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 diehards 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—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 that 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 Karoline Leavitt. She read from a pre-written statement. Listen to this.

Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): The president has now ended conflicts between Thailand and Cambodia, Israel and Iran, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India and Pakistan, Serbia and Kosovo, and Egypt and Ethiopia. This means President Trump has brokered, on average, about one peace deal or ceasefire per month during his six months in office. It’s well past time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sargent: So there are a lot of problems with this rant. Many of these conflicts aren’t at all over. But the really glaring thing is the single biggest promise of peace Trump made is an utter buffoonish failure. He said he’d end the Russia-Ukraine war in one day. In reality, he’s been badly humiliated by Putin and clearly doesn’t know what the hell to do. I think that’s another reason he’s in trouble in the polls because that whole thing really just tore the clothing off the emperor rather brutally. Alex, you want to a crack at her strange monologue there?

Shephard: Yeah. I think we’ll finish where you started, which is with the outstanding conflicts—or the ones that weren’t mentioned. I think in general what you’re seeing are, yes, a bunch of conflicts that have erupted over the last six months, but the Trump administration’s role in them has either been minimal or, in some cases, very self-serving. So you’ve got this border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, which just ended thanks in part to a call from the president who was threatening to withhold new trade deals if they didn’t get their act together. But the irony of reclaiming this today is that Thailand and Cambodia just reaffirmed their peace deal in China yesterday. it’s not like the U.S. solely did any of this. With Rwanda and Congo, that deal has been criticized in part because it was driven largely by Trump’s interest in Congolese minerals. So the peace deal that was reached there mostly just guarantees that the U.S. can continue to take whatever it wants from Congo.

Saying that the Israeli-Iran conflict is resolved is remarkable to me because (1) the president risked entering the country into a world war by sending U.S. bombers into Iran and (2) this is Israel and Iran that we’re talking about. This is hardly a settled issue, and it’s one that I think threatens to blow up again in a few months. I think people have already forgotten the fact that the U.S. intelligence assessment of the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities is that [it] set the program back by months. So it’s very, very easy to assume that this will pop up again in a couple of months. Serbia and Kosovo, that’s obviously a long standing problem—but again, the U.S. has made that conflict more difficult. It’s long supported Kosovar independence efforts. Richard Grenell, who’s a special envoy there, made that much more difficult. Trump claiming to have settled the India-Pakistan dispute—also crazy because again, it’s India and Pakistan we’re talking about. And also, this is a claim that India’s own defense minister has rejected.

I think a lot of these places Trump has injected himself into existing geopolitical conflicts and either claimed credit for short-term ceasefires or, in many cases, made them worse. And then when it stopped, he claimed credit for it. And again, to go back to the very beginning, I think all of this is small potatoes. These are things that have bubbled over since the start of his presidency, but there are two main conflicts that he promised to resolve: Russia-Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war. And in both cases, the situations are vastly worse on both humanitarian grounds and in terms of resolving the conflicts. It’s a disaster.

Sargent: It absolutely is. I want to home in on Leavitt’s weird talk about the Nobel Peace Prize because I think it gets at some of what we’re talking about here. When she does that kind of thing, it’s so visibly directed at the audience of one. That’s what gets me about it. It’s so obviously done solely to make Trump feel good—because there’s not another human being on this earth that’s going to take that ridiculousness seriously except for maybe the most hardcore of Trump supporters. And yet at the same time, that display just reminds everyone that the emperor has no clothes, as I said earlier, right? Because it’s so obsequious and it’s so disconnected from reality. What do they think they’re doing when they do that kind of thing?

Shephard: One of the things that jumped out to me about this is this realization that the way that this administration communicates with the public is that Trump—over the course of the campaign usually, but sometimes over the course of his presidency—just says a lot of stuff. And those markers will be, in this case, I’m going to stop the Russia-Ukraine war on day one, [and] the implication there being, I’m going to be a Nobel Peace Prize–worthy president. And even though he doesn’t ever, ever fulfill any of these promises, the job of Karoline Leavitt is to go and say that he did anyway and to just make up material to support all of that. And again, the overall goal here is to sate the ego of this person who’s obsessed with the fact that Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States, won the Nobel Peace Prize—also for ridiculous reasons. But I think that all that he wants is to have this thing that his Black predecessor got and he doesn’t have.

