THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

In a fascinating new analysis, CNN’s Harry Enten calculates that Donald Trump’s net approval on the economy is 33 points underwater. That’s a shocking 42-point swing from during the 2018 midterms, when Trump was in positive territory. On top of that, Enten notes that in the most recent CNN poll, Trump’s net approval on inflation is 50 points underwater, and that this hasn’t been rivaled by any other president. Meanwhile, Republican pollsters and strategists tell The Wall Street Journal that they fear that under Trump, the GOP has thrown away its traditional advantage on the economy. And they suggest time is running out to turn that around. We talked to New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who has been arguing well that Trump’s unpopularity is the story of our politics. We discuss why the bottom fell out so quickly for Trump, what the punditry still gets wrong about 2024, and why Democrats won’t make a big case that on the economy, their party tends to be far better than the GOP ever is.

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In an interview with Punchbowl News, Donald Trump said straight out that his voters just might not show up for GOP candidates this fall. That’s a striking admission of one of the thorniest problems the GOP faces. But it gets worse. Trump also declared that “a lot” of his voters are “not angry at me,” but “are very angry at Republicans.” That will likely be read by his supporters as a declaration that Republicans are failing Trump, and as encouragement to stay home. Meanwhile, polling shows MAGA voters turning against his war in large numbers. And MS NOW interviewed Trump voters and found them deeply disappointed with his second term. In short, MAGA is cracking up. We talked to Shripal Shah, who runs ad expenditures for the Dem-aligned House Majority PAC. We discuss whether Trump voters are gettable by Democrats, whether the current Democratic lead in the generic House matchup is enough, and how big a challenge the tattered Dem brand really poses. 

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A striking new Washington Post report reveals that Donald Trump privately raged at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, demanding to know why he’d been caught off guard by depleted munitions stockpiles. Yet these leaks actually reveal his own serious screw-ups: Trump wrongly concluded that the munitions situation had been fixed, showing that the commander in chief utterly failed to keep track of the impact his decision to go to war was having on the U.S. military. Meanwhile, other leaks suggest that Trump is feeling privately humiliated by his failure to defeat Iran, which freshly exposes just how deep his miscalculations have been all along. We talked to Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, a skillful interpreter of MAGA pathologies. She explains why authoritarian regimes rely on slavish loyalists like Hegseth, discusses why voters’ rejection of Trump is so important to salvaging the American experiment, and deciphers a conundrum known as “the MAGA paradox.” 

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Democrats just nominated left-wing populist Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race. Yet his victory was razor close, suggesting he faces big challenges ahead. What’s his theory of the case? In his victory speech and in remarks to reporters, El-Sayed offered clues. He described Trumpism as a fusion of the “worst” of neoconservatism and of MAGA, an apt description of the horrors Trump has created. He cast his GOP opponent as a Trump bootlicker, essentially saying this is what Trump demands of his party. And he juxtaposed Trumpism with the ethnic diversity of his coalition and with the immigrant heritage of himself and his children, an effective indictment of Trumpian white-nationalism. Is this enough? We talked to Ron Brownstein, senior political analyst at CNN and columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. We discuss El-Sayed’s many challenges in the general, how he absolutely can assemble a winning coalition, and what he's learned from Barack Obama’s understanding of American politics. 

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Donald Trump has been raging at Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, DC, because she dropped those high-profile prosecutions for alleged vandalism of his Reflecting Pool renovation. That pressure is corrupt on its own. But new leaks are making it look even worse. CBS News reports that Pirro actually carried a box of evidence to the White House showing that the facts simply didn’t support those prosecutions. The meeting got “heated,” per CBS, seemingly meaning Trump wanted prosecutions in spite of what the facts and the law said. Meanwhile, we just learned this fiasco triggered private “tirades” from Trump, further underscoring his quest for lawless prosecutions. We talked to former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade, author of The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government. She walks us through just how deeply irregular this presidential conduct truly is, discusses what has been lost at DOJ, and reflects on how a Democratic House and/or Senate can rein in all this madness next year.

