Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Michael Tomasky: Pleasure’s mine, Greg. Thanks.
Mike, if you had to pick two pillars of Trumpism, they would be: one, empty the country of immigrants, and two, usher in a manufacturing renaissance with protectionism. I think it’s notable that Trump is either deeply unpopular or failing utterly at the two things most associated with Trumpist nationalism. Where do you think we are right now?
But it’s almost all bad. As you know, he has good marks on one thing: cracking down on border crossings, and that he has done—those are way down, and so the public approves of that. But everything else is south, and those are the two pillars: that he was gonna bring back manufacturing and that he was gonna round up undocumented people and put them somewhere.
Actually, in the last year of Joe Biden’s time in office—I went back and checked this—in January 2024, it was around 37,000. And when Biden left office, when Trump assumed office, it was 44,000. So it grew a little bit more in Biden’s last year than in Trump’s first year. So even that that they’re bragging about is a house of cards.
It does seem to me that Democrats as a party are more emboldened now to take on Trump over immigration. That’s something they had been generally hesitant to do. I think that’s deeply entangled with his weakness on the economy. Is that your reading as well? And why do you think this is happening now?
Everywhere you go, everywhere you look, there are protests against Trumpism—and not just in New York and Chicago and San Francisco, but in small towns, in red states, in university towns, of course, but all across the country—and in particular, the people of Chicago and Evanston when ICE was doing its business there. And of course, the people of Minneapolis have really been amazing.
Sargent: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting that you put it that way because to me, it’s very clear that a lot of Democrats have been looking at what they’re seeing in places like Minneapolis, seeing this extraordinary heroism and courage of ordinary people and kind of realizing, You know what, we can’t abandon them. They can’t be on their own. They need some backing. They need institutional backing.
Tomasky: It is. I hope they are. And I think they are. I look at Spanberger, the first day she was in office as governor, issuing that order that Virginia’s state and local law enforcement wouldn’t cooperate with ICE. There was nothing that decreed that she was going to do that, inevitably.
Sargent: Well, that brings us to our special issue. You can check it out at TNR.com. It’s got lots of stuff, folks. We really, really urge you to take a look. Mike, you had the lead piece in this issue on—it’s all about where Democrats go now. Do you just want to sum up your basic argument?
And Kamala Harris did much worse than Joe Biden among noncollege voters. That’s the proxy for working-class in exit polls and in the polling world. Biden got 48 percent of the noncollege vote, and Harris was down to 43. So in other words, she lost it by 14 points, which is quite dramatic. And that was the difference.
And I have a passage in there that seems to have resonated with some people who I’ve been in touch with about the piece. There’s a certain argument among a kind of centrist Democrat that, Oh, the electorate doesn’t want the Democrats to do these big things. They just want to get back to normal. They want to get back to some pre-Trump idea of normal.
Normal has been very, very hard for people. We liberals and elected Democrats need to demand more, and Democrats need to push for more. The old normal isn’t good enough. They need to create a new normal where they unrig the system and wrest political and economic power out of the hands of these multimillionaires and billionaires and into the hands of regular people. And that means fight; that means conflict. They need to seek conflict and take these powerful interests on by name and be willing to make some enemies. That’s the argument in a nutshell.
That seems to me to be like a sort of subset of the broader case you’re making, but an extremely important subset. Like, take immigration, for instance. Yeah, Dems are loudly condemning all the lawlessness and the violence and the killing. That’s great. But there’s an occasion to also say, Our way of doing immigration is better. Yours is terrible. Mass deportations are an utter failure. There’s another way.
Tomasky: My broader argument is mostly focused on my contention that Democrats need to go after the people who are making working-class people’s lives hard. That’s mostly not Trump. I mean, it is, but it’s mostly, like, these corporate bad actors who nickel-and-dime people and pharmaceutical companies who won’t allow generics to sell cheaper drugs and all sorts of things like that. I list many in the piece.
And so I’m saying Democrats need to do more of that. But, you know, they also need to put Trump back on his heels more than they do. And they’ve been doing a better job of that—you know, with Epstein in particular—I think that’s really getting through, what’s going on there. And the Republicans shouting “Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton” isn’t doing it for them. Strategies for putting Trump on the defensive are also really, really important.
And what I really found interesting about your case is this idea that we’re facing a similar scale of challenges, but also a similar scale of opportunity. And it’s very clear that, generally speaking, right now, the sheer ambition of Democrats doesn’t match the moment.
Tomasky: Yeah, well, thanks. I’m glad it struck you because that was the concluding section of the piece. And as I was thinking about the piece—I wrote it last December—I’d spent weeks reporting it and months, really a couple of months, thinking about it. And I decided to conclude the piece with a section that really did try to get elected Democrats who read the piece to think in much bigger historical and ambitious terms.
In the 1930s, under Roosevelt, the Democrats completely changed the conception of what government could and should do by embracing Keynesianism—by putting the government in so many more spheres of people’s lives and improving people’s lives greatly in the process and building up the economy in ways that it had never been built up in that process.
