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Sarah Longwell
Sarah Longwell here, publisher of the Bulwark. I'm joined by our wonder, Andrew Egger, sporting his commander's gear and not his Bulwark gear.
- [02:14]
Andrew Egger
Whoa, look at that. The big reveal.
- [02:15]
Sarah Longwell
I'm always in Bulwark gear now. Always. The sweatshirts are so cozy.
- [02:21]
Andrew Egger
The hats are a little too small for me. I need a haircut before I can Before I can effectively wear my Bulwark hat without looking like a little bit of an idiot these days, but I'm going to get there.
- [02:28]
Sarah Longwell
Your hair is long. Your hair is long. Speaking of taking a haircut, Donald Trump's polling is low these days. Trump's been at a low watermark for months. The last time the New York Times had him at 44% was in September. Gallup has flat at 36% two months in a row. Nate Silver has him at 42% without a number above 43% percent since October. And this is in an environment where he's obviously getting crushed. I want to talk about Trump's lousy poll numbers because we are in a flood of bad news. And whenever Trump has lousy poll numbers, always feel like that's a bit of a bright spot, at least for me, emotionally. I like that. So I want to talk first, because obviously, I think what people are most interested in is how are people reacting to the Venezuela action? And the Washington Post did do a poll right after Trump took action in Venezuela, and 37% said it was appropriate for Trump to act alone, versus 63% who said that he should have gotten congressional approval. It's nice that a majority of Americans still believe in congressional approval. It'd be great if the administration did 24% approval for the US taking control of Venezuela and choosing its new government, versus 45% disapproving, which means that there's a lot of people who don't know still, and only 6% saying the US should decide the future leadership of Venezuela versus 94% who. Who say it should be the Venezuelan people. It's pretty good. What do you make of that?
- [03:57]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, so there's a couple important things, I think, to pull out from the Venezuela polling in particular, and one is if you contrast this moment with, say, I don't know, the last time the United States got way, way, way too involved in some sort of, like, international boondoggle, like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it's a little hard to remember now, but early on, those wars were extremely popular. You know, there was actually a true base of, like, mass popular support. There's, like, there's a reason why, you know, Congress waved those war powers resolutions through, why. Why the White House was so eager to go and to. And to, you know, get involved in these wars, which eventually became very unpopular and a dramatic political drag for everybody. But here, now, we are in a similar situation in some ways, where we have decapitated the Venezuelan government to a certain extent. Obviously, there are massive, massive differences. But, you know, we've. We've introduced a Lot of chaos into that region. And we have given ourselves, or the Trump administration has given itself, a dramatically enlarged role in making sure everything goes well down there from now on. I'm doing a lot of economic investment in the area, talking about things like this, and he's starting from a place of extraordinarily little popular support. There is some. You know, the one kind of thing that many Americans do agree with in that Washington Post poll about the president's handling of this is they think, yeah, Maduro is a bad guy and he should face drug charges in America. Like, it's fine that he's on trial. Everything else about the White House's strategy, which, again, like those things that you just mentioned with, with dramatically low approval. These are all things, things the White House is rolling out right now. President Trump has said explicitly that it's gonna be he and the United States who pick who the next leader of Venezuela is. They've blessed Maduro's former Vice president, Delsey Rodriguez, for now, but they've said if we don't like her, out she goes, too. They've said we're not gonna hold elections there until we're happy to do that. These, in a vacuum, are incredibly, incredibly unpopular positions with the American electorate as surveyed in that poll. But the interesting thing is that even given that there is still a massive, you know, gravity that Trump has personally, which. Which is unlike anything sort of that we've ever seen before and maybe that we'll ever see again. He has this longstanding power to yank, you know, his base, even if they themselves were among the people who were formerly saying, we don't like this, we don't like this. We don't want this to happen to. Immediately after he does it. After it happens, he will. They. They will then start telling pollsters, you know, actually, we're like, a lot more in favor of this than we used to be. So there was a. A y. YouGov poll that just came out. YouGov's interesting. It's not like the most reliable pollster out there, but they do a lot of good temperature checks because they're always in the field. They're always doing these, you know, snapshot polls. So they had a snapshot between December 20th and December 22nd, basically saying, do we. Do you think we should get militarily involved in Venezuela? Very few Republicans say we should.
