LIVE at Castfest! How popular is Donald Trump?

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1:57ready we're almost ready we're just going to test our microphones which means saying hello that's me anthony that's pop pop pop peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers that's very good she's

2:10Marianna Spring:good she's a pro mariana what shall i say that's funny undercover voters my undercover voters are okay we're going to launch straight into this um donald trump is not popular and not popular on a whole range of subjects and a worrying range of subjects if you are for instance a republican congressman or congresswoman running in the midterms in november in spite of that the nation it seems is not turning to the democrats with anything like the kind of enthusiasm that the democrats might hope they would so here's the question could the democrats do perfectly well in november but still mess up the next presidential election that is the fundamental question underlying what we're going to talk about now.

2:56So welcome to AmeriCast.

3:02AmeriCast from BBC News. Do you hear that sound? Oh, I think when I hear that sound, it reminds me of money.

3:09Anthony Zurcher:We didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it.

3:13Marianna Spring:This is a big cover-up, and this administration is engaged in it. This guy has Trump arrangement syndrome. I have four words for you.

3:22Anthony Zurcher:turn the volume up

3:28hello it's sarah here and i'm in the bbc's maiderville studios in london england and it's

3:34Anthony Zurcher:anthony across uh from sarah here uh the the fabulous four have you united a rare time when we're all in the same room together it's great to see you all and i'm sitting opposite anthony it's marianna uh let's get on to the popularity of donald trump or indeed anthony at the moment the lack of it. Yeah, if you look at the poll numbers for Donald Trump, they have declined precipitously across the board over the course of the past year and three or four months. And part of that is natural for a second term president. You're never more popular than the day you are inaugurated. And it's typically a steady decline after that.

4:10Anthony Zurcher:But Donald Trump has done things that have been very controversial over the course of the past year. His immigration policy has angered a lot of people. Hispanic voters, as we have talked about, have turned on him. At least we've seen indications of that. His trade policy has inflated prices, and Americans aren't crazy about that because they still feel like things are too expensive, things are unaffordable. And then the Iran war has been a real drag. And if you look at his poll numbers, there has been a real shift and an increase in his disapproval rating since the start of the war. And the American public is split, mostly 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals.

4:50Anthony Zurcher:So to get down to where Donald Trump is now in the 30 percent, according to the recent polls, or even 20 percent, 20 odd percent for his handling of the economy, you have to not just have the people who always hate you hate you. You don't have to just have the people who are independents not like you. There have to be people in your own party who are fed up or frustrated and willing to tell pollsters that they don't support him for that to be the case. And they are. And a lot of them are influencers or former influencers within that broad kind of category of people.

5:20Marianna Spring:Yeah, exactly. Particularly when it comes to MAGA and the movement on social media. But I think particularly for everything around the Epstein files, when those were released, obviously Donald Trump has many, many times denied any wrongdoing or even being linked to Jeffrey Epstein in any way that could be construed as bad, essentially. But that has not stopped a lot of people on social media connecting him with Jeffrey Epstein, suggesting he was involved in wrongdoing, everything else. And in some ways, perhaps it's not very surprising because Donald Trump kind of built certainly this presidential campaign on the whole, I'm going to try and disrupt the traditional world of politics in the US.

5:55Marianna Spring:I'm going to make it different. Once you are then the president, you are ultimately the establishment. And a lot of these MAGA influences are very anti-establishment and so very against what he's doing. I mean, maybe this was always sort of inevitable in terms of how that was going to go. It's such an interesting point now, isn't it? Because actually so much of American politics is about manning the barricades, isn't it? Which side of the barricade you're then on. And what he's discovering is, as Mariana said, he's on that side of the barricade that's in charge. And there's nothing you can do about it.

6:23And even among, I guess you could call them MAGA influencers, but people on television like Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, these people are pretty establishment in the commentary at. It's the Iran war that's caused them to break with him. And I guess I'm slightly surprised and not surprised that they're against that and that they're very, very critical. But they have just gone wholesale. Everything about Donald Trump is bad from everything about Donald Trump being good. So all of a sudden he does one thing that you don't like and then they've just leapt over the fence. They're barricading the other side now, saying that he's messed up on the economy, on the war, that he's not going to be able to win the midterms, that his polling's awful.

6:59It's as though they've done this complete U-turn.

7:01Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, Megyn Kelly notes Trump's approval rating, has said it's cratered, said essentially, literally, he's effed and has gotten pushback from Donald Trump on that. But Tucker Carlson is an interesting case. He has supported Trump in the past, while there were some times when he was critical behind the scenes during the 2020 election dispute. And that kind of came out and leaked comments in the Fox News lawsuits after the fact publicly and in his comments on his show. He has wholeheartedly endorsed the president up until now. And that's why this clip we're going to play of him apologizing for that support is so remarkable.

