


Whether Donald Trump has “lost his political touch,” focusing on AI/data-center politics, tariffs, the Iran war, and signs Republicans may be drifting away from Trumpism ahead of upcoming elections.
Greg Sargent, staff writer at The New Republic and host of the Daily Blast podcast. He’s described as a politics and policy reporter.
Trump is tone-deaf to public concerns about AI and data centers, despite using federal agencies to facilitate AI data-center development while weakening oversight. His worldview is “repudiated” by the public on core pillars (America First, mass deportations, tariffs). Republicans are staging “Trumppalooza” because Trump hasn’t been a success, especially hurting his base via tariffs and the Iran war. Trump misreads cause-and-effect (trade, inflation, interest rates), and may be insulated by advisors.
Trump’s AI “strong and smart, high IQ president” post; claims about EPA/Justice involvement in AI oversight; tariffs hurting farm/rural America; polling showing 56% of likely voters oppose Trump on the Iran conflict; CBS-linked inflation/war connection; MAGA Inc. super PAC with a reported $400M war chest drawing small donors away from GOP candidates.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes.
Discussion about Trump's views on AI and public concerns.
“I think of Greg as a politics and policy guy.”
Analysis of the GOP event and Trump's political strategies.
“I am always looking for ways to elevate our daily rituals and the Kohler Smart Toilet is proof that design changes everything.”
Explore how recent economic indicators relate to Trump's policies and voter sentiments.
“There are all these data points, though, that Americans can see, right?”
Analyze the challenges faced by the Republican Party in relation to Trump and his influence.
“So I think it's important to break out how Republicans are going to deal with Trump basically going forward.”
Explore how Trump's unique political style has shaped Republican loyalty.
“And by the way, we should add here that Donald Trump has encouraged that.”
Discuss the contingent factors contributing to Trump's past election outcomes.
“Like there is a way to look at the conversation you and I have been having to look at some of this data and say, this is hopium.”
Wrap up the conversation with final insights from Greg Sargent.
“Greg Sargent, thank you so much for coming on.”

Get the gist, explore an idea or ask about something said.
On What Next | Daily News and Analysis, what are the key points of this episode?
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.
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1:00When I got ready to interview Greg Sargent, I did not think we'd be starting with AI. I think of Greg as a politics and policy guy. He writes for The New Republic. He hosts the Daily Blast podcast. Then, this weekend, the big AI CEOs called for an industry-wide slowdown. And as he is wont to do, Donald Trump posted through it. On Monday, before I came in to talk to you, the president posted, the only control or guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart, high IQ president. And the USA has that in spades.
1:41Greg Sargent: Well, it's interesting because Trump has been sort of sneeringly dismissive of community concerns about AI data centers. In fact, he said something along the lines of communities that resist data centers will end up poor and backwards. Whatever you think of Silicon Valley, it is clear that Americans are wary of AI. And so the public outpouring against data centers in particular, and I think data centers are a proxy for AI for a lot of people in these communities. That public outpouring shows how out of touch with everything on this particular debate Donald Trump is. And so it would be good to have a president who's smart, but we don't have one now.
2:28Greg Sargent: the thing about his position that i find so baffling is that he's actually using the federal government in many ways to facilitate the development of data centers for ai and many communities and this has sort of eluded the discussion like he's using the environmental protection agency to weaken oversight and his justice department is even getting involved and so So, you know, I think what the public really wants is a president who's going to use presidential power and work with Congress to make sure that the development of these things and the development of AI more broadly is done in keeping with the public interest and not in keeping with his oligarchic pals, basically.
3:11If you look at this in a political lens, it does seem a bit tone deaf, right? If you have like 40 % of American adults saying AI has a negative effect on society and you are correct in thinking of data centers as some sort of proxy for a lot of that nervousness, it just seems like Trump is fundamentally misreading some political moment.
