The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 13 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump’s alarm about the midterms is growing. He just unleashed a long rant about how he will now import diesel from Russia, a desperate bid to defuse prices as an issue. Meanwhile, new reporting shows Republicans in a deep panic about House seats in blood-red territory. And a new focus group of Trump voters shows they’re strongly rejecting one of his most brazenly authoritarian moves: his taxpayer-funded ads lionizing himself in bizarre dictatorial terms.
So is Trump cratering so badly that it’s opening the way for a broader coalition than we thought against corruption and authoritarianism, one that includes right-leaning voters? We’re talking about all of it with political theorist Paul Crider, who argued for just such a coalition in a piece for The UnPopulist. Paul, good to have you on.
Paul Crider: Nice to be here. Thanks.
Sargent: So Trump’s been running this ad that was originally taxpayer-funded. Here’s a snippet.
Donald Trump (voiceover): With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.
Sargent: Paul, that’s textbook totalitarian propaganda, isn’t it?
Crider: Yeah, absolutely. This is Trump standing in front of the American public on the airwaves as a strongman, kind of an “I am the state” sort of dictator. He’s talking about communists and Marxists and fascists.
These are all people that the Republican side thinks are enemies of the state. They’re the enemies within. You know, he’s talking about liberating America as if America is under invasion. All of this is just textbook fascism.
Sargent: So Sarah Longwell of the Bulwark held a focus group of Trump voters in Florida who now disapprove of him. These are the people he really needs to recapture. They were absolutely revolted by the ad.
Dina, a 53-year-old, called Trump “power-hungry.”
Bob, a 65-year-old, called Trump a “narcissist.”
Eddie from Miami said Trump is the one who’s emulating “communist countries and communist leaders.”
And a 63--year-old named Paul called it “nothing but lies,” adding: “I need some Pepto-Bismol.”
What do you make of that one?
Crider: I like the Pepto-Bismol comment. So these voters that Longwell was talking to, these are voters who voted for Trump in 2024. And they’re souring on him now for whatever reason. This is just how the focus group was selected. So these are people who are at least open to voting for Republicans again, and they’re clearly not interested in doing that now.
And they’re now talking about Trump, who they voted for just two years ago, in terms that you might see in Liberal Currents or something like that. They sound like liberals. You wouldn’t think that these are voices that voted for Trump two years prior. They’re using the language of dictators, you know—power, hunger, all of this stuff—comparing him to the very communist regimes that Trump claims to be opposed to.
Sargent: Yeah, and what strikes me about this as well is that in the kind of limited understanding of this election that sort of fills our punditry, it’s all the economy, it’s all prices. Maybe it’s the war, but only to the degree that it’s affecting gas prices. And maybe it’s tariffs, but only to the degree that it’s affecting prices, right?
But here you hear these voters reacting to something different. What you’d call their anti-totalitarian instincts have been triggered. I think that might be the way to think of it. I think that’s a little bit of a cause for optimism, don’t you, Paul?
Crider: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t think that we would be here without the catastrophic economic consequences of the war, of gas prices, of continuing inflation. But this environment, I think, has made it possible for these sorts of voters to start being more open to all of the other reasons why Trump is bad.
Once you are feeling various kinds of pinches in your own life, then, you know, you’re a lot more open to seeing how, yeah, sure, this Trump guy really is corrupt. Like, you know, now they’re hearing news that maybe they weren’t paying attention to before, because they’re upset. They’re already so angry.
And now they’re seeing new information that they just weren’t seeing before, about the corruption, the deals, you know, Trump palling around with dictators. They’re likely seeing ICE raids and all of the ICE terrorism on American streets in a new light, because of the underlying economic factors.
Sargent: Yes, I agree a hundred percent with that, and I think it’s essential. I want to come back to it. For now, there’s another quote in this focus group from a guy named Ramiro from Miami, who said this:
“We need to get rid of all these people. Even if the Republicans don’t win for the next 10 years, it’s probably best to wash these people out.”
Paul, I really wonder how many of these voters have made this leap, right? What we’re seeing here is they’re seeing the truth about Trump, but also, as this guy puts it, he’s starting to understand that this kind of deep rot of corruption and authoritarianism has taken over the GOP as a party.
