Ben Smith Discusses Trump’s Collapse in 2026

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0:23Ben Meiselas:As Donald Trump's polling hits new lows, we're seeing massive international protests against Donald Trump. We're seeing him mocked in parades, like coming off of whatever the heck that was of Rubio in Munich. You have in Dusseldorf, Germany, a carnival that was taking place today where one of the main attractions was mocking Donald Trump. There were Donald Trump hitting Jesus in the face and giving Jesus a black eye float along with Vladimir Putin floats. There was Donald Trump being a Putin bootlicker float. Of course, right outside of Munich, there was this statue of Donald Trump called the Orange Plague that everybody saw as they were walking.

1:07Ben Meiselas:And rather than me describing it. Let me just play for you what went down. And this is what it looks like in Dusseldorf as Donald Trump. It's a float of Donald Trump violating the Statute of Liberty while he has a stormy tattoo on his leg. Here, play this clip.

1:32Ben Meiselas:More from Dusseldorf right here. Here, play this clip.

1:51Ben Meiselas:Finally I'll show you a little bit more right here. Let's play it.

2:08Ben Meiselas:So the United States was featured alongside the Ayatollah, Putin, Afghanistan. They sure know how to do a carnival there in Dusseldorf and in Germany. More on Donald Trump's crashing poll numbers. The new data out this morning suggested if there were to be a redo of the 2024 election, not only would former Vice President Kamala Harris, well, I would she win, but she'd win pretty big numbers here. Play this clip. Regrets of some folks had a few. What are we talking about here? Well, let's just take a look here. OK, choice for 2024 presidential election. The actual was Donald Trump winning by about a point and a half.

2:45Ben Meiselas:It rounds to a point. But take a look here in a polled redo between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in April of 2025. It was within the margin of our right Kamala Harris by point. But look at where we are now, according to an NBC News survey monkey poll. Kamala Harris wins in a redo asking folks essentially if you could redo the 2024 election, how would you vote? She wins it by, get this, eight points, a massive shift from what we saw back in November of 2024 when Donald Trump won by a point. And I will note that this sample was weighted, weighted to the 2024 result in which Donald Trump won by a point.

3:22Ben Meiselas:But yet Kamala Harris in this reweighted, in this weighted sample, get this, she wins by eight amongst the sample that voted for Trump by one. So the good news is Kamala Harris, for her, wins the 24 election.

3:34Ben Smith:The bad news is it's actually 2026, so it doesn't count for her. What about, though, the 2026 midterms when we're talking about Trump voters and then also Harris voters?

3:44Ben Meiselas:OK, so you see this. And as John was laughing about, the fact is the 2024 election is good, gone, goodbye. But it has a massive impact, this voter sentiment on what may happen later this year. Why do I say that? Because let's take a look at the vote for Congress. And this is very important. All right. 2024 Harris voters. They vote for the Democrats on average by, get this, 89 points. The Trump voters mostly stick by the Republicans, but by a significantly smaller margin, by 83 points. This means that the Democratic base that voted for Kamala Harris is sticking with those congressional Democratic candidates to a much greater degree than those Trump voters are sticking with the Republican candidates for Congress.

4:24Ben Meiselas:And that is why what you're seeing on that generic congressional ballot is Democrats leaping ahead by this point by about five points, because at least at this point, the Trump voters are not sticking by the Republicans as much as the Harris voters are sticking by the Democrats. Yeah. And these numbers may not look that different, but this five points, which is roughly what that is, that really could be hugely important come November. This is people who did vote in 2024. What about those perhaps who did not? OK, so part of the equation, right, is that the Harris voters are really sticking with those Democratic candidates to more so than the than the Trump voters are sticking with the Republican candidates.

5:01Ben Meiselas:But it's more than that. It's also people coming off of the sideline. OK, voters choice for election for the 2026 congressional elections. If they didn't vote in 2024, look at this. Democrats are winning that vote by a significant margin by 16 percentage points. So you add on to that. And you add on to that, you add on to that the independent voters who are overwhelmingly swimming, swinging away from Donald Trump. And the question is why? And I think one of the I think we know the answer. But I think one of the great articles that came out recently was from Semaphore by Ben Smith, host of the Mixed Signals podcast and co-founder and editor in chief of Semaphore.

5:40Ben Meiselas:how Trump's politics return to earth. They identify some of the main factors here in Donald Trump's fall right now. Real videos, the ICE, Border Patrol, Gestapo videos that people are capturing of Trump terrorizing and this Border Patrol terrorizing the people in this country. The Epstein disaster, obviously, the coverup of the Epstein files, the continued coverup, and Donald Trump claiming he's vindicated while there are lots of people in his regime who are mentioned and certainly doesn't seem like vindication would be putting it lightly. And the American people are horrified at what they're seeing and rightfully so.

