The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 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.
With Donald Trump set to deliver his State of the Union speech, he just got hit with a barrage of brutal new polling. One survey has him 27 points underwater, and the other shows him absolutely tanking on virtually all major issues. Yet, in a strange, rambling tirade to reporters, Trump simply denied any of this polling is real, and at one point he even declared that his support is “silent.” We think something big is missing from discussions of Trump’s bleeding of support. A lot of it is due not just to costs, but also to Trump’s flagrant abuses of power. Political scientist Julia Azari of Marquette University has an interesting new piece breaking down all the ways that Trump is fundamentally governing outside the constitutional order. So we’re talking to Julia about the role that’s playing in his failures. Good to have you on, Julia.
Julia Azari: Thank you so much for having me.
Sargent: So let’s start with the new CNN poll, which has Trump at 36 percent approval to 63 percent disapproving among all Americans. Crucially, he’s at 26 percent with independents. He’s also badly underwater with non-college grads—the working class—at 41 percent to 58 percent.
Julia, it sure looks like the MAGA coalition is collapsing, and Trump is throwing away the gains he made in 2024. What do you make of those numbers?
Azari: Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. I think that we have to, kind of, think about what would be the alternative. What would a similar president—under, kind of, similar economic conditions—or a different president with similar economic conditions look like approval-wise?
And it might be the case that presidents are just, sort of, stuck in the low 40s. But even so, Trump is on the lower end of that. And as you cited, in [those polls], even below that level, so I think we can safely say he’s even less popular than you would expect given some of the economic challenges. And the other piece of that is that it’s hard to separate the economic situation from a direct link to some of his distinct economic policies—namely, the tariffs.
Sargent: Let’s listen to Trump talk about polls here. It goes:
Donald Trump (voiceover): You get polls for the election that showed I was gonna get swamped, and I won in a landslide. They were fake polls because polls are tough. You know, when you get a fake poll—I get them today, I saw one today that I’m at 40 percent. 40 percent. I’m not at 40 percent; I’m much higher than that. I mean, I’d love to run against anybody. The real polls say [I’d] kill anybody; it wouldn’t even be close.
Sargent: Trump also said this:
Donald Trump (voiceover): It just amazes me that there isn’t more support out there. We actually have a “silent support.” Well, that’s how I won. I got probably 85 million votes. They say 78 million, 79 million. They cheated at this election, too. It was just too big to rig. Too big to rig.
Sargent: So, Julia, it’s not true that Trump won in a landslide in 2024, and the polls were actually pretty close to right—contrary to what he says there. What do you make of his faith in this “silent support”? Like, in some ways you can, kind of, see why he thinks that, but right now, of all times, the evidence is particularly strongly against it. Your thoughts on all that?
Azari: Yeah, I mean, there’s several things here that really get at my major pet peeves as a political scientist. And one is when people say that Trump won in a landslide—he didn’t. I mean, modern contemporary presidents really don’t. He’s not alone in that. It’s not in and of itself a critique to say that he didn’t; he just didn’t. It’s just numbers.
And in terms of this “silent support,” you know, there is—like you said—there is a sort of discourse of “the polls are way off.” They really aren’t as far off as people think. And sometimes there is a weird poll or an outlier poll. And what I—and I think basically every other political scientist on the planet would say—is: Well, you look for patterns; you look for consistency.
And what we see with Trump is that it’s pretty consistent. He’s not terribly popular. He’s gotten less popular over the course of his term in office. I think we could quibble about by how much or how significant that is, but it has declined. And the other thing is that we’re seeing when you break down specific policies, specific actions, specific ideas about what Trump has done in office—they’re fairly unpopular.
Sargent: The Washington Post poll is very clear on that. It has his approval at 39 percent to 60 percent among all Americans. And on issue after issue, he’s really underwater. On immigration, he’s at 40 percent to 58 percent—that’s 18 points underwater. On the economy, it’s 41 percent to 57 percent—16 points underwater. On inflation, it’s 32 percent to 65 percent—33 points underwater.
Julia, one thing that surprised me really a lot is that Trump is tanking on both immigration and the economy. Those are issues where two things are supposed to hold: One, he’s strong on them—that has been the mythology all along; and two, these are supposedly issues where Republicans enjoy an advantage. So how do you understand what’s happening here? This kind of collapse on these two major issues that are supposed to buoy up Trump and the GOP.
Azari: Yeah. I mean, I think there are, kind of, two things going on. On the issue of the economy—again, I think that we could ask a lot of different questions—but there’s a fairly straightforward story to be had, which is that the main issue with the economy when Trump won in 2024 was not employment. This is not 2008, right? It’s not the stock market. It’s prices.
And his major economic policy that people associate with him has been tariffs, which you can directly tie to the rising of prices. Media has glommed onto that narrative. As I said before, private businesses have glommed onto that narrative. So even if that weren’t true—it probably is—but even if it weren’t true, that would be the message that people are receiving from a lot of different sources. So I think that’s the economy story.
