by Steve Benen | Jun 24, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
About a year ago, a national YouGov poll found that Barack Obama was “by far” the nation’s most well-liked political figure. A national CNN poll released last week pointed in a similar direction. From the network’s report:
Obama is viewed positively by 57% of Americans, a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS finds, far surpassing the ratings for his two Oval Office successors. Only 34% of the public offers a favorable opinion of President Donald Trump, with former President Joe Biden’s favorability trailing at just 30%.
Obama’s standing among political independents is more than twice as high as either Biden’s or Trump’s.
(The poll was conducted before the recent coverage of the opening of the Obama Center in Chicago, which offered the former president a hearty dose of positive coverage.)
While only about one-fifth of Republican voters say they have a positive view of Obama, that’s actually relatively high by contemporary standards: Other living presidents have far less support from voters of the opposing party.
The same survey asked an open-ended question about which president — alive or dead — Americans most admired. Obama again crushed the competition, leading the pack with 30%.
A couple of years ago, the latest edition of the Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey asked a group of scholars to rank every American president, and Obama fared quite well, finishing seventh, trailing only Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson and Harry Truman.
At the time, the results got me thinking about whether the public’s perceptions were more or less in line with presidential scholars’ judgment. Evidently, the answer is yes.
As for Trump — who, incidentally, finished dead last
by Hunter Woodall | Jun 24, 2026 | News, Politics
Zohran Mamdani set out to push the Democratic Party in his own direction — younger, further left, more ambitious and less deferential to its established leaders. On Tuesday, New York City’s voters told him to keep going.
In his biggest political risk since winning office last year, the pathbreaking millennial mayor backed a pair of challengers seeking to unseat Democratic incumbents in Congress while breaking with local leaders over a third, open seat.
The results signaled that Mamdani’s sway over the city’s more liberal electorate extends even when he isn’t on the ballot.
The mayor himself had raised the stakes, casting the primaries as a choice about the direction of a Democratic Party locked out of power in Washington and eager to retake Congress this fall and the White House in 2028.
Mamdani backed Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier, each challenging a sitting member of Congress, and Claire Valdez, who was running for an open seat. Valdez and Chevalier, like Mamdani, were supported by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
In backing Lander and Chevalier, Mamdani put himself at odds with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn native who aims to become the next speaker of the House. Jeffries stood by the incumbents Lander and Chevalier were challenging — Reps. Dan Goldman and Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat, respectively — as a congressional leader almost always does.
Mamdani’s support for Valdez caused a different intraparty friction: Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, one of Valdez’s rivals, had been endorsed by the district’s retiring incumbent, Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez.
All three of Mamdani’s candidates were projected by The Associated Press to
by Steve Benen | Jun 23, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
Under normal circumstances, television networks turn to the public in the hopes that people will watch their program, but they wouldn’t seek political support against heavy-handed government tactics. Unfortunately, there’s nothing about our current circumstances that’s normal. MS NOW reported:
ABC began airing advertisements on its local stations Monday, asking viewers for support amid investigations launched by the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission.
The advertising campaign comes as the federal agency pushes investigations into the network’s shows and after the federal agency’s atypical demand in April that stations owned by the network seek early renewal of their broadcast licenses.
“‘The View’ has welcomed your favorite guests and covered the issues you care about for nearly 30 years,” one of the ads aired during the daytime talk show said. “Now the FCC wants to control who is allowed to appear on the show. Tell the FCC to let the viewers decide.”
The path leading to this point is long and circuitous. After Donald Trump targeted ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, for example, the president’s FCC chairman appeared on a far-right podcast last September and discussed his agency’s role in granting broadcast licenses. Referring specifically to a Kimmel monologue that Republicans didn’t like, Carr added, “When we see stuff like this — look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Roughly seven months later, the public got a better sense of what “the hard way” looks like. In April, the FCC launched a highly unusual early review of ABC’s broadcast station licenses. Although the commission claimed the review was related to the network’s efforts to hire a diverse workforce (which the Republican administration apparently
by Steve Benen | Jun 23, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
There is a degree of irony surrounding Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool fiasco. For months, the president obsessed over the renovation project, framing it as a metaphor for how awesome his awesomeness is: The Republican would tackle a lingering problem that vexed previous administrations, while delivering impressive results quickly and cheaply.
