Who's Really to Blame?

In Conversation with David Rothkopf and the DSR network

[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

Mary Trump: I was on with David Rothkopf of the Substack Need to Know and Deep State Radio, and we talked about the abysmal jobs numbers, how corporate media is spinning them in a way they never would have for Joe Biden, and how Donald is already defying the Supreme Court by trying to push through more limits on birthright citizenship. We covered a lot of other topics as well, so please enjoy.

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David Rothkopf: Well, Mary, are you surprised that the economy is doing so poorly?

Mary Trump: I think Joe Biden has a lot to answer for.

David Rothkopf: Oh, God. They didn’t cut that Trump part out of your brain that blames Biden for everything?

Mary Trump: No. Seriously, though, how could we be surprised? Between the egregious and incredibly foolish tariffs and this war of choice in Iran, none of this should surprise anybody.

What infuriates me most about these jobs reports, which have ranged from anemic to terrible, is the complete inability of the mainstream media to remember how it used to cover jobs reports during the Biden administration. Donald adds one hundred thousand jobs and it’s presented as a tremendous accomplishment. Joe Biden added a million jobs and somehow that wasn’t good enough.

The double standard continues to drive me up the wall.

No, we shouldn’t be surprised. At some point, however, I would like to think responsibility will finally be assigned to the administration that’s actually making these decisions.

David Rothkopf: One of our viewers just commented that John F. Kennedy is really to blame for all of this. I appreciate someone who’s willing to go that far back into history. Personally, I think James K. Polk is responsible.

I also watched CNBC’s coverage, and it was absolutely unbelievable. The host acted as though the world were ending, as though nobody could possibly have anticipated these numbers. Then Kevin Hassett came out from the White House and started offering excuses, claiming there had been a severe winter, teachers stayed on payroll longer than expected, and that all of this was simply a temporary distortion.

It was complete nonsense.

There were two other important details that deserve attention. First, the previous month’s numbers were revised downward by one hundred thousand jobs. Second, and perhaps more importantly, I don’t trust any of the statistics coming out of this administration anymore.

They’ve demonstrated repeatedly that they’re willing to manipulate information, and I simply don’t believe them.

Mary Trump: That’s intentional.

They’ve already told us they’re going to stop collecting certain kinds of data or stop making information publicly available, so there’s very little reason to trust anything they release.

Ironically, all of this reminds me of what happened during the Biden administration because those jobs reports were almost always revised upward. We’d learn two months later that hundreds of thousands more jobs had actually been created than initially reported, yet Joe Biden never received credit for those revisions.

Now we’re watching the exact opposite happen.

Everything possible is being done to minimize the impact of truly disastrous employment numbers, even though those numbers can be directly traced to the policies, if we can even call them policies, that Donald and his astonishingly incompetent administration continue to implement.

David Rothkopf: Another viewer just wrote, “Thanks, Obama.”

Apparently we’re still blaming Barack Obama too.

Let’s move on before somebody decides Abraham Lincoln caused inflation.

DSR Network Moderator: I’m not sure we can blame this one on anyone else.

The president has now signed two executive orders aimed at restricting birthright citizenship. This latest effort targets what the administration calls “birth tourism” and children born to foreign government employees. These actions come shortly after the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s broader effort to limit automatic citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Legal scholars, civil rights organizations, and constitutional experts expect immediate court challenges, arguing that these executive orders are simply another attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Mary Trump: Andrew Jackson is at it again.

David Rothkopf: I actually looked into this because I was curious.

Birth tourism does exist, but it’s extraordinarily rare. There aren’t even reliable statistics because the numbers are so small. The idea that large numbers of women in the final weeks of pregnancy are suddenly flying to Miami to give birth is simply disconnected from reality.

This reminds me of voter fraud.

It’s something that’s repeatedly portrayed as a massive national crisis despite the fact that actual documented cases are vanishingly rare.

Mary Trump: I was thinking exactly the same thing.

It’s just like voter fraud.

The number of actual cases is statistically insignificant.

David Rothkopf: Exactly.

