News & Politics

Donald Trump and the Republican Party are engaged in "political malpractice on an epic scale," according to one conservative commentator, who torched the president for saddling GOP candidates with his toxic baggage at the worst possible time.

Charlie Sykes is a veteran conservative commentator and journalist, who has emerged in the last decade as a vocal opponent of Trump and his MAGA agenda. He appeared as a guest on the latest episode of the "Fast Politics" podcast with host Molly Jong-Fast, where, among other topics, they discussed Trump's unprecedented decision to force the GOP into holding a midterm convention, a practice traditionally reserved for presidential election years.

As the event approaches, reports have emerged that GOP lawmakers and candidates have grown frustrated with the convention, criticizing it as a waste of valuable resources ahead of a crucial election and for making Trump the center of attention at a time when voters are growing increasingly sick of his leadership. They have also scoffed at the high price tag being demanded for attendance, ranging from $25,000 to $100,000.

Amid reports citing anonymous Republicans venting their frustrations about the convention, RNC officials have begun warning candidates that they risk losing support if they do not attend.

"So this is the reporting today from Politico where the RNC issued a warning," Jong-Fast shared. "If members choose to keep an arm's length from the president, they risk alienating their base, and they risk alienating 15 to 20 percent of key Republican voters not turning out because they don't feel like they're a good supporter of the president's policies. RNC spokeswoman said that."

Sykes, in response, did not mince words about this strategy.

"Well, I mean, this is political malpractice on an epic scale, because normally if you're, you know, a swing-seat Republican, what you're trying to do is make this anything other than a referendum on Donald Trump," he said. "If you make it a referendum on Donald Trump, you are in you're in deep s——. And so what is the message coming from the White House? It's got to be all about me. And next week they're having that midterm convention, that's going to be a s——show for the ages."

He added: "And so at the very moment when Republican candidates would like to be back in their districts or their states where they would like to be, you know, putting a little bit of daylight between themselves and [the president], Donald Trump, again, less than 60 days before the midterm says, 'No, it's all about me because he believes that he's really on the ballot, and and he's making the RNC hammer that message home."

Sen. John Fetterman is facing new scrutiny over his job performance and tendency to break with fellow Democrats, prompting the D.C. insiders at Pod Save America to warn about their worst-case scenario that could result from alienating him too much, giving Republicans a gift that would last decades.

Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, won office in the 2022 midterms as a strident progressive, but since taking office, he has become notable for his tendency to back more right-wing views, especially on support for Israel, an issue that the Democratic base has become increasingly hostile towards. A new report from the Wall Street Journal this week also exposed messages from Fetterman's staff in which he appears resistant to actually doing the job of a senator.

Across the various messages, Fetterman complained about having to meet with representatives from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, suggesting that they simply wanted a free trip to Washington, and complained that he did not care about the vaccine and Medicaid issues they wished to discuss. He was also caught claiming to be sick to get out of a meeting with paralyzed veterans, only to then make an appearance on Fox News instead.

During a special Saturday video, the former Obama administration staffers at Pod Save America decried these revelations as Fetterman shirking his "basic constituent services."

"You're a senator. Your job is to take meetings with your constituents to help them with problems that they have and to be there for them," Jon Favreau, Obama's former chief of speechwriting, said. "You were elected their representative in Washington to represent them. And there's plenty of things you do that are not political in nature or not partisan in nature for your constituents and he's just not doing any of those things."

"Favreau also, however, highlighted the many ways in which Fetterman has remained in line with the Democratic Party, despite the frustrations he has caused them.

"If you look at his voting record, he still votes, like in 2025, he voted with the Democrats a little over 80 percent of the time on genuinely partisan votes," Favreau explained. "The average Senate Democrat is 92 percent, but even that sort of obscures [things], because some of his breaks were, like, many times on the same issue, which was, like, government funding. But he votes with Democrats most of the time. He's voted against 42 of 46 Trump judges, and he's voted for zero Trump appellate judges... He's not voting like a right-wing lunatic. He's voting almost like a maybe moderate sort of center-left Democrat, and yet all his time is spent going on Fox and s——ing on Democrats."

Favreau also warned liberals and Democrats to be cautious about antagonizing Fetterman and potentially pushing him further to consider switching to the Republican Party, which could have disastrous consequences in the event he helps decide an "unbelievably important vote."

"I would just tell people to think about it this way," Fareau added. "We get 51 votes [in the midterms], 51 votes in the Senate, we take control of the Senate and then John Federman switches and then suddenly there's a Supreme Court vacancy and now we don't have the Senate anymore and we get you know [Samuel] Alito or [Clarence] Thomas or someone else replaced by someone who's 30 [years old] that we're going to deal with for 30 years. It's like, do you think that is worth being really tough on John Fetterman right now, when... 2028 comes around, and he's up [for reelection], yes, let's go all in and elect someone else, but in the next couple years we're stuck with him. There're a lot of people that could be impacted by this who are not John Fetterman."

President Donald Trump this week insisted that he does not and has never worn a wig, prompting his one-time biographer to reveal the complicated "hair maintenance" that actually goes into crafting his bizarre appearance.

Trump made the remarks during a Rose Garden address on Wednesday, where he discussed a rally in 2024, which had "the worst weather I think I’ve ever experienced outside of maybe a hurricane we had in Florida one time." This, he claimed, was proof against the popular rumor that his odd signature hairdo is the result of wearing a wig.

