Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.
Shephard: Yeah. For the last month or so, I’ve been looking at his steady dip in the polls as analogous to what happened to Joe Biden after the withdrawal from Afghanistan—the moment where the coalition that got him elected breaks up and where you’re basically left with diehards and true believers. And I think that one of the things that really jumped out to me in recent polling is this idea that the emerging MAGA majority that Trump had really pushed after winning reelection [is] completely gone now, basically. His status with Black voters has always been overstated. He only won about 15 percent of the vote—was a big deal because he doubled what he had done in 2020. But his disapproval rating among Black voters is up to 72 percent. Those numbers are similar among young voters. With voters under 30, he was running even, which is pretty crazy for a Republican president, in January. He’s now 30 points underwater. And there’s just nothing you can see here where that’s going to change.
Sargent: Alex, let me throw this in there. Gallup just found that Trump’s overall approval among independents is 29 percent. So we’re really seeing his coalition fall apart across the board, aren’t we?
Sargent: A hundred percent. And now let’s use that as the setup to listen to good old White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. She read from a pre-written statement. Listen to this.
Sargent: So there are a lot of problems with this rant. Many of these conflicts aren’t at all over. But the really glaring thing is the single biggest promise of peace Trump made is an utter buffoonish failure. He said he’d end the Russia-Ukraine war in one day. In reality, he’s been badly humiliated by Putin and clearly doesn’t know what the hell to do. I think that’s another reason he’s in trouble in the polls because that whole thing really just tore the clothing off the emperor rather brutally. Alex, you want to a crack at her strange monologue there?
Saying that the Israeli-Iran conflict is resolved is remarkable to me because (1) the president risked entering the country into a world war by sending U.S. bombers into Iran and (2) this is Israel and Iran that we’re talking about. This is hardly a settled issue, and it’s one that I think threatens to blow up again in a few months. I think people have already forgotten the fact that the U.S. intelligence assessment of the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities is that [it] set the program back by months. So it’s very, very easy to assume that this will pop up again in a couple of months. Serbia and Kosovo, that’s obviously a long standing problem—but again, the U.S. has made that conflict more difficult. It’s long supported Kosovar independence efforts. Richard Grenell, who’s a special envoy there, made that much more difficult. Trump claiming to have settled the India-Pakistan dispute—also crazy because again, it’s India and Pakistan we’re talking about. And also, this is a claim that India’s own defense minister has rejected.
Sargent: It absolutely is. I want to home in on Leavitt’s weird talk about the Nobel Peace Prize because I think it gets at some of what we’re talking about here. When she does that kind of thing, it’s so visibly directed at the audience of one. That’s what gets me about it. It’s so obviously done solely to make Trump feel good—because there’s not another human being on this earth that’s going to take that ridiculousness seriously except for maybe the most hardcore of Trump supporters. And yet at the same time, that display just reminds everyone that the emperor has no clothes, as I said earlier, right? Because it’s so obsequious and it’s so disconnected from reality. What do they think they’re doing when they do that kind of thing?
Sargent: Well, remember when Joy Behar on “The View” went out there and just tore him to pieces, that was the essence of it. It was his jealousy of Obama that was at issue. And of course, the White House really went right out there and essentially said, OK, we’re now going to use state power to punish “The View” for daring to say that about dear leader. This is another example of them just making it all so much worse by making it clear to the whole world that everything is about ministering to his pathologies. That’s just always what everything revolves around at all times.
Sargent: It sure is. I want to return to those Gallup identification numbers, because they really raise some important issues. Again, it showed that Democrats have regained their advantage in party identification. Forty-six percent now identify as Democrats, while 43 percent identify as Republicans. That’s flipped from the end of last year when Republicans led 47 to 43 percent at the start of Trump’s term. Trump’s term has flipped these numbers. It’s funny. I remember that when Republicans had that lead, there was this tremendous amount of attention paid to it. It was another nail in the Democratic Party’s coffin. Now you’re not hearing much talk about this.
Shephard: Yeah. It feels to me like an overcorrection from the first term to some extent. Trump has always been treated in this way, but there’s a condescending quality to me—that essentially they treat his support as, I should say, ineffable, almost as something that can’t be computed, right? That there’s just this connection—innate connection—that he has with his voters, and that it’s mysterious and magical. It’s the way that Trump talks about it. And this is why I think it’s ridiculous when you would always have the “diner pieces” or whatever—and it’s always some guy with shiny shoes and fancy shirt and he goes and talks to the real people. And Trump’s connection to these people is not absolute, right? It’s still a relatively small percentage of voters; again, most of them white. And I think the other aspect of this—people don’t talk about as much as well either—is how racialized it is, right? The press does not treat a Democratic coalition, which is much more diverse and much more working class for that matter, with the same degree of deference. It’s because, and I think that this goes back to your point with George W. Bush as well, of the perception that it’s white working-class voters specifically that is treated this way.