7:41Yeah. So he's talking to his brother, isn't he? is on his own podcast. He's talking to his brother, who's also a Trump supporter and indeed a former speechwriter for him. Let's listen to the Tucker Carlson apology.

7:53Marianna Spring:I mean, you and I and everyone else who supported him, you wrote speeches for him. I campaigned for him. I mean, we're implicated in this for sure. Yes. It's not enough to say, well, I changed my mind or like, oh, this is bad. I'm out. It's like in very small ways, but in real ways, you and me and millions of people like us for the reason this is happening right now. Yes. So I do think it's like a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. You know, we'll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be. And I want to say I'm sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional. That's all I'll say.

8:33I really am confused by this. I mean, as I said before, I understand where they are on the war. Donald Trump said that he wouldn't start any new foreign wars. these people have been against the neoconservative bit of the Republican Party for a long, long time. They didn't like George W. Bush, the people around him and their foreign policy. But they were really happy to continue backing Donald Trump through the tariffs, through his trying to prosecute all of his enemies using the Department of Justice to do that. All the things that Donald Trump has done, which have upset many people all around the world.

9:04They've blindly followed him through all of that. And Tucker Carlson wasn't just commenting favorably on it. He's never out of the White House. I mean, I see him there all the time hanging out with the president and with the cabinet. And now suddenly he's got to wrestle with his own conscience because of one foreign adventure in Iran. Why this complete turnaround?

9:23Anthony Zurcher:I think the foreign wars and Mideast wars and foreign policy was central to Donald Trump's rise. The way he differentiated himself in 2015 and 2016, in part, besides being an outsider, was his criticism of the Iraq War and said Republicans were misguided and he attacked Jeb Bush for what his brother George W. did in prompting the Iraq War in 2003. And I will say it's not just Tucker Carlson. I mean, as I think most of the audience knows, I'm from Texas because I talk about it regularly. And I went back to Texas a couple of times since the start of the war. And the first time I was back there was just a couple of days after the war started.

10:02Anthony Zurcher:And the Republicans I spoke with there were willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. They said, well, you know, he said he wasn't going to get us involved in forever wars. He said he wasn't going to bog us down in the Middle East. They were, I think, hoping it was going to be like Venezuela would be over in a day or two, would go in there, would do it, would get out. That wasn't the case, obviously. And when I went back just a few weeks ago at CPAC, which is a conservative conference in Dallas, I was struck by the number of conservatives there who were willing to openly criticize Donald Trump, kind of the way Tucker Carlson did, said, I feel like we've been misled.

10:37Anthony Zurcher:I feel like he's breaking his promise, particularly younger conservatives. Anyone under the age of 30, I would go up to them and I knew exactly what they'd say. You'd ask them about the Iran war and they would go, yeah, Trump's wrong. And I feel like he is he's making a mistake. This is not what he promised. This is hurting me personally by raising gas prices, you know, making things cost more. I'm worried about my friends who are in the military. I mean, that is a fundamental change from what we saw and what I've seen covering Donald Trump now for the past 11 years. Do you think he might run in 28?

11:10Anthony Zurcher:Tucker Carlson, he might. You know, I've got a 22 year old son who is engaged in politics. He follows it, doesn't watch broadcast news, doesn't read newspapers. He gets all of his information online and through Reddit and through YouTube videos. And he has told me the one person he thinks could be a real threat to win as a Republican is Tucker Carlson because he's an outsider and because he has a kind of a separate brand from the Republican Party. And you're nodding, Marianne. I'm curious if you're seeing that online.

11:39Marianna Spring:Yeah, I actually think to understand what's going on with Tucker, I think there's kind of two separate things happening, which is there's the broader shift around particular issues where people actually aren't that fussed about war and they don't like the impact of war, like stuff being more expensive and not being able to buy gas for their car in the same way and all that kind of thing. But then there's something different, which if you look at Tucker Carlson, you also look at influences like Candace Owens, who people have probably heard of, who in lots of ways inhabit very extreme circles on social media and would be seen as quite extreme in that sense.

12:06Marianna Spring:But actually, on the whole, tend to be quite on the pulse in terms of the sort of direction of travel online. And what I would say is someone like Tucker Carlson, for example, has previously been criticised. So if you think of it like conspiracy land, which I talk about quite a lot, there's a kind of conspiracy land that exists on social media that people have dipped their toes in or been quite central to. Tucker Carlson has repeatedly been accused of spreading disinformation or conspiracy theories. He's always very much defended himself against that idea. But some of those conspiracy theories have been accused of being anti-Semitic.

12:38Marianna Spring:Now, one of the things that he very strongly disagrees with Donald Trump on right now, and if you listen to that podcast episode, he kind of hints at it and talks about it, is to do with Donald Trump's relationship with Israel and this suggestion that there's something kind of untoward going on, that Donald Trump is maybe being controlled in some way. And that's why he's making the decisions he's making. That, again, has triggered more accusations of anti-Semitism and that are different from, you know, political criticism of Israel and Netanyahu and everything else. And I think that if you understand how much of kind of Tucker Carlson's belief system online is built around this kind of evil cabals of people doing bad things thing, then you start to understand why when that no longer fits with what Donald Trump is doing, he sort of has no choice if he wants to keep that online audience, but to split and go another way.

