inflation

Insider unveils behind-the-scene truth of GOP’s private polling problem

Just as Republicans felt they'd reached the bottom, they're rapidly facing a worse midterm environment than even they expected, insiders revealed. Even they may be underestimating how serious the threat has become.

In his DailyMail column, Beltway commentator Mark Halperin recalled an investment banker friend who once told him that sometimes it really is appropriate to panic in a situation. Republicans have reached that level.

With Trump's typical brand of weird, Halperin described it as a kind of "rancid stew for the president's party." However, Republicans are still trying to play into the strong narrative with "the party's muscular TV ads, press releases and social media posts, almost all of which project the confidence of the man who leads them."

"Too bad for them, bravado is no match for reality," Halperin added.

The GOP’s public messaging remains confident. Trump-aligned candidates, party officials and White House representatives point to strong fundraising, campaign spending, voter-contact operations and Democratic weaknesses. They also note that Republican candidates remain competitive in several blue or swing-state races, including contests in Maine, New Hampshire, Michigan and Minnesota.

But behind closed doors, Halperin said he's hearing something different. One bombshell came from Iowa conservative radio host Steve Deace, who warned that GOP House candidates are being told by their own pollsters that candidates Trump carried by 15 points are now within the margin of error. Republicans who are in 10+ Trump districts are likely losing.

He cautioned that the midterm climate might become even worse for Republicans than it was in 2006, when President George W. Bush’s party lost control of both the House and Senate.

The problems are obvious: gas prices, the Iran war, tariffs driving up prices, fears about AI and data centers, White House corruption and an ever-increasing unease with Trump’s behavior and leadership on those issues. That environment has created conditions where macho TV ads and confidence may not be enough.

Halperin cited the Kansas Senate race, where a Democrat hasn't won the seat since 1932. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) thought he would walk away with another win until Democratic pastor Adam Hamilton came along. Marshall wasn't prepared, and it showed in his public appearances.

The Cook Political Report reportedly moved the Senate race there from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican." It doesn't mean the Democrat will win, but it does mean that even in deep-red Kansas, furious voters want more from their lawmakers than Marshall is currently willing or able to provide.

As Kansas hasn't elected a Democratic Senator since 1932, it's worth looking back at what was happening then and comparing it to today, Halperin said. Then, Herbert Hoover was president. His tariff policies became associated with the economic collapse of the Great Depression. Trump knows it well enough to say openly that he wants to avoid being compared to the former president.

"I have one primary wish as president, in terms of people: I never want to be the late, great Herbert Hoover," Halperin recalled Trump telling Axios reporter Marc Caputo during a show in June.

The most telling, the report explained, is that Republican candidates are beginning to distance themselves from Trump on his key issues, such as immigration, which has historically been one of his strongest. Marshall’s call for ICE to coordinate with local law enforcement is one example of a Republican softening or separating from the Trump train.

Ultimately, Halperin closed, "While public polls are horrendous for Republicans, the private ones are worse." He noted that over the past few weeks, as he's written about the possible Democratic wins, not one GOP strategist has reached out to quibble with his statements. Evidently, they've not been that quiet previously.

If voters show up at the polls, he said a "Blue tsunami" could be real.

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The biggest lie about America’s economic crisis is hiding in your paycheck

The “affordability crisis” that Democrats are running on and Trump calls a “scam” is almost always framed as being about prices being too high. But that’s only half of the equation, and the other half — income being too low — is almost never discussed outside of Bernie Sanders’ circles. There’s an insidious reason for that, which I’ll lay out in just a moment.

Politicians promise to “bring prices down” as if prices exist in some sort of economic or political vacuum. But prices are set in dollars, and the true definition of inflation isn’t that prices go up (that’s a consequence of inflation) but that the value of the dollar goes down.

Inflation, in other words, doesn’t quantify the rising cost of living so much as it measures the declining purchasing power of the dollar. And inflation never reverses (except in true depressions). As the CEO of McDonalds said just this week:

“One of the things I’ve talked to our team about is we need to stop talking about that being a difficult environment, and just say that is the environment. Because I think, as we look out forward, we’re not expecting things to change.”

For example, in 1957 my dad bought the Lansing, Michigan house I grew up in for $13,000. Today it’s worth, according to Zillow, $140,400, about ten times as much. But it’s not that the price of our house went up; the value of the dollar has gone down by about a factor of ten in the intervening ~70 years.

