Systemic Error Podcast

What happened AlterNet reports that during a Thursday executive-order signing, President Donald Trump’s Cabinet members and other allies applauded for an unusually long time. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie interpreted the scene as evidence that Trump’s subordinates were afraid to be the first person to stop. Bouie compared the social dynamic—not the consequences—to accounts of officials ap...

What happened RawStory reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to announce a 20 percent reduction in positions reserved for generals and admirals, doubling the 10 percent overall reduction he ordered in May 2025. Pentagon officials told The Wall Street Journal that the armed services would have until Jan. 1, 2027, to complete the new cuts. Hegseth is expected to announce the plan during...

What happened RawStory columnist Jason Miciak argues that Republican senators’ complaints about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are an indirect challenge to President Donald Trump. But the column does not establish that senators are “plotting” Hegseth’s removal or using him as a proxy to target Trump. It offers two critical Senate quotations—one from an unnamed source—and interprets their tone as e...

What happened RawStory reports that Texas Attorney General and Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton privately said Donald Trump’s two-day midterm convention in Dallas hurt Republican polling. Asked at a Washington fundraiser whether Trump was “a little bit of a drag,” Paxton replied that “everybody’s numbers dropped” after the convention and that the situation was “not good.” The New York Times...

What happened AlterNet reports that Autumn Daniels was billed $410 by Carle Foundation Hospital in Urbana, Illinois, after an April emergency-room visit in which staff registered her, checked her vital signs and sent her to the waiting room. Daniels, suffering a severe migraine and vomiting repeatedly, left after four hours without seeing a doctor or receiving treatment. She obtained care at anoth...

What happened Sen. Jim Justice urged the Trump administration to reconsider immigration sweeps that remove long-established community members, telling Politico on Tuesday that officials should admit when enforcement has gone wrong and adjust. RawStory reports that Politico journalist Rachel Shin described his remarks as “a remarkable break” from the administration. Justice’s criticism followed com...

What happened RawStory reports that prominent Republicans are calling Democratic candidates “weird,” reviving an insult Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz used against Donald Trump, JD Vance and other Republicans during the 2024 campaign. Sen. Tim Scott used it at a Republican convention in Dallas, Vance directed it at Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, Trump has applied it to Texas Senate nominee James...

What happened RawStory reports that Sen. Marsha Blackburn sued former special counsel Jack Smith in federal court in Tennessee, seeking $1 in nominal damages and the return of phone records obtained during Smith’s investigation. The complaint alleges that a May 2023 subpoena to Verizon for Blackburn’s call logs around the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack violated her constitutional rights by preven...

What happened AlterNet columnist D. Earl Stephens rejects the claim that Democrats need to project more “joy” to reconnect with voters. His response was prompted by PBS NewsHour co-host Geoff Bennett’s interview with Fox News commentator Jessica Tarlov, who argued that Democrats need sustained engagement with conservative audiences, more cultural connection, and leadership that includes joy. Tarlo...

What happened RawStory, citing The Washington Post’s review of confidential board documents and tax filings, reports that the Kennedy Center’s Trump-appointed leadership exhausted its $21 million bank credit line, depleted much of its debt reserve and withdrew $10 million from the Washington National Opera’s $10.3 million endowment. Arts-management professor Karen Gahl-Mills described the institut...

What happened RawStory reports that Sen. Eric Schmitt used a Senate Judiciary hearing to call former special counsel Jack Smith a “total dirtbag,” a “villain,” and an alleged perjurer. Schmitt presented messages that he said showed Smith traveling to Atlanta to coordinate with local prosecutors, but the purported evidence confused the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes; according to the outlet,...

What happened RawStory reports that former special counsel Jack Smith told a Senate panel on Tuesday that his investigation had developed what he described as proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Donald Trump committed serious crimes against the United States. Smith said he would make the same prosecutorial decision regardless of a former president’s party. His statement was not a convic...

What happened RawStory reports that Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican and retired Air Force brigadier general, called Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s handling of senior military officers “indefensible.” On CNN, Bacon cited the firing or stalled promotions of 80 generals and admirals and said he had heard concerns from active-duty personnel. Hegseth also plans to reduce positions reserved for...

