Bulwark Takes - Why Trump’s Numbers Keep Getting Worse

Episode Date: November 23, 2025

Sam Stein and Jack Cocchiarella take on new polling showing Trump’s economic approval slipping lower than ever, with voters rejecting his spin and his team fumbling explanations on inflation and tariffs.

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please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Numbers don't lie, and so Donald Trump is trying to hide all of them. I'm Jack Hotchrella, joined today by Sam Stein, and Sam, does it look like Donald Trump's polls are getting better or worse to you? Worse. Like, they kind of have a very steady drop. It's not like a, it hasn't been like a roller coaster dive.

It's just going down like that. It's like incrementally. But the accumulative worse is it's fairly evident. Yeah. I think, though, his response to those polls has been like an astronomically greater freak out because the truth social tirades have gotten a little worse. But there are two main polls that just came out recently that really show how Trump is down in the dumps, both economically and I guess almost technically on the war front that I want to get into. Scott Besson is also trying to defend

those numbers. We got a lot of talk about, but I want to get in these polls first. CBS News poll finds most would oppose U.S. military action in Venezuela, say Trump hasn't explained. That's a shocker. The situation around Venezuela has Americans asking to know more across party lines. Big majority say the administration needs to explain what the U.S. intends regarding any action and that it has not done so clearly yet. Meanwhile, what Americans hear from the White House about inflation is, they say, not what they're actually feeling at home. What a surprise.

Rising prices and worsening economic views. And in terms of taking U.S. military action in Venezuela, only 30% are in favor of that, according to this new CBS poll. All right. Here's my hot take. The Venezuela numbers are bad, but, like, I don't think they're going to matter materially for Trump. I think people are tuning a lot of that stuff out. Obviously, I think it would be problematic for him to go to war with Venezuela on a humanitarian, geopolitical and political level.

But it's the inflation numbers in that poll that really sort of stood out to me. So this is the whole reason for his election. Well, not the whole reason, but a huge reason, right? It's like cost of living is up, but Biden's doing jack shit about it, elect me. I'm going to bring all that stuff down. And it's not going down. And we'll get into the actual economics in a little bit. But these poll numbers, there's two things that really stood out for me.

One was the handling of the economy. Okay. So CBS does this thing. Approval of Trump's handling the economy. March 2nd, it's at 51% approval. Okay, he's a couple months in. People are giving him the benefit of the doubt. Things are looking good.

Again, the steady decline. It goes to 44, 42, 40, a little tick up to 41, 40, 38. It's 36 approval now. That's like Biden, bad territory. It's worse than Biden because the Biden number was like 70% of people that the economy is going in the wrong direction with Trump. It's now up to, I think it was 76 in one number. And then there's the CNN poll when he's like minus 41 with independence. And it's funny because they are doing the same Biden justification where it's like, look at the stock market.

Things are getting better. Things are okay. That's what I want to get to. This is the most fundamentally interesting question. Trump makes things sound dot, dot, dot, dot. better than they really are 60% okay so three out of every five people are saying Trump is speaking in way that is totally foreign to me he's saying things are good they are not good he's making them sound good my lived experience is not good only 27% say Trump is saying things about as they

really are 13% think he's underselling how great things are I don't know who those 13% are that's a great group I want to talk to that group I need to meet that person that could be like Bill Ackman. All right. So here's why I think this matters. There's this old, like, you know, conviction in politics, especially in democratic politics, that the worst thing a politician can do is to talk up how good a recovery is going. And the reason why is because you look so detached, not a touch. People who are not feeling a recovery think you are, you know, not paying attention to their plight, think that you're ignoring them, think, again, that you're in a bubble, and they feel disconnected from you. We're not even in a recovery. We are in a shaky economy at best.

