Rachel Maddow on Surviving Trump 2.0

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The first 100 days, bills are passed, executive orders are signed, and presidencies are defined. And for Donald Trump's first 100 days, Rachel Maddow is on MSNBC five nights a week.
Now is the time, so we're going to do it. Providing her unique insight and analysis during this critical time.
How do we strategically align ourselves to this moment of information, this moment of transition in our country? The Rachel Maddow Show, weeknights at 9 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC.
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Download today. Welcome to Pod Save America.

I'm Jon Favreau. So, this is our first Sunday show of the new year.
We are going to be doing one of these every other Sunday for 2025. Exciting.
On each of these shows, we're going to talk to someone really smart in politics or media. And the idea is to sort of step away from the churn and the breaking news and to have interesting, thoughtful conversations about the big ideas and forces and trends shaping the news, shaping politics that we are all scrambling to digest every day, as I'm sure all of you are as well.
I am thrilled that our first Sunday guest is Rachel Maddow, host of The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. Rachel is back to anchoring the 9 p.m.
hour every weeknight for the first 100 days of the second Trump administration. They somehow got her to come back and do five nights a week.
Poor Rachel, but lucky us. On day three of the administration on Wednesday, I sat down with Rachel here at the Sirius XM studios in New York across from MSNBC's offices at 30 Rock.
No doubt by the time you're hearing this on Sunday, a ton of crazy new shit will have happened. But already, by Wednesday, things were feeling not great.
Pretty surreal. Here's a sampling of some of what's happened this week.
Do you intend to continue selling products that benefit yourself personally while you're president? Well, I don't know if it benefited. I don't know where it is.
I don't know much about it other than I launched it. I heard it was very successful.
I haven't checked it. Where is it today? You made a lot of money, sir.
How much? Several billion dollars, it seems like, in the last several days. Several billion? That's peanuts for these guys.
by pardoning not some of the rioters, but all of them,

political violence in this country just became mainstream.

It is now a fact of life in America.

This was a political hoax.

And you know what?

Those people, and I'm not saying in every single case, but there was a lot of patriotism with those people. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in democratic, republican, and independent families.
Some who fear for their lives. She should never be allowed to preach the message of Jesus in her life because she's not even talking about Jesus.
This is why no one's going to these. Yeah, this is why these denominations are dying.
Well, that's just, you know, Elon's thing to grab your heart with one hand and then shoot it out in the sky. You're just you're asking for it.
You're asking for it. Maybe he's just not very well coordinated.
I don't know. FEMA is going to be a whole big discussion very shortly because I'd rather see the states take care of their own problems.
A lot of my friends on the other side of the aisle are sitting by idly while Donald Trump proposes by executive order to destroy Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, which establishes that everybody born in the united states is a citizen

of the united states that's the difference in leadership style so masculinity is back how many genders are there tommy how many genders are there tommy the honest answer desi i don't care i'm a libertarian i don't care what do you want to be you can be what you want to be i won youth by 36 points now maybe that's because i went on t. I don't know.
These people are disgusting. They say that they're for women.
Turns out MAGA and conservatives are the feminists now. We are the ones like Donald Trump who are protecting women and children.
They're not doing it. I wanted to talk to Rachel for this first Sunday show, not just because, like us, it's her job to cover this day in and day out, but because, as listeners of this show know really well, she thinks about things and talks about things and crystallizes things in a way that no one else does.
Here's my conversation with Rachel Maddow. Rachel Maddow, welcome back to Pod Save America.
Hi, John. Nice to see you.
You too. I used to work here.
Yeah, we're in SiriusXM in New York City. I forgot about that.
And I was thinking, oh, I remember where this address is ringing a bell. And then I got out of the elevator and I thought, ah, this is where I did my gay love song call-in late night show.
Really?

As a fill-in host, I wasn't the main host.

Did you get a lot of callers?

Oh, yeah.

Yes.

All men.

That was weird. But yeah, that was a little known sort of grace note on my resume.

Most requested songs?

It was a lot of disco.

A lot of disco. See, I thought it was love songs, and so the Collins were going to be like heart to heart, like, oh, he left me and I want to win him back and everything.
But it was really like love songs. Like, I remember we met at the club and play that, you know, Diana Ross.
That works, too. Thank you so much for taking the time during an especially busy week for you now that they have pulled you back in into doing five nights a week for Trump's first hundred days.
I'm happy to do it. This is our inaugural Sunday show.
The idea is to have a weekly conversation with smart people in politics and media. Let's us sort of step back from the breaking news coverage, focus on the big picture.
Love to start with how you are processing the return of Donald Trump. I think we've all learned in the Trump era that it's possible to be shocked even when we aren't surprised.
There's a difference between fully expecting what will happen and then experiencing it as it happens. So what's been going through your mind this week? I feel like, oh yeah, that's what these muscles are for.

