The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 21 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.
Three new national polls show that President Donald Trump’s job approval is decidedly underwater. Even more tellingly, however, the new polls show that majorities are rejecting Trump’s authoritarian governing tactics. And on top of that, Elon Musk, who’s been tapped to carry out some of Trump’s most autocratic designs, fares even worse than Trump does in this polling. Is it possible that we’re finally seeing a real public backlash to Trump’s authoritarianism, the one that was supposed to materialize during the campaign but didn’t? And if so, what does that mean for how the Democratic opposition should proceed? We’re talking about all this with one of our favorite political scientists, Julia Azari, who has a good piece for her Substack, Good Politics, Bad Politics, about some of these questions. Julia, thanks for coming on.
Julia Azari: Thank you so much for having me.
Sargent: Let’s quickly go through this polling. CNN finds that 47 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s performance while 52 percent disapprove. Gallup finds him at 45 to 51. And The Washington Post finds that 43 percent support what Trump has done in his first month while 48 percent oppose it. Julia, here we have two national polls showing a majority disapprove of Trump and a third poll showing pretty low support for his first month’s accomplishments, such as they are. It’s still early days, but those aren’t great numbers for Trump, are they?
Azari: No, they’re not. They’re not entirely unexpected, but they really do underscore the point that I’ve been trying to make since the November election, which is that there’s not a lot of conclusive evidence that Trump’s specific agenda is very popular. In a context in which there’s a lot of distrust of government, it’s not obvious that strong executive overreach is the answer to that distrust.
Sargent: That brings up what you wrote in your piece, which is, One of the big questions right now is what’s going on with what you call the anti-authoritarian majority. Even during the election we saw majorities taking Trump’s criminality seriously, majorities opposing the authoritarian threats and so forth, but obviously that anti-authoritarian majority didn’t materialize at the ballot box this time. Now, however, people are seeing the authoritarian rule up front. The Post poll finds that 66 percent say Trump shouldn’t be able to freeze funding without congressional approval, and 57 percent say he’s gone beyond his authority. CNN finds 52 percent say he’s overstepped his powers—that includes 57 percent of independents. Julia, is this a situation where people didn’t really know what this would look like until they saw it?
Azari: It feels wild to say yes to the answer to that question because we have seen Trump before. But I think there are two pieces of this. The first one is something I’ve talked about quite a lot since the November election, and that is nostalgia for past presidents. Normally it’s just a curiosity, but Gallup has recorded this. Past presidents get a bump. They have different bumps, but Trump got a 12-point bump between 2021 and 2023. People remember positive aspects of his presidency, particularly because of the years that Biden was in office were so troubling.
That also leads us to a different line of thinking, which is a lack of defined political alternative. There are lines of argumentation about Trump as an authoritarian or as an executive overreacher or whatever you want to call it, there are lines of argumentation about his policies, and there are lines of argumentation in favor of the other side. But what’s missing is a movement that really defines all of these things and brings them together and talks about how, for example, pardoning January 6 people has broader policy implications in some ways, that lawlessness leads to poor policy outcomes or to things that people don’t like. It’s an attenuated connection between pardoning January Sixers and egg prices. In fact, there’s a reason that people like democracy—and it’s not just theoretical. It’s also about better policy outcomes when you have more people expressing input about what the country should do.
Sargent: Yes, I think that’s right. What’s been missing is a big argument about why Trump’s authoritarianism is bad. On the other hand, we are seeing this polling here, which shows majorities are troubled by the authoritarian rule they’re seeing. I would like those numbers to be higher and maybe they’re not higher because of what you’re pointing out, which is the lack of the counternarrative explaining it all. Nonetheless, majorities are unhappy with it, and that seems significant to me. What do you think, Julia? Should we take at least a tiny bit of solace from the fact that majorities are already seeing Trump as an overreacher and potentially even an abuser of his powers?
Azari: I think that what Democrats should be looking at is building power toward the midterms. In some ways, this is really a situation in which the questions are now not about legitimacy or authority. They’re now not about constitutional boundaries—those are questions for the courts, they’re questions for people to ponder. For Democrats thinking about concrete ways to intervene in the broader Trump agenda, the task is power building. That involves looking forward, looking ahead to the 2026 midterms and looking at areas where there is a lack of popular support for Trump generally, and also for specific actions. That’s the game that we’re playing now. These approval ratings, these polls that we’ve just seen are crucial tools in that power-building task.
Sargent: Yeah. I think the key point here that you’re getting at is: Now that we see that majorities are rejecting the overreach, it’s time for Democrats to really step up and prosecute that case a little more strongly against that. By the way, speaking of unpopularity, let’s talk about Elon Musk. The Post poll finds that only 34 percent, and only 26 percent of independents, approving of Musk’s role. Even worse, Americans disapprove by 2 to 1 of Musk shutting down government agencies, and 63 percent are concerned by his team’s access to sensitive government data.
Meanwhile, the CNN poll finds that only 28 percent think it’s good that Trump gave Musk a prominent role while 54 percent think it’s bad. I think it’s surprising that large percentages of Americans have an opinion of Musk in these polls, actually. The original thought was Trump would let Musk do all the dirty work, people would just trust that it was all fine because Musk is a tech wizard and so forth. But Musk has clearly done Trump no favors by being such a megalomaniac about all of what he’s doing. What do you think?