“I went up to the speaker, and it was blowing so hard,” Trump said. “You know, for years, I had to suffer with people saying, ‘He wears a wig.' I don’t wear a wig. But that night, they found out I did not wear a wig because if you did, it was not going to be on your head very long."

Michael Wolff is a longtime reporter and author, best known for his extensive coverage of Trump's political career, including several books about his chaotic first term. During the latest episode of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," co-host Joanna Coles pressed Wolff for his take on Trump's wig claims, which he said were technically accurate, but obscured the deeper, weirder truth about the president's "hair maintenance."

"It is only equivocally not a wig, because I know that... he has what are called patches, and they call it the patch kit," Wolff explained. "And the patch kit is little, you know, small tufts of hair that match whatever color his hair might be at the time, and those are applied if needed and if necessary. So the maintenance of this hair is a major enterprise and has been for many years."

He added: "And in my first book, in Fire and Fury, I described Ivanka... she had a kind of amused perspective on her father and she described the way that hair came together, of having to tease it in certain ways and having to pull it in certain ways and having to fluff it in certain ways. And so you kind of created this confection on top, which is it does look like one of those spun sugar things that you could put your hand in and pull it out and start eating it, and it would have no calorific value whatsoever."

When pressed about whether the patches were held on by some sort of glue, Wolff could only say that they are "pretty secure." He also explained why Trump's claims about not wearing a wig reminded him of Richard Nixon's infamous "I am not a crook" claims.

"That's probably a pretty good indication," he added. "If Trump is making a declaratory statement, then the opposite is probably true."

President Donald Trump is staring down an avalanche of bad numbers, per a new report from The i Paper, and it is setting up his party for a "looming election disaster" in the months to come.

"As America enters the closing stages of this year’s midterm election campaign, Republicans are not just on the back foot ahead of their date with destiny on Tuesday, [November 3], they are flat on their backs in the ring – and the referee has already started the count," veteran DC correspondent Simon Marks wrote on Saturday. "The roots of what appears to be impending disaster for America’s Grand Old Party lie in a series of numbers that provide incontrovertible evidence of the damage caused to the Republican brand by President Donald Trump. His name does not appear on any ballot paper this November, but the White House conceded months ago that the force of his personality makes this year’s electoral cycle a de facto referendum on his return to power."

Writing further, Marks argued that the GOP's slim majorities in both the House and Senate are meaningfully at risk in the looming midterm election due to the mounting hatred voters are expressing for Trump's presidency. He added that "on every single issue voters are questioned about," they show growing disapproval of Trump, as well as the Republican lawmakers who have gotten in lockstep with his agenda, laying out several data points that show the looming disaster headed for the party.

"A look at the details underlying Trump’s approval ratings shows that there is not one issue on which he can claim majority support of Americans," Marks explained. "CNN’s most recent survey, conducted in late July, showed the President’s overall approval rating stood at just 34 per cent. But on key individual issues he is in an even worse position. Just 21 per cent of voters said they approved of his handling of fuel prices, which have soared as a direct consequence of his fruitless war on Iran. That same military campaign is opposed by 72 per cent of voters while his handling of inflation scored the backing of just one voter in every four. Even the two strongest suits in Trump’s arsenal among his own supporters – mass deportations and his continuing questioning of US election integrity – are backed by only 39 per cent and 41 per cent of the public respectively."

Beyond those toxic approval numbers, Marks also argued that the GOP's narrow numbers in Congress are also part of the problem. Since 2024, the party has only maintained slim majorities in each chamber: 53-47 in the Senate, and 219-214 in the House, the latter of which has been whittled down by an unusually high rate of departures.

"Trump’s policies have driven a fresh wedge between Republicans and the growing electoral power of black, Hispanic and other minority voters in America," Marks added. "In the 2024 presidential election, Trump secured the support of 46 per cent of Hispanic voters, a number so unprecedented that some political analysts argued they had effectively secured him his second term in office... But new polling shows Democrats now enjoy a 24-point advantage over Republicans in securing Hispanic votes. According to the research by the non-partisan Pew Research Center almost 50 per cent of Hispanic voters interviewed said they would back Democratic Party candidates in November, with just 26 per cent planning to back Republicans... Black voters are also deserting the Republicans in droves. In 2024, Trump secured an historic 15 per cent of the black vote (almost double the 8 per cent support he secured in 2020). Today, that advantage has also been completely erased, with 8 per cent now saying they will back Republicans in the midterms, according to Pew researchers."

Marks noted that fundraising is one of the few statistics where Republicans have the edge over Democrats, though he argued that money can only do so much in the face of overwhelming voter "antipathy" to Trump and the party. Recent reports have also suggested that Trump is hesitant to do anything with his own war chest of fundraising dollars besides buying ads to tout his record, the last thing many Republican candidates want to put attention on.

Panic no more about young voters deserting the Republican Party in droves, said Gov. Ron DeSantis this week. What youth really want isn’t intervention for affordable homes or cheaper college. They want limited government.

During Thursday remarks to the Heartland Institute, DeSantis acknowledged “serious debates” about how support from young people for the Republican Party has bottomed out since 2024, according to Florida Politics reporter A.G. Gancarski. But while DeSantis acknowledged that young people are whining about “a lot of problems, particularly economically, for young people,” like college tuition hikes and debt, he said these were byproducts of government intervention in the free market.

“Whose problem was that? Who created that problem? Did Free Enterprise create that problem? No, government created that problem,” insisted DeSantis. “You want to look at the cost of groceries? You want to look at the cost of living that has gone up since COVID? Was that because of Free Enterprise? No.”

