Transcript: Trump Fumes at Bad Iran News as Polls Hit Shocking New Low

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 15 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 is raging in all directions. After exploding at Pope Leo over his criticism of the war, he’s now lashing out at an ally, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Why? Because she sided with the pope on the war and because she won’t help him reopen the Strait of Hormuz. This comes as a new polling analysis shows him cratering with noncollege white voters, who are of course a critical voting bloc. The conventional wisdom is that Trump has a high floor of support due to his base. But what if he hasn’t bottomed out yet? We’re talking about all this with New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who’s been writing well about the catastrophic politics of Iran for Trumpworld. Alex, always good to have you on, man.Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.Sargent: Let’s start with some polling, because it’s amazing. CNN’s Harry Enten looked at an average of polls to calculate Trump’s approval with white voters who didn’t go to college. Listen.Harry Enten (voiceover): We are talking about noncollege white voters and he is sliding right into the water. This is a “ruh-roh” moment, to quote the great Scooby-Doo. Trump’s net approving with noncollege whites. Look at this. In February of 2025, it was plus 32 points and now it is minus two points. That is a 34-point shift. And I will note this is an average of polls.Sargent: So that was overall approval. Now listen to what these voters are thinking on the Iran war. Harry Enten (voiceover): What about the war? Well, the war ain’t helping him because just take a look here. Noncollege whites, net approval rating of U.S. military action against Iran, minus five points. You think that’s low? Come over to this side of the screen. How about Trump on Iran? Minus 13 points, a very unlucky 13 indeed for the president of the United States with a key core group of his.Sargent: Just to recap, Trump’s general approval with noncollege whites has slid by 34 points and he’s now underwater with them. On the war, support for it is five points underwater with those voters and support for his handling of Iran is 13 points underwater with them. Alex, that is something. Your thoughts?Shephard: It’s just terrible. There’s always been this misguided idea that Trump’s support among the white noncollege, working-class vote is ironclad no matter what. That’s just not true. We saw this during the pandemic as well. But even during the pandemic, which basically did create a global recession, we did not see the president do this level of economic self-sabotage. The extent to which many people—myself included here—overstated some of the causes of Trump’s victory back in 2024, it’s really coming into the foreground right here. The big thing that rode him to victory was inflation. And Trump is taking a number of actions right now to cause prices to rise. If you look back, the cratering support started at the beginning of this year, so all the way back in January—it predates Iran and it’s post-tariff inflation. That was the start of the erosion of white working-class or white noncollege support. Now Trump has basically quadrupled down on that by starting a stupid war for no reason that he’s now stuck in. You’re seeing things like, for instance, gas going up by 30, 40 percent in some cases. That is forcing people to reckon with what the president is actually doing here, and understandably they are recoiling.Sargent: Well, Alex, I followed up and asked Harry Enten if Trump has ever fared this badly with noncollege whites in polling, and Enten told me that this rivals where he was with that demographic just after January 6. That suggests he’s at a low point with them, as you also said. What’s critical to me here, though, is it isn’t just the economy. His base is cracking over the war, too. Maybe the perceptions of the war are colored very strongly by the impact it’s having on prices. But I also think the war is just filling the headlines with awful news and stuff that makes him just look like a preposterously ridiculous moron. And so this demographic is really souring on him over that as well.Shephard: One of the reasons why a lot of Trump’s voters stuck with him, even amidst all the erratic fire and fury, garbage and nonsense of the first term, was that Trump’s outbursts—they were relatively low stakes—were about people that Trump personally cared about. In general, he was doing things that didn’t tend to affect people’s day-to-day existence. And for some voters, that erratic behavior only communicated the fact that Trump was a different sort of politician. And again, the stakes were relatively low in the first term.