A civil war is unfolding inside the MAGA movement over Nick Fuentes, the neo-Nazi and white supremacist, and President Donald Trump just made it worse. In an interview, Trump defended Fuentes in a way that will boost his standing inside MAGA in a big way. As it turns out, however, this will create a surprising and unwelcome problem for JD Vance. The vice president has tried to avoid taking sides on Fuentes. But it’s now clear that Fuentes represents a constituency inside MAGA that’s too big to exile. That means Vance, who’s hoping to harness MAGA for his 2028 presidential run, will have to tread carefully, and Trump’s intervention has only made that harder for him. We talked to Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, who has a great new piece digging into all this. He explains Fuentes’s growing influence inside MAGA, why Vance will struggle to navigate all these complexities, and what all this says about today’s right more broadly.  Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anxiety is rising among President Trump’s staunchest allies that he’s politically lost his way. The New York Times reports that his advisers fear he’s alienating key voters in his own coalition. And CNN reports that some Republicans are openly warning the White  House that the GOP is in trouble in the midterm elections. Meanwhile, Trump just erupted in a furious new tirade about the Jeffrey Epstein fiasco. In it, he ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Epstein’s ties to Democrats. Bondi immediately did his bidding. That Trump has now formally turned the Justice Department loose in this way shows his anger over Epstein has hit new highs. Some Republicans say all these things are related: Trump is so consumed with Epstein that he’s letting everything else go to hell. So we talked to analyst Michael Cohen, who has a good new piece on Trump’s doldrums on his Truth and Consequences Substack. He explains why Epstein is undoing Trump, how the MAGA coalition is fracturing, how deeper structural factors are working against him, and how it will all impact the midterms. Listen to this episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

President Trump is angrily urging Republicans not to join Democrats in pushing for release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. But all of a sudden, with the discharge petition set to force a House vote, things are rapidly going in the wrong direction for Trump. In a surprise, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene now predicts that the number of Republicans who will vote to release the files will be “a lot higher” than anyone expects. If the GOP defectors hit truly sizable numbers, as suddenly looks likely, it will be a bombshell with terrible implications for Trump, ramping up the pressure across the board in any number of ways. But the process that’s about to unfold is complex. So we talked to Democratic Representative Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, a high profile voice throughout this saga. She explains what it’s like to talk personally with Epstein’s victims, why Republicans are finding it harder to resist pressure, what Democrats will do next to keep the story alive, and why this will keep getting worse for Trump until the truth comes out in the end. Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Suddenly, the Jeffrey Epstein files are back. Democrats released new emails raising fresh questions about the relationship between the sex trafficker and President Trump. It’s gotten so bad that the White House is now privately pressuring Republicans to stop trying to get the Epstein files released, a clear sign Trump is deeply rattled by the emerging info. Indeed, now that it looks like the discharge petition calling for release of the files will get 218 votes, Trump angrily warned Republicans not to join it, another indication of his mounting anxiety. The big MAGA reckoning over all this is coming. So we talked to Nicole Hemmer, author of several excellent books about the right wing. She explains the deep tensions inside MAGA all this is unleashing, how some prominent figures are positioning themselves for a post-Trump MAGA future, where this scandal is heading next, and what all this means for our politics. The discussion gets dark. Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Signs are mounting that the Supreme Court might invalidate President Trump’s tariffs, and he’s clearly on edge about it. Trump just vented wildly about the case on Truth Social, but he made a mess of it: In one rant, he claimed his tariffs have pulled in $2 trillion in revenues. In a second rant only hours later, that number suddenly ballooned to $3 trillion. We think this badly undermines Trump’s case: It shows how reckless and blundering the tariffs truly are, while vividly demonstrating how uncontrollably he lies about their impact and implementation. To unravel all this, we talked to Alex Jacquez of the Groundwork Collaborative, who served as a trade adviser under President Joe Biden. He explains the deeper incoherence underlying Trump’s self-defeating tirades, digs into why even some conservative justices are looking askance at his tariffs—though with this court you never know—and outlines the looming fiascos we face no matter which way the court rules.  Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eight Senate Democrats are now providing the votes to move forward with funding the government, but without getting the Democrats’ principal demand: A continuation of expanded Obamacare subsidies. On Monday, President Trump exploded in a deranged Truth Social rant, attacking air traffic controllers who took time off during the shutdown. He even bizarrely said money will be sent to those who did not. It occurs to us that the absurdity of Trump’s tirade revealed that his stance in the shutdown is weak: He’s the one experiencing most of the political pain from it, and all he can do is shriek wildly at government workers, urging them to minimize that pain for him. We think that should wake up Democrats: It makes a strong case for them to hold the line and not cave. We talked to Brian Beutler, who has a good new piece on his Substack, Off Message, digging into the Democratic surrender. He explains the deeper strategic failings causing the cave, why Trump will take from this that he can extort Democrats further, and how they can still salvage something from this mess. Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Under questioning from reporters about last week’s GOP losses, President Trump seethed that worsening inflation on his watch—a driver of the outcome—is nothing but a Democratic “con.” To buttress this, he floated a ludicrous distortion about Walmart’s Thanksgiving dinner package. Then, when a reporter raised facts contradicting him, he snapped in anger, because only the despot says what reality is. Trump then vehemently claimed “everybody knows” that goods cost more under “Sleepy Joe Biden,” as if shouting it endlessly will make it true. Meanwhile, a New York Times analysis shows that in key races, Democrats won over a meaningful sliver of Trump voters and that Hispanics snapped back to them in big numbers. And another analysis reveals striking details about GOP losses among working class voters. We talked to Bulwark reporter Joe Perticone, author of a good piece on GOP denial. He discusses the fragility of the MAGA coalition, why Democrats were able to reach into new info-spaces, and how Republicans are privately interpreting the loss, given that they’re not allowed to publicly acknowledge the truth about Trump’s unpopularity.  Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

President Trump’s excuses for his party’s losses are getting stranger. He’s now claiming it’s all because Republicans didn’t talk about his accomplishments enough, even though the results dramatically repudiated them. But he knows there’s a problem. Sounding weirdly subdued, he just openly said Republicans should end the filibuster—to pass lots of new laws making voting a whole lot harder. Translation: The GOP’s response to the losses should be rigging the 2026 midterms. Indeed, he also openly declared that if he gets his way, Democrats will “never obtain power.” Donnie, you’re supposed to say voter suppression is about targeting “fraud,” not about locking the opposition out of power forever! We checked in with Democratic operative Jessica Post, who has extensive experience on state-level races, to see how Trump’s rigging efforts are really going. She discusses the state of his gerrymandering scheme, how that could still be a problem for Democrats, why it conversely might backfire on the GOP, and how Democrats should proceed to thwart Trump’s schemes.  Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Tuesday’s elections, Democrats scored crushing victories everywhere. They won the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races by double digits, made big inroads with working class voters, handily won the California referendum, which could result in five more Democratic House seats, and more. Yet Trump is blaming everyone but himself. Punchbowl’s Andrew Desiderio reports that he privately rebuked GOP Senators, suggesting their shutdown was the culprit. He urged them to nuke the filibuster to end the shutdown, claiming failure could render the GOP a “dead party.” And he angrily snapped at Senator Lindsey Graham in the process. In short, Trump cannot accept something fundamental: His coalition is much more fragile than advertised, and he is making it even worse by, well, wrecking the country. We talked to New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who has a good new piece on the energy driving Democrats. We discuss the shift of working class voters toward Democrats, the media’s hangover from overreading Trump’s 2024 win, and the through line connecting those gubernatorial victories with Zohran Mamdani’s triumph. Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Tuesday, President Trump unleashed an angry tirade in which he threatened to stop doling out food stamp payments until Democrats capitulate in the government shutdown. He seethed over “crooked Joe Biden” and made up stuff about food stamp fraud. Coming after a judge ordered payments to continue, Trump’s threat seemed to suggest he’s now directly defying the courts. But then White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt quickly clarified that Trump will obey the law, after all. Given that Trump intended his threat as a dominance display over Democrats, Leavitt undercut him, because she had no choice. We think this shows Trump’s team knows they cannot be seen as breaking the law to deny food to the hungry. We talked to David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, who has a good piece arguing that Trump has lost the shutdown. He demystifies the food stamp battle, explains why Trump’s terrible standing on the economy has made him vulnerable in the standoff, and discusses how this all shows that Democrats need to get in the fight and engage. Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

