The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 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.
Donald Trump’s inaugural festivities have been all about projecting strength and confidence. But The New York Times reports that his own allies are very aware that in fact, he starts his second term in a considerably more tenuous position than the public displays suggest. They fear he may be overreading his mandate and could be suffering from hubris. Trump himself privately worries that the very slim GOP majorities he enjoys could be a real obstacle. All of which raises a question: Could Trump’s presidency, if it’s seen as even moderately successful by the public, normalize his way of doing politics with the American people over the long term? Or will more conventional political and structural patterns assert themselves, leading to failure, backlash, and even MAGA politics getting discredited? Political theorist Alan Elrod has a good new piece for MSNBC arguing that the former scenario is unfortunately a very real possibility. So today, we’re talking to Elrod about all this. Good to have you on, Alan.
Alan Elrod: Good to be here, Greg. Really excited.
Sargent: The Times reports that people around Trump fear he’ll immediately test the public’s tolerance by pushing forward with things that are already unpopular, like mass deportations, pardons of January 6 rioters. They say he does himself the most harm when he’s overconfident, which he certainly is right now. And Politico is reporting that Trump allies acknowledge that Trump’s presidency could quickly go sideways, especially if things like his promise to fix immigration go south, which seems likely. Alan, all this adds up to an admission that Trump’s position is shakier with the middle of the electorate than they publicly allow. Your thoughts?
Elrod: My thoughts are that it might be. But at this time, we have to consider that swing voters, independent voters, they’ve had a lot of time to absorb Trump and Trumpism, yet they came back around to him again in 2024. At a certain point, we have to think that they knew what they were getting. Maybe he can blow it with them if he really overreaches or if he just absolutely can’t get things through Congress, but so far, even with that slim majority, they seem to be willing to go lockstep with him. And I’m a little skeptical that the Jenga tower is going to collapse immediately on him with this.
Sargent: OK. In your piece, you argue that there’s a real risk attendant here, that the American people come to accept Trumpian politics as a normal way of doing politics, that they come to expect more candidates like Trump. What do you mean when you describe this Trumpian mode of politics? What is it that you fear the American people could come to see as normal?
Elrod: It’s the full array of what we’ve been worried about with him from the beginning, which is corruption, kakistocracy, rule by ineptitude, by flattery, by bribery, all the things that we think are the hallmarks of Trump and his mode. The first time around, it worked to say, Look, this isn’t normal, this isn’t what we do. But when you consider that Donald Trump has been essentially the premier Republican politician since 2015, and that now he’s going to serve a second term, nonconsecutive—that means, overall, 12 years essentially of politics dominated in one way or another by Trump—those arguments just don’t really work for people who’ve been exposed to over a decade of this kind of rhetoric and this kind of policymaking conversation.
Sargent: It’s certainly alarming enough. In your piece you argue that there’s a specific reason for all this. Young voters in particular are coming of age during this era of Trumpian politics, and this is, for many of them, all they know, which exacerbates the risk that Republicans will keep nominating these types of candidates over time, which in turn could further entrench this mode of politics. And you talk about this new generation of voters who’s just coming into politics and coming into political consciousness during a time when Trump is all they know.
Elrod: We know generally in political science that when people come of age, it helps shape their politics. And obviously, they’re not all pro-Trump, but the distinction is not necessarily that they’re all MAGA-oriented but that they’re all exposed to this stuff for really the entirety of the time they’ve been paying attention. By the time we get to the end of Trump’s term in 2028, someone who is just that year going to be able to vote would have been five years old when Donald Trump came down the escalator. So at a certain point, that level of exposure really shapes just what you think is normal. Your reference points have shifted.
One of the things I think is important to understand is that when we think about political socialization, there’s what’s going on in the world around you, there’s your parents, there’s also peer effects. As more and more people in this younger generation are exposed to Trumpism—some of them adopt Trumpism, some of them reject it, but all of them are cooking in this stew—what you have is people who are simply used to this being part of politics, a mode of politics, something that some of the people in their peer group do support, something that is a standard.
You can make the argument that American presidents don’t talk a certain way or that administrations don’t engage in certain pressure campaigns on private companies, but that’s all just empty words if what they’ve actually seen for over a decade is people doing this. So it really matters if we’re going to talk about normalization. There’s the ethical question of normalization: Are we making it OK for Trump to do what he does? But then there’s just the descriptive fact that this has been happening for some time. And for many people, whether it means they endorse it, it is normal.
Sargent: And I would add to that that elites are actually confirming the normality of it. So at the inauguration, by the time you listen to this, you will have seen that a number of tech oligarchs were sitting up there on the dais with him: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, so forth. These are people who are essentially openly and explicitly saying, through their presence, that this kind of politics in which they’ve been essentially co-opted to be part of the new Trump oligarchy is acceptable and normal and good, right?
