The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 11 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.
For years now, it was an unquestioned truism in our political discourse that Donald Trump held the advantage on the economy. Yet the evidence is mounting that Trump has completely thrown this away, and now even Republican pollsters are sounding the alarm about the problem. This comes as a new analysis finds Trump’s approval on the economy down at an abysmal 33 points underwater, a drop of 42 points from 2018.
Yet some commentators, and some Democrats as well, think he still possesses some sort of political black magic that we all overlook at our peril. And we don’t understand why. So we’re talking to New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who’s been arguing well against the myth that Trump is Teflon. Alex, good to have you back.
Alex Shephard: It’s great to be with you.
Sargent: So last week we learned that the Trump economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, and worse for Trump, April and May were revised down by 103,000 jobs. On this, Trump is absolutely cratering in the polls as well.
CNN’s Harry Enten averaged the polls and found that during the 2018 midterms, Trump’s approval on the economy averaged plus nine points. Now, Enten calculates it’s minus 33 points. That’s a 42-point swing against Trump. Alex, have you ever seen anything like that?
Shephard: I don’t think anyone’s seen anything like this before. I think the big story of this presidency is that Trump was elected because voters were mad about inflation after the pandemic, and they blamed Joe Biden and his party, the Democratic Party, and they had rosy visions of Trump’s presidency and they brought him back to office. And then Trump and the people around him—and I should say many Democrats as well—saw that victory not as a rebuttal, or a refutation against the Democrats. They saw it as an endorsement of his entire cultural, non-economic program.
And what we’re seeing now is that that was totally wrong. It was just flat-out wrong. And the big story is that voters wanted prices to go down. They did not give Biden the credit that I think his administration deserved for managing inflation, and they brought Trump back in, and Trump took two deliberate acts that sabotaged the work that the Democratic administration had done. He launched a global trade war in April of last year, and then he launched a war against Iran in February of this year, and that’s the presidency right there.
Sargent: I think that’s exactly the story. I want to play something that CNN’s Harry Enten said about all this. He notes that what’s driving Trump’s huge drop on the economy is inflation. And he says that in the latest CNN poll, Trump’s approval on inflation is fifty points underwater. Listen to this.
Enten: But now in term number two, in our latest CNN poll, look at this—Trump 50 points under water. Fifty points under water. I went back through the history books. Again, I told you—I dug deep into them. I dug deeper into them than anyone has basically dug into any polling archive you could before. And no president before President Trump actually had a negative 50-point-or-worse net approval rating on inflation. What does this all mean? Take a look here—Trump’s negative net approval rating: Every single poll since March 29, 2025 has had Trump in the negative.
Sargent: So, two things there. First, no president has ever matched Trump’s terrible numbers on inflation. And second, he’s been in negative territory for the great bulk of his second term. We just talked about the big story of the Trump presidency—he’s been underwater virtually the entire time. Alex, do you think all this has really sunken in with the hive mind that interprets national politics for us?
Shephard: Absolutely not. I think that—I mean, this has been, I think, a story that goes back to Trump one, right? Which is that people have misinterpreted—there’s this idea that there’s a kind of shiny-object theory of the Trump media, that basically coverage goes wherever new news is being made. And especially in the case of the economy and the Iran war, which has been stuck in this kind of quagmire for several months now, that attention doesn’t focus there.
And I think that people then make this leap to say that this is the superpower that Trump has—he can distract you by putting your attention on these other damaging scandals. And the numbers just don’t back this up at all. People are really, really pissed off that they voted for this guy to lower prices and he’s not doing it. That does not mean that the other stuff doesn’t matter or it matters less. But I think that there’s just a lot of anger over that. And I think that that’s really what’s going to drive the midterms, you know, probably for Democrats—it’s looking that way.
However, I also think that the absence of commentary on that, both by sort of mainstream and left-leaning outlets and the Democratic Party, is a huge missed opportunity. I think there’s just a real reluctance to put the blame for this on Trump’s shoulders, even though he took two deliberate acts to sabotage the economy, which is exactly what happened.
Sargent: Can I just bring up a phrase that I cannot stand? It’s when Democrats say, Trump’s negatives are “baked in,” so we don’t have to remind voters about them. You know, yes, you do.
If there’s anything that Donald Trump has proven, it’s that voters forget about what he’s done to the United States of America very, very quickly. And you’ve got to drive it home over and over. Like, you don’t want voters saying, prices, you know, they’re really driving me crazy, it’s both parties. No, it’s Trump. Trump did this to you. Trump did this to you. Say that, Democrats, right?
Shephard: Yeah, I think that it’s this overinterpretation of Trump’s return to power. It’s this idea that because Trump got reelected, that somehow negates all of the kind of Resistance 1.0 work that happened. It’s like when you talk to Democrats who say they shouldn’t impeach him if he comes back. There’s, I think, this larger sense that they focus too much on Trump’s malfeasance.