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On Monday, CNN analyst Harry Enten flagged a truly surprising finding in a Fox News poll that had eluded our attention: Trump’s approval is nine points underwater in Texas, which he won by 14 points in 2024. That’s not all: The Fox poll, which shows Democrat James Talarico up by three points, finds Trump's approval at an astounding 18 percent among independents in Texas, with 50 percent disapproving strongly. That’s remarkable, especially given how key independents are in the Texas Senate race. All this comes as Trump unleashed a long tirade claiming “my REAL poll numbers” are “the best they have ever been.” Trump also bizarrely listed a long litany of accomplishments that were, well, entirely made up, showing he has zero intention to help his party by recalibrating. We talked to Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett, who knows Texas and has worked on midterms. He explains why Trump’s standing with Texas independents is “absolutely shocking,” what the path to victory there looks like, where Talarico still must improve, and how numbers like these could open up other red states for Democrats. 

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Donald Trump unleashed an epic tirade at Senator John Cornyn for blocking his IRS lawsuit settlement slush fund, which would let Trump reward allies and grants the Trumps a form of tax immunity. Cornyn is holding up the nomination of Todd Blanche as attorney general until it’s killed. Trump gloated that he’d endorsed Cornyn’s victorious primary opponent and seethed that the American people want him to have this corrupt fund. In response, another foe, Senator Thom Tillis, landed a hard blow, asserting that Trump’s rage over the fund is exactly why it must be killed. Humiliatingly, Tillis treated Trump like a toddler who must be told, “no.” Plus, a defeat would show that Trump’s license to corrupt DOJ is not limitless. (Underscoring this humiliation, after we recorded Trump petulantly exploded again, saying he absolutely will have his fund.) We talked to New Republic staff writer Emma Janssen, author of our great new politics newsletter all about Democrats, The TNR Blue Book, which you should subscribe to, folks! We discuss her installment on how Dems are exploiting these splits, the deeper reasons for them, and how they reveal Trump’s diminishing power more broadly. 

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Donald Trump and his dutiful Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, have been targeting a number of ABC’s broadcast licenses, and ABC just challenged this hard in a new filing. In an interesting move, ABC cited Trump’s own social media postings and remarks at speeches to show that he is corruptly trying to censor the network as punishment for its content and viewpoints, in violation of the First Amendment. Amusingly, in those examples, Trump blurted right out in public that he does in fact want the FCC to punish ABC precisely because of its speech. Now this has become a weapon against Trump. We talked to law professor Leah Litman, author of a good book about the Supreme Court. She explains why Trump’s public bullying of ABC should undermine his case, walks us through the legal ins-and-outs here, details why ABC might prevail, and discusses how open, explicit corruption is intrinsic to his political project.

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Donald Trump is suddenly bumping up against limits in many areas at once. Top aides just leaked to The Atlantic that he’s “frustrated” with his inability to force Iran’s hand with his increasingly deranged threats. In the case of Trump’s bogus efforts to prosecute James Comey, we just learned that he personally demanded briefings in real time about interrogations of him. That reveals in deeply humiliating fashion his extraordinary personal involvement in the case and makes it more likely it’ll get tossed. His acting DNI chief Bill Pulte is boasting about firing “deep state” denizens even though this may not have actually happened. To make sense of all this, we talked to Talking Points Memo editor-at-large David Kurtz, author of the excellent “Morning Memo” newsletter. We discuss the legal ins-and-outs of these new developments, why there’s some cause for optimism that Trump is being meaningfully constrained, how our institutions are nonetheless on a knife’s edge, and what the endgame of Trump’s attempted authoritarian takeover might look like.

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On Fox News, Donald Trump threatened to bomb all of Iran’s bridges and all of its power plants. Making this worse, Trump declared that his threat could leave all of Iran’s 91 million people without power. That may be the first time Trump has explicitly said this threat could apply to Iran’s entire population, which would constitute an extraordinary atrocity. Though Trump presented this as something he’d be reluctant to do, the key is he still confirmed it’s under consideration. Meanwhile, many MAGA figures are very upset about Trump’s new meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, fearing it portends an escalation: As Steve Bannon put it, this is a “disaster for America First.” MAGA doesn’t care much about Iranians, but Trump’s escalation threats do rattle them for other reasons. We talked to former State Department official Emily Horne, author of the Spin Class Substack. We discuss the humanitarian horrors Trump is actually hinting at, what MAGA pressure on Trump means, and why the logic of the trap ensnaring Trump could lead to a terrible ending.

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