MAGA personalities are suddenly raging at Tucker Carlson, who just conducted a shocker of an online interview with white nationalist and open antisemite Nick Fuentes. They’re attacking Carlson for hosting a “Nazi-sympathizer” who espouses the “foundation of Nazism,” calling this “sick” and “despicable,” and claiming it shows that the effort to “gatekeep the antisemitic, hateful freaks out of the Republican Party” has “failed.” We think one reason this angered right-wingers is that it revealed too much about MAGA: It can’t keep the hateful views at bay, because the movement constantly traffics in similar ideas, albeit in somewhat more subtle ways. We talked to David Austin Walsh, the author of Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right. He explains how all this sheds light on the importance of racists and other extremists to the MAGA coalition, how it previews the coming post-Trump struggle over the MAGA movement, and how it captures the broader story of the American right’s refusal to police its extremists over the last half-century or more. Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In recent days, President Trump issued two furious tirades demanding that Republicans end the Senate filibuster to reopen the government. He ranted at great length in demanding this “NOW” and exploded in all-caps while urging the “NUCLEAR OPTION.” As many noted, this undercut Republicans, revealing that they could simply end the shutdown themselves, ultimately showing that they control the government. Then Trump ranted about his horror that health care premiums are set to spike for millions. This, too, undercuts the GOP, because guess who won’t extend Affordable Care Act subsidies to prevent that? Republicans! Trump’s fury forced Mike Johnson into an awkward routine declaring that the president is “angry” because...the government hasn’t reopened. But this just showed how disconnected Trump is from all this, highlighting the Trump-GOP refusal to do the hard work of negotiating a settlement. We talked to Fair Share America organizer Maura Quint. She discusses Trump’s deep laziness, how this is perceived by low-info voters, and whether this will allow Democrats to penetrate Trump-dominated info spaces.  Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

President Trump’s militarized raids in Chicago just took another horrific turn when agents disrupted a children’s Halloween parade, triggering mayhem. Agents deployed tear gas on locals and tackled several of them, including U.S. citizens. One resident screamed: “You’re scaring our children to death.” In response, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker issued an unnerving warning: Children are getting “terrorized” and “traumatized.” Pritzker also sent a strong message to the country: Your community could be next. And he challenged top Trump officials to suspend their raids just for Halloween weekend, forcing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to give a terrible answer. We talked to Dave Karpf, a professor of media and public affairs who has a good piece for The New Republic about the state of Democratic communications. We discuss how this saga shows the need to supercharge attention to these riveting confrontations, how that’s the ticket for reaching low-engagement voters, and how Democrats should do politics and information warfare amid our slide into authoritarianism.  Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The economic news is getting worse. Major companies are announcing mass layoffs, and it’s dominating the headlines, including in the Rust Belt. Food stamps are about to expire for millions. And new info shows how Obamacare premiums will soar due to lapsing subsidies. That backdrop of bad news makes President Trump’s tearing down of White House structures to build a gilded ballroom even more damaging. Indeed, new polling shows that the ballroom fiasco is now stirring a surprising public backlash. On top of that, commentators are noticing the disconnect between the ballroom optics and the darkening economic situation for millions, a dynamic that will only worsen. We talked to Elizabeth Pancotti, who tracks economic sentiment as managing director of the Groundwork Collaborative. We discuss what the economic news means, why the media should level with voters about Trump’s out-of-touch displays, and how Democrats in key races are seizing the economic high ground. Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Surprisingly, Marjorie Taylor Greene has emerged as a forceful critic of the GOP stance in the government shutdown fight. Greene just unleashed an angry rant at House Speaker Mike Johnson, pointedly accusing him of having no answer or millions of people who will lose Obamacare subsidies due to the GOP refusal to extend them. “He refused to give one policy proposal to our GOP conference on our own conference call,” Greene raged. “Apparently I have to go into a [classified facility] to find out the Republican healthcare plan!!!” This wrecks Trump’s shutdown strategy: It sabotages his effort to blame the shutdown on Democrats wanting to give health care to undocumented immigrants, and shifts blame back to the GOP desire to take health care away from millions of Americans. We talked to Matthew Sheffield, who decodes the right at his Flux newsletter and in a new book charting how the GOP fights the information wars. He explains why this battle is fracturing the MAGA coalition, what that reveals about its deeper weaknesses, and what Democrats should keep in mind as the battle with MAGA intensifies.  Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Air Force One, President Donald Trump unleashed a bizarre, angry, rambling rant about the cognitive test he supposedly aced this weekend. Worse, he compared himself cognitively to two Democrats who both happen to be nonwhite women. This rant backfired on itself: It revealed his worsening mental unfitness, his naked racism, his effort to normalize his belittling of nonwhite members of Congress and his ongoing attacks on democracy, and more. In today’s installment, New Republic contributing editor Meredith Shiner, who regularly critiques press coverage of this administration, paints a powerful picture of the horrors this administration is visiting on everyday people, including in Chicago, where she lives. She argues that the press should connect Trump’s mental decline directly to these real-world impacts by highlighting who’s really running things behind the scenes, and discusses how Democrats might drive home the horrific human toll of it all.  Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In recent days, President Trump has approved federal disaster aid for the red states of Nebraska, North Dakota, Missouri and Alaska while denying it to the blue states of Maryland, Vermont, and Illinois. The White House has not offered meaningful explanations for the discrepancies, which just happen to punish states that didn’t support him in 2024. But we noticed something interesting about this whole saga: In Maryland, the disasters and damage in question severely afflicted the state’s westernmost counties. Allegany and Garrett counties are in Appalachia, deep in Trump country: Both voted for Trump by at least 40 points. We talked to MSNBC’s Steve Benen, author of Ministry of Truth, who has been writing well about Trump’s selective approach to disaster aid. We discuss the explicit nature of Trump’s punishment of states that don’t support him, how Trump screws his own voters while seducing them with promises of pain to blue America, and how this latest saga illustrates MAGA ideology larger depravities.  Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a shockingly brazen move, President Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him $230 million stemming from certain federal actions against him. Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, sent a scalding letter to the White House demanding all internal communications on this shakedown. What struck us was the letter’s forceful indictment of Trump’s corruption and criminality: It denounced Trump’s “blatantly illegal and unconstitutional effort to steal $230 million from the American people” and his “outrageous and shocking” effort to “shake down” the Treasury, labeling this straight-up “theft.” There’s much more, and it made critical legal points as well. We talked to the University of Michigan’s Leah Litman, author of Lawless, a book on the Supreme Court. We discuss Raskin’s letter, the legal nitty-gritty of Trump’s heist, how it exemplifies the MAGA movement more broadly, and how the Supreme Court brought us to this dangerous moment.  Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re seeing a confluence of events that suggest President Trump’s corruption has crossed over to an ugly new place. Trump is destroying a White House building to create a ballroom for him and his rich friends. He’s demanding that the Justice Department hand over $230 million in taxpayer funds to compensate him for “damages.” And Democrats from Senator Chris Murphy to Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries are going after all this in a newly aggressive way. Into this mess stepped White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who issued an extraordinary new defense of Trump’s ballroom fiasco. It was absolutely laden with comically cultish devotion to the Audience of One, but the hagiography also revealed something darker. We talked to New Republic staff writer Matt Ford, author of a great new piece about Trump’s self-dealing. He explains how all this corruption and all this worshipful propaganda reveals Trump’s profound contempt for the rule of law, for DOJ independence, for the idea of the public good, and even for the American people. Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not long after President Trump floated a $20 billion financial bailout for Argentina, he proposed importing beef from Argentina to bring prices down in the United States. This angered American beef producers and produced a backlash from farm-state Republicans. But the most interesting response came from Meriwether Farms, a beef producer in Wyoming that promises to “preserve the traditions of American ranching.” Meriwether posted a long lament on Twitter, professing “love” for Trump but urging him to change course. Meriwether warned that Trump was on the verge of an “absolute betrayal” of the “American cattle rancher” and of “the very people who put food on the table for us.” Does this mean Trump is screwing his own supporters so badly that they’re finally getting angry about it? We talked to Matt Hildreth of RuralOrganizing.org, whose own family has been in farming for generations. He explains the perfect storm of terrible policies hitting Trump’s rural supporters, discusses whether this will help Democrats rebound in those areas, and details how the party is changing its organizing approach in them.  Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices