The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 7 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Editor’s note: Later in this discussion guest Simon Rosenberg makes a critical point that we want to highlight: With Trump and Republicans gaining tens of billions of dollars to expand Trump’s arrests, detentions and deportations, we’re entering a period of intense civil conflict that Democrats will have to engage with more forcefully.
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 Republicans succeeded in passing President Trump’s big bill enshrining his agenda, which could leave 17 million more people without health care while massively redistributing wealth upward via tax cuts for the wealthy. The bill will also give Stephen Miller tens of billions of dollars to create a huge immigration detention complex. Now what? The big question is, Can Democrats get the voters to see the consequences of all this and place the blame for it where it belongs—on Trump and the GOP—in time for the midterms? But what absolutely can’t happen is that Democrats lawmakers and voters alike get demoralized and decide that nothing can stop Trump and Republicans, even if it sometimes feels a lot like that. So we’re talking today to Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, author of The Hopium Chronicles, which is aptly named given the mission ahead. Simon, great to have you on, man.
Simon Rosenberg: Greg, it’s always great to be with you.
Sargent: So Simon, you just wrote that we’re in the middle of a very dark moment. The cuts to USAID are going to kill huge numbers of poor people internationally. Trump and Miller are ramping up the migrant detentions. They’re going to kick millions off health care. They’re mortgaging away our future with massive unnecessary deficits. They’re killing subsidies for green energy and throwing our progress on climate change into reverse. I don’t know, Simon. Looks pretty bad right now. Your thoughts?
Rosenberg: Thanks—of all days, Greg, [for] having me on on this tough day. Look, we’ve had a tough week, and I think that my thought about [going] forward—and we’ll have time to discuss it today and we’re all trying to make sense of all this—is that it’s important for us to not take this bill in isolation as we talk about Trump. It’s everything he’s doing, right? It’s his bending the knee to Putin and selling out America to autocrats around the world. It’s the tariffs. It’s this bill. It’s the vaporization of USAID. And he’s letting Robert Kennedy loose into our health care system. And what the cumulative impact of all of this is.… I describe it as an agenda of sabotage, plunder, and betrayal. We are going to be poorer, weaker, less healthy, less safe, and less free because of Donald Trump and the Republicans and this time that they’ve been in power.
It is shocking that we are in this place where Donald Trump may be getting a win this week but the country is clearly losing and the American people are clearly losing. And the idea that these things could be so disconnected—that he’s doing something that is so manifestly harmful to the country while we’re going to be told for weeks that this was a big win for him, [even though] the real measure should be whether we’re winning and the country’s winning.… And I think this was a big loss. His presidency so far has been a big L, a big loss for the American people and America itself.
Sargent: No question about it. And the press coverage is going to be absolutely infuriating to watch. It’s going to be all about how Trump defied expectations and win, win, win. Just awful stuff. Simon, The Bulwark reports that some Democrats are a bit more optimistic about winning the Senate now that this bill has passed. David Axelrod said that the odds are still remote—but less remote than before. Obviously a brutal path for Dems. The pickup opportunities here are North Carolina, where Thom Tillis is now retiring, and Maine, though Susan Collins just voted against the bill. Iowa’s a long shot. Meanwhile, Dems would have to hold Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Minnesota. Where are you on all that?
Rosenberg: Yeah. Look, I think that we have elections in 2025 that we have to really focus on first. We need to have as big victories as we possibly can in New Jersey, Virginia, and in New York City, and to make elections—which are only four months away, by the way; it’s very soon—feel like clear repudiations of this politics. Trump is already really unpopular. He’s already seen his coalition unravel. And they just passed the most unpopular big bill in modern history. So you would assume that they would continue to struggle with the public, giving us a big opportunity over the next 16 months. But step one is to have a good election this November and continue to build for 2026. And I do think we have to be open to the idea that the Senate now may be in play and do everything we can to make it so.
