Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
It all highlights a deep contradiction in Trump-MAGA psychology right now. Republicans are all required to pretend Trump has been a stupendous success, yet that very posture is dragging them toward electoral catastrophe. We’re talking about it all with New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who’s our go-to person when it comes to Trump losing the culture. Alex, thanks for coming on.
Sargent: So let’s start here. Trump’s promise of a $5,000 check to every American if Republicans hold Congress is one of the centerpieces of their quote-unquote plan to win the midterms. But one Republican operative tells Politico, quote, “No one thinks it’s a serious proposal. It does reek of desperation.”
Shephard: I think the question about this entire farce of a midterm convention was, what is Trump going to talk about, since his entire second term is up in flames right now? And what they’ve done is concocted, you know, I think a plan that’s a complete sham in a couple of ways, right?
But I think the other thing about it, to get to the point about losing the culture, is that Trump’s rise came from this idea that he was a different type of politician, right? He was not somebody who would say something just to get elected and then not do it. And of course, he’s governed in a completely different way. But to me, this is like the biggest possible version of that exact problem—that this is someone who’s just doing shameless electioneering.
Sargent: Exactly. And so this is the context for Trump’s bizarre eruption at a reporter. The reporter says, if your economic policies are working, why do you need to create an incentive for people to turn out to vote? Listen.
Donald Trump (voiceover): I think what you’re going to do—I didn’t do it for turning out to vote. I’ve done it as a reward for people having to put up with five years, and four years, of a horrible situation caused by Biden.
Trump (voiceover): It’s almost a reward for the people having to put up with Biden’s policy.
Trump (voiceover): Not you. Not you. You’re the worst.
Republicans fear that voters aren’t at all motivated to vote Republican because of Trump’s failures. And it’s the pointing out of that fact that got Trump so angry. Your reaction to that?
But I think that the other part of this, right, is that they’re trying to recreate 2024 to some extent. If you recall, Elon Musk had this, like, lottery, that if you could prove that you voted Republican you could win money. And I think that they had certain things on their side at that point, right?
And I think the other thing, which you raised in the question, is that the issue here is that it’s clearly a naked bribe, right? They can’t say anything else. Trump tried to frame this as if it’s a dividend from all of the glorious money that’s from the tariffs—that, by the way, are the primary driver of these price rises that we’re seeing, along with the war in Iran.
Sargent: Yeah, and I think there’s an enormous contradiction at the center of all of this. At the center of everything MAGA right now, really—they just put on this two-day festival designed to push the storyline that Trump has been a world historical success, a smashing success.
Shephard: Yeah. And I think that the other core of it, right, is this enthusiasm problem that I think has always been there with Trump. That, like, Trump has this secret sauce with some voters, I should say, in both directions, if he is on the ballot, right? There are people that will show up and they’ll be excited for him.
I look at Ocean City, Maryland, right? Not exactly a hot spot, but I recall driving down that way, you know, a couple of years ago, and you would see Trump flags everywhere. You’d see them on the road. And I was down there this weekend, and you didn’t see anything. There’s just not any, like, actual enthusiasm.
But I think if you look at the way that he has generated enthusiasm before, it has to some extent always been organic, right? It emerged from him running for president on a message. Whatever you think of that message that’s where it’s come from. And he just cannot. You saw this in 2018, right, with the migrant caravan. They tried the same kind of thing, and it doesn’t work.
Sargent: Well, to your point about driving around the Eastern Shore, which is absolutely pretty Trumpy—last weekend I spent a lot of time driving around a county in western Virginia, in the mountains, that Trump won by well over 40 points. And I only saw one Trump sign. Just one. In many, many hours of driving around really, really Trumpy territory.
Shephard: Yeah. And I think that because with Trumpism, right, it is a different type of political movement. It’s not an endorsement of it, in that it is a sort of—it’s a forever war, right? And I think you’ve seen people respond to it that way, where they, you know, you keep your lawn signs up, you just change them, right? You move the Trump 2020 to the Trump “no more bullshit” sign or whatever. And what we’re seeing now is that people have taken that stuff down.
