The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 27 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump’s advisors have figured out why his approval ratings are in the toilet. The problem is that voters just aren’t aware of how stupendous all his accomplishments have truly been, and reportedly, this is what they’re privately telling him in discussions about the midterms. Oddly, this comes amid new and clear indications that Republicans are panicking about their inability to explain his disastrous rule to voters, and amid new polling that really underscores their perils.
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.
Mona Charen: Hi, Greg. Always fun to be with you. And poetic justice is the best justice.
Sargent: Yes, and you know, it’s looking good right now.
Charen: Let’s, let’s hope so.
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.
Mona, that’s funny. I mean, maybe the border is a fair one, but stock market highs and manufacturing jobs have declined. Your reaction to all this?
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.
But so, yeah, they’re trying to say, you know—this reminds me of, like, a medieval king, you know, who’s a mad king, and all the courtiers are forced to sort of tiptoe around, and nobody can ever say the truth, which is the king is mad. So they try to placate him, and they say, yes, yes, Your Majesty, it’s true, the reason that the polls are looking the way they are is because people just aren’t aware of all the wonderful things you’ve done. And the stock market—I mean, this is Mr. Populism, right? Mr. I’m for the working guy. And so he expects them to be thrilled about stock market gains. No, no, I don’t think so.
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?
And then the other thing is, it’s striking that they cite the closed southern border. He is deeply, deeply unpopular on the broader issue of immigration right now. In fact, he’s thrown away his best issue. And so none of this adds up to a real argument in any sense.
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.
And so they have so overdone it that there’s been a backlash against it. And as an electoral matter, Greg, this could be highly significant. You think about the number of Hispanic men who voted for Trump in 2024, for example. If the polls are right, those voters are gone.
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.
He’s ordered up TV ads about his record that will apparently be used in these House and Senate contests. And as far as I can tell, this isn’t really idle chitchat. There is a big looming question about how Trump’s super PAC will spend the hundreds of millions of dollars it’s holding—how it will spend that money on the midterms, if it will spend it.
This might be the answer: More hagiography of Trump. Mona, do you think Republicans want that?
Charen: So this is just what endangered Republicans want to hear, right? That yes, Trump is going to dig into his huge war chest, and he’s going to produce ads that are all about Trump and how great he is. And so, when they are trying their damnedest to get away from this being a referendum on Trump—because that’s their only hope, is if it’s about other things, about how crazy the Democrats are, about communism, about something else—Trump is saying, no, no, it should be all about me. Where you have his just Titanic ego being a ball and chain for the Republican Party.
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.
Meanwhile, Mona, there’s another poll, a national poll, this one from Strength in Numbers. It finds Trump at 37 percent approval to 60 percent disapproving. That’s absolutely dismal. On prices, he’s at a record negative 48 points underwater. And for the first time, he’s also underwater—get this—on border security.
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?
Charen: Yes, a hundred percent, it is a real reckoning for Trump. And it is worth remembering that in 2018, when he faced his first midterm elections, he was at close to 50 percent popularity—49, something like that. So to be down in the 30s is really devastating. And, people are willing, sometimes too willing, to give presidents a pass.
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.
But this time, everybody is aware that he made the decision to impose those tariffs, that it was his choice. He made the decision to launch a war that he was completely unprepared for and did not fight in any way that was likely to succeed—and without getting the approval of the American people and the Congress, et cetera. And that it has driven up the cost of gas and fertilizer and many other things.
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.
Sargent: Well, the Strength in Numbers poll has something else of interest here. Democrats are leading the GOP on a number of specific economic metrics. They’re plus nine on prices, plus seven on jobs—this is Democrats leading Republicans—plus seven on trade, which is obviously in the news now, and plus twenty-two on health care.
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 think it goes right back to what you just said, which is that the voters can see very clearly—with uncommon clarity, unusual levels of clarity—that Donald Trump is wrecking their economic hopes and economic position and so forth. And so they’re directly linking the Republican Party to Trump.
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.
Charen: It is. Midterms are always a referendum on the president. And so that’s what the voters are going to focus on, is: are they happy or not happy with the tenure in office of the president? And you know, they are saying no. They’re extremely unhappy. Therefore, the other guy. And the other guy are the Democrats. The Democrats are benefiting from that.
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.
