The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 19 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’re in really strange moment right now. As the government shutdown drags on, President Trump’s rants about Democrats and his angry threats are growing more degenerate and detached from reality by the day. He seems utterly incapable of grasping the degree to which all this is backfiring on him. His lies about Democrats and healthcare are only driving them to dig in further. And his bizarre new boast about killing a major tunnel project connecting New York and New Jersey is clearly helping the Democratic candidate in the New Jersey gubernatorial race. Meanwhile, a striking new CNBC poll suggests that the shutdown is causing Trump to absolutely crater. Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg has been arguing that we should keep focused on something very fundamental, that Trump is doing immense harm to the country. He’s profoundly unpopular. And all of that actually matters. This is an important moment to remind ourselves of this. Good to have you on, Simon.
Simon Rosenberg: It’s always great to be with you, Greg.
Sargent: So let’s start with Trump killing this tunnel project linking New York and New Jersey. Here’s what Trump had to say about that.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): And I’ll tell you, the Democrats—they don’t talk about this. You know, we’re getting rid of programs that we didn’t like but that were negotiated in, but we didn’t like. We’re terminating those programs, and they’re to be terminated on a permanent basis. And it’s thousands of people, and it’s billions of dollars. We’re getting rid of a lot of things that we never wanted because of the fact that they made this stupid move. Russell Vought is really terminating tremendous numbers of Democrat projects. This is not only jobs—I mean, the project in Manhattan, the project in New York—billions and billions of dollars that Schumer has worked 20 years to get. It’s terminated.
Sargent: This is real, deranged, Mad King stuff—someone who has completely lost it.
Strikingly, we just had these new polling averages from G. Elliott Morris, which put Democrat Mikie Sherrill up six points, 49 percent to 43 percent, in the New Jersey race. And Sherrill is highlighting Trump’s killing of this project daily in the race.
Simon, your thoughts on all this?
Rosenberg: Yeah, I mean, I think that there are two things that are happening simultaneously that we have to keep in our minds. One is that Trump is doing incredible harm to the country and breaking things that are going to be difficult, if not impossible, to repair. And we must act with incredible vigor to mitigate the damage and to win back power.
But the second thing that’s happening, and that’s equally important, is that he’s in physical, cognitive, and political decline, and that he’s growing, I think, ever more distant from the American people. He’s struggling to rally even his own voters behind major parts of his agenda. And as a political project, he’s failing.
And I think, to some degree, Greg—if I can just say—these two things are related. I think the further, the more there’s a perception that his government and his political project have failed, it’s encouraging them—or encouraging greater escalation toward authoritarianism. And that’s because they’re growing to believe that winning the elections, staying in power through winning the elections next year, is starting to become difficult, if not impossible. And so, therefore, they’re going to door two—which is greater illiberalism, crushing their opposition.
Sargent: And Simon, it works the other way as well, doesn’t it? Because the more authoritarian they get, the more unpopular they get. So can you talk about this New Jersey thing? I mean, this is such a clear illustration of it. He’s going out there and saying, I’m terminating this project. He’s so strong. He’s an autocrat. He can do whatever he wants. But it’s become a weapon in the New Jersey race against the Republican.
Rosenberg: Yes. And as have the government shutdown and the firings of government employees in the Virginia race. I mean, both of these have been, in their extremism, in their arrogance, in their untetheredness, right? They’re taking clear, concrete actions to sabotage their candidates in the two most important elections in November.
And it is because they are—you know, there’s a piece of Trump that is really important. There’s still this element of buffoonery and madness, and he’s unhinged, and they do impulsive and crazy things. And so I do think that you’re right. I think you were right to point out that what we’re talking about is sort of this vicious cycle.
I call it the vicious cycle of a failing strongman—that the more he fails, the more he grows distant from the public, which encourages him to become more of an illiberal strongman and to crack down on his opposition. And I think that he’s in that dynamic right now. And unfortunately, what it’s doing is accelerating his experimentation with becoming a total autocrat.
Sargent: By the way, Simon, I want to underscore the importance of what you said about the Virginia race because I think that’s lost on a lot of people. All these threats to terminate all these federal workers and stuff, that’s absolutely lethal for the Republican in the Virginia race because there’s a huge number of federal workers in Virginia.
