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President Donald Trump was “desperate” for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2025, noted a prominent right-leaning commentator on Thursday — but now he has proved just how unworthy of that honor he truly was. “With the Middle East in flames, President Donald Trump’s desperate lobbying campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize looks ever more bizarre,” wrote Doug Bandow , Senior Fellow at the right-leaning think tank the Cato Institute, for The American Conservative. “Of course, his claim to have ended and prevented numerous wars is more fantasy than reality.” Bandow pointed out that Trump’s surprising bombing of Iran during peace negotiations on two occasions reveals that he cannot be trusted to pursue peace. His proposed massive military buildup further demonstrates the insincerity of his earlier claims to be a peacemaker. “He has ostentatiously flouted Alfred Nobel’s desire to reward those who did ‘the most or the best work within the past year for building fraternity between nations, for the abo...

President Donald Trump won the White House in 2024 by bashing down the “blue-state firewall” that frequently falls into Democrats’ corner. And Wisconsin voters were among those swing-state voters who definitely swung to Trump that November. But the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports voters who helped give Trump a second term have had it with him. “Love him or hate him. That has been a truism for years about President Donald Trump – that America is roughly divided between a big bloc of Trump lovers and a big bloc of Trump haters. But in one important respect this is becoming less true all the time,” reports the Sentinel, citing a recent state survey. In a new national poll by the Marquette University Law School, the share of adults who “strongly” approve of Trump’s performance as president has sunk to 17 percent – less than a fifth of the population. Meanwhile, the share of adults nationally who “strongly” disapprove of his performance has risen to 48 perent – roughly half the pop...

President Donald Trump’s pick to lead a top US security agency withdrew his nomination on Wednesday after more than a year of controversy — including from his own Republican Party. Sean Plankey, Trump's pick to lead the government’s civilian cyber defense agency, withdrew himself from consideration after his candidacy languished in the Senate, wrote Politico's John Sakellariadis and Dana Nickel on Wednesday , adding that Plankey informed Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) and confirmed the information to POLITICO.” Trump tapped Plankey last year in March. Although Plankey was initially viewed as a non-controversial choice, but he quickly ruffled feathers. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) reportedly objected to Plankey’s policies regarding a Coast Guard shipbuilding project and resisted advancing Plankey’s renomination earlier this year. “During Trump’s first term, Plankey served in cybersecurity roles on the National Security Council and the Energy Department,”...

President Donald Trump has “caved and run out of cards” in the war against Iran, according to an official who served under him during his first term. “Officially, if you are in Tehran right now and you are part of the new government that has supplanted the people who were there before, you are reading this message right now and thinking you are in control of these negotiations,” explained Miles Taylor , who served as Homeland Security deputy chief of staff and senior advisor to former chief of staff John Kelly, in a podcast appearance with former CNN anchor Jim Acosta. “You are seeing what Donald Trump said and realizing the President of the United States has caved — that he has run out of cards and that he is terrified to do what he just said hours ago he was going to do, which was that he was so eager to begin bombing. He said if the deadline passes, he's going to resume bombing and that the military would.” Noting that Iran did not do anything which could reasonably be const...

President Donald Trump is failing both with managing the American economy and prosecuting his war against Iran — and a top political strategist, one who advised the previous Republican president, characterized the current situation as that of a “lost war led by a fool.” “The economy is in free fall — it's in a state of collapse,” Steve Schmidt, who advised President George W. Bush but is critical of Trump, posted on X on Tuesday . “There are fuel shortages all over the world, and diesel is $7 a gallon. In California, there will be food shortages because fertilizer can't make it through the Strait of Hormuz, and neither can hydrogen or helium, or dozens of other precursor agents that are necessary to sustain the global economy.” He concluded, “This is a lost war led by a fool.” Schmidt is an outspoken critic of Trump, frequently describing him as far to the right of the Republican Party that Schmidt worked for during the Bush administration. Earlier in April he described t...

