The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 13 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 the losses for Donald Trump are piling up on many fronts at once. His border czar just announced the drawdown of federal agents in Minnesota after protests there turned public opinion. Job creation during Trump’s first year was more abysmal than we thought. The country is losing manufacturing jobs. And new polls show that the public now says Joe Biden did a better job than Trump is doing, which is the ultimate humiliation. Trump is a weak and failing president, and critically there are now signs that Democrats are really acting like it. But there’s more for Democrats to be done on this front. And The New Republic has a special issue out right now that is chock-full of great new pieces laying out how Democrats can mount a more effective and aggressive opposition. We’re talking about all this with Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republic. Mike, great to have you on.
Michael Tomasky: Pleasure’s mine, Greg. Thanks.
Sargent: So let’s start with where Trump is right now. border czar Tom Homan just announced that there will now be a substantial withdrawal of DHS from Minneapolis. Let’s recall that Stephen Miller did not want to back down there. Meanwhile, we just learned that the loss of manufacturing jobs is worse than initial data suggested.
Mike, if you had to pick two pillars of Trumpism, they would be: one, empty the country of immigrants, and two, usher in a manufacturing renaissance with protectionism. I think it’s notable that Trump is either deeply unpopular or failing utterly at the two things most associated with Trumpist nationalism. Where do you think we are right now?
Tomasky: Notable is one way to put it. It’s striking and amazing and something I’m not sure I would have predicted. But he overplayed his hand on both things badly, horribly—as a result, I think, of the bubble that he and his people live in. He talks to aides who are complete sycophants. Nobody ever gives him any bad news. They shield him from the bad polls. He hangs out at Mar-a-Lago, eats his well-done steaks with people who tell him how brilliant he is. And he just never hears anything bad. He won’t let it into his environment.
But it’s almost all bad. As you know, he has good marks on one thing: cracking down on border crossings, and that he has done—those are way down, and so the public approves of that. But everything else is south, and those are the two pillars: that he was gonna bring back manufacturing and that he was gonna round up undocumented people and put them somewhere.
But it goes way beyond that. It goes beyond that to prices; it goes beyond that to other aspects of the economy—the deficit, the debt, the Epstein files, which aren’t going to go away. There’s almost no good news. The one piece of good news was that the Dow hit 50,000, and they’re bragging about that like that’s some amazing thing. Well, the day he took office, the Dow was 44,000 and something. And for the Dow to grow 6,000 points in a year, in 13 months, that’s not really an unusual thing.
Actually, in the last year of Joe Biden’s time in office—I went back and checked this—in January 2024, it was around 37,000. And when Biden left office, when Trump assumed office, it was 44,000. So it grew a little bit more in Biden’s last year than in Trump’s first year. So even that that they’re bragging about is a house of cards.
Sargent: It really is. And so I think this partly explains why the Democratic opposition to Trump seems to have perked up a little bit. Senate Democrats just voted against funding the Department of Homeland Security without the restrictions on ICE they’re seeking. And this week, Democrats were quite merciless in their grilling of senior DHS officials on Capitol Hill.
It does seem to me that Democrats as a party are more emboldened now to take on Trump over immigration. That’s something they had been generally hesitant to do. I think that’s deeply entangled with his weakness on the economy. Is that your reading as well? And why do you think this is happening now?
Tomasky: That is my reading, and it’s happening because Democrats can read polls and they get their courage from Trump’s bad poll numbers, in large measure. But I would also say it’s happening because of people. It’s happening because of people on the ground.
Everywhere you go, everywhere you look, there are protests against Trumpism—and not just in New York and Chicago and San Francisco, but in small towns, in red states, in university towns, of course, but all across the country—and in particular, the people of Chicago and Evanston when ICE was doing its business there. And of course, the people of Minneapolis have really been amazing.
Their actions have said to Democrats, Grow your spine, represent us, do what we’re asking you to do, what we’re here to ask you to do. And they’re also proving to the country at large that MAGA is unpopular, that Trump’s unpopular, and that there’s a great critical mass of people out there who may or may not call themselves liberal and support every liberal item down the line, but who don’t want their country to be like this.