In 1957, for example, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ average retail food price tables for that year, a dozen eggs ran about 56 cents, a pound of hamburger was 46 cents, and a loaf of white bread cost 19 cents. Today, going by the most recent BLS average price data (June), eggs averaged $2.14 per dozen, ground beef was $6.83 per pound, and a loaf of bread comes in at $1.85.

This basket of three groceries that cost $1.21 when Dad bought that house now costs $10.80, just about ten times the 1957 price.

In other words, the purchasing power of a dollar in 1957 was about the same as ten dollars today.

But that’s only half of the equation.

My dad worked in a tool-and-die shop in Lansing and on that one single union paycheck was able to buy that house, a new car every three years, take a vacation every summer, put his four sons through school, and have a nice pension and cushion for retirement. That was the historic definition of being in the middle class.

Two-thirds of us were in that middle class when Reagan took office in 1981 and declared the Republican War on Working People, and as a result of his efforts it today takes two full-time jobs to hit that goal and only around 40% of us can pull it off.

The problem today, in other words, isn’t that prices have gone up too far, but that wages haven’t kept up with them. And for that, you can thank Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, and the GOP.

Just 199 days into his presidency, Reagan fired the nation’s air traffic controllers and decertified their union, kicking off the GOP’s War on Workers. Almost two-thirds of all workers in America back then had the wages and benefits of a union job (because a third of us were unionized, and that set the local wage and benefits floor for another third of us).

And the minimum wage when Reagan came into office was $3.35 an hour or $12.58 in today’s dollars.

In the 45 years we’ve been living in the Reagan Revolution, union density has collapsed to around 6 percent of the private workforce, taking those good wages and benefits with it, while the minimum wage has been frozen by Republicans in Congress at $7.25 an hour (purchasing power of $1.96 in 1981 dollars) for the past seventeen years.

As a result, working class Americans are getting wiped out. As I noted in Who Stole the American Dream?:

“When my Boomer generation was the same average age as Millennials are today, back in 1990, we held 21.3 percent of the nation’s wealth. Louise and I shared in that wealth: although we were still in our 30s, in 1990 we owned a profitable small business—our fourth—and a nice home. …
“Millennials today, by contrast, are roughly the same number of people as Boomers were in 1990 but hold only 4.6 percent of the nation’s wealth. If they’re the same age I was in 1990, they’re most likely struggling to own a home, are deeply in debt, and find it nearly impossible to start a small business.”

And just this summer the Federal Reserve found that about half (49%) of all adults under the age of 30 still live with their parents.

Meanwhile, the Rand Corporation did the math and found that the result of the destruction of our unions and freezing of our minimum wage, combined with massive tax cuts for billionaires from Reagan, Bush, and Trump, have transferred a mind-boggling $79 trillion from the middle class into the money bins of the morbidly rich since the Reagan era.

Republicans and their billionaire owners, in other words, robbed working people for 45 years and are continuing to do so today. And rather than letting you know that they’ve been suppressing wages and benefits all these years, they want you to think that there’s some mysterious “inflation” force of nature that’s responsible for your difficulties.

The math is irrefutable, as MSNBC’s Steve Rattner points out. When a worker produced $100 worth of value for their employer when Reagan came into office, that worker got paid about $65 of that as pay and benefits. Today, the same worker producing the same value for their employer gets about $52.

The remaining $13 goes straight into the pockets of shareholders (driving up the stock market) and CEOs (so they can buy new yachts, million-dollar weddings, and Swiss chalets), and this has been going on pretty much every year since Republicans began this scam.

This is why it seems like it’s all about prices; because of the GOP War on Working People, folks don’t have the income to meet today’s costs of living. Which is why Drudge led his newsletter yesterday with the following headlines at the very top:

10-year yield leaps to 19-year high...
Mortgage rates surge above 7%...
MCDONALD’S CEO: HIGH INFLATION HERE TO STAY...
Big Beautiful Bill Starting to Bite...

While it’s true that “the rent’s too damn high,” the solution isn’t to lower prices. That’s not going to happen (outside of anomalies caused by changes in tariffs, bird flu, the Iran war, and Trump’s trade wars) because we’ve been experiencing actual inflation: the deterioration of the value of the dollar, now running at about 3% a year.

