by Steve Benen | Dec 10, 2025 | Maddowblog, Politics
After Donald Trump lost his re-election bid five years ago, he immediately launched an effort not only to overturn the results, but also to convince the public that he secretly won, reality be damned. There was, however, one key element missing from the president’s pitch: evidence.
Trump asked his 2020 campaign team to produce evidence to bolster his conspiracy theories, but they didn’t, because they couldn’t. He asked his lawyers to do the same thing, but to no avail.
Unsatisfied, the Republican hired the Berkeley Research Group to uncover widespread voter fraud and election irregularities, which did not go well, and then he hired Simpatico Software Systems, which also failed to tell Trump what he wanted to hear.
In the months and years that followed, the then-former president would occasionally promise to share “irrefutable” and “conclusive” evidence, but those vows inevitably turned into embarrassing flops. (Shortly before Election Day 2024, Trump said he had “many different papers” to substantiate his nonsensical claims, but for reasons he never explained, those “papers” never reached the public.)
But as the first year of the incumbent president’s second term nears its end, he’s still confident that he’ll produce the evidence that’s eluded him.
Trump: “It was a rigged election. It’s gonna come out over the next couple months too, loud and clear. Because we have all the information.”— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-12-09T17:23:01.625Z
When Politico’s Dasha Burns sat down with Trump this week for a lengthy interview, she tried to get a better sense of his views on Russia’s war in Ukraine. This, sadly, led the president to say what he always says when asked about the devastating conflict: Vladimir Putin
by Steve Benen | Dec 10, 2025 | Maddowblog, Politics
There’s ample room for debate over which of Donald Trump’s many pardons stands as the worst, but the president’s clemency for former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández stands out for its cartoonish qualities. The details sound so spectacularly unrealistic that they seem concocted by a ham-fisted novelist to annoy readers.
In this case, Trump, despite all of his “tough on crime” chest-thumping, thought it’d be a good idea to pardon a notorious drug trafficker, who was convicted last year and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Even by 2025 standards, the developments were breathtaking: As The New York Times summarized, Hernández “orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy” that benefited drug cartels, even as Honduras grew poorer, more violent and more corrupt.
Hernández also boasted that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses” and accepted a $1 million bribe to allow cocaine shipments to pass through his country.
Trump, however, freed him anyway. Politico’s Dasha Burns asked him about it during a lengthy White House interview this week.
POLITICO: You pardoned the former president of Honduras even though he was convicted in a massive intl drug trafficking scheme. How is that tolerance on drug trafficking?TRUMP: Well I don’t know him and I know very little about him other than people said it was like an Obama-Biden type set up— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-12-09T17:42:01.613Z
“Well, I don’t know him,” the president said, referring to Hernández. “And I know very little about him other than people said it was like an Obama/Biden-type set-up, where he was set up.”
The Republican added that “very good people” (whom he did not name) asked him to pardon the convicted drug trafficker,
by Steve Benen | Dec 10, 2025 | Maddowblog, Politics
After Donald Trump fared surprisingly well in Miami last fall, easily surpassing his vote totals from 2020, the president probably felt comfortable weighing in on the city’s closely watched mayoral race.
While this was technically a nonpartisan contest, Democrats backed Eileen Higgins, a former county commissioner, while Republicans supported Emilio González, a former city manager. Trump eagerly endorsed the latter, and the day before the election, the president wrote on his social media platform, “Miami’s Mayor Race is Tuesday. It is a big and important race!!! Vote for Republican Gonzalez. He is FANTASTIC! … MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
It didn’t work. The Miami Herald reported:
Democrat Eileen Higgins has defeated Trump-backed opponent Emilio González in Tuesday night’s runoff for Miami mayor, with the former Miami-Dade commissioner edging out the former city manager with nearly 60% of the vote, according to preliminary election night results.
A raucous crowd danced to Stevie Wonder’s ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered’ as Higgins stood alongside family and supporters onstage at the Miami Woman’s Club, a symbolic location as Higgins becomes Miami’s first female mayor.
The race wasn’t especially close: Despite Trump’s intervention on González’s behalf, Higgins appears to have won by roughly 18 points.
This is the first time Miami voters have elected a Democratic mayor in nearly three decades.
About an hour’s drive to the north, Delray Beach’s Democratic vice mayor, Rob Long, also easily won a three-way state legislative special election on Tuesday.
