Transcript: Fox News Visibly Rattled as Trump’s Slide in Polls Worsens

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 5 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.

Faced with President Donald Trump’s sliding poll numbers, Fox News personalities have hatched a variety of tactics to deceive their viewers about what’s happening right at the end of their noses. In some cases, Fox figures are making declarations about Trump’s presidency that fly in the face of Fox News’s own polling. In case you needed more evidence that Trump is acting as if none of this is happening, he’s now rolled out a new budget blueprint that contains enormous cuts to the government. The cuts are destined to be so unpopular that even Republicans are already expressing alarm about them. We think we get the game here: Everything is about keeping Trump’s floor with the base from dropping too low. So toward that end, Fox will go all in with the denial about what a disaster this presidency has become. To parse how all this works, today we’re talking to one of our favorite guests, Matt Gertz of Media Matters. Always good to have you on, Matt.

Matt Gertz: Always good to be back.

Sargent: So some quick approval numbers: The Washington Post has Trump at 39 to 55. Both The New York Times and Marist have his approval at 42 percent. The Times polling averages show a net 17-point swing in Trump’s approval against him since the start of his term. Yet Fox News is telling a very different story. Matt, can you recap what you’re seeing there?

Gertz: Sure. I think there’s three main ways that people at Fox have been responding to these poll results. One is by claiming that the polls are fake altogether. This is the angle that we saw early in the week on Laura Ingraham’s show. She had pollster Matt Towery, and he explained that the polls from The New York Times and from ABC hadn’t polled a high enough percentage of Trump 2024 voters, according to him. And because of that, there’s just no possible way they could be right. “He’s not in free fall,” Towery said. “He’s had a little bit of slippage because he’s doing a lot. He’s breaking a lot of eggs to make an omelet, but he’s not dropping in any significant way.”

Sargent: Let me just jump in and say that’s their go-to: that he’s breaking a lot of eggs. But of course he’s not even making an omelet. He’s just breaking the eggs. There are a couple other things you were going to say that Fox News is doing, some devices they’re using.

Gertz: Yeah. Fox News hosts can’t say that the polls are fake because of course Fox’s own polls are very bad news for Donald Trump’s approval ratings. Brian Kilmeade on Fox and Friends took a swing at it. He claimed, “When you look at the 100 days of Trump, the problem with the 100 days and looking at the polls, this format and his agenda is not built for 100 days.” Basically, he says the premise is flawed. You can’t even look at Donald Trump’s poll ratings right now because that’s just not what his agenda is. His agenda is for the long term. He only continued, “He’s redoing the base. He is framing out the house. A lot of it was rotted, and now he is replacing it. There’s not a lot of glory in framing out a house.” I have to say the image of Donald Trump trying to build a structure of some kind with tools is a pretty choice. But for Kilmeade, Trump is rebuilding. He’s got a plan and he’s going to get these great trade deals and pass his tax cuts and then the approval ratings are going to soar.

So we’ve got the polls are fake. We’ve got, You can’t look at the polls because Trump’s agenda isn’t built for 100 days. And then you’ve got Maria Bartiromo, who is a Fox Business host—at one point a very credible business reporter but now just a raging Trumpist—who explained that it’s just impossible not to see that the administration is a huge success. “There’s no other way to look at this first 100 days other than a huge success” is what she said. And I guess the majority of Americans who disagree—in Fox’s own poll about that—are just delusional.

Sargent: Well, yeah, there was another interesting argument on Fox News from contributor Ari Fleischer. He said, “The base will not crack,” and added, “The base is solid for Donald Trump.” Fleischer said that the base will give him plenty of leeway because, again, he’s supposedly taking on these big consequential issues. Now, I don’t know how solid the base is for Trump. Note that the Marist poll finds that among rural voters, Trump’s approval has sunk to almost parity, 46–45, which is just stunning given historical rural support for Trump. And the CNN poll found that more than a quarter of voters who approve of Trump say his policies have increased costs on them, and 41 percent of those who approve of him say it’s likely we’re going into a recession next year. So I don’t know, Matt, when the tariffs start biting more, does he start to lose more support from the base, or not?

