Donald Trump’s advisors think they’ve cracked the code on his underwater approval ratings — believing that voters simply don’t grasp how great he’s been — and The New Republic’s Daily Blast podcast dismantled that claim while dissecting a new Atlantic report on the president’s midterm strategy.

“So these new leaks to The Atlantic are really something,” host Greg Sargent said, unpacking claims that Trump’s team is privately blaming his poll numbers on voters not knowing his “accomplishments,” such as new stock market highs, a closed southern border, and rising manufacturing output.

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Bulwark writer Mona Charen unraveled that claim, likening Trump to a “mad king” surrounded by courtiers too frightened to tell the truth, and flagged the “sleight of hand” that while manufacturing output may be up, factory employment has lagged. Trump’s reported plan to flood the midterms with TV ads about his own record, she noted, is precisely what vulnerable Republicans dread as they scramble to make November about anything other than him.

Polls show Trump cratering to all-time lows, and Republicans are sprinting from him with “no end in sight.” Charen argued voters can’t pin this economy on a virus or on Joe Biden, as the tariffs, the Iran war, and the price spikes belong to him.

“He did this. He’s doing this,” she said.

Charen sees a certain symmetry if the strategy backfires on the party that enabled him, in that the GOP grudgingly swallowed a message built entirely around a president dragging it down.

“And poetic justice is the best justice,” she told Sargent.