The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 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 has been holding rallies lately to energize his voters for the midterms, but he’s running into problems. Press scrutiny of his declining crowd sizes has been harsh, and he exploded in a crazed rant over this, fuming that in fact his rallies are “HOTTER” than ever.
But if anything, these rallies are an admission of weakness and failure. Republicans themselves are leaking word that Trump’s campaigning is a signal of the midterm emergency the GOP faces in deep red areas. And one rally in Ohio displayed a scene that’s doubly revealing along these lines.
We’re getting into all of this with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, a skilled interpreter of MAGA, who has a good piece on Trump’s epic but failing struggle to make voters like him. Amanda, always good to have you on.
Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So Trump has done rallies in Ohio, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Texas, and he’s doing one Monday night in Nebraska. The Times had two pieces showing his crowd size is diminishing considerably.
In Alabama, the Times reports, upper sections were, quote, “almost completely empty,” in an arena that’s smaller than previous ones. And there were empty sections at an even smaller arena in Ohio, the Times noted. Amanda, even more to the point, polls are showing Republicans turning on him in spite of all these efforts. Your thoughts on all that?
Marcotte: Yeah, I think it’s twofold. I think obviously he’s aging, he’s getting even weaker. The political situation is so embarrassing right now that even his loyal supporters are beginning to be uncomfortable. We are hitting that same portion of, like, Bush’s second term, where even his voters just didn’t want to defend him anymore.
It feels, I think, for a lot of the people that support him, it feels kind of pointless at this point. Like, so much of the reason that a lot of Trump supporters kept doubling down and doubling down and doubling down was that they wanted to never admit they were wrong to liberals, first of all.
And second of all, as long as this political project had legs and they could kind of keep reviving the corpse and pushing into the future, it had value to them. So there was a purpose behind blind loyalty. But you can’t reelect Trump. It’s not worth it anymore, now that he’s a lame duck and there’s only so much juice they can squeeze out of this lemon.
Sargent: So Trump raged wildly at the Times for questioning his crowd sizes. He posted on Truth Social that his Ohio rally was “great” and “PACKED,” in all caps. He accused the Times of dishonesty. And he said this about his rallies:
“The rallies are HOTTER than ever. The networks refuse under any circumstances to show the crowds, but you can hear the thunderous applause, and you know that it represents thousands and thousands of people.”
He also said: “I never have empty seats, never have and never will.”
Amanda, I don’t know, for someone who’s doing so smashingly well, Trump sounds awfully angry and unhappy. Your thoughts about that?
Marcotte: I mean, wasn’t it at one of these rallies he literally got up and said that he knows more about every subject on the planet, on the whole planet, than any other person knows about anything? When you’re standing there being like, I’m the greatest of all time, and to a half-empty crowd—it’s like the trope on television when somebody says something and then comically they get disproven the next minute.
Sargent: And on top of that, this actually gets at a real thing, which is that in three of these states that he’s held rallies in, there really are tough Senate races—Texas, Ohio, and even Nebraska, which has somehow become closer now. In fact, one GOP lawmaker from a state Trump recently visited told CNN, quote, “this is a five-alarm fire.”
Amanda, the five-alarm fire is among MAGA and Republican voters. Obviously, the internal data is showing cratering support among Republican voters, especially MAGA ones. The Fox poll of Texas actually showed non-MAGA Republicans not approving of Trump. Like, more non-MAGA Republicans disapprove of Trump than approve of him.
Marcotte: I think it’s also true that they have this perception, and I don’t think it’s incorrect, that whatever Trumpism is, was, and whatever they got out of it, that’s coming to an end. And no one wants to be the last person at a party, right?
Sargent: Right. Right. I think that’s a real dynamic for sure.
Marcotte: Yeah. And I think that it’s not unreasonable for people that saw Donald Trump as their pathway to the kind of culture war victories that they were hoping to get, many of which they did—deportations, abortion bans coming back, you know, homophobia has been surging back, that sort of thing.
I mean, they got a lot of victories. Open racism has been normalized again. So they did get a lot of victories. And now he’s just this embarrassment. He got them into this war, he’s ruining the economy. He’s a lame duck. So this is a good time to sort of do an Irish exit.
