The NPR Politics Podcast - These swing voters shrug at Trump earning billions last year

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

NPR reporters observed focus groups of 12 Pennsylvania voters who backed former President Biden in 2020 and President Trump in 2024. We discuss their cynicism about politicians and the Iran war, and what they think about democratic socialism.This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, political correspondent Ashley Lopez, and senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson.This podcast was produced by Bria Suggs and edited by Rachel Baye.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

President Trump has made a lot of money since getting back into office. Billions of dollars. That has ethics experts running around with their hair on fire. But today, we'll hear from voters, many of whom don't seem to mind. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent.

And today is our latest installment in our conversations with swing voters. These are voters who voted for Joe Biden in 2020. and Donald Trump in 2024, obviously a very important voting block. Ashley, this group of voters today that we're hearing from is from Pennsylvania. What else can you tell us? Yeah, so we talked to 12 voters, six of them identified as independence, four as Republicans and two as Democrats. They talked to us under the condition that we wouldn't be using their last name,

so we're going to be using first names only. And they were part of two online focus groups that were moderated by Rich Tao of Engages, engages partners with us and another marketing research firm called Sago. We go to different swing states every month and we talk to about a dozen voters there each month. Yes. And the important disclaimer here, which we always give at the beginning of our focus group pods, is that this is not a poll. Twelve people is not statistically significant. But the reason we talk to people and we love focus groups is because we get into the why of how voters feel certain ways, not just the what. And in this case, we know that corruption is an issue in the midterms. Democrats are talking a lot about it. And that was one of the things we wanted to see what voters thought.

Right. So recent financial disclosures have found that President Trump has made billions of dollars or companies have made billions of dollars since he got back into office. What did these voters have to say about that? Well, surprisingly, it was mixed. Like half the folks said they were troubled by this. And by the way, the moderator showed them an article that laid out exactly what was happening, which is that, Donald Trump and his businesses made upwards of $2 billion. A lot of that came from cryptocurrency, about $1.4 billion. And, you know, the other half, the other six people seem to, like, wave it off. They seem not very concerned at all. We'll hear from a couple of those voters. Here is Todd and here is Ken.

When it comes to ethics and moral and financial, I think that just about every politician is corrupt. So the fact that he's unknown Huckster, whatever you want to call it. I mean, we've known that for years about him. Just reading that brief snapshot of the article, it didn't appear on a surface that that was done in an illegal way. You know, he's a businessman. He openly admitted it.

This isn't a shock to me or anybody else. He's admitted in the past that he's going to continue running his empire while he's in the presidency. Yeah, and I want to stress that these two voters we heard from were in the group of folks, the ones who were most approving of Trump right now. They seem to have, in general, a pretty good opinion of how the Trump administration is handling things right now. So they were reticent to criticize some things, and this was one of those things. What I found very striking is not that people think it's great that he's making all this money,

just the resignation and the cynicism that this is what all politicians do. and the willingness to just shrug it off. And this is part of the message that Donald Trump has been sending since 2015, which is all politics is corrupt, the game is rigged, just stick with your tribe or your guy or your party. And he even said that in his first term where he did abide by some ethical norms, he complained that he never got credit for it. So why should he do it again?

This, I think, is a real hallmark of the Trump era of politics. there are no more guardrails. Politicians are no longer driven by shame. As a matter of fact, you could say that shamelessness is a superpower. Yeah, and I don't know how much of this is also driven by the fact that Trump in the American imagination is a businessman first, a businessman who almost like happened to become president of the United States. So much in this conversation, there was this one woman, Betsy, who was going back and forth with a moderator about this. And she said, this is what I expect from people in business.

like they're, you know, it's money first. And it seemed like that image of Trump as mostly a businessman who happens to be a president was like how she approached this. Yeah. And you know, we did hear complaints from voters. And here we can listen to two of them, Margaret and Bavana. I would just be worried that whoever he's doing business with would then have his ear a little bit more or be wanting to have, quote, favors or some leniency. that might not be totally on the up and up?