This is what we train for. You know, being back five days a week is its own experience for me.
It's been a few years since I've been doing Monday to Friday shows. And so that's got its own vibe and its own feeling.
But there is a cadence to the Trump chaos news cycle, or a lack of cadence, rather. The 24 hours a day, turning on a dime, internal incoherence, shocking for shock value, shocking for incompetence.
All of that stuff is just kind of flooding back in terms of how to do it. And you can despair over that because the first Trump term was, broadly speaking, bad times for America.
But I also think, well, you know what? We know a little bit about how to cover this. We know a little bit about what to expect.
We know a little bit about what he's like. And so it is our responsibility and our privilege to cover it as best as we possibly can.

And I know how to do that.

And I'm here.

I'm ready to go. Put me in, coach.
I'm ready to play. I feel the same way from the perspective of me covering politics and talking about it on Pod Save America.
Has there been a moment where it's hit you personally, where you're just watching it? You're like, oh, yeah, this is going to we're going to be doing this for four more years now. You know what it was? It was the in the flurry of first couple of days of actions.
There was the stuff about water in California that in Trump started sort of elaborating on it. There was an executive action about it.
But then he also started talking about it, about how we need to turn the valve. Yeah, there is a valve in Northern California that if you just turn it, we will get water in Los Angeles.
He thinks, I think, that North is also up and that up there's a water tower, like it's a New York building. And if you just turn the valve, then down gets the water.
And in the campaign, you might remember him riffing a lot on the difficulty of washing his hair. And how many times he has to flush the toilet to make what's in the toilet go down the toilet.
And I was realizing like, oh, we're going to get the plumbing stuff again. Yeah.
Playing the hits. It's one thing to think about the truly radical designs he has on for the country and for the democracy.
But it's another thing just to remember like the personal pathology that's going to be played out out loud ad nauseum and just repeated until other Republicans start articulating it as a value too. And that the reminder of the nonsense of it, the human nonsense of it was is a visceral thing for me.
Also, I also think like, wow, how could history have been different had he been able to realize his dream of being a plumber? Maybe we as a country wouldn't be going through all this stuff. Yeah, he was a plumber, a hug from dad, something like that.
We're recording this on Wednesday, so who knows what else will happen over the next few days. I haven't been able to get past him pardoning supporters of his who were convicted of violent crime on January 6th because of the message it sends to other Trump supporters who also want to commit political violence because only around 20% of Americans support the pardons.
And because somehow it's not the only thing or even the main thing that everyone's talking about. Why do you think that is? And what has your thoughts been on the pardons? Well, the flood the zone idea is real.
And we not only lived through that before, but they articulate that strategically. People like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and others, they don't want us to be able to focus on any one bad nominee because there are so many bad nominees.
They don't want us to be able to focus on any one outrageous action or policy because there are so many outrageous actions and policies. And that's a strategy.
And so that's part of the reason why we find it hard to focus. I do think that the pardons thing is going to be something that they regret.
And I think it's going to be something for which they have to pay a political cost because we've already seen it just in the immediate aftermath of the pardons that just about every Republican elected official who is asked about it has to say, I haven't seen the details. I haven't, Tommy Tuberville, I haven't watched the videos of the police being assaulted.
So therefore I can't comment on it. But of course, anybody who assaults police officers shouldn't be pardoned.
Seeing Republican elected officials, including the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, including all of these Republican senators who now have to, for example, vote on Trump nominees, seeing them unable to articulate a justification for it, seeing them uncomfortable wanting not to be asked about it, knowing that it is indefensible, and nevertheless being asked to defend it, that is constructive. Because Trump may have his own, I don't know what's going on inside his head, and I don't know exactly what he wants in the world, and I don't like to think about his brain.
Yeah. now exists in a democracy that has other elements of authority and governance.
And to the extent that Republicans are personally repulsed by what he's doing and asked about it constantly and can't defend it and essentially are being forced into a corner where they either have to hide from questions or say they disagree with him, that's probably good in terms of slowing down the worst things he wants to do. And I think it's a good sign that so many Republicans had a terrible, terrible first full day of Trump's second term.

It's wild because I thought your monologue about this and about sort of the use of shame as a tool for elected Republicans who have to defend this was wonderful.

