The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 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.
Two high-quality polls just came out, and they both have President Trump cratering. His general approval rating is dropping, and so is approval of his handling of the economy. He’s in real trouble. Trump and his advisors don’t have much of an answer to this problem. Trump just unleashed a long rambling rant insisting that prices are really going down, not up. And his agriculture secretary followed suit with a set of claims that were even more ludicrous. So what happens if the economy really starts to dip? New Republic staff writer Timothy Noah has been writing well about this question. So today we’re talking with him about how much lower Trump could actually go here and what happens if the bottom falls out. Tim, good to have you on.
Timothy Noah: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Sargent: So let’s start with what Trump said in a speech on Wednesday. Listen to this.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): We’re also making incredible strides to make America affordable again. That’s a new word that they’re using. Affordability, they talk. They had the worst inflation in history. They had the highest prices in history. The country was going to hell. The only thing that we’re going up in is our stock market, okay? The only price that we really have. I mean, we’re bringing prices down. But they came up with a new word, affordability. And they look at the... We were all about affordability and everyone assumes that that meant that no, their prices were high.
Sargent: So the thing about this is that a lot of costs have gone up under Trump, but more to the point, to a greater degree than usual, Trump’s policies are to blame for what’s happening with prices. Can you explain all that for us and respond to what Trump said there?
Noah: Yes. I mean, this is a guy slapping tariffs on everything, and mostly imposing them on countries, not on goods. And of course that’s going to drive up the price of everything. He is now attempting to reverse the impact on groceries by removing tariffs on a few items like bananas and coffee, which—it was insane ever to put tariffs on bananas and coffee, because the United States does not have a domestic coffee industry or a domestic banana industry. We cannot grow coffee beans or bananas in the United States. So we’re never going to have parity with other countries on that.
He’s trying to address this affordability crisis, but at the same time making fun of it. And I really don’t think it comes off very well when a billionaire president is using the term affordability in a mocking way.
Sargent: The funny thing about Trump is that he’s incapable of admitting that something might be going the wrong direction under his presidency. So it makes him unusually badly equipped to handle a political crisis like this, doesn’t it?
Noah: Yes, exactly. I mean, he’s trying to blame it on Joe Biden, but of course Joe Biden isn’t president right now—he is. And he has now been president for almost a year. So it’s possible to track how things are going over the course of his second term thus far. And prices have been going up. Inflation has been on the rise. And we are now seeing that his favorability ratings are—I was just looking at a CNN poll from a couple of weeks ago—that had his favorability at its lowest point ever except in the immediate aftermath of January 6, 2021.
Sargent: Well, we have two new polls, and they’re really bad. A new Marist poll finds Trump’s overall approval rating at 39% with 56% disapproving. That’s bad. A new Marquette poll finds Trump’s overall approval slightly higher at 43%. But listen to this: Marquette has his approval on the economy at 36% to 64%, his approval on tariffs at 37% to 63%, and his approval on inflation and cost of living at 28% to 72% disapproving. That’s absolutely abysmal, and we need to remember that cost of living and inflation—those are the absolutely central concerns of voters right now.
What do you make of all these numbers?
Noah: Well, this is what got Trump elected. Trump would not be president if it weren’t for people being upset about the economy in November 2024. And they are still upset about the economy, arguably more upset about the economy. Look, inflation is going to continue with these tariffs. The only thing likely to bring prices down is a recession, which we could be on the verge of. So that would be a good news, bad news situation. The good news would be that, yes, prices would finally come down or at least stop rising. And the bad news would be we are in a recession.
Sargent: I just want to dwell on this one number. Cost of living was his central promise, the reason he got elected. As you say, now down to 28% approval. That is real dangerous territory for him, I think.
Noah: Absolutely. And the funny thing is presidents don’t usually have a lot of impact on inflation. It’s usually mostly up to the Fed Chairman, who Trump, of course, reviles and blames for what inflation there is. But Trump is an exception among presidents because of his tariff policy. So you can draw a direct line between Trump’s economic policy and rising prices.
