Transcript: Trump Rages Wildly at Media as Poll Exposes a Key Weakness

Waldman: I think because Trump is so ubiquitous, it’s easy to fall into the belief that he must be persuading people. And he repeats the same things over and over, often the same kinds of lies. And you can look at that and say, you know, he won the last election, people must be buying this stuff. And that isn’t necessarily true. mean, his approval ratings were low during his first term. They are very low now. And, you know, he tops out, it seems, at about forty percent. And given the polarization that we have in our country, where almost everybody in any president’s party is going to say they support them and almost everybody in the other party is going to say they don’t, you know, you’re not going to do much better than forty percent. And you’re not going to do much worse than that.

But I think that what’s really striking in some of the polls we’re seeing now is that Trump is doing really poorly, especially on the economy, jobs and inflation. And people are starting to see some prices rise. We don’t know where that’s going to go yet. But Trump spent months trying to convince the country that tariffs were going to bring an age of prosperity that we had never seen the likes of before. And there was kind of an education that went on, a lot of people, I think a year ago, if you had asked people how tariffs work, most people wouldn’t have been able to tell you. But there was a lot of news coverage of both what Trump was saying and about how tariffs actually work. And people did get an education. And if you look at polls, what you see is that most people don’t think tariffs are a good idea, despite how hard Trump tried to convince everyone of that. So I think there are real limits to how he can persuade people, not only because most Americans just generally don’t really approve of him and so are not necessarily inclined to believe things that he says, but even when he has something very specific he’s trying to convince people of, oftentimes it just doesn’t work.

Sargent: Well, just to close this out, I think that really gets to the core of why he’s in such a fury with the media right now, sort of separate from the specifics that he’s pretending to be angry about. The argument over tariffs, in a way, is one of the areas where the media was actually successful. There was really good reason to believe at the outset of this presidency that Trump could actually win the argument over tariffs. It’s, you know, not that hard to sell them just say, I’m trying to protect Americans from global economic forces and all those Democrats don’t protect you from them. And I think there was reason to assume that people might sort of, you know, lose track of the details and see it in those terms, but the press actually covered the issue with great, I think, penetration and really in an informative way. And the result, as you say, has been that The polls are showing that people really understand how tariffs actually work. And Trump, no matter how many times he uses his magical lying powers to say that other countries are paying the tariffs or whatever, it just isn’t really offsetting the actual knowledge that the American people have developed on this issue. And I think that’s a weirdly heartening thing among all the terrible news we’re seeing these days.