Transcript of Ben Smith Discusses Trump’s Collapse in 2026

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As Donald Trump's polling hits new lows, we're seeing massive international protests against Donald Trump. We're seeing him mocked in parades, like coming off of whatever the heck that was of Rubio in Munich. You have in Düsseldorff, Germany, a carnival that was taking place today, where one of the main attractions was mocking Donald Trump. There were Donald Trump hitting Jesus in the face and giving Jesus a black eye float, along with Vladimir Putin floats. There was Donald Trump being a Putin bootlicker float. Of course, right outside of Munich, there was this statue of Donald Trump called the Orange Plague that everybody saw as they were walking. Rather than me describing it, let me just play for you what went down. This is what it looks like in Düsseldorff as Donald Trump. It's a float of Donald Trump violating the Statute of Liberty while he has a stormy tattoo on his leg. Here, play this clip. More from Düsseldorff right here. Here, play this clip. Finally, I'll show you a little bit more right here. Let's play it.

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

So the United States was featured alongside the Ayatollah, Putin, Afghanistan. They sure know how to do a carnival there in Düsseldorff and in Germany. More on Donald Trump's crashing poll numbers. The new data out this morning suggests that if there were to be a redo of the 2024 election, not only would former vice President Kam La Harris, well, I would she win, but she'd win pretty big numbers here. Play this clip.

At Wets of some folks had a few. What are we talking about here? Well, let's just take a look here. Okay, choice for 2024 presidential election. The actual was Donald Trump winning by about a point and a half. It rounds to a point. But take a look here in a polled redo between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. In April of 2025, it was within the margin of her right, Kamala Harris by a point. But look at where we are now, according to an NBC News Survey Monkey poll. Kamala Harris wins in a redo, asking folks, essentially, if you could redo the 2024 election, how would you vote? She wins it by, get this, eight points, a massive shift from what we saw back in November of 2024 when Donald Trump won by a point. I will note that this sample was weighted, weighted to the 2024 result in which Donald Trump won by a point. But yet Kamala Harris in this weighted sample, get this, she wins by eight amongst the sample that voted for Trump by one.

The good news is Kamala Harris, for her, wins the 2024 election. The bad news is it's actually 2026, so it doesn't count for her. What about, though, the 2026 midterms when we're talking about Trump voters and then also Harris voters?

Okay, so you see this, and as John was laughing about, the fact is the 2024 election is good, gone goodbye. But it has a massive impact, this voter sentiment, on what may happen later this year. Why do I say that? Because let's take a look at the vote for Congress, and this is very important, all right? 2024, Harris voters. They vote for the Democrats on average by, get this, 89 points. The Trump voters mostly stick by the Republicans, but by a significantly smaller margin, by 83 points. This means that the Democratic base that voted for Kamala Harris is sticking with those Congressional Democratic candidates to a much greater degree than those Trump voters are sticking with the Republican candidates for Congress. That is why what you're seeing on that generic Congressional ballot is Democrats leaping ahead by this point by about five points, because at least at this point, the Trump voters are not sticking by the Republicans as much as the Harris voters are sticking by the Democrats.

Yeah, and these numbers may not look that different, but this five points, which is roughly what that is, that really could be hugely important come November. This is people who did vote in 2024. What about those perhaps who did not?

Okay, so part of the equation is that the Harris voters are really sticking with those Democratic candidates more so than the Trump voters are sticking with the Republican candidates. But it's more than that. It's also people coming off of the sidelines Line. Okay, voters' choice for election for the 2026 Congressional elections, if they didn't vote in 2024, look at this. Democrats are winning that vote by a significant margin by 16 percentage points. You add onto And you add on to that, the independent voters who are overwhelmingly swinging away from Donald Trump.

And the question is why? And I think one of the... I think we know the answer, but I think one of the great articles that came out recently was from Semifore by Ben Smith, host of the Mixed Signals podcast and co founder and editor-in-chief of Semifore. How Trump's politics return to Earth. They identify some of the main factors here in Donald Trump's fall right now. A real Hill videos, the ICE border patrol Gestapo videos that people are capturing of Trump terrorizing and this border patrol terrorizing the people in this country. The Epstein disaster, obviously, the cover up of the Epstein files, the continued cover up, and Donald Trump claiming he's vindicated while there are lots of people in his regime who are mentioned, and certainly doesn't seem like vindication would be putting it lightly, and the American people are horrified at what they're seeing, and rightfully so. And Trump's attempt at capturing the media really hasn't gone as planned. I mean, yeah, we see what's going on on CBS. Obviously, you have Fox and other media bending the knee, but I think you have independent news also rising, and people are getting their information from places like the Midas Touch Network, like Semaphore, and other places.

