The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 16 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.
As you may have seen, President Donald Trump offered a truly disgusting display in response to the horrific death of Rob Reiner and his wife. What surprised us, however, was the response to this. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, offered a remarkably pointed and heartfelt reply to Trump. Other MAGA figures piled on as well. On another front, MAGA figures are warning Trump that the base is drifting away from him for a whole bunch of reasons. Even Trump’s own pollster is sounding the alarm about the MAGA base. And it appears Republicans are going to let the Affordable Care Act subsidies lapse, which will badly hurt working-class Trump supporters. So we’re starting to wonder, is MAGA hitting a breaking point, and what does this all mean for Democrats? We’re talking about all this with New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who’s been writing well about both Greene and the MAGA crackup. Alex, good to have you on.
Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.
Sargent: So, Rob Reiner and his wife appear to have been murdered, which is an unspeakable horror. Trump, unsurprisingly, seized on this to claim they had died of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and said Reiner’s paranoia had reached new heights amid Trump’s world-historical successes. Alex, that’s deranged even for Trump. But notably, MAGA has been quite critical of this. Robby Starbuck slammed Trump for making their deaths political.
Several other big figures criticized him, too. What do you make of that?
Shephard: I think it’s a couple of things. I think one is that, even by the demented standards by which we judged Donald Trump, this was a pretty despicable statement and one that it’s in some ways not shocking now to see Trump completely reframe a tragedy that has nothing to do with him but, if it involves someone that he detests, to suggest essentially that they deserved what happened to them—which is what that post did. But I think that there are a few things here.
I think one is that we’ve just been seeing—within this sort of larger spike in political violence that is directly tied to the rise of Donald Trump himself—that there has been a lot more debate over rhetoric itself. And I think on the right, there are some figures here who are at least acknowledging this and trying to cover their own ass, for lack of a better term, that they don’t want the most prominent Republican celebrating violence, even if it is nonpolitical—which this seems to be, it seems to be a family matter—because they rightly understand that it damages their credibility in talking about political violence more generally.
I think that’s one part of it. But I think the other part is that what we’re seeing over the last few months, particularly since the elections last month, is that Republicans are rightly realizing that they have attached themselves to a mad king, that people don’t like this guy. And I think what they especially don’t like is the correct sense that he is focused on personal vendettas, a White House ballroom, the sort of marble bathroom in the Lincoln Bedroom, and not on issues of affordability.
And so Trump saying something horrible about Rob Reiner’s murder only reinforces what most Americans already realize, which is that Republicans and this president in particular do not care about the problems that they have right now.
Sargent: Right, and I think what you’re getting out there is that these MAGA figures are starting to see—and I don’t know why it took this long, but whatever—that Donald Trump just doesn’t give a shit about the MAGA movement in any sense. He’s a megalomaniac only in it for himself—pure narcissism. I want to go to Marjorie Taylor Greene, though, who really stood out here. I’m going to read her whole tweet in response to Trump:
Rob Reiner and his wife were tragically killed at the hands of their own son who reportedly had drug addiction and other issues, and their remaining children are left in serious mourning and heartbreak. This is a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies. Many families deal with a family member with drug addiction and mental health issues. It’s incredibly difficult and should be met with empathy, especially when it ends in murder.
Alex, that was very sensitively handled by Greene, even though she doesn’t directly criticize Trump. It stands as a forceful takedown of him just by virtue of the contrast she drew with him. You’ve been writing about her. What do you see going on with this in particular?
Shephard: Yeah, it sort of is like, you do not, under any circumstance, have to hand it to Marjorie Taylor Greene. But it’s a very, very good statement. There’s nothing to argue with it. She rightly understands, as you said earlier, that Trump doesn’t actually care about this movement that he leads or its stated priorities.
Greene sees the president for what he is, which is a lame duck that not only most of the country but a lot of Republican voters are just sort of disgusted by or tuning out, and is taking every opportunity she can, not just to take a shot at him but to take those shots in really targeted ways—to go after Trump for being indecent and for being not focused on the regular needs of voters or regular people. And I think that what we’ve seen from her over the last few months is, I think, a really pretty effective and brutal takedown of this president as somebody who is fundamentally disconnected from reality.
