The Daily Beast Podcast - Why Fading Trump, 79, Just Keeps Losing: Rothkopf

Episode Date: September 13, 2025

The Daily Beast's unmissable columnist David Rothkopf joins Joanna Coles to dive into what he calls one of Donald Trump’s most chaotic weeks yet. The 79-year-old president has been jeered at by protesters across a dining table, faced mounting health concerns, dealt with the assassination of his acolyte, Charlie Kirk, while abroad, his foreign policy has stumbled. Rothkopf, CEO of TRG Media and a foreign policy expert, argues Trump looks increasingly fragile, physically and politically, as allies squirm with embarrassment and rivals like Putin and Xi Jinping test his weakness. Coles and Rothkopf examine America’s rising tide of political violence, driven by alienated young men and a culture awash in guns, and note Utah Governor Spencer Cox’s surprising emergence as a voice of civility. With Trump leaning on inept advisers, losing grip on his narrative, and facing international mistrust, Rothkopf asks whether we are witnessing not just the decline of a president, but the slow unraveling of Trumpism itself. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Donald Trump right now has precisely zero wins since he's become president again. I mean, you can say the big, beautiful bill, but the reaction of the public to the bill has been terrible. It's hugely unpopular. And so I think all this is weighing on him and his own mortality is weighing on him. and the obscene thing is weighing on him. And he just looks like he can't handle it. I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast.

And what a terrible week for Michael Wolf and myself to both be traveling. Michael is in London. I'm in Los Angeles. And we skipped a podcast or two because we thought no one would notice. But in fact, what an extraordinary week it's been. The emergence of Governor Cox this morning. with his press conference. And of course,

a terrible week for President Donald Trump, who's emerged with a strange droopy mouth, terrible job numbers, heckled at a restaurant the first time he steps outside the White House. And of course, the awful, untimely deaths of Charlie Kirk, the young conservative. What a week in America's life.

And of course, the strange Russian incursion. into Polish airspace and the ever looming Ukraine and Russia war, which despite Donald Trump's promise that he would end it on his first day in office, has continued to haunt him. And who better to talk about this with what this means for America and what this means for America's place in the world than David Roscoff, the Daily Beast's brilliant columnist who served in the Clinton administration. He was the editor of Foreign Policy magazine,

and he has his own network, Deep State Radio, a series of very good podcasts. David, let's get into it. David Rothkopf is with us. David, you've written some excellent columns for The Daily Beast this week. Thank you. What an extraordinary week. And actually a terrible week. It's just been such a, such a bizarre week for him. And then we see Donald Trump cheering away at the Yankees and on the sofa of morning television. at Fox News today. What do you make of all this? Can you can you contextualize this week for us? Well, first of all, I don't think Donald Trump can take many more weeks like this. Because among the things he didn't mention, you know, there was this shot of him and he looked like he had just had

a stroke, you know, this picture of him. The droopy mouth. Right. And, you know, last night at the Yankee game, he disappeared for 55 minutes. He went out of the room and disappeared. And, you know, nobody's, nobody's sure about that. But he's looked fragile throughout the week when he was at that restaurant in Washington and he started being heckled. He looked panicked. He pushed himself up against the wall. He held himself still. He wanted to get them out. He just didn't look like he could handle it very well. I think he was, I think he was really shocked by the murder of Charlie Kirk. He looked I mean, I feel like he felt close to him and that was part of it.

But I also think Trump has a morbid concern for his own health. I think he's afraid of assassination. I think he feels there's a lot. I mean, and rightly so, right? I mean, he very nearly got assassinated last summer, not once but twice. Well, that's right. And we're also living, as many people have noted this week, in a period of political violence, where, you know, each week there is some new story, whether it's some guy shooting up

the Center for Disease Control or this Minnesota legislator and her husband getting assassinated or, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So, but I'm just saying Trump seems stressed out by it and he seems older with each passing week. And, and, and, and you can even see it with, you know, for example, the Russian drones flew into Poland. And he's handled it badly from a foreign policy perspective. But you can also see sort of that he's like, oh, okay, well, this will work itself out. It's like he doesn't have energy to deal with Gaza anymore, energy to deal with Ukraine, or energy to deal with the Congress anymore. And, you know, perhaps that's normal. You know, he's a 79-year-old guy. He's going to be

80th on his next birthday. But I would say, if I was Trump's family, I'd be worried about his health. Well, let's just talk about him and his relationship with Charlie Kirk, because I agree that, I mean, first of all, it was a shocking death to everybody, right? Not just Donald Trump, but for Trump, who had himself a brush with, as we said, not one, but two assassination attempts last year, I wondered if it had triggered something for him. I mean, we have no idea if he's ever suffered post-traumatic stress disorder from what was a close shave with death. We know he went straight into the RNC after that and he seemed buoyed up by it.

But sometimes PTSD takes months or years to actually bubble to the surface. Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, you know, the whole story of the assassination attempt last year was kind of weird. You know, was he shot? Was he not shot? What hit him? Why didn't he go to a doctor? And all the, you know, there were legitimate questions about it. But clearly, clearly, it impacted him deeply. Yet there was something else that came out about all of this that I think is interesting because most of the commentary has been, you know, from the right, well, this must have been somebody from the left and Trump fanning the flames of that. From the left being, no, this isn't that. And now then you see the guy and he's the son of a sheriff from a religious Republican family. And the things that were written on the bullets were not ideological. They were, they were gamer phrases that he'd picked up, you know, as a gamer. And then you think of him and you think of the guy who shot at Trump allegedly in Pennsylvania.

And you think of Thomas Matthew Crooks. Right. You think of the guy they found in the bushes in Florida. You think of most of the shooters that you see. And a lot of them, what's shupy. worrying to more people about them is they're not political. These are alienated 20-something males who are online too much, who are mentally not very healthy and that have too much access to guns. And so, you know, a lot of them go and they gravitate towards political violence because it's visible

because that's what people are talking about. But, you know, I don't know if we're interpreting what's going on quite right. Yes, we are a very good. divided moment. But if we want to get to the root causes of the violence, it's something else. It's a pathology within our society. But it's not as political as people say it is. What do you mean it's a pathology in our society? And can we relate this? I was very, I was actually very heartened by Governor Cox at the press conference this morning when they announced the arrest of Tyler Robbins. And I thought, you know, he went through his usual spiel of explaining that they'd got the alleged guy. And then he came back and talked about how this could be the end of a

dark moment or it could be the beginning of an even darker moment. And he talked about Democrats and Republicans getting together. And I thought he'd read the needle by mentioning Trump in a way to acknowledge Trump, something I think as a Republican governor you had to do, but then went on to be completely untrumpian. And I thought, ooh, if I were J.D. I would be watching this guy. This is a candidate Cox emerging. But he referred to the 60s. He said he was born in 1975, but he grew up understanding that the 60s had been this

incredibly dangerous decade. We had three assassinations, obviously JFK, then his brother, RFCK and then Martin Luther King. Can you put this in a sort of historical context? Now, I'm not suggesting you're so old as to remember that. I think you were born in the 80s, David. I think you were born in the 80s. But it wasn't very very violent time. Take your best shot of me.

I can handle it. Okay. I'm from New Jersey. I'm used to being able to handle that kind of stuff. You're Michael Wolfe. You're always claiming the New Jersey defense. Well, it's a, look, it's a distinction. If you can survive Jersey, you can survive anything.

But in terms of this, because you ask two questions, effectively. I think I have three or four questions. Well, let me just break it into two parts. As far as the pathology goes, you know, I'm not a shrink. My daughter's a psychotherapist, and I've learned something from her. And, you know, I think one of the things that we understand about pathologies is there are many contributing factors. The fact that we're a country that's got more guns than people, and we're the only developed

country like that, we have a unique set of challenges to our society. society and 50,000 people or 40,000 people dying every year of gun deaths, that's a part of it. I think it's 100,000 die a year from gun deaths. I think that may be our victims. But I don't know. You may be right. But the point is this, higher than any other developed country, buy a lot. Why?

Because there are 100 million more guns into the country than there are people. So that's one thing. I think another thing is that we do have a lot of people who are alienated, disconnected, you know, victims of being online too much. And we totally underserved people with mental health in the United States. We don't provide them with mental health care money and so on and so forth. And then there is this culture of violence, which sort of connects to your other question, where our political dialogue has been infused with violence.

