THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

Over the weekend, Donald Trump unleashed an angry new rant over the news that his sentencing for his hush money conviction will proceed this week. Buried in Trump’s rage was a key tell: He’s signaling that he’ll use his conviction as a pretext to carry out his own autocratic second-term designs. There are also indications that he hopes to milk his sentencing toward other ugly ends. We talked to Adam Gurri, the editor of Liberal Currents magazine, who’s been making good arguments lately about Trump’s pursuit of “personalist” rule, which shapes everything around the personality at the center of his movement. Gurri explains how Trump is already signaling that this is where his presidency will go—and why that’s so ominous. Listen to this episode here.

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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's guest has done deep research into MS-13: Eric Hershberg, a professor of government at American University and a leading contributor to a major report on the gang. He takes us inside this organization—and explains how implausible the case tying Abrego Garcia to it truly is.

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President Trump’s anger at Canada has darkened: He’s kept up the menacing threats even after it’s become clear Canadians take them seriously. Indeed, Canada’s foreign minister just openly declared that Canadians are “anxious.” Meanwhile, even some Republicans are growing unnerved. Some tell NBC News he appears deadly serious—and that they’re flummoxed by his failure to explain what he really wants from our ally. We keep hearing Americans don’t care about such things. But what if that’s wrong? We talked to Brian Beutler, author of the Off Message Substack. He explains how this standoff is an area where Democrats can graphically demonstrate how degenerate Trump and his GOP have truly become.

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Now that the House has passed military aid to Ukraine, MAGA personalities like Donald Trump Jr. and Tucker Carlson have joined Marjorie Taylor Greene in attacking House Speaker Mike Johnson as a traitor to the cause. Yet this isn’t just typical right wing ranting. It reveals very specific expectations of what Donald Trump would do to our international alliances if he wins back the White House. We talked to A.B. Stoddard, columnist at The Bulwark and author of a new piece digging into these dynamics, about what this MAGA vision for the world really looks like—and why a second Trump term would be so dangerous.

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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 figures raged at Hegseth’s critics as well. We talked to Juliette Kayyem, a former national security official under Barack Obama. She takes us through this latest scandal and explains why the profoundly unfit Hegseth will become a much, much bigger problem for Trump—with no easy way out for the president.

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