The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 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.
NBC News is reporting that some House Republicans privately admit that Donald Trump and MAGA are now a serious liability in the midterms. They’re in a trap. Republicans can’t decide whether to rely on Trump to turn out his supporters—voters that Republicans very much need—because that risks tying them too closely to the ailing, unpopular president. All this comes as new polling shows that Trump is literally the most unpopular U.S. president ever when it comes to gas prices. It also comes amid new signs that Trump’s corruption is becoming a more central issue by the day.
That GOP trap—whether or not to run with Trump—perfectly captures how the GOP’s uncritical embrace of the president is backfiring in just about every way. So we’re talking about it all with Mona Charen, a writer for The Bulwark, who has a good piece arguing that gas prices and corruption are combining to hurt Republicans in hidden ways. Mona, thanks for coming on.
Mona Charen: My pleasure. Always nice to be with you, Greg.
Sargent: So let’s start with this analysis from CNN’s Harry Enten. Here he’s talking about disapproval of presidents on gas prices. Listen.
Harry Enten (voiceover): Oftentimes when gas prices go up, the president pays a price, but never this much, because we’re talking about a record here. Take a look at this. Highest disapproval on gas prices. Look at this. President Trump, 79 percent. 79 percent of Americans disapprove of him on gas prices. Look, the rest of them you see across the board also reach the 70s, but never this high. This is a record high in terms of looking back at every single president this century.
Sargent: So to quickly recap, Trump’s disapproval on gas prices is 79 percent—higher than any other president. And later in the analysis, Harry Enten notes that 85 percent of independents and even 52 percent of Republicans disapprove. Abysmal numbers. Mona, your reaction to those?
Charen: Yeah, it’s really interesting. And though I’m not usually one to say that the voters are wise and smart—you know, because we’ve had reason in the recent past to doubt that—but in this case, I think it’s pretty clear that voters have this very negative view of Trump’s responsibility for gas prices because it could not be clearer why gas prices are so high. It was this unprovoked war that he chose to engage in that has caused the spike in gas prices. It isn’t some exogenous event.
They gave him a break. They didn’t hold him responsible for the COVID virus. There are many things that they thought were out of his control and therefore they didn’t hold him accountable. But this is so clear. And not only did he launch this war, but he did so without ever making a case for it to the American people, without getting any congressional buy-in, far less a declaration of war. And so, yeah, if it’s causing pain, people know exactly who to blame.
Sargent: There’s a remarkable clarity to this one because in most cases presidents aren’t really to blame for economic conditions. And yet in this case, it couldn’t be clearer. And as you said, I just want to bear down a little more on it.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz—which is where 20 percent of the world’s oil traffics through—is very clearly the reason for the price spikes all around the world. And everybody can see it with total clarity, and you just don’t often get something so clearly cut where a president is so clearly on the hook for what’s happening to voters directly, do you?
Charen: No, it’s such a good point. Because look, life is complicated, and certainly economies usually have many things going on at once. And so you can say, well, what’s causing this slowdown? And it could be many things. It’s usually multifactorial. Is it the Fed? Is it trade? Is it COVID? Is it many, many things.
But in this case, it could not be clearer. And beyond that, it is a violation of Trump’s key promise that he made during the 2024 campaign—that he was going to tackle inflation. Now, of course, his promises were ridiculous. But he did make that claim when he was running, that he would bring down prices across the board. And he has clearly not only not delivered on that, he’s counter-delivered. Prices are up, not down.
Sargent: Well, this all helps explain why House Republicans are growing really panicked. NBC News reports that a House Republican confided to the NBC reporters that Republicans are dubious about the party’s strategy and its slogan, which is, quote-unquote, “MAGA Majority.”
Now that’s supposed to mean the House majority—MAGA Majority—but some vulnerable Republicans don’t like it, according to NBC, because MAGA is toxic and because the terminology centralizes Trump too much. Mona, they finally figured out that Trump is toxic. What do you make of that?
Charen: Well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer crew. No, look, they brought this on themselves. They made their beds. Pick your cliché. This party is Trump’s party. If Trump is popular, they win. If Trump is unpopular, they lose. They have no place to hide. They simply don’t. They have given everything over to him. And so they are completely vulnerable.
Now I should just add a caveat, though, Greg. Let’s face the fact that the Republicans are attempting to cheat their way out of this and they are having quite a bit of success. The combination of the willingness of the legislatures in Texas and other states to gerrymander, the fact that Virginia’s counter-gerrymander has now been ruled unconstitutional by the state court of Virginia—and just FYI, I will just add, though people are saying they want to take this to the United States Supreme Court, I am very dubious that that would go anywhere because state Supreme Courts are almost always held to be the experts on their own state constitutions. The Republicans are now in a position where even though they are desperately unpopular, even though MAGA is toxic, as you say, it is still possible that they could hold on.