You know, it was just a week ago the president was, you know, Bush positioning a meme of himself saying, you know, he was going to go to war with Chicago. He uses the language of war. He changed the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. He, you know, the only thing Pete Higsef likes to talk about is lethality. You know, Trump is talking about, you know, the left as being violent lunatics and so forth. And so that contributes to the pathology in this country. The governor of Utah tried to counteract that in some respects.

I mean, he sounded in some respects very much like a typical Republican politician in mentioning scripture and any sort of playing to the base. But he did something very different from Trump, and you're right to point it out. He said, we didn't have looting. We didn't have riots. We talked to one another. We listened to what. another. We came together, and it's time that we need to all come together as a country.

And Trump presented with the exact same opportunity on Fox News this morning, where they said, well, there are people on the right and on the left that do this. He said, no, the ones on the right, they just want us to fight crime. It's the ones on the left who are dangerous that worry me. So Trump is a voice of division. And you raise a really good question, which is, are people getting sick of this? Do they see the violence in this? Are they looking for something different? J.D. Vance is like a barnacle, you know, just doing whatever Trump does, stick into his side, and mimicking the words of division of Trump. But is there room for a Republican? Is there room for Democrat that says this division is a big problem? And we have to find a way to heal the division?

because I think a lot of Americans believe that. And, you know, it was a different kind of sounding GOP leader. And it was encouraging. I mean, I think one can take some hope from that because surely we have a problem. And it is like the 60s. There is this kind of craziness in the land of people going out and acting out their anger. that leaves a death toll and leaves many other victims. Well, and the rhetoric is amplified by social media, right, which there wasn't in the 60s.

Do you think that, well, what do you think China and Russia are thinking as they look at this? They couldn't be happier. I mean, what they're seeing is the United States, their principal rival, the principal counterbalance to their power, getting weaker and weaker with each passing day. They see the president of the United States embroiled in a sex scandal. They see the president of the United States aging and not handling it. They see the president of the United States without any expert advisors bumbling his way through global affairs. They see the U.S. economy, which for most Americans is the big story of the week. Prices are going up.

It turned out we also learned this week that we actually created a million less jobs than we thought we had. The economy could be heading for stagflation, kind of a condition that's bad for everybody, but nobody knows how to solve it. And they say, well, they're falling behind. Xi Jinping, meanwhile, having big parades, having summits, gaining power. Putin tests Trump. Every couple of weeks, he tests Trump. This incursion into Poland was a test of Trump. And every single time, Trump fails the test.

or he succeeds from Putin's point of view. But even today on Fox News, he was like, well, you know, the polls shot down the drones. That's why they landed in Poland. And you go like, holy mackerel, are you kidding me? That's the problem if they had only not shot down the drones. You know, and there were scores and scores of drones. And he's like, well, it could have been an accident. They may not have meant for it to be there.

And immediately the polls were like, no, they mean for it to be there. And, you know, finally, the problem with that is, the Russians are testing for a reason. The reason is they want to see where they can advance next. If they do advance next, whether we are engaged or not, and they're likely to advance because of our own weakness, there is going to be a war on a scale that no one has seen for 80 years. And the weakness of the American president,

like the weakness of appeasers that came before him. And that's what he was doing on Fox News this morning. It looked like a morning chat, right? But he was appeasing the Russians. That could lead to consequences that will make us forget everything else you've talked about in the course of this pot. David, a quick break for some messages. And we're back talking with David Rothcob for about what an extraordinary week in America this has been.

