The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 25 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 just offered some really strange new comments about his war against Iran. He declared it already won and boasted endlessly about the U.S. 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 in Numbers Substack, who produced some of this new polling. Elliott, good to have you on.G. Elliott Morris: Hey, thanks for having me back.Sargent: So Donald Trump had threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants, but then backed off, claiming serious talks about ending the war were underway with Iran, which Iran then denied. Let’s listen to Trump talk about this.Donald Trump (voiceover): 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 are totally defeated.Sargent: Trump also said this:Donald Trump (voiceover): You know, I don’t like to say this—we’ve won this. 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 Tehran and other parts of their country. They can’t do a thing about it.Sargent: 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. Elliott, what did you make of all that?Morris: 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 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 those gross ideas about 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 consuming this gleefully. And that feedback loop is really, really on display whenever someone like Pete Hegseth, for example, talks about this war as well.Sargent: Well, Pete Hegseth is just absolutely pickled in this kind of MAGA 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 Strength in Numbers and Barricade. Trump’s approval is stuck at 37 percent 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 net 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?Morris: 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, 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 and the economy—the president is about 40 points underwater on prices and inflation, and about 23, 24 points underwater on jobs and the economy.