Transcript: Trump Shivs Vance As Election Meltdown Takes Unhinged Turn

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 13 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 unraveled in a series of crazed Truth Social posts on Thursday, and one thing stood out. Trump instructed JD Vance to stop seeking a deal with Iran, instead telling him to focus on investigating alleged corruption in blue states. This really shivs Vance. It also illustrates that Trump and MAGA will never come to terms with why they just suffered the massive electoral rebuke they did, which Vance badly needs them to. And all of this creates major openings for Democrats and liberals to make a new kind of case to voters.

We’re talking about all of it with Zack Beauchamp, who has a great new Substack called Public Reason that’s all about how to restate the liberal case after these Democratic victories. Zack, thanks for coming on.

Zack Beauchamp: Hey, happy to be here, Greg. It’s always fun, especially after a big launch like this.

Sargent: Congrats on the launch, Zack. So Trump erupted on social media, declaring that he’s asked JD Vance to focus entirely on largely invented blue-state “CORRUPTION.” He said this: “Corruption is in the Democrat leadership’s blood. We don’t need a deal with Iran. Those days have long since passed. We’ve got their money, hundreds of billions of dollars, and we’ve got their strait.”

Zack, none of this is real. Iran remains a total catastrophe for us. But note how Trump won’t allow Vance, who’s eyeing a 2028 run, to become the guy who fixes Trump’s Iran fiasco. It’s telling, isn’t it?

Beauchamp: Yeah, look, I want to say two things. First, I love how your intonation changes when you’re reading a Trump quote. Like, it sounds like Trump when you’re talking, right?

Sargent: Thank you.

Beauchamp: See the hands moving back and forth. Second, obviously a lot of what you quoted is nonsense blather, right? It’s like the president just saying what he feels like he needs to say to make it sound like he’s succeeding in Iran.

The Vance stuff, that’s real, and it’s fascinating. Because if you read the post very carefully, when Trump says he’s moving Vance off of the Iran portfolio—he doesn’t quite say that.

But what he does say is we don’t need to make a deal with Iran, and JD, I’m moving you full time to be focusing on fraud at home. That is essentially saying you’re off the case.

Which, in light of Vance’s comments right after the election, right, where he said basically the election was lost because of Iran—it’s clear to me, anyway, from the totality of this messaging, that Vance is being punished for the way that he talked about Iran after the election, blaming the entire election on Iran, and for stepping out from the company and party line on what you’re supposed to say about Iran, and basically blaming Trump for the election loss.

Sargent: That’s really fascinating. I agree that it really, really puts Vance in a box as a kind of punishment. It’s like a penalty box or something.

So Trump also angrily reopened his threat to prosecute Democratic members of Congress. He also raged that the GOP’s failure to pass the so-called Save America Act was “devastating” to Republicans in the midterms.

Zack, Trump suffers the biggest GOP defeat in a half-century, and his answer is to threaten to ramp up the authoritarian lawlessness and the voter suppression. What do you make of that?

Beauchamp: I mean, a leopard can’t change its spots, right? It’s like Trump has one playbook. It’s not that this electoral defeat happened by accident, right? It happened largely, but not entirely, because of Iran. Largely, but not entirely, because of tariffs. And largely, but not entirely, because of Trump’s immigration policy, and specifically the crackdown in Minneapolis, that seems to have been incredibly self-defeating.

But it’s all of those things. And it’s all the other things, too. It’s the constant chaos of the administration. It’s the way in which he betrayed elements of his base on Epstein. It’s who he is, right, as a person. It is his character asserting itself in office.

And what he’s done—I wrote about this actually in the first piece for Public Reason—is removed all the guardrails that prevent policymaking from being checked by anyone other than the president. That was, like, the number one authoritarian priority early in the administration. And what it’s meant is that there’s no transmission layer blocking Trump’s impulses from turning into policy.

And it means that just, like, the craziest things that he thinks and feels and that he believes as a person, the most aggressive things that he thinks, they just go straight into action a lot of the time. And so he just does what he’s going to do. And I don’t think he’s capable of rethinking premises at a deep and fundamental level. It’s just not who he is.

Sargent: Well, all this seems symptomatic of a broader problem gripping MAGA right now. You had a very good piece on this for your Substack—folks, check it out, it’s called Public Reason, it’s very good. MAGA thinkers are saying, essentially, that the real MAGA agenda has been failed by poor execution.

The war was handled incompetently, the tariffs were poorly done, Trump failed to communicate effectively about the reasons for the ICE invasions of Minneapolis and other places. That’s their emerging argument. You wrote very well on this. Can you talk about it?

Beauchamp: Yeah. The thing that’s interesting about this line that is emerging for Trump’s empathetic right is that they’re framing what happened as, like, a combination of a stabbed-in-the-back narrative and a real-Trumpism-has-never-been-tried. It’s, like, kind of both of those blended together, right?

The argument is that Trump did a really bad job implementing the things they care about. And in addition to that, he then betrayed one of the core MAGA principles, which was no new wars. Allegedly—I’ll come back to the allegedly, right?

But that was, in these commentators’ views—and in some ways this is implicit, I think, very clearly, in the way that Vance wrote about the election afterwards—that they think that they’ve strayed from what Trump won on in 2024.

But the problem here is that there’s, like, a fundamental misconstrual of what Trump and Trumpism was, what his supporters want from them, and what the ideology they were standing for was.

There just wasn’t really any kind of principled no-new-wars plank in MAGA ideology, for the simple reason that Trump has been a hawk for his entire life. Trumpism is just Trump. It’s not something separate. There’s no MAGA set of principles you can appeal to, to say Trump has gone wrong.

And so the right now is in this predicament where the one stable thing that sort of determined what it was about, and that papered over these deep divisions in the conservative coalition—Trump himself—is now obviously weakened and on the outs.

And so these people are trying to set up a narrative in which they’re the true heirs of the movement that brought Trump to power. But it’s not at all obvious that they’re going to be able to win that. And I think Vance personally will lose it, for the simple fact that, as Kamala Harris showed us, it’s very difficult to run against an administration when you were part of it.

Sargent: Right. And I think this idea that MAGA was betrayed, that true MAGA principles weren’t brought to fruition or whatever, and that’s the reason for the loss, also misses the immigration story in a big way. In other words, it misses what actually happened in this election with immigration. I think, by the way, a lot of liberals miss this as well.

The failure here isn’t just that Trump’s immigration agenda was unpopular. It’s that the underlying ideological goal of ethnically purging the country was also roundly rejected. And that’s core MAGA.

The exit polls showed a huge majority think immigrants are good for our country. People like James Talarico made an extremely powerful pro-immigrant argument. He won the debate on this issue in the polling with Ken Paxton.

Zack, I think liberals—and this connects to your new project—I think liberals were too quick to conclude that Trump’s 2024 win signaled a durable anti-immigrant shift in the country.

Now that we know this didn’t really happen, is there an opening for liberals to make a more robust case for immigration as a positive good, using the type of liberal language that you’re advocating be brought forth?

Beauchamp: Yes. Yes. I think, absolutely. I feel like it kind of sort of dovetails with trade. And people don’t always admit this, but what you’ll see is that Trump’s tariff policy has led to a total 180 in polls on how Americans view free trade.

Right now, Americans are free traders all of a sudden again. And it turns out that what people thought was this durable protectionist backlash in American politics was really just the fact that a bunch of people didn’t like the status quo, and they blamed free trade for some things that were happening in the status quo. Once they saw the alternative, they swung back.

And so there’s now a question of how to redefine not just, like, how you talk about it as a liberal and what your specific policy stance is, but the terms of the conversation. Like, for a long time, the background theory of American politics has been, American voters have turned against, quote-unquote, globalism, right?

They don’t like more people coming in here. They don’t like interfacing with other countries. And they want to shut the door in a variety of different ways. And I just don’t think that is true on a values level. I think that was a fundamental misread.

But there’s an opening now to give people a new set of concepts, right? To be able to say, well, actually, sure, I get it, you didn’t like the chaos in the Biden administration. And sure, I get it, there were problems with integrating China into the global trade order. But guess what? The United States benefits when we open the doors to cooperation with other countries.

We benefit, as we always have throughout our entire history, when we let in people who contribute to the United States, and keep our population growing, and keep our economy humming, and bring in new kinds of people with new ideas, who end up winning Nobel Prizes in the United States.

Like, this is the classic self-interested case for immigration, but it also is, at a deeper level, a liberal case. It’s an argument that openness is good for people. And I think you saw that a lot in—you pointed to Talarico. You saw it a lot in his campaign rhetoric.

Sargent: Very much so. And I think if you step back even a little bit more, you can sort of frame the whole thing this way. If you think about the three main pillars of MAGA, right—tariffs, mass deportations, America First foreign policy—those kind of make up, I think, basically the entirety of what was rejected in this election by a very, very broad majority of people.

And with the tariffs, I think it’s self-explanatory why Trump is kind of getting people to take another look at global trade as a positive for the country. The mass deportations are getting people to take another look at the fact that they like immigrants.

And America First, which you’ve been very eloquent on—I think you were ahead of the curve on this, in fact. America First is probably best understood not as isolationism, but more American unchecked militarism and utter contempt for international commitments and human rights norms and alliances.

That, I think, is what gives, you know, liberals an opening to restate the case for a more interconnected world, liberal international human rights norms, and so forth. Don’t you think there’s, like, a very big argument to be made right now?

Beauchamp: Yeah, yeah, there is. The way that I think about this is, after 2016, the United States entered a period of ideological rupture, where it’s clear that the old settlement that we had—which was, like, a competition between a sort of center-left Democratic Party and a center-right Republican Party that were both, I think, broadly and in their main contours, liberal politically—that was broken, right? That old consensus was broken. And there was a need for new ideological innovation.

And for a long time, part of the reason why the debate was happening on the terms that it was is that liberals felt very defensive and were having a lot of trouble coming up with new ideas to fill this vacuum. And the right felt not only emboldened by Trump, but also, I think, there was a lot of imagination, a lot of effort going into ideological reimagining on that side of the aisle.

And also, I would think, among a certain set of anti-liberal socialists. So that’s why liberalism has seemed so defensive, in large part. It was intellectually defensive and wasn’t coming up with these new ways of reacting to the collapse of the old liberal settlement.

And what you saw in this election—I don’t want to overread it, right, the same way that Trump people overread things in 2024 on their side. But I do think that the scale of this defeat—like, 2024 was a very narrow victory for Trump; 2026 is the biggest midterm landslide since Watergate, right?

It really is historic, and maybe we should start thinking about it in these historic terms. I think what it suggests is that people aren’t satisfied with the narrative that was on offer from the MAGA types as an explanation for what happened in the world and what it is now.

There’s a tremendous opportunity if someone like Talarico or Jon Ossoff, who I think maybe is the most plausible political actor to do this, can rebuild a new vocabulary for describing what it is people don’t like about the political status quo. Because they don’t like it.

Sargent: Right. And I think we really need to be clear that when people talk about this election as being about affordability, they’re hamstringing us from making this case. They’re hamstringing liberals from making this case.

What we need to be saying, I think, is that the core ideas of right-wing populist nationalism, right-wing authoritarian nationalism, have all kind of fallen apart, right? Tariffs, mass deportations, America First.

This wasn’t just a reaction to costs. The data is very clear that the public rejects the idea of imposing tariffs. The public is now much more pro-trade, as a positive good for the country. The data is also very clear that the public is rejecting the idea that the way to restore proper American identity, or a purified American identity, is to ethnically purge the country of non-white immigrants and their descendants.

And the data’s clear that nobody seems to really like the way Trump is treating our allies. And nobody seems to like Trump’s unilateral war in Iran. So America First, also rejected. The core pillars of right-wing populist nationalism have collapsed. I’d like to see that understood as the basis for our case going forward. Does that make sense?

Beauchamp: Yeah. I don’t want to dismiss the affordability point, because it is sort of objectively true, right, that the reason that voters voted against Trump is because of affordability.

But I think what you’re saying points to is that sometimes, in people’s minds, affordability was a proxy for some other concerns that they had. When they said things weren’t affordable, yeah, they blamed those policies for the fact that they had trouble affording things. And not unreasonably, by the way. The Iran war really did drive up gas prices. Tariffs really did make some things more expensive.

And the immigration, I think, is a kind of different case, because it also played out unevenly. Immigration wasn’t as important in, I don’t know, let’s say, the Michigan Senate race as it was in Texas, or in House races in Texas in particular, because the impact was uneven.

In some places, there was a real sense that the federal government was snatching their friends and neighbors. And that had this very concentrated effect. And you can see—if I have the data right in my head—you can see pretty clear shifts, disproportionate shifts, in high-immigrant, high-ICE-targeted communities, or areas that have large populations that might have been really punished by Trump. And so there’s a backlash. It’s just a different thing that wouldn’t show up in the same way in the aggregate national data.

