Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Anxiety is rising among President Trump’s staunchest allies that he’s politically lost his way. Several new reports document that they fear the MAGA coalition is fragile, that Republicans are in political trouble in the midterms and that Trump isn’t doing enough about any of it. Meanwhile, Trump just exploded in fury on Truth Social saying he is now calling on Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s ties with Democrats. Yet as one Republican pointed out, it’s Trump who is overly obsessed with Epstein right now, and that’s part of the GOP’s political problem. It’s clear that Trump and the GOP are in very deep political trouble, but Trump doesn’t seem to know it. That puts him in a moment of extreme weakness. And yet, do Democrats know it? Are they really set to capitalize on it? Today we’re talking about all this with Michael Cohen, author of the very good Substack Truth and Consequences, who has new pieces out on Trump’s unpopularity and the GOP breakdown. Michael, good to have you on.
Michael Cohen: Greg, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So we have a couple striking new reports out right now. Let’s start with the one in the New York Times. It reports that Trump allies fear that his populist message has become muddled because he’s spending his time courting wealthy donors, like on his ballroom, and demanding Nobel Peace Prizes for his alleged successes abroad. He’s also talking about going to Davos and his advisors fear this would send the wrong message right now. Michael, what I find striking about this is that the GOP coalition seems to be in trouble. The non-MAGA voters don’t like the ballroom or the bizarre Nobel Prize antics and his own allies and advisors know it. What do you think of this?
Really, you know, the things he has done so far—the big, beautiful bill, the shutdown, the refusal to bend on these Obamacare subsidy increases—they’re not… he doesn’t seem to be thinking about politics at all. He doesn’t seem overly concerned about how Republicans do in the elections next year.
Sargent: Well, you’re absolutely right to bring up the Affordable Care Act subsidies. In fact, the other report I wanted to bring up is from CNN, and it says that the expiration of these subsidies has stirred deep anxiety among some Republicans—particularly in the battlegrounds.
It’s like a double blow, right?
And by that point, people will have already been paying these higher premiums for their health insurance. And I don’t know if people are aware of this, but according to a Kaiser Family Foundation report I saw earlier today, those premiums are expected to double in price—double. I mean, that is a huge increase for an ordinary American.
And now actually the chances that the Republicans concede on this point and compromise has actually gone up, because I think once people realize how damaging this is gonna be politically, I think there’s going to be a lot of pressure on Speaker Johnson and, and, and John Thune in the Senate to find some way to avoid this happening.
Cohen: Yes. And look, you really saw this in what happened in New Jersey and Virginia in these off-year elections. In 2024, Trump made serious inroads with younger voters, with Hispanic voters. You saw that completely reversed in New Jersey and Virginia. Now, some people—on the Hispanic voters—some people would say it’s because of the mass deportations. I’m sure that’s part of it.
Same thing with young voters. The switch in young voter support against Trump is overwhelming. I saw a poll about a week or two ago—I think before the Tuesday election—that showed Democrats… there was a question about the congressional ballot: Which candidate do you support, the Democratic or Republican candidate? And among 18- to 29-year-olds, Dems were leading by 27 points. That number probably has even gone up since last week. And that’s kind of what the Republicans are dealing with right now.
Sargent: It really is remarkable. And I think maybe the way to think about it is not a double whammy, it’s a triple whammy because we’ve got Jeffrey Epstein stuff, which is absolutely deadly for Trump and the Republican Party right now. And Trump just exploded on Truth Social over the Epstein stuff. I’m going to read a big chunk of it because it’s so deranged:
Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think that’s going to work, Michael, do you?
So I think that again, I get what they’re doing, but I don’t think it’s gonna work. And I do think that the Epstein story, unlike every other scandal that involves Trump, is one that actually [is] going to strike at the heart of the MAGA base. Because there are Republican voters who truly believe in this conspiracy around Epstein, and they—I don’t think they’re— I think this is an issue where they actually might break with Trump.
And I don’t think the White House—I don’t think Trump—truly realized that. And going after Bill Clinton… And I, and by the way, it’s worth noting that he wrote this, that Bondi should go after Clinton. Apparently within, like, the hour of that happening, Bondi appointed a prosecutor to look into Clinton’s role. I mean, you know, this is just an obvious effort to try to obfuscate Trump’s own relationship with Epstein.
And we all know why, because he’s desperately trying to keep it from coming out. But I think the core truth that Marjorie Taylor Greene got at there is that the Epstein files is really bad for Trump in two ways. Right? The more obvious, superficial way, which is that he’s in the damn files and he doesn’t want ’em to come out, but every second he spends trying to stop the files from coming out reminds everybody that he’s taken his eye off the ball of the economy—or worse, that he’s just wrecking the economy and doesn’t give a shit about it.
He did the same thing on the, on the Russian investigation to some degree, and I think that’s a political problem for him. It’s a political problem for the party. And I do think every day they spend on Epstein is a day they’re not talking about the economy, and that’s a good thing for Democrats.
Can you talk a little bit about that? I mean, these are bad numbers, and I think probably the Times approval average might even be a little high because some of the recent polls we’ve seen—quality polls—have it even lower than that, like in the high thirties. But still, to have the average of polls, the New York Times average, down to 41–55, negative-14, that’s terrible. Can you talk about it?
