The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 24 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.
Suddenly, a bunch of media outlets seem to have figured something out. President Donald Trump is really, really unpopular. There’s long been a tendency to ascribe to Trump something akin to magical political powers, but there’s been a palpable shift in the discourse, and we think that’s highly significant. In one example, Axios, which is generally friendly to Republicans, reported that everywhere Republicans look, they see big political trouble. Axios set its “red alert” time for Trump and the GOP. In another example, a leading polling analyst called Trump’s fortunes “atrocious” and “horrific.” We think Democrats should talk up Trump’s weaknesses a lot more and push the media to tell this story more as well. So today we’re scheming about all this with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, one of our favorite observers of MAGA and media foibles alike. Amanda, good to have you on as always.
Amanda Marcotte: Thank you so much for having me.
Sargent: So let’s start by listening to the striking polling analysis from CNN’s Harry Enten. It’s a bit long, but it’s worth it. Listen to this.
Harry Enten (voiceover): I would say this is probably the worst 10 day period for the president in the polls his entire second term. The numbers are just atrocious. What are we talking about here in terms of net approval rating? Well, take a look. These are all November polls. The best one of the group puts him at 14 points underwater. That’s the Marquette University Law School poll tied for the worst he’s ever had in that poll. Fox, 17 points underwater. Marist, 17 points underwater. The Reuters-Ipsos poll, 22 points underwater. And then taking the cake, the AP NORC poll, 26 points underwater. If you think this is bad, what is driving these horrific numbers for Donald Trump? Well, why don’t we take a look at independents? Trump’s not approving with independents. Back in January, he was close to even. He was at minus four points. Not great, but not terrible. Look at this number. 43 points underwater with independents in the most recent average of these polls. When you are 43 points underwater with independents, you know you’re doing terribly. You can’t win with this. If this holds for next year’s midterm election, wave adios amigos. Goodbye. See you later to that House Republican majority.
Sargent: So that’s really something. To recap, Trump is underwater by anywhere from 14 to 26 points in all these polls. And in an average, he’s underwater by 43 points with independents. Amanda, I didn’t expect it to happen that quickly. Did you?
Marcotte: No, I didn’t really expect it to be this quick. I expected he would lose a lot of popularity over time, I would like to wish I was smart enough to have seen that, but I kind of think it was hard to predict because, like, has this ever happened with any president? That they fall off a cliff so fast?
Sargent: Part of the reason this is such a surprise to so many people, including reporters, is because there’s been this kind of built-in tendency to treat Trump as having something like magical powers. This has just been an enormous problem in the discourse, from my point of view, for a long time. It’s been almost shocking how bad the coverage has been in that regard. There’s always this tendency to treat Trump as if he has some sort of mystical grip on some sort of deeper American essence that we’re all missing. Now, I think that’s partly because, you know, coastal elites flagellate themselves and hate themselves and all that, and blame themselves for missing the Trump phenomenon. But still, it’s been really bad, hasn’t it?
Marcotte: Yeah. And I think this is one place where I’ve always been annoyed with the mainstream media coverage of this. I agree with you that it’s coastal elites—people who maybe have never really lived amongst the middle of the flyover country of this kind. And so they assume there’s just some kind of thing that Donald Trump has, some magic that he’s working that is invisible to them with ‘ordinary people.’ But I’m from Texas. I grew up in rural Texas. Most of the people I grew up around are Republicans. And I just don’t think that it is like that. I think what has happened is a little bit more complicated than folks believe in the media. And I think that Donald Trump’s charisma is not nearly as strong as people assume it is. I feel—and have always felt—that one day he’s going to be embarrassing for these people, and they’re going to pretend like they were never big supporters of his. And right now it’s just like, I think they like the MAGA hat kind of even more than they like Donald Trump, per se.
Sargent: Well, we are seeing a shift in the media coverage. Finally, the New York Times had a front page piece about how Republicans are now beginning to look beyond Trump. The piece noted that Trump just lost on the Jeffrey Epstein files, lost big in fact. It also noted that Republicans just got blown out in the recent elections and that even some Republicans are starting to say that the basic laws of midterm elections are kicking in against even the almighty Donald Trump. Amanda, so the corollary of what we’ve been saying is that there’s also this tendency in the discourse to treat Trump as immune to those types of rules and structural factors of politics, like the way midterm elections work against the party in power. But even that seems to be giving away now. What do you think of that?
