by Steve Benen | Apr 1, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
By all appearances, it was an unfortunate stunt. On Saturday an entertainer named Kid Rock, who had a few hit songs many years ago, shared videos via social media of Apache helicopters doing a flyby at his home in Nashville, Tennessee. The clips showed the entertainer, whose real name is Robert Ritchie, saluting and applauding the troops.
It obviously wasn’t an appropriate use of military resources, and the Army quickly did what everyone expected it to do: It suspended the crew members and temporarily barred them from flight duties pending a review of the incident.
Even Donald Trump conceded on Monday that the helicopter pilots “probably shouldn’t have been doing it” since “you’re not supposed to be playing games, right?”
The president’s defense secretary, however, came to a very different conclusion soon after. The New York Times reported:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday abruptly reversed the suspension of Army crews that piloted two Apache helicopters close to the musician Kid Rock’s residence in Nashville over the weekend. […]
Mr. Hegseth appeared to end both the suspensions and the investigation, with a social media post on Tuesday night declaring: ‘No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots.’
The Times added that the moves represented “a remarkable intervention from the highest level of the Pentagon,” adding that the decree “was another indication of his contempt for legal guardrails in the military.”
As far as the Army was concerned, the crews ignored the military’s strict standards for aviation safety, professionalism and adherence to established flight regulations. As far as the former Fox News host was concerned, aviation safety, professionalism and adherence to established flight regulations just weren’t all that important.
Kid
by Imara Jones | Apr 1, 2026 | Opinion, Politics
On Transgender Day of Visibility, a day meant to affirm that transgender people exist and belong, the Supreme Court struck down Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ minors. Tuesday’s decision did more than remove a state’s authority to regulate health care and more than revive a discredited practice that harms children. It advanced a broader project: erasing transgender people from public life.
Conversion therapy is the pseudoscientific lie that LGBTQ+ people can be corrected out of existence.
Conversion therapy is the pseudoscientific lie that through psychotherapeutic coercion and, in some cases, medical abuse LGBTQ+ people can be corrected out of existence. The actual science is clear. Conversion therapy is not real. Sexual orientation and gender identity cannot be changed, and attempts to change them are linked to severe mental health harms, including increased suicidality.
These findings have been reaffirmed time and again by every legitimate major medical institution, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The persistence of conversion therapy, then, is not a function of scientific debate. It is a function of political utility. More than two decades ago, activists on the religious right framed LGBTQ+ identities as disordered, treatable and something that could, and should, be changed.
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Supreme Court releases decision in conversion therapy free speech case
March 31, 2026 / 08:53
Even as mainstream medical institutions rejected these ideas, these activists, led by large Republican-aligned institutions like the Heritage Foundation, doubled down, creating a parallel information environment that promoted fringe “experts” and deliberately deceptive medical misinformation. These activists framed their opposition to the existence of LGBTQ+ people as concern about children, or as parental rights, or
by Steve Benen | Mar 31, 2026 | Iran Tensions, Maddowblog, News, Politics
As the second month of the war in Iran unfolds, Donald Trump and his team aren’t just eyeing targets in the Middle East, they’re also taking aim at the dictionary.
In recent weeks, the president and his administration have tried to change the plain meaning of all kinds of words and phrases. In this White House, for example, “unconditional surrender” apparently no longer means unconditional surrender. Similarly, the meaning of “war,” “excursion,” “spreading,” “contained,” “imminent” and “no quarter” have all been abused beyond what sense will tolerate, reinforcing concerns that the deadly conflict is, among other things, an elaborate exercise in untethering words from their meanings.
In a piece for The Bulwark, Will Saletan explained, “Donald Trump’s war in Iran has shocked and confused people around the world, including foreign officials. One reason might be that many of these people learned English before Trump came to power. In Trump’s war, words no longer mean what they used to mean.”
But perhaps no phrase has been targeted with the vigor and enthusiasm as “regime change.” On Tuesday morning, for example, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth boasted during a press briefing that “regime change has occurred” in Iran.
Hegseth: “Regime change has occurred”— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-03-31T12:15:20.864Z
A day earlier, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt used similar language, arguing that there’s been “regime change” in Iran because so many Iranian officials have been killed as part of the war.
