Transcript: Trump’s GOP Allies Admit He’s Toxic as Crushing Poll Hits

As Trump breaks new disapproval records amid fresh GOP panic, the author of a piece on his travails explains how unchecked corruption and soaring gas prices are hitting him with a double whammy.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 15 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.

NBC News is reporting that some House Republicans privately admit that Donald Trump and MAGA are now a serious liability in the midterms. They’re in a trap. Republicans can’t decide whether to rely on Trump to turn out his supporters—voters that Republicans very much need—because that risks tying them too closely to the ailing, unpopular president. All this comes as new polling shows that Trump is literally the most unpopular U.S. president ever when it comes to gas prices. It also comes amid new signs that Trump’s corruption is becoming a more central issue by the day.

That GOP trap—whether or not to run with Trump—perfectly captures how the GOP’s uncritical embrace of the president is backfiring in just about every way. So we’re talking about it all with Mona Charen, a writer for The Bulwark, who has a good piece arguing that gas prices and corruption are combining to hurt Republicans in hidden ways. Mona, thanks for coming on.

Mona Charen: My pleasure. Always nice to be with you, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s start with this analysis from CNN’s Harry Enten. Here he’s talking about disapproval of presidents on gas prices. Listen.

Harry Enten (voiceover): Oftentimes when gas prices go up, the president pays a price, but never this much, because we’re talking about a record here. Take a look at this. Highest disapproval on gas prices. Look at this. President Trump, 79 percent. 79 percent of Americans disapprove of him on gas prices. Look, the rest of them you see across the board also reach the 70s, but never this high. This is a record high in terms of looking back at every single president this century.

Sargent: So to quickly recap, Trump’s disapproval on gas prices is 79 percent—higher than any other president. And later in the analysis, Harry Enten notes that 85 percent of independents and even 52 percent of Republicans disapprove. Abysmal numbers. Mona, your reaction to those?

Charen: Yeah, it’s really interesting. And though I’m not usually one to say that the voters are wise and smart—you know, because we’ve had reason in the recent past to doubt that—but in this case, I think it’s pretty clear that voters have this very negative view of Trump’s responsibility for gas prices because it could not be clearer why gas prices are so high. It was this unprovoked war that he chose to engage in that has caused the spike in gas prices. It isn’t some exogenous event.

They gave him a break. They didn’t hold him responsible for the COVID virus. There are many things that they thought were out of his control and therefore they didn’t hold him accountable. But this is so clear. And not only did he launch this war, but he did so without ever making a case for it to the American people, without getting any congressional buy-in, far less a declaration of war. And so, yeah, if it’s causing pain, people know exactly who to blame.

Sargent: There’s a remarkable clarity to this one because in most cases presidents aren’t really to blame for economic conditions. And yet in this case, it couldn’t be clearer. And as you said, I just want to bear down a little more on it.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz—which is where 20 percent of the world’s oil traffics through—is very clearly the reason for the price spikes all around the world. And everybody can see it with total clarity, and you just don’t often get something so clearly cut where a president is so clearly on the hook for what’s happening to voters directly, do you?

Charen: No, it’s such a good point. Because look, life is complicated, and certainly economies usually have many things going on at once. And so you can say, well, what’s causing this slowdown? And it could be many things. It’s usually multifactorial. Is it the Fed? Is it trade? Is it COVID? Is it many, many things.

But in this case, it could not be clearer. And beyond that, it is a violation of Trump’s key promise that he made........

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