The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 29 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.
In a strange turn of events, Marjorie Taylor Greene has emerged as a forceful critic of President Trump and the Republican Party’s stance in the government shutdown fight. And Greene just erupted at House Speaker Mike Johnson over all this, excoriating him for not having a real policy in place to protect all those who are set to lose health insurance due to the GOP refusal to extend Obamacare subsidies. This really exposes the scam at the core of the Trump GOP strategy. And we think it also shows serious cracks in the MAGA coalition. But why is this happening right now? What does it say about this political moment? And how can Democrats exploit it? Today, we’re trying to figure all this out with Matthew Sheffield, who used to be on the right himself, but turned against the right and really knows how it operates. He has a newsletter called Flux and a new book explaining how Republicans fight the information wars. Matt, good to see you.
Matthew Sheffield: Hey, Greg. Good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So let’s start here. There are a number of reports saying that Republicans are splintering over their shutdown strategy. Some Republicans are urging Mike Johnson to bring everyone back and reconvene the House. Clearly the shutdown is taking its toll on Republicans, particularly those who are vulnerable in the midterms. Matt, what’s your sense of what’s going on inside the GOP right now on this?
Sheffield: Well, I would say that this is an example of Republicans in disarray. And it was caused by the Democrats actually taking a page out of the Republican playbook and using it very effectively. Because, basically, an effective political party wants to minimize internal division and maximize the opposition’s divisions.
And that’s what this shutdown strategy over Obamacare subsidies has done. Because, basically, the Republicans, in their big, terrible bill that they just passed, they tried to delay as many of the horrible cuts that they had put in toward after the midterm elections. But the way that health care works, you can’t get away with that kind of delay.
So the premiums are going to go up for pretty much everybody, including people who are not on Obamacare. And I think that that’s a point that has to be emphasized more. Because, basically, when the insurance markets have a lower price because of the Obamacare subsidies, [that] also means that people who are not getting those subsidies get a lower rate.
And so, basically, almost everyone in the country is going to have a massive price increase. And the Republicans want the Democrats to sign off on it. And the Democrats, for once, are not allowing that. Basically, yeah—the Republicans have played this fake policy game for decades, and the Democrats have called the bluff, finally.
Sargent: So, into all this steps Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Here’s what happened: Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman reported that, on a House GOP conference call, Greene challenged the official strategy. Then Greene responded to Sherman’s tweet about that with her own long rant on Twitter.
She said that on that call—this is Greene recounting this—she said that she demanded that Johnson tell her what the GOP plan is to cover the millions of people who are going to get thrown off Obamacare due to the subsidies expiring and, as you say, premium prices spiking for them.
Greene then said this about Johnson: “He refused to give one policy proposal to our GOP conference on our own conference call.”
Matt, that’s striking stuff. Greene really nuked Johnson there. She said straight out that Johnson isn’t sharing any solutions for covering all these millions of people who are set to lose health care. What do you make of that?
Sheffield: Well, it is definitely good to see, I have to say that. But it is an example, though. The Republican Party has basically restyled itself to be a party for less-educated people and men—more blue-collar voters—than they have ever been, historically speaking.
And the reality is, when you create a party that has that base, but then the people who run it are subservient to oligarchs, there’s going to be a lot of tension between those two things. And Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of the very few people to actually notice that the Republican Party actively harms its own voters.
Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s really important. I want to get to that in a minute. First, I want to point out, though, that Greene effectively blew up the entire Trump–GOP scam in this battle.
The Trump argument is that the real problem right now is that Democrats want to give health care to undocumented immigrants, right? That’s the reason the government shut down, according to them.
But Greene steps forward and tells the truth, which is that the GOP is the problem. Republicans don’t want to extend the expanded ACA subsidies for a deranged ideological reason—and that’s the real reason people are about to lose their health care. And that’s why the government is closed.
Refreshing honesty, but pretty rare. Why is Greene doing this right now, Matt, in addition to what you just said there? Does she recognize some sort of opportunity of her own? What’s the real calculus?
Sheffield: Well, I mean, there is, you know, specifically in her case, her district does have a lot of people who are on these subsidies. And, according to her, they are complaining to her that their costs are going to spike. So, there is a specific thing with regard to her district.
But it’s also that Marjorie Taylor Greene is a little different than the typical Republican because she isn’t dependent on Trump—and she never has been, actually. So she has her own separate brand, and she is her own person. And that’s very, very rare in today’s Republican Party.
