Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Steve Benen: Greg, it’s great to be back. Thanks for having me.
Much of this is for severe weather damage. And meanwhile, he denied requests for relief from Maryland, Vermont, and Illinois.
Benen: Yeah, this is not a coincidence. I mean, it’s very hard to imagine we have a set of circumstances in which the president just happens to approve disaster aid for red states and just happens to draw a direct and overt connection between that aid and his performance in those states.
And in fact, when we look at it in a larger context, we’ve seen a similar pattern unfold over months. We’ve seen Donald Trump repeatedly say that he is the president of red states, exclusively. He looks at blue states as somehow beneath him, as if they are second-class citizens, as if they’re undeserving of his support because they failed to support him in the election—which is ridiculous and it’s un-American—but nevertheless, it has become our life now.
Benen: Yeah, exactly. I mean, he could have chosen a more subtle path here. He doesn’t have to go out of his way to say, yeah, by the way, I won these states. But he was explicit in this.
Sargent: Yeah, it’s crazy. Well, here’s where the story takes a weird turn. Maryland had requested disaster relief primarily because of the massive damage that storms have inflicted on the state’s two westernmost counties, Garrett and Allegany counties.
So, in his desire to screw Democratic elected officials in Maryland and blue state voters, he’s hurting his own people. What do you make of that, Steve?
He lost Maryland, I think, by roughly 29 points. But what he doesn’t appreciate is the fact that there are nuances in states—that no state is this monolithic entity—that there are going to be blue voters and red voters. There’s going to be pockets of liberalism and pockets of conservatism in literally every state in the union.
Sargent: And we’re talking about real damage here. According to the AP, it was thirty-three million dollars worth of damage to the state—more than three times the threshold for getting federal aid.
So, Steve, the funny thing is that, you know, if roads are closed, that means no one can use them. It doesn’t just mean the Democratic voters in the area can’t use them. So Trump’s denial of aid is materially hurting people in Trump country in an ongoing and sustained way.
And so here we have a situation in which the state did everything right. They—to cross their t’s, dot their i’s—did the paperwork, and they said, here we have this actual crisis, this actual disaster that affected Democratic voters and Republican voters and everyone in between. They did this right from the beginning in terms of the way in which they followed the process.
But that’s not the way the system is supposed to work. To borrow your phrasing, there is a threshold. Maryland crossed that threshold, and then Trump intervened anyway. That is not the way this is supposed to work. And in fact, it’s an unsustainable model for how it can work.
Trump is boasting about it daily. Russell Vought is targeting all kinds of programs and shutting down projects and sort of lording it on X about how he’s doing this. And it’s supposed to get MAGA very excited—and it is getting MAGA very excited.
And the state’s Republican governor, Montana’s Republican governor, has hailed this project as something that will create good-paying Montana jobs. So here again, totally screwing his own people.
These are the bonds that make the United States the United States. And those are the very bonds that I think Donald Trump is completely indifferent to because of what we were talking about earlier, which is the fact that Trump sees himself as exclusively the president of red states—that his constituents are the people who voted for him, not the people of the country he represents.
Sargent: I think I might even go further than you and say that the MAGA movement is founded on overt hostility to blue America, not just plain old indifference.
So, it’s almost like MAGA thrives on the very idea that blue America constitutes an enemy nation within the United States. I think we need to be really forthright about that — about this kind of enemy politics that they’re practicing.
Benen: Yeah, no, I think that’s right. I think it’s more than fair. In fact, I think that Donald Trump has taken a significant lead in making that happen.
Now, I mean, I know there has been a national conversation of sorts in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder about the role of political rhetoric and the role it may or may not play in terms of inspiring political violence. And I think that conversation is absolutely worthwhile and worth having.
Sargent: And by the way, I think it’s worth noting that he’s screwing his own people in many other ways as well. Somewhere in Trump’s head, he probably thinks that by standing in the way of extending the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies, he’s screwing blue people, he’s screwing blue states, he’s screwing Obama, right?
And just to underscore his contempt for his own voters, he actually went out just the other day — and you had an item on this, I believe, Steve — and said, you know, they’re basically ungrateful. They don’t realize how much great stuff I’ve done for them.
But let’s go ahead and take a look at that in closer detail. I mean, he wants to cut the CDC, for example. But of course, Republicans get sick too. You know, Republican families rely on CDC programs as much as Democratic families do. And he’ll target the Department of Education. Well, you know what? There are Republican families out there with kids with special needs. That’s not unique to blue cities or blue states or blue families. Republican families have the same issues as everybody else.
Sargent: Right. In Trump’s head, he thinks he’s getting revenge on the elected leaders of blue states because they’re Democrats, and he probably also thinks he’s getting revenge on countless voters who didn’t support him.
Jamelle Bouie had an interesting observation about this. I thought he said that MAGA in general has a kind of vision of the country as a Balkanized place that neatly divides into friend areas and enemy areas. But that’s really out of touch with basic contemporary realities in the United States on all kinds of levels, right?
But yet he was elected president. Fine. So now here we are — we are five years into his presidency, five years — and he still doesn’t understand these basic, fundamental, bedrock principles that seem obvious to so many of us.
Sargent: So where’s this all going, do you think? I like to think that there’s sort of a big block of voters in the middle that really recoils at this way of governing — that really recoils at the idea of this kind of friend-enemy distinction that Trump is insisting on with all his decisions.
But I think it could be actually worse for Trump here because he’s so explicitly and overtly trying to hurt the country in so many ways. I really wonder if we get some kind of new level of revulsion on the part of independents and moderates over this that really puts him in the political doldrums — and the GOP with them. You think that’s possible?
Now, this was one of the largest displays of peaceful protest in modern American history, which was just an overwhelming display of opposition. And that suggests to me that there is this groundswell that’s coming into focus here that should make Republicans very nervous.
We see him reaching levels of support that are just unprecedented on levels of unpopularity, given where we are roughly nine months into his term. And so that combination of progressive activism turning out in enormous numbers, coupled with the fact that polls showing the president’s popularity sinking, suggests to me that this is a recipe for profound and dramatic Republican failure — that should make GOP officials and GOP candidates awfully nervous about the prevailing political winds.
And according to the source, anyway, the Trump officials appeared surprised to hear this — as if they didn’t really know that these could be in Appalachia and in Trump country.
Benen: Right. There is just so little due diligence. There’s so little professionalism. There’s so few adults in the room. You know, I’m thinking about that recent instance in which Donald Trump cut off counterterrorism funds to New York City. And then the governor called him and he said, I did what now?
This is not a group of people who are in a position to govern effectively or even care about the matters of how to create public policy. And so, I mean, I think this example that you’re pointing out in Maryland is a fantastic one, but making matters worse is the fact that it’s become routine. This has become the background noise of our political lives — and it’s every day.
Steve Benen, you brought up your first book. I’m going to bring up your second — Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past. People should get that.
Benen: As always, I look forward to seeing you again soon.
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