President Donald Trump’s candid admissions about the impulses driving his presidency suggest he’s entering his “deathbed confession” era, one podcaster says.
Jennifer Welch, co-host of the I’ve Had It podcast, told the Daily Beast that the 79-year-old commander-in-chief has reached a point where he’s not inclined to hold much back. What becomes clear as a result, she said, is that Trump’s authoritarian tendencies have become more apparent.
Appearing on The Daily Beast Podcast, Welch referenced how Trump blurted out a few months ago that he preferred the company of “losers.”
“I always like to hang around with losers, actually, because it makes me feel better,” Trump said at a Miami investor forum. “I hate guys that are very, very successful, and you have to listen to their success stories. I like people that like to listen to my success.”
Trump, who also said he doesn’t care about the midterms or Americans’ financial situations while attempting to manage the war with Iran, “is entering his deathbed confession era,“ Welch told host Joanna Coles.
“He’s starting to say all of the quiet parts out loud. He’s saying, I love hanging out with losers. He likes to be the big d--- in charge,” she said. “He wants everybody to kiss his a--, and they don’t feel second-hand embarrassment or the cringiness of all of that.”
The reason, she explained, is that those close to the president make up “the largest collection of broken people in our lifetime.”
“You’ve never seen a group of such broken people before. This is like if you went to a rehab facility with a triple diagnosis of a personality disorder, meth addiction, inner childhood trauma, all of that,” Welch said. “It’s flagrant incompetence on full display, and I think Trump loves it.”
As an example, Welch pointed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“Ruth Ben-Ghiat—she is a professor at NYU, a scholar on autocrats—and she says this is a feature of dictators, of autocrats: they pick people that are easy to break. They pick people intentionally that are obsequious,” Welch said.
“Look at Marco Rubio and the humiliation ritual that they do with him,” she said, referring to him dressing up like ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Air Force One and wearing oversized shoes that Trump gifted him.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s controversial history with animals also made her a prime candidate for a Cabinet position under Trump.
“These people are very easy to break, like Kristi Noem—the fact that she had murdered her dog. And nobody ever talks about the goat,“ Welch said. ”She also shot a goat. That is a sign for Trump that, ‘Oh, she’s perfect for me.’”
When reached for comment, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle provided the following statement.
“Anything said on the Daily Beast podcast is equivalent to screaming into the void. No one listens to this Trump Derangement Syndrome therapy session,” he wrote, despite the podcast garnering hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube alone. “Jennifer Welch and Joanna Coles suffer from a severe and debilitating disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted their peanut-sized brains.”
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