Nevertheless, Fox News, NewsNation, and every other outlet pushing this narrative will spend endless hours insisting it’s a major national emergency.

Fortunately, the Constitution is remarkably clear on this issue, and the administration has already lost once in court.

But I’m curious about something from your perspective as a psychologist.

What do you do with someone who simply refuses to accept the word “no”?

We’ve already seen this pattern with tariffs. Courts have said, “You can’t do this,” and Donald responds by doing it anyway. Now we’re seeing the same behavior with birthright citizenship.

Increasingly, it feels as though this administration has decided it can simply ignore the courts whenever it dislikes the outcome.

Do you think that’s where this is headed?

Mary Trump: I do.

That has become the pattern, and it’s essentially the strategy they’re following. Courts continue pushing back, but without an effective enforcement mechanism, the administration appears to believe there are no meaningful consequences for ignoring judicial decisions.

They’ve already demonstrated they’re perfectly willing to operate outside the rule of law while actively working to dismantle it.

Thank you, Todd Blanche.

As for telling Donald “no,” that almost always backfires because it causes him to double down, then triple down.

The difficulty is that appeasing him doesn’t work either.

As long as people like Stephen Miller continue getting exactly what they want, they’ll keep manipulating Donald into carrying out their agenda. This wasn’t Donald’s idea.

This is Stephen Miller.

David Rothkopf: Is Donald really having ideas these days? His brain doesn’t seem to be functioning particularly well anymore. I don’t know what you thought of his new wig, but I found it very fetching.

Mary Trump: Hermey the Elf from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer called. He wants it back.

Actually, it reminds me of a family story. My grandfather started losing his hair when he was about fifteen years old. It bothered him for most of his life, but he carried that receding hairline into his eighties and honestly looked perfectly fine. As his Alzheimer’s disease progressed, however, and he became increasingly disconnected from reality, he suddenly decided he needed a truly awful toupee. So when I saw Donald’s latest hairstyle, my immediate reaction was, “Oh my God, that’s my grandfather.” Apparently, bad toupees really do run in the family.

David Rothkopf: Well, fortunately, you seem to have escaped that particular family tradition. Maybe that’s one branch of the genetic tree that skipped you entirely.

Mary Trump: I was found under a log.

David Rothkopf: That explains everything. We are all very grateful for that discovery.

So, what else do we have?

DSR Network Moderator: Another major story this week concerns Michigan’s Democratic Senate race. After its thirty two million dollar primary campaign failed to stop Dr. Abdul El Sayed from winning the Democratic nomination, AIPAC is now reportedly considering supporting Republican nominee Mike Rogers in the general election because of concerns about El Sayed’s position on ending United States military aid to Israel. If the organization ultimately backs a Republican candidate in one of the country’s most important swing state Senate races, it would represent a remarkable shift for what has traditionally been described as a bipartisan organization.

David Rothkopf: Historically bipartisan? Who wrote that copy?

DSR Network Moderator: That’s from The New York Times.

David Rothkopf: Of course it is.

Let’s just be honest about what’s happening. AIPAC isn’t bipartisan. It’s aligned with Likud, and it will support whichever candidates further that political agenda regardless of party affiliation. Before I get myself into trouble and somebody accuses the son of a Holocaust survivor of being antisemitic, Mary, why don’t you go first?

Mary Trump: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Let’s start with something that should be completely obvious but somehow still needs to be said. Opposing the current Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu is not antisemitic. In fact, I would argue it’s the opposite. If you genuinely care about Israel, then you should be deeply concerned about what Benjamin Netanyahu has done to that country.

I think Benjamin Netanyahu has been the worst thing to happen to Israel in much the same way Donald Trump has been the worst thing to happen to the United States. If you truly love something, you don’t love it unconditionally. You hold it accountable. You try to prevent it from giving in to its worst impulses instead of encouraging those impulses.

That’s why this entire situation is so disturbing. It also reminds me of organizations like Third Way, which seem more interested in attacking progressives inside the Democratic Party than confronting the genuine authoritarian threat we’re facing.