Now, I think that the ultimate goal here is… that’s where you don’t have to hand it to Marjorie Taylor Greene. It’s said she wants to advance a lot of the regular goals of this movement, right? I mean, it’s not like she’s suddenly saying that we should have open borders or anything, right? She wants to lead the movement via many of its stated aims.
However, I think, the sort of reading-between-the-lines thing—which you barely have to read between the lines at all—is that she understands that this president has failed in the goals of a second term. I think the first and foremost of which was to get costs under control, but the second, and I think just as important one, is to effectively advance the kind of MAGA priorities.
Sargent: I mean, if Marjorie Taylor Greene is recognizing that you’re a sociopath, then I think you’re in some trouble.
Shephard: It takes one to know one.
Sargent: Right. Well, these are very deep divisions, I think. The Washington Post reports that a number of MAGA figures are sounding the alarm about the overall state of MAGA. They’re warning that Trump hasn’t dealt with cost of living, which you brought up, that he’s too close with tech oligarchs and billionaires, and that he’s tried to cover up the Jeffrey Epstein files.
One conservative pollster reports to the Post that he met with Trump to talk to him about all this, and he warned Trump that a lot of his supporters don’t think he’s drained the swamp or that he’s governed as much of an economic populist. Now, this part is funny. This pollster, Mark Mitchell, also told the Post that Trump didn’t seem as interested in talking about this as he’d hoped Trump would be.
Alex, imagine that—like, Trump not interested in hearing criticism of himself. I mean, but these are serious and deepening divisions, don’t you think?
Shephard: Yeah. And I think that what we’re seeing too is that the way that the administration came into office was with this aura of invincibility. And I think that some of that was needed by a Democratic Party that was too willing to surrender or that saw his sort of reelection as this kind of existential defeat and not what it actually was, which was just a reflection of their inability to get inflation under control and their elevation or their sticking by a president that most people thought was too old for the job.
But I think that that is now really coming back to haunt them and that the priorities that they set about embracing this kind of really aggro and destructive foreign policy that is capped by Trump’s embarrassing desire for a Nobel Peace Prize.
And again, this authoritarian and fascistic push to deport as many undocumented immigrants in the most ruthless and inhumane manner imaginable is actually not just something that people see as not being a reflection of their values—which I think is true—but also that it’s a distraction from him doing the stuff that they ostensibly elected him to do, which was to get prices under control.
And I think what we’re seeing now is that every time the administration does something that is reckless or bombastic, whether it’s invading an American city or it’s the president tweeting that Rob Reiner was a deranged lunatic who deserved to die, that only reinforces that sense.
I think for Republicans, they have a real problem here now, which is that they’ve spent so much time marching behind this guy that I think that there was a semi-credible argument that a lot of folks could have made in the early days of the first term that like, Well, Trump is like that. He tweets all that nonsense, but we’re a different Republican Party. That’s just not true anymore. It’s not credible.
So when folks come out and try to break away, I think what they’re also showing us is that they purposefully created no distance between themselves and this monster, and now they’re in a really, really difficult position where they can’t do that.
And so what they’re left doing is either saying nothing, which is frankly what most of them are doing, or they’re just trying to beg him to do the things that he said he was going to do when he came in. But he doesn’t care, right? He wants to let Stephen Miller do whatever he wants because he wants to spend all this time celebrating those deportations, tweeting racist and hateful stuff, and building his ballroom and his arch.
Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s right. I want to home in on something you said there about the aura of invincibility that Trump started out this year with. First of all, it’s amazing how quickly it has dissipated. I think that itself underscores your point about what a misreading it was of the election results.
But you had this piece on Greene, which was very good. You talked about how Greene had actually figured this thing out that you’re talking about, which is that something Republicans hadn’t figured out, which is that Trump’s agenda is really unpopular and that can’t just be sort of wished away.
Trump and Stephen Miller and the more fascist of his advisers really came in thinking they could use shock and awe to push everything through really quickly, just frighten the country into rolling over and accepting it all. But there’s all this organic resistance across the country, especially to the most fascistic stuff, but even to the less fascistic stuff, like to the tariffs—there’s been a huge outcry and real pushback to that.
