May 6, 2026 at 4:44 AM EDT
DC insider: 'The Trump catastrophe is starting to land' as GOP braces for wipeout

President Donald Trump is so unpopular right now, he is heading toward a historic defeat in the upcoming midterm elections, a longtime Republican strategist recently argued. "Donald Trump's poll numbers and his coalition are falling apart," Steve Schmidt, who advised the previous Republican chief executive President George W. Bush said in a Tuesday Substack post. "It's simply staggering -- unprecedented, even. Across the entire coalition, his voters are running. The Trump catastrophe is starting to land, and it's starting to be felt at the gas pumps. Everything is going to get more expensive, not less expensive, as the summer rolls on. Because Trump's war in Iran -- the war of choice that he's losing -- the impact of it? Well, we haven't even begun to start feeling it."

May 5, 2026 at 10:14 PM EDT
MAGA 'hypnotizing' mediocre 'idiots' to think they're geniuses: opinion

President Donald Trump's political brand is based on convincing unexceptional people that they are better than they actually are, but one critic says he's doing so at the expense of exceptional people who happen to belong to marginalized communities. "Donald Trump is literally hypnotizing mediocre people into thinking that they are meritocratic geniuses, while telling highly accomplished Black, Brown, and Asian people that they are nothing -- that everything they have was given to them by those same mediocre people," liberal commentator Joy-Ann Reid said on Tuesday in an episode of "The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali and Joy-Ann Reid." The pundit elaborated that Trump and his administration promote the idea that white men do not need to prove their merit because, by virtue of being white men, they are already exceptional.

May 5, 2026 at 10:03 PM EDT
Trump steamrolls red-state GOP primaries -- but sour voters will have the final say

President Donald Trump's meddling has delivered a distilled crop of Trump clones in Indiana Republican primaries Tuesday. But the problem for many Republicans, is that few people outside Republican primary voters even like Trump anymore, or his clones. "Indiana Republicans who defied Donald Trump's gerrymandering scheme paid for it Tuesday, as primary voters ousted five of the seven state senators the president targeted with primary challenges after they voted against his redistricting push -- a decisive show of force that suggests his hold on the GOP base remains firm even as his approval rating has hit a new low," wrote MS NOW reporters Hunter Woodall and Ebony Davis.

May 5, 2026 at 8:53 PM EDT
A Trump prosecutor is targeting election workers: report

A prosecutor appointed by President Donald Trump has Georgia election workers in his sights. "Fulton County, Georgia, is trying to fend off a subpoena from a federal prosecutor in North Carolina seeking contact information for thousands of poll workers from the 2020 election," The Guardian's George Chidi reported on Tuesday. "The subpoena, issued in April by Dan Bishop, the interim US attorney of North Carolina's middle district, demands the county provide rosters of election staff members who served in the November 2020 election, including their identification by name, position, residential and email address and personal telephone number."

May 5, 2026 at 8:31 PM EDT
Trump official says president 'worried' the statute of limitations can't save him

Former White House press secretary Sarah Matthews says she believes a recent report claiming President Donald Trump and the White House are coaching staff on how to stonewall investigations from an inevitable Democratic Congress after November. "They see the writing on the wall," Matthews told a panel at MS NOW's "The Weeknight." "They know that the midterms are going to be brutal for them. " [W]ith these midterms coming up, voters feel a lot of buyer's remorse. They feel like they've been bamboozled by this administration. Everything that Trump said he was going to do on the campaign trail, whether that was bring down prices or be the peace candidate, he's done the complete opposite of it."

