Rachel Maddow is wrong

I think Rachel Maddow has good intentions, but those intentions are wrapped up in her employer’s need for advertisers and attention.

MSNBC is interested in ginning up fears of a future in which there is no liberal democracy left, but in the process of ginning up those fears, it papers over the fact that liberal democracy has already been lost.

In a long, too long, segment this week, Maddow explained why Donald Trump’s attacks on the federal judiciary are a harbinger of “autocratic breakthrough,” and that if he decides to ignore courts orders against him, that “puts the US on the brink of abandoning democracy.”

Maddow listed rulings by federal judges in the past week alone that block the president’s criminal and unconstitutional plans to:

• cut scientific and medical funding,
• “buyout” federal workers,
• give Elon Musk access to classified and sensitive data,
• send “illegal” immigrants to Gautanamo Bay prison,
• release the names of FBI agents who investigated J6,
• end birthright citizenship,
• shut down the US Agency for International Development,
• freeze as much as $3 trillion in loans and grants.

She said the Trump administration’s choices are illegal and harmful, but “categorically, the most important thing here is their willingness to defy the courts, because that is the ultimate autocratic breakthrough.”

A willingness to defy the courts, Maddow said, is “a declaration that the rule of law does not apply to them, that it cannot constrain anything they want to do. That is a worse than any one outcome.”

“That is a forever-decision,” Maddow said, one that’s designed to prevent the American people from having any say about anything, ever. “That means nothing anyone else wants, and no court ruling, will ever again have any impact on what our government wants to do to us.”

We are “on the precipice,” she said, “looking over the edge.”

We’re not, though. We already over the edge, and we will never find our way back to liberal democracy if we do not accept that reality.

Maddow came close.

In the segment, she noted that federal judges have already said that the Trump administration is not complying with their orders. He is already doing what she said is “the ultimate autocratic breakthrough.”

Yet by the end of the segment, she pulled back, as if to suggest that though we are facing the abyss, we haven’t fallen into it quite yet, even though we have fallen into it. We have been falling since November.

Maddow is in good company. Lots of liberals, especially the affluent white liberals who tend to watch MSNBC, don’t want to believe the electorate handed the keys to the republic to a demented criminal president. Denial is natural, but it helps no one to encourage it.

That’s what I think is happening with segments like Maddow’s. We must accept that our beloved is dead in order to ask ourselves how to move forward, but Maddow encourages us to believe the dead are not.

Again, I think she means well, but meaning well is also in line with MSNBC’s interests. It’s better to keep viewers glued to their screens with highfalutin talk of liberal democracy being “on the precipice” than tell viewers the hard truth and risk giving them a reason to tune out.

This isn’t just about Maddow. Though hardly anyone watches her or the cable news network that employs her, together they have a commanding influence over the Democrats, and on how they think.

For instance, my senator, Chris Murphy, echoed what she said:

“Pay close attention to the attacks on our court system from Trump, [Vice President JD] Vance and [Elon] Musk,” he said on Twitter. “If they decide to deliberately and brazenly ignore a court order - because the courts command no army - then there is no democracy left. It's a place America has never been before, for good reason” (my italics).

Murphy said this as if unaware of reporting from the previous day in which the president appears to have already decided to “deliberately and brazenly ignore a court order.” Though several judges have blocked his federal funding freeze, Trump keeps withholding hundreds of billions of dollars from being dispersed to states according to law.

“Agencies continue to suspend funding, despite multiple court orders blocking the federal freeze,” Pro Publicareported Monday afternoon.

Maddow and Murphy give the impression that we’re on the edge, but we are over it. What do we do now? Trump “has moved with brazen haste to dismantle the federal government’s public integrity guardrails that he frequently tested during his first term but now seems intent on removing entirely,” the AP said. In a span of hours Monday, Trump:

• “forced out leaders of offices responsible for government ethics and whistleblower complaints.”
• “ordered a pause on enforcement of a decades-old law that prohibits American companies from bribing foreign governments to win business.”
• “All of that came on top of the earlier late-night purge of more than a dozen inspectors general who are tasked with rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse at government agencies.”

Why do liberals stop short of saying what needs saying? I can’t say I know for sure, but part of me thinks about how we think, which is to say, we think in abstractions. I mean, “autocratic breakthrough”?

I wish we’d stop with the highfalutin talk. When, for instance, Trump canceled $900 million in education research contracts that Congress approved, and that past presidents signed into law, he was not “testing the limits of the presidency.” He was not “challenging Congress’ authority.” He was not triggering a “constitutional crisis.”

He was robbing you.

Yes, you.

In broad daylight.

Whenever Trump says he can ignore the Congress and ignore the courts, he’s saying he can ignore the American people, too. There’s nothing you can say or do. He’s robbed you of your sovereignty in blatant violation of federal statute and the United States Constitution.

More than that, he’s literally taking your money.

Some Democrats get it, or at least resist the temptation to take their cues from MSNBC. I’m thinking of Illinois Congressman Sean Casten. In a thread about Musk’s “DOGE,” he said that “the way [constitutional law] is being violated exposes the true motives of the criminals.”

If we still had a liberal democracy, I might wince at that.

We don’t, though, so I don’t.

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