The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 4 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.
On Monday afternoon, while President Trump was talking about his new tariffs, Fox News showed him speaking even as a graphic in the corner of the screen showed the market sliding. That perfectly captures something essential: No matter how much boasting Trump does about the economy, no matter how much propaganda Fox spews about it, the actual metrics are getting worse for him—and the public knows it. Trump’s new tariffs on Canada and Mexico are set to start Tuesday, and Trump just announced a new round of tariffs on agricultural products, which could hurt farmers. On top of all that, new polls from Marist and CNN show his approval underwater, including on his priorities and on the economy. Today, we’re talking about all this with Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg. We’re going to get into whether Democrats are really capitalizing on this moment to the degree that they should. Simon, good to see you again.
Simon Rosenberg: Greg, it’s great to see you. It’s always good to be with the hardest-working man in show business.
Sargent: This is true. By the time listeners hear this, we’ll know more, but on Monday, Trump said the tariffs are going forward—25 percent across the board on imports from Mexico and Canada. Trump also tweeted that starting April 2, tariffs will go into effect on agricultural imports. Trump said this, Addressed to the great farmers of the United States. Have fun. Simon, I’m going to predict this right now: Saying have fun to farmers, which he intends as a positive rallying cry, will go down as a big blunder. It’ll be thrown back in his face. What do you think, Simon?
Rosenberg: Look, we are operating so outside of traditional political physics, outside of how democracies operate. The idea that this guy just gets up every day and proclaims all of his executive orders—today we have tariffs; tomorrow we’ll have something else.… It’s just the madness of it is what is getting at me today. This feels like the work of a madman who has no strategy, who has just become a wrecking ball in American society.
To your point, what’s critical for your listeners to realize is that voters are turning against him. It’s happening very quickly. We’ve seen significant drops in his approval rating already. We’ve seen significant drops in consumer confidence since he became president. And using the University of Michigan survey as an example, he was never below 100 in their measure during all of his time pre-pandemic as president; he’s in the mid-60s now. So he’s lost. In that one measure, he’s one-third lower than he was during the course of his presidency. And if part of what made him president was this idea that when he was in power things were better, that’s all been lost now already by him. It’s evaporated.
I think that he’s looking a lot weaker and more unstable. [That] is the conventional wisdom right now, and Democrats should view this time as he’s weak, unstable, fumbling, making enormous mistakes, and we have to be aggressive as hell to communicate all this to the American people.
Sargent: Well, the Fox News graphic captured this in pretty brutal terms. Trump was talking about his tariffs, and in the lower right-hand corner you could see a graphic showing the markets tanking. This tanking is due to inflationary fears. Tariffs are a tax that will be paid by American consumers, and it’s becoming more and more obvious that we’re going to be embroiled in trade wars. I want to bring this up, Simon: The last time Trump did this, farmers got hurt pretty badly by retaliatory tariffs; in 2018 and 2019, agricultural exports suffered huge losses. Simon, what’s your take on that dimension of it? Are Democrats setting themselves up to capitalize on it?
Rosenberg: The outside PAC of the House Democrats announced today that they’ve dropped ads in 23 districts attacking Republicans—at least on the Medicaid piece of the economic conversation about the vote on the budget bill last week where they voted to cut health care to over 80 million Americans to give tax breaks to Elon Musk and to Donald Trump. So you’re seeing the Democrats very focused on the economic conversation that’s happening right now. And it’s working. These ads that DCCC is launching, or the outside super PAC is launching, [are] a very good sign of how focused the Democrats are about causing pain for Trump on his wild, inflationary economic program.
And let’s be very clear. The economy is slowing. Inflation is up. The markets are spooked and are underperforming right now—and the voters understand. What I’ve read in the polling data and the consumer confidence data is that there’s now already a powerful awareness that Trump equals higher prices, more struggle for working people. Now we’re going to also have this play out in the agricultural sector, which is largely in Republican districts, putting additional pressure on the Republicans who are starting to get weak-kneed about these early days of the Trump presidency.
