Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
And that prompted a scalding takedown from a Democratic senator who actually knows something about these topics. It occurs to us that all this captures something essential about the fix we’re in. Trump has been faking it all his life, and it’s finally catching up with us. We’re going to work through it all with MS Now’s Steve Benen, who caught a really interesting pattern buried in all this lunacy. Steve, good to have you back on.
Sargent: So let’s start with what Trump said at a rally just now. Listen to this.
Sargent: Steve, that is really something. Note the pure seething contempt for anyone who’s concerned by the added costs created by his war, his unnecessary war. He’s unable to grasp these voter concerns through any frame other than how it reflects on him. I think this is a big deal, big news. What do you think?
But no, he doesn’t do any of those things. Donald Trump instead stands in front of a crowd full of supporters, mocks the very idea that they’re suffering in any way, and denies any responsibility for the fact that he’s to blame for these circumstances that people are suffering through.
Sargent: Yes. And this is something that Democrats really have to grab onto. I don’t want to hear anything from any Democratic strategists about how Trump’s negatives are baked in or whatever. Grab this and use it. That’s what I think they should do.
The head of the Republican Party just said he doesn’t care about higher gas prices. He laughs off affordability as a scam. He doesn’t accept responsibility for the fact that he’s ultimately to blame for the fact that people are suffering through these higher costs, higher cost of living, higher prices. And so, I think you’re quite right. For Democrats who are looking for a strategy for the final 12 weeks, for this home stretch between now and November—well, here it is. Donald Trump just handed it to you.
Now, the audio of this exchange is not great, but listen carefully and you can hear that a reporter asks Trump to respond to families’ concerns about these long deployments. Trump just brushes it off. Listen.
Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, no, that ship is moving. No, they’re not. That ship is moving right now, or very shortly, and it’s being replaced with another very similar ship.
Donald Trump (voiceover): No, not nearly long enough.
Steve, I recognize that Trump has rewritten the rules of our politics, but this plus the other thing together paint a picture of a president who feels zero obligation of any kind to take ordinary people’s concerns seriously.
Now, in the case of high gas prices, it’s a much larger group of people, but at the same time, it’s just as important, if not more so, to sympathize with the sailors and marines on the USS Lincoln and the loved ones back home, who are concerned about the fact that they’ve had this modern-day record for the longest possible deployment, and now they’re running out of soap and food.
Sargent: Trump instantly converts everything into a question of whether he is getting the esteem and the adulation that he knows is due to him.
And so if he were to acknowledge their existence, it would reflect poorly on him. And so therefore he has no choice, in his twisted mind and his twisted perspective and worldview, but to say, well, then therefore they don’t exist, because they can’t, in his mind. And it’s just so offensive on its face. A normal human being, much less a normal American president, knows not to behave this way. And yet here we are, seeing him once again demonstrate the fact that his entire worldview is broken.
Benen: Neither do I.
Benen: Well, sure. About a decade ago, apparently, according to Donald Trump, he spoke to some sailor who said that the current system of launching jet fighters off of aircraft carriers was too complicated. And so apparently, as part of this conversation, this sailor—who may or may not exist, whose name we do not know—said that he preferred the steam catapults.
And so, early on in his first term, he apparently directed the Navy to start pursuing this change. And they blew him off because—and this is the important part—they know what they’re talking about. Unlike the president, who doesn’t, they knew what they were talking about, and so they ignored him.
Sargent: Yes. And so you caught this interesting, broader pattern in which Trump just declares himself to be one of the world’s foremost experts, or even the world’s leading expert, in all sorts of different areas, in whatever comes up at any time. You looked back and found that he said this on construction, on tariffs, on firearms, on health care, on drone technology, even on grass. That one, I didn’t know what to make of. Trump is an expert on grass. What kind of grass? I might be leaving a few out.
Benen: Well, you know, last week, in an offhand comment, Donald Trump said, quote, “I know more about grass than any human being, I think, anywhere in the world,” end quote. Now, if you’re laughing, as you should, because it’s hilarious—I laughed at it too. But in context, this is something that he does all the time. No matter what the subject is, he is the world-renowned authoritative source on every subject.