From time to time, we enter into a period where people in public office very frequently do lots of terrible things. What turns them around? What stops them from doing terrible things? What makes them correct course and start doing the right thing instead? One thing that sometimes works is shame and embarrassment.
Being confronted with the wrongness of what they are doing, feeling shame or embarrassment, or at least the possibility of public rebuke and the awkwardness of being unable to explain their actions in a way that satisfies anyone. Sometimes you can't turn public officials around, but sometimes you can.
Sometimes that sort of thing can cause public officials who are otherwise behaving in ways that are weak and wrong to find their spine and to change their minds. I noticed right before we started recording today, Mike Johnson got up and was asked about the pardons.
And he said, well, look, it's, you know, Donald Trump. He has the authority.
And all along, the case has been that people who protest peacefully shouldn't be punished. And then announce that they're going to investigate Joe Biden's pardons.
Yeah. Without even commenting on the people who are convicted of violence.
And then it's incumbent upon anybody who next encounters him to ask him the follow-up questions. Right.
So the peaceful protest is not something that has been criminalized in this country, in this environment around January 6th. January 6th was not a peaceful protest.
Among the people who Donald Trump deliberately pardoned, even though he had the option not to, were people who explicitly pled guilty not to peacefully protesting, but rather to attacking police officers and trying to kill them with baseball bats and two by fours. So, I mean, it just means that this should follow Mike Johnson around like a smell.
Yeah. Apparently, according to reporting from Axios and Notice, J.D.
Vance saying on the Sunday shows before Donald Trump was inaugurated that obviously we shouldn't pardon people who committed violence. It was the response to that that finally led Trump to say, apparently, according to a source, according to Axios, fuck it, let's let them all out.
Because the Trump base people were mad that J.D. Vance thought that they were going to go one by one.
So that was basically a trial balloon. Yeah.
And think about what that means for the dynamic between Trump and J.D. Vance.
In the same way with the Matt Gaetz nomination, right? I mean, they nominated somebody for attorney general, reportedly at the behest of Boris, who they later said were shaking people down for bribes in order for him to suggest them to the president as potential appointees. I don't know.
Maybe somebody should follow up on that. But reportedly, at the behest of Boris Epstein, they named a guy who was actively under investigation for statutory rape, drug use, and prostitution to be Attorney General of the United States.
And you can question Donald Trump's judgment in doing that. Sure, that's a discussion.
What's in Trump's head? What are his aims? Fine. I'm politically more interested in the fact that they then had the vice president-elect, J.D.
Vance, personally grab Matt Gaetz by the arm and walk him into the offices of all of these Republican senators who they then leveraged into endorsing Matt Gaetz for attorney general and saying, yes, they would vote for him. Give Matt a chance to have humiliated J.D.
Vance that way and cost those Republican senators forever. Those Republican senators will have it on their record that they thought Matt Gaetz was a great choice for attorney general before they then pulled him and wasted all that political capital.
That's just political malpractice within the Republican Party and between the president and vice president. And if that's how they're going to act, they should pay for it politically, and they should be asked about that stuff constantly.
J.D. Vance has been now twice publicly humiliated on core issues that he purports to be principled on.
Law and order with Matt Gaetz and the pardons thing where he said anybody who attacked a police officer or was violent shouldn't be pardoned. And then they were.
He should be asked about that every time he pops his head above ground. Sean Hannity did this event last night where he's interviewing Mike Johnson, but he's got all the other Republican House members sitting there.
And he basically talks to them like they're kindergartners. And he was like, now you all know you're not going to get everything you want out of these bills in the first year.
Could you imagine you doing a show where you're like interviewing Hakeem Jeffries and all the other House Democrats are there and you're just like wagging your finger at them and telling them, like, this is what you can expect. This is what you can expect.
And if you have a problem, take it up with daddy. I just think they've all decided to like become supplicants to Donald.
Like they don't, I don't know that, I hope that shame works, but I don't know if there's any of them left that have, that have shame. I think being a, um, a supplicant and doing this sort of dear leader.
Yes, sir. Whatever you say, sir.
Yes, I'm going to turn in my mother. Yes, two plus two equals five.
Yes, Matt Gaetz is a good attorney general choice. Yes, people who hit police officers with baseball bats should be sprung from prison.
Yes, the January 6th defense attorney should be the U.S. attorney, the acting U.S.
attorney in the District of D.C. All of these things are humiliations to every Republican who lines up with them.
And there's no such thing as humiliation for Donald Trump. He doesn't, I think, experience shame or embarrassment.
And again, I don't care to investigate why, but other Republicans do. And Donald Trump isn't going to live forever.
And the MAGA movement is maybe at its apex right now, but it won't be forever. All of these guys are going to have to run for something and they're all going to have to look at themselves in the mirror.
And they all have mothers, children, and they have to live with themselves. And I do think that I'm not counting on human decency, but I am counting on human embarrassment and shame and awkwardness, difficulty of answering questions about these things to be a moderating force in terms of what he can get from his own party.
And I think what he can get from his own party for the foreseeable future is going to be the only de facto limitingining two decades of industry-leading design expertise with cutting-edge AI technology to unlock your strongest creative potential. Design intelligence empowers anyone to build a beautiful, more personalized website tailored to their unique needs and craft a bespoke digital identity

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With Greenlight, you can set up chores. Transcription by CastingWords You're a student of history, especially as it relates to authoritarian movements in other countries and in our own.
If you're listening, you haven't already, you should go listen to Rachel's podcast, Ultra. Thank you.
Or read a prequel, both of which tell the story of a fascist movement in 1930s America.

Excellent.

Both excellent.

Thank you.

