The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 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.
We think a Rubicon has been crossed in our politics. President Donald Trump and his team appear to have explicitly concluded that authoritarian violence is good politics—and many in the media seem to be playing along with this idea. Over the last 24 to 48 hours, Trump has repeatedly exploded with anger at California Governor Gavin Newsom and even called for his imprisonment. He’s talked about the troops going into California in tones befitting a third world tin-pot dictator. And he openly threatened violence against any protesters who dare to show up at the big parade he has planned for this weekend in his own honor. Data analyst G. Elliott Morris has been pushing back on the idea that all of this is good politics for Trump. He’s pointed out in numerous posts on his Substack, Strength in Numbers, that Trump’s immigration agenda is actually quite unpopular, including in a brand new poll that shows his sending of troops into California is widely disliked by voters. So we’re talking with Elliott today. Thanks for coming on, man.
Elliott Morris: Hey, thanks for having me on, Greg.
Sargent: I want to start with Trump saying that any protesters at his big parade this weekend will be met with “heavy force.” Listen to this.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): And if there’s any protester [who] wants to come out, they will be met with very big force. By the way, for those people that want to protest, they’re to be met with very big force. And I haven’t even heard about a protest. But, you know, this is people that hate our country. But they will be met with very heavy force.
Sargent: Elliott, note that he makes no distinction there between violent and peaceful protesters. He said any protester will face force. I think he gives himself away a bit there because he says he hasn’t heard about any protests. He doesn’t want the protests to materialize. He doesn’t want them to be big. He hates crowd sizes that tilt against him. Your thoughts on all this?
Morris: Yeah, I think there’s no way he doesn’t know that these protests are scheduled, especially in D.C., [in] countering his big parade. So I think he’s just trying to get ahead of that. He doesn’t want people to come to his [parade protesting]. I think this is just the latest in a pattern of potential overreach by the administration. You saw this on some of the immigration stuff. This is true on tariffs and trade. This is true on some of his other domestic policy, certainly true on cutting Medicaid and the “one big, beautiful bill.” It’s a pattern of the administration going beyond their what they’ve been sanctioned for by public opinion by the result of the election and moving policy in the extreme direction that Trump and Stephen Miller and the other people in the domestic policy council want to enact.
And to them, the only real barrier to what they can do is their imagination. So they’re going to say, We don’t want protesters on the streets because it’s bad optics for us in our military parade. He doesn’t want his opponents to have anything they can point to as success. That’s part of his destruction of mutual tolerance for the party system, which is classic authoritarianism. And that’s it. That’s the motivation, and everything else circles around that.
Sargent: And we’re clearly seeing that with the California stuff playing out. Trump erupted at Governor Gavin Newsom a bunch of times in the last couple days. In one tweet, Trump raged as follows, “If I didn’t ‘SEND IN THE TROOPS’ to Los Angeles the last three nights, that once beautiful and great City would be burning to the ground right now.” In another tweet, he ripped the governor as “Gavin Newscum,” one of his favorite lines, suggesting that Newsom is somehow inspiring protesters to spit on national guardsmen. He repeated similar stuff to reporters on Tuesday. Elliott, you did a piece analyzing some new polling data on the troops getting sent to California. Can you tell us what you found?
Morris: Sure. Well, look, the motivation here is that there’s an assumption that the politics of sending in the National Guard and the Marines against these protesters—assumed to be violent rioters by the administration, at least that’s what they want to sell—is good politics for Trump and for the administration. And that, at least, doesn’t seem to be the case immediately. YouGov did some polling overnight and they asked a question, “Do you approve or disapprove of Donald Trump sending the National Guard to quell protests in California?” That’s all they asked. And this question is seven points underwater—so 38 percent approve and 45 percent disapprove of this. YouGov asked the same question; they asked, “Do you support sending the Marines in?” and even more are disapproving of this. It’s 13 points underwater.
Now, I don’t want to give the impression that this is totally toxic for the administration. The protesters themselves are also unpopular. YouGov asked, “Do you approve of the protests?” And people say no. So there’s some wiggle room for the administration there. But the point is there’s a potential disconnect between using law enforcement—local law enforcement—to shut down protests or even maybe [addressing] the root causes of the things people are protesting, say, in a democracy and sending in National Guard and Marines to shut down peaceful and sometimes violent protests. And people don’t really like doing the latter. At least right now they don’t see that it’s justified.
