SINCERETALK

Vox writer Astead Herndon says with all the coverage the press gives the Democratic Party over its internecine battle between the centrist and progressive wing, you might have missed that President Donald Trump and his Republican Party are going down in screaming flames this year. “Democratic infighting is distracting from the top story of the midterms,” said Herndon . “Here’s something you wouldn’t know from most of the coverage of this year’s midterm elections: The biggest electability problem belongs to President Donald Trump and the Republicans. GOP candidates in the midterm elections currently have to contend with an avalanche of bad news, including a woefully unpopular president leading an unpopular war, $4 gas — if not higher by November. The administration has also kicked its own base like an ant mound over tariffs, then the release of the Epstein files, and now a deteriorating war of Trump’s own creation. And the party has followed Trump into backing scandal-plagued candidate...

President Donald Trump’s war against ABC and Disney for platforming comedian Jimmy Kimmel has boomeranged on him, with the entertainment behemoth suing Trump’s FCC for violating their First Amendment rights. More recently, the FCC has challenged ABC’s broadcasting licenses. Even a conservative newspaper is siding with ABC and Disney over the Trump administration. “ABC sued the FCC on Tuesday for ‘coercing and retaliating’ because it ‘refuses to bow to the Administration’s demands,’” wrote The Wall Street Journal editorial board on Tuesday . “The lawsuit says the government has violated its First Amendment rights ‘by launching pretextual regulatory investigations and threatening the Stations’ valuable broadcast licenses.’” Describing FCC Chairman Brendan Carr as a “mob-boss” and agreeing with the premise of the lawsuit, the Journal opined that Trump’s FCC is indeed violating “the First Amendment by letting the FCC interfere in editorial judgments and suppress disfavored content and vi...

President Donald Trump’s recent decision to scale down American military exercises in South Korea , which he said is linked to that nation’s refusal to help in the US-Israel war against Iran, was just met with scathing criticism by a foreign policy expert. “Thanks to @realDailyWire for publishing my commentary about President Trump’s order to scale down military exercises with South Korea,” Michael Sobolik , a Senior Fellow in Indo-Pacific Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC), posted on X. In the attached article, he warned that “confusing adversaries and allies is a basic foreign policy mistake. Leveraging enemies to attack friends is a deeper failure. President Trump committed both errors on Sunday when he announced that he was ordering the Pentagon to ‘substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises’ with South Korea.” Noting that Trump earlier claimed America didn’t need South Korea in its effort against Iran, Sobolik added that even though Seoul has given Trump...

Dear Scott (if I may). I’ve argued that the K-shaped economy — a term used to describe growing inequality between high- and low-income households — can be seen in sales of McDonald’s burgers, whose lower- and middle-income customers fell by double digits in the first quarter of 2025 as they struggled with affordability. Last Monday, you criticized me, arguing that McDonald’s problems are instead due to competition from rivals like Burger King. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent@SecScottBessent McDonald's problem is called Burger King, Professor. No wonder Bill Clinton fired you. UC Berkeley should too, if that’s what passes for “research.” Robert Reich (By the way, Scott, Bill Clinton didn’t fire me and Berkeley won’t, either. But your boss has a well-recorded tendency to fire his Cabinet secretaries, so I’d be careful if I were you.) In a recent interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” you even declared that the U.S. economy is no longer in a K shape: “I got sick of hearing about this K-s...

On August 6, a date that’s been called ‘ a day of infamy ,’ construction began on Trump’s border wall through Big Bend National Park. Under a $1.7 billion federal contract strongly opposed by Texas locals regardless of party affiliation, Southwest Valley started bulldozing for profit at 8 a.m., razing habitats of threatened species and destroying native vegetation. Running along parts of the Rio Grande, the project threatens mountain lions, black bears, and desert bighorn sheep that need back and forth access to habitat routes on both sides of the river . Conservationists have made clear that Trump’s 30-foot tall steel wall will sever and permanently destroy those routes . Nearly as bad as the senseless destruction of habitat(s) is the expense. The project will cost two thirds of the entire , chronically underfunded National Park Service’s annual budget. And for what? The area sees almost no illicit cross-border traffic, accounts for only 1 % of annual U.S.-Mexico border crossing...

Trump just took steps to make it very difficult to prosecute money laundering, a crime he and his real estate buddies may well have been committing much of their felonious lives. This month, we learned that Capital One Bank closed more than 300 Trump Organization accounts back in 2021 because, they said, their internal fraud department had flagged illegal money-laundering activity. But on who’s behalf? We know from the Mueller Report and public reporting that Putin spent millions and did his best via social media and hacking the DNC to get Donald Trump into the White House in 2016, and was probably doing the same in 2020 and 2024. But what if there was a way for him to simply drop, say, $100 million right into political campaigns here in America that would back up or benefit Trump and his notorious crime family? Or simply give the money to Trump himself as thanks for screwing Ukraine and destroying America? While federal law prohibits foreign governments, citizens, and corporations f...