The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 29 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.

MAGA suddenly seems very, very out of sorts. Donald Trump raged at Fox News on Monday, blasting the network for its supposedly favorable coverage of Democrats. Meanwhile, a number of Trump’s allies suddenly seem very worried about the backlash to Trump’s hate rally at Madison Square Garden over the weekend. What gives with Trump and MAGA? Democratic strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio offered an interesting diagnosis on social media, arguing that Trump’s rally at the Garden could provide last-minute motivation to vote against Trump among voters who might be tempted to sit out the election. Anat regularly does research into disaffected Democrats and has worked in Latin American politics, so we’re talking about all of this today with her. Thanks for coming back on, Anat.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Thank you for having me.

Sargent: Trump allies are trying to contain the controversy over the rally speaker who described Puerto Rico as a pile of garbage in the ocean and also made racist cracks about Blacks. Senator Rick Scott said the speech bombed because it’s not funny. Congresswoman Ana Paulina Luna bashed Democrats for making an issue out of the “joke” about Puerto Rico. Congressman Byron Donalds blamed the media. A longtime Trump advisor, Peter Navarro, blasted the offending speaker as an asshole. Anat, what do you make of this? Why do MAGA personalities think this requires condemnation while Trump’s other racist outbursts get ignored or defended?

Shenker-Osorio: There’s a consistent pattern that we have seen over time—not just in confronting Trump, but actually, interestingly, in confronting right-wing “authoritarianists” the world over, including in Latin America—which is that there is a certain amount of what a lot of analysts have called “baked in” tacit acceptance of a certain level of hatefulness, ugliness, vitriol. You hear again and again from analysts, Well, that’s not a new thing; voters are learning and they’ve made their voting calculus on the basis of already knowing that Trump is racist, already knowing that Trump is sexist; that’s not new information. So the hallmark that we have seen is that when we shift away from “Trump is” statements, statements about his character, toward things that are about what Trump will do, his future agenda, it’s no longer baked in. Then it is a what we call voter-facing harm.

What’s interesting about the Puerto Rico remarks [is] on the face of them, they may look like another “Trump is” or “MAGA is” thing, but clearly what it’s evoking—and you can see this in the reaction from the incredibly critical celebrity community, the musical artist community that has come down and rightly lifted this up and condemned it—is a visceral reminder of exactly what Trump did during the devastation of Hurricane Maria, and therefore what a Trump administration portends. The reason why it is so important to make sure we are not just in “Trump is” land, but rather “Trump will do” land, is because those voter facing harms are what get disaffected voters [to say] this election that I was putting off to the side, it may well be worth my attention.

Sargent: You’re getting at something critical because a lot of these disaffected voters have simply forgotten what they hated about the Trump presidency. The neglect of Puerto Rico and the sneering contempt toward it during the disaster really typified for a lot of people exactly what they hated about that presidency. So this really shoves it back into people’s faces. The basic dynamic here being that this mass forgetting has benefited Trump incredibly well, almost to the degree of like he didn’t even have a real presidency and he’s just a challenger, right?

Shenker-Osorio: It’s a mass forgetting layered on with people understandably feeling that they are struggling, feeling they are having a hard time, and honestly reacting to a lot of what is distasteful in the present moment as the fault of Democrats because they have a pretty cloudy view. We see this a lot. We’re in focus groups, two to four focus groups a week, every single week, and have been since 2020 actually with some pauses for holidays and so forth—what we see over and again is a lot of, Well, I don’t know, but it seems like Democrats are in charge. Therefore, if there’s chaos, if there’s conflict, if there’s confusion, if America is “on the wrong track,” the general gist of........

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