Look, I’ve been saying this for months now, and I think it’s just the story that not enough people are appreciating. Donald Trump is historically and deeply unpopular. Okay? His numbers for a first-term president are insanely low. And they have—they have been—they have been going lower, you know, and there seems to be very clear… this Navigator survey poll out, I think it was yesterday or today, that showed that his numbers went down during the shutdown. The shutdown definitely hurt him.
I mean, you can talk all you want about Democrats and are they too liberal, are they too moderate, or whatever you want to discuss. But the reality of the situation is that Democrats won big in New Jersey, Virginia, for one major reason: because Donald Trump is unpopular and people want to just send him a message.
There was a hilarious story I’m seeing about the White House which wants to send Trump out to talk about the economy. I mean, good luck with that. He’s not capable of doing that at all. When he goes out on these speaking tours, he talks about his sort of pet issues that he cares about. It’s clear he doesn’t care about the economy. He cares about his legacy. He cares about his ballroom. He cares about his revenge tour. He doesn’t care about the economy, and he has no really good ideas how to fix it.
So to me, this is a situation that is bad for the White House and bad for Republicans, and it’s getting worse. I don’t see it improving anytime soon.
Sargent: And you could even slot the Epstein thing into the revenge tour idea here. So in a funny way, that too works against Trump because nobody likes the revenge tour stuff. No one likes the politicization of the Department of Justice. No one likes the fact that Trump is spending all his time sicking prosecutors on his Democratic enemies. That stuff works against him. All of it works against him. And I don’t know if he knows it.
And, by the way, I think it’s also interesting—we could talk about this a little bit—that, you know, one of the ways Trump was trying to get around the fact that he’s so unpopular, and Democrats are probably gonna do well in the midterms, was he tried to get all the Republican states to redistrict. Well, that’s not working out too well right now.
That speaks to something else, which I think is very characteristic of the White House: that they do not have the same kind of political persuasive capabilities that they once had, or thought they once had, even with their own members.
If that happens, it’s not just a problem for Trump in the substance of the policy of releasing all these files. It’s a problem because it shows that he is weak, and he’s weak with his own party. So that becomes a much bigger political problem for Trump to deal with.
Sargent: Right. I have trouble seeing 13 Republican senators supporting, releasing the Epstein files, but I certainly hope you’re right and I wouldn’t rule it out at all, especially if the vote is very big in the house. As you say, that really brings a lot of pressure, and as you said earlier, Senator Kennedy moving like that is also a key tell. You never know, Donald Trump has a lock on his party until he doesn’t. That’s the thing that people forget, is that politics isn’t static. It actually changes.
Sargent: So you had in your piece, just to wrap this up, you talked about how these key voter groups move towards Spanberger in Virginia and Sherrill in New Jersey. And you talked a little bit about that, especially the young voters. I’m so old that I remember when pundits were saying that the young voters shift towards Trump was the end of the Democratic Party, basically. Somehow all these pundits forgot that the way politics works is that the party in the White House is the one who get the referendum in the midterms and in the off year elections. Talk about that.
And I think what we saw, you know, last week was that what happened in 2024 may not be relevant anymore. I don’t think it’s relevant at all in 2025. And the young-people thing is interesting. You know, if you look at 2020, you look at the midterms—’18 and ’22—Democrats did very, very well with young voters. And in ’24, you saw slippage.
And this should surprise nobody. I mean, from a cultural standpoint, younger Americans are much more aligned with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party, and that’s been true for more than a decade now. None of this should surprise us.
So I just think that we should not… remember that things can change quickly in politics. You know, if the president is not doing what he promised to do, if he is… the economy is struggling, there’s going to be a consequence from that. And these voters who may have switched to Trump in ’24—if they switched—means that their allegiances are fluid. And we’re seeing that now that they’re flowing back to the Democratic Party.
Now we’re seeing they’re really moving in the other direction pretty hard. Chances are that in the midterms we’ll see that as well. They’re motivated by the economy. So that’s one story that’s happening.
So you’re saying the Epstein files alienate those voters, the globalist stuff alienates those voters. There you have, I think, the two big stories of the moment. Can you talk about that?
And not just on the right, but in general, across the political spectrum. But it’s a story that motivates a lot of Republican voters and was a big motivation for them. And, you know, what you’re seeing, I think, with this story—the way that it has continued to metastasize over the past couple of months—is that people care about this and that this is something that Trump doesn’t have a, a good response on. And I think it’s hurting him politically in a way that I don’t—I frankly didn’t—really expect.
I mean, look, there’s probably 30% of MAGA voters who will vote for Trump no matter what, support Trump no matter what. But I think there are some softer Trump voters out there who are upset about this. And I think, will they still vote for Trump? Probably. But will they vote for Republicans in 2026? I don’t know.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you what, the size of the defections or deflections as Donald Trump put it in one of his deranged tweets is going to be a very big tell. Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Michael Cohen’s Substack, Truth and Consequences. Michael, always good to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Cohen: Greg, always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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