Mar. 26, 2026, 4:22 PM EDT

Some deranged death wishes from Christian extremists against Texas Democrat James Talarico have vaulted the Senate candidate into rare air.

Talarico, a progressive state lawmaker known for preaching at Presbyterian churches, rebuked the comments, made by two pastors with ties to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The incident brings to mind other white faith leaders who have faced violent fury from white people while advocating for civil and human rights, such as the Rev. Will Campbell and Freedom Rider James Zwerg.

HuffPost reported on the remarks made on a recent podcast by the extremist pastors, Brooks Potteiger and Joshua Haymes:

After referring to the Texas Democrat as ‘a wolf,’ a ‘demon,’ and ‘a snake,’ the two talked about what they hope becomes of Talarico.

‘First and foremost, we pray that a man like this would be cut to the heart,’ Haymes said. He said he puts Talarico in the category of ‘public enemies,’ or those you ‘are not called to love.’

‘This is where you have imprecatory psalms. This is where you pray strongly,’ he said. ‘The psalmist is not shy. God, destroy them. Make them as dung on the ground.’

But wait, there’s more:

‘I pray that God kills him,’ Haymes continued. ‘Ultimately, that means killing his heart and raising him up to new life in Christ.’

Potteiger concurred. ‘Right, right,’ he said. ‘We want him crucified with Christ.’

Haymes repeated that he wants “death and new life” for Talarico. “And if it would not be within God’s will to do so, stop him by any means necessary,” he said.

Talarico’s”https://x.com/jamestalarico/status/2036647988182036730?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2036647988182036730%7Ctwgr%5Ed51c4d37758d17c3a41a9e9d615c53d527b284cf%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ms.now%2F%3Fp%3D1208984″>response on social media was a simple one, directed at Potteiger:

I’ve previously written about Haymes and his assertions that “the institution of slavery is not inherently evil” and it’s “not inherently evil to own another human being” — and that “every Christian in today’s society should be able to defend” those claims. Such comments help show that he and Potteiger are essentially polar opposites of Talarico, who tends to use his religion to rebuke abuses of civil and human rights — not defend them.

This incident underscores divisions I spotlighted in 2024, when I wrote about the divide between white Christian nationalists and the Christians who adhere to a more loving and radically progressive theology, like the kind traditionally practiced by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Bishop William Barber and other Black leaders.

Fundamentally, Talarico’s response to the far-right pastors seemed to center on what some white Christians believe their god exists to do — harm conservatives’ perceived enemies — and those who spread a gospel of love and shared humanity.

Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.

Mar. 26, 2026, 4:01 PM EDT

This is an adapted excerpt from the March 25 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”

Right now there are real questions about the ability of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to provide this country’s commander in chief with accurate information.

On Wednesday, NBC News reported that Donald Trump is getting his “daily briefing” on the war in Iran in the form of a “highlight reel.” Three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official told NBC News that since the start of the war, military officials “compile a video update for Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours.”

According to those officials, the montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer. One official described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up” — national intelligence in the form of Instagram Reels, basically.

Now, to be clear, the sources stressed that Trump also receives more traditional briefings. But given what we know about how much reading this president does, it’s fair to question how much information he actually retains or understands.

Following NBC News’ reporting, the Iranian foreign minister mocked Trump on social media, essentially calling him a patsy for his own intelligence agencies.

“It is said that Edward Bernays, a pioneer of mass persuasion, served on Committee on Public Information and worked to help Woodrow Wilson rally Americans for war in Europe. When he and Walter Lippmann met president in 1917, they reportedly said ‘We can sell the war to the public,’” Abbas Araghchi wrote. “More than a century later, little has changed — except that now, it seems, the war is being ‘sold’ not once, but daily, even to the president himself, through carefully curated videos.”

It is completely unclear who is putting together these little highlight reels in the first place. Is it a “best of” reel from Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense? From National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard?

Gabbard previously told lawmakers that Trump was getting the “best objective intelligence available to inform his decisions.”

“All the best intelligence” — and the most awesome explosion videos, it appears.

But this is a symptom of a much wider problem. Right now it does not seem like there is a functional truth-telling process in the intelligence apparatus. By many accounts, it has been hollowed out. Experts have been replaced with MAGA loyalists, and we’re seeing the consequences.

On the very first day of the war, the U.S. struck a girls’ elementary school in Iranapparently while meaning to target a nearby military installation. Almost 200 people were killed, most of them children.

As one mother whose child was killed told NBC News this week, “Trump should not think that killing our children has made us despair … He should cry for himself, because he will end up in hell.”

This administration’s total lack of competence has had effects like what we saw in Iran in plenty of other places. Do you remember earlier this month when the Pentagon announced it had conducted a joint operation with the military of Ecuador? According to the U.S. Southern Command, they were targeting “narco-terrorists.” The Department of Defense posted a video to social media that showed a large explosion and told the public it was a “narco-terrorist supply complex.” According to the government of Ecuador, the attack was based on “intelligence and support” from the U.S.

But as The New York Times reports:

The military strike appears to have destroyed a cattle and dairy farm, not a drug trafficking compound, according to interviews with the farm’s owner, four of its workers, human rights lawyers and residents and leaders in San Martín, the remote farming village in northern Ecuador where the strike took place.

Workers on the farm told the Times that Ecuadorian soldiers arrived by helicopter on March 3, doused several shelters and sheds with gasoline and ignited them after interrogating workers and beating four of them with the butts of their guns. Some of the workers said the soldiers later choked them and subjected them to electrical shocks before letting them go.

Three days later, on March 6, the Ecuadorian military reappeared in helicopters, residents said, and dropped at least two explosives on what the Times called “the farm’s smoldering remains.”

You have to wonder if that explosion made it into the president’s daily highlight video.

But this is the apparent product of U.S. intelligence during the second Trump administration: garbage in, terrible garbage decisions out.

On Wednesday, Iraq said the U.S. struck a medical clinic on a military base there, killing seven members of the country’s military and wounding more than a dozen.

The U.S. denies targeting a clinic, but it’s a fair question to ask: Did they know what they were targeting?

Right now, as this war spirals throughout the region, it is not even clear if Trump knows whether or not our country is actually negotiating an end to it. He keeps saying we are, while Iran insists negotiations are a nonstarter.

So here we are, with Iran using its leverage to run a “toll operation” in the Strait of Hormuzmaking their own deals for safe passage with China, Russia, India, Iraq and Pakistan. Maybe they’ll decide to negotiate with the U.S. — and maybe they won’t.

But according to the former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, it’s clear who has the upper hand here. Alex Younger told The Economist“The reality is the U.S. underestimated the task, and I think, as of about two weeks ago, lost the initiative to Iran. In practice, the Iranian regime has been more resilient than I think anyone expected.”

Trump thought this was going to be a cakewalk. He thought it would be a quick process to depose a regime, as it was in Venezuelaand now the war is dragging into its fourth week. As the human toll grows with each passing day, I don’t know if the commander in chief is even aware of the costs of this mess.

Allison Detzel contributed.

Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).

Mar. 26, 2026, 2:28 PM EDT

Republicans have spent a decade telling Americans they’re the party that knows how to run an economy. Fewer and fewer voters believe them.

As the U.S. war with Iran drives up gas prices and snarls supply chainsRepublicans face a growing disconnect between their promises of an economic “feast” and the reality at the pump and grocery store. Their response so far: Ask Americans to sacrifice.

In recent months, Trump and his allies have bluntly asked Americans to sacrifice their personal purchases, advising people to simply shop smarter, buy less and accept short-term pain in exchange for long-term national security gains that administration officials struggle to define consistently.

The messaging has drawn sharp criticism even from within the GOP.

It’s “more than tone-deaf,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former Trump appointee during his first term. “Some of the rhetoric has just been shameful.”

Michele Tafoya, the National Republican Senatorial Committee-endorsed Senate candidate in Minnesota, told conservative talk radio listeners last week that if they’re worried about the cost of fuel, maybe they should “take one less trip to Starbucks” until the Iran war ends and gas prices drop. “Let’s just be patriots about it,” she added.

Similar remarks have been made by President Donald Trump and top administration officials. In December, as tariffs squeezed up costs, Trump told supporters ahead of the Christmas holiday that they could “give up certain products.” “You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice,” he said. In January, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins floated a bizarre $3 dinner consisting of a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla and “one other thing.” In February, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recommended that cash-strapped Americans buy “cheap cuts of meat,” suggesting they purchase liver instead of “a porterhouse steak.” And earlier this month, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett suggested that an extended war in Iran “wouldn’t really disrupt the U.S. economy very much at all; it would hurt consumers, and we’d have to think about what we’d have to do about that, but that’s really the last of our concerns right now.”

