THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

The White House has been boasting that President Trump’s partial pause in the trade war with China is a historic breakthrough. But two new reports, one from The New York Times and the other from the non-liberal Wall Street Journal editorial page, neatly expose what a monstrous scam this notion truly is, in and of itself. As they detail, Trump has put the global economy through major turmoil and un...

Over the weekend, the news broke that President Donald Trump is accepting a luxury jet from the country of Qatar for presidential travel. This extraordinarily brazen act may well violate the Emoluments Clause, which bars foreign gifts to officials unless expressly authorized by Congress. It comes even as Trump is embarking on a Mideast trip to countries that are the sites of Trump-branded projects...

In her most recent media briefing, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went full North Korea with a number of worshipful monologues about Trump. Yet at around the same time, another journalist’s criticism of Trump caused him to explode in a wild, triggered fury that undercut the image Leavitt tried to project of a leader who is strong, calm, and in command of events. We think this tension...

Right after the news broke that Robert Francis Prevost was elected as the new Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, the internet produced lots of evidence that he has promoted articles critical of JD Vance and Donald Trump, and even expressed sympathy for George Floyd. That prompted MAGA figures to erupt in anger. They attacked the new Pope as anti-Trump pro-open borders, a Marxist, and soft on thugs...

President Donald Trump erupted on Truth Social this week when it became clear that MAGA loyalist and insurrectionist Ed Martin’s nomination for U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C. is in trouble. Trump even called GOP Senators to demand their support. But then GOP Senator Thom Tillis announced his opposition, leading even staunch Trump loyalists to concede he might not survive. MAGA personalities las...

Thanks to President Trump’s policies, a confluence of events is set to absolutely clobber rural America. First there’s Trump’s trade war. On Tuesday, Trump unleashed a bizarre set of ramblings that indicated he’s fine with letting it drag on forever, our exporters be damned. Meanwhile, there are new signs that farmers in Trump country are already getting hammered. The House GOP’s planned cuts to M...

President Donald Trump is angry at longtime GOP strategist Karl Rove. That’s because Rove delivered Trump a stern on-air warning about his sliding approval ratings. What caught our attention, though, is what Rove said about immigration in particular. Rove suggested that Trump is in trouble on what’s supposed to be his best issue, and offered a striking explanation for it that surely got under Trum...

President Trump has recently been erupting at Fox News over its new poll finding him with 55 percent disapproval. Trump described Fox’s pollster as “Trump hating” and demanded that the firm be “investigated.” Stephen Miller subsequently called for the pollster’s firing. Guess what: Fox News has gotten the message. As Trump’s poll numbers for other news organizations have steadily worsened, Fox per...

Big news: A federal judge just ruled that President Donald Trump’s renditions under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act are illegal. It’s a crucial moment in the battle against Trump’s lawlessness. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller ranted wildly at the media for daring to ask hard questions about the wrongfully-deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, falsely stating as fact that he’s an “MS-13 terrorist” and raging at the...

We just learned that President Donald Trump’s economy contracted in the first quarter. Trump unloaded twice over this bad news, attempting to blame Joe Biden for it. Meanwhile, some of Trump’s aides went full North Korea, bowing down before him and offering adulation in shockingly abject terms. So how long do Trump’s advisers think they can keep him in a protective cocoon, shielding him from the r...

After the news broke that Amazon might publicly clarify the costs that President Trump’s tariffs are imposing on its products, Trump instructed his White House press secretary to publicly threaten the company. Trump also called Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to express his displeasure, and one adviser told CNN that “he was pissed.” Amazon immediately shelved the plan, and Trump openly gloated about Bez...

President Donald Trump is growing angrier over polls that keep showing him tanking. On Monday, he raged that polls sponsored by media outlets are “COMPROMISED AND CORRUPT.” He even quoted one of his own pollsters saying that surveys from The New York Times and The Washington Post are “FAKE POLLS,” something his pollster clearly hatched to calm his anger. So to what degree are the people around Tru...

