vijay prashad

President Donald Trump is feeling increasingly "powerless," and according to a new piece from MS NOW, his latest "petulant" policy outbursts reflect his desire "to lash out and attempt to exert control" in response to that feeling.

Writing for the outlet on Saturday morning, reporter Hayes Brown argued that Trump's staff is too overstaffed with "spineless sycophants" for anyone to have told him that his executive order to rename Lake Ontario as "Lake America" in response to stalled trade talks with Canada. Aside from his staff's willingness to praise and move fast to implement just about any bad idea that the president has, Brown also argued that the situation exposes other things about the state of affairs for Trump.

"Let’s start with Trump’s obsession with branding," Brown wrote. "He spent much of his career appending 'Trump' to buildings he didn’t build in lucrative licensing deals. In this second term as president, he’s fought to add his name to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Much like the 'Gulf of America' executive order on his first day back in office, Thursday’s order feels like a desperate attempt at getting his followers to associate 'America' with 'Trump.'"

He added: "Trump also tends to lash out and attempt to exert control when he feels most powerless. Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford decided to stand 10 toes down against U.S. negotiators in the face of looming tariffs, rejecting an overwhelmingly unbalanced offer from the American representatives. In response, Trump ordered the government to provide a bandage for his wounded ego, even as he likely views this order as a power move reestablishing his dominance over Ottawa."

Furthermore, Brown explained the third and final thing Trump exposed about himself: his tendency to become "deeply frustrated whenever he can’t force everyone to follow him." This frustration will continue to fester, however, as Canadian leaders like Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford have refused to accept the name change under any circumstances, and have the strong backing of the Canadian public to continue pushing back against Trump's bullying tactics.

"Trump could decide Lakes Huron, Erie and Superior will be called Lakes MAGA, Donald and Trump on American maps, and it wouldn’t shift Carney’s stance a centimeter. (Lake Michigan, which shares the name of a swing state and is entirely inside the U.S., is probably safe.)," Brown added. "And, importantly, an updated map will be small comfort to the Americans who associate the high price of goods like toilet paper with Trump’s overly domineering approach to the (former dominion) of Canada."

He concluded: "This name change is more insulting than threatening, more inane than likely to spark a new round of trade talks. The only way Trump’s move could hurt Canada is if Carney hurts himself laughing at the impotence it suggests. There’s simply no way for the administration to rebrand this trade war as anything but a loss — except maybe (maybe) for mapmakers hoping to cash in on the change."

It is imperative that Democrats launch a third impeachment of President Donald Trump after the midterms, according to one prominent New York Times columnist, and while it might not actually be enough to remove him from power, it might be enough to remove some of his worst officials.

NYT columnist and outspoken liberal commentator Jamelle Bouie outlined the case for another Trump impeachment in his latest "Takes" video, shared to YouTube. In it, he argued that the president's ongoing scheme to meddle with the midterms by imposing new rules on mail-in voting is unlikely to have much of an actual effect on the results, instead serving as a way to inject "chaos" into the aftermath and give Republicans grounds on which to falsely claim that certain Democratic victories are illegitimate.

However that process shakes out, Bouie argued, the scheme nevertheless represents a "conspiracy" to subvert the Constitution, and must be met with a new impeachment push if and when Democrats reclaim congressional majorities in the midterms, even if it would be difficult or impossible to actually remove Trump from office by doing so.

"The president is openly pursuing a conspiracy against the Constitution of the United States," Bouie explained. "Part of an ongoing, at this point what, 18-19 month assault on the Constitution of the United States, 20-month assault. You can't just let that lie. Can't take the position that because impeachment isn't going to result in removal, therefore we can't do anything about it. Therefore, we just have to leave that tool in the toolbox. No.

He continued: "Even if removal isn't going to happen, even if the final outcome, which is that nothing specifically happens to Trump, is in stone because of the high bar for removal under the Constitution, it's still important to engage in an impeachment trial to show the public that the president of the United States is engaged in an open conspiracy against their rights, against the American Republic. That is what's happening. It won't be a waste of time."