And I thought you were astute in pointing out that Greene kind of is figuring that out before other Republicans are. Republicans don’t want to ever say out loud that the country’s turning against Trump. And in a way, she was kind of one of the first to do that, right? To say, You know what, guys? The country’s turning against this guy.
Shephard: Certainly for an elected Republican, she was way out in front of the others. Because I think if you look at the usual critics that are still around, it is the Kentucky boys, Thomas Massie and Rand Paul—they’re aberrations, right? They’re quirky libertarians. They don’t really speak for other people. They’re not really MAGA in the same way Greene is. And I think the fact that Greene is not just MAGA but one of the true disciples of the movement, somebody who emerged after 2016, very consciously styling herself in that way, makes a huge difference.
But I think that what you’re seeing too is that I think the Democrats aided this perception quite a bit that the response from so much of the party after November of last year was to actually reaffirm what a lot of Republicans were saying, which is like, Yes, we’ve entered into a kind of new conservative era, that this is like 1984 all over again—the election year, not the book—and that we have to acclimate ourselves to this new reality, sort of like the kind of DLC New Dems did in the late ’80s. And that’s just not true at all.
I think what we’re seeing increasingly is that Donald Trump was elected because of inflation and to a lesser extent because there were credibility issues with the Democratic Party. And again, they had a third nominee who was not tested via a primary and was only the nominee for 90 days.
It wasn’t like a real election in a lot of ways. And so that was a problem for this administration too, because they just said, Well, this party has completely given up. Their voters aren’t going to show up and protest the way they did the first time, which was sort of true on Inauguration Day, but ever since then, it hasn’t been true at all.
And I think what Greene recognized was that the first order of business is to do the thing that you were elected to do, even if it wasn’t necessarily the core of what your movement is built around. And that’s not what they did at all. They did all the movement stuff, most of which is phenomenally unpopular. And they did none of the inflation stuff.
Not only that—like, the tariffs are a tentpole Trump policy, right? Like this part of inflation is being driven entirely by the tariffs. So it’s just an existential problem for them. Like Trump’s economic agenda is in direct contradiction to his mandate to make prices lower. And Greene got this, and she also got that the fact that they weren’t doing the tentpole thing makes the rest of it more unpopular and worse.
And I think there’s a reason why she called it out, right? That this kind of idea of new economic nationalism or new just nationalism generally, which is xenophobic—I think it’s economically stupid, it’s not good policy—but that Trump’s agenda was doing a kind of bastardized version of it. It was not fulfilling the stated goals of the movement, and it was making the country significantly worse anyways.
Sargent: Yeah, and they’re in much worse shape this time around because Trump is unpopular on the economy in a way he just wasn’t during the first term. I think that’s a point you’ve made elsewhere.
We had also Trump’s own pollster sounding the alarm as well. John McLaughlin is the pollster. He told NBC News that Trump’s going to have to get out and campaign a lot harder or the Trump base will stay home in the midterms. McLaughlin said, “If you can’t motivate the Trump voters, we’re not going to win the midterms.”
Now, Alex, I think that’s partly spin. Getting Trump out there to talk about the economy, it’s not going to help now. It’s going to hurt, right? Trump’s credibility on the economy is suddenly in the toilet, but it’s still telling that Trump’s own pollster went out and said this.
It’s just another way to say, Hey, guys, the base is in a real bad place for us right now. And it looks like they’re not going to do anything to extend the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies, which absolutely clobbers the base. It’s no accident, Alex, that this is one of the early things that Greene fastened onto—the subsidy issue, right? And so there’s just no sense whatsoever that I can detect that they’re trying to pull out of this tailspin. What do you make of what the pollster said?
Shephard: Yeah, I mean, I think that the sort of top-line thing, the diagnosis is totally right. It’s just, how do you fix it? There’s nobody worse who can talk about the economy right now than Donald Trump, who said that affordability is a made-up conspiracy by the Democrats.
Part of the issue, I think, though, is that it gets at a problem that Republicans have had since 2016, which is that the party is Trump. Like, they need him to motivate voters who only come out for him. But they also need him to articulate whatever it is that they’re supposed to be doing, because otherwise they don’t really have anything. He sort of has this sort of veto power over the entire policy program of the party, including, like, if the government should be open and functioning or not.
And I think with the subsidies, you’re seeing this sort of run into another long-standing issue, right? Which is that it’s not like the Affordable Care Act is new. It’s been around for 15 years now, more than 15 years. And for the entirety of that time, Republicans have been arguing that it is destructive and that they will have a better health care policy.
But they don’t have a better health care policy, and they kind of can’t have one because any policy that would get their approval would be even more unpopular than what they’re doing right now. So I think that what we’re seeing too is they’re running into this buzzsaw, which is that they keep complaining about the ACA and saying that they’re going to have a better idea, but their idea would be worse than the existing system. So instead, they’re just kind of letting the existing system collapse because they’re worried about taking any kind of ownership over it.
I mean, it’s obviously handing Democrats a gift, but it is going to really crush the lives of probably millions of people who are seeing these huge increases. I think, as Greene rightly pointed out, that’s a huge electoral problem because those people are scattered all over the country, and it’s not like they’re isolated cases.
Like, if you know people—and everybody knows somebody whose insurance costs are tripling right now. I’ve certainly talked to people that are doing that. And that only reinforces this larger idea that the president is out to lunch and his party doesn’t care about them.
But I think they’ve just decided that they’re not interested in any kind of policy whatsoever, so that the better outcome for them right now is just to not take ownership of this situation at all and hope that the Democrats bail them out at some point.
Sargent: Yeah, sure looks that way. Alex, just to wrap this up, where do you see it all going? And how deep do you think these divisions really are? Like, how do they sort of unspool from here?
Marjorie Taylor Greene is, I guess, retiring from Congress. There are all these big matters of infighting among MAGA right now. There’s the Epstein files. They’re sort of at each other’s throats about pretty much everything. I think there’s some doubt about whether JD Vance can unite the movement.
What do you see happening to MAGA in a broader sense? Do you think it finds a way to hold together behind JD Vance or whoever the Republican nominee is? Or does it actually fracture in some sense that takes it to another place entirely—kind of beyond repair?
Shephard: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the ways you can look at this is that there’s a sort of larger arc here, which is that Trump emerges and takes over the Republican Party in 2015, 2016, and that at that point he’s still surrounded by a lot of establishment people and there’s concerted and real outreach to the kind of conservative mainstream and the Republican mainstream that holds the party together.
Even as Trump continues to go nuts, he’s able to also, through sheer force—of a threatening aura, we’ll say—keep people in line for the first term. And I think he becomes less and less interested in that as he becomes more consumed by personal vendettas and these sort of legal cases after he leaves office. But there are folks who emerge.
Like, I think, one of the unheralded aspects of Charlie Kirk’s status at Turning Point USA was as a kind of outreach director to the rest of the party. And he was very good at kind of healing rifts, particularly among the kind of more ideological MAGA base. And I think what we’re seeing now is that there’s no one out there that can do either the kind of institutional work that Kirk did or the kind of charismatic leadership that Trump displayed earlier on.
And so I’m sure that a figure will emerge at some point to kind of hold the mantle, but so much of what’s been built here was intentionally done so that it could only be led by the sort of charismatic personality cult of Donald Trump. And I think what we’re seeing is that that’s starting to fracture, I think, much earlier than a lot of people anticipated because Trump is so checked out and he’s not doing the kind of political work that he did before.
And so what you’re seeing is—and you saw this a bit with the Reiner backlash—is that people are realizing that they don’t have to toe the line. I think it’s a slow crackup. As was the case during the first term, I think everyone was always like, “This is the moment that it’s all going to come crashing down.” I don’t think we can count on that, but I think what we are seeing and what we’ve seen accelerate over the last six weeks is this slow dismantling of this horrific administration.
Sargent: Yeah, and I think that if Democrats do win the midterms by a sizable amount, which seems likely, though certainly not assured, I think this all starts to really accelerate. Alex Sheppard, man, it was good to talk to you as always.
Shephard: Always great to talk to you.