Transcript: Trump Accidentally Reveals His Contempt for MAGA Voters

As Trump rages at ex-allies in telling outbursts, the author of a piece on Trump and the global right explains how he’s shrinking MAGA—and politically damaging himself and the GOP.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 20 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.

Is MAGA shrinking before our very eyes? In recent days, Donald Trump unleashed more tirades about ex-allies in the MAGA movement who’ve criticized him over the war and other things. Trump’s own pollster added more in a new interview, with both saying Trump’s critics don’t count as MAGA anymore.

In a sense, they’re both saying that you will get excommunicated if your devotion to Trump is not absolute. The real message here seems to be quite clearly that MAGA really is a cult.

This captures so much about this moment—Trump’s deepening unpopularity, the fracturing of his coalition, and the tenuousness of MAGA’s future as it keeps throwing out big voices. We’re talking about all of it with New Republic staff writer Perry Bacon, who has a great new piece on the global right turning on Trump. Perry, good to have you on.

Perry Bacon: Good to see you, Greg. Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So Donald Trump exploded in self-pity and megalomania on Truth Social, and this one had something special. He said this:

“I have among the best poll numbers I have ever had, and why shouldn’t I? ALL THE COUNTRY DOES IS WIN.”

Then Trump attacked MAGA critics this way:

“I hear Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens are fading fast. Their numbers are terrible. They were FAKE MAGA, and now they’ve been exposed!”

Perry, we used to joke that MAGA is whatever Trump says it is, but here he’s making that really clear. Anyone who dares to criticize him is fake MAGA. What do you make of that?

Bacon: I mean, very explicit. As you said, we’ve been talking about a movement or whether MAGA is a movement or an ideology or something else, or just Donald Trump. And, you know, I’ve written and used that phrase to mean other things, but like Donald Trump is saying what I’ve always thought, which is that MAGA is Donald Trump and will be gone the moment he’s off the scene, whenever that is.

Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. By the way, on Trump’s claim that his polls are as good as ever—guess what? That’s not true. One set of polling averages that you noted in your piece has his approval at 38 percent to 58 percent, some 20 points underwater. He’s worse on the economy in many polls: CNN had it at 31 percent and his approval on inflation at 27 percent, which is just extraordinary. That’s the issue voters care most about.

Perry, what’s your general sense of where public opinion is on Trump right now? As we record, he seems to be announcing some sort of deal with Iran, I guess. I think maybe he gets a couple of points out of that, or maybe not. What do you think?

Bacon: I think the question for him is there’s a core of Republicans who are at probably 35 to 40 percent of the electorate—people who are hardcore Republicans, always vote Republican. Can you get below that floor number in this era? If you remember, there are two times this happened where a president got below that. George W. Bush got to the high 20s, low 30s at the end of his administration—after Hurricane Katrina, after the Iraq War, and after the economic meltdown. Those were the big events that happened. And Trump got to the low 30s right after the January 6th insurrection, when pretty much everybody in the world, including Mitch McConnell and lots of Republicans, were criticizing him.

So can he get below 35? I don’t know. And I would have said a war that goes poorly and lasts a long time, but this war maybe is not that long and is maybe going to end soon. But I think the one thing is that he’s probably getting near his lowest possible number, which is probably in the 36 to 38 percent range.

Sargent: Well, I want to highlight some quotes from Trump’s pollster, Jim McLaughlin. He talked to Politico. I’m going to quote one of them. He said this: “The base doesn’t consider a Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, or a Candace Owens a conservative anymore.”

Perry, that’s so revealing. And these are people—I want to stress this—who criticized Trump for going to war, which absolutely does betray his promise to voters. That’s what Trump was supposed to represent to Trump voters: no more wars. Whereas Kamala Harris was supposed to be the Liz Cheney shill or whatever, the candidate of the globalists and the warmongering establishment in D.C.

But for pointing that out, they’ve been declared non-MAGA. I think that’s a window into what Trump and his pollster actually think of his voters. They really believe that those voters will........

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