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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hello, and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Drouke. President Trump's approval rating now sits just below 40%, according to the Silver Bulletin average. That makes for a good headline, but it's still well above the zone presidents reach when things truly fall apart. Both Bushes saw their approval sink to the mid to high 20s during their time in office, as did Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon. And while approval in the high 30s to low 40s is politically dangerous, it doesn't necessarily herald the kind of sea change that produced the Watergate reforms or the Reagan revolution. For most of Trump's decade in the political spotlight, the conventional wisdom has been that he is sui generis. No matter the controversy, the thinking goes, he will retain a base of support strong enough to keep his approval from falling to the levels reached by America's least popular presidents. In light of the political backlash to the ongoing conflict in Iran, Nate Silver and I took to Substack Live on Monday to ask whether that wisdom will hold in Trump's second term. Today's episode is a recording of that second Substack Live. We also talked about the midterms, the Democrats, and plenty more. Nate even shared when he plans to launch his midterm forecast, plus what Elon Musk called him in their latest unfortunate beef.
- [01:34]
B
All right, here's that conversation, and we're live. Nate, happy Monday. How's it going?
- [01:41]
C
Happy Monday, Galen. It feels like a good time for a catch up, for a chat. You know, it feels like a day to walk around New York a little bit and contemplate the world that we're in.
- [01:51]
B
I suppose. Yes. And we're going to do plenty of that today. I think we've promised folks to talk about Trump, Iran, the polls, the political blowback, and there's plenty to talk about. We will, we'll get to the tweet. But while folks are joining, we also have some more recent controversy to discuss from yours truly. I think it's actually been a minute since you were the main character on Twitter now. X. Back in the day in the 5:30 offices, it used to be like, guys like on Slack people would be like, don't look now, but the boss is trending on Twitter again.
- [02:31]
C
It happened a lot.
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B
Yeah, there hasn't been that much of that in the new X era where like, are you just not being as as much of a shit stir or is it the algorithms that have changed
- [02:43]
C
a little bit less? I think and some of the, you know, oftentimes those pylons came from the left and those people have mostly decamped to blue Sky. So, like, yeah, unlike most.
- [02:54]
B
But you're not on, you know, if you don't want to start something again.
- [02:58]
C
Yeah, it just seems like people who are relatively normal Democratic partisans get hounded off that platform. I'm not a normal Democratic partisan. We're not going to talk about blue sky today. I've written about Blue sky in the past. We're talking about Twitter, I think.
- [03:14]
B
Yeah, look, well, so let me just say I was watching TV yesterday, it was Sunday, just, you know, chilling out, getting ready for the week, and I get an email come through from Silver Bulletin that says social media has become a freak show. And I thought, you know, Nate certainly can't just be realizing that now. But I think it was your attempt to put some data behind why maybe social media feels particularly weird now compared with even, I don't know, say, the beginning of the Trump era.
- [03:48]
C
Look, I think it's kind of on a case by case basis, but I'm somebody who did not particularly like the immediate pre elon iteration of Twitter anyway for the reasons you just talked about now. But the one thing Twitter had going for it before is that all of the world's most influential journalists were there kind of providing free labor to the platform in exchange for the implicit promise of you gain influence. You can link out stuff to the place where you actually work for or monetize that in some way. And like, that conversation's been chased away, I think, in part because of, like, departures from the platform, in part because, like, you know, there's no more blue check marks unless you have more than a million subscribers or sign up. I get one because I do have more than a million followers. I'm not paying for it. I have no problem paying for it, by the way. But, like, it's just very. It's very siloed. Now. Twitter, like, I think in some ways the for you algorithm is remarkably smart about surfacing obscure AI discussions that I might be interested in or obscure discussions or Trump polling.
- [04:58]
B
For me, the for you page knows that I. My actual feed is about politics and data and polls. My for you page, while I don't follow any of these accounts, knows that I actually want just like cynical memes and gays stanning Zara Larson. And it is. You're right, it's pretty smart about that.
- [05:17]
C
Heated rivalry memes. Heated gaming.
- [05:19]
B
Exactly. Heated rivalry content. There you go.
- [05:22]
C
None of that in my feed tell you that much.
- [05:24]
B
Oh, okay, all right, Wait, pop off.
