On Monday, when MSNBC’s cameras cut back to the studio directly after Donald Trump’s second inaugural speech, our first glimpse was of an exhausted-looking Rachel Maddow. It’s hard to recall what she said, but her face was unforgettable – she wore the countenance of someone ready to go full Rip Van Winkle and check out for a century. (Stars: they're just like us!)
Maddow, the host of “The Rachel Maddow Show” is in the same boat as everyone else in the United States, maybe in a worse position depending on how far the Leader decides to take his vengeance threats.
On CNN, as media analyst Oliver Darcy noted in his Status newsletter, an extremely muted version of Jake Tapper described the ceremonial proceedings without mentioning that the current president is a twice-impeached convicted felon.
Following a leisurely period of once-a-week broadcasts, Maddow pledged to cover the first 100 days of . . . this.
“To be fair to Tapper, he was not alone,” Darcy pointed out, describing the lack of firepower across all TV news coverage. “It was like the invasion of the body snatchers — familiar faces delivering the news, yet devoid of the passion and conviction that once defined them, as if their former selves had been hollowed out,” Darcy concluded.
And Maddow? In those moments after Trump shuffled off the dais, she was the spiritual mirror for everyone else who watched an inaugural address that her MSNBC colleague Jen Psaki, the former White House press secretary to Former President Joe Biden, described as not like those in “normal times.”
“Typically a president is not discussing themselves, even though they won. The country elected them. They are discussing the country they’re about to govern,” Psaki said. This one was more of a campaign speech than a message communicating a vision.
Psaki has lived in the Beltway beast’s raging belly and withstood its acid. Maddow isn’t that far removed from it, but still, we understand her concern. Following a leisurely period of once-a-week broadcasts, she's pledged to cover the first 100 days of . . . this.
A few hours later, presumably after a short nap and perhaps a long talk with her maker, “The Rachel Maddow Show” returned with its host's standard strong coffee blend of history, sermonizing and pep talk.
Maddow opened with a tale of former Vice President Andrew Johnson’s extreme inebriation on the day Abraham Lincoln was sworn in for a second term, and listed the commonalities between Johnson and Trump. Both were impeached, and both refused to attend their successors’ swearing-in. Trump did not kiss the Bible, a la drunk Andrew Johnson in 1865, but neither did he put his hand on the Bible as he was sworn in.
“We get one of these guys every 160 years or so, whether we need it or not,” she said, “except now . . . we've had this one twice. And why do we deserve that?”
Maddow has resurrected her old fire except, perhaps, with more awareness her show might be one of the few remaining cable news places where a liberal pundit and her interview subjects (NBC News justice department reporter Ryan Reilly and Yale historian Timothy Snyder joined her on Monday) can lay out the stakes without mincing words.
“Trump's transition into his second term in office has not been covered in the media broadly as a debacle, but I think objectively speaking, it has been a debacle,” Maddow said. “I mean, just describing what has happened in this transition, it's like no other transition we have seen other than the other bad Trump transitions in modern times. It's been error and humiliation upon error and humiliation.”
In Monday’s 25-minute intro, Maddow briskly ran through the parade of nepotism, cash-grabbing, grifting, and down payments on favors from foreign leaders happening in plain sight.
In the main, she focused on the crass displays of fealty from billionaires followed by Trump’s blanket pardoning of more than 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, commuting the sentences of those convicted of sedition, including the leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.
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Maddow referred to Musk's “Roman salute” thusly – which is both accurate and gets around any gripes about the world’s richest man being compared to a certain guy who led a beer hall putsch just over a century ago. “The Roman salute is a thing,” she intoned, in case viewers weren’t picking up what she was putting down.
On night 2, Maddow was energized as she recalled the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, OH., drilling down on a fake charity called The Ohio Clean Water fund. That was her gateway into calling attention to Ohio congressman Michael Rulli (R-OH) hiring Mike Peppel, one of the scam charity's co-founders, as his communications director.
“What is Congressman Michael Rulli of Ohio thinking?” Maddow asked incredulously. “I mean, it’s possible he’s not thinking anything about this at all, I don’t know how he thinks.” Then she mentioned the other headline Rulli is best known for in his district: firing his gun at a teenager who he claimed was bow hunting on his property.
Since forgetting recent history appears to be the American condition, here’s a reminder that “The Rachel Maddow Show” earned MSNBC its highest ratings during the first Trump administration, thanks to its host’s knack for deftly placing each day’s lunacy into historical context.
Maddow’s main purpose was to praise Ohio’s local news extensive coverage of Rulli and Peppel's wrongdoing as an example of journalism’s ability to expose politicians’ shamelessness, expressing the hope these men will be pushed to the point of acknowledging their shame again.
