‘What kind of DELUSIONAL reality are we living in?’: Manosphere bros SICK of Trump as MAGA fractures

0:00 The Great Big Beautiful Bill also

0:02 slashetaxes on millions of American small businesses,

0:06 including restaurants, strike cleaners, corner stores.

0:09 What is a corner store?

0:10 I've never heard that term.

0:11 I know what a corner store is, but I've never heard it described.

0:14 A corner store.

0:15 Who the hell wrote that?

0:16 Please.

0:22 IT'S FIVE O'CLOCK IN NEW YORK.

0:24 FROM LET THEM EAT CAKE TO WHAT THE HELL IS A CORNER STORE?

0:27 MARIE ANTWINETTE, EAT YOUR HEART OUT.

0:29 PRECISELY THE SORT OF COMMENT WHEN SUPPORTERS ARE

0:32 HAPPY TO DISMISS IN THE BEST OF TIMES.

0:35 BUT THESE ARE NOT those when you're as increasingly unpopular as Donald Trump.

0:40 It's precisely the sort of comment that stings, sort of like a slap in the face.

0:45 And that's just the beginning.

0:46 This week, a no-tax-on-tips photo up included a door

0:50 dash delivery of McDonald's to the White House,

0:52 courtesy of an Arkansas grandmother with a remarkable backstory.

0:56 We'll let Trump take it from there.

1:00 Earlier this week at the White House,

1:03 I met a wonderful woman named Sharon Simmons,

1:05 a grandmother driving DoorDash to help support her husband's cancer treatment.

1:10 She's got serious cancer.

1:10 He's going to be okay, I think.

1:13 Sharon delivered McDonald's to the Oval Office.

1:16 It was a little bit of a, you know, I mean to be honest, it was a little tacky.

1:23 She was a little tacky?

1:26 Okay.

1:28 So while those sorts of comments can be grating in the moment, it was, in fact,

1:34 those who supported Donald Trump in 2024 who

1:37 are making the larger point on this story.

1:39 Launch.

1:41 How would you bring a grandma that needs to work DoorDash?

1:45 Because they're talking about taxation on tips.

1:47 Yeah, but like pause it for a second.

1:52 Don't we want to live in a country where grandmas don't have to work DoorDash,

1:57 where grandmas get to be retired?

2:02 Like what kind of delusional reality are we living in where

2:06 he's parading around the grandma that's working DoorDash so she can

2:09 afford to pay her husband's cancer bills and he's like see

2:12 we're not doing tips like there's a whole other issue at hand

2:16 here that we need to be focused on again I share

2:21 that evaluation from Andrew Schultz because at the time when he endorsed

2:26 Donald Trump it mattered a whole lot might have made the difference

2:30 if people like Andrew Schultz were for Donald Trump in 2024.

2:32 So the fact that he's against him heading into 2026 matters.

2:36 It also is important in light of this new reporting from The Atlantic,

2:41 quote, these days a shocking number

2:42 of the president's supporters have turned against him.

2:45 Some of Trump's fanboys in the libertarian-leaning manosphere have spent

2:50 the past year baffled by his actions on the Epstein files,

2:53 on immigration and now Iran.

2:55 In the past week, religious as conservatives,

2:57 have been criticizing their once unassailable leader after he posted a photo

3:02 on social media of himself as Jesus and attacked the Pope,

3:05 calling the first American pontiff, quote, weak on crime.

3:10 Some Republican operatives in battleground states told us that they'd

3:14 rather Trump not campaign too hard for their candidate.

3:18 Others have seen their small dollar donations PARTICULARLY INFLATIONS PLUMMET.

3:21 WHILE WE'RE ON THE TOPIC OF TRYING TO GET ELECTED,

3:24 WE'LL NOTE IT APPEARS LAWMAKERS ARE LIKEWISE

3:27 ANXIOUS ABOUT THE ECONOMY AND ABOUT Iran.

3:30 The Wall Street Journal reporting this today, quote,

3:32 while Congress so far has declined to curb the president's war powers,

3:36 it could just be a matter of time.

