The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 12 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.CNN reports that Donald Trump is furious because his bombings of Iran this week were not portrayed by the media as strong and powerful. He’s apparently frustrated, according to CNN sources, who are clearly leaking out of concern for his mental state. On another front entirely, Trump is smashing new records in the polling. He’s reaching new thresholds on inflation, and thanks to Trump, Democrats may now be leading Republicans by a key polling metric for the first time in many decades.We think these stories should all be connected to each other. The rage and frustration over Iran is basically rage and frustration over his political situation, because the former is causing the latter. He’s in a political bind that we don’t think we’ve ever seen before.So we’re parsing through all this new data and new Trump lunacy with Democratic strategist Christina Reynolds, who has worked on a lot of midterms and can explain how all this is playing on the ground. Christina, thanks for coming on.Christina Reynolds: Thanks for having me.Sargent: So let’s start here. CNN polling analyst Harry Enten made a point I haven’t heard before. He said Trump is the only president ever to hit a net approval on inflation of negative 50 points. And he’s done this in many polls. Listen to Enten.Harry Enten (voiceover): Inflation net approval minus 50 points or worse. Fifty points underwater or worse. Total polls per president. Trump in 2026—already eight polls, already at least eight polls in which his net approval rating on inflation or the cost of living is negative 50 points or worse. Every other president in every other year, the answer is zero.Sargent: So just to reiterate, in eight polls, Trump has hit a net approval on inflation of negative 50 points. No other president has ever done that. Christina, I don’t think I’ve seen polling quite this bad on the economy for a president—maybe ever, as long as I’ve been following politics. Maybe something like under George W. Bush, but I don’t know. What do you think?Reynolds: I don’t think it was this bad. And I worked at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in ‘06, and we took back the House. And Bush was certainly not a popular president at that time. But these are numbers that I would send back to the pollster and say, can you double-check? I don’t know that I’ve seen numbers this bad.And I think Republicans have an even bigger problem than those numbers. They have a president who absolutely wants credit for fixing everything. He believes his own spin, certainly, but also he believes he’s taken action and should get credit for that action. And to some degree that happens with a lot of politicians, but this president is especially guilty of that. And so he is not going to fade away into the background, which Bush did largely in 2006. He is not going to let the Republicans go out and shift the conversation.Not that I think they would be able to shift the conversation. When inflation is growing higher than your wages, voters understand that. They know it. They live it. And so you can’t convince them things are better when they’re literally not. But Trump is not just going to go out and talk about things and remind voters of that—he’s going to go out and talk about his ballroom. He’s going to go out and talk about the reflecting pool, as he did in Wisconsin when he went to one of the most vulnerable Republicans. So this is a huge problem for Republicans. It’s not just the polling number, it’s what Trump’s going to do because of the polling number.Sargent: You raise a really interesting point there, which is that Donald Trump isn’t being at all accommodating of the situation that Republicans find themselves in. They’ve kind of urged him to try to talk about the economy in a way that makes it look as if he understands what people are going through and makes it look as if he’s doing stuff. But he won’t do that because it makes him look like a failure, right? Since everything has to always be about his lionization, his glorious greatness, he just says, I don’t care about inflation, or affordability’s a hoax. There’s no sensitivity or awareness of the situation the rest of his party is in, in any sense.Reynolds: Absolutely not. And that is counter to George Bush. It’s counter to what Nancy Pelosi did when she was House Speaker and understood that some people were going to speak out against her. As long as she had the votes, she was OK. I think that there’s some level of what gets the party, what gets the values that you support, where you need to go. And Trump is about what gets Trump where he needs to go. And it’s a huge problem for Republicans.I mean, you heard it in the “I don’t care about the midterms” comment.