As is true in Ohio, so it might be on Capitol Hill, Maddow proposes, where reporters pressed senators on their view of Trump’s pardoning violent insurrectionists and received no real or morally defensible answers.
“What they are effectively going along with here by not raising objections . . . is something that they cannot justify,” Maddow concluded following a litany of footage featuring senators refusing to dissent with Trump’s blanket pardon of the Jan. 6 rioters. She presumes, possibly incorrectly, that these senators felt “stomach-churning self-loathing” at going along with Trump’s decree.
“That feeling of being unable to say anything rational or true that justifies Trump throwing open the prison doors for 211 actively incarcerated people, many of whom were there for violently assaulting police officers . . . that sickening feeling, maybe that – maybe that is what will save the country,” she said Tuesday, adding, “or at least, slow its descent.”
Since forgetting recent history appears to be the American condition, here’s a reminder that “The Rachel Maddow Show” earned MSNBC its highest ratings during the first Trump administration, thanks to its host’s knack for deftly placing each day’s lunacy into historical context.
After Biden took office, Maddow reduced her regular on-air presence to once a week and led live coverage of political events. As of Monday, she’s back to her old weeknight slot, with her colleague Alex Wagner ceding her Tuesday through Friday berth through April 30.
Theoretically.
Who knows what TV news will look like in 100 days? From Nielsen’s year-end numbers for 2024. Fox News’ competitors have much to worry about. It has drawn 72% of the primetime cable news audience since the election, while MSNBC was down 57% since Trump was re-elected, with CNN down 49%.
But the TV news industry — aside from Fox, which has regained most favored nation status with Trump by offering nonstop worshipful coverage while trumpeting disinformation — has a lot more to worry about than plummeting ratings.
As MSNBC noted to Deadline, its viewership also took a nosedive after the 2016 election, only to enjoy four of its most-watched years in its history. Maddow led that charge.
This time, however, MSNBC’s and CNN’s anchors and journalists find themselves in a much direr news environment. On Wednesday, Darcy reported that layoffs were expected to hit CNN and NBC News on Thursday. ABC News staffers are also expecting cuts. Reportedly Maddow herself was not immune to her network's austerity measures; according to a November report by The Ankler, she took a $5 million pay cut in her recently renegotiated five-year contract.
Six days before Trump was inaugurated, MSNBC president Rashida Jones stepped down, and senior vice president for content strategy Rebecca Kutler stepped into her duties in the interim.
CNN’s reporters, though, were directly muzzled by network chief Mark Thompson, who insiders told Darcy called a meeting on Sunday and advised the staff to refrain from pre-judging Trump and “cautioned against expressing any outrage of their own,” Darcy wrote.
As a further reminder, before he was elected, Trump threatened to direct the Federal Communications Commission to revoke NBC’s and ABC’s broadcast licenses. ABC’s parent company Disney settled a defamation lawsuit Trump filed against the broadcast network’s news division that experts agree it could have easily won. Furthermore, the company made a $15 million donation to his future presidential museum.
That may inform NBC's decision to describe Elon Musk's gesture on its website's video as "forcefully [touching] his heart, before raising his hand and saluting supporters" even though everyone who saw it understood it to mean something, ahem, we couldn't not see.
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
Maddow didn’t mention any of that prologue on Monday because there was more than enough to cover by the time her show started. Likening Trump’s actions to authoritarian leaders in Hungary, Turkey, Zimbabwe, Chile and Peru, Maddow explains that while this is novel in American history, it is also knowable in world history.
As Americans, she said, we’ve dealt with corruption and political violence before, citing the Civil War.
“But before each of those things has been treated as a calamity and a scandal. This time it’s a platform,” Maddow said. “This is textbook authoritarian takeover 101 tactics, which means today and literally over the next few days, they're going to see what they can get away with, and how much they can cow people into not opposing what they're doing and not speaking out about what's wrong with it.”
“More than ever,” she continued, “this is not a time to pretend this isn’t happening. You’re going to want to have a good answer when you get asked what you did for your country when your country started to take a turn this radical."
This is where one might say it’s good to have Maddow back on weeknights to make sense of this 100-day plunge, except none of us want to be here – not even Maddow, probably.
But, “we are here. It's happening in our lifetimes. Well, we are citizens responsible for the fate of our country,” she said Monday, concluding her monologue with, “All hands on deck.”
Left unsaid was, "And good luck to us all."
"The Rachel Maddow Show" airs at 6 p.m. weeknights on MSNBC.
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