a little better because it would be so much worse if he were enjoying this.

The fascinating thing about where we find ourselves now is that this is where his entire life has been trending, and this is what he’s been trying to avoid for his entire life. All of Donald’s psychic energy has been spent for his whole life trying to protect himself from the kinds of massive humiliation—massive and unavoidable humiliations—he has now set himself up for. And that is kind of glorious. It’s a sort of poetic justice we don’t often see.

Now, it’s not accountability, and it’s not enough. But this is going to accelerate his metaphorical end, if you will, because in addition to all the things you mentioned, this is somebody who every day gets older. He’s going to be 80 soon, and he is a deeply unhealthy 80. He is clearly suffering from cognitive decline, and he’s had serious undiagnosed, untreated psychiatric disorders for decades.

So the stress he’s under, and the knowledge—and this is the thing that you alluded to, David—that is one of the most significant points we need to press on whenever possible: his ability to protect himself from the knowledge of who he is and how bad things are is eroding. And we need to pile on at every moment, or the Democrats do at any rate, and mock him and point out just how deficient and degraded he is because he can’t handle it.

Any time you see somebody push back, he loses his mind. Imagine if nobody ever let up. He wouldn’t be able to retain structural integrity at this point.

So it’s pretty fascinating. Actually, back in 2020, I said that what needed to happen was that Donald and the Republican Party needed to lose so badly that it would wound him narcissistically in a way he couldn’t recover from. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. He lost, but the Republican Party didn’t lose. And then he got rehabilitated with the Big Lie and January 6th.

We’re now in that territory again, where the narcissistic injury he’s facing is so deep it could be his complete undoing.

David Rothkopf: Well, you have seen older members of your family decline, and it does seem he’s got traits of several of them because his father, I believe, had dementia—

Mary Trump: Alzheimer’s.

David Rothkopf: And his mother had Alzheimer’s, and his mother had a really bad haircut, and he seems to have both. Sorry. Sorry to do that to you while you were drinking.

Norm Ornstein: Let me make—

David Rothkopf: It was unfair. Anyway—

Norm Ornstein: I want to pile on a little bit too. First, of course, saying the other day that his father had been born in Germany, when of course that was a lie. But this is from a speech this morning, quote: “If the prime minister of Norway had given me the Nobel Peace Prize, our submarine wouldn’t have had to sink an Iranian ship.”

So I think as we talk about mental decline and about narcissistic sociopathy or psychopathy, that’s a pretty good piece of evidence that he’s really losing it on a rapid basis.

Mary Trump: Yeah. And he didn’t say that because of the bad haircut.

Norm Ornstein: No.

Mary Trump: He said it because of the other thing.

David Rothkopf: Yeah. The other problem he seems to have—and you make a good point there, Norm—Marco Rubio came up with this super-convoluted reason for war in Iran, because he needed to say that it was because there was an imminent threat, so there was an emergency, so he had to respond.

So he said there was an imminent threat because we knew the Israelis were going to attack, and we knew the Iranians would respond against us if the Israelis attacked, and therefore we had to respond.

But Trump, unable to contain himself from not being the center of the story, then said, “Yeah, but I was the one who told the Israelis to attack,” which creates the beautiful situation—which I, as a national security specialist, have never seen in American history—where this is the first time in history that our president is responsible for the imminent threat we were launching a war against.

I mean, it’s amazing. But Mary, you and I have been talking about this stuff for, I don’t know, 10 years—

Mary Trump: Years.

David Rothkopf: Eight years, for a long time. And we said back then that he was the greatest threat we face. It seems clearer now than ever that there is no threat in the world posed by anybody greater than him.

Mary Trump: Yeah, which is a devastating commentary on almost 78 million Americans who thought this was a good idea because he has no ideology, he has no strategy, he has no plans. Everything he does is to bolster himself up in one way or another, either financially or in terms of perceived power or, again, in terms of protecting his very fragile ego.

But actually, I have to say that the only reason he’s the biggest threat we face is because of the fascists in the Republican Party. He could easily be reined in—or he could have been, anyway—and time after time, along with the corrupt, illegitimate supermajority of the Supreme Court, they refuse to rein him in. They hand him more power. They make it almost impossible for him ever to be held accountable.

So at this point, I blame them as much, if not more. Donald has always been a symptom of a greater problem, and they demonstrate that every single day. They continue to kiss his ass and grease the skids for him to be the most corrupt, venal, dangerous, cruel president—or leader—this country has ever seen, I think.

