Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.
Several other big figures criticized him, too. What do you make of that?
I think one is that we’ve just been seeing—within this sort of larger spike in political violence that is directly tied to the rise of Donald Trump himself—that there has been a lot more debate over rhetoric itself. And I think on the right, there are some figures here who are at least acknowledging this and trying to cover their own ass, for lack of a better term, that they don’t want the most prominent Republican celebrating violence, even if it is nonpolitical—which this seems to be, it seems to be a family matter—because they rightly understand that it damages their credibility in talking about political violence more generally.
And so Trump saying something horrible about Rob Reiner’s murder only reinforces what most Americans already realize, which is that Republicans and this president in particular do not care about the problems that they have right now.
Rob Reiner and his wife were tragically killed at the hands of their own son who reportedly had drug addiction and other issues, and their remaining children are left in serious mourning and heartbreak. This is a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies. Many families deal with a family member with drug addiction and mental health issues. It’s incredibly difficult and should be met with empathy, especially when it ends in murder.
Shephard: Yeah, it sort of is like, you do not, under any circumstance, have to hand it to Marjorie Taylor Greene. But it’s a very, very good statement. There’s nothing to argue with it. She rightly understands, as you said earlier, that Trump doesn’t actually care about this movement that he leads or its stated priorities.
Now, I think that the ultimate goal here is… that’s where you don’t have to hand it to Marjorie Taylor Greene. It’s said she wants to advance a lot of the regular goals of this movement, right? I mean, it’s not like she’s suddenly saying that we should have open borders or anything, right? She wants to lead the movement via many of its stated aims.
Sargent: I mean, if Marjorie Taylor Greene is recognizing that you’re a sociopath, then I think you’re in some trouble.
Sargent: Right. Well, these are very deep divisions, I think. The Washington Post reports that a number of MAGA figures are sounding the alarm about the overall state of MAGA. They’re warning that Trump hasn’t dealt with cost of living, which you brought up, that he’s too close with tech oligarchs and billionaires, and that he’s tried to cover up the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Alex, imagine that—like, Trump not interested in hearing criticism of himself. I mean, but these are serious and deepening divisions, don’t you think?
But I think that that is now really coming back to haunt them and that the priorities that they set about embracing this kind of really aggro and destructive foreign policy that is capped by Trump’s embarrassing desire for a Nobel Peace Prize.
And I think what we’re seeing now is that every time the administration does something that is reckless or bombastic, whether it’s invading an American city or it’s the president tweeting that Rob Reiner was a deranged lunatic who deserved to die, that only reinforces that sense.
So when folks come out and try to break away, I think what they’re also showing us is that they purposefully created no distance between themselves and this monster, and now they’re in a really, really difficult position where they can’t do that.
Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s right. I want to home in on something you said there about the aura of invincibility that Trump started out this year with. First of all, it’s amazing how quickly it has dissipated. I think that itself underscores your point about what a misreading it was of the election results.
Trump and Stephen Miller and the more fascist of his advisers really came in thinking they could use shock and awe to push everything through really quickly, just frighten the country into rolling over and accepting it all. But there’s all this organic resistance across the country, especially to the most fascistic stuff, but even to the less fascistic stuff, like to the tariffs—there’s been a huge outcry and real pushback to that.
Shephard: Certainly for an elected Republican, she was way out in front of the others. Because I think if you look at the usual critics that are still around, it is the Kentucky boys, Thomas Massie and Rand Paul—they’re aberrations, right? They’re quirky libertarians. They don’t really speak for other people. They’re not really MAGA in the same way Greene is. And I think the fact that Greene is not just MAGA but one of the true disciples of the movement, somebody who emerged after 2016, very consciously styling herself in that way, makes a huge difference.
I think what we’re seeing increasingly is that Donald Trump was elected because of inflation and to a lesser extent because there were credibility issues with the Democratic Party. And again, they had a third nominee who was not tested via a primary and was only the nominee for 90 days.
And I think what Greene recognized was that the first order of business is to do the thing that you were elected to do, even if it wasn’t necessarily the core of what your movement is built around. And that’s not what they did at all. They did all the movement stuff, most of which is phenomenally unpopular. And they did none of the inflation stuff.
And I think there’s a reason why she called it out, right? That this kind of idea of new economic nationalism or new just nationalism generally, which is xenophobic—I think it’s economically stupid, it’s not good policy—but that Trump’s agenda was doing a kind of bastardized version of it. It was not fulfilling the stated goals of the movement, and it was making the country significantly worse anyways.
We had also Trump’s own pollster sounding the alarm as well. John McLaughlin is the pollster. He told NBC News that Trump’s going to have to get out and campaign a lot harder or the Trump base will stay home in the midterms. McLaughlin said, “If you can’t motivate the Trump voters, we’re not going to win the midterms.”
It’s just another way to say, Hey, guys, the base is in a real bad place for us right now. And it looks like they’re not going to do anything to extend the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies, which absolutely clobbers the base. It’s no accident, Alex, that this is one of the early things that Greene fastened onto—the subsidy issue, right? And so there’s just no sense whatsoever that I can detect that they’re trying to pull out of this tailspin. What do you make of what the pollster said?
Part of the issue, I think, though, is that it gets at a problem that Republicans have had since 2016, which is that the party is Trump. Like, they need him to motivate voters who only come out for him. But they also need him to articulate whatever it is that they’re supposed to be doing, because otherwise they don’t really have anything. He sort of has this sort of veto power over the entire policy program of the party, including, like, if the government should be open and functioning or not.
But they don’t have a better health care policy, and they kind of can’t have one because any policy that would get their approval would be even more unpopular than what they’re doing right now. So I think that what we’re seeing too is they’re running into this buzzsaw, which is that they keep complaining about the ACA and saying that they’re going to have a better idea, but their idea would be worse than the existing system. So instead, they’re just kind of letting the existing system collapse because they’re worried about taking any kind of ownership over it.
Like, if you know people—and everybody knows somebody whose insurance costs are tripling right now. I’ve certainly talked to people that are doing that. And that only reinforces this larger idea that the president is out to lunch and his party doesn’t care about them.
Sargent: Yeah, sure looks that way. Alex, just to wrap this up, where do you see it all going? And how deep do you think these divisions really are? Like, how do they sort of unspool from here?
What do you see happening to MAGA in a broader sense? Do you think it finds a way to hold together behind JD Vance or whoever the Republican nominee is? Or does it actually fracture in some sense that takes it to another place entirely—kind of beyond repair?
Even as Trump continues to go nuts, he’s able to also, through sheer force—of a threatening aura, we’ll say—keep people in line for the first term. And I think he becomes less and less interested in that as he becomes more consumed by personal vendettas and these sort of legal cases after he leaves office. But there are folks who emerge.
And so I’m sure that a figure will emerge at some point to kind of hold the mantle, but so much of what’s been built here was intentionally done so that it could only be led by the sort of charismatic personality cult of Donald Trump. And I think what we’re seeing is that that’s starting to fracture, I think, much earlier than a lot of people anticipated because Trump is so checked out and he’s not doing the kind of political work that he did before.
Sargent: Yeah, and I think that if Democrats do win the midterms by a sizable amount, which seems likely, though certainly not assured, I think this all starts to really accelerate. Alex Sheppard, man, it was good to talk to you as always.
Shephard: Always great to talk to you.
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