Sargent: I want to get back to this notion of Democrats focusing on the economy in a second. I think they’re putting all their eggs in that basket, and they shouldn’t be. They should be doing a lot more. I want to come back to that. But first, let’s talk about this Marist poll. Trump’s approval is only 45 percent; it’s the lowest in the era of polling of any president at the outset. Only 34 percent of independents approve of this performance. Abysmal. Fifty-five percent overall say the cuts to government are doing more harm than good, and 60 percent say federal employees are essential. The Elon Musk gambit is just blowing up in his face.
Trump is underwater on the economy. In the Marist poll, a plurality say Trump’s changes are making it worse. And 57 percent expect prices to keep rising. Americans don’t see him getting prices under control—that’s what I take from this. I’m not where you are or as rosy as you are; I think this is still incredibly touch and go. He’s still weirdly given all this credit for the supposedly great economy of his first term, which he destroyed—but never mind that. Still, it looks to me like the numbers are going against.
Rosenberg: Yeah. And what’s important about what you just said, and you can see this in many other polls too, is that independents have soured on him very, very quickly. Part of what’s keeping his numbers up is that his numbers with Republicans are extremely high, up in the 90s. But he’s struggling with independents very quickly. And what we learned during the Biden presidency is that independent voters were very attuned toward inflation and prices. It’s one of the reasons we struggled with independents in the election, even though they were with us on things like abortion and climate change and other issues.
You’re seeing some of that same dynamic play out. It is unusual for a president to erode this quickly in their presidency, to have people that just voted for them turn against them this quickly. This is why this movement, I think, is actually a little bit more dramatic than [what] people are saying. He’s now already below his vote and job approval in most of the polls—not all of them—and it’s because of what he’s done. People started coming to understand in November that his economic plan was going to be inflationary and that it was essentially a betrayal of the core argument that he made during the election.
I think he’s playing with fire here politically, under traditional political physics. In a time when the economy is slowing and we’ve had these bad GDP numbers, they’re now going to hoist tariffs? It could increase the cost of cars in the United States by over $10,000. It’s the opposite of everything he said he was going to do. And I think the other thing that’s going to start becoming material to all this is the chaos.
Whatever you think about the Trump agenda, about reforming government and putting tariffs in place or whatever it is, doing all these things so rapidly without any debate, without any transition—to tell farmers, Hey, good luck, brothers and sisters, we’re about to screw you over unbelievably, have at it, and to do it with a month’s warning as opposed to something that’s phased in over a year or two years or three years—is just cruel and disrespectful to people. It is contemptuous of the American people themselves to put them through this level of unnecessary chaos. And I think this is going to start to become another part of his brand: this mad-king cruelty.
Sargent: I want to press you on this a little bit, Simon, because I’m not as optimistic as you are on one front. I agree that there’s the potential there for the chaos to become a really big factor, but I still worry that Democrats on some level are failing to stand for reform. They’re still letting Trump grab the reform-disruption mantle. Now, the disruptions that Trump is unleashing are horrific and destructive, but he’s still, I worry, associated in the public mind with reform and not chaos. And Democrats are not grabbing the reform mantle themselves. There’s a failure here, isn’t there, by the party?
Rosenberg: Well, let me phrase it more as an opportunity. I think that part of what we’re doing is going well—this whole economic engagement and their focus on that—but we need to open up a second front. There needs to be a clear commitment by the Democratic Party to put as much energy into the front that talks about Trump’s attack on what I call “the America of the Four Freedoms,” on his rapid disassembly of the U.S. government itself and the implications that’s going to have, and the mass unemployment that we may see, which is going to contribute to the economic woes of the economy right now. Donald Trump inherited one of the strongest economies in American history, and it’s amazing how rapidly that’s all eroding now.
Sargent: On the other hand, though, Simon, I should point out: Public disapproval of the economy is pretty strong. People like you and I were really a little bit off during the election, to put it mildly, when we thought that the strong economy would be enough. Clearly, it’s not just that.
