The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 1 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’s unpopularity is hitting some important milestones. His approval rating has dropped below 40 percent in at least three different sets of polling averages. What’s more, another analysis shows Trump is more unpopular with independents than any president at this point in his second term, including Richard Nixon. And millions of people across the country just marched to protest his presidency in what may be the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.
So what’s the real nature of the connection between those protests and Trump’s plummeting approval numbers? The answer to that will give us a sense of what it all means for the fall elections. So we’re talking today to Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of Indivisible, the group that organized those protests, about what to make of what’s going on out there in the country. Leah, nice to have you on.
Leah Greenberg: Great to be here.
Sargent: So Leah, what’s the final estimate on the turnout at the protests over the weekend? And by the way, congrats.
Greenberg: Thank you. Well, so our final estimate is more than 8 million folks showed up across 3,300 events around the country and around the world. We had people in all seven continents. And one of the things that was really powerful and exciting about this march—or this moment—was the sheer number of those new events that were taking place in red, rural, and suburban areas. We’ve long had really incredible turnout in a lot of those big blue city centers, but what we are seeing across the country is a real incredible spread at a very hyper-localized level of this discontent and this visibility of opposition to the Trump administration.
Sargent: Well, I really want to come back to that because his erosion in red America and with the base is an important thing. So the New York Times polling averages have Trump at 39 percent approval with 56 percent disapproving. Nate Silver’s polling averages have him at 39.6 percent. And the 50 Plus One website has Trump even lower at 37 percent approval to 58 percent disapproval. Leah, all three of those are below 40 percent. And it’s really worth stressing that these are averages which are deliberately constructed to not move quickly. What do you make of that milestone?
Greenberg: I mean, I think it says what it says, which is that people are tired of this mad king act, right? The reality is it’s not going to be one single thing. It is this constant sense of unaccountable, imperious governance—of his focus being on things like invading and occupying a major American city, or building himself a ballroom palace, instead of on regular people’s experiences, the cost of living, the crises that regular people are going through all over the country. It is the sense that American society is struggling under the weight of AI, a weak jobs market, continued inflation, while Donald Trump focuses on his own glory, his own enrichment, his own power. It’s not a matter of one thing, but it is the aggregate of all of that together.
And I should also add, particularly in the last month, what we’re seeing is that the war is driving a new set of folks out and activating people in a different way. Because fundamentally, people are still getting used to the fact that this is a real and full and escalated war. But they’re reacting very clearly to that.
Sargent: The mobilization in the face of the war is a really extraordinary thing. CNN polling analyst Harry Enten had this amazing on-air monologue. His calculations have Trump’s net overall approval 18 points underwater and among independents, 45 percent underwater. Listen to this.
Harry Enten (voiceover): This has been a steady fall into the abyss. There is no bottom. Death Valley. If there’s one big number from this, is that Donald Trump now has the worst net approval rating among independents of any president ever at this point in term two. He is worse than Richard Nixon, who would be going adios amigos in a few months back in 1974 in term two. Look at this, minus 45 points, worse than George W. Bush at this point in term two. The Iraq war was weighing him down at minus 37 and worse than Richard Nixon when of course there were all those impeachment hearings back in 1974 at minus 36 points. He’s nearly 10 points worse among independents on his net approval rating at this point in term two, Donald Trump is, than Richard Nixon. My goodness gracious.
Sargent: So again, Trump’s approval is a net 19 points underwater and among independents 45 percent underwater. Leah, that last number is really something. You had mentioned that you’re seeing real turnout at these things in unlikely places. And independents are a key part of the Trump coalition. What do you make of that piece of it?
Greenberg: Well, I think when you look at the Trump coalition of 2024, it was a coalition of everyone who was dissatisfied with the status quo. And that is an inherently unstable coalition at the best of times. And it is an especially unstable coalition if you make really clear that your top priorities are a mass deportation agenda that generates blowback pretty much everywhere it goes, an unpopular catastrophic war that nobody asked for, your own enrichment and your prerogatives, putting your signature on the dollar instead of doing anything that’s useful for folks, and massive tax cuts for wealthy people.
