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....