Norm Ornstein: Let’s talk about the cruelty because of another element today. Four of our service people were killed in Kuwait, and by the way, killed because they were in a trailer—a makeshift trailer—with no protection because Pete Hegseth wouldn’t secure it. They landed at Dover Air Force Base today.

Not only was Donald Trump not there, Pete Hegseth—who’s been doing fundraisers for Republicans in the middle of this war—wasn’t there. Nobody was there from the administration to greet these four heroes.

So when his former chief of staff said back during the first term, when Trump was at Normandy, that he called the dead suckers and losers, you know he was not making that up. And the way that Pete Hegseth referred to the fallen soldiers makes it clear that the level of inhumanity here, the lack of any empathy—while you’re the ones who are responsible for these deaths, you’re putting our troops in jeopardy—you ought at minimum to at least laud what happened when they’re downed in the course of a war that you’ve started. But no, they don’t care.

David Rothkopf: It’s worse than that in some respects. Yesterday—was it yesterday? No, Tuesday was an election day in several places in the country. Did you see anything in the results that gives you hope for what Mary’s talking about?

Norm Ornstein: There are a couple of things, although in a broader sense, I think Mary is spot-on. Democrats who are running for office, far too many of them seem to think that all they have to do is talk about affordability. And while that is hugely important—and I have no doubt that Susie Wiles and some others are quietly apoplectic that after the State of the Union, where Trump made lip service to it, he then went out and made sure that gasoline prices would shoot up to a level higher than when he came into office, and is still playing around with tariffs—in fact, Democrats need to focus on the radical and sadistic approach that this administration and Republicans in Congress are choosing.

And there, there’s at least a little bit, I think, of positive things there with James Talarico, who won the nomination for the Senate in Texas. They’re already attacking him for some of the things he said before. One of them, which I saw Texas Governor Greg Abbott jumping all over, was that a couple of years ago Talarico said, “God is non-binary.” Now, if you don’t believe that, then you believe that God has some human form. But whatever it might be, they’re going to go after him. I think he’s on the right path, and I think it was a good choice, and Democrats are rallying behind him.

The choice of Roy Cooper overwhelmingly to be the Democratic nominee for the Senate in North Carolina is a very positive thing.

But there’s a broader point here that we have to keep reiterating, which is: they’re going to go after stealing this election. In Texas, where the secretary of state did not tell voters in two key huge Democratic counties—Democratic-oriented counties—what their polling places would be because they changed around the polling places and didn’t alter some of them to reflect the new map that took place. And then when a judge said, because people were bouncing around and trying to find where to vote, “We’re going to keep the polls open for a couple of hours longer so that people will have the chance to vote,” the Texas Supreme Court, which is a bunch of partisan hacks, basically said no, you’re going to have to close the polls.

So beyond this horrible SAVE Act that we’ve talked about many times before, there will be other things going on.

And the other thing to mention here is this morning the great Maggie Goodlander, congresswoman from New Hampshire, grilled a top Defense Department official this morning and said, “You have plans to send thousands of military forces into all 50 states to prepare for a civil disturbance, which is the precursor to invoking the Insurrection Act and very possibly suspending the election.”

And his response was, “I’ll get back to you on that,” which is insane.

But we are going to have to not only have Democrats focus on the indecency of what’s going on, but all of us are going to have to work overtime to combat what will be massive efforts to basically overturn the elections.

And let’s not forget the despicable potential action taken by Colorado Governor Jared Polis. If he in fact issues clemency for a woman who not only tried to overturn the election and seize ballots and do all kinds of terrible things, but expressed not an ounce of remorse for it, went through the legal process, and was sentenced—not to the most significant sentence she could have gotten, but to nine years in prison for multiple felonies—and if he gives her clemency, it would be a shameful act. A Democratic governor would then be putting himself on the side of election interference and chicanery.

David Rothkopf: Mary, when I listen to Norm describe this—and I have to endure it on a weekly basis. No, I love Norm—but when I listen to him describe this, what we see here, again, are manifestations of the personality of the president that then extend throughout the party, who doesn’t care about rules, doesn’t care about morality, doesn’t care about consequences for anybody but himself.