Sargent: Well, on your website, The Hopium Chronicles, you seem more focused on the House—understandably so. Can you give us a brief overview of your understanding of the state of play there? What’s the path to a majority?
Rosenberg: Yeah. Using the Cook Report—the independent Cook Report—as a guide, there are 29 Republican-held seats that could be in play. These are very imprecise things. We just know these are a reasonable place to go, with eight being true toss-ups, eight being the next level out and then the rest being in the third level out. It’s not a big field, right? In the history of the House, it’s a narrow field, not a big field. Will the field get bigger? If they continue to struggle with the public, yeah. But we are going to have to maintain and keep our incumbents and make sure they come back, and be as aggressive as possible in going out and winning these seats. And I’ll tell you that what has not been widely reported is that Democratic-allied groups, interest groups, already have ads up in many of these places. They’re already softening the ground. They’ve been running ads in many of these districts for months. It’s one of the reasons why this bill was so incredibly unpopular. And so there’s already a whole team of people putting ads up on the air to make these Republicans own this vote in the House.
I do think in the Senate, to your point, it is likely that we’re going to get Roy Cooper in North Carolina. And then we have to look at Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio as being additional states—potentially Texas and Florida, these big states. But it’s not a great map this time for us. You can’t win elections unless you’re open to them being in play and to do things now that we have to do to make it more likely that if lightning were to strike, if they were really to collapse politically, that these things could become in play. So oftentimes the work you do in the off year—the odd year—is what creates the opportunities that you have in the even year. And I think now my assumption is that Democratic donors will engage a little bit more. The whole family is going to be fighting really hard together over the next few months. And we do have to keep our eye on these Senate races and do everything we can to try to put them in play.
Sargent: So Simon, you have been very focused on the nitty-gritty of the battle for the House. Can you shed a little light on the geography here? Where is this going to be settled? Where is the majority going to be won? And what does that mean?
Rosenberg: Well, we have a lot of incumbents that we have to hold in places like New York and California. But when you look at the map of where we have to flip, it’s pretty scattered across the country. It’s Arizona and Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia. California—we’ve got a bunch of seats. Alaska potentially. Florida, Michigan, Montana, Texas. It is scattered around the country.
Sargent: Are they mostly suburban seats, Simon, or are they more MAGAish, or what?
Rosenberg: Yeah, no, they’re swing suburban. Many of these are the classic swing suburban seats in various parts of the country because these more rural districts are just not available to us at this point, unless something dramatic were to happen. I think even just in California, we’ve got three or four seats that are potentially going to be in play. And those are going to be hard to defend for the Republicans given everything that’s happening when you add the immigration enforcement. And [in] Valadao district, California 22nd, for example, it’s reported that over 50 percent [of residents are] Medicaid recipients. And I think this gets to something, Greg, that you and I have discussed offline, which is they are presenting a false story about what this bill does—and you wrote a great column this week about the false stories that Republicans have been telling now for 50 years. But you’re already hearing them say extraordinary things about this bill, that it doesn’t cut Medicaid, that the tax cuts pay for themselves—[which is] something that you wrote about in your piece—that it doesn’t increase the deficit, right? They’re telling extraordinary falsehoods about the bill that could only be the case if they had great confidence that the right-wing noise machine was going to back them up, and that they were going to have enough money to muddy the waters to try to make it more difficult for us to lay these charges at them.
I really do feel that in all the years I’ve been doing this … the Republican Party in the age of Trump has now become so disconnected from reality and so uninterested in reality and so uninterested in telling the truth or being grounded in anything that’s remotely true that it’s been shocking even for me. Like I’m not a kid. I’m not easily shocked, right? But you heard members on television today saying that this isn’t going to cut Medicaid. It’s just staggering how much we’re going to be left with—whatever happens with Trump—a Republican Party [that] has become so fundamentally disconnected from the realities of what they’re doing and the realities of true discourse. And we’re going to see that play out in this fight to define what this bill does and doesn’t do in the coming months and through the election next year.