3:35Greg Sargent: But Donald Trump hasn't thought for two seconds about either the dangers that AI poses or why communities might not like the data centers that power them. And so that failure to think through any of this bleeds right into the political tone deafness. And in other words, he essentially isn't willing to speak to the concerns of communities, let alone act in accordance with those concerns, precisely because he can't even understand what they're thinking in the first place. He's not able to think much about anything. And so, you know, his inability to say to himself, well, are people worried about AI and data centers for a reason?
4:17Greg Sargent: Maybe I should figure out why they're worried about it. I mean, I'm president. I have a responsibility to sort of think through how the American public is processing big events like this one. But he's not willing to think about that stuff. Well, that's really the reason that we wanted to talk to you is what seems to be some increasing daylight, if you want to call it that, between where the president is and where Americans are on a whole range of issues. Obviously, it's not just AI. Tariffs, his ballroom, kind of surveillance in general. And we are barreling toward a very significant election.
4:58And it makes me wonder how long he can get away with ignoring what voters want.
5:04Greg Sargent: Well, what I've been saying lately, and I've said this in a number of pieces at TNR.com, is that in many ways, like the main pillars of Trump's whole worldview are being widely repudiated by the public. America first, mass deportations, protectionism via tariffs. All of those are deeply unpopular. And that's really striking. I don't know that we would have been able to predict that just a year and a half or, you know, a year and three quarters ago. In fact, I was dreading something very different from that happening. But he, I think, is incapable of imagining that his worldview is toxic and failing.
5:46Greg Sargent: And so there's a drift on not just on issues, but on the core pillars of his whole worldview.
5:57Today on the show, has Trump lost his political touch? I'm Lizzie O 'Leary, in for Mary Harris, and you're listening to What Next? Stick around.
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8:51I want to back up a little bit and take this piece by piece. So let's go back to last week to this Trumpapalooza. People like to call it the GOP's midterm convention, which is not really a thing, but OK. Did you watch any of this?
9:09Greg Sargent: I did. What part would you say was for the GOP and what was for Trump? At the center of that entire event and sort of at the center of MAGA psychology right now is this enormous contradiction. The festival is designed to push the storyline that Trump has been this smashing world historical success on every front. Yet, as every person who's at that thing knows, and every reporter covering it knows, and anyone, the few people who watch that on TV know, the very reason that they put the damn thing on is because he hasn't been a success, right? The very reason they put it on is to come up with some way anyway at all of motivating voters who picked Donald Trump in the last election.
9:58And because they face a major problem in the midterms, right, which is that, you know, it's not just that in midterms, turnoff falls off for the president's party because the president isn't on the ballot, though that's important. It's also that in unique ways, Donald Trump's agenda has directly hurt his own base in any number of ways. And so they're absolutely desperate to come up with some way to get these people to come out in the midterms. And this Trumppalooza is all about that. But you wouldn't need to be doing this if he had been a success. That's the core point of it all. And if you know, like, there's no acknowledgement of what we all know, which is that the tariffs have absolutely really hurt farm country, have hurt rural America.
10:45Tariffs are attacks on consumers.
10:47Greg Sargent: Yes, tariffs are attacks on consumers. They're not 50 billion trillion dollars coming into this country from other countries. They were paid by working and middle class consumers. That's who put that money into that kitty. Right. Basically, the costs were passed on to them. There's no acknowledgement of any of that. There's no acknowledgement of the fact that even in some red parts of the country, there's serious opposition to his deportation agenda. And there's no real acknowledgement that the Iran war is driving up global costs in ways that are hurting his own people. And so the core contradiction at the center of MAGA, which is that every Republican is required to pretend he's been a world historical success, even as they all are going through a whole exercise designed to compensate for the fact that it's been an utter failure, is, I think, the story.
11:40Well, I want to talk about some of those policy things because you highlighted the tariffs and you also highlight the war, which has never been popular. The sort of latest timeline estimate on when it might end was Trump promising reporters that the war would end immediately after the midterms. But the Wall Street Journal is reporting that, you know, some of his advisers, Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, are warning him that it could go on. Do you think Trump thinks it's almost over? Is he just saying stuff? Like, how do you piece that out?
