Hindsight

 

Transcript: Trump Unravels in Wild Rants as Polling Shows New Weakness

As Trump’s press conference goes off the rails, a sharp observer of public opinion on Trump argues that the anti-MAGA majority is reviving—and that Trump’s bizarre display demonstrates why that’s happening.

 

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump offered some of his widest ranging remarks to reporters yet, and the proceedings really went off the rails. He raged at one journalist for questioning his corrupt acceptance of a luxury jet from Qatar. He lost his temper when asked why his administration is resettling white Afrikaners but no other refugees. And he tried to humiliate the president of South Africa by thumbing through printouts of news articles of deaths of white South Africans, but couldn’t even defend his lie that there’s a “white genocide” happening there. We think the scene captured something essential about this moment. The corruption and the white nationalism—those are two things Trump openly promised he would do during the campaign, and he’s now doing both of them.

The longtime labor strategist Michael Podhorzer has a good new piece on his Substack, Weekend Reading, arguing that the polling evidence is now clear: Trump won in 2024 because voters either didn’t know what he was promising to do or didn’t believe those promises. So we’re talking about all this today. Good to have you on, Michael.

Podhorzer: It’s great to see you again.

Sargent: Trump met with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House Wednesday and journalists were in attendance. Let’s start here. Trump was asked about the news that the administration will accept a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar, but Trump wanted to talk about the fake “white genocide” in South Africa—so he lost his temper. Listen to this.

Donald Trump (audio voiceover): It’s NBC trying to get off the subject of what you just saw. You are a real ... You know, you’re a terrible reporter. Number one, you don’t have it takes to be a reporter. You’re not smart enough. But for you to go on to a subject about a jet that was given to the United States Air Force, which is a very nice thing.... They also gave $5.1 trillion worth of investment in addition to the jet. Go back. You ought to go back to your studio at NBC because Brian Roberts and the people that run that place, they ought to be investigated. They are so terrible, the way you run that network. And you’re a disgrace. No more questions from you. Go ahead.

Sargent: Michael, this is not someone who is aware of how the public perceives his corruption, is it?

Podhorzer: Well, he’s certainly not aware of how the majority of the public perceives his corruption. It’s a strange time when we even need to look at surveys to see that. But in fact, the numbers bear it out. This is not what people want in a president. I think it’s symptomatic, though, of something that extends across the board, where too many people just didn’t take him literally. Or if they took him literally, thought that the “guardrails” that kept him from doing it in the first term would be there in the second term, despite all the evidence that those things had been dismantled or would be once he took office.

Sargent: Yes, your piece gets at that very well. Your piece argues that the public really just didn’t believe that Donald Trump would do the things that he said he was going to do. And corruption is one of them. He was open and very clear about the fact that he was going to rule in a corrupt way. He promised roomfuls of financiers and Big Oil executives that he would keep their taxes low and do policy their way, and then ask them in the next breath to raise huge amounts of money for him. That’s about as clear as you can be, right? Didn’t Trump essentially say during the campaign, I’m going to be corrupt? And didn’t the public simply not believe him?

Podhorzer: We actually did. And I think one of the incidents you were rolling in there was when he met with oil executives and put a specific price tag of $1 billion on delivering their agenda for them. So absolutely, it was out there. But it’s important to really underscore that even though it was all out there—and in a very thin way people may have known these things—I think the responsibility on the media, civil society leaders, Democratic elected officials, who by their behavior didn’t take it seriously, makes it hard to really see this as just voters being too naive. If you looked at what he’d already promised, it would change America as quickly and thoroughly as the Reconstruction amendments and the New Deal. And that’s the world we’re living in. But almost all of our leaders behaved as that couldn’t possibly happen.

Sargent: Elites really failed us here. I want to focus on another moment from this Trump presser. Trump was asked why he’s letting in white South Africans while suspending refugee resettlement from everywhere else in the world. Listen to this.

Peter Alexander (audio voiceover): Can you explain to Americans why it’s appropriate to welcome white Afrikaners here when other refugees like Afghans, Venezuelans, Haitians have all had their protective status revoked?

Trump (audio voiceover): Well, this is a group, NBC, that is truly fake news. They ask a lot of questions in a very pointed way. They’re not questions, they’re statements. We’ve had tremendous complaints about Africa, about other countries, too, from people. They say there’s a lot of bad things going on in Africa, and that’s what we’re going to be discussing today. When you say we don’t take others, all you have to do is take look at the Southern border. We let 21 million people come through our border. Totally unchecked, totally unvetted.

Sargent: Michael, it is his actual policy to only let in white Afrikaners and no other refugees. How is this an objectionable question? It isn’t. Also note that his answer is ridiculous. He conflates border crossings with refugee resettlement, which is totally vetted. He’s simply not able to defend the policy because it’s clearly racially motivated. I think this is someone who can’t imagine that the public might be alienated by overt white nationalism. What do you think?

Podhorzer: I think that that is definitely a part of it. But I also think that what we’ve learned from scholars of authoritarians, like Ruth Ben-Ghiat and others, is that this is also part of a strategy to enforce their control—to say things that are objectionable because it divides people. And the more your supporters have to go along with your obviously horrible or untrue things, the more loyal to you they become, because they’ve bought into it. And so what he did there in the Oval Office is not much different from what any of the other world authoritarians do. It’s a bullying move. But you’re right, too: I think he doesn’t appreciate what a majority of Americans think ever.

Sargent: Yes. I think that what you’re saying there is essentially that he thinks his base is larger than it is, right?

Podhorzer: Well, this is the tricky thing about being in America. He may think his base is larger than it is—but in America, it doesn’t have to be a majority anymore. And as long as it’s willing to be 100 percent there for you all the time, the question isn’t, “Is it a majority?” It’s, “Is it enough?” And right now, it’s still enough.

Sargent: Apparently, it is. So at another point, Trump flipped through a bunch of printed-out articles about white farmers who he said had been killed. He had clearly never read a word of any of these articles. You could see that. At another point, Trump showed a video also designed to humiliate the South African president that supposedly showed a killing field for whites. Ramaphosa said, I’d like to see where that is, which was a striking moment. But I think the point here is, Michael, that no matter what Trump shows, he’s lying about the “white genocide.” And there’s just no way the voting public thought this particular thing was what they were going to get—overt white nationalism, white genocide theory going global—right?

Podhorzer: Well, I think that just shy of half of the population of the voters did. That’s the state of play, right? It just needed a few more to believe that, and we wouldn’t be in this dystopia now. It’s really important to realize that in this moment, when we’re being reminded of what a disaster the decision that Biden made to try to seek reelection [was]—that’s been documented in the new book, Original Sin—and as we remember how in other countries, the governing party suffered much bigger losses because of inflation and all that, the reason it was as close as it was wasn’t because people love Democrats. We see that right now where their approval ratings are the worst ever. It’s that about half of the people who went out and voted were that disturbed at the possibility of a second Trump term. And if there had been maybe like one in 50 people who had voted for Trump who decided, No, I don’t want this again, he loses, right? It was that close.

Sargent: That’s in your piece. People should read that. It documents that very well. I think we have another sign that the immigration stuff is not really playing in Trump’s favor—a fresh weakness.

The new Marquette Law School national poll, which is a gold standard survey, had some really striking numbers on immigration. While a majority overall generally approves of his handling of border security, we have an even split 50–50 on immigration generally. But here’s where it gets interesting: In Marquette polling, majorities oppose deporting longtime residents without criminal records, and only 38 percent of independents approve of his handling of immigration while 62 percent disapprove. Those are striking numbers.

Here’s another example of what you’re talking about, which is Trump went out and he said he was going to do this. He said he was going to deport everybody. And again, he promised giant camps. He promised something like fascism in response to a supposed crisis, in response to an enemy within. And I don’t think the public thought they were going to get what they’re getting, did they?

Podhorzer: No, absolutely not. And as I [noted] in the piece, and actually more importantly in a couple of pieces I wrote before the election, polling on those specific questions even then was against the things you’re talking about. It’s not as if suddenly when it happened, people changed their mind about whether or not people who’d lived here without a criminal record should be able to stay; that has always been true. But because of the way the media designs its Marquette polls before the election, in this bizarre way, there’s a sense that if you actually say in the question what he’s going to do in an accurate way, you’re being partisan. And so that means the only questions you get is, Who’s better on immigration? Anyone who wanted to could see before the election that a majority of Americans feel exactly the way you just rattled off. That hasn’t changed. And it was the insistence of the Marquette national media polls, and the people who covered them, to not want to seem like partisans by going any deeper. They just stuck with this very simplistic, Who’s better on the economy? and not, Do you support tariffs that’ll mean that your kid only gets three Barbies or something? or that you’re going to be deported—or even more to the point, that you won’t have due process—even though those were all things he said.

