Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
The White House is attempting several lines of attack. One, that Democrats are shutting down the government to deliver health care to undocumented immigrants—which is a lie. And two, that if Democrats continue with this, the White House will use all its power to punish Democratic states and constituencies—which is depraved.
Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): The president likes to have a little fun every now and then and I think both things can be true at the same time. The Democrats have given the administration this opportunity and we don’t like laying people off. Nobody takes joy in that around here. And if you think that, then I think that’s very sad. You view the White House and our staff as wanting to put people out of work. Nobody wants to do that, but sometimes in government you have to make tough decisions.
Marcotte: I really think this entire video just gets to a dilemma on messaging that on messaging is really hurting Republicans—and why I find it a little baffling that the mainstream punditry seems to think that Republicans are winning. Which is, Republicans can’t decide if shutting down the government is a good thing or not.
I was listening to Sean Hannity clips at Media Matters, and it was the same thing. Hannity was just going on and on about how great government shutdowns are and how much he loves government shutdowns. And then you see this polling showing that most voters blame Republicans for the shutdown, and you’re like, well—they are taking credit, you know?
Marcotte: Yeah, part of the problem is that Trump and J.D. Vance and all these people—their instincts are only to do a base-only play, right? They want to only speak to the MAGA base. They want to revel in racism. They want to crap on federal workers. They want to stoke all these resentments. That’s their happy place.
And they need those people to think that Trump is working for them. But they can’t get there, because all they’re doing is signaling that he cannot wait to screw them over.
Marcotte: My partner was making a really funny joke the other day. He was like about how Trump keeps calling all these federal agencies “Democrat agencies,” and he was like, I think that they should lean into...the Democratic Veterans Affairs, Democrat Medicaid, the Democrat Yellowstone Park. I like the sound of that.
Reporter (voiceover): At the top of the briefing you made a statement about that the Democrats are interested in giving healthcare to illegal immigrants? Yes, they are. U.S. law already prohibits that. It’s a 1996 law saying that they cannot give unauthorized immigrants any federally subsidized healthcare coverage through Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, or the Children’s Health Insurance Program. There seems to be a disconnect in the message.
Reporter (voiceover): I’m not denying anything, I’m asking you if you can explain the disconnect in the message.
Sargent: So after snapping at that reporter, Leavitt didn’t actually go on to explain why she was wrong because the reporter was right. And Leavitt seemed to botch the Medicaid formulation there a bit. But what’s noteworthy to me is that in both cases, what really got Leavitt angry is that reporters were accurately pointing out the enormous flaws in White House messaging really puncturing holes in it. What’s your take on that, Amanda?
But J.D. Vance, particularly, does this thing—he uses Big Lies like that to draw people into B.S. debates. You’ll see him do these interviews where he’ll say the Big Lie, and then a reporter will push back, like, Well, that’s not true though—it’s illegal for undocumented immigrants to get Medicaid benefits. And then he’ll say, Well, what I mean is maybe one immigrant once got Medicaid, and da-da-da-da-da.
And I think one of the things they’re trying to do here is posit this hypothetical: One day, an undocumented person slipped through the cracks and got into the ER and got their bill paid—aren’t you outraged? And the implication is: therefore everyone should lose their coverage to prevent that one possibility that they can’t even prove has happened.
Sargent: Well, I think we should talk about what the Democrats’ budget proposal actually is. It seeks to extend the Obamacare subsidies, which are about to expire, and it rolls back the Medicaid cuts in the big ugly bill that Trump passed.
Because these two policies—the ACA subsidies and the Medicaid cuts that Republicans passed with Trump—those absolutely clobber the MAGA base, both of them. And so you’ve got JD Vance essentially saying: focus on illegal immigrants we’re hurting, not on working-class Americans we’re hurting.
I think that when you’re taking away something people already have, you’re in much different territory. People have become dependent on Obamacare, they’ve become dependent on Medicaid—they like going to the doctor.
Meanwhile, the latest Marist poll has Republicans taking more blame than Democrats by 12 points. The latest New York Times poll has Republicans getting more blame by seven points. I don’t know if you saw this, but CNN polling analyst Harry Enten had a good little riff. He pointed out that, in these polls, Republicans are taking the blame by an average of 12 points more than Democrats are. That’s kind of unexpected. I didn’t expect it, I have to say. How do you explain it, Amanda?
