THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

In the leadup to the “No Kings” protests, Trump and Republicans widely derided the protesters as extremists, criminals, and terrorists. Then the protests actually happened. They were a wild success: Peaceful, enormous, and representative of a very wide swath of American society. So what did Republicans do in response? They just kept on calling the protesters criminals and terrorists. That MAGA smear is sharply contradicted by countless on-the-scene accounts. We talked to writer Ana Marie Cox, who has a great piece for The New Republic capturing what the protests looked like in a red county in Texas. She explains that the protesters were mostly ordinary Americans who put on a civil and powerfully patriotic display. We think that in their own quiet way, what these protesters really offered, deep in Trump country, was a brutally effective repudiation of MAGA and Trumpism. 

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President Trump’s fury at Democrats over the government shutdown is escalating. First he angrily announced that he’s “terminated” the big tunnel project connecting New York and New Jersey, basically saying he’d done this to punish Chuck Schumer, an extraordinarily deranged act of direct retribution. Then he unleashed a rambling tirade filled with lies about “mentally damaged” Democrats’ shutdown stance. All this comes as a new CNBC poll finds Trump and the GOP blamed for economic damage over the shutdown by 53-37. This has driven his economic approval down to 42-55, the worst ever in CNBC polling, with his standing on inflation at an abysmal 34-62. We talked to Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, author of “The Hopium Chronicles.” He argues we should focus on the fundamentals: Trump is doing immense harm to the country, he’s deeply unpopular, and that will matter in the midterms—though Rosenberg also discusses why beating Trump and recovering from our authoritarian slide will be a brutal longer-term slog.

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The other day, President Trump announced that he has bombed yet another boat allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean sea. He has now struck six boats, with 27 people dead, and the bombings have been widely denounced as illegal. Now, in a strange turn of events, The New York Times reports that the head of the military’s southern command, Alvin Holsey, is stepping down amid unclear circumstances. Did his resignation have anything to do with these bombings? Congressman Adam Smith of Washington State, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, thinks the answer is likely Yes. Smith talks to us about what he’s personally heard about the resignation and why it’s plausible that Holsey was removed over potential opposition to the bombings. He illuminates just how appallingly lacking in transparency the administration has been about the strikes, and vows that his committee will seek Holsey’s testimony about his departure, which could be very revealing indeed.

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Former special counsel Jack Smith just confirmed that he’d amassed extensive evidence that Donald Trump willfully and knowingly broke the law in stealing classified documents at the end of his first term. Smith’s report on this may never be released. But House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan helpfully exposed a big Trump ruse here. Jordan is demanding that Smith testify to “prove” the Justice Department was “weaponized” against Trump, as Trump wants him to do. But Jordan will never seek Smith’s report on classified documents! In today’s installment, legal scholar Matthew Seligman, a fellow at the Constitutional Law Center, illuminatingly explains how Jordan exposed the scam underlying Trump’s whole approach to DOJ: Everything is about suppressing facts that show the prosecutions of Trump were actually legitimate. Seligman also discusses the recent removals of career DOJ prosecutors, how they’re getting fired for not being corrupt on Trump’s behalf, and how Trump himself is admitting all this right in public. 

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Speaking to reporters Tuesday, President Donald Trump seemed unusually crazed and power-mad, even for him. He imperiously refused to take a question from an ABC reporter as punishment for an interview with JD Vance that went badly. He boasted about cutting only Democratic programs. He confirmed he supports heinous new restrictions on media coverage of the Pentagon. And he threatened to nix federal funds to New York if “communist” Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor. We think all this suggests Trump is newly emboldened. We talked to Brian Beutler, author of a new piece about the urgency of the moment on his excellent Substack, “Off Message.” He explains the futility of news organizations paying bribes to Trump, why conventional politics will not suffice, how the resistance must find a new kind of politics to meet the moment, and what the “No Kings” protests might accomplish toward this end.

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President Trump’s allies are suddenly raging over the October 18th “No Kings” protests. MAGA Mike Johnson and MAGA-fied Representative Steve Scalise are angrily sliming expected attendees as America-haters, antifa, Marxists, and terrorists. Other GOP figures have done the same, with one hinting that the National Guard should crack down on them. This unanimity of messaging about terrorists means it’s all almost certainly being coordinated by Stephen Miller. Yet it’s backfiring: Democrats and rally organizers are using it to galvanize attendance, which will likely succeed. Robert De Niro amplified the call to turn out, inspiring more anger on Fox News. Indeed, the GOP demonization of legitimate protests itself ratifies the “No Kings” message. We talked to Jill Lawrence, who writes well for The Bulwark on Trump’s hatred of blue America. We discuss why large legitimate protests infuriate Trump-MAGA, why the correct response to their smears is to turn out in force, and why that’s likely to happen. 

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In this episode, we talk to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who shares striking new details about President Trump’s ongoing occupation of Chicago. What’s happening there has really gone off the rails: ICE launching hypermilitarized raids of apartment buildings. Children getting pulled out into the streets and potentially traumatized. A priest shot in the head by a pepper ball. This has led Pritzker to take a lead role in denouncing Trump’s abuses of power—and in warning that our slide into authoritarianism could end in catastrophe. In our interview, Pritzker tells us what he’d like to see from Democrats, discusses how Illinois law enforcement is protecting local residents from ICE, and debunks Stephen Miller’s lies about what’s happening on the ground. Pritzker also discusses his inability to even get Trump officials on the phone amid this worsening crisis—making this all look dramatically more dangerous—and warns that Trump’s mental state is worsening fast.

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President Trump’s efforts to prosecute his enemies are suddenly looking even more lawless. Leaks to ABC News just revealed that Justice Department insiders doubt the validity of the prosecution of former FBI director James Comey. This comes after inside sources told MSNBC that a senior prosecutor is resisting indicting New York attorney general Letitia James because the case against her is so weak. Trump is demanding prosecutions of both, and the bucking of his pressure reveals just how corrupt his directives truly are. Meanwhile, Trump just called for the jailing of the governor of Illinois. We talked about all this with former federal prosecutor Kristy Parker, counsel at Protect Democracy. She explains why Trump’s prosecutions are so baseless, what we can read into the resistance inside DOJ, and how it might slow our slide into lawlessness.

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With the government shutdown fight dragging into its second week, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene rolled a grenade into the GOP camp. She erupted on Twitter, demanding to know why Republican leaders have no plan to help millions of people who will be hurt when expanded Obamacare subsidies expire. This wrecks President Trump’s whole strategy in this fight, because it rests on the idea that only Democrats are to blame for the standoff, all due to their undying love of “illegals.” Greene’s broadside also sent House Speaker Mike Johnson scrambling. But we think this fiasco goes even deeper. We talked to veteran congressional scholar Norman Ornstein, author of a new piece on the standoff. We discuss how Greene has exposed serious cracks in the MAGA coalition, why this exposes weaknesses in Trump’s stance, and what Democrats can do to maximize their leverage. 

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Over the weekend, a federal judge blocked President Trump from deploying the National Guard in Portland. The judge blocked Trump from deploying the California National Guard to Oregon, too. Interestingly, the ruling cited Trump’s own tweet, which described Portland as “war ravaged,” in determining that he does not have unlimited authority to wildly invent facts on the ground wholesale as a pretext to justify any use of the military he wants. “The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts,” this Trump-appointed judge declared. “This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law.”  In short, Trump’s gale-force bad faith worked against him. We talked to Oregon’s Attorney General Dan Rayfield, who explains the ruling, details how Trump’s lawless words and threats are undermining his own case, examines the larger stakes of this moment, and looks ahead to what’s next. 

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