6:16Ben Meiselas:And Trump's attempt at capturing the media really hasn't gone as planned. I mean, yeah, we see what's going on on CBS. Obviously, you have Fox and other media bending the knee, but I think you have independent news also rising and people are getting their information from places like the Midas Touch Network, like Semaphore and other places. So let's bring in Ben Smith. Ben, it's great to see you right there. I showed you what was going on in Dusseldorf, but I didn't need to show you in Dusseldorf what's going on right here in Priorea. What's happening in the United States is something astonishing.

6:49Ben Meiselas:And I know you as a reporter, political observer for so many years. I mean, this is, you know, there's definitely something going on right now, which is why you wrote the article that is not hyperbolic, I don't think, to talk about Trump really descending right now, as Enten says, to new lows. What do you make about it?

7:12Ben Smith:Yeah, I don't think Trump is going to win the Dusseldorf mayoral election this November. But more broadly, the thing about Trump is he is this bizarre political phenomenon who seems to play by none of the rules that we grew up thinking about how politics works. And when he arrived on scene, everybody said he was going to lose and he won. And yet at the same time, there are these other periods where he's behaving exactly like any other political figure and actually having the first year of a presidency feel like this massive sea change in the direction of the country in which the president has absolutely reshaped everything.

7:54Ben Smith:And then you get to the second year and that all collapses is like the most familiar pattern in American government. And, you know, Trump's numbers are somewhat worse. I think in the polling, Nate Silver has a little worse than Biden's were at this point of time, a little worse than his own numbers were eight years ago, which is, you know, pretty bad, but within the norms of the second year of a president bad. But, and I think one of the really interesting things is how much of what we thought was happening last year kind of turns out to be wrong. I mean, I think there was this idea that we were post-truth specifically that kind of the combination of these hyper-partisan social media environment and AI was going to mean everybody would live in this kind of closed bubble and nothing would crack through that if you didn't like the reality, you saw somebody who'd make you a video showing a different one.

8:43Ben Smith:I just don't think that's really happened. I was worried about that, but I think particularly around the ICE stuff, what broke through was the reality of these videos. and it broke through, including to the White House, which is now pulled out of Minneapolis. I don't think anybody thought, oh, the big story of 2026 is going to be real videos on social media, which just pursue change everybody's minds about reality. I think that was in a weird way, kind of an unexpected plot twist. And that to me is actually in some ways the thing that everybody he got most wrong. The idea that Trump had created this new epistemic universe.

9:21Ben Smith:Uh, you know, I think we, we, we often overrate the power of our, of our politicians. Right.

9:27Ben Meiselas:Well, he was certainly trying, um, you know, and when we saw the real videos, whether it was Renee Nicole Good, Alex Preti, or the countless others, it followed a repeated pattern. And it's interesting that we're recording this on the day where Trisha McLaughlin announces her resignation or that she's departing. They claim this has been in the works since December, but who the hell really knows with them. But the pattern is Trisha McLaughlin, Kristi Noam, whoever, they come out and they say, this is a domestic terrorist. They try to bend the reality of what it is. And then that's reported as first as the truth.

10:07Ben Meiselas:And then the video comes out and then different angles of the video come out. And then people are like, yeah, but you just said that we're watching the video. And then they go, yeah, but that's not really what happened in the video. And then they kind of, and I think this is what you talked about in the article as well. They then had to basically like with the Preti video, somewhat walk it back and say, well, now we're doing an investigation and then it falls into the ether. But they've tried to bend the reality of what's happening. Don't you think, Elise?

10:38Ben Smith:I think people did think it was working. I think that's the perception of that first 100 days, the flooding the zone, the shock and awe. That magic, whatever it was, has just totally worn off. I think the Trump people, to some degree, have persuaded themselves that they could shape reality, that they could, particularly on X, just reshape people's perceptions of what was actually happening. It reminds me so much of the Bush years. There was this famous line that the Bush administration gave, I believe, to a GQ reporter that they were, that the power of the United States was such, the Bush administration, that they could reshape reality.

11:16Ben Smith:They didn't need to respond to it. And I do think that the best analogy right here is for, at least in my own experience covering politics, is this just feels so much like 2006 when you had the Iraq war, which had been the great initiative of the Bush administration, the fight for freedom, what was what made Bush popular and got him reelected in a certain way, had become so intensely unpopular. And you had this advisor, Donald Rumsfeld, who became seen as the kind of central figure of the administration and who resigned the day after the midterms. And I don't know if it's, you know, it's not really Trump style to push people out, but I would think there's just enormous pressure on Stephen Miller right now.

11:53Ben Smith:And I don't know if he resigns before the midterms, resigns after the midterms, sticks around. But I think that's, to me, it's sort of that moment where the president put a lot of confidence in one advisor to steer national policy in a direction that's been politically disastrous.

12:09Ben Meiselas:Right. You know, but Bush still had conventional political figures around him who still made conventional political moves, even if they express that kind of bravado. I mean, you know, when Trump was confronted with the fact that Howard Lutnick said he had never been to or never spoken with Epstein because he was so disgusting after one interaction, then, you know, brought his freaking children to the island and then did a business deal with Epstein. And Trump's asked about it. Trump's like, yeah, he brought his family. He brought his kids. As far as I know, and the American people like, yeah, that's the problem.

