Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Simon Rosenberg: Greg, it’s always good to be with you, my friend.
Rosenberg: Yeah. The tariffs are the greatest policy error, arguably, in American history. He’s using these powers without congressional assent in this capricious and tyrannical way, and it’s blowing up on him. It’s slowing the economy down. Prices are going up. The market’s crashing. Confidence in the United States is ebbing. Money is flowing out of the country. The safe haven that’s been so critical to our economic success and the dollar strength has been severely damaged. We’ve learned that Trump has now said that he’s going to unilaterally reduce the China tariffs, having been persuaded by his economic team that they were doing enormous damage to the country. So he’s in some form of another retreat—again. I think that this is part of this broader pattern, Greg: that he’s failing and retreating and stumbling, and his buffoonery is becoming clear to the whole world.
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): Let me be clear: There will be no unilateral reduction in tariffs against China. The president has made it clear. China needs to make a deal with the United States of America, and we are optimistic that will happen. And when that continues, it’ll be up to the president what the tariff rate on China will be.
Rosenberg: And he’s spooked by the his polling numbers. Donald Trump wants to be liked. He wants big crowds. He wants adulation, right? He’s not a politician who doesn’t care about those things. Those things matter to him a lot. They’re important to him. His obsession with crowd size; every interview he gave during the presidential election, the first thing he talked about was his great polling numbers. So the poll numbers are becoming a crisis for him because what’s happening with his declining poll numbers ... And remember, we were told during Biden’s presidency that job approval was the coin of the realm, right? Everything flowed in Washington [from the] perception of power.
And what’s happening is that that perception of weakness creates permission structure for people to defy him. So it’s connected to, I think, this rising defiance that you’re seeing. The Supreme Court defied him twice in the last few weeks. Jerome Powell defied him. The Wall Street Journal and The Economist—and Wall Street itself is defying him. You’re seeing this increasing willingness of countries and institutions to defy him. It creates what I call this vicious cycle for him: that the greater evidence of defiance, the [weaker] he appears; the weaker he appears, the more people are willing to defy him. And I think he started to go into a vicious cycle of weakness and defiance, which is obviously good for the U.S. and good for the freedom-loving people of the world.
So I got to think, Simon: As part of your program for fighting Trump, the American people have to stay in this game in a big way, right? They have to let institutions know two things. One, we’re watching whether you cave or whether you stand up to Trump. And two, if you stand up to Trump, we’re with you all the way.
We have to be moving the ball down the playing field every day. And what is just clear as day now is that we are stronger today—the opposition movement—and he is weaker. What’s also true, though, is that we have to have a great sense of urgency about this work because Donald Trump is breaking things that will be very hard, if not impossible, to repair. Both of these things can be true at the same time. He can be weaker, we can be stronger; and he’s also continuing to break things, requiring enormous urgency around our work.
Rosenberg: Yeah, I totally agree with what you just said, Greg. And I think that on some levels, if we can all just take a step back, Donald Trump is a ridiculous person. He’s a ridiculous leader. What he’s trying to do in this country that has almost 250 years of the democratic tradition, strong federalism, a government that has broken into three branches [is] he’s trying to turn this country into Russia, into China, into Venezuela, whatever the analogy is. And why? What’s the point? Usually when these radical transformations happen, it’s because the country has failed, the political system has failed. He inherited one of the strongest economies in American history. American power ... We were paramount. We were very strong in the global stage. There wasn’t some societal collapse that would have precipitated him bringing in these radical reforms that were not central, frankly, to his dialogue with the American people during 2024. And I think people are freaking out....
So I do think that we’re at a point where we should be optimistic. There’s one central learning to me about the last few months, and this is things that you and I have been discussing for a long time, Greg: We’ve learned that people’s minds can change, that our work that we do actually is making a difference, that the country is actually changing their opinion about Donald Trump. And they don’t like what they see. In the Economist poll that came out this week, he’s not in a place of majority standing on any issue that matters to voters right now. He’s now got a majority of the country against him on inflation, the economy, immigration even, right? You’ve seen the country really turn on him.
Rosenberg: I’m not surprised that you’re seeing Democrats stumble or come out of the gates slowly because we’re seeing something so unprecedented in our history—this wanton lawlessness, this abandoning of the Constitution, this aggression that Elon Musk represented in Washington. There’s no question we got out of the box slow. There’s no question about it. And there’s no question that every day there are things that are happening that, to me, you could consider to be disappointing in people’s reactions to things. But while that is true, you’re also seeing greater ambition and greater willingness to defy Trump. And you’ve seen it happen incrementally.
So my own view about this is that in the last 10 days, [with] this heightened level of defiance that you’ve seen even from places like The Economist and The Wall Street Journal—who have now become incredibly part of the opposition movement in the U.S.—and the willingness of Democratic politicians to have greater rhetorical, political ambition, we’re getting there. And yes, let’s all just stipulate that we all wish we were further along than we are right now—but that’s water under the bridge. The key now is we just have to keep moving forward.
Sargent: Just to wrap this up very briefly, to keep the optimistic streak of this conversation going, what’s an optimistic long-term scenario? We’re talking about Trump’s approval getting to where? In the high 30s? And Republicans starting to break more from him, and him caving on more fronts—like, I don’t know, bringing Abrego Garcia back to the U.S.? What’s the short version of the optimistic scenario?
In terms of the polling ... So Donald Trump, in what is one of the most sturdy, reliable polls—the Economist/YouGov poll—is 41–54 in the polling out this week. Minus 13. That’s a 19-point net drop from where he was in the first week of his of his presidency. And what’s important to recognize is that 54 percent disapproval number. Joe Biden, the day that he got out of the race—when he was in trouble and was not able to govern the country any longer and run as a serious candidate—was at 55 disapproval, one point lower than where Trump is in this current Economist/YouGov poll. So he’s hovering in a place where the last person at that place of disapproval had to leave the presidential race in 2024.
We have to start introducing that concept—because in our political system, that word means something. It connotes weakness in our political system. One of the reasons that Trump’s been floating this third term idea is that he’s deeply aware that if he becomes seen as a lame duck, if there starts to be press coverage of his successors—the people running and angling to be president—it will further marginalize him. So we can’t allow his madness to become our own and to obey in advance by not using this term “lame duck,” which is completely appropriate to his presidency at this point.
Rosenberg: Greg, it’s always great to be with you. And I just want to say thank you for the work that you do every day.
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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