It was always kind of odd to think that you were going to get people to completely rethink how they see Democrats—to see Democrats as the ones who want to shut down the government, who want federal employees furloughed, things like that. So no, I mean, just on the very baseline branding issue, Republicans stepped into a big trap on this.
On one hand, everything Russell Vought is doing right now—the threats to directly target Democrats, the threats to cut the federal workforce, all of it—is about delivering a sadistic thrill to the MAGA base. MAGA loves the idea of pain being inflicted on Democratic constituencies. Trump knows that. That’s why he’s putting out videos of Vought as the Grim Reaper.
The core problem is that what thrills MAGA turns off the middle. It’s just a fundamental conflict—and I think they know it. What do you think?
They’ll tell pollsters or in focus groups that they don’t like Trump. They’ll say he’s gross, he’s racist, he’s a pig—but they’ve bought into this lie that he’s a competent businessman. They have this vague nostalgia for what they thought was the Trump economy in his first term, which was really just pre-COVID America, and they’re looking at that with rose-colored glasses.
Sargent: Latino men. Not the women.
Sargent: Yeah, I think you’re getting at what I think is a real problem in the Trump coalition, kind of in a very broad sense, right? So if you think of the Trump coalition as being MAGA plus all these voters who kind of have passing familiarity with Trump because he penetrated deep into the culture for many, many years, he builds big buildings, he’s a rich guy, he must be doing something right. That kind of thing. Once he gets in and governs, everything that they do, everything that MAGA governance does, is tailor-made to splitting that coalition. Like that second bucket of voters who understands Trump as kind of a can-do, snap his fingers, businessman type: They hate the anti-vax stuff. They hate the deportations. They hate the tariffs because they’re getting screwed by them and they’re not ideologues about globalization or anything like that. And then same with the healthcare stuff so, you see what I’m saying? The MAGA coalition is almost guaranteed to fracture once these lunatics actually start governing, I think.
And then what’s the very first thing he tries to do in office? Take away people’s health care. And he didn’t even succeed at that—because of John McCain. Yet in 2018, Republicans lost much bigger than expected in the midterms. And all the data shows it was because of the attack on health care in particular.
Sargent: Layer on all the fascism as well. He’s getting much more of what he wants with the mass deportations. He’s got tens of billions of extra dollars to play with to terrorize immigrant communities and unleash law enforcement in cities and so forth. So you’ve got almost like the first term dynamic that you’re talking about, but supercharged.
But make no mistake: People do not like ICE. People do not like the immigration raids. If you go out to any community and people are talking about it, it’s upsetting people. And obviously, the Jimmy Kimmel situation—I do think it brought home to a lot of people that Trump is a fascist. He does want to censor free speech.
So I do think those threats are upsetting people. But the health care thing is just immediate and visceral in this way that I’m actually glad Democrats went after it as their top issue, because it’s turning out that people are paying attention.
And it seems to me that they’re figuring out that it feels kind of good to put Trump on the defensive. What do you think? It seems like Democrats understand that Trump is not a strong figure right now in a way that they just haven’t previously.
I think, for listeners, what I’d really emphasize is that this is a reminder that speaking out works—organizing works. We shouldn’t just lay down and let this happen to us. Weirdly, I kind of do keep coming back to the Jimmy Kimmel thing, but I think that put a little fire in people’s bellies and made them realize, yes, you do have power in this world.
Sargent: Yeah. In fact, I’ll tell you what—I think the memes and the imagery the White House is using, the depiction of Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero, the Grim Reaper-type stuff—it’s all designed to get Democratic voters and liberals to forget what you just said, which is that they do have power. It’s about emasculating Democrats. It’s about trying to create the impression that it’s all over, that they’ve got utter mastery of the political environment and the information space, so you might as well give up.
I think it’s important to do so in terms that make sense to the people behind the message. We shouldn’t be doing gross AI videos—that doesn’t resonate with the people Democrats are trying to reach. But I do think it’s important to recognize there’s power here, there’s leverage here, and to just keep going forward.
Sargent: Right. It sends the message that they’re not all powerful. They haven’t won. Amanda Marcotte, always great fun to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.
Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
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