Transcript: Trump Press Sec Fawning Takes Bizarre Turn as Polls Worsen

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.