Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Here’s the upshot. No one around Trump is allowed to tell him the truth. And if this helps take down the GOP in the midterms, it’ll be a real dose of poetic justice. We’re working through it all with Mona Charen, a writer for the Bulwark, who’s been pointing out that Republicans really don’t want him anywhere near the midterms. Mona, nice to have you back on.
Sargent: Yes, and you know, it’s looking good right now.
Sargent: So these new leaks to The Atlantic are really something. Trump’s advisors are privately telling him all the bad poll numbers reflect the fact that voters still don’t know about his accomplishments. As examples, advisors cite new stock market highs, declines in fentanyl deaths, the closed southern border, and the increase in domestic manufacturing production.
Charen: Yeah, I was just going to mention that. So a little sleight of hand there. The fact is that manufacturing output is up, but manufacturing employment has lagged. And for a while it was in steep decline. Now it’s ticked up a little bit, but it’s nothing like a boom. And that’s because this has been going on for decades, where we’ve been getting more and more automated ways of manufacturing things. That’s just a fact of life. And Trump sold people on a fairy tale of returning the kind of manufacturing jobs that were prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, and that world is gone.
Sargent: Yeah. And there are a couple of other elements to the sleight of hand, as you put it, that I’d like to quickly highlight. They’re telling him that the manufacturing renaissance is happening. It isn’t. The amount of extraordinary upheaval that he’s inflicted on the country, and really on global trade, to produce these tiny little gains—which aren’t even gains—is really incredible, right?
Charen: Both parties, I think, have a tendency to misread the American public and overread their mandate. So people did not like chaos at the southern border, as they perceived it under the Biden administration, and they wanted a crackdown on border crossings. They did not want what the Republicans have delivered, which is a kind of reign of terror—and grabbing grandmothers out of their homes who’ve lived here for 30 years and have no criminal record at all, et cetera.
Sargent: The numbers really do show that Trump is absolutely bleeding Hispanic men. I want to move on to The Atlantic’s other thing that they reported here, which is that Trump’s answer to this situation is to order Republicans to focus more on him.
This might be the answer: More hagiography of Trump. Mona, do you think Republicans want that?
Sargent: It absolutely is. And we have a bunch of new data that really underscores that point. It’s from some different directions, but it adds up to a striking picture. A new Marquette poll of Wisconsin finds his approval at a net negative nineteen points. That’s 40 to 59 percent, his worst yet in Marquette polling. Sixty percent say his policies boost inflation, seventy percent say the war’s not worth the cost. That’s in a state Trump won, right in the heart of the Rust Belt. And the Rust Belt is where a lot of these big races will be decided.
Remember how his advisors cited that as a positive? He’s actually underwater on border security. And that last one I take as an indicator of across-the-board collapse, like deep collapse, in his public standing. What do you make of all these findings?
Like, for example, voters didn’t hold Trump responsible for the bad economy when COVID hit, because they felt, well, it was an exogenous event, he didn’t cause it, you know, it’s not his fault. And the economy was great up until then, so we’re going to give him a pass.
It is obvious and attributable to his own decisions. He cannot say it’s an exogenous event. He can’t blame Biden—though in that same Atlantic piece you were quoting, they do several times talk about how this is Biden’s fault. But that doesn’t fly. It’s 2026.
Mona, a big pundit narrative has been that, OK, Trump’s very unpopular, but Democrats have a huge brand problem, which could offset it. And I don’t dispute that Democrats have a brand problem. I think that’s a real thing. But for them to be leading the GOP by all these economic metrics is significant, highly so, I think, given the Republican Party’s longtime advantage on economic issues.
And I don’t know to what extent they’re hearing Democrats or not. My general sense is that Trump’s horrific unpopularity is making it possible for Dems to be heard by voters who might otherwise not hear Democrats. But basically, Trump is the reason that the Republican Party is now behind the Democratic Party on economic issues. And that’s an extraordinary turn of events, I think.
I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m in the camp that believes that the Democratic Party should be in the center as much as possible, and should keep a huge tent, and bring in people who are disaffected and who for whatever reason in recent years have been abandoning the Democratic Party. I think they should be sort of moderate in their policy approach, but incredibly fierce in their rhetorical approach.
Sargent: Yeah. Well, the DSA is actually giving Democrats a very big opportunity to say that they’re not for those things.
Sargent: Yeah, well, I just think that what we’re looking at here is that Democrats are suddenly able to reach voters who I think were not within their reach before. And this seems like an essential thing. A lot of pundits have pointed this out, but what’s happening with independents is quite extraordinary right now.
Charen: There are.
Charen: And governors.
Charen: I do. I agree. I mean, I think that’s what you’re seeing, for example, in a place like Texas. Texas, like, you know, that was just out of the question—not even remotely in the realm of possibility a year ago, right? And now James Talarico is doing incredibly well. And I don’t know if he’ll win, but the fact that we don’t know is amazing, in Texas.
Sargent: Yeah, that’s for sure. And there are new signs as well that Republicans are panicking. Politico reports that some of this is spurred by his new trade war with Canada and his plan to flood the country with foreign beef to bring down beef prices. Just going to read some quotes. GOP Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee told Politico that the beef flooding is going to hurt small farmers and ranchers, and added: “I think it could hurt us at the polls.”
Mona, the trade war is really going to hit these Senate races in some of these very big states. How do we square all of this with Trump’s advisors telling him that the real problem is no one knows how great Trump is?
On the other hand, this is a particularly pathological kind of narcissism that Trump has. And he has only hired, in the second term, the kinds of people who will be yes-men and toadies and lackeys. And so he has made a kind of impenetrable bubble around himself.
But he’s not doing that now. He’s not even responding, because he has sealed himself off. And he has surrounded himself with people who will facilitate that. I don’t want to go over the whole Natalie Harp thing again, but you know, her job was the human printer—the person who would simply deliver good news. And that is a fatal weakness for a would-be autocrat, because he loses touch with where the people are.
Charen: Yes.
There’s not even a scintilla of any sense that he thinks he needs to talk to voters about how they might be experiencing what’s happening. And this trade war is going to hurt people. Republicans themselves are saying it.
Charen: Welcome to the world of cartoons, which is where we live now. I mean, it is a cartoon. You’re going to impose tariffs? You’re going to respond with tariffs to my tariffs? Well, in that case, I’m going to—I’ll show you. I’m going to rename Lake Ontario. That’ll teach you. I mean, it is so juvenile and so dumb and embarrassing.
It is going to hurt the Canadians more than it hurts us. But that doesn’t mean it’s not going to hurt us. It’s going to hurt us a lot, which is why you have all of these Republicans—even Republicans—criticizing the trade war. And we have very important races in Maine and in Michigan and in Ohio, and places that are right on the border that are going to be very directly impacted.
And people will know, when their toilet paper becomes unaffordable, and other things. That is, by the way, one of the things on the list—apparently we get our toilet paper from Canada. But yeah, so it’s going to be very significant politically, in just a few weeks.
Charen: Likewise. Thanks, Greg.
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