Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Paul Waldman: My pleasure.
Waldman: Republicans like to say these days that they are the party of the working class. And in some ways, that’s true. We have seen a transformation in voting where more educated voters with college degrees and graduate degrees are much more likely to vote for Democrats. And especially, white voters without college degrees are much more likely to vote Republicans. But one of the implications of that is that people who are more likely to vote for Trump are much more reliant on government services, both as individuals and in the areas in which they live. And you take a bill like this, which is slashing away at government services like Medicaid, like food stamps, like spending for education—those are all things that are going to hit Republicans and the areas where they live particularly hard. And then you layer on top of that a lot of the specific places that they’re going after—things like, for instance, green energy subsidies. Those, about 80 percent of the manufacturing subsidies that the Biden administration put into the legislation that they passed, go to Republican districts. So there are all different kinds of ways where by having this be the ideological realization of what Republicans have wanted all along, they’re actually going to hurt their own constituents and the people who voted for Trump the most.
Sandra Smith (audio voiceover): How do you win over Rand Paul, and what changes is the president willing to see to this bill?
Sargent: The contempt for Trump voters and for Republican voters here is just remarkable. Karoline Leavitt is absolutely certain that she can just gaslight those people into believing that anything that doesn’t do Trump’s bidding simply must be bad for them—that if Trump wants it, it must be good for them. To me, this really reveals how badly they’re trying to screw these people. What do you think, Paul?
And I think that he does believe—and maybe not without evidence—that he can basically tell them that something is good for them when it’s actually bad for them, and they’ll believe it. And you can see, if you want to, all kinds of places where, in his first term, he didn’t do what he said he was going to do, or he hurt them in particular, and they still voted for him. That was true, for instance, in coal country, which is one of the places we addressed in our book White Rural Rage. In a lot of coal country, in West Virginia and Kentucky, he came and he promised them that he was going to bring back all the coal jobs. And he didn’t, of course. Coal was in a long decline for a lot of different reasons, and those jobs didn’t come back. But yet, they still voted for him with as high rates in 2020 as they had in 2016—or higher. And the same thing happened in 2024.
Sargent: I want to note one other thing about that Leavitt rant that we just listened to. She was basically threatening GOP senators there. If they don’t back Trump’s bill, then Trump is going to go tell their voters that their senator has betrayed him. And they think that’s all it takes, right? That’s what the White House thinks is enough. Now, the senators who oppose the bill are people like Josh Hawley, who is against the Medicaid cuts supposedly on populist grounds; Susan Collins, who opposes them because she plays a moderate on safety net–related things; Jerry Moran of Kansas, who opposes them because they will hurt rural hospitals; some others in the mix. Do you think Trump can move senators like these with this type of threat from Karoline Leavitt or not?
For each one of them, they may have their own calculation. They may say, Well, I’ve established enough of my own identity among my constituents and maybe my next reelection isn’t for two years or four years, so I can go out and make this stance and maybe people will see me as principled and maybe Trump will lose interest in taking revenge on me. But it’s always a risk. And there are plenty of people—especially in the House—[where] Trump has endorsed [their] primary opponent and that was the end of their career. But I think maybe senators, who represent a whole state and tend to have even larger egos than people in the House, feel like I can survive it because my constituents love me so much.
Leavitt (audio voiceover): This bill is the most historic piece of legislation to ever move through Congress in modern history. Not only does it save nearly $2 trillion, but it also delivers on the president’s key priorities. It also has historic investments in border security, historic funding for the Golden Dome and our national security, and so many other incredible things are packed into this bill. So now it is before the Senate. Those discussions are ongoing, but the president is not going to back down.
Waldman: Yeah, if they feel they can get away with that, it may be because they’ve gotten away with it before. We have this repetitive cycle where every time Republicans take power, there’s one thing they are absolutely going to do, which is cut taxes on the wealthy. And every time they make the same arguments, which is, This is going to cause such an explosion of economic growth that we won’t be able to count all the money we take in in tax revenue, and it won’t cost a thing. They say that every single time. Every single time it’s wrong, but they come back to it. Maybe it’s because they feel like the news media take it seriously enough that they can get away with it. Obviously, they have a dilemma that is at the core of the Republican political project, which is that if you’re going to advance the interests of a very small wealthy sliver of the population, you have to convince the rest of the population that it’s good for them too. And one of the ways you do it is by saying, It’s actually not going to cost anything because we’re all going to benefit. Cutting taxes for the wealthy will make us all rich.
Sargent: I want to dig in on what you said there about the core Republican political project and the flaws at the very center of it. We’ve got a number of GOP senators who oppose the Medicaid cuts, as we mentioned earlier, and also a few of them who oppose the ballooning of the deficits that the bill would bring like Senator Rand Paul; I think maybe Ron Johnson is in that mix as well. It’s a math problem, isn’t it, Paul, in which they don’t want to be seen gutting Medicaid but they can’t offset tax cuts for the rich any other way? How do they get out of that box?
You cannot get trillions of dollars in cuts without going after those core programs that are the most expensive—and that’s Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And they feel that Social Security and Medicare have to be off the table because seniors are highly motivated. They keep close track on what’s happening with those two programs that they rely on, and they’re going to mobilize against you and vote against you if you touch Social Security and Medicare. So what’s left? Well, Medicaid is left. And Medicaid is an enormous program. It now serves—if you include the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which is a subsidiary—80 million Americans. It is huge. And we spend a lot of money on it. And it gives health insurance to tens of millions of Americans. That’s a worthwhile thing.
Sargent: I think this Gordian knot that we’re talking about is actually made worse by the demographic shifts in the Republican coalition and by people like Josh Hawley, who temporarily at least are taking the rhetoric about the working-class GOP seriously. I do think one way this could all go is that in the end, Republican senators accept a lot of big Medicaid cuts that they just redescribe as cutting waste and fraud. Trump himself has laid the groundwork for this by saying, We’re not going to touch Medicaid. We’re only going to go after waste and fraud. And the funny thing about this, I think, is this is how the Republican Party has been operating for decades. Returning to that old ruse after vowing to be a working-class party would like be a capstone to Trump’s scam. Do you predict something like that? How do you see it playing out?
So you you can play all kinds of rhetorical tricks. There have been a number of different studies looking at how many millions of people are going to lose their health coverage because of, for instance, work requirements—which are really just paperwork requirements, setting up an obstacle course of bureaucracy that you have to navigate. And if you don’t do it, you lose your health coverage. You can characterize that. And Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, has done this in saying, Well, there are 10 million people or something like that who shouldn’t be getting it, because that’s what the study says, that those all those people will lose their coverage if they institute the work requirements. Now, you can say that those people are undeserving—but once the cuts happen, and it turns out it’s your brother who is working a job but didn’t fill in his form quickly enough and lost his health coverage, you’re not going to say that he was undeserving. Once those start to really hit communities, that rhetoric doesn’t really hold up anymore.
Sargent: I think you really put your finger on something important, Paul, which is that to Trump and many Republicans and Karoline Leavitt, their own voters really are the waste. That is what they think at bottom. Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Paul Waldman’s Substack, The Cross Section, and his book, White Rural Rage, which talks about this stuff a lot. Paul, it’s always a great pleasure to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.
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