Because, you know, I think people forget that Donald Trump—basically, the reason why he wins is that he has a unique personal appeal that’s trans-ideological, that people will vote for him just because they think, you know, he’s a good guy—for whatever foolish reasons, sadly. But, you know, like, the regular Republican Party is just Christian oligarchy, and that’s not what people want.
And so, in some ways, this is a preview of what the post-Trump Republican Party is probably gonna—some of the battles that we’ll see.
Sargent: Right. I think Greene definitely is her own person as well. I also think Greene might recognize that Trump is a little weaker than most people think he is right now.
We just had this new YouGov poll [that] just came out—it has Trump at 39 percent approval to 58 percent disapproval. He’s deeply underwater on virtually all major issues. He’s 10 points underwater on immigration—his ‘strong issue’—and 31 points underwater on inflation and prices.
The terrible economic numbers put them in a really bad spot in the shutdown. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Sheffield: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you and The New Republic generally have been—it’s been very refreshing to see you guys make this point regularly—because I think, since Trump came along and had some of these improbable victories, one of the things that those have done is make a lot of people on the left kind of get blackpilled, if you will, and feel helpless.
And the reality is that, you know, dictatorship—it’s kind of like a George Costanza lie—it’s not a dictatorship if you don’t believe it. And so, you know, we have to actively work against this and realize there are lots of advantages that we have on our side to protect democracy.
And that’s the thing with Trump. Trump is a paper tiger that people—he barely had his victories. And again, a lot of that, the main reason that he won in 2024, was that he had tricked people who didn’t vote—they had never voted before or had barely voted at all. And so, you know, the less you knew about the news and about policy, the more—you know—that was his strength.
So really what that points to is that the Democrats have to invest in media and platforms in the way the Republicans did. The right-wing media also—so much of it—we talk about all these far-right podcasters and TikTokers and Instagram people and YouTubers—they weren’t there before Trump.
So this is not a thing that just came out of nowhere; this is not a thing that’s been around forever. We can do this.
Sargent: Yeah, so your book gets into Democrats needing to learn how Republicans actually fight the information wars. It’s something that we talk about on this podcast a fair amount. How does that feed into this shutdown fight?
It seems to me that the vaunted right-wing media is kind of cracking a little in the shutdown. Usually, they’re kind of able to really enforce a propaganda line with real kind of lockstep unity across the board.
I don’t monitor the right wing media the way you do. Can you talk a little bit about what we’re seeing in the right wing media on the shutdown? Are we seeing some cracks due to things like Greene moving away from Trump?
Sheffield: Well, so they don’t talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene doing this because they don’t want to sow division. So they just—it’s not talked about, period.
But I will say that, within the right-wing media, yeah, there is frustration at this. And Fox, the other day, was telling Trump, you need to start talking about immigration more, and victims of illegal immigrant crime, and that sort of thing. So I expect that Trump actually will follow their advice.
They want him to highlight more specific victims, like Laken Riley and other people like that. Because, you know, and of course, in a country of 300 million people, there is no shortage of victims of crimes—of any kind of crime that you want, any kind of race, any kind of age—you can find them.
And so they’re trying to urge Trump to shift the focus to that. But it does get to an underlying point, though: that the power of right-wing media is more in its nihilism—it’s not in driving a positive agenda.
And I think that that’s something that people who are progressive—we have to remember that. Because, you know, in the course of marketing my book and talking about it with people on social media, you know, when I tell them, look, this is what Republicans know, a lot of people just want to say, well, they have all these billionaires, you know, it’s like they’re gods and they can snap their fingers and do whatever they want, you know.
And if that was true, then Democrats would never win elections. So, everybody has their own advantage. I think, one thing—having been on both sides of the aisle—that I can say is that each side thinks that the other side has all the advantages, and that’s just not true. Everybody has advantages, everybody has disadvantages, and you win when you maximize your advantages and, you know, don’t throw your money away.
I mean, like, Democrats, every cycle they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on local TV ads that everyone hates. No one likes these ads—and they don’t work. The academic political science literature shows that even in an environment where there are no opposition ads, the longest any ad lasts is a week. After that, no one remembers anything about it. It has no effect—it was nothing.
And Democrats are buying ads from Sinclair and from Fox. These are right-wing media outlets. They are funding right-wing media—over a billion dollars if you add it up over the cycles. It’s horrible.
Sargent: Well, I just want to return to something you brought up there about Fox News and immigration. I strongly suspect that the reason Fox News is telling Trump to highlight victims of immigrant crime is that they’re trying to reunify the party at a time when that unity is fracturing. Does that sound right to you?