Sargent: At this rally in Ohio, Trump talked about how Haitian immigrants who used to get temporary protected status are now getting deported. And he lied about how they’ve hurt the town of Springfield. In fact, the Haitian influx has done a lot to help reinvigorate the place.
Immigrants have reinvigorated the left-behind heartland in many ways, the places where Americans, especially young Americans, have deserted. But that aside, the crowd got very excited when Trump said the Haitians are getting sent back to their home country, where the conditions are horrific. They started to chant: “deport, deport.”
Amanda, before we get to the culture war stuff here, they get mad when people like us say that the lifeblood of MAGA is sadism, but there you have it on full display. That is the lifeblood of MAGA.
Marcotte: Yeah. And I think the reason that Trump rallies have been as popular as they are, even though it’s the same thing over and over again, is precisely this. There’s safety in numbers.
I think a lot of the people that have this sadistic desire to inflict pain on women, minorities, LGBTQ people—they don’t necessarily feel comfortable saying that on an individual basis. But when they go to a rally, they can chant hateful, racist things like that and get that glee, and they’re kind of anonymous.
Sargent: They’re actually kind of losing the culture wars over immigration, in a certain sense. And I think this Ohio scene displayed it in an interesting way. The New York Times had some polls over the weekend of these Senate races. Just going to read the top lines. James Talarico, the Democrat, is ahead in Texas, 51 to 45. Mary Peltola is ahead in Alaska, 50 to 43, also the Democrat. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown is up three points. In Iowa, Josh Turek, the Democrat, is down one. And Kansas is tied, which is incredible.
But here’s the thing I want to get to. In all these states, Donald Trump is underwater on immigration. That means that among likely voters, more than half disapprove of his performance on immigration. Again, this is in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas. All states Trump won by double digits. And get this: the percentages who strongly disapprove are in the forties in all these states.
I have not seen numbers like this before. I mean, he has completely lost the deep red states on his best issue. And here you’ve got a bunch of MAGA people in a bubble chanting the words “deport, deport, deport,” thinking that they’re winning this debate in some sense. But in reality it’s just crushing Republicans, even in these red states. What do you make of all that?
Marcotte: After the shootings in Minneapolis, I felt like this was probably going to—I’m surprised at how much it has turned around, but I felt like this was going to happen. Thomas Edsall in The New York Times had a really good article recently where he shared some research that showed that while Republican voters have become kind of more racist under Trump, the opposite has happened to Democratic voters.
Which is to say, I think they’ve had to think about some of these issues a little bit more than they used to, and they’ve discussed them. And I think their racial tolerance levels have gone up in response. And that’s an interesting thing.
And I suspect that’s happening kind of in the center too, where a lot of people who had a delusion about this country’s racism and had convinced themselves it wasn’t that serious are seeing this happen, and they’re finally admitting that Haitians are just normal people that want to work hard and raise their families.
Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. I do want to point out, though, that there’s a little bit of cause for optimism in this. Because if you’ve got majorities in these states that Trump carried by double digits turning against Trump on immigration, what it means is that the people that were chanting “deport, deport, deport” kind of represent an increasingly fringe minority.
The MAGA sadism is a minority position at this point, even in some of these red states. And it’s kind of creating this opening for Democrats to capture some of these much softer Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who are horrified by what they’re seeing, don’t relish it the way the MAGA sadists do, and could potentially be looking for something else.
I think there’s potentially cause for real gains to be made there, in terms of building a larger consensus in favor of immigration. What do you think?
Marcotte: Yeah, I think absolutely. And I think it’s moments like this that you can actually start to change people’s minds, right? The door has been cracked open. You know, they took it so far that they’re causing some people that otherwise were kind of softly racist towards immigrants to feel bad, and to maybe reconsider some of the opinions they had.
Sargent: For MAGA, Trump’s promise was that he would defeat us. He would crush you and me, basically. He would crush liberal America, you know, destroy us culturally, rout us in the culture wars permanently, put America back on a anti-woke path, or whatever the precise thing they want is.
But that hasn’t happened. It’s not happening, in the sense that majorities are rejecting him on immigration. They’re rejecting the white nationalism. And, you know, their candidates are in trouble in very deep red areas as a result of this.
And so maybe the fact that liberal America is fighting back and is mobilizing and is so energized and is really ready to take this all the way, right—take this to the mat, as it were—is itself a dissuading factor for some of these MAGA Republicans.
