Editor’s note: Later in this discussion guest Simon Rosenberg makes a critical point that we want to highlight: With Trump and Republicans gaining tens of billions of dollars to expand Trump’s arrests, detentions and deportations, we’re entering a period of intense civil conflict that Democrats will have to engage with more forcefully.
So Republicans succeeded in passing President Trump’s big bill enshrining his agenda, which could leave 17 million more people without health care while massively redistributing wealth upward via tax cuts for the wealthy. The bill will also give Stephen Miller tens of billions of dollars to create a huge immigration detention complex. Now what? The big question is, Can Democrats get the voters to see the consequences of all this and place the blame for it where it belongs—on Trump and the GOP—in time for the midterms? But what absolutely can’t happen is that Democrats lawmakers and voters alike get demoralized and decide that nothing can stop Trump and Republicans, even if it sometimes feels a lot like that. So we’re talking today to Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, author of The Hopium Chronicles, which is aptly named given the mission ahead. Simon, great to have you on, man.
Sargent: So Simon, you just wrote that we’re in the middle of a very dark moment. The cuts to USAID are going to kill huge numbers of poor people internationally. Trump and Miller are ramping up the migrant detentions. They’re going to kick millions off health care. They’re mortgaging away our future with massive unnecessary deficits. They’re killing subsidies for green energy and throwing our progress on climate change into reverse. I don’t know, Simon. Looks pretty bad right now. Your thoughts?
It is shocking that we are in this place where Donald Trump may be getting a win this week but the country is clearly losing and the American people are clearly losing. And the idea that these things could be so disconnected—that he’s doing something that is so manifestly harmful to the country while we’re going to be told for weeks that this was a big win for him, [even though] the real measure should be whether we’re winning and the country’s winning.… And I think this was a big loss. His presidency so far has been a big L, a big loss for the American people and America itself.
Rosenberg: Yeah. Look, I think that we have elections in 2025 that we have to really focus on first. We need to have as big victories as we possibly can in New Jersey, Virginia, and in New York City, and to make elections—which are only four months away, by the way; it’s very soon—feel like clear repudiations of this politics. Trump is already really unpopular. He’s already seen his coalition unravel. And they just passed the most unpopular big bill in modern history. So you would assume that they would continue to struggle with the public, giving us a big opportunity over the next 16 months. But step one is to have a good election this November and continue to build for 2026. And I do think we have to be open to the idea that the Senate now may be in play and do everything we can to make it so.
Rosenberg: Yeah. Using the Cook Report—the independent Cook Report—as a guide, there are 29 Republican-held seats that could be in play. These are very imprecise things. We just know these are a reasonable place to go, with eight being true toss-ups, eight being the next level out and then the rest being in the third level out. It’s not a big field, right? In the history of the House, it’s a narrow field, not a big field. Will the field get bigger? If they continue to struggle with the public, yeah. But we are going to have to maintain and keep our incumbents and make sure they come back, and be as aggressive as possible in going out and winning these seats. And I’ll tell you that what has not been widely reported is that Democratic-allied groups, interest groups, already have ads up in many of these places. They’re already softening the ground. They’ve been running ads in many of these districts for months. It’s one of the reasons why this bill was so incredibly unpopular. And so there’s already a whole team of people putting ads up on the air to make these Republicans own this vote in the House.
Sargent: So Simon, you have been very focused on the nitty-gritty of the battle for the House. Can you shed a little light on the geography here? Where is this going to be settled? Where is the majority going to be won? And what does that mean?
Sargent: Are they mostly suburban seats, Simon, or are they more MAGAish, or what?
I really do feel that in all the years I’ve been doing this … the Republican Party in the age of Trump has now become so disconnected from reality and so uninterested in reality and so uninterested in telling the truth or being grounded in anything that’s remotely true that it’s been shocking even for me. Like I’m not a kid. I’m not easily shocked, right? But you heard members on television today saying that this isn’t going to cut Medicaid. It’s just staggering how much we’re going to be left with—whatever happens with Trump—a Republican Party [that] has become so fundamentally disconnected from the realities of what they’re doing and the realities of true discourse. And we’re going to see that play out in this fight to define what this bill does and doesn’t do in the coming months and through the election next year.
Rosenberg: Again, it gets back to the dueling realities that we have to deal with every day. One is that Trump is doing unbelievable harm to the country. He’s breaking things that will be difficult, if not impossible, to repair. And we have to be operating with incredible vigor to mitigate the damage and challenge them. And the second competing reality is that he’s weaker. He’s struggling. His administration is not succeeding. He’s failing. The economy isn’t doing what he wants it to do. Governments around the world are not bending the knee to him. And his attempt to define reality and to tell these stories—these false stories—is being challenged by reality. Look at the anger they had about the false story they told about the Iran bombing, which went immediately negative for them with the public. He tried to have this military parade, and that same day we had millions of Americans marching patriotically all around the country. His immigration enforcement, which I think they thought would cause the country to rally behind him, has been wildly rejected by the country. So we do now have a majority of the country that has basically made a decision that he’s no good and that they’re not playing ball with the bullshit and the attempt to create these false stories. But this fight for what is true and what is actually happening in our country is going to be this existential fight for us, I think, politically over the next 16 months. And it’s why we have to be on the front foot and we have to be fighting with incredible intensity and ferocity every day.
Rosenberg: Well, it’s instructive, Greg, that you could make the case that the worst part of this bill is this expansion or explosion of ICE. And yet it wasn’t something that we really talked about the last couple of months because Democrats, I think, have still not gotten out of their defensive crouch on border and the immigration and we’ve been a little slow on this over the last few months. You and I are in violent agreement about this. And I think it is amazing. We’re waking up today to the Republicans just passed essentially something to create this partisan political police force that reports to the president that is unprecedented and completely out of character for any democracy—and it wasn’t really a major part of the conversation and debate over the last couple of months.
Sargent: Now, what we’re going to have is intense civil conflict in the streets, more kidnappings, more violence, more dehumanization of immigrants. I can see things going south for them from here. Now, what I want to ask you about is: Do you see that? But also, is there a danger that Democrats—both lawmakers and voters—get pretty deeply demoralized both by the darkness and by the losses? Look, we’ve gotten the shit kicked out of us a bit here, and it’s rough. So is there this danger, right, between between all these factors? What’s the way out of that? How do you get Democrats to stay in the game?
There are more people taking real concrete action for our democracy. I don’t think that’s going to fundamentally change, particularly because I do think now there’s going to be a huge focus in these battleground House and Senate districts, [with] people in these communities communicating to their Republican electeds about their disappointment and anger about what happened. I think that stuff is going to materialize quickly. It’s going to be something for people to do now, and they’re going to go to work. So I do think that our movement is going to continue to grow and get stronger because I think there’s a lot to do. And that’s important in our democracy.
To your point about the rejection, I don’t know about high watermark, low watermark. I don’t know where this is all going to go politically because he’s already so low that I don’t know how much lower he can go, frankly, in his polling. I do think that quickly there will be a sense in the public—and this is something we have to initiate—that this was an enormous mistake, that Republicans made an error, that they are screwing over the country. It’s because in their information universe, Donald Trump is popular. He’s successful. He’s young and thin and has hair and is virile—and all these things that we don’t see. They have created this incredible bubble where in their world he is successful and winning and popular whereas actually in the real world—the world that 55–60 percent of voters inhabit, the ones that will determine the election—they don’t see that at all.
Sargent: Those coming elections are going to be really big for morale purposes. I agree 100 percent, folks. Don’t let up now. This is not the time to get out of the fight. Simon Rosenberg, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on, man.
Sargent: Same to you, Simon.
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