The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 14 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 effort to salvage the midterms for the GOP doesn’t seem to be going well. His make-believe proposal to send five-thousand-dollar checks to everyone has been widely panned, and even Republicans are leaking that they think it’s an act of desperation. Tellingly, Trump raged wildly at a reporter who asked a simple question: If your policies are succeeding, why pay people to vote Republican?
It all highlights a deep contradiction in Trump-MAGA psychology right now. Republicans are all required to pretend Trump has been a stupendous success, yet that very posture is dragging them toward electoral catastrophe. We’re talking about it all with New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who’s our go-to person when it comes to Trump losing the culture. Alex, thanks for coming on.
Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.
Sargent: So let’s start here. Trump’s promise of a $5,000 check to every American if Republicans hold Congress is one of the centerpieces of their quote-unquote plan to win the midterms. But one Republican operative tells Politico, quote, “No one thinks it’s a serious proposal. It does reek of desperation.”
Another says it’s, quote, “obvious in its political calculation.” And Republicans are also leaking word that they were totally blindsided by the idea, pouring cold water on it, you name it. Alex, your reaction to all that?
Shephard: I think the question about this entire farce of a midterm convention was, what is Trump going to talk about, since his entire second term is up in flames right now? And what they’ve done is concocted, you know, I think a plan that’s a complete sham in a couple of ways, right?
One is just that Trump has said he does not need Congress to send these checks. And he’s sort of suggested—OK, some Republicans in the Senate have said, we’ll draft a bill—but they could just do this right now if they really wanted to. Of course. And they’re not. And I think that people are seeing through it.
But I think the other thing about it, to get to the point about losing the culture, is that Trump’s rise came from this idea that he was a different type of politician, right? He was not somebody who would say something just to get elected and then not do it. And of course, he’s governed in a completely different way. But to me, this is like the biggest possible version of that exact problem—that this is someone who’s just doing shameless electioneering.
And I think that people see through it too, which is the other part here, right? Which is that, you know, gas is rising again, is going to go up a whole lot more after what we’ve seen happen in Saudi Arabia on Friday. So, you know, this is just a mess. And I think the only thing that Trump can respond to—we’ve seen this going back before he was a politician—is marketing. This is marketing, but it’s not real politics.
Sargent: Exactly. And so this is the context for Trump’s bizarre eruption at a reporter. The reporter says, if your economic policies are working, why do you need to create an incentive for people to turn out to vote? Listen.
Reporter (voiceover): If your economic policies are working, why do you need an incentive for people to turn out to vote?
Donald Trump (voiceover): I think what you’re going to do—I didn’t do it for turning out to vote. I’ve done it as a reward for people having to put up with five years, and four years, of a horrible situation caused by Biden.
So you heard there that Trump denies that the money is an incentive to turn out to vote, and then spins a bunch of garbage about Biden. Then, amid some crosstalk, the reporter tries to ask a second question, and Trump erupts.
Trump (voiceover): It’s almost a reward for the people having to put up with Biden’s policy.
Reporter (voiceover): Yeah, but you—you also offered checks during the tariff refund—
Trump (voiceover): Not you. Not you. You’re the worst.
Sargent: So there you hear Trump saying, “Not you, not you, you’re the worst.” And he even leans in and glowers at her in this really menacing and creepy way. Alex, I think this is a critical moment because of the question that was asked.
Republicans fear that voters aren’t at all motivated to vote Republican because of Trump’s failures. And it’s the pointing out of that fact that got Trump so angry. Your reaction to that?
Shephard: Yeah, I would say that. And I think it’s a woman reporter who’s asking the question too, which I think is a classic. It’s reminiscent of the “piggy” moment to some extent. And I think, you know, you really see the kind of Roy Cohn outer-borough menace of Trump in that clip.
But I think that the other part of this, right, is that they’re trying to recreate 2024 to some extent. If you recall, Elon Musk had this, like, lottery, that if you could prove that you voted Republican you could win money. And I think that they had certain things on their side at that point, right?