What happened Jim Acosta said Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri should be “hiding in a cave” after Schmitt’s conspiracy theory involving former special counsel Jack Smith and Atlanta reportedly collapsed during a televised exchange on Tuesday. AlterNet does not explain what Schmitt alleged or what evidence disproved it, so the precise substance of that failure cannot be established from thi...

What happened RawStory reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a 36-second official video on September 30, 2026, showing service members running and exercising outside the Pentagon under the slogan “This is War.” Hegseth had appeared earlier that morning wearing a shirt bearing the same phrase. Veterans, former Pentagon personnel, journalists and political strategists mocked the produ...

What happened Rachel Maddow argued on NBC’s “Late Night” that Donald Trump’s unpopularity is damaging Republicans’ midterm prospects because GOP candidates remain publicly aligned with him instead of distancing themselves. RawStory, citing The Daily Beast’s account of the Tuesday-night interview, reported that Maddow described Trump as “radioactive” and said his approval rating was in the low 30 p...

What happened AlterNet’s headline overstates the evidence: no one already knows who will win the 2026 midterms. Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center wrote in The Washington Post that his model, based on generic congressional-ballot polling and the previous three midterms, projected Democrats winning between 225 and 232 of the House’s 435 seats. That is a forecast, not a result. Polli...

What happened AlterNet reports that speculation about Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney receiving a Nobel Peace Prize nomination drew criticism from Fox News host Laura Ingraham and political commentator Ari Goldkind. Ingraham argued that Carney was being celebrated for confronting President Donald Trump despite Canada’s economic strain; Goldkind likewise dismissed the idea. The reporting does n...

What happened AlterNet reports that Republican Senator Eric Schmitt tried to accuse former Special Counsel Jack Smith of perjury during a Wednesday Senate hearing, only to reveal that his supposed evidence concerned the wrong basketball game. Schmitt claimed text messages placed Smith at an Atlanta Hawks game with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on February 3, 2024; the messages report...

What happened At a Wednesday press conference, Blanche repeatedly denied that Justice Department attorney Kurt Olsen had resigned or left his investigation. According to AlterNet, Blanche said Olsen remained employed “exactly where he was before” and blamed inaccurate media reporting for the dispute. A reporter had asked about reports that Olsen and Joe diGenova had departed a Florida-based invest...

What happened RawStory reports that Republican Florida gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds dismissed solar power as a “fad” at a campaign event in Daytona Beach Shores, arguing that it consumes land and cannot provide consistent electricity after dark. He promoted small modular nuclear reactors as a steadier alternative. His Democratic opponent, David Jolly, said solar should be part of Florida’...

What happened AlterNet reports that former Republican strategists Sarah Longwell, Jonathan V. Last, and Tim Miller challenged pundit and former McConnell staffer Scott Jennings’s claim that he had a substantive conversation with Sen. Mitch McConnell about foreign policy. Citing videos of McConnell using a wheelchair and appearing to struggle to communicate, Longwell questioned whether the conversa...

What happened AlterNet reports that Fox News polling gave President Donald Trump a blunt political warning: voters view the cost of living as the country’s leading problem and largely disapprove of his economic performance. In the September 11–14 survey of 1,211 registered voters, 34 percent named living costs as the most important issue, while 63 percent said the Trump administration had made the...

What happened AlterNet reports that Ken Paxton privately said Donald Trump’s September Republican convention in Dallas hurt GOP candidates rather than helping them. In leaked audio from a Washington fundraiser the following Thursday, Paxton said his numbers—and those of other Republicans—dropped after the roughly $50 million event. The New York Times obtained the recording from an attendee who str...

What happened AlterNet reports that the Trump administration expanded the amount of imported lean beef eligible for lower tariffs by 300,000 metric tons—about 661 million pounds—to restrain ground-beef prices. The White House said domestic supply could not meet demand at reasonable prices after ground beef cost about 8 percent more in August than a year earlier. Purdue economists estimated the imp...