Sargent: It absolutely is. As of now, they’re probably going to net at the end of the day around six extra seats due to their redistricting. The analysis that I trust right now, by people like G. Elliott Morris and Nate Cohn, are saying that Democrats have to win the national popular vote by around three points, maybe four at the very outside.
That is really unfortunate and it’s absurdly unfair and disgusting and all the rest of it, but it is doable. Most midterms in memory that have taken place with an unpopular president have delivered a larger win than that. So I really do think it’s possible.
Charen: Yes, I agree. It is possible. It would also be great if Democrats could field candidates who know how to appeal to independents. Because for Democrats to win, they have to win 60 percent of the independent vote, because there are fewer liberals than there are conservatives in this country. And so it’s just a fact of life that Democrats, if they want to win, they have to be able to win over independents—there just aren’t enough Democrats.
So I personally believe that the best way to do that—and I think it’s been demonstrated around the country—is you tailor your candidate to the district and make sure that you have people who are acceptable. You don’t have to give up all your principles. You don’t have to remake yourself into MAGA. But you have to be somebody who doesn’t send independents running for the hills.
There are so many polls, Greg, that show that independents think the Democrats are more radical than the Republicans. I know that’s crazy and I know it’s inexplicable to some people, especially Democrats, but if Democrats want to win elections—and I think we all agree that they really need to, if this republic is going to be anything like what we hope for—they have to figure out how to do that.
Sargent: There’s been a crush of new reporting about Trump’s corruption of late. I just want to point out, independents hate corruption. We just learned some truly shocking news. The New York Times reports that the White House is in talks with the Justice Department in which DOJ would agree to settle a lawsuit that Trump brought against the IRS previously for billions of dollars over his leaked tax returns. Mona, this is an unbelievable story.
A judge is expected to throw out this lawsuit soon, but the White House is actively trying to get DOJ to settle it in Trump’s favor before the judge acts, before the judge throws this out. How is that different from Donald Trump simply ordering an agency to hand him billions of dollars in taxpayer money? That’s what we’re talking about.
Charen: I mean, it is gobsmacking. And, you know, they want us to be lulled into a kind of hopelessness about all of this. And it’s easy to see how that can happen, but we have to fight it. This is an outrageous theft. He is attempting to raid the U.S. Treasury for billions. Now, I can’t imagine that even his own IRS and his own Justice Department will go for billions, but we’ll see.
As I said in my piece, you can get away with a fair amount of corruption if the economy is really strong and people’s pocketbooks are flush. But when the economy is not strong, and people perceive that you don’t care about them, you’re not interested in what’s happening to their bank account, and meanwhile you are stuffing your pockets with gold bars and garish ballrooms and billions from the IRS—people are then going to be very angry.
I saw this recently in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán, the poster child of the post-liberal movement on the right, everybody’s favorite—certainly Trump’s favorite—dictator. He was quite a dictator, because he was a member of the EU and you have to add that. He wasn’t actually putting his opponents in jail.
But he did engage in flagrant corruption. He did make his allies and his family members and himself wealthy. And he did corrupt the society in many other ways, and people put up with it until the economy started to go south. And then the anger about the corruption really erupted and Péter Magyar was able to make that a very strong campaign issue.
And we’ve seen this in a number of countries, seen it in our own country. I mean, arguably Bill Clinton engaged in really reprehensible conduct as president with women, and people were willing to shrug it off because the economy was roaring. And now, you know, Trump—people knew in 2024 when they voted for him that Trump was corrupt.
I don’t think, you know, except for the MAGA crazies, those independents, those sort of normie Republicans who pulled the lever for Trump—they knew he was corrupt, but they figured, okay, it’s a bargain. We’ll get some corruption, but my bank account will be better. Prices will come down. We’ll get the economy of 2018 back. And he has failed to deliver on his end of the bargain and he doesn’t even seem to care. And that is, I think, going to really kill him. I think this is a huge iceberg that he is sailing right into, this corruption issue.
Sargent: And not only that, the corruption news is multiplying on other fronts as well. We’re hearing that the ballroom is now going to cost a billion dollars. And let’s recall that he unilaterally and probably illegally bulldozed the White House East Wing to build this thing. There are also dubious things going on with the contracting on the reflecting pool project. And then there’s the corrupt lawsuit. I want to get at your point...