Instead, we should be talking about how to get wages back up to where they should be:

— The minimum wage peaked in buying power in 1968 at the crest of America’s middle class prosperity: it was $1.60 an hour, the equivalent of $15.70 today. We should at least double today’s federal $7.25 minimum wage as soon as possible.

— Similarly, unions are both democracy in the workplace — a desirable situation in a nation that claims to value democracy — and give workers the bargaining power to demand a fair share of the value they’re producing for their employers.

We should be doing everything we can to make it easier to form and join a union. Instead, we’re subsidizing billionaire anti-union employers.

For example, in Nevada, 48.4% of Amazon workers and 29.3% of Walmart workers were enrolled in Medicaid (free healthcare for low-income people) in 2024. Other states have similar statistics, although the numbers are highly regional because Democratic-controlled states tend to have far higher minimum wages than Republican-controlled ones.

Nationally, a new 2026 GAO report found that virulently anti-union employers with morbidly rich CEOs — including Walmart, Amazon, Dollar General, McDonald’s, Dollar Tree, Target, and Home Depot — had huge numbers of workers receiving Medicaid or SNAP, with literally millions of them working full time but still earning so little that they qualify for these welfare subsidies paid for with your and my tax dollars (the billionaires, by and large, aren’t paying income taxes above 4%).

Research from the UC Berkeley Labor Center found that 27.8% of nonunion workers’ families rely on SNAP, the EITC, or TANF. These are direct, taxpayer-funded subsidies for the billionaires who own and run these companies and refuse to pay an honest wage for honest work.

Our national corporate media, of course, would rather not discuss any of these simple realities for two very basic reasons:

1. If they acknowledged this echo of the Reagan Revolution, they’d have to pay their own workers more or seem like hypocrites.

2. They don’t want to “seem partisan” by calling out the GOP’s 45-year campaign to rip $79 trillion away from working families to give to the oligarchs who, in many cases, own these very same media properties.

So, it’s up to us. While it’s okay to talk about affordability and inflation, let’s always be sure to point out that the real problem is that working people are being ripped off by their employers and we need to raise wages and union density nationwide.

And that’s something that politicians can change — and progressive Democrats (and Dwight Eisenhower) did during the years from 1933 to 1981 — with government policies. With our support, they can do it again.

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Nine foreign officials reveal why they’ll never trust US leadership again

I spent much of this week talking with foreign officials who are in the U.S. for United Nations meetings. I was curious to know how they’re strategizing about the United States in the future — assuming Democrats do well in the midterm elections and Trump becomes a lame-duck president.

(None of my nine sources were heads of state; my stature doesn’t reach that high. But they were high enough to give me some useful insights.)

Here’s what I learned:

1. Most are thinking past Trump. They believe his influence is already waning, and his bellicose rantings show that he knows it. He’s still dangerous, they say, but not nearly as dangerous as he was, and he’s no longer capable of plunging the world into war. Every one of them told me he’s deeply unpopular in their countries.

2. They’re thinking in a timeframe of five to 10 years. They see Trump as a temporary phenomenon and assume the United States will “return to its senses.”

3. But — and here’s the part that concerned me — they’re unsure they can ever again rely on the United States for world leadership. Several pointed out that the fact Americans elected Trump for a second time reveals, in the words of one of them, “there’s something troublesome about your nation that transcends Trump.”

4. Even post-Trump, they see the United States as unstable and unpredictable. They don’t believe the country will fall into civil war, but they worry that policymaking will cycle between extremes because, in the words of another, “your extreme inequality will make it difficult to achieve any longer-term consensus.”

5. As a result, they’re looking ahead to a world where another nation, or group of nations, will take leadership on global issues that need to be addressed, such as climate change, AI, migration, widening inequalities, Putin’s aggression, and disease prevention.

6. Which nation or group? Another official put it to me this way: “We don’t trust China, the U.N. doesn’t work because of its security council, but the EU isn’t strong enough yet. Several of us are hoping that over the next decade the EU will be joined by Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, and that this new EU — really, a World Union — will devise a structure that enables it to work collaboratively and forcefully for the good of the world.”

