THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

A civil war is unfolding inside the MAGA movement over Nick Fuentes, the neo-Nazi and white supremacist, and President Donald Trump just made it worse. In an interview, Trump defended Fuentes in a way that will boost his standing inside MAGA in a big way. As it turns out, however, this will create a surprising and unwelcome problem for JD Vance. The vice president has tried to avoid taking sides on Fuentes. But it’s now clear that Fuentes represents a constituency inside MAGA that’s too big to exile. That means Vance, who’s hoping to harness MAGA for his 2028 presidential run, will have to tread carefully, and Trump’s intervention has only made that harder for him. We talked to Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, who has a great new piece digging into all this. He explains Fuentes’s growing influence inside MAGA, why Vance will struggle to navigate all these complexities, and what all this says about today’s right more broadly. 

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Anxiety is rising among President Trump’s staunchest allies that he’s politically lost his way. The New York Times reports that his advisers fear he’s alienating key voters in his own coalition. And CNN reports that some Republicans are openly warning the White  House that the GOP is in trouble in the midterm elections. Meanwhile, Trump just erupted in a furious new tirade about the Jeffrey Epstein fiasco. In it, he ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Epstein’s ties to Democrats. Bondi immediately did his bidding. That Trump has now formally turned the Justice Department loose in this way shows his anger over Epstein has hit new highs. Some Republicans say all these things are related: Trump is so consumed with Epstein that he’s letting everything else go to hell. So we talked to analyst Michael Cohen, who has a good new piece on Trump’s doldrums on his Truth and Consequences Substack. He explains why Epstein is undoing Trump, how the MAGA coalition is fracturing, how deeper structural factors are working against him, and how it will all impact the midterms. Listen to this episode here.

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President Trump is angrily urging Republicans not to join Democrats in pushing for release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. But all of a sudden, with the discharge petition set to force a House vote, things are rapidly going in the wrong direction for Trump. In a surprise, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene now predicts that the number of Republicans who will vote to release the files will be “a lot higher” than anyone expects. If the GOP defectors hit truly sizable numbers, as suddenly looks likely, it will be a bombshell with terrible implications for Trump, ramping up the pressure across the board in any number of ways. But the process that’s about to unfold is complex. So we talked to Democratic Representative Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, a high profile voice throughout this saga. She explains what it’s like to talk personally with Epstein’s victims, why Republicans are finding it harder to resist pressure, what Democrats will do next to keep the story alive, and why this will keep getting worse for Trump until the truth comes out in the end.

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Suddenly, the Jeffrey Epstein files are back. Democrats released new emails raising fresh questions about the relationship between the sex trafficker and President Trump. It’s gotten so bad that the White House is now privately pressuring Republicans to stop trying to get the Epstein files released, a clear sign Trump is deeply rattled by the emerging info. Indeed, now that it looks like the discharge petition calling for release of the files will get 218 votes, Trump angrily warned Republicans not to join it, another indication of his mounting anxiety. The big MAGA reckoning over all this is coming. So we talked to Nicole Hemmer, author of several excellent books about the right wing. She explains the deep tensions inside MAGA all this is unleashing, how some prominent figures are positioning themselves for a post-Trump MAGA future, where this scandal is heading next, and what all this means for our politics. The discussion gets dark.

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Signs are mounting that the Supreme Court might invalidate President Trump’s tariffs, and he’s clearly on edge about it. Trump just vented wildly about the case on Truth Social, but he made a mess of it: In one rant, he claimed his tariffs have pulled in $2 trillion in revenues. In a second rant only hours later, that number suddenly ballooned to $3 trillion. We think this badly undermines Trump’s case: It shows how reckless and blundering the tariffs truly are, while vividly demonstrating how uncontrollably he lies about their impact and implementation. To unravel all this, we talked to Alex Jacquez of the Groundwork Collaborative, who served as a trade adviser under President Joe Biden. He explains the deeper incoherence underlying Trump’s self-defeating tirades, digs into why even some conservative justices are looking askance at his tariffs—though with this court you never know—and outlines the looming fiascos we face no matter which way the court rules. 

