MSNBC's Rachel Maddow opened her show on Monday with a blistering look at how President-elect Donald Trump has loaded his transition with chaos and grift.
"The last transition Donald Trump was part of was the worst presidential transition in the history of the country," said Maddow, alluding to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. "And given how disastrously he performed in that last transition, I mean, you have to just assume that this one inherently will be better. It has to be, right? But I think it is worth being blunt about the fact that it might be close. Because this, too, is a terrible, terrible presidential transition. And I think it ought to be more central to the way that we are talking about what's going on in politics and in our country and in government at this moment."
"This is the transition where the president-elect, throughout the presidential transition period, has continued to sell his junk," Maddow continued. "His self-branded watches and sneakers and Bibles. He put out a new Inauguration Day edition of his special branded Bible. He's still selling boots. Now he's selling Trump boots and his new crypto, whatever it is, and his commemorative coins and his commemorative guitars, he's selling this stuff while he is the president-elect. Nothing like that has ever happened before. Nothing that classless and tacky has ever happened to the U.S. presidency before."
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But his monetization of the inauguration is only the beginning, Maddow continued — there's also the substance of what he's saying as the incoming leader of the free world.
"This is the transition where he said at a press conference that it might have been Hezbollah that did the January 6th attack," said Maddow. "Really, Hezbollah did it. He also said at that same press conference that he's going to pardon the people who did the January 6th attack. Well, I'm sure Hezbollah will be delighted. This is the transition where he made unprovoked threats to seize territory from three other nations, three other nations with whom we are allied. And that is, of course, inexplicable to those countries. It's inexplicable to most Americans, but it's also equally very exciting to the dictators of Russia and China, who actually have been either seizing territory from other countries or planning to."
The problem, she added, is that "whether or not Trump actually follows through on these weird threats, those two dictators will have Trump's words during the transition to throw back at the United States of America, if the U.S. ever again bothers to object to big countries like theirs stomping on small countries and seizing their land."
Watch the video below or at the link here.