For me, when I see that, the first thing that comes to my mind is abuse of power. And that to me is morally wrong. And that itself should be a problem and is a problem to me. And of course, you're going to hear Democrats try to make it into a problem. Corruption is a big, big theme for Democrats. But it'll be interesting to see if it gets any traction among voters who are pretty numb to it. That's what I'm wondering is just kind of where this is heading in future years in terms of whether we're moving towards a pendulum swing potentially in terms of, I guess if I'm hearing

half of these voters express this deep level of cynicism, almost to the point where they don't seem to care. That does not seem to indicate that in future Congresses, they're going to be super motivated to ban or regulate any of what we're watching. Well, except for there's a whole lot of other things that they're really angry at Congress for and are likely to throw the bums out. Ethics just doesn't seem to be one of them. And to reiterate Mara's point, like, it is half and half in this group of 12 people. But if you look at polling nationwide, the majority of voters are not happy with what they're seeing in the Trump administration in terms of corruption. And the majority of voters do think Trump is enriching himself.

And that isn't a good thing to them. So, you know, I do think like this could work with a lot of voters now. We're talking about people who voted for Trump. And in a lot of this conversation, folks are saying, I knew this about him. I knew he was a businessman. I know he cares about money and he cares about his own financial interest. And I voted for him anyway. It's almost like they made peace with that before all this happened. And I'm a lot. are not surprised to see that this is happening. Yeah, and I mean, it does feel like a lot of this talk about the president enriching himself while in office seems connected in some way to Americans' financial anxieties. This is something we've heard in a number of previous focus groups.

Did that come up at all? Or how are these voters feeling about the economy right now? He's enriching himself at a time when most voters feel economically stressed. That's what makes corruption real to people. On an abstract level, is he violating some ethics rule? They don't care about that. Yeah. And every month we ask folks if they feel less or more or equally economically anxious than they did before Trump took office again. And this group of people, absolutely no one said they feel less economically anxious. There was a mix of people who are like, look, I feel the same as I did during the Biden administration or they feel worse.

And a lot of that has to do with gas prices, as we've been hearing for the past couple of months now. And how much, I guess, in terms of gas prices obviously directly related to the ongoing conflict with Iran, Strait of Hormuz being closed. How much blame do they place on the president for the prices and then also for the conflict in Iran? This is a question we've asked over and over again in almost every single focus group. They blame him. They blame Iran. The war is very unpopular.

Many of them referenced the fact that he ran against U.S. involvement in foreign wars. They feel that's one of the reasons they voted for him and they got just the opposite. But the other thing that struck me is how incredibly informed these voters are about the price of gas. They know what it was this week. They know what it was last week. Unlike many of the other issues that occupy professional politicians, they're focused on the cost of living. Yeah, they blame prices on Trump and the war, but they also blame the fact that this is still going on him as well. Actually, let's hear from Polina.

And like sometimes when he intervenes from previous examples, right, like it causes even more chaos. So like there's instances from press experiences. I don't think this is something that's going to lead to a resolution. It might actually make it worse and extend the time frame. Yeah, there's this feeling like Trump isn't handling this well. And one of the questions that was asked this month was whether voters felt like Trump had a plan or that Trump would even be capable to find a resolution to the war in Iran before the end of this year. And there was very little optimism about that coming to fruition. And a lot of that has to do with Trump himself, the back and forth, the changes in messaging,

the sort of lack of clarity of a short term and a long term plan. Let's hear from Ken. You know, I'm a little torn on this, to be honest with you. But I would say, I would stand by my answer that I'm not confident fully, primarily because of Israel. You know, that seems to be the main monkey wrench right now, like a big part of, Iran's demands are that Israel stops bombing Lebanon. They stop bombing, you know, multiple other targets, and they won't stop. Yeah, and I'll be clear. Like, Ken was one of the voters who was pretty supportive of the president. He just is among a contingency on the right that has a lot of

questions about the U.S. relationship with Israel. It's interesting. I feel like we talk a lot about how foreign policy is pretty low on the list of things voters seem to think about when they go to vote. But I hear Israel come up over and over again when we have conversations on the left and the right. And I guess I'm wondering, is that kind of an exception to the rule this midterms potentially? Well, it's exception to the rule. But as I always say, historical rules only work until they stop working. And we do have this bipartisan backlash against Israel, feeling that Israel is the one who's calling the shots, convincing Donald Trump to do things that aren't in America's interest.

