The following is a
lightly edited transcript of the March 25 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.
Donald Trump just offered some really strange new comments about his war against Iran. He declared it already won and boasted endlessly about the U.S. military’s domination of Iran while seething at the news media for refusing to acknowledge his greatness. Pete Hegseth followed up with some similar comments, and in his case they were drenched in bloodlust. Do Trump and Hegseth think the American people like this kind of unbridled enthusiasm for violence and domination?
Some new polling analysis shows yet again just how unpopular this war truly is, yet there’s no trace of any concern about any of this from Trump and Hegseth. What if the bloodlust is working against them? We’re talking about all this today with G. Elliott Morris of the Strength in Numbers Substack, who produced some of this new polling. Elliott, good to have you on.
G. Elliott Morris: Hey, thanks for having me back.
Sargent: So Donald Trump had threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants, but then backed off, claiming serious talks about ending the war were underway with Iran, which Iran then denied. Let’s listen to Trump talk about this.
Donald Trump (voiceover): If I want to take down that power plant, that very big, powerful power plant, they can’t do a thing about it. It’s like, ‘take me.’ That’s all they can do. And yet, if you read the New York Times or if you watch ABC fake news or NBC fake news, you’d say it’s a close battle. It’s not a close battle. They are totally defeated.
Sargent: Trump also said this:
Donald
Trump (voiceover):
You know, I
don’t like to say this—we’ve won this. This war has been won. The only one that
likes to keep it going is the fake news. I mean, the New York Times. You read
the New York Times. It’s like we’re not winning a war where they have no Navy
and they have no Air Force and they have no nothing. And we literally have
planes flying over Tehran and other parts of their country. They can’t do a
thing about it.
Sargent: So when Trump says “take me” like that, it’s got this weirdly pathological edge—this obvious enjoyment of violence and domination. And his anger at the media is so strange. He really thinks the news media’s role is to hail this war as a world-historical triumph. Elliott, what did you make of all that?
Morris: The thing that really has stood out to me about this administration since day one is how much it seems like a made-for-X presidency. It just seems like these people want to satisfy some of the worst corners of the internet—the people who spend the most time online on a social media platform, in this case X, that really rewards some of those gross ideas about power, especially.
I mean, this is very similar to the Manosphere side of the internet as well. And it’s hard for me to hear Donald Trump talk like that and not think of all of the people on X—where I don’t spend any time anymore—who are consuming this gleefully. And that feedback loop is really, really on display whenever someone like Pete Hegseth, for example, talks about this war as well.
Sargent: Well, Pete Hegseth is just absolutely pickled in this kind of MAGA domination talk and all these memes and stuff like that. I want to come back to that stuff about the Manosphere in a bit, because interestingly, parts of the Manosphere have been against the war. But first, let’s talk about your new poll—it’s for Strength in Numbers and Barricade.
Trump’s approval is stuck at 37 percent with overall Americans, which is abysmal. That seems to be driven mostly by his crushingly awful numbers on the economy. You guys had him at a net negative 39 points on handling prices. He’s underwater on every issue that you track, including border security for the first time. Elliott, can you talk about what you found?
Morris: Yeah, I keep seeing evidence in these surveys that just gets worse for President Trump every time we take a new poll. So the trend here, in other words, is deeply negative, and it has been for a while. It’s one thing to be at minus two on border security, your previous best issue, for example.
But when that number has declined 12 points over the last year—and that’s, I mean, to be honest, that’s probably the one policy area where Trump is delivering on some of his promises. There being no significant traffic crossing the border, at least that shows up in the statistics. That’s a real indictment of the presidency overall.
And really it only gets worse from there. On the things that people tell us are their most important problem—that being affordability being the big one, and also jobs and the economy—the president is about 40 points underwater on prices and inflation, and about 23, 24 points underwater on jobs and the economy. That being the number one issue that he won the 2024 election on, voters now say in our survey that they trust Democrats more to handle these issues—six points on inflation and the same six-point margin on jobs and the economy.
