Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
G. Elliott Morris: Hey, thanks for having me back.
Morris: Sure. So at Strength in Numbers, my Substack, what we like to do is look at an average of all polls over a certain amount of time. While there’s some noise in the data, when there’s a clear shift in how people feel about the president in a short amount of time, we can be reasonably confident that we can attribute that to certain events. So since July 13, there’s been about a two percentage point increase in Trump’s disapproval rating, from 52.5 percent of the public saying they disapprove of the job he’s doing as president to 54.5 percent. And there’s been a corresponding decrease in his approval rating, from about 44 percent to about 42.5 percent. Look, you can come up with other explanations for me, maybe, but it seems like the easiest explanation here is the Occam’s razor one: The thing that’s sucking up all of the news attention that’s particularly damaging to Trump because of the last two years of Republican positioning on this is the one that’s affecting his approval rating. That’s my analysis.
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): The president has said if the Department of Justice and the FBI want to move forward with releasing any further credible evidence, they should do so. As to why they have or have not or will, you should ask the FBI about that.
Morris: Yeah, it seems unlikely to me, given everything else Trump is able to do with a snap of his finger, that if he wanted full transparency, he wouldn’t get it from his own FBI, especially with the people who are running the FBI today, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino. So it just seems obvious that there’s some roadblock that we’re not seeing. And in terms of public opinion, the public agrees with that. Reuters/Ipsos polled people between July 15–16 and asked them if they agreed with the statement, “The government is hiding Epstein’s alleged client list,” and 70 percent of people said that they agreed with that. They also agreed with the statement, “The government is hiding information on Epstein’s death,” which I know we don’t necessarily want to touch and I’m not sure how much we believe that. But just that is a point in the case that the public sees that something is going on behind the scenes here. And I think that’s the explanation for Karoline Leavitt’s comments as well.
Morris: Yeah. And people do want the transparency. If you ask them, “Should the government release all the documents it has about Jeffrey Epstein?” that’s an 80–20 issue. They’re clearly reading public opinion here in that the people want the information. And then the next question is like, “Why are they not getting it?” and that’s, I guess, where we have to be a bit more speculative.
Leavitt (audio voiceover): I don’t believe that’s something the White House was aware of. You’d have to ask the FBI.
Morris: Yeah, that’s just classic obfuscation by the press secretary, right? If they could say no, then they would say no. They say no all the time when they don’t have information on their side. This press secretary … How does The New York Times call it? Stretches the truth, perhaps? So they could be stretching the truth further here if they want, but instead you get the redirection to the FBI. So I agree. I think that’s pretty telling of what’s going on behind the scenes here.
The reason I bring this up, Elliott, is that this is the sort of event—this letter—that can continue the media maelstrom, which in turn gets the public more and more focused on this. What are you seeing in the polling there? Are you seeing like a marked uptick in actual interest by the public? Because I’m expecting if Democrats can stoke this more this way and more questions get aired out in the media, the public gets more and more focused on it.
Sargent: Well, as a scholar of public opinion, can you talk a little bit about why we should anticipate that things like this Durbin letter and other interventions by Democrats that focus the media on this issue are likely to gin up more public interest about it? This is something you public opinion–types obsess over pretty regularly.
Sargent: And I think a coordinated message has gone out among top Republicans. We had House Speaker Mike Johnson also comment on whether there will be a House vote compelling release of the Epstein files. Listen to this.
Reporter (audio voiceover): So no vote after the resolution?
Sargent: So here Johnson again conflates releasing the grand jury testimony with releasing the files. Note, again, the effort to portray Trump as supremely transparent. Like I said, the message does appear coordinated. They’ve got to be looking at similar data to what you’re talking about here. And let me ask this, Elliott, if I could: There’s going to come a point when House Republicans get even more nervous about this, aren’t they?
Sargent: Well, you wrote this piece trying to dig into why this is so problematic for Trump. I want to read a bit from it, “[B]y siding with Epstein and against transparency, Trump significantly injures his reputation as an outsider fighting the ‘deep state’ for God and country. Much of the conspiratorial wing of the Republican Party has been arguing that Epstein was in bed with major Democratic donors and other political elites — by refusing to side against them, Trump implicitly sides with them.” He’s the traitor to his class, in a way, to appropriate the FDR idea. He’s the guy who’s going to go in and avenge the people by showing them how elites rigged the system in their favor, how corrupt their globalist schemes are and so forth. So I think you’re really getting at something essential there. This cuts against his political mystique at a very deep level.
Sargent: Right. He’s basically in on the elite cover-up. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s essentially what’s exactly happening.
Sargent: And it’s interesting how hard Johnson and Leavitt are working to obscure that that’s his actual position. That’s really what’s at issue here with the throwing of the FBI under the bus. That’s basically, Hey, we’d love to have the files out there. Go talk to Kash.
Sargent: I just want to pick up on what you said about young men. Of course, young men are the success story for Trump of the 2024 cycle—the incels and those types, all the Joe Rogan–vote types, and so forth. They’re the more conspiratorial, “anti-system” voters that Trump was able to win over. You do think this costs him with that demographic? And does that matter in the midterms though? How do you see all that playing out? These are probably the types of voters that would sit out a midterm, but I would imagine that Trump would like them to turn out on his side—on the side of the Republican Party—precisely because the midterm electorate is going to be made up of highly educated, highly motivated voters who lean Democratic.
Sargent: I’ve got to say, it’s awfully inconvenient for Trump and House Republicans that the people now sounding the loudest calls for transparency on this matter are House Democrats, right?
Sargent: Fascinating stuff. Elliott Morris, thanks so much for talking to us, man. It’s going to get really, really crazy.
Morris: Yeah, this is probably one of the more interesting stories I’ve covered in my last 10 years. Thanks for having me on, Greg.
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