The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 28 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.
President Donald Trump is looking increasingly vulnerable on the very thing that helped him win the election: rising costs. On Thursday, Trump announced that his long planned tariffs on Mexico and Canada will go forward on March 4. Yet just a few hours later, a new poll hit, finding that 59 percent of Americans expect Trump’s tariffs will drive up prices further. Only 31 percent say they’ll be good for the economy. Meanwhile, on another front, Republicans are starting to cancel their town halls out of fear of voter blowback over Elon Musk’s rampage through the federal government. Andrew Bates, who was a senior press secretary in President Biden’s White House, has been arguing relentlessly that Trump and Republicans are heading into extremely rough waters on the economy, so today we’re talking to him about how Democrats can capitalize. Thanks for coming on, Andrew.
Andrew Bates: I appreciate you having me.
Sargent: Let’s start with this Bloomberg poll. Not only do 59 percent say Trump’s tariffs will bring higher prices, 61 percent say food prices have increased in the last month. Only 38 percent think the economy is working for them. All this is echoed by a whole bunch of other polls and by worsening consumer sentiment metrics. It’s worth pointing out, Andrew, that many economists agree with these majorities. They, too, say Trump’s tariffs will lead to rising prices. Your reaction to all of it?
Bates: Yeah, I think that he betrays the fundamental promise that he made to the country. I remember in the Republican National Convention speech, he told people on day one—that’s a direct quote—prices will fall across the board. He also said that inflation would end immediately—immediately is also a direct quote. He was very explicit about this. And of course that was a false promise. Tariffs are a tax, and they are a tax that is disproportionately paid by people who are not wealthy, people that spend a greater percent of their income on daily necessities, food, clothing.
And I think that what’s especially telling about this is the revenue that they make from these tariff taxes—the revenue they’re taking in from middle-class folks who they said they were going to fight for—they’re turning around and they’re using it to make room in the budget for tax giveaways to billionaires and big corporations. It’s like a Bernie Madoff scheme. They are trying to take money out of the bank accounts of hardworking people after they got their votes promising lower cost, lower prices. Instead, they’re actively raising prices that they said they were going to reduce, and taxing people for it, and they’re pocketing that money.
Sargent: It’s a funny thing, Andrew. Trump is explicit on this point because he keeps saying the tariffs are going to bring in gangbusters revenue. Well, what do they need the revenue for?
Bates: That’s right. Because they’re trying to add trillions to the deficit with tax giveaways for the wealthy. And you mentioned the DOGE cuts too. That also relates to this because while everybody is against waste—myself, every Democrat I’ve ever known—a lot of what they’re cutting is bone and not fat. For example, they fired people who have been in charge of fighting bird flu while egg prices are skyrocketing. They want to use the money that went to those salaries for tax cuts for the rich. And it’s also true of the Medicaid cuts and the Affordable Care Act cuts they want to make. That is also to accommodate tax welfare for the richest people in the country, for Elon Musk and for Donald Trump themselves. It’s just a total reverse of what they promised voters.
Sargent: Well, speaking of Republicans being on their back feet right now, NBC News reports that House Republicans are backing off some of their town hall meetings. And here we see that it’s because of Elon Musk, as you mentioned earlier, his DOGE cuts. Republicans have been getting absolutely hammered by constituents over the chaos and destruction that Musk has unleashed with all this. What do you make of the nature of this energy? Do you think it’s too early to be confident that this will translate into something meaningful? Or alternatively, are there signs already that we’re seeing something durable here, a level of dissatisfaction and backlash that could snowball and become something that matters in the midterms?
Bates: I think people are feeling that the common denominator for everything they’re doing is that working people, middle-class folks, people that they promise to fight for are being screwed over so that billionaires themselves, big corporations can see tax giveaways. And if people are feeling this in their daily lives, that’s going to have an impact. And it also sets the impression. This is a country that takes people seriously. When they make an explicit promise on the campaign trail—when they say that when it comes to your top priority, your daily costs, I promise you on day one you’ll feel relief—then not only does that not happen but [they] use [their] power to do the opposite so that [they] can make money off people—he’s going to benefit directly and so will Musk from the tax giveaways—that all hits home for people. And their daily lives are being disrupted. That’s not what they were sold.
They were told their daily lives would improve. But if you look at some of the stuff they’re classifying as waste, they’re putting military families through hell. They also are getting rid of cancer research; I don’t know a single American who thinks that that is waste. They are desperately trying to find the people that keep our nuclear arsenal secure because they fired them, and I don’t know a single American who thinks that is a good idea. Everyone wants to get rid of waste, but I would argue it is exceedingly wasteful to put trillions of dollars on the country’s credit card so people like Elon Musk can have lower taxes, which, by the way, exacerbates inflation. If you increase the deficit, it makes inflation worse. They told us they were going to end it.