What are you seeing right now that feels like history is repeating itself? What feels new? And any lessons from all your research that could be useful to us right now? The thing that feels new in modern America, like in the past century, I'd say, in the United States, that is something that we do see in other countries. And this is something where even contemporary other countries, I think, offer a good lesson in terms of what this means, is the attempt to integrate loyal, lawless, paramilitary force with the state.
So we have these executive orders that direct people within the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies, and even like the SEC and the FTC, to investigate past actions by those agencies basically to see if there's anything that they can use as a pretext to bring prosecutions against government officials and former Biden administration officials. That's the use of the government to essentially terrorize the opposition and to terrorize the previous administration.
At the same time, you've also got flinging open the doors of the federal penitentiary and letting out over 200 people who were actively incarcerated for federal crimes, most of which involved violence on January 6th. And you've got pro-MAGA members of Congress like Lauren Boebert offering to give them guided tours of the Capitol now that they're out.
I highlighted on the show on Tuesday night, one of those guys who she was offering a tour of the Capitol flashing the white power sign behind her while she was saying it. Those sort of twin threats that we're going to use the government to destroy opposition, but we're also going to use lawless, loyal, paramilitary, immunized force to physically menace people and to create an environment in the civic space that makes regular people afraid to enter, regular people afraid to participate, that is something that we've seen in lots of other authoritarian countries.
We've seen that, for example, in Turkey in modern times. We've seen that a little bit in Hungary.
We've seen that in some other, we've seen it in the Philippines. Seeing that in the United States, those things happening at once feels new.
And it's worth remembering that paramilitary violence and militias are illegal in every state in the country. And even if they are going to be immunized federally, this may be a place for state law enforcement.
Yeah. I'm interested in how you're thinking about covering Trump 2.0.
I saw you say that you're trying to follow a watch what he does, not what he says mantra, which we're trying to do on this show as well. It's hard.
It's hard to know when he's being serious, when he's trolling. It's hard to know what matters, what matters less.
It's hard to know where to focus people's attention. How are you thinking about navigating all that? How are you thinking about it? I'm still working it out right now.
I'm trying to focus on the effects of his policies on people. Because I'm thinking just from a political perspective that we need to persuade people that maybe people who voted for Trump for the first time or people who didn't vote at all, that he's not what he promised is not going to happen.
Right. He's not going to make their lives better.
And I don't think that just means sort of kitchen table issues, though it does. I think it also means like making sure people know that now there are these violent criminals who are convicted of assaulting police officers out on the streets.
And that's what he's doing, too. So I think that I'm trying to do less of what was the salute that Elon Musk gave, right? Because it's like, OK, who wins that fight? Like, we can have that debate.
And then maybe everyone in the country can say, oh, yeah, no, it was a bad salute. And then what happens? We didn't vanquish Elon Musk.
He's still around. He still bought his speech now.
He can put a new label on it, but he's still doing all the things he does. He gets to do all the things he does.
So I'm trying to focus on what actually affects people that Donald Trump is doing and making sure that we're clear about it. And also making sure that, you know, I'm trying not to make, I feel like if you turn the dial, the outrage dial to 11 all the time then it sort of numbs people yeah and then when something's really serious they'll be like ah you said that before and you know it didn't come true how does that apply to like the greenland and panama stuff like how are you thinking about that i'm thinking that he seems pretty serious about panama i mean you put something in an inaugural address and he seems pretty serious about Greenland, too.
So I think you got to watch it. I don't subscribe to that's just a distraction and we can't talk about Greenland and Panama, especially because it potentially involves military force.
Anything that involves, again, this is affecting people's lives. People in the military here, people at home, our safety, our security, the alliances that we have, like that does affect people.
I would love to talk about it and cover it in a way that people can say, all right, this is how it matters to me. Yeah.
But I don't think you can just wave it away as a distraction. The thing that is interesting about it to me is that it is invented out of whole cloth for the purpose of this Trump term.
Yes. Like there was no pressure on the issue of Panama that anybody was agitating about.
There was no, I mean, yeah, like competition for the Arctic. Sure.
Like that's, you know, Russia has a lot of icebreakers. Okay.
Like, yeah, I've been covering that for 15 years. But this is something, this is a place they've decided to plant a flag and to put a lot of rhetorical energy, to put it in the inaugural, as you say.
And I feel like it's a good test case for us to figure out the doing versus saying line. One of the things that's interesting now that he's president is that Panama's response was to go to the UN and to lodge a complaint with the United Nations saying, hey, one of the rules here of us all in the United Nations is we're not supposed to threaten and menace other countries.
He's doing that. He said in his inaugural, we're taking it.
And when asked ahead of his inaugural, will you rule out military force? He said, no, I won't. Well, we actually aren't supposed to do that within the United Nations.
He probably knows that. That's probably part of this.
Similarly, with Greenland, there's a lot of, I think, very elementary level understanding about what it means to be a NATO, which is that if any NATO country gets menaced or attacked, all the other NATO countries are treaty bound to defend them and respond to it. Very little discussion, though, about what happens when one NATO country threatens another.
That's not a thing that we usually have, but we really can't do that within NATO. And threatening to take Greenland is threatening, and to do so potentially via military force is threatening to make war on our NATO ally Denmark.
So it seems to me that maybe the important thing here is, you know, why did Trump have one of his executive orders be taking us out of the World Health Organization? Yeah, that just sort of slipped by yesterday. Yeah, it's because he doesn't want us to be in any organizations of any kind that represent the post-World War II international legal order.
So take us out of the World Health Organization, thereby effectively probably collapsing the World Health Organization, really screw up NATO by threatening war on a NATO ally, potentially forcing the question of whether or not the United States is rightfully within NATO, within the United Nations, start menacing another. I mean, Panama does not have a military.
So us proposing military force against Panama isn't actually even threatening a war. It's just threatening an invasion.
But it does so in a way that is already calling the question as to whether or not we are a member and good standing of the United Nations. So if all of this is about blowing up not just our international standing, but blowing up the post-war international order and all of the international institutions that we bolster that make up the post-World War II international landscape, well then, you know, maybe these things have some logic.
And it also means that Trump's second term in office will be the greatest pinnacle of achievement of Vladimir Putin, who more than anything wants to destroy the post-war liberal order and have a supposedly multipolar world where big countries just take what they want. Yeah.
And that's, again, back to that's something that people should care about or because if the, you know, at a time when we have Putin and China and Iran and North Korea cooperating more, it is a dangerous world. For us to stand alone or are we going to stand with them? Yeah.
And it's a question that Americans should get the answer to from Donald Trump.

