Trump Tirades on Iran Take Ugly, Sadistic Turn as Crushing Polls Hit

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This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic produced and presented by the DSR Network.

I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump just offered some really strange new comments about his war against Iran.

He declared it already won and boasted endlessly about the US military's domination of Iran

while seething at the news media for refusing to acknowledge his greatness.

Pete Hegseth followed up with some similar comments and in his case they were drenched

in bloodlust.

Do Trump and Hegseth think the American people like this kind of unbridled enthusiasm for

violence and domination?

Some new polling analysis shows yet again just how unpopular this war truly is, yet there's

no trace of any concern about any of this from Trump and Hegseth.

What if the bloodlust is working against them?

We're talking about all this today with G. Elliott Morris of the Strength and Numbers

Substack who produced some of this new polling.

Elliott, good to have you on.

Great, thanks for having me back.

So Donald Trump had threatened to bomb Iran's power plants, but then backed off claiming

serious talks about ending the war.

We're underway with Iran, which Iran then denied.

Let's listen to Trump talk about this.

If I want to take down that power plant, that very big powerful power plant, they can't

do a thing about it.

It's like, take me.

That's all they can do.

And yet if you read The New York Times or if you watch ABC fake news or NBC fake news,

you'd say it's a close battle, it's not a close battle, they're totally defeated.

Trump also said this, you know, I don't like to say this.

We've won this with this war has been won.

The only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.

I mean, The New York Times, you read The New York Times.

It's like we're not winning a war where they have no Navy and they have no Air Force and

they have no nothing.

And we literally have planes flying over to Iran and other parts of their country.

They can't do a thing about it.

So when Trump says take me like that, it's got this weirdly pathological edge, this obvious

enjoyment of violence and domination and his anger at the media is so strange.

He really thinks the news media's role is to hail this war as a world historical triumph.

Elliot, what did you make of all that?

The thing that really has stood out to me about this administration since day one is

how much it seems like a made for X presidency.

It just seems like these people want to satisfy the some of the worst corners of the internet,

the people who spend the most time online on a social media platform, in this case X that

really rewards some of that gross, some of those gross ideas about like power, especially.

I mean, this is very similar to the manosphere side of the internet as well.

And it's hard for me to hear Donald Trump talk like that and not think of all of the people

on X where I don't spend any time anymore who are like consuming this gleefully.

And that feedback loop is really, really on display whenever someone like Pete Hagstaff,

for example, talks about this war as well.

Well, Pete Hagstaff is just absolutely pickled in this kind of mega domination talk and all

these memes and stuff like that.

I want to come back to that stuff about the manosphere in a bit because interestingly,

parts of the manosphere have been against the war.

But first, let's talk about your new poll.

It's for strengthen numbers and barricade.

Trump's approval is stuck at 37% with overall Americans, which is abysmal.

That seems to be driven mostly by his crushingly awful numbers on the economy.

You guys had him at a negative 39 points on handling prices.

He's underwater on every issue that you track, including border security for the first time.

Elliott, can you talk about what you found?

Yeah, I keep seeing evidence in these surveys that just gets worse for

President Trump every time we take a new poll.

So the trend here, in other words, is deeply negative and it has been for a while.

It's one thing to be at minus two on border security.

Your previous best issue, for example.

But when that number has declined 12 points over the last year,

and that's, I mean, to be honest, right, that's probably the one policy area where Trump

is delivering on some of his promises.

There being no significant traffic crossing the border, at least that shows up in the statistics.

That's a real indictment of the presidency overall.

And really, it only gets worse from there.

On the things that people tell us are their most important problem,

that being affordability, being the big one, and also jobs in the economy.

The president is, well, his 40 points underwater rounding here on prices and inflation.

And he's about 23, 24 points underwater on jobs in the economy.

So that being the number one issue that he won the 2024 election on.

And now voters say in our survey that they trust Democrats more to handle these issues,

six points on inflation and the same six point margin on jobs in the economy.

