SINCERETALK

CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront Host Erin Burnett did not have to work hard to unmask the duplicity of Republicans and their propaganda networks Friday night. Republican-aligned networks were scrambling on Thursday and Friday to clean up the apparent ignorance of South Carolina Senatorial candidate Darline Graham, after her humiliating gaffe at an interview. Graham, who has been endorsed by President Donald Trump for a senate seat after the untimely death of her brother former Sen. Lindsey Graham, confessed total ignorance of even lightweight international policy topics at a recent debate. “Are Taiwan and the south China Sea national security issues for the United States, and if so, why or how?” asked a host. Graham admitted: “I'm just going to be honest here. I'm not on national security, that I'm not that informed on national security. So—but I do support the military.” She quickly added that, “my brother was in the Air Force for 33 years. After national and global press...

CNN reports President Donald Trump’s own servicemembers appear to be hedging their bets against the United States in Trump’s war on Iran. Marshall Cohen, CNN senior reporter, spoke with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer on Friday to discuss the revelation that roughly 150 Polymarket accounts appear to be U.S. military insiders, some with clear access to sensitive military information. The prediction site Polymarket outed dozens of accounts that showed signs of potential military insider trading to the Justice Department for investigation, a senior company official told CNN. The referrals pertained to accounts flagged by a watchdog group in a Thursday report . “That nonpartisan organization, the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, said it analyzed a massive trove of publicly available Polymarket data and found 152 accounts that profited about $8 million on war markets – including about the Iran war – and contained several hallmarks of insider activity,” reports CNN. Many of the accounts showed sig...

President Donald Trump has a history of being a very “unreliable partner,” says economist Justin Wolfers , so why would any other nation trust a nation under his control. “Suppose I told you I’d been married seven times, and that I’d cheated on all seven wives. And then I asked you to marry me anyway,” said Wolfers. “If I had breached that agreement with seven past spouses, I reckon you wouldn’t trust me to live up to it the eighth time. And so even as we might say the words ‘in sickness and in health’ at some flashy ceremony, I’m not sure it buys us anything.” That’s where we are with Canada, said Wolfers and Trump’s claims of being a better man and partner with our closest economic partner. Trump is currently threatening Canada with yet another 50 percent tariffs on a wide range of items, said Wolfers. “[This includes] — and this is the important — stuff that he had already agreed not to tariff as part of the USMCA, the free trade agreement that he negotiated with Canada,” Wolfers...

President Donald Trump told his former fixer and personal attorney, Michael Cohen , that he believes he would win in a record landslide if he ran for reelection, despite his low approval ratings. Washington observers find the claim to be risible. "If I were running today, I think I'd win by 25 points," Trump told Michael Cohen on the latter's radio show on Thursday . "I think we'd win by a lot. The economy has never been stronger." In response, former Republican attorney and ex-husband to Trump's first term counsel Kellyanne Conway, George Conway, posted on X , "Lmaoooooo." Similarly former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) , who used to support Trump, posted "Pathetic. Both of these guys." Meanwhile journalist Ben Jacobs wrote "No one is better at incisive interviews than @speechboy71." Since presidential popular votes were tabulated in 1824, only three presidents have won an election by a margin of roughly 25 points: Warren Hard...

CNN anchor Jake Tapper cut through packaged talking points spouted by U.S. Rep. Mike Flood (R-Neb.) in a brutal Thursday interview . Tapper began the discussion with a request for Flood’s reaction to President Donald Trump’s dismal poll numbers and the apparent affect his unpopularity was having on individual GOP races up and down the ballot. To this, Flood launched into the passage of the Housing Affordability law, which he claimed increased building and construction hiring in his state. Flood was slipping into claims that his Nebraskan steel mill “couldn't be busier” when Tapper cut him off with a fact check. “Well, I mean, polls indicate that … voters overwhelmingly do not agree with your assessment of the economy. And I will note that that Housing Bill that you helped write to help people afford homes, President Trump didn't sign it. It became law without his signature ,” Tapper said, momentarily throwing the lawmaker. Trump had instead taken the bill hostage in an effort ...

President Donald Trump’s former attorney refused to repeat earlier testimony he made when called to task about Trump’s criminality. Cohen was the star witness in New York prosecutors’ 2024 hush money case against Trump involving illegal use of money to buy a sex worker’s silence. This made Trump the first ever former president to become a convicted felon when he was found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records to keep word of his affair with Stormy Daniels from public view. Cohen later turned on his former boss, testifying that he lied and bullied for Trump during his years working for the Trump Organization. He even told reporters, among other things, that “there will never be another election again in America” if Trump is reelected. Now, after years of lobbing additional criticism at his former employer, Cohen is set to become a radio interviewer with a Trump interview packed up and ready to play. But Cohen ducked and ran for cover when CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked C...

British journalist and CNN business reporter Richard Quest minced no words while discussing the nation’s ballooning debt under President Donald Trump and Republicans. CNN anchor Jake Tapper reported on Wednesday that the U.S. national debt had crossed the $40 trillion mark. “That's a big deal, especially for you kids watching out there, because you're going to have to pay it off. It's a milestone that will currently impact every american, every business. And of course, the federal government,” said Tapper, ushering Quest to speak. “It’s very simple,” said Quest. “It costs more money for everybody to borrow. Why? Because the federal government borrowing money at these sort of rates. By the way, it's the highest rates for long for 30-year bonds since 2007. And what that means is everything else that's related to it, for example, mortgages are also costing more money. Give you an example. A year ago, a 30 year mortgage was 6.5. today it is 6.6. doesn't sound much...

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...

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...