Sargent: Well, speaking of that, notice this reporting that as late as Wednesday, Trump was privately telling Republicans that cutting Medicaid will hurt them electorally. Now, I don’t know if Trump knows what’s in his own bill or not—but putting that aside, what’s clear is that Trump does know it’s a third rail. And now they’re cutting it by nearly $1 trillion dollars. Ten million people could lose Medicaid. So I take some optimism from the fact that Trump still, on some level, knows how perilous this is. Am I wrong to be optimistic about that?
Rosenberg: Again, it gets back to the dueling realities that we have to deal with every day. One is that Trump is doing unbelievable harm to the country. He’s breaking things that will be difficult, if not impossible, to repair. And we have to be operating with incredible vigor to mitigate the damage and challenge them. And the second competing reality is that he’s weaker. He’s struggling. His administration is not succeeding. He’s failing. The economy isn’t doing what he wants it to do. Governments around the world are not bending the knee to him. And his attempt to define reality and to tell these stories—these false stories—is being challenged by reality. Look at the anger they had about the false story they told about the Iran bombing, which went immediately negative for them with the public. He tried to have this military parade, and that same day we had millions of Americans marching patriotically all around the country. His immigration enforcement, which I think they thought would cause the country to rally behind him, has been wildly rejected by the country. So we do now have a majority of the country that has basically made a decision that he’s no good and that they’re not playing ball with the bullshit and the attempt to create these false stories. But this fight for what is true and what is actually happening in our country is going to be this existential fight for us, I think, politically over the next 16 months. And it’s why we have to be on the front foot and we have to be fighting with incredible intensity and ferocity every day.
Sargent: Well, to your point about the fact that the public is actually against them on immigration, I 100 percent agree. Stephen Miller clearly is not capable of understanding that his fascism is unpopular. He thinks it’s being widely feted. We’re at a point though where he’s now going to have tens of billions of dollars for ICE detention. We just saw the opening of Alligator Alcatraz in Florida. They’re going to build more of these now. We’re going to have ramped-up disappearances, more deaths in detention, more horrible deportations, more kidnappings off the streets. Now, I know that you tend to agree with me about Democrats on this, but I got to ask. The party has to get their head straight on this issue. No more bullshit hiding from it. No more too-clever-by-half consultant speak about being reluctant to raise the salience of the issue. You’ve thought a lot about this. How can Democrats get it right on the issue going forward given all that we’re about to see? And will they? Are you optimistic?
Rosenberg: Well, it’s instructive, Greg, that you could make the case that the worst part of this bill is this expansion or explosion of ICE. And yet it wasn’t something that we really talked about the last couple of months because Democrats, I think, have still not gotten out of their defensive crouch on border and the immigration and we’ve been a little slow on this over the last few months. You and I are in violent agreement about this. And I think it is amazing. We’re waking up today to the Republicans just passed essentially something to create this partisan political police force that reports to the president that is unprecedented and completely out of character for any democracy—and it wasn’t really a major part of the conversation and debate over the last couple of months.
So yeah, this is going to be an area of unbelievable, enormous conflict that we have to lead with and not be dragged into. It’s going to hurt the economy. It’s inhumane. It’s a violation of everything that we believe is American. The public is already not there on this. And this stuff is going to get wild. I do think this is going to be.… I put on Bluesky earlier today, What is Donald Trump going to do for the next 16 months? He needs to create daily spectacles. He’s reveling in the sadism of his administration. And you just get the sense that a large part of his understanding of what he’s going to do in the role as president that he plays on television is going to be to beat the crap out of immigrants—in public. And now he has unprecedented tools to do it. Certainly, we have to be far more forceful in challenging this. The public is with us on this. And wrestling with the inhumanity—if I can just speak to this for a second, you raised it earlier.… I think the thing that perhaps is the most shocking to me of this early Trump 2.0 is the absolute disregard for human life, the inhumanity of what they’re doing, and the dehumanization—the incredibly rapid dehumanization—of people they don’t like.
