Every weekday, The New Republic’s Greg Sargent brings you a fresh way of thinking about the biggest political stories of the moment, offered up in an entertaining, information-packed conversation with a leading lawmaker, journalist, or newsmaker. We go deep into the stories behind the headlines leading TNR and other news outlets—while making it fun and fast.
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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. Trump then vehemently claimed “everybody knows” that goods cost more under “Sleepy Joe Biden,...
Greg Sargent and Jessica Post discuss Donald Trump's explicit statements about ending the filibuster to enact restrictive voting laws, aimed at securing permanent Republican power. They delve into Trump's denial of recent election losses, arguing the results were a repudiation of his policies, particularly on the economy. The conversation also examines Republican gerrymandering efforts across states like Texas and North Carolina, and how Democratic counter-strategies and recent electoral victories might backfire on the GOP's plans, leading to a cautiously optimistic outlook for 2026.
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 rebuked GOP Senators, suggesting their shutdown was the culprit. He urged them to nuke the filibuster to e...
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 secretary Karoline Leavitt quickly clarified that Trump will obey the law, after all. Given that Trump...
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 Republican Party” has “failed.” We think one reason this angered right-wingers is that it revealed to...
In recent days, President Trump issued two furious tirades demanding that Republicans end the Senate filibuster to reopen the government. He r anted 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 government . Then Trump ranted about his horror that health care premiums are set to spike for millions. ...
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 “terrorized” and “traumatized.” Pritzker also sent a strong message to the country: Your community co...
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 damaging. Indeed, new polling shows that the ballroom fiasco is now stirring a surprising public backlas...
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 conference call,” Greene raged. “Apparently I have to go into a [classified facility] to find out th...
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 and his ongoing attacks on democracy, and more. In today’s installment, New Republic contributing edi...
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 whole saga: In Maryland, the disasters and damage in question severely afflicted the state’s westernm...
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 Trump’s corruption and criminality: It denounced Trump’s “blatantly illegal and unconstitutional effort ...
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 Hakeem Jeffries are going after all this in a newly aggressive way. Into this mess stepped White House pr...
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 American ranching.” Meriwether posted a long lament on Twitter , professing “love” for Trump but urging h...
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 smear is sharply contradicted by countless on-the-scene accounts. We talked to writer Ana Marie Cox, wh...
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 stance. All this comes as a new CNBC poll finds Trump and the GOP blamed for economic damage over the...
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. Did his resignation have anything to do with these bombings? Congressman Adam Smith of Washington St...
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 Justice Department was “weaponized” against Trump, as Trump wants him to do. But Jordan will never seek ...
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 funds to New York if “communist” Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor. We think all this suggests Trump...
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’s all almost certainly being coordinated by Stephen Miller. Yet it’s backfiring: Democrats and ra...
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 Pritzker to take a lead role in denouncing Trump’s abuses of power — and in warning that our slide into a...
This episode delves into President Trump's intensifying lawlessness, examining his calls to jail Illinois officials and the suspicious prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey. It exposes how key witnesses are undercutting politically motivated cases, forcing career prosecutors to resign or resist bringing charges. The discussion contrasts the Republican Party's failure to act as a bulwark against Trump's abuses with the crucial internal resistance within the Justice Department, offering a glimmer of hope that the rule of law might still hold.
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 only Democrats are to blame for the standoff, all due to their undying love of “illegals.” Greene’s b...
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 to justify any use of the military he wants. “The President’s determination was simply untethered ...
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 spectacle of reporters punching holes in the leading White House arguments in the shutdown standof...
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 lawbreaking. Trump has responded by escalating the lawless threats toward Blue America. In an intervi...
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 September , suggesting job losses could now get worse. All this bad economic news is piling up just as we...
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 constituting a kind of enemy nation within our borders. The display prompted Senator Ruben Gallego to s...
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 this is backfiring: Evidence quickly emerged that the shooter may well be a Trump supporter motivate...
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 deeply underwater on immigration , his “best” issue. Many of his most dramatic recent moments,...