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

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Right wing media fears Trump-backed Paxton can’t 'string a sentence together'

A morning discussion on CNN began about once-loyal podcasters abandoning President Donald Trump in the new era of his presidency. It comes at an interesting time after Trump tried to remove several members of the press from the White House. Now, conservative outlets don't want to talk much about him either.

CNN played a supercut of podcasters telling Trump he's "lost touch" with the people and even Megyn Kelly begging Trump to "behave like a normal human."

"I mean, the president 3D chess — shut up!" she yelled into the microphone in April.

A Wall Street Journal report analyzed 70,000 hours of podcasts and found that mentions of Trump have slowed since summer of 2025, but much more after the start of the Iran war.

CNN contributor Lulu Garcia-Navarro said that everyone knew this day was coming and that there would come a point in which Trump no longer mattered. She explained that, unlike broadcast and cable television, a podcast stream on platforms has a direct connection to the audience because it shows when they start to click away.

"You can see when your numbers go down," she explained. "And I will tell you that generally speaking, and this is anecdotal, but people are less interested in talking about the president, if only to say, can't he shut up."

The Washington Examiner's executive editor and podcast host Bob Cusack said that it's clear Trump is losing his own audience.

Noel King, co-host of the podcast "Today, Explained," added, "I have a theory about this. As a podcaster, I will speak also anecdotally. People are less interested in President Trump, and I'll tell you why: He is incoherent. He does not make any sense. He seems completely out of touch. And if you don't have anything to talk about other than, like, this 80-year-old man is speaking nonsense, your audience is going to be like, okay, whatever."

One reason podcasters are turning to speak with Texas senatorial candidate James Talarico is that he's "interesting."

"In these podcasts you need — I mean, not in the news — I do something different, but these guys need a hero or a villain. Talarico is good on both, depending on how you feel about him or what you," King continued. She meant that to the left he's a hero and to the right he might be a villain, but both sides have an opinion and want to talk about him or hear about him. That's not the case for others, like Trump.

"I think also Texas is interesting. I think people feel like there's a narrative there," Garcia-Navarro said. "Will Texas flip? You know, who is this character that's come on to the scene? What does this mean for us? You know, he's a Christian that feeds into our audience. He's a person that we can legitimately talk about in a way that doesn't seem damaging to, you know, the psyche or the moral beliefs of the people who might follow."

She added that on the other side, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton is "boring as anything ... Ken Paxton has not sat down for an interview at all this cycle. And I will tell you that even people who were wanting to book him are like, can he string a sentence together for more than a few minutes?"

- YouTube youtu.be

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Ex-MAGA lawmaker fumes at Trump voter who knows he lies — and doesn't care

A former Republican lawmaker who once backed Trump fumed in an X post on Thursday about a current President Donald Trump supporter who — despite knowing that the president frequently lies — will continue supporting him despite the fabrications.

"A Trump voter just told me - 'I know Trump lies to me all the time, and I don’t care. As long as I get tax cuts, right wing judges, and mass deportations, he can lie to me all he wants,'" former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) posted. "I give you examples every week of Trump voters who’ve seen the light and finally turned on Trump. They’re the exception. The vast majority will never turn against Trump. Like that guy,."

Walsh then included an emoticon of a finger pointing upward.

"He’s unreachable," Walsh concluded.

This is not the first time that Walsh has called out Trump supporters for sticking by him no matter what he does. In February he explicitly compared them to a cult for continuing to back the president even after it became clear he was going to break his promise to keep America out of wars in order to invade Iran.

“I thought you wanted him to end wars all over the world,” Walsh wrote on his blog. “You said you wanted him to end American entanglement in conflicts and wars around the world. America shouldn’t be involved in these wars, you said. That’s why you’re voting for Trump, you said.”

He then pointed out how Trump has clearly broken that promise when it comes to Iran.

The Illinoisan continued, “And you don’t like when people call you a cult, Trump voters? What else are people to think when you voted for Trump to get us the hell out of wars around the world, and instead he gets us involved in wars around the world and starts new wars, and you still sing his praises and support him? What are we to think, MAGA, but that you are a cult?”

The erstwhile lawmaker concluded, “You’ve got no argument against people calling you a cult. And if he takes us to war against Iran, and you clap and applaud and throw him flowers, Trump supporters, I will be at the front of the parade calling you a cult.”

