The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 10 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.
President Donald Trump’s anger is mounting over last week’s crushing GOP losses. In a series of rants, he vented at Democrats over what he called the “affordability con job.” He claimed he doesn’t want to talk about affordability at all, and he snapped at a reporter who brought up facts that contradicted what he was saying about prices. All this comes as two new analyses show that the GOP losses might have been worse than we thought, particularly in terms of what they say about the fragility of the MAGA coalition. So we’ve been wondering, what do vulnerable House Republicans think when they hear Trump go into denial about what happened? What do Republicans do if they’re not allowed to tell the truth about the unpopularity of Trump’s policies? We’re talking about all this with Joe Perticone, who covers Congress for the bulwark and has a good piece exploring the deep roots of GOP denial about their losses. Joe, thanks for coming on.
Joe Perticone: Glad to be on.
Sargent: So Trump has taken to talking about Walmart, which just announced that its promotional Thanksgiving dinner is cheaper than last year’s. He says this actually shows that prices are down, not up—and that, in turn, shows Democrats’ message was a lie.
Listen to this.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): So I just heard this yesterday that Walmart said that the Thanksgiving was 25 more expensive, 25 percent more expensive under Biden. That’s a big… to me that’s a… that’s a big number because Walmart’s respected. I mean, Walmart is Walmart and, you know, they’re giving you prices. So that would mean that the whole series of pricing and costs, you know, the groceries and everything else, it was a con job. It was a con job. Affordability, they call it, was a con job by the Democrats.
Sargent: So the whole Walmart thing is nonsense. This year’s Thanksgiving basket is missing a bunch of items that last year’s had, and it wouldn’t be a good gauge of grocery prices anyway—which absolutely are up.
Joe, what do you think of Trump’s idea of an “affordability con”? Is that good political messaging?
Perticone: I think it shows he’s starting to realize—or maybe his team’s starting to realize—that he’s being treated like a normal politician, at least in this context. Biden went through the same thing, where they said it’s all good, but people were saying, no, it’s not.
And we saw that in the elections this week, in which people in the supposed Trump coalition really broke, and it wasn’t this ironclad coalition of voters. They rejected the first year of what they’ve seen, which means that he hasn’t really corrected anything.
And if anything, it’s gotten worse. I mean, we see it not just in groceries, but electricity prices, all kinds of utilities going up. I think the one good thing he has going is gas prices are a little bit lower—but not as low as he promised.
Sargent: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting that you talk about him being subject to the normal rules of politics—which I think is what you’re getting at. You know, in conventional political punditry and analysis, the biggest cardinal sin of all is to contradict the voters on what the economic conditions they’re experiencing really are.
And Trump’s doing that to the max. He’s saying, I’m not even talking about it. It’s all bullshit. And for a normal politician, that would be the cause of fifty new columns saying he’s totally out of touch, he’s totally in denial. I don’t think we’ll get that with Trump, but he is going down that same conventionally bad path, isn’t he?
Perticone: Yeah, he gets this, like, a jester’s privilege—which is kind of a medieval term—where, you know, because he’s a liar, and because he’s always joking or not telling the truth, everyone just kind of brushes it aside as, oh, that’s how he acts.
But we can see now that people are at least saying, that’s not true, you’re not doing it for me the way you said you would. And that’s toxic in politics.
Sargent: The jester’s privilege. That’s a good one. Talk about it more, will you?
Perticone: Yeah. I mean, think about it—in medieval times, the jester could even mock the monarch, and people just laughed because they were like, that’s his job—to be a bumbling, lying fool. And Trump has benefited from that.
He tells lies all the time about, like, the most mundane things, and so nobody cares—nobody bats an eye. But he’s seeing consequences now, and you can see that in his frustration and how he’s handled just this prices thing.
Sargent: Well, let’s listen to a little more of Trump—speaking to him being frustrated. First, a reporter brought up the facts about the Walmart Thanksgiving baskets, and Trump reacted very badly.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, I haven’t heard that you’re telling me. Who are you with? Who are you with?
Reporter (voiceover): I’m NBC News, sir.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): Fake news. You’re fake news. What? NBC’s gone down the tubes along with most of the rest of them.
Sargent: Now listen to Trump rage a bit more about the “affordability con.”
President Donald Trump (voiceover): The reason I don’t wanna talk about affordability is because everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under sleepy Joe Biden.
Sargent: So Trump is really angry, and it’s really something to behold. Not only does Trump refuse to admit to what happened in the election and how voters feel about it—additionally, no one is allowed to talk about it.
Reporters have been warned: if they tell the truth about prices under Trump, they and their news outlets will face very public castigation from him.
Joe, what do you make of what you heard in those two audio clips?
Perticone: I think there’s obviously the frustration—he doesn’t like being contradicted on what he either says or believes is the truth. But this kind of trickles down now in the GOP. And we saw that—I certainly saw it on the Hill this week—talking to these members of Congress, saying, should this cause alarm?
