Transcript: Trump Frustrated as Midterm Woes Worsen: “He’s Very Angry”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 6 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 very frustrated over his mounting failures on multiple domestic fronts. Having fired his attorney general and Homeland Security chief, he’s now looking at purging more top officials. As one report puts it, “he’s very angry.” Meanwhile, Trump’s advisors are reportedly very worried about the war’s deep unpopularity. One senior aide fears he’s being given a rosy picture of how the war is being received and that he’s deeply misled as a result. The through line to all this is that Trump is bumping up against the limits of his magical thinking. Yet there’s no sign of any willingness to adjust. New Republic staff writer Kate Aronoff has been writing really well about the reality check his policies have received. So we’re talking to her about this weird tension between this and his refusal to course correct and the real damage it’s all doing. Kate, really nice to have you on.

Kate Aronoff: Nice to be back.

Sargent: So Time magazine reports that top White House advisor Susie Wiles fears that Trump is being fed a bill of goods about the popularity of the war. She fears it’s really hurting GOP chances in the midterms. Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio has conducted studies showing its unpopularity and a small group of aides delivered this bad news to Trump. Kate, I think it’s hard for some pundits to accept that Trump’s war has made him even more unpopular. That’s not how things are supposed to work.

Aronoff: Yeah, I don’t want to be too kind about the history of American wars, particularly in the Middle East—but this is an exceptionally unpopular one. And they didn’t even have the dignity to haul out a Colin Powell–type figure to hold the little vial up before a panel and tell us a lie about weapons of mass destruction. They just kind of went in, and there was no lead-up, there was no sort of attempt even to cultivate some sort of popular support or even a real sense that Iran posed a threat. Who was it—Tom Cotton said [there has been] an imminent threat for 47 years from Iran?

It boggles the mind that anyone would imagine that this would make Trump popular and do anything other than crater already pretty shaky public support. But I hope that means this war can end as soon as possible.

Sargent: Well, that’s actually a reasonable supposition in some sense, because if Trump’s pollster is conducting surveys showing the war is very unpopular and Susie Wiles is telling Donald Trump, Sir, whoever’s telling you that this is going well is lying to you and this is going to kill us in the midterms, then there actually is something of a chance that Trump looks for a quicker way out.

Aronoff: One would think that that would be the most likely outcome—that this thing would be wrapped up soon, because it’s dragging on multiple fronts, whether it’s gas prices in the United States or the fact that American soldiers are starting to die.

Sargent: Trump knows things are going very badly on many fronts. He just fired his attorney general, Pam Bondi, and Politico now reports that he’s weighing firing Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. One administration official tells Politico: “He’s very angry and he’s going to be moving people.”

Kate, I thought that was interesting because obviously Lutnick has a big economic role and a big role with the tariffs. So clearly Trump’s ticked about his economic approval being in the toilet and he’s looking to make it appear like he’s acting to fix things. But Kate, would firing Lutnick do much?

Aronoff: Well, it wouldn’t open the Strait of Hormuz, for one. That is ultimately what he’s trying to deal with, is that he started a war of choice alongside Israel to provoke a country that can control the Strait of Hormuz. Somehow the Defense Department did not think about that possibility that you could close down 20 percent of the flow of crude oil for the entire world, along with a host of other very important commodities, by starting a very stupid and illegal war.

Sargent: There’s an interesting dimension to this that we should try to draw out a bit. Trump is in a rage over the Supreme Court striking down his tariffs. In some sense, he’s probably taking that out on Lutnick. But the thing is, the tariffs were struck down because they were illegal. And Trump is incapable of grasping that. He’s incapable of understanding that his power is not absolute.

So someone has to be at fault. Other than him, somebody. So we’re in this weird place where Trump is tanking in the polls in part because his belief in his own omnipotence was so delusional. Kate, that seems less than ideal.

Aronoff: Well, it’s all less than ideal at this point. But yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, these tariffs are illegal. It is an unprecedented use of executive power to enact tariffs, which historically have been acts of Congress, have required more democratic input to make these huge impactful decisions about trade flows. He does think of himself as a king in many ways, and he is coming up against the limits of that belief right now, whether it’s the Supreme Court or just the fact that people don’t seem to like this. If he does still think he’s a king, he’s not a very popular one.

Sargent: Just as a quick aside, Trump’s rage at the Supreme Court was stoked earlier this week when there were oral arguments over his effort to end birthright citizenship. It became clear very quickly that even the conservative justices were really, really skeptical of the arguments that the administration is offering. A lot of legal experts are now saying, Look, this thing’s probably going to lose for Trump in some form.

What’s interesting there is Trump actually showed up at the Supreme Court because, yet again, he had delusions about his own omnipotence. He seemed to think that showing his face would just be such a formidable and fearful sight to the justices that they would fold. What you’re looking at there is that this is a guy who’s incapable of seeing things from the point of view of other people. He doesn’t understand the incentives that might be operating on the conservative justices.

They’ve clearly rolled over too much for Trump. But here’s a case where if Trump is actually in the courtroom, in the chambers during this whole thing, it’s going to be much harder for them to side with him. He just doesn’t seem to be able to think his way into other people’s minds. It’s a very puzzling problem, but there we are.

Aronoff: Besides the lack of empathy, he does seem to treat a lot of problems as if he is running a casino. If you can show up to whatever restaurant and intimidate whatever power broker might happen to be there ... I’m from South Jersey, I have some familiarity with how the casino industry works. That is kind of how it works. That is not, thank God, how the country works.

So he can’t just throw his weight around and expect to get his way. That has happened a lot, unfortunately, but in this case, hopefully, that will not be the case.

Sargent: I know South Jersey, and that is certainly the type of territory that Trump thinks he can master, that’s for sure.

Aronoff: Well, all his casinos went bankrupt there, so he couldn’t master it for too long. He had to sell them.

Sargent: It really is like he shows up at the Supreme Court in the sort of same spirit as if there’s a gambler in one of his casinos who’s cleaning up and really bankrupting the house. He shows up with a bunch of thugs that’ll intimidate the gambler into leaving or something. That really is the spirit of him going to the Supreme Court.

Aronoff: Yeah, in an amazingly unreconstructed way.

Sargent: You had this very good piece about the Strait of Hormuz closing down due to Trump’s war and Trump’s apparent belief that he can just order the price of oil to come down. There was a good line in there, I thought, about how the Strait of Hormuz—which is around 20 miles wide at its narrowest point—is the central and most important geographic fact about our global energy situation. Can you get into all that a little bit?

Aronoff: I wrote this piece the other week after—you may have seen, as listeners may have seen—markets were expected to open really down. The price of oil was supposed to be very high. And before markets opened around 7 a.m., Trump tweets that we’re going to put off bombing Iranian energy infrastructure for another five days, a.k.a. until markets close again on Friday. They ended up extending that, but there is this amazing thing: that Trump has managed for a while to almost unilaterally control the paper price of oil.

We don’t have to dwell too long on the intricacies of global energy markets, but there is this distinction between the paper price—which is the thing that’s affected by things that Trump says, by news in the world, that operates a little bit more like the stock market, it’s a little touchier, a little more reactive to things that are happening in the world—and the actual price of oil, what it is that people are actually paying, that buyers and countries are actually paying in order to get oil into their countries.

There is this real air of unreality, and something along the lines of what we’ve been talking about so far, where he thinks he can—the term is “jawboning”—jawbone the price of oil and just ignore the fact that there are real shortages. Part of what is driving up the cost of oil is the fact that this very important passageway is closed.

Only a handful of tankers are getting through, countries are sort of negotiating deals on the side to try to get some supply sent their way. But for the U.S., they’re not getting things through. And many U.S. allies are not getting supplies through. That’s causing a real crisis in Asia, which maybe we can talk about. It’s having knock-on effects for us here in the U.S. that are much less severe—but $4 gas is nothing to sneeze at, obviously.

Sargent: Just to tie this to the broader themes here, this really indicates this very crude and really skin-deep understanding of power, which is odd. He’s president. He’s been elected president twice. So you’d think he’d have a more complicated sense of how power works. Yet here he is just assuming that if he can kind of bluff the price here and there of oil down a little bit, that it will somehow solve the larger problem.

There’s a seat-of-the-pants quality to it all—this constant sense that he’s always bluffing his way through the day and he’ll just deal with the problems that come tomorrow when they come. I just find it a little hard to understand how someone in a position like this, who already spent four years in the presidency, who’s now spent another year in the presidency in the second term, would have such a flimsy understanding of how power works. How do you account for this?

Aronoff: I think there is a real tendency among wealthy people not to acknowledge the consequences of their actions, often because they don’t feel them. Trump has not paid for gas in I don’t know how long. He is not getting out and putting his car to the machine and putting the nozzle up to his gas tank. This is not the world that he lives in. He doesn’t live in a material world.

He lives in a world where people are showing him videos on an iPad or whatever it might be and saying, Aren’t you proud of me, daddy? Look at what I’ve done. That is this totally sycophantic, really constrained view that he’s operated in for a very, very, very long time. That’s not unique to Donald Trump. That is how a lot of very wealthy people live their lives. And that can give you a warped view for what is actually happening in the world, but also, as you said, how power works.

He’s not actually having to go in and sort of negotiate things in a way that he might have done earlier in his career when he was brokering between different power players. He’s just lived in this bubble of his own creation for a very long time. That makes it hard to just see anything beyond.

Sargent: You’re really getting at a strange tension about this whole situation, just to finish this up. Trump has now said the Strait of Hormuz will magically open itself. So clearly on some level, he’s bumped up against the limits on his powers and that somewhere in his head, he realizes that he can’t make it open.

All the machinations about him firing more people suggest that he does know the political situation is very dire for him and the GOP. So on some level, he knows that the seat-of-the-pants stuff isn’t going to cut it.

Yet at the same time, he’s unwilling to change anything because he views that as a show of weakness and that’s not permissible. So we’re all stuck in Trump’s bubble now, aren’t we? Where does that leave us?

Aronoff: Yeah, I wish I knew. I wish I knew where any of this was going. That’s why things feel so strange and uncertain right now in oil markets—the things that I’ve been covering for the last couple of weeks—but also more generally, we are stuck in this sort of weird psychology of this very strange man and all of the characters he’s surrounded himself with. I don’t want to put it all on Trump. This is a bigger problem in some ways than that.

But it is really, really, really hard to know what is going to happen, in part because we are dealing with someone who themselves does not know what is going to happen from one day to another and seems very volatile.

Sargent: There’s really only one way out of this, which is to organize and to vote in big enough numbers that it punctures that bubble and gives us more control over the situation. That’s really the bottom line. He can bluff all he wants and he can order the price of oil to drop and he can command the Strait of Hormuz to open itself magically. But we don’t ultimately have to remain in this bubble if we show up in large enough numbers—we can overwhelm it and take charge of the situation a little bit. I really hope people will do that, Kate.

Aronoff: Like we were saying at the beginning, this war is really, really, really unpopular. People are fed up with higher gas prices. People are fed up with American soldiers dying abroad. People are fed up with having to see dead babies on their feed. So I think—I hope—that we really can puncture this bubble surrounding Trump that we have been forced to live in and end this war.

Sargent: Well, we do have that power. We just have to exercise it in big enough numbers. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Kate’s work over at TNR.com. She does great stuff on climate and on the politics of it. Kate Aronoff, really wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on.

Aronoff: Thanks for having me.