Transcript: GOPers Quietly Fear It’s All Falling Apart for Trump

As Republicans start leaking their fear that the bottom is falling out for Trump and the GOP, Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg ponders whether his party can close the deal—and what could still go wrong.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 23 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.

A Republican operative just offered something remarkable to Politico about how the party is thinking about the midterm elections right now. The operative said this: “We’re preparing for the bottom to fall out.” This quote seems to capture something bigger. There really is a sense that things are spinning out of Trump’s control. The Iran war debacle is deepening. A bizarre new outburst from Trump suggests he’s delusional about what this really means. The polls also show Trump continuing to crater on the economy. And as Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg pointed out on his Hopium Chronicles Substack, that GOP operative’s dismay is in sync with polls we’re seeing in the Senate races, including in places that voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

But we still think there’s a long way to go, and a lot of things can go wrong. So we’re talking to Simon Rosenberg about how Democrats can close this deal, and whether all that GOP pessimism is really that justified. Simon, thanks for coming on.

Simon Rosenberg: Greg, it’s always a pleasure.

Sargent: Good to see you, Simon. So Politico’s report is really striking. One GOP operative says they’re preparing for the bottom to fall out. That operative also says that Senate races are in play in Iowa, Alaska, and Ohio, and even that House districts that Trump carried by double digits are firmly in play.

Simon, I’m just not ready to get that optimistic. If all those places are really in play—and again, this is coming from a Republican—then it really is on the verge of falling apart for Trump. Are you there yet or not? And why?

Rosenberg: No, I think we have a shot here, right? I mean, it’s a year of opportunity for us. How well we seize it is really going to be in part up to us. They’ve created a situation where he’s already fallen very far, much further than where he was in 2018 at this point. The national climate is plus seven or so, or above, for us, which means that the House should flip. We have polls showing Sherrod Brown up—independent polls showing Sherrod Brown up in Ohio, and Mary Peltola up in Alaska, and Josh Turek up in Iowa. I mean, these are states that Trump won by more than ten points.

Sargent: A lot of this has to do with the war. A second Republican close to the White House tells Politico that all this is driven by Trump’s refusal to accept that he’s lost in Iran. This Republican calls this “a classic escalation trap.”

I’m a little torn over this. On the one hand, it’s not that hard to imagine him pulling out of the war in September and declaring victory, though he’d probably have to accept a fair amount of humiliation to do that, and he might not be willing to. And yet on the other, you hear things like this from Donald Trump.

Donald Trump (voiceover): A poll just came out. Americans don’t want high gasoline prices, but they’re not against the war. That just came out loud and clear in a poll. Nobody wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Do you want Iran to have a nuclear weapon? You think it’s good?

Sargent: Simon, that’s really something. The new Washington Post poll finds 29 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the situation in Iran, with an extraordinary 69 percent disapproving. The contrast between him saying the war is popular and Republicans admitting the bottom is falling out over it is really something, isn’t it?

Rosenberg: Yeah, look, he can’t accept—he has said repeatedly there are no limits on his power. And what he’s finding is that there are, and he can’t accept that. And he can’t accept that the war may be the biggest mistake by an American president in all of American history. And he has no way out, because he already declared—remember, Greg, he already surrendered and declared victory once.

And that didn’t work, because Iran wasn’t playing ball with the perception that he was actually the victor. And they started asserting themselves in the Strait of Hormuz, which was an unacceptable situation for the United States and his regional partners. And so he’s now had to go back in and do what he did before, which didn’t work, which is bomb them, which was ineffective.

And so he’s in a very bad place. And the resumption of the war itself has driven up energy prices, and it’s going to reignite inflation. Interest rates are going up, the bond yields have gone up.

Sargent: One Republican operative told Politico about the war, “Nobody can........

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