Trump Rages Wildly at Hegseth as Leaks Reveal Humiliating New Blunders

A striking new Washington Post report reveals that Donald Trump privately raged at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, demanding to know why he’d caught off guard by depleted munitions stockpiles. Yet these leaks actually reveal his own serious screw-ups. Trump wrongly concluded that the munitions situation had been fixed. In short, the commander in chief utterly failed to keep track of the impact his decision to go to war was having on the U.S. military. Meanwhile, other leaks suggest that Trump is feeling privately humiliated by his failure to defeat Iran, which freshly exposes just how deep his miscalculations have been all along. We talked to Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, a skillful interpreter of MAGA pathologies. She explains why authoritarian regimes rely on slavish loyalists like Hegseth, discusses why voters’ rejection of Trump is so important to salvaging the American experiment, and deciphers a conundrum known as “the MAGA paradox.” Listen to this episode here.