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  "path": "/article/211590/transcript-fox-meltdown-booing-trump-polls-turn-brutal",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-10T11:18:51.000Z",
  "site": "https://newrepublic.com",
  "tags": [
    "Podcast",
    "Politics",
    "Donald Trump",
    "Polls",
    "here",
    "new polling",
    "tanking horribly",
    "spinning wildly",
    "booed relentlessly",
    "own polling",
    "sounded like",
    "had to say afterward",
    "called",
    "described",
    "said",
    "flagged all this for Media Matters",
    "new Economist/YouGov tracking poll",
    "new Reuters survey",
    "average of polls",
    "look at Trump’s net approval state by state"
  ],
  "textContent": "_The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 10 episode of the_ Daily Blast _podcast. Listen to it_ here_._\n\n\n\n\n**Greg Sargent:** This is _The Daily Blast_ from _The New Republic_ , produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.\n\nDonald Trump is really, really, really unpopular. This week brings a barrage of new polling that shows him tanking horribly by a whole host of different metrics. It’s no accident that this comes as Trump and his propagandists are spinning wildly to erase what everyone saw in New York on Monday night, which is that he was booed relentlessly, thunderously, and mercilessly. Nobody understands better than Trump and MAGA that perceptions of his unpopularity are lethal. Right now they’re feeding on themselves and driving him into a worsening downward spiral.\n\nWe’re parsing through all of it with Grant Wiles, the VP of data and polling at NextGen America, the youth mobilization group, which has its own polling showing that Trump has completely lost the culture. Grant, good to have you on.\n\n**Grant Wiles:** Great to be here.\n\n**Sargent:** So Trump was at Madison Square Garden on Monday night. He was loudly booed twice. Here’s what the second one sounded like.\n\n_[Audio of loud, sustained booing]_\n\n**Sargent:** And here’s what Trump had to say afterward about his reception.\n\n**Donald Trump (voiceover):** _It was certainly amazing. It was—I think mostly cheers. It was loud and it was very enthusiastic._\n\n\n\n\n**Sargent:** OK, Grant, numerous news accounts said he was booed. _The Times_ called them “loud and raucous boos.” _The Washington Post_ described “loud jeers.” The AP said he was “booed loudly.” But to Trump it was great. Your reaction to all this?\n\n**Wiles:** Yeah, I think we’re just witnessing our president in real time experiencing the cognitive dissonance publicly of seeing that the vast majority of Americans simply do not like him. It’s why we see many artists pulling out of the 250 event on the National Mall.\n\nHe’s gone from somebody who prided himself on his ability to have successful friends who he can brag about, to a situation where nobody wants to really be affiliated with him.\n\n**Sargent:** You know what’s funny—Fox News recognizes how lethal this moment at Madison Square Garden really was. Fox, for instance, according to Matt Gertz, who flagged all this for Media Matters, had a chyron up about this saying he got a, quote-unquote, “mixed reception,” which is a really generous way to put it.\n\nThen Fox’s Brian Kilmeade said that it was “mixed.” “There were people cheering,” he said. And he blamed the boos _on the security_.\n\nAnd then Fox’s Lawrence Jones tried to explain away the booing by saying: “You don’t expect anything different from the same crowd that voted for Mamdani.” So I guess Fox’s Lawrence Jones did hear the booing.\n\nWhat do you make of that? I think really what this means, Grant, is that Fox News really understands on a very visceral level that the escalating perceptions of Trump’s unpopularity are themselves deadly for him. What do you think?\n\n**Wiles:** Yeah, I’m just glad my paycheck doesn’t rely on deluding the president into thinking that everybody likes him, because it’s getting increasingly difficult in this day and age. Whenever we see anyone break with this trend or this delusion that they’ve conjured up for him, bad things happen to them. They lose Republican primaries, their opponents get endorsed, they lose their jobs, they get replaced.\n\nAny number of things can happen to somebody who fails to prop up that delusion and maintain it really delicately for our president. But the reality is American people aren’t so easily deluded anymore. They know who he is.\n\n**Sargent:** I’ll tell you, Fox News knows this as well as anyone because, for instance, their pollster often finds pretty bad news for Trump, finds pretty damning stuff about his popularity. And Trump tends to react by demanding very loudly and angrily that Fox fire its pollster. So Fox News knows that they’re in this position where they have to tell the despot that his popularity is soaring, that nothing that he’s hearing about his unpopularity is real, as they did here.