The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 15 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 is raging in all directions. After exploding at Pope Leo over his criticism of the war, he’s now lashing out at an ally, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Why? Because she sided with the Pope on the war and because she won’t help him reopen the Strait of Hormuz. This comes as a new polling analysis shows him cratering with non-college white voters, who are of course a critical voting bloc. The conventional wisdom is that Trump has a high floor of support due to his base. But what if he hasn’t bottomed out yet? We’re talking about all this with New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who’s been writing well about the catastrophic politics of Iran for Trump world. Alex, always good to have you on, man.
Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.
Sargent: Let’s start with some polling because it’s amazing. CNN’s Harry Enten looked at an average of polls to calculate Trump’s approval with white voters who didn’t go to college. Listen.
Harry Enten (voiceover): We are talking about non-college white voters and he is sliding right into the water. This is a ruh-roh moment, to quote the great Scooby-Doo. Trump’s net approving with non-college whites. Look at this. In February of 2025, it was plus 32 points and now it is minus two points. That is a 34-point shift. And I will note this is an average of polls.
Sargent: So that was overall approval. Now listen to what these voters are thinking on the Iran war.
Harry Enten (voiceover): What about the war? Well, the war ain’t helping him because just take a look here. Non-college whites, net approval rating of U.S. military action against Iran, minus five points. You think that’s low? Come over to this side of the screen. How about Trump on Iran? Minus 13 points, a very unlucky 13 indeed for the president of the United States with a key core group of his.
Sargent: Just to recap, Trump’s general approval with non-college whites has slid by 34 points and he’s now underwater with them. On the war, support for it is five points underwater with those voters and support for his handling of Iran is 13 points underwater with them. Alex, that is something. Your thoughts?
Shephard: It’s just terrible. I mean, I think there’s always been this misguided idea that Trump’s support among the white non-college, white working-class vote is ironclad no matter what. And that’s just not true. We saw this during the pandemic as well. But even during the pandemic, which basically did create a global recession, we did not see the president do this sort of this level of economic self-sabotage. And I think that the extent to which many people—myself, I think, included here—overstated some of the causes of Trump’s victory back in 2024, it’s really coming into the foreground right here.
The big thing that rode him to victory was inflation, right? And Trump is taking a number of actions right now to cause prices to rise. And if you look back, the sort of cratering support started at the beginning of this year, so all the way back in January—it predates Iran and it’s post-tariff inflation. That was the sort of start of the erosion of white working-class or white non-college support. And now Trump has basically quadrupled down on that by starting a stupid war for no reason that he’s now stuck in. And you’re seeing things like, for instance, gas going up by 30, 40 percent in some cases—that is forcing people to reckon with what the president is actually doing here, and understandably they are recoiling.
Sargent: Well, Alex, I followed up and asked Harry Enten if Trump has ever fared this badly with non-college whites in polling, and Enten told me that this rivals where he was with that demographic just after January 6th. That suggests he’s at a low point with them, as you also said.
What’s critical to me here, though, is it isn’t just the economy. His base is cracking over the war too. And as you say, maybe the perceptions of the war are colored very strongly by the impact it’s having on prices. But I also think the war is just filling the headlines with awful news and stuff that makes him just look like a preposterously ridiculous moron. And so I think this demographic is really souring on him over that as well.
Shephard: I think one of the reasons why a lot of Trump’s voters stuck with him, even amidst all the kind of erratic fire and fury, garbage and nonsense of the first term, was that Trump’s outbursts—they were relatively low stakes—were about people that Trump personally cared about. And in general, he was doing things that didn’t tend to affect people’s day-to-day existence. And I think for some voters, that erratic behavior only communicated the fact that Trump was a different sort of politician.
And again, the stakes were relatively low in the first term. If you look back then, as bad as things were, for the most part it largely amounted to a big tax cut—pre-pandemic, a big tax cut bill that any Republican president would have passed anyway. And I think now what you’re seeing are those voters having to reckon with what those policies look like in the real world, right? In a way that they haven’t had to before.