Elrod: Absolutely. For someone like Zuckerberg, they’re saying it’s acceptable and good. For someone like Tim Cook, they’re saying, Well, this is the game you have to play. There’s a range there. And not everyone is necessarily saying, I love Trump. This is how it should be, but plenty of people are saying, Well, last time around, we offered lots of rhetorical signals that we don’t like Trump or that we’re different and that we are with the greater majority of the American people who stand for these other virtues. And this time around, we’re going to play the game.
And so it matters probably to distinguish between the full-throated support and the people who are just accepting the new reality, but both of them suggest that the terms have changed.
Sargent: Absolutely. To your point about young voters getting acclimated to all this, I want to play something Trump said at his “victory rally” in D.C. on Sunday. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): Don’t believe this stuff when you hear, “The kids are liberal.” They’re not liberal. Maybe they used to be, but they’re not anymore. You’re going to see how many people are for us.
Sargent: Alan, Trump said it right there. They want to condition a whole generation to expect and support violent authoritarian corrupt race-baiting politics.
Elrod: They do. One of the first things I think is important is: The idea that the younger generation is more liberal all the time is a myth anyway, right? Look, Richard Nixon carried a slim majority of the under-30 vote in 1972. Bush and Gore split the 18-to-24 vote in 2000. I’m not comparing Bush to Trump, but the idea that the younger voters automatically liberal is something that I think is a bit of a myth. It’s certainly been reinforced by the way in which Obama carried younger voters, but I agree that Trump and his cohort want to condition younger voters. And it’s because they understand that political socialization, the ways your political identity is shaped in your teens and 20s, can lock in and become a strong political habit over time in your adulthood. So if you can get younger voters, one, OK with your politics, and two, voting, what you’ve done is potentially, not necessarily automatically, locked in a cohort of voters through their adulthood.
Sargent: I want to push back a little bit on something you said earlier about how there’s not really necessarily a danger of Trump overreaching or at least maybe that people are getting a little too optimistic that that will happen. During the campaign, it’s true as you say that voters have been exposed to Trump’s authoritarianism and his intimations or direct flirtations with political violence for years. All the reporting and the polling indicated to us throughout the campaign that this was something that did concern voters but they were putting aside those concerns due to the cost of living and other considerations that really had nothing to do with Trump’s authoritarianism. And right now, we are seeing that the things that Trump plans to do are unpopular.
We have a new AP poll this weekend: Only about four in 10 Americans favor mass deportations of undocumented immigrants who haven’t been convicted of crimes; Only three in 10 favor the tariffs that Trump looks likely to impose; Six in 10 oppose pardoning most January Sixers. Yet right out of the box, Trump is already starting with a blizzard of extreme executive orders on many of these fronts. So there really is a risk that the middle of the electorate, particularly if Trump doesn’t get prices down and his tariffs maybe drive costs up, starts to really turn on the authoritarian stuff as well once their reason for voting for him is stripped away or revealed to have been a failure. You see what I’m saying? I’d like to hear you talk about that a bit.
Elrod: I don’t disagree, but I do think it’s a test moment for how broken our politics is if Donald Trump does push through these things. People have said they don’t want mass deportations; people have said they care about prices, tariffs could push prices up; people have said a number of other aspects of what Trump wants to do is unpopular, or least that they’re not sure about it. But this is where we get into a moment where we’re really going to test just how far gone our politics is.
I tell people I’m a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. I do think the long-term trends with a lot of these ideas are bad, and that people will see that they are bad. But in this moment, the information environment, the polarization, the way in which people have memory-holed the last four to eight years, I do think concerns me about the public’s capacity to rapidly reject any particular Trump policy move.
Sargent: I will say, in favor of what you’re arguing, one thing that I fear is that Trump gets a lot of credit for the very good economy that he’s inheriting. Look, this is going to happen. He’s been saying right up until today that everything is an absolute disaster, and starting now, everything will be absolutely great under him. And I fear that one real risk is that the electorate starts to associate the good economy with the mass deportations and other Trumpian authoritarian politics and starts to say to themselves, Well, it’s scary stuff that he was talking about, but look, it’s working, isn’t it?
Elrod: That’s very prescient, honestly, because I believe that the public has a very poor understanding of causal relationships when it comes to economics. They tend to just blame the administration that’s in power for things being good or bad. And I do think Trump will probably say, You know, they told you that mass deportations would completely disrupt the American economy, but if he’s doing them, and at the same time, prices are coming down as a residual effect of where things were when Biden left office and the economy is heating up even more, then we know that he likes to run it hot, then he probably will say, They lied, all this works, everything is fine. And I don’t know that we have a lot of evidence that the public will reject that particular narrative.
