On the heels of Elon Musk’s exit from the federal government, Rachel Maddow shared the metaphor she believes best sums up the billionaire’s time in Washington.

During Monday’s show, Maddow highlighted one particular agency that was targeted by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE. In March, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) sued DOGE after it faced a “takeover by force” of its Washington headquarters. With the help of law enforcement, DOGE seized USIP’s building and laid off the independent agency’s employees.

Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that the takeover was illegal and ordered the Trump administration to return the headquarters to USIP. When employees returned, they found the office in a state of disarray, full of water damage, rats and roaches, according to a sworn statement from the agency’s chief executive.

While Maddow acknowledged that many have used Musk’s black eye, on display during his Oval Office goodbye last week, as a metaphor for his time with the White House, she argued that USIP provided a more “on the nose” way to describe the billionaire’s legacy.

“A building seized pointlessly, shut down pointlessly, left to be infested by vermin — all so its rightful owners can eventually come back and have to put it all back together again. For no reason at all,” Maddow said. “I think that’s a better metaphor.”

You can watch Maddow’s full take on Musk’s exit above.

A federal judge on Tuesday sided with a class of transgender plaintiffs against one of President Donald Trump’s executive orders. Granting a preliminary injunction, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth told the Federal Bureau of Prisons to keep providing gender-affirming care to inmates, notwithstanding Trump’s order that had sought to bar federal funds “for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”

After Trump issued his order in January, the plaintiffs’ access to hormone medications and social accommodations (like clothing and hair removal devices) was cut off or reduced. Hormone medication access came backbut they still couldn’t get social accommodations. On behalf of a class of plaintiffs diagnosed with gender dysphoria, they sought to halt the order.

Lambertha Reagan appointee, agreed with them at this early stage in the case. He said the BOP must make social accommodations available to all class members to the same extent they were available prior to Trump’s order, as well as provide hormone therapy to all class members who were prescribed hormone medications by BOP or other medical personnel to the same extent as prior to Trump’s order.

The preliminary injunction is not a final decision on the subject but rather a move by the judge to maintain the status quo while the case proceeds.

But in siding with the plaintiffs at this preliminary stage, Lamberth said they’re likely to succeed on the merits. He said he agreed that the government’s enforcement of the order is “arbitrary and capricious” by failing to justify the executive action while treating gender dysphoria differently from other medical conditions.

Quoting from Trump’s executive order, the judge said it failed to “make any effort whatsoever to explain how providing hormone medications or social accommodations to prisoners hampers ‘scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, trust in government,’ or any other virtue animating the Executive Order.”

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Jordan Rubin

Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined BLN, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.

This is an adapted excerpt from the June 2 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

They nicknamed it the “Bear.” It’s a military aircraft first designed in Russia in the 1950s and built to compete with the American B-52 bomber. The Tupolev Tu-95 can fly across continents before it has to stop and refuel, and it can carry eight long-range missiles.

For decades, Russia has had dozens of Tu-95 bombers and other planes like it. On Sunday, Ukrainian drones struck several Russian air basesdestroying a fleet of planes, including several Tu-95 bombers.

Russia has been hammering Ukraine with these bombers for years, and this weekend, Kyiv decided that rather than just trying to intercept the missiles that these planes keep firing from the sky, it would instead try to take out the planes.

According to NBC NewsUkraine’s Security Service smuggled more than a hundred drones into Russia. They hid them under the roofs of mobile wooden cabins in a process that took months.

Ukraine just disabled a primary piece of Russia’s nuclear arsenal with devices that look like they came from RadioShack.

Then all at once, simultaneously, with no warning, the cabin roofs were opened via remote control, and then the drones flew off to do their thing, packed with explosives.

Ukraine says they destroyed planes across four different military sites in Russia, including in Siberia at a site almost 3,000 miles away from Ukraine. Of Russia’s entire fleet of military bombers, Ukraine says they were able to destroy or severely damage about a third of them.

Now, was Russia aware that this was going to happen? Clearly no. Did they have defenses in place to protect their planes? Well, that’s a funny story.

In a video of Sunday’s drone attack, put out by Ukraine’s Security Service, you can see round objects on the wings of Russia’s bomber planes. Those circles are actually tires — like the tires you put on your car. Apparently, this is a thing Russia has been doing for a while now. One NATO military official told CNN in 2023, “We believe it’s meant to protect against drones. … We don’t know if this will have any effect.”

Well, now we know. As Sunday’s strike shows, tires do not prevent drones from destroying your attack planes.

This whole thing is just astonishing, not just in a foreign policy way, but also in an action movie kind of way. It also has really serious implications beyond Russia and Ukraine. Those bomber planes Ukraine just torched are not only equipped to carry regular missiles, they also can carry nuclear warheads.

If you are Russia, the United States or any country with nuclear weapons, your national security policies are based around the fact that you have an impenetrable nuclear deterrent. Why would anyone attack you if you could then retaliate by blowing them off the map with your nuclear stockpile?

But Ukraine just disabled a primary piece of Russia’s nuclear arsenal with devices that look like they came from RadioShack, which means it has to contend with the fact that its impenetrable nuclear arsenal is not so impenetrable after all.

Sunday’s strike also has really important strategic consequences for every country that thinks of itself as having a nuclear deterrent.

For our country, wouldn’t this be a good time to have a robust, competent national security apparatus thinking about those kinds of implications and making smart, well-informed strategic decisions on how to react to them?