3:38 The margins on the war powers' votes have been narrow in both chambers,

3:42 and some Republicans have suggested their votes could

3:45 change in a matter of days or weeks.

3:47 There are 200 days separating the American people from the midterm elections.

3:52 Plenty of time for Trump to reassemble a fractured coalition, sure.

3:56 But plenty of time to squander it forever as well.

3:59 That's where we begin the hour.

4:01 Writer and editor of Protect Democracy, Amanda Carpenter is back.

4:04 Also back with us, president of Media Matters for America,

4:07 Angelo Carison is here, and the author of The Message of the Markets,

4:11 Substack, Ron Insana, is here with us as well.

4:14 Let me, Angelo, in sort of our ongoing

4:16 investigation and scrutiny of the the people who,

4:21 I think, made the difference in Trump's ability to return to the White House.

4:26 I played Andrew Schultz.

4:27 Let me show you where Joe Rogan is putting himself,

4:30 positioning himself in front of his millions and millions of listeners.

4:36 So what do you, what do you think of what's going on in Iran?

4:41 Terrifying.

4:41 Yeah.

4:42 All of it's terrifying.

4:43 Most people that voted for Trump or wanted Trump to be in office.

4:47 One of the things that was attractive was this no no more wars sure

4:50 of course and now we're in one of the craziest ones yeah and China's

4:55 flying in cargo planes filled with stuff we don't know what the there

4:59 and Russia is giving I THINK I RAN INFORMATION ABOUT WHERE OUR TROOPS ARE.

5:03 SUPER FUN, GREAT TALKING ABOUT A LOT OF TIMES.

5:07 AGAIN, I ALWAYS WANT THE DISCLAIMER THAT I'M NOT

5:10 SHOWING ANYONE JOE ROGAN BECAUSE HE IS TO BE EMULATED,

5:12 celebrated, lifted up or given a paper plate award for anything.

5:16 I think it's important that the top rated podcast in America

5:20 is describing the person he endorsed in the 2024 election this way.

5:24 And I think it's super important that it's 3 million listeners hear this, quote,

5:28 Russia is giving Iran information about where our troops are,

5:33 about where your kids are,

5:34 about where your husbands and wives and sons and daughters are.

5:37 Super important that Joe Rogan's audience heard that.

5:40 Yeah, it's significant because he is like, oh,

5:43 he and the others sort of in that same category,

5:46 they're a weather vane for the political zeitgeist.

5:49 Or another way to say it is, you know,

5:50 in previous coverage, if this was 10 years ago,

5:53 there would be like the undecided voters that always get captured in polling.

5:57 It's sort of the people that don't think about politics first,

5:59 that are not partisan creatures.

6:01 They don't just go vote for one party all the time.

6:04 The very people, as you noted in your intro that wrote

6:06 when Rogan sort of didn't just endorse but made the case,

6:10 he didn't just bring along his people.

6:11 He brought along sort of another part of the information ecosystem

6:15 that shaped the worldview of a lot of new Trump voters.

6:17 And that's the significant part of all this, because

6:20 it's an indication of where his audience is,

6:22 where a lot of the audiences are and where things are going politically.

6:26 And that's the first step.

6:27 And then the second thing is that it is a, it sort

6:30 of reflects on how much power Trump actually has in the moment,

6:34 because the MAGA media really only works.

6:37 Trump's narrative dominance only exists.

6:39 But the storytelling engine behind it is unified.

6:42 If they're all helping reinforce the same story that Trump is telling.

6:46 But when they are now not, you know, sort of doing the counterspin for Trump,

6:50 but the main attackers of the story that Trump is telling,

6:53 it isn't just that they're weakening him by not carrying water for him.

6:57 They're actually undermining and actively cutting against,

7:00 they're truth-telling in a way, the story that Trump is telling.

7:03 And that's sort of the so what of the immediacy.

7:05 It then creates some potential where the laws

7:08 of political reality can start to get shaken up again.