Trump's talking it up as if it's the greatest economy on Earth. And all these people that have been like, what is he talking about? He's really risking, alienating a huge swath of voters. It's almost worse, maybe worse, than the rating that he gets for his handling of the economy, in my estimation. And what was interesting to me is that when you're talking about like, just take a look at the Venezuela of it all. It's like Trump isn't explaining why we would be going to war with Venezuela. But that's a similar question asked about the economic numbers, where it's like Trump isn't explaining what he's doing to get bad inflation, which is funny when J.D. Vance says, like, okay, you need to be patient. We're working on it. It's going to take a little bit of time

for every American to feel that economic boom, which we really do believe is coming. Donald Trump is the most omnipresent cultural figure in like American history. I don't know. And so if he and his constant barrage of posts and messaging isn't explaining what their economic message is, then people aren't like looking for it and not getting it. He's just not delivering it, obviously, which is much different than the Biden issue when he just wasn't out and about enough and nobody saw him. So it's funny for Vance to say, like, be patient, we'll explain when they just will never explain. It's a weird thing to promise. True. And I would add to that that they're not really. consistent messaging, right? Like, so you can say we're working on to be patient, but then you can't say things are gangbusters great, right? Like, it's either one or the other. So, like, if the stock market has a great day and you say, this is the Trump economy, you can't then turn around and say,

you know what, it's the Biden economy because we're still working on getting, you know, back to what he had done to us. And look, it's difficult. I'm not sitting here saying like it's, it's easy to explain this stuff. Obviously, if it were easy, people would, you know, no incumbent would ever lose, right? It's hard when your policies contribute to this stuff. So inflation has obviously been caused by the terrorists. Otherwise, they wouldn't be rolling the back on food products. But then you have messengers like Scott Besson, who goes out and says weird stuff. I meet the press like he did this morning. Let's play the clip with him and Kristen Welker where she's saying, why is inflation still up? And he has some weird analogy to her arm.

Well, and banana prices are up almost 7%. Coffee prices up nearly 19%. Isn't that fact that you're rolling back tariffs in admission that ultimately they do drive up prices for consumers? Chris, how much does your arm weigh? That I do not know. Exactly, but you know how much you weigh and you get on the scale every morning. Inflation is a composite number and we look at everything. So we are trying, we try to push down the things we can control. And as I said, that we are working on. The energy prices are down, and everything flows from that. And I think we're going to see these other prices come down. And again, many of these goods were part of trade deals with countries that have been in the works for months. I mean, like, what? It just doesn't make

sense. How much is your armway? I love that he's like, do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to bring out the Bessent charm. Like, this is like the most, like, rigid guy. in the world who just like kind of sounds like he's about to take a breath before every it's kind of like choppy and he's like you know i'm just going to lay on that southern that best is he from the from the great state of leisiana or is he a south carolina guy so i have no i think he's i think i don't think asking a female anchor how much you your armways and then say you get on the scale every day right i don't know it just seems kind of like uh out of touch yeah it's so also let me just add this jack he's wrong like he's just wrong about energy prices look

It's hard to say definitively, energy prices where they stand because it varies by state, for instance, and there's different forms of energy. But look, I mean, energy prices, I'm just pulling up this Yahoo article from like nine days ago. They are not down. And here's Gas Buddy a couple of days ago who looks at the cost of gasoline, obviously. This is from the 20 seconds. This is from Saturday. National average price of gasoline today is 3.1 cents per gallon higher than a year ago.

Well, Sam, do you remember who told us last week that the price of energy was up? It was Scott Besson, who was upset with Mikey Sherrill about the cost of energy being up in New Jersey. What I would respond to is electricity prices are a state problem. And, you know, I was very interested to see in the earlier clip where the governor, the governor elect of New Jersey, said, well, I'm going to bring down energy prices. Well, it was her predecessor, Phil Murphy, who took him up. My favorite part about that clip is him saying, like, well, grocery prices are going down. If you look at, so energy is going to go down. Like, he didn't even come prepared with the talking point about like the Thanksgiving,

whatever meal basket that they keep bringing up that has lost like half of the items in it, which is just like such a funny thing to say. It's like, hey, when you eat less, it's going to cost you less. So America, go out there and starve. You'll save a couple of bucks. Exercise more. Eat less. So we're going to grow more, spend less or constrain spending.

That with the Kristen Welker get on the scale thing, I think Scott Besson is like advocating for dieting. He just wants everyone to be nice and lean. But he didn't even come with the talking points. That's my favorite part. And this is the thing. Okay, so the Yahoo piece says at the end of August 2025, residential electricity prices jumped 6.2% compared to the last 12 months per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Again, I don't want to like overstated because there's no, each state has different energy issues and they're going to have to deal with them separately. But this gets to my original point.