Marcotte: I wish people remembered what happened in 2018, right? Democrats had sweepingly huge election wins because not only did the rules of midterm elections apply, but Donald Trump motivates his opposition. I think we saw this pattern happen twice, where a lot of people just assumed he wasn’t going to win, so they didn’t turn out in 2016 or 2024 in the numbers that they should have. But now that he’s in office, people are freaking out and they’re mobilizing. We’re seeing this with the No Kings protests. We’re seeing a lot of reason—the people that are fighting back against ICE—we’re seeing a lot of reason for people to be like, oh shit, he’s the president again, I guess I better get off the couch. I think that’s kind of what we’re seeing here.
And I will not be surprised if turnout is really high in the midterms. And that’s all before you even get into the fact that the elephant in the room is that Donald Trump is 79 years old, and he is not looking good these days. And I think that his ability to be a strongman leader of the MAGA cults kind of depends on him looking like someone who’s going to survive for the next few years. I think there’s a bet that increasingly few people are interested in taking.
Sargent: Well, I will tell you, as part of this kind of media turn against Trump, it’s clear that a lot of MAGA figures are now questioning Trump’s strength and his ability to hold the movement together. And that’s its own sort of death knell. The Axios piece that I referenced earlier actually cited, “rising internal MAGA drama and division,” as part of their diagnosis for saying that this is a red alert moment for Trump and the Republican Party. The Axios piece was really surprising. It cited this Fox News poll which finds that more than three fourths of respondents view the economy negatively. And Axios, as I said earlier, said that there are signs of trouble everywhere for the GOP. Axios is pretty friendly to Republicans. They’re hardly a resistance flagship outlet at all. And so I think for the super savvy guys at Axios to be being this blunt is a clear tell of where they think the power is flowing.
Marcotte: Yeah, on the issue front, I do think that the economy is really… I mean, even Trump has been persuaded, obviously, that he should be worried about the bad economic news because he’s trying to stick to talking points. He fails. But it’s clear that whoever sat him down and said, this affordability issue is going to hurt you, got through to him because he’s trying to use the word, even though, you know, affordability sounds as weird in his mouth as saying please or thank you. He’s just incapable of understanding that people struggle to afford things. Even though he’s been broke how many times. Because he’s rich guy broke so he still has money to pay for whatever he wants. But it’s interesting.
I’m in New York right now and I walked by Zuccotti Park today and I just was reminded of Occupy Wall Street really vividly today and how much anger and energy it harnessed about the financial collapse and billionaires taking over and just sucking up all the wealth for themselves. And I kind of feel we’re in that moment again, another decade plus later.
Sargent: Yeah, it does feel that way. I thought there was another interesting tale on some credit here to Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who compiled a bunch of headlines showing that the media is turning on Trump or at least acknowledging how weak he is. One of the ones that he cited is this Politico piece, which I had missed, which is about how Democrats swept at the school board level and they called it a culture war backlash. Now that is a real rarity to hear from the mainstream media. think there’s this deeply embedded flaw in the discourse on this as well, which has been to interpret Trump and Trumpism and Trump’s victories as a sign that the culture in some very profound sense has moved to the right, has really rejected wokeness and all that now, so can you talk a little bit about that? I think we’re really seeing that that whole storyline was hype that it was mostly nonsense. Is that too optimistic?
Marcotte: No, I think that’s exactly right. A couple years ago, I did some reporting in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, about a school board race there in 2023, I do believe. And what had happened was that Moms for Liberty had taken over their school board, and this group of parents had gotten together and formed their own organizing committee and were recruiting candidates to run from the left for that school board. And they swept in 2023. And then in this last election, that same county, that same school board that I reported on—the last remaining Republicans on the board lost in November. So this school district in Bucks County went from being all Republicans on the school board to, in the space of two years, all Democrats on the school board. All. And a lot of what was driving it when I was on the ground was a genuine belief that these people are bananas, these right-wing culture warriors are fringe characters that live in a fantasy land, and that what they consider wokeness is what normal people just consider the real world.
Sargent: There in Bucks County, a sheriff lost his election in just in these recent contests against a challenger who deliberately and explicitly tried to make the race into a referendum on ICE and the ICE raids. And it was a solid victory for the challenger on this issue. That is something that you would think should shock the hell out of lot of pundits. Because one of the things we have constantly heard is that Trump has this kind of deep grasp on what the public really wants on immigration in particular. But what we’re actually seeing is that candidates can make their races about ICE and raise the salience of immigration and win. What do make of that?
Marcotte: I am not surprised in the slightest. So I live in Philadelphia—that’s why it was easy for me to get to Bucks. And while Pennsylvania has not been in the news a lot for the ICE situation, it’s been really bad. I can tell you that. And I think that people across the state are outraged about it, because there has been a lot of immigration from Latin America to Pennsylvania, and they do all sorts of jobs like work in the food industry. They work in agriculture; there’s an Amazon packaging plant in Reading, Pennsylvania, that has a lot of immigrants working there. And these people are perceived widely as hardworking, honest neighbors, and nobody likes seeing your neighbors treated this way. It’s very distressing. And when I’m in Philly, every time anyone sees it—like, all anyone talks about are the ICE raids. Everyone’s terrified, everyone’s scared. It’s basically the gossip on the streets: how many ICE raids people have witnessed recently.
Sargent: And ICE has become a real pariah agency. There’s been data that really shows that it’s approval or standing with the public has plunged precipitously. And there’s another dimension to this as well, which is that the ICE stuff is just tailor-made for social media. It spreads like crazy on social because these are super shareable videos. They’re incredibly dramatic. They have heroes and villains and the villains are wearing masks, literally.
Marcotte: What’s funny is they designed these ICE raids to be filmable because in the sort of fascist mind of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and all the people behind and Kristi Noem and all the people behind this, they thought it would be a show of force that would intimidate the population of this country into being like, they’re scary. They have masks. We have to be afraid. They want to scare us. They like being the villains. But, you know, I’m going to get all weepy now, but goddamn it, we’re Americans.
Sargent: Yes, I think that’s important. Yeah, because the masked raids—especially wrapped up with the imagery of big armored vehicles on streets and, you know, kidnappings and snatchings off the street by anonymous-looking goons and stuff like that—really triggers some sort of anti-totalitarian instincts in people and just strikes them as intrinsically and powerfully anti-American in some very deep sense. And I think that’s what’s going on here as well. I’m glad you raised that point about the fascism of people like Stephen Miller, thinking that they could shock-and-awe their way to getting everyone to kind of accept this. But that whole idea has really backfired in the face in a big way.
Marcotte: I think history will look back, and the thing that will be most striking is that while all these elite journalists and politicians and businessmen kissed the ring and bowed down and were afraid of Trump, people in their jammies and slippers—ordinary people—when they see ICE coming into their neighborhood, they confront them in the street. And the courage of ordinary people in this moment has been quite stunning, especially when you compare it to the elite in this country.
Sargent: You know, those elites are being a little short-sighted. Do they really think MAGA is going to be in charge forever and ever and ever?
Marcotte: No, in fact, I think the reason for a lot of this cowardice is exactly that. They think that Trump is not long for this world, that he will be out of power shortly either because he dies or because he’s too old really to run again. And they just think we’ll just kiss the ring for now and we will get through this and then things will go back to normal. I think that’s the calculus going on.
Sargent: Very interesting. Well, to wrap this up: so we’ve got the media starting to admit that Trump doesn’t have a deep lock on the culture. He doesn’t have a mystical attachment or mystical connection with the American people’s real dislike of immigrants or whatever. We’re seeing some admissions in the media of that. But I think looking down the road, you can kind of see places where the media could revert to its old bad habits. Like, if Trump invades Venezuela—and it looks like a big possibility—all of a sudden we could be back in a situation where we’re getting media coverage of the ‘popular war president,’ or ‘Trump is very strong and Democrats don’t dare raise any objections to what he’s doing now,’ that sort of thing. How do you see this playing out? Do you think Trump continues spiraling downward kind of indefinitely, or are we going to get some unpleasant surprises where the media looks for ways to tell the story of a surprising turnaround for Trump on the economy or on his popularity? What do you think is going to happen?
Marcotte: I think they’re going to want that narrative maybe, but I’m going to steal Dan Pfeiffer’s observation on Pod Save that like lame-duck presidents in their second term, when their polls start to fall, they never recover. That’s just how it is historically and traditionally. Trump is a uniquely toxic person who can’t help but make things worse, so I think that that’s going to happen again. I think this may be—he does have a floor because of stubborn Republicans being unwilling to admit they were wrong. But even then, I think there’s going to be a point where people really realize he is over, that he is a lame duck. And I think the part where people start pretending they never voted for him, or that they were tricked into voting for him, or they find some face-saving excuse for why this has happened— to get out of having responsibility and accountability for it—I think we could be seeing that happen to Trump the way that it happened to George W. Bush in his second term. You know, by the end of Bush’s second term, I couldn’t find a Republican who said they’d vote for him.
Sargent: Well, Amanda Marcotte, that sounds like certainly a plausible possibility, and it would be the ultimate irony if the rule that holds in the face of the almighty Trump is that rule as well—that the lame duck who’s spiraling downwards can’t pull himself out of the spiral. Really good to talk to you, as always.
Marcotte: Thank you, same.