Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Alan Elrod: Good to be here, Greg. Really excited.
Elrod: My thoughts are that it might be. But at this time, we have to consider that swing voters, independent voters, they’ve had a lot of time to absorb Trump and Trumpism, yet they came back around to him again in 2024. At a certain point, we have to think that they knew what they were getting. Maybe he can blow it with them if he really overreaches or if he just absolutely can’t get things through Congress, but so far, even with that slim majority, they seem to be willing to go lockstep with him. And I’m a little skeptical that the Jenga tower is going to collapse immediately on him with this.
Elrod: It’s the full array of what we’ve been worried about with him from the beginning, which is corruption, kakistocracy, rule by ineptitude, by flattery, by bribery, all the things that we think are the hallmarks of Trump and his mode. The first time around, it worked to say, Look, this isn’t normal, this isn’t what we do. But when you consider that Donald Trump has been essentially the premier Republican politician since 2015, and that now he’s going to serve a second term, nonconsecutive—that means, overall, 12 years essentially of politics dominated in one way or another by Trump—those arguments just don’t really work for people who’ve been exposed to over a decade of this kind of rhetoric and this kind of policymaking conversation.
Elrod: We know generally in political science that when people come of age, it helps shape their politics. And obviously, they’re not all pro-Trump, but the distinction is not necessarily that they’re all MAGA-oriented but that they’re all exposed to this stuff for really the entirety of the time they’ve been paying attention. By the time we get to the end of Trump’s term in 2028, someone who is just that year going to be able to vote would have been five years old when Donald Trump came down the escalator. So at a certain point, that level of exposure really shapes just what you think is normal. Your reference points have shifted.
You can make the argument that American presidents don’t talk a certain way or that administrations don’t engage in certain pressure campaigns on private companies, but that’s all just empty words if what they’ve actually seen for over a decade is people doing this. So it really matters if we’re going to talk about normalization. There’s the ethical question of normalization: Are we making it OK for Trump to do what he does? But then there’s just the descriptive fact that this has been happening for some time. And for many people, whether it means they endorse it, it is normal.
Elrod: Absolutely. For someone like Zuckerberg, they’re saying it’s acceptable and good. For someone like Tim Cook, they’re saying, Well, this is the game you have to play. There’s a range there. And not everyone is necessarily saying, I love Trump. This is how it should be, but plenty of people are saying, Well, last time around, we offered lots of rhetorical signals that we don’t like Trump or that we’re different and that we are with the greater majority of the American people who stand for these other virtues. And this time around, we’re going to play the game.
Sargent: Absolutely. To your point about young voters getting acclimated to all this, I want to play something Trump said at his “victory rally” in D.C. on Sunday. Listen to this.
Sargent: Alan, Trump said it right there. They want to condition a whole generation to expect and support violent authoritarian corrupt race-baiting politics.
Sargent: I want to push back a little bit on something you said earlier about how there’s not really necessarily a danger of Trump overreaching or at least maybe that people are getting a little too optimistic that that will happen. During the campaign, it’s true as you say that voters have been exposed to Trump’s authoritarianism and his intimations or direct flirtations with political violence for years. All the reporting and the polling indicated to us throughout the campaign that this was something that did concern voters but they were putting aside those concerns due to the cost of living and other considerations that really had nothing to do with Trump’s authoritarianism. And right now, we are seeing that the things that Trump plans to do are unpopular.
Elrod: I don’t disagree, but I do think it’s a test moment for how broken our politics is if Donald Trump does push through these things. People have said they don’t want mass deportations; people have said they care about prices, tariffs could push prices up; people have said a number of other aspects of what Trump wants to do is unpopular, or least that they’re not sure about it. But this is where we get into a moment where we’re really going to test just how far gone our politics is.
Sargent: I will say, in favor of what you’re arguing, one thing that I fear is that Trump gets a lot of credit for the very good economy that he’s inheriting. Look, this is going to happen. He’s been saying right up until today that everything is an absolute disaster, and starting now, everything will be absolutely great under him. And I fear that one real risk is that the electorate starts to associate the good economy with the mass deportations and other Trumpian authoritarian politics and starts to say to themselves, Well, it’s scary stuff that he was talking about, but look, it’s working, isn’t it?
Sargent: Well, on mass deportations, I think that the polling is painting a very misleading picture. You’ve just brought up one of the things that pisses me off more than anything, so I’m going to rant now. The polling almost always, or at least most of the time, tends to ask, “Do you favor mass deportations, yes or no?” When it’s asked as a yes or no question, voters tend to say yes because they associate deportations with something like public order. But when pollsters ask, “Do you favor mass deportations or a path to legalization for most noncriminal migrants?,” then solid majorities favor the latter. It’s creating a really misleading impression that the public favors mass deportations when the polling wording, when it’s structured in a much more revealing way, actually shows support for the opposite. See what I’m saying? I worry that our public discourse is actually contributing to the problem that you’re underscoring here.
So if there is a lot of actual turbulence and he can’t deliver any of these ideas in an orderly fashion, and people do feel like their lives are being disrupted and they feel like they’re watching people they know be treated roughly, then I do think there’s the potential for some backlash. And that’s probably where he is the most vulnerable. Less on the idea that any particular move might be unpopular in a public polling sense, but more in the broader idea that if he is not delivering an orderly, stable government—and I don’t necessarily mean the tweets, I mean this time around policy-wise—then people might say, Well, I picked him because he was supposed to be this big, strong man that could steady things, and he’s not. So that could hurt him, and that may be the one silver lining.
Elrod: I think there is. Again, I tend to think of myself in this context as a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist, which is that I don’t know how quickly public reaction will build, I don’t know if you’ll get the kind of.... No, we’ve already seen you’re not going to get the same marching in the street that you got in 2017. But I do think that one of the most effective ways to get the public to react is when they see things happening in their own backyard, when it’s affecting them personally. So seeing neighbors, if they know people who are going to end up getting harassed by Trump’s immigration regime; seeing prices go up if they do because of tariffs; seeing actual day-to-day not just inconveniences but things that truly disturb them, I do think there’s a chance that by the time we get to something like the midterms, that does matter.
Sargent: Look, there’s no question that you’re raising an alarming scenario, which is that a fairly large number of swing voters become acclimated to Trump’s way of doing politics: the authoritarianism, political violence, the corruption, the celebration of oligarchy, the celebration of kleptocracy. It’s an alarming scenario, no question.
When Donald Trump leaves office, and in 2028 should the Democrats manage to win, there’s still going to be a lot of rebuilding norms, reconditioning the public to a certain way of politics if we actually want to try to recover that. Because at this point, it’s just been too long to say that even if you electorally defeat Trump or Trumpism, that you don’t still have to face the cultural consequences of a decade and a half of this stuff marinating the American public.
Elrod: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure. Long time, first time.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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