So I think that, again, it’s not a matter of the single thing or the one secret trick that is going to turn people against the administration. It is the pervasive reality that they are focused on their own power and enrichment while American families are struggling evermore.
Sargent: And the abuses of power are obviously central. I mean, no kings, right?
Greenberg: Yeah, that’s right. And, you know, “No Kings” was very much constructed as an umbrella container. If we were trying to protest every single thing that happened under this administration, we would have five protests a day and we would burn ourselves out really fast. When we created No Kings, the whole idea was to really create a container that would allow us to be in dialogue with the most outrageous things of the day while carrying through a collective theme about a government that doesn’t represent us and doesn’t feel accountable to us.
So, the first No Kings was energized by the deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles. The second one was a reaction to the administration’s massive encroachments on free speech in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination. This one, we saw a huge animation around ICE, the secret police, around the war. What we’re seeing collectively is that people come for a lot of reasons, but they can hold up that shared sense that we’re all under attack and we’re all facing the same imperious, unaccountable governance that is harmful to us.
Sargent: I’d like to ask you a little more about what the war is doing out there in the country. As you said, you’ve organized several of these. The energy behind previous ones seemed very driven by the National Guard, by ICE invasions, by mass kidnappings, all this stuff that was triggering people’s anti-totalitarian instincts. The trappings of these paramilitary warfare moments against Americans really trigger those. And I think that really works with No Kings.
Now it’s clear, though, that the war in Iran is a big driver of all this protest energy. Elliott Morris’s analysis of Iran polls found that it’s like the least popular war at the outset of any U.S. war in memory. That wasn’t at all assured, was it? What do you make of that? Like, how did that happen? And what are you seeing on that?
Greenberg: Well, I think it’s entirely to be predicted because this administration made almost no public case for war in the first place. It was a surprise to people. And to some extent, I think the initial reaction was a little muted in part because Trump has a long record of kind of threatening aggression, tiptoeing right up to the point where he’s going to do something irreversibly damaging and then walking it back.
I think there were a lot of people who did not immediately have a massive reaction to it because they experienced it as one of many different episodes of saber rattling aggression. But as it has become clear that this is a massive generational catastrophe and one that’s going to have immediate implications for Americans as well as being catastrophic for thousands of innocent lives lost abroad so far, people have really been starting to rev up and starting to make the connections between the international and the domestic agenda.
It’s very obvious to people that if we are spending a billion dollars a day for a war and for bombs that are going to destroy Iranian schoolgirls’ schools while we are cutting healthcare and costs for schools at home, those two things are connected. There’s no sense of this is the affordability agenda and that is the international policy agenda. Those two things are the same agenda.
Sargent: Leah, I want to go back to what you were saying about the base and about the turnout in some red areas. We had this extraordinary Fox News poll the other day. I want to run some of the findings by you because it sort of provides a little bit of an indication of why you might be seeing that.
I should say that the Fox poll had his approval among independents at 25 percent and his disapproval among independents at 75 percent, which is extraordinary. But critically, only 28 percent of independents support the war in Iran. And then on top of that, Trump is underwater with non-college whites and even non-college white men. You don’t get closer to the molten core of the MAGA base than that. And critically, those demographics in the Fox poll also oppose the war. So he’s losing his base over the war, isn’t he?
Greenberg: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely the case. Look, I think that there was a door that was left open by the disastrous Biden administration policies on Gaza for Trump to portray himself as the anti-war candidate in 2024. I think many people, including folks like the Uncommitted Movement, recognized at the time and tried to avert a situation where Trump was able to do that.
Also there was absolutely a base of folks who thought they were voting for the anti-war candidate in 2024 when they voted for Donald Trump. And so you are seeing a fracturing of that set of folks. They may not necessarily be the highest information voters, but a war is certainly capable of breaking through to them.
And I think, more generally, I would say there is a sort of unhelpful tendency in the Democratic consultant class to think about talking about economic issues and everything else as a binary where if you’re not talking about affordability, then you’re not breaking through to voters on affordability.
But voters are actually perfectly capable of making a judgment based on what they understand to be your priorities based on what they see in the headline. So if all you see in the headlines about Donald Trump is that he is going to war, he is bombing other places, he is attacking and invading American states, he’s launching the newest version of his ballroom plans—you’re perfectly capable of figuring out the corollary, which is that he is not very focused on your economic wellbeing.
Sargent: The other thing that drives me absolutely crazy about that sort of Democratic consultant class brain lock is that it just doesn’t reckon with how information works in the Trump era. It’s all about attention. It’s all about what Trump is doing. I mean, that’s the bottom line, right? Like, our politics is about Donald Trump a lot of the time. Believe me, I wish that weren’t so, but it is. He commands the attention. He’s the one driving very powerful emotions among people, especially negative ones. And Democrats need to accept that speaking to those emotions is an essential part of the project, right?
Greenberg: 100 percent. We live in an era where information is going to travel via an algorithm. The algorithms are against us, which is no small part of the problem. But in addition, if you film something that has the perfect message for the perfect median voter, but it’s really boring, then it sits on your page and it does not go anywhere else.
And so the basic assumption that you can rely on some kind of media vehicle to carry your message to the voters the way that a newspaper used to if you were getting called for comment—that’s not true anymore. You actually have to get attention. You have to be in the fight. You have to engage with the news of the day if you want people to hear you at all.
Sargent: Yeah. And in fact, we saw all this play out in real time. We had a Democratic consultant brain lock moment where we were told, you know, we can’t talk about Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation because it will make Democrats look like they’ve taken their eye off the ball, they’re not looking at kitchen table issues anymore. And I mean, come on.
So that was just absolutely disproven in real time. We saw a tremendous amount of citizen involvement in these things. And critically, a lot of it went viral on social with these incredible videos, which just happened to have a lot of attention-grabbing drama to them. And the Democrats who started speaking to the feelings unleashed by that stuff really broke through. And breaking through—you have to break through, right?
Greenberg: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Look, I mean, people want heroes. They want courage. They are driven by conflict. If we don’t generate those things and we don’t use them strategically to get our message through, we’re just going to get ignored.
Sargent: Absolutely. And so I think in a way none of this was assured, and I want to ask you about this. I’ve been arguing at NewRepublic.com that Trump has thrown away the traditional GOP advantage on three of the party’s recent strengths—the economy, immigration, and national security. That’s an extraordinary thing, but it was not necessarily predictable. At the outset of Trump’s second term—and I’m sure you noticed this too—there was a big sense among the punditry that Trump’s victory was bigger than it actually was, that he was a strong and formidable figure who had correctly grasped the deeper yearnings of the American people.
We had no way of knowing that the tariffs, the deportations, and the war would all get so roundly rejected by the public. And yet that happened. What do you think happened there? How did it unfold this way?
Greenberg: So I would say, first of all, I think there was always an over-calibration, particularly in how elite quarters understood the 2024 election. I remember talking to reporters in November and December of 2024 and their frame was: the resistance is over, Donald Trump has won this resounding victory, there’s no real possibility that there’s going to be any kind of repeated backlash the way that there was in the first term.
Meanwhile, I was like, what are you talking about? We have the most people we have seen in many years. We are getting five Indivisible groups a day right now. They are flooding in. They are reporting record meetings. They’re doing all the things that people do to get organized before you see the big public show of opposition.
And part of the theory originally with No Kings was actually, let’s figure out a way to visibilize the fact that American society—elite institutions might have folded to Donald Trump, but American society really hasn’t. And that there is opposition in so many more places than you might expect. That was really the original core of why we did the first No Kings—was trying to bring that current out.
I think there are a couple of things that within elite quarters that drove that. I don’t think you can understate the extent to which there was, within a bunch of different institutions, a prolonged and very intense backlash to MeToo and the racial justice uprising, and a sort of reactionary tendency that led a lot of people to be far more open to Donald Trump and far more dismissive of the threats that he posed—particularly among quarters where a reassertion of a certain amount of the social status hierarchy was welcome. I think that is one big piece of it.
