THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

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 l...

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 disch...

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...

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 no...

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...

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. Transla...

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 rebuke...

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 se...

MAGA personalities are suddenly raging at Tucker Carlson, who just conducted a shocker of an online interview with white nationalist and open antisemite Nick Fuentes. They’re attacking Carlson for hosting a “Nazi-sympathizer” who espouses the “foundation of Nazism,” calling this “sick” and “despicable,” and claiming it shows that the effort to “gatekeep the antisemitic, hateful freaks out of the R...

In recent days, President Trump issued two furious tirades demanding that Republicans end the Senate filibuster to reopen the government. He ranted at great length in demanding this “NOW” and exploded in all-caps while urging the “NUCLEAR OPTION.” As many noted, this undercut Republicans, revealing that they could simply end the shutdown themselves, ultimately showing that they control the governm...

President Trump’s militarized raids in Chicago just took another horrific turn when agents disrupted a children’s Halloween parade, triggering mayhem. Agents deployed tear gas on locals and tackled several of them, including U.S. citizens. One resident screamed: “You’re scaring our children to death.” In response, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker issued an unnerving warning: Children are getting “t...

The economic news is getting worse. Major companies are announcing mass layoffs, and it’s dominating the headlines, including in the Rust Belt. Food stamps are about to expire for millions. And new info shows how Obamacare premiums will soar due to lapsing subsidies. That backdrop of bad news makes President Trump’s tearing down of White House structures to build a gilded ballroom even more damagi...

Surprisingly, Marjorie Taylor Greene has emerged as a forceful critic of the GOP stance in the government shutdown fight. Greene just unleashed an angry rant at House Speaker Mike Johnson, pointedly accusing him of having no answer or millions of people who will lose Obamacare subsidies due to the GOP refusal to extend them. “He refused to give one policy proposal to our GOP conference on our own...

On Air Force One, President Donald Trump unleashed a bizarre, angry, rambling rant about the cognitive test he supposedly aced this weekend. Worse, he compared himself cognitively to two Democrats who both happen to be nonwhite women. This rant backfired on itself: It revealed his worsening mental unfitness, his naked racism, his effort to normalize his belittling of nonwhite members of Congress a...

In recent days, President Trump has approved federal disaster aid for the red states of Nebraska, North Dakota, Missouri and Alaska while denying it to the blue states of Maryland, Vermont, and Illinois. The White House has not offered meaningful explanations for the discrepancies, which just happen to punish states that didn’t support him in 2024. But we noticed something interesting about this w...

In a shockingly brazen move, President Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him $230 million stemming from certain federal actions against him. Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, sent a scalding letter to the White House demanding all internal communications on this shakedown. What struck us was the letter’s forceful indictment of Trum...

We’re seeing a confluence of events that suggest President Trump’s corruption has crossed over to an ugly new place. Trump is destroying a White House building to create a ballroom for him and his rich friends. He’s demanding that the Justice Department hand over $230 million in taxpayer funds to compensate him for “damages.” And Democrats from Senator Chris Murphy to Democratic House leader Hakee...

Not long after President Trump floated a $20 billion financial bailout for Argentina, he proposed importing beef from Argentina to bring prices down in the United States. This angered American beef producers and produced a backlash from farm-state Republicans. But the most interesting response came from Meriwether Farms, a beef producer in Wyoming that promises to “preserve the traditions of Ameri...

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 sme...

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 s...

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. ...

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 Just...

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...

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...

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 Pritzk...