And you see that on the right and the left. And I think that's a big. big shift in American politics, and I don't think it's going away, at least certainly not as long as B.B. Netanyahu is the leader of Israel. All right. We've got to take a quick break and more in just a moment. And we're back. And I want to ask about something else that's been in the news a lot lately, which is the health of American lawmakers and the sort of transparency that voters expect about the health of our lawmakers. This came up a lot of last couple weeks regarding former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and in his medical. condition and kind of how little for so long people knew about what was going on there. How did this group of voters feel about that issue? Well, they were as specifically if they felt like if there are health-related issues that would keep someone from office for an extended amount of time, whether that should be disclosed

or if they felt that there is a cone of privacy that they should be afforded if they're having some issues. And, you know, most of the voters said that they think public officials should be transparent. Actually, let's hear from Betsy on this. Well, they decided to run for a public office. You're always in the public line light. That's a choice you make. Everyone makes choices.

They represent us, the people. So if they have an illness, whatnot, there's nothing wrong of taxpayers and voters to know what's going on. We're paying for their care and salaries. I think there should be transparency of full awareness. I mean, this isn't entirely surprising. You know, we have gerontocracy in this country. I'm using this word for the second time this week, which is kind of funny. But, you know, there are a lot of aging people in power in Congress.

And I'm not surprised to hear that voters want to know what's going on, especially with, you know, power so close. You know, a few seats in Congress can decide, you know, whether or not something passes or fails. They want to know what's going on. Yeah, this is a big reason why voters are so cynical and think that politicians lie and they're not transparent. You know, you've got Mitch McConnell out of Congress for weeks. But we also had a younger member of Congress, Tom Kane, in his 50s, who was absent for months, didn't disclose anything until he came back. It turned out he had depression. But this is why voters are cynical.

As Betsy just said, they pay the salaries of these members and they don't know anything about them when they're gone. Yeah, and Polina pointed out that in this media environment, like being silent about what's going on actually breeds a lot of misinformation. Like, let's hear from her. Well, I mean, I mean, here's the reality, right? Like, I think depending on that tier of, like, visibility you have as a, right, like, as a politician, I feel like, people are going to Google and research the heck out of this, right? So it's like you might as well share it because people are going to trust you. Yeah, it almost feels like there's two parts of this. There's one, like, what is the politician's responsibility. But basically what she's

saying is, like, whatever they're hoping for isn't working because you're actually just making people more skeptical and you're like you're hurting your own personal almost political brand by doing this. You know, and we can't forget about Joe Biden. I mean, that was a huge thing. That was the mother of all, you know, no transparency. And people are suspicious, as they should be when politicians don't come clean and explain what's happening to them. All right. I want to switch gears a little bit to talk about a topic that we talked about on the podcast yesterday, which is this ongoing back and forth between President Trump and Republicans and kind of the insurgent movement of the Democratic Socialists of America on the kind of on the left. And this idea that President Trump is painting

these candidates as communists. One of the things we talked about was it's a little unclear to me how that's going to land with voters or which voters are, is that that line of attack is going to be effective with. So I am really interested to hear if these group of swing voters were asked about that and if they had thoughts. Well, they were asked to take a look at basically the Democratic Socialists of America platform. The moderator ran through a couple slides with different policy proposals, and they were asked to reflect on whether they would support a candidate who held all those positions. So I want to level set a bit and just say that often swing voters are low propensity, but also like low information. So this isn't like going to be like the kind of voters

you're seeing right now in Democratic primaries who are really engaged, have a working knowledge, some of them of what the DSA is. These voters for the most part were. pretty much unable to, like, adequately define things like capitalism and socialism to begin with. So this was like a very high-level conversation that seemed a little bit out of a step. To be fair, I don't know that I could. If you gave me a pop quiz, defined capitalism completely accurately. I think I did this with you yesterday. And I did not have a great answer. So, but I have a little empathy for them. Me too. Continue. Yeah. Yeah. It is, you know, especially if you're talking to people about like their day-to-day needs and what they want out of politics, I don't think they want to have like a lofty conversation about, political theory, right? But anyway, so when they were met with these slides, it was, you know,

