SINCERETALK

President Donald Trump is waging political warfare against Indiana Republicans who did not vote for gerrymandering — but he is meeting opposition from members of his own party. “Even though Indiana state Senate leader Rodric Bray isn’t on anyone’s primary ballot next week, he is the ultimate target of President Donald Trump’s demand for political retribution,” the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported on Thursday . “Seven Republican senators who voted in December against redrawing Indiana’s U.S. House district maps are facing Trump-endorsed challengers backed by millions of dollars in spending by national pro-redistricting groups.” Bray, who spoke with the Chronicle about the subject, expressed disappointment with the president’s actions. “It was a very, very challenging session in December, and those votes were hard, and the folks that voted against it, I know, are now under a massive attack from Washington, D.C, and elsewhere in the nation,” Bray told the Chronicle. “I just would hate ...

President Donald Trump's plans for the Iran war are "unraveled" and too treacherous "for reality," warned the Republican leader's former Homeland Security chief of staff. The conversation began when MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace asked Miles Taylor, who worked for Trump during his first term, about the president's Iran war options. "One involves a mission that, based on the Axios reporting, involves sending special forces in to dismantle, destroy, or steal the enriched uranium," Wallace asked. "I mean, that sounds like a riskier military operation than anything that's been contemplated to date. The other is to take over part of the Strait of Hormuz — there's a blockade of a blockade that doesn't seem to be going very well, so that's an escalation of something we're not exactly crushing." Wallace added, "And the other is to bomb their infrastructure, which goes very close to the line that Donald Trump telegraphe...

President Donald Trump is abusing his power to persecute political opponents, but at least one recent effort was so transparently absurd that even a major Trump supporter could not get behind it. Reporting for MS NOW on Wednesday, anchor Nicolle Wallace pointed out that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s indictment of former FBI Director James Comey is being widely mocked, even by conservatives otherwise inclined to back the president. In the indictment , Blanche claimed that Comey threatened Trump’s life because he “publicly posted a photograph on the internet social media site Instagram which depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out ‘86 47’, which a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.” Much to Wallace’s surprise Jonathan Turley, who defended Trump against his first impeachment attempt and has repeatedly backed his controversial legal moves,...

Former Assistant Special Agent in Charge with the FBI Michael Feinberg says he has no reason to feel safe that President Donald Trump won’t send his politicized Department of Justice after him with a bogus and expensive prosecution as he already has with former FBI director James Comey. “As to whether I'm worried. Yeah, of course I'm worried on a lot of levels,” Feinberg told MS NOW Anchor Nicole Wallace. “This is an administration that comes after critics, and … I'm in the position of being a critic.” Feinberg made his confession after former DOJ Pardon Attorney Elizabeth Oyer admitted publicly that she, too, feared legal persecution by the vindictive president. “On a personal note, … I'm worried for myself. I mean, I've had a security incident at my home after I left the department. That was very worrisome. And the idea that I don't know that the justice department or the FBI is a place that I could turn for help because of the people who are in charge ...

Semafor reports that it isn’t just a smattering of Republicans who are trashing President Donald Trump’s proposed bailout of Spirit Airlines. It’s a united front — and they’re furious. “It’s horses-——,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., told Semafor of Trump’s proposal of forcing taxpayers to invest $500 million in the failing company. “My God: 10 percent stake in Intel, 5 to 10 percent stakes in three or four mining companies, ‘golden share’ of US Steel — and now a half-a-billion-dollar stake in Spirit Airlines.” Trump spent the brunt of his second term bending congressional Republicans to his will, but his iron gripe appears to stop at bailing out Spirit. Less than a week after Trump claimed his administration was “thinking about” buying a stake in the company, nearly a dozen GOP lawmakers — ranging from moderates to conservatives and from rank-and-file lawmakers to party leaders— told Semafor they either opposed or hated the plan. “This would be a really bad idea. I don’t think you wa...

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

Some conservatives are blaming the Secret Service for the seeming attempted assassination of President Donald Trump on Saturday — but one Wall Street Journal columnist is not having any of it. “One conservative called the Secret Service’s handling of security an ‘unmitigated failure,’” wrote The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn on Monday , who also reported on how mainstream media outlets like The Washington Post covered the story. “Others complain about ‘lax security.’ The Washington Post reported that ‘the Trump administration provided a lower level of security for the White House correspondents’ dinner than it has for other gatherings of high-ranking officials.’ Attendees have reported being waved in to the building with barely a showing of their ticket—though the security perimeter around the ballroom held.” He added, “The second-guessing has only begun, and it’s becoming wrapped up with other issues. On his X account, Chairman James Comer of the House Oversight Committee n...

President Donald Trump is at risk of violating the Constitution through his Cabinet picks, a Libertarian scholar recently warned — although right now he appears to be on the right side of the law. Describing Trump’s decision to keep Todd Blanche as acting attorney general and Keith Sonderling as acting labor secretary, in lieu of Pam Bondi and Lori Chavez-DeRemer respectively, a scholar from the prestigious Cato Institute warned that the president is walking a very fine line. “Almost all vacancies in the executive branch are governed by the Federal Vacancies Reform Act (FVRA) of 1998, which sets uniform rules of who can be an acting officer and how long they can serve,” Thomas A. Berry , the director of the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor in chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review, wrote on Monday. “But when the FVRA was enacted, about 40 separate statutes were on the books that provided different special rules for how acting officers may...