Rosenberg: I don’t disagree with that. It’s no secret that the Biden team had a very hard time figuring out how to capitalize on that from a political and communication standpoint, but that’s water under the bridge now. Here we are, and I think it’s critical now given that Trump and Musk are breaking things that are going to be hard to repair. You wrote an amazing piece about this with USAID over the weekend, about how there’s going to come a point here where these are things that can’t get fixed, that millions of people are going to die. The public health of the people of the world is going to be really shattered by what we’re doing with USAID. So now, in addition to focusing on the economic piece, we have to open up the second front on helping communicate to the American people about the attack and disassembly of the American government itself, and the attack of what I call the America of Four Freedoms, which in my formulation is this rules-based order abroad and our constitutional order here at home.
I don’t think we have started to communicate to the American people about how illegal and unconstitutional many of the things are that Trump is doing, and many of the things are the people who work for Musk and the DOGE team are doing. I don’t think that the American people in this democracy that’s been around for almost 250 years are going to be supportive of things that are so obviously a violation of our constitutional order and the way that things have worked here in America. So I do think we have an opportunity, Greg, to do what you’re saying. I think we have an opportunity to engage the American people about what they’re really doing—and to provide an alternative. Senator Elissa Slotkin is going to be laying out not just the indictment of Trump Tuesday night but also the path forward for the Democrats and where we need to go.
I’m with you on the reform issue. I wrote an essay for The New Republic a year ago calling on the Democrats to make the reforming of Washington one of our central priorities during the election, so you and I are in sync on this. But I do want to say that we can do two things at the same time: We can continue to push the economic agenda and open up the second front. I think it’s required because there has to be an urgency around how Trump is breaking things that are going to be very hard to repair. We need to be doing far more to prevent that from happening than we are right now, in my view.
Sargent: To give you credit, you have been making this case fairly regularly that indicting Trump on the economy is not enough, that Democrats need to do more. You’ve also connected it to other things. You’ve said that Democrats have to indict Trump for running an attack on our country from within—Elon Musk dismantling the U.S. state; Trump putting a misfit like RFK in charge of public health, which will debilitate one of America’s greatest assets; and all the ways these things are directly connected to the ongoing sellout of Ukraine and realignment of the U.S. with the interests of Vladimir Putin and the rising forces of global authoritarianism or fascism. Why, Simon, are Democrats reluctant to do this? Just lay it out for us, man. You know this party well. What the hell?
Rosenberg: I’m not sure I totally understand, to be honest. I think that there, you could make the case that we’ve tried to stay on firm ground—but the time for that has passed. After what happened in the Oval Office on Friday, any attempt to downplay the significance of Trump’s selling out to Putin and to the possibility that he and Musk are doing Putin’s bidding not just in Ukraine but in the way [that’s] dismantling the U.S. government and that this could be an attack on the U.S. itself through a different form.... Whatever words we’re going to use to describe this, we have to be aware that this is not something we can wait to the midterms to resolve. We’re going to win the midterms by beating them now and defining Trump as being a reckless, irresponsible, mad king now who’s doing incredible harm to the American project.
That’s why this engagement you’re seeing, we need to ratchet it up. We need to get much more aggressive. We need to be much more ambitious. And I’ve laid out a series of things in my Substack about ways that Congress can be doing much more than they are doing now every day. I think there’s a real appetite for it now. Particularly after Friday where there was no longer any story you could tell about what Trump’s intentions were any longer, you’re going to see Democrats being much more aggressive now.
Sargent: I sure hope so. I want to highlight a key number from a new CNN poll as well. His approval is also underwater in this poll, but critically, it finds that a majority, 52 percent, say that Trump hasn’t paid enough attention to the nation’s most important problems. Again, for voters, that’s going to be the economy and prices, but I think there’s a way to weave that into the case you’re making. The insanity with annexing Greenland and stealing the Panama Canal, that sort of stuff—those aren’t our most important problems. So if Democrats feel like everything has to be reducible to the kitchen table or whatever, they can at least say it that way, right? “Why is Trump running this authoritarian experiment when there are problems to solve?” but talk about the authoritarian experiment.
Rosenberg: Listen, when I think about what you just said, I come back to something that I really felt during the Democratic convention last year. We were seeing, in some ways, the most powerful Democratic Party that I had personally engaged with since I had started in this business a long time ago. And the reason why is I felt our convention was not about progressivism or moderation; it was about love of country, and there was this powerful patriotism that pulsed through the convention that was really compelling to me. For us to really defeat Trump, we’re going to have to tap into love of country and patriotism, to hug the flag and all the things, [to show] that we are the true America. He’s the betrayer. He’s the appeaser of foreign authoritarian.
