Trump's midterm promise backfires as GOP voters revolt

0:01Brian Tyler Cohen:Trump's$5 ,000 promise to his voters backfires, and I interview Jonathan Swan about his new book, Regime Change. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. Just days ago, Trump decided to come out and promise$5 ,000 to every American, but only if the Republicans won the midterms. It was a lie as transparent as it was desperate, not to mention illegal, but still, Trump told it because, as I always say, he thinks his audience is stupid and never wastes an opportunity to show it. Well, we now have some data backing up that point, and it's not great for Trump. According to Elliott Morris, voters aren't confused about the motive either.

0:38Brian Tyler Cohen:62 % said Trump made the promise mainly to win votes in November, and only 13 % think he genuinely intends to send the money. Moreover, 71 % of adults say it is inappropriate for a president to promise government payments that depend on his party winning an election, including 53 % of Republicans. Only about a quarter think the checks would actually go out even if Republicans win. We also asked voters whether Trump's promise makes them more or less likely to vote for Republican candidates in Congress. 28 % said less likely, 13 % said more likely, and 53 % said it makes no difference. But many voters in that 13 % already told us they were voting Republican in November.

1:16Brian Tyler Cohen:Fewer than 4 % of adults say the checks make them more likely to vote Republican and aren't already there. This offsets with large losses among independents who said by an 11-point margin Trump's scheme turned them off. So not only did voters not believe Trump's$5 ,000 promise, but the people who did believe it were already voting for Trump, and more people were actually turned off by it than it pulled in. Think about that. A net loss of voters after Trump tried to buy people off. And I'd imagine that part of the reason that voters don't believe him is that he's done this before, constantly. He promised a doge dividend that never materialized, a tariff dividend that never materialized.

1:53Brian Tyler Cohen:Back in his first term, it was a middle class tax cut that never materialized. This guy has bait and switched his own voters more times than Lucy's pulled the football away from Charlie Brown. So no, they're not buying it. Another pretty funny byproduct of this is that it's undermined the Republicans' ability to frame the Democrats as these spooky socialists who are trying to give everything away. Like, for example. But the problem is this. Democrats, by a pretty wide margin, seem to like socialism. Well, they were never taught of the horrors of socialism and the greatness of capitalism. The radical socialist platform that seems to be taking over the Democratic Party.

2:30Socialism doesn't fly.

2:32Brian Tyler Cohen:And just days ago, the Senate Republicans' official Twitter account wrote, Democrats, socialists love to promise free stuff, but they never mention who pays for it. My dudes, your leader is out here promising money like Oprah. Oprah. Only difference being that Oprah actually does what she says. So I'm heartened to see people waking up to the lies from this president and his party. For years, they have been treating their audiences and their voters with utter contempt, assuming that they will fall for whatever they say no matter how many times they refuse to deliver. But this government has finally put an end to all of that.

3:03Brian Tyler Cohen:This is a Republican party that swore prices would go down, they've gone up, they swore no new wars, we're in one, they swore the Epstein files would be released, they're suppressing 3 million documents. They swore cheaper gas and lower inflation. Instead, they're rising or at record highs. It's bad enough to fail to deliver. It's something entirely worse to fail to deliver and yet still pretend like you are. And the blue wave that we're going to see in November will prove that there is just a limit to how much Americans are willing to be lied to. Next up is my interview with Jonathan Swan. No Lie is brought to you by Factor.

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4:45Brian Tyler Cohen:So let's eat real. Head to factormeals.com slash BTC50 off and use code BTC50 off to get 50 % off and one free breakfast item per box for one year while supplies last until 10 31 26. That's code BTC 50 off at factormeals.com. BTC 50 off at factormeals.com. I'm joined now by the author of the new book regime change Jonathan Swan. Jonathan thanks for joining me. Great to be here. Thanks. So I argue and have argued that Donald Trump is an autocrat. This is somebody who is seeking to use the military as his own personal police force who's undermined the constitution who doesn't accept election results where he loses.

5:25Brian Tyler Cohen:At the same time, in your book, you and Maggie describe a document where Donald Trump compares himself to Mao, to Stalin, to Hitler, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan. So where is the disconnect here? Because the right will lose their minds if you make any reference to Donald Trump acting as a dictator or an autocrat. But at the same time, he seems to relish that comparison. You know, I suppose the word has connotations that people don't want to, you know, deal with. But as you said, Trump himself embraces it. You know, he posted on Truth Social the other day, a picture of his face looking at the globe and it says his hemisphere.

