Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
We’re breaking it all down with political scientist Tom Schaller, who has a good piece for the Public Notice Substack on Trump’s ongoing inflation catastrophe. Tom, good to have you on.
Sargent: So let’s just start with Trump’s announcement that he’ll send $5,000 to all Americans if Republicans hold the House and Senate. As many people quickly pointed out, Trump has promised to send people money over and over again. His contempt for his voters here is just boundless. Tom, your quick reaction to all that?
Sargent: You know, the funny thing about this is it highlights another layer of contempt for Americans that Trump shows here. He’s saying that he’ll be able to send $5,000 to all Americans because the tariff revenue has been so big, which he casts as money that we’re getting from other countries.
Let’s talk about some of this polling. The new Quinnipiac poll has Trump’s approval rating down at 33 percent. On the economy, it’s 32 percent, his lowest ever in Quinnipiac polling. On the war with Iran, he’s at 29 percent. And on trade with Canada, he’s at 28 percent. Extraordinarily terrible numbers.
Schaller: You have more faith in the voter than I do. Let me just start by saying that. And I’m a political scientist, and I’m sure I’ll take some crap for saying this, but I don’t have a lot of faith in voters. So if voters had a substantial knowledge of how the economy works, Greg, they would have known during the campaign that two of the three policies that I talked about in the Public Notice piece—not the Iran war, because obviously that hadn’t happened yet.
It’d be like if you and I were picked by our local town to sit on a panel to pick the new fire chief. And we interviewed a guy, and he was kind of brusque and he didn’t have good manners, but he had two really great ideas when he explained to us his philosophy of putting out fire. One is, he shows up with a giant flatbed truck of dried hay and he dumps that on top. And then if that doesn’t work, he brings a tanker of kerosene and sprays that on, because we know that liquids douse fires. And we said, let’s hire that guy, what a genius.
Sargent: It’s a fair point. I would add, though, that when actual conditions force people’s minds to concentrate a little, they actually do. I do take it as heartening that he’s in the twenties on his trade war with Canada and in the twenties on the Iran war. Put it this way: we’ve never had a situation, I don’t think, where the direct connection between policy and outcome on the economy—which is something that presidents often don’t really have a lot of control over—has been so clear.
Schaller: Well, I mean, I do think voters, rightly or wrongly, they have these, you know, cues that they take. Obviously the gas price is one of them, and grocery prices and housing prices are another. And as I showed in the piece, because so much of the construction industry, residential or commercial, is staffed by immigrant labor, you’re going to raise the cost of housing prices to buy a house. And then of course, when the housing prices go up, then the landlords can charge more in the rent, because of the market situation.
So, Trump’s policies are very inflationary. My point is not that people can’t figure out that they’re paying more for a pound of beef or a gallon of gas. My point is, they should have figured this out during the election. That’s all I’m saying.
Back in 2018, the last midterm, he was at plus ten with that demographic. So as Enten notes, independents have swung sixty-two points against him on the economy. Tom, I keep saying this, but Trump’s collapse with independents is an undercovered story. We haven’t seen anything quite like this. Independents really matter in midterms. What do you make of all that?
So yeah, that is a shocking number, minus 52, even without the baseline of plus ten. But it’s doubly shocking. I was surprised—I thought you were going to say he was minus 20 or minus 15 back in 2018. But to have been plus ten and still Republicans took serious losses in 2018—yeah, I am very, very surprised.
Sargent: Well, I think you actually put your finger on an important point, an underlying factor to all this that’s really worth drawing out a little bit, which is that during Trump’s first term, he really did remain above water on the economy. That’s the big difference between then and now.
Schaller: Well, I think that’s true, that the pure effect of his policies was significantly muted, because he at least had some adults in the room instead of a Cabinet full of sycophants.
Whereas the economy was in much worse shape when he came into office in January 2025, following post-COVID inflation. But, you know, Americans, fairly or unfairly, they give extraordinary credit to presidents when the economy is good, whether they deserve it or not. And sometimes they give undeserved blame when the economy is bad. So Trump is being, you know, sort of penalized for the very thing he benefited from in the first term.
