Transcript: Trump Spirals at Rally as Fox Drops Bomb on GOP Chances

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 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.In the final week of the midterms, Donald Trump will be campaigning almost entirely in red states. That tells you exactly what Republicans think of the map right now: it’s deteriorating for them. And indeed, Fox News just dropped some surprising ratings changes that illustrate that Democrats are now contesting some very deep red territory. Yet by all indications, Trump isn’t aware of what’s happening, as some really strange remarks he just unleashed in Texas strongly suggest.Michael Cohen has written well recently on his Truth and Consequences Substack about how and why Democrats are now contesting such difficult turf. So we’re talking to him about all this today. Michael, thanks for coming on.Michael Cohen: Thanks for having me, Greg. Always great to be here.Sargent: So as we’re recording this, Trump is campaigning in Texas. He has scheduled stops in coming days in Ohio and Iowa and South Carolina. He just held a rally in Mississippi, of all places. Michael, this is all red territory, some of it deep, deep red territory. What do you make of it?Cohen: I mean, it’s pretty obvious that the Republicans have problems turning out their voters, and they are really not even trying to compete in blue states or even purple states so much, but they’re trying to shore up their support in red states. So, I mean having Trump show up in a place like Mississippi, for a race that now looks like it’s actually pretty close. South Carolina, I think he’s going to be there twice, for a race with Darline Graham, who seems to be having all kinds of problems separating from Democrat Annie Andrews. It’s obvious that this is just—he’s playing triage.I also think in a lot of places, Republicans don’t want Trump there, because he is a liability for the party. The only places where he’s not a liability are solid red states where he still has some reservoir of support and can get voters out to the polls.Sargent: That is so essential. Stay away from the swing areas, stay away from the places where everybody hates you, only stay in the places where we really need you to get out your base. And even in these red places, the base isn’t turning out. That’s the message we’re getting from this, right?Cohen: Absolutely. I think it’s pretty clear that the only asset that Trump can possibly serve to Republicans at this point in the campaign is in mobilizing that core Trump vote, which is, I mean, shrinking. I mean, it is probably around 30 percent. But in a place like Mississippi or South Carolina, it’s a little bit higher, obviously. His approval is probably around 40 percent. And I guess the assumption is that he can get those voters out. Now, is it going to work? Who knows?But I think it does tell you just how desperate this map has gotten for Republicans, and just that they are playing defense in a lot of places where I think about six months ago, no one would have thought they’d be playing defense.Sargent: Trump just unleashed some really strange remarks in Texas. Here he’s talking about how his Mideast adventures are such a smashing success.Donald Trump (voiceover): Your country is making an absolute fortune because of the situation in the Middle East. We’re steering them all to Texas. We’re sailing to Louisiana. Alaska is a big beneficiary. Everybody is a benefit. The whole country.And here he’s talking about the Strait of Hormuz and his adventures in changing the names of things on maps.Trump (voiceover): And I will tell you, more oil is right now flowing out of the Hormuz Strait. We’re thinking about renaming it the Trump Strait. Should we do it? Well, we did that with the Gulf of Mexico, into the Gulf of America. We do that with a little lake, one of the Great Lakes. Lake Ontario is now Lake America.Sargent: So putting aside the crazy details here, the bigger message that Trump is sending with this is that everything he’s doing with the war in Iran is a world-historical success. That’s making everyone rich. He’s scribbling new names on his little globe, and that displays genuine American dominance. He really thinks this is all perceived as success, as his success, as success for our country. It’s delusional in that sense, Michael. What do you think of it?Cohen: Well, we should look on the bright side, which is that he is not talking about Jon Husted’s ass. So that is a positive, and that is something I think we should all be glad for.I think what has been obvious for most of the last two years is that Trump simply does not care about what Americans care about. He cares about his ego. He cares about his vanity projects, like his ballroom and his arch and his golf course he wants to build in Washington, D.C. He cares about going after his political rivals and his enemies. I mean, he wrote a 1,300-word post the other day about Bill Maher. I mean, this is not a guy who has his finger on the pulse of the country. But what I am struck by is, he doesn’t even seem to care.He has basically turned the presidency into just his sort of ego-stroking exercise. And that’s