THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

Last week, President Trump unleashed an angry tirade over anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, threatening to invoke the “INSURRECTION ACT” against “professional agitators and insurrectionists,” i.e., ordinary people. On Friday, Trump seemed to suggest he might not, but he also left the threat very much dangling out there. Indeed, after we recorded this episode, Trump kept raging, seething about jailing Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, sharing tweets about “anti-ICE anarchists,” and exploding about Minnesota politicians supposedly wanting criminals in their state, showing his fury is on full boil. This comes as a devastating New York Times frame-by-frame analysis of Renee Good’s shooting shows very clearly that the shooting was not remotely justified. Making all this still worse, troops are now reportedly mobilizing for possible deployment to Minnesota. We talked to Mother Jones writer Mark Follman, author of a new piece on Trump’s exploitation of crises. We discuss how the Trump-ICE cover story is collapsing, how dangerous invoking the Insurrection Act would be, and what Trump hopes to accomplish by stoking social antagonisms at moments of national trauma. 

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After fielding a perfectly legitimate question about ICE abuses on Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt lost her temper. She smeared the reporter as a “left-wing hack.” She then broadened her indictment to the whole “fake” media. She also angrily ridiculed another journalist for asking why Trump recently “joked” that we shouldn’t have midterm elections. That Leavitt was triggered by questions about ICE again shows the White House is refusing to admit error of any kind. This comes as one new poll has Trump’s disapproval on immigration soaring to 61 percent, and another one finds a majority thinks ICE is making our cities less safe. We talked to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, which has a great new report on Trump’s migrant detention system. We discuss the heartening public rejection of Trump, ICE’s coming explosion in recruitment, and why the refusal to change course means ICE is set to wage a Forever War on the American people. 

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House Speaker Mike Johnson’s response to growing ICE violence is really something to behold. In one long, rambling answer, he blamed shooting victim Renee Good in every which way, absurdly claiming she’d been “taunting” ICE officers and “impeded” them, while insisting they’d been “very patient.” In another one, he played sleazy little games, claiming the violence represents the “tragic consequences” of ICE facing “too much resistance”—again blaming the victims for violence against them, without a hint of concern about ICE’s conduct. We talked to Sarah Posner, author of several good books on the religious right, who is launching a new podcast next week called “Reign of Error.” We discuss Johnson’s strain of Christianity, how Trump and MAGA fuse religious and secular authoritarianism, and why some leading Evangelicals are now calling on people to pray—not for the victims of Trump-MAGA violence, but rather for Kristi Noem and ICE. 

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Donald Trump is going all in on the lunacy that the Minneapolis shooting should prompt a crackdown on the left. He unleashed ugly tirades on this, claiming the protests are “fake” and that officials are investigating their financial backers. He also lied uncontrollably about crime in Minnesota while hinting darkly that the crackdown there will get worse. This comes as a new Quinnpiac poll finds majorities of voters say the ICE shooting is not justified (53-35) and disapprove of ICE enforcement (57-40). Those numbers are even worse for Trump among independents (59-28 and 64-33). And new YouGov poll finds 53 percent say the ICE officer should face charges. We talked to New Republic staff writer Melissa Gira Grant, author of a new piece on the smearing of victim Renee Good. We discuss how Trump has lost the middle of the country over ICE, why his crackdown on the left will fail, and and why new Justice Department resignations over the shooting are so incriminating to Trump and his top advisers.

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There have been some ugly developments around the horrific killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis by an ICE agent. Donald Trump offered a vile new excuse for the shooting, claiming the victim was “disrespectful” to law enforcement. Meanwhile, a damning Wall Street Journal report finds that since July, there have been 13 examples of federal agents firing into civilian vehicles, with eight people shot and two confirmed dead. What’s more, the report suggests much of this was avoidable. All of that is quite simply a shocking indictment. Yet despite massive anti-ICE protests over the weekend, Trump officials are only being more contemptuous of those angered by the killing. We talked to Tim Dickinson, senior writer at The Contrarian, who attended a protest in Portland. We discuss the utter lack of oversight on law enforcement right now, how Trumpworld sees this as an opening to further antagonize blue America, and why protesters are determined to make something good out of Renee Good’s death. 