Sargent: Well, since you brought up the Fed Chair, Jerome Powell, I just want to cite a rant that Trump unleashed about him as well.
President Trump (voiceover): I’d love to fire his ass. He should be fine. Guy’s grossly incompetent. You gotta work on him, The only thing Scott’s blowing it on is the Fed. Because the Fed, the rates are too high, Scott. And if you don’t get it fixed fast, I’m gonna fire your ass, okay?
Sargent: I mean, he’s, you know, he’s really in charge of the situation, isn’t he? He’s going to fire people. He’s going to get this fixed fast. He’s on top of everything. It’s the apprentice guy all over again.
Noah: It reminds me of 20-odd years ago when—remember when Trump tried to actually patent the expression you’re fired, which he used to say on his TV show? Right. He’s still on TV. He’s still back in that mental universe, I think.
But the funny thing is, if you want to fix prices, this isn’t the way to do it, is it? No, it’s not. Bessent, who has the reputation of being one of the more rational members of Trump’s administration, had this sort of pathetic performance on one of the Sunday talk shows where he was asked about beef prices—which shot up—and he blamed it on New World screwworm. He said migrants were coming across the border and they were bringing New World screwworm, which was killing our cattle.
This is completely ridiculous. Try and get a mental picture of this. New World screwworm—every once in a blue moon, a human gets it. I think we had the first case where a human got it last August; it was the first case observed in 50 years. This is a disease that spreads from cattle to cattle. What he seems to be suggesting is that migrants are sneaking across the Rio Grande with cattle, where they’re sure not to get noticed, right? It’s absurd.
Sargent: That actually occurs to me. If they’re actually going to say that, he’s basically saying that our border is so porous that you can just walk in with a herd of cattle and not get noticed. Doesn’t seem like a good argument to me. Well, let’s listen to a little more of some of these bad arguments. The message blaring forth from the administration right now is that everything’s just fine. Prices are falling everywhere. Listen to this from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. She admits beef prices are a problem, but then says this.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins (voiceover): In the larger context, almost everything else is coming down. Dairy, eggs, cheese, turkey for Thanksgiving next year. I think the basket is about 17 percent lower this year than it was last year.
Sargent: So Tim, that thing about the Thanksgiving meal is just BS. It’s based on a comparison of Walmart Thanksgiving packages. And this year’s is smaller with fewer goods than last year’s. That’s why it’s cheaper. But they’re really sticking with that one. They just can’t stop talking about it. Trump brought it up yet again in the speech. And on those specifics about prices, broadly speaking, grocery prices are up.
Noah: No, broadly speaking, I think the actual turkeys themselves may have come down a little bit, but I think the rest of it is wrong. Milk prices certainly are up.
Sargent: And groceries across the board, right?
Noah: And groceries across the board are up. Look, you want to be careful about what you wish for when you’re talking about prices. Nobody really wants prices to come down across the board. When that happens, you’re in a depression. What people really want is for prices to rise more slowly and for certain commodities, certain commodities that shoot up and down like oil, obviously, to come down. yeah, they are denying reality. They think people are stupid and will believe what they say and will not check. And the polls suggest that that strategy is not working.
Sargent: It certainly isn’t. There’s something about this that interests me as well. It’s kind of well understood as a political rule that you’re not supposed to tell people that the economy is just fine or getting better if they don’t feel it. Under the pundit rules of engagement, this gets you automatically tagged as out of touch with what real people are feeling. But Trump is not usually described as out of touch in that way. And I’m kind of curious as to why. It’s almost as if he’s understood to be such a relentless liar that he almost gets a weird pass on this type of lying about the economy. And yet the funny thing is that here’s a case where Trump really is out of touch with what ordinary people are going through. What do you make of this weird disconnect?