While Trump might be mostly safe from removal via impeachment, Bouie added that many of his most controversial and despised administration officials might not be, suggesting that there could very well be enough Republican support in Congress to remove the likes of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Steven Miller.

"And I'll say that there are other figures in the administration that you probably could remove through impeachment," Bouie said. "Russell Vought, Pete Hegseth, Steven Miller: as executive branch officials, they can be impeached. And I bet you would find some Republicans who wanted to remove them."

Impeachment of Executive Branch officials can pass the House of Representatives with a simple majority. However, to remove the impeached official from office, it would require two-thirds of the Senate, 67 votes, to pass.

Sources inside the White House say President Donald Trump is suffering the consequences of surrounding himself with yes-men and good news as Iran continues to beat him to pieces, according to Daily Mail.

Trump unilaterally attacked Iran in February, convinced that the invasion would be quick and effective. But apparently the president kept sound advice out of the equation before he launched the assault that has been slogging on for six months. It’s not the nature of Trump to take responsibility for his own mistakes, however -- so he appears to be taking it out on his bootlicks by sidelining at least one, according to sources.

“One is a sledge-hammer and the other is a scalpel,” the anonymous source told Daily Mail, comparing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

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

According to the Daily Mail, Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Dan Caine, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others all get a chance to update the commander-in-chief, a source familiar with the proceedings told the Daily Mail. But recently, Trump has been elevating Bessent in these settings.

The elevation of Trump’s new “golden boy” followed an explosion at a Camp David retreat earlier this month after Trump became furious that all the good news he demands from his flunkies did not live up to the reality of the war. Most notably, the U.S. military's shortage of critical defense munitions, which Trump had been convinced “had been fixed,” reported the Daily Mail.

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

Now Bessent appears eager to step into the captain’s chair from which Hegseth was ejected.

“He's very trusted,” the source close to the president said. “It's not just on Iran, his stock is increasing. He's just more and more involved in things.”

Hegseth's allies insist the Treasury Secretary's promotion is not a demotion for the Secretary of Defense, however.

“There are limits to how much militarily will be accepted by the public and by the Congress,” a senior Department of Defense official close to Hegseth told the Daily Mail. “The economic measures complement the bombing campaign.”

The new phase is “a much better strategy,” the official added.

President Donald Trump is making the U.S. resemble the "fall of Rome" at an alarming rate, according to a new piece from The i Paper, as his aggressive policies increasingly turn the nation into a "friendless" pariah.

Writing for the outlet on Saturday, reporter Nick Bryant argued that the recent 250th anniversary celebrations in the U.S. had been turned into something more like "a season of national waning," despite Republicans hoping that the milestone would reinvigorate Trump and the party's electoral momentum. He added that the "decadence" and "gold trappings" in Washington, D.C., that are dominating Trump's attention invoke the "decline" and ultimate collapse of the Roman Empire.

"Donald Trump’s United States is becoming increasingly friendless," Bryant wrote. "American isolationism is conventionally thought of as an active choice by the United States itself. Now, as the age of America comes to an end, it is being imposed from outside by other countries, including long-standing allies. This week it was not the US President who was heralded as the leader of the free world, but the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney who adopted the tone of a wartime leader in the trade dispute with Washington. 'You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked,' said the former Bank of England governor, channeling his inner Churchill. Carney has dispensed with the deferential default adopted by so many Western leaders towards Trump and again opted for defiance."

He added further: "A protracted dollar-for-dollar trade war would be more economically ruinous north of the border than south. But Canada has a significant economic arsenal. As Carney reminded his compatriots, it supplies 85 per cent of electricity imports, and 60 per cent of crude oil imports. It is also the largest customer for 26 US states, and a top three customer for 45. Trump, as well as threatening the destruction of the Canadian auto industry, has renamed Lake Ontario Lake America. Typically sophomoric, its the sort of stunt that again diminishes his office and his country."

