MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
For more about President Trump's standing among voters, let's bring in Jonah Goldberg. He is editor-in-chief of the conservative website The Dispatch, and he's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Good morning, Jonah. Thanks for joining us.
JONAH GOLDBERG: Hey. It's great to be back.
MARTIN: So what's your take on some of this recent polling that Deepa was telling us about, showing the president's popularity falling even further?
GOLDBERG: Well, I think, you know, he - we're - he's doing us a great service 'cause we're finally seeing what the true Trump base in the electorate is, the irreducible base. And when only - according to that AP poll, only 17% of Americans strongly approve of the job he's doing. I think that's the number, right? I don't think if you can still strongly approve of how everything's going, we know you're - that number's not going to get much lower than that.
I think, you know, more broadly, the president misread the 2024 election and so did his biggest fans, and he - the president tends to surround himself with his biggest fans. So he only hears what he wants to hear. And they read the election results as if every single vote for Trump was a vote for the full MAGA agenda. And while that 17% strongly approve was for the full MAGA agenda, the majority-making voter, the swing voter in those swing states - right? - the Hispanic or African American mechanic or white, noncollege-educated autoworker or whoever, those guys mostly vote - voted out of nostalgia for the pre-COVID economy of Trump's first term. And Trump just simply hasn't delivered that. He hasn't lived up to the hype, and I think that's what's hurting him the most.
MARTIN: So, you know, to your point, the president spoke about polls this month at the White House Easter Egg Roll. He found a number he liked. Let me play that for you.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I would say MAGA makes up a majority, like, about 95% of the Republican Party, all right? So they went out, and they did a poll, and CNN came back 100% support. So they support what we're doing.
MARTIN: That was actually an NBC News poll last month among MAGA members - people who identify as MAGA. So it just seems as though that the president seems to be convinced that MAGA is the Republican Party. What do you think about that? I mean, does - he just gets that wrong?
GOLDBERG: I'd go farther than that. I think in his mind, he thinks MAGA are the only real Americans. You know, he actually once said, the most important thing is unifying the people, the other people don't matter. (Laughter) And I think that's sort of his mindset. And so as long as he thinks his base is a hundred percent with him, that - I think that he feels that empowers him. The problem with that - just as a sort of a social science thing in terms of polling - that poll was essentially asking the people who want to say, I hundred percent support Donald Trump. Do you a hundred percent support Donald Trump? And it turns out that the people who you ask that of, a hundred percent support Donald Trump. It's a tautology. If you were all-in for Trump, you know, when you've asked people who would define themselves as all-in for Trump, they're going to say they're all-in for Trump. It's just not a very interesting polling, except for Trump's narcissism.
MARTIN: So we've been hearing about some prominent voices - or people who had been prominent voices - in the MAGA world, who have since sharply criticized the war in Iran. There's Tucker Carlson. There's Megyn Kelly. There's Marjorie Taylor Greene. Do their critiques represent a real split?
GOLDBERG: No. I think this is one of the most beneficial aspects of this phase of Trump's second term, is that it turns out that some of the people who most loudly claimed that MAGA or America First or Trumpism was a serious, coherent, ideological agenda with great buy-in from the American people were just wrong. Trump's - Trumpism is a psychological phenomenon, not an ideological phenomenon. And Trump has celebrity charisma with the people who love him, and Tucker and Megyn Kelly and Marjorie Taylor Greene and some of the even worse gargoyles of the right who claim to be speaking for the authentic voice of MAGA, turns out that at least if you go by the polling, they don't have a lot of wide support. It turns out that those people are essentially entertainers too, and they don't command large swaths of the GOP electorate, and they don't represent them either.
MARTIN: So before we let you go - about 30 seconds here - you know, very few congressional districts are considered competitive. So how much do you think the president's popularity will matter to the midterms?
GOLDBERG: Well, it'll matter in the basically 32 districts where they are competitive. And I suspect if you get anything close, like, to a wave, we'll see some surprises on election night. I also think, you know, between now and November, if the current pace of chaos that we're seeing out of the White House continues and we continue to be more in the Spinal Tap-drummer cabinet shuffles, you could see people freaking out just 'cause they feel uneasy, and those numbers could get even worse.
MARTIN: We have to leave it there for now. That's Jonah Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Dispatch. Jonah, thanks.
GOLDBERG: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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