Finally: Trump get news that “Scares the sh**” of out him

I'm joined now by the former communications director for Barack Obama and co-host of Pod Safe America, Dan Pfeiffer. Dan, you wrote something that caught my attention in a pretty big way. I'm going to put it right here on the screen. If you're a Republican on the ballot, this is the number that should scare the ---- out of you. And so what you were referring to was the fact that Trump's job approval among non-college white voters in 2018 was nine points in the positive. In 2020, it was eight points in the positive. In 2025, it was 24 points in the positive. Now that number, as of July 2026, is negative eight points, eight points in the negative. So we're looking at a 32-point swing from just when Trump was elected two years ago. Talk to me about that number and why that number in particular was such an important metric for you to comment on. Sure. To give you one other stat with this, according to exit polling, Trump won that group of voters by 34 points. White non-college educated voters, white working class voters are the core of MAGA. They are his base. They have been his most loyal voters. They're the ones who have stuck with him through two impeachments, an insurrection, mounds of corruption. And it seems like they are beginning to sour on him. And that has dramatic effects on what the MAGA coalition looks like, how big it is. What would really worry me with Republicans is these are the voters you have to turn out. And if they are not going to turn out, if they are not excited about Trump, if they are pissed at Trump, they think they broke our promises, that is bad news for particularly Republicans in places like Wisconsin and Michigan, where white non-college educated voters make up a huge swath of the population. And Maine as well. Maine on that list. And so that's the point I want to dig into here, because this is Trump's approval rating. So how do you reconcile the correlation between Trump's approval rating and the other Republicans who are not named Donald Trump who are going to be on the ballot? I mean, do they get any leeway or is Trump's approval rating going to be directly correlated with how poorly his own party does? I mean, I suspect if Republicans on the ballot cannot outperform Trump's approval rating, which is 32 percent, then they're going to lose in every seat in the country, basically. Yes, they will outperform Trump. But the way to think about it is every point that Trump's approval rating goes down, particularly among this group, the white non-college educated voters who make up his base, that is more of an anvil on the shoulders of these Republicans. It makes it harder for them to win. They are swimming upstream against it. There's a world in which Trump is at 37, 38, but the bulk of it is independents, Democrats, some of these voters who will vote in presidential elections and not vote in midterms. This group right here, these are the people, these white non-college educated voters are the ones he needs to turn out, and they are unhappy with him right now. The irony of this is, you look at one of the most criticized moments of Kamala Harris's campaign. It was on The View. She was asked what she would do differently than Joe Biden. She refused to break with him on anything. She refused to even put forward one single idea that she broke on him with. And so, you know, in effect, Biden's unpopularity became her unpopularity because she refused to put any space between them. Now Republicans are falling for the exact same phenomenon where, you know, they have refused to serve as a check against him on anything except for, you know, John Cornyn and Tom Tillis, both of whom don't have a job after this term. But the rest of them have have hugged him. They haven't run away from him. And so in a way, even after having watched Kamala Harris fall for this exact phenomenon, they're doing the same. They're repeating her mistake in this election cycle where his unpopularity is weighing all of them down. It's interesting because the dynamics are both similar and different, right, where these Republicans on the ballot are dealing with an unpopular president of their own party. Kamala Harris was dealing with an unpopular president of her own party. Now, Kamala Harris outran Joe Biden's popularity by, you know, 15 points or so. He was in the maybe about maybe about 10 to 11 points, I guess is probably where Biden was at the end. And some of these Republicans will outrun Trump by at least that. The reason why they're in a bigger pickle than Harris was is that Biden was there was there was not a ton of strong enthusiasm for Biden among Democratic voters. She had a freedom to break with him that these Republicans feel like they do not have, because the there are a couple when you look at polls, you can cut these in several ways, but you can do it by education rates. I'm talking about here. The other way to do it is you get the Republican sample and you say, do you consider yourself a member of the MAGA movement or not? MAGA voters still love Trump. His numbers are in the 80s with that. Now, that group is getting smaller as people are leaving that group. But the problem for Republicans is they need those, quote, unquote, MAGA voters to turn out for them. And if they come, if they break with Trump, he will punish them publicly in a way they could further diminish turnout against their base. They really are in a situation. I imagine in 2024, Kamala Harris could have broken with Biden on some issues like Gaza or the border or inflation, and it would not have affected Democratic turnout in any measurable way. I think here these Republicans are really weighing what to do. You stick with Trump, you pay the price with swing voters and soft Republicans. You break with Trump, you pay the price with turnout MAGA voters. And