Further "signs of America’s waning have abounded" throughout Trump's harsh summer months, Bryant added, highlighting the bruising scandals involving the USS Abraham Lincoln, the depleted military stockpiles, the pullback from joint exercises with South Korea and Israel's rejection of a proposed Gaza peace plan. He also noted that various European nations recently held a "coalition of the willing" meeting to address the ongoing Ukraine war, with the U.S. not involved at all and new U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham overseeing the proceedings, providing yet more evidence of the country's diminished stature as a global leader.

While the U.K. seems willing to continue the "special relationship" with the U.S. for now, Bryant noted that it is also in the process of "diversifying diplomatically by resetting its relationship with Beijing," signaling the decline of American influence.

"To say that 'America First' means America alone has become a cliché. More and more, it doubles as a truism," Bryant concluded. "Why, Trump is even thinking of rekindling his first term bromance with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. A summit between the two would highlight Trump’s isolation: 'Little Rocket man' and an incredibly shrinking US president."

Former Republican speechwriter David Frum says Americans are not accustomed reclaiming stolen or swindled wealth from fallen authoritarian rulers. But, thankfully, a host of scruffy kleptocratic (or former kleptocratic) nations Nigeria, Peru and the Philippines can provide lessons on how to go about it.

It’s a shame that the grift and self-enrichment of the Trump family has thrown the U.S. into a class with recovering, somewhat notorious, democracies, but that’s what Americans voted for in electing a convicted felon, and that’s what the Republican Party then enabled by surrendering its congressional duties, Frum told the Atlantic.

However, “done right, this work can deliver justice and strengthen democratic institutions for the long run,” he said. “But cleaning up after a corrupt regime also comes with serious challenges and hazards.”

President Donald Trump has abused his office to enrich himself and his family in ways that are completely unprecedented, said Frum, “not only in the United States but also in the history of almost any peer democracy.”

Only Italy’s lawless former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi compares, and Berlusconi was sentenced to prison.

“Trump faces little danger of prison,” said Frum, adding that the Republican-led U.S. Supreme Court has “bestowed substantial criminal impunity on him, even assuming that he leaves office in 2029 as required by the Constitution. … But an ex-president remains subject to civil liability, and the proceeds of bribery, extortion, insider trading, and market manipulation may be exposed to civil penalties. Other countries have shown the way.”

Alberto Fujimori, who was elected president of Peru in 1990, dissolved that nation’s Congress and the Supreme Court and rewrote Peru’s constitution to allow his own reelection in 1995. Then came the self-enrichment. His intelligence chief ran a system of embezzlement and kickbacks that “amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts.” Just after Fujimori’s 2000 reelection to a third term, he fled the country. But Peru set up a special prosecutor’s office and worked closely with countries hosting Fujimori’s contested assets.

“Peru has since recovered about $200 million of misappropriated wealth from accounts in the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, the United States, and Luxembourg,” said Frum.

And then there’s Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who pillaged billions of dollars over two decades.

“After his ouster, his democratically elected successor, Corazon Aquino, created a Presidential Commission on Good Government to recover this stolen wealth,” said Frum. “As of 2022, the PCGG had returned $5 billion to the Philippines, according to reporting by the country’s leading English-language newspaper.”

Over in Nigeria, leader Sani Abacha swiped about $4 billion, stashing the funds in foreign accounts and shell companies. Again came a new specialized unit in 2002, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, to reclaim the money from Abacha’s heirs.

“This work received considerable help from the Swiss government, which agreed to freeze Abacha-related accounts, and from the United States, which cracked down on Abacha-owned shell companies,” said Frum. “Nigeria got back about $1.5 billion, according to the World Bank’s tally.”

“The message to Americans? The recovery of corrupt assets from fallen leaders is not hopeless, but it is difficult and risky,” said Frum. “This work demands permanent institutions specifically tasked to investigate and prosecute, and broad international cooperation to locate, identify, seize, and return dirty money.”

But it has to happen, he insisted, because “if the Trump family can keep the money it has accumulated this term, the next generation of Trumps will be far richer than Donald Trump ever was.”

