Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
But if anything, these rallies are an admission of weakness and failure. Republicans themselves are leaking word that Trump’s campaigning is a signal of the midterm emergency the GOP faces in deep red areas. And one rally in Ohio displayed a scene that’s doubly revealing along these lines.
Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
In Alabama, the Times reports, upper sections were, quote, “almost completely empty,” in an arena that’s smaller than previous ones. And there were empty sections at an even smaller arena in Ohio, the Times noted. Amanda, even more to the point, polls are showing Republicans turning on him in spite of all these efforts. Your thoughts on all that?
It feels, I think, for a lot of the people that support him, it feels kind of pointless at this point. Like, so much of the reason that a lot of Trump supporters kept doubling down and doubling down and doubling down was that they wanted to never admit they were wrong to liberals, first of all.
Sargent: So Trump raged wildly at the Times for questioning his crowd sizes. He posted on Truth Social that his Ohio rally was “great” and “PACKED,” in all caps. He accused the Times of dishonesty. And he said this about his rallies:
He also said: “I never have empty seats, never have and never will.”
Marcotte: I mean, wasn’t it at one of these rallies he literally got up and said that he knows more about every subject on the planet, on the whole planet, than any other person knows about anything? When you’re standing there being like, I’m the greatest of all time, and to a half-empty crowd—it’s like the trope on television when somebody says something and then comically they get disproven the next minute.
Amanda, the five-alarm fire is among MAGA and Republican voters. Obviously, the internal data is showing cratering support among Republican voters, especially MAGA ones. The Fox poll of Texas actually showed non-MAGA Republicans not approving of Trump. Like, more non-MAGA Republicans disapprove of Trump than approve of him.
Sargent: Right. Right. I think that’s a real dynamic for sure.
I mean, they got a lot of victories. Open racism has been normalized again. So they did get a lot of victories. And now he’s just this embarrassment. He got them into this war, he’s ruining the economy. He’s a lame duck. So this is a good time to sort of do an Irish exit.
Immigrants have reinvigorated the left-behind heartland in many ways, the places where Americans, especially young Americans, have deserted. But that aside, the crowd got very excited when Trump said the Haitians are getting sent back to their home country, where the conditions are horrific. They started to chant: “deport, deport.”
Marcotte: Yeah. And I think the reason that Trump rallies have been as popular as they are, even though it’s the same thing over and over again, is precisely this. There’s safety in numbers.
Sargent: They’re actually kind of losing the culture wars over immigration, in a certain sense. And I think this Ohio scene displayed it in an interesting way. The New York Times had some polls over the weekend of these Senate races. Just going to read the top lines. James Talarico, the Democrat, is ahead in Texas, 51 to 45. Mary Peltola is ahead in Alaska, 50 to 43, also the Democrat. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown is up three points. In Iowa, Josh Turek, the Democrat, is down one. And Kansas is tied, which is incredible.
I have not seen numbers like this before. I mean, he has completely lost the deep red states on his best issue. And here you’ve got, like, a bunch of MAGA people in a bubble chanting the words “deport, deport, deport,” thinking that they’re winning this debate in some sense. But in reality it’s just crushing Republicans, even in these red states. What do you make of all that?
Which is to say, I think they’ve had to think about some of these issues a little bit more than they used to, and they’ve discussed them. And I think their racial tolerance levels have gone up in response. And that’s an interesting thing.
Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. I do want to point out, though, that there’s a little bit of cause for optimism in this. Because if you’ve got majorities in these states that Trump carried by double digits turning against Trump on immigration, what it means is that the people that were chanting “deport, deport, deport” kind of represent an increasingly fringe minority.
I think there’s potentially cause for real gains to be made there, in terms of building a larger consensus kind of in favor of immigration. What do you think?
Sargent: For MAGA, Trump’s promise was that he would defeat us, right? He would crush you and me, basically. He would crush liberal America, you know, destroy us culturally, rout us in the culture wars permanently, put America back on a anti-woke path, or whatever the precise thing they want is.
And so maybe the fact that liberal America is fighting back and is mobilizing and is so energized and is really ready to take this all the way, right—take this to the mat, as it were—is itself a dissuading factor for some of these MAGA Republicans.
Marcotte: No, that’s really perceptive. I love it. I love it. That’s amazing. Because it’s like—you’re right, like, many broken promises from Trump. He’s going to lower prices. He’s going to keep us out of wars. He’s going to crush the libs. Add that to the list of broken promises. I love it.
And I think at that point they began to realize that actually most Americans still think that they are not cool, and they will never be cool. And I think that that’s been a shot in the arm culturally for the left, and has been very depressing for the right. And you love to see it.
Marcotte: Yeah, no, I mean, part of what MAGA was able to do to sort of make themselves seem cool, even for a minute, was they presented their fascist ideas as, like, arch irony, right? They’re like, these are jokes and memes and silly stuff.
Like, I think for normal people that voted for Trump—they lied, a lot of people allowed themselves to believe it really was just jokes, that the Haitians eating cats and dogs thing was just a joke. No, they meant that. They meant that in the same way that Nazis saying similar things about Jews meant it.
Sargent: And if you think about the videos that just absolutely saturated the culture, saturated social media, of the shooting of first Renata Good and then second Alex Pretti—in the Renata Good one especially, you could hear the crack of gunfire. You could hear the shots.
Marcotte: Yeah. It’s very reminiscent of how a lot of the Black Lives Matter protests rose up out of seeing video of people getting killed by police. And you know, that has a clarifying effect on the mind. Because yeah, now it’s not a cartoon anymore. That’s a person. That person has a family, you know.
Like, they are going to bring Republicans back into the fold, especially because they’re going to outspend Democrats by around $200 million or something. And we’re going to see potentially the polls tighten. I think people should be prepared for that.
So yeah, I think a lot of them, if they go to the voting booth, I think they’re going to vote for the Republican. That said, they’re going to have a turnout problem. I think a lot of people aren’t going to want to make that choice. And so they’re probably just going to sit this one out.
Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
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