LOS ANGELES.–Bringing 51-year-old Rachel Maddow back to her daily hosting job at ultra-liberal MSNBC, the network has lost over 50% of its viewers, leaving the network in shamble in terms of its daily line-up and audience share. MSNB hopes that bringing Maddow back adds to the resistance against 78-year-old President Donald Trump. Maddow slammed Trump for issuing pardons to the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters, hoping that she’d get some political traction with the progressive base. But the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was already litigated by Democrats in the 2024 election with voters deciding clearly they didn’t care about the issue. To 60-year-old Vice President Kamala Harris, she beat the Jan. 6 issue into the ground to the point voters just said they had heard enough. Maddow thinks she can shame Republicans for Trump’s decision to issue blanket pardons to Jan. 6 rioters.
Maddow, like other progressive broadcasters, thinks she’s still pushing for Kamala to get elected, with the election long over. “The really don’t want to talk about it because there’s no easy way to talk about it,” Maddow told her MSNBC audience. At this point, her audience wants to haze Republicans anyway they can, since they won the presidency, Senate and the House. “What they’re going along with here is something they can’t justify,” Maddow said. Trump said the pardons were issued because of abusive prosecutions by the Justice Department, essentially throwing the book at Jan. 6 rioters. Department of Justice prosecutors, in some instances, added additional time to sentences by invoking the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, intended for financial crimes related to the Enron scandal. Sarbanes-Oxley should never have been used to add to sentences in the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters.
Maddow thinks the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection is still a motivating factor for Democrats when they deliberately used the event to blame Trump. Democrats and the press routinely call Jan. 6 rioters “Trump supporters,” implying that Trump was directly involved in what Democrats called an insurrection. But the “insurrection” was no coup d’etat but an angry White mob punishing Congress for doing nothing the summer before when Black Lives Matter looted, committed arson and defaced federal buildings around the country. Democrats in Congress watched the country taken over by angry Black mobs, blaming Trump for the May 25, 2020 death of George Floyd, blaming it on Trump’s White supremacy. All Maddow can say now is how Trump and Republicans disgraced themselves by pardoning Jan. 6 rioters when they should rot in prison of other criminals.
Maddow has a real edge when it comes to Trump because he’s opposed to a LGBTQ-plus agenda, cancelling many of the pro-LGBTQ-plus agenda pushed by the Biden administration. “The stomach-churning self-loathing that all those senators felt today, the same and embarrassment that they felt today as they were asked and asked and asked again about the president of their party spring 211 people how were actively incarcerated in federal prison, mostly for violence against police officers, while they were taking part in a violent attack on the U.S. Congress from which some of these same senators had to run for their lives,” Maddow said. Maddow represents the radical LGBTQ-plus agenda, holding nothing but contempt for Trump because of his stands against the transgender community. Maddow can’t stomach the fact that voters moved on from Jan. 6.
Maddow has an ax to grind with Trump for issuing orders to restrict transgender influence in the Pentagon. Taking it personally, Maddow has whipped up what’s left of her audience trying to resist Trump’s restrictions on LGBTQ-plus issues inside and outside the military. Maddow can’t let go of Jan. 6, thinking that if will infuriate enough voters to turn against Trump in the 2026 Midterm elections, the only thing left for Democrats. Maddow tried everything on her audience to promote former Vice President Kamala Harris, including the Democrat mantra that Trump would destroy U.S. democracy. “Shame and embarrassment and the difficulty of answering unanswerable questions about indefensible things, those brakes that can be tapped in our political system,” Maddow said, making all the same arguments made during the 2024 campaign.
Trump and many conservatives are fed up with pandering to the LGBQ-plus lobby, representing a tiny fraction of the population but wanting influence over all U.S. government policy. Maddow takes offense to Trump shifting attention away from the LGBTQ-plus community, something Kamala talked a lot about in the 2024 campaign. Maddow knows that Trump had nothing to do with Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riots but she routinely blames Trump for the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. Democrats thought they had a winning issue in 2024 campaign but found out voters didn’t really care about Jan. 6. When Special Counsel Jack Smith didn’t say in his indictment on election interference that Trump planned, organized and participated in Jan. 6 Captiol riots, that should have been enough for Maddow. But Maddow like other Democrat hacks like to blame Trump for the whole thing.
About the Author
John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.