Let's bring in Ben Smith. Ben, it's great to see you right there. I showed you what was going on in Düsseldorff, but I didn't need to show you in Düsseldorff what's going on right here in pre-Oreo. What's happening in the United States is something astonishing. And I know you as a reporter, political observer for so many years. I mean, there's definitely something going on right now, which is why you wrote the article that is not hyperbolic. I don't think, to talk about Trump really descending right now, as Enton says, to new lows. What do you make about it?

Yeah, I don't think Trump is going to win the Düsseldorff mayoral election this November. But more broadly, the thing about Trump is he is this bizarre political phenomenon who seems to play by none of the rules that we grew up thinking about how politics works. And when he arrived on the scene, everybody said he was going to lose, and he won. And I think, and yet at the same time, there are these other periods where he's behaving exactly like any other political figure. Actually, having the first year of a presidency feel like this massive sea change in the direction of the country in which the President has absolutely reshaped everything. And then you get to the second year and that all collapses is the most familiar pattern in American government. Trump's numbers are somewhat worse, I think, in the polling, I think, Nate Silver has a little worse than Biden's were at this point of time, a little worse than his own numbers were eight years ago, which is pretty bad, but within the norms of the second year of a President bad. And I think one of the really interesting things is how much of what we thought was happening last year, it turns out to be wrong.

I think there was this idea that we were post-truth, specifically, that the combination of these hyperpartisan social media environment and AI I was going to mean everybody would live in this closed bubble and nothing would crack through, that if you didn't like the reality you saw, somebody would make you a video showing a different one. I just don't think that's really happened. I was worried about that, but I think if particularly around the ICE stuff, what broke through was the reality of these videos. And it broke through, including to the White House, which is now pulled out of Minneapolis. But I don't think anybody thought, oh, the big story of 2026 is going to be real videos on social media, which just change everybody's minds about reality. I think that was in a weird way, an unexpected plot twist. And then that to me, is actually, in some ways, the thing that everybody got most wrong, the idea that Trump had created this new epistemic universe. We often overrate the power of our politicians.

Right. Well, he was certainly trying. And when we saw the real videos, whether it was Nicole Good, Alex Pretty, or the countless others, it followed a repeated pattern. And it's interesting that we're recording this on the day where Trisha McGloughlin announces her resignation or that she's departing. They claim this has been in the works since December, but who the hell really knows with them. But the pattern is Trisha McGloughlin, Christie Noe, whoever, they come out and they say, This is a domestic terrorist. They try to bend the reality of what it is. And then that's reported it as first as the truth. And then the video comes out, and then different angles of the video come out. And then people are like, Yeah, but you just said that we're watching the video. And then they go, Yeah, but that's not really what happened in the video. And then they, and I think this is what you talked about in the article as well, they then had to basically, like with the Preti video, somewhat walk it back and say, Well, now we're doing an investigation, and then it falls into the ether. But they tried to bend the reality of what's happening, don't you think, Elyce?

I think people did think it was working. I think that's the perception of that first 100 days, the flooding the zone, the shock and awe. And that magic, whatever it was, has just totally worn off. And I think the Trump people, to some degree, have persuaded themselves that they could shape reality, that they could, particularly on X, just reshape people's perceptions of what was actually happening. It reminds me so much of the Bush years. There was this famous line that the Bush administration gave, I believe, to a GQ reporter, that a power of the United States was such, the Bush administration, that they could reshape reality. They didn't need to respond to it. And I do think that the best analogy right here is, at least in my own experience covering politics, is this just feels so much like 2006 when you had the Iraq War, which had been the great initiative of the Bush administration, the fight for freedom, what was what made Bush popular and got him reelected in a certain way, had become so intensely unpopular. You had this advisor, Donald Rumsfeld, who became seen as the central figure of the administration and who resigned the day after the midterms.

I don't know if it's not really Trump style to push people out, but I would think there's just enormous pressure on Steven Miller right now. I don't know if he resigns before the midterms, resigns after the midterms, sticks around. But I think that's, to me, it's that moment where the President put a lot of confidence in one to steer national policy in a direction that's been politically disastrous.

Right. But Bush still had conventional political figures around him who still made conventional political moves, even if they express that bravado. When Trump was confronted with the fact that Howard Lutnik said he had never been to or never spoken with Epstein because he was so disgusting after one interaction, then brought his freaking children to the to the island and then did a business deal with Epstein, and Trump's asked about it. Trump's like, Yeah, he brought his family. He brought his kids. As far as I know, and the American people are like, Yeah, that's the problem. He brought his kids to the island where the children were sex trafficked. That's the issue of the judgment here. You talk about the Epstein files in your article. His handling of that has been so botched and so So destructive. Every day, it just feels like he's further and further not... I mean, obviously, he's alienated people who despise him, but even his own base is like, What? You're saying you're vindicated? What are you talking about?

Yeah. No, I think the Epstein files. I mean, one of the really great political mistakes I've ever seen was Pam Bondi and Dan Bungino and Cash Patel. I guess they weren't in the joke. Trump liked to talk about the Epstein files, like to throw it his mud at his enemies. But also, of course, he knew that he'd been close friends with Jeffrey Epstein for years. By the way, no serious allegation that Trump ever committed a crime. That is not in the files. But the association with Epstein right now, politically, it's like an oil spill. You can't get it off you once it's on you. I can only imagine what Trump was thinking when these trusted aides of his went and said, We're going to release all the emails. This is going to become the center over piece of American law enforcement. We're going to divert the FBI and these US attorneys from immigration cases, from everything else to redact Epstein files when, of course, Trump was going to be all over them. Of course, he knew that. He'd known Epstein for years. They were friendly. That was widely reported before he ran for President. It was all over the tabloids.

Just an unbelievable unforeced error by his team to totally derail, I think, his second term by just dropping this giant bucket of allegations basically on Trump's head. And he can't really say, I'm going to fire anybody who has a connection with Epstein, because obviously, Trump had a closer relationship with Epstein than Lutnik or than anybody else here.

You mentioned there that there's, regarding the Epstein files, that there may not be anything in the files. There certainly are lots. I think there are lots of allegations that are made against Donald Trump in the files that were never investing investigated by the FBI and DOJ. We see the allegations there, whether they're corroborated or uncorroborated. They were never investigated. And I think a lot of people have concern about that. But look, I think what people are recognizing- Well, let me just say, I actually just, for what it's worth, I disagree with you on that.

You think the Biden Justice Department participated in a years long cover up of Donald Trump's crimes? I think there's huge dump of files that were probably... They were part of one of the biggest investigations in American history. And the reason nobody got indicted is because they find anybody to be indicted.

Well, I think that there was an active- I realize this may be a dissenting view. No, I appreciate dissenting views, but I think it's a healthy debate to have. So one of the things that I think is important is this undisputed fact, and you could push back if you think it's true or not. Mar-a-lago, was it a site where child sex trafficking took place? Like, true or false?

I I guess I think that there's just the allegations being thrown around the Epstein files. You just got to really root them in evidence. And I just see no reason to believe that the Biden FBI was involved in an extensive cover up of crimes at Mar-a-Lago. That just seems unlike Likely to me.

Well, I think that Virginia Jufre was somebody who was at Mar-a-Lago who was sex trafficked when she was underage. And there was the ongoing case in the appeals against Skye Lane. And then Donald Trump has been found civilly liable for sexual assault, right?

Yeah. I feel like you're trying to turn me into Donald Trump's lawyer here, Ben.

I'm not trying to turn you into his lawyer. To me, no matter whether it was Biden, whether it was Trump One, whether it was Obama, where it was George W. Bush. I'm not trying to turn you to any. I just think that there are a lot- No, but I think we can probably agree that the people around Trump really should have known better than to unseal this particular Pandora's box, which just flew right into their own faces in just really an incredible way. Well, I think that they have a lot of explaining to do. I don't think Latinx explanations are great. I don't think the fact that Steve Banon was having all of these conversations was great. I think that it raises a lot of serious questions. And look, I think that the American people are looking who's in control now, who's the people saying, release it. They're the ones. There's a lot of documents that haven't been released. I think we'll leave it at there's a lot of questions that need to be answered.

Yeah. I think there are questions that... I think partly because Trump genuinely, admittedly, publicly had this friendship with Epstein, it's just so hard for him to ever disentangle from this. It's just an unsolvable political problem for him, I think.

No doubt. Everybody take a read of Ben Smith's article in Semifork. Check it out and make sure you all check out the podcast as well. Mixed Signals. Thanks, Ben, so much for joining us.

Thank you so much.

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