What are your sources in the diplomatic arena in other countries? What are they telling you about how America presents at this point? Well, it's a little bit like what we've talked about in the past. But what I'm hearing is that they don't trust us. And so while they go in and they flatter Trump sometimes or they try to deal with Trump and Rubio, you know, in much the same way, you know, you'd sort of humor. an older relative who's losing it, they're all planning to go their own way. They're all becoming less dependent on the United States and more dependent on one another. Now, in some respects,

maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the U.S. had too much influence. But from the point of view of all these other countries, the U.S. was the foundation of Pox Americana. The U.S. was the basis that have kept us from having a world war for 80 years. And with that gone, and with people wanting to test the limits of what they can do, like Putin, like Netanyahu, like perhaps a Xi Jinping, it's super dangerous to have a void where once you had the world's most powerful nation, and they all fear that. It felt this week as if Trump was out and about because he was responding to all the rumors that suggested he was ill, that possibly he'd actually died over the,

over the weekend. He was obviously under instruction or he decided to get out and about. And yet, as you said earlier, he seems deflated. There is so much going on. And his usual bluff and ability to throw it off and change the narrative. It doesn't seem to have happened. Do you think that Russia and Ukraine situation is weighing on him? I mean, it is something he promised he would sort out on his first day. we overheard him on hot mic saying to Macron, oh, I think that Putin wants to do a deal with me. I know it's crazy. But, you know, and you have pointed out on this podcast that he uses his personal relationships with people

in lieu of actually having any kind of strategy with foreign countries with the international community. Do you think that particular situation and his failure to resolve it in any way whatsoever is weighing on him? I think all these. Everything he said he was going to do, he can't do, right? He said he was going to solve Ukraine in a day. It's not going to be solved. He said he could solve the problem in Gaza. It's getting worse.

He said he was going to bring peace to the Middle East, getting worse. He said he was going to make America stronger vis-a-vis our allies. He's not. He said he'd fix the economy and fix inflation. Inflation is going back up. Jobs are not being created. He said he would, you know, rebuild the country from within with his new policies of immigration and, you know, getting tough in cities and stuff, those

policies are super unpopular. His policies of, you know, gutting health care, you know, 11 million or so people are going to be kicked off of Medicare next year, and they're worried about it. The people he's put into the government are not competent. Donald Trump right now has precisely zero wins since he's become president again. I mean, you can say the big beautiful bill, but the reaction of the public to the bill has been

terrible. It's hugely unpopular. And so I think all this is weighing on him and his own mortality is weighing on him. And the Epsine thing is weighing on him. And he just looks like he can't handle it. I'll give you an example.

other day, yesterday, I guess, somebody came up to him outside the White House. He's doing one of these conversations with the press who are there who are allowed near him, which is not really the press these days. But he's doing one of these conversations and somebody says to him, oh, I'm very sorry to hear about your friend Charlie Kirk. How are you holding up? That's kind of a softball question, right? You know, Charlie was a good guy. I don't feel so good about it. It's a big loss for his family. He goes, Oh, yeah, no, I'm holding, I'm holding up pretty good. You can see the trucks here, and they're building the ballroom.

And, you know, they've wanted to have a ballroom here for 150 years, and it's just going to go over there. And you're like, what? What? Hello? Is anybody home? What's going on between those ears? And the reality is we get that a lot, they get meandering. We get him searching for an answer that, you know, it's like, I don't know, somebody with dementia.

I'm not saying that that's what he has. searching for the right word or phrase, trying to recall what it was that got them to where they are right now. And I just think he's losing it. So this does seem like an opportunity then for a Democrat. I actually think you saw Governor Cox stepping into an opportunity. Sometimes history did you a moment and you seize it. And I thought, oh, we're seeing perhaps this is an emergence of a kinder GOP. And you said earlier, oh, it's like, you know, a normal GOP person. And you've forgotten about the normal Republicans because the Mao Republicans have been so noisy and so loud. And you feel like they've eclipsed all other Republicans.

But as we know, the voters are largely moderate. They're in the middle. This is an opportunity for Democrats. Who is emerging? Well, you know, you always turn it to that. It's like things are going. well, and it's like I feel like I have answers for things. And that one, I'm not so sure. But let me, let me offer a couple things. One, this week, we saw a win for a Democrat. There was kind of a

big win and it hasn't gotten a lot of attention. But Donald Trump decided not to go to Chicago. You know, Pritzker and the people of Chicago said, no, you're not coming here. We're going to block you. We're going to make this difficult. We're going to challenge it in part. And Trump changed this tune. He said, no, we're going to go to Memphis instead. And said, we're going to go and, you know, we're going to take my campaign someplace else. So Pritzker kind of won on that ground. You've also started to see that some of the Democrats who are new voices like Mamdani in New York or the mayor in Boston, who are seen as progressives, are doing better and better.

