The Daily Blast: Trump Is on a Huge Losing Streak—and It Just Got Even More Humiliating

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Now on the greatest tests, the number of 18 years, the number of customers and customers in the world has increased the volume of the unit. Only so long the preparation, the number of the actions of the package and the cheese minus action. This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I'm your host Greg Sargent. Donald Trump has been losing on a lot of fronts lately.

The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. His attack on the Fed chair failed. The Supreme Court struck down his tariffs and will probably rule against him on birthright citizenship. He failed to prevent Virginia from passing a referendum adding house seats for Democrats. And that's only a partial list.

For the MAGA base, however, the illusion must always be sustained that Trump is in total mastery of events and forever has his enemies on the run.

So his team is now leaking word that he's going to seriously ramp up the prosecutions of enemies. And then one case is press secretary tried hard to playkate the audience of one in an amusing way. As someone who's saying senior political correspondent Ed Zeteo has been writing well about how the cult of Trump prohibits any truth telling about all this losing. So we're talking to him about all of it today. Swin, always good to have you on.

Thank you so much for having me back. Well, let's start with the first big one. Trump's Justice Department has dropped its effort to prosecute federal reserve chairman Jerome Powell for supposedly lying to Congress about a renovation of Fed headquarters.

This thing was always joke.

One federal judge blasted it as an effort to harass Powell primarily over Trump's hatred of him. And the New York Times reports that prosecutors admitted that they didn't have evidence of any crimes by Powell, but wanted to press forward anyway.

“So when that's not how this is supposed to work, isn't it?”

Okay, something that really pisses me off by this stuff is if you go down the roster of the names that are publicly available of the lawyers at DOJ who are conducting this. These are not always people who used to be on Donald Trump's personal legal team. There are a good number of them who have been there for a while throughout multiple administrations, not just this one. So these hugely corrupt authoritarian efforts are not just defined by the pure blooded team Trump individuals. It is populated also by people who have been in the system for a long time and continue to stick with it when they could very well just, you know, do the ethical thing and resign.

So there's a lot of people got that got blood on their hands on this stuff, but the good news is even if these people don't face this sort of professional consequences that you or I would think would be appropriate for doing something so brazenly corrupt in authoritarian.

“When you get before a judge, in some cases, even occasionally sometimes a Trump appointed judge, you have to make an argument that kind of occasionally amounts to one plus two does not equal 11 team.”

Then a lot of these lawyers are waltzing into court trying to with a straight face convinced these judges that, oh, of course, Donald Trump's effort to punish all of his enemies is built on math in which one plus one equals 11 team. How could you possibly say that's fictitious judge? Yeah, I mean, we have a whole sort of track record that sort of bears out what you're saying on two fronts. One is they've lost these efforts to prosecute Trump's enemies have mostly failed. They've mostly imploded in buffoonery really.

In point two, we've actually seen a lot of resignations and a lot of consternation from the professionals at DOJ. So yes, these people who are doing this stuff could be following their colleagues out the door and could be doing the principled thing, but they're not. It's completely embarrassing because so many of these prosecutions against Trump's real and perceived political enemies, like your audience, I'm sure has looked at some of the indicting documents or some of the details and read some of the transcripts online.

It is been a year and a half of the absolute white, most bush league, most barcical stuff in a court of law that a lot of people not just me, but actual legal experts, actual distinguished lawyers when they look at it, they have nothing else but to say other than I have never fucking seen anything like this. And yet, in spite of all that in mega world, you're not allowed to say Trump has lost ever in any sense. So the U.S. attorney for DC, Janine Piero, is now saying the investigation will be picked up by the feds inspector general. Now listen to this from White House press secretary Caroline Leather.

This has obviously been a priority for the president. If you drive by the fed building, the president has a point. This is a project that's been going on for a very long time. It's costing taxpayers billions of dollars. And I think it's in the best interest of the taxpayer to get to the bottom of it. So the investigation still continues. It's just under a different authority. So when note how levitt has to pretend that Trump cares about the details of the renovation and that he's just got the best interest of the taxpayer at heart, I don't know which is worse here. The absurdity of that, like the insulting absurdity of it, or the need to reassure the audience of one that he's winning, they're both bad.

There are some people who get a little bit annoyed with you as a political journalist or political commentator if you compare Donald Trump's Washington to Donald Trump's Pyongyang.

“Because they say to themselves, it's like, well, this is a very uniquely American authoritarianism and why do you default to comparing it to foreign despotism isn't there a little bit of an implicit racism in that?”

I completely disagree. As an Asian guy, if anybody wants to Google image my name, I completely disagree with that criticism in part because if you're talking about the way the Republican party elite treat Donald Trump and Trump is the way they talk about their supposed God Emperor and how he can never fail, he can only be failed. I'm sorry. It reminds me of literally only one other government on the face of the planet.

