The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 27 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.
In recent days, President Trump has approved millions and millions of dollars in disaster aid for a number of states. He’s also denied disaster aid to a number of other states. You’ll be shocked to hear that the states that got aid voted for him in 2024, and the states that didn’t get aid did not vote for him in 2024. But a funny thing has happened in this saga. In the process of trying to screw democratic states, it appears Trump has also screwed at least two counties that heavily voted for him. This captures something essential about MAGA. Trump’s agenda is often sold to his voters explicitly as something that will hurt Democrats, yet it’s actually also hurting them. MSNBC’s Steve Benen has been writing well about Trump’s ugly efforts to punish states that don’t support him. So we’re talking to Steve about what all this means today. Good to see you, Steve.
Steve Benen: Greg, it’s great to be back. Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So the basics here are that in recent days, Trump approved big disaster declarations for Nebraska, North Dakota, Missouri, and Alaska. In two of his social media posts announcing this, he went out of his way to declare that he had won those states.
Much of this is for severe weather damage. And meanwhile, he denied requests for relief from Maryland, Vermont, and Illinois.
Steve, that’s crazy. Can you bring us up to date on it?
Benen: Yeah, this is not a coincidence. I mean, it’s very hard to imagine we have a set of circumstances in which the president just happens to approve disaster aid for red states and just happens to draw a direct and overt connection between that aid and his performance in those states.
And then, on the other hand, he says, oh, by the way, these blue states, yeah, I decided they don’t deserve federal disaster aid. I mean, if there was just any variance in this, it would seem less subtle. But it’s not. He’s just being overt about this.
And in fact, when we look at it in a larger context, we’ve seen a similar pattern unfold over months. We’ve seen Donald Trump repeatedly say that he is the president of red states, exclusively. He looks at blue states as somehow beneath him, as if they are second-class citizens, as if they’re undeserving of his support because they failed to support him in the election—which is ridiculous and it’s un-American—but nevertheless, it has become our life now.
Sargent: Well, it’s worth noting something here, I think. Why would Trump bother declaring that he had won these states that he’s awarding disaster relief to in the first place, which he did in his Truth Social post. It could be just his usual megalomania at work. My only association with this state is that I won it or whatever. But I think it’s also to make it explicit that he doles out government resources to those who support him, don’t you?
Benen: Yeah, exactly. I mean, he could have chosen a more subtle path here. He doesn’t have to go out of his way to say, yeah, by the way, I won these states. But he was explicit in this.
I’m looking at the quote from Alaska, which he said, “which I won big”—all caps—in 2016, 2020, and 24. The only reason to mention that is to make this direct correlation between the money he’s prepared to provide to these states for disaster aid and the fact that he sees them as political allies.
Sargent: Yeah, it’s crazy. Well, here’s where the story takes a weird turn. Maryland had requested disaster relief primarily because of the massive damage that storms have inflicted on the state’s two westernmost counties, Garrett and Allegany counties.
Now, for those of you who haven’t been to western Maryland, that is Appalachia. It is Trump country. Trump won Allegany County by 40 points in 2024. He won Garrett County by 54 points in 2024.
So, in his desire to screw Democratic elected officials in Maryland and blue state voters, he’s hurting his own people. What do you make of that, Steve?
Benen: You know, it’s so frustrating to see Trump’s overly narrow, myopic perspective here. He sees Maryland. He looks at a map—he looks at his red and blue map of states—and he sees blue. And that instinctively, in his mind, says, OK, those are not my people. Those are my enemies, because they are in a state that voted for Kamala Harris overwhelmingly.
He lost Maryland, I think, by roughly 29 points. But what he doesn’t appreciate is the fact that there are nuances in states—that no state is this monolithic entity—that there are going to be blue voters and red voters. There’s going to be pockets of liberalism and pockets of conservatism in literally every state in the union.
And so for him to just look at Maryland and say, well, they’re all my enemies, that necessarily means that he’s going to end up punishing a lot of people who voted for him and who support him and are looking to him for assistance that they deserve.
Sargent: And we’re talking about real damage here. According to the AP, it was thirty-three million dollars worth of damage to the state—more than three times the threshold for getting federal aid.
And those Trumpy counties, Garrett and Allegany, were hit by serious, serious damage. According to the disaster relief letter from Maryland Governor Wes Moore, there was serious flash flooding in them, and in some towns it was life-threatening. The letter describes road closures, evacuations, rescues, infrastructure damage, and school closings. And residents in those counties continue to experience disaster impacts.
So, Steve, the funny thing is that, you know, if roads are closed, that means no one can use them. It doesn’t just mean the Democratic voters in the area can’t use them. So Trump’s denial of aid is materially hurting people in Trump country in an ongoing and sustained way.
Benen: You know, Greg, there’s something that you said a moment ago that really stood out for me. You used the phrase ‘threshold for federal aid.’ And the reason that stood out for me is because we are supposed to be dealing with a bureaucratic system. There is a formal process that the federal government and state officials and local officials are supposed to follow in order to qualify for the federal assistance that they’re entitled to.