In August Dr. Steven Hassan, cult expert and author of "Combating Cult Mind Control" and "The Cult of Trump," told AlterNet that Trump supporters engage in cult-like behavior because of the news environments they choose to enter.

"Going back to your initial question about how people are voting against their self-interest — it really comes down to what information sources they're relying on and who their network is that they identify with," Hassan told AlterNet. "So if they really love Joe Rogan, they're going to follow a lot of his views. And consequently, when he turns against Trump, Trump loses a lot of followers. What I'm trying to convey is that we're living in an age of digital manipulation that's never been seen before, with people's personal data being used to silo information — to drive them further left if they're already progressive-leaning, or further right if they're already Republican or conservative-leaning. And it's quite strategic in its use of algorithms."

He went on, "So it's not simply about looking at personality type, Matthew — the disposition of a person who becomes a Trump follower — but the social and information environment people are being subjected to."

Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist and professor of cognitive science at the University of Bristol, told AlterNet in August that people also gravitate toward Trump because he validates their prejudices.

"If you sort of give an instrument to people that measures their racism and misogyny, well, it tells you about who they're gonna vote for and all that kind of stuff pretty well," Lewandowsky told AlterNet.

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'She doesn’t care': Trump biographer lays bare Melania’s latest 'sham'

One of President Donald Trump's biographers has been in his own legal conflict with Melania Trump, but on Thursday night, Michael Wolff and Joanna Coles couldn't help but notice the first lady's week of flops.

Speaking on the Daily Beast podcast, the two began with Mrs. Trump's appearance on Fox Business, where the hosts fawned over how excited they were to be in her presence.

"Madam First Lady, thank you so much for being here. We're beaming and in your presence. We just cannot thank you enough for joining us," one of the co-hosts said.

"Oh my god! I mean, I don't think they knew what to say," said Wolff. "It's like. I mean, they obviously this was set up. Obviously they were assigned to do this. Obviously. They were stuck. I mean, this is their job. And they had to, they had to make the most of this."

Coles said that the hosts seemed bewildered at the idea that Melania Trump, was there when she's "barely been visible" over the past two years of the administration. She noted that the Daily Beast has audited the number of public events of first ladies over the century and that Mrs. Trump is by far doing the least among them.

"And we know that she's made a third fewer appearances than certainly than Michelle Obama. And she's the least visible First Lady of the entire century," Coles said.

Wolff mocked that Fox said, "You do so much. We can't believe how hard you work." He said it was "staggering" to say, given how far from reality it is.

Coles noted how unusual it is that Mrs. Trump is never seen with female friends. Her last known female friend was Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, whom the administration trashed after the work she did during the first inauguration. Winston Wolkoff ran the Met Gala for Vogue for a decade, but Mrs. Trump "dragged her name."

"So, that was Melania's last known friend, I think, and it's impossible to think of her with female friends," Coles said.

The two moved to discuss Mrs. Trump's new initiative, which is supposed to be the "Davos for women," which she is calling "Imperia." It is also a province in Italy. Davos is a resort town in Switzerland.

"You don't have to learn this because we will never hear from it again," Wolff assured. "I mean, this is as much a sham as her marriage is."

"But it's not a DEI thing," Coles said. "Definitely not DEI."

"Oh! No, they went out of their way. This is not DEI," said Wolff.

"But what are they talking about?" Wolff asked. "But it was literally everybody there saying, 'Please God, take me.' Why am I here?"

They then moved on to mock her outfits, saying that at one point Mrs. Trump appeared to be cosplaying as the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

"I think she's trying to make herself look serious," Coles said. "Anyway, watch this space for more developments of Melania frantically networks."

"There is really — it's not even frantic," Wolff said. "She'll do this. She got — she got her clip. She'll go away. We'll never hear from this again. She doesn't care."

They expect she'll be working on her Amazon series and creating content and video for that show.

"I mean she's not going to set up a Davos for women," Wolff said. "I mean this is preposterous. I mean, everything she said ... was as though AI-generated. What was she talking about? She's talking — and the answer is she's talking about nothing!"

However, Coles noted, Mrs. Trump has managed to profit off of her husband's time in the White House.

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MAGA congressman blasts Trump for undermining Republican midterm chances

A Republican lawmaker who normally supports President Donald Trump openly admitted in a Thursday interview that the president's "lack of focus" is hurting members of his party seeking reelection.