That’s just a really dismal place to be if you’re the incumbent president. And it’s only going to get worse because of the effect that this new war in Iran is having on prices.
Sargent: Well, that is fascinating. So let’s talk about your findings on the war. Fifty-eight percent in your poll said the war is a bad use of taxpayer dollars. Sixty-one percent would oppose it if gas prices rise by a dollar or more per gallon. And a majority—51 percent—say the war will make America less safe, while only 26 percent say it’ll make Americans safer. That’s a dramatic rejection of Trump’s core rationales for the war. What’s your take on all that data? And is there some other data on the war worth discussing in the poll?
Morris: Yeah, there might be two things to say. First, zooming out a little—the Iraq War was not this unpopular. People did not think there was this little utility in something like the Iraq War for years. Trump is really speed-running the decline in popularity of wars here, when you’re looking at these numbers.
The second big thing is just the intensity divide.that we see. Forty-four percent of adults say that the war is a very bad use of taxpayer dollars, whereas only 15 percent of them say it’s a very good use of taxpayer dollars. For something—a question this hard for anyone in charge of the government—it’s just hard to get people to approve of taxpayer spending in general. You should expect the question mostly to be negative, except for stuff like Social Security.
But when the intensity gap is this high, that signals a really powerful, mobilized resistance to the administration’s policy. And that shows up in the other questions and also in stuff like protest data and online social media discourse about the incumbent party. So it also puts the president in a really tough position in terms of continuing the war if it’s incurring political and electoral costs—this intensity data suggests that it will.
Sargent: Your poll has Democrats leading Republicans in the generic House ballot matchup by 49 percent to 43 percent—that’s a lead of six points. I want to ask you about parallels between this moment and 2006. In that midterm, George W. Bush’s war in Iraq was very unpopular, but Democrats were actually slow to take it on.
They finally did and they won the House and even the Senate, which was looking like a very big leap. And they did it by opposing the war pretty aggressively after not being willing to. Right now, it seems like the timetable is really compressed—Democrats are basically opposed to the war in Iran as a party right at the outset, and they’re taking it on more aggressively at the very start than I think I’ve ever seen before.
Why is that happening? Is it because Trump is such a profoundly damaged figure, and is it because polarization is worse? What explains the compression in timetable here?
Morris: I think the Democratic Party is perceiving everything we’re talking about here—in terms of the intensity of backlash to the president overall, the unpopularity of the war, and the general feeling that the president’s speeches, his meetings with his cabinet, his press appearances, and those of his cabinet members are geared toward a war-fighting presidency in terms of war-fighting on social media, and an optics-first presidency rather than something that is delivering for the American people on the things they say are most important to them: prices, jobs, healthcare, and elections and democracy writ large.
And I think the Democratic Party has the same data—or better—that you and I have here in the public, Greg, and they’re probably perceiving the weakness of the administration on the war. In particular, we have to think back to 2006 as well. The Bush administration spent the better part of a year and a half selling the war, manufacturing a crisis that they needed to respond to. And there’s none of that for a surprise war where the administration changes its justification every single day—and, to go back to the beginning of the podcast, just has really gross public appearances about use of force against civilians, or just the prosecuting of the war and the cost to the American people in general.
Sargent: So another point you’ve made that I think is really important is that we shouldn’t be analyzing support for the war solely through the prism of is MAGA for it or is MAGA splitting—as if the molten core of MAGA is what’s important here. I think, and I think you have said this as well, that we should be looking at Trump’s 2024 coalition and how it’s doing and what it’s thinking about the war. And there you actually see some real divisions.
We got some data from Quinnipiac recently that I want to run by you, Elliott. The Quinnipiac poll found that only 40 percent of voters support the war on Iran versus 53 percent who oppose it. I asked Quinnipiac for a demographic breakdown and they found that among voters aged 18 to 34, only 21 percent support the war—and among non-white voters without a college degree, a proxy for the non-white working class, also only 21 percent support the war. Huge majorities of both of those demographics oppose the war.
