Transcript: Fox in Meltdown over Booing of Trump as Polls Turn Brutal

As Trump gets mercilessly booed at the Knicks game and Fox spins wildly to erase it, a data analyst parses new polls showing Trump cratering—and explains why he’s entered a downward spiral.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 10 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 is really, really, really unpopular. This week brings a barrage of new polling that shows him tanking horribly by a whole host of different metrics. It’s no accident that this comes as Trump and his propagandists are spinning wildly to erase what everyone saw in New York on Monday night, which is that he was booed relentlessly, thunderously, and mercilessly. Nobody understands better than Trump and MAGA that perceptions of his unpopularity are lethal. Right now they’re feeding on themselves and driving him into a worsening downward spiral.

We’re parsing through all of it with Grant Wiles, the VP of data and polling at NextGen America, the youth mobilization group, which has its own polling showing that Trump has completely lost the culture. Grant, good to have you on.

Grant Wiles: Great to be here.

Sargent: So Trump was at Madison Square Garden on Monday night. He was loudly booed twice. Here’s what the second one sounded like.

[Audio of loud, sustained booing]

Sargent: And here’s what Trump had to say afterward about his reception.

Donald Trump (voiceover): It was certainly amazing. It was—I think mostly cheers. It was loud and it was very enthusiastic.

Sargent: OK, Grant, numerous news accounts said he was booed. The Times called them “loud and raucous boos.” The Washington Post described “loud jeers.” The AP said he was “booed loudly.” But to Trump it was great. Your reaction to all this?

Wiles: Yeah, I think we’re just witnessing our president in real time experiencing the cognitive dissonance publicly of seeing that the vast majority of Americans simply do not like him. It’s why we see many artists pulling out of the 250 event on the National Mall.

He’s gone from somebody who prided himself on his ability to have successful friends who he can brag about, to a situation where nobody wants to really be affiliated with him.

Sargent: You know what’s funny—Fox News recognizes how lethal this moment at Madison Square Garden really was. Fox, for instance, according to Matt Gertz, who flagged all this for Media Matters, had a chyron up about this saying he got a, quote-unquote, “mixed reception,” which is a really generous way to put it.

Then Fox’s Brian Kilmeade said that it was “mixed.” “There were people cheering,” he said. And he blamed the boos on the security.

And then Fox’s Lawrence Jones tried to explain away the booing by saying: “You don’t expect anything different from the same crowd that voted for Mamdani.” So I guess Fox’s Lawrence Jones did hear the booing.

What do you make of that? I think really what this means, Grant, is that Fox News really understands on a very visceral level that the escalating perceptions of Trump’s unpopularity are themselves deadly for him. What do you think?

Wiles: Yeah, I’m just glad my paycheck doesn’t rely on deluding the president into thinking that everybody likes him, because it’s getting increasingly difficult in this day and age. Whenever we see anyone break with this trend or this delusion that they’ve conjured up for him, bad things happen to them. They lose Republican primaries, their opponents get endorsed, they lose their jobs, they get replaced.

Any number of things can happen to somebody who fails to prop up that delusion and maintain it really delicately for our president. But the reality is American people aren’t so easily deluded anymore. They know who he is.

Sargent: I’ll tell you, Fox News knows this as well as anyone because, for instance, their pollster often finds pretty bad news for Trump, finds pretty damning stuff about his popularity. And Trump tends to react by demanding very loudly and angrily that Fox fire its pollster. So Fox News knows that they’re in this position where they have to tell the despot that his popularity is soaring, that nothing that he’s hearing about his unpopularity is real, as they did here.

I think maybe Fox and Friends, which is the morning show that I just quoted from, really does try to puff up Trump, maybe in a way that the polling outlet at Fox News does not. So that schism is itself kind of interesting. You know what I mean?

Wiles: Yeah, we........

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