“It was because of the COVID spending, the Biden stimulus, the Federal Reserve,” said DeSantis, referring to a disease that the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic as far back as 2020. “Government created the inflation. Government created the interest rates. Government has made it more difficult for young people to get by. So the idea that the answer is going to be more government, but in a conservative direction, that’s a fool’s errand.”

Topping DeSantis’ kick list, however, was not inflation caused by President Donald Trump’s ongoing trade war with U.S. economic partners and our nearest neighbors. And it most certainly was not because of a unilateral war that Trump declared against the nation of Iran in February, despite no direct attack on the U.S. from that country.

Counter to the Florida governor’s claim, however, are polls revealing young voters very much hold Trump and Republicans responsible for high inflation chipping away at their entry-level job wages, and the cost of filling up their cars for the Monday workday. Youth are also looking to punish the party in power for the high costs of college and high home prices and exorbitant mortgage costs making home-ownership difficult for people under the age of 30.

But DeSantis said there’s no way Republicans are going to compete with Democrats’ advocacy for a health social safety net and lower costs, so don’t even bother.

“There is no way (Republicans are) ever going to be able to outdo a Mamdani in promising government benefits to people. It’s a fool’s errand to do that game,” said Desantis, calling for Republicans to remain “true to the principles that have made this country great.”

“You can’t just recycle policies from 40 or 50 years. You’ve got to adapt. You’ve got to understand what’s going on, but please do not fall for this,” he urged, adding that Democratic socialists “are promising the moon and will fail to deliver.”

President Donald Trump's view of the world has been overcome by "dangerous fantasies," according to a new piece from The i Paper, with his ability to grasp "vital aspects of what’s going on around him" coming into question.

Veteran reporter Fred Kaplan published a new piece for the outlet on Saturday, citing a recent report from The Atlantic which found that Trump "lacks a lot of basic information" and arguing that this overpowering "obliviousness has rarely been more glaring" than amid the recent fiasco surrounding outgoing Army Secretary Dan Driscoll.

"Driscoll had clashed repeatedly with the Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth, especially over Hegseth’s moves to fire or block the promotion of more than 80 senior officers, most for their adoption of 'diversity, equity and inclusion' (DEI) policies, many for their promotion of new ideas (such as recognising the new dominance of drone warfare over, say, tank manoeuvres), at least half because (and pretty much only because) they were black or female," Kaplan wrote.

He continued: "No surprises here. Driscoll – who, like Hegseth, is an Ivy League law school graduate and Army veteran with political ambitions beyond this administration – had been expected to resign for some time. The stunner was that, according to The Atlantic, Trump expressed surprise at Driscoll’s comments. It seems the President – who also serves as the commander-in-chief of the US armed forces – had no idea that Hegseth had dismissed or derailed the careers of so many senior officers or that the Army was now soaked in turmoil as a consequence. (In April, Hegseth also fired the Army’s much-beloved top general and hasn’t nominated a replacement since."

Kaplan argued that this remarkable break with reality might not be terribly surprising for Trump, given his long-established habit of dismissing any report that clashes with his own "prejudices" as "fake news," as well as the steady information diet of "praise and happy-making news" he is fed by his scandal-plagued aide, Natalie Harp.

"This may explain why Trump tells interviewers that many people regard him as the greatest president of all time (if some people do regard him as such, Natalie Harp has tracked down their TikTok posts) or that the war in Iran is going smoothly (some commentators have said so) or that his positive ratings in the polls are historically high (it’s unclear where he might have picked up that myth, as in fact they’re as low as any president’s have been)," Kaplan explained.

He later concluded: "As long as Trump can convince himself that he’s “winning” in Iran, he will champion Hegseth as the agent of those victories. The question is how long even the likes of Trump, so determined to evade bad news, can sustain this delusion – and whether, when the truth starts to burn, he pushes Hegseth under the bus, as he has done to so many other top aides whose loyalty he’d suddenly deemed lacking."

Politicos and pundits all know that the last 60 days following Labor Day is the rubber-to-the-road moment where both political parties must gun their engines to the checkered flag. It would be an ideal time, they say, for President Donald Trump and Republicans to discover the gas pedal is on right.

But that’s just not happening — primarily because American voters are discovering what it costs to gun their own engines on Labor Day weekend.

“Motorists across the U.S. have been warned that this will be the ‘most expensive Labor Day weekend on record’ due to ‘geopolitical tensions’ and ‘disruptions’ to global oil supplies,” reports the Mirror.

Thanks to disrupted traffic in the Strait of Hormuz and Trump’s unilateral attack on Iran, gas prices are forecasted to be on average $4.03 per gallon over the weekend. This is 87 cents higher than 2025, and it surpasses the previous 2012 record high of $3.83 per gallon.

And the timing could not be more godawful for the party and president in charge, especially with Labor Day being the so-called springboard into either triumph or tragedy for Republicans.

“It’s been a challenging year for motorists, with constant ups and downs at the pump that stayed elevated into this final summer holiday, though relief may lie ahead if tensions ease,” Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, said in a statement.

At this point Trump knows what he’s in for, and he likely knows he’s the cause of it. The Mirror reports Trump was feverishly twisting the arms of his oil industry buddies, hoping U.S. refiners and fuel distributors could expand domestic refining capacity and raise energy production to lower gas prices in the final days leading into the midterms.