"I think a lot of people are burying Republican prospects in the November election; I think 40 days out is a little early to say that," Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD) told CNN's Jake Tapper in response to a question about an earlier remark Johnson made about Trump's seeming lack of focus. Johnson is not seeking reelection to the House of Representatives because he unsuccessfully attempted to run for South Dakota governor. In response to Tapper's question, he tried to boost the GOP's electoral prospects while admitting that the president has made political mistakes.

"I would say our chances of winning are a lot better if we're talking about the border, about what real steps have been taken on affordability, and about us rolling back some of the nonsense that was going on in the cultural space," Johnson added to Tapper. "If we're instead talking about Lake Ontario and reflecting about whether or not CNN should be a part of the pool, I think Republicans' prospects are markedly worse. And so, yeah, when I talk about focus, I think Republicans need message discipline, because there is a story to tell there, and it doesn't have a d - - - thing to do with Lake Ontario."

It is notable that Johnson referred to the Great Lake in question as "Lake Ontario" because Trump recently ordered it renamed to "Lake America" after Canada refused to capitulate to Trump in recent trade talks. Johnson mentioned "whether or not CNN should be a part of the pool" because the president recently and unsuccessfully attempted to ban that news network, along with the media outlets MS NOW and Politico, from covering the president at the White House.

Speaking with AlterNet last week, one political and polling expert argued that Trump is likely to suffer setbacks in the upcoming midterm elections both due to his own poor polling and historical precedent.

"It's primarily the president's weak approval rating combined with the usual difficulty that the presidential party has in a midterm," Kondik told AlterNet at the time. "I also think there may be even more for voters to react to in 2026 compared to even 2018, because Trump has acted as more of an imperial president and there is more dissatisfaction both with the economy as well as the president's foreign policy choices."

Kondik also drew from American history to explain why Trump is in a weak position.

"Generally speaking, a president who is this unpopular should see his party lose a lot of ground in Congress," Kondik explained to AlterNet. "That said, Joe Biden also had poor approval in 2022, but Republicans didn't do all that well—they flipped the House but not the Senate. However, the Republican lead in the generic ballot was not as large as the Democratic lead is now."

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Critics say 'pathetic' Trump’s summit behavior humiliates America

President Donald Trump's conduct when engaging in summits, such as his ongoing one with Chinese President Xi Jinping, is "pathetic," at least according to one conservative commentator and retired professor from the US Naval War College.

"Once at the White House, Trump took Xi for a quick tour," wrote The Atlantic's Tom Nichols on Thursday. "Trump had long ago replaced Joe Biden’s portrait in the hall of presidents with a picture of an autopen, a petty jab from a small and petty man, and on their walk, he made sure that Xi saw it. He even gave the Chinese leader a bit of a pat on the arm while yukking it up."

Nichols continued, "This was too much even for the conservative writer Charles Cooke of National Review, who posted on X about Trump’s 'grotesque behavior.' Xi, Cooke said, 'is a communist dictator, and the head of a foreign state. Our internal divisions are not fair game in this context.'"

Nichols then summed up the problem with the president's approach to foreign policymaking, at least when it comes to key summits such as those with Xi and North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong-un.

"But Trump does not think in these terms," Nichols wrote. "His summits are a national hazard precisely because Trump apparently does not understand that he is representing the United States; instead, he seems to think he’s just having a visit with some of the guys in a very cool club of which he’d very much like to be a member. His attempts to ingratiate himself are obvious and pathetic, and they function as a giant tell to America’s opponents: This president likes you, fears you, and wants your approval."

Earlier in the same article, Nichols pointed out that "in the Donald Trump White House, summits are hazardous excursions during which the interests of the United States are shoved aside by a president whose cringe-inducing admiration of dictators makes these meetings into rituals of American humiliation. The country would be better off if Trump just stopped hosting or attending them."

He singled out Trump's obsequious behavior toward Russia's dictator, Vladimir Putin.

"No one, however, has taken Trump to the cleaners more times than Putin," Nichols explained. "Trump seems to both venerate and fear the Kremlin leader, and when they are left in a room together, things do not go well for the United States. After their 2018 meeting in Helsinki, Trump stood next to Putin and told the world that he accepted the word of a former KGB spy over reports from the U.S. intelligence community. And this was at a time when the president had a Cabinet and staff far more willing to tell him hard truths than his current circle of sycophants."