Gertz: I think we’re going to see a slow decline as people in the base realize what his policies are doing to them. If you’re a Fox News host, your every incentive is going to be to downplay potential impacts of those tariffs, both on their viewers and on support for Donald Trump, because their audience is made up of Donald Trump’s strongest supporters; those will be the people who will be the last to abandon him if they ever do. But when we at Media Matters listen to, for example, call-in shows from right-wing radio hosts, people like Sean Hannity, what we started hearing is more and more frequently people calling in and saying, These tariffs are bad for my personal business. What’s going on? When is he going to make the deal so that we don’t have to start laying people off? I think we are going to end up seeing an “emperor has no clothes” moment here, where more and more of the public sees the impact that his policies have on their pocketbooks and are not willing to accept it.

Sargent: I just want to underscore for listeners what you just said, which is basically that a number of Fox personalities are deceiving their viewers about what the polling is showing, essentially saying, No, none of that polling can possibly be right, including our own polling. That can’t possibly be right because Trump is a smashing success. But their own base is calling into these shows and saying, Well, this is a disaster for us. Now I think probably a lot of those people still approve of Trump, but the dynamic is still as I say it is, right? The customer base, the rank and file who are supposed to be enthralled to Trump are starting to see cracks and starting to see problems, right?

Gertz: And that’s the point at which right-wing media runs into a real problem, because their entire reason for existence is to create this alternate reality for their viewers to inhabit. And if their viewers are confronted with policy impacts in their own lives that are just diametrically opposed to what they’ve been hearing, it becomes a risk that they will start to abandon the people who have been telling them that these policies are going to work out great for them. That’s the point at which people in right-wing media are put in a very uncomfortable position. No matter which way they respond, they’re going to end up losing a chunk of their audience.

Sargent: Well, that’s for sure. We’ve talked a lot about the Fox News poll, so I just want to clarify that the Fox poll itself had Trump’s approval at 44 percent with 55 percent disapproving. Not quite as bad as other polls, but pretty bad, especially given the fact that Fox also had only 33 percent approving of Trump’s tariffs while 58 percent disapprove. Matt, I’ve been wondering, is there a split at Fox here where the “news” side does talk about Fox’s own numbers to some degree while maybe Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, and the other supercharged MAGA personalities don’t? How often do those MAGA types talk about bad Fox News polling for Trump?

Gertz: Yeah, they tend to avoid it as much as they possibly can. It’s been interesting. The poll numbers, as you say, for Fox News aren’t quite as bad for Trump as some of the others are, but it always hits him harder when they’re coming from Fox News. And so we saw, earlier in the week, Trump saying that the pollsters at The New York Times and at the ABC/Washington Post poll should be “investigated for ELECTION FRAUD, and add in the Fox News Pollster while you’re at it.” And then later in the week, Stephen Miller went on a Fox program and was asked about the poll numbers and said that Fox should fire its pollster. That’s something that Donald Trump just keeps coming back to. Fox has not actually done that, I guess, to their credit. But it’s certainly a situation where he is very annoyed when Fox News tells anybody that he’s not the most popular, best president in the history of the world.

Sargent: Well, Trump has been raging at Rupert Murdoch and at Fox News over the bad polling; he does bring it up from time to time. As you point out, Stephen Miller has openly called on Fox News to fire its pollster. I guess Trump wants to sic the FBI on Fox News’s pollster or something like that. Can you talk about this dynamic? Because I’m really curious. What happens within Fox News when something like that takes place? I’ve got to think it’s like a lightning bolt hitting Fox headquarters when Trump does that. What are the incentives internally at Fox for keeping their pollster and what are the incentives in the other direction? How does that all play out?

Gertz: It can be pretty explosive at Fox News when Donald Trump goes after them. We saw from the filings in the Dominion lawsuit a few years back that after the 2020 election, Donald Trump became enraged when Fox News was not supportive enough of his false claims of voter fraud. They were doing quite a lot to bolster his lies—but not enough, he thought. And he started lashing out at Fox and telling viewers to watch Newsmax, one of its competitors, instead. And that was really a devastating blow to the network. We saw from the filings that there were basically a large number of panicked emails going back and forth and panicked text messages between Fox News hosts, between Fox executives, all worried that he could destroy the network more or less. And so Fox is very, very keen on keeping him happy.

