SmartNews

President Donald Trump has created a new threat to the 2026 midterms, one in which there is "little recourse" for those who could stand in his way, according to one analyst.

Michael Feinberg, MS NOW's national security analyst, revealed on a new episode of MS NOW's "Deadline: White House Weekend" with host Nicolle Wallace that Trump's decision to install Bill Pulte as the Acting Director of National Intelligence presents a potent threat to the midterm elections. He warned that Pulte has access to swaths of sensitive information that can be used to sow doubt in the election results, and possibly give Trump an avenue to rig it ahead of time.

Political analysts and observers ridiculed President Donald Trump's rant on Sunday about the supposedly "criminally made algae" in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Trump has faced significant criticism over the last couple of weeks because of the state of the reflecting pool. The administration undertook a more than $16 million renovation project on the grounds that the pool had never been properly repaired by previous administrations. But the new pool bottom began peeling, and the algae Trump had promised to eliminate returned.

A political analyst lamented the "dark moment" that is President Donald Trump's Great American State Fair, a 16-day festival at the National Mall organized by a Trump-linked entity called "Freedom 250," during a new podcast interview on Sunday.

Jon Lovett, co-host of "Pod Save America" and a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama, discussed the state fair on a new episode of "The Daily Beast Podcast" with host Joanna Coles. He noted that attendance is low amid a heatwave across the East Coast and that several attractions at the event aren't working as advertised. While those issues were almost expected, Lovett noted that the event itself also casts a shadow over the nation's upcoming 250th birthday.

With “little fanfare,” the Supreme Court is quietly working to double its own police force, Politico’s Josh Gerstein reported on Sunday, a push that justices and court officials apparently “loathe” discussing.

“The push for a rapid security buildout stems from the substantial threats to the justices at a moment of growing political violence in the U.S. and the sense that the system has just not been up to the task of keeping them safe,” Gerstein wrote. “That’s a belief that appears to be shared by at least some of the justices themselves.”

Former CBS News correspondent Scott MacFarlane expressed astonishment on Sunday at the viral reach of a Senate floor speech by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) cataloging alleged corruption across the first 500 days of President Donald Trump's second term.

"Wow," MacFarlane wrote, noting that Murphy's floor speech on Trump administration corruption "has now received 1 million views."

MS NOW host and former GOP lawmaker Joe Scarborough sharply rebuked House Speaker Mike Johnson on Sunday, accusing him of hypocrisy after the speaker claimed Democrats were trying to "steal" elections.

The exchange stemmed from Johnson's appearance on Fox Business's "Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo," where, according to a clip shared by the anti-Trump outlet The Bulwark, the speaker framed an election fight in stark partisan terms.

President Donald Trump’s decision to launch his unpopular war against Iran earlier this year has already sparked a global “shift,” renowned economic professor Richard Wolff argued recently, one that also set the president on an imminent path toward total irrelevancy in “only a few months.”

A professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and former professor at Yale, Wolff pointed to the recent progressive sweep last week in New York as evidence of his theory, and compared it directly with the civil unrest sparked during the Vietnam War that ultimately helped – at least, in part – bring about the U.S. withdrawal.

An MS NOW host argued Sunday that President Donald Trump squandered a rare political gift — a bipartisan housing bill that could have eased financial pressure on millions of Americans — because he "threw a temper tantrum," choosing instead to hold the legislation hostage to his voter ID agenda.

In an opening monologue, the host laid out what they framed as a baffling self-inflicted wound. Trump, he said, "had the opportunity to actually do something that could ease the financial burdens for countless Americans" and could have signed "the largest housing affordability bill in a generation" — a rare bipartisan measure that would have handed his own party something to campaign on in November.

Iranian state media has reportedly declared that the country now has "no choice but to obtain the atomic bomb," according to a post circulating online — a statement that, if accurate, would mark a dramatic escalation amid the ongoing exchange of strikes between the U.S. and Iran.

The claim was relayed by the account The Hormuz Letter, which posted what it described as a breaking statement from Iranian state media. According to that post, Iranian state media argued the country must "absolutely reach nuclear deterrence" before current negotiations can be conducted, framing the pursuit of a weapon as necessary to remove what it called "the military option for the occupation and partitioning of Iran" from the table.

Reporting from the National Mall in Washington, D.C., Fox News’ Peter Doocy claimed that people were “still coming out” to the Great American State Fair, though he soon became the butt of a joke online after viewers noted a glaring contradiction directly behind him.

“It’s really something!” Doocy said Sunday, speaking from an elevated news desk on the National Mall about the fair, organized by the President Donald Trump-linked group Freedom 250. “The weather, not the best today, but people are still coming out.”