Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Yet some commentators, and some Democrats as well, think he still possesses some sort of political black magic that we all overlook at our peril. And we don’t understand why. So we’re talking to New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who’s been arguing well against the myth that Trump is Teflon. Alex, good to have you back.
Sargent: So last week we learned that the Trump economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, and worse for Trump, April and May were revised down by 103,000 jobs. On this, Trump is absolutely cratering in the polls as well.
Shephard: I don’t think anyone’s seen anything like this before. I think the big story of this presidency is that Trump was elected because voters were mad about inflation after the pandemic, and they blamed Joe Biden and his party, the Democratic Party, and they had rosy visions of Trump’s presidency and they brought him back to office. And then Trump and the people around him—and I should say many Democrats as well—saw that victory not as a rebuttal, or a refutation against the Democrats. They saw it as an endorsement of his entire cultural, non-economic program.
Sargent: I think that’s exactly the story. I want to play something that CNN’s Harry Enten said about all this. He notes that what’s driving Trump’s huge drop on the economy is inflation. And he says that in the latest CNN poll, Trump’s approval on inflation is fifty points underwater. Listen to this.
Sargent: So, two things there. First, no president has ever matched Trump’s terrible numbers on inflation. And second, he’s been in negative territory for the great bulk of his second term. We just talked about the big story of the Trump presidency—he’s been underwater virtually the entire time. Alex, do you think all this has really sunken in with the hive mind that interprets national politics for us?
And I think that people then make this leap to say that this is the superpower that Trump has—he can distract you by putting your attention on these other damaging scandals. And the numbers just don’t back this up at all. People are really, really pissed off that they voted for this guy to lower prices and he’s not doing it. That does not mean that the other stuff doesn’t matter or it matters less. But I think that there’s just a lot of anger over that. And I think that that’s really what’s going to drive the midterms, you know, probably for Democrats—it’s looking that way.
Sargent: Can I just bring up a phrase that I cannot stand? It’s when Democrats say, Trump’s negatives are “baked in,” so we don’t have to remind voters about them. You know, yes, you do.
Shephard: Yeah, I think that it’s this overinterpretation of Trump’s return to power. It’s this idea that because Trump got reelected, that somehow negates all of the kind of Resistance 1.0 work that happened. It’s like when you talk to Democrats who say they shouldn’t impeach him if he comes back. There’s, I think, this larger sense that they focus too much on Trump’s malfeasance.
But I think the other issue is that there’s just this fear—they’ve looked at focus groups that say Democrats care too much about Trump. And that’s, you know, true to the extent that what voters are saying is they want an alternative to these things. And one way that you showcase your alternative is that you point out what the other people are doing and say, we’re going to do something different here.
Sargent: GOP pollsters are very aware of what’s happening right now. The Wall Street Journal reports that some of these Republican pollsters are sounding the alarm about Trump and the economy and the Republican Party. One Republican pollster made what I thought was a really telling point.
Now, The Wall Street Journal says Republican analysts think time is running out for Trump and the GOP to regain their image as better on the economy. That sort of thing, where voters are hyper-focused on their everyday costs, is an extremely difficult thing to dislodge, I think.
And when you look back at attacks that Biden faced during his term in office, right? So many of them were unfair, but they were very focused on the everyday well-being of Americans, right? And you’re just not seeing Democrats do that as much as they could.
And you have a presidency that is self-dealing, whose family’s making billions of dollars, while basically, you know, many Americans are struggling to make basic needs, right? They know what the cost of their power bill is—and the president is making, you know, two billion dollars from the crypto industry.
You almost never hear them say Joe Biden actually left Donald Trump with a very good economy because Democrats are better. And the reason they don’t want to say that kind of thing is this lack of confidence that you’re getting at. They don’t think they can win arguments, I think. And that’s a particular example of one they don’t think they can win. They think voters just decided Biden was a disaster, and they just never want to talk about that again.
Shephard: Yeah, and I think that there’s a related thing here. I think part of the issue is that you have a situation where the Democrats basically made the best of a bad situation, and Trump is making the worst of a good one, which I think is a delicate political argument to make. But it’s not one that’s wrong.
And then, if things weren’t bad enough then, he launches a war against Iran in February, at the end of February. Essentially, seemingly, you know, convinced that air power alone will win this war and that Iran won’t close the Strait of Hormuz, even though, as we now know, many people in the military were telling him that this was a very real possibility.
But it almost understates the problem here—that this is a presidency that launched a war based on the premise that it would be over shortly, that you would be able to do regime change in a massive country with huge military infrastructure that essentially has been run by the IRGC for years anyway, and now is stuck in a situation where Iran is fully calling the economic shots.
Like, Joe Biden did not make the cost of eggs go up in the post-pandemic period, right? But Trump has basically taken every concrete action you can to destroy the economy right now. And it seems to largely be held aloft by posts or statements that he makes every Sunday or Monday morning before markets open, like clockwork now. And yeah, there’s no sign that that’s going to change between now and the midterms.
It’s a thing in political science that voters blame presidents for the state of the economy, often unfairly, but here’s a case where he absolutely is responsible for the state of the economy. He’s just breaking one record after another.
Sargent: So this is really interesting: According to The Wall Street Journal. Another GOP pollster, David Winston, sent a cautionary note to Republicans back in June. It said this: “If Democrats could sustain leads on the economy and win double-digit margins among independents, as some polls show, a blue wave is possible.” So this pollster said that back in June, and guess what? Dems are now leading on the economy in some polls, and they are winning independents by double digits in the generic House ballot matchup now.
Shephard: I mean, I think that that’s sort of the dynamic between congressional Republicans and the president right now, too—is that they want him to do things that will help them. And that requires essentially discipline on both a messaging standpoint and a policy one, that Trump is not actually capable of doing. And with Iran, I think right now he’s trapped in a place—and has been trapped in a place by Iran—where if he doesn’t give them the JCPOA, the Iran deal that Obama reached with Iran in 2015, plus more, right, they are not going to open the strait.
But you know, I think there’s another issue here as well, which is just that congressional Republicans want something to run on, right? Like, that’s not the president. And Trump does not want them to be able to run on anything that’s not him. And that’s the place that they are in right now. And they cannot run on economic stewardship, which has been the backbone of Republican messaging—not just on the economy, right, on everything—for more than half a century now. They can’t do that. They can’t run on, you know, we’re making the trains run on time, or good governance, because this administration is clearly a mess.
And what you’re seeing now, I think, is something that is kind of phenomenal, which is that they’re now saying, actually I may think the Democrats are woke, right, I may think that they got crazy, they want to cancel Thanksgiving, right, they want to do all this crazy stuff, but I’m OK with woke if it gets me better economic leadership.
The big challenge for the party is, how do you change a multigenerational impression that Democrats are not going to help your bottom line— tjat they’re going to take your money and they’re going to give it to somebody else? And I think that that’s an opportunity that’s being lost here.
Sargent: I could not agree more, Alex. I think that we have an opportunity here to see Democrats really speak to voters in a whole new way. I think voters’ ears are open. They’re ready to listen to a new case. Alex, good to have you on, man. Thanks so much.
Shephard: Thank you. Appreciate it.
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