Donald Trump commands the U.S. less like a president and more like Julius Caesar, one conservative legal scholar wrote for The Atlantic , with his unhinged leadership being the result of a decades-long plot by the right that has backfired severely and threatens to fully erode Democracy. Gregg Nunziata is the executive director of the Society for the Rule of Law and previously worked as legal counsel for Senate Republicans. On Monday, he published an extensive new piece for The Atlantic, decrying Trump's new brand of "American Caesarism in nearly full bloom," emulating the rule of the Roman emperor who destroyed the republic by "claiming to speak for the people even as he disregarded laws and norms to govern by caprice ." "Despite ambitions to fundamentally change the course of the country, this administration has no real legislative agenda ," Nunziata wrote. "Instead, the president governs by executive orders, emergency decrees, and extortiona...

You can be Secretary of Defense (War) and cause the mightiest military in the world to be brought to its knees, and still keep your job in the Trump regime. You can be in charge of public health and cause measles to reemerge as a major hazard to Americans, and still keep your job. You can be illegally enriching yourself and your family as Commerce Secretary, and still keep your job. But you’ll be fired for actively and unnecessarily getting bad press. A few days ago, a senior White House official told Politico that FBI director Kash Patel’s bad press was “not a good look for a cabinet secretary” and had frustrated Trump. “It’s only a matter of time,” they said, before Patel is canned. Like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Patel has been his own worse press agent. He filed a $250 million defamation claim against The Atlantic magazine over its April 17 report claiming that his FBI colleagues were alarmed by his excessive drinking and unexplained absences . The...

These seven hearty bowls, from loaded cauliflower to coffee-dressed roasted vegetables, pack enough personality and substance to stand as proper meals when the weather turns cold. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/GxbQIie via sinceretalk

A traffic officer died when the state vehicle she was driving collided head-on with a long-distance bus on the N2 in Jeffreys Bay on Monday morning. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/yHXB57c via sinceretalk

News24 investigative journalists Khaya Koko and Azarrah Karrim take you behind the scenes of the latest Johannesburg Water story and the contractors that pocketed millions. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/Y9ZepDR via sinceretalk

US President Donald Trump and other attendees at a glitzy media gala in Washington made a hasty exit after gunshots were fired. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/LQlBxSu via sinceretalk

US Secret Service agents bundled US President Donald Trump from the stage as shots rang out at a media gala, in what the president later described as an attack by a “would-be assassin”. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/YIxfruZ via sinceretalk

Everything from this week’s edition of City Press in one convenient place. from News24 News24/TopStories/rss https://ift.tt/lzhKGWa via sinceretalk

How does President Donald Trump deal with the non-stop bad news and dreadful poll numbers assaulting the White House every day? One former Trump official delivered the answer after MS NOW host Michael Steele asked him “what all the little mice around him” are doing to blunt the ugly numbers. “Are they lying in his ear and telling him those aren't real polls? Or does he not really give a crap?” Steele demanded. “They're lying to him like there's no tomorrow because that's the team he wanted to have in the second term,” said Miles Taylor, who worked for Trump in his first term as a DHS deputy chief of staff. “[Trump] was so irked that he spent four years in the first term hearing from people that were telling him bad news.” Taylor said it’s the same story from every autocrat “throughout history.” “They don't like to hear bad news. He does not have people around him who want to tell him bad news. And when he does encounter it — because you can't be in the re...

U ntil fairly recently , President Donald Trump’s MAGA fold mostly united around a certain set of beliefs. But researchers have now confirmed that at least one of their founding principles is based on the complete absence of any hint of fact in their lives or in their circle. “Psychology researchers Christopher Stockus, now at Marietta College, and Ethan Zell of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro … designed a project to measure whether an objective gap in factual knowledge exists between [left-leaning and right-leaning] political groups,” reports PsyPost . “The researchers wanted to investigate if this knowledge gap might explain the differences in how each group views the necessity of environmental policies. Plenty of scientists have tested specific partisan misconceptions or beliefs in conspiracy theories, but comprehensive tests comparing overall knowledge across political groups are relatively rare. But Stockus and Zell established a systematic method to evaluate ge...

Former White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews says nobody can escape Father Time, and right now Father Time is trampling boot marks all over President Donald Trump’s mind. Her opinion came after a painful series of photos of Trump appearing to nod off and go straight into REM sleep at an important Oval Office Thursday conference, augmented with citations of Trump’s more unnerving late-night posts . “I just think it's gotten even worse in the sense that it's a little bit more extreme. In the first administration, we didn't have him posting about wanting to annihilate an entire civilization . And so … it seems like he's lost his fastball and that he's not beating Father Time,” said Matthews, who worked in Trump's first administration. “Look, you can't beat father time. And I think old age is catching up with him. And so he's not as on it and as sharp as he once was. And I think that is also just enhancing the craziness that was already kind...

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...