Right. Like this is a dangerous time.
What are you planning to do to keep us safe? Is it just to take Greenland and Panama? Is that going to keep us safe? Are we going to be an axis power now? Are we the bad guys this time? Because if it's China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, which is the axis that's like, for example, waging war in Ukraine right now, and that's the model that Trump likes in terms of how countries should not be constrained and how they behave, is he proposing that, you know, he talks about his love letters from Kim Jong-un. He says, I know I said that I would end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours within one day of me being elected, let alone sworn in.
But he actually said, but I need to talk to Putin in order to see how that's going to go. I mean, the way that he's easing up all of his big talk on China, everything that he had threatened against China, all of a sudden China's good.
China doesn't have to worry about anything. I mean, we'll see how it goes with Iran.
Apparently, the last warning that the Biden administration gave to Trump's incoming national security team before they walked out of the White House was, watch out, Iran wants to kill U.S. government officials and former U.S.
government officials, whereupon Trump immediately withdrew the Secret Service protection detail from John Bolton, which had been put in place because of the Iranian hitman who tried to kill him. The Axis powers, to the extent that there is one, are the people and the entities that Trump is acting most inexplicably positive toward.
And if we're going to join that kind of an axis, I don't think that's the way Americans think of ourselves. Pots of America is brought to you by Stamps.com.
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When you look back at how you covered the first four years of Trump, anything you would have done differently? I would have hydrated more systematically. that's good that's.
Rather than relying on individual little paper cups of water that I filled up and then drank while coming back from the water cooler. Yeah, I would have taken, honestly, I would have taken better care of myself.
I do think that that chaotic cadence of there being no normal day of, you know, the president's, what is it? He sleeps in until 10 or 11 in the morning and then watches some TV and rolls in around noon and then just pounds Diet Cokes until four in the morning and makes up policy based on whoever he last spoke to and posts it on his social media. I mean, that environment for people who are trying to, you know, cover the most important country in the world and its workings is trying.
It's physically trying. And so we, I think we need to, we need to do more tag team relay stuff.
We need to take better care of ourselves. We need to, as you say, sort of calibrate to understand what the biggest threats are and what's just gross.
Yeah. That is hard.
I mean, I struggle with, and I heard this from people during the course of the campaign, people I know, who are like, look, I don't love Trump, but we survived the first Trump term. And everyone, you know, everyone was hair on fire and saying it was going to be the end of democracy.
And here we are. We survived.
There were bad things that happened. You know, there were some bad things that happened.

These are people who are like, January 6th, awful.

He's a bad person.

But like, how bad can it be?

We survived the first time.

Wow.

I know.

And it's hard because I'm trying to like,

I'm trying to figure out how to calibrate.

Like, because I do think that this time,

this time it's actually much more serious.

And I'm like, I think the threat is much more dangerous. Yes.
Than was in the first in the first term and i'm trying it doesn't seem like most well clearly because they voted for him but it doesn't seem like most people in the country believe that yeah i i um i think there is a bias toward um thinking that the institutions that we have are durable and that they'll always exist and that no work had to happen to get them and they'll defend themselves. But just look at elections.
One of the things that Pam Bondi talked about after the Matt Gaetz attorney general nomination fell apart and Pam Bondi got in there, one of the things that is expected from the Justice Department under Bondi is that they're going to do some sort of examination of the 2020 election because of this predicate lie that the election was somehow stolen from him.