6:10I mean, he's embracing the idea that he's at a minimum, a regional hegemon. um he doesn't view countries in this hemisphere as independent sovereign countries he views venezuela as an american colony essentially and marco rubio is the viceroy of venezuela so one of marco rubio's many jobs right so you know i don't get too hung up on you know the terminology we try to describe in the book what he's doing and it's indisputable that he has expanded presidential power and use presidential power in ways that a the framers did not intend and b in ways that no president in our lifetime in some respects no president ever has done before

7:00Brian Tyler Cohen:do you think that there is a full acceptance by the republican party that this is not a political movement that's interested in democracy like do you think that what we're seeing right now is is just the Republican Party relinquishing their participation in a democracy. I think what we're seeing that is more notable is a whole branch of government decide to remove themselves from the field. And this is the legislative branch. Yeah. Last year, we make the argument in the book, and I think it's indisputable, that in 2025, Donald Trump wielded more absolute control and dominance over his own party in Congress than any president that we've ever seen.

7:45And Congress ceased to operate as a check against the executive branch. It ceased to operate as an independent branch of government. It became a subsidiary of the administration. And you saw senators who we know from our reporting felt that people like Pete Hegseth were grossly unfit to be in the jobs that they were put in grossly and yet under fear and pressure they voted for him so when you have a whole branch of uh of government decide to essentially seed the field that's how you get this dynamic the only way people talk about well how do you restore some semblance of the system that we have american style democracy well you can't have the system when one branch ceases to function and pieces out.

8:34And then the other branch, the judiciary, is stacked with Trump appointees all the way up.

8:39Brian Tyler Cohen:Do you think that these Republicans are realizing that contracting all of their autonomy over to the executive branch was a mistake? As we see brand new polling, for example, showing that Democrats are now favored in the House and the Senate. Fox News just released a poll a few days ago showing that they're shifting 15 races in favor of Democrats. There were no races that were shifted in favor of Republicans. Trump himself is now saddled with, according to the American Research Group, polling a 29 percent approval rating. That's the first time in either of his terms that he's had an approval rating in the 20s.

9:13Brian Tyler Cohen:As we know, midterm elections are a referendum on the president and the party in power. But the party in power, as you've said, has contracted all of their power over to the executive branch. Do you think that there is some recognition from these other Republicans that they've made a mistake by making their entire identity just Donald Trump, who now himself has become so toxic. Yeah. I mean, you're seeing the evidence of that, right? You're starting to see Republicans distance themselves from Trump. I'm not saying it's happening en masse, because a lot of these Republicans still have the calculation that, well, we need the base to show up in the election.

9:52And yes, his approval rating has fallen precipitously among independents. And enthusiasm is way down, but he's still generally popular among Republicans. So they have this balancing act. He's toxic among the general electorate, still pretty popular among Republicans. And they have to figure out, what do I do? So, you know, you see Salazar in Florida come out with an ad where she's to the camera criticizing the president on immigration. You start to see some candidates scrubbing his name from their websites. so you are seeing that you don't have to dig inside their minds you just look at the behavior but it's too late it's too late it's not believable for voters that these people five minutes before an election it's ridiculous someone who's been in absolute lockstep until the eve of the election it's okay, fine

10:53Brian Tyler Cohen:throughout this whole process since the book was released, there have been these constant attacks by Trump himself where he's gone after you guys. He goes after Maggie more acutely, but, you know, it's not... I wouldn't put it past Trump to attack the woman in a male-female duo to go after the woman more frequently, but did he think that when you guys were interviewing him that you were going to write a puff piece on him? Or is this like kayfabe? Is this him just pretending to be angry, but at the same time, he kind of relishes the attention that he's given by virtue of being in this book, even if he's presented as the heel?

11:32So there's no kayfabe. You know, my colleagues at The New York Times reported two months ago about serious security concerns with Air Force One. 48 hours after the story, FBI agents showed up at their front doors, serving them subpoenas. He's suing The New York Times. this is all very draining on resources um he's investigating a number of our stories particularly with regard to the munitions crisis um trying to find our sources that stuff is just it's deadly serious there's no kayfabe involved um as for trump talking to reporters we tried to get an interview with him for a couple months through the front through the press office and the thing and they didn't everyone thought it was we learned subsequently was trying to block us getting the interview they thought it was a bad idea right no one was saying oh president you should really sit down you know do this interview so we went directly to president trump and and the fact is every reporter in washington has his phone number and he will pick up the phone and talk so we went directly to him and that's how we ended up getting the interview trump will talk to anyone.

12:43He just will. And he will take anyone's call. He will believe that he's his own best spokesman. And generally speaking, he'll think that it's worth his while to put his message out there and see how it goes. I don't think he had any illusions that this would be a puff book or a flattering book or what have you. But I also think he has known Maggie in particular for a very long time and, you know, felt it was worth his while to sit down with us.