She won a big victory in Boston against the others. And then the craft sons stepped out of the race. She's a rising star. Mom Dani just yesterday met with Bloomberg. People are starting to realize he's going to win. And, you know, he even stepped back some of his criticism of the NYPD because he's moving from one kind of campaign into kind of a more of a governing mode. And finally, I think, you know, one of the little things that gets under my nerves, a lot of

people go, oh, Mom, Donnie, that's just a New York story. It can't apply anywhere else. And I think the reason they say that is because it applies everywhere else. Because authentic, young, real change agent, sense of humor, understands how the modern media works, all are things that are appealing. And especially people are listening to people and trying to deal with the problems they've got, which is food costs too much, rent costs too much. they feel like the top 1% are getting everything and everybody else is being left behind. And whether it's, you know, they can come from across the political spectrum. You've got gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey, both women, both Democrats,

both with a strong national security background, who look like they're going to win their races pretty handily. And so there are encouraging stories. Alyssa Slotkin in Michigan is another person like that, West Moore, and Maryland is another person like that. There are encouraging stories out there. And I just think that these two things that we're talking about here intersect. The era of Trump is going to come to an end. There is no clear or appealing error apparent to Trump.

Is Trumpism over when Trump eventually dies? Is Trumpism gone? Well, I think that's something people have debated, but my guess is it is. My guess it is because the degree to which Trumpism was very much about one guy and his style of dealing with things and the fact that people believed he was going to shake things up because he was who he was, that's going to go. And I don't, you know, you're not going to believe that about J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio or those guys. Is the effort of the far right to try to control the courts, use all the scorers, use all the scorsts, sure tools they can to control the Congress, control the states, get their cultural agenda advanced, going to end when Trump is gone?

No, because it existed before Trump. You know, it's existed for 40 years, that effort. And so that'll continue. But it's going to take on a different tone. And, you know, when you talk about Cox, I think it's a very interesting point, because where is he from, Utah? Who does he sound like? he sounds like the most

demeaned loser in American politics in the past 10 years the victim of Trump Mitt Romney you know Mitt Romney the guy who was actually

right about Russia Mitt Romney who you know was from Utah and from Massachusetts who you know had a but but

but I couldn't have been more middle of the road right right total centrist right and and you know there are plenty of things you know, he shouldn't have left his dog on the car.

You know, he shouldn't, there are a bunch of things about Mitt Romney. But if that's the only thing that you have against Mitt Romney that he put his dog in a box on the car roof, compared to the modern politician now, compared to the mega politicians, that's, you know, how quaint to think that that was an issue for people like them. It's adorable. You know, no, seriously, to think about what we were talking about 10 years ago is just, adorable, you know, Barack Obama's tan suit, you know, this, this kind of stuff. It's, it's just adorable. But there was a pernicious subcurrent. Mitch McConnell was around.

Dick McCheney was around. Leonard Leo was around. The Koch brothers were around. There were things happening that led us to this point. The question is, you know, it's, I don't think Trump's going to go away and we're going to flip the switch and it'll be a toll new America. But the question is, what's the trend line? And are we moving back a little bit towards civility, back a little bit towards substance, back a little bit towards public service again as being a principle we like to see guiding, you know, our people in our office? And I think the signs are that's quite possible. David, we're just going to take some ads. And we're back talking to David Rothcopf, the Daily Beast columnist.

Well, I like Cox's message about get off your phone, go out into the community, do some public service, hug your friends. Feel the grass. I thought all of that was a very positive message and it was surprising to have a Republican politician say something like that because we've moved so far. But I thought there were two things that seem very symbolic. One, the paving over of Jackie Kennedy's Rose Garden, just the metaphor. four of that. And then the other was that at the restaurant where he got heckled, I thought that Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance looked embarrassed for Trump. They looked embarrassed. And he knew that they were embarrassed and he was caught. And as you said, he sort of backed into the corner and the Secret Service have come in for some pressure because it was felt that they should have managed to get Code Pink out of the way. Where did Code Pink the pro? protesters come from. But there was something in that moment that I thought was very telling.

