Transcript: Fiasco for Trump as GOP Memo Warns of Midterm Bloodbath

As a new Republican memo issues a harsh warning about the elections, a writer who covers the Trump economy explains how the economic distress of ordinary people could prove decisive this fall.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 1 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.

Public polls are starting to show that Democrats are now more trusted on the economy than Republicans are—a milestone with major implications for the elections. Strikingly, a new memo from Republican operatives just conceded this as well, while sounding a loud warning that the GOP is in danger of losing the Senate. All this is also underscored by fresh economic data. It suggests that the struggles of ordinary Americans could be getting worse.

New Republic staff writer Monica Potts has been doing some really good reporting on what ordinary voters are thinking and feeling about the economy. So we’re talking to her about all this today. Monica, nice to have you on.

Monica Potts: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So let’s start with the new data. GDP grew at 2 percent during the first quarter of this year, which is better than last year, but still came in under expectations. And inflation just had its biggest spike in nearly three years by one metric, driven in part by gas prices and the war. Monica, it just seems like we’re economically stuck. Is that the right way to think about it?

Potts: I think so. The economy was on a path to recovery at the end of the Biden administration. I think people conveniently forget that the post-COVID era was a really unusual time and we hadn’t seen anything like it in our lifetimes, and a lot of the ways that people consumed changed. Their incomes changed.

The way that we thought about what we needed and what we wanted to spend our money on changed throughout that period. And of course, inflation rose really rapidly. So things were heading back to normal, and actually a report earlier this month from economists at the Federal Reserve found that inflation might have been back to normal had we not had the new tariffs from the Trump administration and some of the other shocks to the economy under his tenure.

Sargent: Yeah, well, this economy is largely the creation of one person, Donald Trump. And I want to get into that in a bit. Politico reports on this new Republican memo that shows striking findings. It’s from Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-backed group. And that’s its own story, which we’ll get to. But for now, I want to read this line from it: “Our internal polling in several battleground states and one-on-one conversations with voters show that for the first time, Democrats are more trusted on the economy and inflation.”

Monica, that’s striking. Other polls have shown this as well. Trump’s 2024 victory was all about the economy and inflation, and Democrats were in just terrible shape on both due to what you talked about, the post-COVID inflation shock. How do you account for this turnaround?

Potts: Well, I think that Trump was riding a long-term advantage that Republicans had on the economy—at least since Reagan, American voters have tended to think that Republicans are better for the economy, largely because of their rhetoric on small businesses, on cutting taxes, and people tend to think that that’s good.

So I think that he came into office with a huge advantage on the economy that he really blew—the first few things that he did as president were to kind of squander that trust that people had. People saw right away that the things he was doing weren’t what they wanted from him. And so I think that that has given an opening for people to think about the Democratic rhetoric on the economy more and to maybe start trusting the Democratic Party more on what they say the economy needs.

Sargent: It’s just kind of amazing because not only did Republicans have this deep built-in advantage on the economy that you talked about, which is largely unearned but goes back many decades, Trump also had this big unearned advantage on the economy. And I was doing some reporting up in Reading, Pennsylvania about what happened with the Latino vote there in 2024, moved towards Trump.

And what I was struck by was how deeply this cultural picture of Trump as this crack businessman who builds big things and makes things happen and is an entrepreneurial spirit, how deeply that had taken hold with a lot of low-information voters. That’s just something that I think Democrats were really unable to do anything about, and yet that’s been pissed away too.

Potts: Yeah, that’s right. And I think people forget that the vast majority of voters aren’t reading the really long investigative pieces that show that Trump actually wasn’t a very good businessman. I mean, you can find all of the evidence that you want to show that Trump inherited most of his wealth. He squandered it—his early successes as a builder or as a real estate person really based on his father’s work. And he was never really the businessman he........

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