Over the weekend, President Trump raged on Truth Social at judges who are ruling that Trump must follow the law in the case of wrongfully-deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia and others illegally deported to prisons in El Salvador. Trump again threatened to dispense with due process for migrants. Yet this comes even as Trump admitted in a new interview that he’s open to bringing Abrego Garcia back and re...

President Donald Trump just made some new public statements about the Russia-Ukraine war, and they were thoroughly unimpressive. At one point, he seemed to get angry at Vladimir Putin over a massive new Russian attack on Ukraine, calling on Putin to “STOP.” But then in remarks to reporters, he openly suggested that he doesn’t expect Russia to make any serious concessions at all in the quest for pe...

Suddenly, President Donald Trump appears to be retreating or getting knocked back on multiple fronts. Trump is considering whether to slash his tariffs on China. Elon Musk is stepping back from the administration. Federal scientists are admitting the Measles outbreak is worse than previously acknowledged. And the leaks about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are intensifying. All this comes as a new...

On Tuesday, largely due to President Trump’s tariffs, the International Monetary Fund downgraded its projections for economic growth in a big way. Meanwhile, we’re already starting to see layoffs. All that comes as new polls show Trump cratering on the economy. Trump is now shifting blame to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for the tariff fallout. But those attacks are only rattling markets...

President Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is imploding again. We just learned that he shared still more highly sensitive data on a private signal chat. A GOP Congressman just basically called for his resignation. And a former chief Pentagon official who is a Trump supporter himself also tore into Hegseth’s tenure, calling it a “full-blown meltdown.” That triggered a furious response from...

President Donald Trump’s case for leaving Kilmar Abrego Garcia to rot in an El Salvadoran prison continues to collapse. In bizarre, rambling remarks to reporters in which Trump talked about Abrego Garcia’s alleged ties to MS-13, Trump revealed the profound weakness of his own arguments. In particularly ugly fashion, Trump basically admitted he knows little about the supposed evidence linking him t...

In an extraordinary escalation of President Trump’s rage at Harvard University, the administration just threatened to block Harvard from receiving foreign students if the university doesn’t provide extensive information on students to the government. Trump also erupted at Harvard on Truth Social, making all kinds of other threats. On another front, GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski openly admitted to a s...

Donald Trump’s illegal deportations are running into more trouble. A federal judge just declared there’s probable cause to find the administration in criminal contempt over the removal of Venezuelans to El Salvador. Meanwhile, a Democratic Senator went to El Salvador to check on Kilmar Abrego Garcia and got a shocking response. And a new polling analysis has a warning for Trump: On immigration, he...

Harvard University has declared that enough is enough, and it’s now openly refusing to buckle to Trump’s command for subservience on multiple fronts. In response, Trump erupted on Truth Social like a petty tinpot dictator, raging that Harvard should lose its tax exempt status and worse. We think this reveals a hidden weakness: Trump and MAGA know that if institutions don’t capitulate to them, and...

On Monday, Donald Trump met with El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and in an act of true infamy, the two authoritarian leaders collectively agreed that wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia will not be returned to the United States. And in a series of vile rants, Trump clearly telegraphed his intention to defy the Supreme Court, which has directed the administration to facilitate his return. We talke...

After President Trump raged for weeks at law firms he regards as personal enemies, a number of them just surrendered to him like falling dominoes. That Trump boasted about this on social media so conspicuously represents a dark turn: He’s warning anyone mulling resistance that it’s time to capitulate. Meanwhile, Alina Habba, a loyal Trump henchwoman who is now interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey,...

After President Trump’s supposed tariff “pause,” we still have a 10 percent tariff on most global imports, the trade war with China is intensifying, and markets have plunged again. Fox News figures are aggressively spinning the “pause” as sheer brilliance, propping up Trump’s own posture that he’s got everything running according to plan. Then a Fox correspondent told the truth: Trump got spooked...

President Donald Trump’s tariff chaos continues. He just announced a big reversal: For 90 days, the reciprocal tariffs will come down, but a universal 10 percent tariff will remain, and he’s hiking tariffs on China into the stratosphere. Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson just moved to prevent the House from voting on whether to rein in Trump’s assertion of unilateral authority to impose the ta...