all this is for him. And there’s no message coming out of the White House that actually is intended to appeal to non-hardcore MAGA voters. That’s where Trump is now. And I mean, you see this in these clips. He’s just—it’s just free association, but on topics that are not even related to the issues that voters care about.Sargent: Yes. And I think we should talk about the sound of the crowd at these rallies. So they want him in these red places to really turn out that core MAGA base that you’re talking about. They’re not even expecting him to be able to bring over swing voters at this point, or appeal to independents. But when Trump is standing there talking about how he’s rewriting names on maps and how we’re all getting rich from his war, right? He hears the crowd cheer, and I really think he thinks that that’s what America thinks.Cohen: A good part of the reason he ran for president, why he ran again, is to go to these rallies and to get validation from his audiences. That is what motivates him more than anything else. That’s why he does so many of these events, because they are validating and affirming to him, and they are ways of sort of filling the limitless void that exists in his soul. So I think that’s one part of what is going on here. He is just trying to stroke his ego.The second thing about Iran. I mean, he is again living in a world of total delusion about what is happening in Iran. And he’s trying to keep spinning this. This is something Trump’s always done. He always tries to spin reality, but it’s just getting harder and harder for him to do it. And on Iran, there is no good way to look at this conflict right now. There’s no good way to think about what the U.S. has accomplished, which is not a great deal.I mean, we are seeing increasing flows of oil coming through the straits, but that is not actually lowering oil prices, in large part because the cost of getting the oil out of the Gulf is so prohibitively expensive. In fact, ironically, the reason why oil is flowing is because the price is so high. If the price went down, we might not get as much oil flowing to the Gulf.And now there are reports that he is thinking of attacking Iran after the midterm election. They’re talking about, apparently, a three-day attack that will accomplish nothing. It will not change Iran’s strategic calculus, but it will lead to a spike in oil prices, and it will lead to potentially an Iranian military response that could spike those prices even further. So I think what you’re seeing with Trump is a politician who is not only deeply out of touch with the American people, he’s deeply out of touch with reality. And I don’t think this is going to end well for him or for his party come Tuesday.Sargent: Well, to that point, Fox News just shifted a bunch of House races in the Democrats’ direction. Two of these really jumped out for me.First, Fox shifted Kentucky’s sixth district from Lean Republican to Toss Up. This is a race for a GOP-held open seat. The Democrat here is a veteran and former prosecutor, Zach Dembo. And Democrats are really bullish on winning and pulling off a surprise here. But Michael, Trump won this district by 15 points two years ago, and Fox now has it as a toss-up. I just find that remarkable. What do you make of it?Cohen: This Kentucky race is interesting because Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, who is a likely 2028 presidential contender, has invested a great deal of time and energy and his own credibility into Democrats flipping this seat. This is, like, the one seat in Kentucky that is a potential flip for Democrats. This is Andy Barr’s old seat. He’s running for Senate. And Dembo is running neck and neck.And this is interesting in another respect, that we may know early on where things are going on election night, because Kentucky closes its polls pretty early. And if Dembo is ahead, or if we know that he’s winning, it gives us a good sense of where this race is going to be going.Sargent: Yes, that’s one thing Democrats are telling me as well. Keep an eye on Kentucky six early in the night, because as you say, we’re going to get the information out of there pretty early. And by the way, even if Dembo isn’t actually winning outright, if he’s keeping it close, we’re going to know that Democrats are probably going to have a pretty good night, right?Cohen: Absolutely. That’s a great point. Yes, definitely. I mean, look, that is—I think you said the plus-15 Trump district. I mean, if that’s a close race, even if Dembo loses, if you’re seeing a 12-point shift, for example, in where it was in 2024, a lot of places where you have Republicans in seats that are, let’s say, a plus eight or plus 10 Trump, they’re going to be feeling pretty uncomfortable if that’s the result coming out of Kentucky early on election night.Sargent: Yes. And the second seat that Fox just shifted is North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District. This is also a GOP-held open seat. The Democrat here is Jamie Ager. He’s a family farmer going back generations. This is western North Carolina. It’s in Appalachia. And Trump won here by 10 points. It’s very rural. And Fox just moved it