13:15Brian Tyler Cohen:Isn't he busy? Like the notion that somebody would take anybody's call and talk to anybody. I mean, I know what I do as a YouTuber on a daily basis. Like, I don't have that much time if somebody like the amount of calls that I have to screen because I just don't have enough hours in the day and I'm not, you know, leading the U.S. military. um what percentage of his presidency does it come across seems like him marketing his own presidency versus the actual governing aspect of things well you know it's interesting i i think there's a split your look particularly last year we were watching what looked like this frenzy of action which it was you know particularly the first three executive orders oh yeah it was absolutely and it was very well they'd planned it all out and what have you but when you talk to people who go in and meet with trump they say it's like he has all the time in the world yeah you know george w bush barack obama they used to have their schedule down to like 10 minute increments you know this a meeting with trump meanders can meander for two three hours with people wandering in and out, way off the agenda.

14:29You could spend an hour talking about the ballroom and the Corinthian columns and the type of marble that he's putting in the bathroom.

14:37Brian Tyler Cohen:I think somebody asked him how his meeting with President Xi went, and the first thing he said was that we spoke about granite. Right. Two global superpowers. I completely believe that. That's not the part I doubt. But when we went in and saw the president for this book, when we interviewed him, he seemed completely unhurried. It was the 17th day of the war with Iran, and the war seemed to be the furthest thing from his mind. He had printouts of photographs of maple trees on the Resolute desk because he said he was buying maple trees for the White House. And then he had different angles, images of the ballroom.

15:20And that was what he wanted us to see first. That was the first probably 15 minutes of the interview. And you talk to anyone who spends time with him, he spends an inordinate amount of time essentially on interior decoration and trying to figure out how to put his name on more physical monuments and other aspects of Washington, D.C.

15:44Brian Tyler Cohen:The way that I think about this, and this is coming from somebody who is, you know, both a cynic and contemptuous of him, which is that, like, you move to honor yourself by, you know, etching your name into all these structures now because in the future you don't have that much faith that somebody's going to do it for you. And so you have to honor yourself now before he leaves office, because really what what history is going to show is that he was the first autocratic president of this country, that that he left office kind of ushering in the Second Gilded Age where folks are more desolate, hungrier, sicker, poorer than they were before.

16:25Brian Tyler Cohen:and so you know like if if he doesn't do it who's who's gonna do it i don't know if you have the same read on things or if it's just some degree of malignant narcissism what do you make of the fact that he that his sole focus here seems to be shoving his face and and name onto as many structures as possible i hope i'm not misremembering this but i don't think i am um ben terrace from new york magazine wrote a piece recently um about trump's interior you know renovations and projects of in dc and i think trump himself admitted out loud that if he doesn't do it no one else will yeah okay so and so i i actually think he said that um he remember what one of his great um sources of rage when he left the first time was his name being taken off buildings um was you know pga event being taken away from his golf course yeah and so i think a big part of his determination when he came back to office was i'm going to put my name in a way on so many things that it will be permanent you know it was a big deal for him that the palm beach airport became the donald j trump airport um the library which no one talks about it's not actually a library that he's being built it's it's a tower it's a giant tower it looks like um the freedom tower um in miami on gifted land um and we report in the book that they're soliciting money from the saudis to build it you know this is the story of the administration but he is trying to make sure that he is unerasable um because i think he realizes because he's gone through that experience that he will be that there will be efforts to uh take his name off what do you what do you think the reaction will be if you have a Democratic president and the ballroom gets renamed because Democrats have full control of government, like in that hypothetical situation where you have a Democratic president, House, Senate, you have the, you know, what I'm sure will be the Donald J.

18:28Brian Tyler Cohen:Trump presidential ballroom. Strike that name. It becomes the Barack Hussein Obama presidential ballroom. What happens in the aftermath of that moment as far as Trump is concerned based on your interactions with him. I think the way he sees the ballroom is regardless of what name, I mean, obviously I'm sure he would want it to be the Donald Trump, whatever, but he built it and everyone will know that. And that was, you know, he's changed the White House in that way. And it's not really conceivable to me that it would be bulldozed, you know? Right, I agree with that. Well, let's expand the scope of this question.

19:07Brian Tyler Cohen:All of the things he's trying to etch his name into, you've got, you know. He'd be enraged. I mean, look at the Kennedy Center. They took his name off the Kennedy Center, and he's talking about bulldozing the Kennedy Center. Okay, so, you know, that's the reaction. I mean, you drive down near the White House, Washington, D.C., you see the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. By the way, an institute that they tried to shut down during Doge, and then he stuck his name on it. I mean, I don't think it takes a genius to realize that if a Democrat comes into the White House, that's just going to not be called the Donald J.

