THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent Greg Sargent

Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in Manhattan has already served up some extraordinary moments. On Friday, former Trump aide Hope Hicks’s tearful testimony undermined the defense that Trump’s legal team will attempt to mount. On Monday, new evidence tied the payments to mistress Stormy Daniels tightly to Trump, and he was again held in contempt for attacking jurors, this time threatened with jail. We talked to Kim Wehle, a professor of law and former assistant U.S. attorney, about why these developments signal still more damning revelations ahead.
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In his much-discussed Time interview, Donald Trump threatened to use the military to carry out mass deportations in a second term. The proposals he offered are appalling on their face. But beyond that, by regularly using vicious tropes about undocumented immigrants and other domestic enemies within, Trump is trying to acclimate voters to the ugliest forms of authoritarian, dehumanizing language. We talked to Maria Teresa Kumar, the president of Voto Latino, about a new effort she’s launching with other Hispanic leaders to alert voters to the grave threat Trump poses—before it’s too late.
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Unexpectedly, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been making a huge number of appearances all over right wing media of late. Trump advisers are loudly warning that this threatens to take voters from him, helping President Biden. But we’re skeptical: It’s still more likely that in the end RFK hurts Biden more than Trump. And there are cynical reasons why right wing media sources might be boosting RFK Jr. right now. We chatted with Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the Democratic group Third Way and a shrewd observer of U.S. party politics, about the true RFK effect, how RFK is functioning as a stalking horse for Trump, and what MAGA media might be doing to help along the scam.
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A new consensus is settling in among political analysts: Donald Trump’s poll numbers look unexpectedly formidable in states like Arizona and Georgia, which means President Biden’s most likely path to victory requires winning Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. And yet Trump will almost certainly lose if he can’t win one of those three. That’s why Democrats can stop Trump if they beat him in Wisconsin. We talked to Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, who explains how years of painstaking organizing is laying the groundwork to defeat Trump by thwarting his designs, first and foremost, in the Badger State.
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In a new interview, Donald Trump gave away the game: If he wins the White House, he’d be fine with anti-choice crackdowns in red states going to horrific extremes. Trump vowed (unconvincingly) to leave abortion to the states, but when pressed, he suggested he’d be okay with prosecutions of women who get abortions and even with states monitoring their pregnancies. In addition to revealing what Roe v. Wade’s demise has wrought, that could give Democrats a boost in this fall’s state-level elections. We talked Arizona state senator Eva Burch about how the future of reproductive rights will raise the stakes in these contests—and about her own personal and emotional experiences with the issue.
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Recently Elon Musk triggered outrage by promoting a vicious speech by a Dutch activist that pushed virulent white nationalist ideologies. Musk added that Europe is threatened by “population collapse” that could lead to “dead civilizations.” What often gets lost amid such controversies is that Musk is pushing ideas that are part of a genuine political movement shaped around long term demographic anxieties. We chatted with reporter Gaby Del Valle, author of a great new Politico piece about the first ever “Natal Conference,” in Austin, Tx., and the far-right movement to get (some) people to have more babies, who helped place Musk’s talk about low birth rates in a global political context.
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