- [05:26]
C
But what's left over so it's like, not even as though, like, the cat turd accounts of the world get, like, all that much engagement. It's just there's no central conversation apart from this low quality arguing back and forth between, like, cat turd and, like, the Gavin Newsom press account. And like, it's quite remarkable how low quality the things that do surface to the top of the algorithm are, right? In part because there are selection effects where if you're somebody who has something interesting to say, then Twitter's probably not the place to say it. There is some degree of monetization, but, like, you know, I see people bragging about, oh, I made, you know, several thousand bucks this month from Twitter. Okay, good. Good for you. You know, I don't get that much for, for my occasional trollish tweets and links that don't really work to the rest of the Internet. But, like, you know, if you actually have something differential, differentiated, say, then you might want to become a streamer or a podcaster or have a substack or go work for the New York Times or the Washington Post or something like that. So you, you kind of have like a selection effect where, like, only kind of mediocre midwit talent is going to want to spend time on the platform. And when you kind of like point this out with the grabby headline, then like, like. So my tweet on Twitter, it has like 10 million impressions and rising. It's been responded to by everyone from Elon Musk who used the R word. I know what my editorial stance is on saying the R word or not. I'm not super greasy.
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B
Wait, you got called the R word by Elon Musk? Yes. How did we not lead with that? I didn't even see that. Would you like to. I mean, you don't have to say the word, but can you quote what he actually said?
- [07:03]
C
It was in a reply. So he didn't dunk on the main timeline, right? So I guess Twitter has this person who's a hand of product name Nikita Bear, and he was kind of making some, like, bullshit excuses about, like, well, we don't actually suppress links. Except there. Here are. Here are five ways I'm paraphrasing, right? We don't suppress links per se, but there are reasons why they tend not to get clicked on. And I'm like, anytime you design an algorithm. And I've built algorithms myself, right? I've built models. You know, human beings design these algorithms, and the algorithms very steadfastly perform the functions that the human being wants. And if downstream from that, you have cat turds, pet photos, getting literally 50 times more engagement than a New York Times linked to a story about, like, fallen soldiers in a rescue mission to recapture fallen soldiers in Iran, then, like, you are not a terribly relevant platform. You are a platform for, like, boomer memes, which is the same direction that Facebook went. In the article, I'm like, I talked about our history at 5:38 and how, like, we launched in 2014 at kind of the very peak of Facebook's influence, as well as Twitter for that matter. And, like, Facebook deteriorated into a very low quality signal for any type of news content for various reasons apart because their algorithm was, I think, really badly designed.
- [08:20]
B
Right.
- [08:20]
C
Also because they wanted to keep you on Facebook. They wanted to maximize time on platform. And Twitter was unique in that it was a place that was open and would link out to the rest of the web. And so people would use it as an RSS feed. People would say, anything that, like, is relevant is going to come across my Twitter feed. And so I kind of use that as my portal. You know, again, I would have days where I never went to Google or never went to the New York Times homepage or Memorandum or whatever else, because, like, if something important was going to happen that was in your universe, it would be based on the people that you follow on Twitter. And now, A, a lot of people have left. B, deprioritizes external links. C, this is maybe the more important part. In some ways, it's very hard to actually get like a chronological feed of the people that you follow.
- [09:06]
B
Right.
- [09:07]
C
The New York Times has 53 million followers. A lot of people have indicated a preference to link or to read what the New York Times has to say. And yet their tweets might get a few thousand views, right? Or, like, you know, tens of thousands or sometimes just hundreds. Right? So, like, it's really, really suppressed. You have to try very hard to, like, actually get, like, a feedback of the people that, like, you chose to subscribe to.
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B
Can we. I want to talk about. Neat. So I remember the era when, you know, I produced the FiveThirtyEight politics podcast for a decade and spent many of those years looking on Twitter to get ideas for stories that we would ultimately discuss on the podcast. And so I'm familiar with how it's. How it was useful and has become less useful. We're also both on Substack now. We are now live on Substack. So we have pretty intimate experiences with Twitter. And we also now have a bias for Substat. But for the 90% plus of Americans who are not at least active on Twitter, what does this mean for their lives or for our politics? Like, can we explain the big picture here now that we've gotten into some of the weeds a little bit?
- [10:19]
C
I mean, on the one hand, it might make things a bit less polarized if you don't have this kind of gigantic mothership that directs the opinion of everybody in the news media.
- [10:32]
B
Right.
- [10:32]
C
You know, Twitter used to be called like the assignment editor for, for the mainstream media, so there's less group think. On the other hand, like, people get really deep in their rabbit holes. Like, I genuinely think that Elon doesn't believe that the quality that Twitter is surfacing is like, for the most part, total partisan, low engagement quality crap. Right. I think he actually kind of believes some of this stuff. I don't want to get too cute about tying this to like, Iran, but like, to think that like, this war would just go over smoothly like Venezuela, that we wouldn't have problems in the strait of horror movies and this is like the most predictable consequence of all time. Right. Like back when I used to be in high school debate where we would run these things called disadvantages, right. Where if you do this policy proposal, here's a disad and kind of like one of the things that was canonical was like, yeah, if you ever tried to attack Iran, then they'll block oil as trade off Hormuz and maybe cause a global recession, global energy crisis, potentially. The fact that we didn't seem to have any contingency plan to deal with that. And Trump is like constantly on his heels trying to backpedal or escalate, to de. Escalate or whatever else. Like, you have to be in a pretty deep epistemic bubble not to think of that. Right. It's like, not even like, in certain ways, I guess we are getting into
- [11:55]
B
a random Wait, so you're saying. So you're saying that being on Twitter today is the same quality advice that the President is getting from his advisors in the White House. Or like, is that the parallel that you're drawing?
