Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
That’s amusing, but it also comes as some brutal economic news landed suggesting job losses could be about to get worse. The bigger story here is that the bad economic news is piling up at exactly the moment we’re entering a bruising government shutdown fight. And of course, a shutdown will make the economy even worse.
Alex Sheppard: It’s great to be back.
Sheppard: Yeah, I mean, it’s also funny that he puts ‘negotiating’ in inverted commas, as if there’s some other possible meaning for that word. But this shouldn’t have come as a shock at all. One of the things I found most surprising about this is that Politico’s agriculture newsletter—because of course they have a newsletter for everything—reported that the Trump White House was taken aback by the response from soybean farmers who are being crushed by these tariffs.
Not only is this absurd, it’s also crazy that no one in the Trump administration could have seen this coming. And now they’re clearly scrambling. Trump is promising to rub some pennies together from the tariffs he’s bringing in. But this is just yet another sign that this trade war—yes, it’s doubling money from tariffs—is devastating the actual American economy, including a lot of people who happen to be Trump voters.
Sheppard: It’s not just that though, too. The stated rationale for this tariff policy has shifted somewhat, at its foundational basis, that it’s supposed to rebuild American enterprise, manufacturing, it’s supposed to make Americans wealthy by building up their ability to make things, right? So I think the other thing that’s so absurd about this is that you have an actual successful industry. There is really no market for domestic American soybeans. If you’re an American soybean farmer, you sell them to foreign markets, most notably China. And so I think what you have here too is like an example of just how ridiculous this entire stratagem is that Trump is essentially like taking existing successful American industries that do export goods, in this case soybean farmers, and holding them hostage so he can one, extort the rest of the world in the form of tariffs and claim that he’s making all this money. but also to build up successful American industry or farming, manufacturing, whatever you want to call it. And what you have here is an actual successful thing. It’s being destroyed. And there’s nothing that this administration can point to that’s being built domestically because of these tariffs.
Sheppard: I mean, I think it’s been pretty bad for a while. Consumer sentiment has been a sort of leading indicator for quite a while now, and it hasn’t always meant bad economic news. But I think—you always had a situation where you had the so-called “vibecession” during the Biden administration. Talking to a lot of Dem policy people, I think that was always misjudged to some extent. You could point to a lot of good numbers during the Biden administration, but at the same time, there was inflation, there were various things that made you feel like your dollar was being stretched more.
I think the effects of the shutdown are going to start to show too. And the only thing holding the line right now are the markets, which have shown an almost religious faith in Trump—or at least said, as long as things don’t fall off a cliff, right, as long as you have the economic version of that AI video of the lady crashing into a bridge or whatever, then they’ll stick with the guy. But even that may start to crumble now. The mood plus the underlying numbers are combining in a way we really haven’t seen since the start of the pandemic, or maybe even since the fall of 2008.
Alex, it seems like Trump is very poised to take the blame for a government shutdown, given all those underlying weaknesses. I mean, he’s out there telling his own voters that he’s going to have to hand them cash to make them whole after his policies killed them. I mean, I think this gives Democrats an opportunity to hold the line. What do you think?
I think the Democratic offer—right, which is essentially to keep the government open in exchange for extending Affordable Care Act subsidies, some rollback of the cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and an assurance that you’re not gonna not spend funds allocated from Congress in the future—that really just rolls back to an ask of saying: if you extend these ACA subsidies, we’ll reopen the government. That’s really pretty reasonable.
He doesn’t care about making the economy function for people. He’s on this kind of weird side quest all the time—either with the tariffs or, again, in the case of the shutdown, you have the news today that they’re gonna continue construction of the White House ballroom. Right?
Sargent: I’m really glad you underscored Trump’s fundamental laziness, which I think is lost on a lot of people. He hates the act of governing, he hates the details. He’s not a reader. He obviously can’t stand sitting still long enough to actually learn what Obamacare subsidies are.
That, plus farm country getting absolutely slaughtered by his tariffs.
But it does seem, as your piece captures, that there might be a bit of a shift—where Democrats are starting to really sense real weakness on Trump’s part. What do you think?
Obviously, the voters who care deeply about this are many of our readers, your regular MSNBC types who’ve been focused on it for years. But that message has been hard for Democrats to communicate to median voters, independents, and so on. Trump’s obstinance here is underrated. His refusal to reopen the government means the government is essentially being run however he and Russ Vought want to run it.
Vought is a standard movement conservative in a lot of ways, with old-school Heritage Foundation goals: shrinking the federal government and waging war on the administrative and regulatory state. What makes him effective is that he’s sold this to Trump in Trumpian terms. He’s told him: your first term would have been really successful, but the bureaucracy was full of liberals secretly thwarting you.
That argument scared Schumer away back in March. But as of Wednesday, October 1st, Vought has begun slowly rolling out what he plans to cut in federal spending.
Sheppard: Yeah, I think that—not to bring it back to Vought quickly—but I think that you look, you can see sort of how they respond in the actions he took on Wednesday, which is he cuts this big infrastructure project in New York and New Jersey. Well, what’s happening in New Jersey right now? It’s a pretty important gubernatorial race that’s also pretty close.
And to your point about the law breaking, I think that the more power that Trump and Vought take for themselves during the shutdown—because you don’t have Congress there telling them not to do anything—the more you can draw attention to that aspect of this presidency as well.
Sargent: But Alex, do they know that?
I think what they should be reminded of is like, you know, the last time that Republicans shut down the government, you know, they gained seven Senate seats, right? The 2014 midterms. And I think that, you know, voters have a short memory, right? If they’re worried about the midterms for this, then it’s just way too far away from right now.
Sargent: It’s such a critical point and I’d like to unravel it a little more. Trump’s approval is the coin of the realm. Driving his approval rating down is the name of the game. That’s what everything should be oriented around.
And so I think the effect of that sort of constant drumbeat of negativity about Dems—and just to be clear, the approval rating of Democrats is less important than the approval rating of the president when it comes to the midterms, that’s just how politics works—and so this kind of constant rush to say, well, Dems are also in a terrible position, sort of has spun them to the point where they don’t actually keep focused on the prize, which is Trump’s approval going down.
I mean, you could argue that it gets to the complexity of the problem that they’re facing and that they have to appease the base while also winning over voters who think that they’re too focused on identity issues or whatever, but I just think that it doesn’t matter, right? The Democratic approval rating doesn’t matter now. It will matter maybe in six months or so, but the overall landscape for the midterms—you look at something like the special election that happened last week in Arizona, Democrats romped to victory there.
Sargent: Yeah. And just to go big picture, every single piece of data we see, everything we’re seeing in our politics points to a dynamic which is typical for a midterm after a party loses the White House in which that party is strengthened, emboldened, invigorated, angry. There’s just no reason to think the dynamics are in some sense going to be, you know, rendered inoperable by Trump’s kind of magical political powers or whatever it is that pundits seem to see in him. Democrats are in a position to win the House back and they’re in a position to take advantage of Trump’s weakness right now. I just don’t know if they know it.
Now, I think that’s sort of played into their hand here, and you now have this sort of bizarre environment where their ask was very simple, but now you know Jeffries in particular is just pissed off because of these racist sombrero videos and you know Trump is just refusing to dig in. Republican senators don’t want to do this because it’s got you Obama in quotation mark somewhere in the bill with the subsidies. But you’re staring down a long shutdown here, and it’s not clear that Schumer or Jeffries were prepared for that, but they better gear up because that’s where we’re headed.
Sheppard: Thanks. It was fun.
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