Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Monica Potts: Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here.
Stephen Miller (audio voiceover): They’re the ones who have been advocating for the one percent. They’re criminals, they’re killers, they’re rapists, and they’re drug dealers. And I’m glad they’re here today because me, Pete, and the vice president [are] going to leave here. And inspired by them, we’re going to add thousands more resources to this city to get the criminals and the gang members out of here. We’re going to disable those networks, and we’re going to prove that the city can serve for the law-abiding citizens who live there. We are not going to let the communists destroy a great American city, let alone the nation’s capital.
Sargent: Monica, a couple of things about this. Note the threat. It’s overt. They’re good to respond to demonstrators with more law enforcement resources pouring into the city. And also note the absurd claim that only white hippies are upset about what’s going on. What are you seeing out there?
Sargent: It’s so interesting that you make that point that people who are protesting this stuff love their cities. Donald Trump and Stephen Miller see cities as representative of something very different than residents themselves understand it as. Can you talk a little bit about that?
I just think that what we see is this is pandering to his rural and suburban base. There are people who live in small towns in this country who haven’t been to a city in a long time or they only travel to it very briefly. They see things that are unfamiliar to them. They see a lot of people walking around. They’re scared of cities. They have racist stereotypes about who lives there and what happens there. So for them, this might be something that they’re cheering: to see this militarization of a city. It’s based on falsehoods. It’s based on this idea of crime that isn’t there and doesn’t exist anymore.
Potts: No, not at all. And we’ve been hearing from communities of color, and especially things like the Black Lives Matter movement and related movements, that they want to think about public safety differently. They’ve been protesting the increased militarization of the urban police forces for several years now—or more than a decade now. So having troops on the street harassing people, smoking cigarettes on their own stoops, or arresting delivery drivers who are just trying to make a living is not what people want in these cities. They want cities that are safe for them and their children for sure, but they want to think about public safety in a more nuanced and more community-minded way than modern policing allows for. And we’ve been hearing that for 20 years.
Potts: Exactly right. Yeah, they don’t want to be challenged on their own beliefs. And so the idea that Black D.C. residents might be with them prevents them from having to deal with their own stereotypes.
Also, I do think on some level that Miller and the more overtly fascist people around Trump really thought that this was their moment. We see constantly Trump people telling credulous reporters things like this is a fight Trump wants, this is a fight that Democrats can’t take on. And I think that there is some genuine hubris there. What do you think about that?
Sargent: So let’s go through some more polling because it’s still not getting enough attention. A recent Pew poll found that 56 percent of Americans are not confident in Trump’s ability to effectively handle law enforcement in this country versus only 44 percent who are confident. A Reuters poll this week found that only 42 percent approve of Trump’s handling of crime and only 43 percent approve of his handling of immigration, supposedly a strong issue. The key here, I think, is that we’re getting numbers like these even as people’s phones and TV screens are filled with these images we’re talking about of Trump’s various crackdowns, the National Guard in L.A. and D.C., the federal law enforcement swarming D.C. and so forth. Those aren’t the numbers of someone who’s winning the argument. So let’s talk about Dems here. Shouldn’t polling like this be a bigger part of the conversation? And why don’t Dems see an opening?
There’s actually a lot of opportunity to lead on issues like that and on issues like “crime.” You can say we should make our community safer, but what Trump is doing is not that. He’s leading the military into cities where U.S. citizens are being stopped while they’re trying to make deliveries or while they’re just hanging out with their friends on the sidewalk. Or you can say we do need to deal with immigration, but we need to create a legal pathway for people who were brought here as children without being able to do anything about it because they were too young to make a decision. But what Trump wants to do is break families apart and send people to foreign prisons and do something that [America] doesn’t do, which is close its doors to people who want to work hard.
Sargent: Yeah, and these polls that I just cited before show opposition to having troops in the street fighting crime. It seems like there is an opportunity for Democrats. You wrote very well about this in your piece. You asked why Democrats aren’t in the argument about this and, I think, rightly pointed out that they’re squandering a chance to focus the country on the main event. Can you talk about that a little?
Sargent: Right. I think on some level, Democrats have just decided that they can’t persuade voters that Trump isn’t actually interested in fighting crime, that he’s using this as a pretext to consolidate power. It’s a ready-made argument. They could connect it to Trump’s kowtowing to Putin—which we’re seeing on the international stage right now—and, as you say, to his sucking up to international dictators. The through line is very clear, but it feels to me like Democrats are squandering an opportunity to make a big case on it.
Sargent: The Newsom evolution is probably worth spending a moment on. People might recall that he started out this year with Trump taking power playing footsie with Trumpism. He had clearly determined that the way to the White House in 2028 is to be a Democrat who understands the grievances of Trump supporters in some sense. And so he did right-wing podcasting and stuff like that. But that really was a fiasco. And then events forced Newsom’s hand a little bit—the troop invasion of L.A. and so forth. But as you say, it was when he started to stand up aggressively to Trump and to stand for the people that he represents, that’s when he got more popular.
Sargent: I want to close this out by talking about the role of the media in some of this. The New York Times had a big piece earlier this week about how Democrats are nervous that taking all this on might alienate their own voters who don’t like crime. But the piece was remarkably credulous in that it simply assumed that voters will believe that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and takeover of the D.C. police is about fighting crime. The assumption is that voters can’t make the simple leap to see Trump’s talk about crime as a pretext. And so I think there’s a really negative and toxic dynamic here: When the media is credulous about Trump’s ability to win arguments and treats arguments as things that Trump is in control of—as they treat the crime argument—even when he’s not, that persuades Democrats that they can’t take it on. It’s a toxic loop in a way. I don’t see any way out of it, but man, the press is not helping here.
Sargent: Yeah, just to finish this up, watching Stephen Miller rant that way with his voice getting more and more panicky and shrill makes me think that maybe Democrats should try to tell themselves that Trump and his advisers actually aren’t winning these arguments. When you see Stephen Miller do something like that, it really looks to me like he’s losing his shit. That he’s frustrated. He doesn’t understand why people aren’t rallying behind his fascism. He’s using the imagery of crime. Isn’t that supposed to scare people into supporting whatever the leader wants? What do you think Democrats should start doing from here on out?
Sargent: I agree. And the idea that there’s still time is really critical. And Democrats, you know, voters like it when elected leaders fight for them. Monica Potts, thank you so much for coming on. That was a great talk.
Potts: Thank you so much for having me. It’s an important moment and an important topic.
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