Fox News has seen anyone at the network who’s willing to be a dissident even some of the time leave or be fired over the years, so what’s left for Donald Trump to criticize apparently is the network’s pollster. And the polling operation, as far as I’ve heard and as far as I’ve read, is quite reputable. Their numbers seem to move pretty closely to what we see from other mainstream pollsters. The one critique that I’d make is you will, from time to time, see questions in the polls that seem really geared to finding results that the evening “screamfests” can talk about. But the numbers do seem generally on track with what you see from other pollsters—and that is unacceptable to Donald Trump. The idea of the network that he loves so much—that he treats as such a propaganda outlet—occasionally allowing viewers to see that he is not as popular as he would like to be is unacceptable. And so it must be destroyed, as far as Donald Trump is concerned.

Sargent: Well, I think there’s cause for thinking his numbers will slide more. Trump has just put out this new budget blueprint that calls for cutting $163 billion in federal spending next fiscal year. This would cut more than a fifth of current spending. We’re talking here about huge cuts to the safety net, education, the environment, medical research, assistance for the elderly, much, much more. It’s a wildly insane proposal, complete madness. Politico reports the Republicans are already expressing alarm over it. Senator Susan Collins is faulting the cuts to medical research, education, and support to low-income people. Representative Tom Cole is suggesting it can’t pass even a GOP-controlled House. Matt, what do you think vulnerable House Republicans think about this budget right now?

Gertz: I think they’re probably pretty terrified. The combination of that budget and the follow-up of the reconciliation bill that they’re planning, which will include massive cuts to Medicaid in order to finance huge tax cuts for the rich, is just political suicide if you’re a Republican in a district that Trump has not carried by a whopping margin. And even then, they must start running into trouble.

I would say the real concern here ... These sorts of budgets are typically dead on arrival, but in this case, it’s a little bit different. Trump and his administration have basically claimed that they view whatever spending is passed by Congress as just a ceiling; that they can cut whatever they want, which is wildly unconstitutional; and that they can just not disperse the funds that Congress appropriates. And that, I think, is going to make negotiations around this really tough. How they’re going to pass a budget when even Republican senators can’t count on the president to follow through on any deal is really hard to see.

Sargent: It sure is. Well, let’s try to bring these two strands together. Like I said at the outset, I think the real game here that you’re seeing on Fox News is that they’re really trying to keep that floor as high as possible. They know Trump is losing independence in droves right now. Cost of living crisis is huge for independence. The rule of law stuff is actually really huge for independence as well; we’re seeing large majorities of independence opposing even some of the lawless stuff on immigration. So it’s all keeping that floor high. It’s what Ari Fleischer said on Fox, The base won’t crack. That’s how they keep the numbers somewhere in the 40s, somewhere manageable for the midterms.

But now with a budget like this, you’re really seeing laid bare how badly Trump’s own voters are going to get absolutely screwed in every way. These types of cuts will absolutely slaughter Trump’s own voters. And it’s basically, OK, Elon Musk has been given his walking papers, but we’re going to try to do his cuts through Congress. So if the game is to keep the base intact, it seems as if Trump is really not acting as if that’s even necessary, which flabbergasts me. Can you talk about how Fox proceeds in this environment with those tensions?

Gertz: Yeah, it’s just a really difficult morass for them. And most of what they’re trying to do is avoid talking about it. So you saw the other day, Donald Trump came out, basically declared himself the Grinch, and said, As a result of the tariffs, instead of getting your kid 20 dolls, they might only have two dolls, and they’ll be more expensive. That’s just not a message that will sell to anyone who is not a total sycophant. Anyone who has any sense of political realities will be able to say, That’s obviously bad. And Fox basically ignored it. They just got away from it as quickly as possible. The only time there was really discussion on any of the opinion shows was when Jessica Tarlov, the Democrat on The Five, brought it up—and the Republican co-host just bolted. They did not want any part of a discussion about that. And that, I think, is what we’re going to see.

There’s going to be an effort by Fox News to avoid talking about economic issues, avoid talking about the impacts of the tariffs, avoid talking about what the impact of Medicaid cuts will be on rural hospitals and everything like that. And what they’re going to do instead is they’re going to turn up the volume on culture-war issues. They’re going to start warning their viewers that if Democrats win, criminal illegal aliens will be coming to your house to murder you. That’s the discourse they’re going to go with because they just don’t have any other options.

Sargent: Matt Gertz, it’s always great to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.

Gertz: Always good to be here. Take care.

Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.