Transcript: Trump Ballroom Saga Worsens for GOP as Midterm Panic Grows

As Trump’s obsession with building monuments to himself backfires for his party, a political scientist explains how his “vanity presidency” is badly alienating voters in the middle.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 6 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 allies are privately warning that the GOP is in serious trouble in the midterms. Politico reports that Trump’s obsessions with his vanity projects, like his ballroom, are distracting from the economic message that Republicans think is necessary to stave off a bloodbath.

So what did Trump do this week? Well, he managed to get Republicans to seek $1 billion in taxpayer money for the ballroom. He also rambled bizarrely about his support with MAGA voters, as if that somehow will matter in the midterms. Trump simply does not have any conception of public service, of the presidency as an institution that belongs to the people. Is that itself becoming a huge liability for the GOP?

We’re talking about all this with political scientist Tom Schaller, who has a new piece for the Public Notice Substack on Trump’s vanity presidency. Tom, good to have you on.

Tom Schaller: Great to be back, Greg.

Sargent: So I just want to start with something Trump said today about his polling and his public support. Listen to this.

Donald Trump (voiceover): I am, according to CNN, 100 percent approval within the Republican Party. That’s almost—that’s better than your record. I’m at 100 percent approval. Do you see the CNN poll? Nobody talks about it. CNN—I think the people that did that poll probably got fired—but within the Republican Party and MAGA, which is basically 100 percent of the party, I think. 100 percent.

Sargent: Tom, the Republican Party is not actually 100 percent MAGA. Many Republicans are non-MAGA and a non-trivial swath of them disapprove of Trump’s various policies. But more important, MAGA support won’t be nearly enough for Republicans to survive the midterms. Yet here, Trump appears unable to process that thought because only his supporters exist. Your thoughts on that?

Schaller: I mean, as the kids say today, he’s delulu. Greg, I mean, he has no concept of what’s going on, or worse, he knows what’s going on and he’s trying to spin things. I mean, that’s actually the more charitable view—that his tutelage under Roy Cohn is that you never admit defeat, you never say you’re wrong, you always put the shine on the bright side of everything, and you fake the numbers. We know he inflates all kinds of percentages and makes up gas prices—lower when he’s in charge, higher when somebody else is in charge.

But part of the problem—I think, on a more serious note, aside from his delusional attitudes about things and beliefs in himself—is that unlike the first term, we had some serious people recommended to him that worked for him, including all the way up to chief of staff and top advisors. He’s completely surrounded by yes-women and yes-men. And all they do is praise him and tell him how amazing he is.

And so you wonder if bad news even gets through anymore to him because nobody has the fortitude to say, hey, Mr. President, this is not polling well, or you’ve made a bad decision here, or here’s what they’re saying in the news. And so I don’t know. It must be piercing somehow because he’s online at 2, 3 in the morning. But maybe his feed is such that it’s just nothing but praise.

Sargent: Well, that gets to something I want to ask you about. Politico reports that some of Trump’s closest allies fear that his efforts to stage events around the economy are failing for a number of reasons. One of them is that Trump’s tendency to talk about his imperial projects, like the White House ballroom and the victory arch, is muddying the economic contrast that Republicans think must be drawn with Democrats. The report says Republicans are increasingly anxious and think the House is basically lost.

Tom, what’s funny is you don’t hear Republicans attach their name to the idea that the ballroom talk is bad for them, precisely because the cult leader won’t allow it. And yet the slavish devotion to Trump is itself killing them. Can you talk about this weird dynamic? I haven’t seen anything quite like it.

Schaller: Yeah, it’s like they’re willing to go down with the Titanic on this guy because they’re so petrified of him and his voters. But when these issues are turning against him, it doesn’t make any sense for them to jump on board with these sort of vanity projects and stapling his name to everything. For all the talk about how inflation and the price of things matter—and it does, and I’m not saying it’s unimportant—I remember telling people very early on in 2025,........

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