Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
In a sense, they’re both saying that you will get excommunicated if your devotion to Trump is not absolute. The real message here seems to be quite clearly that MAGA really is a cult.
Perry Bacon: Good to see you, Greg. Thanks for having me.
“I have among the best poll numbers I have ever had, and why shouldn’t I? ALL THE COUNTRY DOES IS WIN.”
“I hear Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens are fading fast. Their numbers are terrible. They were FAKE MAGA, and now they’ve been exposed!”
Bacon: I mean, very explicit. As you said, we’ve been talking about a movement or whether MAGA is a movement or an ideology or something else, or just Donald Trump. And, you know, I’ve written and used that phrase to mean other things, but like Donald Trump is saying what I’ve always thought, which is that MAGA is Donald Trump and will be gone the moment he’s off the scene, whenever that is.
Perry, what’s your general sense of where public opinion is on Trump right now? As we record, he seems to be announcing some sort of deal with Iran, I guess. I think maybe he gets a couple of points out of that, or maybe not. What do you think?
So can he get below 35? I don’t know. And I would have said a war that goes poorly and lasts a long time, but this war maybe is not that long and is maybe going to end soon. But I think the one thing is that he’s probably getting near his lowest possible number, which is probably in the 36 to 38 percent range.
Perry, that’s so revealing. And these are people—I want to stress this—who criticized Trump for going to war, which absolutely does betray his promise to voters. That’s what Trump was supposed to represent to Trump voters: no more wars. Whereas Kamala Harris was supposed to be the Liz Cheney shill or whatever, the candidate of the globalists and the warmongering establishment in D.C.
Bacon: Yes. To be fair to them, they have some evidence of that. Remember, there were polls in 2016 that showed Republicans used to pretty much be opposed to Russia. And then a lot of them started approving of Russia once Trump—they used to say, we don’t want an adulterer as president. And then they changed their mind about that.
Sargent: Yeah, and of course, as we all know, people who cover this stuff as relentlessly as you and I do—unfortunately for us, I guess—this is not exclusive to Republican voters by any means. Voters tend to develop their allegiances on identity grounds. Policy isn’t that important to them. They say that they support this or that policy sometimes as a statement of identity and allegiance.
Bacon: Yeah, I mean, to give an example—people often follow the guidance of their political leaders. A good example was in 2012, I think the majority of African Americans opposed gay marriage. Then Barack Obama—a respected person who’s president, but also very respected among African Americans—says I’m for gay marriage and immediately the majority shifted their views. They rethought the issue because of a leader in his case.
So again, Democratic voters—a lot of my friends will follow what a Biden or AOC or a Bernie or a Warren says. I won’t deny that. But that said, those people also tend to speak in terms of accuracy and normalcy and so on. So if you’re a Democrat, you might be modeling yourself after people, but those people believe in democratic norms and election results and so on.
Bacon: And he would defend himself, but he would never usually go on—he would never go on Twitter and trash them and say they’re not real liberals, which is what we’re just seeing now.
And, you know, there’s an irony here that’s probably worth highlighting, which is that Obama’s Republican critics absolutely portrayed him as a cult leader to his followers, fairly relentlessly. It was a really big refrain during the Obama years. And in fairness, there was a lot of adoration for Obama, no question.
Bacon: He’s invoking the idea that he should be compared to Jesus Christ. This is something I never would have thought Republican voters would have been for before. So yes.
Bacon: I mean, the fact that JD Vance—who is not usually conciliatory—has been giving some comments that, I respect the Pope, but we disagree. His comments have not been as sharp as usual. These people are very conservative and attack everyone, but I think they’re aware that attacking the Pope is probably not smart, in part because that doesn’t just offend Catholics in the United States.
Sargent: Right. And we should probably add that among those constituencies that these far-right leaders in Europe rely on, Trump himself is very unpopular.
Sargent: Yeah, and your piece made that point really well. I want to get to that in a second. First, I want to highlight one more quote from Trump’s pollster, Jim McLaughlin. He says: “There are no real divisions among the GOP MAGA base. They overwhelmingly support President Trump and his policies.” Perry, I just don’t understand this spin.
Bacon: Right, because part of this is a lot of pollsters will ask, first of all, are you part of MAGA? And then they will second ask, do you approve of Trump? And so in some ways, the people who say they’re part of MAGA—that means they’re a Trump voter. So it’s not really telling us more than that.
Right now, if you look at the polls in North Carolina, look at the polls in Ohio, look at the polls in Alaska—that’s the problem. You have these people who were Republican voters, or were in 2024 at least, who are not MAGA and who do not like where the prices are going, do not like inflation, do not like this Iran war and do not like all the madness of Trump being himself. And I think that’s the core of it that they’ve got to be worried about. And the pollster, I think, is only saying the base is with us, but neither party’s base alone can win elections. You have to have those other people in it.
But as you point out, for Republicans to hold onto those seats in some of these states, they need a large chunk of non-MAGA. And in these states, it looks like there’s really a fairly strong desire for a check on Trump. It doesn’t take much for a non-MAGA voter who voted for Trump because of inflation to say, this guy isn’t delivering on my stuff and he’s out of control. And okay, this Democrat who’s running here has a strong personality and has distinguished him or herself from the national party and has deep ties to the state and so forth—it’s not that hard for that group of voters to get over to supporting that Democrat, right? Can you talk about this dynamic?
A lot of them are Republican voters. Like if you look at Alaska, Ohio, Texas, the Democratic candidates are going to have to win some actual Republicans. In Maine and North Carolina, you can probably just win the election on Democrats alone. North Carolina is very narrowly between the parties. But I think in those three places, Democrats have to win something like Ohio, Alaska, Texas—probably two of those. And those are going to be tough.
Sargent: Yeah, and there are strong Democratic candidates in a number of these states. And North Carolina, I think, is a really interesting tell. The fact that it really does look like Democrats are on track to win there—it’s going to be super tight, it’s North Carolina—but that is a key tell, don’t you think?
Sargent: So this is why it’s so baffling to me that Trump and his people keep spinning, MAGA is with him because like, so what? That’s not going to matter for the battle for the House and the battle for the Senate.
Bacon: Well, I think the key thing is we’re 10 years into this. So if you’re a liberal—if you’re Perry Bacon or Greg Sargent, Nancy Pelosi, of course you criticize Trump. They have a phrase for it: Trump Derangement Syndrome. I think that’s all silly, but that said, those of us who’ve been correctly criticizing Trump for 10 years, we’re not saying anything new. And so in a certain way, we’re repeating ourselves.
We have a Republican Party in the United States now where you never hear any criticism of Trump because being a Republican functionally means liking Trump. But conservatives abroad do not have to behave that way, and they’re not. And I think that matters. And look, there’s no way to say this—whatever the Pope says is news. And so in a certain sense, the Pope criticizing you is a big story. And the fact that the Pope is repeatedly criticizing Trump is a very important dynamic of politics.
Bacon: I mean, I guess you can probably win the governorships and Senate races in 25 states just as the Republican base. So I think part of what it is, is that they don’t seem to really—I mean, part of it is like we’ve credited them a lot, but it’s not clear to me that Donald Trump’s staff actually exactly knows why they won those Latino, younger, and Black voters in 2024. I think that was kind of an accident and kind of like an anti-incumbent wave.
Sargent: Absolutely right. And by the way, the war is really, really the type of issue that’s driving those groups away from Trump really, really fast and really, really hard. Folks, make sure to check out Perry’s show over at NewRepublic.com. It’s called Right Now with Perry Bacon. Perry, great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.
Bacon: Thanks for having me, Greg.
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