“This is not an ‘I feel your pain’ party,” Bartlett told MS NOW. “This is just a preposterous notion of either telling the American public that we’ve reached the golden age, or dismissing the very legitimate economic concerns.”

The real-world stakes are immediate for many Americans.

Hunter Luther, a 21-year-old North Carolina voter who describes himself as a MAGA Republican, said premium gas in his area now tops $5 a gallon — almost $85 to fill his tank. At the grocery store, “everything seems to be going up and nothing’s going down,” he said. “It’s getting hard.”

Luther said he wants Republicans to acknowledge that “what they’re doing is hurting us.” He also questioned the strategic logic of the war itself: With the administration open to negotiating with a successor with ties to the regime of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in strikes on Feb. 28, he wondered what the conflict had achieved.

“If you’re just going to negotiate with the new one, then what’s the point of getting rid of the last one?” Luther said. “This was all for nothing, and now our prices are going through the roof for no reason.”

“They should have thought that out before they even went over there,” he said.

Repetition as strategy

The White House’s response to economic anxiety is deliberate, according to Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian, the authors of an upcoming book, “Trump’s Ten Commandments.”

“Having each of the Cabinet members say the exact same thing about how affordability is a hoax, how prices are coming down, how soon the Iran conflict ends, all prices are going to be lower than they’ve ever been before, and how everything in the grocery stores is cheaper than it’s ever been,” Tian told MS NOW. “He wants everyone repeating these messages, because by repeating those messages over and over again, he thinks people actually start believing it.”

Trump says that when the war in Iran ends, gas prices will “go lower than they were before.” Vice President JD Vance, for his part, recently described high gas prices as a “temporary blip.”

“Once the Iranian terror threat is neutralized, Americans will again see gas prices plummet, real wages grow, inflation cool, and trillions in investments pour in,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement to MS NOW. “President Trump was resoundingly re-elected to the White House precisely because he understood how Americans were left behind by Joe Biden’s economic disaster.”

But even if the war in Iran ends this week, Sonnenfeld — who, as founder of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, regularly speaks with CEOs — predicts that supply chains and gas prices won’t return to normal for a year.

The White House has taken some steps to ease the pressure — temporarily suspending rules to allow non-U.S. ships to travel domestic routes and releasing more than 170 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Neither measure has stopped the rise in prices, which have climbed more than $1 per gallon over the past month, according to AAA.

And that’s contributing to a dynamic that’s eroding the Republican Party’s longtime edge among voters on economic issues. For more than a decade, Americans have viewed the GOP as more responsible stewards of the nation’s economy compared with their political rivals.

But there are signs that advantage is slipping. An October Gallup study found Republicans with their lowest marks since 2013 on which party is “better to keep the country prosperous” — a result before gas prices soared and inflation meaningfully escalated. Trump’s approval rating on the economy hit an all-time low this month in Reuters/Ipsos pollingwhich has tracked the metric since his first term. The 29% mark is lower than at any point during Joe Biden’s presidency, including when inflation peaked at 9.1% in 2022. A similar trend is found in polling from Fox Newswhich found this week that Trump’s overall job disapproval rating is 59% — his worst marks of either of his terms in office.

Trump loyalty holds — for now

Despite those numbers, Republican elected officials have remained publicly loyal to Trump, including those facing competitive primaries or difficult midterm races.

A GOP strategist, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to speak publicly, told MS NOW internal research shows voters respond more favorably to policies explicitly tied to the president.

Bartlett said the political calculus is also different: Biden “clearly showed his age, and it made it all the more difficult to campaign or even appear with him,” whereas Trump projects an energy that Republican candidates can still leverage. He “continues to be the largest, strongest driving force in the Republican Party,” Bartlett said.

November’s results will offer the first real test of whether the GOP’s economic brand can survive the war — and whether the working-class voters who powered Trump’s last two victories are still willing to pay the price.

“The same issue set that got the GOP a trifecta in 2024 threatens to undermine its power in 2026,” said Eli Yokley, a political analyst with Morning Consult, a nonpartisan pollster. “Even at a similar point ahead of the midterms in Trump’s 2018 term, Republicans weren’t facing a similar confidence problem.”

Akayla Gardner is a White House correspondent for MS NOW.