They say, well, you know, he’s not actually crushing them. He’s not crushing Amanda Marcotte and Greg Sargent, or whatever. You know what I mean? He’s not crushing those libs. So I don’t know, man, I’m not sure I’m on this train anymore. Does that seem crazy?
Marcotte: No, that’s really perceptive. I love it. I love it. That’s amazing. Because it’s like—you’re right, like, many broken promises from Trump. He’s going to lower prices. He’s going to keep us out of wars. He’s going to crush the libs. Add that to the list of broken promises. I love it.
And yeah, I think, you know, it also just—there was that one moment, like right after he won, for a few months, where there was this sense that MAGA was, like, culturally ascendant. And it started to crack apart, right? Basically right when Charlie Kirk died, honestly. And like, Jimmy Kimmel—they tried to fire him, and instead it showed, like, there was this support for Jimmy Kimmel.
And I think at that point they began to realize that actually most Americans still think that they are not cool, and they will never be cool. And I think that that’s been a shot in the arm culturally for the left, and has been very depressing for the right. And you love to see it.
Sargent: Well, you know what else happened at around the time when that supposed cultural ascendancy seemed to suddenly waver and start tailspinning down? Two things. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was sent to a foreign torture prison, and ICE started invading cities. I think that really was one of the things that started the unraveling.
Marcotte: Yeah, no, I mean, part of what MAGA was able to do to sort of make themselves seem cool, even for a minute, was they presented their fascist ideas as, like, arch irony, right? They’re like, these are jokes and memes and silly stuff.
But you can’t, like, pull a gun on somebody and force them into a concentration camp in a joking way. And they tried. They really did try. Like, ICE and DHS were putting out all these memes. They had, like, the cartoon meme of the woman crying as she was getting arrested and stuff. But it’s not funny. It’s not funny, because that’s a real person.
Like, I think for normal people that voted for Trump—they lied, a lot of people allowed themselves to believe it really was just jokes, that the Haitians eating cats and dogs thing was just a joke. No, they meant that. They meant that in the same way that Nazis saying similar things about Jews meant it.
And there becomes the moment where the proof starts to happen that they meant it. And that clip about Donald Trump leading a bunch of people chanting “deport”—like, those are real people. Now, they were always real people, but I think in a lot of people’s imaginations that was a joke. And now you cannot deny that they are actually uprooting these people and sending them to a violent country that they were trying to escape.
Sargent: And if you think about the videos that just absolutely saturated the culture, saturated social media, of the shooting of first Renata Good and then second Alex Pretti—in the Renata Good one especially, you could hear the crack of gunfire. You could hear the shots.
And those break through all the memes and all the cartoon stuff and all the hilarity and all that sort of stuff. And then the car just sort of slowly rolling down the road with a dead person slumped over the steering wheel, and then essentially hitting a pole. Like, that just broke the memes, I think.
Marcotte: Yeah. It’s very reminiscent of how a lot of the Black Lives Matter protests rose up out of seeing video of people getting killed by police. And you know, that has a clarifying effect on the mind. Because yeah, now it’s not a cartoon anymore. That’s a person. That person has a family, you know.
Sargent: Yeah. Well, just to completely wrap this up, where do you see this going? You’ve got Trump doing these rallies. He’s obviously struggling to boost energy in MAGA country. I fear it’s going to be a little bit successful.
Like, they are going to bring Republicans back into the fold, especially because they’re going to outspend Democrats by around $200 million or something. And we’re going to see potentially the polls tighten. I think people should be prepared for that.
Marcotte: I cannot emphasize enough how much, in some communities in this country, the idea of voting for a Democrat is the equivalent of selling your child into slavery. It’s treated as—they are literally told that it’s demonic, that you will literally go to hell if you vote for a Democrat. And so I think a lot of people are going to struggle to do that, even though they know in their heart that it’s the right thing to do.
So yeah, I think a lot of them, if they go to the voting booth, I think they’re going to vote for the Republican. That said, they’re going to have a turnout problem. I think a lot of people aren’t going to want to make that choice. And so they’re probably just going to sit this one out.
Sargent: Yep. It sure looks like it’s trending in the right direction. Amanda Marcotte, always awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much.
Marcotte: Thanks for having me.