Sargent: I want to flag another number from the Bloomberg poll because I think it gets at your point very well. Only half of Republicans—Republicans—say they think the tariffs will be good for the economy. I think there’s clearly a problem in Trump’s base right now of some kind. There are a lot of signs coming out of the White House and Trumpworld that they’re really working hard to juice up the base again. Something’s wrong. All the talk about annexing Greenland and stealing the Panama Canal and so forth, for some reason, energizes Republican voters, so they’re pushing that constantly. There’s clearly among Republicans a bit of uncertainty about whether Trump really is delivering on the economy already. Can you talk a little bit about that? What do you think that means?
Bates: Yeah, you mentioned energy. I think that there’s a very real question about whether he has the energy to do the job. We all saw Elon Musk parading around in the cabinet meeting as though he was president. I saw this week [that] when Donald Trump was asked by a reporter about Musk’s demand that federal employees justify their continuing to be on payroll, he didn’t even seem to know about it. He said something like, Well, I guess they’ll be fired if they don’t do it right. You’re the president, and you don’t know? I think that he has been deferring to [Musk] so much. And he also has stopped talking about things like costs. As you’re getting it, he’s trying to talk about anything else, but it does seem like they’ve lost the narrative and they’re trying to get it back. And you just can’t explain away if people are paying more money and feeling that pain and it’s your fault.
Sargent: It’s extremely clear that there’s an opportunity right now, I think, to fracture the MAGA coalition. As you mentioned earlier, Republicans are getting ready to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid right now. The Trump coalition this time around included a lot of lower propensity, lower engagement, working-class voters, but non-MAGA ones. Trump’s own pollster recently found that 59 percent of voters in the 18 most competitive House districts are worried about their financial situation. And Trump’s own pollster essentially gently told Republicans, You better prioritize the working class in these budget moves you’re making in coming months. What do you want to see from Democrats in terms of driving this wedge among Republicans? How can Dems peel off those voters in advance in the midterms? What do you want to see them doing more of?
Bates: I think that we need to remember that people’s bottom line is virtually always going to be their highest priority, and that there is a pervasive and very real sense in the country that the tax code is already very unfairly weighted in favor of people that are wealthy. For some context, I led our press around when we were passing the Inflation Reduction Act in the White House, and I had expected Medicare negotiating lower drug costs to be the most popular element of the Inflation Reduction Act, but I was wrong. That was the second most popular. The first was that we were raising taxes on the wealthy and big corporations.
Americans across ideological lines are very supportive of making the tax code fair, and they loathe tax giveaways to the rich. Like you were getting at, Trump’s own pollster shows people hate that even more when it means that you’re costing millions of folks their health care. Hospitals would close across the country, especially in rural areas, if they make Medicaid cuts on this scale—and I don’t think that they’ve reckoned with it. If that comes on the heels of I’m promising you lower costs, I’m raising them on you so that I can get a tax a tax benefit myself, I’m also making your health care costs go up and causing mayhem in your community by closing hospitals because I also just want tax welfare for myself, that’s just about the least popular set of things you could do.
Sargent: You worked in the White House. What are you seeing coming out of there right now? Can you read between the lines, read the tea leaves a little bit? What do you think’s going on internally? Are there debates inside about the stuff that we’re talking about here? There have got to be people in there who know that this stuff is becoming a major problem for them. What’s your reading?
Bates: I think there are probably two things happening. One is, as you say, there are people who recognize they have a problem because consumer sentiment is falling. I would argue that’s one of the most important kinds of polls that we have access to. It’s what shows how Americans feel about the economy in general. And they’re seeing that people took Donald Trump seriously when he said that right away costs would fall, and they’re not feeling it; they’re feeling the opposite. So there’s some folks who probably recognize it. They are showing what they don’t want to talk about. Which to your question about Democrats focus, that is something you should always keep in mind. If he doesn’t want to talk about costs, if he doesn’t want to talk about tax giveaways for the rich or health care or his tariff taxes, you should talk about those things.
But there’s probably another set at the White House that just feels like, They won and they get to do what they want. I’ve been talking to folks who’ve been trying to impress on some Republican members how hurtful Medicaid cuts would be in, say, my home state of North Carolina; and while there’s some people in competitive districts who seem like they get it, there are a lot of these folks who seem a little drunk on the wind, like they’re just going to do what they want. And that is a recipe for backlash. Again, the common thread of all these things is selling out the people they promised to fight for to the rich. You literally have the wealthiest man in the country, both in terms of literal money and in terms of incel energy, prancing around, looking like a moron, cutting the jobs of people that keep nukes safe, cutting the jobs of people that are fighting bird flu as egg prices go through the roof, putting military families through hell, and obviously the American people hate it.