When this journalist wrote for Salon, he interviewed the two people that Trump offered to hand over to Putin during that summit, billionaire and whistleblower Bill Browder and former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. Both foreshadowed Nichols' subsequent criticism.

“I was deeply disappointed,” McFaul explained to Salon. “The generous interpretation,” he continued, is that Trump “didn’t understand what he was talking about. But let’s be clear: What Trump was doing was assigning moral equivalency to a legitimate indictment with lots of evidence against several Russian military intelligence officers for violating American sovereignty in 2016 during the presidential elections, with a completely fabricated, cockamamie story invented by Putin. To even, for a moment, give any kind of dignity to what President Putin proposed was not in America’s national interest, from my point of view.”

Browder, similarly, told Salon at the time that "I have no idea what motivates his behavior. All I can say is that the idea that he seemed to entertain for a few days of handing me and 11 Americans over to Vladimir Putin for our work on the Magnitsky Act seemed pretty horrifying.”

Nichols himself has previously singled out Trump's behavior as endangering American national security, such as during an MS NOW appearance in August.

“He now has become completely wrapped up in his own power and surrounded by people that are just footmen rather than advisors. That is incredibly dangerous,” Nichols told anchor Nicolle Wallace. “It's bad when it's the, the head of a corporation or the captain of a sports team, but when you're the president of the United States and you lose touch with reality because you're simply cut off from anybody and anything that can contradict the reality of that movie inside your own head rather than what you see around you, that's just astonishingly dangerous.”

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Trump official tries to do an end-run around Supreme Court justice

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has historically disagreed with President Donald Trump — and now Trump is trying to do an end-run around her in a key case over whether immigrants can be deported to countries other than their nation of origin.

"The Justice Department’s emergency filing at the Supreme Court on Thursday also contains an unusual request," reported Politico's Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney on Thursday. "Under the court’s announced assignments, emergency appeals from the 1st Circuit are directed to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson."

The Politico journalists added, "Sauer’s submission says that if Jackson doesn’t immediately grant the stay the administration is seeking, it wants that matter referred to the full court for action. The language suggests that DOJ lawyers think Jackson may simply give immigrant rights advocates a few days to respond and leave the lower-court rulings in effect in the meantime, but the full court could be more receptive to the administration's claims of urgency."

To justify this decision, Attorney General Todd Blanche, wrote that "without even allowing the government a chance to respond, and in the dark of night, a federal appeals court blocked us from conducting all third-country removals of illegal aliens, an entirely legal and invaluable tool to stem the tide of illegal immigration." Yet Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, contradicted Blanche's assertion.

"This is FALSE," Reichlin-Melnick posted on X. "The government has NOT been barred from doing third-country removals. ICE has been barred from doing so 1) without telling people before they're on the plane, and 2) without letting them raise fears of persecution/torture."

Reichlin-Melnick then quoted the germane portion of the court decision in question.

"The final judgment contains five declarations that, together, construe applicable law to require DHS to take three actions when executing third-country removals that are not contemplated by the Guidance," the decision said. "(1) to seek first to remove class members to countries they have designated or of which they are subjects, nationals, or citizens; (2) to provide class members with effective notice of DHS's intention to remove them to a specified third country; and (3) to provide class members with a meaningful opportunity to contest removal to that third country on the ground that they have a reasonable fear of being persecuted or tortured there. See 28 U.S.C. § 2201(a)."

It is not surprising that the Trump administration would not want to avoid Jackson. In 2025 she famously denounced the Supreme Court's tendency to side with Trump, even when doing so required them to be ideologically inconsistent, as "Calvinball" jurisprudence because "Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”

Even when the court has rarely opposed Trump, Jackson has spoken out against its pro-Trump wing, such as when she pointed out the judges like Clarence Thomas willing to overturn birthright citizenship were "ow surprisingly suggests that the Citizenship Clause was a race-conscious remedial measure, relating only to 'freed slaves such as Dred Scott,' post, at 56, and those who shared with them certain characteristics," even though on other occasions they have downplayed or denied the role of racism in shaping the United States.

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Rubio's silence shamed by former CIA officer: 'He knows better'

President Donald Trump hosted Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the White House this week for a multi-day event in which critics complained the president "fawned" over Xi. But one national security expert and former CIA officer is shaming Secretary of State Marco Rubio for refusing to stand up for America in the moment.

MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace on Thursday, ahead of the state dinner, asked Sue Gordon for her response to seeing Trump roll out the red carpet for Xi while he has "nothing but disdain and smears for our close friends to the north in Canada."

"I mean, you just talk about split-screens," Wallace said. "It is disrespect and fighting words for our one-time allies and sucking up in a grotesque and embarrassing manner for all Americans, for our sort of strategic adversaries. What does it say about Marco Rubio that he didn't lay his body down before Trump got to Andrews [Air Force Base] and greet Xi?"

Gordon said that she's known Rubio "for a long time. I know he knows better." She thinks that one reason he's seen so little is that "he thinks that he is going to be able to bring some semblance of wisdom and [propriety] and understanding of second and third order effects best if he keeps a low profile. Denied!"

She explained that there are days "when you just have to take a room and do the American people's work. So, I know him, I know he knows better, and somehow to me, that makes his silence even more abysmal than those that have less power, less wisdom, and equal access. So I think it says a lot."

Trump believes he can sway someone into doing what he wants by "who we're fawning over," but Gordon explained that it won't produce any results. Instead, it signals to China that Trump needs them. He's not displaying strength. He's showing weakness.

"I suspect that the president thinks it will. What you're sending a message to our allies and partners is you — we are going to say whatever is expedient for us."

What she doesn't understand is how Trump could go from sounding the alarm on China and trying to build an America that can exist independently from China and then do what he's done this week.

She said that six years ago she would have told Trump that China is not America's friend and that he "can't manipulate them into being less than they want to be by flattering them."

But by flattering them, Gordon explained that Trump has revealed himself while "giving them an opening to influence you via what you have shown. So, it just — it's sending signals around the world. And what I would say to our friends about our friends and allies is they're going to have to decide who we are and whether they will bear a cost for us if they are put to a test. This is just a really difficult, unfortunate, sad projection for the future."


- YouTube youtu.be


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Republicans break with Trump over 'final straw'

On Thursday, following a war resolutions vote that saw an unusual number of Republicans break rank and side with Democrats in an attempt to end the conflict with Iran, an expert from a leading think tank asserted that the issue may be “ending” the presidency of President Donald Trump once and for all. While the vote failed due to a single Democratic defector, Brookings Institution Fellow Jessica Riedl said the Republican defections were telling.

“We may be witnessing the Iran war (and gas prices) as a final straw essentially ending Trump's presidency,” posted Riedl, who served as Chief Economist for former Republican Senator Rob Portman. “Most lame duck presidents see their own party usually move on around this time (see Bush with Katrina). It seems like Iran is where the dam finally broke with Trump.”

The resolution – which would have directed Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from the war – was passed by the House in July in a 214-208 vote, with four Republican lawmakers backing it. Then on Thursday, writes the Hill, “Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on Thursday voted for the war powers resolution for the first time, joining GOP Sens. Susan Collins (ME), Lisa Murkowski (AK) and Rand Paul (KY), who have voted for previous resolutions directing Trump to end the war.” The effort was defeated after “centrist Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), an ardent supporter of Israel, was the only Democrat to vote against it.”

“Tillis said the conflict has dragged on for too long without congressional authorization and argued it has become a serious political liability for GOP candidates because of its impact on gas, diesel and fertilizer prices,” reports the Hill. “We’re reaching a point to where we just need answers. We got to know what success looks like,” said Tillis, adding that there has been a “consistently downward-trending negative reaction” from the public since the first strikes against Iran in February. “We don’t know how long it’s going to go,” he continued. “So, we’re afraid it could be a forever war. It’s a war that’s obviously hurting people economically. Why are we doing this? What is the goal?” According to the Hill, “Polls show support for the war dropping among Republicans. A CNN poll conducted by SSRS of 1,206 U.S. adults nationwide this month found that support among self-identified Republicans has dropped by more than 10 percentage points since March.”

While experts like Riedl see the Republican defections as a growing sign of Trump’s decline, the fact that the broader party voted to continue the war has not gone unnoticed, which is an unpopular stance considering the looming midterms. As Republican strategist Rina Shah noted, “Most Americans want this war ended. Congressional Republicans just voted to keep it anyway.”

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