Sargent: Well, on mass deportations, I think that the polling is painting a very misleading picture. You’ve just brought up one of the things that pisses me off more than anything, so I’m going to rant now. The polling almost always, or at least most of the time, tends to ask, “Do you favor mass deportations, yes or no?” When it’s asked as a yes or no question, voters tend to say yes because they associate deportations with something like public order. But when pollsters ask, “Do you favor mass deportations or a path to legalization for most noncriminal migrants?,” then solid majorities favor the latter. It’s creating a really misleading impression that the public favors mass deportations when the polling wording, when it’s structured in a much more revealing way, actually shows support for the opposite. See what I’m saying? I worry that our public discourse is actually contributing to the problem that you’re underscoring here.
Elrod: I agree entirely there. What I also think is important, and it connects to what you were just saying, is that I do think Trump’s Achilles’ heel could be this question of chaos versus order. Mass deportations had the potential to be a complete mess, as do some of his economic policies, as do some of his other ideas in terms of how he wants to reshape the executive branch, how he wants to handle international politics. And a lot of voters, correctly or not, associated Trump with order, strength, firmness. This is also just typical of authoritarian-oriented figures.
So if there is a lot of actual turbulence and he can’t deliver any of these ideas in an orderly fashion, and people do feel like their lives are being disrupted and they feel like they’re watching people they know be treated roughly, then I do think there’s the potential for some backlash. And that’s probably where he is the most vulnerable. Less on the idea that any particular move might be unpopular in a public polling sense, but more in the broader idea that if he is not delivering an orderly, stable government—and I don’t necessarily mean the tweets, I mean this time around policy-wise—then people might say, Well, I picked him because he was supposed to be this big, strong man that could steady things, and he’s not. So that could hurt him, and that may be the one silver lining.
Sargent: Yes, I absolutely agree with that. In fact, it really is critical that that is precisely what his allies and advisors are admitting privately. When they say that he’s in a tenuous position, what they’re really talking about is that there’s a clear danger here of overreach, particularly in the areas where Trump is practicing the most Trumpian authoritarian violent modes of politics: mass deportations, pardons of January Sixers, prosecuting Trump’s enemies and so forth. They know what you just said, which is that there’s a real capacity for things to get very chaotic and alarming to middle of the road voters who just want stability. So there is a danger of public backlash and rejection of that way of doing politics in particular, isn’t there?
Elrod: I think there is. Again, I tend to think of myself in this context as a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist, which is that I don’t know how quickly public reaction will build, I don’t know if you’ll get the kind of.... No, we’ve already seen you’re not going to get the same marching in the street that you got in 2017. But I do think that one of the most effective ways to get the public to react is when they see things happening in their own backyard, when it’s affecting them personally. So seeing neighbors, if they know people who are going to end up getting harassed by Trump’s immigration regime; seeing prices go up if they do because of tariffs; seeing actual day-to-day not just inconveniences but things that truly disturb them, I do think there’s a chance that by the time we get to something like the midterms, that does matter.
So I agree there that those overreaches are real, and they’re not just a problem because of the ethical or normative considerations, and I think that’s where I would draw the distinction. I don’t know if the public is going to sit there and say, Well, he’s overreached because this is not a norm, what I think they’re going to say is, He’s messing up my life. He’s doing things I don’t like. It’s causing chaos in my own backyard. The kid’s parents that my kids play soccer with, one of them got deported. That’s the stuff that can stick. But I do think it’s a distinction from the conversation about where we’re at in terms of our political norms and what we’re willing to accept from politics.
Sargent: Look, there’s no question that you’re raising an alarming scenario, which is that a fairly large number of swing voters become acclimated to Trump’s way of doing politics: the authoritarianism, political violence, the corruption, the celebration of oligarchy, the celebration of kleptocracy. It’s an alarming scenario, no question.
Elrod: Absolutely. And this is a tactic for people on the authoritarian right. What you want to do is just boil the frogs slowly to a degree. There’s a sense in which the longer people are exposed to this, the less these arguments about this isn’t the way things are done work. Now, you can still see collapse, right? Again, you can still see these political projects overreach and fail, but that then becomes more a question about what they’re actually delivering and less a question about the public still believing in those norms. And it creates the problem that we’re going to have to face on the other side of Trump.
When Donald Trump leaves office, and in 2028 should the Democrats manage to win, there’s still going to be a lot of rebuilding norms, reconditioning the public to a certain way of politics if we actually want to try to recover that. Because at this point, it’s just been too long to say that even if you electorally defeat Trump or Trumpism, that you don’t still have to face the cultural consequences of a decade and a half of this stuff marinating the American public.
Sargent: Alan, think you’ve really stated that very well and underscored what I think is the stakes for the next four years in a different kind of way. Alan Elrod, thanks so much for coming on with us, man.
Elrod: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure. Long time, first time.
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.