Transcript: Trump Unraveling as Aides Feed Him Crackpot Poll Hopium

As a new report says Trump bizarrely plans to run ads in the midterms about...himself, a shrewd decoder of MAGA explains why he won’t allow Republicans to get distance from him.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 27 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 advisors have figured out why his approval ratings are in the toilet. The problem is that voters just aren’t aware of how stupendous all his accomplishments have truly been, and reportedly, this is what they’re privately telling him in discussions about the midterms. Oddly, this comes amid new and clear indications that Republicans are panicking about their inability to explain his disastrous rule to voters, and amid new polling that really underscores their perils.

Here’s the upshot. No one around Trump is allowed to tell him the truth. And if this helps take down the GOP in the midterms, it’ll be a real dose of poetic justice. We’re working through it all with Mona Charen, a writer for the Bulwark, who’s been pointing out that Republicans really don’t want him anywhere near the midterms. Mona, nice to have you back on.

Mona Charen: Hi, Greg. Always fun to be with you. And poetic justice is the best justice.

Sargent: Yes, and you know, it’s looking good right now.

Charen: Let’s, let’s hope so.

Sargent: So these new leaks to The Atlantic are really something. Trump’s advisors are privately telling him all the bad poll numbers reflect the fact that voters still don’t know about his accomplishments. As examples, advisors cite new stock market highs, declines in fentanyl deaths, the closed southern border, and the increase in domestic manufacturing production.

Mona, that’s funny. I mean, maybe the border is a fair one, but stock market highs and manufacturing jobs have declined. Your reaction to all this?

Charen: Yeah, I was just going to mention that. So a little sleight of hand there. The fact is that manufacturing output is up, but manufacturing employment has lagged. And for a while it was in steep decline. Now it’s ticked up a little bit, but it’s nothing like a boom. And that’s because this has been going on for decades, where we’ve been getting more and more automated ways of manufacturing things. That’s just a fact of life. And Trump sold people on a fairy tale of returning the kind of manufacturing jobs that were prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, and that world is gone.

But so, yeah, they’re trying to say, you know—this reminds me of, like, a medieval king, you know, who’s a mad king, and all the courtiers are forced to sort of tiptoe around, and nobody can ever say the truth, which is the king is mad. So they try to placate him, and they say, yes, yes, Your Majesty, it’s true, the reason that the polls are looking the way they are is because people just aren’t aware of all the wonderful things you’ve done. And the stock market—I mean, this is Mr. Populism, right? Mr. I’m for the working guy. And so he expects them to be thrilled about stock market gains. No, no, I don’t think so.

Sargent: Yeah. And there are a couple of other elements to the sleight of hand, as you put it, that I’d like to quickly highlight. They’re telling him that the manufacturing renaissance is happening. It isn’t. The amount of extraordinary upheaval that he’s inflicted on the country, and really on global trade, to produce these tiny little gains—which aren’t even gains—is really incredible, right?

And then the other thing is, it’s striking that they cite the closed southern border. He is deeply, deeply unpopular on the broader issue of immigration right now. In fact, he’s thrown away his best issue. And so none of this adds up to a real argument in any sense.

Charen: Both parties, I think, have a tendency to misread the American public and overread their mandate. So people did not like chaos at the southern border, as they perceived it under the Biden administration, and they wanted a crackdown on border crossings. They did not want what the Republicans have delivered, which is a kind of reign of terror—and grabbing grandmothers out of their homes who’ve lived here for 30 years and have no criminal record at all, et cetera.

And so they have so overdone it that there’s been a backlash against it. And as an electoral matter, Greg, this could be highly significant. You think about the number of Hispanic men who voted for Trump in 2024, for........

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