- [12:07]
C
It's a parallel, not a direct. I don't think Trump himself is spending much time on. On Twitter. Right. But it's like a parallel to like, you can kind of get in these rabbit holes where you're closed off from negative feedback and like, and to some extent you can just do things. It's sort of true. I mean, look, people sometimes do make too much of things that Trump does. Right. Because he's very good at hiding the ball. Maybe it's not even deliberate. Right. I mean, he's kind of a chaos agent a little bit. And like, there's a lot of news and like, I think when kind of like Iran first hit the newsfeed, it's like, oh, okay, boy. There's a lot of other stuff going on. Right. This was the same weekend that the Pentagon had gotten in a big fight with Anthropic, for example. So the AI people were, were writing about that. And then, you know, I don't know if it kind of like didn't dawn on me originally that like, this Iran thing could potentially derail the entire Trump presidency, the entire Trump second term potential.
- [13:09]
B
Do you think that's the direction that this is headed? So the last time we, you and I talked about the war in Iran, five days after it started, we had a live show at the Comedy Cellar. And we kick things off by talking about the Democratic and Republican primaries in Texas. Of course, James Talarico had just won that the runoff on the Republican side for Senate is, is still happening, but not going quite the way we thought it would at that time. By, by which I mean that John Cornyn and Ken Paxton are both still in that runoff. But then we moved on to Iran and we talked mostly about how it had started something of a, a civil war within the Republican Party. But amongst like, media elites within the Republican Party, there were like the Megyn Kelly's and Marjorie Taylor Greene's versus the Ben Shapiro's and what like. And that has played out even more. It's blown up even more. But for Trump himself, beyond just the elite media ecosystem, has this gone better or worse or just about how you would have expected when we last spoke five days into the war?
- [14:17]
C
Look, I think if you, it's, it's hard in real time to kind of pause and get in a sense of calm where you kind of like actually try to forecast how things will go.
- [14:27]
A
Right.
- [14:27]
C
Like, I don't think there's any individual element of this that is all that surprising. In fact, the attack itself was not that surprising. They had telegraphed it and kind of soft pedaled it in the media for like weeks ahead of time. But like, look, in the first thing I published about Iran, I said there were three risk factors for Trump, above and beyond. Because, like, the thing about, okay, the US Is engaged in a war. If it doesn't involve ground troops, then people might not be that concerned about it, or retaliatory attacks on American targets. Although both those Things could happen later on, of course. Right.
- [14:58]
B
Because let's remember that Operation Midnight Hammer grew in pop like was very limited, grew in popularity as the months went on. And the same thing ultimately happened with Venezuela. In fact, I think there's an article in the Atlantic today talking about how actually things in Venezuela went quite well. And so at the start there was the possibility that it would go the way that other attacks, I guess, or military strikes by the United States had gone.
- [15:28]
C
Much lower degree of difficulty. Galen. Right. You know, when this is over, I might go out and run a couple miles or a 5k or something. I wouldn't be prepared to run for a marathon. And the analogy that like, oh, I can run a 5k, therefore I can run a marathon, would not, would not hold up very well. Yeah, look, three risk factors. Number one, obviously the effect on global energy prices and the global economy. And by the way, this, it reminds me a little bit of like Covid, where you kind of like see the effect in the rest of the world before it hits the United States. These tankers with oil can take several weeks to reach their destination. And so in some ways the effects are only becoming clearer now. Right. They're worse kind of east and West. The U.S. by the way, if we hadn't made all this progress on a much greater degree of energy independence, then it would be much worse. Right. You know, so that is smart and admirable by our decision makers to like supply most of our own oil. We are now the world's largest oil producer. We are more self sufficient and that helps like a fair bit. But, but still it's all one interconnected market. And a global recession will affect, you know, profits for corporations here and things like that too, as well as like higher gas price. Right. That's like the one big bucket. Right. Number two is the collaboration on the war with Israel I think complicates some of the politics. You know, that one, I kind of tend to avoid talking too much about Israel on Silver Bulletin. Right. You know, it does create complications both on the left and the right. But like number three, I think maybe more important than that is like this is really off brand for a certain type of Trump voter, I think, where, you know, during the first term, until Covid hit, Trump could say the liberal media freaks out about X and Y and Z and P and D and Q and I fire the FBI director and whatever else. Right. But the economy is good, the stock market is up and I haven't started any stupid wars like the last 20 presidents before me have Right. And now none of those promises are true anymore. I don't know what the constituency was for this war. Right. I guess there were some neocons left over from kind of like the Bush era. But the war started out with negative approval. And you're right that people should be careful about hypothetical polling. But like, in some ways, voters were sympathetic to Trump when the global economy tanked because of COVID I mean, he only lost to Biden by, you know, tens of thousands of votes in the swing states. And his approval rating didn't go down that much. Right. During the COVID recession, which was objectively the most severe recession since the Great Depression, appeal rating kind of only moved down by a point or so.
