Rachel Maddow broke down in extensive detail Monday night why she believes “the bill has come due” on President Trump’s appointment of Pete Hegseth as his Secretary of Defense and his brief entrusting of Tesla CEO Elon Musk as a senior advisor in the White House.
“You live long enough, you realize that there are some days, there are some times, when the bill comes due,” Maddow said atop her Monday MS NOW segment. “You’ve done things in the past, perhaps ill-advised things you kind of knew at the time weren’t a good idea. Sometimes you are able to skate by for a little while, you get away with that stuff for a little while, but eventually you learn in this life that the bill comes due.”
To prove her point, Maddow pointed first to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency stint last year, which resulted in widely criticized budget and funding cuts. Among the programs axed by Musk and Trump was a project to build firebreaks in the Superior National Forest of Minnesota.
“Elon Musk and Donald Trump did not care enough or were not bright enough to understand what a project like that might conceivably be for, and so they ixnay-ed it,” Maddow explained. “The bill has come due. The Superior National Forest in Minnesota, as we speak, is on fire. Thank you, DOGE. Thank you, Donald Trump.”
Maddow later turned her attention to Trump’s decision to appoint Hegseth, a “troubled and totally inexperienced Fox News host,” as his Secretary of Defense.
“The Pentagon under Pete Hegseth, what are they working on? They say they’re going to shoot up troops with testosterone,” she reported. “That’s their plan to get around to all the winning, right? Because sure, that’s really the problem here. I mean, the bill is starting to come due for this stuff.”
“You’ve got Trump as commander-in-chief and then Hegseth at the Pentagon. These are the guys playing with the U.S. military like it’s a cross between ‘G.I. Joe’ and beer pong,” Maddow continued. “So, yes, we are in another inexplicable and apparently inextricable Middle East war that is wildly unpopular, that appears to have no end, that appears to have no point and that we clearly are losing. The bill comes due for bad decisions.”
“Trump and Republicans know that voters are just champing at the bit to throw them out,” the host added. “So what do we get from Trump today? We get Trump demanding that the U.S. Supreme Court allow him to monkey wrench the elections this fall. Trump today asked the United States Supreme Court to cast aside lower court rulings to let him go ahead with his bizarre executive order that would, among other things, allow him to use the U.S. Post Office, the U.S. Postal Service, to block people from mailing in their ballots.”
“Of course he is asking for that power,” Maddow concluded. “If people were able to vote like they normally do, he and the Republicans know what would happen.”