Now, I don't think that's just for Trump's ego. And I don't think that's because he's embarrassed that he hasn't ever provided any evidence that demonstrated that the 2020 election was stolen and he wants to show that evidence because he wants everybody to know he's not a liar.
I don't think that's what's motivating that. I think what's motivating that is an effort to try to make elections seem suspect, dangerous, wrong, and something that we shouldn't depend on in the future.
And it's really, really, really important that we have a 2026 midterm. It's also very important that we have a 2028 presidential election.
But I don't think in 2025 you assign your Justice Department to proclaim the falsity of a previous election because you're interested in holding normal elections going forward. You do that in order to discredit elections as a system in this country so that we don't have them anymore.
And maybe that sounds like hair on fire. Maybe that sounds like I'm being alarmist because we did, in fact, just have an election.
But I don't think we should assume that that that threat is resolved.

I really don't think it is.

And I think if you watch what he's doing, you can see the real danger there.

I mean, you can just tell yourself a story, put out a hypothetical about how this could work, right?

Which is we have the 2026 midterms and Democrats maybe take back the House.

We get to 2028.

Let's say Democrat wins in 2028

and Donald Trump's still in the White House

and he's leaving or he's supposed to leave.

And he says, no, J.D. Vance actually won.

This was fraud.

And now he controls the whole government.

And he has lessons that he's learned

from failing to stay in power forcefully in 2020. And when you say, oh, this could lead to the end of democracy, we'd be like, oh, you're exaggerating.
But like what I just laid out, couldn't we see that happening? Do we see Donald Trump? And now that he already did that once, do we see him just saying, oh, no, J.D. Vance lost.
He's a loser. That's fine.
I'll let the next Democrat in. Right.
And what else? Or maybe I'll stay. Or maybe I'll stay until we settle this yeah there was some fraud prop me up in the corner i'll be fine there was some fraud and i know the constitution says but you know what it's it's instability right now i'll leave eventually but i'm just going to stay for a little bit it could happen like that and and there's other i mean there's other factors at work here um i mean what are the other constituent parts of democracy that we need to be worried about? One of them is the fourth estate.
We need to worry about having an actually free press and not having state TV. And the press is under incredible pressure from without, but also demonstrating all of the wrong instincts, I think, broadly speaking, in terms of supplicating themselves to the new power in Washington.
And that is something that is not a fait accompli. It's not done.
It's an iterative process. I think the public should react to that.
I think that people should vote with their feet and people should support independent and free-spirited press that isn't cowed and that isn't afraid and that isn't intimidated. But that is something that we need to fight for too.
And public opinion and public behavior there really matters. It's not a done deal.
All of this stuff is, nothing's inevitable. All of this stuff is live.
I mean, one of the wild cards here is, and this is something that's been surprising to me, you know, I think one of the sort of caustic and maybe slightly mean-spirited observations that was also true about the first Trump term is that while every president after a term looks about 25 years older than he did at the start of his term, that didn't really happen to Trump. Like at the end of his four years, he kind of looked the same.
And maybe that happens when you only roll in in the middle of the afternoon. Maybe that says something about his work ethic as president.
But as he is now sworn in for his second term, he looks old and unfit and frail. And he is the oldest person ever to take the oath of office as president.
And we've obviously just been through a version of this with President Biden and his age issue being so determinative and important in terms of what happened in the last electoral cycle. But Trump doesn't look good.
And J.D. Vance is like 15 and ready to go.
But those dynamics, I think, are going to be a real wild card in terms of what happens between these two men, between what happens in terms of how together Trump is. You don't get to age infinitely and poorly without it ultimately affecting the way that you behave and speak.
His second inaugural address, for whatever you can say about its content, was also delivered in a low slurring mumble. Real workman like.
But also kind of. He hates giving speeches that like that are written for him because he likes he just wants to be a host and just do his thing.
His like his real speech was the speech he gave after that was like a 33 minute speech to the Republicans where he just got to do his all of his stuff. He got to do all of his stuff, but it was also very poorly done.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's... That's delicious.
He doesn't care. He's not an orator.
He's just trying to like, you know, he's just doing a show. He's a host.
He's never been like a... You know, he's not Churchill, right? No.
That's never happened. But he's also not himself.
He's also just not as good as he was even a couple of years ago, even at the start of the campaign. And to see him physically decline, if he's going to fall apart mentally and or physically in this term, that's really going to be a wild moment within this crazy and humiliated, magnified Trump-Republican supplicant party.

I'm sure they'll handle it well. Yeah.
You were talking about the press, and obviously, you know, Trump's suing everyone now. Yeah.
Poor Ann Seltzer and the Des Moines Register and ABC settled. Are you afraid? Do you worry? Oh, I'm not afraid.
But I do expect that there'll be, you know, that Elon Musk and all the other, you know, who paid Rudy's settlement with the Ruby Freeman and Cheymos? I'm assuming that all of the money people who are doing Trump's bidding in order to get their own interests catered to by the US government, I'm assuming that they will all fund a gazillion

defamation lawsuits that are designed to ruin not only individual critics in the press and individual reporters, but also whole news organizations. I am hopeful that news organizations writ large will understand this as a threat to them all, and they will band together and make sure that there aren't, for example, meaningful attacks on the Sullivan decision that defends the freedom of the press in terms of libel and defamation protections.
So I'm not afraid. I am eyes wide open and expecting that the courts will be used to try to destroy the press.
But again, I think the public should have something to say about that when it happens.