So I’m not a psychotherapist, as you are. I’m not trained in this kind of stuff. And so I regularly go through in my mind: is he a sociopath or is he a psychopath? And when I look it up online, it says, “Psychopaths are likely born with genetic or biological deficits, appearing calculated, charming, and emotionally cold, whereas sociopaths are shaped by environment, appearing erratic, impulsive, and prone to rage.”

And I was just wondering—which is it?

Mary Trump: Can’t it be both? It can be. Why limit ourselves?

I think that there is something wrong here. As I said on a different show the other day, this is the moment in world history since the time that Hitler blew his own brains out in a bunker that the fate of the world is most impacted by the psychological dysfunction of a single man.

Yeah. And this one—that’s what constantly blows my mind. He’s so grotesque. He’s so weak. He’s so deficient and depraved and just gaudy and grotesque—all the tree rot, all of it, creeping tree rot. What kind of person looks at him and thinks, “Oh yeah, that’s my guy”? It’s embarrassing. I know that’s not the most important thing, but it’s also embarrassing and inexplicable.

But the problem is that fragile systems bend toward their most dysfunctional member, and America has become an increasingly fragile system for decades. It’s almost as if Donald was the logical outcome of that. And he is a manifestation of what this country has become, I think.

So the question then is, as you said earlier, is his exiting stage left going to be enough to right us? And that’s why it is so important for Democrats, who are the only party who care about democracy, who try to defend democracy, who care about the well-being of American citizens—generally speaking—to stand firm.

And as awful as it is when Republicans bend the knee, or when corporations and white-shoe law firms and institutions of higher learning capitulate, at least that makes some sense to me, as vile and unacceptable as it is. But when Democrats do it, considering they are technically outside of the system that created Donald, that I do not understand at all. And all they do is make themselves ridiculous and make our jobs harder.

So if Polis does indeed grant clemency to that woman, he needs to be primaried and he needs to lose his run for reelection.

Norm Ornstein: I think he needs to be shunned.

Mary Trump: Oh yeah. So many people need to be shunned. That’s true. These are people who should not be accepted into polite society or a society of any kind of decency again. So hopefully we’ll get to the point where we can start doing the shunning.

David Rothkopf: Yeah. I love the fact that Norm goes back to his Amish roots to find ways to punish these people.

But I’m going to do something here, and Mary, I’m glad you can see it in our last couple of minutes on this episode. Every episode, I try to end on something upbeat. And every episode, Norm confounds me. It’s like a regular battle where I try to make it upbeat, but I’m going to succeed this time.

Norm, is there not something uplifting in the offing? Is there not the premiere of a documentary on PBS tonight called Immutable that we should all know about, Norm, that will make us feel better? Is that not something positive, Norm Ornstein?

Norm Ornstein: Thank you very much for that, David. And Mary has seen this documentary a couple of times. Mary has volunteered at our summer debate camp.

So this documentary is on Friday evening. Here in Washington, it’s on WETA, the public television station, at 9:00 p.m. Unless the war takes an even bigger turn for the worse, we have a segment on the NewsHour on Friday with a couple of our remarkable kids, and Morning Joe on Friday morning.

And for those whose public television station, ridiculously, is not airing it tomorrow evening, Friday evening, go to pbs.org. There’s also going to be a YouTube version of this that will be up on Friday, which happens to be National Speech and Debate Day.

It is heartwarming, uplifting, inspirational, and God knows that is in such short supply these days.

David Rothkopf: And it’s reflective of the hard work and vision and commitment of Norm Ornstein.

Mary Trump: Yes, and Judy. So I just want to add my two cents. It’s so beautifully done. It’s so incredibly moving. I had seen it already, but to watch it in an audience with other people and see how moved everybody was, it was such a testament to the work Norm and Judy have done, to the work all of the coaches and administrators do, and especially to the extraordinary work these kids do.

I was so honored to volunteer and to see what they do to prepare and become knowledgeable, and the ways in which they engage with each other. I think every school in this country should have a debate team. It is powerful, powerful stuff.

David Rothkopf: Thank you for that, Mary. Thank you for joining us today. Hope you’ll come back if you enjoyed it. And thank you always, Norm.

Watch Words Matter HERE

Thank you, everybody, for listening to us. And please join us on all the other podcasts we do every day or watch them on YouTube, where our audience is growing pretty steadily. We’re covering this war in great depth, and we’ve had a number of podcasts on that and we will have more, where we bring in very, very high-level experts to provide perspectives you can’t get anywhere else. So this is a really good time to be joining us.