Rosenberg: Listen, Abigail Spanberger made a video for our Hopium community that I’ll be releasing tomorrow. In it, she hits very hard that the illegal layoffs and firings are having a huge impact on the economy of Northern Virginia. And this is very central to the argument she’s making, right? In that her opponent supports all of this, right?
And so I do think that it is, Greg—as you were getting at earlier, as you pointed out—just to reiterate the point you made, that I think this issue of Trump taking money, of his taking total control of the Treasury and acting as if the legislative branch doesn’t exist, is a legitimate kind of escalation in his effort to become a dictator and to have essentially this unitary executive where there aren’t three branches of government—there’s one.
Because we’ve already seen the Supreme Court become essentially an adjunct—or really report—to him and do his bidding, weakening the legislative branch. And now what Trump is doing, functionally, by grabbing control of the purse, is eliminating the need for a legislative branch.
And I think that, you know, they are marching ever closer to this sort of fantasy they have—this unitary executive fantasy. And we have to take all this really seriously. He is attempting, in a way that I still think is hard for us all to believe, to not be a president but to be a dictator. And I think that he’s escalated in that regard in the last few weeks.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about this new CNBC poll, which shows him in real political trouble. It finds Trump 13 points underwater on the economy—only 42 percent of Americans approve of his handling of it, versus 55 percent who disapprove. Those are his worst numbers of any CNBC poll on the economy during either of Trump’s two terms.
And only 34 percent approve of his policies on inflation and the cost of living—62 percent disapprove. Absolutely terrible. This is all related to the shutdown as well. Simon, what’s your take on these numbers?
Rosenberg: Well, to me, there were two things about this poll that really stood out. Number one is that the way it was written and the way it has been covered on CNBC today is: Trump failing, falling, stumbling, in decline, and losing.
For all of his—you know, this stuff has been seen by all of their buddies in New York and on Wall Street. And I’m sure there are all sorts of emails now coming from Trump allies on the Street about what the hell is going on? You guys are getting beat.
So, to me, the second bit that was really important is that they had a chart—a graph show—that’s very prominent, both on television and in the written report, that 53 percent of the country was blaming Trump and the Republicans for the government shutdown and only 37 percent Democrats. That’s the biggest spread of any poll that I’ve seen.
And so what it shows is that Trump is now being blamed for the bad economy. There’s an erosion of support for him on economic issues and in his overall approval rating. He’s losing the big argument with the Democrats on the shutdown.
And so, if you’re a Trump supporter in the business community—which is where this stuff is reaching—what this is signaling is that he’s failing, that he’s losing, and that he’s not winning against these ‘dirty Democrats’ that they hold in such incredible contempt.
Sargent: Simon, let me jump in and say that among independents in the CNBC poll, 58 percent blame Trump and Republicans and only 21 percent to blame Dems. So they’re losing the middle of the country.
Rosenberg: They’re losing the middle of the country. And the thing is, this poll is actually, on most issues, better than most of the other independent polling. This poll trends a little bit more Republican historically compared to the other independent polling.
I mean, the polling that Trump has had in the last few weeks—in The Economist/YouGov and Reuters/Ipsos and all of the independent polling—there have been two things true about the polling. One is that he’s been consistently now below where Biden was after the debate—his disastrous debate performance—when he was in such bad shape that he was forced out of the presidential race, right?
But the second thing is that in most of the polling we’ve had in the last few weeks, Trump is in the 20s and 30s on major issues, not in the 40s and 50s—which means that he is really struggling to rally the country behind him on anything that matters to the American people.
And this gets to the core argument I’ve been making, which is that his powers are ebbing. His powers of persuasion are ebbing. His health is ailing. He’s clearly in cognitive decline. He’s growing, you know—I think he’s basically… 55 percent of the country is basically unavailable to him now on any major issue.
Sargent: So speaking of Trump’s decline, let’s listen to Trump talk about Democrats on the shutdown at a press conference he just had.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): I think right now the Democrats are really damaged, mentally damaged. They want to take 1.5 trillion with a T, trillion dollars, and give it to people that invaded our country. They came into our country illegally from prisons, from mental institutions, gang members. They want to give them health care and take it away from our citizens. We’re not going to do that. 1.5 trillion dollars they want to destroy. They want to destroy our health care system. We’re not going to let that happen.