We have to add this to the narrative because it makes it really powerful. It also, I think, brings in a lot of Reaganite Republicans, people who were proud of their parties defeating the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War. Donald Trump is trying to relitigate the Cold War here to some degree, right? And I think that we can continue to bring people along into our coalition on both fronts. Not only the economic front where I think there’s going to be a lot of disappointment in Trump’s leadership—there already is—but also in his betrayal of the country and his appeasing of foreign dictators. What could be less American than that?
And for all the veterans who’ve served in our country and fought for freedom around the world, who’ve now been casted out by the Trump administration—he’s creating enormous opportunities now for us to go do what you and I hoped or thought we were going to be able to do in the election, which is to reach out and bring people along.
I want to be very clear about what I’m saying here. I don’t want to sugarcoat any of this: The country’s in grave danger, and we need to raise our game here as pro-democracy Democrats and fight at a much higher level if we’re going to stop the carnage that is happening all across the country.
We’ve got a lot of work to do here, and Democrats have to find and tap into the patriotism and love of country that’s there for all of us. We’ve got to get big, and we’ve got to make big arguments about what he’s doing to the greatest democracy in the history of the world. We saw today in the CBS poll that 4 percent of Americans support Putin, think that Putin is on the right side of the war. Three percent of Americans don’t view the Europeans as our allies. What Trump’s doing with Russia and Ukraine and alienating Europe has the support of about 4 to 5 percent of the country right now. This is dangerous political terrain for him.
Sargent: I don’t know, Simon. I’ve got to interrupt you there and say that the problem is that he is casting it as whether we are going to spend treasure abroad or not. I want to try to get you to close this circle a little bit. It’s true that the convention displayed a really singularly strong Democratic Party in some senses; but of course, on the economy, it wasn’t close to enough. Biden’s numbers were a disaster. They lost the election. It was a narrow loss, but it was still a loss. And this was a very winnable race. I guess what I want to try to close on though is: How do you reconcile these things?
Maybe the way to think about it is like this: They did strike a strongly patriotic message that really could have resonated more if it weren’t for the fact that Trump was perceived as a magician on the economy, and if it weren’t for the fact that there was great nostalgia for the Trump economy of the first term. So maybe where we’re getting to here is if Democrats get their economic arguments and policies right, and if Trump economic rule is shown to be a catastrophe, then some of the other arguments have a chance of also breaking through. Is that the way to think about it?
Rosenberg: I’m not sure I’m there with you. I don’t know that it’s this-and-then. I think we can do both, and we have to do both because there is a lack of urgency in my view about the things that Trump is breaking now and how they will be difficult, if not impossible, to repair. Your USAID story did a great job explaining what’s going to happen to the reputation of the U.S. If we just literally pull out of a hundred countries simultaneously and cause millions of people in these countries to die, that will affect our standing in these countries potentially for generations. These are things that we have to do more.
We can do both. We can make our case in the economy, which I think we’re doing effectively. The polling is very clear on that; the path forward is very clear on that. But we have to develop the second front, and I think we can do both. And if we do, we can start really driving down Trump’s numbers in a way that could materially take these early cracks that are opening in his congressional support.
You’re seeing Republicans start to talk openly about their concerns about Russia, about cutting Medicaid, about Elon Musk’s attack on the government; you’re seeing more vocal opposition to that. We’ve got to turn that into votes for us that start blocking the Trump agenda and really challenging him. That will come if we work really hard. And if we do, Greg, what you say, but I think we’ve got to do both. In some ways, where you’ve seen the greatest break from Trump has been on Russia, and that’s why it’s also to create those cracks and turn them into big cracks. Right now, the biggest crack in their family is on what’s happening with Ukraine and Russia, so I think we have to do both.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you, Simon, you and I were both way too optimistic last time around. I think we could both admit to that. Hopefully, this time, maybe there’s more grounds for believing that he can be beaten. Simon Rosenberg, thanks so much for coming on, man.
Rosenberg: Keep the faith, Greg. Thanks for your amazing work.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.