Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
So is Trump cratering so badly that it’s opening the way for a broader coalition than we thought against corruption and authoritarianism, one that includes right-leaning voters? We’re talking about all of it with political theorist Paul Crider, who argued for just such a coalition in a piece for The UnPopulist. Paul, good to have you on.
Sargent: So Trump’s been running this ad that was originally taxpayer-funded. Here’s a snippet.
Sargent: Paul, that’s textbook totalitarian propaganda, isn’t it?
These are all people that the Republican side thinks are enemies of the state. They’re the enemies within. You know, he’s talking about liberating America as if America is under invasion. All of this is just textbook fascism.
Dina, a 53-year-old, called Trump “power-hungry.”
Eddie from Miami said Trump is the one who’s emulating “communist countries and communist leaders.”
What do you make of that one?
And they’re now talking about Trump, who they voted for just two years ago, in terms that you might see in Liberal Currents or something like that. They sound like liberals. You wouldn’t think that these are voices that voted for Trump two years prior. They’re using the language of dictators, you know—power, hunger, all of this stuff—comparing him to the very communist regimes that Trump claims to be opposed to.
But here you hear these voters reacting to something different. What you’d call their anti-totalitarian instincts have been triggered. I think that might be the way to think of it. I think that’s a little bit of a cause for optimism, don’t you, Paul?
Once you are feeling various kinds of pinches in your own life, then, you know, you’re a lot more open to seeing how, yeah, sure, this Trump guy really is corrupt. Like, you know, now they’re hearing news that maybe they weren’t paying attention to before, because they’re upset. They’re already so angry.
Sargent: Yes, I agree a hundred percent with that, and I think it’s essential. I want to come back to it. For now, there’s another quote in this focus group from a guy named Ramiro from Miami, who said this:
Paul, I really wonder how many of these voters have made this leap, right? What we’re seeing here is they’re seeing the truth about Trump, but also, as this guy puts it, he’s starting to understand that this kind of deep rot of corruption and authoritarianism has taken over the GOP as a party.
I mean, that’s what we want to happen. We don’t want this election to be decided just on prices. We want it to be a referendum on the fascism as well. And so when I see right-leaning voters starting to sort of see things in those terms, I feel a little encouraged. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I do. What do you think?
Sargent: Yeah, exactly. Well, Politico had this striking report saying Republicans are in full-scale panic and bracing for a catastrophe in the midterms. Internal polling shows a slew of House seats deep in red territory are now at risk.
Paul, again, in the limited conventional understanding of this election, that would only be about the economy, but I’m hoping it’s a lot broader. What do you think of those quotes?
Crider: Yeah, I mean, on the quotes, they’re just music to my ears. But there is talk of this election being a realignment. We’ve talked about blue Texas—“Blexas,” as it’s called—for years now. And everyone, you know, Democrats were extremely disappointed in 2024.
Now that the Latino electorate, I think, is more sort of painfully aware of this, I think it sets the stage for a firmer alignment with the Democratic Party, who is standing up for Latinos’ right to be Americans.
I find it really striking that we’re seeing a kind of big politics coming from a lot of Democrats right now. You know, some of them are still playing small ball, but some of them are going big. What do you think, Paul? Are you seeing that?
So yeah, we’re seeing this moral language that Democrats haven’t always been comfortable with, because I guess they’ve been afraid of alienating, you know, evangelical Christians.
Sargent: Yeah, and not only do you see it with the DSA Democrats, but you see it with the ones who are very, very actively courting the middle of the electorate, very actively courting the voters we’re talking about in this episode—these right-leaning voters who are turned off by Trump and are starting to see that something’s really, really wrong.
Trump said this: “Diesel prices for Americans will be coming down fast. Lower prices for Americans, especially our great farmers, ranchers, and truckers, is my greatest priority. This is a very big and important announcement.”
Crider: Right, that’s exactly right. If the bottom is falling out of the Republican electorate, the chances in November—then these voters are just primed to see all of these other things that are wrong with what Trump and the Trump administration are doing.
Voters are seeing through this. Even voters who maybe two years ago voted for Trump, voted for Republican candidates—they are now primed to see that all of this is just flimflam. It’s Trump lying. Like, they’ve always known that he’s a liar, but now his lies are a little bit more real, and they’re a little bit more prepared to call him out on the lies and not put up with them.
And I want to say that I think that’s not at all true. Like, the polls have actually shown real support for Ukraine, and that calculation by Trump and the fascistic advisors around him is really quite disgusting. What do you think about that?
Crider: Now that affordability is such a crisis, and there are so many other issues that are pinching them in their personal lives, they are better able to embrace their own true values of wanting to live in a free country, right? And to not want to support dictators in foreign countries.
Sargent: And Trump’s a bad guy, and the American public’s figuring that out. I just want to close on what I think is really the essential point you made throughout this discussion, which is that yes, we do need these kind of catastrophic economic conditions for a lot of these Americans as the precursor to this. But once that is happening, it’s opening the ears of a lot of these voters to a new kind of set of arguments about what’s happening right now.
And the result is that a lot of these voters are hearing new arguments about immigration, new arguments about Russia and Ukraine. And I find that a little bit heartening. I don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves here, but can you talk a little bit about that sort of dynamic, where all these voters are suddenly reachable?
You know, how do we get to a place where voters overall are more open to immigration, and we can have something like a liberal immigration reform? Well, I think that we can do that by planting the seeds when voters are already very hostile to ICE and to deportations.
I mean, now’s the time when we can start maybe chipping away at the problem of anti-democratic institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College. You know, I think voters are going to be more open-minded to that as well.
It’s very good, and it sets forth a lot of this stuff in a very accessible but really thorough and profound way a lot of the time. Paul, thank you so much for coming on.
Crider: Thanks so much, Greg.
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