Republican strategist and President Donald Trump supporter Scott Jennings managed to muddle his signals during a CNN panel discussion over voter apathy, arguing that voters are weary of partisan attacks on the other side while simultaneously attacking liberals as anti-American. CNN anchor Kasie Hunt ticked off survey numbers at the panel table revealing that only 36 percent of people feel the United States is the greatest country and 41 percent believing it is only one of the world’s greatest nations. But 23 percent of people proclaimed flatly that “we're not one of the greatest countries.” After a table discussion on divided U.S. politics, Jennings put Democrats in the 23 percent. “If you look at the splits on that by politics … on how people feel about America, the promise of America, if you look at whether they're proud of their country or not … Republicans and conservatives are proud to be Americans, and it's Democrats and liberals who are not,” Jennings told the ...

Now in its eighth week, President Donald Trump is increasingly responding to pressure to wrap up his “little excursion” in Iran, with the clearest sign that he’s feeling that urgency being his own insistence that he is “under no pressure whatsoever.” But as the world grapples with the stark economic consequences of the war, including skyrocketing gas prices, Republicans are coming to terms with the “inconvenient truth” that there’s little they can do to avoid the electoral fallout at the November midterms. While Trump and his allies have scrambled for ways to manipulate gas prices or at least distract from the increase, repeatedly suggesting that the cost hike is only temporary, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has let it slip that it “could be next year” before numbers creep back down at the pump. He and even Trump have now admitted that prices could climb “a little bit higher” before November, and Republicans are starting to face the fact that they’re going to pay for it at the poll...

A third woman is leaving President Donald Trump’s Cabinet in roughly a month: first Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, then Attorney General Pam Bondi — and now Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer. “Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer will be leaving the administration to take a position in the private sector,” White House spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement . “She has done a phenomenal job in her role by protecting American workers, enacting fair labor practices, and helping Americans gain additional skills to improve their lives.” Cheung added Deputy Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling will take her place. Unlike Noem and Bondi, Chavez-DeRemer was not explicitly fired, but rather had her departure merely announced without reference to a predicating incident. Yet there were a number of controversies surrounding DeRemer: she is accused of sending personal messages and requests to young staff members, with some of her family and top aides doing likewise; of us...

In the face of sinking economic growth forecasts across the world, tourism can lean against the trend, writes Busisiwe Mavuso. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/wvfHsI4 via sinceretalk

In light of Trump’s increasingly cruel and bonkers behavior — toward Iran, toward the pope, his posts, his bottomless vengeance, his continuing ICE raids, his continuing use of the Justice Department to target his enemies, his shameless corruption — many of you want to know: “What can I do now ?” Here are 10 recommendations, in rough order of importance. 1. Protect the decent and hardworking members of your communities who are most vulnerable. This is an urgent moral call to action. As Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol continue their roundups and deportations, many of our neighbors and friends are endangered. They and their families are understandably frightened. Trump’s executive orders allow ICE to arrest undocumented immigrants at or near schools, places of worship, health care sites, shelters, and relief centers — thereby deterring them from sending their kids to school or getting help they need. If you trust your mayor or city manager, check in with their offices to see what the...

Iran is not currently planning to attend talks with the United States, state media said, after US President Donald Trump ordered US negotiators to travel to Pakistan, just days before a ceasefire in the Middle East expires. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/ue0l741 via sinceretalk

Futurism reports “a tranche of psychological studies found something startling about Donald Trump’s most loyal soldiers: they each turn to a grim coping mechanism to make sense of the real estate mogul’s laundry list of lies and documented sexual abuse .” Three separate research papers, published together in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology , each point to the same conclusion, say analysts. Psychologists surveyed 128 U.S. adults in October 2019, who indicated a preference for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Asked how they justified their support for the GOP candidate given allegations of his sexual misconduct , over half the group said they relied simply on denial and chose to not believe the charge. “Those results were reproduced in a second study, started in December 2019, two days after federal lawmakers voted to impeach the president ,” reports Futurism. “This time, 173 MAGA diehards largely either denied the accusations, or demurred by changing the top...

