As Trump Goes Truly Off Rails on Econ, Fox Quietly Bursts His Bubble

THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

The New Republic

News, Politics

4.4 • 800 Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2026

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Donald Trump’s state of the union speech was the culmination of many months of lies about his economy and his tariffs. Yet in recent days, even Fox News has been admitting to how bad the news is getting. Fox figures have gently tried to tell Trump the truth about tariffs: One hinted Trump should use the Supreme Court ruling against them as an offramp. Another said Republicans are privately celebrating the decision. A third warned the tariffs badly threaten the GOP’s midterm hopes. On Fox Business, one anchor was surprisingly blunt about Friday’s bad inflation data. And a reporter called the recent 1.4 percent growth numbers a “bad miss.” Yet Trump needs his media allies to sugarcoat his economy through the midterms. We talked to Media Matters senior fellow Matthew Gertz. He explains how Trump’s economy is creating serious dissonance for Fox propagandists and viewers alike, how this reveals Trump’s deepening problems with his base, and why all this spells trouble for the GOP this fall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:53.6	This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.
0:59.9	I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
1:08.6	Donald Trump's State of the Union speech told a story about his economic successes that is pure fiction from top to bottom.
1:16.6	But for Trump to tell this story all the way through Election Day this fall, he's going to rely heavily on the MAGA and right-wing propaganda apparatus to do it for him.
1:26.9	But here's the thing.
1:28.6	Sometimes the news is so bad that even Trump's media allies can't keep a lid on it.
1:34.2	Trump was just hit with some very tough inflation numbers that showed up in a damning way on Fox.
1:39.5	The network has also been surprisingly blunt about other recent bad economic news as well, and
1:45.9	all this comes as a new poll shows enormous majorities rejecting the story Trump told in his
1:51.6	speech.
1:53.1	So can Trump's propaganda network hold together his fictional story or not?
1:58.2	We're parsing through this with the excellent Matt Goertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters.
2:02.5	Matt, good to have you back on, man. Always good to be here. So we just learned that inflation was
2:08.3	worse than expected for producers, which is a sign that more inflation might be coming. Listen to the
2:13.6	news as it was described by Stuart Varney on Fox Business. The first voice is his. The second
2:19.7	one is his guest, David Bonson. Let's begin with the latest read on inflation. This is important,
2:27.0	and it's probably moving markets. It's the producer price report. It came in hotter than expected.
	...

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