13:22Marianna Spring:I think he's also quite good at reading the room online and working out what people are responding well to or not. It's interesting, Anthony, that you say it's younger people who you notice are like, oh, I'm not sure I'm so fussed. these are the main kinds of people they'll be seeing. They won't be kind of watching most of the traditional media. They run businesses, these people. This is where I think it's slightly difficult politically. These people run multi-million dollar businesses. Which rely on clicks and views. And they rely on conflict, exactly. As you've taught us down the years when we've been talking to you about these things, or taught me anyway, that actually what they're doing is slightly different from old-style political campaigning, where they've got a set of things that they want to happen.

14:02They're businesses that thrive on conflict and need the conflict to keep going. The woman who does Call Her Daddy, that's incredibly successful. Alice Cooper, the podcast that is, I think, number four or so in American podcasts. I was reading the other day, she's having a get together very much like this one, actually, here in Maida Vale, except hers is in Las Vegas. They've got the Chippendales at halftime. And Paris Hilton is the DJ. and you know these are really these are big big businesses and i'm not talking us down in any way shape or form it's lovely and we've all had a nice cup of tea or at least we have in the green room but nothing more than that and there is you know there is a side to all of this that is about commercial futures for individual people and i don't know what you think so i just wonder whether the politics of it in a sense you ought to see separately yes because they'll go in the direction of clicks, as you say.

14:57And it's interesting though, isn't it? As you're saying, Mariana, that they're good at reading the room online. I mean, if you're doing this because you have to, for financial reasons, appeal to the maximum number of people, then that's a fairly good indication for us to follow of where voters are thinking, the kind of people that they want, if these people really do, you know, very, very good at sniffing what's in the wind. But of course, there's different people, aren't there? You've got a kind of diehard base of Donald Trump fans, which people reckon, what, just about under a third of the electorate will stick with Donald Trump, did through 2020, all of that kind of thing.

15:33He's got quite a high floor. He can only fall so far with support. But the people who put him in the White House are anything but diehard fans. Some of them are swing voters, some of them moderate Republicans who voted with their wallets largely and thought that he would run the economy better than the Democrats would. And they remembered feeling better off during his first term. It's where they're going to go with all of this. It's absolutely crucial, not how many people in the base are turned off. And actually, we've had an email about that from Sarah who says, and she must be in the States, because she says, it's a common misjudgment to think that anyone who voted for Trump is a MAGA diehard who will believe anything he says.

16:10That's definitely not the case. I'm surrounded by Trump voters, and most of them do not actually like Trump. They tolerate him because they're either pro-life or anti-woke or both. I think that's a very interesting point. You've got the people Anthony's talking to at, say, for instance, CPAC, who are MAGA diehards. They've got their own views about it. But you've got ordinary folk who I spoke to them all the time. You must have done as well through the 2020 election. They say, look, he's pretty awful. I wish he'd shut his mouth. Someone should deny him access to social media. If he could just get on with running the economy, basically, and making me feel better off.

16:44It's where they go that's important.

16:46Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, I think so. I think that especially evangelicals, they feel like the Lord works in mysterious ways. Donald. I've asked them that. Who knows? Maybe they're right. They'll say, you know, yes. But you can't argue with the fact that Roe v. Wade was overturned, that he has put forward, you know, right to life sorts of issues and that he has taken on their cultural conservative issues. And they're willing to kind of grin and bear it. Although it is also interesting to say that a lot of them pushed back with the Trump as Jesus meme that he shared. and his criticism of the pope, you know, he can the people who were tolerating him because the ends justify the means or however you want to call it.

17:30Anthony Zurcher:They may want to start distancing more. And I think you'll see that first in Republican politicians in Congress, ones who are running for office in the midterm elections in November. If they start to distance themselves from Trump, because Trump's done, he's not running for president again. He's not his name's not going to be on the ballot again, despite some of those rumors. But there are other Republicans who names will be on there in November. And if Trump goes down and keeps dragging them down, they are going to have to find ways of distancing themselves, kind of the way Tucker Carlson has.

18:03What then are the Democrats, Anthony? How popular slash unpopular are they generically?

18:09Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, there are a couple of ways to look at that. The first way is, if you look at it, the approval rating for Democrats, kind of writ large, the same way that we've been looking at approval rating of Trump. And if you look at it that way, Democrats honestly aren't much better off than Donald Trump. The latest poll numbers have them languishing in the low to mid 30 percent as well, 60 something percent disapproving of them. And what I said about Donald Trump and the Republicans is true of the Democrats as well. You don't get to that kind of disapproval rating unless there are people in your own party who don't like what your party is doing.