LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Jonah Goldberg has been listening with us. He's the editor-in-chief and co-founder of the conservative website The Dispatch. Jonah, good morning, and welcome back to the program.
JONAH GOLDBERG: Good morning. Always great to be here.
FADEL: So this poll doesn't really have much good news for the Republicans. Is there one number that stands out to you?
GOLDBERG: Yeah. I mean, the thing I thought was kind of fascinating was that of people who disapprove of the president, 53% strongly disapprove, and only 6% just disapprove, which kind of shows how basically attitudes toward the president are polarizing, sort of like in a centrifuge. You get the purest stuff when you spin it. Attitudes are polarizing to the extent that, like, nobody just has a little bit of a problem with Donald Trump. If they dislike him, it's that they have very strong feelings. And that kind of partisan disapproval intensification is unprecedented for Trump and almost unprecedented for any president.
FADEL: I wonder - you know, the president has said - as we heard him say at the convention - act like I'm on the ballot. And I wonder if that now becomes a liability for these candidates.
GOLDBERG: Oh, it - well, it definitely does. I mean, it - look, basically, it's as if the electorate heard him say that and says, we accept your terms. The gamble that they were making with that midterm convention was that they knew there were a lot of people who wanted to vote against Trump. It's the people who like Trump that they felt like they needed to turn out and excite. And we'll see. I mean, it's still possible that the midterm convention thing, which really wasn't a convention, will have a helpful effect at the margins. But it just seems like that ultimately, the people who really want to vote based on Donald Trump are the ones who want to vote against Republicans rather than for them.
FADEL: You know, the other thing that I found interesting was immigration has long been an issue where voters favored Republicans, especially President Trump, and they've now lost that edge. How do you read that?
GOLDBERG: Yeah. So I think there are a lot of different things going on. I think that, first of all, there are a lot of people who like the idea that Trump was going to send back the worst of the worst and all of that. And what they're seeing is something beyond that. I think that, you know, one of the things - I think this is basically a strategy of the Trump administration, of Stephen Miller and several other people, to basically make the chaos and just absect fear that they were creating for not just illegal immigrants, but legal immigrants and even U.S. citizens who just happened to be going around looking like immigrants, according to some people - that chaos would get a lot of people to self-deport.
Like, I think it was an intentional thing. The downside of it is that's not what a lot of Americans really wanted or expected. And so that, I think, hurts. I also think the fundamental mistake - and this is a mistake that basically both parties have been making for 25 years, but, like with everything, Trump does it on steroids - they assume that every single voter they get is voting for the most expansive, extreme version of their agenda. And so Trump came into office thinking that every single voter in every single swing state was voting for full-spectrum MAGA and wanted this administration to behave, you know, like a biker gang with diplomatic immunity on every front. And the truth is a huge number of voters, particularly the voters that won him the election - those independent, those non-college-educated Hispanic and white working class voters, even a lot of male, Black working-class voters - those guys were voting because they were nostalgic for the pre-COVID economy of Trump's first term.
And that was their pitch to them, is that we're going to get the economy rolling again. We're going to deal with all of this inflation. And instead, what we get is a president who spends most of his time, it seems, talking about ballrooms, about - and delivering $6 and whatever it is - 50 cent - diesel gas. And so there are just an enormous number of people who say, this isn't what I voted for, and on all of these issues, I thought I was getting X, and I got a hell of a lot of Y.
FADEL: Do you think if the economy was doing better, this wouldn't be as dismal as it is, even with the mass deportation that we're seeing these events where American citizens have been killed - I mean, do you think this is mostly driven by people's pocketbook?
GOLDBERG: I don't want to say mostly. I don't want to go all vulgar Marxist on anybody. But, look, economy matters. It always matters. If the economy were roaring at three or 4% growth or whatever, or if he had the economy that he had at the beginning of his first term, I think his problems would obviously be less. But, you know, it works the other way around, too, is that if you look at the people who have most strongly supported Trump - that's been his real superpower, is holding on to, like, this 32% of the electorate that supports him no matter what, the sort of Always Trump people. They're disproportionately concentrated in, you know, obviously in red states - that's axiomatic - but disproportionately concentrated in agricultural states, rural states, manufacturing states, you know, the Farm Belt of the South through the Midwest.
And the problems with our economy is our overall economy isn't as bad as it feels for a lot of people. I mean, if you just look at the top-line numbers. But the problems that we're having are really concentrated precisely in those demographics. Like, expensive diesel affects the entire agricultural economy. The tariffs affect the manufacturing economy and are felt by people who work in it much more directly. And even, like, the core - a big chunk of the core MAGA people were the people who really believed they were voting for a guy who didn't want any more endless wars. So you just think about the issue climate from economics on down, a huge amount of just the headaches that are coming from the news, it's like they're aimed at discouraging Trump's core supporters, which is why we saw in another poll this week, for the first time, Trump dipped into the high 20s, you know, to 29% in approval, which is - you know, that's crazy town.
FADEL: So if you're a swing district Republican or the GOP candidate in a close Senate race, how do you react to this poll?
GOLDBERG: I would sacrifice 50 oxen to Baal. No. I think - so part of the problem is I think the Republicans who have a good - have their own independent identity - you know, they're really known in their community - they're doing better. It's the ones who are just basically generic Republican and don't have any independent identity, who are getting dragged down by Trump. And it's just awfully late to try and say, hey, I'm my own person. I'm not a rubber stamp for this guy. Voting is basically starting, and it's a real dilemma.
FADEL: Jonah Goldberg is the co-founder of the conservative website The Dispatch. Jonah, thank you for joining us again.
GOLDBERG: As always, a pleasure. Thank you.
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