SINCERETALK

When Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) mistakenly accused prosecutor Jack Smith of being at a basketball game in Atlanta (and implicitly colluding with another anti-Trump prosecutor, Fani Willis), observers initially accused him of wrongly trusting staffers who mixed up the Atlanta Hawks basketball team with the University of Iowa Hawkeyes franchise. Yet even as some Republicans blasted Schmitt for his egregious error and others promoted him as a hero while pretending he had not been publicly fact-checked , few suspected the truth: Schmitt knew his claims about Smith were unvetted, but presented them as factual anyway. "With correct knowledge of the conversation, Republican Senator Eric Schmitt was warned ahead of time by Republican staff on the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Jack Smith text he wants to use to catch Smith in a line were 'unvetted,'" MS NOW anchor Michael Steele reported on Wednesday, breaking a story exclusive to the network. "Schmitt? Well, he dec...

Politico reports a GOP senator’s recent blunder was so bad it may already be impacting staff trying to flee the senator’s office. “Ethan Harper, the general counsel to Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), was expected to leave his role on Friday and begin a new one in the White House Staff Secretary’s office next week, according to three people familiar with the plans granted anonymity to discuss them,” reports Politico. “But that transition was in doubt today following a congressional hearing that’s embroiled Schmitt in controversy, the people said.” Politico reports that there is no evidence Harper was responsible for the monstrous gaffe Schmitt unleashed when he failed to trap former special investigator Jack Smith with allegations of colluding with other prosecutors investigating President Donald Trump. On Tuesday, Jack Smith faced questioning at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, in which Republicans attempted to attack his investigations into Trump’s alleged corruption . At one point...

An anxiety-ridden White House has dispatched Vice President JD Vance to cobble together President Donald Trump’s disintegrating coalition in South Texas on Wednesday, but analysts and New York Times reporters say the Republican tent has largely collapsed. In a district that Trump and the Republican Texas legislature gerrymandered to be more favorable to them, Vance finds himself struggling to stump for candidates in a border region “where eroding support for President Trump has raised Democratic hopes of flipped seats in both the House and the Senate,” according to the Post. Vance rallied for the Republican challenger to Representative Vicente Gonzalez in a race that remains tightly contested despite Trump and Republicans packing the district with what they thought was a loyal Hispanic contingent that once supported Trump. “Hispanic voters in South Texas have soured on Mr. Trump , growing increasingly angry over the handling of the economy and immigration enforcement,” reported Time...

President Donald Trump recently released a campaign ad using taxpayer money, an act so blatantly illegal that even many of his fellow Republicans are fuming about it . Yet despite GOP lawmakers grumbling about it, Trump's former attorney described them as "cowardly" because they will never take substantive action to hold the president accountable. "Trump has thrown so much lawlessness and so much corruption at the American people that his hope is that people just accept it, that they think this is the way it is, and that they surrender to him," Cobb told CNN anchor Erin Burnett on Tuesday. "[Senate Majority Leader] John Thune, [North Carolina Sen.] Thom Tillis, [Texas Sen.] John Cornyn, even [Louisiana Sen.] John Kennedy said that this was improper, that they shouldn't spend public funds on this. They know it's illegal." When Burnett affirmed this, Cobb added that they were not going to do anything. "We've got a cowardly Republican-le...

Before serving as an anchor for MS NOW, Nicolle Wallace was an adviser to the Republican presidential campaign of the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona . Yet when discussing President Donald Trump's supporters in the same Republican Party for which she used to work, Wallace argued on Tuesday that they have been made into fools by the very man in whom they placed so much trust. According to Wallace, Trump possesses no meaningful thoughts or concern on "their worries, on their spouses' worries, on their kids' lives, on the cost of groceries, the cost of gas, the lies and betrayal over the largest elite sex-trafficking ring in global history in the Epstein files, and the promise to never have another forever war, and then taking the country to war and spending our treasure in Iran." Instead Trump's political movement is based on the assumption "that the foot soldiers of the Big Lie will view the election lie as bigger and more important, and more of a gut-sh...

Bloomberg reports analysts and investors alike are finally wising up to President Donald Trump’s up-and-down roller coaster of oil prices, and they’re finally settling in for a long-term slog with Trump in the White House. “The conflict in the Middle East and the implications for forward inflation remain the primary macro narrative and are likely to dictate price action in US rates for the foreseeable future,” BMO Capital Markets’ Ian Lyngen told Bloomberg as a Tuesday drop in oil prices failed to keep stocks and bonds from sliding into an ugly drop. Previously, Wall Street investors had rallied whenever Trump announced progress in ending his unilateral war on Iran — which has bottlenecked global oil supplies and driven up prices on the international market. But Tuesday drop in oil prices “did little to allay Wall Street’s concerns that still-elevated energy costs could fuel inflation and spur Federal Reserve rate hikes,” according to Bloomberg. This means Trump’s magic button for t...