And I think that, again, there should be some unity within the news business to recognize

that we are all in this together.

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There's a larger challenge with media that I think about a lot, which is that most Americans aren't paying attention to anything we say and aren't following much news at all. Right.
Right. And, you know, Kamala Harris does really well among people who not don't just tune into MSNBC and Pod Save America, but just follow the news.
Right. In any venue.
Right, in any venue. Trump did well with people who don't follow the news or who follow some news on social media, right? And those people care a lot more about cost of living, safety of their communities than they do the threat Trump poses to democracy, right? They feel like that's sort of esoteric.
And it makes me wonder if we're all just like sitting here talking to ourselves

and to an audience that's already been convinced.

And I wonder how we break out of that

so that more Americans know what's going on.

What do you think?

I mean, it sounds like you're worried

that we are just talking to ourselves.

I am, I am.

And I just, I think that, I mean,

a lot of this is the way technology has changed

the way that we talk and communicate and interact.

And if this is all gonna be done on social media,

I think that's. I am.
And I just, I think that, I mean, a lot of this is the way technology has changed the way that we talk and communicate and interact. And if this is all going to be done on social media, I don't know.
I mean, it's one of the reasons I'm still hanging around on X because like, you know, I don't love it. Not a great platform.
It was never a great platform. Now it's a really bad platform.
Yeah. But, you know, there's part of me that I'm like, oh, we're all going to go to Blue Sky and then we're all just going to talk to each other in Blue Sky and then we're going to talk to each other in Pod Save America and we're going to talk to each other in MSNBC.
And it's like, we all got it. I mean, maybe we're like, are we coming up with a plan altogether? Like, how are we going to get outside that bubble? And I don't know.
I don't know. But I think that like that is maybe the central challenge that the Democratic Party faces from a political perspective, but also the media faces, traditional media faces from a perspective of getting people to trust the information that they're getting and making sure that the information gets out there.
Right. I also think that it's one thing to think about it from a sort of 30,000 foot like academic structural perspective.
It's another thing to think about it in terms of like what are you john going to do it to do every day yeah what are your what are your skills what are you going to expend calories on today right and you you do what you can i mean i'm very happy that msnbc is actually very highly performing on tiktok and on youtube um we're among the most um sort of volume- we're among the most widely viewed news organizations on both of those platforms. That's good.
During the transition, I did a series of segments that were for YouTube only, that weren't for TV, that were looking at the backgrounds of a number of the Trump nominees. Those got huge traffic on YouTube.
I was really happy for that. I am at Blue Sky and at maddo.msnbc.com at Blue Sky and encourage you to be there because maybe right now it feels like Blue Sky is people who already listened to Pod Save America talking to each other about what they saw on MSNBC.
But if it gets bigger, it won't all be that.

Well, community is important too.

Building community is also important.

And when you're on an iterative social media platform,

meaning it's a place where you don't just receive stuff,

you interact with people and that's an important part of what you're doing there.

I think it's important to not be in a place

where the interaction is rigged to favor MAGA outcomes. And that's explicitly happening at Twitter.
And I think there's a reason that everybody has jumped ship from threads, which was a Twitter knockoff that seemed like it might be better, but now it's essentially going through the same process that Twitter went through because Mark Zuckerberg's politics have also followed Elon Musk's down that particular hole. So if you're in an iterative environment where your interactions are going to be gamed in order to favor Donald Trump and Elon Musk's desired outcomes.
Like, don't do that.

Don't provide, don't spend your one precious life providing free content to those gentlemen.

Do you ever think about like going into the lion's den,

going on some of these other right-leaning shows,

some of these other right-leaning podcasts?

Not necessarily like go on Hannity

and have a debate kind of thing,

but like the Joe Rogans of the world,

that's shorthand for all of those because I don't want to get into another debate about Joe Rogan.

But do you ever think about that?

Like that's one way to start.

How do you think about persuading people?

I mean, what I do is talk about the news.

Yeah.

Right.

So I read all day and do reporting and fact checking research and then try to observe what's happening in the world, try to make some sense of it, try to present it truthfully, and explain what's important about it and why it matters and what might happen next. And I'm doing that instead of one day a week on MSNBC, I'm now doing that five days a week on MSNBC, and I'll do that for the whole first hundred days.
I'm trying to do as much of that as I can on social media as well. I'm trying to keep the pots that I've got boiling, boiling in terms of my next podcast and my next book.
And there's a scripted TV show and three different movies and a documentary that I'm doing interviews for right now and trying to do all that stuff. And I just feel like, you know what? I'm going to wake up every day.
I'm going to do my thing. I'm going to do my thing.
And I'm going to do it in a way that I'm trying to do all that stuff. And I just feel like, you know what? I'm going to wake up every day.