And before votes even started, before I could ask them, they were already starting this narrative that it was just blue states voting for blue candidates—that’s what we expected. I was talking to Rick Scott from Florida, and I said, well, that’s not exactly the whole picture. If you look at, you know, the Atlanta metro area, you saw places like Cobb County go from Harris plus fifteen to Democrats plus forty-five. And then you had red areas like Forsyth that were Trump plus thirty finish only, you know, Republican plus twelve, I think.
And so those kinds of things—and trends happening in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, like the bellwether area—they had Democratic sweeps at the countywide level. And so when I kind of confronted him with it, he just kind of fell back onto, well, we have to reflect on every race.
Most of the people I spoke to—the senators, Republicans—they didn’t entertain any kind of reflection. Maybe because it’s forbidden, or maybe because they just don’t want to. But Democrats are now living with this panic of what happened in 2024. Republicans did not react the same way, at least from what I’ve heard this week. And I’m not really seeing it on the internal political side from them either—which is dangerous for them.
Sargent: It’s crazy spin, because the evidence is very clear that they lost ground with their own people. We saw both Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey gain ground with working-class voters. They both basically erased the GOP advantage with non-college voters, getting up to fifty percent. And those are overperformances relative to previous contests.
And, you know, there was one thing that I really found interesting about your piece—which is that, look, it’s not all that unusual for parties to spin losses. But in this case, the whole thing was really exacerbated in a major way by Trump’s pathologies and his kind of ironclad grip on the entire party’s discourse.
No one’s allowed to dare say that Trump was the problem here. Everyone had to kind of just pretend that Trump was telling the truth when he said, oh, you guys didn’t talk about my policies enough. Can you talk about that dynamic—how it just, how it just makes it worse for them?
Perticone: Yeah. Well, we saw a little bit of them maybe starting to blame Trump for things in 2022, after there was the fumbling of not taking back the Senate majority. And that quickly subsided, because Trump inserted himself into the presidential race much sooner than candidates normally do. He quickly consolidated, and they all got on board—and you haven’t seen that in the aftermath of this.
And part of that is why House Republicans have functioned so much better than they have in previous years—this year—because Trump is pulling all the strings now. Like, Mike Johnson is gonna end up looking like a pretty effective Republican speaker compared to the past three of them, purely because Trump is the one dictating everything.
I don’t think they’re not realizing there’s a problem. I think they understand there’s a culture of retribution for any kind of disobedience. So they’re all really toeing the line in ways that are probably unhealthy for them politically.
Sargent: Yeah, probably. We’ve got these two new statistical analyses of the election out right now. One is from The New York Times’ Nate Cohn, who looked at Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill’s wins in Virginia and New Jersey and concluded they flipped as much as seven percent of Trump voters—that is, voters who voted for Trump in 2024—in their direction.
In Jersey, Sherrill won back as much as eighteen percent of the Hispanic support that Trump had gotten in 2024. Hispanics moved back to Spanberger as well. Meanwhile, a lot of Hispanics who had supported Trump also stayed home—and all of this has relevance for the 2026 midterms.
Joe, what do you think of that analysis, and is the broader pattern here that that analysis found something that Republicans on the Hill, particularly vulnerable ones, acknowledge?
Perticone: I think we’ve seen a lot of anecdotal stories in the past several months—or the past year—that Trump’s been president, where you’ve talked to Hispanic Americans who say, I thought he was only going to go after the bad ones. I didn’t think he was going to go after me and all the people in my community.
And you have places, like in parts of Southern California, where priests have said, you don’t have to come to church anymore—which is a very huge break in protocol in the Catholic Church—because they’re afraid of being rounded up.
And so we’re learning that the Hispanics who all shifted toward Trump, it’s not this ironclad coalition. They’re actually turning into a major swing demographic here. And yes, Trump has decreased border crossings like no president in recent memory, but I think they’re starting to take note of the profiling and the abuse.
And it seemed—like I said—it seemed very anecdotal leading up to this, but the election showed that it is really moving the needle on a political level.
Sargent: So G. Elliot Morris looked at an even broader set of races and concluded that working-class and lower-income nonwhites—and also young Americans—moved back to Democrats by an average of twenty-five points. Morris concludes that this really undermines the idea that Trump’s 2024 win represented a realignment.
The realignment theory has been that Trump’s success with those demographics is something durable. It represents, like, a deep underlying shift of the electorate toward conservative populism—or Trumpism, or whatever you call it.
Joe, it’s my sense, anyway, that Hill Republicans are treating the gains that were made in 2024 among those demographics as something that they can kind of count on—like they’ve put them in the bank, that they’re there for them for future races. But they probably won’t be. Is that what Republicans think? Do they think that they can bank on those gains?
Perticone: I think that they viewed Trump’s win in 2024 as, like, a new coalition. And it’s not looking like that—partly because Republicans don’t perform as well in this current era when Trump’s not on the ballot.
