February 22, 2026 at 12:13 PM EST
Former lawmakers say American election system is in a 'death spiral'

When political scientists from the United States examine other democratic republics, one of the things they are struck by is the lack of a two-party system in Italy, the Netherlands or Spain. The Italian parliament, for example, isn't known for being dominated by two parties, but rather, for MPs coming from an array of parties. And coalition government comes into play when members of different parties have to join forces to get anything done.

February 22, 2026 at 11:04 AM EST
'Betrayed their trust': Donald Trump just alienated another key part of MAGA base

During his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump broadened his appeal by ramping up his outreach to Latinos, independents, swing voters, tech bros, Generation Z and the Manosphere. Trump's 2024 coalition also included the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement, which started with conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s presidential campaign. But now, according to the conservative website The Bulwark, he is alienating MAHA activists.

February 22, 2026 at 9:58 AM EST
More Republicans are weighing new career options as chaos devours GOP power

With Democrats having enjoyed a series of double-digit victories in recent elections and President Donald Trump dogged by weak approval ratings, a long list of GOP lawmakers won't be seeking reelection in the 2026 midterms. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) left Congress altogether in early January, and Republicans ranging from Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) to Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska) decided against seeking reelection but plan to serve out the rest of their terms.

February 22, 2026 at 8:22 AM EST
Trump's grip on GOP leaves Republicans searching for relevance -- and a way back

Watching MS NOW (formerly MSNBC), one is often reminded that President Donald Trump is not universally loved on the right. The cable news outlet leans liberal or center-left, yet some of its hosts are conservative Trump critics who were prominent figures in the GOP in the past -- including former Rep. Joe Scarborough, ex-White House Communications Director Nicolle Wallace and former Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Michael Steele. Moreover, Never Trump conservatives and libertarians are frequent MS NOW guests, including attorney George Conway, New York Times columnist David French, former Judge J. Michael Luttig, The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson and The Bulwark's Tim Miller.

February 22, 2026 at 8:03 AM EST
Trump's presidency teeters on the brink as explosive new allegations surface

We've only had one genuinely failed presidency in the modern era: Richard Nixon's. I believe we're on the verge of the second, and for very similar reasons. If it plays out the way I expect, the consequences could be world-changing, and will certainly alter how our politics work for decades to come. The tipping point began in a big way when Attorney General Pam Bondi went before Congress to defend Donald Trump. When asked how many of Epstein's co-conspirators she'd indicted, she refused to answer and instead completely lost it, going off on a bizarre rant that included:

February 21, 2026 at 3:37 PM EST
'She prayed for you': Florida Trump voter pleads for return of wife 'kidnapped' by feds

Wayne DeMario, a Florida Republican who voted for President Donald Trump, on Friday delivered a "desperate plea" to the president to return his wife, Yamile Alcantu, who's been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for eight months. "Please get her home," DeMario told Local10 on Friday. "Please, she does not deserve this. She is the sweetest person, and she prayed for you." DeMario, a small business owner in Miami-Dade county, told Local10 he and his wife were Trump supporters prior to their ordeal. According to DeMario, Alcantu, who Local10 reports "moved to the U.S. from Cuba 25 years ago through a Visa Lottery," had "a minor run-in with the law during a traffic stop" back in 2008. "They go through her purse, and then they dump the purse out, and three Xanax pills fall out," DeMario explained. His wife has checked in annually with ICE "for years," Local10 reports. In June, things changed. "They grabbed her, put her in shackles and chains," DeMario said, likening her detention to being "kidnapped." "ICE held her at a detention center in Jacksonville and moved her to Louisiana," Local10 reports. "I really thought this was just going to be something more organized, but it's obviously not," DeMario told the outlet. "They just blanket everybody."

