SINCERETALK

On the same day that he was humiliated for the 25th time before a court for trying to force states to hand over their voter rolls , President Donald Trump continued rolling out another aspect of his voter suppression plan — namely, sending Justice Department workers to polling places. "[Assistant Attorney General Harmeet] Dhillon has the authority to deploy only monitors, not observers," reported Democracy Docket's Jacob Knutson on Tuesday . "Her comments could be a troubling sign that the DOJ may intend to assert expansive powers — far beyond the scope of the department’s traditional monitoring program — for the 1,000 monitors it plans to deploy." Knutson quoted Dillon as saying, "Federal election monitors from the department are — observers, I should say — are similar to other types of observers you see, so they’re not going to be interfering in any way or running the election." The Democracy Docket journalist also wrote, "Dhillon went on to re...

A Republican lawmaker, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska , is accusing President Donald Trump of betraying Republican values by banning media outlets — including CNN, MS NOW and Politico — because they frequently criticize the president. "I say this as an old school Republican, I find it so unnecessary," Bacon told CNN anchor Erin Burnett. "We want a free media. It's competitive media. You guys compete with each other and the truth comes out. Even if one media source is not on target, the other ones will cover it." He added, "And it's good for democracy. And I find that picking a fight with the media is beneath what the White House should be doing and we're better than that. And all these petty fights — it's the media, it's Canada, it's Greenland, it's Canada, or Denmark, it's President Macron and his wife — it's just so unnecessary. I think most of us prefer the president focusing on what we need." Bacon concluded, "We w...

President Donald Trump recently banned three media outlets that he claims were unfairly critical of him — Politico, CNN and MS NOW — from covering him at the White House. Now it has been revealed that he openly admitted that he did so based on their viewpoints, in violation of the First Amendment. "After MS NOW, CNN and Politico sued the Trump administration on Monday over the president banning their reporters from White House grounds, Trump’s communications team sent congressional Republicans talking points Monday night in defense of the president’s decision," reported MS NOW's Mychael Schnell on Tuesday . "According to the document obtained by MS NOW, the White House wants Republicans to argue that “no president has been more transparent or offered more of his time to the press” and that the First Amendment does not grant reporters access to the White House." The talking points claimed that the reporters are not protected by the First Amendment to engage in ...

The state should drop charges, including an allegation of gross immorality, against a Duval County teacher who posted about Charlie Kirk after he was killed, an administrative law judge has recommended. The decision came last week, addressing charges against Hope McMath, who was an advanced placement art history teacher at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts, a magnet high school in Jacksonville, when Kirk was killed in Utah in September 2025. Her Facebook post positioned the shooting as “Karma,” referring to Kirk’s comment, “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.” Additionally, according to the state, she “posted or reposted an artist’s rendition of an individual holding the screaming severed head of what clearly is intended to represent the President...

Democrats’ chances of taking back the Senate look better than ever, but even if November brings a blue wave, they will still not have control of the legislative and executive branches simultaneously until at least 2029. The question facing Democratic lawmakers now is how they should conduct themselves during these wilderness years if they want to regain a trifecta in the next presidential election. Voting down any idea the White House or GOP leadership propose without suggesting any alternative is a bad idea. More than three-quarters of Americans say they want more bipartisanship in Washington, and voters often punish opposition parties they view as do-nothing obstructionists. Fetterman, take notes: When you vote with Republicans, do it to help working-class families buy homes, not to make sure gas prices keep going up. But when we say Democrats should be more bipartisan, it’s important to specify what we mean. This moment has provided exemplars of two very different kinds of aisle ...

Last week, the unlikely duo of Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon keynoted a Washington conference to demand a stop to AI, its data centers, and the risks AI poses to jobs and even to the human species. Notably, both lambasted the corporate oligarchs behind AI. The most potent force in American politics is anti-establishment fury at a system seen as rigged against average working people. AI has become Exhibit A. Until recently both parties largely avoided criticizing the wealthy corporate elites that funded their campaigns. In nature as in politics, one does not bite the hands that feed. Trump Republicans have instead aimed populist fury at immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, Black and Latino people, “communists,” Muslims, so-called “woke” leaders, “coastal elites,” “childless cat ladies,” and other scapegoats. Democrats — with the exceptions of Bernie Sanders, AOC, and a few others — have also avoided criticizing wealthy corporate elites, aiming populist fury at Trump. This may be changing. It’s...

Republicans are still running behind in a must-win swing state race in the coming midterms, and as one of the nation's top election forecasting experts warned , the party is almost out of time to turn things around. As President Donald Trump's toxic reputation with voters has tanked the GOP's midterm prospects, it has grown increasingly possible that it might lose its Senate majority , as well as the House of Representatives. One of the make-or-break races in that fight is in Michigan, where former Republican congressman Mike Rogers has continued to trail his Democratic opponent, epidemiologist Abdul El-Sayed. Republicans have attempted to torpedo El-Sayed's chances by accentuating his progressive stances as too left-wing, as well as his past affiliations with controversial commentator Hasan Piker, but so far, these efforts have not seemed to seal the deal with voters. Decision Desk HQ is an outlet considered to be one of the foremost sources for election results trac...