You're going to do my thing.

I'm going to do my thing. And I'm going to do it in a way that I'm proud of and that I hope is persuasive.

And I can't make people who don't want to hear it from me want to hear it from me.

But if you are persuaded to hear from me, I hope that I'm always speaking in a way that is fair and persuasive and you can take it to the bank in terms of its factual spine. You're a I know you're not a Democratic strategist.
You're a commentator, but you you are a close observer of Democratic politics. Excellent caveat.
That was very well done. Also, someone who is, you know, very studied in how pro-democracy movements and parties have succeeded in the past.
When you look at the Democratic Party right now, what do you think it has to change

going forward in order to defeat or at least marginalize the anti-democratic faction in this

country? And so it really isn't a question beyond just the Democratic Party, though that is,

we have two parties and that's the party right now that is the pro-democracy party. But what do you think needs to be different? Well, I mean, I think that there isn't much magic to it.
You have to be excellent opposition. The Republican Party under Trump has consolidated power in Washington, in all three branches of government, undoubtedly.
It's a very narrow margin in the House. It's not that huge a margin in the Senate, but they've got everything.
Therefore, when you're in opposition from that position, I think the obvious thing to do is to stick a wedge in every awkward division among the party that has consolidated power. I mean, there's hugely incompatible forces at work within the MAGA universe, literally even between the president and vice president.
And so let's start there. The tech billionaires and the base of the party.
Yeah. So, I mean, yes, on H-1B visas, right? Should we have immigration controlled by corporations for that purpose in the way that we have or not? Yeah, on that stuff, but on everything.
I mean, they can't even decide what they're going to do about SALT, about the state and local taxes deduction. They're at a trillion dollar impasse within their party on that issue alone.
Okay, let's start there. You do have the palpable self-loathing humiliation and escape hunting fear of every Republican senator who was asked about the pardons of those violent felons.
You do have, I think, legit law-and-order-minded Republicans in elected office, including some of whom had to run for their lives on January 6th. One of their number, an elected Republican in the House of Representatives, is offering guided tours of the scene of the crime of January 6th to some of the people who were there with baseball bats and two-by-fours beating police officers and threatening to kill members of Congress not that long ago.
So that's a divide there. You either think that's cool or you don't.

Yeah.

And that party, the ruling power in Washington, which is, that's it.

I mean, they are in complete control.

They own everything that happens.

Yeah, I think that's a big deal.

They've got those divides among themselves.

And just go with those hammer and tongs and make them figure out who they are.

And I think that the American people are not going to like it. But just, I don't think there's more magic to it than that right now.
Yeah. We've talked a lot about what we're doing.
What's one habit or tip that you'd give to anyone for maintaining their sanity through these next four years? And we started off you saying that maybe hydrate better, take better care of yourself. Is is there anything you do i mean you're working all the time so i can't imagine what do you what do you do i gotta figure that out i mean i'm playing with my kids now you know i'm you know i have to i have a four-year-old and a one-year-old so that's a full-time job it is a full-time job i'm i'm better now about when i'm with them to like i put the phone in another room yeah and i'm like i don don't need to, I can't do the news all weekend long, you know? So I'm trying to do that, but I don't know.
I think that's, I mean, again, not magic, but that's real. And you can tell day to day that has an effect on you.
Yeah. Yeah.
I believe in compartmentalization. Absolutely.
That's cool. Just do it.
I mean, and everybody has to calibrate it differently, right? If you're caring for an elderly parent and also caring for your kids and working full-time and trying to do something at school, you're already compartmentalizing in order to get to a meal once a day. I mean, so everybody has different levels and sort of different imperatives about how they need to do that.
But I think as a principal, that's good. There should be certain times of day when you are not doing things that you were otherwise doing in other parts of the day.
And so for me, that means starting looking at the news at a specific time and trying to stop looking at the news at a specific time. It means spending time outdoors.
I'm a person who likes being outdoors when it's cold. I ice fish is my winter recreation of choice.
And so far, it's been an excellent ice season. And so I try to just make myself do that.
Conveniently, there is no cell surface anywhere. There's also available ice fishing, at least where I live.
That's smart. Which is really good.
I mean, all that stuff matters to me. For me personally, it's important to read fiction.
It's important to exercise. It's important to spend time outdoors and with animals and family and loved ones.
So it's just... That's great.
That's good advice. Yeah.
Take vitamins, drink a lot of water, drink less. It's okay.
You'll be all right. Rachel Maddow, thank you so much for joining Pod Save America.
And we are so glad you're back. Me too.
Five nights a week. Me too.
I know you tried. You tried to escape.
You just couldn't do it. I will escape again on April 30th, which makes it very doable.
I will believe you. I believe you.
Thanks, Chuck. Take care.
Appreciate it. That's our show for today.
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As a parent, you can't always be in the car, but you can stay connected to their safety with Greenlight Infinity's driving reports. Monitor their driving habits, see if they're using their phone, speeding, and more.
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