Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Julia Azari: Thank you so much for having me.
Julia, it sure looks like the MAGA coalition is collapsing, and Trump is throwing away the gains he made in 2024. What do you make of those numbers?
And it might be the case that presidents are just, sort of, stuck in the low 40s. But even so, Trump is on the lower end of that. And as you cited, in [those polls], even below that level, so I think we can safely say he’s even less popular than you would expect given some of the economic challenges. And the other piece of that is that it’s hard to separate the economic situation from a direct link to some of his distinct economic policies—namely, the tariffs.
Donald Trump (voiceover): You get polls for the election that showed I was gonna get swamped, and I won in a landslide. They were fake polls because polls are tough. You know, when you get a fake poll—I get them today, I saw one today that I’m at 40 percent. 40 percent. I’m not at 40 percent; I’m much higher than that. I mean, I’d love to run against anybody. The real polls say [I’d] kill anybody; it wouldn’t even be close.
Donald Trump (voiceover): It just amazes me that there isn’t more support out there. We actually have a “silent support.” Well, that’s how I won. I got probably 85 million votes. They say 78 million, 79 million. They cheated at this election, too. It was just too big to rig. Too big to rig.
Azari: Yeah, I mean, there’s several things here that really get at my major pet peeves as a political scientist. And one is when people say that Trump won in a landslide—he didn’t. I mean, modern contemporary presidents really don’t. He’s not alone in that. It’s not in and of itself a critique to say that he didn’t; he just didn’t. It’s just numbers.
And what we see with Trump is that it’s pretty consistent. He’s not terribly popular. He’s gotten less popular over the course of his term in office. I think we could quibble about by how much or how significant that is, but it has declined. And the other thing is that we’re seeing when you break down specific policies, specific actions, specific ideas about what Trump has done in office—they’re fairly unpopular.
Julia, one thing that surprised me really a lot is that Trump is tanking on both immigration and the economy. Those are issues where two things are supposed to hold: One, he’s strong on them—that has been the mythology all along; and two, these are supposedly issues where Republicans enjoy an advantage. So how do you understand what’s happening here? This kind of collapse on these two major issues that are supposed to buoy up Trump and the GOP.
And his major economic policy that people associate with him has been tariffs, which you can directly tie to the rising of prices. Media has glommed onto that narrative. As I said before, private businesses have glommed onto that narrative. So even if that weren’t true—it probably is—but even if it weren’t true, that would be the message that people are receiving from a lot of different sources. So I think that’s the economy story.
People don’t like the idea of a “chaotic border,” whatever that may mean. But they also don’t like the idea of deporting people who’ve been here a long time. They don’t like the idea, certainly, of what’s happening now: of these sort of state forces with no accountability killing American citizens. People don’t really like that—unsurprisingly.
Azari: Right, exactly. And like many policies, people have one attitude about these sort of overarching concepts when you present them in the abstract, and a very different attitude when you start to break them down specifically. I don’t know—I’m not exactly sure what that’s called or if that has a specific name—but I think it’s a phenomenon that’s really worth paying attention to as we consider how American politics works.
Fox News, of all places, displayed this graphic—a very striking graphic of those numbers on tariffs that was flagged by the seemingly tireless Aaron Rupar. It was really a powerful image. Now, Trump watches Fox News, so he probably saw these numbers. Julia, it’s often said that Trump’s team keeps bad news from him, like he’s in a bubble. But I don’t know—with the midterms approaching, I’ve got to think the White House political team is getting really nervous about the unpopularity of his tariffs, especially with him doubling down on them. What do you think about all that?
Right? That’s essentially what the Court does. And Trump instead doubles down on it. And now it’s really associated with him. That is certainly something that I would imagine his political staff would want to communicate to him. I also think the Fox News point is really interesting because tariffs are particularly an area where the Republican coalition is a little bit strained. And there are some cracks in the Democratic [coalition] on it as well, but specifically when you think about what are some things that might make the business community abandon their support for Trump, this seems like an issue that’s ripe for that.
Azari: Right. Yeah, I think that’s really important. You have a group of voters that has been trending Republican for a long time and that you can imagine—not to make broad assumptions about a group of people—but you imagine that folks in this group who are on the lower end of the income scale are very sensitive to price differences. And the industries that they may wish would come back to the United States are not going to automatically do so because of the tariffs. That’s just not going to happen.
The Fox poll also had Trump’s overall approval a bit higher, but it had him at 45 percent to 55 percent on immigration—that’s ten points underwater. And on the economy, he’s at 40 to 59 in Fox’s polling, 19 points underwater. Tariffs: 37 to 63, 26 points underwater.
Azari: Yeah. I mean, I guess I sort of link it to the larger “Trump project.” To me, a lot of what he’s saying about the polls has echoes of what he said about the 2020 election. And what he said about the 2016 election—which, of course, he won in the Electoral College, but still talked about fraud in the vote—is that any result he doesn’t like, he just says, Well, this is fake news. This is fake.
What we’re kind of seeing is Trump getting into this spiral of being unpopular, being in denial of it, and then doing things that are even more unpopular. And I don’t really know where this spiral ends, or where this takes us, or what it looks like after the midterms.
Azari: Yeah, this is really my, kind of, takeaway from this—from the last decade of Trump and Trumpism. And it was what I was trying to get at in my Substack post that I had this Monday at Good Politics/Bad Politics about Trump’s behavior as an unconstitutional leader.
Sargent: What was so interesting about your post is that you kind of laid out a “taxonomy” of the ways in which Trump is governing outside the Constitution. Can you walk us through that a little bit?
What I did in the more recent piece was try to, kind of, apply this to the Constitution and say: Well, you know, is Trump following the Constitution as it’s written and laying out the presidency as it’s written? The real thing I wanted to test in that piece is this new pet theory I’m working on, which is that the 14th Amendment and its guarantee of equal protection under the laws is what, kind of, gave meaning to the presidency as it’s laid out in Article II, which gives it the responsibility of protecting, preserving, and defending the Constitution.
I take this, kind of, a step further and say: Once we have determined that someone’s operating outside of the constitutional order, it is impossible to apply the questions we used to apply to understand their presidency, because they’re operating in a totally different office in a totally different, kind of, context.
And then also immigration—which I think, in addition to the visual aspects of it, the killing on the streets, the masked kidnappings, and all that—I think on some level people really get that what Trump is doing with his paramilitary forces is really trying to treat a very large subset of Americans as, fundamentally, sub-citizens. Both in terms of the treatment of undocumented immigrants, but also the occupations against people’s will—the armed occupations against people’s will. Do you see a direct connection, in some sense, between Trump’s deep unpopularity and the extra-constitutional ruling?
There are different wordings of this question and slightly different timing, and it seems like this really is something that is of concern to Americans. On the deeper level, another point I raise in the piece is that Americans disagree about a lot regarding the Constitution, but there’s one, kind of, idea that’s pretty consistent in it, and that is that we understand power to be broken up and distributed across different entities. We don’t expect one person, or even one branch, to have all the power.
Sargent: Just to boil this all down really simply: I think people intuitively get that he’s acting like a “mad king,” and they react very badly to that.
Azari: Thanks so much for having me.
Hence then, the article about transcript trump seethes at bad polls as even fox admits he s tanking was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Trump Seethes at Bad Polls as Even Fox Admits He’s Tanking )
Also on site :