The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 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.

We don’t think it’s really sunken in with people just how badly President Trump is doing in the polls right now. He is deeply underwater on every major issue. And in another data point, new Gallup numbers show party identification among Democrats rising and among Republicans falling. Trump’s political situation is very precarious. The fate of many of these trade deals is up in the air. Inflation just rose again by a key metric. And Trump just had a terrible day in an appeals court where judges were skeptical of the legality of his tariffs. We don’t know for sure that those will even hold up.

We can always tell when Trump is in a shaky situation when press secretary Karoline Leavitt rushes in to praise him with absurdly over-the-top, obsequious flattery—and boy, did she not disappoint this time. Today we’re talking about all this with New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who has a great new piece taking stock of Trump’s overall cratering in polls across the board. Thanks for coming on, Alex.

Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.

Sargent: So Alex, let’s quickly take stock of the situation. The consumer price index is up again—up 2.6 percent from a year earlier. Some headlines: New York Times, “Key Inflation Measure Rose in June”; ABC News, similar, “A key US inflation gauge rose last month as Trump’s tariffs lifted goods prices.” He’s out there tweeting like crazy that this country is hot right now and that we’re getting rich off his tariffs. But things are very shaky for him right now. What’s your overall reading?

Shephard: Yeah. For the last month or so, I’ve been looking at his steady dip in the polls as analogous to what happened to Joe Biden after the withdrawal from Afghanistan—the moment where the coalition that got him elected breaks up and where you’re basically left with die-hards and true believers. And I think that one of the things that really jumped out to me in recent polling is this idea that the emerging MAGA majority that Trump had really pushed after winning reelection [is] completely gone now, basically. His status with Black voters has always been overstated. He only won about 15 percent of the vote—it was a big deal because he doubled what he had done in 2020. But his disapproval rating among Black voters is up to 72 percent. Those numbers are similar among young voters. With voters under 30, he was running even, which is pretty crazy for a Republican president, in January. He’s now 30 points underwater. And there’s just nothing you can see here where that’s going to change.

And I think the other big change here is new polling is pointing to the fact that Trump ran even with Latino voters in 2024. He won, I think, 48 percent of the vote, which, again, is a huge number for a Republican candidate. But basically on immigration alone, those numbers are starting to shift. You’re seeing two-thirds of Latino voters turn on the president based almost solely on his immigration policies. And that’s not, again, factoring into the fact that as Trump brags about raking in $150 billion in tariffs, that’s a tax on American citizens, right? Everyone is seeing prices go up. The level of dissatisfaction is high. It’s growing. And I think, again, people are going to look at the early part of July as the turning point in this presidency. It’s the combination of the bill, the effective tariffs starting to take hold, and the Epstein stuff, which he has not been able to control and has made worse at every opportunity.

Sargent: Alex, let me throw this in there. Gallup just found that Trump’s overall approval among independents is 29 percent. So we’re really seeing his coalition fall apart across the board, aren’t we?

Shephard: Yeah. And again, you saw this in basically 2016 and 2024. Trump won because of his standing with independent voters who decided that they could put up with some of the craziness because they were either tired with establishment Democrats or they just wanted to break the mold of American politics. And again, that is all reverberating back. The other thing too is, I’ve been talking to a lot of Democratic strategists who I think are rightly angsty about the party’s standing with voters heading into the midterm elections—and they should be. I think the Democratic electorate is pretty furious with their leadership, and a lot of that is justified. But you mentioned earlier the rise in registration, and I think what we’re seeing here too is Democrats have an existential problem that they need to sort out—but they’re not going to be punished for it in the polls. Right now people are so disgusted with this administration that they’re looking for any opportunity or any alternative, and Democrats are going to provide that.

Sargent: A hundred percent. And now let’s use that as the setup to listen to good old White House press secretary........

© New Republic