Systemic Error Podcast

What happened AlterNet reports that Donald Trump blamed Republican strategist Karl Rove and Texas Sen. John Cornyn for making it harder for Trump-backed Ken Paxton to defeat Democrat James Talarico in a Texas Senate race. The article argues that Trump’s Truth Social post—especially his praise of Paxton as Texas’s greatest attorney general—exposed the weakness of his own judgment rather than establ...

What happened AlterNet reports that Republican operatives were surprised when rural voters in recent focus-group conversations blamed billionaires, corrupt politicians, and a rigged economic system for their financial distress. The reporting does not establish that these voters are moving to the Democratic Party, but it says some are receptive to populist economic arguments. The article cites rura...

What happened Robert Reich accused The New York Times of “dangerously fraudulent” coverage for presenting online reactions to a Michigan Senate debate between Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed as two roughly equivalent partisan narratives. As described by AlterNet, the Times analyzed more than 13,000 posts on X and contrasted what purportedly left- and right-leaning feeds showed u...

What happened Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno told Fox News that Republicans could be “dead as a party” if they lose working-class voters. As AlterNet reports, Moreno argued that Donald Trump rescued a party that had abandoned those voters, only for Republicans now to risk losing them over economic pressure and the war with Iran. The warning came less than two weeks before the 2026 midterm elections...

What happened AlterNet, citing ProPublica’s reporting, says an FBI public-corruption investigation examined allegations that Sen. Lindsey Graham traded official help for campaign contributions. Former Navatek CEO Martin Kao told agents that, at a private Washington dinner on March 3, 2020, Graham agreed to support roughly $10 million in federal work benefiting Navatek after requesting a total of $...

What happened AlterNet reports that former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor believes Donald Trump opposed foreign election interference selectively: not as a matter of national sovereignty, but when he thought it could hurt him politically. Taylor bases that conclusion on his experience in Trump’s first administration, while presenting Trump’s underlying motive as his ow...

What happened President Donald Trump had White House staff distribute printed copies of a recent Truth Social post to reporters waiting outside the Oval Office on Tuesday, according to AlterNet. The post claimed that Trump had spent or would spend more than $400 million on the midterm elections, including more than $300 million on advertising, voter contact, rallies, turnout programs, and what he...

What happened AlterNet reports that Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign circulated an attack ad featuring Donna Arthur, the mother of Democratic candidate Amy Acton, accusing Acton of lying about her childhood. Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, said the campaign was exploiting family trauma involving alleged sexual abuse by Arthur’s husband. The ad drew condemnation f...

What happened AlterNet reports that President Donald Trump’s lawyers are seeking to prevent the BBC from calling former special counsel Jack Smith as a witness in Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the broadcaster. Trump alleges that a BBC documentary misleadingly edited portions of his January 6, 2021, Ellipse speech to suggest that he directly called for violence at the Capitol. The BBC disputes...

What happened AlterNet reports that President Donald Trump has intensified his public attacks on Fox News while promoting the pro-Trump Right Side Broadcasting Network. Conservative commentator Jim Geraghty argued that the dispute shows an increasingly strained relationship between Trump and the network as the midterms approach. Trump praised RSBN’s coverage of a Kentucky appearance and accused Fo...

What happened AlterNet attributes the renewed squeeze on US paychecks to President Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran at the end of February. The outlet reports that Iran retaliated by blocking oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, driving up energy, transportation, and fertilizer costs while wage growth slowed. According to the article, year-over-year wholesale inflation reached 6.3 per...

What happened AlterNet reports that Homeland Security Investigations, the ICE branch responsible for criminal investigations, inadvertently switched internet providers in April of the previous year and lost its ability to conduct court-authorized wiretaps for months. During the outage, wiretaps reported by Department of Homeland Security investigators fell by more than 80 percent under then-DHS Se...