President Donald Trump has made it clear that he will try to rig the 2026 midterm elections to make sure Democrats don't reclaim one or both chambers of Congress. He has suggested everything from sending law enforcement to polling places to outright seizing ballots , from declaring a national emergency to strong-arming Congress into not accepting results that benefit the Democrats. He has already tried to suppress mail-in ballots and succeeded, in some cases, in forcing states to hand over voter rolls. On a grassroots level, he and his MAGA movement have installed supporters in key positions to deny election results that are favorable to the Democrats. Instead of simply doing his best to govern well and convince voters to retain Republicans on the basis of his record, Trump is focusing on issues that benefit him personally despite voters overwhelmingly disagreeing with him — building a White House ballroom, renaming the Kennedy Center after himself, promoting AI data centers, wa...

Republican midterm candidates are starting to flee from associating with President Donald Trump while others tune out his outlandish antics, and according to one conservative commentator , it comes down to how he "aggressively squandered" the strengths that got him reelected . Rep. Mariá Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican who has represented the state's 27th District since 2021, turned heads across the political world this past week when she released a new midterm ad firmly breaking with Trump on immigration, saying that some of his mass deportation efforts have "gone too far." Her district is nearly 74 percent Latin American, and Trump carried it by around 15 points in 2024, amid a major shift towards Republicans made by Latino voters that year. Now, as anti-Trump conservative Charlie Sykes said on the "Fast Politics" podcast, that voting bloc has made a dramatic shift away from supporting the president, resulting in an ad like Salazar's, whic...

Lobbyist and Republican strategist David Urban hit a wall on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 after trying to pivot away from President Donald Trump’s abrupt call to ban certain media companies from the White House on Friday. News was circulating most of the evening after Trump vowed to ban CNN, MS NOW and other organizations for reporting stories he does not like. Urban attempted to pivot from Trump’s announcement, which critics called a First Amendment violation. “I come on here, you know, every night and say we should be talking about a lot of different things today. For example, instead of talking about banning the media, the president does have good news. There's a report out—the U.S. Census Bureau put a report out that said poverty rates in America are at historic low. As a matter of fact, real wages, real median household income jumped 2.6 percent. … And instead of talking about that, like all day and crowing about that great news, we're talking about this. And nobody in Ame...

While speaking with a panel about President Donald Trump’s recent ban of CNN, MS NOW and other possible media outlets, CNN anchor Erin Burnett played a withering supercut of Trump’s adolescent-grade abuse and name-calling of women around him at press gaggles. This, Burnett insisted, was “only a small sample.” “What a stupid question for you to ask,” Trump barked to an unknown woman on July 27. “You’re the most obnoxious reporter in the whole room,” he told another woman on December 8, 2025. “You are the worst reporter,” Trump told CNN’s Kaitlan Collions on February 3. “Quiet! Quiet, piggy,” he ordered another woman on Nov. 14, 2025. “I’m tired of it, you dumb person,” Trump told a woman on May 12. “She’s a horror show,” he blasted another female reporter on May 8, while talking to aids. And finally: “You have a lot of hate in your heart,” Trump accused a woman Sept. 16, 2025. “As I said, that’s a small sampling,” Burnett told her panel, adding “he thrives on those exchanges.” “You k...

Kerry Kennedy, a daughter of JFK’s younger brother, former attorney general and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, held nothing back after hearing of President Donald Trump’s justification for insisting his name should be on the memorial of an entirely different president. “It's heartbreaking to me,” Kennedy told CNN anchor Jake Tapper on Friday night , while describing a recent photograph of Trump seated on Air Force One, holding what looks like a presentation poster entitled “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED . “It's heartbreaking because this is the monument to our slain president. And this is also the monument to the arts. The most important monument to the arts in our entire country. And these are the actions of a petty little tyrant who can't get his way. And because he can't add his name to it, he's going to blow it up.” “[If he had his way] It would be like the Trump Eiffel Tower or the trump Buckingham Palace or the Trump Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,” said Kennedy, without m...

CNN anchor Jake Tapper took no kindess on Friday to President Donald Trump’s announcement that he was “banning” CNN, MS NOW and Politico “from the White House, … effective immediately.” There was no indication the Trump administration had taken steps to follow through on the ban. CNN reporters were not escorted from their White House workspace near the briefing room later on Friday, nor was the CNN team traveling Friday with Vice President JD Vance removed from the reporters’ pool. But Tapper had no mercy for what he called Trump’s “unconstitutional” ban. “He wants the news to bend,” said Tapper. “… Let's remember that earlier he defined ‘fake news’ as purposely negative stories. That's ‘fake news’ to him. He wasn't talking about stories that are inaccurate. He started talking about stories that are not positive.” Tapper made note to report Trump said “more [was] to come,” and he talked about the Washington Post and the New York times, both of which he repeatedly called “...

