Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Simon Rosenberg: It’s always great to be with you, Greg.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): And I’ll tell you, the Democrats—they don’t talk about this. You know, we’re getting rid of programs that we didn’t like but that were negotiated in, but we didn’t like. We’re terminating those programs, and they’re to be terminated on a permanent basis. And it’s thousands of people, and it’s billions of dollars. We’re getting rid of a lot of things that we never wanted because of the fact that they made this stupid move. Russell Vought is really terminating tremendous numbers of Democrat projects. This is not only jobs—I mean, the project in Manhattan, the project in New York—billions and billions of dollars that Schumer has worked 20 years to get. It’s terminated.
Strikingly, we just had these new polling averages from G. Elliott Morris, which put Democrat Mikie Sherrill up six points, 49 percent to 43 percent, in the New Jersey race. And Sherrill is highlighting Trump’s killing of this project daily in the race.
Rosenberg: Yeah, I mean, I think that there are two things that are happening simultaneously that we have to keep in our minds. One is that Trump is doing incredible harm to the country and breaking things that are going to be difficult, if not impossible, to repair. And we must act with incredible vigor to mitigate the damage and to win back power.
And I think, to some degree, Greg—if I can just say—these two things are related. I think the further, the more there’s a perception that his government and his political project have failed, it’s encouraging them—or encouraging greater escalation toward authoritarianism. And that’s because they’re growing to believe that winning the elections, staying in power through winning the elections next year, is starting to become difficult, if not impossible. And so, therefore, they’re going to door two—which is greater illiberalism, crushing their opposition.
Rosenberg: Yes. And as have the government shutdown and the firings of government employees in the Virginia race. I mean, both of these have been, in their extremism, in their arrogance, in their untetheredness, right? They’re taking clear, concrete actions to sabotage their candidates in the two most important elections in November.
I call it the vicious cycle of a failing strongman—that the more he fails, the more he grows distant from the public, which encourages him to become more of an illiberal strongman and to crack down on his opposition. And I think that he’s in that dynamic right now. And unfortunately, what it’s doing is accelerating his experimentation with becoming a total autocrat.
Rosenberg: Listen, Abigail Spanberger made a video for our Hopium community that I’ll be releasing tomorrow. In it, she hits very hard that the illegal layoffs and firings are having a huge impact on the economy of Northern Virginia. And this is very central to the argument she’s making, right? In that her opponent supports all of this, right?
Because we’ve already seen the Supreme Court become essentially an adjunct—or really report—to him and do his bidding, weakening the legislative branch. And now what Trump is doing, functionally, by grabbing control of the purse, is eliminating the need for a legislative branch.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about this new CNBC poll, which shows him in real political trouble. It finds Trump 13 points underwater on the economy—only 42 percent of Americans approve of his handling of it, versus 55 percent who disapprove. Those are his worst numbers of any CNBC poll on the economy during either of Trump’s two terms.
Rosenberg: Well, to me, there were two things about this poll that really stood out. Number one is that the way it was written and the way it has been covered on CNBC today is: Trump failing, falling, stumbling, in decline, and losing.
So, to me, the second bit that was really important is that they had a chart—a graph show—that’s very prominent, both on television and in the written report, that 53 percent of the country was blaming Trump and the Republicans for the government shutdown and only 37 percent Democrats. That’s the biggest spread of any poll that I’ve seen.
And so, if you’re a Trump supporter in the business community—which is where this stuff is reaching—what this is signaling is that he’s failing, that he’s losing, and that he’s not winning against these ‘dirty Democrats’ that they hold in such incredible contempt.
Rosenberg: They’re losing the middle of the country. And the thing is, this poll is actually, on most issues, better than most of the other independent polling. This poll trends a little bit more Republican historically compared to the other independent polling.
But the second thing is that in most of the polling we’ve had in the last few weeks, Trump is in the 20s and 30s on major issues, not in the 40s and 50s—which means that he is really struggling to rally the country behind him on anything that matters to the American people.
Sargent: So speaking of Trump’s decline, let’s listen to Trump talk about Democrats on the shutdown at a press conference he just had.