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The other day, five Senate Republicans helped pass a measure blocking President Trump’s authority to wage war in Venezuela without Congress. That caused Trump to erupt in a crazed fury. He attacked those Republicans by name, fumed that they had weakened his authority, and raged that “they should never be elected to office again.” He even seethed at their “stupidity.” This comes amid other signs of GOP defiance:  A number of House Republicans backed extending Affordable Care Act subsidies and other measures Trump opposed. Several GOP Senators openly criticized the administration’s handling of the ICE killing in Minneapolis. One slammed Stephen Miller’s comments on Greenland as “stupid.” We talked to Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who writes well about Trump’s psychoses. We discuss how all this shows Trump’s power isn’t absolute, why he’s so desperate to keep you from realizing that, and why we shouldn’t get psyched out every time he plays tyrant on TV.

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As the scandal around ICE’s killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis gets worse, two leading Democrats—Representatives Eric Swalwell and Daniel Goldman—are set to introduce a new bill reining in ICE. It would end qualified immunity for civil enforcement officers like ICE agents, making it easier for victims of their abuses to sue them or pursue criminal charges against them in court. All this comes as top MAGA figures and leading Republicans have flatly defended the killing in some truly ghoulish displays. This, even as powerful new video analyses from The New York Times and The Washington Post show unequivocally that the shooting was at minimum absolutely unjustified. We talked to Swalwell and Goodman about their new proposal, the need for the state of Minnesota to prosecute the shooter, the folly of expecting the FBI to investigate the killing, and the need to functionally end ICE’s existence over the long term.

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On Wednesday, an ICE agent killed a woman in her vehicle on the streets of Minneapolis. She was reportedly a U.S. citizen. But then President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem made their own conduct even more damning by blaming the victim and insisting the officer acted out of legitimate self-defense. The video Trump posted didn’t come close to supporting his claims. Other videos strongly suggested the officer wasn’t at all in a life-threatening situation and that lethal force was in no way justified, and Minnesota officials vehemently backed that up. DHS officials then leaked that the agent had violated use-of-force protocol. We talked to New Republic contributing editor Felipe De La Hoz, who writes well about ICE accountability. We discuss the government’s collapsing cover story, how this saga sheds light on ICE’s larger rogue-agency lawlessness, and what needs to happen to rein in this rogue agency.

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Last year, Senator Mark Kelly and five other Democrats posted a video with a stark message: Military service members and officials are not obliged to carry out illegal orders. This infuriated Donald Trump, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reprehensibly bringing disciplinary action against him as a retired Navy man. But this is backfiring: Kelly has now offered a striking new response in a second video, and it’s powerful stuff. Kelly speaks emotionally about his family’s commitment to the military and to the country, and absolutely humiliates Trump over his disregard for military service and disdain free speech. Indeed, the attack on Kelly is likely to fail and will continue making Trump look worse. We talked to legal expert Leah Litman, author of the book Lawless, about the Supreme Court. She walks us through the legal ins-and-outs of this dispute, explains why the case against Kelly represents its own abuse of the process, and reflects on how this saga captures Trumpworld’s deeper contempt for public service. 

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President Trump just unleashed a wild rant on Truth Social, accusing media figures of deliberately ignoring good news about his worsening tariff disaster because they “hate and disrespect our country.” He added that the tariffs have made us “FAR STRONGER AND MORE RESPECTED THAN EVER BEFORE.” What caught our eye is how this shows Trump running everything, no matter how trivial, through a “strong” versus “weak” frame. He’s vowing to seize Venezuela’s oil after his invasion; he’s threatening many other countries with military action; and he’s even menacing Greenland, a NATO ally. Yet a new poll finds surprisingly low support for his action against Venezuela on multiple fronts. We talked to international relations expert Nicholas Grossman, who argues that Trump has it all backwards: All these blustering fits and threats are a sign of Trump’s personal and political weakness and also are weakening our country’s international standing. We discuss whether that bad poll suggests an opening for Democrats to seize the strong/weak frame from him. 

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