President Donald Trump and his administration are sinking deeper into "desperation" with their latest moves, according to reporter Sarah Ewall-Wice, and it marks what could be a "monumental shift" in power heading for Washington.

Ewall-Wice is a political reporter for The Daily Beast who appeared as a guest for the latest edition of the outlet's flagship podcast. During the conversation with host Joanna Coles, she said that there is "a growing sense of desperation ... coming out of this White House," based on the things she has heard, and this desperation is reflected in the questionable things that the president is choosing to focus on.

“I talked about Republicans and the swagger they had coming into Trump’s White House in early 2025. There is no swagger right now,” Ewall-Wice told Coles. “There’s an active attempt to try and promote ideas that are not sticking. And so it feels like there’s about to be a monumental shift in Washington... Making over Washington, D.C., renaming lakes, and just a plethora of other things that smell of desperation [are] coming out of this White House as a distraction."

She added: "The president puts the focus on these useless things that he’s focused on and promoting, and the White House pushes out this kind of bizarre social media campaign to tout him renaming the lake."

Ewall-Wice noted that considerable discrepancies have emerged between Trump and his administration, and the Republicans actually on the ground running midterm campaigns. Those candidates, she explained, are pushing "how they’ve helped or how they can help the voters who need to go to the ballot box to vote for them," which Trump is "not focused on... in the same way whatsoever," spending all of his time on "random spiels about changing names of lakes or redecorating the White House or building a ballroom." All of this, she noted, can be seen coming to a head in recent polls showing Trump's grasp on his past supporters slipping away.

She also compared the past reaction from Republican lawmakers to Trump's order to try and change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America," which many touted publicly as a "great thing." Now, however, hardly any of them have anything to say about his attempt to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America" to try and spite Canada amid trade talks, even though the order carries about as much weight for actual voters as the "Gulf of America" order.

"So he’s been using a lot of these distractions that are completely pointless, useless, and a complete waste of the office of the president of the United States," Ewall-Wice said. "And that’s what I hear from people out across the country who are just trying to get by, where they hear so much about some of the nonsense that’s coming from Donald Trump."

She added further: "And they’re like, well, that’s not helping me, and that’s frustrating. And it just goes to show that the president is focused on how he appears and what he’s looking at. It’s not about making things better for us. And I get that sense from Democrats... but independents, who are not really aligned with Republicans or Democrats, have been making the same case. And some Republicans also are like, ‘We are frustrated by this. This is not working for us.’”

President Donald Trump and MAGA’s revamp of CBS News does not appear to be going so well. Staff are reportedly turning on one another as viewership wanes from the rebooted network, and staff are fighting hard for a chunk of the network’s reduced audience.

“Insiders told RadarOnline.comarOnline.com the ambitious journos see each other as competition and are each playing to win. While Dokoupil was recently on vacation, correspondent Matt Gutman stepped into the CBS Evening News anchor chair and delivered 4.1 million viewers, the broadcast's best weekly performance in 17 weeks and its first time topping 4 million since March.”

"Tony is panicked," a source told Radar. "He knows television is a ratings business, and when your replacement suddenly delivers the biggest audience in months, people start asking questions."

Now, insiders said the men's relationship has “gone from frosty to downright hostile.”

The station’s viewership has lagged since the arrival of Bari Weiss, who was hired by CBS to be editor-in-chief of CBS News in October 2025, when Paramount Skydance acquired CBS. Weiss had no television-news experience, but she is the founder of the conservative Free Press, and she made sure to put her conservative stamp on the formerly unaffiliated news.

Former veterans called CBS News is a disgraced shell of a news organization after the firing of famed “60 Minutes” senior correspondent Scott Pelley, after gutting most of the rest of its staff.

Weiss’ renovation did not catch on with its audience, so after the ratings ticked up under Gutman, Dokoupil allegedly freaked.

A source told the Daily Mail in early August that they found it "odd" Dokoupil would leave his post for so long at such a pivotal time. The source added: "Everyone is entitled to a vacation, but when you are trying to build an audience and fighting to right a failing ship, taking a two-weeker is a head-scratcher.