And in case that weren’t quite enough to get GOP officials’ attention, on the same day, Democrat Eric Gisler flipped a state House seat in Georgia, scoring an unexpected upset in a district Trump won last year by 12 points.
The
by Steve Benen | Dec 9, 2025 | Maddowblog, Politics
FBI Director Kash Patel’s tenure has been a national embarrassment in a great many ways, but among the most jarring developments this year is the sheer volume of bureau personnel who’ve been purged for political reasons, leaving the FBI destabilized.
MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian noted that the ongoing purge “is without precedent in the modern history of the bureau. It raises questions about whether the Trump administration is trying to turn the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency into an instrument of presidential whim — exactly the thing he baselessly accused his opponent of doing.”
That was in August. Things are worse now.
For those concerned with justice and the integrity of federal law enforcement, that’s the bad news. The good news is that many of those who’ve been peremptorily fired are fighting back in court. NPR reported, for example, that 12 FBI agents who were fired this year for taking a knee during racial justice protests in 2020 are now suing Patel and the bureau, alleging unlawful retaliation.
According to the former agents’ court filing, they were backed against a wall in the midst of a protest and took a knee to de-escalate a situation that threatened to escalate. From the report:
The former special agents — who together have nearly 200 years of experience — once received awards for helping disrupt mass shootings, expose foreign spies and thwart cyber attacks.
But they say as elite federal law enforcement agents, they never received training on crowd control, nor did they have riot shields, gas masks, or helmets when they faced down volatile crowds in the streets of Washington, D.C., in June 2020.
The Justice Department inspector
by Steve Benen | Dec 9, 2025 | Maddowblog, Politics
Three weeks ago, several Democratic military veterans serving in Congress released a video to remind service members that they have a responsibility to reject illegal orders. Despite the legal accuracy of the message, the White House launched a furious retaliation campaign that was extreme, even by contemporary standards.
Donald Trump helped lead the charge, insisting that the Democratic lawmakers, who’d done nothing wrong, had engaged in “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”
Though the story is no longer dominating headlines, the president has not given up on trying to use the levers of federal power, on multiple fronts, to target the Democratic veterans who appeared in the video. Last week, there was even a report about Trump-appointed FBI leaders “pressuring the bureau’s domestic terrorism agents to open a seditious conspiracy investigation” into the Democrats who urged service members to follow the law.
Time will tell what, if anything, comes of the White House’s crusade, but if there are going to be investigations into political leaders who’ve said publicly that service members must reject illegal orders, administration officials should probably start preparing to scrutinize some of their own.
CNN reported last week, for example, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who’s helped advance the partisan offensive against the Democratic veterans, delivered remarks in 2016 explaining that U.S. military personnel “won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander in chief” and described the refusal of illegal commands as a part of the military’s ethos and standards.
CNN also found that, as Election Day 2016 drew closer, the former Fox News host told viewers that servicemembers are “not going to follow illegal orders.”
That is to say, eight years ago, the future
by Steve Benen | Dec 9, 2025 | Maddowblog, Politics
The Trump administration’s policy of deadly U.S. military strikes against civilian boats in international waters has been a global controversy for months, but the burgeoning scandal took on even greater significance two weeks ago, when The Washington Post reported on the administration targeting and killing a pair of survivors after a strike in early September.
Almost immediately after the allegations reached the public, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer issued a challenge to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “[R]elease the full, unedited tapes of the strikes so the American people can see for themselves,” the New York Democrat wrote in an online statement. “Your recklessness demands full transparency.”
The release of the video has quickly become a key point of contention in the larger debate over the alleged war crime.
As recently as Wednesday, after a reporter asked about releasing the full video of what transpired in the Caribbean on Sept. 2, Donald Trump said, “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have we’d certainly release, no problem.”
Three days later, Hegseth was pressed on the same point and offered a very different answer. “We’re reviewing the process, and we’ll see,” the beleaguered Pentagon chief said when pressed on whether he’d choose transparency.
On Monday, the president abandoned his previous position. The New York Times reported:
Days after President Trump declared he had ‘no problem’ releasing a video of a second strike on a boat in the Caribbean on Sept. 2 that killed two alleged drug smugglers hanging to remnants of the hull, he reversed himself on Monday and said he would let Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth decide whether to make it public.
It’s easy to imagine
