The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 28 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.
This week, Governor J.B. Pritzker delivered an extraordinary takedown of President Trump in response to Trump’s threat to send troops into Chicago. Soon after, Trump exploded in fury about Pritzker’s impudence, calling the governor a bunch of names and instructing Pritzker to bow down before him and beg for his “HELP” in fighting crime. What’s striking here is that Pritzker did something unusual. He communicated directly with his constituents from the heart, vowing to use all his power to protect them from Trump’s authoritarian takeover. Rather than let Trump get away with pretending his moves are in any sense about fighting crime, Pritzker cast Trump as the primary threat to the people of his state. All this comes as a new poll shows that majorities of Americans simply are not accepting Trump’s word for it that this is all about crime. So why are pundits pretending he’s winning the politics of this battle when he’s not? We’re talking today to Brian Beutler, who has a great new piece on his Substack, Off Message, taking stock of what Pritzker did. Good to see you again, Brian.
Brian Beutler: It’s great to be back.
Sargent: Let’s just jump in and start with J.B. Pritzker’s response to Trump. Here’s one excerpt. It’s a bit long, but it’s worth it. Listen.
J.B. Pritzker (audio voiceover): To the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous, we are watching and we are taking names. This country has survived darker periods than the one that we’re going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf. You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.
Sargent: So there’s a lot to say about this, but one thing I want to flag is that Pritzker says straight out there that Trump wants to provoke a violent confrontation in order to create a pretext for an even more draconian crackdown. He goes straight to the core truth that Trump wants more violence and wants more tension and hate between Americans. Your response to all this?
Beutler: The response that Pritzker is getting to his comments from people who will vote for Democrats but are currently telling pollsters that they have a low opinion of the Democratic Party—I hope it awakens other Democrats, other governors, and the leadership in the Democratic Party in Congress to the problems with the way they’ve gone about confronting Trump over this and a variety of other similar things, where Trump will overreach, abuse power, but cover it with some pretext that he believes will make the issue a good one for him so long as that’s how the public internalizes it. In Los Angeles, it wasn’t about occupying Los Angeles; it was about immigration. In D.C., it’s not about occupying Washington, D.C.; it’s about crime. Same thing in Chicago.
And that has a tendency to put the Democratic leadership in Congress back on their heels on the defensive. [They] engage in lot of throat-clearing about how they’re not actually soft on crime, they’re not actually soft on border security before they get to the part where they call him a liar and say there’s no emergency and that he’s trying to manipulate people and that they’re not going to stand for it. And Pritzker managed to do this in a way that engendered a great deal of solidarity among the majority of Americans who disapprove of Donald Trump and in a way that I think—I hope—will serve as a deterrent or a warning to people within Trumpworld who understand that this moment of time isn’t going to extend in perpetuity, that there might be accountability on the other side of this, and that doing it might just be a political mistake.
Sargent: I’m intrigued by your pinpointing of the Americans out there who vote Democratic but are unhappy with the Democratic Party right now. This is a big group of people, and they’re essentially absent from the debates that we have about the politics of these things. What they think matters or should matter to Democrats, right? Isn’t Pritzker essentially activating those people, saying, Hey you, you’re being heard, which is something that I don’t think a lot of Democrats do. They don’t say you’re being heard to that constituency.
Beutler: Pritzker went further in a way that it’s actually very moving to me. He said, “If you hurt my people.” That’s a statement of his leadership of the state Illinois and the city of Chicago, but it’s a statement of solidarity with citizens who depend on their elected leaders to protect them from harm. And it’s those people, people who have been missing that from the Democratic congressional leadership, who are driving the public opinion favorability with the Democratic Party from where it should be, which is probably around half because about half the country votes for Democrats, into the 20s. Which essentially says that about half of the party’s voters are fed up with being abandoned by their leadership, that the administration has made a point of coming after people who comprise that population—people like us.
Sargent: In response to Pritzker, he tweeted this, “A really DEADLY weekend in Chicago. 6 DEAD, 27 HURT IN CRIME SPREES ALLOVER THE CITY. Panic stricken Governor Pritzker says that crime is under control, when in fact it is just the opposite. He is an incompetent Governor who should call me for HELP.” Brian, the reality is that Chicago crime has fallen sharply on just about every front, murders included. But that aside, what’s amazing to me about this is that Trump actually thinks he’s seen as competent on this issue. And also he doesn’t even pretend to be concerned at all about what the people of Chicago or their elected representatives actually want. To me, that gives away the whole scam. It isn’t about helping anybody. It’s about imposing on and occupying them. Can you talk about that?
