Transcript: As Trump Unravels, Even Fox Cringes at His $5,000 Giveaway ...Middle East

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 11 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 numbers on the economy have taken another big dive. A Quinnipiac poll finds him at a record low, and a CNN analysis finds him in much, much worse shape on the issue than in 2018. But Trump has an answer. He’s just promised to send $5,000 to every American if Republicans hold Congress. The idea is so ludicrous that even Fox News figures are gently mocking it. All of which raises a question: Have Trump’s magical reality-bending powers finally run out?

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.

Tom Schaller: Good to be back, Greg.

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?

Schaller: Well, he won’t deliver on it, and I think we all know that. We didn’t get a rebate for the tariffs that we paid—the corporations did. So in effect, his tariffs, one of the things I talked about in the new piece, were a retail sales tax on Americans that was paid initially by corporations, but they’re getting made whole. And of course, they’re not going to give any of the money back. So you can count on that $5,000 like you can count on getting your tariff money back. That’s my gut reaction.

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.

So he’s basically saying, all this money that we’re getting from other countries, we’ll send it to Americans. But of course, the truth is literally the exact opposite. The tariffs are being paid by Americans, and nothing will be sent back to them.

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.

You wrote in your piece that all of Trump’s policies are conspiring to push up prices and hurt the economy. I think this polling shows that voters really understand the connection here between all these things. Your thoughts on all that?

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.

But Trump ran on immigration reform and taking all the immigrant labor out of the country. And of course, he ran on tariffs. And if you thought about those two policies for a moment: one is essentially an inflationary policy on domestic production, because it raises labor costs when you eliminate some of the most efficient and lower-paid workers. And the second, of course, tariffs, as we already discussed, is just a tax, a retail tax on imports. And so Trump was campaigning to end inflation on two inflationary policies.

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.

And then, halfway through his term—now I’m analogizing to the Iran war—he said, well, no, what you really do to put out a fire is you throw a bunch of firecrackers in there, because that disseminates the fire and that puts it out. So this is the person that Americans hire to fix the economy, even though he can’t do basic percentages, much less understand global macroeconomic politics.

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.

And so for him to be polling in the twenties on tariffs and trade, when that was one of his quote-unquote strengths, I take that as a sign that maybe voters are starting to see what’s going on here.

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.

And then of course the groceries, right? Almost every meal you eat, whether you eat it at a restaurant, whether you eat it at home, is made with fruits and vegetables and other produce items, whether fresh or processed, that are planted, picked, you know, and delivered by immigrant labor.

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.

Sargent: Well, speaking of the situation here, CNN’s Harry Enten made an astounding observation. He looked at Reuters and CNN polling and concluded that Trump is now fifty-two points underwater with independents on the economy.

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?

Schaller: Well, first of all, I’m shocked. I didn’t realize it was that bad. And I didn’t realize it was that good for him in 2018, which was a bad cycle for Republicans. So if Trump was plus ten with independents and they still took a shellacking in 2018, boy, are they really in trouble here in 2026, eight years later.

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.

And yeah, people are upset because Trump promised to fix the economy and lower inflation and lower the price of your energy bill. And of course he promised to end the Gaza-Israel war and the, you know, Russia-Ukraine war, and he hasn’t delivered on any of that stuff. And maybe people are starting to realize that he’s high on promises and low on delivery.

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.

The fundamental thing here is that during the first term, Trump didn’t actually get his way on a lot of these policies to nearly the same degree that he has in the second term. The first time, he was in positive territory on the economy. Now he’s in absolutely abysmal territory. What do you think of all that?

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.

But I think the other difference you cannot overlook is that—despite, at one point, on what was then called Twitter, Trump claiming that the unemployment rate under Obama was 42 percent when it was literally a tenth of that, it was about 4.5 percent—Trump inherited a smoking hot economy in January 2017, when he first took office, despite his claims that America was in the economic toilet. And he was riding the fumes of that for those first two years.

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.

Sargent: Well, I would add one nuance, just to throw this out there. It’s true that the economy was worse when Donald Trump took over in 2025 than it was when he took over in 2017. But the key thing to remember is that the whole world was recovering from post-COVID shock and post-COVID trauma. And The Economist described the American recovery as the envy of the world.

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.

He’s just an absolute calamity, always. Everything he touches dies, as the great man said. And so what do you think of all that, Tom? I mean, this is a guy who just keeps fucking everything up. And I’m hoping finally the world is catching up with him. Is that possible?

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 you know, Trump is really destroying things in a way that—were we not the world’s largest economy and most powerful military, the kind of decisions that we’ve seen him make, I know we’ve been talking about this with the Defense Department and Pete Hegseth—other countries wouldn’t be able to survive those kinds of mistakes. Other economies might collapse with the leadership of Trump.

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.

Sargent: Well, anyway, his cratering numbers on the economy are the context for his promise to send $5,000 to every American if Republicans hold Congress. Fox News figures were practically mocking this. First, listen to this Fox anchor call bullshit on it.

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.

Now listen to Fox’s Bret Baier, who’s practically snickering while he makes these points.

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.

And finally, here’s Laura Ingraham asking a very good question about the idea.

Laura Ingraham (voiceover): Why not just give the money now? If you have the money, why not just—

Donald Trump (voiceover): They can’t. I’ll tell you what, because the Democrats can’t do it. Because with them it’s negative growth. With us it’s so positive.

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?

Schaller: Yeah. If you’re going to bribe people, you want the money up front. And of course, it’s hard to buy votes anyway. I always joke with my students in Poli 100, if anybody wants to pay me for my vote—since it’s a secret ballot, I’ll take as little as 50 cents, because you can’t enforce the bribe, right?

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.

Sargent: So the ludicrousness of the five-thousand-dollar promise is really a desperate effort to mask his terrible polling situation.

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.

And so I’m wondering if those are leading indicators that the Democratic lead is starting to expand now, because the polling averages have had it at around six, right, or seven. And so I think maybe the lead might be expanding now. What’s your sense of it?

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 it’ll be interesting to see if some Republicans, where they’ve sliced it a little too thin with their strategic gerrymandering and have created some 54–46 districts and so forth—that could be enough to tip a district that they sliced a little too close in order to maximize the number of Republican-leaning seats in a particular state. And some incumbent makes a mistake, is underfunded, or just there’s voter anger, or those independents show up, and suddenly Republicans who thought they were safe lose their seats.

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.

Sargent: Well, just to underscore that point, let’s remember that Trump is the one who forced Republicans to enter into this mid-decade gerrymandering spree. It would be really a great dose of poetic justice if the result of that was to get Republicans to move safe seats into somewhat less safe territory, and then, because Trump is such a catastrophe, all of a sudden the wave sweeps those seats away. That would be really something, wouldn’t it, Tom?

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.

He probably really believes he’s super popular and beloved by the American people. So, you know, he’s smoking his own supply, so to speak, and his staff won’t give him the hard news, which is, he’s extraordinarily unpopular, frankly hated.

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.

We know he’s in denial about people he’s endorsed who’ve lost primaries, and is suing the media for telling the truth about his endorsement records. So, you know, I actually never give the guy credit, but give him credit for, like, owning his numbers and saying, make me the central focus point for your vote this November. So I say, go for it, America.

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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