Sargent: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting that you put it that way because to me, it’s very clear that a lot of Democrats have been looking at what they’re seeing in places like Minneapolis, seeing this extraordinary heroism and courage of ordinary people and kind of realizing, You know what, we can’t abandon them. They can’t be on their own. They need some backing. They need institutional backing.
You know, Democrats have to be part of this big pushback against the madness that Trump has inflicted on Americans. And that courage to me is deeply inspiring. And I think Democrats really, I think, to some degree had no choice but to go along, but also are genuinely inspired by it, which I think is a positive thing. What do you think?
Tomasky: It is. I hope they are. And I think they are. I look at Spanberger, the first day she was in office as governor, issuing that order that Virginia’s state and local law enforcement wouldn’t cooperate with ICE. There was nothing that decreed that she was going to do that, inevitably.
And she’s a moderate person. I don’t want to cast unfair aspersions on her, but it’s not unreasonable to think that that wasn’t the first item on her dance card. But she did it responding to public will. And then Mikie Sherrill has done similar things in New Jersey. And so, yeah, they are realizing, elected Democrats, that yes, there are millions and millions of people out there who are screaming at them, begging them, Represent our values! Represent our values against these mad people!
Sargent: Well, that brings us to our special issue. You can check it out at TNR.com. It’s got lots of stuff, folks. We really, really urge you to take a look. Mike, you had the lead piece in this issue on—it’s all about where Democrats go now. Do you just want to sum up your basic argument?
Tomasky: Yeah, sure. So the main question to emerge from the 2024 election for Democrats was: What happened with working-class voters? What happened with the working-class vote? And we saw that Trump did better among working-class voters—even working-class voters of color, Black working-class voters, Latino ones, and others.
And Kamala Harris did much worse than Joe Biden among noncollege voters. That’s the proxy for working-class in exit polls and in the polling world. Biden got 48 percent of the noncollege vote, and Harris was down to 43. So in other words, she lost it by 14 points, which is quite dramatic. And that was the difference.
So I start by saying, what’s the answer to that problem? And the piece is a 10,000-word answer to that question. Just to boil it down to a few sentences, it’s this: The best way to show working-class people that you’re on their side is to be on their side and to pick fights for them—to go after the people, the corporate bad actors chiefly, who are nickel-and-diming them, who are making their lives hard, who are making their daily struggles more difficult than they need to be. People feel this all the time.
And I have a passage in there that seems to have resonated with some people who I’ve been in touch with about the piece. There’s a certain argument among a kind of centrist Democrat that, Oh, the electorate doesn’t want the Democrats to do these big things. They just want to get back to normal. They want to get back to some pre-Trump idea of normal.
I say no. For millions and millions of people in this country, the normal that has obtained for the last 10 or 20 years has sucked. The normal has had them falling a little more behind every year, has had them being terrified about losing their job—now losing it to an AI chatbot—has them terrified at the prospect of having an unexpected medical bill that they can’t cope with, has them worried about their kids’ mental health that the government’s not doing anything about, which I think is a big sleeper issue.
Normal has been very, very hard for people. We liberals and elected Democrats need to demand more, and Democrats need to push for more. The old normal isn’t good enough. They need to create a new normal where they unrig the system and wrest political and economic power out of the hands of these multimillionaires and billionaires and into the hands of regular people. And that means fight; that means conflict. They need to seek conflict and take these powerful interests on by name and be willing to make some enemies. That’s the argument in a nutshell.
Sargent: Well, I want to pick up on a certain aspect of that. You do point out in your piece that Democrats have been showing some fight lately—winning the political battle over Obamacare subsidies, for instance. But you pointed out that, in a way, Dems still aren’t proactively setting the terms of the debate in a way that forces Republicans to talk about things in ways that put them on the defensive.
That seems to me to be like a sort of subset of the broader case you’re making, but an extremely important subset. Like, take immigration, for instance. Yeah, Dems are loudly condemning all the lawlessness and the violence and the killing. That’s great. But there’s an occasion to also say, Our way of doing immigration is better. Yours is terrible. Mass deportations are an utter failure. There’s another way.
In other words, there are like these opportunities in Trump’s weakness to say, “We are better.” What do you think of that, and how does it fit into your broader argument? What should Dems be doing more of?
