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Intelligencer columnist Ed Kilgore says Republicans derived a benefit from chaining themselves to President Donald Trump over the last decade, but they are definitely not the party to envy anymore. If anything, they're living "a total nightmare."

“[The year] 2026 has been even worse for [Sen.] John Thune (R-S.D.) and his GOP colleagues,” wrote Kilgore. “Senate Republicans began the year absolutely secure in their majority, thanks to a very favorable landscape and insane amounts of money. Now that majority is in real peril. The congressional GOP is totally dependent on Trump, and he seems to be the one Republican in Washington who doesn’t understand that the party can’t win the midterms unless it addresses Americans’ cost-of-living concerns.”

Kilgore added that Thune has been insisting that the Senate abandon its bipartisan traditions such as the filibuster, automatically approving judicial appointments from each senator’s state and working with a nonpartisan professional parliamentarian. He quoted Trump’s Wednesday Truth Social post to illustrate his point.

The other striking thing about the Truth Social post, Kilgore said, is that Trump "seems to be returning to the sort of plague-on-both-your-houses 'outsider' rhetoric he deployed regularly during his first presidential run in 2016."

"He says Republicans are complicit with 'Dumocrats' in blocking the excellent Pulte; have 'ridiculous' views on the blue-slip tradition; and 'fell into a trap' by refusing to blow up every single precedent in order to enact the SAVE America Act.

Trump's plan appears to be "keep publicly attacking his party for disloyalty and incompetence while demanding that they win the midterms," he added, which spealls trouble for most any party fighting to retain its slim majority. But of course, Kilgore added that "Thune must know that even if Republicans somehow maintain control of the Senate, Trump may depose him as majority leader anyway in favor of a new punching bag."

Veteran reporter and author Michael Wolff, who has covered Trump’s life and political career in depth, recently explained in his Daily Beast podcast “Inside Trump’s Head” that the president’s fellow Republicans are nervous that the poor quality of his appointees will impair their own credibility.

"I think it is that Trump’s low-rent lackeys and incompetents now are challenging every Republican senator’s credibility," Wolff explained to co-host Joanna Coles. He later said that “when this administration began, the new president gets the benefit of the doubt," adding that this is especially damning for lawmakers who supported Trump’s questionable appointees in order to show partisan solidarity.

“Almost each and every one of the senior Trump appointments — how do we characterize them? As lackeys and incompetents,” Wolff argued. “Almost everybody in the Senate, especially Republican senators, has had to reevaluate the votes that they’ve cast for these people and has had to reluctantly take responsibility for putting these lackeys, incompetents, and completely unfit people in the job. That is a pattern. That’s there. And this has become a separate political issue for Trump.

Law and Crime reports Pulitzer Prize board members are demanding a Florida judge either force President Donald Trump to respond to their discovery demands or to shut down his Russia probe lawsuit until after his second term ends.

In 2022, the ever-litigious Trump sued 19 individual members of the Pulitzer Prize Board for defamation and conspiracy because the board refused to rescind the 2018 joint awards it gave to The New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

In 2024, Trump crowed premature victory when the judge overseeing the case denied the board’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit — but that dismissal was not a win. Pegg’s ruling did not even suggest the Pulitzer Board’s review of its award was flawed.

Two years later, the president appears to have frozen up, having refused to produce “a single written response or document” related to discovery requested by the defendants.

The Board argues that it’s gone out of its way to produce every scrap of information demanded by Trump’s lawyers, but Trump’s people have stalled in handing much of anything.

“Despite these extraordinary extensions for his discovery responses, Plaintiff has yet to produce a single written response or document. Defendants, on the other hand, have engaged in robust discovery,” the Board said. “Over the last year, Defendants have reviewed more than 71,000 records and produced more than 124,000 pages of documents. In addition, six Defendants have sat for merits depositions, two more will be deposed in the next three weeks, and additional Defendants will soon be scheduled to sit for depositions by the end of September.”

Additionally, the Board argues Trump’s lawyers have “deposed two non-party witnesses who authored independent reviews of the 2018 National Reporting Prize and propounded a second set of discovery requests on Defendant David Remnick, to which Remick has already responded.”

Trump’s people, meanwhile, have submitted countless requests for extension while they gather their information.

“In his motion, Plaintiff asserts that he needs yet more time to respond to Defendants’ discovery responses — in total now seeking nearly ten months to respond to the First RFPs and Brown Interrogatories — for the same reason he gave in seeking the last extension,” said the Board. “The needs of the Presidency are purportedly too great to balance with his role as a Plaintiff in his case.”