- [07:02]
Sarah Longwell
I've got it right here. Yeah, just the poll you're referring to. It says three weeks ago, only 43% of Republicans say they depressed approve of military action. Against Venezuela. But not to preempt your point, I assume that you mean that last week then, 53% of them did. And then in YouGov's latest poll, conducted after the Maduro strike, 78% of Republicans said they approved. So.
- [07:24]
Andrew Egger
Astonishing.
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Sarah Longwell
Yeah. More than One of the Republicans, 35%, changed their mind on the question after Trump went in.
- [07:30]
Andrew Egger
35% in three weeks. Completely flip. I mean, obviously it's not exactly the same people, but it's a representative sample. 1 in 3 of all the Republicans had one opinion about military interviews, intervention in Venezuela then and a different one now. And so I think a lot of the time we, we sort of talk about, like, Trump is doing all this incredibly unpopular stuff, you know, and it's like, it's obviously not good for him. It's not improving his very bad approval ratings, but it's not exactly eating into that base either. You know, he has that, that insanely like, ironclad kernel of support. Who even, even on the stuff that's supposed, you know, in kind of the popular imagination, the stuff that motivates the MAGA base at the deepest level, like not getting really involved in new foreign conflicts, it turns out to be as plastic as Donald Trump needs it to be for that, that core of the core there.
- [08:18]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, here's the. I don't know if I'm pushing back exactly, but I guess my thought on snap polling is that the reason that after he go get goes and gets Maduro, that he's getting this favorable bump from the same people who definitely say they don't want to go, you know, and do regime change. Is that it? If it looks like a quick smash and grab job, right. Like, they got him, big win, okay, we got a bad guy out of there. That's one thing. It's another thing if we just stay there and it becomes a protracted, you know, protracted adventurism like Iraq or Afghanistan, especially if you see boots on the ground. And so I guess I'm not necessarily confident that if Trump keeps going the way he now is saying he is going, where he says, oh, no, we're in charge, we're going to stay in charge, we're getting the oil out. Like, he is doubling down on those things, there's no evidence that this is going to be just the short term win. And so I'm not sure that it stays that, that high among the base if it's a protracted engagement. Do you agree?
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Andrew Egger
I do agree. For, for, for what it's worth, I mean, I think we're going to, that's going to be an interesting way to stress test this. Right. I mean, on the one hand, it's not like he's making a secret of that stuff now, right? He's, he's saying this is what's happening, this is what we want to do. And now is when we're seeing the bump. You know, like that, that latest poll came, you know, several days after, after the, the initial strike and when, when Trump was in the midst of saying, saying all these things, you could see that sag. But I think that, I think that the thing that that is showing is it's almost like independent of any particular issue set. Right. I mean, it's just like, well, you say you don't like this thing, but what if I told you Donald Trump liked it? And you know, it's not, it's not every Republican, it's not even a majority Republicans, but, but for a way bigger chunk than you would expect. It's, it's. Yeah, well, actually. Well, why didn't you say so in the first place? Right. It's that kind of, that kind of response. I mean, I think that, that does help to explain why even though a lot of these things from, from the Epstein files to, you know, this intervention in Venezuela to, you know, being, being dramatically more pro tech than, than in the first term or whatever, you still have that, that base that is just sort of ride or die.
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Sarah Longwell
Yeah, there's an element to always of or the libs mad. Oh, then I like it. Now are they crying about this? I'm for it as long as they're crying about it. So that, that piece was interesting, that switch. The thing though, that I think a lot of people were really struck by though in the polling was Puck had this exclusive with a project called Speaking with American Men sitting Sam, which people made fun of when it was first out, like, oh, you're going to have a project to understand men and whatever. But people are pretty interested in this most recent poll that, that they came out with, which shows that Trump is hemorrhaging support among the block that helped him kind of put him over the line in 2024, which was young men or men in general. His Favorability overall was 56% with young men a year ago. Today it's 46% and 36% among all young people. Hispanics and young people have been the ones who have abandoned Trump the most in this first year, just in general. So among the drivers, 78% say it matters to avoid unnecessary wars and conflicts. And they now think Democrats are better than Republicans in this respect by about a five point margin. And only 27% of young men agree that Trump is delivering for people like you. 26% say he's made an effort but didn't deliver. 40% say he talked big but let people like me down. Only 22% agree with the question, do you feel like Donald Trump is fighting for people like you? 50% said no or not really. Andrew, you're a young man. What do you think?
