MS NOW star Rachel Maddow should have extra time to prepare her long lecturing monologues on Monday night, since she's only doing one show a week for a reported $25 million a year (nice work if you can get it). But on April 6, she borrowed from an NPR story to underline how the Trump administration is mistreating the veterans in this time of war. It's too bad she didn't actually seem to read the whole article that she was sharing with her superfans.
It unfolded like this, next to the graphic "Breaking Bad," as if Trump is like the drug kingpin in that show.
MADDOW: How are these guys doing taking care of the troops and the veterans who come home from war? This is the lede from NPR. Quote, more than 10,000 veterans lost their homes to foreclosure since May of last year, when the Trump administration shut down a key safety net in the VA home loan program. Quote, the Trump administration was warned this would happen. At a hearing in March 2025 before the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, a representative from the Mortgage Bankers Association warned about it explicitly. quote, ‘Foreclosure. Period. That's really where it's going to come to. Nevertheless, less than two months later, the Trump administration shut down the rescue program anyway. Since then, more than 10,000 U.S. veterans have lost their homes through foreclosure sales.
Rachel Maddow makes propaganda with an NPR story on veterans losing their homes under Trump.
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) April 7, 2026
She left out the part where NPR explained "The roots of the crisis go back to a mistake made during the Biden administration..." Because Maddow makes propaganda. https://t.co/6ATT2mDAg7 pic.twitter.com/5Y25HdlLeW
Maddow left out the part where NPR's investigative reporters explained the problem goes back to the Biden administration, even if the story still pushed an anti-Trump angle:
The roots of the crisis go back to a mistake made during the Biden administration, when the VA abruptly shut down a pandemic assistance program while thousands of vets were still in the middle of it. Struggling homeowners who used the program to skip some mortgage payments suddenly had to pay those payments back all at once — an unaffordable burden for many of them. After an NPR investigation exposed the problem, the VA halted foreclosures for a year while it rolled out a fix.
Republicans in Congress, citing costs, wanted to kill that fix and replace it with something else. But last spring, the mortgage industry warned that shutting down the program without first replacing it would be a disaster.
"Foreclosure. Period. That's really where it's gonna come to," warned Elizabeth Balce, representing the Mortgage Bankers Association, at a hearing in March of 2025 before the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs.
Less than two months later, the Trump administration shut down the rescue program anyway.
The story highlights sympathetic veterans who now can't make the payments that are suddenly demanded. There's really nobody from the Republican side quoted (the Trump VA offered a written statement). So the NPR story has an anti-Trump slant -- but not as propagandistic as Maddow's little cartoon of a commentary. (The piece that aired on Morning Edition sounded more anti-Trump than the online version.)
Remember, Maddow's fans in the media have long gushed over her as a "Wonky-Tonk Woman" who always "does her "homework." Well, she flunked this exam.