They had inflation, and they had the sense that Joe Biden was not fully cognizant. And they don’t have any of that right now. So he’s resorting to a form of even more ludicrous bribery, right?
And I think the other thing, which you raised in the question, is that the issue here is that it’s clearly a naked bribe, right? They can’t say anything else. Trump tried to frame this as if it’s a dividend from all of the glorious money that’s from the tariffs—that, by the way, are the primary driver of these price rises that we’re seeing, along with the war in Iran.
And you look at that money, it’s $300 billion. It’s not an insignificant amount of money, but it’s less than a quarter of what you would need just to pay for these checks. This is an economic policy that’s not working. It’s an economic policy that is making things more expensive. It’s an economic policy that people hate. And a five-thousand-dollar check that will never appear is just not enough to make a difference there. It’s ridiculous.
Sargent: Yeah, and I think there’s an enormous contradiction at the center of all of this. At the center of everything MAGA right now, really—they just put on this two-day festival designed to push the storyline that Trump has been a world historical success, a smashing success.
Yet the very need to stage this thing to motivate voters itself shows that they know that’s a massive lie. And the second that contradiction is pointed out to Trump, he melts down. But it really is at the core of this moment, isn’t it?
Shephard: Yeah. And I think that the other core of it, right, is this enthusiasm problem that I think has always been there with Trump. That, like, Trump has this secret sauce with some voters, I should say, in both directions, if he is on the ballot, right? There are people that will show up and they’ll be excited for him.
And if you contrast him with a Democrat, a woke Democrat or an old Democrat like Joe Biden, people will turn out. When he’s not on the ballot, and especially right now, nobody cares, right?
I look at Ocean City, Maryland, right? Not exactly a hot spot, but I recall driving down that way, you know, a couple of years ago, and you would see Trump flags everywhere. You’d see them on the road. And I was down there this weekend, and you didn’t see anything. There’s just not any, like, actual enthusiasm.
You’re seeing generic polls now—two generic polls in the last week, right, the most recent of which was a Quinnipiac poll from this week that showed Democrats at plus eleven on the generic ballot. They’ve got a huge enthusiasm problem. And Trump’s response is always to try to astroturf it.
But I think if you look at the way that he has generated enthusiasm before, it has to some extent always been organic, right? It emerged from him running for president on a message. Whatever you think of that message that’s where it’s come from. And he just cannot. You saw this in 2018, right, with the migrant caravan. They tried the same kind of thing, and it doesn’t work.
And this time I think it’s even more shameless because again, say what you will about the migrant caravan, but it was still a policy message that was tied in some way to recreating what Trump had done two years earlier. Now they’ve just run out of gas on every front, to the point that it’s just a kind of—it’s Ed McMahon’s, whatever, Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.
Sargent: Well, to your point about driving around the Eastern Shore, which is absolutely pretty Trumpy—last weekend I spent a lot of time driving around a county in western Virginia, in the mountains, that Trump won by well over 40 points. And I only saw one Trump sign. Just one. In many, many hours of driving around really, really Trumpy territory.
So I thought that was a key tell. And when you’re on Twitter or Bluesky or whatever, you constantly get people reporting that in. And I take that very seriously, by the way, Alex. I think we should, don’t you? People are constantly saying on the socials that they were in this Trumpy county, that Trumpy part of the country, and there are just no signs.
Shephard: Yeah. And I think that because with Trumpism, right, it is a different type of political movement. It’s not an endorsement of it, in that it is a sort of—it’s a forever war, right? And I think you’ve seen people respond to it that way, where they, you know, you keep your lawn signs up, you just change them, right? You move the Trump 2020 to the Trump “no more bullshit” sign or whatever. And what we’re seeing now is that people have taken that stuff down.
And like, anecdotally, again, I drove across the country last year, and you were seeing—like, around this time, I think you were still seeing them up. Like, wherever you went, they would kind of be there ambiently. And it’s just gone now. That’s what he is up against, right? And that’s what this midterm convention thing was about—was about trying to get this movement back on that kind of footing. But the problem is that he’s failed, right?