12:15Greg Sargent: So that's a tough question because it requires getting in his head, which is a hard thing to do for obvious reasons. But as far as I can tell, he is very, very susceptible to advisors who are telling him that he has basically won this conflict. That's what all the reporting seems to indicate. I don't think he actually listens to or potentially might not even hear people who are saying the contrary. I mean, remember going into this thing, he was getting all kinds of warnings from the Joint Chiefs and some very senior significant people that what happened in Iran actually could happen. They were telling him, sir, you know, there's the Strait of Hormuz.
12:59Greg Sargent: There's a reason that people hesitate before doing what you're about to do. They're going to close it down. It's going to hurt the global economy. It's going to drive up prices. He was told all those things. And this, I think, is the essence of the Trump mentality, really. He doesn't hear that because he's absolutely convinced on some level that his power is limitless. He thinks of American power as being the same thing as his power, right? Like the state is him and so forth. Right. The Department of Justice is my lawyers. Yeah. And even sort of almost more fundamentally and more psychologically, when he talks about American power, he's talking about his own omnipotence.
13:38Greg Sargent: Right. And so I don't I think right now what he tells himself, in essence, is Iran is on the I've destroyed them. I've won, as he keeps saying. Iran is on the verge of economic collapse, which, you know, I don't really know how much we do know about that. There may be something to that. So he's now saying that after the midterms, this thing's going to end because the story he's telling himself is that Iran is only holding on by a thread in order to get through the midterms without surrendering. There are all these data points, though, that Americans can see, right? Like they can see news about the war.
14:15They can see the consumer price index rise. They can see that gas prices are very high. And the one that I have been thinking a lot about is they will see some sort of decision from the Fed, the Federal Open Markets Committee meets this week. They will have some sort of announcement on the 16th. And it makes me wonder, like, oh, does Trump have his captive Fed that's going to do what he wants? Or is the Fed looking at the bond market, at the stock market and thinking, actually, maybe we should raise rates? So just before we get to that, I want to cite some polling from CBS News from over the weekend, which goes to the points we were just making and you were just making about the Iran war.
14:59Greg Sargent: CBS News asked likely voters nationally if they would vote for a candidate who either opposes Trump on the U.S.-Iran conflict or supports Trump on the U.S.-Iran conflict. 56 percent of likely voters say they will vote for a candidate who opposes Trump on the conflict, on the war. Only 32 % say that they will vote for someone who supports that. So we now know that the American public is, you know, really directly connecting the dots between Trump's decision to go to war and the impact that it's having on prices, which, by the way, we should stress is an unusual thing. It's not typical for voters to really see a very clear link between actual presidential policy and what happens with the economy.
15:51Greg Sargent: Generally, the political science tells us that voters will just hold the president responsible whether or not. This is the Ray Fair hypothesis. Right, exactly. Yeah. For my dorks listening. they'll vote against the president if the economy's bad, and they'll vote for the president if the economy's good, regardless of whether there's a connection. What's unusual about this situation is that, you know, and presidents are often unfairly blamed or unfairly credited for the state of the economy. But here's a situation where the link is clear. Trump was essentially left an economy which wasn't perfect, but the economists called it the, you know, the envy of the world, right, after the post-COVID shock.
16:33And he set about wrecking what he had been bequeathed, right? Like, so tariffs, Iran, and ICE, all those things are, you know, inflationary. And I find it just very striking that you've got this large, large majority that just wants members of Congress who will stand up and stop the war, basically. It's unusual that it's that crystal clear, I think. Well, this also brings me to the Federal Reserve, though, because if they are looking at all these inflationary pressures, classically, in that moment, a Fed should raise rates. And yet you have Trump's kind of handpicked Fed chair. And we certainly know that the president is a low interest rate guy.