19:38Trump Institute of Peace. So, you know, he'll be he'll be watching all of that very closely.

19:41Brian Tyler Cohen:OK, so the fact that we're talking about this and the fact that he's doing all of this obviously underscores the extent to which his focus is on these vanity projects and not regular people. Is there any recognition on his on his behalf where where, you know, his focus is on, you know, kind of this this like let them eat cake type deal where he is just focused on building himself a ballroom and a triumphal arch and encrusting the Oval Office in gold and redoing the reflecting pool at the same time that his election was predicated on this idea that people felt forgotten in this country and they couldn't afford gross.

20:21Brian Tyler Cohen:I mean, he talked about like this, this elusive old fashioned word groceries. Like that was the focus of his campaign. He had a he had a quote, a clip that I that I often throw to in my videos where he says the reason he won the election was, yes, immigration, but also the cost of groceries. And now all of those costs that that left people feeling so destitute have been exacerbated. And yet all the while his focus is just on these interior design projects. One thing we found when we were reporting the book, just again and again and again, when we were talking to people who were either working for him in the government or people who would come in and visit him, is his mind was not on domestic policy or cost of living issues or any of the things that you were talking about.

21:07In fact, he wasn't even particularly worried about domestic politics. His staff were desperate for him to care more about the midterm elections, to be more invested in the results of the midterm elections. But if you look at it from Trump's perspective, his existential victory, his great victory was 2024, where he saw the stakes as I may end up in prison or I may end up back in the White House. And after he won that, it was all about a legacy in his mind, which is imprinting himself all over the world, doing quote unquote big things, which is overwhelmingly in the field of foreign affairs. He thought he could be the first president 47 years to get rid of this Iranian regime.

21:53He obviously did regime change in Venezuela. You get the idea there. the cost of living issues are very low down yeah on the hierarchy and what's really interesting brian is we're seeing for the first time say what you want about trump but historically he's been pretty good at getting on the right side of populist issues right he's now on the wrong side of some of the biggest populist issues in the country ai right right one of the most the clearest cut polling you will see we talk to republican strategists talk to democratic strategies data centers people are overwhelmingly opposed to them fearful of this technology and trump sounds if you if you transcribed one of his comments about ai it might as well be jensen huang might as well be sam walman he isn't even he's an evangelist about this technology completely on the other side of this populist issue the iran war um uh you know go down the list the public does not find it endearing that he is building this ballroom and gilding everything and that his family is making orders of magnitude more money than they've ever made.

23:05It's coming through in focus groups. It's coming through in polling. His team knows that. I mean, we got private focus groups in polling for the book. And this was like early this year. It was horrific. It was alarm bells just ringing out. He just doesn't care that much.

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24:39Brian Tyler Cohen:out.

24:48Brian Tyler Cohen:365 day returns now available in Canada and the UK, too. That's Q. U. I. N. C. Dot com slash BTC. That suggests that, you know, he is acting. I mean, obviously it's amplified, you know, orders of magnitude higher, but that he's acting like a lame duck, which I guess raises the question, what do you think he will do as it relates to a third term? He's not exactly acting like somebody who is going to run for a third term. But at the same time, this kind of thing has been floated. And, you know, he obviously refuses to rule out the prospect. But just curious, you know. So I make a practice of never like glibly dismissing any, like after January 6th, I don't sort of say, oh, no, you know, whatever.

25:35I don't sort of preemptively rule out anything. But I'm not seeing any signs in our reporting for the book, for the newspaper that Donald Trump is preparing for a third term or that he even wants to. um think from his perspective or at this point that he could i mean like his approval ratings so you know he and i don't i don't even legally i mean like like approval rating wise yeah but but but you know for example we have scenes in the book where he's rupert murdoch's over for dinner and he's asking murdoch to assess who he likes better jd vance or marco rubio he's constantly asking people what do you think of jd thinking about the prime you know it's more of a sport for him it's almost like he's a color commentator talking about this stuff but um so i don't see any indications privately publicly that he is contemplating that and you know from his perspective his family make two billion dollars or more probably way more than we know way more than we know um he uh you know he is remaking washington in his image um he is um uh doing whatever he wants in the role he's going to he said we report in the book that he's going to pardon anyone who came within 250 feet of the oval office he has sweeping immunity from the supreme court he has nothing to fear legally right so you know i think he will the probably the thing he will miss most is the attention.