And so, yes—like, this is a roundabout way, Greg, of saying, well, I have some issues with the way that you framed it and phrased it. Like, I agree with the underlying point 100 percent.

Sargent: And I want to return to something you said earlier, because I think it gets at the stakes of all this, right? Which is this idea that I think a lot of liberals have in their heads, that they have to tiptoe around Trumpian populism.

They have to sort of say to themselves, well, the reason Trump won in 2024 is voters decided that Trump was, in some sense, right about trade, about immigration, and about the liberal international order.

Now, I don’t want to dismiss entirely the idea that voters did think that there was something to Trump’s case. But a lot of liberals really overread that, especially after 2024. And we’ve got to stop doing that.

To get to the point where we correct our own ideology and make a good case for our own, right, we kind of have to be clear that we’re not afraid to say that right-wing populist nationalism has failed and is very unpopular. And then there’s a starting point there, I think. What do you think of that?

Beauchamp: Yeah. The way I conceptualize it is that the public hasn’t made up its mind on what it wants to be affirmatively, right? The American public doesn’t have a sense of what—maybe no public has an ideological sense, but the American public is unusually unsettled as to where it stands right now.

And so what it suggests to me is that they’re open to persuasion, because they’re not happy with the way things are going, and they haven’t seen anyone come up with a way to channel what they think is wrong with the status quo into a political agenda that seems to address their concerns.

I think one advantage Democrats have here, particularly, is that their agenda is not inherently inflationary. Whereas getting rid of immigrants, and, you know, putting big tariffs on other countries, and starting expensive foreign wars in the name of, like, seizing stuff for America—that makes things more expensive. That is just what it does. And there’s no way to avoid that with tariffs and immigration crackdowns.

Sargent: Yeah. In a sense, there’s a political economy of Trumpism. Like, I think we need to sort of rehabilitate the concept of political economy. And maybe this is the place to sort of end this. It connects everything together. This idea that the election was about affordability takes the political out of political economy, right?

And so people decided that trade is good, people decided that they like immigrants, people decided that they like our international alliances and human rights norms and so forth. Yes, as you pointed out, the starting point for that, or the entry point, the tip of that spear, was the high costs. But they connected those high costs to a set of values that they thought was off. And so liberals, I think, can now step forward and do what you’re calling for, which is kind of a refocusing on what worked for Democrats in this election, connecting liberalism to everyday politics by saying, these are the values that make an economy that will be fairer for all of us. Is that sort of where you want this to go?

Beauchamp: Yeah. My view of it is that there was, like, a baby step in the right direction when Democrats started picking up on some of the themes in abundance. I don’t think it’s the whole solution. But what that package did, like that sort of package of beliefs and ideas, is it said, hey, there’s this ambient concern people have about things not really working, and things being too expensive, and, you know, government not operating in the smooth way that corporations do sometimes when you interface with them. And those are, like, sort of everyday complaints people have about the state.

And being like, no, there’s a liberal way to think about these, to surface these problems and to bring them into the sort of ordinary political agenda, through very specific policies like permitting reform—that was an act of ideological innovation that seems to have actually worked pretty well in a lot of cases.

Like, I don’t think that swung the election for Democrats. I think it has led to some good policy changes in blue states particularly, that may end up helping build power long term, or, like, sustain a blue-state model.

And what you need to do is do that kind of work on a grander scale, right? Tell not just a story about, you know, fixing government and making more things. Tell a story about building a society that people want to live in, right? A society, not just an economy, right? A place in which we feel like we have purpose, meaning, connection, and value.

Sargent: In a way, the simplest way to put it might be that we need people to start really making the case for a liberal political economy. Zack Beauchamp, your website is really starting us off on this thing. Public Reason, it’s called. It’s a Substack. Check it out, folks. Zack, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Beauchamp: Hey, Greg, I’m always happy to be here. Public-reason.com. I just have to do that at the end of every episode. I was going to say my agent makes me do that, but that was for my book. I don’t have an agent. I just have me, for a Substack.

Sargent: Cool, man. Well, I’m glad you got it in. Zack, thanks for coming on, man.

Beauchamp: Thanks.