I joined Ezra Klein on The Ezra Klein Show to talk through whether Trump actually wants to lose the midterms, what the 2026 map looks like from inside the GOP, and the widening split between traditional conservatives and the right’s media wing.
Klein: Trump is now under 40 percent approval in a bunch of different polls — more unpopular at this point in his term than basically any modern second-term president. Let’s start with him. Why is he down there?
Donovan: If you think about the mood of the country that produced the comeback of Donald Trump, putting together the coalition that he did, that was predicated on a rejection of the status quo and the bet that Trump would be able to return us to the economy and maybe the vibes of pre-Covid 2020. Of course, that’s much harder to do than it is to talk about. I think this is fundamentally about frustrations of how difficult some of these problems are to tackle.
Donovan, on Tucker Carlson: What was good for Tucker is getting attention however he can, including right now picking fights with Donald Trump, because there is an appetite for that in a way that there wasn’t a couple years ago. But I don’t know that that’s his project. I don’t know that his is an electoral proposition. He’s trying to build his own platform. He’s trying to build his own audience.
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