If Trump is happy to hide behind the White House to avoid putting up his legal fists, the board says he should just keep hiding until the White House is finished with him. And gather his lawyers later.

“If he cannot live up to those responsibilities while also faithfully executing the Office of President of the United States, then the case must be stayed until Plaintiff's term in office has concluded," the defendants said.

Strangely, Trump himself had insisted on moving forward with the case while in office, and argued that point all the way up to Florida's Supreme Court in summer 2025, according to Law and Crime.

President Donald Trump is gradually eroding Republican support in a crucial swing state — indeed, the so-called “Keystone State” itself.

“Michael Pace likes his Republican congressman, yet he is almost certain to vote for his Democratic challenger,” reported CNN’s John King as he surveyed Pennsylvanians in advance of the 2026 midterm elections. He quoted Pace saying that “Trump is the problem that I see. The president is not doing what I think a president should be doing, and that's disturbing to me.” For that reason, Pace argued, he will oppose even a Republican politician he normally likes because he does not want that person to support Trump.

King also reviewed rising gas prices, frustration at the Iran war and the persistent problem of widespread inflation to explain why many Pennsylvanians are turning on Trump.

Discussing Pennsylvania’s wealthiest congressional district (that is, the first district), located in the southeastern portion of the state, King said that “this will be the toughest of the three districts we visited for the Democrats to win from there to the north and the seventh congressional district. Democrats believe: look at the margin last time. They should have a good chance here.”

He then moved on to the eighth district.

“Do the Democrats need to win all three. No," King. "But two of those three, at least, would tell you the Democrats are off to a good start as they try to retake the House. And we'll know that pretty early on on election night, because Pennsylvania is in the east. The polls close early. So can they get two? Can they get three? Are the Democrats having a tougher night than anticipated? We'll know that pretty early on come election night.”

Pennsylvania is so crucial to Republican chances in the upcoming midterms, a dark money right-wing group invested in ads to hurt the candidacy of firefighter Bob Brooks, who was perceived by many as the strongest potential nominee to flip the 7th district currently represented by Republican Ryan Mackenzie.

“By now, you may have seen television ads running paid for by a PAC called Lead Left,” Lamont McClure, one of the Democrats running in that district, told AlterNet in May about the ads. “I want to be clear. I'm running my own campaign and I've never heard of Lead Left before today. Our political system is broken and we have to put an end to all of the dark money being spent on our campaigns. I hope all of the candidates will join me in calling for the immediate cessation of dark money SuperPAC spending on all of our campaigns.”

He continued, “Throughout this campaign at every forum and debate we've had, I have called for a Constitutional Amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's disastrous decision in Citizens United. I renew that commitment today.”

Brooks himself said that the ad was created to sabotage his campaign because the GOP is intimidated by him.

“Republicans are targeting me because I’m the candidate they fear the most,” Brooks explained at the time. “They don’t want to face me in November because they know this firefighter will smoke Ryan Mackenzie, flip this seat, and stop Donald Trump’s cruel agenda.”

Mackenzie, on the other hand, leaned into the ad, with a representative telling AlterNet at the time “all the Democratic candidates are carbon copies when it comes to their radical left policies, but as soon as the DCCC decided to support scandal-plagued Bob Brooks, the dark money started flying around."

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After single-handedly launching a war against Iran and ballooning U.S. inflation a desperate President Donald Trump has flailed his way into a hasty Iran War agreement that is infuriating his once beholden team of right-wing allies and news media.

MS NOW host Melissa Murray had more than enough video outrage to vent on Wednesday evening, pointing out that “top MAGA and Fox News figures are not being shy about weighing in.”

“They're better off than they were before the hostilities began,” one former GOP lawmaker railed on Fox News.

“I hate to say this in this deal. The biggest loser is the United States and India,” said “Bolling” host Eric Bolling.

“I will say that the early returns do not look wildly promising at this point,” lamented MAGA influencer Ben Shapiro. “… Let's be very clear. This is the vice president's deal. It does not have support.”

“America has given up all of its leverage in this situation,” wailed another Fox News panelist.

“The regime has not changed,” argued former GOP lawmaker and show host Trey Gowdy. “They're just richer! … I didn't believe it. I thought somebody was spoofing me. … How about the guys and gals that bled and died on our country's behalf? Where's their fun? I didn't see that in MOU.”