there's no good answer there for them. Why now? Why are we seeing this exodus away from MAGA at this point after all of the depraved ---- that's happened at the hands of this president and this administration? I mean, we have seen endless, endless corruption. We saw, you know, obviously the January 6th insurrection, the self-dealing. We saw a first term where COVID was handled abominably, where the only legislative priority was a tax cut that disproportionately favored millionaires and billionaires. He's never been a populist, even though he's claimed he has. But why this moment in particular are we finally seeing some people get fed up and leaving the coalition? It's prices. Inflation and high prices has been the driving force in American politics for five years now. It is why Biden's numbers went down. It's why Trump got a second chance at the presidency. And it's why Trump's numbers are going down now. And it's particularly magnified because of the war in Iran, which everyone thinks is stupid and wants to be over. It makes Trump look weak and at the mercy of events instead of in control of events. And it's forcing gas prices up. And so when prices go up, Trump's numbers go down. And that's where we are. So I guess the flip side of that question is recognizing that there are fractures for the first time in his coalition. Why is Trump acting this way? Why does he continue to engage in a war that's just killing himself and his party? Why does he continue to suppress? Well, I mean, I know why he continues to suppress the Epstein files, but the broader point, why does he continue to commit these actions and engage in behaviors that is so aggressively unpopular that it's taking people who were diehard MAGA voters and supporters for the last decade and driving them away? I think he does not care about the midterms. I think he ideally he would like to win the midterms. I think he somewhere deep in his soul dreads the investigations that will come. But he is unable or unwilling to do the things that would at least improve the chances of Republicans. He probably can't get out of this war in any terms that work for him. He has no magic levers to pull that will lower prices. I mean, he could stop raising them by putting tariffs in place. I mean, couldn't you just end the war tomorrow and pull out? Yeah, he would have to suffer, you know, the indignity and embarrassment of a war that America isn't winning. But is it any worse than, you know, the continued pain that he's enduring and that the rest of America is enduring by virtue of continuing it? I feel like I'm swimming in Tommy Vitor and Ben Rhodes's pool right now. But I think the challenge for Trump is if America were to say we're stopping bombing now, Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. Yeah. And as long as Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, something I will note, they did not control before this. Right. That is going to affect oil prices. If we gave up and we stopped bombing, would oil futures go down and maybe there'd be some gas relief price relief? Maybe. But all it takes and this is the there's like this asymmetric nature of this war, which is all it takes is one missile or drone from Iran to hit a ship or threaten a ship. And that will once again slow traffic to a trickle. He has no real ability absent a massive ground invasion of Iran to regain control of the strait in a real way. And so he's stuck, at least for the time being, in a world of oil prices much higher than they were before this war started. Could they come down a little bit? Might that help him on the margins? Maybe. But the fundamental dynamics are what they are and they're going to be that way for a while now. But there are domestic priorities, too. I mean, him sacrificing the prospect of Todd Blanch becoming his attorney general because he wouldn't offer in writing an end to some of these egregiously unpopular policies, like giving himself protection from audits for him and his family. This $1.8 billion slush fund that's that's so corrupt, even Republicans aren't willing to stomach it. Like even even right now, he's continuing to fight this stuff in the courts, won't offer any written confirmation that this fund is actually dead. These are easy wins for him to do. And yet even on this stuff, he's not relenting. Yeah, no, he is thoroughly self-obsessed and megalomaniacal. He can't get out of his own way here. And all the things he's doing, whether it's obsessing about the reflecting pool, the arch to Trump that he wants to build, putting his name on the Kennedy Center, the ballroom, all of that stuff. Each individual thing doesn't matter to voters that much. They think it's probably stupid. If they're they don't want to waste it on that. But what they all do together is they tell a story about the things that Trump cares about besides helping you, besides lowering your prices. These are the things he is doing. The war is the biggest one. But all this other dumb stuff that seems like it shouldn't matter, it matters to him, because the thing that I tell every Democratic politician I talk to is the way to think about this is everything's an affordability issue. The Epstein files and him fighting about the stupid topless thing is an affordability issue because that's what Trump's doing when instead of doing something to help you or even talking about how much he wants to help you, he's talking about things that you do not care about that affect him. It's about him, not you. So the way I've thought about this is the fact that Trump continues to engage in this behavior and do these things is really just, you know, there's one part of me that's like, oh, he's clearly given up on the midterms, but I think that he's given up on the midterms in a different way. He's given up on the midterms in terms of trying to win them