17:19What does he do if they do raise rates? He's going to freak out. Yes, he is absolutely going to freak out. I think it's interesting to think about the psychology of this as well. I think Trump sort of thinks to himself like, you know, basically a certain direction on a graph is good and another direction on a graph is bad, right? Like, so he looks at something that shows the stock market going up and he just says, he touts it because it's a line going up on a graph under his presidency, right? And he just sort of thinks of it as strength and power and, you know, we're booming, we're rolling. And so I think the same same thing is true with interest rates, but sort of in reverse.
17:58He sort of says to himself, you know, people don't like paying interest. If interest rates are low, everybody feels, you know, better. This is in his head, right? And, you know, I'm winning. I don't know that it's more complicated than that because he doesn't seem to connect interest rates with what actually happens in the real world, right? I mean, which is fascinating. You'd think that someone who has dealt with kind of buildings would, but fair. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing that's really a puzzler about Trump, right? Because he has acted in the world, right? And so if you think about like the reasons low information voters picked him in 2024, right?
18:42It's basically, you know, that's the guy on TV who fires people. He builds big things in Manhattan, which is, you know, the real estate capital of the world or whatever. I'm not sure that's true, but a lot of people, I think, in the United States think it's true, right? And so there is a genuine perception that has reached very deep into the culture of Donald Trump as somebody who gets big things done in the world. And it becomes very puzzling when you run up against his inability to understand some of the most basic things about trade, about interest rates. I don't know how to account for that, really.
19:24I think maybe he's very subject to manipulation. And what we're seeing now, like the people who thrive in there are people like Stephen Miller, who really know how to press his buttons in very kind of mysterious ways. And so that, I think, is the only way to understand his failure to kind of piece together
19:45Greg Sargent: their basic cause and effect with his undeniable acting in the world. So let's take all these things and put them together. The Trump-a-palooza, the polling. Does Trump still have the juice? So I just want to go back to that original point I made, which is about the three pillars of Trumpism. Because I don't think about it as sort of a juice in some kind of holistic sense. like there's one thing called juice. You know what I mean? When he won in 2024, there was a certain pundit interpretation which held that his right-wing nationalism tapped some sort of authentic sentiment in the country, right?
20:31Like on some level, I mean, remember when, you know, pundits were essentially talking about how people were doing the Trump dance in the end zone, athletes were doing it, pop stars were, you know, saying nice things about him. You know, it looked right after the 2024 election as if the whole culture had moved toward Trumpism in some sense, that, you know, that there was this kind of right wing populist nationalist spirit in the country that he had brought to the surface. And I think that was always wrong, right? Like there was never that thing. So in a sense, there was never actually juice. You see what I mean?
21:08And in a moment, it all collapsed very fast. As soon as the emperor was revealed to have no clothes right at the outset, as soon as ICE people started shooting people and pulling grandmas out of, you know, buildings, soon as, you know, the tariffs started driving up prices, his approval really sunk very fast. And what I take from that is that the election of Trump wasn't actually a cultural moment in his favor. It was just a reflection of inflation and post-COVID shock, basically. And so I don't know that he ever had the juice. Right. Like a lot of things had to line up for him to get elected a second time.
21:45And it was a remarkable comeback, no question. But a lot of luck was there, I think. And so the perception of Trump having juice was a creation, I think, of the punditry, really, and of the political classes. I don't think he ever had it.
22:02We'll be right back after a quick break.
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24:02So I think an important question here then is what that means for the Republican Party. Like even if we set aside the national electorate over somewhere else, you still have a Republican Party that is trying to figure out what to do with their president, their figurehead, the person who, frankly, the party has been shaped around for the last decade in many ways. So I think it's important to break out how Republicans are going to deal with Trump basically going forward. And I guess one question I have for you is how many Republicans are still putting their weight behind Trump? Candidates, folks in elected office, how do they look at this situation?
