THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

Donald Trump faced merciless booing at the Knicks game Monday night, and Fox News figures quickly recognized how perilous this is. As Media Matters details, Fox personalities and on-air chyrons spun madly in response. They absurdly portrayed the reception as much more muddled, as inspired by something other than Trump, and even as meaningfully peppered with cheers for him. This comes as his polls just nosedived again: A new YouGov poll has Trump’s approval on the economy and inflation in the twenties. And fresh data from The Argument shows Trump deeply underwater in numerous red states with competitive Senate races. He continues to slide in the polling averages, too. We talked to Grant Wiles, a data analyst with NextGen America, which just released new research on Trump’s toxicity with young voters. We parse all the new polls, dig into why Trump propagandists fear he's in a downward spiral, and discuss how Democrats can avoid getting too complacent about the midterms.

Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the weekend, Donald Trump exploded during an on-air interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker. He called her “crooked” and “stupid” and abruptly ended the interview in a fury. This was ostensibly because she questioned his claims that California’s ongoing vote counting is rigged against GOP candidates. But we think the real reason is darker. As the votes are being counted, those candidates—Spencer Pratt for Los Angeles Mayor and Steve Hilton for Governor—are looking weaker than advertised. In real time, Trump is witnessing the failure of MAGA’s online disinformation apparatus to invent reality whole cloth and inflate the strength of his candidates into something it isn’t. In today’s episode, tech writer Gil Duran, author of the forthcoming The Nerd Reich, a book about techno-authoritarianism, puts this in perspective. He explains the California contests, why it’s so infuriating for Trump to watch real votes coming in, why this saga represents a larger failure of Trump-MAGA online propaganda, and why that has heartening deeper implications.

Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Donald Trump is desperately trying to salvage his gala commemorating the United States’s 250th anniversary after many celebrities pulled out. He let out a weird tirade insisting that he is telling them not to come, and also announced a paltry set of acts that’s downright humiliating. This comes after he seethed that he didn’t need other musical acts because he himself will be performing. Also, he’s bigger than Elvis! Trump’s plans drew savage mockery from MAGA influencer Matt Walsh, who ridiculed organizers for inviting “washed up geriatric one hit wonders,” and then turning it into a rally where “Trump will talk about himself for 90 minutes.” We talked to New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who writes well about Trumpism and the American zeitgeist. We discuss how Trump/MAGA had their cultural moment in 2024, how they pissed it away to inflict mass suffering on the people they hate, and the deeper reasons MAGA is so toxic within the culture. 

Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This comes as The New York Times reports that extensive internal war games among military officials established that Iran would react to an attack by closing the Strait of Hormuz—which Trump ignored. And incredibly, officials just leaked to The Atlantic that Trump is privately “irritated” by commentary casting his emerging framework as weaker than Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal. Trump also wants a way to argue that Iran “accepted terms from him that Obama never managed to extract.” We talked to former National Security Council veteran Emily Horne, author of the Spin Class Substack. We discuss how all those leaks themselves signal Trump’s growing weakness, why his demand for a “better” deal than Obama’s may be hopeless, and whether that leaves us any way out of this fiasco.

Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified before a House committee on Wednesday, Representative Ted Lieu questioned him at length about Donald Trump’s mental decline. It was an extraordinary moment. Lieu repeatedly confronted Rubio with damning video of Trump falling asleep and spewing word salad, cornering Rubio into lying about what we can all see with our own eyes. The moment captured something essential about how our politics works today—and shows why Democrats should relentlessly center Trump’s unfitness for the presidency whenever possible. We talked to Brian Beutler, author of the excellent Off Message Substack. We discuss the deeper reasons that Democrats need to pick viral fights like this, ponder how Trump understands politics through a strong-versus-weak frame, and parse through how James Talarico should combat right-wing smears in the Texas Senate race.

Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices