Independent Americans with Paul Rieckhoff

A quick-hit media blitz — Paul Rieckhoff's back-to-back TV appearances in one place. First, on NewsNation Now, Paul unpacks Trump's expanding conflict with Iran: the worst ceasefire ever, missiles still flying, the Strait of Hormuz unsecured, and the regime controlling the tempo while our military gets sucked into what he calls a "sucking chest wound" that's dragging down the economy and...

The Democrats Will Not Save You in Maine—or Anywhere. Cuba is Next. Sen Mitch McConnell is MIA. Independent is Not “a Schtick”. World Cup. And New Professional Women’s Baseball League!  Trump's forever war is expanding faster than anyone in the mainstream press is willing to say out loud. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has quietly invited more than 60 countries to a meeting framing Antifa as a tra...

Two stories broke in the same news cycle, and both are gut punches for anyone who cares about accountability. In Maine, Democratic Senate candidate and former Marine Graham Platner has withdrawn after a Nazi tattoo, ugly online history, and rape allegations from two women who went on the record. Paul was skeptical from day one — and lays out why Platner ducked every veteran interviewer who might h...

Plus: Trump is a Jinx. US Men Implode in Seattle. Platner Continues to Implode in Maine. Optimism for America 250. The New Toy Story is Important. America just turned 250, Team USA just got bounced from the World Cup, and the MAGA machine is running all gas, no brakes on everything from Iran to the ranks of our own military. Paul sits down with Admiral James Stavridis — former NATO Supreme Allied...

FIFA, Balogun, and the Trump Jinx. July 4/America 250/Independents Day Reflections.  It's America 250 week, the World Cup has swept through New York, and tonight Team USA plays Belgium in what host Paul Rieckhoff calls the biggest US soccer match in his lifetime. Naturally, Donald Trump has already elbowed his way into the story — publicly pressuring FIFA over Folarin Balogun's red card, then taki...

His Counter-Narrative To Trump On Patriotism, Open Primaries In Md, The Lessons Of The Knicks, And an NBA Team In B’more. Independents Day Special It’s Independence Day. And there are few leaders better suited for this moment than Maryland Governor Wes Moore. Paul Rieckhoff sits down with his longtime friend and returning champion for a July 4th conversation about leadership, patriotism, independe...

July 4th is two days away. America is turning 250. And there is nobody we’d rather hear from right now than America’s historian, Ken Burns. Paul Rieckhoff is taking a couple days off at the beach with the kids, so we’re replaying one of our all-time favorite Independent Americans conversations. Ken Burns joins Paul for a sweeping, urgent, deeply American talk about the Revolution, George Washingto...

Gen. Barry McCaffrey on the Danger of Thinking War Can Be Easy. Plus: Trump, Greenland & the US as a ‘Predator Nation’. Reflections on the End of Iraq. Independents Week Replay Gen. Barry McCaffrey doesn't do polite. In this replay conversation from the Independent Americans vault, the retired four-star general and MSNOW national security analyst sits down with Paul Rieckhoff to name what almo...

“War Is Chaotic — and We Went In Without a Strategy'" with General Mark Hertling. Plus: Iran, Hegseth & 'Fitness Cultism’. Why His Son Chose to Serve. A Father's Wartime Journal — and a Gut Check for This July 4th War is chaotic and complex. You really never know which way it's going to go — and you especially don't know if you go in without a strategy. That's the line General Mark Hertli...

What Is an Illegal Order? The Four-Star Navy SEAL Walks Us Through It. A Million Russian Casualties, And The Precedent We Can’t Afford To Break. Independents Week Replay Paul sits down with retired Admiral Bill McRaven — Navy SEAL, former SOCOM commander, former University of Texas system chancellor, and one of the clearest voices in American public life — for a conversation built for this moment....

Plus: Why Trump Needs NATO More Than NATO Needs Trump. Pete Hegseth has been quietly purging the Pentagon of anyone who might outshine him, contradict him, or threaten his grip on power. This week he came for General Chris Donahue — a West Point graduate, 75th Ranger Regiment veteran, former commander of the military's most elite special missions unit, the architect of the Afghanistan airlift that...

Iran Deal is the Worst Deal Ever. DSA Runs the Table, WIll it Cost the Dems? The story of the Real SAV Act. Who Do You Trust in  Post-Truth Era? America has a primary problem, and New York City is ground zero. Less than 500,000 voters showed up to decide who runs a city of five million, while a million independents — Paul included — were shut out by the most closed primary in the country. That's n...

Primary Fallout. Trump Blows Up Housing Bill for SAVE Act—Because He’s Focused on the Elections. DJT Thinks He’s a UFC Fighter. Hegseth’s Pentagon Purge Continues. Good News for Independents in DC.  Flu Outbreak Sickens Hundreds of Troops.  Mamdani is the new king of the Democratic Socialists, and he didn't get there by accident. He understood that closed primaries are a rigged game where the play...

Iran Now Costs $80B! Giannis Antetokounmpo to Miami. Will Trump Jinx World Cup Fever? The MAGA machine is cracking. Tucker Carlson — a 35-year Republican defender — just announced he won't support the GOP in the midterms. Marjorie Taylor Greene piggybacked within hours. Shawn Ryan, Joe Rogan, and others have already signaled the same. So what comes next? A more extreme Republican spinoff? A fake-i...

What About an Arc de Healthcare? Trump’s Destruction of Our Shared Symbols is an Attack on All of Us. World Cup Joy, Living in the New South, Friendly, Helpful Neighbors and Driving Across America.  Henry Rollins doesn't do small talk. The punk icon, author, USO road dog, and longtime friend of the show returns from Nashville to deliver one of the most blistering hours we've recorded this year. He...

Paul Rieckhoff and journalist David Rhode rip into the wreckage of Trump's Iran operation — a campaign sold as an existential fight that ended with sanctions lifted, frozen assets returned, the nuclear program intact, and the regime still in power to keep slaughtering its own people. Thirteen American troops are dead. Forty percent of the Navy was tied up. The defense budget is ballooning past $1....

IVA showcase: Veterans Meeting the Moment: Todd Achilles on His Idaho Senate Run & Ridgecrest, CA Mayor Travis Endicott. Father’s Day 2026.  The Iran operation is being called the biggest American strategic loss in a generation, and the receipts are damning. Thirteen service members dead, billions unaccounted for, forty percent of the Navy tied up, sanctions lifted, assets returned, the nuclea...

It was a split-screen American day. In New York, two million people packed the Canyon of Heroes for a Knicks parade that felt closer to VE Day than a basketball celebration — kids out of school, FDNY Ladder 10 in the crowd, fans flying in from Sydney. In Washington and overseas, the president was busy selling an Iran deal that even Mike Pence and Nikki Haley are calling a loss. Ballistic missiles...

With 2 Million Independent TN Voters 775k Votes is the Magic Number. Where Do Trump Voters Go Next? Reason Over Extremism. Independence Never Goes Out Of Style. Tennessee looks like a red wall on the map. Look closer. Roughly 48% of eligible voters there are unaffiliated — the highest share in the state (34%-R/18%-D/48%-I) — and only a third of them bothered to show up last midterm. That's not apa...

B-52 Bomber Crashes In California. Trump At NYC Parade? Knicks At White House? Primaries Tues In Alabama, Dc, Georgia And Oklahoma. NYPD Rise To The Moment.  Independents have hit 47% of the country. Republicans are at 26%. Democrats at 27%. That's not a trend line — that's a tectonic shift, and the new CNN poll out today confirms what this show has been saying for years: the angry middle isn't ho...

The Greatest MAGA Military Recruiting Ad Ever. Iran and US Say They Have a Deal. Hegseth: Ecuador and Guatemala Are Next. Fox Gobbles Up Roku. USA Soccer Wins Big! Even Though Trump Called Them.  Sports is our mirror. On Saturday night, that mirror reflected the best of America — a 53-years-in-the-making Knicks championship built on a diverse, humble, durable team led by Jalen Brunson, a man who s...

The people's house is being rented out for a pay-per-view cage match. On his own birthday, Donald Trump is staging a UFC event at the White House — with security and overhead costs that will run American taxpayers an estimated ten to twelve million dollars, on top of a sixty million dollar production tab. This isn't a charity fundraiser. It isn't on broadcast TV. It's a corporate hype machine behi...

The two parties don't just run the game — they run the refs. In this News Nation panel conversation, Paul Rieckhoff makes the case that America's closed primary system isn't merely broken, it's rigged: party-run, party-refereed, and engineered to push both sides to the fringe while the 90-million-strong angry middle gets locked out. With independents now giving Donald Trump an approval rating in t...

Clayton as DNI, DOJ/Trump’s $1.8B slush fund lives, Trump vs Platner, and Iran and inflation. It has been a wild, weird, harrowing week — Iran, ICE in Minneapolis, a UFC fight at the White House, the Knicks in the playoffs, and a president who keeps telling you out loud what he plans to do next. In this special Friday pop-media episode, Paul Rieckhoff brings you his weekly conversation from MS Now...

Iran Hits Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan. Trump vs Gov Wes Moore in Golf. World Cup Begins and Team USA Plays Tomorrow!  Trump told a room full of Americans he "loves inflation" — while working families are getting strangled at the grocery store and the gas pump. Meanwhile, DHS Director Markwayne Mullin is openly fantasizing about siccing ICE on New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, treating federal i...