"Makes you wonder if Dokoupil has given up," the source told Radar.

New York Times reporter and co-author Maggie Haberman confirmed MS NOW anchor Jonathan Capehart’s claim that the White House is in a ‘constant state of chaos’ as employees lose purpose and leap from windows as the midterms encroach.

“There’s a sense of grind and a lack of having fun or common purpose in this White House right now,” said Haberman on MS NOW’s “The Weekend” Saturday morning. “They want to see him succeed, but [Trump] is not doing much to help himself.”

Show co-host Eugene Daniels then played footage of U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitting that “the one thing” Trump likes to do in the middle of the week is construction — as opposed to acting like a president.

“[Trump’s staff] are all aware of what Howard Lutnick just said, except I was pretty surprised, Eugene, to hear him say that publicly, that they are ‘trying to keep the president happy’ because he prefers focusing on building projects on the day job over what he was elected to do as president,” said Haberman. “I don't think that's going to make voters very thrilled. But that certainly is true that that is what the president prefers. So, nobody is really trying to rein him in that hard. They're just trying to figure out how to balance it heading into November.”

She repeated her claim that staff don't deliver bad news to Trump in troublesome doses, but instead introduce portion of truth carefully couched in other, happier topics — because staff’s top priority is apparently Trump’s happiness over all else.

“People are very careful about what they say to him. He intimidates people [and] his own staff,” Haberman said.

While speaking, Haberman pushed back on White House attacks on her after she published a story revealing Trump was ducking a ceremony in Manhattan for the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, in part because he was refused the opportunity to make a speech, according to four sources with knowledge of the events.

“When we tried to follow up and confirm your reporting, a senior White House official told me that actually the reason for Trump going to the Pentagon instead of New York is because JD Vance is going to be attending, and the vice president and the president cannot be at the same place at the same time,” co-host Jacqueline Alemany told Haberman.

But Haberman dismissed that claim outright as White House after-the-fact cleanup work.

“Look, we stand by our reporting and the Times put out a statement explaining that this is based on multiple sources, that we went to the White House. We were quite transparent with them about what we were reporting, including [that] … part of the reason why he was not going to New York was because they didn't let him speak, and the White House did not say anything or push back on what we were reporting. And then 24 hours later, the president started attacking the piece.”

“You know, so readers can make their own assessment about a denial that comes a day later,” Haberman snapped.

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Republicans are begging President Donald Trump to tap his roughly $400 million MAGA.in PAC money to help them struggle through bruising midterms, but Trump appears in no hurry to invest. But conservative attorney and eternal Trump critic George Conway says Trump’s mental illness, coupled with his greed, will not allow him to invest in his own people.

“This is pure Donald Trump,” Conway told the MS NOW’s “The Weekend” panel Saturday morning. “… Trump is the most narcissistic human being we have ever seen in American politics. Full stop. But on the upswing, that helped him because we had a society that is itself narcissistic and was sick of hearing, ‘oh, we have to help these people,’ ‘we have to help those people,’ and ‘we have to help everyone.’ It was kind of like the Janis Joplin song, ‘lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?’”

But the problem, said Conway, is that Trump’s narcissism also works against the party of which he is supposed to be a part.

“Trump does not give a (expletive) about anyone other than himself,” Conway continued. “He doesn't care about the Republican Party, certainly doesn't care about those senators on the hill over there he demolished. He doesn't care about people paying more at the gas pumps. He does not care about anybody. And the other thing is because he is the most extreme kind of narcissist that psychologists have ever found — the malignant narcissist, the sociopath and narcissist, combined — he becomes more and more delusional over time because they create their own little world.”

People surround Trump, enveloping in a cozy shroud of fluffy lies, said Conway. He has “human printers” who print out things that tell him how great he is, aggravating his delusions.

