Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Matthew Sheffield: Hey, Greg. Good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Sheffield: Well, I would say that this is an example of Republicans in disarray. And it was caused by the Democrats actually taking a page out of the Republican playbook and using it very effectively. Because, basically, an effective political party wants to minimize internal division and maximize the opposition’s divisions.
So the premiums are going to go up for pretty much everybody, including people who are not on Obamacare. And I think that that’s a point that has to be emphasized more. Because, basically, when the insurance markets have a lower price because of the Obamacare subsidies, [that] also means that people who are not getting those subsidies get a lower rate.
Sargent: So, into all this steps Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Here’s what happened: Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman reported that, on a House GOP conference call, Greene challenged the official strategy. Then Greene responded to Sherman’s tweet about that with her own long rant on Twitter.
Greene then said this about Johnson: “He refused to give one policy proposal to our GOP conference on our own conference call.”
Sheffield: Well, it is definitely good to see, I have to say that. But it is an example, though. The Republican Party has basically restyled itself to be a party for less-educated people and men—more blue-collar voters—than they have ever been, historically speaking.
Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s really important. I want to get to that in a minute. First, I want to point out, though, that Greene effectively blew up the entire Trump–GOP scam in this battle.
But Greene steps forward and tells the truth, which is that the GOP is the problem. Republicans don’t want to extend the expanded ACA subsidies for a deranged ideological reason—and that’s the real reason people are about to lose their health care. And that’s why the government is closed.
Sheffield: Well, I mean, there is, you know, specifically in her case, her district does have a lot of people who are on these subsidies. And, according to her, they are complaining to her that their costs are going to spike. So, there is a specific thing with regard to her district.
Because, you know, I think people forget that Donald Trump—basically, the reason why he wins is that he has a unique personal appeal that’s trans-ideological, that people will vote for him just because they think, you know, he’s a good guy—for whatever foolish reasons, sadly. But, you know, like, the regular Republican Party is just Christian oligarchy, and that’s not what people want.
Sargent: Right. I think Greene definitely is her own person as well. I also think Greene might recognize that Trump is a little weaker than most people think he is right now.
The terrible economic numbers put them in a really bad spot in the shutdown. Can you talk a little bit about that?
And the reality is that, you know, dictatorship—it’s kind of like a George Costanza lie—it’s not a dictatorship if you don’t believe it. And so, you know, we have to actively work against this and realize there are lots of advantages that we have on our side to protect democracy.
So really what that points to is that the Democrats have to invest in media and platforms in the way the Republicans did. The right-wing media also—so much of it—we talk about all these far-right podcasters and TikTokers and Instagram people and YouTubers—they weren’t there before Trump.
Sargent: Yeah, so your book gets into Democrats needing to learn how Republicans actually fight the information wars. It’s something that we talk about on this podcast a fair amount. How does that feed into this shutdown fight?
I don’t monitor the right wing media the way you do. Can you talk a little bit about what we’re seeing in the right wing media on the shutdown? Are we seeing some cracks due to things like Greene moving away from Trump?
But I will say that, within the right-wing media, yeah, there is frustration at this. And Fox, the other day, was telling Trump, you need to start talking about immigration more, and victims of illegal immigrant crime, and that sort of thing. So I expect that Trump actually will follow their advice.
And so they’re trying to urge Trump to shift the focus to that. But it does get to an underlying point, though: that the power of right-wing media is more in its nihilism—it’s not in driving a positive agenda.
And if that was true, then Democrats would never win elections. So, everybody has their own advantage. I think, one thing—having been on both sides of the aisle—that I can say is that each side thinks that the other side has all the advantages, and that’s just not true. Everybody has advantages, everybody has disadvantages, and you win when you maximize your advantages and, you know, don’t throw your money away.
And Democrats are buying ads from Sinclair and from Fox. These are right-wing media outlets. They are funding right-wing media—over a billion dollars if you add it up over the cycles. It’s horrible.
Sheffield: That’s definitely what they’re trying to do. Like, the goal of right-wing media and of Trump is always to take the focus away from their agenda and onto anything else—literally anything else. So what Democrats have to do—like, there’s this big discussion now about, you know, the center people are the problem or the left-wing people are the problem. And the answer is no: you just have to attack a lot more and keep the focus on the extreme Republican agenda. Like, that’s what you gotta do.
So, from one side, you’ve got these moderate House Republicans who are very vulnerable heading into next year’s midterms, and they really can’t afford for the subsidies to expire and people’s premiums to spike. They’re gonna lose suburban voters over that—and a certain type of moderate suburbanite really has its place in the Trump coalition, as hard as that is for some people to accept.
She’s kind of highlighting that as well. Can you talk about that whole set of fractures?
And they’re fine with some of those dystopias being Christian supremacist and others of them being tech oligarchy, whatever—they don’t care. But that’s not what the Republican voters [want]. And there’s a caricature that a lot of progressives and centrists have about the Republican voter. Most Republican voters don’t actually know what Trump stands for outside of two or three issues.
And so this is about making the voters aware of who is doing this to you. This is the struggle of our moment now. And I know there’s this stereotype, again, as I was saying, that people think, well, people just vote for Trump because they’re racist or because they’re sexist or whatever hateful thing that they have. And, of course, there are plenty of people like that.
And so, when you focus to these voters and put it in front of them in an undeniable way—that, look, your money, your premiums are going to go up, you know, you’re going to lose this, you’re going to lose that, it’s going to be taken from you—and it’s, you know, that’s the beauty of a shutdown from a strategic standpoint.
Sargent: Well, just to close this out, you mentioned earlier that any Democratic strategy right now has to be laser focused on exacerbating the rift that is opening up in the Trump slash MAGA coalition over all of this. What does that look like? And where do you think this is all going to go?
So we have to put the focus on that and let people know this is going to impact you, and it’s going to impact your jobs. Another way to do that, you know, is to push for expanding these subsidies—don’t push for just keeping them. That’s one thing that Trump does well, and Republicans have done well in negotiations: they’ll have a thing that they push for as a concession, and then when you give it to them, they say, ‘Okay, now you have to do this.’
Sargent: Hundred percent. Matt Sheffield—really well said. Folks, check out Matt’s book; it’s called What Republicans Know. It’s about how the GOP fights the information wars and what Democrats can learn from that.
Sheffield: Yeah, thanks. Great to be here.
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