- [12:11]
Andrew Egger
Less and less young. You know, it's, I increasingly am like, do I, do I still get, is it stolen valor for me to continue to describe myself as a young man? No, I, this is really interesting, right? I mean it is, it is, it is kind of an underappreciated fact about the 2024 election that like this, this very kind of like personal connection question between Trump and, and young men in particular was like humongous for him. Right? I mean you go back to the, like Kamala Harris is for they, them but Donald Trump is for you. The ads that were so effective, not because like trans policy in particular is like actually motivating so many because of what that poll question that you just mentioned gets at that. I think that Donald Trump is the kind of person who is actually much more attuned to the grievances and the problems that I have and the obstacles that I face in my life than the prevailing sort of lib elite consensus is or whatever. And so I'm going to go out and I'm going to pull the lever for Donald Trump. That was a lot of the kind of emotional calculus for young men there. Some of those young men, obviously there are a number of young men who, who belong to kind of the former category we were just talking about. You know, there are young men in the MAGA base. But, but for a lot of people these were, these were Trump or for a lot of these voters, they were kind of Trump curious voters who, who went for him in the end, who, who, who have now after a year of it plainly continued to, to sort of abandon him in, in greater and greater numbers. And the amazing thing about, about those numbers to me is that it just, it just really suggests that there he has more room to fall. You know, the fact that he is at, I think you said 46% popularity overall, like approval rating overall with young men down from 56% a year ago. You know, that's a pretty big gap. But when you talk about only 20% or so or a number in the 20s, that is confident that Trump is actually, like responding to your problems or is actually paying attention to the issues that you care about. I mean, that's a pretty significant gap from the 20s to the 40s, right? And so, like you, and this is something we've continued to see, right, is that this is where these, these, these kind of median voter type or these flip flopping type constituencies that were really good for him in 2024. Not only are they, has he lost a lot of ground, but he continues, continues to lose ground with these constituencies in a way that, you know, if you are a Republican pollster who's looking at this stuff and keep in mind that even the status quo is not good for Trump, he's losing elections left and right in this moment. So if you're a pollster who's looking at this stuff, you need to find a way to stop the bleeding. You need to say, look, these midterm elections are coming up, something needs to change here. But we have no evidence that Trump is really doing much of that at all. He's kind of triangulating for, you know, trying to get the easy popular wins. Instead, it's what we've been seeing. It's more military adventurism in Venezuela, for instance. It's more issues where, yeah, he can get his base to come on side with him. The people who are already bought in. He's not losing them because he still has this kind of amazing supernatural ability to, not supernatural, but this amazing ability to just like get them to go along with him. But the problem is that that does not gain him any ground with these other people, these other constituencies that he actually really does need electorally if he's going to avoid a major shellacking this year and in 2028.
- [15:37]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, I mean, look, health care costs are going up. Prices are not coming down. Trump is still insisting that his tariffs are somehow making us rich and businesses do not feel this way. But your point about it can get worse. I think that absent some big shift, these things compound over time. If we are, because Trump keeps like promising like the tariffs are going to make us rich, the oil from Venezuela is going to make us rich. And I saw for the first year of Trump 2.0 in the focus groups, just a real like, let's, let's wait and see. Give him a minute, give him some time. And I'm already in the new year, actually, the episode that's coming out on Saturday with John Chait from the Atlantic, we go through a bunch of swing voters and they're starting to Shift like they are starting to do, you know, you know, before you were again, people were like mad about the prices. We've heard about that the whole time. But the Trump voters in these groups were not happy for the most part about Venezuela. Like, people are sketched out by the idea that we might. Because people, the, the thing about Iraq and Afghanistan is just like, people have seen this movie before recently. And also like Trump ran on not being this guy, on not doing this thing. And so there's a real sense, again, these are swingier voters. So it's not the base, but they're just like, this is not what he said he was going to do. This is, I don't like this. This isn't what I wanted. And, you know, as ice becomes more aggressive, I just think that there is a lot more room to go sour on Trump. I do not think. I think people sometimes are like, why isn't the bottom fallen out yet? But I think that one of the reasons is that in the first year of a presidency, people often give a president time to do the things they said. You know, you hear from voters like, Rome wasn't built in a day, even though he said he was going to lower grocery prices and then the Ukraine war on day one and all that stuff. They know that that's Trump bluster and not a real political possibility. But they do get fed up and I think we may be starting to, to see more of that.