And they are having to actually see that, like, this guy, Donald Trump, who claims to be breaking the system on our behalf, is actually engaging in just another stupid Middle East war. He’s not explaining why he’s doing it. And every action that he’s taken since that war began has only made it worse. It’s only made costs go up. And I think in general, people are looking at this with understandable wariness, right?
Where you look at a situation like the Strait of Hormuz and it’s impossible, I think, regardless of your political beliefs, to not to be incredibly cynical about it and say, this is a situation in which the U.S. has managed to lose in the Middle East faster than at any time in our history—maybe even going back to when we were fighting the Barbary pirates or whatever. And I think that also matters here.
And again, I think for all of the talk about the president’s ability to communicate with these kind of low-propensity voters, there has not been any of that about this war. You look back—the things that have cut through to the mainstream are Trump tweeting that he’s Jesus or whatever. It’s not a rationale for going to do regime change in Iran. And that’s because there’s no one in this administration that can actually tell you what they’re doing here. But if you are a voter, what you will see is, for instance, I went on vacation two weeks ago and when I came back gas was a dollar and 40 cents more expensive than when I left.
Sargent: I think you got to the critical point there, Alex, which is that the Strait of Hormuz situation is just really legible to a lot of voters. It’s a choke point. A lot of important stuff passes through it. Trump has said that he will obliterate Iranian civilization to compel Iran to open the strait—and they didn’t open the strait. So people are kind of wondering, like, what is this half-cocked lunatic doing? He’s threatening to incinerate tens and tens of millions of people and it’s not actually forcing Iran to do his bidding. And I really think the entire mystique is just cracking up over that. What do you think?
Shephard: Yeah. I mean, I think that they’re totally high on their own supply and they have been for a really long time. And, if you look back, for instance, at the Iraq War—to which that is a much more significant use of American manpower—but that war at least had a sort of fake rationale of providing democracy to the Middle East, and it existed as a kind of post-9/11 catharsis for people. Both of those things were legible. And this war is just not legible, right?
It is legible when you explain to people that this is a longstanding Israeli preoccupation and that the Gulf States had their own reasons for wanting the U.S. to do it. But none of these parties could understandably take out the Iran regime themselves because they don’t have the military power to do it. So they convinced Trump to do it. Which is what happened. And I think when you look at it more broadly, I think people understand that that’s what happened here.
But I think inside the administration, my general sense is that Trump believed that he had kind of gotten in and out of Venezuela in this way, that he could just keep kind of doing this, and that he is the sort of sole master of reality and he can declare victory whenever he wants. We’re in a situation now where Iran—our stated adversaries—are in a much stronger negotiating position than they were before, right? Because they can hold the United States economy hostage, and they know that Trump is terrified of that as well. But he also can’t get out of a situation in which he’s not the sole winner, which is already impossible here. And that’s the bind that you and I and the millions of non-college white voters that we were talking about earlier find ourselves in right now.
Sargent: Trump’s frustration over Iran right now is just white hot. After the Pope criticized the war and Trump unloaded on the Pope, the prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, called Trump’s attack on the Pope unacceptable. This really angered Trump. He said this to an Italian newspaper: “It’s her who’s unacceptable because she doesn’t care if Iran has a nuclear weapon and would blow up Italy in two minutes if it had the chance.”
Alex, this isn’t just any pointy-headed European leader. Meloni is a member of the MAGA International. What’s funny about this, though, I think is that Meloni didn’t understand that she’s not even allowed to defend the Pope if it makes the ailing American despot look bad in the least. Trump has to be above the Pope, even for the prime minister of Italy.
Shephard: Well, yeah, and of course, we all know about the Iranian nuclear threat to Italy right now, too. I do think that this tells us something that is really interesting to me, though, which is that basically from the moment that Trump really emerged—especially since him and Steve Bannon linked up—there was this idea that they were the kind of spearhead of this global far-right movement. And this was like back in June of 2016, after the Brexit vote happened, Trump was going around calling himself Mr. Brexit.
And there was this larger sense—and this is like where a lot of the Viktor Orbán links come from, the Hungarian president who went down after 16 years basically of power over the weekend—there was this idea that they were sort of part of this groundswell of the global far right, that populists were fed up with open borders, that they were fed up with bureaucrats, that they were fed up with people in faraway places like Brussels, which is ridiculous to me, dictating how they live, and that they were going to rise up. And I think what we’re seeing is the crackup of that everywhere.
