The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 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.
MAGA’s biggest names are in a fury right now because the Senate parliamentarian has delivered a big blow to GOP hopes of passing President Donald Trump’s big budget bill. Marjorie Taylor Greene unleashed an extraordinary rant on Twitter in which she actually threatened to vote no on his bill because of what the parliamentarian has done to it. All this comes as Trump is getting hit with some of the very worst polling of his second term. We think Trump will probably get his bill in the end, but the bill itself is incredibly unpopular. Trump has caught in this bizarre dynamic in which he badly needs wins, but the wins themselves are only likely to make his standing worse. Today we’re talking about all this with journalist Sarah Posner, who just wrote for Talking Points Memo that the public is souring on just about every one of Trump’s big initiatives. Sarah, thanks for coming on.
Sarah Posner: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Sargent: Let’s start with Trump’s big bill. The Senate parliamentarian just ruled that a number of the big provisions can’t stay in it if Republicans want to pass it via a 50-vote threshold in the reconciliation process. Those provisions include major cuts to Medicaid, some policies targeting undocumented immigrants, some anti-trans stuff, and a bunch of other things. What’s critical is that Republicans need some of those policies to get the “savings” they need to fund tax cuts for the rich. So this is a major problem for them. And yet Senate Majority Leader John Thune says Republicans won’t ignore the parliamentarian. Sarah, that’s a pleasant surprise. What do you make of where all this is right now?
Posner: Well, I know that Thune has said that and some other top Republicans like Susan Collins have echoed that, but other Republicans are starting to attack the parliamentarian in, of course, the very typically ugly, dangerous ways that we see too much of from the Republican Party in this climate of political violence. Tommy Tuberville took to Twitter today and called her “WOKE” and said she needs to be fired. So if that thinking starts to take hold and Trump enters the equation pressuring Thune, who knows what’s going to happen? I think that Thune is sincere in saying that he doesn’t want to get into a conflict or a conflagration with the Senate parliamentarian. But we also know that even when Republicans say that, at the end of the day when Trump enters the picture, they can rapidly change their minds.
Sargent: Well, Marjorie Taylor Greene got into this act. She went on this wild rant in which she said she’s a no on the bill if Republicans don’t fire the parliamentarian and keep all that stuff in there. She said that if all of that stuff stays in, Republicans will be voting for sex changes on kids, health care for illegals, all that awful stuff. So she said Thune must fire the Senate parliamentarian, and other MAGA types also did. As you mentioned, Senator Tuberville, who might be the dimmest MAGA light out there … but Representative Greg Steube also said she’s an “unelected swamp bureaucrat.” I don’t think Trump has called for a firing yet, but the danger here is it becomes a litmus test of sorts where being pro-MAGA and pro-Trump requires calling for the firing of the parliamentarian because she’s become the enemy, which is what Marjorie Taylor Greene said, right? What happens if that happens?
Posner: Right. So the unusual situation here is that the parliamentarian serves at the pleasure of the Senate. Trump himself cannot fire her, but Trump obviously has been very successful on putting pressure on top Republicans to do his bidding on Capitol Hill. So the dangerous thing that could happen is if he starts to pressure Thune and Collins and other top Republicans in the Senate who have expressed reluctance to fire the parliamentarian. I think it’s a very dangerous situation because as much as we like to think that somebody like Thune is going to be very reasonable about this, we’ve just seen it happen so many times where congressional Republicans just cave to Trump. I think it’s a big unknown at this point.
Sargent: Yeah, the “institutionalists” have this tendency to just fall like dominoes when Trump shows up and demands something, you know what I mean?
Posner: Yeah. And to be perfectly honest here, I think that Trump probably has no idea of the intricacies in the bill; what the reconciliation process is; why the parliamentarian struck certain provisions because they weren’t amenable to the reconciliation process. I doubt that Trump knows all the ins and outs of that. He just wants his big bill with the big tax cuts. And he wants to be able to say, We didn’t cut Medicaid, when they did cut Medicaid, right? This is the game that he and Mike Johnson are playing where they say, We’re not going to cut Medicaid. We love Medicaid, but then the bill actually cuts Medicaid to shreds.
Trump could very much, like you said, want a win. He’s very much trying to make the Iran military strikes a win when they clearly weren’t really a win. So he’s battling over that. He’s probably angry that this bill isn’t going to get passed by July 4 as they discussed. And when Trump is angry and there is no recourse for congressional Republicans, they often end up just doing his bidding.
