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 a new NBC poll finds majority disapproval of Trump on the economy for the first time ever in NBC polling. Yet by all indications, Trump isn’t listening to any of this. He’s forging ahead with his plan for tariffs, and he rarely even bothers talking about the economy anymore. So what’s going to happen to Trump’s alliance with Fox News if a recession really looks likely to hit? We think it’s a sign that Trump’s project is more fragile than you might think. Today, we’re talking about all this with Matt Gertz of Media Matters, who’s been closely tracking Fox coverage of Trump’s economy. Good to have you on, Matt.
Sargent: Let’s start by listening to what Fox host Maria Bartiromo said about the tariffs. She was interviewing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who talked about how we need tariffs because imported goods like foods aren’t adequately tested. Then this happened.
Sargent: Matt, the frustration there is palpable. The key point is that Trump has no real rationale for the tariffs—and it’s so nakedly obvious that even Fox News won’t play along. What do you make of it?
Sargent: Matt, when she interviewed him earlier this month as you mentioned, she literally said it straight to his face. She practically begged Trump to show some clarity on the tariffs. And Trump basically said, Nope, the tariffs are going to go up. Bartiromo served this opportunity to make it clear that at some point the craziness is going to stop, and he was like, Nah, I’m not going to do that.
Sargent: We’ve seen a lot of it from Fox figures lately. Bartiromo, for instance, on Monday quoted the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development saying “higher tariffs will slow economic growth and push inflation higher worldwide.” Fox anchor Charles Payne was pretty blunt recently saying “the boon times are over”—I guess that’s an admission that things were much better under Biden. And Payne actually also pronounced consumer sentiment “scary.” Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich said on Fox News, “We are sliding toward a recession.” Matt, does Fox News question Trump that way on any other issue? I can’t think of one.
Sargent: Yeah. I want to talk about that schism a little more. If you take The Wall Street Journal, for instance, the editorial page is absolutely trashing Trump on the tariffs day in and day out practically. I think it’s fair to say, don’t you, that Fox News and The Wall Street Journal editorial page are really allied with the GOP’s plutocratic wing?
Sargent: Unquestionably. This week, an NBC News poll found that 54 percent of voters disapprove of Trump on the economy and 55 percent disapprove of his handling of the cost of living. Just 18 percent of voters say the economy is excellent or good. That’s just brutal. Now, we should note that NBC found Trump’s overall approval at 47 percent a bit better, but even here a majority disapproves. And the thing is, Trump’s economic numbers have long been his Teflon, the thing that gets him through everything else. For those to be cracking now so visibly means his overall approval is on very shaky ground as well.
Sargent: Underscoring your point there about Trump really taking his eye off the ball of the economy and focusing on his enemies and culture-war craziness, the NBC poll finds that among independents, 30 percent approve and 67 percent disapprove of Trump’s performance in office. Those are terrible numbers among independents, Matt, and independents famously do not like the type of stuff we’re seeing from Trump right now. It really clearly shows that you’re correct that he has really taken his eye off the ball of the economy and is now focused on things that the middle of the country just sees as a total distraction.
Sargent: I feel like it’s really important to underscore this point: Tariffs are a tax on consumption. Those fall most heavily on the poor and the working class and some middle-class voters as well who spend a larger proportion of their income on consumption. And Trump is openly out there saying that he needs these revenues because he’s going to continue his tax cuts which will overwhelmingly benefit wealthy corporate investors and the very rich. So he’s quite literally trying to transfer the tax burden from the rich to the poor. It seems to me that these numbers are looking really terrible even before we’ve seen him actually do this. What happens when he does it?
Sargent: I want to get to your point about the schisms inside Fox. You had a piece recently where you pointed out that some Fox personalities, at least, are still trying to hold to the propaganda line, insisting that nothing is at all amiss on the economy or with Trump’s tariffs even as their own colleagues are sounding the alarm. Can you talk about that?
Then you have other people. You have the folks at Newsmax who are trying to compete with Fox News by being ever more pro-Trump than anyone else could possibly be. They’re trying to fill the old Lou Dobbs niche, so you have people there explaining that pain comes with change, that maybe stocks need to take a nosedive so the working man can get a little relief from all this inflation. And Greg Kelly [argued] that Trump has always known what’s best for the U.S. and viewers are better off listening to Trump because he’s always proven right. That’s the caliber of the commentary that we’re getting.
Sargent: It seems like it’s worth pointing out as well that building this great new Trumpian economy is really just not going to happen, right? The way tariffs work is they also impact inputs on intermediate products that are needed to manufacture things in the United States, actually [raising] the cost of making things here as well.
Sargent: We should also bring up Paul Krugman’s point from the other day, which is, Are we even sure we want to manufacture shoes in the U.S. again? Shouldn’t we be looking at the higher level manufacturing goods? By the way, one thing that’s entirely missing from all these discussions is that Trump is taking all kinds of steps to destroy the new jobs that are being created in high-end manufacturing in the green energy economy. So this is yet another way none of it makes any sense. He and Vance constantly rhapsodize about manufacturing work, but they’re in the process of wrecking some of the best possible manufacturing jobs of the future.
Sargent: I want to ask you about Fox’s ideology, the reigning ideology on the right that you were talking about earlier. Another thing that we haven’t seen hit yet but is going to hit are the huge cuts to the safety net that Trump and Republicans want to make. We’re talking about huge amounts of money being cut out of Medicaid potentially. We’re talking about rollbacks of these subsidies for the green economy, which even some House Republicans are opposing. What happens when those start to hit? How does Fox straddle that? Fox News ideologically is predisposed toward wanting the safety net to be destroyed; yet, at the same time, they want the MAGA project to succeed. They know as well as anyone else that a lot of people on Medicaid are Trump voters. So how do they straddle that part of it?
Sargent: Matt, you follow how Republicans interact with Fox News; that’s something you followed for a long time. House Republicans, especially the ones in moderate districts, the really vulnerable ones in next year’s elections, are going to really start balking at these Medicaid cuts and at the rollbacks of green energy subsidies. Fox News wants the Republican Party to succeed also in addition to Trump and MAGA succeeding. Fox News does not want the Republican Party to lose the House in the 2026 midterms. How do they get around that? They’re going to have to start sounding some alarms about how at least the politics are pretty bad for Republicans when these cuts start, no?
Someone’s going to end up getting hurt, probably a lot of people along the way. And Fox is going to need to come up with something. Part of the issue is going to be during that whole negotiation that happens over what happens with this reconciliation bill or bills, there’s going to be so many different conflicting signals from Donald Trump, from his top advisors, from congressional Republicans. It’s going to be hard for them to figure out what position they’re even supposed to take if they want Donald Trump to succeed—and that could lead to, I think, some pretty scattershot commentary.
Gertz: Thanks so much for having me.
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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