You look at Canada, for instance—Canada was probably on the verge of electing a kind of Trump-esque figure last year. Trump comes into power, puts in these tariffs. Now you have a technocrat, Mark Carney, the former head of the Bank of England, running there. And I think Meloni is fascinating because she is the furthest-right Italian prime minister since Mussolini, right? That’s not debatable. That’s crazy in its own way. But she has really had to dial back on her populism and conservatism because of the association with Trump and how toxic that is. And I think that what you’re seeing is that even among far-right figures, tying yourself too close to him is a problem. Of course, I mean, again, if the president attacks the Pope and you’re the prime minister of Italy, you do sort of have to step in. But that again is the absurdity of this moment.
And again, once you speak out against Trump, you have this ridiculous situation where Trump is watching television on Sunday and sees these three American cardinals speak out against the war and then literally—kind of literally—starts a holy war right after that. And the reverberations, I think, from that are huge. But I think that the Orbán defeat there is not immaterial to this—that global far-right leaders are looking around and saying, this is a pretty bad moment for us. People are turning against this kind of far-right populism that has been ascendant since Trump essentially walked down the escalator in 2015.
Sargent: Yeah. I mean, in fact, I want to underscore what you’re saying by pointing out that when Meloni ascended, that was seen as a real sign that this global far right, this MAGA International, was really on the march. And so for her to have to really start distancing herself from the, you know, unquestioned supreme leader of the MAGA International is a real sign that it’s just starting to crack. That, plus Orbán going down to defeat, really suggests that the global right is on much shakier ground than it looked as if they would be. And boy, it happened fast.
Shephard: This was already baked in before Iran, right? And Iran is the most catastrophic thing an American president has done since Iraq. I mean, it’s maybe worse in some ways, which is crazy to say. But I think what we’re seeing here is a huge global trend that is manifesting itself everywhere and seems to be manifesting itself here as well, though we won’t be able to see its results in full view until the midterm elections in November.
Sargent: Trump’s anger at Meloni is also over the fact that she’s apparently not willing to send military help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump said this to the paper, speaking about Italians: “Do they like the fact that your prime minister isn’t giving us any help to get oil? I’m shocked at her. I thought she had courage, but I was wrong.”
Alex, I don’t know if Trump understands the situation at a basic level. The problem doesn’t appear to be that we don’t have enough military firepower. It’s that military firepower can’t force Iran to open the strait. Isn’t that the essence of this?
Shephard: Yeah. And I think the other thing too is what Trump is doing is psychological more than it’s strategic, right? That he wants other people to take the blame here. That he is trying to bring in NATO and the European Union, which have wisely kept their distance from this entire farce. The United States does not need help militarily to bomb Tehran, but it does need the help of other nations to end this conflict, right?
It needs the help of countries specifically that are not Israel to end this conflict. And it needs those countries, I think, to help find an off ramp, or to build one that is acceptable to the United States, Iran, the Gulf States, and the Iranian regime, to the extent that such a thing exists right now. And instead of trying to bring those sort of partners in to find a way out of this, Trump is alienating them and demanding that they share in the blame for something that is just colossally stupid.
Sargent: Well, to return to some stuff you said earlier in this discussion, I think there’s an interesting through line to all this. Trump’s MAGA allies in Europe are turning against him over the war—that means MAGA International is splitting over it. Meanwhile, Trump’s base is splitting over the war at home. That means MAGA in America is fracturing over it.
The scale of betrayal—in a way—of what Trump is ostensibly supposed to represent and what MAGA is ostensibly supposed to represent, nevermind that it was always bullshit that they were anti-war, but they’re supposed to be that. The scale of this betrayal is actually at the point where it’s really seriously endangering a massive movement. And I find that really striking. And I’ve got to say, man, if this is what brings MAGA crashing down, then boy, is that a certain kind of satisfying, poetic justice—aside from the fact that thousands and thousands of innocent people are getting killed.