So I think that’s what voters want. They want somebody who will fight this and who will show real passion about what Trump is doing to the country, but who doesn’t say that they want to abolish the police and, you know, end the Senate and do a lot of the things that are on the DSA’s website, you know?
Sargent: Yeah. Well, the DSA is actually giving Democrats a very big opportunity to say that they’re not for those things.
Charen: Well, and that’s a really interesting way of putting it. I hope they take them up on that.
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.
Trump’s numbers with independents are just so unbelievably awful that you can’t even believe it when you look at them. But one poll after another is just showing that he’s absolutely cratered with the middle of the country. And I think a lot of those voters are now tuned into some of these Democratic candidates. And by the way, there are a lot of good Democratic candidates out there.
Charen: There are.
Sargent: Right. And that has very heavy 2018 vibes in that sense, I think. You’ve got a lot of good Senate candidates, and you’ve got a lot of good candidates in these very difficult House races in places like Iowa, Wisconsin.
Charen: And governors.
Sargent: Yes, good gubernatorial candidates as well. It’s my sense that they can now speak to voters who wouldn’t have listened before. And there’s real transformative potential there, I hope. What do you think?
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.
So yes, I do think that the failure of Trump—and one more thing, though, to say. You were saying, you know, that you look at these numbers and you almost can’t believe how bad they are for Trump. And part of me is nodding along. The other part of me is saying, why did it take this? Why did it take so long for people to finally see the reality of how awful he is? I don’t know, but thankfully they are seeing it now.
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.”
Meanwhile, you’ve got two Republican Senate candidates, Maine incumbent Susan Collins and John Sununu, who’s running in New Hampshire—they’re criticizing Trump’s trade war with Canada. West Virginia Senator Jim Justice said “folks out there” are “hurting.”
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?
Charen: So look, part of this is just what happens to many presidents when, you know, they become isolated and they live in a bubble. Arguably it happened to Biden. Biden was out there saying, people don’t know all the great things I’ve done. Look at all the legislation we passed, et cetera, et cetera.
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.
He used to spend, in the first term—he spent a lot of time watching TV, and watching MSNBC at the time, and constantly, was responding to criticism of him. And in every speech, you could tell he’d been listening to his critics, because he would say, they say blah, blah, blah, you know, or, I’m not supposed to say this because they say, you know—that sort of little thing.
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.
Sargent: The Natalie Harp parallel is interesting. Maybe the fact that Trump’s advisors are essentially acting as a bunch of Natalie Harps internally—it’s the Natalie Harp political strategy at work, really, isn’t it?
Charen: Yes.
Sargent: So, about the trade war with Canada—I still think that this is going to be a much bigger factor than people are noticing. Throughout the Midwest, you’ve got already a lot of pain from Trump’s tariffs. And you’ve got a lot of races in these regions that are going to decide this thing. And now you’ve just got Trump going out there saying, fuck you, Canada, I’m going to take Lake Ontario.
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.
Yet he’s just off in the bubble you’re talking about, thinking to himself that if I tweet a visual about Lake Ontario becoming Lake America, all of a sudden that’ll just make things politically right. What do you make of all that?
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.
And by the way—I, you probably have Canadian listeners. I feel so terrible about what this country is doing to Canada, our great friend and neighbor who, we love. And it isn’t us, it’s just this moron in the White House who’s doing this. But I’m very, very sorry.
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.
We’ll all be impacted, but it is going to hurt people. And once again, it is just—he can’t escape responsibility, right? I mean, it’s just like we were talking about with the Iran war and with the earlier tariffs. This lands directly in his lap. It’s not anybody else’s fault. He can’t blame Biden, he can’t blame a virus. He did this. He’s doing this.
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.
Sargent: I agree. Mona Charen, thanks so much for coming on with us. Really great to talk to you, as always.
Charen: Likewise. Thanks, Greg.
Hence then, the article about transcript trump unraveling as aides feed him crackpot poll hopium was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Trump Unraveling as Aides Feed Him Crackpot Poll Hopium )
Also on site :
- ‘Crash Landing on You’ Star Hyun Bin Returns in ‘Made in Korea 2’—What To Know About the 9-Year Time Jump
- 36 Years Ago Today, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Final Concert Ended in an All-Star Jam—Then a Helicopter Crash Changed Everything
- ‘I’m a Hepatologist, and This Is the One Thing I Tell Every Patient With Fatty Liver To Start Eating’