Sargent: Well, I want to talk about what the media is saying about the politics of this since, as you pointed out, it’s just being assumed widely that this is good for Trump. News organizations are credulously reporting that the White House views this as political winner and simply accepting this at face value. Axios says this episode provides Trump a “opportunity to fuse power, politics, and spectacle,” suggesting this lets Trump fight on immigration as his home turf. NBC News reports that the White House sees this as a “winning issue.” What I find so frustrating about this, Elliott, is that they’re just regurgitating White House spin on this and not subjecting the claims to any independent scrutiny of their own. It’s just appallingly bad, bad professionalism. What do you think?
Morris: I think there’s a little bit of bad, bad action perhaps going on in the editing here, but I think there’s also some complacency. There’s a pressure, and I know this firsthand in corporate media, to have a take, to have something to say about an event. Because if you don’t have something to say, you can’t cut newsreels on it, and you can’t suck in advertising money, and your company doesn’t make money. So I think lots of the analysts and commentators and pundits are pressured to have a take on this. And their default take is whatever their prior is, whatever assumption they have about the world. And unfortunately, I think that that assumption is being influenced too much by headline approval numbers for Trump on immigration—this is not an immigration issue, by the way; this is a protest civil rights law enforcement issue—and being too influenced by the images from 2020 that is weirdly retconned in our head to be good for Trump. But in fact, academic studies showed that the protests in 2020 increased Biden’s vote share and hurt Trump, at least the nonviolent ones did. So I think there’s a failure to update those priors and people just have to have a take. And that’s probably driving most of this early media coverage on this stuff.
Sargent: Well, I want to come back to that. I want to pick up on something you just said there about whether this is actually an immigration issue. You can divide the claim that the media is making here into two pieces. The first is that immigration is an issue automatically plays in Trump’s favor. Now separately, you’ve looked at that pretty closely. What did you find there?
Morris: Strength in Numbers, my Substack, partnered with a polling company called Verasight. And what we did is we asked people, Do you support blanket deportations, just deporting everyone who’s here illegally, no matter how long they’ve been here or what crimes they’ve committed, just everybody? and we found that that preference for policy is very soft. That if you give people information about the types of people that have been deported, then their support for deportations falls dramatically. And we’ve found other parts of Trump’s immigration agenda to also be unpopular. And in fact, the only real part of his agenda that’s popular in immigration is deporting convicted violent criminals—so you get about 87 percent support for deporting those people. That one makes sense. And basically everyone else, Americans say, Don’t deport them. So that’s just to say what we conceptualize as immigration as an issue is highly subject to what you define it as, and deportations are not super popular. Perhaps building a border wall is popular. It doesn’t necessarily directly hurt anyone except for the people who trying to come here and who aren’t captured in polling, I guess. Maybe drug enforcement is popular as well.
But this is not one of those issues. This is an issue of protest, and especially this is an issue of protesting the types of deportations that public opinion have found to be the most unpopular. So I don’t think it’s an immigration issue. I think it’s perhaps an excessive deportations issue, and now it’s becoming a civil rights issue too.
Sargent: So just picking up on what you said there, Elliott, it seems to me that the bulk of the data really shows very clearly that on specifics Trump’s immigration agenda is very unpopular. What’s so baffling to me is that political reporters just can’t get their heads around this really simple and basic concept. And consider it this way, what Stephen Miller and Trump are doing is actually almost the opposite of deporting the violent criminals. And that’s the position that polls really well, right? They’re actually moving resources away from the removal of violent criminals to the removal of nonviolent criminals—people who have been here a long time, people who have jobs, people who haven’t committed any other crime except for maybe something immigration related—that the Trump immigration agenda is literally the opposite of the thing that’s popular. And why can’t political reporters get that through their heads?
Morris: Yeah, again, I hesitate to call them lazy because there’s just a lot of incentives in the newsroom. But we go through the world and we have preexisting pictures in our heads, the social scientist and journalist Walter Lippmann used to say. And I think these pictures that people have in their heads of other people, of what they believe just are baked in there way too much; that cake is already baked. And people have a really hard time adjusting those prior assumptions about the world. And then the other thing is Trump’s got a vibes advantage on immigration. He’s had the advantage on this issue overall for the better part of a decade now—and there’s just so much grace given to the administration on enforcement, on crime, and on immigration because of that historical advantage. But that’s not the world we live in anymore, so time for people to adjust those priors. That’s what I would say.