Sargent: Now what we’re going to have is intense civil conflict in the streets, more kidnappings, more violence, more dehumanization of immigrants. I can see things going south for them from here. Now, what I want to ask you about is: Do you see that? But also, is there a danger that Democrats—both lawmakers and voters—get pretty deeply demoralized both by the darkness and by the losses? Look, we’ve gotten the shit kicked out of us a bit here, and it’s rough. So is there this danger, right, between between all these factors? What’s the way out of that? How do you get Democrats to stay in the game?
Rosenberg Well, I think, first of all, we have these elections coming up soon—and so there are things to be channeled toward. Second is, I do think that the “No Kings” protest, the Tesla takedowns, which were wildly successful.… There are now millions and millions of people who are getting up every day with the idea that they’re going to do something, and I don’t think that’s going to change. And frankly, that community could grow. Just in my own Hopium community, it’s amazing to see people talk about how I go to protests and I call my members of Congress every day and I hang out with my group and we send postcards into races. A lot of people have become more muscular in their civic engagement over the last few months, and I think that’s one of the reasons, as I was saying earlier, we are stronger than we were.
There are more people taking real concrete action for our democracy. I don’t think that’s going to fundamentally change, particularly because I do think now there’s going to be a huge focus in these battleground House and Senate districts—people in these communities communicating to their Republican electeds about their disappointment and anger about what happened. I think that stuff is going to materialize quickly. It’s going to be something for people to do now, and they’re going to go to work. So I do think that our movement is going to continue to grow and get stronger because I think there’s a lot to do.
And that’s important in our democracy. On the other point you’re making, I’m not a worrier by nature, but the thing that I worry about a little bit today is, What is Trump actually going to do over the next 16 months? Because again, he needs, as Anne Applebaum called it, to recreate the spectacle of power every day. He’s not getting trade wins. Global leaders don’t like him and don’t want to bend the knee to him. He’s been rejected again and again. It is worrisome that he and Vlad are back on the same side again over the last few days; this rancid relationship that he has with Putin has resurfaced in recent days as a deeply worrisome thing.
To your point about the rejection, I don’t know about high watermark, low watermark. I don’t know where this is all going to go politically because he’s already so low that I don’t know how much lower he can go, frankly, in his polling. I do think that quickly there will be a sense in the public—and this is something we have to initiate—that this was an enormous mistake, that Republicans made an error, that they are screwing over the country. It’s because in their information universe, Donald Trump is popular. He’s successful. He’s young and thin and has hair and is virile—and all these things that we don’t see. They have created this incredible bubble where in their world he is successful and winning and popular whereas actually in the real world—the world that 55–60 percent of voters inhabit, the ones that will determine the election—they don’t see that at all.
One of the reasons that people have to realize that they don’t seem to be concerned about his poll numbers right now is that in their polling universe, in their political universe, he’s actually popular in these fake made-up polls. I think this is really important because I think that they are anticipating there are going to be elections. They just have confidence through their money and through Trump’s innate strength and power that they’re going to be able to survive our attacks on them. And I think we’re going to find out, for example, in New Jersey and in Virginia just within a few months whether they can. I don’t think they will. And I think the key, though, is how hard we all work. And to your point, if we let up, if we obey in advance, if we don’t do everything we can to maximize our opportunities, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. And that’s why the single most important thing is: Everyone here who’s listening, you just have to work as hard as you possibly can over the next 16 months in order to take advantage of the opportunities that we’re being given.
Sargent: Those coming elections are going to be really big for morale purposes. I agree 100 percent, folks. Don’t let up now. This is not the time to get out of the fight. Simon Rosenberg, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on, man.
Rosenberg: Greg, it’s always a pleasure to be with you, and thank you for your continued thought leadership in this challenging time.
Sargent: Same to you, Simon.