May 5, 2026 at 7:59 PM EDT
Fox News viewers more likely to embrace debunked conspiracies and violence

People who regularly watch Fox News are more likely to believe in a debunked conspiracy theory that has been widely linked to violence, according to a recent study. "Recent years have witnessed an increase in white Americans' support for the Great Replacement Theory (GRT), the xenophobic conspiracy theory that posits that political elites are embracing permissive immigration policies to bring in 'obedient' voters who will vote for them and who will eventually replace native white citizens," scholars Jesse Rhodes, Seth Goldman and others wrote for the journal PS: Political Science & Politics. They added that, because Fox News frequently promotes this theory, the article's authors decided to study "the American Multiracial Panel Study to investigate whether exposure to Fox News is associated with support for the GRT." After surveying more than 1,000 people over a period of more than a year, they concluded that "whites who receive their political news from Fox News are significantly more likely to support core tenets of the GRT than those who do not," a phenomenon consistent with what they dubbed a "Fox News Effect."

May 5, 2026 at 6:14 PM EDT
Conservative says Trump has done irreparable harm to Americans' trust in government

According to a top defense expert, President Donald Trump's Iran war has made it impossible for millions of Americans to ever trust their government's foreign policy again. "For decades, the U.S. government has been willing to start wars but not strategically and transparently manage them, consistently misleading its citizenry to justify adventurism abroad," Alexander Langlois, a contributing fellow for Defense Priorities, wrote for Reason on Tuesday. "The conduct of the Trump administration in the current war with Iran is no exception."

May 5, 2026 at 6:03 PM EDT
Grievance-ridden Trump 'loathes' voters for whining about their problems: report

MS NOW Anchor Nicole Wallace and panelists took turns ruining President Donald Trump's look of impatience with voters while he obsesses over his various pet projects around the U.S. Capitol. "This is who he is," said Wallace, referring to a photo of Trump hoisting a design of his beloved White House ballroom and flaunting it to the media. "He doesn't give a hoot about your economic despair, couldn't care less and has no clue how much eggs cost or anything else. He's angry at you for caring about the price of gas, is angry at you for caring about losing your health care, is angry at Marjorie Taylor Greene for caring about the promise about 'no forever wars,' is angry at Tucker Carlson for calling BS on him, betraying his voters on all those. All of the above."

May 5, 2026 at 5:35 PM EDT
Trump still searching for 'magic formula' that will never come: expert

As the war with Iran moves into its third month, President Donald Trump is increasingly desperate for the "magic formula" that will deliver victory, but according to Iran expert Steven Erlanger, he can't win because he "doesn't understand" the situation in the first place. Not only was he misinformed about what the conflict would entail, but he is ignorant of the psychology of the Iranian regime. Writing for the New York Times, Erlanger details Trump's efforts so far, from the airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities last June, to the initial attempt at regime change in February, to the blockade of Hormuz he hopes will reopen that very strait.

May 5, 2026 at 5:13 PM EDT
Supreme Court 'boiling over' into malfunction as conservatives choose 'sides'

There has been a "deterioration of morale" at the U.S. Supreme Court, Yale Law School professor Justin Driver told Bloomberg News, as he predicted "there will be major fireworks" by the time the high court's term comes to a close around the end of June. Other legal scholars share that concern.

May 5, 2026 at 5:11 PM EDT
White collar suspects skip away as Trump focuses on his personal enemies: report

Anonymous sources tell Bloomberg that the Department of Justice and President Donald Trump's prosecutor allies in Florida are letting white collar crime suspects go unprosecuted while Trump pursues his political enemies. "Shortly after ascending to the top of the Justice Department last month, Todd Blanche gathered prosecutors in Miami to press for results from a highly sensitive probe into some of President Donald Trump's perceived political enemies," reports Bloomberg. "Blanche and Jason Reding Quiñones, the relatively little-known US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, have ramped up the months-long investigation into politically charged allegations that former senior government officials acted illegally years ago to undermine Trump."

May 5, 2026 at 11:54 AM EDT
Kyrsten Sinema argues North Carolina's 'homewrecker' law doesn't apply to her

Former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Az.) filed a court document in the case involving her affair with a former security guard, claiming the law doesn't apply to her because she has no ties to the state in which she is being charged. An obscure North Carolina "homewrecker" law is being used to allege that Sinema broke up the couple's 14-year marriage, reported The Arizona Republic .