Beutler: Yeah, the fact that America is a violent country is not new. If it is an emergency, then it’s been an emergency for many decades. And the solutions to the emergency are not and cannot be that you fan the military out throughout the country. Because even if you manage to flood the streets of Chicago and Washington with enough uniformed military officers that people who might commit crimes just decide to stay indoors and crime goes down, you can’t replicate the strategy across the country. So it’s not an emergency. And that gives the lie to Trump invoking emergency powers in order to do this as does the fact that he’s doing it selectively.
I’m not the first person to observe that crime rates are higher in cities with Republican mayors or big city with Democratic mayors that are in Republican states. So like New Orleans is a good example, St. Louis. Donald Trump isn’t sending troops to those cities because it is about projecting power against and intimidating populations that don’t support him and don’t want him there. Beyond wanting to intimidate them, he—I believe—hopes that he can push people to their breaking point so that they lash out. They can’t maintain the peaceful protest and civil disobedience best practices through endless occupation. And then he cites acts of violence perpetrated against federal agents or national guardsmen as pretext to crack down even harder.
And this is all obvious. It’s obvious if you are interested in getting to the truth of the matter—like think about it for more than one second. And I think that it should be foregrounded in the way Trump opponents talk about it, that this is all a lie. The purpose of it is to generate propaganda and to seize more power, and we’re not going to play along.
Sargent: Exactly right. I want to go back to J.B. Pritzker’s response to Trump for a second. Listen to this.
Pritzker (audio voiceover): To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your National Guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people, you would be failing your constituents and your country. Cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation, and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.
Sargent: What I think is so critical there is that Pritzker is actually indicting MAGA. He’s again going to the essence of things by saying plainly that Trumpism at bottom is about turning Americans viciously against each other, about getting them to hate each other. And that is what MAGA is about. Your thoughts on that?
Beutler: Yes. I think that Trump and Trumpworld—they may be in some amount of denial about how unpopular they are, but some of that denial stems from the fact that without ever garnering a majority of the public’s support, they’ve managed to attain unfathomable political power. And so there’s maybe a disconnect in their minds about how brittle their handle on things is, that if they just stoke perpetual war against the other half of America, their hold on power will re-cement itself. And I think that that’s a dangerous assumption for them to make.
It’s gratifying to hear Pritzker do two things there. The first one is not just ask but basically tell the Republican governors that he has to work with that he will figure out ways to hurt them back if they participate in this. It’s not a sustainable thing for them with say 40 percent of the country behind him—or 42 generously—to antagonize the other 58 percent and expect that to work out for them in the long run. It’s just a good reminder for people who get demoralized under the weight of the constant abuse. The sense of forward motion of the Trump regime can make people who oppose him feel like they’re outmanned and in the minority. They’re overpowered, but there are more of us.
Sargent: Well, to that point, we have this new Quinnipiac poll. It finds that Trump’s approval among U.S. voters is 37 percent. But notably, 56 percent disapprove of his sending of the National Guard into D.C. Only 41 percent approve. Among independents, it’s an extraordinary 61 percent disapproving of his sending them in. And on his approval of his handling of crime in particular, he’s deeply underwater as well, at 42 to 54. When I look at numbers like that, Brian, just to go back to the point we discussed earlier, it makes me think that something like this from Pritzker really would move and resonate with people in the middle as well. They’re going to hear someone saying, This is absolute madness. It has to stop. And I think they hear that as essentially an indictment of a massive overreach and a massive display of authoritarian power.
Beutler: Donald Trump has never been able to achieve majority support, let alone maintain it. And as he overreaches, as his lust for power overtakes him and he grabs for more and more, he tends to become less and less popular. And it’s not just that he becomes less popular, it’s that almost all of those people [in] the majority of the public that disapproves of him strongly disapprove of him. So basically half the country just hates Trump compared to the 25 percent that adore him. Those are really important numbers not just for Democrats thinking about how they’re going to do in subsequent elections, but where people in the middle are and what might attract them to Democratic appeals, Democratic rhetoric.
There are two schools of thought on this. One is the approach that the Democratic leadership in Congress takes where they look at past elections and they look at issue polling and they assume that, OK, because of what this data says, the median voter thinks Democrats are softer on a crime than Republicans. Ergo, if Donald Trump is doing something on the pretext of fighting crime, Democrats need to make sure that they don’t come across as weak on crime in order to appeal to the median voter. But what I think is happening—and what I think J.B. Pritzker thinks is happening—is that people in the middle are seeing Trump abuse his power and they don’t like it. And when they hear the opposing side not really fight it, they don’t like that either. What they do like is somebody with gravitas and courage calling it bullshit and saying, I’m going to use all the power that I have to stand in your way. And if I fail, I’m not going to stop then either.
