by Steve Benen | Apr 13, 2026 | Maddowblog, Media, News, Politics
Last summer, after The Wall Street Journal reported on Donald Trump’s alleged 2003 birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, the president responded with unsubtle threats. “President Trump will be suing The Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp, and Mr. Murdoch, shortly,” he wrote online, referring to himself in the third person for reasons unknown.
The Republican added soon after, “The Wall Street Journal printed a FAKE letter, supposedly to Epstein. These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures. I told Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his ass off, and that of his third rate newspaper.”
In mid-July, the president did, in fact, file the defamation suit, seeking a jury trial and a judgment of at least $10 billion. At least for now, it now appears he will get neither. The Journal reported:
A federal judge on Monday dismissed President Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles, based in Miami, Fla., ruled Trump hadn’t made a valid legal claim that he was defamed by an article about a letter to financier Jeffrey Epstein bearing Trump’s name.
“Because President Trump has not plausibly alleged that defendants published the article with actual malice, both Counts must be dismissed,” the jurist wrote.
We’ll learn soon enough whether the president’s lawyers appeal and/or file an amended lawsuit, but as things stand, his highly dubious and historically unusual civil case is no more.
If it seems as if Trump has faced related failures before, it’s not your imagination. Indeed, one of the most striking things
by Steve Benen | Apr 13, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
In 2015, just a couple of months after launching his Republican presidential campaign, then-television personality Donald Trump decided to do something rather provocative: He publicly took aim at Pope Francis.
The pontiff, the GOP candidate complained at the time, was “very political” and failed to recognize what Trump said was the distinct possibility of ISIS terrorists invading the Vatican. Months later, the future American president added, “I don’t think he understands the danger of the open border that we have with Mexico.”
After Francis denounced the idea of a border wall dividing the United States and Mexico, Trump upped the ante in February 2016, calling the pope’s comments “disgraceful” and suggesting he was “a pawn” of the Mexican government.
A decade later, the Republican decided to go even further in an offensive against Francis’ successor, Pope Leo XIV.
In a 330-word tirade published on Sunday night to his social media platform, Trump wrote, among other things:
Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy. … I like his brother Louis much better than I like him, because Louis is all MAGA. He gets it, and Leo doesn’t! … Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician. It’s hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it’s hurting the Catholic Church!
As part of the same online rant, Trump meandered through a series of odd grievances, touching on Covid-era restrictions, Iran’s nuclear program, the recent U.S. offensive in Venezuela, how impressed he is with the 2024 election results, the stock market and how annoyed he is
by Victor Ray | Apr 12, 2026 | Opinion, Politics
My employer, the University of Iowa, recently joined the reactionary national trend in higher education by creating what it calls the Center for Intellectual Freedom. Iowa’s Republican legislators, after being snookered by decades of evidence-free propaganda claiming left-wing indoctrination at colleges, appropriated a million dollars toward the creation of the center last year as a counterweight to this imaginary problem. But this center isn’t a balance for anything. It is, instead, a beachhead for the right’s attempted authoritarian takeover of higher education in the state.
One of the center’s first planned classes was canceled because only one student enrolled.
But not even conservative students are buying what the Center for Intellectual Freedom is selling. Despite the center’s director personally reaching out to the many conservative student groups on campus, one of the center’s first planned classes was canceled because only one student enrolled. Yes, you read that correctly: one student. The state could have saved some of the money it spent creating a safe space for conservative students by letting that one student enrolls in independent study.
When the two classes did get started in March, one had only 11 of 32 seats filled and the other only eight of 32.
The lack of demand for the center’s offerings should not be surprising, because the best evidence shows that, contrary to what conservative policy makers claim, conservative student’s don’t feel isolated or targeted on campus. According to a recent study from Gallup and the Lumina Foundation, only 2% of college students — and only 3% of college students who identify as Republicans — said their political views have made them feel out of
by Steve Benen | Apr 10, 2026 | Iran Tensions, Maddowblog, News, Politics
A couple of weeks ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared publicly that his country’s government had “irrefutable” evidence that Russia had provided intelligence to the Iranian regime.
