The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 17 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.
Anxiety is rising among President Trump’s staunchest allies that he’s politically lost his way. Several new reports document that they fear the MAGA coalition is fragile, that Republicans are in political trouble in the midterms and that Trump isn’t doing enough about any of it. Meanwhile, Trump just exploded in fury on Truth Social saying he is now calling on Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s ties with Democrats. Yet as one Republican pointed out, it’s Trump who is overly obsessed with Epstein right now, and that’s part of the GOP’s political problem. It’s clear that Trump and the GOP are in very deep political trouble, but Trump doesn’t seem to know it. That puts him in a moment of extreme weakness. And yet, do Democrats know it? Are they really set to capitalize on it? Today we’re talking about all this with Michael Cohen, author of the very good Substack Truth and Consequences, who has new pieces out on Trump’s unpopularity and the GOP breakdown. Michael, good to have you on.
Michael Cohen: Greg, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So we have a couple striking new reports out right now. Let’s start with the one in the New York Times. It reports that Trump allies fear that his populist message has become muddled because he’s spending his time courting wealthy donors, like on his ballroom, and demanding Nobel Peace Prizes for his alleged successes abroad. He’s also talking about going to Davos and his advisors fear this would send the wrong message right now. Michael, what I find striking about this is that the GOP coalition seems to be in trouble. The non-MAGA voters don’t like the ballroom or the bizarre Nobel Prize antics and his own allies and advisors know it. What do you think of this?
Cohen: I mean, one thing I’m struck by in Trump’s second term is I don’t think I’ve ever seen a president who seems to care less about his political standing than Trump. I mean, he really doesn’t spend a lot of time and energy trying to improve how Americans see him. He seems very completely focused on his own sort of pet issues, which is, I would say, his legacy—which is why you see all these efforts to travel around the world trying to make peace deals, and his ballroom, I think, is part of that legacy consideration. And also his revenge tour. I mean, that is what seems to be driving him.
Really, you know, the things he has done so far—the big, beautiful bill, the shutdown, the refusal to bend on these Obamacare subsidy increases—they’re not… he doesn’t seem to be thinking about politics at all. He doesn’t seem overly concerned about how Republicans do in the elections next year.
And so from that perspective, if I was Republican, I would be pretty concerned about this, because you have a president who should be leading the way politically and is not.
Sargent: Well, you’re absolutely right to bring up the Affordable Care Act subsidies. In fact, the other report I wanted to bring up is from CNN, and it says that the expiration of these subsidies has stirred deep anxiety among some Republicans—particularly in the battlegrounds.
It occurs to me that the MAGA coalition is getting hit by a kind of double whammy. On one side, you’ve got the ACA subsidies lapsing—that’s going to hammer the Trump base. The economy is killing him with his own voters. But on the other, you’ve got key voters in the GOP coalition who voted for Trump, that helped Trump win, who don’t like all the ballroom antics and the Nobel Prize garbage and all that sort of stuff, and he’s not doing anything to appeal to those people.
It’s like a double blow, right?
Cohen: Yeah, the Obamacare subsidy story is underappreciated how much of a landmine this is for Republicans, right? I mean, I know the Democrats, you know, allegedly caved in the shutdown. I guess they did, they did cave in. They didn’t get to what they wanted, but they actually took the situation up politically so that this budget bill that they agreed to expires at the end of January.
And by that point, people will have already been paying these higher premiums for their health insurance. And I don’t know if people are aware of this, but according to a Kaiser Family Foundation report I saw earlier today, those premiums are expected to double in price—double. I mean, that is a huge increase for an ordinary American.
And here’s the thing: why are Republicans not more concerned about this? I don’t actually kind of get it. I really don’t. Democrats, in a way, gave them a lifeline by shutting the government down over this issue. If they compromised on it, it would have actually diffused what is a ticking time bomb, which is these increases.
And now actually the chances that the Republicans concede on this point and compromise has actually gone up, because I think once people realize how damaging this is gonna be politically, I think there’s going to be a lot of pressure on Speaker Johnson and, and, and John Thune in the Senate to find some way to avoid this happening.
Sargent: I think a lot of Republican elected officials still don’t quite understand the degree to which they depend on these new types of working class voters as well. Don’t you?
Cohen: Yes. And look, you really saw this in what happened in New Jersey and Virginia in these off-year elections. In 2024, Trump made serious inroads with younger voters, with Hispanic voters. You saw that completely reversed in New Jersey and Virginia. Now, some people—on the Hispanic voters—some people would say it’s because of the mass deportations. I’m sure that’s part of it.
But part of it too is some of these voters voted for Trump because they were unhappy about the economy under Biden. Think they’re happy now? I don’t really get the impression that they are. If you look at the numbers on the economy, most voters are not happy with the state of the economy, and they’re not happy with Trump’s attention to the issue, or lack thereof.