\n\nI think maybe Fox and Friends, which is the morning show that I just quoted from, really does try to puff up Trump, maybe in a way that the polling outlet at Fox News does not. So that schism is itself kind of interesting. You know what I mean?\n\n**Wiles:** Yeah, we know he spends a lot of time watching TV and reacting to these folks who are talking about him on TV. And it’s getting increasingly difficult, slash impossible, for them to even spin his latest approval or favorability ratings in any way that’s remotely positive. Because we’ve seen a steady decline since he took office in 2024. And there’s been almost no upticks since.\n\n**Sargent:** So let’s get into some of the new polling that’s just out. It’s really bad for Trump. The new Economist/YouGov tracking poll has Trump’s overall approval at 35 percent of Americans versus 60 percent who disapprove. That’s 25 points underwater. His approval on the economy is 29 percent to 63 percent disapproving. On inflation, it’s 24 percent to 68 percent.\n\nSo on the economy and inflation—the most important issues to voters right now—he’s in the twenties. And on inflation, fewer than one in four Americans approve of his performance. That’s bad, right?\n\n**Wiles:** Yeah, I think it’s important to note at the same time that just because he’s down doesn’t mean we should take this for granted. Last cycle we saw billions of dollars being poured into a PR campaign to support him and prop him up. And the normalization of Trump happened at every level of the ballot, where people felt like, maybe he’s a businessman, the economy is an issue, we should potentially trust this person.\n\nAnd even though we’ve seen since then that that has been proven wildly false and to not be a good idea, it doesn’t mean that once the Republicans spin up their machine again, they won’t have a lot of forces naturally working on their behalf again. So from our perspective, we want to make sure that people actually vote and they have the ability to vote and are equipped to vote, understand how, and that we can turn this disapproval and dissatisfaction with the administration into tangible election results.\n\n**Sargent:** Just to build on what you’re saying a little bit, there’s tremendous institutional investment in propping up Trump, basically. Fox News is an enormous organization. It’s an enormous propaganda outlet. There’s going to be hundreds and hundreds of millions spent, maybe a billion dollars, by outside groups between now and election day, trying to push up those numbers, trying to take the edge off his disapproval.\n\nSo yes, there’s a whole enormous barrage coming that’s going to be designed to just drown out all this stuff we’re seeing. That said, these numbers are very bad. And I guess it’s on Democrats to make sure that those perceptions of Trump actually stick through the election, right?\n\n**Wiles:** Yeah. And more importantly, I think Trump and Republicans have seen how unpopular they are, and they’re laying the groundwork to actually rig these elections through voter suppression—the SAVE Act, the newest version of the SAVE Act. The Supreme Court ripping up the Voting Rights Act and the power of Black voters, and through redistricting and gerrymandering. To them, voter participation itself is an act of resistance.\n\nWe’ve looked at analysis of what the SAVE Act would do, and it would target the main ways young people register to vote, which is 70 percent of them register at the DMV or online. Young people move twice as often as other demographics and less than half of them have passports. So there was a very concerted effort to restrict the voting rights and eligibility of young people in this country. And it’s just one of many things we’re focused on at NextGen.\n\n**Sargent:** I think it’s worth just saying here that this effort to suppress the vote of young people is really telling in one sense. The inroads that Donald Trump made with young voters in 2024 was one of his big success stories. It was one of the Republican Party’s bigger public opinion and political success stories of the last couple of decades.\n\nIt was a really big deal, and it led to a whole lot of talk out there about how a new coalition was coming into being behind this new working-class, Trumpified Republican Party. And so now all the data shows us that every last little bit of his gains among young people is just gone. Every last little bit’s just gone.\n\nAnd so now they’re at the point where they’re coming up with new ways to suppress the vote of young people. And Trump is furiously raging at Republicans, demanding that they pass this voter suppression thing in time to save them for the midterms. That alone is a big story and tells us a lot.