Black tax is often talked about in jokes and hashtags, but for many South Africans it is a quiet, heavy reality that shapes every payday decision. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/nxsGDeZ via sinceretalk

Airline pilot and former Republican George Poncy says he was furious when he discovered Republican Florida Gov. Ron Desantis planned to slap the name “Donald Trump” on his Palm Beach International Airport. “Well, the guy’s a criminal,” said Poncy, speaking to the Miami New Times about Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records. “I don’t know anything that’s named after a criminal. There’s no Lucky Luciano Bridge or Jeffrey Epstein Highway. It’s insane. It is. It’s not much more complicated than that.” The Times reports Poncy filed a lawsuit in Palm Beach County Circuit Court, arguing that Desantis and the state has “unlawfully stripped” the county of its home rule authority by mandating the name change. The name change to the “Donald J. Trump International Airport” arose from a bill in the Republican-dominated Florida Legislature describing Trump as “the most consequential president of our lifetime,” but that’s not the way 83-year-old Poncy sees it. “Nobody ...

Conservative commenter William Kristol says things are looking bad for President Donald Trump and his Republican Party in November, but if things go down in November as voting trends suggest it will still leave in charge a desperate and angry president with staff willing to jettison both the law and self-respect to conduct Trump’s agenda. “If you’re going into a midterm when your party has controlled both the White House and Congress, and that party is joined at the hip to a president who’s losing 29 percent to 49 percent among those who care the most and who are the most likely to vote, your prospects are . . . not good,” said Kristol. “So April’s electoral good news from Hungary could well be followed by good news from the United States in November.” “But! An increasingly desperate Trump will still be in charge of the executive branch,” Kristol warned. “He’ll have all the levers of presidential power at his disposal, and he has subordinates seemingly as willing as ever to use the...

President Donald Trump delivered the cap to the Turning Point USA event in Phoenix, Arizona, and he had a friendly audience to take his words. This might explain the absence of rolling eyes and questioning looks on a few claims that Trump inflated, played down or made a point not to mention at all due to their controversy. 1. The U.S. will march in and take the Iranian nukes that he claimed were obliterated. Months ago, Trump claimed to have “ obliterated ” Iran’s nuclear capabilities — the lingering existence of which he then later cited as one of the reasons to attack Iran last month and blow-up global fuel prices. But at the Friday TPUSA event, Trump said Iran’s nuclear capabilities are still somehow both “obliterated” yet in need of collection. “You'll be very happy. The USA will get all nuclear dust,” he told the cheering TPUSA crowd. “You know what the nuclear dust is? That was that white powdery substance created by our B-2 bombers, those great B-2 bombers. Late one e...

Trump advisers are privately telling Zeto editor Asawin Suebseng that they’re worried President Donald Trump’s liberal use of pardons for allies and financial contributors may not be enough to save then when Democrats nab either one or both houses in November. They “tell me they’ve recommended to the president and other top Republicans that they should try to get creative in concocting ways to preempt lawsuits, or state and local prosecutions of Trump’s staff,” wrote Suebseng . “But even in the fevered fantasies of MAGAworld’s legal brain trusts, they know that is a tall order, at best.” Trump is happy to use pardons as presidential tool to free allies convicted of corruption, but staff are nervous that pardons can only go so far because they do not apply to all convictions. “After all, they say, state and local prosecutors still exist – and though mass pardons from Trump could make their jobs harder, some of those progressive prosecutors have openly signaled to the Trump adminis...

Republicans are getting worn down by the expectation of serious losses in November, says former Republican strategist Rick Wilson. “The mood from Republicans that I've talked to in the last few weeks is funereal,” said Wilson, a Lincoln Project co-founder who worked for the George H.W. Bush's campaign. “Behind [House Speaker] Mike Johnson's bluster they're running the on a message strategy. But behind that bluster, their rank-and-file members are desperate for Trump to shut up. They are desperate for him to stop doing insane things. They are desperate for him to stop picking fights with the Pope and invading countries and doing the things that have led them into this economic box canyon that they can't get out of.” Wilson told MS NOW anchor Katy Tur that Republicans are having to go back home to constituents, but they having nothing to tell them about. “They don't have a bill to brag about. They can't go home and say, ‘yeah, by the way, I cut Elon Musk...