What happened Seven Boeing 737-700 jets acquired for the Department of Homeland Security as part of President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign were largely idle at Lake Charles Regional Airport in Louisiana, AlterNet reported, citing Bloomberg. Aircraft-tracking data indicated that each had flown fewer than five times since April 2026. The aircraft were part of a reported $464 million purchase...

What happened AlterNet reports that President Donald Trump delivered a confused passage at a Monday political rally, invoking Barack Obama, “Mohammed,” Michigan, and an unspecified campaign appearance without clearly connecting them. The report does not identify whom Trump meant by “Mohammed,” establish what event Obama was supposedly attending, or explain whether Trump’s claims were accurate. Alt...

What happened AlterNet, citing Bloomberg Law, reports that U.S. District Judge Ada Brown emailed confidential material—including sealed court papers unrelated to the misconduct allegations against her—to roughly 140 judges, lawyers, and journalists. The Judicial Council for the Fifth Circuit disclosed the distribution in an order issued Tuesday while confirming that Brown was already under miscond...

What happened AlterNet reports that Vice President JD Vance, asked at a press conference to define socialism and explain the success of candidates described that way, first connected the term with prioritizing workers, then said he no longer knew what it meant and substituted complaints about foreign workers and transgender athletes. The “trap” in the headline is AlterNet columnist Sabrina Haake’s...

What happened AlterNet reports that, early in President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security directed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to secretly obtain and hack a voting machine, then send its findings to the White House. CISA staff were also reportedly told not to notify the manufacturer about discovered vulnerabilities. Car...

What happened AlterNet reports that Donald Trump asked oil executives at an April 2024 Mar-a-Lago dinner to raise $1 billion for his presidential campaign while presenting industry-friendly policies as a “deal.” Citing The Washington Post, the outlet says Trump offered tax breaks, regulatory rollbacks, expanded drilling, an end to the Biden administration’s pause on new liquefied-natural-gas expor...

What happened AlterNet reports that anti-Trump conservative commentator Rick Wilson argued on Molly Jong-Fast’s “Fast Politics” podcast that President Donald Trump’s increasingly unfiltered remarks are undermining a central MAGA myth: that he represents “robust, strict masculinity.” Wilson pointed particularly to Trump’s repeated comments about the attractiveness, physique, and appearance of Ohio...

What happened AlterNet published an essay by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich arguing that the Republican Party is “dead” as a governing institution because it has subordinated policy, principle, and internal dissent to Donald Trump. Reich’s claim is political, not literal: the party still exists and contests power, but he says loyalty to Trump has displaced its former commitments. Reich points...

What happened AlterNet reports that Meta temporarily disabled the main “No Kings” account during nationwide protests on Saturday after its systems flagged unusual activity and suspected bot involvement. Meta later said engineers determined the account should not have been removed, restored access after an additional delay, and issued what it described as a sincere apology. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,...

What happened AlterNet columnist D. Earl Stephens argues that Donald Trump’s agenda should not be described as a failure because, by Stephens’s measure, it has produced the fear, institutional damage, inequality, and personal benefit that Trump and his allies sought. Writing 17 days before the midterm elections, Stephens portrays the second term as a “catastrophic success” for Trump, wealthy suppo...

What happened AlterNet reports that Judge Ana Reyes denied President Donald Trump’s motion to remove her from litigation over the East Potomac Golf Course. The administration alleged that Reyes was biased, hostile and overly emotional; she answered that her criticism followed the government’s abrupt removal of hundreds of trees after months in which she had credited its lawyers’ representations an...

What happened AlterNet reports that former federal prosecutor Elie Honig accused President Donald Trump’s Justice Department of abandoning political independence after federal agents searched Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington home on October 12, 22 days before the November 3 midterm election. Agents were investigating whether Omar or relatives made false statements in immigration and natural...

What happened AlterNet reports that Donald Trump has used conservation easements on golf properties to claim large tax deductions while keeping the land as operating businesses. Citing Forbes, it says an easement at Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, could sharply reduce taxes associated with Trump’s reported 2025 income; Forbes estimated the benefit at roughly $825 million, with a marg...