He’s failed on the core reasons he won, which were all driven about inflation, and about, I think also, the idea that you have an executive who is accountable to people and up front with them, right?
And I think what you’re seeing is that aside from maybe the deportation regime, even among his biggest supporters, right, people are frustrated, because the number one promise that he made was to bring prices down. And now all he can do is say, well, maybe I’ll give you a five-thousand-dollar check that everybody knows they’re never going to get.
Sargent: So we actually have some data that supports the arguments we’re making here, and really sheds light on some of the deeper currents of all this. Nate Silver has the Dems leading in the House generic ballot matchup by over eight points. And critically, that’s in the likely voter model—not the registered voter model, or all adults, or anything like that. The likely voter model.
So now you can see the dynamics kicking in that worry Republicans. You can see where the energy is. You can see that when the model screen is for likely voters, all of a sudden the Democratic lead grows. And that’s what this convention’s supposed to correct. But a ludicrous promise like this $5,000, and a bunch of stupid, infantile bashing of Dems—it’s just not going to be the kind of thing that moves these tectonic plates to the degree that Republicans need them to move, right?
Shephard: Yeah. I mean, I think the other thing with that convention that you saw was, I thought, a really concerted, if somewhat marginal, effort to win over three groups that were instrumental to Trump winning in 2024: Black voters, Latino voters, and young voters. So you saw a lot of the speeches, particularly earlier on Wednesday before Trump spoke, were aimed at Black and Latino voters. And then Vance’s speech, which was ridiculous, was, I think, aimed at sort of contrasting him with other millennial politicians, most notably Abdul El-Sayed, but also Zohran Mamdani as well.
And I think it’s just not convincing, right? Because they just don’t have the sauce anymore. And I think that they thought that there was more depth, or at least that there was more of a—we’ve talked about this before—but that there was more of a sort of cultural or even ideological generational shift happening.
And I think what we’re seeing is just that these voters have become much less automatically drawn to the Democratic Party than they were before, but that does not mean that they are moving over to the Republican Party. And I think that this is the larger problem here, is that people are just tuning them out culturally, which I think was still, again, not true—I think there was a willingness among some voters in all three of these groups to sort of hear out Trump and Vance in 2024. And that’s just not the case now.
And, like, Anna Paulina Luna giving a speech at this ridiculous convention is not going to change the fact that Trump is underwater with Latino voters in a way that, you know, is both deserved but also extraordinary, given where he was with those voters two years ago.
Sargent: Yeah. And your point is really well taken on that, because another thing that this convention was supposed to portray was a man in total mastery of the culture, right?
So that’s another big lie at the core of this, because they wouldn’t need to do this if he actually mastered the culture, and he was wielding the mastery that this sort of smoke-and-mirrors show was meant to portray. Can you talk about that?
Shephard: Yeah, I mean, I think this is, like, the idea of Trumpism. And I think what was so alarming about what we were seeing less than two years ago now was this idea that there was just kind of ambient Trump ascendancy, or at least ambient Trump interest, everywhere—which just had not been true. There were, you know, either—it was because it was taboo in certain communities, or just because people just hated the guy. And that had just shifted.
And now I think that what you’re seeing is this effort to try to recreate, like, what was essentially lightning in a bottle. But it was not complicated. It had everything to do with, I think, misplaced frustration about pandemic-era restrictions and misplaced frustration about post-pandemic rises in prices. That’s it, right?
And I think that they just overlearned that lesson completely. And now you’re seeing what Trump has always done in these situations, which is to try to, like, conjure this thing that he can occasionally generate on his own. And they just don’t have it anymore. You’re just like, well, why would anyone want to tune into this, right?
I mean, Wednesday and Thursday, right? These are the first two days of the NFL season. And I think that Trump’s arrogance in sort of counterprogramming that, I think, says a lot too about his, like, larger cluelessness. Like, yes, I would say, as both Canada and Iran clearly know based on actions that they have taken over the past week, the American midterm calendar starts after Labor Day.
