The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 6 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 allies are privately warning that the GOP is in serious trouble in the midterms. Politico reports that Trump’s obsessions with his vanity projects, like his ballroom, are distracting from the economic message that Republicans think is necessary to stave off a bloodbath.
So what did Trump do this week? Well, he managed to get Republicans to seek $1 billion in taxpayer money for the ballroom. He also rambled bizarrely about his support with MAGA voters, as if that somehow will matter in the midterms. Trump simply does not have any conception of public service, of the presidency as an institution that belongs to the people. Is that itself becoming a huge liability for the GOP?
We’re talking about all this with political scientist Tom Schaller, who has a new piece for the Public Notice Substack on Trump’s vanity presidency. Tom, good to have you on.
Tom Schaller: Great to be back, Greg.
Sargent: So I just want to start with something Trump said today about his polling and his public support. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (voiceover): I am, according to CNN, 100 percent approval within the Republican Party. That’s almost—that’s better than your record. I’m at 100 percent approval. Do you see the CNN poll? Nobody talks about it. CNN—I think the people that did that poll probably got fired—but within the Republican Party and MAGA, which is basically 100 percent of the party, I think. 100 percent.
Sargent: Tom, the Republican Party is not actually 100 percent MAGA. Many Republicans are non-MAGA and a non-trivial swath of them disapprove of Trump’s various policies. But more important, MAGA support won’t be nearly enough for Republicans to survive the midterms. Yet here, Trump appears unable to process that thought because only his supporters exist. Your thoughts on that?
Schaller: I mean, as the kids say today, he’s delulu. Greg, I mean, he has no concept of what’s going on, or worse, he knows what’s going on and he’s trying to spin things. I mean, that’s actually the more charitable view—that his tutelage under Roy Cohn is that you never admit defeat, you never say you’re wrong, you always put the shine on the bright side of everything, and you fake the numbers. We know he inflates all kinds of percentages and makes up gas prices—lower when he’s in charge, higher when somebody else is in charge.
But part of the problem—I think, on a more serious note, aside from his delusional attitudes about things and beliefs in himself—is that unlike the first term, we had some serious people recommended to him that worked for him, including all the way up to chief of staff and top advisors. He’s completely surrounded by yes-women and yes-men. And all they do is praise him and tell him how amazing he is.
And so you wonder if bad news even gets through anymore to him because nobody has the fortitude to say, hey, Mr. President, this is not polling well, or you’ve made a bad decision here, or here’s what they’re saying in the news. And so I don’t know. It must be piercing somehow because he’s online at 2, 3 in the morning. But maybe his feed is such that it’s just nothing but praise.
Sargent: Well, that gets to something I want to ask you about. Politico reports that some of Trump’s closest allies fear that his efforts to stage events around the economy are failing for a number of reasons. One of them is that Trump’s tendency to talk about his imperial projects, like the White House ballroom and the victory arch, is muddying the economic contrast that Republicans think must be drawn with Democrats. The report says Republicans are increasingly anxious and think the House is basically lost.
Tom, what’s funny is you don’t hear Republicans attach their name to the idea that the ballroom talk is bad for them, precisely because the cult leader won’t allow it. And yet the slavish devotion to Trump is itself killing them. Can you talk about this weird dynamic? I haven’t seen anything quite like it.
Schaller: Yeah, it’s like they’re willing to go down with the Titanic on this guy because they’re so petrified of him and his voters. But when these issues are turning against him, it doesn’t make any sense for them to jump on board with these sort of vanity projects and stapling his name to everything. For all the talk about how inflation and the price of things matter—and it does, and I’m not saying it’s unimportant—I remember telling people very early on in 2025, I’m like, these kinds of things like tearing down a whole chunk of the White House—it’s not really a vanity thing, although it’s a selfish thing, like tearing down Rob Reiner after his murder.
Those things are—I call them like V8 politics. Like, you don’t have to understand what the donut hole problem is in the Social Security funding for people born between 1935 and 1937 to have an opinion about Rob Reiner, whose movies you probably love. And you don’t have to be an expert in the FICA taxes and how they fund Social Security and Medicare to understand that a president coming in and just tearing down the White House as if it’s his personal property at Mar-a-Lago—these things resonate in a way that turn people against you as a person. They sour you not just on a president, but make you look like a malicious, selfish, vain person, which is exactly who he is.
Sargent: Tom, I think for that reason that you identified there, the ballroom has actually gotten tremendous penetration in the culture. It’s really the perfect symbol of Trump’s megalomania and sort of the state of things in the country right now.
Now, I want to remind everyone that there was a moment where some Democrats called it a distraction and said they wouldn’t talk about it, they’d only talk about affordability. I think that’s a big mistake. Things like the ballroom punch through to low-information voters in a way that virtually nothing else does. And Democrats need to beat the living shit out of Trump over the ballroom day in and day out, in my view.
Schaller: I agree 100 percent, Greg. To me, these moments hearken back to, say, the 1992 presidential debate where George H.W. Bush, then the incumbent president, is answering economic questions and Clinton is killing him in that little town hall debate. And they catch George H.W. Bush looking at his watch, which—it’s just a nonverbal. It has nothing to do with whether he’s a good president, whether he’s managed the Gulf War well, how well he’s doing on the economy, a very shallow and short recession. It just indicates that he literally doesn’t care.
