Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Matthew Gertz: Always good to be here.
Stuart Varney (voiceover): Let’s begin with the latest read on inflation. This is important and it’s probably moving markets. It’s the producer price report. It came in hotter than expected — prices up 2.9 percent over the last 12 months. Now look at the core number. This pulls out the volatile prices for food and energy. Prices up a whopping 3.6 percent in the last 12 months. That is the highest reading since March of 2025.
Stuart Varney (voiceover): No, it’s not. It’s not encouraging at all, is it? The Fed’s going to be looking at that for sure.
Sargent: This story generated a lot of bad headlines for Trump. USA Today said, “Price bump may signal inflation is on the rise.” Matt, this seems like bad timing for Trump after the State of the Union speech, which claimed this massive historic turnaround. What did you think of that?
And in some cases Fox just rolls with his BS and parrots it as propaganda. But every now and again, especially on Fox Business, you see them coming to grips with reality — that the economy is sputtering, that everything is not as great as he would have it be. And when that happens, I think it creates some dissonance for the viewers.
Gertz: Yeah, I think in general you see them falling back on two narratives. Whenever there’s a good piece of news, it’s a sign that Trump’s economy is booming. Whenever there’s a bad piece of news, a bad number that comes out, it is evidence that Joe Biden is still waging war on the American business community in some way.
Sargent: We just learned that economic growth was far lower for the fourth quarter of 2025 than we thought — 1.4 percent. Here’s Fox Business reporter Lauren Simonetti describing that.
Sargent: And here’s former torture memo author John Yoo discussing those numbers right after the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs.
Sargent: So Matt, here again, Fox Business and Fox News letting some bad news slip through. How often does that happen on those two channels?
And because of that, I think you see the bad news slipping out a little bit more often, especially on Fox Business, which, as the name might suggest, has more of an audience of people interested in business news. They can’t entirely wave away the actual numbers that are coming out, because the audiences are people who are interested in business, who know some things about business, and are more likely to be the kind of old-school conservative business types than the new-school MAGA types on issues like tariffs.
Brian Kilmeade (voiceover): If you go blow up a fantastic deal with the EU by putting 10 percent on, they go and answer with more. And a lot of the goods that we get will affect what we are paying in the stores. If you affect what we’re paying at the stores, Republicans have almost no chance of holding the House and Senate. And might even lose the Senate.
Shannon Bream (voiceover): We all know members that we’ve talked to on the GOP side of the aisle who are silently, quietly breathing a sigh of relief. There have been Republicans on Capitol Hill who have voted against some of the president’s tariffs. They think it’s actually hurt the economy and hurts their ability to go out and make the argument that this president is working to make things more affordable.
Gertz: I think that’s right. I think that to some extent you have a traditional business community that is wary of tariffs, and you have a MAGA audience that has bought into them to a greater degree. Notice though that no one is saying this was a bad idea for Trump to do this in the first place.
They’re part of the same team, all pulling for the same goals, rather than trying to actually criticize the president for his policy decisions.
Gertz: No, that would be, I think, a bridge way too far. That’s the sort of thing that causes Trump to get angry and lash out at the network, which is something that we have seen him do over the years when he thought particular hosts got out of line.
Brian Kilmeade is not exactly a liberal by any stretch of the imagination. He is a hardcore conservative who supported Trump down the line. But nonetheless, someone whose familiarity with politics predates Donald Trump, and thus has some values from before the MAGA takeover of the party.
Gertz: It’s definitely a heavy lift, which isn’t to say that there aren’t people at Fox willing to try to do the work. Sean Hannity, for instance, after the State of the Union on Tuesday night, went on Fox for a special edition of his show and he started by saying, “Moments ago, President Trump wrapped up yet another iconic, uplifting, patriotic State of the Union.”
It’s interesting — I noticed the next morning that the Wall Street Journal, which is corporate cousin to Fox News, put out a report from their Korea bureau chief highlighting how North Korean state media had provided unbridled flattery that underscores the dictator’s need to establish a cult of personality supremacy as a smokescreen for his nation’s woes — basically praising Kim for nonsensical, meaningless accomplishments, saying that he was the greatest person in the world with unimaginable accomplishments and that their future is infinitely bright and promising. There’s basically no daylight between how North Korean state media talks about that country’s dictator and how Sean Hannity talks about Donald Trump.
I’m going to read from the post that Donald Trump sent. “The recent decision of the United States Supreme Court concerning tariffs could allow for hundreds of billions of dollars to be returned to countries and companies that have been ripping off the United States of America for many years.
Matt, I don’t know what to make of that. I don’t think the Supreme Court is going to rehear or re-adjudicate the case. And I also think the Supreme Court did have this in mind. What do you think of this?
It’s also interesting how he describes this as allowing the money to be returned to countries that have been ripping off the United States. One of his repeated lies throughout the entire debate about tariffs has been over who pays tariffs. He claims — and has claimed and told his supporters for years — that tariffs just get paid by foreign countries, and therefore now that the money has to be returned, it would theoretically go to foreign countries. In reality, we pay the tariffs. The cost is paid by the importer and gets passed on to the consumer. These are all taxes on us. We, for some reason, have huge tariffs on literally everything we buy now, and we are the ones who ultimately pay for them.
But Fox doesn’t want its viewers to know that their prices are going up because of what Donald Trump has done. He doesn’t want them to know that either. But that is the state of affairs.
He’s going to keep running at it, he’s going to keep trying to inflict them on everybody, and he’s probably going to succeed in inflicting some tariffs on the American people for the rest of this year, potentially through the election.
Gertz: It leaves them in a very chaotic situation. I would say if there’s a guiding line, it’s that if Democrats are criticizing tariffs, the Democrats are wrong, but Donald Trump might want to back off the tariffs to help Republicans — because Democrats will attack them on tariffs.
Sargent: I will say that dissonance is going to get really shrill and difficult for them going forward, right through Election Day. Matt Gertz, thanks for coming on with us, man. Always super illuminating.
Gertz: Thanks for having me.
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