Transcript: As Trump Unravels, Even Fox Cringes at His $5,000 Giveaway

As Trump’s rants about the elections grow more unhinged, a political scientist explains how a perfect storm of Trumpian idiocy is what landed him and the GOP in such a deep political hole.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 11 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’s numbers on the economy have taken another big dive. A Quinnipiac poll finds him at a record low, and a CNN analysis finds him in much, much worse shape on the issue than in 2018. But Trump has an answer. He’s just promised to send $5,000 to every American if Republicans hold Congress. The idea is so ludicrous that even Fox News figures are gently mocking it. All of which raises a question: Have Trump’s magical reality-bending powers finally run out?

We’re breaking it all down with political scientist Tom Schaller, who has a good piece for the Public Notice Substack on Trump’s ongoing inflation catastrophe. Tom, good to have you on.

Tom Schaller: Good to be back, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s just start with Trump’s announcement that he’ll send $5,000 to all Americans if Republicans hold the House and Senate. As many people quickly pointed out, Trump has promised to send people money over and over again. His contempt for his voters here is just boundless. Tom, your quick reaction to all that?

Schaller: Well, he won’t deliver on it, and I think we all know that. We didn’t get a rebate for the tariffs that we paid—the corporations did. So in effect, his tariffs, one of the things I talked about in the new piece, were a retail sales tax on Americans that was paid initially by corporations, but they’re getting made whole. And of course, they’re not going to give any of the money back. So you can count on that $5,000 like you can count on getting your tariff money back. That’s my gut reaction.

Sargent: You know, the funny thing about this is it highlights another layer of contempt for Americans that Trump shows here. He’s saying that he’ll be able to send $5,000 to all Americans because the tariff revenue has been so big, which he casts as money that we’re getting from other countries.

So he’s basically saying, all this money that we’re getting from other countries, we’ll send it to Americans. But of course, the truth is literally the exact opposite. The tariffs are being paid by Americans, and nothing will be sent back to them.

Let’s talk about some of this polling. The new Quinnipiac poll has Trump’s approval rating down at 33 percent. On the economy, it’s 32 percent, his lowest ever in Quinnipiac polling. On the war with Iran, he’s at 29 percent. And on trade with Canada, he’s at 28 percent. Extraordinarily terrible numbers.

You wrote in your piece that all of Trump’s policies are conspiring to push up prices and hurt the economy. I think this polling shows that voters really understand the connection here between all these things. Your thoughts on all that?

Schaller: You have more faith in the voter than I do. Let me just start by saying that. And I’m a political scientist, and I’m sure I’ll take some crap for saying this, but I don’t have a lot of faith in voters. So if voters had a substantial knowledge of how the economy works, Greg, they would have known during the campaign that two of the three policies that I talked about in the Public Notice piece—not the Iran war, because obviously that hadn’t happened yet.

But Trump ran on immigration reform and taking all the immigrant labor out of the country. And of course, he ran on tariffs. And if you thought about those two policies for a moment: one is essentially an inflationary policy on domestic production, because it raises labor costs when you eliminate some of the most efficient and lower-paid workers. And the second, of course, tariffs, as we already discussed, is just a tax, a retail tax on imports. And so Trump was campaigning to end inflation on two inflationary policies.

It’d be like if you and I were picked by our local town to sit on a panel to pick the new fire chief. And we interviewed a guy, and he was kind of brusque and he didn’t have good manners, but he had two really great ideas when he explained to us his philosophy of putting out fire. One is, he shows up with a giant flatbed truck of dried hay and he dumps that on top. And then if that doesn’t work, he brings a tanker of kerosene and sprays that on, because we know that liquids douse fires. And we said, let’s hire that guy, what a genius.

And then, halfway through his term—now I’m analogizing to the Iran war—he said, well, no, what you really do to put out a fire is you throw a........

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