So in a sense, while the comparison that you’re making holds, it’s still also true that he twice inherited a good situation, and both times he flushed it down the toilet. The first time he flushed the economy down the toilet by screwing up the COVID handling to a catastrophic degree, right? Like, hundreds of thousands of deaths, probably needless. And then the second time, he’s just flushed it away with policies—with immigration policy, with tariff policy, with war.
Schaller: Yeah, I think the world is catching up with him, and I think the world is turning its shoulder to us. I’m in Canada right now, in fact, and Canadians have had it with Trump. And they are essentially a European ally here on the North American continent, to the NATO alliance, and increasingly are behaving like Europeans—which is finding other trade partners around the globe instead of trading with us. And that’s going to affect our long-term import and export ability.
And so in a weird way, Trump is benefiting from the fact that the United States is such a powerful and rich country that you can screw things up at the margin, to great pain for many Americans and many people who aren’t Americans economically, and the country isn’t going to fold.
Fox News anchor (voiceover): We should note, though, it is not the first time he has promised a cash payment like this. He promised Americans two-thousand-dollar rebates during his tariff policy when that was enacted, but after court challenges to the tariffs themselves, those two-thousand-dollar checks so far have not materialized.
Bret Baier (voiceover): But if Republicans win the House, five thousand dollars for every adult citizen. So you do the quick math, that’s about one point three trillion dollars. I can hear the critics’ heads exploding. They’re saying out loud, I guarantee you, the president is bribing voters to vote for Republicans to take over the House, and then he’s bankrupting the country, because the deficit and debt is huge and inflation would come back if this comes into play.
Laura Ingraham (voiceover): Why not just give the money now? If you have the money, why not just—
Sargent: So Ingraham says, why don’t you just give people the money now? It’s a good question. And Trump has absolutely no answer to this. For Fox News, that’s pretty harsh stuff, isn’t it, Tom?
So if voters want to ask for $5,000 ex ante for their votes—heck, I’d take $5,000 from Trump, especially if he wrote it from the Trump business organization, and send me a check. I’ll promise to vote for Republicans from the top or the bottom of the ballot. Just send me the $5,000, wire it to my bank account. I promise, and I’ll keep that promise, much like Donald Trump has kept so many of his promises.
What’s your sense of the fundamentals now? Do you think these polls are pretty much capturing how bad it is for Republicans? The Quinnipiac poll I mentioned earlier has Democrats plus 11 in the House generic ballot matchup. I really doubt it’s that high right now, but another poll had it at plus 11 recently.
Schaller: Yeah, if the two recent polls, even if they’re slightly outliers or they’re off by a couple of percentage points, it could pull the, you know, the sum of the averages from, you know, plus six to plus seven, plus eight, plus nine. And if you get up into those high single digits, or make it to 10 percent, you know, then that’s going to be a slaughtering.
And then I think finally you’ll have an intraparty revolt, because Republican members of Congress for the most part have backed Trump as a matter of self-survival. They’re petrified of MAGA voters. They know that they can’t win without them, but they might come finally to the realization that they can lose with them, and/or with only them. And so, if we start to see some people that the Charlie Cooks of the world didn’t have as even leaning Republican or as solid Republican seats fall, then there will be recriminations.
Schaller: What’s also funny about this is that—and actually, give Donald Trump credit for this—he wants his name to be metaphorically on the ballot, even though he’s not standing for reelection in the midterm. And he said that in Dallas, like, vote as if I’m on the ballot. So maybe that answers our earlier question about whether he knows that they’re really bad and he’s lying about it. That’s probably not true.
And give him credit for the guts of it, because if they get slaughtered in the midterms, he can’t say it’s not my fault. He can’t say, well, I wasn’t on the ballot. He said, vote as if I’m on the ballot. So he’s going to own the election results in a way that he normally doesn’t take responsibility for anything. I’m sure after the election he’ll blame—he’ll say we had bad candidates and they ran bad campaigns and it’s not my fault.
Sargent: I agree a hundred percent. Tom Schaller, thanks so much for coming on, man. Always good to talk to you.
Schaller: Great to be here. Cheers.
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