Transcript: Trump Unravels in Wild Rants as Polling Shows New Weakness

Podhorzer: Well, this is the tricky thing about being in America. He may think his base is larger than it is—but in America, it doesn’t have to be a majority anymore. And as long as it’s willing to be 100 percent there for you all the time, the question isn’t, “Is it a majority?” It’s, “Is it enough?” And right now, it’s still enough.

Sargent: Apparently, it is. So at another point, Trump flipped through a bunch of printed-out articles about white farmers who he said had been killed. He had clearly never read a word of any of these articles. You could see that. At another point, Trump showed a video also designed to humiliate the South African president that supposedly showed a killing field for whites. Ramaphosa said, I’d like to see where that is, which was a striking moment. But I think the point here is, Michael, that no matter what Trump shows, he’s lying about the “white genocide.” And there’s just no way the voting public thought this particular thing was what they were going to get—overt white nationalism, white genocide theory going global—right?

Podhorzer: Well, I think that just shy of half of the population of the voters did. That’s the state of play, right? It just needed a few more to believe that, and we wouldn’t be in this dystopia now. It’s really important to realize that in this moment, when we’re being reminded of what a disaster the decision that Biden made to try to seek reelection —that’s been documented in the new book, Original Sin—and as we remember how in other countries, the governing party suffered much bigger losses because of inflation and all that, the reason it was as close as it was wasn’t because people love Democrats. We see that right now where their approval ratings are the worst ever. It’s that about half of the people who went out and voted were that disturbed at the possibility of a second Trump term. And if there had been maybe like one in 50 people who had voted for Trump who decided, No, I don’t want this again, he loses, right? It was that close.