SINCERETALK

Near the end of AlterNet's exclusive interview with former Social Security Commissioner Martin O'Malley, the decades-long public servant asked if he could add a closing thought. He then proceeded to explain why President Donald Trump, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and the rest of the Republican Party are targeting Social Security. "They believe a person with a disability who can't work is a waste!" O'Malley said, his voice simultaneously outraged and erudite. "That an elderly person is a waste! That an orphan child is a waste!" He continued, "That's why so many of the hardest-right ideologues — like Elon Musk, who says empathy is the greatest weakness in the Western mind — are going after Social Security. Not only is it the one agency with money in the bank they can rob, but it's also an agency that defends a principle most of us still cling to: that in America, there's no such thing as a spare American — n...

President Donald Trump continues to flounder in his attempt to not lose control of Congress during the 2026 midterm elections, as he loses support among his own voters and turns to debunked conspiracy theories and controversial maneuvers to stay in power . Yet a candidate who he is personally pushing as the Republican nominee for the US Senate in South Carolina, Darline Graham, is floundering so badly that a former Army corporal warned on Wednesday she is dangerously unqualified to serve. "The truly jarring moment came when Greta van Susteren (remember her?) asked Ms. Graham about the importance of Taiwan to the national security of the United States," former Army Corporal Charlotte Clymer wrote for her Substack . After including a link to the video, she added “Ms. Graham asked her to repeat the question—which bought her about five seconds of stalling—and then hesitated and said, 'I’m just gonna be honest here. I’m not on national security—I’m not—I’m not that informed...

CNN host Kasie Hunt barely contained her smiles while playing high-speed footage of President Donald Trump droning on for more than 30 minutes to reporters about new pavement. “Like I'm fixing the country,” Trump said before Hunt eventually had to kick the video into high speed to hasten the process. “We're fixing the White House, too. It's ridiculous the way this place was taken care of [by] nobody, including other presidents. They didn't see it. But I see it because I was very good at real estate, like maybe the best in a lot of ways. And, uh, I love construction.” “’I love construction,’ he says,” said Hunt, on her Wednesday “The Arena with Kasie Hunt” show as Trump rattled off his plans. “Instead, he spent 32 minutes — yes, 32. We counted. And you are currently watching part of it at double speed with some jumps, so you can get a sense of just how long this went on for with the president explaining in painstaking detail the changes that he's bringing to the pe...

President Donald Trump’s wife, First Lady Melania Trump , is reported less than pleased at the amount of attention her husband has feted on his ever-present assistant, Natalie Harp . Yet even as the Republican Party seethes at people like Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) who call out Trump’s unorthodox relationship with Harp, anti-Trump conservatives are speculating that the First Lady likely has more that she wants to say on the subject. “I want a Melania press conference so bad,” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller said on Monday. “That's all. I just want another one.” His colleague Jonathan V. Last replied, “Yeah? You want another one where she talks about…” Miller cited the First Lady’s earlier press conference in which she denied her confirmed relationship with the late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, prompting Last to impersonate Melania saying “I do not know who this human printer is.” Yet as the two men noted, there is a more serious undercurrent to the potentially lurid Trump-Harp sto...

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...