It wouldn’t just be a triumph for his presidency; it would be a totemic success story, demonstrating that Trump’s unique approach to problem-solving is fundamentally superior to what Americans have come to expect from traditional officials.
At least, that was the idea.
The debacle has become a metaphor of sorts, but not the one Trump had in mind. As the Reflecting Pool turned green, and the blue paint that he was so excited about started peeling off the surface, the president has confronted all kinds of difficult questions, not only about his failed results, but also about the fact that the project took far longer than he promised, with a price tag that soared far above his initial assurances, all while cutting corners and relying on controversial no-bid contracts.
The Republican proved the opposite of his intended point: Instead of demonstrating the superiority of his model, Trump offered timely evidence that his approach doesn’t work.
With this in mind, the president came to realize in recent days that he needed an excuse — or preferably, villains who could shoulder the blame for his own failures.
To that end, he began assuring the public over the weekend that he’d succeeded beautifully, but “vandals” intervened and ruined his triumph. At an unrelated White House event on Monday afternoon, the president went further, alleging nefarious criminals — some armed
by Steve Benen | Jun 22, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
The story that the White House expects Americans to believe is that Donald Trump and his team are impervious to pressure. The president does what he wants, when he wants, and the more people urge him to choose a different course, the more likely he is to stand his ground.
The narrative, however, isn’t true. The Republican administration reverses course under pressure with some regularity.
We saw several examples of this on trade policy last year, for example, giving rise to “TACO” mockery (“Trump Always Chickens Out”). More recently, the White House took steps to back off plans for a $1.776 billion compensation fund, after officials in both parties condemned the idea as an unprecedented “slush fund.”
As last week neared its end, however, Americans saw back-to-back reversals on the same day that helped underscore the larger point.
As June got underway, Trump administration officials announced plans to dismantle a $368 million deep-ocean observation system that, as The New York Times reported, “was put in place a decade ago to monitor coastal environments, marine ecosystems and powerful currents that affect the global climate.”
There was no real point to the move. The money had already been spent, and the deep-sea instruments were already anchored. But members of Team Trump decided that they simply did not want the information the observation system offered, so they said they’d destroy it.
At least, that was the original idea. Last week, a bipartisan group of senators took steps to block the administration from dismantling the system, insisting that the move would be both illegal and damaging to coastal communities. One day later, Team Trump announced that the observation system would
by Michele Norris | Jun 19, 2026 | Opinion, Politics
Few presidents have walked a more improbable path to the American presidency than Barack Obama. So it’s fitting that, much like the president it’s named for, nothing about the Obama Presidential Center is traditional. Not its Juneteenth opening. Not its location on the South Side of Chicago. Not its design, not its sprawling campus that includes a basketball court and outdoor grills, and not the exhibits that not only showcase what the 44th president accomplished but also highlight what he did not get done.
Michelle Obama’s story is also woven throughout the main narrative. There’s a teaching kitchen and a sledding hill. And, in a break with tradition, the $850 million campus does not include the president’s physical archives. The Obamas’ physical papers are in separate facility maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration, and that federal agency is managing his fully digital library.
Watch MS NOW’s exclusive interviews with Barack and Michelle Obama as part of “Hope Comes Home: Inside the Obama Presidential Center,” airing Friday, June 19, from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET.
The unconventional approach begins with the name. It’s the Obama Presidential Center. Not a library. That distinction was deliberate and signals an orientation toward everyday people, rather than scholars and history buffs. But the center does include a branch of the Chicago Public Library serving as an invitation to the surrounding community — and especially to the students at the high school directly across the street.
Traditional presidential libraries are usually shrines that zero in on a single man. However, the permanent exhibit in the museum space doesn’t even open with Obama’s childhood in Hawaii, Indonesia or Kansas or his early