12:48Ben Meiselas:He brought his kids to the island where the children were sex trafficked. That's the issue of the judgment here. And so you talk about the Epstein files in your article. His handling of that has been so botched and so destructive. And every day it just feels like he's further and further. I mean, obviously he's alienated people who despise him, but even his own base is like, what? You're saying you're vindicated? What are you talking about?

13:20Ben Smith:Yeah. No, I think the Epstein files, one of the really great political mistakes I've ever seen was Pam Bondi and Dan Bongino and Kash Patel. I guess they weren't in on the joke. Trump liked to talk about the Epstein files, like to throw out his mud at his enemies. But also, of course, he knew that he'd been close friends with Jeffrey Epstein for years. By the way, no serious allegation that Trump ever committed a crime. That is not in the files. But the association with Epstein right now politically, it's like an oil spill. You can't get it off you once it's on you. I can only imagine what Trump was thinking when these trusted aides of his went and said, we're going to release all the emails.

14:03Ben Smith:This is going to become the centerpiece of American law enforcement. We're going to divert the FBI and these US attorneys from immigration cases, from everything else to redact Epstein files when of course Trump was going to be all over them. Of course he knew that. He'd known Epstein for years. They were friendly. That was widely reported before he ran for president. It was all over the tabloids. And so just an unbelievable kind of unforced error by his team to kind of totally derail, I think his second term by just dropping this giant bucket of allegations basically on Trump's head. And he can't really say, I'm going to fire anybody who has a connection with Epstein because obviously Trump had a closer relationship with Epstein than Lutnick or than anybody else here.

14:48Ben Meiselas:You know, you mentioned there that there's, you know, regarding the Epstein files, that there may not be anything in the files that there certainly are lots. Let's be, I think there are lots of allegations that are made against Donald Trump in the files that were never investigated by the FBI and DOJ. I mean, we see the allegations there, whether they're corroborated or uncorroborated, they were never investigated. And I think a lot of people have concern about that. But look, I think what people are recognizing. Well, let me, I just, I actually just, for what it's worth, I disagree with you on that.

15:21Ben Smith:I mean, you think the Biden justice department participated in a years long coverup of Donald Trump's crimes. I think these are, you know, this huge dump of files that were probably, they were part of one of the biggest investigations in American history. And the reason nobody got indicted is because they couldn't find anybody to indict. Well, I think that there was an active.

15:37Ben Meiselas:This is me.

15:38Ben Smith:I realized this may be a dissenting view.

15:40Ben Meiselas:No, well, look, I appreciate dissenting views, but let's, you know, I think it's a, I think it's a healthy debate to have. So, you know, one of the things that I think is important is this undisputed fact. And you could push back if you think it's true or not. Mar-a-Lago, was it a site where child sex trafficking took place, like true or false?

16:04Ben Smith:I mean, I just, I mean, I guess I think that they're just the allegations being thrown around the Epstein files. You've just got to really root them in evidence. And I just see no reason to believe that the F that the Biden FBI was involved in an extensive cover up of crimes at Mar-a-Lago. That just seems unlikely to me.

16:20Ben Meiselas:Well, I mean, I think that, you know, I mean, Virginia Giuffre was somebody who was at Mar-a-Lago, who was, you know, sex trafficked when she was underage. And there was the ongoing case in the appeals against Ghislaine. And then Donald Trump has been found civilly liable for sexual assault. Right. Yeah.

16:37Ben Smith:I feel like you're trying to turn me into Donald Trump's lawyer here, Ben. I'm not, I'm not trying to turn you into, I'm not trying

16:42Ben Meiselas:to turn you into his lawyer. You know, I, I just, you know, to me, there's a lot, you know, no matter whether it was Biden, whether it was, uh, you know, Trump won, whether it was Obama, where it was George W. Bush, you know, I, I, I'm not trying to turn you to any, I, I just think that there are a lot.

17:00Ben Smith:No, no, but I think, I think we can probably agree that like the people around Trump really should have known better than to unseal this particular Pandora's box, which just flew right into their own faces and just really an incredible way.

17:13Ben Meiselas:Well, you know, I think, um, you know, I think that they have a lot of explaining to do. I don't think Lutnik's explanations are great. I don't think the fact that Steve Bannon was having all of these conversations, you know, was great. You know, I think that it was, it raises a lot of serious questions and, and look, I think that the American people, you know, are looking who's in control now, who's the people saying, release it. They're the ones, There's a lot of documents that haven't been released. And I think we'll just, we'll leave it at there's a lot of questions that need to be answered.

17:44Ben Smith:Yeah. And I think there are questions that, I mean, I think partly because Trump genuinely, admittedly, publicly had this friendship with Epstein, it just becomes, it's just so hard for him to ever disentangle from this. I mean, it's just a sort of unsolvable political problem for him, I think.