Noah: I think that he just he has never been able to handle adverse news. He makes a point. He has said that you You never say you’re sorry. You never admit fault. And he doesn’t have a playbook for dealing with bad developments. He didn’t during COVID and he doesn’t now. Remember, during COVID he spent half the time pretending that it wasn’t happening.
Sargent: Yeah, I think you get at a really essential point, which kind of gets back to what we talked about earlier, which is that Trump is uniquely badly equipped to handle serious crises because those require acknowledging that things aren’t going well and he can’t do that.
Noah: He can’t do that and on top of that people are afraid of giving him bad news. mean which is the my mentor Charlie Peters the founding editor of the Washington Monthly always said this was the central problem in government is that people at the agencies live in abject terror of passing on bad news, and it has to be overcome because if the people at the top don’t get the bad news, they lose their sense of reality and they can’t govern properly. I think Charlie would be absolutely astonished at the degree to which this is happening today in Washington.
Sargent: Well, and there’s another area where he’s uniquely poorly equipped because he’s particularly scary to people who would deliver bad news.
Noah: Yeah. I mean, if you’re a prosecutor and you’re to prosecute somebody and you say we don’t have a case, you get fired. We’ve seen that. So instead we see him pursuing really sort of dubious prosecutions of his enemies. And they’re not going to go anywhere. They’re going to get thrown out.
Sargent: So Trump makes it very clear with these kind of rituals of public humiliation that are designed as control devices. He lets people know very clearly that if you don’t carry out his bidding, you’re going to get publicly castigated in a really terrible way. And so he’s surrounded, particularly in a second term, by people who are in even more abject terror of not doing his bidding or telling the truth.
Noah: That’s right. And there are two things about that. One is he has has gotten further with that strategy than I ever would have imagined in my wildest dreams. But at the same time, it doesn’t work. He doesn’t know how to gauge the probability of success. He’s not interested in that. So, for example, on tariffs, the betting now is heavy that he’s going to lose his court case on tariffs and he’s going to have to replace hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. He just didn’t sort of take into account the possibility of losing.
Sargent: In fact, he’s out there saying that it’s going to be trillions of dollars, which is false.
Noah: Which is not true.
Sargent: Right. But so now we get to the fun part. You had this very good piece recently gaming out what a downturn, a serious downturn could look like. How much lower could this go, Tim? And where do you think we are right now? How precarious is all of it?
Noah: We’re on track to have the worst November in the stock market since 2008, which was two months after the crash in 2008. And that’s not good. We’ve seen a lot of volatility, but the direction in November has mostly been down.
Look, I don’t know whether there’s going to be an outright stock crash. I certainly hope there isn’t. But there are a lot of people who are predicting that there will be. And at the very least, we are going to have a bear market, which could easily induce a recession.
A lot of people are observing that it’s a tiny handful of stocks that’s driving the entire stock market—a handful of tech stocks, of which the biggest is Nvidia, which is the wildly successful AI chip manufacturer. And that’s a perilous situation, to be that dependent on these individual stocks.
So that’s the picture for the stock market. The rest of the other companies in the S&P 500 aren’t doing that well. Then you have consumer sentiment, which is still propping up the economy. If the stock market comes down, then the top 10% in the income distribution—which is basically, these are the people who are driving consumer purchases right now because we have such a grotesquely unequal economy—if they get hit with stock losses, then their consumption is going to go down. And at this point, that is the main thing that’s keeping the economy in good health.
So I think a recession is very likely in the next two or three months.
Sargent: And my God, if Trump is down in the 20s and 30s on some of these economic metrics now, it’s going to get even blacker for him.
Noah: It’s going to get blacker for him. He’s going to deny it’s happening, which is going to make it worse. I think we’re looking at a really grim downward spiral for Trump. I only hope that this economic downturn, which is likely, is a mild one.
Sargent: Well, unfortunately, we’re all hitched to Trump. So if he’s going to go on a downward spiral, all of us are. Timothy Noah, always great to talk to you, man. Thank you for all that. We really appreciate it.
Noah: Thank you, Greg.