When asked about her political views in 2010 by the Valley Advocate, Maddow replied, "I'm undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I'm in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican Party platform."[85]
Maddow opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In February 2013, she said:
We say that Vietnam changed our politics forever. But less than 40 years after this, again, a campaign directed at the highest levels of government to get us to agree to a war based on something that did not happen the way they said it happened. It was a months-long campaign in 2002 and 2003, and it worked ... In three weeks, the CIA pulls together what normally takes months. It is delivered just seven days before the congressional vote ... By the end of 2002, the U.S. military is headed to the Gulf. Congress is on board, as are British Prime Minister Tony Blair and most of the mainstream media. The stage is set for war.[86]
During the 2008 presidential election, Maddow did not formally support any candidate. Concerning Barack Obama's candidacy, Maddow said: "I have never and still don't think of myself as an Obama supporter, either professionally or actually."[87]
In 2010, Republican Senator Scott Brown speculated that Maddow was going to run against him in the 2012 Senate election. His campaign used this premise for a fundraising email, although Maddow repeatedly said Brown's speculation was false. Brown continued to make his claims in the Boston media, so Maddow ran a full-page advertisement in The Boston Globe confirming that she was not running and separately demanded Brown's apology. She added that, despite repeated invitations over the months, Brown had refused to appear on her TV program.[88][89][90][91] Ultimately, it was Elizabeth Warren who ran in 2012, defeating Brown.[92]
Maddow has suggested that the alleged Trump-Russia collusion has continued beyond the 2016 presidential election.[93] In March 2017, she blamed Russia for WikiLeaks' Vault 7 disclosure of the CIA's hacking tools, saying: "Consider what the other U.S. agency is besides the State Department that Putin most hates? That Putin most feels competitive with? That Putin most wants to beat? It's the CIA, right? ... Smart observers say this is the largest dump of classified CIA material maybe ever, and it really could be a devastating blow to the CIA's cyber war and flat-out spying capabilities, and that dump was released by WikiLeaks."[93] Regarding the Trump-Russia investigation, Maddow said: "If the Trump presidency is knowingly the product of a foreign-intelligence operation, that is a full-stop national crisis."[48] Concerning "alternative facts" and fake news, Maddow said: "The president denigrating the press is important in terms of his behavior as an increasingly authoritarian-style leader, period."[48]: 56
Following the October 2018 murder of Saudi Arabian dissident journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Maddow argued that Donald Trump's business ties to Saudi Arabia are raising some troubling questions.[94]
In December 2018, Maddow criticized President Trump's decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.[95]
In July 2020, Maddow predicted that unemployment figures covering the previous month would be "absolutely terrible"; after the figures were released, showing the largest growth in employment in a single month in U.S. history, Politico named Maddow's prediction one of "the most audacious, confident and spectacularly incorrect prognostications about the year".[96]
In May 2021, former New York Times reporter Barry Meier published Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies, which cited the Steele dossier as a case study in how reporters can be manipulated by private intelligence sources. Meier named Maddow as one example.[97]