That's just a real, dismal point to be in if you're the incumbent president.

And it's only going to get worse because of the effect that this new war in Iran is having on

prices. Well, that is fascinating.

So let's talk about your findings on the war.

58% in your poll said the war is a bad use of taxpayer dollars.

61% would oppose it if gas prices rise by a dollar or more per gallon.

And the majority 51% say the war will make America less safe.

Well, only 26% say it'll make Americans safer.

That's a dramatic rejection of Trump's core rationales for the war.

What's your take on all that data?

Is there some other data on the war worth discussing on the poll?

Yeah, there might be two things to say.

First, zooming out a little, the Iraq war was not this unpopular.

People did not think there was this little utility on something like the Iraq war for years.

Trump is really speedrunning the decline in popularity of wars here when you're looking

at these numbers.

The second big thing is just the intensity divide that we see.

44% of adults say that they think the war would be a very bad use.

Of taxpayer dollars or is it a very bad use of taxpayer dollars?

Whereas only 15% of them say it's a very good use of taxpayer dollars.

And something, you know, a question this hard for anyone in charge of the government,

like it's just hard to get people to approve of taxpayer spending.

In general, you should expect the question mostly to be negative,

except for stuff like social security.

But when the intensity gap is this high that signals a real powerful,

like mobilized resistance to the administration's policy.

And that shows up in the other questions and also stuff like protest data and just on,

you know, online social media discourse about the incumbent party.

So it also puts the president in a really tough position in terms of continuing the war.

If it's, if it's incurring political and electoral costs,

this intensity data suggests that it will.

Your poll has Dems leading Republicans in the generic House ballot matchup by 49%

to 43%. That's a lead of six points.

I want to ask you about parallels between this moment in 2006.

In that election, in that midterm, George W. Bush's war in Iraq was very unpopular,

but Democrats were actually slow to take it on.

They finally did and they won the House and even the Senate, which was looking like a very big leap.

And they did it by opposing the war pretty aggressively after not being willing to.

Right now, it seems like the timetable is really compressed.

Dems are basically opposed to the war in Iran as a party right at the outset.

And they're taking it on more aggressively at the very start than I think I've ever seen before.

Why is that happening? Is it because Trump is such a profoundly damaged figure?

And is it because polarization's worse?

What explains the compression and timetable here?

I think the party, the Democratic party is perceiving everything we're talking about here

in terms of the intensity of backlash to the president overall, the unpopularity of the war.

And the general feeling that the president's speeches, his meetings with his cabinet and

his press appearances and those of his cabinet members are geared toward a war-fighting presidency

in terms of war-fighting on social media and an optics first presidency rather than something

that is delivering for the American people. On the things they say are most important to them,

prices, jobs, health care, and elections and democracy.

writ large. And I think the Democratic party, they have the same data or better that you and I do

here in the public, Greg. And they're probably perceiving the weakness of the administration

on the war in particular. And we have to think back to 2006 as well. The Bush administration

spent the better part of a year and a half selling the war, manufacturing a crisis that they

needed to respond to. And there's none of that for a surprise war where the administration changes

its justification every single day and to go back to the beginning of the podcast just has like

really gross public appearances about use of force against civilians or just the persecuting

of the war and the cost of the American people in general.

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So another point you've made that I think is really important is that we shouldn't be analyzing

support for the war solely through the prism of is mega for it or is mega splitting like as if the

molten core of mega is what's important here. I think and I think you have said this as well

that we should be looking at Trump's 2024 coalition and how it's doing and how what it's

thinking about the war and there you actually see some real divisions. We got some data from

a Quinnipiac recently that I want to run by you Elliott. The Quinnipiac poll found that only 40%

of voters support the war on Iran versus 53% who oppose it. I asked Quinnipiac for a demographic

breakdown and they found among voters aged 18 to 34 only 21% support the war and among non-white

voters without a college degree proxy for a non-white working class. Also only 21% support the war.

