Darline Graham Just Made Her Disastrous Foreign Policy Gaffe Worse

South Carolina Senator Darline Graham has a baffling excuse for her humiliating debate performance—spoiler alert: It involves transgender athletes!

Speaking on Fox News’s Sean Hannity Show Wednesday, Graham explained the shocking moment she admitted she was “not informed on national security,” when asked whether Taiwan and the South China Sea were national security issues for the United States.

“You know, I tripped up on one question last night regarding Taiwan. But you know I’ve said many times, I’m not a politician, certainly not a career politician, I don’t speak politician,” she said. “You know I was just honest, and I think that’s kind of a foreign concept.”

It’s true that a wise woman knows herself to be a fool—but Graham’s foolishness wasn’t finished.

“Of course Taiwan is our friend, but I think people in South Carolina are more worried about making ends meet, they’re concerned about boys in girls’ sports,” she added.

It would be surprising if people in South Carolina really felt that way—considering the state passed a law banning transgender students from playing on girls’ or women’s sports teams four years ago. The conservative-majority Supreme Court recently upheld similar rules in two other states, cementing the status of South Carolina’s transgender athlete ban.

She added that South Carolinians were more concerned about the second amendment, the SAVE America Act, and illegal immigration, “so they’re concerned about a lot of things other than Taiwan.”

Crucially, if Graham can’t answer simple questions about national security, she has no business being on that debate stage. She also has no business representing South Carolina, for in the same debate, Graham also claimed that there were 50 million people living in South Carolina. There are only 5.6 million.

Senator Jon Ossoff, a 2028 presidential contender, has struck gold with his jab at President Trump’s aide Natalie Harp.

The White House quickly lashed out after Ossoff mentioned Harp during an Atlanta rally on Sunday, and ever since then, Harp has been all over the news, with new details about her unusually close relationship with the president being revealed nearly every day. On Wednesday, Ossoff reveled in how he successfully rattled the Trump administration.

“It’s been amazing to watch this White House melt down over this all week. And about Natalie Harp, these White House staffers are adults, public officials paid by the taxpayer, with immense power in positions of public trust,” Ossoff told MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell. “And whether it’s Natalie Harp printing out Donald Trump’s daily dose of delusion and flattery, or Peter Navarro steering taxpayer-funded loans to Trump family investments, or Pete Hegseth deluding the president daily into deepening this quagmire in the Middle East, no one cares about their feelings.”

Ossoff went on to attack Trump for being obsessed with building the White House ballroom and flying in a luxury jet gifted to him by Qatar while neglecting military personnel fighting his war, such as the sailors experiencing poor conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, accusing him of retreating “into this circle of sycophantic aides who tell him every day what he wants to hear, not what he needs to hear.”

On Sunday, Ossoff called out Trump, saying that “he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” That touched a nerve, with Trump calling him a “Pee-Wee Herman lookalike” and White House communications director Steven Cheung calling him “Jon Jackoff” and “the biggest cuck loser in politics.”

Since then, details have emerged about Harp’s obsession with the president, from insisting on riding in the trunk of Trump’s SUV in 2023 to stay close to him to writing gushing letters where she says she forgets to eat and sleep. Her brother told CNN Tuesday that she has written letters to other presidents and has “an unhealthy obsession.”

Other longtime Trump staffers have been perfectly willing to (anonymously) dish about Harp and her unusually close relationship with the president for years now, with aides calling her the “human printer” for printing out drafts of suggested social media posts for him to review and articles for him to read. She’s seen as the source of his bizarre social media posting habits, too. The more she is seen at his side, the more the news stories driving Trump’s inner circle wild will continue.

Michael Cohen won’t confirm or deny whether he’ll use President Trump’s Thursday appearance on his podcast to ask for a pardon.

“We’ll see,” he said to Politico regarding the potential pardon request. “Will I make that request down the road? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.” He noted that “people may be interested to hear two individuals that were friends for a decade and a half who have not publicly spoken in eight years” discuss their history together. “What could they talk about?” he mused.

Trump will call into Cohen’s weekly talk radio program and podcast When You Know You Know Thursday evening.

“Beyond ridiculous. Cohen conned so many liberals,” commentator Medhi Hasan wrote on X. “I am glad I was one of the few cable hosts, when I was at MSNBC/Peacock, to have actually grilled him on air and not just uncritically accept his BS and fake conversion.”