Azari: There’s a couple of things going on there. Another piece of data that I think is useful is a Pew Research study from 2023 that shows that Americans are pretty concerned about cybersecurity, about government access to private information, and about their information. I was somewhat surprised that the issue was as salient as it was.
The other thing is Musk. Salience is a really relevant point there too. If you’re going to appoint someone in a presidential administration, [if] you’re going to pick someone to have all this power that’s not really checked, the strategic thing to do would be to pick somebody who is not very well-known. And Musk is not that. Musk was quite well known even before he was in politics; he was a public figure, at least to a lot of people who followed tech. He also had some pretty high-profile scandals around his business and his treatment of women. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember that there was an anti-Musk backlash before he was a political figure.
The other thing I can’t stop thinking about has actually been the 2009 backlash about Obama and the White House czars. You remember this? There was a big media freak-out about who are these czars that Obama is appointing. Which again, these were dull people with policy expertise and not controversial media figures like Musk. But there was this real pushback of, What is a czar? How many of these czars are Senate confirmed? And some of them weren’t. Is this an illegitimate power grab? So there are narratives out there that that suggests that people are quite nervous about these expansions of presidential power through the appointment of these personnel that are not elected.
Sargent: Yes, we’ve got the mother of all czars here. And as you say, Americans are uncomfortable with that. By the way, to your point about Musk being well-known—it’s not just that he’s well-known, it’s that he’s a friggin’ megalomaniac. He’s a lunatic. He goes out and thrives on publicly antagonizing people. So that’s obviously not going to work in Trump’s favor as far as I can tell.
Azari: Yeah, particularly, the thing that I keep coming back to is they’re tangling with veterans, both concretely, substantively, and also symbolically talking about the government in that way. That strikes me as a potential real pain point. Although, we’ll see how that unfolds because this anti-fascist majority doesn’t always materialize.
Sargent: It doesn’t always materialize. It shows up in the polls steadily, but doesn’t always show up at the ballot box. I think we’re going to be in a different situation in 2026. Then, some of the structural conditions will kick in and midterms that work against the party in power. By the way, one of the weird narratives about the Trump presidency has been that disruption is his friend. Trump can disrupt, and everybody will magically be seduced into thinking they want his strongman tactics to clean up the mess. Never mind that he’s making the mess. That’s been the narrative anyway. Are we seeing some reason to doubt that?
Azari: “Destruction” is such an interesting concept in American politics because people want it. And we have had a lot of recent elections where the incumbent party has done badly and where people clearly want change. Then when change actually happens, inevitably there are losers. Inevitably, there are people who are either affected in a negative way or who are suffering from trade-offs, and that’s true even under much more normal political circumstances. You add in this element of policies that are actions that end with people losing their jobs without warning, that end in an interruption of services? People do not like those kinds of disruptions. Those strike me as fundamentally unpopular disruptions. So yeah, we shall see. And I meant to raise this earlier, we’ll see if this persuades Democrats that Trump doesn’t actually have a magical popular opinion mandate—that belief seems to be driving some of Democrats’ behavior.
Sargent: It certainly does. So does the idea that the only thing that voters care about is economic and material conditions, that there’s no way to reach voters with talk about authoritarianism unless it can be shown to have a material impact on people. By the way, the CNN poll finds 73 percent of Democrats say the party in Congress isn’t doing enough to oppose Trump. That matters. Don’t Democratic lawmakers have to make it clear to their rank and file that they recognize the threat Trump poses, that they’re acting, that they’re up to the moment? There’s a risk that voters disengage if not, right?
Azari: Yeah, it’s hard to get a handle on exactly what’s going on in the Democratic Party right now. But certainly, the Democratic identifiers seemed pretty unsatisfied with what the party is doing. To take this to a really meta level, I keep going back to how old the two parties are, how many times they’ve both readapted, and how it seems like they’re ripe for rethinking. And it does seem like that is driving some of what’s happening in the Democratic Party. On the one hand, you have a very institutionalist, preservationist, cautious element. On the other hand, you have people who really want to see serious structural change—in this case, that’s manifesting and wanting to see a much more strenuous objection to the current administration.
Sargent: Just to wrap this up, can they can they step up and and really deliver? The conditions are ripe for it, don’t you think?
Azari: I think it’s tricky because they need to use the powers of influence that they have. There’s a long-standing hesitance to either go too far and be seen as obstructionist or to embrace out-of-the-norm solutions; Democrats have been, in particular, really hesitant around that. So I think the Democrats are going to have to decide what strategy or, maybe more importantly, strategies they use to push back on the administration.
Democrats have an opportunity right now to do that because Trump is clearly vulnerable in public opinion and the public seems to be responsive to the idea that he’s overreaching. So whatever we thought was this really powerful mandate from 2024, even if it was there—and I’m skeptical—it doesn’t seem to have lasted.
Sargent: I really hope that Democrats listen to you on that. Julia Azari, thank you so much for coming on with us today.
Azari: Thank you so much.
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.
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