The president, meanwhile, has begun pushing a similar message on a nearly daily basis. On Sunday night, for example, during a Q&A with reporters on Air Force One, he declared, “We’ve had regime change.”
Pressed on the point, he added,
by Steve Benen | Mar 31, 2026 | Iran Tensions, Maddowblog, News, Politics
It was a couple of weeks ago when the White House first let Congress know that the administration is looking for an additional $200 billion on top of existing military spending to help cover the costs associated with the war in Iran. When Donald Trump was asked why he needed the money, the president told reporters early last week, “It’s always nice to have.”
I suppose that’s true — it is “always nice to have” $200 billion — but given that Trump has also said that the war is effectively over, that wasn’t much of an answer.
The larger question, however, is whether and how lawmakers on Capitol Hill respond to the request.
Broadly speaking, members have three options. They could simply decline to approve the additional spending, as most Democrats and even some Republicans are prepared to do. They also have the choice of passing legislation to spend the $200 billion, adding the costs to the nation’s budget deficit, which tends to be how modern military conflicts have been financed.
The third option, however, is the one that’s suddenly receiving the most attention: Lawmakers could approve the new spending, while cutting a comparable amount of existing spending to prevent a $200 billion increase in the deficit.
And where, exactly, would members find $200 billion? Axios reported:
Republicans are considering reductions in federal health spending to help pay for a budget bill containing as much as $200 billion to fund the Iran war and immigration enforcement.
New efforts to rein in health programs are sure to be controversial and open the GOP up to election-year attacks that they’re cutting health care to pay for an unpopular war.
Naturally,
by Charles F. Coleman Jr. | Mar 31, 2026 | culture, Opinion, Politics
Rozonda Thomas, Chilli of the 90s girl group TLC, was outed by a report Saturday in The Independent, as a quiet donor to MAGA causes. Chilli, whose group TLC is embarking on a tour with Salt-N-Pepa and En Vogue in August, posted an apology to Instagram after The Independent, citing public Federal Election Commission records, linked her to multiple donations totaling $1,000 made “to the Trump 2024 campaign and affiliated political action committees.”
“I WANT TO BE CLEAR: I am not MAGA and do not support any of the many policies that are causing great harm to the American people,” she wrote on Instagram. “I made a mistake too many make: I did not read the fine print. I thought I was supporting causes against human trafficking and for veterans.”
I did not read the fine print. I thought I was supporting causes against human trafficking and for veterans.rozonda “chilli” thomas
Chilli, 55, had also shared a meme disparaging former first lady Michelle Obama, and in a video said she had only shared that post accidentally and had “no clue” that she’d done so until she began to get phone calls about it. She said she has the “utmost respect and admiration” for Obama and wouldn’t be “disrespectful to her or to any woman.”
But taken together, the political donations, the social media post disrespecting Obama, her scheduled tour and even a long-ago retort of “all lives matter” should cause us to question the sincerity of Chilli’s disavowal of MAGA politics. Assuming she believes what her political donations suggest that she believes, we can put her in a line that started with Ye, who
by Steve Benen | Mar 30, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
On personnel matters, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hasn’t exactly earned the benefit of the doubt. Last year, for example, after the beleaguered Pentagon chief replaced so many women in military leadership roles that The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols noted, “At this point, women have been cleared out of all of the military’s top jobs. … Some observers might see a pattern here. Discerning this pattern does not exactly require Columbo-level sleuthing.”
On matters of race, the former Fox News host’s record isn’t any better. After all, Hegseth prioritized placing a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee (which includes a slave guiding the Confederate general’s horse) in the West Point library, which came on the heels of reinstalling a racist Confederate memorial that had been removed from Arlington National Cemetery in 2023.
Hegseth also helped push out Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the second Black man to serve as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and helped create a leadership team in which the chairman and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all five service chiefs and nine of the military’s 10 combatant commanders are white men.
Late last week, however, these concerns reached a striking new level. The New York Times reported:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is blocking the promotion of four Army officers to be one-star generals, a highly unusual move that has prompted some senior military officials to question whether the officers are being singled out because of their race or gender.
Two of the officers targeted by Mr. Hegseth are Black and two are women on a promotion list that consists of about three dozen officers, most of
