'She can't spell AI!' MSNBC's Rachel Maddow speechless at Trump official's 'terrible' flub
April 11, 2025
A.1. Steak Sauce is having a moment after Education Secretary Linda McMahon mixed the popular steak-topping condiment with artificial intelligence – and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was all over the gaffe she called “delicious.”
Maddow in the opening minutes of her Friday show paused to highlight the latest blunder to emerge from President Donald Trump’s administration after she first highlighted the infamous “Signalgate” debacle, and the president’s own misdialed call this week to his estranged former National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster, who he proceeded to curse out.
“There is a school system that is going to start making sure that first graders or even pre-Ks have A.1. teaching every year starting that far down in the grades – and that’s just a wonderful thing,” McMahon said at an education conference earlier this week.
“What are talking about here?” Maddow said as she appeared stunned by the mix-up she replayed a second time for viewers. She then skewered the education secretary in a spicy take-down of the former wrestling CEO.
“Now I myself, I love me some A.1. It’s tangy. It really brings out the best in a steak or whatever. But A.1. – I mean it's not like an education term of art like K-12 or something, right? Or pre-K, you know what I mean?” Maddow said as she jockeyed between laughter and open shock. “Like A.1. is a whole different thing.”
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She went on to play a second clip of McMahon later making the same mix-up, which prompted the MSNBC host to literally spell out the difference in the terms.
“This is an anagram that you spell out,” Maddow said Friday. “It’s not like NASA where you don't say N-A-S-A, you just like pronounce the anagram as if it's a word. This is the whole anagram spelled out. It’s artificial intelligence ‘A’ and then ‘I’ – ‘AI’ – and she cannot spell that!"
Maddow added: “So now we've got tangy salty A.1. in all the schools. And that will somehow be facilitated by abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, which, you know, it'll be delicious.”
By the end of Maddow’s opening monologue, the exasperated host concluded: “Everything they're doing is so terrible.”
Watch the video below via MSNBC or at the link here.