President Donald Trump insists that he is as popular as ever, but a right-wing radio commentator declared that Republicans are in danger of losing key midterm election races. “One wonders how many warning signs Republicans need to see that they have a problem in Georgia — and nationally,” Erick Erickson wrote for the Atlanta Journal Constitution on Wednesday . “But on April 7, they got another one.” Erickson referred to the recent House race for Georgia’s 14th congressional district, in which former Floyd County District Attorney Clay Fuller won by 12 points in a district that Trump won in 2024 by 37 points. The pattern, he said, has been reflected elsewhere throughout both Georgia and America. While it is reasonable to place part of the blame on local factors, Erickson laid a great deal of it at the feet of his own party’s president. “He keeps giving his supporters reasons for exasperation,” Erickson wrote. “In just the last week he dropped an F-bomb on Easter while praising Alla...

A Politico Senior Affairs writer reports that the California Supreme Court has declined to reverse the disbarment of conservative attorney John Eastman, one of the co-conspirators in President Donald Trump‘s plan to overturn the 2020 election. The decision came weeks after Bar Court Judge Yvette Roland ruled Eastman should be removed. Last year, A California appellate court, charged with reviewing recommendations to discipline lawyers in that state, affirmed the findings of a trial judge and recommended that Eastman 'be disbarred from the practice of law in California and that Eastman's name be stricken from the roll of attorneys .'" Eastman was one of Trump’s lawyers in 2020, and he played a big part in helping Trump try to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, which the former president falsely claims was “stolen” by Joe Biden and Democratic officials. Eastman helped devise a false elector’s scheme involving former Vice President Mike Pence invalidating t...

Here are the Daily Lotto and Daily Lotto Plus numbers. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/Ba2fTM5 via sinceretalk

President Donald Trump’s antics are hurting Republicans as they head into the 2026 midterm elections… but they are not sure they can stop him. “The Iran war is a case in point,” reported CNN’s Aaron Blake on Tuesday . “Trump launched it without bothering to build a consistent case for it to the American people. The objectives have regularly shifted, and Trump seems unfamiliar with basic details.” Blake added, “He has threatened Iran with apparent war crimes and even warned last week that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight’ — before averting that course.” Between launching an unpopular war against Iran, threatening war against Denmark, posting an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ and feuding with the popular American-born pope, Leo XIV, Trump is overall making it very difficult for Republicans to defend the party brand. “The most recent events have led even some former Trump allies — like ex-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Candace Owens and Alex Jones, as w...

Religion News reports the leader of President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission said out loud that church and state separation is a falsehood at the group’s final meeting — which immediately drew fire from a pro-Constitution advocacy group. At a Monday hearing at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican and the chair of the commission, broached his claim, saying: “Would it not be a good recommendation that every school, every university, every business, has to have that one sheet on the bulletin board about protecting people’s religious liberty, and that the separation of church and state is the biggest lie that’s been told in America since our founding?” Patrick said posts proclaiming the death of church and state could be similar to federal notices from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration promoting safety and preventing hazards. Religion News reports Patrick posed his question to George Mason University’s Anton...

President Donald Trump may act like he is answerable to no one, but an ex-Republican consultant warns that he and the rest of the “Epstein class” are nearing the end of their heyday. “Everyone knows how much the Trump family cares about the little people,” wrote Steve Schmidt, who previously advised President George W. Bush, in a Substack post on Tuesday . He then showed a picture of First Lady Melania Trump going to an immigrant detention facility wearing a jacket saying, “I don’t really care. Do u?” “She’s a beautiful soul," Schmidt wrote sarcastically, and then proceeded to tell the story of Amanda Ungaro, who was reportedly held in an ICE detention facility for more than three months by her ex-partner Paolo Zampolli after Trump intervened to help Zampolli in a custody dispute. “Melania claims it was Zampolli who introduced her to her soulmate at the Kit Kat Klub in Manhattan in 1998,” Schmidt wrote. “That’s the story at least. Ungaro came to the United States via airplane...