Yeah. I mean, also the fact that Trump was surrounded by Moly and Curley, right? I mean, those three guys that you just mentioned, you know, the three stooges. The three stooges is, you know, but it says something because that's what he's chosen. I mean, you know, think, think about, you know, the fact that when this horrible crime happened, who did they dispatch, you know, Holmes and Watson? you know, Cash Patel and Dan Bongino, the Keystone cops, every single thing they have done are said with regard to this particular crime has been a mistake. And it's because Trump has surrounded himself with losers.

And this is going to prove to be a particular problem for him because as he ages and as he faces all of these complex issues and he doesn't have his family around him. And he doesn't have anybody around him who he can turn to and say, you handle this because none of them have the capacity to handle it. I thought it was a strange comment at the end of his spiel at the press conference, Cash Patel referring to Charlie Clark said, referring to Charlie Clark said, see you in Valhalla. When I was growing up, Valhalla was a place that Vikings went to do.

They went off on a ship when they were dead and you pushed them off into the sea or the late. That's when you were a Viking. You grew up in the North of England from Viking stock. You're probably part Viking. I think I am part Viking. And I'm not, yeah, whatever that means, you know, however long it was that they came to the door of England. Well, first of all, kind of weird to choose Val.

When you're talking about a guy who was so, you know, overtly Christian all the time, right? because that's not the Christian habit. But there's a reason for it. And it's a little dark. But the reality is that the people who talk about Valhalla a lot are white supremacists. A lot of those kind of white supremacist groups like to evoke Vikings. They like to evoke that kind of thing. And, you know, who did go to Valhalla, by the way, in Viking and North's mythology?

It was warriors. The reason they celebrated is because they feel they're all involved in an existential struggle to restore, you know, the white male, you know, domination to the United States. And so I think, you know, that's one of the other things we have to look at and all of this stuff. And it comes exhausting after a while. But it's like there's code being spoken. And the story, somebody is always trying to twist the story a little bit to suit, you know, audiences. And Cash Patel was trying to do that. And I think Governor Cox saw that, knew that, and seized back the narrative.

Anyway, I see candidate Cox emerging in an unexpected, an unlikely way. I'm sure he's going to be very happy to have the Viking vote from Northern England behind it. Okay. David Roscoff, it's always good to talk to you. Thank you for shedding some wisdom and some light on what has felt like a very dark week. And we will come back to you again and again for more wisdom, please. And I always like to come back because I enjoy the conversations. Well, thank you.

Thank you. And I want to just refer listeners to your. your columns in The Daily Beast, every week you write, and again, from a position of great knowledge and wisdom, something which is not appreciated as much as it should be these days. Thank you very much, David. Have a very pleasant weekend. Who better to unpack a very complicated week like this than David Roskopf. He brings such wisdom and insight and perspective to everything he talks about. And what an extraordinary week it was a terrible, untimely death. And clearly, the emerging. of a new Republican candidate in Spencer Cox. If I were J.D. Vance, I would be very nervous indeed that there is an alternative to Trumpism

and this morning we saw its emergence. Anyway, if you have been, thank you for joining us. Don't forget to subscribe to The Daily Beast, just at the Daily Beast.com. Also, join the Daily Beast network, which you can do by pressing the join button under this video if you're watching on YouTube. subscribe on Apple, Spotify,

wherever else you get your podcast. Don't forget to share it with a friend. Lead us a comment on YouTube. And you can leave us comments now on The Daily Beast too. And this week we've had lots and lots of you writing in to share your thoughts about Charlie Kirk's untimely death. So thank you for that. And know that we read the comments

and some of your suggestions for guests and stuff we're really trying to act on. I'll be back tomorrow with Michael Wolf. Michael Wolf is in London. Neither of us will ever travel again after this week. But I look forward to getting Michael's perspective from Europe too. And as our first lady, who emerged from wherever she's been hiding to talk about AI and the robots are coming and to be at her husband's side at the 9-11 memorial, as our first lady would have us say, be beast. And thank you to our production team, Devin Roderino, Anna von Erson, and our editor, Jesse Milwood.

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