Sargent: And we’re seeing in this poll that there’s a real fresh weakness here on immigration in the sense that now that he’s actually doing these things, the public is actually seeing them upfront. As you say, during the campaign, the polling hinted that if he did these things, they would be unpopular. But now that’s really happening and he’s showing striking weakness on what’s supposed to be his strongest issue.

Podhorzer: Absolutely. But again, if it didn’t take it to happening to have people change their mind or rethink it. In one of The New York Times polls in either September or October where they asked people, “Do you support mass deportation?” plurality or majority did. They also asked, but didn’t really give equal weight in the reporting, to a question about whether or not there should be a path to citizenship for people who’ve been here and not violated the law and paid their taxes, and an even bigger majority were for that, right? But we didn’t hear about that then, because it would get in the way of the story of America moving right.

Sargent: Let’s talk about that. Your piece basically makes the point that even if the anti-MAGA majority didn’t quite show up in the 2024 election.... And we should all admit that we got that one wrong, I thought the anti-MAGA majority was going to show up; other people did as well. That turned out not to happen. But you argue that nonetheless, it’s still there, and now we’re actually seeing it. And it would be in response to the stuff we’re talking about here. It’s in response to the overt corruption. It’s in response to the overt white nationalism. It’s in response to the corrupt threatening of media organizations, which we see in these rants at reporters, etc. Can you talk about that?

Podhorzer: Yeah, absolutely. Again, it’s really such a tragic abdication of institutions that are provided from the Constitution—through freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly—that civil society that rests on that did not use those constitutional rights ahead of the election to inform the public. When you think about what is happening now to this country, what’s being broken in ways that are not going to be fixed, right? And you think about how much money gets spent for this or that little niche issue, or how much time member of Congress does this or that. In fact, 2024 was about whether or not we’re just going to shred the Constitution, right? Almost no one was behaving as if that was actually going to be our future. And you were, and a number of other people.... It is cringey sometimes to be in a crowd when you yelled fire and everyone just looked the other way. But that’s what everyone needed to do.

Sargent: And it didn’t happen. Just to wrap this up, I think what we’ve got here is Donald Trump either doesn’t think that he needs a majority of the public on his side as he governs, or is delusional about how large his support is on these issues, whichever it is. It’s one or the other, I think. How does that end up impacting the midterm elections, do you think? How does that fact—what I just said—plus the fact of a reemerging anti-MAGA majority play out in the midterms? And how can we be sure that you’re right, that that majority is actually there?

Podhorzer: There are no polls that say otherwise. And I’m not a fan of the polling precision, but it just makes sense, right? In terms of the midterms, there are a couple components to the answer. The first is: What kind of midterms are they going to be? As you know, through executive orders, Republicans in Congress are trying to intervene and change the rules for our elections—by making it more difficult for certain people to vote, by really withdrawing from trying to protect elections from getting hacked. All sorts of ways. We will again, in November, cast ballots, but whether it’s going to be on the terms we ever have is still an open question.

Second thing is, notwithstanding what Musk just said, Trump has already raised several hundred million dollars, and Musk has a bottomless wallet. And so we don’t know what kind of spending, right? 2024 was unprecedented billionaire spending. So that’s a factor that you don’t know how to weigh in. If it were an election like the 2010 midterm, certainly the before times, they would be routed. If you look at any historical analogy—the presidential favorability, the favorable, all of those things—it would certainly lose the House and really risk the Senate. But that’s a longer shot now just because of all the different ways they’ve made it harder to unseat Republicans in red states. I think that it is really important for us to understand not just our responsibility in this moment of crisis for the things we value most in being American, but also to begin to hold our leaders accountable for standing up and making sure that that is protected—because it’s never been more important. And what I wrote and what I’ve written really brings across just how much our leaders have failed us over the last several years.

Sargent: And you’ve been really terrific at bringing that out. Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Michael Podhorzer’s Substack Weekend Reading. Michael, thanks so much for coming on. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

Podhorzer: Likewise.