Two big blunders. Let’s start with Trump – you may remember last month when the bombshell story coming from the president’s mouth was that the US was funding $50 million of condoms for Hamas in Gaza. It turned out, after the slightest amount of research, that the Congressional budget was actually sending sexual health equipment to the Gaza province of Mozambique.

There was no correction.

Flash forward to Trump’s tumultuous joint address to Congress this week: to thunderous laughter from Republicans, he listed more “fraudulent” items that the US is funding: “$8 million to promote LGBTQI+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of. $8 million for making mice transgender.”

Again, we did the tiniest amount of research, and saw that it isn’t transgender but transgenic. Transgenic mice are genetically altered to study diseases and have revolutionized pre-clinical research since the 1980s. The correction for this one likely won’t get the same laugh from Republicans.

Next blunder: Nicole Wallace at MSNBC. During a calmer moment of Trump’s joint address, he made DJ Daniel, a 13-year-old boy who is recovering from brain cancer, an honorary member of the Secret Service. Wallace struggled to find a way to attack this, but have no fear, she got her shot in:

“I hope [DJ] has a long life as a law enforcement officer… but I hope he never has to defend the US Capitol against Donald Trump’s supporters, and if he does, I hope he’s not one of the six who loses his life to suicide.”

Woah!

First of all, probably not a good idea to talk about children (especially those who have brain cancer) committing suicide. And second, that could be the most aggressive politicization of an innocent topic we’ve ever heard.

And this is just the start of a wild Thursday Throwdown: Rep. Eric Swalwell erases the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, CNN shows some interesting polling about the Ukraine War, and the Chuckster is hot now.

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Useful Idiots’ resident economist Yanis Varoufakis returns to the show this week to analyze Trump and Musk’s chainsaw cuts to Medicaid, USAID, and other government programs, answering the important question: is it actually bad for a government to run a deficit?

But before getting into the DOGE of it all, Varoufakis gives an economic explanation for how Trump reclaimed power, and whose fault it is.

“Donald Trump is the creation of the Democratic Party's spectacular, lamentable failures,” he says. “The first time he was elected, it was entirely due to Barack Obama. Barack Obama betrayed every single promise or principle that he put forward in 2008.”

And his reelection was a result of the same calculated missteps by the Dems. “The average American couldn't make ends meet. And yet the liberal establishment were saying you've never had it so good and you should celebrate the fact that we've had a recovery in the labor market and inflation. People couldn't make ends meet. And there was a Democratic establishment telling them that it was the best of all possible worlds. How dare you complain about your finances?”

Just as he did after Obama, Trump capitalized on this: “Trump comes again and says, I'm looking you in the eye and I can recognize your pain and I'm going to make you great. So he got elected as a result of very concerted efforts by the Democrats to lose.”

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But will Trump follow through on these promises to help the working class, or will the donors in Mar-a-Lago trump the voters?

“The Republicans,” Yanis explains, “are notorious for being exceptionally liberal when it comes to handing money to themselves, to their friends, to the financial and real estate community. They have no problem doing that. But they look at a single cent, nickel, or dime being spent on a poor person and they scream blue murder. Why? Because they are class warriors. They're in the business of conducting a vicious class war against the little people.”

But the even harsher reality, he says, is the reason it will be so challenging to fix any of these problems: “Unfortunately, the Democrats have been even more efficient class warriors than the Republicans.”

Subscribe for the full interview with Yanis Varoufakis where he explains this, plus why Amazon is “the wet dream of the Soviet Economic Planning Ministry,” how technofeudalism killed capitalism, and the real reason that Germany is so beholden to Israel (hint: it’s not Holocaust guilt like they say).

Catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Brian Stelter: Voters Who Want Peace Are Illiterate

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