But I think Trump was trying to kind of, yeah, generate momentum out of nothing. And I think all he did was just call attention to everything that he doesn’t have. And finally, hosting this thing in Texas just put way more attention onto James Talarico, who spent the entire week on television. You know, I think it’s going to backfire spectacularly.
Sargent: It absolutely is. And we’ve got still more data to talk about here, which is that the speech on the opening night of the convention drew about 2.5 million viewers on Fox News. This is according to Nielsen data. And Fox was the only major network to carry Trump’s two-hour address in full. Two point five million is just absolutely humiliating, Alex. Can you talk about what the context is for a number like that?
Shephard: Well, I mean, I think one context of it is that there are not full opening day NFL numbers yet, but it would be less than 10 percent of what opening day of the NFL reached last year. And again, since this year the opening game was a literal repeat of the Super Bowl, I would suspect that those numbers might be higher than twenty-eight million, which they were last year. It is about a tenth of the number of people that watched Trump’s 2024 speech at the RNC.
I mean, these are, you know, by some measures, it’s about twice the viewers that CNN had. I think CNN had 1.1 million viewers at the same time. So basically he got twice the normal cable viewership of America’s second most popular cable news network. And that’s just not a lot of viewers. And I mean, the speech itself was almost two hours long.
To some extent, right, the $5,000 check promise, based on media coverage afterwards, is probably going to get more eyeballs than that. But again, that just gets back to the point—they might say, yeah, that’s great, because that’s what we want people to take from it. But I think that all that communicates is their desperation, and the fact that he’s lying, right? This is just the thing that people hate about Trump, is that he’s a blowhard and he’s just saying stuff that he thinks will win votes.
Sargent: Man, we really screwed ourselves pretty royally in the last election, dude. Just to wrap this up—you had this good piece arguing that Iran and Canada have found Trump’s Achilles’ heel. You just alluded to that, which is that he can just be bled out politically in the run-up to the midterms.
Iran is just holding out and pushing global prices higher, energy prices higher, and Canada’s going to accept some short-term pain in a trade war, which will be real, in order to hurt Republicans in some of these border states with big Senate races.
But Alex, just to get to the big theme here, there’s almost another emperor-has-no-clothes narrative unfolding on the global level here, right? Like, because the story that Trump tells is that his power is limitless and he’s vanquished all his enemies, right? And this must not be questioned by Republicans. That story cannot be questioned.
And the result is that they aren’t allowed to seriously work with congressional power to end these conflicts. They could just protest a little, but that’s it, right? And that hurts them above all. That’s the ultimate hilarious irony to it.
Shephard: Yeah. And I think there’s a lot of things to be rightly angry about, but the two biggest reasons why people are upset with the president is really just one, right? Is that the war in Iran and the trade war are causing prices to rise. And actions taken by Iran—I mean, over the last several months, but really over the last week. Like, the Houthis now control a vital second strait, right? A second Strait of Hormuz has basically emerged, this time in the Red Sea.
Canada, I think, has been very open about the fact that they are choosing tariffs that will affect key Senate races in places like Kansas and Maine. Kansas is a very interesting one, right? Because Trump is four points underwater in Kansas right now, which is just a truly insane thing to say.
And so I think what we’re seeing is in the piece that I wrote was about the kind of delicious irony of this—that Trump’s second term has marked, I think, a real aggressive and troubling shift in American foreign policy, to the extent that he’s just openly doing election interference in other countries. He’s using tariffs to try to get candidates that he wants to win.
He’s using most-favored-nation status, using all kinds of tools to try to help other people that he likes—it usually backfires. And you know, what we’re seeing now is that Canada and Iran are hitting him, I think, much harder and more strategically, in ways that will hurt and are going to prolong what’s the biggest driver of his unpopularity right now.
Sargent: That absolutely seems like the key dynamic. Alex Shephard, always awesome to talk to you, man. Thank you so much for coming on.
Shephard: This is fun. Thanks.