It’s unclear what exactly brought Cohen back to Trump. Cohen worked as an attorney for Trump from 2006 to 2018, when he was sentenced to three years in federal prison on charges related to his role as the middleman in Trump’s hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. He wrote a book titled Disloyal in 2020 in which he called Trump “a cheat, a mobster, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.” He testified against him in 2024 regarding the hush money as well. Now Trump and Cohen are apparently chummy again.

Cohen wrote in a Substack article titled “The Impossible Reunion” on Thursday that “forgiveness doesn’t have amnesia.”

“Sometimes the most extraordinary act of courage isn’t winning the fight. It’s deciding the fight doesn’t have to last forever. And sometimes, after everything has burned down, forgiveness is the only thing capable of building something again,” he wrote. “This evening, you’ll hear whether we can.”

Donald Trump’s closest aide, Natalie Harp, refused to seek security clearance for more than a year while working in the White House.

Two people familiar with the matter told MS NOW that it was unclear why Harp had failed to obtain the proper security clearance received by all staff when they began working at the White House. Maybe she was too busy writing the president gushing love letters to finish filling out her SF-86 forms?

After concerns around Trump’s seemingly obsessed personal aide mounted among the White House counsel’s office and security officials, the president was forced to personally intervene, one of the people told MS NOW. In recent months, Harp filled out the forms to receive a background check and has since received her security clearance.

Harp’s missing security clearance is just one of several red flags raised by staff during Trump’s second administration that has spurred frustrations among West Wing staffers, four people told MS NOW.

Since joining the president’s posse ahead of the 2024 election, Harp has become a central gatekeeper to the president, allowing certain voices to be heard over others. Harp “plays into the less productive and more troublesome parts of his nature, putting things in front of him that aren’t vetted,” one of the four people told MS NOW.

One national security official voiced concerns that Harp’s unusually close proximity to Trump provided her access to more sensitive information than anyone else in the president’s orbit.

There had been “subtle moves,” to create space between Harp and Trump, another of the four people told MS NOW. “She is just persistent and not realizing that’s what they were trying to do,” they said.

Harp does seem persistent—she once reportedly rode in the trunk of Trump’s SUV when there weren’t enough seats for her up front.

The security clearance issue stems back to the early days ahead of Trump’s second term, when the president-elect’s team reportedly failed to submit security clearance requests for members of his second administration, in violation of the Presidential Transition Act, a federal law that coordinates and funds the transition of power from one administration to the next.

Harp’s security status is part of a broader trend of carelessness in Trump’s second administration. FBI Director Kash Patel also reportedly granted former deputy director Dan Bongino a waiver to bypass getting a key security clearance, but the deputy director was still given access to highly classified information, such as the president’s daily brief, which collates essential information from the intelligence community.

A Florida school board—known for its book bans, anti-mask mandates, and anti-LGBTQ stance—has lost its conservative majority.

The Sarasota County School Board election, which was led by a co-founder of the conservative group Moms for Liberty, saw two Democrat-endorsed candidates, Megan Tennimon and Beth Mayberry, cruise to victory. A third Democratic candidate, Jimmy Glover, will face a run-off vote in November. If he is victorious, he will be the first person of color to ever sit on the five-person Sarasota County School Board.

“I really think at the end of the day, regardless of political affiliation, our community was just tired of the culture wars, the political theater and being the center of national attention for all the wrong reasons,” Tennimon, a former teacher, said.

“I think that they realized how destructive those divisive policies really were,” Mayberry, also a retired educator, added. “What they’ve seen in the last four years, with basically the tabloid happenings on the school board and a lot of the policies and resolutions that were being made, our general community did not agree with.”

Florida and Governor Ron DeSantis have very much led the charge against “woke” in schools. In 2023, the state banned Advanced Placement Psychology in all public schools because its teachings on sexual orientation and gender identity violated the state’s draconian “Don’t Say Gay” law. The state was responsible for 40 percent of all book bans across the country in the 2022–23 school year, banning 1,406 books like The Kite Runner, Little Rock Nine, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. In the last year, the Sarasota School Board specifically removed race, sexuality, and disability from its anti-bullying rules and declared its loyalty to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Maybe people seem to be getting anti-woke fatigue at both the state and local level. But Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich doesn’t seem to think so.

“Every couple of years someone in the media writes our obituary, and every couple of years parents show up and prove them wrong,” Descovich told The Washington Post. “School boards are ground zero in the fight for parental rights, and last night Florida parents made that clear.”

Regardless, it’s clear that anti-wokeness isn’t a winning message anymore in Sarasota County, or even Florida at large—as Angie Nixon, a democratic socialist, also recently won the Democratic nomination for Senate.