THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

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Christina Bobb Is Back, and Flailing Trump Needs Her More Than Ever Mar 22, 2024

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With Donald Trump’s fundraising badly trailing that of President Biden, the RNC’s new “election integrity” lawyer, Christina Bobb, is emerging as an important player in the Trump-MAGA campaign apparatus. Bobb, who was deeply involved in Trump’s Stop-the-Steal efforts, will help reassure the MAGA faithful, perhaps firing up the small-dollar donations that Trump desperately needs. We chatted with Andrew Egger, who has a great new piece for The Bulwark about Bobb’s role, about why she’s so pivotal for Trump and how she’s become the face of the new MAGA establishment.

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She Had a Heart-Wrenching Abortion. Now She’s a Candidate—in Alabama Mar 21, 2024

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Donald Trump just announced that he’s likely to campaign for the presidency on a promise of a 15-week abortion ban, even as political commentators are wondering whether reproductive rights will be as salient this fall as they were in 2022 and 2023. An interesting test looms in deep red Alabama, where Marilyn Lands is running for a state House seat in a special election set for March 26th—a campaign that Lands has made about her own agonizing abortion story. We talked to Lands about what she’s hearing on the ground and how voters are reacting to her personal journey.

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Is Mike Johnson Finally Ready to Stick It to MAGA on Ukraine? Mar 20, 2024

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Is there any chance that Congress will not abandon Ukraine to the Russians? With Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans determined to cut off military aid to Ukraine, it’s looking grim. Yet there are glimmers of hope. Some Republicans are reportedly pushing a proposal that would offer aid to Ukraine as a loan. And there are signs that House Speaker Mike Johnson does want something to pass. We chatted with Democratic Congressman Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, who offered a keen understanding of the tortured dynamics surrounding this deeply dispiriting debate.

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Trump’s Humiliating $454 Million Bond Fiasco Shows Deep 2024 Weakness Mar 19, 2024

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This week, Donald Trump’s lawyers admitted that he’s failed to secure a bond to cover the half-a-billion-dollar penalty he faces in his civil fraud case in New York. As The New York Times delicately noted, “he does not have enough liquidity” to persuade any company to provide that bond. Translation: He doesn’t have the cash. This is humiliating to Trump, relative to his self-mythology. But it also points to his broader, largely-overlooked weaknesses in the 2024 campaign. We discussed this with The New Republic’s Timothy Noah, author of a great new piece on Trump’s financial travails that predicts he will soon declare bankruptcy.

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Trump’s Deranged “Bloodbath” Rant in Ohio Should Wake Up the Media Mar 18, 2024

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In Ohio over the weekend, Donald Trump delivered one of his most unhinged and dangerous rally speeches yet: He used appallingly dehumanizing language about migrants, saluted the Jan. 6 rioters as patriots and heroes, and predicted a “bloodbath” if he loses the election. We talked to New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser, the author of an excellent new piece about Trump’s use of violent and authoritarian language at rallies like this one, about why the media urgently needs to do better at conveying the full threat to democracy that Trump poses.

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Chuck Schumer’s Brutal Takedown of Bibi Is a Watershed Moment Mar 15, 2024

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On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer gave an extraordinary speech lacerating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel over the horrific civilian toll in Gaza. This is an important moment in U.S. politics: The highest ranking Jewish Democrat stood strongly for Palestinian rights at a time when the war in Gaza is badly dividing the Democratic coalition. To navigate these complexities, we talked to Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, which is promoting a peace effort called Standing Together, and Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, who writes regularly about intra-coalitional tensions among Democrats.

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The Serious Case for Not Freaking Out About Trump’s Scary Poll Numbers Mar 14, 2024

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Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg has prominently argued that it’s premature to freak out about Donald Trump’s lead in the polls. Rosenberg’s case is partly that the Democratic Party is strong and has been winning lots of elections lately, as readers of his “Hopium Chronicles” well know. But there’s another, less-appreciated side to his analysis: That the people who make ads and run campaigns and do politics for a living know that Trump’s unfathomably high pile-up of negatives is, in the end, probably insurmountable for him. So we chatted with Rosenberg about this side of his theory — and about why the Biden team appears quietly confident of victory.

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Inside the $50 million “Never Trump” Plan to Finish Him Off for Good Mar 13, 2024

Show notes

This week, a group of prominent “Never Trump” Republicans and conservatives announced that they will spend $50 million to defeat Donald Trump this fall. The group, Republican Voters against Trump, hopes to appeal to independents and moderate Republicans who backed him in 2020 and might be persuaded not to in 2024. But how big is this pool of voters, and what’s the best way to reach them? We chatted with strategist Sarah Longwell, who runs the group and regularly conducts focus groups to figure out what really makes these elusive voters tick.

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How the Media Whitewashes the Trump-MAGA Threat—Revealed by an Insider Mar 12, 2024

Show notes

Over the weekend, The New York Times published a news analysis entitled, “The Biden-Trump rerun: A nation craving change gets more of the same.” This has become a constant refrain in the press: One of the candidates is running on an explicit set of promises to destroy American democracy, yet the press keeps calling this a “rerun” of 2020, almost as if it’s all a sporting event. We chatted with Mark Jacob, a former veteran journalist who writes the “Stop the Presses” newsletter, about all the insidious ways that press coverage is sanitizing the threat posed by Donald Trump and MAGA.

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Moms for Liberty Founder’s Sex Scandal Spells Big Trouble For MAGA Mar 11, 2024

Show notes

Have you heard of Bridget Ziegler? A co-founder of the far right Moms for Liberty, she is embroiled in a three-way sex scandal involving her husband, Florida GOP chair Christian Ziegler. Now some Florida parents are running brutal ads attacking her, even as the Moms for Liberty movement is unexpectedly losing ground everywhere. We chatted with journalist Jennifer Berkshire, the author of a forthcoming book on our cultural battles over education, who explained the bigger, deeper story here: The right are the ones now on the defensive in the school wars.

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