Sargent: Well, I think a big part of this will be what starts to happen on Fox News. If Trump starts to see that a bunch of Fox News figures are saying the Senate parliamentarian is an enemy of Trump, then all bets are off. That’s how it works.
Posner: Right. But I think that the person here at the center of all of this is Thune. Thune is the one who has to hold the line. And if he caves to Trump on this, he’s basically ceding not just Congress’s role in the separation of powers and checks and balances but [also] literally his dignity.
Sargent: In your piece, you flagged a bunch of new polling that finds the big budget bill really underwater. A Fox poll has it at 38 percent favor it versus 59 percent who oppose it. Quinnipiac finds that only 27 percent support it. Pew Research has supported 29 percent and a Washington Post/Ipsos poll has it at 23 percent. Now in fairness, those polls have a lot of voters who are undecided, but those are just terrible numbers. Trump and Republicans have had months to try to sell this thing, but they’re not even trying really. How do you explain this striking level of public sourness? You’ve been following this stuff for a while. You’ve seen some of these big legislative debates. This is really one of the most unpopular pieces of legislation I think I’ve ever seen.
Posner: I agree. It’s really astonishing how underwater it is. And I think it’s largely because people don’t like the idea of taking money from poor people to pay for the megarich’s tax cuts. It’s so blatant. They haven’t even really tried to hide that that’s what’s really going on here. They’ve played semantic games with what they’re doing with Medicaid to try to make it seem like they’re not really cutting Medicaid, that they’re actually improving Medicaid. That’s Mike Johnson’s disingenuous line. But a lot of people are not listening to Mike Johnson’s press conferences. They’re catching wind of this from social media, from TikTok, from Twitter. Even on Twitter, there are people talking about how these are going to be tax cuts that go to the megawealthy being paid for by taking health care away from kids and poor people.
And I haven’t seen Louisiana-specific polling, but Politico had a story the other day about Republicans, including elected Republicans in Louisiana, who are literally begging Congress not to pass this bill. Thirty-five percent of Louisianans are on Medicaid. So I don’t know what the Republicans are thinking in terms of what’s.… I guess they’re hoping to get it passed and ride off into the sunset, or hope that people won’t notice what happens to their health care coverage and so forth. But they’re really acting strangely confident that the public is on their side.
Sargent: What makes it even more bizarre is that Trump’s own pollster has been putting out warnings on this. He had a polling memo a while back that showed very strong public opposition, among working-class voters in particular, to these types of cuts to the safety net. And he wouldn’t be doing that unless there was some serious worry among some people around Trump that he is just absolutely not in touch at all with the politics of a lot of this stuff. He’s flying around the world and lording it over NATO, he thinks. He’s dropping big bombs, and he’s becoming the “greatest world historical figure we’ve ever seen.” They’re actually saying that literally. Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, and Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, openly said that this is like “the greatest thing any president has ever done.” So that’s the information universe Trump is inside. And yet there are these other people who are looking at the numbers and saying to Republicans, Don’t do this. It’s really going to screw us in the midterms big time. And yet it’s just not getting through. I don’t know what to make of that.
Posner: Well, I think that he’s operating in this mental system where anyone who contests his way of thinking is lying and deserves to be berated and fired and all the rest. You’ve seen it in his reaction to his own intelligence community’s intel about the effect of the bombing of the nuclear sites in Iran. He’s basically saying he “obliterated” them and the intelligence community is saying, You didn’t, and he refuses to believe it. But here, he has the complete capitulation of Senate and House Republicans in advancing this bill that is a threat to their own majority. It’s really astonishing, unless they really have drunk the Kool-Aid that they’re going to win some argument that the 2026 midterms were rigged or something. I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it that they forge ahead despite this horrific public opinion about what they’re doing.
Sargent: And by the way, Sarah, Trump is sliding in polls across the board right now as well. A new Quinnipiac poll has it at 41–54. And critically on all these big issues, Trump is badly underwater. The Quinnipiac survey has him at 41–57 on immigration, supposedly his strongest issue. He’s at 39 percent approval on Israel and Iran, which is backed by other polls—a remarkable repudiation of Trump right when he’s the commander in chief. It’s an incredible slide on every front.
Posner: Yeah. The only thing that I can figure from all of this is that they hold out hope, which is maybe their least unrealistic hope, that somehow the Supreme Court is going to save them at the end of the day on whatever issue it is. Now, obviously the Supreme Court can’t save them from the parliamentarian and can’t save them from public opinion, but maybe.… I don’t think that they have a specific trick up their sleeve, but I think that they’re just so deep into Trump loyalty that they don’t know how to back their way out of it at this point.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about an area that you’re really, really shrewd on, which is the Christian nationalist base—because I think that might be part of this a little bit. Mike Johnson and some of these others, Marjorie Taylor Greene, think they’re on this mission. And what I don’t quite understand is, Do they see themselves as being part of a liberal democracy or not? They have this base that can’t be moved. It will always be with him; I’m talking about the Christian nationalist base, the hard-right religious base. And there’s a messianism at the core of all this, which is odd for me because it’s a little unclear what they think they’re accomplishing. It’s just an open-ended messianism, which is shaped around Trump winning and not much else. Can you talk about that phenomenon, the Christian nationalist undercurrent to all this?
Posner: They believe that basically our modern, surrealistic liberal democracy in the United States is antithetical to the Christian nation that they contend God intended America to be. So they come at every political dispute from the standpoint of we are defending white Christian America from the woke liberals who have taken away our rights to pray in public and to have our religious freedom and to ban abortion and trans health care and all the things that they want to ban. And when you come at every political dispute from that point of view, you don’t really want to have a democracy. You want to have some kind of theocratic Christian Republic or maybe even a theocratic Christian autocracy with Trump at the helm. So they’re not really thinking about it within the same framework that you or I would be.
And while they’re attuned to public opinion polling, someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Mike Johnson isn’t worried about losing their own seat. And if they do end up in the minority, well, that just gives them more ammunition to fundraise over how terrible the Democrats are for suppressing the rights of Christian Americans. So they’re basically just in this feedback loop where they’re constantly fighting this religious battle. And in a strange sense, even when they lose, they win, if that makes sense.
Sargent: So what you said there really, to me, sheds a lot of light on what we just saw from Marjorie Taylor Greene, this wild rant. I don’t think it’s an accident that she kind of defaults to three different things, right? One, the Senate parliamentarian is woke, which I think that means demonic to them, right? Two, the Senate parliamentarian wants to fund sex changes for kids. And three, the Senate parliamentarian wants to provide health care to illegals, right? So it’s just a small step from there to firing the Senate parliamentarian because they don’t see themselves as functioning in a democracy. It’s a theocratic mindset, right? They’re fighting against these demonic enemies that are allied with people inside the bureaucracy, supposedly, to stop Trump.
Posner: Well, with regard to the bill, it leaves us in this place where they could very easily go off the deep end and fire the parliamentarian and jam this bill through notwithstanding her rulings on the various pieces of it that don’t fit into reconciliation. That’s the worst-case scenario. That’s next stage of the constitutional crisis. If they somehow pull back from the brink and go back to the drawing board on the bill and pass some pared-down version of it where they tell grandpa Trump that he got everything he wanted, which is also another possibility, then we’re still operating in the same world we were operating in two weeks ago. So yeah, they have been against liberal democracy. They’re still against liberal democracy. I think the question here is, How far off the deep end do they want to go with this nuclear option for blowing up their own legislative rules?
Sargent: Just to close this out, maybe the way to think about the public opinion piece is they just don’t think of themselves as beholden to the broader public in any sense, right? They don’t have any conception of the public interest. They don’t see themselves as representing the whole country in any way. They don’t have any sense of obligation to the whole country, to people who didn’t vote for Trump. It’s messianism at the core, right? This is your specialty. What’s the mindset there?
Posner: I think that they believe that Trump is this salvific figure for Christian America, and that they have made their own decision to capitulate to him, and that they really believe that the rest of the country needs to capitulate to him as well—regardless of what they think. That’s why they don’t care what the public opinion polls show because they think they’re going to have a way to force people to either like it or lump it. And this is the stuff of how dictatorships come to be, which is why we need to continually defend our democracy against what they’re trying to do.
Sargent: Sarah Posner, it’s really interesting to talk to you. I think the bottom line here is that that shows why it’s so essential to hold the line in a situation as small as this one. Senate parliamentarian—99.9 percent of Americans don’t even know there’s a Senate parliamentarian, but we need to be sure she stays there because those broader things are at stake. Sarah, thanks so much for coming on. Always great to talk to you.
Posner: Thanks, Greg.