Sargent: Well, that’s a point you’ve made really forcefully. And I’d actually like to add something to it, which I think is missing from the discourse on this, which is that we already know that the public turns against Trump on the specifics because it happened in the past—another time. You may remember that Trump was president another time. You remember that from 2017 until 2021? And during that period, Trump had an immigration agenda that he was implementing. And what people don’t remember today, I think willfully, is that that agenda was unpopular. So that’s something else that’s been erased from the discussion here, because I guess what a lot of pundits really default to is that position you just laid out, which is that Trump has this automatic potency on the issue, but it actually wasn’t born out in real life when he was president last time. Can you talk about that?
Morris: Yeah, and this is the pattern. This is the same pattern. Last time, it was less about deportations, much more about securing the border, they called it. And that involved another notable case when the administration steps beyond the policy that public opinion has sanctioned for the administration. That’s when they broke up families at the border and they separated people as they crossed the border, children from parents. And shortly after that, Trump’s net approval on immigration fell to minus 30 points—one of his worst statistics ever. His net approval rating overall was minus 20. And I just think that that should be, maybe zooming out here a little bit, proof to some people that these opinions that people have are not set in stone and they can react to the events. In this case, I think the administration’s also perhaps towing the line or has already gone far beyond what the public opinion has sanctioned for deporting certain people. And time to make those same arguments, I would say. If this is true, then let’s see if it’s true and make the arguments and try to test public opinion on it in real life.
Sargent: So there’s a second claim embedded in this media approach of essentially granting Trump potency on this issue, which I think is in some ways even more sinister and misleading; you got at it earlier. It’s the idea that voters will automatically look at the spectacle in California as being primarily about immigration. But why would voters look at it that way? What they’re seeing on their TV screens is American troops being sent into an American city in response to largely peaceful protests. Now, it’s true that the press is magnifying the degree to which there is violence there, and that could tilt opinion maybe toward Trump a little. But that aside, there’s simply no reason to assume, as Axios and NBC did in those things I just read, that this constitutes an issue that’s Trump’s home turf. It’s almost as if voters go through this motion where they say, Oh, well, Trump is doing this because of immigration issues. Therefore I see what he’s doing as being about immigration. And I just don’t think that’s how voters process information. Can you talk about that?
Morris: Yeah, voters, we know by and large.... First off, only about half of America pays attention to this stuff. Let’s just set our expectations [there]. The people who do pay attention to this stuff get their opinions filtered to them, for the most part, through opinion leaders. So that’s people who work for the party, politicians they follow, New York Times columnists, writers at TNR, and some people on Substack. And those people, I guess, are talking about this as an immigration issue in much of the press. Like you pointed out, and I agree, I think they’ve adopted those positions somewhat lazily, but it doesn’t work the other way around. The press is making an assertion in large part that people are going to view this as immigration because it’s about some enforcement in L.A. technically at the very beginning, but it’s not anymore. And if journalists don’t present this de facto as an immigration issue, then most people won’t see it that way. They have an agenda-setting—we say in social science—power in the press, and they should be cognizant of that, especially in a time when political norms and constitutional rights are being violated.
Sargent: Well, let’s step back a little bit and talk a little bit more about the way the media is covering this stuff. We started out by listening to a naked threat of force from Trump. I looked at a few news clippings about that threat, and they all just treated it in an almost matter-of-fact tone; they reported it pretty straight. And similarly, when Trump called for the jailing of Newsom, it wasn’t treated as huge or alarming news. It was just treated as the president said something and, in many cases, it was buried deep in stories, not even a headline—even though the president called for the arrest of a governor of the opposing party based on zero law breaking of any kind. Elliott, can you talk a little bit about why the media is going here? And in a global sense, is authoritarian violence good politics for Trump or not?
Morris: No. It’s not good politics. What we have as a president who is using executive authority to nationalize or federalize the National Guard in a way that hasn’t been done since 1965 to quell small bursts of pretty isolated violence in L.A. And he’s also saying he will use, I guess, similar force against peaceful protesters. He’s not discriminating against peaceful and violent protesters against his parade this weekend. So I just don’t think in any other reality that that plays well. The only reason we’re having this conversation is because Trump has branded himself as the law and order guy. And to assume that this plays well because of the latter just seems extremely unevidenced to me.
Sargent: Well, folks, if you enjoy this conversation and you want more actual straight talk on what the polling shows, definitely check out Elliott Morris’s Substack, Strength in Numbers. Elliott, thanks so much for coming on, man. Good to talk to you.
Morris: Yeah. Thanks, Greg. Appreciate it.