A couple years ago on the Déjà News pod, @sifill.bsky.social told me and @maddow.bsky.social that Trump tapped into (white) people’s desire “to be free of the requirements of decency.” And that has lived in my head ever since.

Current events confirm the achieved wisdom of time-honored classics in the social sciences.

Oh ok

After huge local pushback and protest, there will be NO massive trump prison camp in Merrimack New Hampshire: www.wmur.com/article/ice-...

ICE tackles and arrests New Jersey father outside his home, leaving his 6-year-old first-grade daughter at home alone. She goes out looking for him. "I got my boots and changed my clothes. I wanted to find some help to find my dad..." www.ms.now/the-weekend-...

Yesterday morning kids were sent running from their bus stop in panic because ICE showed up. This guy at today’s ICE Out of Lindenwold protest is a must watch 😭. @maddow.bsky.social

The volume & geographic distribution of protest nationwide during year 1 of Trump's second term was extraordinary.

really interesting to me how many professional political commentators have basically retconned the draconian immigration enforcement policies of Obama and Biden out of existence and have completely swallowed the right wing narrative of immigration enforcement

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas confirms Trump prison camp purchase called off, and vows to ensure that no other site in Kansas City gets one either. KCUR story about "Platform Ventures" no sale: www.kcur.org/news/2026-02... Mayor's confirmation from instagram - www.instagram.com/p/DUqpKhwkUJb/

Look! "News of a potential immigrant detention center in Kansas City sparked fierce public backlash over the past month. At rallies and protests, many people called on Platform Ventures to not sell the building to the federal government..." And now: www.kcur.org/news/2026-02...

I called up one of the White House's "special government employees" involved in the Fulton County FBI raid. I ended up on the phone for almost two hours hearing about the "deep state" "cabal," "Satanists," poison soda, and the "pure evil" of "gay pride." talkingpointsmemo.com/news/meet-th...

Way-hey! After concerted local pushback, New Jersey company decides not to contract with ICE: "The contract with ICE will not move forward, a Holman spokesperson told Patch. "I have been informed that we declined that particular body of work," the spokesperson said... patch.com/new-jersey/c...

The name Kurt Olsen is probably unfamiliar to most Americans, but he’s: - Trump’s former campaign lawyer - pushed discredited voter fraud claims - gained access to highly classified intelligence as part of a crusade against the 2020 results www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...

Project Salt Box tonight: projectsaltbox.substack.com/p/using-data...

🚨 New: We built a visual tracker of the warehouses ICE is targeting across the US. Working off an idea from @actualkatherine.bsky.social, we’ve mapped active searches, canceled deals, and linked state property records. Explore the map here: tinyurl.com/ICEWarehouse...

Bukele warming up the crowd for Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast really captures this era's caustic cocktail of racism, Christian nationalism, and authoritarianism. www.thebulwark.com/p/what-trump...

NEW: ICE has spent at least $172 million this month on warehouses that it plans to convert into immigration jails www.bloomberg.com/news/feature... W/ @sooophie.bsky.social

What

Damn proud of Minnesota.

photo 1/23/26 by Alex Kormann for The Minnesota Star Tribune www.startribune.com/ice-raids-mi...

This comes just after the president publicly demanded that ICE should start showing the public how terrible the people are who they're grabbing and arresting. In this case, his name is Liam. He's five years old. www.kare11.com/article/news...

Attn news commentators: Trump saying he could use force to obtain Greenland but won’t is not Trump saying he won’t use force to obtain Greenland. It is Trump using force as a threat to obtain Greenland. That is why he mentions it.

Truly one of the most radical speeches I have heard a western leader give in my lifetime.

I wrote about how concentration camp regimes evolve and why it's not too late to stop this, even though we are deep in it now.

March 24, 1945 archive.org/details/Army...

"LLMs are structurally indifferent to truth."

Every legal story now is either Ancient Circuit Judge Delivers Crystal Clear 100 Page Rebuke To Trumpist Overreach or In Unsigned Shadow Docket Decision, 6-3 Majority Declares Trump Can Hunt People For Sport

I haven’t been able to form a sentence in like 10 minutes

It's here! "Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order" Episodes 1 and 2 are up today... Eps 3-6 coming from here on out on Mondays. Free to listen on any podcast app. (For no ads and early access to all episodes, it's $2.99/month for an MS NOW premium subscription...) podcasts.apple.com/me/podcast/r...

An amazing new Trump controversy, Part II of II: - Saturday afternoon: Trump says he spoke to Bolsonaro the night before and planned to see him “in the very near future” - Monday afternoon: The Trump White House isn’t sure whether Trump actually had the conversation he referenced two days earlier

absolutely incredible -- CNN host introduces a segment about Trump's "new healthcare proposal," but less than two minutes later breaks into her script to announce "breaking news" that Trump's healthcare proposal is being postponed

My new podcast! "Burn Order" - 6 episodes. Free to listen on any podcast app, or online. First 2 episodes come out for everyone on Monday 12/1. MSNBC Premium subscribers get them early -- this Friday 11/28. Listen to the trailer here and follow the series... podcasts.apple.com/me/podcast/r...

every week we get to friday and i think well maybe next week will not be so weird

“What could the little man do—since he so passionately desired to exercise authority and neither this nor any other sane state would give it to him—but use his trick of gathering together luckless fellows to overturn the state and substitute a mad one?”

This is really something. Trump/GOP efforts to rig midterms running into serious trouble

The thing to understand about this is that this catastrophe in the UK has redounded to the political benefit of the very same people and political movement that pushed for it! Extremely perverse.

Noem and Lewandowski "ordered ICE officials to buy 10 737 jets from Spirit Airlines that they said would be used to boost deportation flights—and for their own travel... ...Spirit, which filed for bankruptcy for a second time in August, didn’t own the planes. The planes also don’t have engines."

A List of Things Said to Have Been Ruined by Women 🧵

Quite a photo

Media sneering about "anti-Trump" politics reflects a deeper inability to acknowledge that he's really unpopular. To some journos, "anti-Trump" codes as "delusional Resistance doesn't grasp Trump's mystical connection w/Real American People." h/t @jamellebouie.net newrepublic.com/article/2027...

After 13 years, Mississippi Democrats have broken the Republican Party’s supermajority in the Mississippi Senate. Democrats flipped two GOP-held Senate seats and one House seat in the special elections. buff.ly/nTvLlFI

The factional grifters will hate this, but the Mamdani-Spanberger-Sherrill axis actually suggests the outlines of a broad, emerging Dem coalition organized around both anti-Trump *and* affordability politics, not a party bitterly divided against itself.

BREAKING: NY Board of Elections says more than 2 MILLION votes have been cast in the NYC election - the highest number since 1969.

Here we go!

In Opinion Dick Cheney became a fierce critic of Donald Trump after the Capitol insurrection — but by then, it was too late, Ron Suskind writes. “Mr. Cheney had done as much as anyone in history to undermine Americans’ trust in their institutions and leaders, including Mr. Cheney himself.”

This is so true. That bureau did a singularly amazing job during that time.