Charen: Can we just say one thing real quick about the ballroom?
Sargent: Of course.
Charen: It started out—so he bulldozes the East Wing, which by the way, I worked there in the Reagan administration. I took it personally. It was a beautiful building and it was graceful and it fit in with the whole White House campus. Anyway, without anybody’s say-so, without approval from the planning commission or anybody, he bulldozes that and he says, I’m going to build a ballroom and it’s going to be $200 million and it’s all going to be paid for by contributions from private parties, not going to cost the taxpayers a dime.
Few months later, he says, well, it’s actually going to be much bigger and it’s going to be $400 million, but don’t worry, it’s all going to be paid for by private contributions—which is corrupt enough by itself, right? Because people can buy favors by contributing to his ballroom. But now the Republicans in the Congress, in the Senate, are saying they want the taxpayers to spend a billion dollars on this ballroom. So so much for the taxpayers won’t be on the hook. Anyway, just wanted to get that off my chest.
Sargent: Corruption can be a sleeper issue in U.S. politics in unexpected ways. In 2006, the corruption under George W. Bush and the GOP Congress helped Democrats win both chambers of Congress then. I think corruption was a big reason Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020. Now it’s an issue to a degree I don’t think we’ve ever seen before.
It’s extraordinarily vivid because the combination you brought up of the gas prices and the corruption—it’s very clear right now because things are going to shit all over the place, even as Trump is obsessing over all these corrupt monument schemes in a very public way. It’s not like it’s being hidden. It’s right out in public in just about every conceivable way. That’s new, isn’t it? In some ways.
Charen: Yes. So Trump has really lost his touch, or he just doesn’t care. But the other half of when corruption can come back to bite you—there are two situations as I see it. One is, as I mentioned, when the economy turns south and people’s own pocketbooks are suffering, they become much less tolerant of corruption.
The other is when they do not—so if people think that the stories about corruption are just partisanship, they think everybody does it, and there go those Democrats again, criticizing the president, they’ll criticize him no matter what he does, et cetera. If you can get by on that, then you can slide. But the fact is, it isn’t the Democrats right now who are fronting the corruption. It’s Trump himself and his toadies.
It is Trump who can’t shut up about the damn ballroom. It’s Trump who makes that the centerpiece after the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—he immediately goes to, this is why we need the ballroom. It is he who keeps talking about his plans to renovate Washington, his plans for the reflecting pool, his plans for a triumphal arch—God forbid.
Honestly, I don’t know, Greg, about you, but I want to go lie down in front of the bulldozers on that one. But he is the one who’s elevating this. I don’t think the Trump of the first term was doing this kind of thing. Back then, it was like signing his name on the stimulus checks and making sure he could claim credit for anything that went to the taxpayer. But this time it’s all about me, baby.
Sargent: Right. The one thing during the first term was you had him essentially booking rooms in his hotel to corrupt sheiks and stuff like that.
Charen: Oh, I’m not saying there wasn’t corruption. There was, but it was quieter. What he’s doing now is like he’s using a bullhorn to draw our attention to it.
Sargent: He absolutely is. Just to close this out, economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who is right-leaning, had a pretty interesting quote to The Washington Post. He said that people inside the White House, Republicans in and around the White House, are growing anxious. He said, “They’re very worried.” And then he said this: “I think there’s no way to sugarcoat that if we don’t get the price of gasoline down, Republicans are toast. It’s really simple.”
What do you think, Mona? Is that how you see this playing out? Is it basically that they’re not going to really be able to get prices down in a general sense and are Republicans likely toast?
Charen: Well, I mean, barring some sort of miracle, it doesn’t seem likely. They always say that prices go up like a rocket and come down like a feather. And so it is hard to get prices down quickly enough. The conventional wisdom is that people make their voting decisions by August of an election year, and pretty much after that it doesn’t much matter—they’ve made up their minds. So we’re in May. Could something happen to bring prices down by August? I’m not going to say it’s impossible. I just think it’s exceedingly unlikely.
As for whether Republicans are toast, I would just say this. In all likelihood, they’re going to have a bad year. Democrats should be doing everything possible to make it a terrible year. But this is going to be a long-term struggle that we are in against illiberalism and quasi-fascism. And it ain’t going to be over in November.
Sargent: Certainly not, for all kinds of reasons. The struggle is going to continue into 2028 in very big ways. Folks, if you enjoyed this, check out Mona’s podcast over at The Bulwark—The Mona Charen Show. Mona, thank you so much for coming on, as always. Great to talk to you.
Charen: Likewise. Great to see you, Greg.