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On her "embarrassing" first day at the press room podium, President Donald Trump's new press secretary exposed the sinister truth behind what the MAGA movement means when it claims to support "meritocracy," according to a new piece from MS NOW.

Writing for the outlet on Wednesday morning, author and former White House speechwriter David Litt expressed some empathy for Katie Zacharia obvious struggles in her first press conference, explaining how he himself started in the Obama administration when he was just 24. Despite that, her performance still raised far more questions about her qualifications than she answered.

"Among them: Why all the unnatural pauses while reading out loud from a binder?" Litt wrote. "What’s with the weird hand gesture where she taps her fingertips together? Is she the first press secretary in history to publicly mix up the president with their own spouse? Why did she flee the briefing room after just 14 minutes, only eight of them spent taking questions?"

In fact, far from just seeming ill-equipped to be White House Press Secretary, Litt noted that Zacharia appears to have had "extensive experience at being unqualified for her job."

"According to the investigative journalism newsletter Popular Information, she has repeatedly described herself as a lawyer despite there being no evidence she ever passed the bar exam," Litt explained. "(Later today, when asked which state she passed the bar in, Zacharia replied, “When I moved to China.” I have no idea what that means.) Yet those of us with low expectations were shocked by how poorly she performed."

Litt further suggested that Zacharia's hiring would appear to cast yet more doubt on Trump's 2015 promise to only hire "the best and the most serious people" if elected president, as well as casting doubt on the MAGA movement's overall claim to support "meritocracy." The truth of what is going on, however, "might be more complicated," he added, "And in a way, more dangerous for the country."

"Perhaps the problem isn’t that Trump and MAGA don’t really care about meritocracy," Litt wrote. "It’s that they have a different definition of merit than the rest of us do. Just look at the president’s statement announcing Zacharia’s hiring as press secretary. He pointed to her 'unblemished record of support' and the fact that she has 'been a loyal and brilliant supporter, right from the beginning.' He ended his statement on Truth Social, whose parent company Zacharia once advised, by saying, 'She is, likewise, a devoted fan and member of MAGA!''"

He continued: "These are not what most of us would consider to be professional qualifications... Even Trump’s strongest supporters don’t make hiring decisions this way. Elon Musk clearly gets an ego boost from his legion of social media groupies. But when he hires for his companies or political operations, he tends to choose people he thinks will be effective, not just supportive. Trumpworld functions differently. It’s a mistake to ask whether Trump thinks his new press secretary is qualified or merely sycophantic. For Trump, sycophancy is a form of qualification."

An analysis has revealed that the $169 billion deficit in Social Security, a byproduct of his own tax laws, is at odds with President Donald Trump’s promise to see the program protected.

As The Washington Post reports, the chief actuary for the program has put a figure on the damage: some $169 billion in lost funding over a decade from the tax cuts contained in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The estimate is all the more pointed given that the retirement trust fund is on course to be drained of its reserves by 2032.

Trustees say once that happens, incoming taxes will only be able to meet 78 percent of what is owed in retirement and survivor benefits. Without some action from Congress, an across-the-board cut of 22 percent would be the likely result.

Trump claimed that he will not make cuts to Social Security. “Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security,” he said in a video message in 2023.

Yet the 2025 tax bill tells a different story. While campaign ads have touted “no tax on Social Security,” the legislation does not do away with the taxation of benefits. It does, however, offer provisions like a temporary $6,000 extra deduction for those 65 and up, lowering the federal tax burden for many of the country’s older citizens.

Since the trust funds are supported in part by income taxes on some of these benefits, any reduction in liability means less revenue for the system. The $169 billion in question is lost program revenue, not a direct hit to the monthly check a retiree receives.

In their 2026 report, the trustees point to the new tax law as well as declining birth and immigration rates as reasons for a gloomier outlook, moving the date of the trust fund’s depletion from early 2033 to the end of 2032.

A review of political advertising in 63 competitive districts by the Post found Republicans outspending Democrats on Social Security ads by a factor of seven.

In Pennsylvania, for instance, Rep. Scott Perry has made much of the senior tax deduction the main message in his bid against Democrat Janelle Stelson, while also distancing himself from an old plan to tweak benefits and the retirement age. Stelson has made defending retirees her pitch, but the Post notes neither has put forth a concrete way to deal with the shortfall.