And that’s just not true at all. I think one thing that was sort of true was that, especially in the first term, they decided to treat Trump as an aberration. This kind of fever dream that Republicans were in. But this is the party of Trump now. That’s why he is able to hold on to power. And, you know, there’s no daylight between Congress and him on Iran or the trade war. So if you look at the economy, that’s one issue there.
But I think the other issue is that there’s just this fear—they’ve looked at focus groups that say Democrats care too much about Trump. And that’s, you know, true to the extent that what voters are saying is they want an alternative to these things. And one way that you showcase your alternative is that you point out what the other people are doing and say, we’re going to do something different here.
And I think on that point, Democrats have really, really dropped the ball. And I think, you know, there’s a real lack of urgency in making a kind of argument for what they will do with the, you know, limited amount of power that they’ll have if they retake one or both chambers of Congress in the fall.
Sargent: GOP pollsters are very aware of what’s happening right now. The Wall Street Journal reports that some of these Republican pollsters are sounding the alarm about Trump and the economy and the Republican Party. One Republican pollster made what I thought was a really telling point.
He said that he’s seeing something new in his focus groups of voters in battleground states, which is that these voters “know exactly to the dollar the amount of their power bill.” Same with health care and food prices.
Now, The Wall Street Journal says Republican analysts think time is running out for Trump and the GOP to regain their image as better on the economy. That sort of thing, where voters are hyper-focused on their everyday costs, is an extremely difficult thing to dislodge, I think.
Shephard: And I think it’s also frustrating, as somebody who thought that coverage of the Biden economy was very unfair and was frustrated by Republican attacks and the inability of Democrats to push back. But I think that there’s a real fear of claiming ownership over economic policy, right? Of arguing that Democrats are actually a lot better at this, and that what Trump is doing is sabotaging the economy.
And when you look back at attacks that Biden faced during his term in office, right? So many of them were unfair, but they were very focused on the everyday well-being of Americans, right? And you’re just not seeing Democrats do that as much as they could.
And I think—this is what I wrote about last week—but you’re also not seeing them tie it into the other big story of this administration—or one of the other big stories of this administration—which is, you know, historic corruption that we have not seen ever in this country, even in the Gilded Age.
And you have a presidency that is self-dealing, whose family’s making billions of dollars, while basically, you know, many Americans are struggling to make basic needs, right? They know what the cost of their power bill is—and the president is making, you know, two billion dollars from the crypto industry.
Sargent: Absolutely. You actually brought something to mind, which is that at the end of the Biden presidency, when Donald Trump took over, The Economist had this now very famous cover, which described the U.S. economy as the envy of the world. Ask yourself this, Alex. How often do you hear a Democrat say that Donald Trump inherited an economy that was the envy of the world, according to The Economist? You almost never hear that.
You almost never hear them say Joe Biden actually left Donald Trump with a very good economy because Democrats are better. And the reason they don’t want to say that kind of thing is this lack of confidence that you’re getting at. They don’t think they can win arguments, I think. And that’s a particular example of one they don’t think they can win. They think voters just decided Biden was a disaster, and they just never want to talk about that again.
And I kind of get that, but they’re throwing away this opportunity to say, we Democrats, we keep leaving Republicans with good economies and they keep destroying them. I think we should hear more of that.
Shephard: Yeah, and I think that there’s a related thing here. I think part of the issue is that you have a situation where the Democrats basically made the best of a bad situation, and Trump is making the worst of a good one, which I think is a delicate political argument to make. But it’s not one that’s wrong.
And I think what it overlooks too is the almost suicidal nature of economic policy under this presidency. So, almost the entire story of this presidency from the very beginning—it starts with DOGE cuts, which begin basically the moment that Trump takes office again. It sort of peaks, for a while at least, with Liberation Day—that’s Trump’s massive global tariffs, where he puts tariffs on basically every country in the world in April of 2025.
And then, if things weren’t bad enough then, he launches a war against Iran in February, at the end of February. Essentially, seemingly, you know, convinced that air power alone will win this war and that Iran won’t close the Strait of Hormuz, even though, as we now know, many people in the military were telling him that this was a very real possibility.
And now you have a situation where the president has strangled an otherwise fairly good economy based on his own completely bizarre economic theory about tariffs that no expert—even conservative economists—believes. No one has believed this since the 1880s, basically. And then, also, you have this kind of hubris, right? This sort of imperial hubris that I think people also don’t credit Trump for as well—that U.S. naval and air power and economic might can withstand anything that you throw at it. And that sort of leads to the situation that we’re in now, where—I think part of it is Democrats have called Trump’s response to Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz a sort of capitulation, right? A huge failure.
But it almost understates the problem here—that this is a presidency that launched a war based on the premise that it would be over shortly, that you would be able to do regime change in a massive country with huge military infrastructure that essentially has been run by the IRGC for years anyway, and now is stuck in a situation where Iran is fully calling the economic shots.
They’ve announced that they’re closing the Strait of Hormuz indefinitely. And it’s not like Iran hasn’t taken actions that have decided important elections in American history before. And so he’s just completely at the mercy of this IRGC-run country now. And there’s a thing that does feel like just deserts, or like schadenfreude, as an anti-Trump commentator. But I think the insanity of that is something that is still not well covered, and Trump’s own role in it.
