The Daily Blast: Fiasco for Trump as Leaked GOP Memo Warns of Epic Midterm Bloodbath

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For all of you, in Waksthung. Now, let's test the choppy fight.de. This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

Public polls are starting to show that Democrats are now more trusted on the economy than Republicans are, a milestone with major implications for the elections. Strikingly, a new memo from Republican operatives just conceded this as well, while sounding a loud warning that the GOP is in danger of losing the Senate.

All this is also underscored by fresh economic data. It suggests that the struggles of ordinary Americans could be getting worse. New Republic staff writer Monica Pots has been doing some really good reporting on what ordinary voters are thinking and feeling about the economy. So we're talking to her about all this today.

Monica, nice to have you on. Thanks for having me. So let's start with the new data.

GDP grew at 2% during the first quarter of this year, which is better than last year,

but still came in under expectations. And inflation just had its biggest spike in nearly three years by one metric, driven in part by gas prices in the war. Monica, it just seems like we're economically strong. Is that the right way to think about it?

I think so. You know, the economy was on a path to recovery at the end of the Biden administration.

“I think people conveniently forget that the post COVID era was a really unusual time.”

And we hadn't seen anything like it in our lifetimes and a lot of the ways that people consumed, changed. They changed. They're in comes changed. The way that we thought about what we needed and what we want to just spend our money on changed throughout that period.

And of course, inflation rose really rapidly. And so things were heading back to normal and actually report earlier this month from economists at the Federal Reserve found that inflation might have been back to normal. Had we not had the new tariffs from the Trump administration. And some of the other shocks to the economy under his tenure.

Yeah, well, this economy is largely the creation of one person Donald Trump. And I want to get into that in a bit. Politico reports on this new Republican memo that shows striking findings. It's from Americans for prosperity, the Koch back to group. And that's its own story, which we'll get to.

But for now, I want to read this line from it. Quote, our internal polling in several battleground states and one on one conversations with

voters show that for the first time Democrats are more trusted on the economy and inflation.

Quote, Monica, that's striking. Other polls have shown this as well. Trump's 2024 victory was all about the economy and inflation. And Democrats were in just terrible shape on both due to what you talked about the post-COVID inflation shock.

How do you account for this turnaround?

“Well, I think that Trump was writing along term advantage that Republicans have.”

That Republicans had on the economy for at least since Reagan people have American voters have tended to think that Republicans are better for the economy largely because of their rhetoric on small businesses on cutting taxes and people tend to think that that's good. So I think that he came into office with a huge advantage on the economy that he really blew. And that in the first few things that he did as president were to kind of squander that trust that people had.

People saw right away that the things he was doing wasn't what, you know, the things he was doing weren't what they wanted for him. And so I think that that has given an opening for people to think about the democratic rhetoric on the economy more and to maybe start trusting the democratic party more on what they say the economy needs.

which is largely unearned, but goes back many decades. Trump also had this big unearned advantage on the economy. And I was doing some reporting up in Reading, Pennsylvania about what happened with the Latino vote there in 2024. Moot towards Trump. And what I was struck by was how deeply this cultural picture of Trump as this crack business man who builds big things and makes things happen and is an entrepreneurial spirit.

“How deeply that had taken hold with a lot of low information voters that that's just something that I think Democrats were really unable to do anything about.”

And yet that's been pissed away too. Yeah, that's right. And I think people forget that the vast majority of voters aren't reading the really long investigative pieces that show that Trump actually wasn't a very good business man. I mean, you can find all of the evidence that you want to show that Trump inherited most of his wealth. He squandered it his early successes as a builder as a real estate person really based on his father's work.

And he was never really the businessman he portrayed on TV.

But people still had this idea, this really long held idea of him as a businessman. That was his, you know, public persona that was really ingrained. And I think that it was always going to take a lot of work to try to chip away at that. I'm not even sure the Democratic Party even really tried. And I don't know if it would have worked if they had.

So, you know, people just a lot of people had an idea that he was a businessman. They have an idea that the country needs a businessman or at least someone who thinks like a businessman to run it, which is really not how the country runs, but that's a whole other story.

And so, you know, it's kind of amazing that he really has squandered that in just a little earlier.

But he has people don't believe that about him anymore. They think he's making the wrong decisions. Yeah, and also the other cultural picture of him is as the guy who fires people who just makes things happen really quickly. And so, well, here's another line I want to read from the memo. As it stands today, our view is that the Republican Senate majority is at risk, close quote.

Monica, I think the Senate map is still awfully hard. Democrats have to net four seats and some really tough states for them. But if there's anything that can get Democrats there, it's this kind of widespread economic distress. Can you talk about that? Yeah, absolutely.

“I mean, we talked about it a minute ago, but the truth is that there was a pretty substantial number of voters.”

Who thought, at the end of the Biden administration, the economy is not where I want it to be. Trump's a business man and he can get us back. And so, that was his huge advantage with a lot of voters in the middle. A lot of independence, a lot of swing voters to the extent that they exist. And a lot of people who were upset about Biden's economy and so, who just didn't turn out to vote for.

And so, you know, I think that the fact that Republicans are in this position is completely attributable to Trump squandering that trust with voters.

And I think it's really kind of amazing because Democrats always probably have an advantage in the house.

The party that isn't in the White House has an advantage in the House in the midterms. It's kind of one of the things you can take to the bank for the most part. The Senate map is really difficult, but if the candidates are right, if the wins are right, if we are still stuck in Iran, if we're still stuck in a lot of conflicts. Globally, if tariffs are still bad, if the price of oil stays high, if people, if inflation is up, if people don't have faith that the economy is going to get better. You really start to see where Democrats have an opening, I think.

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For all the in-vacstrums. Now, post-test on Shopify.de So, let's just talk a little more about that point you're making, which is that Trump created this economy. And Trump is the reason that Republicans are in such bad shape on it.

It really is an odd situation, because for the most part, presidents don't have that much control over economies. And yet, Donald Trump managed to figure out a way to really damage it in just about every conceivable way, right?

“You mentioned the tariffs, which really had an inflationary effect”

for a lot of people. And then there's immigration, which I don't think people usually connect to the economy, but that also had a negative economic effect. It had a negative effect on jobs by just reducing the number of immigrants in the country and so forth.

And then, of course, there's the war as well, which, you know, has really spiked prices. And we're really stuck. He doesn't seem to be at all aware of the fact that he doesn't really have a lot of leverage in this situation.

He's just tweeting that he's got all the leverage. And he's happy to wait for, I don't know, as long as it takes until Iran

finally realizes that he's the boss and concedes.

But I would, if I'm a Republican office holder, like a vulnerable incumbent Republican in the house, I'm like, dude, you got to stop this war already. We're just going to get wiped out.

“It's just, can you talk a little bit about how Trump did this?”

Yeah, it is one of the ironies of our time that people blamed Biden for the economy that wasn't, it was largely out of his control. A normal president who is doing what the job of a president is is trying to create the conditions for a good American economy for people to share in economic growth.

And it's kind of hoping that private industry takes us the rest of the way because where, you know, America's very much believes in its free market economy ideals. And what Trump has done is a number of things he enacted tariffs unilaterally, which have had a really big impact both on the price of goods,

global, or with the price of goods in America. And also the impact of on our trading partners globally has had it has had an effect as well because people don't really know what's going to have it next with Trump. Some writers have called it the tariffs that Trump chaos tax. And you could call it the chaos economy because, you know,

businesses, consumers, anyone who interacts with the economy wants to have some idea where we're going. They want to know if it's a good idea for them to buy a car, this month, or if they should refinance their mortgage because rates are going down and they're going to stay down. And so, you know, when you're making big decisions or even small decisions, you kind of want to

have a sense of where we are in the economy. And because Trump is so erratic, he announces policies on his social media platform, he keeps changing his mind about tariffs constantly. He just started wars in Venezuela and Iran kind of overnight without taking his justifications to the American people.

All of those things have both real and kind of perceived effects that become real because it changes the way people enter into the economy. Well, related to all this, one of the things that's interesting in this memo is it calls on Republicans to focus much more on the economy. But everyone knows at this point that Trump isn't mentally capable of

focusing on anything really except for maybe the ballroom. But he certainly doesn't have much of an interest in the economy. You can just visibly see that at these events that they try to set up where Trump's supposed to, you know, refocus everyone on the economy and just can't do it.

But even if he were able to, he couldn't do it effectively because of what we're talking about here.

And what's just so amazing to me about this is that Republicans all know

that Trump is no longer a credible voice on the economy. But they just have to pretend not to know that. You know what I mean? Like they have to say, we really want the president to talk more about the economy, even though they know it wouldn't do them any good.

Yeah, I don't know why they, I feel like they still are relying on Trump to be kind of this magic into locketer with the American people that he has some ability to kind of sway them.

party to come to terms with the ways that their other policy priorities do

clash with the economy. You mentioned before, and I didn't comment on it before, but I should should, is that a lot of the immigration policy is hurting the economy. There was just an American tax fairness report that came out today that a lot of the industries that rely on Latino labor that employ a lot of Latinos are

suffering because immigration enforcement and immigration policy is so draconian and up in the air. And so all of the things that Republicans have concentrated on that they wanted Trump to concentrate on are also hurting the economy. And so at some point they have to say, you know, we are actually doing this.

Our president is doing this, and we are doing this with our policies.

It's not just, you know, a side effect or it's not just circumstances. It's our policies.

“Right. And I think the report you just talked about on immigration is really”

important because it highlights how Trump is a Muslim ideology is getting us here as well because for Trump and for Steven Miller and for the anti-immigrant nativists around him and so forth, they think that having fewer immigrants in the country is an inherently good thing. Like it's intrinsically good even if the negative effects on the economy

persist. Right. To them, it's worth it. Like it's so important to have fewer immigrants in the country that they're willing to have lower job growth as a result.

Like they actually kind of almost say that openly. And so there you have the ideology of Trump is having a directly

negative impact on everybody's material fortunes basically.

