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 lashed out in response. Lost in this saga has been the basic reason we don’t want a MAGA-brained Januar...
May 08, 2025•27 min
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 Medicaid will likely pose a massive problem for rural hospitals. And big GOP cuts to food stamps will...
May 07, 2025•23 min
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 Trump’s skin. This comes as Trump also delivered another diatribe about the Supreme Court for suggesting...
May 06, 2025•24 min
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 personalities have begun going to great lengths to deny what the numbers clearly show. This highlights ...
May 05, 2025•22 min
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 very idea that migrants he labels “terrorists” should get due process. It’s a clear sign of Miller’s...
May 02, 2025•20 min
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 realities of his disastrous reign? We talked to New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who has a g...
May 01, 2025•23 min
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 Bezos bending the knee, an unnerving signal of more autocratic bullying ahead. Meanwhile, a new PRRI po...
Apr 30, 2025•23 min
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 Trump simply lying to him about his disastrous reign? They’re deceiving him about the state of public o...
Apr 29, 2025•21 min
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 retrying him for deportation through lawful channels. For Trump to acknowledge he has this option whil...
Apr 28, 2025•23 min
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 peace. This striking public admission badly undercuts Trump’s “master dealmaker” mystique, and wrecks ...
Apr 25, 2025•26 min
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 poll finds broad public opposition to Trump’s abuses of power—revealing a surprise weakness in an ar...
Apr 24, 2025•23 min
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 and investors more, backfiring on Trump. We talked to one of the best economic commentators out ther...
Apr 23, 2025•21 min
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 Donald Trump Jr., who declared this turncoat critic “exiled” from the Trump movement. Other MAGA fig...
Apr 22, 2025•20 min
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 to the gang—even though this notion is central to the rationale for refusing to bring him back. Today...
Apr 21, 2025•18 min
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 sense of widespread terror of retaliation: “We are all afraid.” We talked to Jeffrey Sachs of Acadia ...
Apr 18, 2025•25 min
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’s significantly weaker than he appears. We think all this has the makings of a fiasco for Trump: He...
Apr 17, 2025•23 min
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 band together to overcome their collective action problem, the Trump-MAGA assault could very well fa...
Apr 16, 2025•21 min
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 talked to Asawin Suebsaeng, a senior political reporter at Rolling Stone magazine and an adjunct journali...
Apr 15, 2025•22 min
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, launched investigations into the state’s governor and attorney general, lodging a dark threat of mo...
Apr 14, 2025•24 min
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 by the bond markets. This shattered Trump’s illusion of command. Meanwhile, his cabinet members are ...
Apr 11, 2025•24 min
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 tariffs—a clear abuse of power. This, plus the House GOP gearing up to cut Medicaid by hundreds of bil...
Apr 10, 2025•29 min
The fate of dozens of Venezuelans deported by the Trump administration to a maximum security prison in El Salvador remains in doubt. So does the fate of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who administration officials admit was removed in error, even as they refuse to return him to the United States. The Supreme Court just issued rulings on these cases, putting a hold on a lower court’s order to reverse Abrego Garcia’s removal, and allowing the deportations of Venezuelans to resume for now. In that second one...
Apr 09, 2025•22 min
As the chaos grows around President Trump’s tariffs, the Mad King is now raging wildly in many directions. He erupted over China’s reciprocal tariffs, threatening dark retribution. He exploded at Republicans, because a handful of them are now moving to reign in his power, which he’s not taking well. Faced with this turmoil, Trump insists the tariffs are already getting results. But the arguments don’t add up. Between this and the cracks now showing in GOP support for him, it’s clear that this wi...
Apr 08, 2025•24 min
President Donald Trump has more support in rural America than any U.S. politician in decades, and farmers remain overwhelmingly loyal to him. Yet with Trump’s tariffs unleashing a trade war and China striking back with retaliatory tariffs, farmers and their representatives have declared again and again and again that this will be absolutely brutal for them. As one put it, if farmers don’t get a government bailout, they will face “a disaster.” Another says farmers are “shocked.” Meanwhile, nearly...
Apr 07, 2025•22 min
After President Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on imports from all over the globe, prompting the markets to implode, he took a question about it on Thursday. He ranted and rambled delusionally about how everything is just great, bizarrely likened the country to a patient that had just undergone surgery without grasping why his metaphor is the opposite of reassuring, and spouted more nonsense about money pouring into our country. On top of all that, his imposition of the tariffs is likely an enor...
Apr 04, 2025•22 min
After Democrats scored a huge victory in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, a contest that revolved heavily around Elon Musk’s involvement, Trumpworld is turning on their favorite billionaire. In a striking turn of events, Politico reports that Trump has informed members of his inner circle that Musk will soon be moving on from his multi-faceted role. What’s more, as Musk’s departure looms, White House loyalists and outside allies are now dishing that they view Musk as unpredictable and a major p...
Apr 03, 2025•23 min
By now you may have heard that the Trump administration deported a Maryland man to a Salvadoran prison in “error.” The administration is refusing to bring him back, and this case has extremely dark implications. JD Vance and press secretary Karoline Leavitt both mounted defenses of this that were both weirdly angry, and quickly went off the rails. Meanwhile, MAGA-friendly media have gone into justificatory overdrive. Here’s the real story: They’re all fine with “accidental” deportations, because...
Apr 02, 2025•24 min
President Donald Trump is set to announce that he’ll impose sweeping new global tariffs on imports, and Congressional Republicans are already scrambling wildly to try to shield their states and districts from the fallout. Meanwhile, a Fox News poll finds that Trump is sliding on the economy, with the public turning against tariffs in particular. And an Associated Press survey also has terrible news for Trump on this front. Notably, all these negative consequences kicked in well before the tariff...
Apr 01, 2025•20 min
President Donald Trump’s own allies are beginning to turn on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Politico reports. White House and Pentagon insiders are increasingly questioning Hegseth’s judgment, and see him as the culprit in the disastrous news that Trump’s top advisers discussed war plans in an insecure chat. Yet there’s little indication that Trumpworld is ready for the next Hegseth fiasco, even as Trump allies clearly are bracing for his tenure to get worse. We talked to Jennifer Rubin, co-fou...
Mar 31, 2025•28 min
By now you may have heard that President Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained a foreign student at Tufts under shocking circumstances, for an unnervingly thin rationale. This is only the latest in an escalating trend, in which numerous students are being targeted for removal based in many cases on what appear to be their political associations and viewpoints. In a stunning turn on Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated straight out that the administration is hopin...
Mar 28, 2025•18 min