Crisis number two: civil rights, finally ending Jim Crow, finally ending segregation, finally bringing these supposed fruits of freedom to everyone in the United States. And that took a lot of courage. Again, done quite imperfectly and we’re still fighting for these things today, goodness knows. But they did rise to that challenge and they passed civil rights and they passed voting rights and they passed other laws that put us on the right course.
That crisis is driven by people like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and all those techno-fascist libertarian weirdos who have amassed more and more political and economic power and want still more—and many of them are open enemies of democracy. It’s not just beating Trump and winning the midterms. It’s beating that. It’s unrigging the system and getting political power out of those guys’ hands. That’s the challenge. Are they up to it? So I try to conclude with what I hope is kind of a stirring call for them to rise to this occasion.
Tomasky: It is, yeah. And they’re not going to do it by accepting millions of their campaign contributions. That’s not going to work. They have to forgo those contributions. That money is already floating away from them. Those people are backing—I mean, like Bezos and Zuckerberg—those people are backing the Republicans now.
Sargent: And if you’re going to break that sort of oligarchic/fascist class’s grip on the United States right now, you can’t only be talking about the price of eggs. You can’t be using narrow, focus-group-tested language. You’ve got to think bigger and speak in bigger terms as well, right?
Do many things; make all of these arguments and tie them all together. They’re all part of a larger argument, which is that our democracy—the oldest in the world—is worth saving and worth nurturing and worth growing and improving. And that involves economics: It involves cheaper prescription drugs; it involves protecting democracy; it involves expanding voting rights; it involves protecting immigrants; it involves all of those things.
Sargent: Well, and by the way, rank-and-file Democrats absolutely want the party to behave the way you and I are discussing here. The New Republic special issue also had our own exclusive poll of rank-and-file Democrats. You can check it out at TNR.com.
And the poll also found most Democrats still want very aggressive government action on the economy: higher taxes on the rich and corporations and aggressive action on climate, which is very big. Yet the poll also finds, I think interestingly, that there’s a fairly large bloc in the party who are more moderate. What did you take from the poll?
But they want a more aggressive party. They want a party that fights more, and they want a party that will go after rich people and corporations in no uncertain terms. We asked questions and we phrased them like, “Do you think the Democrats are too timid, or just about right, or too aggressive in trying to tax rich people?”
You’ve got rank-and-file Democrats saying, as you said, “We believe in government.” One result that really struck me: We asked people, in general, “Do you think our society advances through large government action, like Social Security and voting rights, or through the private sector meeting people’s desires and needs?” And that was like 80–20.
Sargent: Just to sort of return to where we started: The 2024 election, I think, persuaded a whole lot of people that the basic pillars of right-wing populism—or Trumpism or MAGA—one, restrictionism against immigrants and emptying the country of immigrants, and two, fortifying the manufacturing base with protectionism, somehow had won the culture.
Do you want to just sort of wrap it all together? I mean, the fact that we have this message coming from the electorate—this kind of anti-Trumpism, pro-pluralism, pro-democracy, pro-immigration, pro-trade—this is where the majority is. Democrats have an opportunity to become that electorate’s party, right?
What I tried to do in the piece is sketch out an agenda that I think both sides can rally around. Now, what I’m calling for is, on paper, economic populism—and that’s identified with the progressive left. Centrists might be wary of that. But I really tried not to write about it in a way that codes as left-wing. I talk about how Democrats need to talk to farmers more; that’s not left-wing. I talk about how Democrats need to talk to people who go to vocational school and trade school and community college, instead of just talking all the time about college debt and college.
I mean, we haven’t talked much about cultural issues, and there’s some thorny stuff there. I don’t think—again, your average American doesn’t want to be cruel to transgender people and doesn’t want to erase transgender people from society. They don’t want that. That’s not who people are. Democrats can give voice to that and represent that while still representing mainstream America.
Tomasky: Sure. There’s a piece by Alex Shephard called “Not Your Father’s Democrats.” It’s built around figures like Graham Platner and Zoran Mamdani, who are on the left. But it also nods toward other figures like Spanberger, who you would not call “on the left,” but it says of these people, what unifies them is that they’re throwing some elbows—that they’re fighting, and that they’re fighting based on beliefs, and that they don’t come across like they’re just reading polls. So that’s one.
And then the last piece is about immigration... What was his name? What was his name?
Tomasky: By Greg Sargent! It talks about how Democrats can take control of the immigration debate. It points to J.B. Pritzker and Gavin Newsom as showing the way here and goes into some very smart things the two of them have done.
Some change was needed. I get that. And he did win two elections and he did grow the economy and he did a number of progressive things. But one of the things that was bad overall about that Third Way-ism was the tendency to say, Well, the Republicans are extreme and we’re not that extreme, but we do sort of agree about this—sort of accepting Republican presumptions and saying, Well, we’re the reasonable people.
Sargent: Elbow-throwing patriots—in other words, right, Mike?
Greg Sargent: Well folks, our special issue is really, really good. If we do say so ourselves, it’s at TNR.com. It’s got pieces by a bunch of different writers—you’ve heard a rundown of them—and the poll is also really interesting. Please check it out at TNR.com. Michael Tomasky, really wonderful to talk to you.
Tomasky: Pleasure’s mine, Greg.
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