“I do have concerns about the memorandum of understanding,” confessed former Trump vice president Mike Pence to Fox.

“Unless you were home schooled by a day drinker. No one's confident that Iran’s going to do anything,” said U.S. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.)

Trump’s high-speed memorandum of understanding would bring his disastrous attack on Iran to a close, but it would also grant Iran $300 billion that would be distributed to that country through an investment fund, and end economic sanctions, and the unfreezing of Iranian assets. Plus, there will be waivers that allow Iran to sell oil on the global market.”

Many of these concessions did not even exist before Trump and Israel chose to attack.

This leads to headlines, that Murray characterized as “absolutely scathing.”

The conservative Drudge Report barked up a distillation of several rotten headlines, including “Iran declares total victory will control Hormuz,” as well as a Wall Street Journal headline declaring “America in retreat.”

The right-wing and heavily influential Financial Times wrote “Humiliation’: Donald trump battles claims his Iran deal is worse than Obama’s” — while the cover of Rupert Murdoch's own New York Post declared: “Lovebomb,” complete with an image of people burning an American flag.

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Zeteo reporters Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng say President Donald Trump is now having to admit humiliating defeat in the war he single-handedly launched against Iran, so now he is bitterly back to focusing on ramping up attacks on fellow Americans.

"As [his] failed war in Iran allegedly nears its conclusion, as a humiliating and well-deserved defeat, our authoritarian president is pivoting back to his other unsuccessful war – his assault on Americans," writes Zeteo. “... Trump’s ICE operations are surging, and so are his garbage lawsuits against protesters … One Trump adviser even explicitly told us that it was ‘a good thing’ the president was seemingly trying to wind down his war in Iran, because ‘we need to focus on the terrorists here and the problems we have at home.’”

This, they say, includes American citizens who dare to protest the administration’s policies, with the administration “getting back to bringing ridiculous criminal cases against anti-Trump protesters.”

“The Trump Justice Department, which functions as an arm of the White House, unveiled a conspiracy case on Tuesday against members of ‘a Minneapolis-based direct-action group with antifa ties,’” reports Zeteo, quoting the DOJ. “The case is eerily reminiscent of the DOJ prosecution of the ‘Broadview Six,’ which included former Zeteo contributor Kat Abughazaleh, for allegedly blocking vehicles at an ICE facility outside Chicago.”

The DOJ was forced to dismiss all charges in that case once the judge reviewed grand jury transcripts and found evidence of allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.

As in the Broadview Six case, the DOJ fell back to rote allegations of “conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer” against some protestors. Abughazaleh posted of the lazy charges, complaining that “the process is the punishment.”

“Earlier this year, sources with direct knowledge of the matter tell us, officials in the Trump Justice Department and elsewhere in the federal apparatus were determined to bring sweeping criminal charges against peaceful protesters and activist leaders in Minnesota,” reports Zeteo. “So far, they’d brought some cases against … activists, but not to the degree that certain senior Trump officials, such as White House policy architect Stephen Miller, craved.”

Administration personnel examined everything from the way Minnesota activists and demonstrators were organizing on encrypted messaging apps, to their liberal use of whistles, despite such accusation being “a tough sell,” according to one administration official conceded to us.

“It’s hard making people afraid of people with whistles," they added.

Nevertheless, Zeteo reports the administration looking to crack down on blue cities across the nation, including New York.

One of President Donald Trump’s closest allies, far right activist Laura Loomer, admitted on Wednesday that she had been seemingly tricked by the Russian government.

“When I was deplatformed, and when my election was rigged because the Big Tech social media companies wouldn't allow me to have access to social media, RT started reaching out to me and asking me to come on their show,” Loomer said, referring to her failed Florida congressional run (about which there was no evidence of fraud) and the Russian state-sponsored television network. “And they said, why don't you have a byline on RT? And you can even write for RT?”

Loomer claims she never took money from RT but appreciated that they allowed her to appear on their network. Yet even though she interpreted this at the time as the network perhaps caring “more about free speech than my own country,” she later felt manipulated.