from Toss Up to Lean Democratic, which is just amazing. A 10-point district for Trump is now leaning Democratic. Democrats think they’ve got this one. That’s pretty striking.Cohen: What’s happening in North Carolina is pretty fascinating, because first of all, you’ve got a Senate race, with Roy Cooper running, in which he has a huge lead over Michael Whatley. In fact, the Republicans have basically taken money out of the race because they don’t think Whatley has a chance of winning.And what we’re seeing in the early vote in North Carolina—I know, I hate to read too much into early voting, but in North Carolina, the early voting on behalf of Democrats is just off the charts. And you’re seeing this, by the way, in a number of states. But in North Carolina, you’ve got a lot of close House races that look like Democrats have an advantage.This race you mentioned, this was a race that I think a year ago would have been seen as a lean, even likely Republican race. Now it’s lean Democratic. And you’ve got other races which were a few weeks ago solid Republican, now moving to the likely, even lean category in North Carolina. And so I think what you have here is just a couple of states where it is fairly obvious that the bottom has fallen out for Republicans. And North Carolina’s one.And by the way, North Carolina, just for the record, if you look at 2024—I know that Trump won there, but Democrats did really well in statewide elections in ‘24. They won the governor’s race, they won the lieutenant governor’s race, they won a Supreme Court race. I think they won a number of the down-ballot races. So this kind of prestaged what you saw in ‘24. And you have a very popular Democratic governor in Josh Stein. So I think you’re seeing Democrats making real inroads in North Carolina, and that can have a huge impact down the road into ‘28 and beyond.Sargent: Well, you mentioned that the Kentucky race has major implications for 2028, and I want to talk about North Carolina’s implications as well. North Carolina, people may remember this district, the 11th district, is in western North Carolina, where there was serious disaster relief needed and Donald Trump lied his ass off about the disaster response there. And Democrats tell me that that’s one of the reasons that they’re so competitive in this Trumpy part of the state now.And I think we’re going to look at that if Jamie Ager wins, if the Democrat wins, and it sure looks like he’s going to. We’re going to look at that and say, well, you know what, North Carolina’s really moving now. You mentioned this, I want to detail it a little more though, because right, demographics are pushing North Carolina in a Democratic direction, but more slowly than a place like Virginia. Trump still won there in 2024, but he only won by three points, if I recall, which is actually one of his smallest victories of all.So if we’re seeing the demographics in the eastern part of the state start to shift enough to bring this into the Democratic column in the presidential, and we’re seeing the western part of the state, the kind of huge margins that Republicans run up in these rural places, starting to come down a little bit—that’s how you get there, to shift North Carolina in 2028, right?Cohen: North Carolina was always sort of, along with, like, Georgia and Arizona, seen as the places where Democrats could potentially flip those states from red to blue. It’s already happening in Arizona and Georgia. I mean, Arizona is not a blue state, but it’s certainly moving more in that direction. In Georgia Jon Ossoff’s going to win by a huge margin. Keisha Lance Bottoms looks like she may be able to win that governor’s race, which would be huge for Democrats if she can win. And so North Carolina could be next.Sargent: So another surprising Fox News ratings change was to move the Ohio Senate race from Toss Up to Lean Democratic. This is a state Trump won by double digits. This is also the place where there’s been this huge controversy over that vile ad by Vivek Ramaswamy about Amy Acton and the governor’s race. Trump has gone all in on the ad.I don’t think most Democrats think this race is leaning Democratic. They think it’s very, very close. It’s a toss-up. The polling averages do have Brown up by around three points, but that’s still a dead heat, basically. What do you think about what’s going on there?Cohen: Look, even before that awful ad, the people I talked to in Ohio were suggesting that Acton and Sherrod Brown were likely to win, and that you were going to see one, maybe two House seats flip from red to blue. Keep in mind that Ohio Republicans redrew the maps to give themselves an advantage in one or two seats. And the opposite looks like it’s about to occur.Now, I’ve got to say one thing here. We certainly could see a situation in which Republicans do end up turning out in numbers higher than we expect, and that pushes a couple of these Republican senators over the line. You could see it in Minnesota, you could see it in Mississippi, you could see it in South Carolina. I don’t know if you’ll see it in Ohio or Texas, but you’ll certainly see it in some of these places. That’s a real possibility. We