It is a sizable gap, and covering it in 2033 alone would take close to $500 billion. For Republicans, it is a contradiction: the president vows to put a shield around retirement checks even as his tax policy is set to siphon money from the system.

"Morning Joe's" opening discussion focused on the GOP's failure to understand the American public as the election approaches.

Wednesday marks 20 days until the Nov. 3 election and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has been on a tour to help his members as the GOP holds on for dear life. One stop was in Texas, where the GOP-led legislature redrew district lines, shifting Democratic votes to more Republican-leaning areas. While the hope was that the Republicans could win at least 18 seats, that number looks a little closer to five, Axios reported last week.

While Johnson remains optimistic in public, saying his party is "on offense," he was hammered by a Fox News host who questioned why he would be in Texas, a traditionally red state, if they truly were on offense.

CBS News asked Johnson, "What do you say to voters, republicans who say they like you, your values, your policies? But Republicans are in control of everything in Washington, and they're not happy with this economy."

Johnson didn't have a great answer there either. He said he's frustrated too; everyone is. "But that's not related to policies. It's not related to the Republicans in office."

Even the CBS reporter wasn't buying it. "To make that case, though, to a voter who knows, Republicans are running the House and the Senate and the White House...?"

The "Morning Joe" crew had a collective eye-roll, but Joe Scarborough said he was grateful that at least Johnson was smart enough to know not to pivot to talking about the sexuality of Rep. James Talarico (R-Texas). The GOP has lately moved on from talking about the economy, food and fuel prices and instead focused on what constitutes a "real man."

"He just lied and said it's not Republican issues. It is the war and it is tariffs. And that has driven up the prices of just about everything," said Scarborough. "And by the way, Donald Trump had warnings from every economist. He had warnings from people at the Fed (Federal Reserve). J. Powell tried to tell him tariffs are inflationary and you know they're inflationary. So Donald Trump tried to get him arrested. But tariffs are inflationary. The war is inflationary. And so he's (Johnson) lying and said we don't have anything to do with this. Americans just aren't that dumb."

Willie Geist pointed out that the redistricting that Johnson mentioned was also a problem of the GOP's own making.

"They did a lot of this," Geist said. "The seats is now having to fight for, perhaps he didn't anticipate that. But you're right — it is policy. The war with Iran was a choice that closed the Strait of Hormuz that he just referenced. The speaker did and has driven up oil and gas prices."

Meanwhile, he continued, "President Trump yesterday, even in Alaska, was saying still — almost two full years in now — Biden, it's Biden's fault. It's Joe Biden's fault. Nobody believes that oil prices are lower now than they were under Biden. That's objectively untrue, publicly searchable on Google. So they're just flailing desperately on the core issue, which is the cost of living."

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One of the forces behind President Donald Trump’s Iran paranoia was the fear that a single nuclear blast miles above America could knock out the power grid and plunge the country into darkness.

The New York Times reported on Wednesday that the political prominence of beliefs that Iran could knock out the U.S. with nothing more than an electromagnetic pulse (EMP).

Ironically, the report began by mentioning that during Trump's first term, he "signed an executive order directing federal agencies to defend the United States against an unusual type of nuclear strike that his advisers warned could shatter the power grid, wipe out critical infrastructure and lead to a national collapse."

The problem is that it's incredibly unlikely.

The report explains that the overwhelming scientific consensus is that Iran managing an EMP attack would be extraordinarily difficult to carry out. An EMP is a powerful burst of energy that is created when a nuclear weapon is detonated high in the atmosphere. In a normal nuclear strike an EMP likely wouldn't kill people the way an actual blast would. The real problem is that it would disable electricity, communications, transportation, banking, water systems and other U.S. infrastructure. In an era run by technology, it would collapse the U.S.

In 2019, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to strengthen U.S. resilience to EMPs after a New York "dairy entrepreneur" sounded the alarm that even a small nuke from Iran could trigger an EMP and collapse the U.S. Henry Schwartz has been on a mission to incite panic among top Republican officials and advisers in the U.S.

That's when conservatives like Frank Gaffney, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, John Bolton, Pete Hegseth, John Ratcliffe and JD Vance began panicking and promoting the warnings and advocating for military action against Iran’s nuclear program.

According to the experts who spoke with the Times, the freakout is being dramatically overstated.

To have a successful high-altitude EMP attack, Iran would likely need a hydrogen bomb, not a basic atomic weapon. They would also need the exact altitude, orientation, "precise alignment of its gamma rays" and unpredictable space-weather conditions.