“I’m just grateful I’m not on the ballot,” former speaker pro-tempore Patrick McHenry told a Saturday morning panel on MS NOW’s “The Arena with Kasie Hunt.” “… The American people are focused on how they’re living, how’s their life and how do they feel about it. And they don’t feel great, and the headwinds are real. There’s a macro concern about AI, … but it’s really about the rising cost of energy.”

Americans are also increasingly pessimistic about the overall economy, according to the Mirror, as the consumer sentiment index, an indicator of how confident Americans are about their own personal finances and the overall U.S. economy, fell 7.6 percent in August.

“Political analysts have warned that voter backlash to Trump's handling of the unpopular war and subsequent rising gas, fuel and food prices, as well as inflation, poses a major threat to the Republican Party ahead of the high-stakes November midterm elections,” the Mirror reports.

President Donald Trump's mail-in voting push would not merely inject chaos and uncertainty into the midterms, one D.C. and former GOP insider warned for MS NOW, it would also fundamentally "destabilize" the future of elections and the constitutional order in the U.S.

Michael Steele previously served as the head of the Republican National Committee from 2009 to 2011, and has since emerged as one of the more outspoken conservative opponents of Trump and his MAGA agenda. He works as a political analyst and occasional guest host for MS NOW, and frequently publishes op-ed columns for the outlet warning of the damage the president is inflicting on the country.

In his latest piece, published Saturday morning, Steele touched on Trump's desperate legal battle to allow his plans to limit mail-in voting ahead of the 2026 midterms via executive order. The order remains gridlocked by rulings from lower courts, though the Supreme Court last month ruled that a specific lawsuit seeking to combat the changes was invalid because it was filed too soon. Now, with his initial plan uncertain, Steele wrote that he has resorted to a "secretive and rushed effort to use the U.S. Postal Service to disrupt mail voting on the eve of the midterms."

"Trump’s proposal to have postal workers determine who may receive a mail ballot would be wrongheaded at any time," Steele explained. "Under the Constitution, voter-roll decisions are made by state and local officials, subject to rules set by Congress. The president has no role in making them. But trying to impose this system after some states have already sent ballots to voters is more than a misguided policy proposal. It would turn routine election administration into chaos, destabilizing the midterms and undermining voter confidence."

Steele argued further that, no matter what any one person thinks about mail-in voting, on a fundamental level, "the Constitution did not place the administration of American elections in the hands of the president." Instead, it explicitly grants state governments the authority to regulate the "Times, Places and Manner," and gives Congress the "power to make or alter those rules."

"That division of authority was deliberate," Steele added. "The framers understood the danger of allowing those in power to set the rules that determine whether they remain there."

Steele concluded his piece with a dire warning about this fight that Trump has undertaken, arguing that it would he massive ramifications for the country's future if he is successful.

"The stakes are more than the future of mail voting. Our very democracy is at risk," he wrote. "Democracy depends on the constitutional architecture that supports fair elections, from the separation of powers to the independence of state and local officials. That is where the present danger becomes larger than Trump."

President Donald Trump’s former attorney Ty Cobb shocked MS NOW’s “the Weekend” panel into silence Saturday morning when he called his former client ‘a rapist” on cable television, before millions of viewers.

Cobb, who worked for Trump in his first administration, has made himself a gadfly in Trump’s second term, trashing the president’s unconstitutional behavior and reprehensible character. And he did not wait to tick down the list of accusations against the president Saturday while discussing the Supreme Court’s recent decision to allow Trump to forge ahead with building a “likely illegal” ballroom.

“I think that people need to recognize that when the founders created the Constitution, they expected that Congress diligently would work to control a president who was either not up to the task or, in this case, evil,” said Cobb. “They didn't really draft the Constitution with the expectation that an informed electorate would elect somebody like Trump, a malignant narcissist, convicted felon, rapist, and somebody who was really out to feather his own nest and pursue all these vanity projects.”

At that point, rattled MS NOW anchor Jonathan Capehart interrupted Cobb’s rant with a heated warning and an anxious expression.

“Well, one, well, one, one thing, one thing, Ty. I just have to stop you because you just — you just called the president a, a, a rapist. And that is a legal thing that he has not been convicted of. So, we just got to be, be clear on that,” Capehart stuttered.

“No, you're absolutely right. No, you're absolutely right. He has not been convicted of it. But the federal judge who oversaw the E. Jean Carroll trial said on the record that he was guilty of rape.”

“No, no, no, no sexual assault,” countered a flustered Capehart.

“No. Actually, Jonathan, you're wrong. I'll send you the site,” Cobb insisted. “But that aside—”

“But Finish your answer,” Capehart urged.

“That aside that the courts are lagging metric in the under the Constitution that we that we have that that they can only react,” Cobb continued. “They can't correct problems before they occur. And they have to wait for things to mature and be brought before them by people who have the right to sue. And we've seen standing issues. We've seen other issues permit these projects to go forward, most recently with the ballroom. They concluded that the national trust for historic preservation did not have the standing necessary to bring that suit. Perhaps others will bring it. But the one litigant that could bring all these cases and prevent what we're seeing is Congress. And Congress is doing nothing because of the cowardice of the Republican leadership. It's tragic. But they have let the country down.”

What may have agitated Capehart is the outrageously litigious nature of Trump, who has sued other news organizations for reporting provable facts. Trump sued BBC over reports that even now threaten to pull his own children to the stand, and could force the president to reveal documents that he is currently fighting to hide from BBC lawyers. Trump has also sued the Wall Street Journal for reporting the news of a sexually suggestive card Trump doodled and gave to convicted sex-trafficker and friend Jeffrey Epstein. Trump even signed the card with his signature, which formed the outline of a woman’s body.

Despite the fact that the card actually existed, Trump did not hesitate to try to take the WSJ to court over it, and was later made a fool by the release of the card with what looks like his signature.

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With the shape of a 6-foot-2 potato, President Donald Trump looks nothing like an athlete, says conservative columnist Maureen Dowd.

“But in legal terms, the president is an Olympic-class sprinter. He breaks the law so fast that the law is left in his orange dust,” she added.

Trump is an outlaw, she said, and the U.S. system was not built for an open outlaw and a felon in the Oval Office.

“He zeros in on loopholes in the law and the system that are based on trust and the assumption that our leaders — and their families — will be not be voracious scam artists,” said Dowd, who then quotes Trump biographer Tim O’Brian saying “The Constitution was built on this idea that the president would have enough decency and morality that they just wouldn’t run around exploiting the gaps. And for Trump, it’s like red meat. … His whole worldview is built around the idea that you exploit systems for personal gain, and there’s nothing wrong with doing that because the world’s populated by sharks and you just have to be the biggest shark.”

But amid the rampage, of Trump’s defiling institutions and “razing our hallowed spaces,” Dowd complained that Chief Justice John Roberts seems “belatedly alarmed” after proclaiming in a Monday dissent that the president’s $300 million taxpayer-funded ballroom can be completed.

Noting that the president was “likely” infringing on Congress, Roberts said, “Today’s decision is no victory for the separation of powers.”

But Trump bulldozed the East Wing and tore up both of Jackie Kennedy’s gardens before Congress or historic preservationists had a chance to weigh in, said Dowd. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called this a “catch me if you can” approach to razing the White House, and Dowd accused the Supreme Court of protecting the “outlandish outlaw by palavering about whether the architectural historian who brought the case has ‘standing’ to do so. Yet shouldn’t any American have standing to challenge Trump’s desecrations?”

“There are so many pathetic scenes of the Supreme Court and Republicans in Congress caving in to Trump — on his war in Iran that he calls ‘small potatoes’ and that JD Vance risibly claims is not a war; on his attempts to disenfranchise voters; on trying to hijack the Postal Service to obstruct those voting by mail; on plotting to sell of a chunk of Yosemite to a private developer; on allowing the killing of endangered wolves and the secret slaughter of wild horses; on trying to slap his name back on the Kennedy Center; on his petty, vindictive renaming of Lake Ontario as ‘Lake America,’ in the midst of the U.S.-Canadian trade war, even though it’s not even named for the Canadian province,” said Dowd, launching into a rant.

Now Trump is forging ahead with his Napoleonic Triumphal Arch, despite the fact that it lacks federal approval and that the gold angel on top might endanger planes flying in and out of Reagan National Airport.

O’Brien thinks the most tragic thing is that the Supreme Court now has a conservative majority “that believes in the unitary executive and is getting roadblocks out of the way to give the president more latitude, at the very moment we get a Caligula who desperately needs roadblocks,” said Dowd. “Roberts gave Trump the runway, and now he’s objecting. But it’s too late.”

“And that’s the lesson of everybody who doesn’t understand who Donald Trump is,” O’Brien said. “He’s simply there to pick your pocket.”

Denials that the Pentagon is not a flaming mess under President Donald Trump are likely premature, reports the Guadian, because that’s not what officials from inside are saying in private.

“While the Pentagon insists that any suggestion the defense department is in disarray under Hegseth is “completely baseless,” alarm over [Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s] conduct in the role – and the implications – has not merely been expressed by Hegseth’s political opponents,” reports the Guardian.

“The secretary of defense is a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States and the world,” said Randy Manner, a retired major general in the US national guard and member of National Security Leaders for America (NSL4A), a group of former military leaders. “He has done more harm to the national security of the United States than any secretary of defense since the country was created.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who is abandoning the U.S. Senate after relentless clashes with Trump, urged the president this week to outright fire his defense secretary.

“I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country,” Tillis wrote on social media. “He is intimidated by competence and retreats to ginning up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of our national defense and the health and wellbeing of our fighting force.”

Last week sources directly inside the White House claimed Trump was catching the consequences of surrounding himself with yes-men and “good news” maidens while Iran beat the president to pieces, according to Daily Mail. Furious to finally see the truth of his failure, Trump whipped into his bootlicks and sidelined at least one, according to sources.

“One is a sledge-hammer and the other is a scalpel,” an anonymous source told Daily Mail, comparing Hegseth to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — who was allegedly crawling over Hegseth’s bloody back to direct Iran War policy.

But retired major general Paul Eaton told the Guardian that even Donald Rumsfeld’s failings paled in comparison to Trump and his “secretary of war.”

“… [T]his is infinitely worse because we had a lot of other very smart people to corral the bad ideas coming out of Rumsfeld. [This time] we’ve had the whole removal of seasoned men and women who have learned things the hard way most of the time in combat,” said Eaton.

Michael O’Hanlon, a defense and strategy expert at the Brookings Institution, similarly, told the Guardian that Trump will not easily survive the peril his department leaders have put him in with their incompetence.

Hegseth, he said, was “not going to wind up leaving a major mark. He’s going to wind up being known as the guy who fought Trump’s culture wars for him – and maybe failed to help Trump stay out of trouble in the Iran war, depending on how bad that gets.”

For years, Fox News and other Republican Party propagandists have suffused airwaves, talk radio and social media, successfully painting Democrats as incompetent or frail on issues. With an endless legion of talking heads barking GOP marketing under the guise of independence, "manhood" or “real America” even centrist voters were more apt to declare themselves “Independent” rather than “Democrat.”

At least until now.

Today, thanks to the doings and policies of President Donald Trump, the share of Americans who associate themselves with the Democratic Party has grown significantly over the past year, the New York Times now reports.

“The latest (Gallup) data shows Democrats with a 10-percentage-point advantage over Republicans when voters are asked which party they identify with and when independent voters are asked which party they lean toward,” reports the Times. “The findings come as President Trump’s approval rating has been below 40 percent for months, and as polls have found that Democrats are competitive across key Senate races in states that went heavily for Mr. Trump in past years.”

According to the Times voters have bounced between parties over the last several years, with Republicans and independents who lean toward the Republican Party holding a reliable advantage over Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents as recently as 2024. The current Democratic edge, however, is now “far wider than recent Republican leads” and similar to the one the party held in 2020, when Biden won the presidency and the party claimed the House and the Senate.

Democrats — long the punching bag in on-the-street political conversations — appear to have Trump and his economy to thank for the current surge in voters fleeing to their ranks.

“What we are seeing now is similar to the end of the George W. Bush administration, when he was pretty unpopular,” said Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup. “Democrats had a big lead in party identification, which was then a prelude to the 2006 and 2008 elections, which were big victories for Democrats.”

Probably most despairing of all for Republicans is the fact that data from Pew Research Center shows that this growth for Democrats is largely driven by groups that had previously supported Trump. This includes Hispanic voters, young men and young women.

“In 2024, young voters had a one-percentage-point Republican lean — the only time that group has favored Republicans this decade,” reports the Times, adding that this year the Democratic advantage among the same group is a whopping 16 percentage points, compared. This is a huge shift from roughly two years ago when editors marveled that disaffected youth were “going MAGA” or conservative for the first time since the Reagan generation.

Among Hispanic voters, the Democratic edge has increased by nine percentage points over the same period.

Even worse for the Republican Party, this quarter’s share of self-proclaimed Democrats is similar to the final quarter of the 2018 midterm cycle, when nearly 49 percent of Americans identified as Democrats. It was that year, the Democratic Party gained more than 40 seats in the House, said the Times.

Former Democratic strategist and permanent White House gadfly James Carville exploded during his Friday Politicon podcast, telling discouraged voters not to doubt the reckoning headed for President Donald Trump after the November elections deliver one or both chambers of Congress to Democrats.

Carville’s comments came after the show’s audience asked what could possibly change after midterm elections, especially considering Trump “declares war without Congressional approval, builds a ballroom without approval, issues tariffs without approval and appoints cronies without approval.”

“Why won’t it just be more of the same with a Democratic Congress,” the caller demanded.

“Because when you have the authority and the intervention of an election it makes it very difficult to [be a tyrant],” Carville said, visibly grinning over Democrats’ glowing prospects suggested by polls. “And the Republican Party — or at least some of them — are going to want to get on with this. They’re going to want to get on with 2028. They’re gonna want to fight bathroom legislation and track athlete [nonsense] and all of the stuff that they prioritize and they’re going to figure out that [Trump] is not in their interest anymore.”

“Trump is an 81-year-old fat old man,” added Carville, who is no youth himself. “I’m not a doctor … but you can’t tell me that man doesn’t have a coronary artery disease or something else. Republicans are gonna say ‘(CENSORED) this guy. He’s not a part of where we’re going as a party or anything else.’ And they’re going to change. … We’ll talk about him on the Wednesday after the election, but the whole world is going to change in early November. It’s just gonna change.”

And Carville had absolutely no doubt about which direction the midterms would go. His glee suggested he was practically picking out paperweights and knick-knacks for incoming Democrats’ congressional desks.

“Trump thinks he’s divine,” said Carville, referencing memes the president has circulated depicting him as “Trump-Jesus.” But he added that “the only people who think Trump is more divine than Trump himself are the Democrats,” who view him as a blessing.

“He’s going to get the living (CENSORED) kicked out of him and it is going to change everything,” Carville growled dangerously. “It’s going to change the whole room temperature. It’s going to change the way people look at him, the way people look at the United States, the way we feel about ourselves. It is coming … and it’s headed right for his jaw.”

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The New York Times reports the Pentagon hit roughly 50 members of the Joint Staff with polygraph tests in an aggressive war on potential leakers.

“U.S. government investigators have taken the extraordinary step of subjecting … members of the U.S. military’s Joint Staff to polygraph tests over leaks to journalists, including about how the Iran war has created a shortage of crucial munitions, according to officials briefed on the move,” the Times reports, with investigators asking military officers and civilian employees on if they had ever disclosed classified information to members of the press, and about whether they provided information about diminished U.S. munitions stocks.

According to the Times, the polygraph tests were conducted in August “after a flurry of news reports detailed diminished stocks of crucial munitions, including of long-range missiles and Patriot interceptors.”

Trump himself was reportedly caught off guard by news of the devastated munitions, likely because his staff and lieutenants feed him nothing but good news concerning his unilateral war. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth allegedly found himself sidelined after proving himself a useless ‘yes-man’ incapable of delivering more than happy fluff about the U.S. conflict.

“Hegseth, among others in the president's orbit, 'tells Trump what he wants to hear,'” the Daily Mail recently reported, citing an insider, who echoed “concerns about Trump's 'yes-men' military advisors shared by Republicans on Capitol Hill.”

The elevation of Trump’s new “golden boy” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent over Hegseth in military matters followed an explosion at a Camp David retreat earlier this month after Trump became furious that all the good news he was getting from flunkies did not live up to the reality of the war. Most notably, the U.S. military's shortage of critical defense munitions, which Trump had been convinced “had been fixed.”

'The environment changed,' a Trump insider said, describing a realization inside the administration that Trump simply “can't bludgeon [Iran] anymore.”

“In a statement, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told the Times that the department “does not comment on internal personnel or investigative matters but takes all leaks of classified national security information extremely seriously and investigates accordingly.”

Professor and former United States Secretary of Labor Robert Reich worked himself into a frenzy Friday evening, worrying that President Donald Trump is too mentally muddled to be making international economic decisions without meticulous guidance.

Speaking with MS NOW anchor Jonathan Capehart, Reich fretted that Trump’s recent decisions in escalating a trade war with U.S. long-time economic ally Canada suggested something was clicking correctly in his head anymore.

“He doesn't understand [trade] at all,” Reich raged, referencing the extreme backlash the U.S. is facing due to Trump’s tariff war. “I'm afraid he's an economic illiterate. Even somebody who has taken one week of economics, even somebody who has not taken economics, who has just simply observed the world, understands that trade is, generally speaking, a good thing. There's something called comparative advantage. We get the benefits of Canada’s forests, Canada's aluminum, Canada's this, Canada’s that. And they get the benefits of what we specialize in.”

Reich added that it was “really terrifying” to see Trump go off on "crazy statements," like a recent one he posted to Truth Social, pressuring federal agencies to “LOWER THE [interest] RATE OR I’LL STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT.”

“One wonders whether he is losing it or he never had it or he's going to actually make policy based upon these crazy notions, or is anybody advising him at all,” demanded Reich. “I mean, what is Scott Bessent doing as secretary of the treasury, who's job is to at least confer with the president and give the president some economic background. It just worries me, those kinds of crazy things. And of course, what's the American public supposed to take away from this?”

Additionally, Reich feared Trump's corruption will leave a long-lasting stain that will destroy trust in the American economy for years, possibly decades.

“The administration is drenched in a kind of corruption in which big companies are constantly pouring money in places where Donald Trump says they should, including Trump's own family,” Reich said, momentarily losing his words in his frustration “… [A]n economy depends on certain expectations being met by producers, by consumers. Everybody needs to know what the rules are, and everybody needs to know that the rules are going to be pretty stable in the future. And the real underlying problem for the American economy … is that nobody knows what's going to happen next week or next month, or what is simply the rules. It's an arbitrary system that Trump has created, and that arbitrariness is undermining the integrity of the entire economy.”

He added, however, that voters will ‘be judging” Trump on his economy as the mid-terms roll up in November. “The public is not stupid. You can't tell them that they're doing better than they think they're doing.”

It was quick, but here it is. The New York Times reports The Tetris Company, which owns the rights to the classic video game, denounced a Trump administration produced Tetris clone that has the player blocking people from crossing the U.S.-Mexican border.

“Build the Wall, the White House version of Tetris, urges the player to ‘protect the border from the incoming horde,’ which is rhetoric that President Trump and members of his administration often use about immigrants,” according to the Times.

“The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall,’” the company said in a statement, adding that “at Tetris we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them. To our fans everywhere: we love you, we see you, and we’re grateful to have you in our community.”

With a dark warning, the Tetris Company added: “P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously.”

The White House rolled out the website Thursday featuring classic arcade-style games with a MAGA twist with remakes of 8-bit favorites, including Flappy Bird, Snake, Duck Hunt and other classics originals. The MAGA version of Snake, for example, features alleged cash-grabber Border Czar Tom Homan leading a line of brown people in orange jumpsuits while he chases other “illegal immigrants” around on a grid.

“In another game, reminiscent of Duck Hunt, the user employs a net to catch gold bars and money, illustrative of putting money into a Trump Account,” reports Fox. “The Washington Monument is depicted in the background of that game.”

"The President continues to rack up victory after victory on behalf of the American public, while opponents of his agenda are defending their record of raising taxes and empowering criminal illegal aliens," an official told Fox News Digital. "This is an effort to further contrast between a culture of fun and winning and the dark socialist vision Democrats have for America."

The Times added that this was only the latest incident in which an owner of a creative work objected to the Trump administration’s use of it.

“A long list of musicians have denounced Mr. Trump using their music at his rallies, and some have taken legal action to protect their copyrighted material,” wrote the Times, adding that in November, musician Olivia Rodrigo, who is Filipino American, condemned the use of her music in a post by the Department of Homeland Security promoting the administration’s mass deportation effort.

The Times reports the Trump administration has labored to sidle up to the gaming community, particularly young men who voted for Trump in 2024.

But good luck with that, said critics, as polls and interviews reveal that same voting group to have largely dumped Trump in the nearly two years since he returned to the White House, mostly due to the failure of his economic policies and his ongoing war in Iran, among other things.

“This is why prices are soaring and Iran defeated us -- we have morons playing games instead of governing. Stupid is as stupid does,” complained one critic on X.

AllRise New reporter Adam Klasfeld reports Judge Indira Talwani blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order ‘experiment’ that could result in valid ballots being tossed.

“[T]he court finds [...] that immediate implementation of the Final Rule issued less than seventy days before the November 2026 election threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail,” said Talwani in her order blocking Trump's EO.