You can't tell people, hey, energy's down when they know they're paying more, a little bit more at the pump. Or they know that their electricity bills are actually elevated. You can't tell them things are going great when they don't feel it and they don't see it. You know who knows this? The Biden freaking White House, they tried doing this. And they understood that it's impossible to sell people a bag of goods and say, you know, well, you should be grateful for it. And I just think the Trump White House is in trouble, real trouble for this stuff. Well, it also is funny as there's this increasing recognition that these AI data centers are just like all of this storage capacity is what's driving up people's electrical costs.

In some states, not in all states, but in some states. Not in all states. But you do have Trump out there saying like the stock market is exploding because of only seven stocks that are exploding because of kind of this AI bubble has been created by raising your energy costs to make these stock prices artificially inflated, which serves a very small and like getting. smaller portion of Americans who actually have skin in the game in the stock market. So he's like, well, a very small number of people are benefiting because your electrical costs are going up, but they're not going up, but groceries are down, but they're not, but the stock market. And so all of it put together is just like we have traded all of the wealth that we can possibly collect from the bottom 50% of Americans to the 0.1%. And now we're going to lie about it.

It's a great economic theory. Good job. And then on top of that, you add to the likely rise in premiums that are going to come because the affordable care extended subsidies are expiring. And it's a real bad situation. You can tell because a bunch of congressional Republicans are looking for ways to get ahead of this. Trump's not signed off on this stuff yet, but you could see a situation down the road where he does realize he's got to figure out a way. I mean, he's floated this idea of a tariff rebate check. That's not really getting any traction. I'm surprised he's not more open to extending the subsidies. We'll see if he, you know, lessens his opposition to that. Because,

At some point, people are going to freak that their bills are just going up when he promised that they would be halved, halved when he took office. Well, after his time was Zara, do you not think he's going to do Medicare for all? He's been talking about it. He's talking about it a little bit. Maybe he's all right. Maybe Mom Dine convinced him on that one. What was your takeaway from that? I know you talked about it a little bit already.

Yeah, I mean, I think it sits with Trump. Do you think this love fest continues or is he going to try to pull back? No, nothing is permanent with Trump. Come on. He was, you know, he turns on anybody and everybody. But I do think it's very evident that a little bit of flattery gets you a long way with the guy. I think he really is non-confrontational in person. He's perfectly confrontational online.

And look, I think he's a superficial dude. He thinks Mamdani is a winner. Mamdani is a good-looking guy who had a nice big victory in Manhattan and talks good game and is very telegenic and he's good on TV. And I think Trump really likes that stuff. And it doesn't really take much more to get on his good side. It doesn't. It's pretty funny. And it's pretty funny, again, the Scott Besson, a little less telegenic defense of the tariffs as they're pulling them back. I wanted to talk a little bit more about tariffs. But before we did, I wanted to play the greatest tariff clip of all time. As Scott Besson is talking about bananas because we just have to see it as much as we possibly can. Absolutely. What's the tariff on bananas? Americans, by the way, love bananas. We buy billions of them a year. I love bananas. What's the tariff on bananas? The tariff on bananas would be representative of the countries that produce them.

And what's that tariff? Generally 10%. Correct. 10%. Walmart has already increased the cost of bananas by 8%. But as countries do deals with us, that will go to zero. As countries do deals with us, that will go to zero. But the cost is on the American consumer now and on the businesses with the confusion now.

Mr. Secretary, I believe you know better. There's no uncertainty if you build in America. and you produce your product in America, it will be no tariff. We can't produce bananas in America. And the concept of building in America and paying no tariff is very, very clear. We cannot build bananas in America. So we're not making bananas here,

and I don't think we're ever going to anytime soon. But maybe if Scott Besson is way in arms, then he can... I don't know, man. Maybe we can get some AI-generated banana production in America at some point and all our problems will be solved. That's what I'm open for it. It's worth raising my electrical bills by 50% if we can get those AI.

banana. It pays off. It pays off with cheaper bananas down the road. What were the digital tokens? Oh, God, how am I forgetting those that people trade in the AI bullshit? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. But on that note, on our problems being solved by AI, Sam, thanks for joining me as always, man. Jack, you're the man. Appreciate it.