When Trump blasts Fox News for failing to "work for us," what's key is the *open and unabashed* assertion that he is entitled to a 24/7 propaganda outlet working on his behalf.
The open flaunting of Trump's corruption is a key feature of it.
We should view Trump's demand that Fox News function as his personal propaganda network, along with his nonstop lying and attacks on legitimate news organizations, as its own form of insidious corruption:
"All politicians shade the truth. But most hew to an underlying belief that gaslighting voters too shamelessly treats them with deep contempt; that at some point, factual reality has to matter; and that this is necessary for democracy to function."
Absurd: Trump's aides are telling him working class voters love his tariffs. But recent polls actually show majorities of non-college voters say tariffs raise prices, and disapprove of his handling of them. I looked at the data. It's striking.
Notable: There's a clear racial divide among working class voters on tariffs in latest Marquette poll. Noncollege white men like tariffs (yet it's only 44-40!) but *huge* majorities of noncollege *nonwhites* are skeptical of them.
More evidence of this racial divide among working class voters: Marquette finds majorities of nonwhite noncollege voters say Trump's policies will boost inflation. And CNN finds 71% of them disapprove of Trump's handling of tariffs:
A note on JD Vance's repulsive response to the deportation of a Salvadoran in "error": The whole point of his stunt is to show that Trump feels free to remove people even when the law *doesn't* justify it.
“If nobody can do anything to bring him back once he’s been deported, then the order preventing his deportation in the first place is meaningless,” the lawyer for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported in "error," tells me.
The Trump administration's position is effectively a declaration that it has the power to remove people, outside the law, in "error," without having any subsequent responsibility to rectify that “error.”
Time to focus on Marco Rubio's role as a chief Trump enabler. Rubio is helping execute some of Trump's worst designs: Terminating program for Ukrainian kids, deporting people to foreign gulags, wrecking USAID, arrests with zero due process.
Next up: Rubio is key to the deportations of Venezuelans to a notorious prison in El Salvador, many without any evidence. Rubio negotiated the deal making this possible. He says this is a good deal for taxpayers and that these are "good jails."
Horrifying: After the contract tracking Ukrainian children abducted by Russia was terminated, the underlying evidence of these potential war crimes seems to be missing, a bipartisan group of Reps just charged in letter to Rubio. Two GOPers signed. Details: newrepublic.com/article/192924…
Two *GOPers,* Don Bacon and Brian Fitzpatrick, joined this letter, which says underlying info/evidence collected on abducted Ukrainian children has vanished.
They're calling on Rubio to say what happened to this data. State Dept still saying nothing.
Horrific: One of the USAID programs Trump just terminated was set to deliver lifesaving treatment to hundreds of thousands of starving kids abroad. Much of it is now in a Georgia warehouse.
Rubio's promise to preserve urgent assistance was a lie.
This is one of hundreds of terminated USAID contracts. The full list is appalling: There's tons of the "lifesaving humanitarian assistance" that Rubio promised to protect.
Former USAID official Atul Gawande tells me we'll see a "a massive loss of life."
The cancellation of the lifesaving assistance for starving kids abroad is really a galling one. This stuff was grown by American farmers and manufactured by American workers. This spreading of American bounty and good will long had bipartisan support.
Awful news --> Delivery of therapeutic food assistance to nearly 400,000 severely malnourished kids is suddenly in doubt due to Trump-Musk firings at USAID, two manufacturers of the product tell me.
The product is called Ready to Use Therapeutic Food. It's a paste made mostly of peanuts, milk, and sugar, designed for children to ingest if they're on the edge of starving to death.
It's made in two US factories, one in Georgia, the other in RI.