I think people are starting—including MAGA people—to figure out that this presidency is all about him and it’s not about the voters. And so to your point, it’s not either/or, it’s not a mutually exclusive choice. They can talk about the price of gas and affordability and the fact that Trump, after 10 years, tells us he doesn’t even have concepts of a healthcare plan other than repeal and replace Obamacare, which is working very well. It’s that he’s so focused on this other stuff.
So yeah, it’s only a billion dollars in a $7 trillion budget—that’s one seven-thousandth. You can say these are pennies on a dollar, and it is a billion dollars for a ballroom. But it’s what the message sends—that he’s got more time to talk about this than he has to talk about everyday Americans’ lives. And it reinforces the idea that the presidency for him is all about him. And it’s not a job to serve the American public and do what’s best for the people of the United States.
Sargent: Yeah. And if you think about low-information voters, for them, it’s these little symbolic things that really carry a lot of resonance. And you can kind of see why that’s the case. They’re not obsessing over politics the way you and I are.
They’re catching little glimpses of it here and there on their phone, on the TV, maybe between shows that they’re watching, whatever. It’s not easy for people to interpret politics to the degree that you and I try to.
Schaller: So for the 90 percent of voters who are Democrats or Republicans or lean heavily toward one party or the other, policy doesn’t matter even if they’re familiar with it. But for the 10 percent in the middle—these are people who don’t vote in primaries, they only vote in presidentials, they’re very tuned out to policy, they don’t even understand what the parties have in their platforms, they can’t really measure objectively the performance or the relevance of a particular bill.
The vast majority of voters going into 2024 had not heard of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act or his stimulus package or anything else he had done. And those voters, as you point out, they vote on optics. They vote on little clips. And they vote on things like, this guy’s trying to put his name and face on everything that he can get his hands on.
Sargent: Right. And we’ve got Republicans in Congress now seeking one billion dollars in taxpayer money to pay for the ballroom—though the money’s supposed to only fund security elements of it. Trump and Karoline Leavitt had previously said it would be paid for 100 percent by donors. Republicans are just shackling themselves to this megalomania, which is a strange spectacle indeed, Tom.
Schaller: He’s lost everybody that doesn’t wear a red hat. And I think he’s lost a lot of them, particularly those in the middle—the soft Republicans, moderate Republicans, and the people in the middle who aren’t hard partisans—because they look at a billion dollars and they say, he’s got time for that, but he doesn’t have time to solve healthcare.
He’s got time to put his name on the passport, but he doesn’t have time to lower prices, which he said he would do on day one. He’s got time to build a 250-foot arch, but he doesn’t have time to figure out the price of gas and the price of groceries and the price of eggs, as was the big issue in 2024. He’s focused on all the wrong things because he’s focused mostly on himself and only himself.
Sargent: Well, we had a Washington Post poll that found 56 percent of Americans oppose the ballroom and only 28 percent support it. Sixty-one percent of independents oppose it, which is really something. Now, 65 percent of Republicans support the ballroom. At first glance, I read that and I thought, well, okay, this really shows that the base is with Trump. And that’s kind of true, but 65 percent isn’t that big actually.
So there’s a fairly non-trivial swath of Republican voters out there—again, the non-MAGA types—who also look at the ballroom and say to themselves, holy shit, this is just a complete disaster.
Schaller: I guess the good news is he can’t go any lower, if you’re his top advisors and you’re Susie Wiles or Karoline Leavitt. And I suppose he could bounce back. Presidents usually don’t bounce back—usually their poll numbers do not recover, barring a major crisis. I mean, this is a guy who’s trying to capitalize on an attempted assassination, even though it wasn’t really close. The guy was taken down a floor away and his numbers haven’t moved.
There’s no empathy or sympathy left for Trump because I think he’s exhausted whatever reserves he had from January 20th, 2025. They’re gone now. It only took him 16 months to exhaust everybody who doesn’t wear a red hat.
Sargent: So what’s the upshot of this? Is there data out there that supports the general idea that Trump’s megalomania—the imperial presidency, as it were—is itself actually backfiring at this point?
Schaller: Yeah, I think you already cited the ballroom opposition. There was a poll from YouGov about Trump’s face on the passport and 62 percent of Americans say they wouldn’t want his face on their passport. And I’m curious to see what happens with this 250-foot arch that he’s planning for Northern Virginia. When he was asked about it, they said, what is this designed to commemorate? And he gave his favorite one-word answer: me. And I think as people start to tune into that, they’re going to realize that this sort of vanity presidency is not what they voted for him for. They voted for him to fix inflation.
And even though he ran on two inflationary policies—A, run out all the immigrants who provide cheap labor to keep the cost of domestic goods down, and B, tariffs, which raise the price on all imported goods—I often wonder who’s dumber: Donald Trump running against inflation with two inflationary policies, or the people who voted for him thinking he was going to solve inflation with two inflationary policies.