Like, Joe Biden did not make the cost of eggs go up in the post-pandemic period, right? But Trump has basically taken every concrete action you can to destroy the economy right now. And it seems to largely be held aloft by posts or statements that he makes every Sunday or Monday morning before markets open, like clockwork now. And yeah, there’s no sign that that’s going to change between now and the midterms.
Sargent: I think what you’re getting at there is that, to a very uncommon degree, voters can directly perceive a link between what Donald Trump is doing and what’s happening to their own economic situation. That’s extremely rare, that you have such a direct link. But here’s yet another way that Trump has just outdone all his predecessors.
It’s a thing in political science that voters blame presidents for the state of the economy, often unfairly, but here’s a case where he absolutely is responsible for the state of the economy. He’s just breaking one record after another.
Shephard: There is a thing where—especially as a reporter who used to cover, you know, the domestic economy—it is very frustrating in some ways to have a president who does actually control whether the economy is good or not. Because I think you’re sort of taught, and experts will always tell you, like, actually, voter perceptions on the economy, they’re kind of ridiculous, right? We just saw that with Biden. And in this case, it’s—yeah, it’s very literally true.
Sargent: So this is really interesting: According to The Wall Street Journal. Another GOP pollster, David Winston, sent a cautionary note to Republicans back in June. It said this: “If Democrats could sustain leads on the economy and win double-digit margins among independents, as some polls show, a blue wave is possible.” So this pollster said that back in June, and guess what? Dems are now leading on the economy in some polls, and they are winning independents by double digits in the generic House ballot matchup now.
So, according to this Republican pollster, a blue wave is very possible. Alex, just to your point about Trump’s mismanagement of everything and just how palpable it is, I really think Republicans went into the summer expecting Trump to recognize the situation that he was creating for the Republican Party. And they kind of expected him to try a little harder to turn things around. And instead he just went out there and said, I don’t give a shit about anything, basically. What do you make of all that?
Shephard: I mean, I think that that’s sort of the dynamic between congressional Republicans and the president right now, too—is that they want him to do things that will help them. And that requires essentially discipline on both a messaging standpoint and a policy one, that Trump is not actually capable of doing. And with Iran, I think right now he’s trapped in a place—and has been trapped in a place by Iran—where if he doesn’t give them the JCPOA, the Iran deal that Obama reached with Iran in 2015, plus more, right, they are not going to open the strait.
And Trump came to political prominence attacking Obama for many things, many of them very racist. But one of those was the Iran deal, right? His entire premise as a politician has been that he is a good deal-maker. And the only way out of this mess is to make a very bad deal, right? And that’s entirely his fault.
But you know, I think there’s another issue here as well, which is just that congressional Republicans want something to run on, right? Like, that’s not the president. And Trump does not want them to be able to run on anything that’s not him. And that’s the place that they are in right now. And they cannot run on economic stewardship, which has been the backbone of Republican messaging—not just on the economy, right, on everything—for more than half a century now. They can’t do that. They can’t run on, you know, we’re making the trains run on time, or good governance, because this administration is clearly a mess.
And I think the biggest issue is that voters returned Trump to power knowing fully who he is. I think this is one of the things that actually is really misunderstood about the presidency and many of his supporters. They know who he is. Many of them like that he’s crazy and unhinged. But others—a lot of the people that voted for him in 2024—did so kind of holding their nose and saying, look I don’t like the guy, but I have good memories of the economy between 2017 and 2019. And you know what, a little bit of crazy is worth it if I can get that back.
And what you’re seeing now, I think, is something that is kind of phenomenal, which is that they’re now saying, actually I may think the Democrats are woke, right, I may think that they got crazy, they want to cancel Thanksgiving, right, they want to do all this crazy stuff, but I’m OK with woke if it gets me better economic leadership.
And I think one of the things that frustrates us collectively—if I can speak for you as well as me—is a failure to press that case fully. This is a kind of generational opportunity that they haven’t had since the end of the Clinton presidency, the scandal-marred end of the Clinton presidency, to change the narrative about how Democrats actually lead, and to make it realistic.
The big challenge for the party is, how do you change a multigenerational impression that Democrats are not going to help your bottom line— tjat they’re going to take your money and they’re going to give it to somebody else? And I think that that’s an opportunity that’s being lost here.
And then the other opportunity is just to make a larger case against Donald Trump’s leadership here. That’s the story, in every way. The corruption is the story. His leadership of the Iran War is a story. And his leadership of the Republican Party is the story. And I think we’re hearing a lot of Democrats say it’s really expensive when you go to the grocery right now. And it is—but who made it expensive?
Sargent: I could not agree more, Alex. I think that we have an opportunity here to see Democrats really speak to voters in a whole new way. I think voters’ ears are open. They’re ready to listen to a new case. Alex, good to have you on, man. Thanks so much.
Shephard: Thank you. Appreciate it.