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Rachel Maddow said we are in the middle of an authoritarian takeover.
"The was no learning," Maddow told Colbert about Donald Trump's competence.
Rachel Maddow is back hosting her show only on Mondays. However, she is still unflinching in her critique of the United States’ authoritarian spiral. Maddow returned to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert this week to do what she does best: torch authoritarianism with facts and a bit of biting humor.
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Appearing on Tuesday night, the out lesbian MSNBC anchor described President Donald Trump’s second term as an authoritarian catastrophe met by a defiant, grassroots response across the country. After anchoring nearly 70 consecutive weeknight broadcasts of The Rachel Maddow Show to mark the president’s first 100 days back in office, Maddow returned to her regular one-night-a-week schedule this week. Jen Psaki’s new show, The Briefing, now fills the Tuesday through Friday 9 p.m. hour.
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“We are in the midst of an attempted authoritarian overthrow of the U.S. government,” Maddow told Colbert. “And it is not by an insurgent movement… It’s the party in power.”
She rejected the idea that Trump returned with a steadier hand. “There was no learning,” Maddow said. “the personalization of government means you’re depending on the personal competence of the guy in charge — and that’s a limiting factor.” She pointed to Trump’s obsession with reopening Alcatraz, saying he governs as if “movies are real.”
The comment was not a throwaway. Trump’s vow on social media to restore the decaying island fortress as a “symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE” has been met with disbelief by experts and tourists alike. Alcatraz, which closed as a prison in 1963, is now a National Historic Landmark that draws more than a million visitors annually. The New York Times reports the site is riddled with structural decay — broken plumbing, crumbling walls, and reinforced ceilings to protect guests from falling debris. Local officials and park historians have dismissed Trump’s proposal as unserious and destructive. Trump, meanwhile, insisted he was inspired by Hollywood and claimed — inaccurately — that “nobody ever escaped.”
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Despite the surrealism, Maddow said the chaos is familiar. “We know how to fight fascists,” she said. “We’ve done it before. And we will beat this one too.”
But this time, Maddow said, the resistance is stronger. “There are protests every single day. Tuscaloosa. Boise. Lima, Ohio. All 50 states,” she said. “There isn’t a Republican member of Congress anywhere in the country who can show his or her face without getting yelled at by constituents.”
The Monday-only return marks a transition at MSNBC, as the network unveils new programming under its stand-alone identity. The Briefing with Jen Psaki debuted this week with a hard-hitting interview featuring Pete Buttigieg, who warned of the Trump administration’s degradation of federal safety systems, the politicization of the National Transportation Safety Board, and the chaotic leadership of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Psaki’s show now fills Maddow’s former weeknight slot.
Before her scaled-back return, Maddow used her 100-day coverage to hammer the administration’s dismal polling. On April 29, she told viewers, “Trump is underwater on essentially everything.” She highlighted polls that found 55 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance, with “furious” being the most common emotion respondents used to describe his presidency. Disapproval of his immigration policies, cuts to medical research, and attacks on birthright citizenship all outpaced support by wide margins.
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Maddow also revealed new reporting, including the deportation of a 23-year-old gay Venezuelan asylum-seeker to a Salvadoran mega-prison, without a hearing or deportation order. “Just on Trump’s say-so, you’re gone,” she told viewers. “Disappeared indefinitely.”
Maddow’s warning is rooted in her extensive research on the historical rise of fascism in the U.S., detailed in her bestselling book, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, which is out in paperback now. Speaking to The Advocate when the book was released in paperback, she explained how fascist movements in the 1930s operated with broad public support, forged unlikely alliances, and infiltrated government institutions — all dynamics she sees echoing in Trump’s second term. “You need people to be told that you can’t believe journalism. You can’t believe experts; you can’t believe science,” Maddow said. “There is no knowable truth. Just count on your leader to do it.”
Colbert asked if MSNBC had faced internal pressure to soften its Trump coverage. Maddow was firm: “Not at all,” she said, though she noted Trump once publicly called for MSNBC journalists to be executed. “He said we should all be put on trial for treason so they can execute us all,” she recalled. “Okay, big guy.”
Now, as MSNBC pushes forward with its revamped lineup — including The Weekend with Jonathan Capehart, Eugene Daniels, and Jackie Alemany, and new shows hosted by Symone Sanders Townsend, Alicia Menendez, and Psaki — Maddow’s weekly presence still carries weight. Her Monday broadcasts offer a grounding force amid the network’s growing slate of truth-first journalism.
“It depends on the American people loving liberty and loving democracy,” she said. “And knowing that what the founders gave us is something we’re not going to squander.”
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