I wouldn’t want to say kind of straight out that these voters are starting to recognize that the Republican Party is fundamentally an authoritarian party, but it sort of feels like it’s moving in that direction with some of these focus group quotes, right?
I mean, that’s what we want to happen. We don’t want this election to be decided just on prices. We want it to be a referendum on the fascism as well. And so when I see right-leaning voters starting to sort of see things in those terms, I feel a little encouraged. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I do. What do you think?
Crider: No, I think that’s a really good point. If we only win this election on affordability concerns, on the economy, then we’re not planting any seeds for a long-term refutation of this really anti-American authoritarianism.
Sargent: Yeah, exactly. Well, Politico had this striking report saying Republicans are in full-scale panic and bracing for a catastrophe in the midterms. Internal polling shows a slew of House seats deep in red territory are now at risk.
The Republican fear is white working-class voters won’t just stay home—they might actually vote for Democrats. One GOP operative says, “The scary part is we don’t know where the bottom is.” Another one says a lot of Republicans are “scared to death.”
Paul, again, in the limited conventional understanding of this election, that would only be about the economy, but I’m hoping it’s a lot broader. What do you think of those quotes?
I mean, the fears about deep red territory, House seats that have not really been thought of as competitive for years and years and years—that’s really striking stuff, and creates sort of, I guess, an environment where you could see something like a real paradigm shift of some kind. Do you think that’s possible?
Crider: Yeah, I mean, on the quotes, they’re just music to my ears. But there is talk of this election being a realignment. We’ve talked about blue Texas—“Blexas,” as it’s called—for years now. And everyone, you know, Democrats were extremely disappointed in 2024.
But if Talarico wins, if Hinojosa wins the governorship, then there’s a real chance that this is just the beginning for a place like Texas, which has a heavily Latino population, who are now, after this election, after they have learned the lesson that Trump doesn’t just want to deport the quote-unquote bad illegals—no, he just wants to whiten the entire American population and get rid of Latinos in general.
Now that the Latino electorate, I think, is more sort of painfully aware of this, I think it sets the stage for a firmer alignment with the Democratic Party, who is standing up for Latinos’ right to be Americans.
Sargent: You’ve got Democrats across the board speaking a new language of anti-corruption, of anti-authoritarianism, of anti-fascism, really. It’s almost like an anti-fascist language that Democrats are speaking, and they’re kind of making a pretty strong case for pluralism and for economic interdependence with other countries.
I find it really striking that we’re seeing a kind of big politics coming from a lot of Democrats right now. You know, some of them are still playing small ball, but some of them are going big. What do you think, Paul? Are you seeing that?
Crider: Yeah, I am seeing that. And Talarico’s a good example of this, the way that he’s really bringing his Christianity into his politics. And not in the scary kind of way, you know, separation of church and state stuff. No, he’s just being very blunt about the Christian source of his morality, of his ethics. And you see it in Kansas too with Adam Hamilton, who was a pastor for a long time. So he’s not hiding anything about his Christian faith.
So yeah, we’re seeing this moral language that Democrats haven’t always been comfortable with, because I guess they’ve been afraid of alienating, you know, evangelical Christians.
We’re seeing that, and we’re seeing a much punchier liberalism from the likes of Angie Nixon, and from a number of DSA-style or DSA-adjacent candidates like Abdul El-Sayed and Mamdani and AOC and all of these people. So yeah, I’m very encouraged about this. There’s a real thickness, as opposed to the shallowness, the moral shallowness, in Democratic politics these days.
Sargent: Yeah, and not only do you see it with the DSA Democrats, but you see it with the ones who are very, very actively courting the middle of the electorate, very actively courting the voters we’re talking about in this episode—these right-leaning voters who are turned off by Trump and are starting to see that something’s really, really wrong.
So, in the limited understanding of the election that we’re talking about here, what Trump just did on Russia can’t possibly matter to voters. He just reversed U.S. pressure on Russia, announcing that Russia will now supply hundreds of thousands of gallons of diesel to the markets.
Trump said this: “Diesel prices for Americans will be coming down fast. Lower prices for Americans, especially our great farmers, ranchers, and truckers, is my greatest priority. This is a very big and important announcement.”