If you’re a cross-pressured voter and you like some things about Trump or thought you did but then he does something that you realize is egregious, why would it make sense that you would want to hear the other party soft-pedal their opposition to it? You’d want them to be forceful about it.
Sargent: The pathology and thinking that you’re highlighting there has really seeped through to the punditry as well. Again and again, we hear that Trump has laid a trap for Democrats. He’s baiting them into talking about an issue that favors Trump. But all of this, to your point, simply presumes upfront that the debate has to unfold on Trump’s terms. It assumes that voters will automatically see what Trump is doing as actually being about fighting crime, and that Dems can’t contest that. Dems can’t make the argument that this isn’t about fighting crime; it’s about consolidating autocratic power. Is there any reason to assume that Democrats can’t make that argument and win it?
Beutler: There’s none except for how they’ve constructed themselves, how they’ve built their institutions, how they’ve recruited talent, how they’ve hired for advisers and strategists. So you have this big architecture of people who buy [into the mindset that] the Democrats are weak about all this stuff. And you can see it when reporters inside the Beltway are doing their insider-reported takes on Trumpian overreach, [saying] that liberals in their bubble might not like it when your grandmothers are being hauled off in chains, but the American people want the border security and Democrats are weak on that issue and so this is probably Trump’s strength. What’s happening below the surface of those pieces is that those reporters are going to talk to Republican sources and they’re going to talk to Democratic sources—so communications officials in the Republican Party, communication officials in the Democratic Party and people like that, right? And what they’re hearing from those people who are hired by the parties that they work for is the same thing that the pollsters who work for the leadership are saying.
The Republicans are saying, We are on the front foot here. This is a bad issue for Democrats and we’re going to catch them being soft on crime. And then the Democratic aides, advisers, communication strategists, whatever, are saying a version of the same thing. It’s like, We don’t want to take the bait here. Or we think that we’re walking into a trap if we fight him on this. And so the pundits and reporters who do this kind of journalism walk away with the impression that the parties agree, this is a bad issue for Democrats. Apart from the substance of it and the real text of it, which is the most important part, the subtext of the Pritzker speech, the thing that cheered me, is creating a proof point for the other side of the argument—the side that you and I tend to agree with, I think, and that we wish was better represented in punditry and in the Democratic strategist class.
My hope is that you see more of this out of other ambitious Democrats, because nothing succeeds like success. If more people start sounding like Pritzker and they get more support and Trump’s numbers on this look like they do in the Quinnipiac poll, that’s the thing that could filter deeper down into the party—from Hakeem Jeffries down to the people who work for him. So that when people who write for Politico go fanning out to see if Republicans have secret strength even though their polling says they don’t, they hear a different tune from the same set of sources.
Sargent: Well, we’ve been in situations like this before during the Bush years. The press wrote popular war president, popular war president, popular war president for years, even though Bush’s numbers were sliding into the toilet and the war was unpopular. We’ve seen similar things during the first Trump years. We saw it on immigration during the second Trump term where the punditry just accepted it on faith that Trump was going to win the argument over the rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Democrats couldn’t dare take that on. Stephen Miller whispered that in reporters ears and got them to credulously repeat it and turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But you had a few Democrats who went out there and did the right thing and stood up for the rule of law. And public opinion turned around, and eventually the party got it together and figured out. Well, I should actually scratch that because they haven’t gotten it together on immigration more broadly, but a number of them came out in defense of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which took a while. So I’m a little bit hopeful that we can nudge the party to a better place on this issue as long as we keep seeing numbers like this from Quinnipiac. What do you think? Is it possible?
Beutler: Yeah. If you want to take an example from recent history, your point about the Democratic Party being on the back foot on the Iraq War for so many years and then the punditry matching that disposition for so many years—what did it take to really upend that to get people to see the situation clearly? It was Barack Obama becoming a senator, running for president, having opposed the war from the beginning, and defeating Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary on the basis of her support for the Iraq War—which was in and of itself a finger-in-the-wind problem. She was doing what we see Democratic Party leaders in Congress doing today where public opinion actually is on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, on immigration, on the occupation of cities by National Guards. The situation is crying out for somebody with Obama-like foresight and Obama-like determination to make that the thing that propels him to the top of the field in Democratic presidential politics. I think Pritzker could be that person, [but] the more the better. And the more visible they are, the quicker we are to shaking the cobwebs off a little bit.
Sargent: Well, that’s what elections are for. I guess the bottom line here is that the 2028 Democratic primary jockeying is going to essentially force the party or drag it to a much better place on this issue. And I do think that could actually happen. Brian Beutler, always an enormous pleasure to talk to you, man.
Beutler: It’s always fun. Thanks, man.