Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Simon Rosenberg: Greg, it’s great to see you. It’s always good to be with the hardest working man in show business.
Rosenberg: Look, we are operating so outside of traditional political physics, outside of how democracies operate. The idea that this guy just gets up every day and proclaims all of his executive orders—today we have tariffs, tomorrow we’ll have something else.... It’s just the madness of it is what is getting at me today. This feels like the work of a madman who has no strategy, who has just become a wrecking ball in American society.
I think that he’s looking a lot weaker and more unstable. [That] is the conventional wisdom right now, and Democrats should view this time as he’s weak, unstable, fumbling, making enormous mistakes, and we have to be aggressive as hell to communicate all this to the American people.
Rosenberg: The outside PAC of the House Democrats announced today that they’ve dropped ads in 23 districts attacking Republicans—at least on the Medicaid piece of the economic conversation about the vote on the budget bill last week where they voted to cut health care to over 80 million Americans to give tax breaks to Elon Musk and to Donald Trump. So you’re seeing the Democrats very focused on the economic conversation that’s happening right now. And it’s working. These ads that DCCC is launching, or the outside super PAC is launching, is a very good sign of how focused the Democrats are about causing pain for Trump on his wild, inflationary economic program.
Sargent: I want to get back to this notion of Democrats focusing on the economy in a second. I think they’re putting all their eggs in that basket, and they shouldn’t be. They should be doing a lot more. I want to come back to that. But first, let’s talk about this Marist poll. Trump’s approval is only 45 percent; it’s the lowest in the era of polling of any president at the outset. Only 34 percent of independents approved this performance. Abysmal. Fifty-five percent overall say the cuts to government are doing more harm than good; and 60 percent say federal employees are essential. The Elon Musk gambit is just blowing up in his face.
Rosenberg: Yeah. And what’s important about what you just said, and you can see this in many other polls, too, is that independents have soured on him very, very quickly. Part of what’s keeping his numbers up is that his numbers with Republicans are extremely high, up in the 90s. So it’s preventing, but he’s struggling with independents very quickly. And what we learned during the Biden presidency is that independent voters were very attuned toward inflation and prices. It’s one of the reasons we struggled with independence in the election, even though they were with us on things like abortion and climate change and other issues.
I think he’s playing with fire here politically, under traditional political physics. In a time when the economy is slowing and we’ve had these bad GDP numbers, they’re now going to hoist tariffs? It could increase the cost of cars in the United States by over $10,000. It’s the opposite of everything he said he was going to do. And I think the other thing that’s going to start becoming material to all this is the chaos.
Sargent: I want to press you on this a little bit, Simon, because I’m not as optimistic as you are on one front. I agree that there’s the potential there for the chaos to become a really big factor, but I still worry that Democrats on some level are failing to stand for reform. They’re still letting Trump grab the reform/disruption mantle. Now, the disruptions that Trump is unleashing are horrific and destructive, but he’s still, I worry, associated in the public mind with reform and not chaos. And Democrats are not grabbing the reform mantle themselves. There’s a failure here, isn’t there, by the party?
Sargent: On the other hand, though, Simon, I should point out: Public disapproval of the economy is pretty strong. People like you and I were really a little bit off during the election, to put it mildly, when we thought that the strong economy would be enough. Clearly, it’s not just that.
I don’t think we have started to communicate to the American people about how illegal and unconstitutional many of the things are that Trump is doing, and many of the things are the people who work for Musk and the DOGE team are doing. I don’t think that the American people in this democracy that’s been around for almost 250 years are going to be supportive of things that are so obviously a violation of our constitutional order and the way that things have worked here in America. So I do think we have an opportunity, Greg, to do what you’re saying. I think we have an opportunity to engage the American people about what they’re really doing—and to provide an alternative. Senator Elissa Slotkin is going to be laying out not just the indictment of Trump Tuesday night but also the path forward for the Democrats and where we need to go.
Sargent: To give you credit, you have been making this case fairly regularly that indicting Trump on the economy is not enough, that Democrats need to do more. You’ve also connected it to other things. You’ve said that Democrats have to indict Trump for running an attack on our country from within—Elon Musk dismantling the U.S. state; Trump putting a misfit like RFK in charge of public health, which will debilitate one of America’s greatest assets; and all the ways these things are directly connected to the ongoing sellout of Ukraine and realignment of the U.S. with the interests of Vladimir Putin and the rising forces of global authoritarianism or fascism. Why, Simon, are Democrats reluctant to do this? Just lay it out for us, man. You know this party well. What the hell?
That’s why this engagement you’re seeing, we need to ratchet it up. We need to get much more aggressive. We need to be much more ambitious. And I’ve laid out a series of things in my Substack about ways that Congress can be doing much more than they are doing now every day. I think there’s a real appetite for it now. Particularly after Friday where there was no longer any story you could tell about what Trump’s intentions were any longer, you’re going to see Democrats being much more aggressive now.
Rosenberg: Listen, when I think about what you just said, I come back to something that I really felt during the Democratic convention last year. We were seeing, in some ways, the most powerful Democratic Party that I had personally engaged with since I had started in this business a long time ago. And the reason why is I felt our convention was not about progressivism or moderation; it was about love of country, and there was this powerful patriotism that pulsed through the convention that was really compelling to me. For us to really defeat Trump, we’re going to have to tap into love of country and patriotism, to hug the flag and all the things, [to show] that we are the true America. He’s the betrayer. He’s the appeaser of foreign authoritarian.
And for all the veterans who’ve served in our country and fought for freedom around the world, who’ve now been casted out by the Trump administration—he’s creating enormous opportunities now for us to go do what you and I hoped or thought we were going to be able to do in the election, which is to reach out and bring people along.
We’ve got a lot of work to do here, and Democrats have to find and tap into the patriotism and love of country that’s there for all of us. We’ve got to get big, and we’ve got to make big arguments about what he’s doing to the greatest democracy in the history of the world. We saw today in the CBS poll that 4 percent of Americans support Putin, think that Putin is on the right side of the war. Three percent of Americans don’t view the Europeans as our allies. What Trump’s doing with Russia and Ukraine and alienating Europe has the support of about 4 to 5 percent of the country right now. This is dangerous political terrain for him.
Maybe the way to think about it is like this: They did strike a strongly patriotic message that really could have resonated more if it weren’t for the fact that Trump was perceived as a magician on the economy, and if it weren’t for the fact that there was great nostalgia for the Trump economy of the first term. So maybe where we’re getting to here is if Democrats get their economic arguments and policies right, and if Trump economic rule is shown to be a catastrophe, then some of the other arguments have a chance of also breaking through. Is that the way to think about it?
We can do both. We can make our case in the economy, which I think we’re doing effectively. The polling is very clear on that; the path forward is very clear on that. But we have to develop the second front, and I think we can do both. And if we do, we can start really driving down Trump’s numbers in a way that could materially take these early cracks that are opening in his congressional support.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you, Simon, you and I were both way too optimistic last time around. I think we could both admit to that. Hopefully, this time, maybe there’s more grounds for believing that he can be beaten. Simon Rosenberg, thanks so much for coming on, man.
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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