And so here we have a situation in which the state did everything right. They—to cross their t’s, dot their i’s—did the paperwork, and they said, here we have this actual crisis, this actual disaster that affected Democratic voters and Republican voters and everyone in between. They did this right from the beginning in terms of the way in which they followed the process.
And yet we have a Republican White House that said, no, no, no, that’s not good enough. The president just said, unilaterally, I’ve decided that that disaster is not going to go to you for reasons that he has not explained. But of course, we don’t need an explanation. We already know what the explanation is, which is that he did it for political purposes.
But that’s not the way the system is supposed to work. To borrow your phrasing, there is a threshold. Maryland crossed that threshold, and then Trump intervened anyway. That is not the way this is supposed to work. And in fact, it’s an unsustainable model for how it can work.
Sargent: Right. And I think it’s worth putting this in the larger context in another way. We’re in the middle of a government shutdown in which Russell Vought, who’s Trump’s budget chief and a really sick ideologue, is out there explicitly using the budget and shutdown process in order to punish blue states.
Trump is boasting about it daily. Russell Vought is targeting all kinds of programs and shutting down projects and sort of lording it on X about how he’s doing this. And it’s supposed to get MAGA very excited—and it is getting MAGA very excited.
But here again, he’s also screwing over red state voters. There’s a particular project I have in mind. One of the projects that Russell Vought cut or shut down, defunded, is called the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub. And that happens to span Oregon, Washington State, and—you guessed it—Montana.
And the state’s Republican governor, Montana’s Republican governor, has hailed this project as something that will create good-paying Montana jobs. So here again, totally screwing his own people.
Benen: Yeah. And I’m glad you put it in this larger context because I think that when we step back, there are these—these philosophical bonds that kind of bind us together as a country that are supposed to just transcend parties, transcend elections, transcend generations.
These are the bonds that make the United States the United States. And those are the very bonds that I think Donald Trump is completely indifferent to because of what we were talking about earlier, which is the fact that Trump sees himself as exclusively the president of red states—that his constituents are the people who voted for him, not the people of the country he represents.
And it’s just so offensive on its face. And yet, after five years of Trump’s presidency, here we are in his second term, he still doesn’t understand his broader responsibilities that transcend this narrow partisan and ideological view.
Sargent: I think I might even go further than you and say that the MAGA movement is founded on overt hostility to blue America, not just plain old indifference.
We’re right in the middle of a situation where Trump is sending troops into blue cities and explicitly demonizing them for being blue areas in ways that are meant to appeal to the MAGA base and are really exciting the MAGA base.
So, it’s almost like MAGA thrives on the very idea that blue America constitutes an enemy nation within the United States. I think we need to be really forthright about that — about this kind of enemy politics that they’re practicing.
It’s not like, you know, memes on Twitter. It’s not a joke. They really think of us as the enemy, and we just need to accept that and deal with it.
Benen: Yeah, no, I think that’s right. I think it’s more than fair. In fact, I think that Donald Trump has taken a significant lead in making that happen.
I’m reminded of a recent tweet in which, on his social media platform, he referred to Democrats as “the party of hate, evil, and Satan.” His words, not mine — hate, evil, and Satan.
Now, I mean, I know there has been a national conversation of sorts in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder about the role of political rhetoric and the role it may or may not play in terms of inspiring political violence. And I think that conversation is absolutely worthwhile and worth having.
But at the same time, it’s against that backdrop that we have an American president — an incumbent American president — who refers to his political opponents as the party of hate, evil, and Satan. To your point about the degree to which the MAGA movement demonizes the Democratic Party and their opponents, I think it’s worth emphasizing that it’s Donald Trump leading the way on that. I think that it’s the MAGA base; it’s just following the cues of their leader. And in this case, their leader is Donald Trump, who is saying outlandish things that are unprecedented in the American tradition as it relates to the chief executive.
Sargent: And by the way, I think it’s worth noting that he’s screwing his own people in many other ways as well. Somewhere in Trump’s head, he probably thinks that by standing in the way of extending the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies, he’s screwing blue people, he’s screwing blue states, he’s screwing Obama, right?
But his own base is getting absolutely hammered by those premium hikes that we’re going to see. But it just so happens that the tariffs are actually hurting red America pretty badly across the board. And here again, he just went out there and said he wants to import Argentinian beef. His own people are in a fury about that. Beef farmers are upset about it. Cattle ranchers are upset about it.
And just to underscore his contempt for his own voters, he actually went out just the other day — and you had an item on this, I believe, Steve — and said, you know, they’re basically ungrateful. They don’t realize how much great stuff I’ve done for them.
Benen: We’re about a month into the government shutdown now, and one of the phrases that I’ve heard Donald Trump say repeatedly for weeks is these references to Democratic programs, Democratic priorities. But he’s never actually articulated what that means.