\n\n**Wiles:** Yeah. I mean, we looked at Yale’s poll that they conducted in the spring, and they looked at every demographic on the generic ballot between last fall and this spring, and every single demographic has shifted on the generic ballot towards Democrats through significant numbers, often.\n\nGranted, there are the least gains among the youngest parts of the electorate, specifically the 18 to 22 range, but there are massive gains in the 23 to 29, 30 to 34 ranges. And we’re seeing that reflected across the space.\n\n**Sargent:** Right. So you’re basically talking here about really big gains for Democrats among some of these young voter groups. I just want to return to some of the polling. The Economist/YouGov tracking poll that I mentioned earlier—we should note here—is not an outlier.\n\nA new Reuters survey also has Trump’s approval at 35 percent. _The New York Times_ average of polls, which is pretty conservative and takes in a lot of data, has him at 38 percent. That’s really bad, especially for a polling average. He’s probably in the mid-thirties. He’s now, at the very least, firmly in the thirties, right?\n\n**Wiles:** Yeah, there’s no doubt about it. We did an analysis of all of the polls in 2025 that we could possibly get our hands on and found similar information. His polling averages have been trending down the entire time he’s been in office. There’s no sign of stopping at this rate. And he continues to do things that are deeply unpopular with the American public and very little to actually benefit them, if anything. And so people are wise to that. They know that the economic situation is tough. They’re experiencing it.\n\nWe just conducted focus groups and young people were saying just how difficult life has been from an economic standpoint and just culturally. One person said, _Trump ruined my high school years, ruined my college years, and now is ruining the rest of my twenties_.\n\nAnd that is emblematic of how young people are feeling when a lot of them didn’t really know much about him until the 2016 election, even though he was quite normalized at the time. They’ve come a long way in their journey on experiencing what life is like under Trump. And for them, it’s economic anxiety.\n\n**Sargent:** Well, I’ll tell you—what I think you’re getting at there is the degree to which Trump is this kind of malevolent, destructive force in American life at this point. And I want to close on that. First, I just want to talk about an interesting new poll from The Argument Substack. What they did is look at Trump’s net approval state by state.\n\nI’m just going to cite a few examples. Trump is eight points underwater in Ohio. Eight points underwater in Iowa. Ten points underwater in Texas. Eighteen points underwater in North Carolina. Those are all states Trump won, and those are all states with serious Senate races in them. Now, of course, winning in those states for Democrats will be very hard. But still, Trump now looks like a truly big drag on Republicans in all these places. Again, places that are pretty red. Your thoughts on that?\n\n**Wiles:** Yeah. I mean, Republicans are in the really unfortunate situation of having to defend the president’s record while him himself not being on the ballot. We’ve seen that he often is the driving force of a lot of new Republican voters to the polls. But when he’s not on the ballot, like we saw in 2018 and 2022, the Republicans that are have to deal with the consequences and defending his horrible record.\n\nSo as you pointed out, he’s underwater, disapproval rising in those states. Even when you look at the same data that folks are referencing on the generic ballot, you’ll see that there are really tight races in Texas, in Ohio.\n\nThis is not a pipe dream. Texas is very much in play this year, and this is a real election with a strong candidate. And Trump decided to intervene at the last second to put Paxton up. And being someone from Texas, I think that’s a horrible idea. They’re going to regret this decision.\n\n**Sargent:** Well, speaking of the Texas Senate race, there is a new poll this week—a new independent poll from the Texas Pulse—that finds James Talarico, the Democrat, three points ahead of State Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican. It’s 47 percent to 44 percent with Talarico in the lead.\n\nNow, nobody’s going to pretend here that Texas is easy. A shit ton of stuff can still go wrong. It’s an incredibly hard state to win. But I think it’s probably worth focusing a little bit on what you just said, which is that if Texas is going to be winnable, it’s because of Trump in two ways.