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Eight Senate Democrats are now providing the votes to move forward with funding the government, but without getting the Democrats’ principal demand: A continuation of expanded Obamacare subsidies. On Monday, President Trump exploded in a deranged Truth Social rant, attacking air traffic controllers who took time off during the shutdown. He even bizarrely said money will be sent to those who did not. It occurs to us that the absurdity of Trump’s tirade revealed that his stance in the shutdown is weak: He’s the one experiencing most of the political pain from it, and all he can do is shriek wildly at government workers, urging them to minimize that pain for him. We think that should wake up Democrats: It makes a strong case for them to hold the line and not cave. We talked to Brian Beutler, who has a good new piece on his Substack, Off Message, digging into the Democratic surrender. He explains the deeper strategic failings causing the cave, why Trump will take from this that he can extort Democrats further, and how they can still salvage something from this mess.

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Under questioning from reporters about last week’s GOP losses, President Trump seethed that worsening inflation on his watch—a driver of the outcome—is nothing but a Democratic “con.” To buttress this, he floated a ludicrous distortion about Walmart’s Thanksgiving dinner package. Then, when a reporter raised facts contradicting him, he snapped in anger, because only the despot says what reality is. Trump then vehemently claimed “everybody knows” that goods cost more under “Sleepy Joe Biden,” as if shouting it endlessly will make it true. Meanwhile, a New York Times analysis shows that in key races, Democrats won over a meaningful sliver of Trump voters and that Hispanics snapped back to them in big numbers. And another analysis reveals striking details about GOP losses among working class voters. We talked to Bulwark reporter Joe Perticone, author of a good piece on GOP denial. He discusses the fragility of the MAGA coalition, why Democrats were able to reach into new info-spaces, and how Republicans are privately interpreting the loss, given that they’re not allowed to publicly acknowledge the truth about Trump’s unpopularity. 

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President Trump’s excuses for his party’s losses are getting stranger. He’s now claiming it’s all because Republicans didn’t talk about his accomplishments enough, even though the results dramatically repudiated them. But he knows there’s a problem. Sounding weirdly subdued, he just openly said Republicans should end the filibuster—to pass lots of new laws making voting a whole lot harder. Translation: The GOP’s response to the losses should be rigging the 2026 midterms. Indeed, he also openly declared that if he gets his way, Democrats will “never obtain power.” Donnie, you’re supposed to say voter suppression is about targeting “fraud,” not about locking the opposition out of power forever! We checked in with Democratic operative Jessica Post, who has extensive experience on state-level races, to see how Trump’s rigging efforts are really going. She discusses the state of his gerrymandering scheme, how that could still be a problem for Democrats, why it conversely might backfire on the GOP, and how Democrats should proceed to thwart Trump’s schemes. 

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In Tuesday’s elections, Democrats scored crushing victories everywhere. They won the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races by double digits, made big inroads with working class voters, handily won the California referendum, which could result in five more Democratic House seats, and more. Yet Trump is blaming everyone but himself. Punchbowl’s Andrew Desiderio reports that he privately rebuked GOP Senators, suggesting their shutdown was the culprit. He urged them to nuke the filibuster to end the shutdown, claiming failure could render the GOP a “dead party.” And he angrily snapped at Senator Lindsey Graham in the process. In short, Trump cannot accept something fundamental: His coalition is much more fragile than advertised, and he is making it even worse by, well, wrecking the country. We talked to New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who has a good new piece on the energy driving Democrats. We discuss the shift of working class voters toward Democrats, the media’s hangover from overreading Trump’s 2024 win, and the through line connecting those gubernatorial victories with Zohran Mamdani’s triumph.

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On Tuesday, President Trump unleashed an angry tirade in which he threatened to stop doling out food stamp payments until Democrats capitulate in the government shutdown. He seethed over “crooked Joe Biden” and made up stuff about food stamp fraud. Coming after a judge ordered payments to continue, Trump’s threat seemed to suggest he’s now directly defying the courts. But then White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt quickly clarified that Trump will obey the law, after all. Given that Trump intended his threat as a dominance display over Democrats, Leavitt undercut him, because she had no choice. We think this shows Trump’s team knows they cannot be seen as breaking the law to deny food to the hungry. We talked to David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, who has a good piece arguing that Trump has lost the shutdown. He demystifies the food stamp battle, explains why Trump’s terrible standing on the economy has made him vulnerable in the standoff, and discusses how this all shows that Democrats need to get in the fight and engage.

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