“Now, when I see them say things like, we need to denazify Ukraine and we need to continue our brutal war with Ukraine, while they pretend to be, you know, some Orthodox Christian country — but they're slaughtering thousands, like hundreds of thousands, of young Christians in Ukraine — and then they're supporting actual neo-Nazis in the United States of America by clipping their podcasts, I'm like, wow,” Loomer said. “We fell for Russian propaganda, and I fell for Russian propaganda. And so when Loomer Unleashed had this opportunity to send a correspondent, um, abroad to Ukraine, to be embedded on the front lines of the war and meet with, uh, Ukrainian officials — and there were multiple U.S. senators there at the Odessa Security Conference, um — and Andrew asked me whether I would approve a correspondent to go to Ukraine, I thought about it for a while, and I was really hesitant to do so, because I thought, what are people going to think of me?”

She added that she has been anti-Ukraine for so long without “recognizing how, you know, as a conservative, or as a Trump supporter, or just as an American citizen, how I was being emotionally manipulated by propaganda online. And so I felt a little embarrassed, to be completely honest, sending a correspondent abroad, because I thought, well, people are going to attack me, and they're going to say that I'm a hypocrite, and they're not going to be gracious, and they're not going to give me an opportunity to change my opinion.”

This is not the first recent occasion in which Loomer has split with the Republican’s far right on foreign policy. In May she argued that former Trump supporters like former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Candace Owens have “Israel derangement syndrome” by seemingly blaming all the world’s problems on Israel.

“It’s like a psychosis. It’s literally a psychosis,” Loomer said. “It really is Israel derangement syndrome.”

At the same time, Loomer has had outsize influence over American foreign policy during the second Trump administration, such as getting key national security council advisers fired and urging the president to wage war against Iran.

Podcaster Joe Rogan claimed on Wednesday that he was previously targeted by American presidents for spreading COVID-19 misinformation, although he declined to name names.

“Thank God I was on Spotify and thank God Spotify is not an American company,” Rogan said on Wednesday. “And also it helped that I was number one in, like, 90 countries and not number 90 in one country, you know? That helped. That helped a lot.”

He also said that presidents and former presidents were involved and contacted his employer, Spotify, a Swedish streaming service.

“I can’t even talk about it but there was presidents involved and former presidents involved that were contacting Spotify,” Rogan said. “Oh yeah. Trying to get me removed for vaccine misinformation. Yeah. And it turned out to be right. All of it. Not a single [person] apologized.”

Contrary to Rogan’s claim, the COVID-19 vaccines that he regularly denounced as unsafe have proved to be as effective and advisable to use as other conventional vaccines. Meanwhile his claims that COVID-19 can be treated through alternative methods like taking ivermectin have been thoroughly debunked.

“It was nuts, but it didn’t work,” Rogan said. “But they tried. They spent a lot of money, a loooot of money.”

Rogan is a right-wing streamer who has made the news repeatedly during the 2020s for using his platform to promote President Donald Trump, Trump’s supporters and reactionary billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. He also makes scientifically inaccurate claims such as saying that man-made climate change is not a threat to the planet and that the pseudoarcheology promulgated by Graham Hancock is real. Additionally, he has repeatedly used his platform to advance racist ideas, such as saying Black brains are fundamentally different from white brains and that white nationalist politics should be normalized.

More recently, Rogan laughed supportively when former football player Josh Hokit won a heavyweight bout over fighter Derrick Lewis at Trump’s recent birthday bash.

"Shout-out to Trump for having the balls to put some s—— like this on," Hokit initially said, then continuing his monologue by claiming that “lastly, Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?"

That was not the first time Rogan laughed along supportively when Hokit made racist comments about a Black woman. In January he did so after Hokit won a separate UFC match and proclaimed “P.S. Brittney Griner is a man!” Rogan laughed so hard that he struggled to hold on to his microphone.

“Brittney Griner catching strays,” Rogan later chuckled, which he then qualified by saying “she doesn’t deserve that.”

Rogan has also tended to laugh off other comments that others find offensive, such as him lightheartedly dismissing Trump comparing himself to Jesus Christ as the product of him using too much AI.

President Donald Trump’s naked capitulation to Iran — the nation he unilaterally attacked — with restitution payments, and surrender on Iran disarmament, has got MAGA voices crying all over podcasts, reports Bulwark.

Bulwark podcaster Tim Miller joined guest Krystal Ball, cohost of “Breaking Points” podcast to watch the waterworks.

“A lot of them are still trying to stay in [Trump’s] good graces, like Ben Shapiro [who] … still wants to kind of like play both sides a little bit so he was being very measured,” said Miller.

“The folks at the commentary podcast were not measured,” Miller continued. “They were very, very upset. … They wanted the war. They thought it was gonna help Israel. They thought it meant that Trump was gonna be more on their side than he had been. It has not worked out how they planned.”