Elliott, can you talk about that? I mean, those are the voters who went to Trump because of the economy and prices during the Biden years, right? And now he’s losing them.
Morris: Yeah, I’ve combined all of the survey data for my Strength in Numbers Verasight polls over the last year so that I can look exactly at this question—how Trump’s voters in 2024 feel about him by demographic group. And the biggest swings against Trump, not just on war or prices but overall, are among Black Americans, young Americans, Hispanic Americans, and those from households making less than $50,000 a year.
I mean, the defection here is like 20 percentage points on average of those groups I just mentioned—25, actually, on average, say that they disapprove of the way Trump is handling his job as president today. If you run the math on this and you take 25 percent of those groups that voted for Trump and shift those votes over to Harris, she wins by about three or four percentage points. It’s not even really all that close.
Sargent: Well, let’s close by listening to Pete Hegseth—speaking of the MAGA corps. Listen to this.
Pete Hegseth (voiceover): The air campaign that we’ve conducted, that Israel’s conducted alongside us, was one for the history books, truly. And it’s because we have a president of the United States that, when he sends his war fighters out to fight, he unties their hands to actually go out and close with and destroy the enemy as viciously as possible from moment one. And that’s why we see ourselves as part of this negotiation as well—we negotiate with bombs. You have a choice, as we loiter over the top of Tehran, as the president talked about, about your future. The president has made it clear that you will not have a nuclear weapon. The War Department agrees—our job is to ensure that. And so we’re keeping our hand on that throttle as long as, as hard as, is necessary.
Sargent: So, Elliott, you just can’t miss how drenched in bloodlust and sadism and domination that sort of talk is. You mentioned at the start of this that this kind of talk is really about playing to the online segments of MAGA. What’s so puzzling to me about this is that they keep this up even though they’re losing young people—these are the very voters, young men in particular, who we are told that Trump was able to make huge inroads with thanks to the Manosphere and the podcasters and so forth.
But you’ve got people like Joe Rogan now turning on the war. None of this bloodlust stuff appeals to those types of influencers, as far as I can tell. Yet they keep trying to push this anyway, and I don’t get it. Elliott, explain it to me—what on earth are they thinking?
Morris: I think Pete Hegseth doesn’t know how to be secretary of defense—or secretary of war, as he’s calling it—and he’s trying to create a character to play. I mean, he’s a Fox News host, so he’s familiar with playing characters. In my headcanon, or my retconning of this—to use some 29-year-old language—he’s like mashing Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld together and just going 111 percent with that performance.
And it just goes back to how we started the show, right? These people are performing for an audience—an audience that is extremely polarized politically, but also socially—and they want to punish the political and demographic opposition. And they salivate for performances like Hegseth’s. When he posts—and we also know from reporting that these people are just obsessed with looking at their metrics on Twitter and the responses—when he gives this performance and then loads up Twitter five minutes later and these things are all viral with some of the worst people on the internet, it’s no wonder that he keeps hamming up this character.
Sargent: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So just play this out for us to close out. Do you think that if Trump kind of finds an exit ramp, or declares victory and goes home, or maybe even gets Iran to give in to some sort of settlement on nukes—which seems unlikely, but I guess not impossible—is there any way for Trump to help himself at this point?
Or is he just so profoundly damaged on all these different metrics, on his basic competence and his commander-in-chief abilities, that there’s no real way to recover on this stuff? What’s your general sense?
Morris: I have a survey out right now, and we should have results back hopefully by the end of the week, asking about support for a ceasefire. And I think there he could win some political points by backing down and signing a ceasefire. But where does that leave the country? The bigger questions here—Americans have lost their lives, they’ve paid more for gas and for other trade that’s impacted by higher gas prices. And in the context of Iran, they’ll probably be at the same place in terms of nuclear enrichment that they would have been without the JCPOA—that conversation notwithstanding. I don’t see an off-ramp here for him.
Sargent: G. Elliott Morris, great to talk to you. That’s fascinating stuff. Thanks so much for coming on.
Morris: Thanks, Greg.