SINCERETALK

President Donald Trump frequently rails about “communists” and “socialists,” and the GOP has increasingly leaned into such attacks as it has grown more desperate in the face of an uphill midterm battle . But according to a longtime GOP pollster, accusations of “ socialist ” don’t have the “shock value” they once had. As Politico explains, Republicans have struggled to define an opponent during this midterm cycle, though “Trump has frequently sought to blame Biden for high prices and other challenges that his administration has faced. Even so, the former president has become a far less useful punching bag for Republicans since leaving office and remaining largely out of the spotlight.” The same goes for former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. No other Democrats have managed to elicit the same level of conservative anger, so Trump and the GOP have turned to the classic red baiting. Besides peppering speeches with accusations of communism and socialism, “the GOP has run ads seeking to tie Democrat...

The New York Times reports President Donald Trump personally instructed his budget director to use taxpayer money for TV ads praising him and his presidency, “setting in motion a $20 million contract that used funds from the Department of Homeland Security, according to people familiar with the matter.” “Mr. Trump was eager to see the laudatory ads on the air and told Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to come up with the money from within the government,” said government sources speaking with the Times. They added that Mark Paoletta, the budget office’s counsel, and Will Scharf, the White House counsel, both said it would be legal to use D.H.S. funds. And the president and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, both spoke with Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, about the ads. The ads have hit expensive time slots on Fox News, CNN and MS Now, with football games on Fox and with national newscasts on CBS, ABC and NBC, includin...

Former Stars and Stripes publisher Max Lederer says the Pentagon outright directed him to fire journalists for ‘insubordination’—for daring to use their freedom of speech to report truth. "I was just told, 'do what you're instructed and serve these notices,'" Lederer told an audience during a CSPAN interview, hosted by Military Veterans in Journalism. Stars and Stripes, a US military news publication funded in part by the government, is intended to have editorial independence, but the Washington Post reported in January that new hire applicants were now being asked what they will do in order to forward Donald Trump's "policy priorities," under the second Trump administration. “How would you advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role?" the question reads. "Identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired....

Empower Chief Investment Strategist Marta Norton said she was getting nervous over the amount of debt some of the nation’s richest companies were incurring as a result of rampant investment in AI — the product that is largely driving President Donald Trump’s 2026 stock market growth. Fox Business host Liz Claman, of “The Claman Countdown,” initiated the discussion by bringing up the amount of debt companies are shouldering in their race for AI buildout. “What about that hyper debt scale issuance? They’re shouldering so much debt, and not just the hyperscalers. You know, in June, Nvidia had gone to the market with $25 billion in borrowing and even the best-in-class ones that do have a lot of cash on the balance sheet are very exposed. Do you see any negatives there?” “That is something that I do think we need to watch,” confided Norton. “They’re building a whole new world and they’ve eaten up a lot of their cash flow, which was enviable just a few years ago, and now it’s negligible. ...

A recent study says Americans’ support for political violence fell in 2026, but MAGA supporters remain the most likely to justify it. PsyPost covered the research , which was published as a preprint on SocArXiv and not yet peer-reviewed. But early nationally surveys suggests that American public support for political violence decreased heading into the 2026 midterm elections, contrary to popular fears. “The findings indicate that while partisan tensions remain high, about three-quarters of U.S. adults say political violence is never justified in general, and very few say they would be willing to commit it,” reports Psypost. But those numbers do not necessarily hold true for the MAGA political enclave, say researchers. When researchers examined differences among political groups, they found that MAGA Republicans and MAGA supporters who do not identify as Republicans tended to report higher levels of justification for political violence compared to Democrats and non-MAGA Republicans. ...

President Donald Trump has made at least $1 billion so far promoting his cryptocurrency , a coin that was sold primarily to his own supporters. Those same supporters tended to lose all of their investments as a result of that business venture , which critics describe as a scam, and even Trump backers like right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan are starting to turn on the president as he continues to deregulate the crypto industry and personally profit. Speaking to former President Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser on Thursday, MS NOW host Nicolle Wallace pointed to these developments to make an important point — namely, that Trump actively hates his own supporters. "What's amazing to me, Ben, as someone who's covered Trump most days for a decade — and that's on me — is to see how much he hates his voters," Wallace told Rhodes. "I always thought that Steve Bannon was, for his political views and his contribution to the degradation of our politics, o...

President Donald Trump’s national ad buy featuring himself immediately drew critics over laws against using taxpayer money to fund political advertising. But government sources now tell NBC News that Trump did not even alert administrators that their budgets would be footing the bill. “They didn’t sign off on it,” an official said of CBP leaders. “They were thinking, ‘There’s no way they’re going to try to take the funding from CBP for those ads.’” “Senior leaders at Customs and Border Protection were cut out of the decision to use their agency’s funds for a national ad buy featuring … Trump and learned about it from a news report, according to a Department of Homeland Security official with direct knowledge of the decision-making process,” said NBC reporter Julia Ainsley. CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott and his senior advisers “were not included in several meetings where the idea of spending the agency’s money on the ads was discussed,” the official said. And while CBP leaders were t...

President Donald Trump has long relied on the support of farmers — and yet one of his new policies has quietly sabotaged their economic well-being. "President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday directing the secretary of agriculture and secretary of health and human services to begin exploring options for adding warning labels to food that contain 'significant amounts' of alpha-galactose, a sugar molecule found in most mammals," The New Republic's Edith Olmsted wrote on Thursday . "You may have heard of that substance before because of alpha-gal syndrome, an increasingly common and potentially life-threatening food allergy to red meat that can develop from a tick bite." Olmsted added, "The Trump administration’s new rule was framed as one way of cracking down on tick-borne illnesses—but it may end up hurting the meat industry in the process. The new rule could potentially result in meat processors being forced to slap an allergy alert o...

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...