by Mike Wise | Aug 12, 2026 | Opinion, Politics, Sports
Culture war dopamine, that euphoric feeling that follows making an outrageous statement on the controversy du jour, is clearly a dangerous drug. Addicts are known to swap logic and reason for Fox News appearances. They become nonsensical, lend credence to the absurd and eventually stage full-blown clown shows.
Take Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, two 30-something former NBA players who recently declared themselves eligible for the 2027 Women’s National Basketball Association draft.
Citing the current WNBA guidelines, which state “Only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA” (and don’t explicitly exclude transgender women players in their collective bargaining agreement), Freedom and White have capitalized on the recent anti-trans comments made by Indiana Fever role player-provocateur Sophie Cunningham. Her anti-trans statements, which she claims are motivated by her desire to “protect young girls,” have led to small protests on both sides of the issue.
Freedom and White have capitalized on the recent anti-trans comments made by Indiana Fever role player-provocateur Sophie Cunningham.
These aren’t merely political stunts mocking the league and the women who play in it, but malicious attempts to demean a marginalized population in the apparent hope that a NewsNation or Fox News producer will call for an interview so these budding hot-takers can be given some attention on what is a non-issue.
For the record, no openly transgender athlete has ever competed in the WNBA or any of the nation’s other women’s professional sports leagues. State bans on transgender athletes in women’s sports have been held up by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Olympics now clearly forbids transgender athletes in female events. And the number of trans
by Steve Benen | Aug 11, 2026 | Congress, Maddowblog, News, Politics
As last week got underway, the Senate Republican majority had a lengthy list of things to do before the chamber broke for its lengthy summer recess. By and large, GOP senators got through some of their to-do list, including passing a stopgap spending bill to prevent a government shutdown during an election season and confirming Todd Blanche as attorney general.
But Donald Trump had far more in mind. In fact, the president wanted to see senators act ahead of their lengthy summer break on a variety of other proposals, including bills related to cryptocurrency regulation and college athletics.
And then, of course, there was the White House’s voter suppression package that Republicans have labeled the SAVE America Act.
Two weeks ago, in an item published to his social media platform, Trump wrote that Senate Majority Leader John Thune “should not allow the United States Senate to ‘leave town’ until it passes The Save America Act or, far better still, TERMINATES THE FILIBUSTER, where Republicans can then quickly pass everything they ever dreamed of, including a full and deep throated SAVE AMERICA ACT, the Budget, and the ever looming Debt Ceiling disaster, 1929!”
How’d that work out? With predictable failure. The New York Times reported:
The Senate bowed to political reality at 4:36 a.m. on Saturday, adjourning and allowing bleary-eyed senators to leave Washington without any concrete steps toward passing the voting restriction bill that President Trump has demanded for months.
Republican lawmakers had insisted they would work tirelessly to enact election changes that Mr. Trump has suggested the party needs in place to win the midterm elections. Instead, they departed with little to show for their
by Steve Benen | Aug 10, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
Around this time three years ago, then-North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum still had a reputation as a relatively pragmatic Republican with a successful private-sector background. After launching an ill-fated presidential campaign, Burgum was asked in July 2023 whether he would ever be willing to conduct business with Donald Trump, then his GOP primary rival.
“I don’t think so,” he responded.
In the months that followed, as his second term as governor ended and his national candidacy failed to gain traction, Burgum followed a painfully familiar path — the onetime Trump critic and rival became a sycophantic Trump ally — which worked rather well: He was a finalist for his party’s vice presidential nomination, and after Trump won a second term, Burgum was rewarded with a White House Cabinet post.
Things have gone downhill for him ever since.
For the past year and a half, Burgum has tried to lead the Interior Department, where, when he’s not saying foolish things about how solar power works, his principal responsibilities have focused on serving as the president’s “personal project manager,” overseeing assorted renovation projects that Trump has prioritized above his actual responsibilities.
As the Reflecting Pool fiasco helps prove, those efforts have not fared well. Indeed, during a contentious White House meeting nearly two weeks ago, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro reportedly upbraided Burgum, telling the president that it was the interior secretary and his department who screwed up the project and misled everyone, including Trump.