Right.

“Yeah. And I think the fact that they say it openly that the effects of their policies”

are having such an obvious impact on people's lives. People are seeing it in their local economies, local business owners are having trouble because their employees are disappearing or, you know, people aren't buying because they're, you know, worried about what's going to happen down the road. That sort of makes it clear to voters in a way that nothing else possibly could have.

You know, and I think that that's going to be hard for Republicans too, because they were trying to do kind of like double speak for a long time before just to say, oh, you know, we need, you know, immigrants are taking your jobs, which was part of the rhetoric from the Trump campaign, at least since 2015. It's been kind of core of his identity.

I think people have to see now that that's not true. Yeah, that is certainly even disproven. So just to go big picture on talk about your reporting, there's this nugget in the memo that I want to bring out. It hails Trump's tax cut as a landmark piece of legislation,

and then like in the next sentence admits that people's economic concerns are really profound. Of course, that tax cut represented a massive upward transfer of wealth, which is exactly what Americans for prosperity, the authors of this memo wants, right? And so what that tells us is that people are struggling under the economy that the

plutocrats want.

“It seems like there's a big opening for a more populist economic program from Democrats now, right?”

You did some reporting on this. Is there a way that Democrats could talk about a new direction entirely? Yeah, I did reporting on earlier this week on a report from way to when. It's a left-leaning strategic group that does polling and kind of strategy for Democrats. And one of the things that they found was that messages that concentrated on kind of a populist economic message saying,

you know, we need to tax corporations, you know, we need to make the economy fairer for the working class. Messages like that really did sway people. And people are open to that kind of messaging because they can see now. I think they can feel and see that there's an economy right now where the wealthy are looking out for each other.

The tax cuts are helping the wealthy that some of Trump's billionaire friends are benefiting from the most from this economy. And in the meantime, people are drowning in debt just trying to pay their energy bills and trying to pay their grocery bills. So I think that there's an opening to say like that we need to tax corporations more corporations are treating working people unfairly. You know, those, there's a lot of polling. Even in swing states, even in states that kind of are more approving of Donald Trump's presidency than the nation as a whole.

Those states voters in those states voters that are getable voters that need to be persuaded to vote for Democrats. We're swayed by messages like that that say, you know, we need to kind of re-sort our economy and re-focus our economy. And it seems like there's really an opening in another way too, which is that like everything is really in flux to an unusual degree, I think, right?

the states are in a way. Like we had the COVID shock and the inflationary shock of that.

“And that was a really profound experience for a lot of people, I think.”

It was really disorienting and disparating and shook people up a lot.

It allowed Trump to swoop in and do this amazing comeback or whatever.

But then you have a right wing populist to put it in polite terms, right? And then actually doing the stuff like doing the agenda of right wing populism tariffs, you know, immigration restriction is on America first, pissing on our alliances and so forth, and that's a disaster. So like, is there sort of a different kind of opening now to take charge of people's understanding of these big questions that maybe wasn't there before?

“Yeah, I think so, I think there's a new kind of hunger from voters and especially younger voters who don't remember Reagan”

to focus on workers to think about worker power to focus on government provision of expensive services like child care.

You know, a lot of millennials now are the youngest millennials, I think, are in their 30s almost or in their already. You know, these are people who are ready to buy homes and start a family and they're kind of seeing the long term effects of the Reagan era policies that concentrated power among a lot of big businesses that diminished worker power that diminished wages over time. And I think that there's a new opportunity then to tell us a different story about the American economy, which is, you know,

when that allows for thinking about building the economy from the worker up to think about the kinds of institutions that can be countervaling forces against big corporations.

To think about refocusing political power on the working in middle classes.

“I think there's a lot of people, but especially young voters who are very hungry for that, yeah.”

Yes, and the younger voters are among the constituencies that move to Trump just like the non-white working class. And so to those voters, maybe the right wing populist stuff sounded somewhat credible, right? Like it's anti-elite, it's about workers, it's about power, it's about worker power in some way, even though we know that it's sort of a sham. And so has it been sufficiently discredited? Has Trump as a right wing populism? Have those things been discredited enough to create an opening to do something new?

I think so. I mean, at least right now a lot depends on what happens in the next year or the next two years. And a lot probably depends on what happens on how the democratic candidates and the democratic party is a whole take up the story. Because there was a lot of the things that Trump said that did sound good to people. And he's not putting his money where his mouth was, he's not fulfilling that. And so I think, and the people around Trump are traditional Republicans doing traditional Republican things.

And so tax cuts to the wealthy, you know, concentrating power, taking away rights from women, taking away rights from minorities, immigration enforcement that's draconian and not an accordance with American ideals. And I think that that just really does give an opening for the democratic party to potentially solidify those young voters as their voters for life, you know, because they're kind of getable, I think in a lot of ways now still. I think that's really well put. Folks, if you enjoyed this make sure to check out Monica Patsa's stuff at tnr.com.

It's great. It's on these topics very regularly. Monica, thanks so much for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. I hope you enjoyed this video. Thank you.