And that's the one that exists in North Korea's Pyongyang and how they treat their totalitarian dictator.

I mean, it's not an exaggeration at all to say that the two things are comparable. If you put the sound clips beside each other in both instances, whether it's Caroline Levitt or some aparachic in North Korea, the deer leader deserves the sun and the moons and the stars and commands all the heavens and anybody else who says otherwise must be dealt with swiftly and aggressively.

It really is as bad. If you listen to Caroline Levitt or Sean Hannity, you can map it almost directly onto North Korean propaganda.

It's it's one to one, a thousand percent. Well, let's sum up a few other losses Trump lost before the Supreme Court on tariffs and he's likely to lose on birthright citizenship.

“And let's remember in this latter case, Trump showed up at the court to pressure the justices with his fearsome presence.”

Trump also commended Republicans to gerrymander as many states as possible, but he couldn't stop Virginia from adding seats, which will be in the Democratic column, maybe as many as four, though that one's still before the courts. That's a very clear case of Trump picking a major war, this redistricting arms race that as of now, at least he's probably losing your thoughts on all that. Well, whether it's in the Middle East or all the way to the mainland of the United States Donald Trump cannot seem to stop starting wars that he very quickly starts getting his ass kicked it.

“Look, he's trying to rig upcoming elections in his and the Republican Party's favor on a multitude of fronts. This is one of them in which he pressured the Republican Party in variety of states.”

Obviously, most notably Texas to do redistricting at a time when they typically don't do it, so he could try to dilute democratic seats and advantages for the 26 midterm elections. Now, Democrats, as you and I are used to pointing out, often have an instinctive inclination to try to take the high road or at least pretend that they're doing that and have a problem with either literally or proverbially fighting back or punching back. This time, two some of the Democratic Party leadership's credit in different states decided that, "Okay, we're not going to unilaterally disarm."

If Donald Trump is going to try to rig an election, we need to try to establish deterrence for the future so that we can at least try to send a message to the Republican Party that if you keep doing this, it is going to turn out poorly for you. And so far, at this current state in the arms race, because of what happened under Gavin Newsom's leadership in California and others in California and because of what happened in Virginia, very, very recently, it seems it's basically a universal, we accepted a premise here that Donald Trump and the Republican Party are currently on the losing end when you do the very basic math.

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The third terrarians like Trump kind of thrive on the expectation that everybody is going to roll over for them.

And in case after case here, Trump keeps getting surprised when people fight back. It's classic bully behavior. I mean, it's classic bully behavior. It's the stereotype of every single school yard bully. At the moment you shove them a little bit and they lightly fall off the jungle jing set.

Suddenly they're the victim. They're the aggrieved party. How could you do that? Why are you being so mean to me? That's exactly what we have in the political character of a Donald Trump.

Like I'm not at all trying to downplay. I never will. Downplay be severity of the damage that he and his gang are causing. And are likely to continue causing on his historic levels between now and whatever they're out of all. I'm not downplaying that at all.

Having said that they are losing more. And in some cases a lot more than they and their coat would ever publicly admit. Or especially President Donald Trump would ever be willing to admit. Otherwise his ego would cave in on itself. And also at the same time there is a pathetic weakness and massive gaping hole of insecurity that undergirds all of this

Maga authoritarianism. Like I would feel sorry for all of them if they weren't so despicably cruel on a multitude of fronts. I really would. I have to suppress that part of my brain and my heart that makes me want to feel sorry for these people. We'll make sure to keep that suppressed.

“I think you're putting your finger on sort of the structural position of the Republican party in a funny way too,”

because the Republican outcry over Democrats doing the very same thing that they do. But doing it to their own advantage is essentially an objection to the fact that anybody's fighting back against them. Republicans quite literally and explicitly expect that the way this is supposed to work is that they get to regulations and Democrats roll over and take it. That's their position. Yes, openly openly.

I mean, that has always been the position of not just Trumpism, but a lot of these other more quote unquote older school Republicans who are now, of course,

just been completely subsumed into the ideological project of the cult of Trump. But yes, their position has always been like it is morally crooked or maybe even illegal if you do a tenth of something. If we do nine tenths or a hundred percent of something, we get to do it just because it would hurt our feelings if you said we didn't get to it. And by the way, the Roberts court agrees with us. So ha ha check the scoreboard.

So Trump just exploded on truth social over the tariff loss now that the US is reimbursing businesses for the tariffs they paid before they were invalidated Trump said this quote. People and companies that have taken advantage of our country for decades because of the horrible and ridiculous United States Supreme Court decision on tariffs are now supposed to be given back. A hundred fifty nine billion dollars close quote. Look, you know, Trump has gotten his way out of the Supreme Court a lot. There's no denying that.