He promised all these day-one things—he was going to solve Gaza-Israel, he was going to solve the energy bills. And he hasn’t done any of it. And people gave him a little bit of time through the summer. He’s 16 months in now and he hasn’t accomplished any of that. And he’s actually created new problems in Iran, as you well know. And it seems like he’s very, very distracted with trying to leave all these legacy footprints—of him and statues and pictures and images and the Kennedy Center and the new airport in West Palm Beach.
It probably doesn’t take a lot of time, between you and me, to order some toady to go down and lean on the FAA to change the name to DJT, Donald J. Trump Airport, in South Florida. But it’s the optics of it. It’s like, he’s got time for that, but he doesn’t have time for me and my family.
Sargent: So in your piece, which talked about the vanity presidency as a thing, you got into the larger historical context here. You discussed how we’ve had really corrupt presidents. We’ve had really inept ones. We’ve had nasty bastard ones and so forth. You went through the whole litany of bad presidential qualities, as it were, and concluded that Trump is something special. Can you talk about that?
Schaller: Yeah. So I start off with sort of the superficial stuff, which we already covered—and I will repeat: the naming things, putting his name and tacky gold leaf on everything, lying about, you know, his golf championships and all the other stuff that he does. That’s just about me, me, me and how great I am and bragging about his big brain and his incredible memory. And everybody agrees I’m one of the most genius people.
He’s now apparently comparing himself to Caesar and Alexander the Great, as literally the most influential and powerful person ever to draw breath on the planet—this nonstop breaking his own arm to pat himself on the back.
But I dig in in the middle of the piece, as you know, Greg, and I take a more serious angle to this. Because the problem with Trump’s megalomania, the problem with his narcissism, the problem with his vanity, is that because he needs these people to tell him in every cabinet meeting how special and great and smart he is, he begins to believe that he’s invulnerable. He begins to believe he’s the smartest person on every topic.
He literally believes he’s the smartest person on every topic in every room. And that’s starting to backfire now because he’s so dumb he couldn’t figure out what a teenage first-night player of Stratego could figure out, which is that Iran was going to block the Strait of Hormuz as their one and only ace in the hole.
Sargent: There’s also just a different conception of the presidency at work here. Obviously, previous presidents have been corrupt. They’ve been warmongers. They’ve been incompetent and so forth. But this is a level of, I guess, personalist rule that I think is hard to find a parallel with. Isn’t that right, Tom?
We’re talking about someone who just on some really fundamental level doesn’t see his role as serving the public in a large sense. They’re really only his supporters and him, and that’s it. Not only does no one else exist, but those parts of the country are to be punished and beaten down and denied basic services and otherwise crucified really. Can you talk about this conception of the presidency, the personal conception of it?
Schaller: Yeah, the other half of this coin—besides, like, everybody praise me, everybody tell me how great I am, let me put my name on every building, every airport I can pin down—is the negative side of this that you allude to, which is remember Trump ran this time as: I am your retribution. He framed it that way. Vote for me to get retribution against the liberals and the woke. And to be fair, he has gone after universities. He has gone after intellectuals and expertise in general. He has gone after science. He has gone after the media. So he has gotten some retribution for what his MAGA meatheads love and devour voraciously.
But if you pay attention to what he’s really doing—if you look at how he’s twisted the Department of Justice in particular to go after James Comey, to go after Letitia James—that doesn’t put any extra money in anybody’s pocket. That doesn’t lower the price of eggs. That doesn’t make healthcare more affordable. That doesn’t lower the price of gas.
What he really meant—though he was very clever, because he’s a great con man, in phrasing it—he said, you’re my retribution. The voters are his retribution for all the perceived ills of the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax and the supposedly stolen election and every other enemy on his list.
Sargent: You know, that’s really interesting. In other words, when he said, I am your retribution, what he really meant is all the voters, the entire electorate, is merely an instrument in his personal drama.
Schaller: Exactly. Like he views everybody instrumentally. I don’t think we need to work our way through that—that’s very clear. And everything for Donald Trump is transactional, and those transactions are always asymmetric. You praise me, you support me, you bow to me, you give me what I need. And then I never return the favor.
It’s amazing how many Republicans have not learned the lesson that no matter how much loyalty you give, how much praise, he never reciprocates. Right? And even when he endorses people, he endorses so he can say he won or he endorses because he needs their vote. Everything is instrumental. Everything is selfish.
And like I said, he was very clever about framing it as, I’m going to be like this vehicle, this vessel in which you pour all your animosities and angers and hatred, and I’m going to exact retribution against immigrants and liberals and trans people and wokism and pronouns and whatever else you’re mad about in middle America that you think retribution is going to make your life somehow better, even though it doesn’t. And he’s done some of that, to be fair, but most of his retribution has been done on a very private and personal level with his own personal agenda.
Sargent: Well, as you said, Republicans don’t seem to be getting the message. They don’t seem capable of understanding any of this. But there really is only one group of people who can deliver this message to Republicans, and that’s voters in the midterms. Tom Schaller, really great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Schaller: Great to be here, Greg. Thanks so much.