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Multiple polls and surveys released in recent days have shown US consumer sentiment cratering—and all the while, the US stock market keeps hitting record highs.The Kobeissi Letter, a financial newsletter, posted a graphic Saturday that matched consumer sentiment as measured by the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers with the performance of the S&P 500 stock index over a 30-year span.The graphic shows that, up until around 2020, consumer sentiment matched stock market performance closely, although there was a large divergence between the two leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, where stocks briefly outperformed consumer sentiment before crashing downward as the housing bu

At the White House congressional picnic on Tuesday evening, as Abba's "Dancing Queen" echoed across a lawn dotted with cornhole games, a ferris wheel, and food stations serving short ribs and apple pie, Donald Trump took time to celebrate a political scalp, according to a new story in The Guardian. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican and persistent critic of the president, had lost his primary race and was conspicuously absent from the festivities. "We won the Massie thing," Trump

This week, the president has hit the floor in his support. A new Reuters poll found that Donald Trump's approval is 35 percent. A new Q poll found that it's 33 percent. Nate Silver said it's lower than Joe Biden's was after the Disaster Deba

The creation of an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” at the Department of Justice may have shocked a lot of people, but not Paul Figley, a legal scholar and former DOJ staffer who has spent years warning that taxpayer money could be used by an administration for political ends in just this way.The fund, the result of a settlement of legal claims by Donald Trump and his family against the IRS, aims to compensate those who “suffered weaponization and lawfare” at the hands of the federal government. It has already been called a “slush fund”

On May 17 thousands of President Donald Trump’s faithful supporters (and many right-wing Christians), assembled in Washington, D.C. for “Rededicate 250”— a celebration that some critics called a “taxpayer funded white Christian nationalist rally.”But while some were celebrating the festivities, at least one conservative Christian voice was noticeably absent from the White House-backed

Social media is still ringing from a painful recent Fox News poll delivering some of the most damaging news President Donald Trump could probably get.The poll’s most brutal finding was that Trump is not only losing serious ground among groups he made surprising inroads with in 2024. He’s also cratering with his most loyal constituency: white men.The Fox survey revealed Trump’s approval was underwater with working-class whites (46–54), rural voters (43–57), and general white men (48–52). Other, less revelatory news, was

Last week President Donald Trump issued a sop to mothers with a new website that purports to be a one-stop shop of useful information for mothers. Tressie McMillan Cottom called the website “underwhelming,” but its existence “is a rare concession that Trump is very unpopular.”And if Trump’s looking for moms to save him and his party in November, it’s looking like they won’t.“Bucolic imagery of a faceless pregnant woman standing in a golden field dominates the homepage. A lot of real estate is also dedicated to controversial ‘pregnancy centers,’ code for

President Donald Trump insists he was not involved with an IRS settlement that creates an unsupervised $1.8 billion fund that potentially hands out millions of dollars to people who attempted to overthrow the 2020 U.S. election. But Zeteo reports the president is lying about his lack of involvement.“After news broke this week that Donald Trump’s administration had agreed to create a $1.776 billion slush fund for his allies, in order to settle the president’s completely bogus lawsuit, Trump got busy telling a blatant lie,” reports Zeteo writers Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng. “I wasn’t involved in the settlement,” Trump

New York Times Columnist and attorney David French told fellow columnists that he has absolutely no compassion for the Republicans who nailed themselves to President Donald Trump’s collapsing house.“We’re seeing this combination of factors happening right now,” said French speaking to a Saturday panel of Trump’s attempt to create a wildly unpopular slush fund, under his exclusive control, to disburse money to people of his choosing. “Trump is [pushing the fund] at the same time that he has flexed an enormous amount of control over the G.O.P. at the grass-roots level, with defeating five Indiana senato

A CNN panel found itself in the uncommon position of ganging up on one of its own panelists after she defended the proposal of a slush fund entirely orchestrated by President Donald Trump’s handpicked board members.“I mean, I would push back on that a little bit. What you call the slush fund I call the anti-weaponization fund,” right-wing podcaster Emily Austin told the “Table for Five” panel. “I'm sure on both sides of the aisle, we all have friends whose lives have been absolutely ruined, whether they were innocent. And you said that this is going to people who as