But he's also losing some big ones and he's trapped in the dynamic that you just identified where he keeps shrieking with fury at the court.

“And it isn't working. He's here again, picked a fight that he's not winning, right?”

The Supreme Court is such a glorious example of how the bully Donald Trump got everything he wanted. The spoiled brat Rich Kid bully got basically what he want to look he might be very well on the way to roughly half of the Supreme Court being Trump appointed.

And he is still not happy with it.

He's constantly seeing about it whenever they go up against him here and there, even though on probably more than 90% of things, he, they agree and co-sign all of his bullshit with him and the Republican party. They even gift wrapped him his, his torqued up presidential immunity that he's now benefiting from that he obviously benefited from during the 2024 race.

You got to argue that they are the reason he is not imprisoned right now.

“When this is where it gets a bit darker, I think. Trump, of course, fired his old attorney general, Pam Bondi and she's been replaced by acting attorney general Todd Blanche, a former Trump defense attorney and maybe a current one as well.”

But now Blanche and his people are leaking word that they're going to be seriously ramping up the prosecutions of Trump's enemies were Bondi failed. Now I don't think Blanche is going to be more successful because as you point out, like there are juries and judges that they have to deal with. But this is still just disgusting. He's going to wheel the machinery of justice improperly or even unlawfully against Americans who are innocent.

“solely because the alien despot who's falling asleep during press conferences can't stand the notion that he isn't winning or whatever. It's just vile.”

But it's going to go into a variety of like permit, Trump allies, both on the legal, political and advocacy side on the outside. Some of whom have been furiously upset, including some on the record that the Steven Miller led war on terror against the left in the United States, particularly in the wake of the Charlie Crook assassination, did not materialize in the hyper regressive way that they wanted and a lot of these people put the blame squarely at Pam Bondi's feet. Because you know, you got to blame someone. Somebody's got to be a scapegoat and this rippled its way all the way up to Donald Trump himself, who pointed sources were talking to at the time quite direct knowledge of this matter.

Trump had been bitchy for weeks if not months ahead of Pam Bondi's ouster that one of his top complaints with her and he had a good laundry list of complaints.

“But one of the top complaints was, and I'm obviously paraphrasing you, is that she was not wielding the Department of Justice aggressively enough to jail as many of his political enemies and personal enemies at a clip in a rate, as that Trump won.”

But she was not shoving enough of his nemesis behind bars. So he basically fired the very modified Pam Bondi for not being aggressively authoritarian or corrupt enough.

But as you pointed out, that's not entirely her fault. It's not like she wasn't a super maga, Trump loyalist person who hated a lot of these same people. The issue was, even though these guys are committing a ton of democratic backsliding and pulling America in that direction, they do have to deal with democratic institutions and also a political party that is accountable to the voters. So it takes a lot of time, effort, skill and intelligence, emphasis on the word time and patience to actually create a genuinely authoritarian structure where a guy like Donald Trump could sit at top, the federal apparatus, and actually just throw anybody you wanted, whether it was Rosio Donno or John Bolton or James Colmy or whoever, in jail or take away their citizenship, just on a whim and just because he wanted to.

As bad as things are in the United States of America right now, we are not very yet, and then when Donald Trump looks out as his DOJ and FBI, it gets antsy about why we're not rocketing as quickly as he would like to in that direction, he's got to blame some. And just because you got rid of Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche is not a wizard. He's not going to get you your right stock fire moment in a week and a half. It's just not going to happen. So when you made a really interesting point in your piece, which is that this dynamic is kind of pervading the entire GOP precisely because Republicans are not allowed to question Trump.

They're actually constraining themselves from number one trying to get them to course correct and number two from breaking with him. The funny thing I'd add to that swim is that they're the ones who are paying the price for this. He doesn't pay any price. They do. They are governed entirely by a republic of fear right now. Fear of what will happen if you kind of go against Trump too much or say the wrong thing about him on life TV or pint closed doors to his face or into the era of somebody who is super close to him.

So basically surrender in that and admit defeat. And if the war keeps going, it could screw so many of their midterm election chances come November. Whether it's that or other elements of the Trump regime agenda, including their mass deportation policies that have become low foe. This is a really popular with normal Americans. These are things that both the Republican Party elite would kind of like some more public relations manicuring on so they can try to get away with certain things with the normal average voter in the upcoming elections.

“But at the same time, they are inextricably tied to these things either because they really do want to get the end results from them because they believe in the project or because they're simply just not allowed to cross Trump.”

You know what, they are two peas in a pod, Donald Trump in the rest of the Republican Party who absolutely deserve each other and whatever goes on the electorally between now and no God bless them.

Very well said as one soup saying it's always great to talk to you man, even if it's going to require a Trump passing from the scene before we get even a tiny bit of relief from any of this. So when good to talk to you. Thank you for having me.

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