24:48So it seems to me that they're kind of caught in a bit of a tension, don't you think, Lizzie? Like, on the one hand, they have to show up at Trumppalooza and they have to say that Trump was the stupendous success and that he's completely owned his enemies and he's defeated everybody and he's the greatest, you know, leader in world history and so forth. But then that runs into the problem, which is that, you know, Trump's collapse among independents has been extraordinary. By the way, I really think that's an undercover story in this country. Trump's collapse among independents. It's just amazing.
25:23If you start to look at the polls on a regular basis and look at his numbers among independents, including in places like Texas and Iowa, it's shocking. I mean, you know, as Trump himself would say, you've never seen anything like it. Each Republican is trying to figure out their own way of managing these tensions, right? Like they've really, Susan Collins, since she's in Maine, which is a very tough state for Republicans, except for her historically, you know, she's been kind of permitting herself to go a little further than other Republicans will. But you'll note that a lot of candidates in some of these Midwestern states that are directly impacted by Trump's trade war with Canada are coming up with ways to say that Kansas, like Wichita is the home of bombardier.
26:11Yeah. Yeah. Wichita, the home of bombardier, which Trump threatened to completely cut off sales in the U.S. from, but also places like Michigan and Iowa and, you know, where there are competitive House races and competitive Senate races as well. You've got Republicans figuring out a way to somehow support the trade war with Canada, even though there's no way the voters in those states are for that. Okay, so this is where I want to talk about a piece you wrote that I found really interesting that talks about the money behind all of this, where you have something called MAGA Inc. And I feel like you should explain that because I think it's really important to show where the small dollar contributions are going, whether they are going to the president or whether they are going to Republican candidates.
27:03Yes. Well, James Comer, who is, you know, a senior House Republican, had a very interesting aside about this the other day.
27:11Greg Sargent: He basically said, we hope that Trump is going to spend from his super PAC, MAGA Inc., on our races. Because at this juncture, he hadn't yet. This was a couple of weeks ago. And there was it was a little unclear what he was going to do. And James Comer actually said, I don't think he meant to say this, but he said that that a lot of the small donor base of the Republican Party is giving to MAGA, Inc., Trump's super PAC, instead of to Republican candidates. And like the fact that the small donor base is giving to Trump's super PAC and not to Republican candidates at the expense of Republican candidates is a really key tell and gets at the dynamics we were talking about earlier, right?
27:53Like, you know, the small donor base of the Republican Party doesn't really like Republicans that much. They like Trump. And by the way, we should add here that Donald Trump has encouraged that. He has said over and over in every which way that Republicans have failed him. So he's basically telling the small donor base of the Republican Party to give him money and not give it to Republicans, which is quite striking. Well, so I think then the natural question is like, OK, well, why haven't they turned on him? Is it because they can look at MAGA Inc.'s, what is it? It's got some astonishing amount of cash on it, a$400 million war chest and say, oh, well, we're hoping he might give us some money or we're scared that his diehard voters are going to reject us.
28:42In some ways, I don't know how they square that circle. So it goes back to that tension we talked about earlier, doesn't it? Like in the sense that, you know, if their problem is basically that Trump voters aren't going to turn out without him on the ballot, the last thing they can do is actively separate themselves from Trump, given that they need these people. Here's the thing that I think maybe a lot of people don't get about the Republican Party's fealty to Trump. It's actually understandable, right? Because Donald Trump was, you know, he cracked a code that Republicans were unable to crack.
29:20And this goes back to the sort of the larger context for all of this. But you'll recall that Barack Obama, after he won in 2012, right, there was a fair amount of dismay among Republicans who thought that they were on the losing end of demographic evolution. There was calls for serious moderation on immigration because they were losing the non-white vote, especially the Latino vote. And, you know, even Mitt Romney, a fairly strong candidate, you know, a solid guy in certain ways, was unable to beat Barack Obama. So Donald Trump came along in that milieu and said, no, the way to win elections, the way to beat the Obama machine is to turn against immigrants.