Sargent: This is just whacked out shit. Everything I’m seeing out there suggests that this kind of nonsense only gets Democrats to dig in more. You talk to lot of Democrats, Simon. Is that your sense as well?
Rosenberg: Yeah, Democrats think we’re winning this. And based on the polling, we are. I mean, we’re not only winning on the question of who to blame for the shutdown, but, you know, the country clearly doesn’t want the health care cuts to go through. So we’re in a very strong position on the two central issues that are being litigated right now. Trump is failing to win either one of them.
I mean, imagine that—in most of the polling right now on the question of Do you blame Democrats?—which is the central argument he’s making right now, this big argument Trump’s making is the shutdown is their fault; Democrats shut it down—he’s not above 37 percent on that in any poll.
And they’ve appeared very flummoxed. Mike Johnson has exhibited historic cowardice in keeping Congress out for the last few weeks. It’s sort of an unprecedented, extraordinarily illiberal, and almost comical and ridiculous thing that he’s doing. Thune went on MSNBC this week and sort of tried to make nice-nice with Democrats and indicated that he also was really upset at what Russell Vought was doing in his commanding—illegally—the Treasury dollars.
I think these guys, all of a sudden, went from believing they were the kings of the world to being in kind of deep shit politically. And it’s happened really quickly. And I think we have to give Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries a lot of credit for having seized this opportunity and continuing to keep their team together in this important fight.
Sargent: Well, I would like to see a lot more from Schumer and Jeffries engaging on immigration, engaging on the slide into authoritarianism. But point taken.
To your point about them thinking that they’re on top of the world—that gets at a tension I want to talk about. On the one hand, Trump really thinks he’s on top of the world, right? He thinks he’s a world-historical figure now, with what happened in the Middle East. He’s murdering people in the Caribbean with total impunity, with bombs that go boom and make him feel powerful. He’s sending troops into cities. All of that makes him very, very strong.
He thinks he can just lie wildly about the Democratic position in the shutdown and throw the word illegals around, and the American people will be hypnotized by his magical lying powers. But then you look at the CNBC poll—once again, Trump is underwater on deportations too, his strong issue, right? And the public is negative on his handling of the Israeli–Hamas conflict.
He is incapable of understanding any of this, and that tension is, I think, very dangerous—in the sense that you got at very early in the discussion.
Rosenberg: Well, the question is—I have a slightly different take on it, Greg—which is that I think he actually knows all of this and what’s happened. I think he knows that his powers are ebbing. I think everyone around him knows that his powers are ebbing and that they’re panicking and that they’re scared, which is why they’re trying to do this kind of wild redistricting they’re doing. And now they’re getting the compliant Supreme Court to figure out another way to go get them a bunch more districts in 2026, because what they’re terrified about is losing power.
And maybe this is the tension you’re describing—that we know from history that a lot of what causes governments and leaders to become autocrats is the sense that, in order to gain power or while in power, they broke the law, and therefore, if they ever lose power, they will be subject to justice. We are now in that place here in the United States, right? Donald Trump is a crook. He is unprecedentedly corrupt. He’s killing people illegally and murdering people and has people doing it with him, by the way. It’s not just him—there are people committing crimes with him. The people who are Russell Vought and Kevin Hassett and others who are working to steal money from the Treasury are committing crimes, right?
Now, he may be promising them pardons. But the issue now is that there is this wild, incredibly animating fear they have of Democrats winning the elections next year. And I think it’s because they’re aware that not only will there be subpoenas and hearings, but that there’s a chance they could go to jail this time, right? Because I don’t think we’re going to be so stupid as not to prosecute this stuff effectively—as we were, you know, during Biden’s administration.
And so I do think that part of what’s driving this is they’re scared. They’re losing. They don’t feel like this stuff is working. They know the economy isn’t going well. So what it’s causing them to do, Greg, is a version of what you were saying—which is for him to have to restore his strength and his manhood and his manliness through these other extraordinary means, right? Through the use of the military, through killing fishermen in the Caribbean, through the saber-rattling that he does against the Democrats every day, to putting James Comey into jail.