Sargent: Well, remember when Joy Behar on “The View” went out there and just tore him to pieces, that was the essence of it. It was his jealousy of Obama that was at issue. And of course, the White House really went right out there and essentially said, OK, we’re now going to use state power to punish “The View” for daring to say that about dear leader. This is another example of them just making it all so much worse by making it clear to the whole world that everything is about ministering to his pathologies. That’s just always what everything revolves around at all times.

Shephard: Well, the other issue here, too, is that.… I am a critic of a lot of American state power, but the idea that Trump can go around and just insert himself into various conflicts with the goal of creating something that he can present to the Nobel Prize committee.… I think a lot of the list of conflicts there are things that the U.S. would have a normal role, as a imperial power, essentially, to try to cool down. But Trump himself is injecting himself into these things. You talk to people that are involved in the Kosovar peace process, [and] they’re saying, He’s making our life a lot harder. He’s not doing it because he wants the world to be safer. He’s doing it because he wants to go to Sweden. It’s crazy.

Sargent: It sure is. I want to return to those Gallup identification numbers, because they really raise some important issues. Again, it showed that Democrats have regained their advantage in party identification. Forty-six percent now identify as Democrats, while 43 percent identify as Republicans. That’s flipped from the end of last year when Republicans led 47 to 43 percent at the start of Trump’s term. Trump’s term has flipped these numbers. It’s funny. I remember that when Republicans had that lead, there was this tremendous amount of attention paid to it. It was another nail in the Democratic Party’s coffin. Now you’re not hearing much talk about this.

I got to say, I just don’t think that the press is comfortable telling the full truth about Trump’s unpopularity. There’s this weirdly baked-in default position of treating Trump as somehow Teflon. I think a Democratic pollster was quoted saying that Trump is Teflon the other day. I mean, what the fuck was that guy thinking? And it reminds me a lot of the way George W. Bush was treated in 2005 and 2006. People who have been following this stuff for a a really woefully long time, like you and I have, may remember that at that time, George W. Bush was described constantly as a popular war president. And it didn’t matter what the numbers actually showed, right? They just kept dipping and dipping, and this was just a media thing that could not be shaken. I feel like we’re in a bit of a similar position right now, do you?

Shephard: Yeah. It feels to me like an overcorrection from the first term to some extent. Trump has always been treated in this way, but there’s a condescending quality to me—that essentially they treat his support as, I should say, ineffable, almost as something that can’t be computed, right? That there’s just this connection—innate connection—that he has with his voters, and that it’s mysterious and magical. It’s the way that Trump talks about it. And this is why I think it’s ridiculous when you would always have the “diner pieces” or whatever—and it’s always some guy with shiny shoes and fancy shirt and he goes and talks to the real people. And Trump’s connection to these people is not absolute, right? It’s still a relatively small percentage of voters; again, most of them white. And I think the other aspect of this—people don’t talk about as much as well either—is how racialized it is, right? The press does not treat a Democratic coalition, which is much more diverse and much more working class for that matter, with the same degree of deference. It’s because, and I think that this goes back to your point with George W. Bush as well, of the perception that it’s white working-class voters specifically that is treated this way.

Sargent: Yeah, and I just want to return to those Gallup numbers for a second showing that Democrats have regained their advantage in party ID. What that really shows is that the fundamentals of how our politics works are kicking in. And that’s something that I think a lot of people can’t get their heads around. This idea that Trump just doesn’t defy all the rules of politics. The party that’s out of power is gaining ground now—just the way it’s happened in just about every midterm, except when there’s something really unique and out of the ordinary. This is really something that I think a lot of Democrats in particular have trouble accepting: that the rules apply to Trump.

Shephard: Yeah. The story of Trump is always that—he does it successfully, and it’s the one thing that he does very well, right?—he campaigns as a guy who says, You see all these other people, I’m different from them. I’m more like you. I understand what your issues are. I’m not in it for myself, or, to the extent that I’m in it for myself, it’s good, right? It’s a different type of corruption. And I think that a lot of people who are understandably fed up with both parties in America look at Trump as something else, right? And I think that, again, Democratic attacks that other Trump is an authoritarian, fascistic force—although they’re accurate, occasionally [they] have the effect of reinforcing that. But in office, the story has always been that he governs, for the most part, with bog standard Republican approach that people hate. He also does a lot of authoritarian and fascist stuff too. But the idea in the press in particular, and you hear it from other Democrats as well, is that somehow he has the magic campaign touch all the time. It’s just not true. And voters reject it.