He’s failed on the core reasons he won, which were all driven about inflation, and about, I think also, the idea that you have an executive who is accountable to people and up front with them, right?
Sargent: So we actually have some data that supports the arguments we’re making here, and really sheds light on some of the deeper currents of all this. Nate Silver has the Dems leading in the House generic ballot matchup by over eight points. And critically, that’s in the likely voter model—not the registered voter model, or all adults, or anything like that. The likely voter model.
Shephard: Yeah. I mean, I think the other thing with that convention that you saw was, I thought, a really concerted, if somewhat marginal, effort to win over three groups that were instrumental to Trump winning in 2024: Black voters, Latino voters, and young voters. So you saw a lot of the speeches, particularly earlier on Wednesday before Trump spoke, were aimed at Black and Latino voters. And then Vance’s speech, which was ridiculous, was, I think, aimed at sort of contrasting him with other millennial politicians, most notably Abdul El-Sayed, but also Zohran Mamdani as well.
And I think what we’re seeing is just that these voters have become much less automatically drawn to the Democratic Party than they were before, but that does not mean that they are moving over to the Republican Party. And I think that this is the larger problem here, is that people are just tuning them out culturally, which I think was still, again, not true—I think there was a willingness among some voters in all three of these groups to sort of hear out Trump and Vance in 2024. And that’s just not the case now.
Sargent: Yeah. And your point is really well taken on that, because another thing that this convention was supposed to portray was a man in total mastery of the culture, right?
Shephard: Yeah, I mean, I think this is, like, the idea of Trumpism. And I think what was so alarming about what we were seeing less than two years ago now was this idea that there was just kind of ambient Trump ascendancy, or at least ambient Trump interest, everywhere—which just had not been true. There were, you know, either—it was because it was taboo in certain communities, or just because people just hated the guy. And that had just shifted.
And I think that they just overlearned that lesson completely. And now you’re seeing what Trump has always done in these situations, which is to try to, like, conjure this thing that he can occasionally generate on his own. And they just don’t have it anymore. You’re just like, well, why would anyone want to tune into this, right?
But I think Trump was trying to kind of, yeah, generate momentum out of nothing. And I think all he did was just call attention to everything that he doesn’t have. And finally, hosting this thing in Texas just put way more attention onto James Talarico, who spent the entire week on television. You know, I think it’s going to backfire spectacularly.
Shephard: Well, I mean, I think one context of it is that there are not full opening day NFL numbers yet, but it would be less than 10 percent of what opening day of the NFL reached last year. And again, since this year the opening game was a literal repeat of the Super Bowl, I would suspect that those numbers might be higher than twenty-eight million, which they were last year. It is about a tenth of the number of people that watched Trump’s 2024 speech at the RNC.
To some extent, right, the $5,000 check promise, based on media coverage afterwards, is probably going to get more eyeballs than that. But again, that just gets back to the point—they might say, yeah, that’s great, because that’s what we want people to take from it. But I think that all that communicates is their desperation, and the fact that he’s lying, right? This is just the thing that people hate about Trump, is that he’s a blowhard and he’s just saying stuff that he thinks will win votes.
Iran is just holding out and pushing global prices higher, energy prices higher, and Canada’s going to accept some short-term pain in a trade war, which will be real, in order to hurt Republicans in some of these border states with big Senate races.
And the result is that they aren’t allowed to seriously work with congressional power to end these conflicts. They could just protest a little, but that’s it, right? And that hurts them above all. That’s the ultimate hilarious irony to it.
Canada, I think, has been very open about the fact that they are choosing tariffs that will affect key Senate races in places like Kansas and Maine. Kansas is a very interesting one, right? Because Trump is four points underwater in Kansas right now, which is just a truly insane thing to say.
He’s using most-favored-nation status, using all kinds of tools to try to help other people that he likes—it usually backfires. And you know, what we’re seeing now is that Canada and Iran are hitting him, I think, much harder and more strategically, in ways that will hurt and are going to prolong what’s the biggest driver of his unpopularity right now.
Shephard: This is fun. Thanks.
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