- [18:18]
B
Or the Great Recession.
- [18:20]
C
Well, the, the COVID shock, the one off Covid shock, it only lasted for three or six months. Right. I mean, that was, I guess, the most disruptive economic event in modern economic history. Right. The duration is much less, the total area under the curve, much less than the Great Depression, by the way. The world economy is quite resilient. You know, one of these things that I think we learn as we've been through a lot of tumultuous times in the United States and around the world is like, it's a pretty robust system. People have incentives to like, make things work and keep things working. And you can, like, you can cause a lot of damage to things and cause things to tear away and they kind of have some. I don't know if it's centripetal force, whichever force it is, that kind of brings things back to the middle a little bit and you know, lol, nothing ever matters. It's like a decent heuristic most of the time, but like, it's such a kind of classic lame duck presidential blunder in some ways. Right. It's like not any of these extraordinary ways. And of course you can debate like, is Trump usurping congressional power? And he is. Right. But also that's nothing new. Exactly. It's such a classic kind of second term blunder to get in over your head in the Middle east and to be getting bad advice from left, right and center and, or not left, right and center, to be getting bad advice from like Pete Hegseth, I think, and some of the hawks in the Department of Defense, or I should say Department of War, I suppose. You know, you know, I don't know. You sound conspiratorial talking about this. You know, obviously Israel has been pushing hard for this conflict and they've been much more gung ho about it than we have. And Trump is someone who reputationally kind of tends to listen to the last person he talked to, Right. If Netanyahu or whatever is persuading him to this or other, other leaders. But like, it's, it is very off brand in, in some ways for Trump.
- [20:11]
B
I want to talk about the public opinion landscape a little bit because that's often how we judge how big of a blunder something actually is. I mean, we have been through 10 years of Trump doing something us asking, you know, is this going to be the final straw? How much will this move his approval rating? And oftentimes you and I have talked about, you know, 2 percentage point movement here or there. Oftentimes we're talking about movement within the band of, you know, the lower 40s. In terms of overall approval, Trump recently fell below 40% in the approval tracker, your average at Silver Bulletin. I mean, he's at 39.7%, I think, as of today. So it's not a dramatic fall. The war in Iran is also unpopular according to the averages. So Trump's at net negative 17 overall. I think the war in Iran is at net negative 18 overall. On one hand, that is just flat out unpopular. When you compare it to other presidents, when you compare it to performance at the midterms or in presidential elections, that's not where you are if you're going, if you're performing well in the American political system. On the other hand, it doesn't necessarily seem like the bottom has fallen out A La Bush Jr. In, you know, 2006, 2007, maybe it just could take a matter of time. But, you know, let me ask a question that I've asked you plenty. Is Trump just different? Is the way that his support works a little bit different than how support for Bush 1 or Bush 2 or even Biden worked in the sense that it's harder for the bottom to fall out?
- [21:58]
C
Yeah, I probably have a fairly nuanced answer to that. I mean, number one.
- [22:01]
A
And that is the end of today's preview. Head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and catch the full episode. Both the audio and the video are available there. Nate and I chatted for a little over an hour and touched on lots of stuff. Trump's political standing, how that could shape the midterms, and what to make of the current betting market odds showing Democrats slightly favored for control of the Senate in 2026. That just changed within the past week or so. Like I said, head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and catch the whole episode. It's eight bucks a month or 80 bucks a year, and paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes. Can join the paid subscriber chat to pass along questions for us to discuss on the show. And most importantly, we'll make sure that we can continue as an independent podcast, prioritizing curiosity, rigor, and a sense of humor. When you become a subscriber, you can connect your account to wherever you listen to podcasts so you'll never miss an episode. There's a link in the show notes explaining how to do just that. Again, head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber. Hope to see you there.