shouldn’t dismiss it completely.I just think that if you look, though, at where this campaign is going, what Trump is saying, where he’s going, where money is going from the national Republican campaign committees—it’s going to really solid red seats, seats that should not be in play. So I think what we’re looking at here is a big Democratic win. The question is, how big will it be? I think that really is the debate point. Is this a wave? Is this a tsunami? Or is this, I like to call it, an extinction-level event for Republicans? I don’t know the answer to that, and nobody does, but it’s one of those three possibilities, I think.Sargent: Yes, I agree with everything you said there. I want to also underscore that it is absolutely possible that Republicans can just hang on to the Senate barely, if their voters turn out in the places that they need them to turn out. What’s your sense of the Senate if you had to make the call right now? Nate Silver has it at 75 percent odds that Democrats win the Senate. Where are you on this? Do you think Democrats win it?Cohen: Yes, if you look at the poll numbers, it certainly suggests that Democrats should win in Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, possibly Iowa, possibly Kansas. Here’s the problem—Sargent: Alaska.Cohen: And Alaska too. Thank you. I forgot Alaska. And then there’s, you know, Michigan—we could go either way at this point, it seems to have tightened a little bit. The other races, like South Carolina and Mississippi, I’m more skeptical those things are going to flip.But here’s the problem for Democrats. All of these races, except for North Carolina and Maine, are in states where Trump won by double digits in 2024. I mean, it’s unprecedented for a party to flip this many seats that are solid red states in one election. We’re talking about it happening in two, three, or four states. That’s kind of crazy.That’s kind of crazy. It is crazy. And even to suggest this could happen just seems completely outlandish. But you can’t deny what the polls are telling us.And the polls in Texas have shown James Talarico ahead pretty much since the summer. Same with Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Same with Mary Peltola in Alaska. You know, Adam Hamilton is routinely now leading in the polls in Kansas, and Roger Marshall is running one of the worst Senate campaigns, I’d argue, in the country.So yeah, I mean, it’s crazy to think that we are at this place where Democrats could win so many places that they just have not won in years. But the data is what the data is, and the polling is what the polling is, and the early vote is what the early vote is. And it certainly suggests that that’s where things are headed. Again, it’s a question of 51 seats versus 53 or 54 seats. I think that is really the question that we don’t know the answer to at this point.Sargent: And we should stress that polls can be wrong, if they’re off a few points, right? If they’re off a few points in a direction that favors Republicans, all of these races basically don’t go the way we want, or most of them don’t. But the funny thing is that for all the talk about the polls being wrong, what history tells us is that in midterms during the Trump era, the polls actually haven’t been that wrong.And just to underscore this point too: basically, Democrats really only have to win two states that Trump carried by double digits to get the majority, provided they get Maine and North Carolina, which looks pretty likely. So you can see a path. It’s doable. As remarkable as it is, it’s doable, and so is a slightly larger majority, too.Cohen: I just want to say this though. I mean, you’re right about the polling. The polling could be off, the polling could be wrong. But there’s so many other data points that just back up this idea that this is going to be a huge election for Democrats.It’s the performance in off-year elections, which were unprecedentedly high for Democrats, overperformance in 2024. This is this year and last year. It’s the enthusiasm in primaries, the number of Democratic voters turning out. It’s the early voting, which just suggests that Democrats are motivated to vote, and that even occasional voters who lean Democratic are turning out in record numbers. You’re seeing this in North Carolina, you’re seeing this in Texas, you’re seeing this in Virginia, to some extent Florida.I mean, I think the only reason why so many of us are just like, I don’t know, is because so many of these battles are being fought in red territory, in Republican territory. If these were purple states, I don’t think there’d be a question of where this is going. But you have to sort of take it with a grain of salt when you’re in a place like Texas where Democrats haven’t won a statewide election in 30 years.I mean, in Kansas, they haven’t won a Senate race since the 1930s. So the idea that they’re going to win—I mean, it could happen. I think it might happen. But I mean, let’s just be honest, that’s an earthquake event for that to happen.Sargent: It certainly is. Michael Cohen, always awesome to talk to you, man. Thanks for all that.Cohen: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.