30:06And as a result, he did. I don't think it's actually that so much, but his unique charisma, his power as a kind of political figure and cultural figure especially, galvanized Republican voters in a way that no Republican was able to since Reagan, right? And so, you know, Republicans look at Donald Trump and say, he figured something out. He knows how to reach these people. We don't. Right. And so you can understand why they've tied themselves to him. He solved a problem that they couldn't solve themselves. So. I guess I want to also challenge our own assumptions, right? Like there is a way to look at the conversation you and I have been having to look at some of this data and say, this is hopium.
30:58This is people who, you know, have been foiled by Trump at every turn, kind of spinning a midterm narrative. Is this, is this hopium? Or do you think the numbers will bear this out in November? So I would contest the premise that he's foiled us at every turn. You think so? Yeah, I think so. Because, and I think that's actually part of the error that accords him juice in a way. if you think about it, like Donald Trump,
31:31Greg Sargent: a lot of contingent events had to line up for 2016 to happen. I mean, there were two terms of a Democratic president. There was a somewhat weak Democratic nominee, right, who had weaknesses that, you know, I think we weren't able to perceive. Right, and then a sort of historic shuffle around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he didn't win the popular vote, right? It was like, you know, I did not expect Trump to win that election. I got that wrong. A lot of people got that wrong. But it wasn't a decisive win by any means. In 2018, conventional midterm patterns assert themselves. Democrats win 40 seats in the House.
32:11Greg Sargent: 2020, Donald Trump goes down. He loses by a significant margin, like an actual big victory, as opposed to the one in 2024, which wasn't big, right? 2022 actually largely has Republicans is underperforming. So for three straight elections there, Trump could not, you know, get his way. His juice was non-existent, right? And then in 2024, a lot of contingent events lined up again for him to win. Now, I'm not trying to take away from his ability. I think he's like the second most charismatic, the second best politician of our time behind Barack Obama, right? Especially in his parts of the country.
32:52Greg Sargent: I would definitely give him that, you know. But even with that, a lot of things had to go his way that were unlikely events. And so, you know, we've had, what, two, three dozen special elections that have swung, I don't know, 10, 12, 14 points against Republicans, you know, relative to 2024. So that's real, those are real findings. Now, special elections are a different electorate from the midterms, but the midterms are also going to be a pretty engaged and pretty educated electorate compared to presidential years. So, you know, are the polls wrong? Like Nate Silver has Democrats up by over eight points in the generic ballot matchup among likely voters.
33:38Greg Sargent: That's getting into wave territory. You've got Calarico leading in a number of polls in Texas, which is unusual. Now, I think the Senate's really hard, okay? I don't want to give anyone any false illusions. Like, it could easily go the other way. Like, every one of those Senate races is on the knife's edge. Republicans could hold the Senate. The House could be a lot closer than we expect. All of that's possible. But most of the actual electoral outcomes we're seeing and most of the data we're seeing does suggest a sizable Democratic win. And that would be in keeping with not just conventional political patterns in American politics, but also with what we've seen under Trump himself.
34:19He has lost. He doesn't always win.
34:27Greg Sargent, thank you so much for coming on. It was great to talk to you.
34:30Greg Sargent: Yeah, thanks so much, Lizzie. Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic and host of The Daily Blast podcast. And that is it for the show. What Next is produced by Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Ducharme, and Patrick Ford. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TVD. Mia Lobel is the executive producer of podcasts here at Slate. Ben Richmond is the senior director of podcast operations. I'm Lizzie O 'Leary. You can find me on Blue Sky, where I am at Lizzie O 'Reilly. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you soon.
35:09Thank you.
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The GOP just held a midterm convention that was centered around the one thing their base seems to really like: Donald Trump.
The only problem is that pretty much everyone outside the GOP is blaming Trump for rising inflation, a foreign war, and a stagnating economy—and, oh yeah, Trump won’t be on the ballot.
Guest: Greg Sargent, host of “The Daily Blast” podcast and a staff writer at The New Republic.
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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Ducharme and Patrick Fort.
Paige Osburn is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TBD.
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