This week, he vented his frustration over the White House’s indifference. The Guardian reported:
Speaking in an interview with Alastair Campbell on The Rest is Politics podcast, Zelenskyy said he had tried to draw the White House’s attention to the close collaboration between Moscow and Tehran.
He said Russian military satellites had photographed critical energy infrastructure objects in the Gulf states and in Israel, as well as the locations of US army bases across the region. The Kremlin passed details and images to the Iranian regime, he said, to facilitate its attacks.
“I said this publicly. Did we hear a reaction from the U.S. to Russia that they have to stop it?” Zelenskyy asked rhetorically. He added, “The problem is they trust Putin. And it’s a pity.”
His frustration was understandable. Just days into the war with Iran, multiple news organizations, including MS NOW, reported that Russia had provided Iran with information that could help it strike American targets. One U.S. official told MS NOW point-blank, “Russia is providing intelligence help to Iran.”
While some skepticism might’ve been understandable, it wasn’t long before lingering doubts about the accuracy of the reporting evaporated. Iranian officials have publicly confirmed Russia’s “military cooperation”; U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz acknowledged Russia’s wartime “strategic partnership” with Iran; and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said matter-of-factly that Russia “is providing intelligence to Iran to better attack and kill American troops.”
The Wall Street Journal
by Steve Benen | Apr 10, 2026 | Iran Tensions, Maddowblog, News, Politics
For U.S. service members, one day from the war with Iran stands out: On March 1, the second day of the military offensive, an unmanned Iranian drone struck a “tactical operations center” in Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, killing six U.S. soldiers and wounding many others.
Donald Trump’s response to the deadly developments sparked a controversy; the president posted a prerecorded video to social media, in which he said, among other things, “Before it ends, that’s the way it is. Likely be more.”
But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s response was considerably worse.
Two days before he pressed news organizations to downplay the significance of fallen U.S. troops, the beleaguered Pentagon chief told reporters, in reference to the Iranian drone, “Every once in a while, you might have a squirter that makes its way through.”
In other words, according to Hegseth, defenses were in place to protect the U.S. military outpost in Kuwait, but one unmanned drone managed to sneak through and do deadly harm.
That version of events is now facing important pushback from sources in a position to know. MS NOW reported, as part of the network’s liveblog coverage:
The White House did not address the account Thursday of survivors of the Iranian attack on a U.S. military outpost in Kuwait who pushed back against the Pentagon’s characterization of the incident. Six U.S. service members were killed in the strike during the early days of the war.
In an interview with CBS News, one soldier injured in the attack on the Port of Shuaiba called Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s description of the incident as merely one drone that ‘squeaked through’ a ‘falsehood.’
One of the injured soldiers, speaking on
by Steve Benen | Apr 10, 2026 | Economy, Maddowblog, News, Politics
A week ago, during his address to the nation about the war in Iran, Donald Trump took a moment to repeat familiar and false claims about the U.S. economy. The president said Americans are currently enjoying “the strongest” economic conditions “in history” (a spectacularly wrong assertion) and that there’s “no inflation.”
Even at the time, the suggestion that there’s been “no inflation” in his second term was immediately recognized as an absurdity, but a week later, one of the Republican’s favorite lies suddenly looks even more ridiculous.
On Thursday, core personal consumption expenditures price index, which is closely watched by the Federal Reserve to gauge inflation, offered more discouraging news. On Friday morning, things looked even worse. CNBC reported:
Consumer prices spiked in March as the Iran war sent energy costs soaring and took the Federal Reserve further from its inflation target, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report Friday. Underlying inflation, however, was relatively tame.
The consumer price index increased a seasonally adjusted 0.9% for the month, putting the annual inflation rate at 3.3%, pushed by a 10.9% surge in energy costs.
The data was entirely in line with expectations, but that won’t matter much to American consumers who are struggling with the highest CPI in two years. What’s more, inflation in March showed the highest one-month increase in prices in roughly four years, when oil prices spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The price of gasoline, meanwhile, saw its largest one-month increase since 1967.
In fairness, it’s worth emphasizing that core prices, excluding food and energy, showed a far more modest increase.
The trouble is, the cost of food and energy count.
A national CNN poll