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he will do everything in his power to prevent Democrats from reclaiming either chamber of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections . Now Marc Elias, an election attorney who founded the voting rights organization Democracy Docket, is warning that Trump has already guaranteed the 2026 election will be historically unfair — even if Democrats do ultimately prevail. "It is easy to look at the individual pieces," Elias told MS NOW host Nicolle Wallace on Tuesday. "We have a big victory, as you mentioned, in the Supreme Court, preventing an illegal gerrymander from going into effect in Missouri. There was a setback involving the ability of the SAVE database to be rolled out, halted in the Supreme Court. There was a victory you mentioned in the trial court. There have been other cases that have been filed, right? There's just a lot going on, but what it's doing is building and building and building toward Election Day....

So, Republicans: what’s the plan for Tommy Tuberville? The question may puzzle you. To use the GOP standard-bearer’s preferred metaphor, your team has what seems to be a 35-point lead with time winding down. Your quarterback can hand the ball off and manage the clock until time expires. But that guy under center is throwing deep and getting picked off. And he’s keeping the opponents in the game. Let’s go back to last Tuesday. Tuberville spoke with CNN, who asked him whether high gas prices — $4.09 a gallon in Alabama as of Saturday , up from $2.79 last year — hurt his constituents. There was a simple answer to this question: Yes. Tuberville opted for a convoluted one. He said that gas prices “go up and down” and agreed with a statement that Alabamians were willing to pay higher prices at the pump because of the state’s prior support for Donald Trump. Tuberville also took the floor on Tuesday to deliver a nearly 20-minute speech attacking transgender Americans. There was the usual...

From his waging of the unpopular Iran war to his enthusiastic support for data centers to ongoing rising prices that he has failed to lower, President Donald Trump keeps staking out positions on issues in ways that alienate him from his own supporters. Now a focus group demonstrates the impact of all these controversies on Trump's staunchest supporters: They're depressed. "The overwhelming vibe among Trump voters in our focus groups is depression," posted The Bulwark's Sarah Longwell on Monday . "Trump isn’t doing what he said he would! And depressed voters = depressed turnout. It’s not that so many Republicans are going to vote for Democrats, it’s that so many Republicans aren’t going to vote." Longwell has previously discussed how Trump's deeply unpopular presidency is hurting not only himself, but the Republican Party. Earlier in September , she described how Trump is rapidly approaching the "Bush line," or the moment statistically w...

"Treat the president the same as the guy screaming by the freeway exit." When Justin Levitt uttered that sentence in our interview, I felt a mixture of fear and relief. The fear stems from the fact that, unlike the guy screaming by the freeway exit, President Donald Trump has immense power. With that power, Trump has terrorized immigrants, persecuted transgender people, laid off thousands of hard-working federal employees, gutted the nation's once-superior scientific establishment, poisoned our natural environment and destroyed our longstanding international relationships. While doing these things, he has transformed the Republican Party into a political cult of personality, one in which members are literally told to pledge allegiance to him , and enriched himself to the tune of roughly $2 billion. Yet the "guy screaming by the freeway exit" analogy can also inspire relief. Levitt — a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School who served under Presidents...

Today, with just over five weeks to go before the midterm elections, I want to point out a critical distinction that’s not being picked up in the media — between people who voted for Trump in 2024 but do not identify as part of the MAGA movement and people who voted for Trump in 2024 and still do identify themselves as part of the MAGA movement. According to data from sources like the Economist /YouGov Poll , roughly 53 percent of Republican voters describe themselves as “MAGA Republicans” or consider themselves part of the MAGA movement. That leaves a considerable number of non-MAGA Republican voters. How do these two groups of Republican voters line up on the central issue of affordability? A recent Politico poll showed that just 28 percent of voters who describe themselves as being part of the MAGA movement say expenses have become less affordable since Trump took office. These MAGA voters are far more likely to say the economy has gotten better since Trump took office. On the ot...