According to Stephen M. Younger, a former Los Alamos physicist, even advanced nuclear states would struggle with this and the odds that it could take down the U.S. are worse than even a coin flip.

"In the vacuum of space, however, the gamma rays create no shock waves or mushroom cloud. Instead, they strike the planet’s upper atmosphere, producing a chain reaction that creates something akin to a super-strong radio transmitter," said the report. "The gamma rays hit air molecules and knock out electrons that spin around the Earth’s geomagnetic field lines, creating waves of electromagnetic energy so powerful they can fry circuits thousands of miles away."

Experts have certainly kept an eye on it, but it isn't as likely as Mr. Schwartz seems to believe. Still, his close relationship with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suggests a Schwartz believer is at the top.

The report closes by making it clear that while nuclear proliferation should always be a concern and grid security is important, an Iranian EMP attack is not a credible near-term existential threat. Schwartz's EMP movement may be politically influential, but among the scientific community, reality reigns. It turns Schwartz's exaggerated campaign into a confrontation with Iran.

President Donald Trump’s own statements are muddying the waters in his latest bid to oust Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, a bid complicated by a recent rebuke from the Supreme Court. Legal experts are now wondering if a panel of his political appointees has, in effect, already made up its mind on her future.

When it came to the special committee he put in place to look into mortgage fraud claims leveled at Cook, Trump did not mince words with reporters on Saturday, according to a Wednesday report from The New York Times.

“I think she’s dishonest,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Saturday, referring to the Fed governor, Lisa Cook, who he has been trying to fire for over a year.

The report notes that the president was more interested in her unwillingness to back the lower interest rates he is after than in the specifics of the allegations. “She’s an automatic no vote, and that’s not a good thing,” he said.

Such comments have fueled the argument over whether Cook will be afforded a fair hearing by a body put together by a president who has been open about his desire to see her go. The Supreme Court put a stop to Trump’s first move to dismiss her in June on the grounds she had not been given a chance to make her case, though the justices left room for him to try again if he followed due process.

Yet, Kathryn Judge of Columbia Law School sees it differently. In a discussion with the Times, the Fed scholar suggested Trump’s earlier remarks put the new hearing’s motives in question. “It feels like they are going through a bunch of procedural hurdles, but that they likely have the outcome that they want already decided,” she said.

The committee includes National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling and EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, all handpicked by Trump. Both Hassett and Sonderling have been in step with Trump on the matter of interest rates; Hassett has also described the charges against Cook as “serious” and pressed for her to take a leave of absence.

The charges, which stem from federal housing director Bill Pulte, are over two properties Cook is accused of improperly listing as primary residences on mortgage applications. She has denied any wrongdoing and is yet to face any criminal charges.

Her counsel, Abbe Lowell, wrote to the administration voicing her “significant concerns regarding the objectivity and fitness of the committee.” While the White House has set a closed-door session for Nov. 5, Cook’s lawyers say a conflict in her schedule will keep her from being there.

White House spokesman Matthew Middleton defended the president’s move as “an in-person hearing that will be conducted in a fair and open process.”

Peter Conti-Brown, an expert on Fed governance at the University of Pennsylvania, said of Trump's unconventional setup as a pal of "quasi judges in a quasi-judicial process." He acknowledged the move fulfills the Supreme Court's basic requirements but concluded, "It’s worth saying out loud what everyone knows: This is all pretext.”

Donald Trump is a pathocrat.

The Age of Trump is defined by its pathocracy: a society ruled by the emotionally, psychologically, morally, intellectually, and spiritually sick, whose behavior spreads throughout the population and becomes the new normal.

Donald Trump and his enablers and followers have repeatedly defined deviancy down. There is no bottom. It will take the American people years, if not decades, to climb out of the pit.

Last Monday, Donald Trump gave a speech at a midterm campaign rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, where, speaking about the Iran war, he said, “Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” The audience reacted with a mix of cheers, applause and laughter.

Here is the full quote:

And again, remember with the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city. Let them take, let it, let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. That’s, this is a very small price to pay, and it’s gonna be over very soon. It’s essentially almost over with. They always say they have a big threshold for pain. They need it, let me tell you. They need it, but it’s going to end very soon, and it’ll end one way or the other and your gas and your gasoline and all of the things.

A nuclear attack on San Diego or Los Angeles could kill millions of Americans.