Data analyst G. Elliot Morris fears the GOP may be a dead-party-walking as they head into the mid-terms — and polling analytics are setting the GOP up for terrible disappointment. “The polls are [possibly] understating support For Democrats, not Republicans, as you might have heard,” said Morris, speaking on the data generating process with The Downballot Podcast host David Nir . “If you pay any attention to politics and the polls over the past couple of cycles, then you will probably be triggered by large apparent misfires in public opinion surveys in the direction of the Democrats over the last four election cycles, basically every cycle since 2016, except for the midterms,” said Morris, referencing President Donald Trump’s unexpected wins in 2024 and 2016. However, “once you look under the hood,” said Morris, it appears pollsters are accidentally creating the potential for bias in the other direction and setting Republicans up for even more disappointment than they’re already expe...

Former Kansas governor Bill Graves is a Republican with a growing hostile attitude toward President Donald Trump and the Republicans who unfailingly enable him. “The Republican Party to me today feels like sort of a bad frat party,” said Graves on the Thursday night edition of Erin Burnett Out Front . “Everybody sort of just full of this joy and enthusiasm about how great things are going. And they're not really grasping the struggles that are going on every day for everyday Americans.” “I don't recognize this Republican Party,” Graves insisted. “I'm still a Republican, and I intend to stay one. But I'm hoping the Republican Party trends back more towards me than further away from me.” Graves said he lamented the “corruption and ineptitude” coming from the White House, and he said the party was failing the balance of power system that made the U.S. a functional democracy for so long. “I've got a tremendous respect for the balance of powers in our in our nation. And...

Rep. Chip Roy of Texas unleashed a masterclass of denial while speaking with CNN anchor Jake Tapper on Thursday night . The act kicked off after Tapper confronted Roy with footage of First Lady Melania Trump hosting an ‘opulent’ White House dinner scene complete with expensive dinnerware as Americans struggle under an affordability crisis created by Trump’s own policies. “Can you explain the worldview of the president and first lady when they — when she puts up that state dinner video?” asked Tapper. “It’s very fancy. But it's giving kind of like Nancy Reagan, White House china vibes, and then President [Donald] Trump talking about how there is no affordability crisis.” “I'm never going to try to explain what someone else is thinking about on any particular issue,” said Roy, immediately surrendering the argument. “But what I can tell you is what the people of Texas are telling me and people across the country. … [P]eople are concerned, of course, about affordability, and the...

President Donald Trump is famously targeting the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by demanding that it be renamed to mention him, despite courts repeatedly ruling that he cannot legally do this without congressional authorization. Yet even as he targets America's premiere cultural center, the president also has another legendary institution in his sights — the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). Also like the Kennedy Center, USIP is applying for legal relief. "NOT JUST THE KENNEDY CENTER: U.S. Institute of Peace asks for emergency relief to bar any 'plans to carve President Trump’s name into the facade of the iconic USIP headquarters building,'" Politico's Kyle Cheney posted on X on Thursday . He included a screenshot of a legal filing by USIP in which they appealed to the courts to "prevent Appellants or those acting on their behalf from carrying out plans to carve President Trump's name into the façade of the iconic USIP headquarters bui...

President Donald Trump has suffered a string of defeat in the last few weeks, but veteran, activist and “Independent Americans Podcast” host Paul Rieckhoff, told CNN Wednesday that he should get accustomed to that losing sensation in the weeks leading into November and the remaining two years of his term. The Supreme Court recently told Trump where to put his attempt to constrict mail in voting , Congress has passed a Russian sanctions bill against a nation led by what Trump considered a friend . And on Wednesday his own appointed Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh voted to raise interest rates despite Trump engaging a year-long war with the former fed chair over the same threat. To top all that off, the underpowered nation of Iran is beating Trump to a pulp on his economy by launching savvy military attacks that have ballooned global oil prices — assuring that an angry host of voters will be heading to polls in November to punish the party in power, and Trump. CNN anchor Erin Burnet...

President Donald Trump tried to cancel talk show host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel last year, in an effort that boomeranged so badly on him that it helped Kimmel's ratings and even rallied some conservatives against him . Now a political scientist is observing that Trump, apparently learning nothing, may have drawn attention to Kimmel's recent interview with Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico — and, in the process, helped that interview outperform Trump's own midterms convention. "This is a profile in boomeranging," Jason Johnson, an associate professor of communication and journalism at Morgan State University, told MS NOW's Ari Melber on Wednesday. "The effort to censor the interview we have Kimmel here has actually enhanced it only because they chose to fight. By putting it on YouTube, that puts it out to the world and, oh my gosh, we are way over the normal audience. And the intrigue — I mean, I'll tell folks, they titled it the intervie...