Paul, you know that it’s big and important because he said so. But putting aside the details, I’m going to go out on a limb and say a lot of the right-leaning voters we’re talking about here won’t actually like this, even though it’s pitched as good for your wallet. What do you think?
Crider: Right, that’s exactly right. If the bottom is falling out of the Republican electorate, the chances in November—then these voters are just primed to see all of these other things that are wrong with what Trump and the Trump administration are doing.
So this new oil deal with Putin is terrible, but it’s of the same piece with Trump’s ads that he’s paying for with taxpayer dollars, right? And it’s also similar to the election bribe, right? Trump promising to pay voters five hundred dollars or whatever it is, you know, if Republicans win.
Voters are seeing through this. Even voters who maybe two years ago voted for Trump, voted for Republican candidates—they are now primed to see that all of this is just flimflam. It’s Trump lying. Like, they’ve always known that he’s a liar, but now his lies are a little bit more real, and they’re a little bit more prepared to call him out on the lies and not put up with them.
Sargent: I want to say one more thing about this Russia announcement. I think that for Trump and some of the more fascistic advisors around him, they really think that there’s this latent majority out there in the United States that is kind of for abandoning Ukraine and kind of for aligning the United States with Russia. Don’t you think that they think that?
And I want to say that I think that’s not at all true. Like, the polls have actually shown real support for Ukraine, and that calculation by Trump and the fascistic advisors around him is really quite disgusting. What do you think about that?
They do think that this sort of thing, this kind of softness with Russia, this kind of—I don’t know—this alignment with Russia has support in the United States among populist voters, or whatever, or anti-globalist voters, or whatever phrase you want to use for it. I think that they are making a very bad miscalculation here. Is that too optimistic?
Crider: Now that affordability is such a crisis, and there are so many other issues that are pinching them in their personal lives, they are better able to embrace their own true values of wanting to live in a free country, right? And to not want to support dictators in foreign countries.
I think most Americans want to see America as a good country, one of the good guys, right? We don’t want to hear about a war where are we the baddies, right? We want to see ourselves as the good guys. And Putin’s a bad guy. He’s always been a bad guy. The American public knows that Putin is a bad guy.
Sargent: And Trump’s a bad guy, and the American public’s figuring that out. I just want to close on what I think is really the essential point you made throughout this discussion, which is that yes, we do need these kind of catastrophic economic conditions for a lot of these Americans as the precursor to this. But once that is happening, it’s opening the ears of a lot of these voters to a new kind of set of arguments about what’s happening right now.
I just want to endorse that and say it’s really essential. I think that’s what’s happening. I think you’re seeing voters potentially all of a sudden listening to Democrats in a way that they might not have before. A lot of credit to some of these Democratic candidates for that, but also the economic stuff had to pry it open.
And the result is that a lot of these voters are hearing new arguments about immigration, new arguments about Russia and Ukraine. And I find that a little bit heartening. I don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves here, but can you talk a little bit about that sort of dynamic, where all these voters are suddenly reachable?
Crider: The lesson that I want Democrats to take away from this is that this is an opportunity. Now is not the time to focus only on affordability and quote-unquote kitchen-table issues. Because voters are opening up their minds about all the other problems, it’s an opportunity to plant some long-term seeds about the kind of vision for the country that we want.
You know, how do we get to a place where voters overall are more open to immigration, and we can have something like a liberal immigration reform? Well, I think that we can do that by planting the seeds when voters are already very hostile to ICE and to deportations.
So I think that we can really seize the narrative over the next two years on this issue in particular, but also the issues of corruption, and just, like, a real full-throated democracy where voting is easy and maybe a little bit more egalitarian.
I mean, now’s the time when we can start maybe chipping away at the problem of anti-democratic institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College. You know, I think voters are going to be more open-minded to that as well.
Sargent: Well, it’s really essential that Democrats try to lay out that big case, because in two years they’re going to be very likely running against the avatar of all this right-wing authoritarianism, JD Vance himself. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Paul Crider’s stuff at Liberal Currents. He writes for that publication.
It’s very good, and it sets forth a lot of this stuff in a very accessible but really thorough and profound way a lot of the time. Paul, thank you so much for coming on.
Crider: Thanks so much, Greg.