Tomasky: My broader argument is mostly focused on my contention that Democrats need to go after the people who are making working-class people’s lives hard. That’s mostly not Trump. I mean, it is, but it’s mostly, like, these corporate bad actors who nickel-and-dime people and pharmaceutical companies who won’t allow generics to sell cheaper drugs and all sorts of things like that. I list many in the piece.
So that’s my main point, but proactively going after Trump is an important sort of one-B. It’s an important sub-point because they often find themselves—Democrats—on the defensive. Trump’s out there talking to the press every day and he, by his nature, creates conflict and he names names and he names enemies. Boy, does he name enemies.
And so I’m saying Democrats need to do more of that. But, you know, they also need to put Trump back on his heels more than they do. And they’ve been doing a better job of that—you know, with Epstein in particular—I think that’s really getting through, what’s going on there. And the Republicans shouting “Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton” isn’t doing it for them. Strategies for putting Trump on the defensive are also really, really important.
Sargent: Agreed. I want to go to a big-picture point you made, where you noted that Democrats have faced major movements or major moments of both challenge and opportunity twice in their history. The 1930s produced the New Deal; the 1960s led to far-reaching advances in civil rights.
And what I really found interesting about your case is this idea that we’re facing a similar scale of challenges, but also a similar scale of opportunity. And it’s very clear that, generally speaking, right now, the sheer ambition of Democrats doesn’t match the moment.
Like, how do you want to see Democrats do that? We need Democrats to think bigger, and some basic sense that they’re just not conveying—there’s almost a smallness and narrowness. Your call for ambition, I thought, is really striking. Can you talk about what they should do?
Tomasky: Yeah, well, thanks. I’m glad it struck you because that was the concluding section of the piece. And as I was thinking about the piece—I wrote it last December—I’d spent weeks reporting it and months, really a couple of months, thinking about it. And I decided to conclude the piece with a section that really did try to get elected Democrats who read the piece to think in much bigger historical and ambitious terms.
What I said was, you know, if you look at the Democratic Party historically, the Democratic Party of the nineteenth century wasn’t much to write home about. The Southern variant was white supremacist, and the Northern variant was very corrupt, built around urban machines. When you get to the twentieth century, the party starts to find its purpose. And it did so particularly in answering two great crises in American history.
In the 1930s, under Roosevelt, the Democrats completely changed the conception of what government could and should do by embracing Keynesianism—by putting the government in so many more spheres of people’s lives and improving people’s lives greatly in the process and building up the economy in ways that it had never been built up in that process.
So in the 1930s, I say, there were a lot of people who thought that communism or fascism was the wave of the future and that democratic capitalism was going to die. But Roosevelt and the Democrats saved and reformed and changed democratic capitalism and made it much more responsive to the needs of people. So that was crisis number one that the Democrats answered. Not perfectly, of course—nothing’s ever perfect—but they answered it.
Crisis number two: civil rights, finally ending Jim Crow, finally ending segregation, finally bringing these supposed fruits of freedom to everyone in the United States. And that took a lot of courage. Again, done quite imperfectly and we’re still fighting for these things today, goodness knows. But they did rise to that challenge and they passed civil rights and they passed voting rights and they passed other laws that put us on the right course.
And so I conclude by saying we face a third crisis today on that same level. And that crisis is the concentration of economic and political power into a smaller and smaller number of hands. And Donald Trump is only a part of that crisis; he’s even kind of only a symptom of that crisis.
That crisis is driven by people like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and all those techno-fascist libertarian weirdos who have amassed more and more political and economic power and want still more—and many of them are open enemies of democracy. It’s not just beating Trump and winning the midterms. It’s beating that. It’s unrigging the system and getting political power out of those guys’ hands. That’s the challenge. Are they up to it? So I try to conclude with what I hope is kind of a stirring call for them to rise to this occasion.
Sargent: Yeah. What’s striking to me about this explanation is that the true nature of the challenge is the willingness of this small group of oligarchs—or the eagerness, I should say—to ally themselves with authoritarians and fascists in the governing sphere. Breaking that kind of alliance and the power of it is, to me, another way to think about this big challenge.
Tomasky: It is, yeah. And they’re not going to do it by accepting millions of their campaign contributions. That’s not going to work. They have to forgo those contributions. That money is already floating away from them. Those people are backing—I mean, like Bezos and Zuckerberg—those people are backing the Republicans now.
I say good riddance. Democrats shouldn’t be taking their money, shouldn’t be taking crypto money. That’s a lot of money to make up; I understand that. But that’s a whole different argument about whether candidates should be spending 80 million on television ads. We won’t get into that. But, yes, they need to free themselves from that and just become enemies of those people, because those people are enemies of our democratic republic. And there’s no compromising with them.
Sargent: And if you’re going to break that sort of oligarchic/fascist class’s grip on the United States right now, you can’t only be talking about the price of eggs. You can’t be using narrow, focus-group-tested language. You’ve got to think bigger and speak in bigger terms as well, right?
Tomasky: Exactly. And this is an intrademocratic debate that bugs me and has always bugged me. Should we do this or that? Should we talk about prescription drugs or democracy? This just drives me nuts. Do all of it. Why can you only do one thing?
Do many things; make all of these arguments and tie them all together. They’re all part of a larger argument, which is that our democracy—the oldest in the world—is worth saving and worth nurturing and worth growing and improving. And that involves economics: It involves cheaper prescription drugs; it involves protecting democracy; it involves expanding voting rights; it involves protecting immigrants; it involves all of those things.
Republicans don’t sit around and say, Gee, should we talk about tax cuts, or should we talk about God and country? No, they don’t do that. They talk about everything, and they come across to their people as more sincere and more belief-driven. And Democrats, when they have those kinds of debates and try to make those kinds of choices, they don’t come across as belief-driven.
Sargent: Well, and by the way, rank-and-file Democrats absolutely want the party to behave the way you and I are discussing here. The New Republic special issue also had our own exclusive poll of rank-and-file Democrats. You can check it out at TNR.com.
We dug deep into the views of rank-and-file Democrats here. Just going to run through some findings really quickly: Large majorities say government can still improve people’s lives and believe progress is happening. Mike, I think that’s not a small thing, since Trumpism is all about getting us to give up on all that.
And the poll also found most Democrats still want very aggressive government action on the economy: higher taxes on the rich and corporations and aggressive action on climate, which is very big. Yet the poll also finds, I think interestingly, that there’s a fairly large bloc in the party who are more moderate. What did you take from the poll?
Tomasky: This is a poll, by the way, of 2,400 or so rank-and-file Democrats conducted in early January. And we asked them a lot of questions about both their beliefs and what they want their party to do. And I think we asked them a lot of questions that pollsters don’t normally ask. And that’s what I think is interesting about it.
But they want a more aggressive party. They want a party that fights more, and they want a party that will go after rich people and corporations in no uncertain terms. We asked questions and we phrased them like, “Do you think the Democrats are too timid, or just about right, or too aggressive in trying to tax rich people?”
And the percentage who said “too timid” was off the charts—it was like 80-something percent. And taxing corporations and cracking down on corporate bad actors—these were the things that really drove people. People are very supportive of abortion rights and voting rights and rights for immigrants and stuff, but the economics really came through in this, and the economics really drove this poll.
You’ve got rank-and-file Democrats saying, as you said, “We believe in government.” One result that really struck me: We asked people, in general, “Do you think our society advances through large government action, like Social Security and voting rights, or through the private sector meeting people’s desires and needs?” And that was like 80–20.
So that’s what they want. That’s what Democrats want. They’re pragmatic in certain ways, but they want boldness, particularly on class economics.
Sargent: Just to sort of return to where we started: The 2024 election, I think, persuaded a whole lot of people that the basic pillars of right-wing populism—or Trumpism or MAGA—one, restrictionism against immigrants and emptying the country of immigrants, and two, fortifying the manufacturing base with protectionism, somehow had won the culture.
Like, the culture had turned toward those two things, and that, I think, was a big source of Democratic fear for a long time. But if you look at this, we’re really seeing that it’s not so. In a funny way, we’re actually seeing that majorities kind of support open societies. They support trade, they support immigration, and they support pluralism.
Do you want to just sort of wrap it all together? I mean, the fact that we have this message coming from the electorate—this kind of anti-Trumpism, pro-pluralism, pro-democracy, pro-immigration, pro-trade—this is where the majority is. Democrats have an opportunity to become that electorate’s party, right?