David Rothkopf: Please don’t mention Third Way. You’re trying to trigger me.

The article everyone has been talking about wasn’t really about some thoughtful centrist movement. It was essentially an interview with Third Way leaders attempting to make themselves relevant again while raising money. I know those people. I worked with many of them during the Clinton administration. At one point I probably would have considered myself part of that New Democrat movement until I eventually realized how much damage that political philosophy had done.

What I found encouraging was what happened immediately after Dr. Abdul El Sayed won the primary. Mallory McMorrow endorsed him. Haley Stevens endorsed him. Governor Gretchen Whitmer endorsed him. Alyssa Slotkin endorsed him. Democrats across Michigan came together behind the nominee exactly the way a political party is supposed to after a primary election.

Strangely, though, The New York Times didn’t seem interested in writing a story about Democrats uniting. That apparently wasn’t the narrative they wanted to tell.

Mary Trump: No, because that’s never the headline they choose.

Instead, they highlighted the president of Third Way announcing that his organization was preparing for war. The obvious question is, “War against whom?” Is it against the fascists dismantling American democracy? No. It’s against progressives and democratic socialists.

That tells us everything we need to know. It’s a profoundly cynical exercise in preserving power, and once again we’re watching corporate media amplify exactly the wrong story while ignoring what actually matters.

DSR Network Moderator: Well, lest we leave people with the impression that only Democrats are fighting among themselves, Republicans have their own internal conflict unfolding. Representative Max Miller is facing growing pressure from fellow Republicans to resign and abandon his reelection campaign following domestic abuse allegations made by his ex wife. Prominent Republicans, including Ohio Senators Jon Husted and Bernie Moreno, who is also Miller’s former father in law and the father of the woman making the allegations, are now publicly urging him to step aside, citing both his family’s well being and the potential political consequences for the Republican House majority.

David Rothkopf: What’s remarkable about this story isn’t that Republicans are suddenly discovering a conscience. They’re not. The only reason anyone is saying anything now is because they’re worried about losing a congressional seat. If they believed Max Miller could still win, none of this would be happening.

This is the same Republican Party that has spent years defending Donald Trump through every scandal imaginable. Character has never been the standard. The only standard has been political survival. The moment someone becomes a political liability, suddenly people rediscover their moral compass.

That’s not accountability. That’s political self preservation.

Mary Trump: Exactly. That’s what makes it so cynical.

It’s also important to remember that this is the same Republican Party that repeatedly excused Donald’s behavior toward women for decades. They excused sexual assault allegations, they excused infidelity, they excused abusive language, and they excused behavior that, under any normal circumstances, would have ended a political career instantly.

Now we’re supposed to believe they’ve suddenly become deeply concerned about protecting women or standing up against abuse. Please.

The only thing that’s changed is the political calculus. They’ve decided Max Miller might become an electoral liability, so now they’re pretending principles matter.

That’s not morality. That’s opportunism.

David Rothkopf: That’s exactly right, and it’s part of a much larger pattern we’ve watched play out for years.

Republicans have become extraordinarily skilled at turning every issue into a calculation about power instead of principle. Everything is viewed through the lens of whether it helps them keep control. If it does, they’ll defend almost anything. If it doesn’t, they’ll suddenly discover standards they abandoned long ago.

It’s one of the reasons public trust continues to erode. People recognize the hypocrisy, even if they can’t always articulate exactly why it feels so wrong.

Mary Trump: And I think one of the great dangers is that we’re becoming desensitized to it.

We’ve watched so much corruption, so much hypocrisy, and so much cruelty that each new scandal begins to feel almost routine. That’s incredibly dangerous because none of this is normal. None of this should ever become normal.

We’re talking about a political party that repeatedly demonstrates it values power more than democracy, loyalty more than the Constitution, and political advantage more than basic human decency.

That’s an extraordinarily dangerous place for any democracy to find itself.

The challenge for the rest of us is refusing to become numb. We have to continue calling these things what they are because once we begin accepting them as simply the way politics works, we’ve already surrendered far more than we realize.