President Donald Trump once warned against a huge "time bomb" facing the country while he raged on the 2016 campaign trail, but according to a new piece from The Hill , he now seems content to completely ignore it . Writing for the outlet on Sunday, legal scholar David Wippman and historian Glenn C. Altschuler noted that Republicans have been fussing about the national debt for decades , harkening back to warnings from Ronald Reagan in 1981 when it surpassed $1 trillion for the first time. They also noted that Trump himself said that the U.S. was "sitting on a time bomb" of debt when he first ran for president, pledging that he would eliminate it within eight years. As he reaches the halfway point of his second term a decade later, he has come nowhere close to that lofty promise, with the debt hitting the $ 40 trillion milestone last month . In fact, Wippman and Altschuler explained, he is doing considerable work to worsen the debt severely. "Since January 202...

I feel optimistic about the midterm elections, just over five weeks away. But my stomach aches when I think of what’s at stake. Call me nauseously optimistic. I suspect you’re in a similar place. If it were only the polls, I’d feel reasonably good. Here’s one that stuck out for me: The share of Republicans who say the economy is better than a year ago has collapsed from over 70 percent in January to 29 percent in September, according to last week’s New York Times /Siena poll . Here’s another: According to a Wall Street Journal poll , just 37 percent of Americans approve of the job that Trump is doing — the lowest approval rating of any president heading into a midterm election in Journal polls dating to 1990. Another good sign: Because of Trump’s unpopular war, his dreaded tariffs, and their effect on prices, Republicans in tight races are starting to tiptoe away from Trump. In recent days, Maine Senator Susan Collins and Kansas Senator Roger Marshall have distanced themselves from...

Biographer Michael Wolff walked through the knots the White House staff must untangle as they try to get President Donald Trump to focus on tangible outcomes in meetings with foreign leaders. Over the past week, Trump welcomed China's leader, Xi Jinping , and it appeared their activities were centered around the president showing off his construction, his military and what appeared to be his first trip to the National Archives as president. Meanwhile, the visit from Xi was said to be a "summit," which would focus on trade, avoiding a crisis with Taiwan, discussions over minerals, market access, guardrails for artificial intelligence and arms control. Trump’s approach to meeting foreign leaders puts his aversion to detailed briefings on full display at a time of high-stakes diplomacy. It's a "difficult moment for a president" who must hold a lot of information in their brain about customs and gestures all while remembering the specifics about policy and in...

President Donald Trump got a strong legal pushback from three major media organizations — CNN, MS NOW and Politico — after banning them from the White House press pool ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Washington, DC. In an article for The Atlantic, legal expert Quinta Jurecic warns that the media ban is a "preview" of the "two-year temper tantrum" that lies ahead during the second half of Trump's second presidency. "The whole kerfuffle was a display of both Trump's power and his impotence: damaging to democracy yet also undermining of his own authority," Jurecic explains in her Atlantic article. "What prompted this particular round of White House abuse of the press is not entirely clear. But Trump often resorts to attacking the media when he receives news he dislikes — and between rising fuel prices caused by the war in Iran, sinking poll numbers for the congressional GOP, and Trump's own declining popularity, there i...

During a speech at Southern Methodist University in Texas on Tuesday, September 8, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had a message for the bond market : "I am the house now." But according to journalist Joseph Zeballos-Roig, "the house is getting a lot of egg on it ." In a late September op-ed for MS NOW, Zeballos-Roig argues that Bessent "dared traders to cross him" during that September 8 speech — and is getting more than he bargained for. "The $32 trillion American bond market is generating a flood of headlines lately," Zeballos-Roig writes on MS NOW's website. "Why? The instrument that the U.S. government uses to fund its own activities is going haywire. The 10-year Treasury yield is trading at its highest level since the run-up to the financial crisis in 2007, and a similar spike has been recorded for the 30-year yield, which reached its highest point since 2004. These bonds influence mortgages, auto and corporate loans, so it carri...

In the past, television journalist and former Fox News pundit Geraldo Rivera was on very friendly terms with President Donald Trump. But Rivera, now 83, lashed out at Trump when he refused to accept the results of the United States' 2020 presidential election. And now, Rivera is highly critical of Trump's ban of three major media organizations — CNN, MS NOW and Politico — from the White House press pool. The ban came days before Trump's White House meeting with visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping. During an appearance on MS NOW , Michael McFaul — who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia under former President Barack Obama — was appalled that reporters for CNN, MS NOW and Politico were kept out of the White House while members of state-owned Chinese media were granted access. In a Friday, September 25 post on X , formerly Twitter, Rivera wrote, "President Trump's ban on WH media was as badly timed as it was Unconstitutional. He wanted maximum exposure of his grand...