The prosecutor isn’t alone in expressing her frustrations with Burgum. Politico reported that Interior Department staffers are increasingly concerned about just how poorly the Cabinet agency is being run. From the article:
Some staffers were
by Steve Benen | Aug 10, 2026 | Economy, Maddowblog, News, Politics
Those looking for good news in the latest job numbers will be hard-pressed to find anything. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest data, the U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, and while the unemployment rate inched lower, to 4.1%, even this was discouraging: The “improved” rate was the result of the labor force participation rate dropping, as opposed to additional hiring.
The fact that job growth turned negative was itself striking, especially since this was the sixth time this has happened since Donald Trump returned to the White House. (During Joe Biden’s presidency and Barack Obama’s second term, the total number of months in which the economy lost jobs was zero.)
All told, the U.S. economy has added 542,000 jobs over Trump’s 19-month second term, a dramatic decline from the nearly 2.7 million jobs that were added over the previous 19 months. Excluding the 2020 pandemic, the first year of Trump’s second term was the worst year for job creation since the Great Recession, and this year is on track to be the second-worst year for job creation since the Great Recession.
The White House basically has three options. It can (a) try to make excuses and hope the public buys it; (b) ask Americans for patience, saying that conditions will eventually improve; or (c) pitch an absurd alternate reality and hope for the best.
Take a wild guess which approach Team Trump prefers.
On Friday, shortly after the job numbers were released, Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council and the top economist in the White House, told Fox News that if we exclude the part of the economy
by Steve Benen | Aug 10, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
The more Donald Trump made the Reflecting Pool renovation project one of his top priorities, the more humiliating it was when he and his team failed spectacularly to deliver the promised results. Instead of demonstrating the superiority of his approach to problem-solving, the president offered timely evidence that his model — rooted in cutting corners, controversial contracts, rushed timelines, etc. — simply doesn’t work.
But instead of moving on from the endeavor, Trump made matters vastly worse. A devastating New York Times report last week explained that the project “became a striking reflection instead of the second Trump administration’s willingness to skirt laws, expend millions of dollars, ignore facts and punish truth tellers in service of the president’s demands to put his mark on the capital.”
The reporting dovetailed with a Washington Post editorial that summarized that the Reflecting Pool debacle “was a silly summer story that should have been a relatively minor political embarrassment. … Instead, the administration turned it into an appalling abuse of prosecutorial power.”
The fiasco took a radical turn in June when the president began assuring the public that he’d actually succeeded beautifully, until “vandals” intervened and ruined his triumph. It was these villainous rascals, he insisted, who deserved the blame for his failure. The Republican further insisted that everyone play along with this alternative explanation, despite the inconvenient fact that the “vandals” didn’t appear to exist in reality.
For his part, Trump didn’t just blame these nefarious criminals, he also repeatedly claimed to have proof. “We have photographs or tapes, like moving cameras” that show people “cutting it with a box knife,” he told reporters last week, adding,
by Jeremy Busby | Aug 9, 2026 | Opinion, Politics, White House
The 25 states that have sued the Trump administration over its latest effort to impose tariffs on dozens of countries correctly pointed out that the claim that those countries haven’t sufficiently cracked down on goods made with forced labor is the administration’s pretext to reimpose tariffs the Supreme Court struck down.
On top of that, the Trump administration’s claim that tariffs are needed to punish those 59 countries and the European Union, which it says are too permissive of forced labor, is also hypocritical. I write this from Texas, a state that has kept me incarcerated for nearly three decades and is one of the country’s biggest beneficiaries of forced labor.
Texas, a state that has kept me incarcerated for nearly three decades, is one of the country’s biggest beneficiaries of forced labor.
I have seen guards attack a man for his refusal to chop grass. I have seen countless others pepper sprayed for refusing to perform work details. Some of my college classmates were expelled from religious and educational programs for failing to show up for prison-mandated work. On any given day, nearly 2 million people are behind bars in this country. More than half of them, approximately 1.2 million, are held in state or federal prisons, where work is compulsory.
The Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which Congress ratified in 1865, abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime. That exception continues to be exploited by individual states and by corporations. Prison administrators nationwide have legally used incarcerated people for forced labor, both for prison operations and for-profit purposes. More than two years ago, The Associated Press launched a series that traced forced prison labor to