\n\nTrump is deeply underwater in Texas of all places. And number two, Trump forced Republicans to nominate Ken Paxton, who is absolutely a weaker candidate in just about every conceivable way than incumbent Senator John Cornyn is. So there you have Trump’s toxicity really kind of represented in two dimensions, don’t you?\n\n**Wiles:** Yeah, and you also have a candidate who’s even more unpopular than Trump, believe it or not. Ken Paxton has a very low approval rating. He has a million issues as a candidate. And that’s even before you take into account that he’s on the hook for defending Trump’s record.\n\nIt’s going to be a very tough race for them. It’s going to be a very tough race for us. But I feel much better with Talarico as a candidate than I do with Paxton.\n\n**Sargent:** OK, well, I want to close on this point that you made earlier. NextGen America, your group, recently released some research. I want to focus on one of your findings, which was that you found highly negative views of Trump as a person and as a cultural phenomenon, with many discussing Trump as someone who’s really wrecked our political and social life. Can you describe those findings?\n\nThey seem to me to get at that point I raised a little earlier, that he’s really this kind of malicious and profoundly destructive force in American life right now. And I think that that is really what we’re seeing in some of these public displays of rejection of him and so forth. What did you find on that front?\n\n**Wiles:** Yeah, one of the most striking takeaways I had from that focus group that we just ran with Tulchin Research—they were Bernie’s pollster in 2020, a really highly respected pollster in the space—we found that Trump’s brand is so damaged compared to the last time we talked to young people.\n\nHe’s not getting the same benefit of the doubt or credibility as a businessman as he was at the start of his term or in 2024. Young voters have fully seen who he is, and they don’t like it. One of them called him, “a malignant narcissist who was out for himself and the powerful.”\n\nAnd in both the groups we ran, for young men and young women, they were asked for gut reactions to Trump. They offered up words like horrible, infuriating, predatory, criminal, an egotistical loser, con man, cult leader. The list goes on. But there was pretty much uniform agreement that he’s had a really negative effect both on the culture of this country and on the policies that affect their daily lives, specifically regarding the economy.\n\n**Sargent:** Amazing stuff. You made a point earlier I just want to really finish out on, which is there’s almost like a double-whammy effect here. On the one hand, Donald Trump’s not on the ballot in this fall’s midterms, which means he’s not going to be seriously getting out that sort of low-information, low-engagement voter that really only Donald Trump can get. It seems like he may be the only figure in American life who’s really able to mobilize those constituencies on that kind of level, with that kind of juice. So you have that on the one hand—he’s not there bringing out his own voters.\n\nYet at the same time, because of the structural ways in which midterm elections work, his increasing toxicity, his increasing unpopularity, his disastrous policies are weighing down on the party in power, because in midterms, what happens is voters turn out against the party in power. And so it’s like a two-layered effect here of Trump toxicity, in a way, isn’t it?\n\n**Wiles:** We’ve seen this pattern in presidential years where Democratic support is often overestimated. In addition to the margin-of-error effects, we saw polls consistently finding Democrats doing better than they actually did. We call that polling error. And when you look at the midterm elections—2018, 2022—we saw the opposite happen, where Republicans were getting overestimated on the congressional ballot. And so it’s very possible that this trend continues in 2026 and that Democrats are actually stronger than they look in reality on these polls.\n\nBut we’re not taking anything for granted. We want to make sure that people are equipped to vote, they know how to vote, their rights are protected, and that very harmful legislation like the SAVE Act never gets passed.\n\n**Sargent:** I’ll say, Grant Wiles, that the pieces are all in place here to win a really tremendous midterm victory, but the forces arrayed against that happening are going to be considerable. We’re talking about a billion dollars and an enormous crush of voter suppression. And God knows what they’re going to try to do with the military and ICE. Bottom line is, it’s not going to be easy, even though Trump is an utter disaster for his party. Grant Wiles, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.\n\n**Wiles:** Thanks for having me.",
  "title": "Transcript: Fox in Meltdown over Booing of Trump as Polls Turn Brutal"
}