And again, what you’re seeing here, to point back to the numbers I talked about at the top, is that the voters who were taken in by that argument that he’s different, that he’s going to govern in a different way, have all gone away. It’s why I think the Epstein story is actually significant. It’s a story that shows that Trump is actually like everybody else. He’s in it to protect himself, to protect his own buddies. He’s in it for craven and corrupt personal reasons, because he’s depraved.

Sargent: A hundred percent. And the mention of the authoritarianism and fascism is important, too, because there’s this weird irony around that. It works like this: The authoritarianism and fascism is actually, believe it or not, making him unpopular. People don’t like that stuff. And yet at the same time, those things make it harder for a lot of people to accept that Trump’s unpopular. When the polls come out, when you tweet out a poll showing him tanking, a thousand people just tweet at you, LOL, dictators don’t care about being unpopular. People simply assume it doesn’t matter if he’s unpopular. There’s this tendency to default to this idea that Trump is invincible, right? Either elections will be just canceled or they’ll just be rigged beyond hope. Either way, the central thought is that he has in some sense fundamentally won permanently, right? But there are going to be midterms. I don’t think he’s going to be able to rig them, at least to the degree that he’d like. And people need to start realizing that he wants you to think that he’s invincible so you give up on politics. What do you think, Alex? Am I being too optimistic here?

Shephard: No, no. I’m generally our resident cynic, but I feel fairly, fairly similarly right now. Even if Texas is able to succeed with this radical and insane gerrymandering process, the Democrats are in very good shape. And they’re in it because people are fed up on basically every front of this administration. And I think this is not really true in the first term. There was a grace period for Trump’s second term where I think the general public was open to whatever it was that he was going to do. And six months in, it’s very, very clear that there’s been a wholesale rejection on more or less every front. And again, dictators care quite a bit about being popular. Eventually they will create a situation in which they close themselves off from public opinion. But this is a president that cares very, very deeply about that.

And I think the other reason why it matters is that the other big story of this term for me is that.… [During] the first Trump term, I was very mean to people like Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, Republicans who very tepidly opposed the president, but they did help block his legislative agenda in ways that were ultimately meaningful on the grand scale. That front doesn’t really exist in the current Congress—but I do think if you continue to see the downfall in public opinion, there are going to be Republicans that are going to have to look very seriously at becoming more of a blocking force. Or again, if you look at things like the Epstein files, right? That’s a very easy way for Republicans to go against the president and satisfy their base at the same time. Eighty percent of the base wants those files released.

Sargent: Yeah, you’d think that that would be a way. Just to close this out. What do you think happens to Trump’s coalition over the next year into the midterms? You went through some data showing that the coalition is falling apart and fracturing. Does it get worse and how does that happen?

Shephard: Yeah, we have data about this already. One thing that the press does underestimate are the voters that just turn out for Trump—who do exist; they’re real voters and they only vote for Trump—but they don’t vote in the midterm elections. And every time there are off-year elections, the press is always waiting with bated breath to see if the Trump coalition will show up. They never do. Trump isn’t on the ballot. And I think that the question here for Democrats is going to be.… It’s probably enough, frankly, for those voters just to stay home, but I think the question here is that there’s an opportunity for them to rebuild trust with communities that, again, I think rightly held the Democrats accountable for taking them for granted. There’s an opportunity there to change the way that they talk to minority communities, particularly to Hispanic and Latino voters, in a way that I think is very, very interesting.

It’s a generational opportunity for the party. But again, you look at the last month and you would say, What could Donald Trump do to possibly bring these voters back? And I think that he’s starting to think about this, too, which is why you start to see ridiculous ideas like cutting checks getting floated around.

Sargent: Yeah. And the tariffs and the immigration crackdown are really perfectly suited to start rebuilding that trust with those constituencies that you’re talking about, working-class constituencies for Democrats. Alex Shephard, always great to talk to you, man. Thanks for all this.

Shephard: Yeah, you too. Appreciate it.

Sargent: Folks, a quick announcement: We are taking a couple weeks off and the podcast will be down. We will be back the week of August 18. Can’t wait to see you there. Take care.