Her bigger argument, according to Klasfeld, is that the Constitution simply “does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.”

“Broadly, the Constitution vests the President with “executive Power” and commands him to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed[.]’ The President ‘plays no direct role in the process’ of appointing electors, ‘nor does he have authority to control the state officials who do,’” she wrote.

The judge added that the Supreme Court has observed, that “the President’s power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker.”

Thus ends the deliberation that began on Thursday to decide whether to extend an earlier injunction indefinitely. Talwani last week blocked the Postal Service from implementing the plan for 14 days, a period that would have expired Sept. 10.

Prior to her Friday decision, Talwani had asked heated questions of Justice Department attorneys and a coalition of Republican states regarding how they believed they could implement the new rule on the eve of early voting across many states. Even then, her questions highlighted concerns raised by a broad coalition of nonprofits and Democratic states that Trump’s Postal Service could chaotically reject thousands of valid ballots if allowed to plow ahead with Trump’s new rule.

Former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland Ty Cobb was a member of President Donald Trump’s first administration legal team, so he feels he speaks with some familiarity when describing his old employer.

This does not mean his familiarity is in any way flattering, however. While speaking with news journalist and podcaster Jim Acosta on Friday, Cobb actually had plenty to say about Trump’s character. He also had much to say about how badly that character is abusing a U.S. government system that was never designed to deal with an overtly corrupt cad.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts recently sided with progressives on the court in calling what Trump was trying to do with building a ballroom “probably illegal.” But even though Cobb mostly agreed that the National Trust for Historic Preservation did not have standing in trying to prevent Trump from building his controversial ballroom and charging taxpayers for the construction, he could see why Roberts probably was concerned about what's happening to the rule of law and the “level of corruption that we see in the White House.”

“The chief justice's opinion was is basically … a line in the sand,” said Cobb of the decision that ultimately allowed Trump to move forward with building the ballroom while ducking rules for funding and approving it. “He could have easily kept his powder dry, but he basically made it clear this was lawless. Keep in mind this is the chief justice who wrote the tariffs opinion. He wrote the birthright citizenship opinion. He wrote the opinion protecting the Federal Reserve. And he wrote this opinion. I mean, he's made it very plain that … he perceives Trump as the existential threat that he is.”

But at the same time, Cobb said Roberts was obligated to apply the Constitution, which clearly does provide Article II powers to the White House that are extraordinary.

“They were intended to be extraordinary because the presidency was intended to be occupied by extraordinary people,” Cobb added. “The George Washington's, the FDR's, the Teddy Roosevelt's, the Obama's.”

“Not a scumbag,” interjected Acosta.

“Yeah. I mean, not somebody who was just purely evil and out for himself,” Cobb said in agreement. But he added that the court would not have it’s hands so full if the Republican-run Congress was not beholden to party over country.

“We have a Congress that has been neutered by its cowardice,” said Cobb. “You've got Little Mikey Johnson (Speaker Mike Johnson) who shut down Congress for two months merely to avoid a vote on the release of the Epstein files in connection with the last piece of Epstein legislation. … So, the fact that Congress exists only to facilitate Trump's whims at this stage the game is not something that the founders could have ever anticipated. And they also never anticipated that the presidency would be occupied by somebody as evil as Trump, somebody who is a functional crime boss.”

Cobb added that the U.S. is now “tied with Columbia” in the percentage of people who suspect the federal government is corrupt, at 90 percent.

Economist Justin Wolfers said the U.S. economy created 162,000 jobs in August, more than most economists expected, but President Donald Trump managed to lock out the jobs he most campaigned on creating.

“This is an administration that talks about big boofy blokes in hard hats and steel-toed boots. Manufacturing coming home. The 1960s, all over again. That rhetoric is the entire justification for the tariffs,” reports Wolfers on his substack. “That, to be brief, has not happened.”

Since January 2025, the U.S. economy has created nearly a million jobs in health care and social assistance, which already compares unfavorably to job creation under former president Biden. But the even worse news, said Wolfers, is that the rest of the Trump economy has actually shed jobs.

In fact, it looks like the only thing that kept Trump’s numbers from looking even worse was the fact that the U.S. is an aging nation whose population is in need of more health care.

“This is a services economy shifting further toward services, and it’s been doing that for decades regardless of who’s in the White House or what they say about factories,” said Wolfers. “I don’t want to downplay these numbers: August was a reasonably good month for the non-health-care economy, with growth spread fairly widely. That’s a true improvement on the rest of the Trump term. But one month doesn’t rewrite eighteen.”

And almost all of it went to women, Wolfers added, with only a paltry 7 percent of jobs created in the second Trump term going to men.

“Ninety-three percent have gone to women. Over roughly a year and a half, that’s on the order of 60,000 jobs for men against 747,000 for women,” said Wolfers, admitting that he was “surprised” by that number, considering Trump’s lopsided support among men over women.

And despite that fawning support from the hyper-male world of MAGA, Wolfers said “We may be on the cusp of a male jobs recession,” under Trump.

“If your net job growth is almost entirely in health care and social assistance — well, those sectors employ women in large majorities. As a result, nearly all your net job growth goes to women. The composition of the jobs determines the composition of the workers,” Wolfers said.

And still, despite the good numbers among women, real wages are still falling, with prices far outpacing paycheck wages.

“That’s why it’s harder to put food on the table. That’s why an economy with 4.1 percent unemployment and six straight months of job growth can still feel like it’s squeezing you. A job is not the same thing as a raise,” Wolfers said.