Trump also spewed out conspiracist fantasies about “communist socialists” and “radicalized lunatics” declaring, “We’re going to beat them big. This is the most important midterm election….”

Trump continues to live in his own alternate reality:

They gave us the dark age of America. That was two years ago. We were living in a dark age, but we quickly turned that into the golden age of America. It’s the golden age….

But now the radical left, Democrats want to burn it all down. They want to burn it down. You see these lunatics that they’re running in Michigan and Texas all over the place. They’re just lying. Their whole life is talking about radicalization and stupidity.

This man commands America’s nuclear arsenal, and with it the power to destroy the world several times over.

Trump and his spokespeople spent the last week trying to “clarify” his comments about Los Angeles and San Diego.

On Tuesday, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung claimed that the “media freakout over President Trump’s comments is not rooted in reality.” He continued: “[Trump] was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped. America is safer because of the President. Iran has no nuclear, no navy, no air force, and no money.”

Last Thursday, Trump raged on Truth Social:

The Fake and Artificial News is out there trying to say that I’m inviting the enemy to bomb San Diego and Los Angeles when, in actuality, what I was talking about was that a temporary increase in the price of Gasoline is a small price to pay for Iran not having a Nuclear Weapon and, if you want to see a big price, can you imagine what it would be like if they bombed San Diego and/or Los Angeles? All I was doing was making a comparison between paying a little more, for a short time, for Gasoline, versus the bombing of our Major Cities. Everybody knew that, the Fake News knew it as well, but they continue to go out and say that I am asking the enemy to bomb two Cities that I love. It’s totally clear what I say but, these people are Degenerates, and think they can continuously get away with Fake News!

This is textbook propaganda: distraction, projection, and gaslighting.

Predictably, too many among mainstream news media continued to normalize Trump’s extremely dangerous behavior by presenting his remarks as a misunderstanding, as “Trump just being Trump,” as hyperbole, or that he was really talking about gasoline prices. A week later, the mainstream media has mostly thrown Trump’s remarks about the possible nuclear annihilation of two American cities down the memory hole. They are bored. The attention economy feeds off novelty.

I offer this basic test for determining the true meaning of Trump’s comments about nuclear war and the destruction of Los Angeles and San Diego.

In language, meaning is created by the relationship between the speaker and, in the example of a political speech, the audience and the larger context.

Donald Trump said, “[L]et them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” The audience laughed, cheered, and applauded. Trump did not stop talking or clarify his meaning and intent. He also did not chasten the audience for their reaction or tell them that Iran must be stopped and that there is nothing funny or entertaining about nuclear war. Instead, Trump smiled and continued speaking, appearing pleased with himself.

The audience did not boo or heckle him, look stunned, go silent, or otherwise visibly show their disapproval. Taken together, Trump’s language and the audience’s response suggest that the destruction of these cities — and the potential deaths of millions of Americans — was acceptable or perhaps even amusing to the MAGA people at the rally.

Research has repeatedly found that Trump’s MAGA people are more likely than other Americans to express support for political violence against perceived enemies.

A simple counterfactual also exposes the double standard surrounding Trump’s comments about the destruction of Los Angeles and San Diego.

If Obama or another Democratic president were to make a comparable statement about a Republican-led city such as Houston or Mobile, many of the same people now defending Trump would be demanding that Obama be removed from office, tried for treason, convicted and then imprisoned — or worse.

This is also part of a much larger pattern in which Trump tries to silence his critics and mute democratic life.

He has repeatedly threatened to use the military and federal law enforcement to “invade” Democratic-led cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles. In a series of speeches to members of the military last year, he called Democrats “gnats” that needed to be “taken care of.”

Trump has repeatedly threatened to withhold federal money from blue states and cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Illinois, California, New York, and Minnesota, if they do not support him and his MAGA agenda. This is de facto political extortion and not normal governance in a democracy.

In a video shared on social media, historian Timothy Snyder, a leading expert on authoritarianism, warned that Trump’s statements about Los Angeles and San Diego signal Trump’s obvious willingness to take extraordinary measures to remain in power against the will of the American people.

“Telling Americans that it would be acceptable, or even good, if San Diego were destroyed, if Los Angeles were destroyed by Iran…tells us where his mind is. His mind is exclusively focused on staying in power. It’s exclusively focused on himself. There is no care for Americans there. There’s only an obsession with perhaps having less control over things than he has now. It’s a very clear sign of just how wrong things have gone, when the American president can stand in front of Americans and fantasize about millions of Americans being killed.”

