THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

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...

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 on...

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...

Things are not okay in the White House. Numerous new national polls show President Trump and the GOP taking far more blame for the government shutdown than Democrats. One polling analyst flatly declared that the gap has reached double digits. Meanwhile, at a media briefing, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt twice lost her temper under tough questioning. Notably, what angered her was the...

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut has taken a lead role in forcefully sounding the alarm about Donald Trump. He’s urged Democrats to use their power creatively to constrain Trump’s abuses. But in recent days, Trump’s consolidation of authoritarian power has expanded. And we’re in the middle of a government shutdown fight in which Democrats are drawing a hard line, but not for an end to Trump’s l...

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump unleashed a strange Truth Social rant declaring straight out that farmers are getting hurt because China is not buying soybeans. Of course, Trump’s own trade wars are the reason for this, so he in effect admitted that his own policies are badly screwing one of his core constituencies. This comes as the ADP report finds that the economy lost 32,000 jobs in Septe...

In a speech to military officials, President Trump went full fascist: He said America is under “invasion from within,” declared that the generals in the room will be enlisted in a “war” against that enemy, and bizarrely insisted that U.S. cities should be used as military training grounds. We think this is Trump’s most explicit declaration yet that he sees large swaths of America as themselves con...

Investigators are still examining the motives driving Thomas Jacob Sanford, who opened fire on a Mormon church in Michigan, killing four people. Yet White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt quickly link the killing to an alleged rash of anti-Christian violence. “This appears to be yet another targeted attack on Christians,” Leavitt insisted, amplifying a similar claim by President Trump. Yet t...

What if we told you that Donald Trump is a really unpopular president? Would that surprise you? It’s not something you hear much in the media. Yet in recent days new polls from the Associated Press, Gallup, Quinnipiac, Reuters, and the Economist all show Trump’s approval rating in terrible shape. He’s in the toilet on specific issues, too: On the economy and trade he’s polling in the 30s, and he’s...

President Trump’s Justice Department is widely expected to indict former FBI director James Comey, someone the president has hated for years. Yet this push was just undermined when The New York Times reported a surprising turn of events: Career prosecutors reportedly informed DOJ political appointees that they have not been able to find evidence that would sustain a conviction. As the Times notes,...

After Jimmy Kimmel reappeared on ABC and spoke movingly about President Trump’s failed effort to oust him, Trump lost it on Truth Social and threatened Kimmel yet again. He also threatened to “test” his ability to bully ABC into yanking Kimmel a second time. In so doing, Trump accidentally demolished a big new lie that Fox News and MAGA figures have been making again and again: That Kimmel’s retur...

President Trump gave a speech to the United Nations on Tuesday that was a geopolitical and psychological dumpster fire. In addition to signaling absolute contempt for our allies and for global institutions, he slipped into angry and solipsistic grievance. He boasted about his polling, seethed that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, threatened to unshackle the U.S. military from international law, se...

Over the weekend, President Trump explicitly commanded Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute his political enemies in a crazed Truth Social tirade. He named the Democrats he wants prosecuted, and even openly boasted that he’d pushed out a veteran career prosecutor for refusing to carry out this mission. Now Rolling Stone reports that Trump’s open demand of his attorney general was so corrupt tha...

Several weeks after President Trump ordered a military strike on a small boat in the Caribbean Sea, killing 11 people supposedly suspected of drug smuggling, this saga has gotten much worst. Last Monday, Trump bombed another vessel, killing three. Again his administration released zero evidence supporting the decision, and the specifics in this case make this campaign look increasingly lawless. An...

This week, ABC suspended comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show under pressure from the Trump administration. The ostensible reason: Kimmel supposedly spread disinformation about Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin. But then President Trump ranted to reporters on Air Force One about the ouster, and he basically confirmed that he’s sending a message to networks that they can’t criticize him too much. “They’re no...

As the Jeffrey Epstein scandal has worsened, President Trump’s story has been that it’s all Democratic “hoax,” and that his signature on that lewd drawing in Epstein’s birthday book is a “forgery.” But at a congressional hearing Wednesday, FBI director Kash Patel faltered under intense questioning from Democrats. Patel filibustered when asked whether Trump’s name is in the Epstein files. He seemed...

President Trump seems even more angry at the media than usual. His lawyers just filed a lawsuit against The New York Times that First Amendment lawyers are dismissing as a total joke. The suit, however, is also chock full of angry rants that appeared dictated by Trump himself. And he announced it with a Truth Social tirade that boiled with fury. Meanwhile, Trump himself snapped directly at reporte...

In a surprise, Fox News is reporting that the knives are out for FBI director Kash Patel due to many recent missteps, including the botching of key facts about the hunt for Charlie Kirk’s assassin. That this is being featured by Fox News may be a sign of how dire Patel’s internal standing has truly become. Yet we’re in the middle of a complicated moment. Even as Patel’s tenure is beset with follie...

In an appalling move, President Trump went on Fox News and openly suggested that far-right political violence is typically justified as a response to left-wing extremism. This functionally tells Trump supporters that it is now open season on the liberal-left after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Trump also signaled he will use the power of the state to exact retribution on Trump-MAGA's designat...

Questions are mounting about President Trump’s decision to bomb a small boat in the Caribbean Sea, killing all 11 people on board. The administration says these were drug cartel members who posed a threat to the United States, but many legal experts have concluded the bombing might have been illegal or a war crime. And this saga just got darker. Senator Tim Kaine and two dozen other Democrats just...

GOP Congresswoman Nancy Mace lost her temper on the House floor on Wednesday. It all started when Mace unleashed a long, vile tirade about transgender Americans. After that, Congresswoman Sara Jacobs, a Democrat, offered some cutting criticism of the absurdity of GOP anti-trans rhetoric. That prompted Mace to fly into a fury and start shouting. We think this is a telling moment: We’re all supposed...

House Democrats have released Jeffrey Epstein’s “Birthday Book,” and it’s brutal for President Trump. His note to Epstein is real and it appears to bear his distinctive signature. There’s also an image of Epstein holding a big check that discusses selling a “fully depreciated” woman to Trump. On Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, visibly irritated, offered some truly absurd spin about Trum...

There’s been an amusing turn in the saga involving President Trump’s vile effort to remove Lisa Cook as governor of the Federal Reserve. Trump has relied on his flunkies to cook up allegations of mortgage fraud against Cook—and other foes as well—but now news organizations have blown big holes in the scam. They’ve reported that numerous Trump officials, and even relatives of his top ally in the an...

President Donald Trump’s losses in court are suddenly piling up on many crucial fronts at once. Most of his tariffs were just ruled illegal, prompting him to explode in fury. An appeals court blocked Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act for deportations. And a judge invalidated Trump’s cancellation of grants to Harvard. There’s a big through line here that deserves attention: Judges are taking a v...

At a Senate hearing on Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. got massacred by harsh questioning from Democrats and Republicans. They called out his anti-vax views and condemned his decapitation of our public health system. But Matt Gertz of Media Matters noticed something funny: Fox News’ coverage bent over backward to portray him as pro-vaccine, as someone working to...