Sheffield: That’s definitely what they’re trying to do. Like, the goal of right-wing media and of Trump is always to take the focus away from their agenda and onto anything else—literally anything else. So what Democrats have to do—like, there’s this big discussion now about, you know, the center people are the problem or the left-wing people are the problem. And the answer is no: you just have to attack a lot more and keep the focus on the extreme Republican agenda. Like, that’s what you gotta do.
Sargent: Absolutely. Well, let’s talk about the strains all this is putting on the MAGA coalition. You got at this a little earlier in the conversation. I think it’s almost a double whammy here.
So, from one side, you’ve got these moderate House Republicans who are very vulnerable heading into next year’s midterms, and they really can’t afford for the subsidies to expire and people’s premiums to spike. They’re gonna lose suburban voters over that—and a certain type of moderate suburbanite really has its place in the Trump coalition, as hard as that is for some people to accept.
But from the other side, the subsidies expiring will smash into a lot of the people in Trump’s working-class MAGA base very directly. And if I understood your earlier point correctly, Marjorie Taylor Greene has got her finger on that pulse. She gets that there’s a really deep contradiction in MAGA—in that MAGA really has made the Republican Party more dependent on working-class people even as it’s beholden to the oligarchs.
She’s kind of highlighting that as well. Can you talk about that whole set of fractures?
Sheffield: Sure. Yeah. And this is the fracture that has to be at the centerpiece of any Democratic strategy going forward—in every candidate, in every race. You have to maximize this rift because, you know, it’s a fundamental tension: the oligarchs that control the Republican Party—their goal is to destroy all government, sell it for pieces, and turn America into a RoboCop dystopia. That’s their goal.
And they’re fine with some of those dystopias being Christian supremacist and others of them being tech oligarchy, whatever—they don’t care. But that’s not what the Republican voters [want]. And there’s a caricature that a lot of progressives and centrists have about the Republican voter. Most Republican voters don’t actually know what Trump stands for outside of two or three issues.
And this was illustrated very well before last year’s election. The Washington Post did a poll with YouGov in which they asked people about specific policy items that Trump and Harris had advanced in their campaigns. And what they found in this poll was that Harris’s proposals were overwhelmingly more popular—and that Trump had far fewer proposals that had over 50 percent support.
And so this is about making the voters aware of who is doing this to you. This is the struggle of our moment now. And I know there’s this stereotype, again, as I was saying, that people think, well, people just vote for Trump because they’re racist or because they’re sexist or whatever hateful thing that they have. And, of course, there are plenty of people like that.
But, as Hillary Clinton noted correctly in the 2016 campaign, only about half of the Trump voters are these deplorables. The other half are people who just aren’t paying attention. They don’t follow the news. They don’t know the issues.
And so, when you focus to these voters and put it in front of them in an undeniable way—that, look, your money, your premiums are going to go up, you know, you’re going to lose this, you’re going to lose that, it’s going to be taken from you—and it’s, you know, that’s the beauty of a shutdown from a strategic standpoint.
Nobody cares about what congressional leaders have to say most of the time. They have to beg to get any kind of coverage in the mainstream media. But this is the moment where people are finally paying attention to them in the media—and it’s unavoidable to hear what they have to say. And this is why it’s working so well for the Democrats.
Sargent: Well, just to close this out, you mentioned earlier that any Democratic strategy right now has to be laser focused on exacerbating the rift that is opening up in the Trump slash MAGA coalition over all of this. What does that look like? And where do you think this is all going to go?
Sheffield: Well, another way of doing that is focusing on education. So, the Republican Party under Trump is trying to eliminate the Department of Education. I think most people don’t know that that’s happening. And they’re trying to cut science funding—you know, they’re doing all these horrible cuts.
So we have to put the focus on that and let people know this is going to impact you, and it’s going to impact your jobs. Another way to do that, you know, is to push for expanding these subsidies—don’t push for just keeping them. That’s one thing that Trump does well, and Republicans have done well in negotiations: they’ll have a thing that they push for as a concession, and then when you give it to them, they say, ‘Okay, now you have to do this.’
And if Democrats can do that and keep that focus on health care—say, we want to have more subsidies for people, we want to restore funding for rural hospitals—again, this is an issue that is just absolutely radioactive for them. So, the more that it can be talked about, the more Democrats should do it.
Sargent: Hundred percent. Matt Sheffield—really well said. Folks, check out Matt’s book; it’s called What Republicans Know. It’s about how the GOP fights the information wars and what Democrats can learn from that.
Matt, thanks so much for coming on, man.
Sheffield: Yeah, thanks. Great to be here.