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.
Harry Enten (voiceover): We are talking about non-college white voters and he is sliding right into the water. This is a ruh-roh moment, to quote the great Scooby-Doo. Trump’s net approving with non-college whites. Look at this. In February of 2025, it was plus 32 points and now it is minus two points. That is a 34-point shift. And I will note this is an average of polls.
Harry Enten (voiceover): What about the war? Well, the war ain’t helping him because just take a look here. Non-college whites, net approval rating of U.S. military action against Iran, minus five points. You think that’s low? Come over to this side of the screen. How about Trump on Iran? Minus 13 points, a very unlucky 13 indeed for the president of the United States with a key core group of his.
Shephard: It’s just terrible. I mean, I think there’s always been this misguided idea that Trump’s support among the white non-college, white working-class vote is ironclad no matter what. And that’s just not true. We saw this during the pandemic as well. But even during the pandemic, which basically did create a global recession, we did not see the president do this sort of this level of economic self-sabotage. And I think that the extent to which many people—myself, I think, included here—overstated some of the causes of Trump’s victory back in 2024, it’s really coming into the foreground right here.
Sargent: Well, Alex, I followed up and asked Harry Enten if Trump has ever fared this badly with non-college whites in polling, and Enten told me that this rivals where he was with that demographic just after January 6th. That suggests he’s at a low point with them, as you also said.
Shephard: I think one of the reasons why a lot of Trump’s voters stuck with him, even amidst all the kind of erratic fire and fury, garbage and nonsense of the first term, was that Trump’s outbursts—they were relatively low stakes—were about people that Trump personally cared about. And in general, he was doing things that didn’t tend to affect people’s day-to-day existence. And I think for some voters, that erratic behavior only communicated the fact that Trump was a different sort of politician.
And they are having to actually see that, like, this guy, Donald Trump, who claims to be breaking the system on our behalf, is actually engaging in just another stupid Middle East war. He’s not explaining why he’s doing it. And every action that he’s taken since that war began has only made it worse. It’s only made costs go up. And I think in general, people are looking at this with understandable wariness, right?
And again, I think for all of the talk about the president’s ability to communicate with these kind of low-propensity voters, there has not been any of that about this war. You look back—the things that have cut through to the mainstream are Trump tweeting that he’s Jesus or whatever. It’s not a rationale for going to do regime change in Iran. And that’s because there’s no one in this administration that can actually tell you what they’re doing here. But if you are a voter, what you will see is, for instance, I went on vacation two weeks ago and when I came back gas was a dollar and 40 cents more expensive than when I left.
Shephard: Yeah. I mean, I think that they’re totally high on their own supply and they have been for a really long time. And, if you look back, for instance, at the Iraq War—to which that is a much more significant use of American manpower—but that war at least had a sort of fake rationale of providing democracy to the Middle East, and it existed as a kind of post-9/11 catharsis for people. Both of those things were legible. And this war is just not legible, right?
But I think inside the administration, my general sense is that Trump believed that he had kind of gotten in and out of Venezuela in this way, that he could just keep kind of doing this, and that he is the sort of sole master of reality and he can declare victory whenever he wants. We’re in a situation now where Iran—our stated adversaries—are in a much stronger negotiating position than they were before, right? Because they can hold the United States economy hostage, and they know that Trump is terrified of that as well. But he also can’t get out of a situation in which he’s not the sole winner, which is already impossible here. And that’s the bind that you and I and the millions of non-college white voters that we were talking about earlier find ourselves in right now.
Alex, this isn’t just any pointy-headed European leader. Meloni is a member of the MAGA International. What’s funny about this, though, I think is that Meloni didn’t understand that she’s not even allowed to defend the Pope if it makes the ailing American despot look bad in the least. Trump has to be above the Pope, even for the prime minister of Italy.
And there was this larger sense—and this is like where a lot of the Viktor Orbán links come from, the Hungarian president who went down after 16 years basically of power over the weekend—there was this idea that they were sort of part of this groundswell of the global far right, that populists were fed up with open borders, that they were fed up with bureaucrats, that they were fed up with people in faraway places like Brussels, which is ridiculous to me, dictating how they live, and that they were going to rise up. And I think what we’re seeing is the crackup of that everywhere.