Shephard: Yeah. And I think that you’ve been seeing this sort of crackup—I’ve been writing about it for the last couple of months, especially since Iran started—which is it started, I think, with people that are all opportunists. They are almost all, or maybe all, antisemites. They are people like Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly. But these are also people that I think were genuinely trying to intellectually backfill the notion of Trumpism with something. And that’s not just the president. And what you’ve seen, I think, is a real—the first schism was between people that were trying to kind of come up with a meaning outside of Trump for this stuff. They left. And I think that you now have this sort of true believers that just say, well, MAGA is Trump, it’s whatever Trump says, it’s just a straight-up cult of personality.
But one of the things that you saw this week was, after the Jesus picture, people like Riley Gaines or these kind of Catholic influencers—they were out too. And I think that was notable to me, not because I think it will necessarily last, but you see how quick these people will leave now, right? That anyone is basically—if there’s a sort of exit door that cracks open, they will speak out about it. And that’s a notable difference from the first term, where for the most part the kind of Trump opposition on the right was from a sort of more establishment or moderate wing.
And what we’re seeing now—in some ways it resembles the aftermath of January 6th—is that there’s a sense that he’s done, right? He’s a loser, he’s cooked. And so the people that understand that they are going to have to be fighting over what power in the Republican Party looks like post-Trump are starting to position themselves and sharpen the knives. And I think that is something that I assumed was going to happen closer to the end of this term. But it’s happening right now. And it’s, I think, causing this sort of accelerated breakdown of this coalition.
Sargent: Well, just to wrap this up, here’s the best part of all. JD Vance can’t do that. He can’t distance himself from Trump. He’s tied to Trump very, very tightly. All he can do is get dutiful reporters to write things in newspapers saying that really, really, he totally opposed the war. And at the same time, he of course is really loyal to Trump. So he’s going to stick by Trump because he’s a loyal guy, even if he has misgivings. And he’s the guy who’s supposed to be inheriting this movement and this coalition. And it’s cracking up under him, yet he can’t distance himself from the dark force, the kind of vortex that’s causing the cracks to really radiate out in all directions.
I mean, it couldn’t be happening to a nicer guy. You wrote about this. Can you sort of take us through how JD Vance kind of manages this at this point?
Shephard: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been fascinated with Vance more or less since I first came into contact with him via Hillbilly Elegy. He is one of our great opportunists and cynics and is a shape-shifter par excellence. And I think what he’s been doing this term has been really interesting to me because he’s trying to sort of build connections with these various sort of independent movements within MAGA, right—whether they’re kind of this sort of podcast crowd or the sort of more intellectual wing. Certainly he has his Catholic conversion story and his upcoming memoir about that. So he has a kind of religious conversion take as well. But one thing that Vance does not have, which Trump does, is an independent base of support within the party.
And I think where Vance is fascinating is that you’re seeing somebody who’s trying to figure out what a Vance coalition post-Trump could look like. And he, in the lead-up to Iran, basically said, okay, well, if I can keep my hands clean here—while Marco Rubio, his main rival probably for the nomination, has his fingerprints all over that—then he can go out and say, look, you know, Trumpism, you know, it still works, right? We moved too far with it. This Iran thing is a mistake, but you can follow me and I will take care of all of that. And that’s just not going to work at all.
As we’ve been discussing, he is tied to all of this. So I think what we’re seeing is that there isn’t like a successor who can come in and just say, I am MAGA now, right? And we’re going to do MAGA without Trump and it’s going to be even better—because Trump has never allowed somebody like this to flourish or prosper in any way. And so I think that also points to a kind of failed-state situation, right? That Trump will be term-limited—he’s not going to hold on to power, I don’t think—but he’s not going to. And you’re going to have these people that are fighting over the sort of scorched earth that we’re left in, which is $6 gas, a strengthened Iranian regime, no strong ties to Europe or even to the Gulf States, maybe, in the Middle East. And a country that is more isolated, weaker, and poorer than it was 10 years ago, solely because we elected this moron twice.
Sargent: Well, there is one other thing that Trump has that JD Vance definitely lacks, and that’s charisma. Which is also a problem because he’s going to need that to try to hold together all these different competing factions who, as you say, will have their knives out for each other. Alex Shephard, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Shephard: Thanks for having me.