by Steve Benen | Jan 22, 2026 | Maddowblog, Politics
As the 21st century got underway, Americans had reason to celebrate a public health breakthrough: Measles had been eliminated in the United States.
The good news, however, did not last, and 2025 saw multiple measles outbreaks in U.S. communities. In fact, The Hill reported, “The U.S. on Tuesday met one of the key conditions for losing its measles elimination status, more than 25 years after it achieved this distinction and one year into a second Trump administration that has deprioritized the prevention of infectious diseases.”
One might expect the leaders of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to react to these developments with great concern. But the Trumpified CDC is apparently content to shrug with relative indifference. STAT News reported:
With measles transmission in the United States at levels that haven’t been seen in decades, the principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday that he would not view the loss of the country’s measles elimination status as a significant event.
‘Not really,’ said Ralph Abraham, a physician who formerly served as Louisiana’s surgeon general. ‘You know, it’s just the cost of doing business, with our borders being somewhat porous [and] global and international travel.’
Of course, international travel was also common between 2001 and 2024, and according to Republicans, our domestic borders were plenty “porous.”
Abraham added, “We have these communities that choose to be unvaccinated. That’s their personal freedom.”
As The San Francisco Chronicle noted, public health advocates responded to the CDC deputy director’s comments with disgust. Pediatrician and vaccine specialist Paul Offit said in an online discussion hosted by the health blog Inside Medicine this week, “When you
by Steve Benen | Jan 22, 2026 | Maddowblog, Politics
On the anniversary of his second inaugural, Donald Trump held a mind-numbing White House press conference in which the president emphasized one of his long-held obsessions: his defeat in the 2020 election.
During a harangue on border policies, Trump abruptly switched direction. “It was a rigged election,” he said, referring to one of his go-to conspiracy theories. “Everybody knows that now. And by the way, numbers are coming out that show it even more plainly. We caught them. We caught them.”
As a factual matter, this is delusional. There are no “numbers” coming out. No one has been “caught” having done anything. Everything the Republican said on the matter was entirely made up, his enthusiasm notwithstanding.
A day later, during remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump repeated the same nonsense — this time with a fresh element.
Trump: “It was a rigged election. Everyone knows that, they found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It’s probably breaking news, but it should be. It was a rigged election.”— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) 2026-01-21T15:18:23.612Z
After starting to make some comments related to Russia’s war in Ukraine, Trump again shifted his focus. “It was a rigged election,” he began, echoing a familiar lie. “Everybody now knows that, they found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It’s probably breaking news.”
It’s tempting to wonder why the president would have direct, personal knowledge about who “will soon be prosecuted,” but there’s no point in playing dumb about the White House’s control of the Justice Department.
That said, there’s no reason to assume that Trump was telling the truth. To the contrary,
by Austin Sarat | Jan 21, 2026 | Opinion, Politics
Progressive Democrats turned up the heat last week in their effort to convince party leaders to start impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump. Among other things, they cite as impeachable offenses the president’s unprovoked attack on Venezuela and his use of the Justice Department to target his political opponents.
ABC News quotes Kat Abughazaleh, who is running for Congress in Illinois, calling for Democratic leaders to “‘grow a f—ing spine.” Abughazaleh, who says political leaders have helped convince Americans that we “shouldn’t take measures toward a future that we want to live in,” calls impeachment “just another tool in the accountability machine.”
President Trump has committed impeachable offenses, but that does not mean that impeachment is the best remedy.
President Trump has committed impeachable offenses, but that does not mean impeachment is the best remedy. It would be, at best, a distraction from Trump’s real vulnerabilities, and even if it succeeded in elevating JD Vance to the highest office in the land, it would not spare the nation from the plague of cruelty and corruption we have experienced since Jan. 20, 2025. That is, it would not save American democracy.
Even though this isn’t the time to actively pursue impeachment, that doesn’t mean Democrats should be silent or fail to talk about why impeachment is warranted. Failing to do so normalizes the president’s abuses of authority and, as they accumulate, habituates people to them.
But, contrary to what Abughazaleh is doing, Democrats definitely shouldn’t make impeachment a part of their platform. The best chance Democrats have to check the president’s lawlessness, corruption and abuses of power is to win control of the House of Representatives and/or
by Steve Benen | Jan 21, 2026 | Maddowblog, Politics
Five months ago, the public first learned about Charles Borges, then the chief data officer at the Social Security Administration, and the remarkable whistleblower complaint he’d filed. According to his dramatic accusations, members of Elon Musk’s DOGE operation had uploaded a copy of a highly sensitive database to a vulnerable cloud server, creating “enormous vulnerabilities.”
The New York Times reported soon after that the database in question included “individuals’ full names, addresses and birth dates, among other details that could be used to steal their identities, making it one of the nation’s most sensitive repositories of personal information.”
In theory, Borges, a decorated military veteran, would have been rewarded for coming forward to shine a light on the underlying risks. In practice, he quickly found himself out of work: Borges told NBC News in September that after reporting his concerns to management, he “suffered exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear, creating a hostile work environment and making work conditions intolerable.”
It was around this time that he submitted his “involuntary resignation.”
In August, after Borges blew the whistle, the Trump administration said he was wrong. This week, however, the Department of Justice implicitly acknowledged in a court filing that he was right, although it did not reference the former chief data officer by name.
So where does that leave Borges, five months later? The Washington Post highlighted a quote from his lawyer:
‘Having admitted what Mr. Borges has said all along, the Social Security Administration must take appropriate action to protect Americans’ data, and Mr. Borges must get justice for the violation of his rights,’ Borges’s attorney Debra Katz said in a statement
by Steve Benen | Jan 21, 2026 | Maddowblog, Politics
During a mind-numbing White House press conference on Tuesday afternoon, Donald Trump delivered a familiar boast with a straight face. “America,” the president said, “is respected again on the world stage.”
The line, of course, has been a staple of the Republican president’s rhetoric across both of his terms, despite the ridiculousness of the underlying point. International public opinion research has consistently shown that global respect and confidence in the U.S. has reached record depths under Trump.
But it’s not only foreign citizens who have lost respect for the Trump-led United States, it’s also foreign officials and governments, which are increasingly looking at what’s become of us with a combination of fear, disappointment, contempt and confusion.
As the American president’s crusade to acquire Greenland intensifies, and as he imposes economic penalties on U.S. allies who balk at his demands, Trump’s claims of global respect have taken a dark turn. We’re no longer looking at an absurdity; we’re instead confronting a tragedy.
While Trump prepared to join other world leaders at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, The Wall Street Journal reported:
President Trump is showing up for an annual gathering of the global elite here in the Swiss Alps, swinging a wrecking ball at the international order. […]
The reactions from many U.S. allies and partners, some of them aired in public, many of them still only expressed in private, are stark: Trump’s America seems to have lost its mind.
The most dramatic example of such perceptions came during Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s prepared remarks at the gathering, in which he declared, “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
by Steve Benen | Jan 21, 2026 | Maddowblog, Politics
In recognition of the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s second inaugural, the White House released a list of “365 wins” from the past year. One of the entries gave the president credit for delivering “a historic stock-market rebound, with the major stock indices all hitting repeated new record highs.”
It was a flawed boast for a variety of reasons. For one thing, while the major indexes improved in 2025, nothing about the results was “historic.” For another, given that the U.S. stock market had a very good year in 2024, characterizing that growth as a “rebound” didn’t make sense, either. (Also left unsaid is the fact that several major economies internationally fared better than the United States on stock market growth.)
But perhaps most notable of all was the problem the White House didn’t see coming: the bad timing of the boast. The New York Times reported:
President Trump’s intensifying standoff with European leaders over the fate of Greenland prompted a sharp response from investors Tuesday, with the value of U.S. stocks, the dollar and government bonds all falling.
The S&P 500 dropped over 2 percent for the first time since October, as investors reacted to Mr. Trump’s increasing threat of higher tariffs on European allies unless they supported his plans for America to take control of Greenland.
It’s worth emphasizing that the Vix index — sometimes referred to in financial circles as the “panic index” — jumped, reaching levels unseen in months.
As an NBC News report, assessing the overall losses, noted, “The S&P 500 ended lower by around 2.1%, while the Nasdaq Composite plunged more than 2.4%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped around