Shephard: Yeah. The story of Trump is always that—he does it successfully, and it’s the one thing that he does very well, right?—he campaigns as a guy who says, You see all these other people, I’m different from them. I’m more like you. I understand what your issues are. I’m not in it for myself, or, to the extent that I’m in it for myself, it’s good, right? It’s a different type of corruption. And I think that a lot of people who are understandably fed up with both parties in America look at Trump as something else, right? And I think that, again, Democratic attacks that other Trump is an authoritarian, fascistic force—although they’re accurate, occasionally [they] have the effect of reinforcing that. But in office, the story has always been that he governs, for the most part, with bog standard Republican approach that people hate. He also does a lot of authoritarian and fascist stuff too. But the idea in the press in particular, and you hear it from other Democrats as well, is that somehow he has the magic campaign touch all the time. It’s just not true. And voters reject it.
Sargent: A hundred percent. And the mention of the authoritarianism and fascism is important, too, because there’s this weird irony around that. It works like this: The authoritarianism and fascism is actually, believe it or not, making him unpopular. People don’t like that stuff. And yet at the same time, those things make it harder for a lot of people to accept that Trump’s unpopular. When the polls come out, when you tweet out a poll showing him tanking, a thousand people just tweet at you, LOL, dictators don’t care about being unpopular. People simply assume it doesn’t matter if he’s unpopular. There’s this tendency to default to this idea that Trump is invincible, right? Either elections will be just canceled or they’ll just be rigged beyond hope. Either way, the central thought is that he has in some sense fundamentally won permanently, right? But there are going to be midterms. I don’t think he’s going to be able to rig them, at least to the degree that he’d like. And people need to start realizing that he wants you to think that he’s invincible so you give up on politics. What do you think, Alex? Am I being too optimistic here?
And I think the other reason why it matters is that the other big story of this term for me is that.… [During] the first Trump term, I was very mean to people like Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, Republicans who very tepidly opposed the president, but they did help block his legislative agenda in ways that were ultimately meaningful on the grand scale. That front doesn’t really exist in the current Congress—but I do think if you continue to see the downfall in public opinion, there are going to be Republicans that are going to have to look very seriously at becoming more of a blocking force. Or again, if you look at things like the Epstein files, right? That’s a very easy way for Republicans to go against the president and satisfy their base at the same time. Eighty percent of the base wants those files released.
Shephard: Yeah, we have data about this already. One thing that the press does underestimate are the voters that just turn out for Trump—who do exist; they’re real voters and they only vote for Trump—but they don’t vote in the midterm elections. And every time there are off-year elections, the press is always waiting with bated breath to see if the Trump coalition will show up. They never do. Trump isn’t on the ballot. And I think that the question here for Democrats is going to be.… It’s probably enough, frankly, for those voters just to stay home, but I think the question here is that there’s an opportunity for them to rebuild trust with communities that, again, I think rightly held the Democrats accountable for taking them for granted. There’s an opportunity there to change the way that they talk to minority communities, particularly to Hispanic and Latino voters, in a way that I think is very, very interesting.
Sargent: Yeah. And the tariffs and the immigration crackdown are really perfectly suited to start rebuilding that trust with those constituencies that you’re talking about, working-class constituencies for Democrats. Alex Shephard, always great to talk to you, man. Thanks for all this.
Sargent: Folks, a quick announcement: We are taking a couple weeks off and the podcast will be down. We will be back the week of August 18. Can’t wait to see you there. Take care.
Hence then, the article about transcript trump press sec fawning takes bizarre turn as polls worsen was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Trump Press Sec Fawning Takes Bizarre Turn as Polls Worsen )
Also on site :
- Anycubic Opens Deposits for Kobra X, Following Formnext Debut of Its Next-Generation Entry-Level Multicolor FDM Printer
- Disgraced former Centinela Valley schools Superintendent Jose Fernandez dies
- As millions of Gen Zers face unemployment, CEOs of Amazon, Walmart, and McDonald’s say opportunity is still there—if you have the right mindset