Same thing with young voters. The switch in young voter support against Trump is overwhelming. I saw a poll about a week or two ago—I think before the Tuesday election—that showed Democrats… there was a question about the congressional ballot: Which candidate do you support, the Democratic or Republican candidate? And among 18- to 29-year-olds, Dems were leading by 27 points. That number probably has even gone up since last week. And that’s kind of what the Republicans are dealing with right now.
And I think a lot of that has to do with the economy. And so that they are willing to, A, have these bad numbers in the economy and then proceed with these premium increases—it’s political malpractice. It’s a hard thing to grasp what’s going on up there on Capitol Hill that they’re allowing this to happen.
Sargent: It really is remarkable. And I think maybe the way to think about it is not a double whammy, it’s a triple whammy because we’ve got Jeffrey Epstein stuff, which is absolutely deadly for Trump and the Republican Party right now. And Trump just exploded on Truth Social over the Epstein stuff. I’m going to read a big chunk of it because it’s so deranged:
“I will be asking AG Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, JP Morgan Chase, and many other institutions and people to determine what was going on with them and him. This is another Russia, Russia, Russia scam with all arrows pointing to the Democrats.”
Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think that’s going to work, Michael, do you?
Cohen: Do you think anybody believes that outside of, like, the pure MAGA base? I understand that—that Trump wants to get this issue to go away. But it’s sort of like the idea that you can do that by sort of pointing to Democrats, when I think something like half the emails that were released by Democrats last week or this week contain Trump’s name. That’s a pretty hard argument to make, especially when you’re actually talking directly about Trump.
So I think that again, I get what they’re doing, but I don’t think it’s gonna work. And I do think that the Epstein story, unlike every other scandal that involves Trump, is one that actually [is] going to strike at the heart of the MAGA base. Because there are Republican voters who truly believe in this conspiracy around Epstein, and they—I don’t think they’re— I think this is an issue where they actually might break with Trump.
And you’re seeing this on the Hill, by the way. You’re seeing already Democrats—I mean Republican senators and congressmen—who are distancing themselves on Epstein, or at least saying that they’re gonna support this House vote on releasing the Epstein files. I saw on CNN this week, Senator Kennedy from Louisiana coming out and saying that he, you know, might vote to open… on this, this bill to open up the Epstein files that are at DOJ. That’s a huge shift. I mean, Kennedy is a big supporter of the president, but I think he understands where the political winds are blowing, and on this issue, they’re blowing against the White House.
And I don’t think the White House—I don’t think Trump—truly realized that. And going after Bill Clinton… And I, and by the way, it’s worth noting that he wrote this, that Bondi should go after Clinton. Apparently within, like, the hour of that happening, Bondi appointed a prosecutor to look into Clinton’s role. I mean, you know, this is just an obvious effort to try to obfuscate Trump’s own relationship with Epstein.
Sargent: It’s ludicrous. And then Marjorie Taylor Greene got another dimension of the Epstein thing. I think she pointed out that Trump is spending his time trying to stop the Epstein files from coming out. In other words, Trump is the one who’s obsessed with Epstein, not Democrats. Well, Democrats want the files, but it’s Trump who’s really letting it consume him in some sort of really profoundly pathological way.
And we all know why, because he’s desperately trying to keep it from coming out. But I think the core truth that Marjorie Taylor Greene got at there is that the Epstein files is really bad for Trump in two ways. Right? The more obvious, superficial way, which is that he’s in the damn files and he doesn’t want ’em to come out, but every second he spends trying to stop the files from coming out reminds everybody that he’s taken his eye off the ball of the economy—or worse, that he’s just wrecking the economy and doesn’t give a shit about it.
Cohen: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s right, and I also think that they have gone above and beyond trying to cover up or trying to make this issue go away with Epstein. It’s not working. And they—and I don’t even know if Trump’s guilty of anything. I really don’t. I’m not convinced he did anything wrong except maybe, perhaps, you know, not speaking up when he may have known that Epstein was abusing young girls, but he’s… he looks guilty. He’s made himself look guiltier than he probably already is.
He did the same thing on the, on the Russian investigation to some degree, and I think that’s a political problem for him. It’s a political problem for the party. And I do think every day they spend on Epstein is a day they’re not talking about the economy, and that’s a good thing for Democrats.
Sargent: So on your Substack, you had this piece that used the New York Times’ chart—polling chart—of Trump’s approval, which is an average of the polls, and it looks like it’s now nosedived to its lowest point of his second term. It’s down to 41% approve and 55% disapprove. That is a negative-14 rating, and the trend is very clearly down in recent days.
Can you talk a little bit about that? I mean, these are bad numbers, and I think probably the Times approval average might even be a little high because some of the recent polls we’ve seen—quality polls—have it even lower than that, like in the high thirties. But still, to have the average of polls, the New York Times average, down to 41–55, negative-14, that’s terrible. Can you talk about it?
Cohen: Yeah, no. Look, the AP poll from—I think it was this week or last week—had him at 36%, which is insanely low. I don’t remember it being that low even in his first term.
Look, I’ve been saying this for months now, and I think it’s just the story that not enough people are appreciating. Donald Trump is historically and deeply unpopular. Okay? His numbers for a first-term president are insanely low. And they have—they have been—they have been going lower, you know, and there seems to be very clear… this Navigator survey poll out, I think it was yesterday or today, that showed that his numbers went down during the shutdown. The shutdown definitely hurt him.
His numbers on the economy are in the 20%. He’s getting killed on health care. Even immigration, he’s doing poorly across the board. He is unpopular. And I don’t think—I think it wasn’t until last week and the election returns in New Jersey and Virginia—people suddenly realized how unpopular he is and how damaging this is to the party.
I mean, you can talk all you want about Democrats and are they too liberal, are they too moderate, or whatever you want to discuss. But the reality of the situation is that Democrats won big in New Jersey, Virginia, for one major reason: because Donald Trump is unpopular and people want to just send him a message.
And, by the way, it’s not just that people disapprove of him; they strongly disapprove of him. His strong-disapprove numbers are much higher than his even sort-of slightly disapprove numbers. This is the biggest story in American politics, and it’s not—I don’t see much reason to believe it’s gonna get better.
There was a hilarious story I’m seeing about the White House which wants to send Trump out to talk about the economy. I mean, good luck with that. He’s not capable of doing that at all. When he goes out on these speaking tours, he talks about his sort of pet issues that he cares about. It’s clear he doesn’t care about the economy. He cares about his legacy. He cares about his ballroom. He cares about his revenge tour. He doesn’t care about the economy, and he has no really good ideas how to fix it.
So to me, this is a situation that is bad for the White House and bad for Republicans, and it’s getting worse. I don’t see it improving anytime soon.
Sargent: And you could even slot the Epstein thing into the revenge tour idea here. So in a funny way, that too works against Trump because nobody likes the revenge tour stuff. No one likes the politicization of the Department of Justice. No one likes the fact that Trump is spending all his time sicking prosecutors on his Democratic enemies. That stuff works against him. All of it works against him. And I don’t know if he knows it.
Cohen: Oh, I don’t think he knows it at all. Or if he does, I don’t think he cares. I just don’t think he cares about the Republican Party. I don’t think he cares about the long-term future of the party. I think he’s concerned about Democrats taking back the House in ’26 because he is worried about maybe getting impeached again. But I don’t think he cares politically about—from a policy standpoint—about what happens.
And, by the way, I think it’s also interesting—we could talk about this a little bit—that, you know, one of the ways Trump was trying to get around the fact that he’s so unpopular, and Democrats are probably gonna do well in the midterms, was he tried to get all the Republican states to redistrict. Well, that’s not working out too well right now.
I wrote a piece out this week about it. If you add up the numbers, it’s quite possible that Democrats actually gain more seats from redistricting than Republicans do. Just today, an hour or so ago, Indiana Republicans announced they’re not going to redistrict. They got a hard, hard push from the White House on this, and they said no to the White House.
That speaks to something else, which I think is very characteristic of the White House: that they do not have the same kind of political persuasive capabilities that they once had, or thought they once had, even with their own members.
So that is a good… and you may see on this Epstein thing—and just to go back to that for a second—you could see a good number of Republicans in the House end up voting to open up the files. And if that happens, I don’t think there’s any chance the Senate blocks that.
If that happens, it’s not just a problem for Trump in the substance of the policy of releasing all these files. It’s a problem because it shows that he is weak, and he’s weak with his own party. So that becomes a much bigger political problem for Trump to deal with.
Sargent: Right. I have trouble seeing 13 Republican senators supporting, releasing the Epstein files, but I certainly hope you’re right and I wouldn’t rule it out at all, especially if the vote is very big in the house. As you say, that really brings a lot of pressure, and as you said earlier, Senator Kennedy moving like that is also a key tell. You never know, Donald Trump has a lock on his party until he doesn’t. That’s the thing that people forget, is that politics isn’t static. It actually changes.
Cohen: No, it changes a lot. And actually in these days, it changes, you know, from month to month and year to year for sure.
Sargent: So you had in your piece, just to wrap this up, you talked about how these key voter groups move towards Spanberger in Virginia and Sherrill in New Jersey. And you talked a little bit about that, especially the young voters. I’m so old that I remember when pundits were saying that the young voters shift towards Trump was the end of the Democratic Party, basically. Somehow all these pundits forgot that the way politics works is that the party in the White House is the one who get the referendum in the midterms and in the off year elections. Talk about that.
Cohen: I love to point this out: you know, the last three presidential elections we’ve had governing trifectas won by each party in each of these three elections—2016 Republicans, 2020 Democrats, 2024 Republicans. You know the last time that happened in American politics? Never. It’s never happened before, which says to me that there is a major sentiment of anti-incumbency in the country right now, which also means that if you’re drawing your conclusion from what happened the last election, you might need to update your priors.
And I think what we saw, you know, last week was that what happened in 2024 may not be relevant anymore. I don’t think it’s relevant at all in 2025. And the young-people thing is interesting. You know, if you look at 2020, you look at the midterms—’18 and ’22—Democrats did very, very well with young voters. And in ’24, you saw slippage.
Now, to assume from that slippage in a year in which there was a great deal of anti-incumbency, in which the economy was a major concern among all voters, especially young people—if you drew from that that all of a sudden Democrats are screwed with young voters, I mean, you really were sort of, I mean, based on a sample size of one. And what we’ve seen in the past nine months is there’s no group in which Trump has lost ground more dramatically than with younger voters.
And this should surprise nobody. I mean, from a cultural standpoint, younger Americans are much more aligned with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party, and that’s been true for more than a decade now. None of this should surprise us.
You know, but beyond that, what happened in ’24 was that a lot of young people were upset about the state of the economy—they couldn’t find jobs, inflation was high. Well, guess what? The economy isn’t very good now either. So, not surprisingly, those same voters have switched back to the Democratic Party. I think also, by the way, they’re not terribly happy with a lot of the policies that Trump’s implementing, like on deportations and on other cultural issues.
So I just think that we should not… remember that things can change quickly in politics. You know, if the president is not doing what he promised to do, if he is… the economy is struggling, there’s going to be a consequence from that. And these voters who may have switched to Trump in ’24—if they switched—means that their allegiances are fluid. And we’re seeing that now that they’re flowing back to the Democratic Party.
Sargent: Absolutely. So let’s try to tie all this together. So one of the storylines here is that the low-propensity voters who aren’t really MAGA ideologues in any sense—they’re very fluid, as you said—we’re talking about young voters, you know, non-white working class of a certain type, they moved to Trump a little bit in 2024.
Now we’re seeing they’re really moving in the other direction pretty hard. Chances are that in the midterms we’ll see that as well. They’re motivated by the economy. So that’s one story that’s happening.
Then we have this other story in which Donald Trump is completely fucking his base in every conceivable way, including the elements of his base who are hardcore MAGA, or at least pretty, pretty committed to Trump—maybe not super, super hardcore MAGA, but pretty committed to him, right?
So you’re saying the Epstein files alienate those voters, the globalist stuff alienates those voters. There you have, I think, the two big stories of the moment. Can you talk about that?
Cohen: Well, you know, think one thing I think I’m surprised by is how big a story this Epstein files issue really is. Because I have to say, I’ve always been—because I was skeptical there was really much here. I’ve never bought into a lot of the conspiracy theories around Epstein. But I think what we’ve seen over the past couple of months is a recognition that this is a big story for a lot of people on the right.
And not just on the right, but in general, across the political spectrum. But it’s a story that motivates a lot of Republican voters and was a big motivation for them. And, you know, what you’re seeing, I think, with this story—the way that it has continued to metastasize over the past couple of months—is that people care about this and that this is something that Trump doesn’t have a, a good response on. And I think it’s hurting him politically in a way that I don’t—I frankly didn’t—really expect.
And I think it’s… look, you could say all the bad things in the economy about Trump, all things are going to hurt Trump, and that’s the major thing that’s going to hurt Trump. The economy is the biggest factor; that’s what’s going to hurt him the most. But this Epstein story is kind of—this is a nagging story that continues to chip away at his support, especially, I’d say, among, you know, these sort of committed MAGA voters.
I mean, look, there’s probably 30% of MAGA voters who will vote for Trump no matter what, support Trump no matter what. But I think there are some softer Trump voters out there who are upset about this. And I think, will they still vote for Trump? Probably. But will they vote for Republicans in 2026? I don’t know.
That’s why I said before, I’m kind of getting to the point now where I think a lot of these Republican senators and House members may conclude they don’t want to be on the wrong side of their own voters on this issue. That could be wrong; I suspect that’s what’s happening. And when you see somebody—Kennedy—come out and say that, that makes me think this is a real thing.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you what, the size of the defections or deflections as Donald Trump put it in one of his deranged tweets is going to be a very big tell. Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Michael Cohen’s Substack, Truth and Consequences. Michael, always good to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Cohen: Greg, always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.