Miller then played two choice clips of “Commentary podcast” co-host John Podhoretz blasting Trump on Tuesday.

“I honestly don't know if it could be worse because if this war ends the way I fear it's going to,” said Podhoretz. “America is going to be in a strategically tactically and militarily worse position than it was under Biden and before Trump came back into power. That is to say, he made a choice to test America's resolve, America's ability to win war, to exert its will, to change the nature of the map, and he has choked, he has chickened out, he has bled himself dry, and better that we shouldn't have done it in the first place.”

“True. No lies detected,” admitted Miller, adding a note that Podhoretz admitted “plainly that the point at the beginning was we are going to exercise our will on the Middle East and change the map.”

Show hosts Eli Lake and Podhoretz then slammed Trump’s motivation for giving Iran and the Muslim nations everything they wanted, allegedly because Trump succumbed to bribery.

“Because they're giving him a plane,” said Podhoretz, to the nodding agreement of show panelists. “Because they're bribing his sons. Because they're bribing his friends' sons. We know this. We all know this. Everybody knows it. But? And when that wasn't having an effect on larger scale policy, by which I mean geopolitical the choices that Trump was making geopolitically — not that you could overlook it because you shouldn't overlook corruption — but it was like they were they were bribing him and he was doing whatever it was that he wanted to do anyway.”

At this, Miller could not contain his bitter laughter.

“It's like Trump was getting bribed. You know it. We know it. Everybody knows that Trump was getting bribed. But as long as he was also doing what Israel wanted, it was kind of like, well, whatever. We'll just kind of look the other way on this for two seconds,” cackled Miller. “But now that he's not anymore, we can all just say it bluntly that Trump is corrupt. It's like, well, no s——. Welcome aboard. Water's warm.”

This podcast is by far not the only grumble coming from the MAGA side, with commentator Erick Erickson saying, “This is an American surrender."

President Donald Trump is showing signs of serious decline as he approaches his 80th birthday, according to a former presidential aide.

“Vice President Harry Truman was an honest man, but he deceived the country after he had his one and only visit with the 32nd President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” Steve Schmidt, who advised President George W. Bush, commented on his podcast on Wednesday. “He knew that Roosevelt was a dying man and he did die on April the 12th, 1945. He was inaugurated for the fourth and final time on January 20th. This matters because Franklin Roosevelt wasn't seen in public every day quite like Donald Trump is. The images of Roosevelt at Yalta are shocking. The war etched onto his face, old before his time, falling apart. The burden of command weighing heavily.”

From there, Schmidt compared Trump to the Roman emperor Nero, who also began to mentally decline during the final years of his reign.

“Look at his decomposition physically,” Schmidt said. “He can barely get out of a chair. He's lost with the European leaders who are redirecting him back into the photo. Does it remind you of anyone? A previous president off-derided by Donald Trump for getting lost in similar photo ops?”

He continued, “Look at Trump's hands. Look at his ankles. The swelling is obviously attributed to a coronary condition. His words slur. He falls asleep. He is poked and prodded by 22 different medical specialists like he's ET at Walter Reed Army Hospital. All of this is to say, J.D. Vance, his fascist understudy, puppet to Peter Thiel, general weirdo and lover of the couch, may soon be commander in chief. We should talk about this more.”

Schmidt is not alone in raising the alarm about Trump’s seeming health decline. Former Tufts University psychiatry professor Dr. Henry Abraham told AlterNet the same thing in May.

“There has been a frightening progression of symptoms,” Abraham explained. “These include grandiosity without moral safeguards, paranoia, impulsivity, vindictiveness, easy misperception of being harmed, moments of omnipotence, uncontrolled rage, and sole control over the use of nuclear weapons in a time of war. As a psychiatrist reviewing these, I can only say Yikes!”

To be clear, the problem is with Trump’s displayed signs of decline and not merely his age.

When President Joe Biden became America’s first octogenarian president in 2022, University of California – San Francisco’s Division of Geriatrics professor Dr. Louise Aronson, a professor told this journalist for Salon at the time.

“There is a legitimate increase in risk of disease, disability, and death with advancing age and that risk varies tremendously among octogenarians depending on their health, opportunities, and function,” Aronson explained. She then added, “to the extent the media focuses on age primarily, they are engaging in ageism. It would be more fair, equitable and ethical to focus more on policy and outcomes, honesty and track record, and so much more.”