it was only one person who said that they would support someone who held those positions. But there were some nuances to those answers. I actually want to play Annabelle's first. I'm on the fence. I'm not sure if I would or not because some stuff I like some I didn't like. So if this person was all for all of those things, probably not. Okay, why not? What about it was a turnoff to you? because there does need to, it seems too, like, untethered, I think is the term. It seems a little too untethered and we need to have some form of order. By the way, the second voice you heard there is Rich Tao, the moderator of the folks groups.

And what was happening there is Rich Tao put up on the screen some of the things that you would find if you went to the Democratic Socialist for America website. And some of them people found kind of appealing like free health care or free child care. or, you know, making college easier to pay for. But there were other things on the website like open borders, defund the police, abolish ICE. And those are things that people felt went a little bit too far. But those are the things that Donald Trump and the Republicans are going to try to hang around the neck of every single Democrat.

The reason he's talking so much about communism is because he thinks that's a much more incendiary charge than saying that they're socialists, because there's part of at least democratic socialism that is popular with people now. But I do think this is what you're going to hear in the midterms more and more. Donald Trump has used the word communist over and over again. And we wanted to ask these people if any of these labels mean something to them and get a certain kind of reaction. Yeah, and I will say another common critique wasn't even about like whether this was scary communism or anything.

It was more grounded in like sort of financial realities. Actually, let's hear Todd. Some of the principles are good, but the ability to pay for this and the ability to put fairness and equity in who and how it will get paid for, that's a pipe dream. Yeah, I think that's like a common critique is that like the more wealthy Americans would have to front load a lot of the cost of this. And they seem like a lot of, you know, some of these voters seem like unhappy with that as a concept in general. Yeah, but also what Todd was referring to are these benefits going to? to everyone, including rich people, which is certainly what the DSA wants, or are they going to be targeted to people of lower incomes? This is going to be, I think, a debate that's going to go on

way past the midterms, because polls show that people, especially young people, are unhappy with capitalism. They don't feel the system is working for them. It's too hard to buy a home. And even a college education doesn't seem worth it anymore. So we're going to hear a lot more about this, and that's why we've included these questions in the focus groups. And folks in the DSA will also say, like, the reason we're not paying for this stuff is because we're paying for things like the war in Iran. Because we are spending so much on our military, there are just fewer resources and a sort of realignment of the country's priorities could address those needs. Now, the question is, like, you know, how easy is that to convey to voters in this sort of like media, you know, atmosphere? I'm struck by this kind of interesting dichotomy of like, I feel like we talk every time we do one of these things about how much voters seem to want change to what is currently happening. And yet both parties are trying to paint the other as extreme. which is like the definition of that is like you want extreme change, right? And so it's like simultaneously people want change and they don't want change all at the same time. Well, not all change is extreme in the eyes of voters.

I mean, help with buying a house sounds pretty reasonable to them. You know, defunding the police sounds unreasonable. It also depends what voters you're talking to. This group of voters is not the Democratic primary voter. Like these are not people who are looking at things like, you know, a revamp of capitalism as it stands in America. I talked to Rich Tao about this, and he said the thing about a lot of these swing voters, a lot of these independent voters that, you know, we talk to across the country is that they want change, but they don't want radical change. They want things to be moving a little slower than maybe voters in the sort of fringes of the party want. So this is a group of people that, yeah, you say things like abolish ice.

It is not resonate the way it would in a Democratic primary. Yeah. And these are the people that are going to determine the makeup of Congress next year. I mean, the extremes of both parties are important, and as a matter of fact, you know, our system is now geared to give them a much bigger voice. But the reason we do the swing voter focus group is because people who are able to change their minds, who voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 24, are people who might be able to change their minds again. All right. Well, we can leave it there for now.

I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR politics podcast.