Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
All this comes as Trump is getting hit by more terrible poll numbers, this time on the economy. Trump had some spin to offer on the polls as well. Which raises a question: Does there come a point at which these bizarre contortions and ramblings undermines support for Trump among the voters who still, for some reason, see him as a strong, competent, and decisive leader? Writer Susan Milligan has a new piece for The New Republic looking at how Republicans have been portraying Trump lately as a strong “daddy” figure, so we’re talking to her about why this portrayal is looking more more absurd by the second. Thanks for coming back on, Susan.
Sargent: To catch people up, Musk sent this email over the weekend telling federal employees to list their last week’s accomplishments and then said that failure to reply would be taken as resignation. Trump was asked about that on Monday, and then this happened.
Sargent: Note how angry he is at being questioned on this. FBI Director Kash Patel, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and numerous other agency officials have told their employees that they don’t need to respond to this email. Yet here Trump seems to suggest that it might be live policy, spreading more confusion. It doesn’t sound like he knows what’s actually been happening with the idea, or the pushback it’s received. What do you think, Susan?
Sargent: There was one moment a few days ago where Trump said something like, Elon Musk is doing a great job, but I’d like him to be even more aggressive. And what he really meant by that, very plainly, is that Elon’s got to start showing the goods already, because he’s not coming up with anything.
Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. And Trump is a bit ticked off about the polling right now. CNN analyst Harry Enten highlighted some remarkable numbers from Gallup’s latest economic confidence index: Only 20 percent right now say the economy is good or excellent, and 59 percent say the economy is getting worse. Susan, it seems to me that if this continues, negative perceptions of the economy could color how the public sees all of Musk’s massive cuts and firings. Trump is desperately trying to portray Musk as on top of things, as rooting out waste and fraud and making everything hum like a machine—but negative perceptions of the economy will lead voters to be more likely to see everything as going off the rails. What do you think?
There’s a fundamental problem here. Musk and Trump have this idea that the government is like a business—and that you can run it as some profit-making enterprise and cut this here and cut this here and increase the bottom line—when it’s an institution that provides services to people. So even the people in red states who say they’re upset about spending and waste want government services, and now they’re starting to realize that they may not get them.
Milligan: Yes. There’s this idea that the Democrats are [of] the “mommy” party and they want to nurture. They want to help the people who are underserved in some way with health care, with education, with housing, that sort of thing. And Republicans are [of] the “daddy” party, and they want to protect you from evil outside forces and so forth. Still, both of them are rooted in the idea that the government is doing something for you.
Sargent: Well, the “daddy” mystique does break apart when all this incompetence comes to the fore. It’s worth noting that there’s a really creepy cultish quality to all the “daddy” talk about Trump. That aside, there’s something deadly serious going on here, which is that Trump has staked a lot on Musk and DOGE, very prominently deputizing Musk to find waste, fraud, and corruption in the government. And the story has uniformly been that Trump is finding nothing. The whole thing has been a comedy of errors.
Sargent: I want to talk about this other moment during Trump’s press conference today when he tried to put a positive spin on the polling. He talked about a Harris poll, which supposedly found that large majorities support what Trump and Musk are doing. Listen to this.
Sargent: Susan, what do you think of that?
Sargent: It really seems like things are going south rather quickly for these guys, doesn’t it? We did have a bit of a honeymoon. There was some good polling for him at the outset, but then a number of polls found majority disapproval of Trump’s performance, never mind Musk’s, which polls even worse. It seems to me that this whole thing has really gotten out of hand very quickly. And I don’t understand where Trump’s political team is. They seem to be completely absent. These are obviously pretty hardheaded people like Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, who were on the campaign and frankly did a pretty damn good job. I hate to admit it, but they did. I don’t know where they are on this. It seems like they’re just completely MIA.
There was another scene in that meeting that was weird and creepy where Trump actually put his hand on Macron’s knee and Macron picked it up and moved it over to Trump—and Trump kept trying to push it back. I don’t know whether that was trying to make it look like they were besties or what, but it was a really weird dominating scene.
Milligan: That’s something creepy “daddy” does. One of the kids in the street, their parents tell them, Don’t go to that guy’s house for Halloween.
Milligan: I think we have two things going on with Trump. In general, sometimes when people come from the business world and they’ve been a CEO, it’s a hard adjustment for them to come into government where they can’t just dictate something and it gets followed. It doesn’t work that way in government, not even when you’re the president of U.S.
Those things coming together—narcissism and the frustration over not being able to run the U.S. government like it’s The Apprentice or something—really unnerves him.
Milligan: And it also says something that Macron felt comfortable openly dressing down the president of U.S. in his house. That does something. That’s a subtler message, but it is still a very powerful message right there that he felt that that was OK to do. That says something about Trump’s standing in the world.
Milligan: Yes. He didn’t take his belt out, fortunately.
The whole point of Trump’s authoritarianism is to essentially say, You’ve been frustrated by the failures and incompetence of the previous administration. Here comes a strong leader to set everything right. And then in their calculus, that will get people acclimated to and accepting of authoritarian rule and so forth, but it’s all been just a catastrophe so far. It’s just been a real mess, and I don’t see how they’re able to bridge those two things. It seems like the chasm between those two things is a major problem for them.
So very quickly, quicker frankly than I had anticipated, you’re seeing people who were Trump supporters who were behind this waste, fraud, and abuse program finding that they’re getting hurt by it, saying, I voted for Trump and my daughter just lost her dream job working for this agency. What happened? Or the Venezuelans who voted for Trump and are seeing their neighbors who are undocumented being deported. I’m not sure what they thought was going to happen, but apparently they didn’t think it was going to happen to them.
Milligan: Well, I think they’re finding out now that he was. And I’m curious to see what will happen with the Latino vote in the midterms. Of course, the Latino vote is not monolithic, but Trump made some substantial inroads in that vote in 2024. And I think he may lose it.
Milligan: I think it is, especially because Musk himself is the embodiment of this very narcissistic autocrat. And the way he ran his companies [was] he did the same thing: He offered people this voluntary resignation and he’d give you a payout, and then it turns out they didn’t get the money. It’s just very bad P.R. for the administration, and he’s not even a cabinet secretary. He’s not the vice president. I think he’s going to need to find some way to rein him in without making it look like that’s what he did, making it look like it was Elon’s idea.
Sargent: That’s exactly why he thinks he can just bark, “You’re fired,” or have Elon Musk bark, “You’re fired,” and then it’ll just happen. He doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of civil service protections in any way. Where do you see the perceptions of Trump going? Do you expect there to be a real downturn and perceptions of him as a strong leader going forward?
Sargent: Definitely a real key tell there. Susan Milligan, thanks so much for talking to us today. Good to talk to you.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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