February 21, 2026 at 2:38 PM EST
'Head scratcher': Trump aides struggle to spend $500 billion more the military asked for

A stunning report in the Washington Post on Saturday reveals aides for President Donald Trump are running into "logistical challenges" surrounding how the U.S. military can spend "a whopping $500 billion in their forthcoming budget." According to four people who spoke with the Post, after Trump "agreed to a roughly 50 percent funding boost sought by" Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, White House aides and defense officials struggled with "where to put the money, because the amount is so large." Per the Post, "The White House is more than two weeks behind its statutory deadline to send its budget proposal to Congress, in part because it is unclear how precisely to spend the additional $500 billion." As the Post reports, "senior Pentagon officials have consulted with former senior defense officials as they grapple with the challenge." Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel, said with the spending increase, "it now appears that the Pentagon budget is detached from" a previous defense strategy released by Hegseth's team in January. That strategy "calls for the Pentagon to focus first on defense in the Western Hemisphere, with less emphasis on Europe, Africa and the Middle East," the Post reports. Cancian called it a "head scratcher" that the U.S. would pull back from those regions while also increasing the budget. "If you've got a 50 percent budget increase, you don't have to do any of that," Cancian said. "You'd be talking about all the new places you'd making investments."

February 21, 2026 at 2:14 PM EST
Gorsuch takes aim at Supreme Court's Trump prejudice -- and calls out Congress' dysfunction

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch's 46-page opinion on President Donald Trump's tariff case reveals the conservative's trepidation over his colleague's apparent double standard toward the current president compared with former President Joe Biden -- and reminds Congress it, too, can make decisions. While the Supreme Court largely struck down Trump's tariffs in Friday's ruling, conservatives "splintered," NBC News senior Supreme Court reporter Lawrence Hurley wrote, with Chief Justice John Roberts penning the ruling, and Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett joining the majority. Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito dissented. Hurley on Saturday detailed Gorsuch's opinion that "took aim at his colleagues on the Supreme Court for a lack of consistency" in their handling of presidential power under the Trump administration. Hurley notes Gorsuch "chided several of his fellow justices" for "effectively applying the same Supreme Court precedent differently under Trump than they did under Biden." According to Hurley, under Biden, conservatives on the Supreme Court adhered to the "major questions doctrine," or the notion that "sweeping presidential action" must be "authorized by Congress." In his opinion, Gorsuch argued his liberal colleagues "do not object to [the major questions doctrine's] application in [the tariff] case" despite rejecting the theory under Biden. As for his conservative colleagues, Gorsuch called out those "who have joined major questions decisions in the past [but] dissent from today's application of the doctrine." As NBC News reports, "Thomas, Kavanaugh, Barrett and liberal Justice Elena Kagan all felt the need to respond to Gorsuch in their own opinions." Kagan, in her concurring opinion, had "a side-battle [with Gorsuch] over the major questions doctrine," taking aim at the conservative justice's assertion she was somehow embracing his favored legal theory, Slate legal reporter Mark Joseph Stern wrote Friday on BlueSky. In her note, Kagan wrote that Gorsuch "[insists] that I now must be applying the major questions doctrine, and his own version of it to boot " Given how strong his apparent desire for converts ... I almost regret to inform him that I am not one." Fordham University School of Law professor Robin Effron said the splintering "shows you how much internal dissension there is on the Supreme Court right now." She also called Roberts' majority opinion a "huge fail," noting that it read like he'd hoped to land a unanimous decision on the ruling. While Kagan argued in her concurring opinion that she was not, in fact, embracing the doctrine, George Mason University law school professor Ilya Somin told NBC News that Kavanaugh actually argued the major questions theory does not apply to Trump's tariff case at all. "It seems like they want to carve out this arbitrary exception to major questions for tariffs even though it can't be justified," Somin said. Still, Gorsuch appears to believe athe Supreme Court strife related to Trump's tariff case could have been solved by "the bygone era of legislative power," a separate New York Times analysis explained. "Yes, legislating can be hard and take time," Gorsuch wrote. "And yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people's elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man." Times reporter Catie Edmondson noted Gorsuch's language was "a description of governing completely at odds with what is currently underway across the street from the Supreme Court at the Capitol, where Republicans controlling the House and the Senate have ceded their power to one man -- Mr. Trump -- on a variety of issues." Edmondson detected in Gorsuch's opinion "a note of reproach for the current dysfunctional state of affairs in Congress," pointing out a specific phrase from his writing: "Deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions," the conservative justice wrote. "For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious."

