MSNBC The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle
July 1, 2025
11:39 p.m. EST
STEPHANIE RUHLE: For weeks, Senate Republicans wondered whether they would be able to pass Trump’s massive spending bill. Well, now that they have, some are asking a new question: will their voters forgive them for it? Polling shows that the bill Republicans work tirelessly to pass is deeply unpopular, even among Republicans. And the midterms are, of course, inching closer and closer by the day. MSNBC senior political analyst Matthew Dowd joins me now. He’s also a former George W. Bush strategist and founder of Country Over Party. I’m so glad you’re here tonight.
This bill punishes the poorest Americans, many of whom are Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters. Is this going to haunt the president at all or will his fan base stay faithful, or do they exist in a news desert and they won’t blame him for any hardships they face?
MATTHEW DOWD: I mean, I think the reality is, and you showed the polling of this, this is definitely going to harm them. The question is: how much? And that to a degree depends on whether or not the Democrats can be efficient and effective in a messaging on this. I think it’s a perfect opportunity for Democrats in this election.
And, you know, Donald Trump can’t run again, no matter what he says, but the Democrats taking the House and possibly the Senate could make his life exceedingly miserable for the last four – the last two years of his presidency. I mean, I think what the Republicans have done is twofold and given the Democrats two very powerful messages. First is the Republican Party. It’s laughable anymore if they stand up and claim they’re the party of fiscal responsibility, it’s just laughable. And if any Republican does that, we in the media and the people running against them should just laugh at them and just basically say, you’ve abdicated that completely.
So they’ve given the idea of fiscal responsibility to the Democrats, who’ve often been accused of being tax and spend. If I were the Democrats, I would basically say, “You might have called us tax and spend, but those guys, they’re grift and spend. That’s what they are. They’re grift and spend. They reward people that are their friends. They give contracts to people. This is what they do, and we’re now in a fiscal mess because of it.”
That’s one. The other side is, and I hope the Democrats do this, they should run on economic populism. The Republicans and Donald Trump have captured cultural populism. They have not captured economic populism, which is much more powerful. Much more powerful, as we saw in the mayor’s primary in New York, how powerful an economic populist message is. If the Democrats do that, run on fiscal responsibility and economic populism, there’s no way that the Republicans can withstand the wave that’s going to occur in 2026.
RUHLE: Well, let’s actually talk about that mayoral race, because today, Zohran Mamdani has – we know, he has officially won the Democratic Primary for New York City Mayor. What does it tell you that Wall Street is absolutely freaking out? Like, I can tell you, every source that I speak to is ringing my phone off the hook, panicked about this guy, right? And he is a self-described democratic socialist. He has said aggressively negative things, you know, fair to say, you know, against the wealthy. But this is one single person who could become the mayor of a single city when the city council and the state governor will likely make it very difficult for him to get any of his most ambitious proposals through.
Yet these exact same Wall Street voters say almost nothing when Donald Trump, the President of the United States, launches global trade wars, defies the rule of law, and threatens to block mergers of companies that he doesn’t like. Why is it that this group of people, these influential Americans, these big donors, why do they shrug off what the President of the United States that’s blowing through the rule of law, why do they shrug off what he does day in and day out? And they’re panicked over a possible mayor of New York. Is it because this new mayor doesn’t support capitalism, and this current president supports crony capitalism?
DOWD: Well, I think that’s the point, and I don’t think you can say that Mr. Mamdani doesn’t support capitalism. I think he’s basically said it works, but it doesn’t work when it’s crony capitalism, as you say. And the thing that’s offensive about Wall Street, and you’ve covered this, Stephanie, for years and years and years, they don’t – they no longer believe in the common good. They believe in the idea that they should be able to own as many yachts as they can possibly own. They should be able to own as many vacation homes as they possibly can own, no matter what happens to the working class in our country. And we’re sitting on here, in one of the lowest tax rates and some of the least services of any of the modern countries in the world, the lowest tax rates and the least services in it.
And while the rich get richer and richer and richer, the working class get – have it harder and harder and harder to meet. And I think what Mr. Mamdani has demonstrated is that you can have a message, and you can effectively deliver it in very unique, interesting ways and actually have huge accomplishments. They should be afraid. They should. Wall Street should be afraid. They’ve ridden this train for decades. They’ve ridden this idea that nobody’s taking away their capital gains stuff. Nobody’s taking away all of these things that they’ve been given in our country, in this sort of corrupt form of capitalism that exists.
I, for one, am a capitalist. I’m a big capitalist. I’d like to try capitalism. We’re right today in America, we don’t have capitalism. We have a system in government that rewards a very few and hurts the many in our country in this. Capitalism is supposed to basically, the design, as you know, is to lift everybody up, create new industries, give incentives for people to get hired, give incentives for people to be paid more in the course of this, as a country grows. That’s not what exists in America today.
RUHLE: Every time you come, as soon as we go into the commercial, I say. “God, I love Matthew Dowd,” so why don’t I just say it when we’re on live TV? Thank you for joining me, my friend. Great to see you.
DOWD: Thanks, Steph, you too.
