Transcript: As Trump Goes Off Rails on Economy, Fox Bursts His Bubble

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 2 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech told a story about his economic successes that is pure fiction from top to bottom. 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. But here’s the thing: sometimes the news is so bad that even Trump’s media allies can’t keep a lid on it. Trump was just hit with some very tough inflation numbers that showed up in a damning way on Fox. The network has also been surprisingly blunt about other recent bad economic news as well. And all this comes as a new poll shows enormous majorities rejecting the story Trump told in his speech. So can Trump’s propaganda network hold together his fictional story or not? We’re parsing through this with the excellent Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters. Matt, good to have you back on, man.

Matthew Gertz: Always good to be here.

Sargent: So we just learned that inflation was worse than expected for producers, which is a sign that more inflation might be coming. Listen to the news as it was described by Stuart Varney on Fox Business. The first voice is his, the second one is his guest, David Bahnsen.

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.

David Bahnsen (voiceover): This PPI number was not good.

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.

David Bahnsen (voiceover): They are. And so are the people that are making capital investments that are seeing higher prices.

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?

Gertz: Yeah, I think that’s really the issue. You have a situation where Donald Trump wants to talk about his golden age of America. He wants to talk about all the great jobs that he’s creating, how he’s got inflation squashed, how everything is going great. But the numbers that come out about this economy are not as rosy as he would like it to be.

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.

Sargent: I want to get into that dissonance at some length later. We like dissonance on here, especially with right-wing media. Can you for now though map out for us the way right-wing media treats this stuff in a broader sense? The tariffs are deeply unpopular and have had all sorts of negative effects. Yet meanwhile, Trump is spinning a fictional story on the economy that numbers keep debunking. How does right-wing media, as a general matter, deal with all this?

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.

This has worked well enough to get them through the day over the last year, but eventually you have to think that is going to run out. Not yet, obviously — you still see JD Vance out on the stump saying this is all Joe Biden’s fault. But Election Day is coming, and two years in, blaming your predecessor for the economy is just not going to sell to people.

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.

Lauren Simonetti (voiceover: Okay, it was a bad miss. The economy grew at an annualized rate of just 1.4 percent at the end of last year, down sharply from the 4.4 percent growth in the prior quarter. What happened? The government shut down.

Sargent: And here’s former torture memo author John Yoo discussing those numbers right after the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs.

John Yoo (voiceover): This might be a blessing in disguise, because we just had GDP report numbers from last year that showed the economy significantly slowed.

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?

Gertz: It’s pretty rare. I don’t want to exaggerate this too much. In general, Fox News is a propaganda apparatus for Donald Trump, and they make really little bones about it, particularly compared to the first term — they have stapled themselves to him. But at the same time, during the daytime news hours and over on Fox Business, the audience is a little bit different than it is in primetime on Fox News.

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.

Sargent: Yeah, they’re a little less tethered to Trump and MAGA in a sense. Let’s listen to a couple more examples from Fox News. Here’s Fox’s Brian Kilmeade on the 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.

Sargent: And here’s Fox’s Shannon Bream on the Supreme Court decision on the tariffs.

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.

Sargent: So Matt, what’s striking to me about this really is that here you see a bit of a divergence in interests between Fox News on one side and Trump and MAGA on the other. Fox News is heavily tethered to the business community in many ways, and the tariffs in particular are something that the business community really hates. And so they’re really — in addition to the audiences being a little different — their kind of masters are a little different here, aren’t they? Can you talk about that split?

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.

Instead it’s always hedged as: Trump would be in a better spot if he were to get rid of these tariffs, it would be in the interests of the Republican Party candidates if there weren’t all of these tariffs. It’s always framed in a way where they’re trying to help Trump help himself.

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.

Sargent: Yeah, they’re not allowed to really say anything like, boy, Trump really screwed this one up pretty badly, didn’t he?

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.

That’s happened less frequently, though, certainly in the second term than the first term. I think that’s largely a function of the fact that a lot of the old standbys in the Fox straight news branch who might, from time to time, tell the truth — people like Shep Smith or Chris Wallace — aren’t around anymore. A lot of them were either forced out or left voluntarily. But it is much more of a new-school MAGA brand at Fox News now. The fact that we’re talking about Brian Kilmeade as the voice of reason is, I think, really a sign of how far things have gone.

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.

Sargent: Let’s talk about the heavy lift that Trump’s propaganda apparatus has here, because it’s really heavy. Reuters had this new poll. It looked at some of the claims Trump made in his speech. So for instance, Trump essentially said, the economy is booming, we’re booming. And Reuters found that 68 percent of Americans say no, the economy’s not booming. Then Trump also essentially said we’ve defeated inflation, which Biden saddled us with. Reuters found that 82 percent of Americans disagree with the statement that there’s hardly any inflation in the U.S. So that’s a heavy lift for the propaganda apparatus, isn’t it?

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.”

He said that Trump had championed our country and the achievements of “you, the American people.” And he said that Trump delivered a glowing speech that highlighted the triumphs, the struggles, the bravery of so many American people. “Under President Trump’s leadership, America’s full potential is unlocked and the state of our union, thankfully, is strong.” And that was just the monologue. Then he hosted a bunch of different Republican leaders, all of whom agreed that this was the greatest State of the Union they had ever heard.

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.

Sargent: Donald Trump actually exploded on Truth Social over the Supreme Court decision on tariffs, and he did something odd, which is suggest that it’s time for the court to rehear it, which I’m not sure is a thing or not.

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.

And now, according to this decision, could actually continue to do so at an even increased level. I’m sure that the Supreme Court did not have this in mind.” Trump then goes on and says, “Lots and lots of countries are taking advantage of us, have been taking advantage of us for decades.” They’ll now be entitled to a, “undeserved windfall” from the United States. And then he concludes with this: “Is a rehearing or re-adjudication of this case possible???”

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?

Gertz: Yeah, so the Justice Department, as this case was going through the courts, repeatedly said that it was not an emergency that had to be sped up in the process specifically because any funds that were tariffed could be returned by the federal government. That has been baked into their legal arguments over and over again this entire time. So the idea that we have just discovered that, oh my God, the money that has been illegally taxed has to be returned is utter nonsense.

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.

On Fox, that has often not broken through to viewers, in part because people are so eager to support the president. So earlier this week there was a segment on Fox — Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger gave the rebuttal to the State of the Union on Tuesday night and she described the tariffs as a massive tax hike on you and your family. And after that, Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones said that was 100 percent false — that there’s been zero inflation based on the tariffs, that you cannot say that it caused inflation on the American people — even as it is, in fact, the case that Trump’s trade policies have forced American families to pay more than $1,700 each in tariff costs.

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.

Sargent: I think this is a good place to conclude. So basically Fox News mostly deceives people about tariffs. But as we went over earlier, it’s also an area where Fox News sometimes tells the truth because Fox News and Fox Business feel somewhat beholden to the business community as well. And yet here you’ve got Donald Trump signaling with this kind of rage rant that he simply will never, ever, ever give up on the tariffs.

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.

So where does that kind of leave right-wing media? Where does that leave Fox News going forward? How are they going to try to contain this disaster so it doesn’t just murder Republicans in the midterms?

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.

There’s a total incoherence, a mishmash of different talking points, all of which lead up to the idea that Donald Trump must be supported at all costs. And I don’t think there’s a way out of that trap for Fox News, Fox Business, for any of them. They have made their bed with Donald Trump, Donald Trump really loves tariffs, and so they’re all stuck with each other.

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.