Tomasky: They truly do. I don’t think they have to make a series of awful choices between: “Do we go left, or do we go center?” And I think I talk a little bit about that debate in the piece, too. I think there are genuine differences between progressives and centrists, but I think they can sometimes be overstated.
What I tried to do in the piece is sketch out an agenda that I think both sides can rally around. Now, what I’m calling for is, on paper, economic populism—and that’s identified with the progressive left. Centrists might be wary of that. But I really tried not to write about it in a way that codes as left-wing. I talk about how Democrats need to talk to farmers more; that’s not left-wing. I talk about how Democrats need to talk to people who go to vocational school and trade school and community college, instead of just talking all the time about college debt and college.
That’s very important—I’m not saying it’s not—but what about the 60 percent of people who don’t go to college? What are they getting out of that? They go to trade school; they go to vocational school; they go to community college. They’re dental hygienists; they’re electricians. Democrats need to talk to those people. And I think by doing that, they can build a durable majority. They can get more than Joe Biden’s 48 percent of working-class votes. And they can do it without really having made many compromises.
I mean, we haven’t talked much about cultural issues, and there’s some thorny stuff there. I don’t think—again, your average American doesn’t want to be cruel to transgender people and doesn’t want to erase transgender people from society. They don’t want that. That’s not who people are. Democrats can give voice to that and represent that while still representing mainstream America.
Sargent: So I think what I’m hearing from you, Mike, is that there’s actually some cause for optimism in this moment. And there’s real opportunity out there, sort of tucked among all the horror that we’re living through. And our special issue is about that. It has a number of other pieces that try to lay out ways for Democrats to take charge of these big debates in the ways we’re talking about. Do you want to just close by telling us what else is in the issue?
Tomasky: Sure. There’s a piece by Alex Shephard called “Not Your Father’s Democrats.” It’s built around figures like Graham Platner and Zoran Mamdani, who are on the left. But it also nods toward other figures like Spanberger, who you would not call “on the left,” but it says of these people, what unifies them is that they’re throwing some elbows—that they’re fighting, and that they’re fighting based on beliefs, and that they don’t come across like they’re just reading polls. So that’s one.
Perry Bacon Jr. has a wonderful piece about how the Democrats should not just study the electorate to death; they should change it. They can do things to make the electorate more liberal and to grow more liberals in this country. Republicans did that. They made more conservatives than used to exist, and Democrats can do that too. And Perry has, I think, a handful of smart ideas about how they can and should do that.
And then the last piece is about immigration... What was his name? What was his name?
Sargent: I thought you’d never get to that one, Mike.
Tomasky: By Greg Sargent! It talks about how Democrats can take control of the immigration debate. It points to J.B. Pritzker and Gavin Newsom as showing the way here and goes into some very smart things the two of them have done.
But also, it argues that: Democrats, don’t be shy about this. Play offense; don’t spend your life responding to Republican charges. Get out there and play offense and give your vision of the country. Like—one of the bad things—I’ll conclude here, but I understand why Bill Clinton was the kind of politician he was, because back in those days the number of Americans who identified as “liberal” was in the teens and the Democratic Party had been walloped. I mean walloped in three consecutive elections.
Some change was needed. I get that. And he did win two elections and he did grow the economy and he did a number of progressive things. But one of the things that was bad overall about that Third Way-ism was the tendency to say, Well, the Republicans are extreme and we’re not that extreme, but we do sort of agree about this—sort of accepting Republican presumptions and saying, Well, we’re the reasonable people.
But that’s over. The world has changed, the country has changed, the electorate has changed, the issues have changed. It’s time for the Democrats to assert their beliefs, seize the moral high ground, play offense, and just offer a completely different vision for our society than the one the Republicans are offering.
Sargent: Elbow-throwing patriots—in other words, right, Mike?
Tomasky: That’s it.
Greg Sargent: Well folks, our special issue is really, really good. If we do say so ourselves, it’s at TNR.com. It’s got pieces by a bunch of different writers—you’ve heard a rundown of them—and the poll is also really interesting. Please check it out at TNR.com. Michael Tomasky, really wonderful to talk to you.
Tomasky: Pleasure’s mine, Greg.