February 21, 2026 at 1:03 PM EST
'String of embarrassing defeats' for Trump DOJ as courts expose officers' lies

The Department of Justice has "suffered a string of embarrassing defeats" in court as federal government cases against people accused of "physically attacking officers or interfering with their duties " have recently been dismissed or ended in not guilty verdicts," the Guardian reports. After President Donald Trump surged federal agents in Minnesota, a number of cases in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region revealed a gulf between federal agent's claims and the actual facts on the ground, often backed by video of the events. Frederick Goetz, a lawyer for a man charged with felony assault for allegedly attacking an officer, and whose charges were later dismissed by prosecutors, told the Guardian he sees "a pattern" among similar cases in the region. "There are unreasonable uses of force by ICE agents and border patrol," Goetz explained. "You immediately have stories perpetuated to justify that force: 'The officer was being attacked. This was an ambush.' All of that spin is to cast the victims as violent perpetrators. Then the story falls apart once you get the facts." In Goetz's client's case, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director Todd Lyons last week acknowledged "sworn testimony provided by two separate officers appears to have made untruthful statements." Lyons insisted federal authorities are investigating the officers. As the Guardian reports, several other cases in Minnesota have "fallen apart" under the facts. "Earlier this year, Minnesota federal prosecutors dropped assault charges against a man, who was accused of ramming his car into agents during an immigration operation," the Guardian reports. "The DOJ presented no witnesses to establish probable cause." And on Tuesday, Judge Donovan Frank "dismissed with prejudice federal assault charges filed against a Minneapolis man accused of 'tackling' an ICE agent," calling the "allegations 'vague and contradictory.'" The DOJ's inability to secure convictions in these cases come as "the number of assistant U.S. attorneys in Minnesota has fallen from more than 40 prosecutors before Trump retook office to fewer than two dozen," the AP reports. Minnesota, according to the AP, "has been hit especially hard" by a slew of resignations across the United States. Because of this, "a growing number of defendants are beginning to escape accountability, as the remaining prosecutors are forced to dismiss some cases, kill others before charges are filed and seek plea agreements and delays." "Public safety has not been served by these rash of cases," Goetz told the Guardian. In one such case, 12-time convicted felon Cory Allen McKay, "with a three-decade record of violent crime that includes strangling a pregnant woman and firing a shotgun under a person's chin " walked free after the prosecutor on his case retired," the AP reports. According to the report, McKay's lawyer, Jean Brand, said the move was "completely surprising" to her. She didn't learn that Trump appointee Daniel Rosen abruptly dropped the case until after her client's release. Last year, former assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Hollenhorst successfully argued that McKay "was too dangerous to be released before trial," the AP reports. McKay's lawyer called Hollenhorst's retired "a huge loss' for the Justice Department, despite the win for her client.

February 21, 2026 at 9:27 AM EST
Republican election expert undermines key Trump claims

Former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer is sounding the alarm. Speaking to CNN on Thursday, Richer said that if SB 1570 becomes law, it "would prove a significant disruption."

February 21, 2026 at 9:23 AM EST
How the end of America begins

Donald Trump's Crusade against Kilmar Abrego Garcia is "on life support" as it may finally be dismissed this week or next by District Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Tennessee. But will that be the end of this father's and husband's ordeal? This week, I told you about the historic pattern associated with countries moving from democracy to tyranny. First, they start breaking the law and ignoring the Constitution in small ways, and the more they get away with it -- and buy off or threaten politicians who may otherwise stop it -- the more they do it. We've been watching Trump do this almost from the first day of his second term in office.

February 21, 2026 at 8:44 AM EST
UK journalist attacks America's 'culture of complete impunity'

British police released former Prince Andrew on Thursday after 11 hours in custody, with his shocking arrest earlier in the day making him the first senior British royal to be arrested in nearly 400 years. Police are probing his connections to the deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein and whether he shared classified government information with him while serving as a U.K. trade representative from 2001 to 2011. King Charles' brother, now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor after being stripped of his royal title, is the most high-profile figure in the U.K. to be implicated in a widening scandal over ties to Epstein, who died in a New York jail in 2019 awaiting trial on sex trafficking. Authorities did not reference sexual abuse allegations against Mountbatten-Windsor or Epstein's sex trafficking case; Mountbatten-Windsor settled a lawsuit with Epstein survivor Virginia Roberts Giuffre in 2022 and has denied all wrongdoing.