7:11 And that was the other part of your intro,

7:13 too, where Republicans are not there yet, but they're saying,

7:16 I don't know, soon enough we may start

7:18 to do something different than what the president wants.

7:20 And that's because they're slower, because they're not weather veins.

7:23 They're stuck in a much more partisan sort of strict mold,

7:26 but ultimately they are creatures of this political reality too.

7:29 And so that to me is the significance.

7:31 They're indicators of where things are

7:32 at and, more importantly, where it's going.

7:35 Yeah, Amanda, you know, Amanda,

7:38 the stain that'll be the second point that Angela's making,

7:41 that no one expects Republican lawmakers to use their eyes and their ears

7:45 or their feet to walk around their districts and ask people, how you doing?

7:49 You know, how you doing?

7:51 I know.

7:52 I know your son or daughter or husband or wife is deployed.

7:54 How are you feeling about that?

7:56 Or to walk into any business on Main Street and say, how are you feeling?

8:01 That's staying as Liz Cheney said during the January 6 hearings,

8:06 you know, that's staying to live forever.

8:08 But that they're not even interested in their own

8:13 political survivals is to me the black box.

8:15 What do you make of this moment?

8:18 I sort of think that, you know,

8:20 we talk a lot about MAGA Republicans and the MAGA elite class, which includes,

8:24 you know, lawmakers and people who are really loyal to And I

8:27 think as a condition of political survival through the Trump years,

8:32 they've had to learn this ability to tune out everything else, right,

8:38 in order to just go GOING TO GO ALONG WITH THE MAGA LINE.

8:42 BUT IF YOU SORT OF SEPARATE THOSE PEOPLE OUT AND LOOK AT, OKAY,

8:45 WHO ARE THE REAL people, the voters who are in Donald Trump's base

8:50 that brought him into the White House for twice.

8:54 And I sort of put that in two buckets.

8:56 The first big buckets are just sort of of, you know,

8:59 economically minded Republicans who were happy to support him and ignore a lot

9:04 of the character flaws because they saw

9:06 or perceived that the economy was working for them,

9:09 whether that was in the form of tax cuts, good EMPLOYMENT NUMBERS, ET CETERA.

9:13 THAT IS SORT OF BEING PUT DOWN BY THE HIGH GAS AND GROCERY PRICES THAT WE

9:19 ARE SEEING RIGHT NOW IN LARGE PART DUE TO HIS UNNECESSARY RECKLESS WAR IN IRAN.

9:23 SO THIS IS SORT OF LIKE PUNCTURING A LOT OF THOSE BUBBLES.

9:27 AND THERE'S A LOT OF PEOPLE WHO VOTED FOR CHILD THAT WERE HAPPY

9:30 TO GO ALONG WITH THEM BECAUSE A PART OF THAT GOOD ECONOMY MEANT WORLD STABILITY.

9:33 I MEAN, THE BURN THAT THIS COUNTRY FEELS

9:36 IN THE aftermath of our wars in the Middle East.

9:39 And, you know, a big reason Obama was elected and Trump

9:42 was elected also is to sort of put that era behind us.

9:45 And suddenly he's returning us to THAT AND THEN

9:48 WE'RE UNCLEAR ABOUT THE REASONS WHY.

9:50 SO I THINK THAT HAS A LOT TO DO WITH HIS DISAPPROVAL NUMBERS.

9:54 BUT THEN ALSO YOU cannot discount this, the people

9:58 of faith who were happy to support Trump even if

10:02 they didn't believe that he was a believer but they

10:05 appreciated the gestures that he made to those community whether

10:08 he meant it or not they took it at face

10:11 value and acted upon it but now these posts

10:14 that you're seeing put that like you cannot believe that anymore

10:18 when he's posting pictures of himself as Jesus J .D.

10:22 Vance is lecturing the Pope about theology.

10:24 And so I just think you see a lot of these reality bubbles

10:27 being punctured in a way that those two big buckets of people can't ignore.