on the merits, but he hasn't given up on the midterms in terms of trying to just rig the rules of the game in his favor. That's why he's expending all of his political capital not on signing the housing bill or, you know, dropping this absurd idea of the slush fund or the protection from audits, but instead trying to pass the Save America Act. I mean, he was literally willing to exploit the corpse of Lindsey Graham and be like, the last thing he said to me on the phone was that he clearly this is a priority for him. Do you view this as the same way as he's done trying to win the midterms on the merits, but is now throwing all of his weight behind just trying to win them in a different way by rigging the rules of the midterms in his favor? It's just hard to know what actual information and data Trump has about how bad his political position is. You know, his MAGA PAC has $400 million in the bank. There was reports this week they're going to start deploying that money to help Ken Paxton in Texas. So there are some things happening on the margins. If Trump can steal the midterms, he will steal the midterms. I want to remind people that's a much harder prospect than I think he wants people to know. Let's say he signed the SAVE Act tomorrow, right? Senate ends the filibuster. They pass it. House passes. It goes to Trump. He signs it. One, almost impossible to implement before the midterms. Two, and even more important than that, almost certainly hurts Republicans more than Democrats because of the people most likely to have a passport or the birth certificate on hand are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans. And so he's kind of just focused on himself, casting about, spending most of his time on making monuments to himself and lining his pockets, and the rest of it's kind of noise. So this is a question kind of going to what you just mentioned about the financial advantage that Republicans had. It's a question that I explored a little bit with Tommy on Thursday. But we found out that Elon Musk's PAC is going to donate between $100 and $120 million. Obviously, there's a massive disparity in terms of what the RNC has versus what the DNC, I would say, has but doesn't have. Yes, exactly. How are you thinking about the financial advantage and the impact that that's going to have? And I ask this question on the backdrop of the fact that we are in this cycle right now, where Republicans have this financial advantage right now, and yet in the off-year elections, in the special elections, and in polling, Democrats have continued to enjoy a 9, 10, 11, 12, 13-point overperformance from 2024, even amid this backdrop of the financial disparity. So I think there are a couple things going on here. And it's worth noting that Democratic candidates themselves are massively out-raising Republican candidates. And candidate dollars go much further than Super PAC dollars, because at least when you're talking about television ads, TV stations are legally required to charge candidates the lowest available rate. They can gouge living daylights out of Super PACs. So one television ad from a campaign, like John Ossoff, Rory Cooper, Sherrod Brown, Mary Patil, are all massively out-raising their Republican opponents. James Tallarico just raising money like you can't even imagine. And so one, in terms of dollars, depending on the market, one ad from James Tallarico is going to be worth three. They're going to have to basically pay two to three times what Tallarico is paying for ads. Now, the fact that Republicans have more money means we are not going to be able to force them to make real decisions about where to run. They can probably spend all the money they need in Maine, all the money they need in North Carolina. Maybe they'll spend money in Georgia, I don't know, but it's going to be harder to sneak one past them. By being competitive in as many places as we are, Republicans will have the money to spend to do that. That is a real consequence of the fact that Democratic large donors are not giving, not just to the DNC, but to the DSCC, the DCCC, at the same rate the Republican donors are giving to the Republican version of those committees. All right. I want to end with one last question. I'm not going to ask you to predict anything, but I am going to ask for, given this moment, a snapshot in time, would you rather be the Democrats or the Republicans in the House and the Senate? I would almost certainly rather be the Democrats. Democrats are incredibly well-positioned. Republicans have a very narrow majority. Trump is very unpopular. We have some very good candidates. This includes, by the way, the Senate, not just the House. That's how I feel about the House. I'd rather be the Democrats than the Republicans, for sure. We are very, very well-positioned in the House. We are better positioned than we had any right to be hopeful for in the Senate, but it remains an uphill battle. We need a lot of things to go right for us. Michigan, Iowa, we basically have to draw an inside straight to do it. We have the chance to do it. We have the candidates to do it, but we need a little political luck. Trump seems to be wanting to give that to us, so we'll take it. Exactly. This is the political environment to do it in. To that end, a good way to continue winning this uphill battle, in large part, is to subscribe, for those who are watching right now, to Dan's newsletter, MessageBox. I'm going to put that link right here on the screen and also in the post description of this video. It is something that I read on a daily basis. Could not recommend any substack or newsletter higher than the MessageBox, so if you're not yet subscribed, please do yourself a favor. Subscribe, sign up, and I promise you will not regret it. Dan, as always, thanks so much for the time. Thank you, Brian. Great to talk to you.