Huge majorities of both of those demographics oppose the war. Elliott can you talk about that?

I mean those are the voters who went to Trump because of the economy and prices during the Biden

years right and now he's losing them. Yeah I've combined all of the survey data for my

strengthen numbers fair site polls over the last year so that I can look exactly at this question

is how Trump's voters in 2024 fuel about him by demographic group and the biggest swings against

Trump not just on war or prices but overall are among black Americans, young Americans,

Hispanic Americans and those making from households making less than $50,000 a year.

Defection here is like 20 percentage points on average of those groups I just mentioned 25 actually

on average say that they disapprove of the way Trump is handling his job as president today.

If you run the math on this and you take 25% of Trump's vote or if you take 25% of those

groups that voted for Trump you shift those votes over to Harris she wins you know by about

three or four percentage points it's not even really all that close. Well let's close by listening

to Pete Hegseth speaking of the Maga Corps listen to this. The air campaign that we've conducted

that Israel's conducted alongside us was one for the history books truly and it's because we have

a president of the United States that when he sends his war fighters out to fight he unties their

hands to actually go out and close with and destroy the enemy as viciously as possible from

moment one and that's why we see ourselves as part of this negotiation as well. We negotiate

with bombs. You have a choice as we loiter over the top of Tehran as the president talked about

about your future. President has made it clear that you will not have a nuclear weapon.

The war department agrees our job is to ensure that and so we're keeping our our hand on that

throttle as long as it's hard as is necessary. So Elliott you just can't miss how drenched in

bloodlust and sadism and domination that sort of talk is you mentioned at the start of this that

this kind of talk is really about playing to the kind of online segments of Maga. What's so

puzzling to me about this is that they keep this up even though they're you losing young people

that these are the very voters young men in particular who we are told that Trump was able to

make huge inroads with thanks to the manosphere and the podcasters and so forth but you've got people

like Joe Rogan now turning on the war none of this bloodlust stuff appeals to those types of

influencers as far as I can tell yet they keep trying to push this anyway and I don't get it.

Elliott explain it to me what on earth are they thinking man?

I think Pete Hexf doesn't know how to be secretary of defense or secretary of war as he's calling

it and he's trying to create a character to play but he's a fox news host so he's familiar

with playing characters in my in my head canon or my retconning of this to use some 29-year-old

language he's like mashing Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld together and just going

111% with that performance and it just goes back to how we started the show right these people

are performing for an audience an audience that is extremely polarized politically but also

socially and they want to punish the political and demographic opposition and they salivate for

performances like Hexf and when he posts though the and we also know from reporting these people are

like just obsessed with looking at Twitter and how and their metrics on on their responses so

when he gives this performance and then he loads up Twitter five minutes later and these things

are all viral with like some of the worst people on the internet it's no wonder that he keeps

hamming up this character right yeah that's exactly right so just play this out for us to close out

do you think that if Trump kind of finds an exit ramp or whatever or declares victory and goes

home or maybe even gets Iran to kind of give in to some sort of settlement on nukes which

seems unlikely but not I guess impossible is there any way for Trump to help himself at this

point or is he just sort of so profoundly damaged on all these different metrics on his basic

competence and his commander and chief abilities so damaged that there's like no real way to recover

on this stuff what's your general sense I have a survey out right now and we should have

results back hopefully by the end of the week asking about support for a ceasefire and I think

there he could win some political points by by backing down a stop and signing a ceasefire but

where does that leave the country the bigger questions here yeah Americans have lost their lives

they've paid more for gas and for other trade that's impacted by higher gas prices uh and in

the context of Iran right they'll probably be at the same place in terms of nuclear enrichment

that they would have been without the JCPOA but that sort of conversation nonwithstanding so

I don't see uh uh off ramp here for him GL at Morris great to talk to you that's fascinating

stuff thanks so much for coming on man thanks Greg