- [17:51]
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- [18:51]
Sarah Longwell
Okay, Andrew, you had a theory about my Bush line argument that you wanted to raise?
- [18:57]
Andrew Egger
Well, yeah, and you kind of got at it a minute ago, just there, because I, this is just something that I have been sort of noodling on and I wanted to kind of get your take on it because it seems to me that one of Trump's greatest political strengths, like all along has been this insane ability that we keep talking about to get the base to go along with whatever. They're so bought in, they're in for a penny, they're in for a pound. And that has create like that he can get shoved down to about that 35, 40% range based on any number of things. But he's unbelievably resilient. And like, like, even, even after January six, you know, it didn't really dip much lower than that because, because of just the, the extent of their devotion. I have been wondering in recent days whether this thing that is a long term strength of his might actually prove this year to be a weakness where, where the thing that Donald Trump needs to do right now if he wants to recapture his party's chances of doing well this year and in 2028, is course correct, is make some kind of major change on the fundamental building block stuff that, that is, you know, keeping people upset with him. And whether that is, you know, pulling away from these, from these foreign entanglements like in Venezuela, or lifting the pillow off the face of the economy that he's put on it in terms of tariffs and things like this, I mean, make some kind of major, major, major, major sort of course correction. But the problem is that, because even when he does stuff that, that is really unpopular to the American people, so many of his base people who are going to vote for him no matter what, like, even if they were to tell pollsters now, yeah, I hate this, they'd still be voting for him in 2020, 2028, like in 2026. He doesn't need to like continue to convince them of anything, but because that's like that baseline of support in every poll that will never go away. It will never go away. No matter what. He, he like doesn't really feel the heat on himself. Right? It like doesn't matter how many times he kind of like re traumatizes all of those sort of median voter groups like the, the young men that we were just talking about writ large or minority voters, or all these groups that he really does in fact need to maintain these inroads that he's made with Them because he will not see, you know, numbers that dip into like the really concerning levels because of this sort of security blanket that he has wrapped around himself of the base voters. So I think in the immediate term, it's good for Trump that the bottom does not fall out of his support. You're probably not going to see congressional leaders abandoning him in the way that you would if he got, I don't know, 20% national support in public polls or something like that. But in the medium and long term of the next few elections that are going to decide so much, it just actually seems like he is sort of being lulled into a false sense of security by this base that's around him all the time.
- [21:46]
Sarah Longwell
Time. Andrew Egger, with the ten dimensional chess, right, what we want is for Trump to stay just high enough that he doesn't course correct to improve the chances of his party. Okay, I take your theory that's interesting to me. I would say that when I talk about the Bush line and getting Trump to 32%, I want Trump to leave office below the Bush line. I want him to be at the end of his term there. And I, I, look, I don't know, I, I can sort of understand what you're saying. And sometimes I get into my own, like, I'm, I don't want the Supreme Court to rescue him from his tariff policy because I want people to say like, no, this is what you voted for. This is. But at the same time, I also, I would like the government to function. I would like Congress to be involved in decisions about going to war. And so I don't want Trump to run, you know, entirely roughshod. And I do think that dropping public opinion over time is what causes the elite sort of conservatives who hang in there with Trump or a lot of the people who create the permission structures to support Trump to start going. This might be a sunk cost. I might need to start distancing myself from this. And so, you know, I'll have to ponder your question about what it means for the 2026 election. I suspect, though, that if Trump lost 5 points or stayed the same, the 2026 is probably gonna do what 2026 is going to do, because it's always going to be that weird combination of Trump not actually being on the ballot, but still being a big motivator for opposition to him. And I'm not sure that changes whether he's five points lower or not. I think what public opinion does is it is a signal for people to move on from Trump and to start to put real public distance between themselves and Trump, which I think allows sort of Congress to start making decisions to buck Trump, which are already starting. I mean, today we had one of the first big votes where he had five Republican senators say, no, you got to consult us if you're going to do more in Venezuela. And I think those are the kinds of things I want to see the drop in public opinion start to conjure for him. But I, I agree, I guess a little bit in a Machiavel, Machiavellian sense, that I wouldn't want him to get so panicked by public opinion that he starts being a good enough president. Like, that's, but it's a tough, that's a tough thing because I also don't want him to do, like, there are the harms that I think are like, hey, this is what you, what happens when you vote for this. And then there's the harms that I'm like, we don't want this. Like, the ice occupying the streets and elevating the level of threat between citizens and these masked agents are things that I, that I don't want. I don't want Trump having his own paramilitary that, that I, I want Congress to say, no, we're not giving you another half a billion dollars or whatever he's asking for, for his own sort of personal military behaviors. And so I do have a trillion. Half a trillion. Sorry, I'm sorry with the t. Of course we're talking about the military budget here. And so I do want public opinion. It is the, Besides the courts, public opinion is our only check. And so it also, I gotta say, Andrew, it's also a check on sanity and a check on does the country respond to some of this stimuli and say, right, it's not okay. Which we, we need. We need. That, I guess, would be my argument back to you.