“Like that Mission Accomplished 2026 meme [Trump posted] the other day. Okay, he is delusional. He is actually psychotic, which is a bad thing for a guy with the second largest arsenal of nuclear weapons on the planet. He's gone off the deep end,” said Conway. “… He's the pied piper. Yes, the GOP sees the reckoning, but they're stuck.”

For that reason, said Conway, Trump will happily blow the brunt of his PAC money on himself and his own personal ends.

“He will spend that money on himself precisely because who is going to tell Donald Trump ‘you're very unpopular. So why don't you stay home and we spend money on something else?’ That kind of person does not last very long,” Conway said. “In fact, there was a story in I think it was Axios, where [Sen.] Ted Cruz [R-Texas) went to the president and said, ‘hey, you know, we're headed for a disaster here.’ And, and Donald Trump's response to him was literally, I'm not going to use this word: F-U.”

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In Georgia and other states Democrats are doing the unthinkable, reports the New York Times — and President Donald Trump’s Republican Party doesn’t appear to know how to deal with it.

It’s been nearly 10 long years of Republicans winning Republican primaries by glomming to Trump’s side and out-Trumping their Republican adversaries. Sen. Darline Graham (R-SC) won her South Carolina Senate primary against Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) solely by virtue of Trump’s endorsement, which still carried enough weight in the Republican Party to carry her over the finish line despite a devastating gaffe on international policy in an interview. Democratic operatives called her “dumb as concrete,” and even many Republican voters felt she was woefully unprepared to lead the state as senator.

“She has a master's and she's helped people that are blind and she's a lovely woman advocate. But I don't feel like she has the experience,” said at least one of many 2024 Trump voters surveyed by the Bulwark.

Sen. Bill Cassidy went down in flames in Louisiana’s Republican primary this year after Trump endorsed his opponent. It did not matter that Cassidy voted in line with Trump on nearly every issue, even agreeing to confirm Trump’s controversial Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. despite strong reservations about Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views.

But loyalty to Trump is the litmus test for political viability within the Republican Party, regardless of other credentials or accomplishments. And Cassidy’s opponent managed to out-MAGA Cassidy among Louisiana’s mostly white Republican populace. Plus, Cassidy made the politically deadly mistake of voting to impeach Trump in 2021 for trying to steal the election with an elaborate fake electors scheme, and "miscalculated Trump's vengeance," according to critics.

Meanwhile, over in Texas, Sen. John Cornyn, lost his Republican primary to MAGA-tized contender Ken Paxton, despite Paxton’s long rap sheet of long list of scandals. But Trump officially opted to endorse Paxton, sending shockwaves of panic and doubt throughout the Texas GOP due to Paxton’s colossal flaws.

A Trump endorsement is all it takes for Paxton and other Trumpy Republicans to win their Republican primaries — but Republicans must now content with the fact that general election voters are not the hard-right MAGAsphere that decides victory in GOP primaries.

In Georgia, for example, the Democratic candidate running against Republican contender Mike Collins is using a strategy based in large part on taking advantage of Trump’s sagging approval ratings, with a Fox News poll in June finding Trump with net-negative ratings in Georgia, with 56 percent holding an unfavorable view of him. And — since the only thing it takes to survive a GOP primary is a Trump endorsement over witty conversation and solid policy — Collins’ weak standing.

Historically, Democrats running in deep-red Southern states have had to alinate their own party to get any traction at all, and even then their battle for “Republican-lite” only lasted so long before a Republican ousted them. But incumbent Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff “hasn’t moderated his votes or his message to appeal to a broader swath of voters, as Democrats in competitive statewide races often do in the conservative-leaning South,” reports the Times.

“Instead, he has dived into his party’s efforts to thwart the president’s agenda in Congress, and sharpened his attacks on Mr. Trump and Republicans on the campaign trail,” said the Times.

And not only is his message resonating with voters, The Times reports the Georgia incumbent is looking more presidential by the week.

"Mr. Ossoff’s strong position in the race, formidable fund-raising and increasingly prominent confrontations with Trump administration officials have supercharged speculation about his presidential prospects, a topic he stubbornly avoids," the Times said.