The story on immigration is that public opinion is really malleable on that issue relative to many other issues—really sensitive to framing. And so I think when Trump was framing “the border is insecure, the Biden administration has failed,” some people were quite receptive to that framing. But then when you talk about what to do about it—even right after the 2024 election—that actually fell apart quite quickly.
People don’t like the idea of a “chaotic border,” whatever that may mean. But they also don’t like the idea of deporting people who’ve been here a long time. They don’t like the idea, certainly, of what’s happening now: of these sort of state forces with no accountability killing American citizens. People don’t really like that—unsurprisingly.
Sargent: Well, I’m really glad you said all that because, boy, do our pundits misunderstand immigration and public opinion. We have a piece on that up at tnr.com. Folks, check it out; it goes pretty deep into how public opinion actually works on immigration. It’s very thermostatic, and it really swings pretty wildly. And as you say—I thought this was a really smart point—it’s very, very sensitive to framing. And boy, is the imagery that’s flooding people’s phones really framing this issue in a stark way right now.
Azari: Right, exactly. And like many policies, people have one attitude about these sort of overarching concepts when you present them in the abstract, and a very different attitude when you start to break them down specifically. I don’t know—I’m not exactly sure what that’s called or if that has a specific name—but I think it’s a phenomenon that’s really worth paying attention to as we consider how American politics works.
Sargent: I couldn’t agree more. So on tariffs, The Washington Post poll found that only 34 percent approved of his handling of them, versus 64 percent who disapproved. That’s 30 points underwater.
Fox News, of all places, displayed this graphic—a very striking graphic of those numbers on tariffs that was flagged by the seemingly tireless Aaron Rupar. It was really a powerful image. Now, Trump watches Fox News, so he probably saw these numbers. Julia, it’s often said that Trump’s team keeps bad news from him, like he’s in a bubble. But I don’t know—with the midterms approaching, I’ve got to think the White House political team is getting really nervous about the unpopularity of his tariffs, especially with him doubling down on them. What do you think about all that?
Azari: Yeah, it’s particularly interesting in light of the Supreme Court decision because somebody basically said the Court handed Trump an “out.” They said: “Here’s this bad policy that you’re doing that people don’t like, and it’s not achieving the ends that it’s intended to achieve. We’re going to strike it down for you, and then you just blame us.”
Right? That’s essentially what the Court does. And Trump instead doubles down on it. And now it’s really associated with him. That is certainly something that I would imagine his political staff would want to communicate to him. I also think the Fox News point is really interesting because tariffs are particularly an area where the Republican coalition is a little bit strained. And there are some cracks in the Democratic [coalition] on it as well, but specifically when you think about what are some things that might make the business community abandon their support for Trump, this seems like an issue that’s ripe for that.
Sargent: And also, it’s going to knock him down among working-class voters. And so you saw these kind of amazing non-college numbers that we just alluded to earlier, right?
Azari: Right. Yeah, I think that’s really important. You have a group of voters that has been trending Republican for a long time and that you can imagine—not to make broad assumptions about a group of people—but you imagine that folks in this group who are on the lower end of the income scale are very sensitive to price differences. And the industries that they may wish would come back to the United States are not going to automatically do so because of the tariffs. That’s just not going to happen.
Sargent: Fox has admitted on other occasions that things are going badly for Trump. Fox had a recent poll of its own that found Democrats leading in the generic House ballot matchup by 52 percent to 46 percent. That 52 percent for Dems is the highest Fox has ever recorded for either party.
The Fox poll also had Trump’s overall approval a bit higher, but it had him at 45 percent to 55 percent on immigration—that’s ten points underwater. And on the economy, he’s at 40 to 59 in Fox’s polling, 19 points underwater. Tariffs: 37 to 63, 26 points underwater.
So here’s the thing, Julia: Even Fox News polling is finding this, and Trump watches Fox News. So he has seen these numbers, and yet you hear this weird, rambling denial anyway. What do you make of it?
Azari: Yeah. I mean, I guess I sort of link it to the larger “Trump project.” To me, a lot of what he’s saying about the polls has echoes of what he said about the 2020 election. And what he said about the 2016 election—which, of course, he won in the Electoral College, but still talked about fraud in the vote—is that any result he doesn’t like, he just says, Well, this is fake news. This is fake.
We have silent supporters and, sort of, in denial of any larger project of opposition. And I see that as really problematic in a constitutional democratic republic for a lot of reasons. But one of those reasons is that there is a literature in political science that suggests that public opinion really is a crucial and important constraint on how presidents think about their power.
What we’re kind of seeing is Trump getting into this spiral of being unpopular, being in denial of it, and then doing things that are even more unpopular. And I don’t really know where this spiral ends, or where this takes us, or what it looks like after the midterms.
