President Donald Trump appears to be lacking the energy and enthusiasm he displayed in his first term, and The New Republic’s Greg Sargent is celebrating that the media is now willing to talk about it.
In his Monday morning podcast, Sargent spoke with Salon's Amanda Marcotte, noting that not only are Trump and his policies "really, really, unpopular," but there's "been a palpable shift in the discourse, and we think that’s highly significant."
He cited Axios, "generally friendly to Republicans," which claimed they "see big political trouble. Axios set its 'red alert' time for Trump and the GOP."
CNN data analyst Harry Enten said on Friday that Trump experienced the worst ten days of his term so far, calling the numbers “atrocious” and “horrific.”
Sargent said Democrats should be talking more about this “weakness."
"We discuss why the political media smells blood, how deepening splits in MAGA show Trump’s weakness, what it means that the Trump-MAGA culture war and immigration raids are badly alienating ordinary voters, and how Trump is in a potentially irreversible tailspin," Sargent wrote, introducing the podcast.
Marcotte confessed she never expected it to get this bad this quickly for Trump.
“I would like to wish I was smart enough to have seen that, but I kind of think it was hard to predict because, like, has this ever happened with any president? That they fall off a cliff so fast?” she said.
Sargent agreed that over the years, Republicans have treated Trump like he has "magical powers."
"There’s always this tendency to treat Trump as if he has some sort of mystical grip on some sort of deeper American essence that we’re all missing. Now, I think that’s partly because, you know, coastal elites flagellate themselves and hate themselves and all that, and blame themselves for missing the Trump phenomenon," Sargent said. "But still, it’s been really bad, hasn’t it?"
The Salon columnist agreed that the mainstream media coverage of Trump has always "annoyed" her.
"It’s coastal elites — people who maybe have never really lived amongst the middle of the flyover country of this kind," Marcotte said. "And so they assume there’s just some kind of thing that Donald Trump has, some magic that he’s working that is invisible to them with ‘ordinary people.’ But I’m from Texas. I grew up in rural Texas. Most of the people I grew up around are Republicans. And I just don’t think that it is like that."
She called it “more complicated” than the media believes. Now that Trump’s charisma is faltering, she wonders how quickly people who have been “big supporters of his” will suddenly pretend they never stood with him.
Marcotte also pointed to the sweeping 2018 midterm election, when the GOP lost a significant number of House seats. She attributes that to Trump’s voters being unmotivated when he is not on the ballot, while his opposition is eager to vote against his policies and MAGA-aligned politicians.
"I think we saw this pattern happen twice, where a lot of people just assumed he wasn’t going to win, so they didn’t turn out in 2016 or 2024 in the numbers that they should have," she estimated. That has changed over the past year with large protests across the country, even in red states.
Marcotte thinks it will result in a huge turnout for the 2026 elections.