But you also have, for example, after the election, Democrats were kind of panicking, saying, we need a liberal Joe Rogan, which was kind of silly. You’re not going to just create a liberal Joe Rogan—but they have been very active. And so I wonder if this is, with young voters, a little bit of a confirmation of their new tactics.
For example, during the government shutdown—which is now thirty-eight days, the longest ever—House Democrats have held these media-row-type events in the Capitol with influencers, creators, and media outlets, which historically have only been reserved for big events like the State of the Union. But they’ve done several. They’ve also just done a lot more outreach to find new media.
And I think that might be—maybe it could be—cracking into the younger voters who swayed right. This could be maybe the first kind of data point in understanding that. But, you know, time will tell.
Sargent: That’s really interesting. I think there may be another factor as well. If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that Democrats are breaking into those information spaces that are hard to reach traditionally for Democrats—places where the whole constellation of MAGA influencers dominate. And that’s very heartening news for Democrats, if that’s right.
I think maybe another part of it, though, is that Trump’s presidency—and the sort of parade of horrors that it produces, the visuals—that stuff is tailor-made for social media. It’s super shareable. It’s very dramatic, very powerful, very visual. That stuff is breaking through in a major way.
Note Joe Rogan, who you brought up, is constantly—at this point—talking about the mass deportations and the ICE raids. That stuff is really, really resonating deep in those info spaces. And if I’m a Democratic strategist, I’m looking at that and saying, hey, Trump has given us a way to get into these places now. What do you think?
Perticone: Yeah, a lot of those podcasters and content creators who weren’t exactly or explicitly political, but who very [much] leaned into Trump—the difficulty for Republicans is those guys aren’t Republicans. You can’t contain them. They can’t stay on message.
So when someone like Joe Rogan starts breaking, that is devastating, because his audience is the same—or it’s grown—but he’s not toeing the Republican line the ways in which he was last November.
Sargent: So when you’re on the Hill, Joe, and you talk privately to Republicans, do they admit to some of the stuff or not? And how do you see this playing out from now into the 2026 midterms?
Perticone: So, in the wake of this past election—this past week—they have not come to… this is why I wrote in my piece that it’s a state of denial. I didn’t really view it as spin. It looked more like, no, it’s going to be fine. And that, you know, that’s not good for them.
So, in the early first Trump term, you would get all these Republicans who would talk to us privately about how they hate him. They’d say they think it’s all going to blow over soon—they can control him. Now they can’t do that. And now I think they’re all on board.
But you’re starting to see some people make a calculated dash—or maybe create an exit strategy—like Marjorie Taylor Greene. She’s, you know, she was saying Nancy Pelosi was this great legislator, while several years ago she was saying she should be executed for treason.
So, you are seeing some Republicans get wise, but I think they’re doing it in a more calculated way because they have to be. They can’t just break with Trumpism because there’s political consequences. Like, Thomas Massie is the only one who’s done any kind of formal public break—and he was always like that in private as well—but he’s done this formal public break. He’s got primary challenges now; he’s under constant attack.
Someone like Rand Paul is kind of getting that treatment to a lesser degree. But you’re still seeing a few Republicans maybe start to think there’s going to be a life after Trump. And what does that look like? Does it say, oh, I’m the next Trump? I think you’ll see some of those. Or they might say, true Trumpism has never been tried. You know, I guess we’ll see.
But you’re starting to see little cracks—but it’s not in a meaningful way that I think Republicans will be able to seize on in a year’s time.
Sargent: And how do you see all this playing out into the 2026 midterms? Do you sense that what we saw on Tuesday is really a harbinger?
Perticone: So the Supreme Court—if they block Trump’s tariff ability—they might give him a gift. They’ll, you know, prevent him from savaging the economy further, which he won’t like, but it might end up helping him in some ways.
But it could end up being that prices could continue to rise, or they could stay the same. Or, for example, prices could stay the same even though economic conditions get better, because companies don’t want to lower their prices once they’ve raised them.
And so there’s a lot of anxiety—or there should be a lot of anxiety—for Republicans. This is a big warning sign, what happened this week, and it could very much continue going into next year. And it’s not a lot of time.
Sargent: And this kind of lock that Trump has on the Republican Party—and sort of brain lock on the entire MAGA-slash-GOP information universe—suggests to me that they’ll continue with the deportations and the ICE raids, and even ramp them up, which they don’t seem to be willing to admit is really working against them.
Perticone: Yeah. In all of these states that they’re doing this—you know, they’re going after immigrants not just in California, for example, where they’re doomed anyway—but they’re doing it in all of these states that they need to rely on.
And as we’ve seen, it’s just marking these huge shifts and turning a new bloc of swing voters that are highly unpredictable, because they’re a new bloc and there’s no track record for determining how they’ll switch votes in the coming elections—except for these past two years, really.
Sargent: Well, that would be really something else if they continue and they just completely throw away in the midterms the gains that Trump made with Hispanics, which were significant. Joe Perticone, that was an awesome discussion. Thanks so much for coming on. Really good stuff.
Perticone: Thanks for having me.