Sargent: There is a debate among Democrats right now over whether focusing on costs and kitchen table stuff is enough. A lot of the more moderate Democrats seem to want to do that, but there is a strong argument for taking on Trump and Musk and Republicans more forcefully over the nonstop law breaking, the profound unfitness of Trump’s new cabinet figures, the havoc they’re all unleashing by hacking away viciously at the federal government. Chris Murphy has been in that latter camp urging a more aggressive stance on some of that stuff. I think I agree with him. Where are you on all this?
Bates: I think that the way that Trump is abusing the rule of law and dividing Americans against each other is disgusting, and I think that what we have to do is remember that we need to make a case to folks who may not feel that way off the bat. What we need to do is try to reach them. And that means listening to them about what their top priorities are. Most Americans’ top priority is almost always going to be: How can I create a better financial future for my family? And there is a way that you can do that that also addresses a lot of these abuses for which there is a cost. But what we need to remember is there are a lot of parallels between now and 2017. I worked at the Democratic Super PAC American Bridge that cycle leading their House races arm; we took back the House, and it was because the American people hated the idea of costing millions their health care and driving up premiums so rich folks could get a tax cut. And of course, we were able to stop that, but we focused on it. We also focused on how his only legislative “accomplishment” was blowing up the deficit with tax welfare for rich people.
We were disciplined. We did not take his bait. We were aware that if he was talking about something else, it’s because he wanted us to. We stayed concentrated on what people thought should be front of mind for their leaders: their costs, their bottom line. And that builds a credibility that will then get them to take you seriously about some of these other threats. And there are profound costs to corruption. A good example of this is Trump likes to talk a big game about China, but he has been consistently outfoxed by them. I remember he claimed he got a great trade deal with China during his first term; they didn’t meet any of the American export targets that he promised the country would happen. This was not long before he promised people Covid was not a serious threat because Xi had promised him that it was under control, which was, of course, horseshit; the guy he said that he bonded with over a beautiful slice of chocolate cake.
If you look at USAID, that helps China. That hurts our economy and it helps China because we are locked in a global competition with China to see who can get better access, better economic relationships with just about every other country out there. USAID is one of the main ways that we counter their Belt and Road Initiative. And there are ways when that comes up that we can make clear for people that that actually hurts your interests, but what we have to lead with is, I know that you’re feeling these costs, I am too. We were all promised that they would fall on day one, but what are they doing instead? They are using full control of Washington to raise your costs, to take your health care—all so Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their rich friends can see a tax windfall. And that opens the door.
Sargent: I think there’s no question that people really don’t remember how important the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which were an enormous giveaway to corporations and the rich, were in the midterms. Can you just get at that a little bit? People usually seem to think that it was just anti-Trump energy. And by the way, it really was. There was a lot of anti Trump organizing on the ground, and there was a lot of angst about the Muslim ban, about immigration and that sort of thing. But the tax cut was a big part of the 2018 House Democratic win, wasn’t it?
Bates: Yes, it was central to it. And what we have to remember is energy, if it’s channeled correctly, can be very powerful; but if energy is not informed by strategy, it is not going to bear fruit. So we have to make sure that we’re using our energy in a constructive way. That means talking to the folks who might be skeptical now, but who, as they feel this economic pain that’s being inflicted on them, as Republicans force onto the country this radical redistribution of wealth from hardworking people to billionaires, to big corporations, that is eye opening, can see you in a new light.
Democrats need to remember that midterms are usually defined by the agenda of the incumbent president and their party. That doesn’t mean that you don’t talk about your own, but it means that that is what opens the conversation. That’s what people are reacting to. You need to use that foil, identify what it is that repulses people most—and obviously it’s that their costs are going up so rich people can get a tax cut—and then show that you are the alternative to it, that you think there should be a fair tax code for hardworking people.
This is not a country that appreciates the values of Bernie Madoff, but that is exactly what you have in the White House right now. You have two billionaires who promised people that they were going to get relief from global inflation but they are raising the costs themselves, charging you so that they can cut their own taxes. And while they’re at it, they’re also taking your health care away and raising health care costs and shuttering rural hospitals and costing us manufacturing—all so they can profit off of you. They promise people new access to the American dream, but they’re really just taking money out of your bank account and putting it into their own. That’s the thing that disgusts people.
Sargent: I do think Democrats are going to have a very strong case to make. I just hope that they keep their own people energized as well. I agree with you that there’s a way to bridge the two. Andrew Bates, thanks so much for coming on with us, man. It’s really good to talk to you.
Bates: Thank you for having me.
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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