- [25:42]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah, no, and I definitely take all of that. I think, I think like, what I, what I have in mind is more just like a, like a, maybe a two glib, like, analytical point about, like, the way this is going to play out. But just for the record, if any of you out there are, are really trumpy reliable bulwark listeners for some reason, I don't know, just, just so you know, you do have my permission to stop telling pollsters that you're in favor of all of this stuff. I would not be personally upset to see his popularity drop. Drop to 15 or 20 or. Why not? Let's go lower 5 or 10%. Why not? That'd be cool. But I But I do, I guess I'm mostly just thinking about, like, the ways in which he has stimuli that cause him to act in specific ways. Right. It's not that he does not care about triangulating for the midterms. Right. I mean, there's been a lot of talk about how, for instance, he's keeping the pro lifers shoved way down there in the corner. He's put them in, don't come up, don't try to do any pro life policy at the federal level that's bad for us in the midterms. Um, and yet there's all this unpopular stuff that, that's because he doesn't care about that, right? Yeah, yeah. And I just think, I just think that, like, I don't know, it's a, it's a tough nut to crack. Like, I think that, that he, he continues to give himself permission to do this stuff in part because he knows that, like, his people will, will rally around him no matter what. So I don't know.
- [27:10]
Sarah Longwell
Hey, speaking of Bush, I, I, I, I had this pulled up because I was doing it for something else, but I. Do you know what President Bush's approval rating was in September and October and November? December of 2021. Can you.
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Andrew Egger
Oh, it was 22,001, you're saying, or I'm sorry, 2001.
- [27:34]
Sarah Longwell
2001.
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Andrew Egger
So right after, right after 9, 11. Yeah, immediately after, shockingly high. I don't know, it was like 80%. Where was it?
- [27:40]
Sarah Longwell
90%. 90%. And then it slowly crept down. But so December, it was at 86% in 2022. Because these were the numbers I was looking for, because I think herbs. 2022, 2002, 2002, he was still throughout that year. He started the year at 84% and ended still at 61% at the end of 2002. And then of course, 2003, he goes into Iraq. But there are moments in 2003 where he is at 70%, 71%. You know, he ends 2003 at 63%. I mean, these are just. So when you think about how much he had to drop to be at 32% by the time he left, a lot of people had to change their minds about George W. Bush. And obviously we live in a very different hyper polarized time that does not allow for swings like that. But I do think that the reason that I talk about the Bush line and having Trump leave office at 32% is that that was, that set the table for a complete shift in the Republican Party. And I think if we're going to have a complete shift in the Republican Party again away from what Donald Trump has taught the party to do and be, which is evidenced more and more by the way J.D. vance is behaving, which is monstrous, then you need Trump to leave. Deeply unpopular. And that is the thing that public opinion can get you, is the need for the Republican Party to do something different. But I will tell you too. But don't before you send me comments that say, sarah, the Republican Party's dead. Don't you say, no, it's never coming back. The one that we knew back in the day, it's never coming back. But there's probably at least something of a healthier version out there, one one could imagine.
- [29:39]
Andrew Egger
Nobody knows what the future of the Republican Party looks like. And I think it's an interesting question. Will, will we will we continue to spiral further into unspeakable horrors that we've never seen before, or will there be some sort of course correction back in the direction of not that. And that's. Yeah, let sign me up for the ladder.
- [29:55]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, I would certainly it'd be nice if one of the two major political parties wasn't absolutely out of its mind. Okay, guys, go hit subscribe to the channel. Follow us on Bulwark, all the places substack. Go become a Bulwark plus member. We'll see you soon. Thanks, Andrew.