And again, once you speak out against Trump, you have this ridiculous situation where Trump is watching television on Sunday and sees these three American cardinals speak out against the war and then literally—kind of literally—starts a holy war right after that. And the reverberations, I think, from that are huge. But I think that the Orbán defeat there is not immaterial to this—that global far-right leaders are looking around and saying, this is a pretty bad moment for us. People are turning against this kind of far-right populism that has been ascendant since Trump essentially walked down the escalator in 2015.
Shephard: This was already baked in before Iran, right? And Iran is the most catastrophic thing an American president has done since Iraq. I mean, it’s maybe worse in some ways, which is crazy to say. But I think what we’re seeing here is a huge global trend that is manifesting itself everywhere and seems to be manifesting itself here as well, though we won’t be able to see its results in full view until the midterm elections in November.
Alex, I don’t know if Trump understands the situation at a basic level. The problem doesn’t appear to be that we don’t have enough military firepower. It’s that military firepower can’t force Iran to open the strait. Isn’t that the essence of this?
It needs the help of countries specifically that are not Israel to end this conflict. And it needs those countries, I think, to help find an off ramp, or to build one that is acceptable to the United States, Iran, the Gulf States, and the Iranian regime, to the extent that such a thing exists right now. And instead of trying to bring those sort of partners in to find a way out of this, Trump is alienating them and demanding that they share in the blame for something that is just colossally stupid.
The scale of betrayal—in a way—of what Trump is ostensibly supposed to represent and what MAGA is ostensibly supposed to represent, nevermind that it was always bullshit that they were anti-war, but they’re supposed to be that. The scale of this betrayal is actually at the point where it’s really seriously endangering a massive movement. And I find that really striking. And I’ve got to say, man, if this is what brings MAGA crashing down, then boy, is that a certain kind of satisfying, poetic justice—aside from the fact that thousands and thousands of innocent people are getting killed.
But one of the things that you saw this week was, after the Jesus picture, people like Riley Gaines or these kind of Catholic influencers—they were out too. And I think that was notable to me, not because I think it will necessarily last, but you see how quick these people will leave now, right? That anyone is basically—if there’s a sort of exit door that cracks open, they will speak out about it. And that’s a notable difference from the first term, where for the most part the kind of Trump opposition on the right was from a sort of more establishment or moderate wing.
Sargent: Well, just to wrap this up, here’s the best part of all. JD Vance can’t do that. He can’t distance himself from Trump. He’s tied to Trump very, very tightly. All he can do is get dutiful reporters to write things in newspapers saying that really, really, he totally opposed the war. And at the same time, he of course is really loyal to Trump. So he’s going to stick by Trump because he’s a loyal guy, even if he has misgivings. And he’s the guy who’s supposed to be inheriting this movement and this coalition. And it’s cracking up under him, yet he can’t distance himself from the dark force, the kind of vortex that’s causing the cracks to really radiate out in all directions.
Shephard: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been fascinated with Vance more or less since I first came into contact with him via Hillbilly Elegy. He is one of our great opportunists and cynics and is a shape-shifter par excellence. And I think what he’s been doing this term has been really interesting to me because he’s trying to sort of build connections with these various sort of independent movements within MAGA, right—whether they’re kind of this sort of podcast crowd or the sort of more intellectual wing. Certainly he has his Catholic conversion story and his upcoming memoir about that. So he has a kind of religious conversion take as well. But one thing that Vance does not have, which Trump does, is an independent base of support within the party.
As we’ve been discussing, he is tied to all of this. So I think what we’re seeing is that there isn’t like a successor who can come in and just say, I am MAGA now, right? And we’re going to do MAGA without Trump and it’s going to be even better—because Trump has never allowed somebody like this to flourish or prosper in any way. And so I think that also points to a kind of failed-state situation, right? That Trump will be term-limited—he’s not going to hold on to power, I don’t think—but he’s not going to. And you’re going to have these people that are fighting over the sort of scorched earth that we’re left in, which is $6 gas, a strengthened Iranian regime, no strong ties to Europe or even to the Gulf States, maybe, in the Middle East. And a country that is more isolated, weaker, and poorer than it was 10 years ago, solely because we elected this moron twice.
Shephard: Thanks for having me.
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