I also think, frankly, the press consistently has this tendency to think of Republicans as the voice of the real people, the voice of the real Americans, et cetera, et cetera. And so that was just doubly in play in a way that was frustrating and easily disproven at the time if people were paying attention, but not that many people were.
Sargent: Well, fortunately, some people were. Just to try and bear down on what you’re saying—I think if I understand you correctly, you’re saying that there was sort of an institutional built-in hostility to the racial justice movement of, I guess, 2020, post-George Floyd, and an institutional hostility towards wokeness that kind of led a lot of institutional players—many top shelf reporters and commentators included—to almost hope that Donald Trump was sort of the revenge on the woke and the revenge on the left that they were all looking for in some sense.
And so they were just way too quick to over-read Trump’s win as this kind of deep and profound cultural referendum on the left and on wokeness and in favor of quote-unquote populist conservatism or whatever they like to call it. Is that more or less what you’re saying? And can you talk a little more about it?
Greenberg: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think there was a tendency among a lot of quarters to think of this as, sort of, this is the new normal, as opposed to this is the farthest point of a pendulum swinging one direction that is about to swing back the other way real hard. I also think some people really thought that they were going to get the Trump of 2017, who is not very organized, who is constrained by a bunch of advisors who were not his yes-men, who really didn’t have much of a plan coming in for what he was going to do.
And instead they got Trump of 2025 and Project 2025 and Stephen Miller—a bunch of people who came in very intentionally and very determined to use every power they had to the max, to penalize every outside institution that could challenge them and to collectively remake American society. They had an ambitious plan that they started putting into action immediately. And that fostered and galvanized a backlash much faster than a lot of people would have expected.
Sargent: Absolutely. So Leah, how do you translate all this into the midterm? Sometimes I’ll talk to a Democratic operative and I’ll hear an estimate of their pickup of House seats that’s lower than I’d like to hear, honestly, although it’s not necessarily uniform. Sometimes I hear larger estimates.
What’s your sense of how all this energy on the ground and these low approval numbers will convert into gains in the House and Senate? What has to happen to ensure that it does convert on the scale we’re hoping for? How good are you feeling about things?
Greenberg: Well, I think we are heading for a midterm wipeout for Republicans of biblical proportions. I think that every sign we are seeing—from the off-year elections last year to the special elections, to the massive crowd surges of opposition, to the polling—all converge on the same point, which is that there just are no Republican safe seats in this upcoming election. And I would encourage people to try hard wherever you are, even if historically the place you are is considered a little bit on the safer side or considered a red area. So I think the map is in play in a big way.
What is a big threat is—because Donald Trump knows this too—we have every reason to believe he is going to try to sabotage the election six ways from Friday. He has already been putting into action his gerrymandering plan. He has already been putting into action his mid-decade redistricting to gerrymander as many seats as he can. He has already been attempting various executive orders to shift around voting parameters. He will continue to try a bunch of dirty tricks to suppress the vote, to manipulate the process of voting in elections—key elections—to subvert the count.
We should expect all of that heading in. We should organize and prepare for it. We’re facing an election cycle that is unlike any we’ve ever seen before in terms of the overall inclination and power of the federal government to mess with every aspect of the process in order to ensure a result that’s favorable to them. And so we’ve got a plan for that.
Sargent: Leah, I guess there are two sets of signals we’re getting, just to kind of close this out now. One is that the maps are not quite as good as we’d like them to be. So the House map is not sort of riddled with as many competitive seats—or obviously superficially and on the surface competitive seats—as say the 2018 map was. So that’s leading some Democrats to trim their sails a little about the predictions. The Senate map is very hard for Democrats. So that’s also leading some Democrats to trim their sails a little.
But the flip side is that there are all these other signals that are essentially telling us that anything can happen anywhere, right? And you’re basically saying organize toward the latter set of signals. Is that the story?
Greenberg: 100 percent. I’m saying wherever you are, you should be working towards the biggest turnout you can because we don’t know where we’re going to get lucky. But I would bet that in November we’re going to see some real surprises in some pretty red places.
Sargent: I mean, if that energy keeps going, then I think you’re right. Anything can happen this fall. Leah Greenberg, thanks so much for coming on with us.
Greenberg: Thank you.