And so when it comes to things like how best to launch jet planes off of an aircraft carrier, he doesn’t turn to people who know what they’re talking about. He instead says, well, I am the foremost expert on this subject. I talked to a sailor 10 years ago who likes catapults. So therefore, we’re going to go with that steam-based approach.
But I can’t help but feel like, after a lifetime of Trump getting away with this, we might finally be at the point where he’s not going to be able to get away with it much longer. Is that too optimistic, or what?
There are a lot of people who voted for him who now regret that. There are a lot of people who voted against him, or who are now eager to vote in the midterms. And so I don’t think it’s overly optimistic to think that we’ve really turned a page here. We’ve got congressional Republicans kind of separating themselves from him. We see voters definitely rejecting the White House.
Sargent: I think a lot of people will listen to you and me talking about this with a little bit of pessimism or skepticism. They’ll say, OK, well, we went through this in Trump 1.0. And in a few years, everybody just forgot about what Trump had done, even though, you know, hundreds of thousands of people needlessly died and the economy was crashed into the shitter. And that’s true, right? But there is reason to think that things are different this time.
We’re seeing in his second term Trumpism unshackled on every front—immigration, tariffs, America First in the world. And I think that that fact, that the three major pillars of Trumpism, of MAGA, of right-wing populism, were really tried in this new kind of way and are failing so miserably, kind of creates an opening for a different level of rejection of Donald Trump and Trumpism. Do you think that’s too optimistic?
And so I don’t want to make it seem as if somehow Trump has always persevered under these circumstances, because I think we look back in recent history and that hasn’t been the case. But putting that aside, even looking at more contemporary conditions, I think that what we’re seeing now is a wholesale rejection based on a wholesale failure.
Sargent: Some polls are showing that Democrats have the advantage on the economy for the first time in many years. So immigration and the economy and national security—three areas where Republicans have had traditional advantages, all thrown away by Donald Trump’s incompetence. That’s the story, I think.
Sargent: These are really the three pillars of right-wing populism more broadly, right? Immigration, economy, America First in the world. And so I think, as you said earlier, the American people might be ready to hear something different. I think really they may have their ears open in a way that maybe they haven’t in a very long time. I sure hope so, anyway.
Sargent: Well, let’s conclude on Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona. He responded to Trump’s craziness about the Navy and the uprooting of the system. Listen to this.
Sargent: That’s quite a takedown, Steve. I think that Democrats have an opening to really recapture national security in a very broad sense here, by putting people like Mark Kelly out there to just scaldingly ridicule the idea that this guy has any idea what he’s talking about on any of these fronts, especially when we’re in the middle of such an absolute global catastrophe as the one he’s drawn us into. What do you think?
And I think the fact that Trump is failing so miserably in Iran, and the war continues to drag on—here we are, it’s nearly six months in. Americans were told that this was going to be a quick war, this was going to be an easy war, that this was going to be a casualty-free war, and none of those things have happened. And so now we have people like Mark Kelly, who has a lot of credibility on this, clearly speaking out, but others are speaking out as well.
Sargent: Just to take your 2008 and George W. Bush comparison one step further—everybody should recall that in 2004, after George W. Bush was reelected, he looked absolutely untouchable. I remember the atmosphere at the time was that because of September 11, and because of, you know, all the sort of theatrics that Karl Rove was doing, which at the time looked really formidable, right?
Benen: Exactly. You know, it’s so easy to forget that after 2004, we heard the same things that we were hearing shortly after 2024—that we had entered an era of Republican dominance, that Republicans were going to be leading for the foreseeable future, that they’d cracked the code, they’d rewritten the alignment, everything was going to be different from here on out. That’s what we heard in 2004, when Republicans were running the show. They had the White House, the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. And as far as we were told, the conventional wisdom from most of the pundits was that Democrats were just lost at sea for the foreseeable future. Two years later, Democrats took back Congress. And then two years after that, they controlled the show. They were in charge.
Sargent: And Trump was supposed to be the guy who was much shrewder than the Bushes and the Roves of the world. Steve Benen, all of that was beautifully said. Thank you so much for coming on. Folks, if you want to check out Steve Benen’s stuff, make sure to check out the MaddowBlog over at MS Now. Steve, great to talk to you.
Benen: See you soon, Greg. Thanks.
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