Listen to Professor Snyder.

The danger lies not only in what Trump may soon do, but in how the repeated normalization of once-unimaginable behavior has conditioned many Americans to accept it.

In his 1993 American Scholar essay, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a trained sociologist, argued that American society has repeatedly redefined deviant and antisocial behavior as acceptable. As society kept lowering its standards, behavior once considered wrong and intolerable became normalized and routine.

In a 2000 PBS interview, Moynihan recalled reading a story about a mass murder in the Bronx where seven people were killed. What struck him was not the horrible murders themselves, but the details about a mother who saved her infant by hiding it under a bed.

“The fact that seven people had been shot in the back of the head was not interesting at all. And I thought of that wonderful example of gangland violence, the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago, when Al Capone’s men rubbed out seven of Bugs Moran’s men. Well, it became the subject of national legend. And so the idea clicked. We could no longer deal with the amount of murder going on in Manhattan and the Bronx, so we had to sort of say, well, only special murders get attention. And you can take this pattern of avoidance and defining deviancy down all across the society.”

Two decades later, in 2016, Trump bragged that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters.

He was proved correct. Trump was elected twice despite his attacks on the country’s democratic norms and institutions, its sense of normalcy, and its basic standards of human decency. Even more damning, Trump was reelected after he attempted to nullify the 2020 election and his followers attacked and overran the Capitol on January 6. For many of his MAGA people, these are not disqualifying acts, but rather reasons to vote for him.

By supporting Trump, tens of millions of Americans have chosen to define deviancy down and, in doing so, have elevated fascism, authoritarianism, and other antihuman forces that are imperiling the safety and future of the United States and the world.

Donald Trump gives his MAGA followers permission to be their worst true selves. What will happen if Trump and his MAGA Republicans lose the upcoming midterms and eventually the presidency? What remains of their collective normalcy may fall out completely, unleashing even more disinhibition that extends well beyond Trump himself.

Chauncey DeVega is a politics and opinion writer whose work considers American democracy, inequality, political power, and the enduring significance of race in American society and the wider world. He was formerly a senior politics writer at Salon. His essays and commentary have been cited by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC, NPR, The Atlantic, and other leading publications. He hosts two podcasts: The Chauncey DeVega Show and The Truth Report.

President Donald Trump traveled to Alaska on Tuesday to support Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) in his reelection bid amid fears he will lose the office to Rep. Mary Peltola (D). He followed the event with a posting spree of bizarre videos, including one of him playing with a tiger.

Trump arrived an hour late to the Alaska rally in Wasilla, spoke for 90 minutes and then closed out the night with his unique dance to YMCA.

Trump did address the affordability crisis in his speech; he largely dismissed it as a media-driven Democratic talking point and promised that energy prices would fall. At issue for Alaska is that they secure shipments for food and other items throughout the summer for the winter. So, for many in the rural parts of the state, costs are locked in whether or not prices fall in the coming weeks, Alaska Public Radio explained.

He claimed that reporters confronted him with “affordability” on his first day in office and characterized it as a “Democrat scam,” rather than offering a detailed plan for grocery, housing or fuel costs.

In a surprise move, Trump pardoned two Alaskans onstage, Zachary Czubak and Patrick Fleming, who had pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating the Clean Air Act by tampering with federally required vehicle emissions-monitoring devices.

He also claimed he secured a deal with Taiwan to buy gas from a pipeline that hasn't been built yet in Alaska. In another move, he announced that the FCC would vote on an additional $162 million for Alaska broadband expansion. That remark was particularly curious, as the Joe Biden administration recommended that exact same amount across the tribal lands in Alaska before it left office.

Trump then flew to Las Vegas and overnight appeared to be filled with enough glee to begin an hours-long posting spree of videos on Truth Social remembering the good old days and some days that

In addition to Trump's video wrestling and playing with a tiger. It came after Trump posted a story about a man in Europe who was mauled to death by a tiger. It prompted confusion on social media about what exactly Trump meant by the video. Another video showing Trump's walk down Pennsylvania Ave. for his first inauguration was remixed with a documentary on lions. It talks about his mane.

Another video discusses his $5,000 election bribe, while another talks about a "Massive Oil, Gas, and Mineral Exploration" project he claims will begin in Greenland. The timeline is unusual, as the cold winter generally pauses fieldwork and exploration, though existing mines continue.