These are ways of him restoring strength that he actually doesn’t have. It’s like drinking the blood of virgins in order to restore the decline that he’s going through. And I think that again, you know, we are now in this place where he’s made a decision not to course-correct, not to try to become popular, not to do the right thing for the American people, but to stick to his oligarchical agenda that’s enriching a couple hundred of his buddies and screwing over everybody else.
And in order to do all that, he has to become a full-on authoritarian. And I think that, you know, this is the moment we’re in. We can keep both of these true at the same time: that he’s failing politically and his government is failing—but he’s also doing things such that I don’t know that you can argue that America lives in a democracy, that we live in a democracy, any longer.
Sargent: So, Simon, I agree with your articulation of Trump’s situation, but to close this out, I want to throw some pessimism your way and have you tell me why I’m wrong, okay?
I don’t really have any confidence in the notion that these people will face any kind of accountability, even when we have a real attorney general again. And on top of that, as weak as Trump is, I can see scenarios where Democrats end up with not that much in the shutdown fight. Maybe they get the subsidies restored temporarily. They’re certainly not gonna get anything more than that, I don’t think.
And they should be asking for a lot more—they are asking for more—and they should be holding out for more. I don’t know that they will at the end of the day. And then, with all this redistricting going on, I worry that Democrats won’t be able to win the House by enough to capture the House.
Democrats are also in a pretty rough political situation in many respects. Am I wrong about all that?
Rosenberg: I worry about the escalating authoritarianism in the last few weeks. I don’t think we have really sort of processed the degree to which Trump is now acting as if there’s no longer a legislative branch in America. And I think his corralling of the Treasury and treating it like a piggy bank is among the most dangerous sort of moments in this Trump 2.0.
But to respond to all of what you’ve said directly—look, we’re in it now, right? We’re here now. There are no easy paths for us any longer. What’s in front of us is a five- to ten-year, or even longer, process of getting rid of MAGA and restoring the integrity of our democracy. And it’s going to be really hard and really painful. People are going to have to recognize this is going to be the hardest thing any of us have ever done in our political lifetimes. And because of that, we might as well get on with it and bring it on.
I think we have to stop believing that somehow there’s an easy path here, or that somehow we just win an election and everything’s going to snap back. I think all the things you described are going to be hard. Winning the elections next year is going to be really hard. They’re going to have unprecedented amounts of money. They’re also going to be doing unprecedented things to make the elections not free and fair. Right? We are still going to have to power through and do the best we can.
You know, we have to do what you said, which is more directly confront them—both on the damage the tariffs and inflation are doing, and on his increasing autocracy, which I think has not been central enough to our narrative. There’s a lot.
If I can just end on sort of an upbeat note here a little bit, I think we’re winning all these big arguments with Trump—and we’re not even making the best arguments that we have. I think our ability to indict him and to tell the story about who he is and what he’s become can get much stronger, more durable, and deeper by adding inflation and prices and his embrace of autocracy—expanding out that argument from the current focus on health care to something much stronger, in order to push him even further away from the American people.
And then finally, something you and I agree on, because we’ve talked about it before, is that Democrats have to not only broaden and deepen our argument, but we need to take on Trump’s strongman brand more directly. We need to make him weak, not strong. We need to make him a loser, not a winner; a failure, not a success; a villain, not a hero. We need to have an orchestrated campaign, because there’s a lot of evidence in the data that what’s still propping him up and keeping him in the low to mid-forties—as opposed to the mid- to high-thirties—is this perception that he’s a strong leader. And we need to take that away from him.
You know, the ridicule that we’ve seen emerge, I think, is going to become a very, very powerful tool in diminishing that part of the strongman brand. I love the evolution and the innovation we’ve seen around the inflatables, the frogs, the dragons, and everything else. Jimmy Kimmel—I think this is a powerful new weapon that we have to fight off authoritarianism. And it’s only at the beginning, because ridicule is essential in taking down strongmen.
So I hear you, brother. I think this is going to be really hard. But you know, the best way out is always through, as Robert Frost taught us. And we just have to get on with it and fight it out.
Sargent: Simon Rosenberg, I sure hope Democrats listen to that entire thing you said at the very end there. Great to talk to you as always, dude. Thanks for coming on.
Rosenberg: Greg, thanks so much. Just as you know, I’m just grateful for all the work that you do and everybody, we just got to keep our head down and keep fighting.