Here are the Daily Lotto and Daily Lotto Plus numbers. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/ay3PTDs via sinceretalk

In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has waded ever deeper into a new “holy” war of his own making — this time against the Vatican. While it’s only a war of words, the backlash has been severe to the point where Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has issued the president a warning : “I would leave the Church alone.” Trump’s conflict with the Holy See dates back to January, when Pentagon officials held a closed-door meeting with the then-ambassador from the Vatican, telling him, “America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.” An American official then reached for a medieval weapon and made a threatening reference to the Avignon Papacy , during which the French monarchy used military force to control the Pope. When news of this incident came out three months later, it happened to be at a moment when the Pope was speaking out publicly against Trump’s war on Iran. During the Pope’s Palm Sunday homily , he dec...

New legislation and proposed legislation aim to limit political influence in government departments and to protect whistleblowers. However, writes Busisiwe Mavuso, they don’t go far enough. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/1QHjtlC via sinceretalk

US President Donald Trump told reporters that he is “not a big fan” of Pope Leo XIV, after the global leader of Catholics made a plea for peace. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/1xtyIoA via sinceretalk

As the DA concludes its federal congress with a renewed focus on attracting a diverse pool of voters, black delegates argue that the party’s challenge lies not in appealing to black voters but in overcoming what they describe as “stigma” and narratives propagated by political opponents. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/ipMQyK6 via sinceretalk

The past terrifying week has caused me to wonder: How did America ever get to a point where one man, backed by the military might of the United States, could credibly threaten death to an entire civilization? I’m also wondering how 19 super-rich American households could have added $1.8 trillion to their wealth in just the last 24 months — roughly the size of the economy of Australia — while the rate of child poverty in the U.S. has more than doubled , from a low of 5.2 percent in 2021 to over 13 percent now? How have we come so perilously close to climate catastrophe, with spring temperatures in the Western United States already shattering records — and yet governments are spending over a trillion dollars a year subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and banks have channeled over $3 trillion to fossil fuel companies since the Paris Agreement, while there are almost no funds to protect living ecosystems? How have we allowed artificial intelligence, the most powerful technology the ...

Acting DA federal youth leader, Ndipiwe Olayi, believes that for South Africa to be saved from the abyss, the DA ought to remain in the government of national unity (GNU). from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/loEfi42 via sinceretalk

Mpumalanga police are conducting both internal and criminal investigations into a constable who was caught on camera attacking a man at the Volksrust police station. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/x1veDJ7 via sinceretalk

A hometown columnist in deep-red Louisiana is showing no mercy to a Republican U.S. Representative who appears to be "the new leader in the contest for which U.S. Senate candidate in Louisiana’s Republican primary can show the most abject toadyism to President Donald Trump." “Sometimes Trump is right, but when he is wrong, he can be spectacularly wrong,” reports Baton Rouge Advocate columnist Quin Hillyer. “It takes a special level of toadyism to campaign as if it’s a virtue to support one of Trump’s most spectacularly wrong choices. U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow (R-La.) is currently blasting her incumbent opponent, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) for delaying a hearing on Trump’s nomination of Casey Means for surgeon general, even though Means has never been licensed as a physician. [Means] has so many oddball beliefs, both personal and medical, that she might as well be an AI-generated caricature,” said Hillyer. “Even one of the wackiest members of MAGA-world, conspiracy theorist...

Conservative columnist Kevin Williamson warns people “not to make the mistake of overcomplicating [President] Donald Trump.” “He’s a simple man whose actions are … described as the ordinary daily application of his vices: laziness, vindictiveness, greed, vanity, arrogance, cowardice, and, above all, stupidity,” said Williamson in the Dispatch . “He is a rage-addled dimwit with a savantic gift for manipulating lesser fools and a vulnerability to manipulation by men who are similarly vicious but more capable: Vladimir Putin, J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, even one or two of his idiot children.” “Stronger men can push him around, and weaker men succeed by flattering him,” added Williamson. “His enemies can manipulate him at least as easily as his allies.” Nevertheless, Trump must be taken seriously — at least “in the sense that one may take a brain tumor as a serious thing but not a thing you’d have an argument with or lose a chess match to.” Leaders in Iran appear to know this. “Trump...