But let’s go ahead and take a look at that in closer detail. I mean, he wants to cut the CDC, for example. But of course, Republicans get sick too. You know, Republican families rely on CDC programs as much as Democratic families do. And he’ll target the Department of Education. Well, you know what? There are Republican families out there with kids with special needs. That’s not unique to blue cities or blue states or blue families. Republican families have the same issues as everybody else.
And so from this twisted perspective, he’s thinking, well, if he just cuts the programs that Democrats care about, then Democrats will suffer. But that’s insane. We know better. We know that Republicans rely on the same programs and the same departments, the same agencies, and the same funding that everybody else does. And so whether he realizes it or not, he is hurting his own people as he hurts the country in the process.
Sargent: Right. In Trump’s head, he thinks he’s getting revenge on the elected leaders of blue states because they’re Democrats, and he probably also thinks he’s getting revenge on countless voters who didn’t support him.
Why he needs to get revenge is an interesting question, but let’s put that aside. The point is, he’s not really able to ask himself whether this stuff will collaterally hurt his own people.
Jamelle Bouie had an interesting observation about this. I thought he said that MAGA in general has a kind of vision of the country as a Balkanized place that neatly divides into friend areas and enemy areas. But that’s really out of touch with basic contemporary realities in the United States on all kinds of levels, right?
Benen: It is. And you know, what I’m stuck on is the fact that Trump doesn’t yet understand this. You know, I mean, obviously we know that when Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he was the first and only candidate in American history to have literally no background in government experience. He had never served a day in his life in public office and public service of any kind.
But yet he was elected president. Fine. So now here we are — we are five years into his presidency, five years — and he still doesn’t understand these basic, fundamental, bedrock principles that seem obvious to so many of us.
If anyone should understand these details, it’s the incumbent five-year American president. And yet here we are, stuck in this bizarre conversation about the things that he simply doesn’t understand — about whom he’s hurting and how.
Sargent: So where’s this all going, do you think? I like to think that there’s sort of a big block of voters in the middle that really recoils at this way of governing — that really recoils at the idea of this kind of friend-enemy distinction that Trump is insisting on with all his decisions.
What do you think? Is that going to sort of bear force? I mean, you know, in midterm elections, it’s usually the pattern that the out party ends up overperforming because it’s more energized and the in-party’s voters are a little complacent or whatever — or maybe even a little disappointed in what’s happening.
But I think it could be actually worse for Trump here because he’s so explicitly and overtly trying to hurt the country in so many ways. I really wonder if we get some kind of new level of revulsion on the part of independents and moderates over this that really puts him in the political doldrums — and the GOP with them. You think that’s possible?
Benen: I do. And there’s two elements to this that I want to point out for your listeners. I think that one of them is what we’re seeing at the activist level. You know, obviously we were just on the heels of the No Kings rally — I should say No Kings rallies — where roughly seven million people turned out.
Now, this was one of the largest displays of peaceful protest in modern American history, which was just an overwhelming display of opposition. And that suggests to me that there is this groundswell that’s coming into focus here that should make Republicans very nervous.
The other element I think that’s equally important is what we’re seeing in public polling. Donald Trump is not popular. What he is doing is not succeeding. He is by no means some kind of political colossus who has somehow rallied the nation behind him. Just the opposite is true.
We see him reaching levels of support that are just unprecedented on levels of unpopularity, given where we are roughly nine months into his term. And so that combination of progressive activism turning out in enormous numbers, coupled with the fact that polls showing the president’s popularity sinking, suggests to me that this is a recipe for profound and dramatic Republican failure — that should make GOP officials and GOP candidates awfully nervous about the prevailing political winds.
Sargent: I sure hope so. I just want to bring this back to the Maryland situation to close this out, because there’s a little tidbit I’ve actually learned that I want to share here — which is that, according to a high-level person in Governor Wes Moore’s administration, Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s administration, his staff privately informed Trump officials that the two Maryland counties with the damages are in Appalachia, are in Trump country.
And according to the source, anyway, the Trump officials appeared surprised to hear this — as if they didn’t really know that these could be in Appalachia and in Trump country.
There you have it, right, Steve? I mean, that’s… it’s pretty extraordinary.
Benen: Right. There is just so little due diligence. There’s so little professionalism. There’s so few adults in the room. You know, I’m thinking about that recent instance in which Donald Trump cut off counterterrorism funds to New York City. And then the governor called him and he said, I did what now?
You know, this is a White House that does not know what it’s doing. There are no — you know, I wrote my first book about Republicans abandoning their role as a governing party, and here we are seeing them prove the point.
This is not a group of people who are in a position to govern effectively or even care about the matters of how to create public policy. And so, I mean, I think this example that you’re pointing out in Maryland is a fantastic one, but making matters worse is the fact that it’s become routine. This has become the background noise of our political lives — and it’s every day.
Sargent: Yeah, the fact that it’s routine is also the point. They’re trying to make that routine.
Steve Benen, you brought up your first book. I’m going to bring up your second — Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past. People should get that.
Steve, it was great to talk to you, man, as always.
Benen: As always, I look forward to seeing you again soon.
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