Sargent: This is just whacked out shit. Everything I’m seeing out there suggests that this kind of nonsense only gets Democrats to dig in more. You talk to lot of Democrats, Simon. Is that your sense as well?
I mean, imagine that—in most of the polling right now on the question of Do you blame Democrats?—which is the central argument he’s making right now, this big argument Trump’s making is the shutdown is their fault; Democrats shut it down—he’s not above 37 percent on that in any poll.
I think these guys, all of a sudden, went from believing they were the kings of the world to being in kind of deep shit politically. And it’s happened really quickly. And I think we have to give Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries a lot of credit for having seized this opportunity and continuing to keep their team together in this important fight.
To your point about them thinking that they’re on top of the world—that gets at a tension I want to talk about. On the one hand, Trump really thinks he’s on top of the world, right? He thinks he’s a world-historical figure now, with what happened in the Middle East. He’s murdering people in the Caribbean with total impunity, with bombs that go boom and make him feel powerful. He’s sending troops into cities. All of that makes him very, very strong.
He is incapable of understanding any of this, and that tension is, I think, very dangerous—in the sense that you got at very early in the discussion.
And maybe this is the tension you’re describing—that we know from history that a lot of what causes governments and leaders to become autocrats is the sense that, in order to gain power or while in power, they broke the law, and therefore, if they ever lose power, they will be subject to justice. We are now in that place here in the United States, right? Donald Trump is a crook. He is unprecedentedly corrupt. He’s killing people illegally and murdering people and has people doing it with him, by the way. It’s not just him—there are people committing crimes with him. The people who are Russell Vought and Kevin Hassett and others who are working to steal money from the Treasury are committing crimes, right?
And so I do think that part of what’s driving this is they’re scared. They’re losing. They don’t feel like this stuff is working. They know the economy isn’t going well. So what it’s causing them to do, Greg, is a version of what you were saying—which is for him to have to restore his strength and his manhood and his manliness through these other extraordinary means, right? Through the use of the military, through killing fishermen in the Caribbean, through the saber-rattling that he does against the Democrats every day, to putting James Comey into jail.
And in order to do all that, he has to become a full-on authoritarian. And I think that, you know, this is the moment we’re in. We can keep both of these true at the same time: that he’s failing politically and his government is failing—but he’s also doing things such that I don’t know that you can argue that America lives in a democracy, that we live in a democracy, any longer.
I don’t really have any confidence in the notion that these people will face any kind of accountability, even when we have a real attorney general again. And on top of that, as weak as Trump is, I can see scenarios where Democrats end up with not that much in the shutdown fight. Maybe they get the subsidies restored temporarily. They’re certainly not gonna get anything more than that, I don’t think.
Democrats are also in a pretty rough political situation in many respects. Am I wrong about all that?
But to respond to all of what you’ve said directly—look, we’re in it now, right? We’re here now. There are no easy paths for us any longer. What’s in front of us is a five- to ten-year, or even longer, process of getting rid of MAGA and restoring the integrity of our democracy. And it’s going to be really hard and really painful. People are going to have to recognize this is going to be the hardest thing any of us have ever done in our political lifetimes. And because of that, we might as well get on with it and bring it on.
You know, we have to do what you said, which is more directly confront them—both on the damage the tariffs and inflation are doing, and on his increasing autocracy, which I think has not been central enough to our narrative. There’s a lot.
And then finally, something you and I agree on, because we’ve talked about it before, is that Democrats have to not only broaden and deepen our argument, but we need to take on Trump’s strongman brand more directly. We need to make him weak, not strong. We need to make him a loser, not a winner; a failure, not a success; a villain, not a hero. We need to have an orchestrated campaign, because there’s a lot of evidence in the data that what’s still propping him up and keeping him in the low to mid-forties—as opposed to the mid- to high-thirties—is this perception that he’s a strong leader. And we need to take that away from him.
So I hear you, brother. I think this is going to be really hard. But you know, the best way out is always through, as Robert Frost taught us. And we just have to get on with it and fight it out.
Rosenberg: Greg, thanks so much. Just as you know, I’m just grateful for all the work that you do and everybody, we just got to keep our head down and keep fighting.
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