Sargent: I guess your point is that, in some sense, Trump is behaving in an extra-constitutional way. The flagrant denial of what the polls say isn’t just “Trump being Trump” or “Trump being crazy”—on some level, he actually believes the opposition to him is illegitimate and doesn’t really exist, right?
Azari: Yeah, this is really my, kind of, takeaway from this—from the last decade of Trump and Trumpism. And it was what I was trying to get at in my Substack post that I had this Monday at Good Politics/Bad Politics about Trump’s behavior as an unconstitutional leader.
It’s not just a, sort of, thing that he’s saying; it’s part of this larger conceptualization of the fact that he doesn’t have to deal with any opposition. And this is different than any other president we’ve had. We’ve had flawed individuals who made flawed choices, but they weren’t in complete denial of the existence and legitimacy of any opposition to them.
Sargent: What was so interesting about your post is that you kind of laid out a “taxonomy” of the ways in which Trump is governing outside the Constitution. Can you walk us through that a little bit?
Azari: Sure. Yeah. So I have a couple of different, kind of, frameworks that I’ve used to break this all down. I had a piece a couple of weeks ago asking the question, “Does the American presidency exist anymore?” That looked at Trump’s rhetoric and his, kind of, decline to function as a president who feels like he needs to try to unify the country with his language.
What I did in the more recent piece was try to, kind of, apply this to the Constitution and say: Well, you know, is Trump following the Constitution as it’s written and laying out the presidency as it’s written? The real thing I wanted to test in that piece is this new pet theory I’m working on, which is that the 14th Amendment and its guarantee of equal protection under the laws is what, kind of, gave meaning to the presidency as it’s laid out in Article II, which gives it the responsibility of protecting, preserving, and defending the Constitution.
And so the question I, kind of, pose is: Is this a way we can evaluate presidents? Are they falling down on this duty if they’re not committed to carrying out the Constitution in this 14th Amendment lens of protecting all Americans, treating all Americans equally? When we start thinking about Trump through that lens, we can think of lots of different ways that he has demonstrated his lack of commitment—ways that he has formally challenged some of the provisions of the 14th Amendment.
I take this, kind of, a step further and say: Once we have determined that someone’s operating outside of the constitutional order, it is impossible to apply the questions we used to apply to understand their presidency, because they’re operating in a totally different office in a totally different, kind of, context.
Sargent: Well, let’s just talk about that a little more to close out. It seems to me that you can actually draw a direct link from Trump’s unpopularity right to the “governing outside of the constitutional order” in some sense. If you look at the policies that Trump is pursuing that are most deeply entangled with authoritarian rule and abuses of power—there are the tariffs, which he’s just flagrantly doing without Congress.
And then also immigration—which I think, in addition to the visual aspects of it, the killing on the streets, the masked kidnappings, and all that—I think on some level people really get that what Trump is doing with his paramilitary forces is really trying to treat a very large subset of Americans as, fundamentally, sub-citizens. Both in terms of the treatment of undocumented immigrants, but also the occupations against people’s will—the armed occupations against people’s will. Do you see a direct connection, in some sense, between Trump’s deep unpopularity and the extra-constitutional ruling?
Azari: I do. And I think—so there’s, sort of, two directions where I would go with this. And one is just the raw evidence. So you don’t have to take it from me. Again, we look for consistency in polls, and there’s data from the Brookings Institution, there’s data from Pew—all of which are direct questions people ask: “Is Trump using too much presidential power?”
There are different wordings of this question and slightly different timing, and it seems like this really is something that is of concern to Americans. On the deeper level, another point I raise in the piece is that Americans disagree about a lot regarding the Constitution, but there’s one, kind of, idea that’s pretty consistent in it, and that is that we understand power to be broken up and distributed across different entities. We don’t expect one person, or even one branch, to have all the power.
This is where the Trump project has been really distinct from what’s come before; they’ve really tried to consolidate their power, kind of, under MAGA across the presidency, Congress, even the court—institutional boundaries across federal and state. That is really unique in our history. Typically, it might be that some have wanted to do that, but they’ve never succeeded. And that also, kind of, goes back to this idea of denying legitimate opposition. I think that Americans—you know, even if they’re not coming into this with a lot of specific, detailed knowledge of the text of the Constitution—Americans, sort of, know this in our bones: that the power is supposed to be shared among a lot of different people, and that disagreeing and opposing is part of our tradition.
Sargent: Just to boil this all down really simply: I think people intuitively get that he’s acting like a “mad king,” and they react very badly to that.
Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, check out Julia Azari at Good Politics/Bad Politics, the Substack, and check out her book, Backlash Presidents: From Transformative to Reactionary Leaders in American History. Julia, thanks so much for coming on with us.
Azari: Thanks so much for having me.