Rachel Maddow skewered President-elect Donald Trump’s still-developing list of cabinet appointments Monday, first breaking down the litany of controversies and federal investigations surrounding his first term’s picks — before deciding the new crop could also continue his reputation as “one of the worst presidents in the history of the United States.”
The “Rachel Maddow Show” segment on MSNBC served as a Veteran’s Day explainer to the Trump 2.0 administration leaders, including incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Walz and Trump’s so-called “border czar,” Tom Homan.
“The first Donald Trump presidential term had so many cabinet officials forced out of office in disgrace and referred to the Justice Department to face criminal charges, it’s actually hard to remember them all,” Maddow said at the top of the segment.
“And of course, just one of the scandals of the Trump administration is that despite an unprecedented number of cabinet officials being referred to the Justice Department for potential prosecution, the supposedly independent Department of Justice under Donald Trump decided to actually bring criminal charges against precisely none of them — which is yet another of the Trump scandals from his first time, but still.”
Watch the full segment below:
After going through a murderer’s row of half a dozen cabinet officials — including Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao and Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta — Maddow determined that Trump’s first four years in office “were just bad.”
“It was a bad presidential term. It is not normal to have a half dozen members of the cabinet referred for potential criminal prosecution for crimes they allegedly committed while they were serving in the cabinet. It’s not normal,” she said. “I mean, that’s the kind of thing that gets you listed repeatedly as the worst, or among the worst, presidents in U.S. history when presidential historians and scholars are surveyed about these things, right? This is why Trump is considered by experts in the field to be if not the worst, then certainly one of the worst presidents in the history of the United States — I’m sorry, Warren G. Harding. It just wasn’t good!”
And if Trump’s newly appointed Secretary of Veteran Affairs looks familiar, it’s because he previously served in the first Trump administration before his mishandling of a sexual assault report derailed his political career.
“The guy who’s in charge with staffing up the defense department leadership for the military, making sure we’ve got all the best, most ethical people there, it’s the guy who left office last time under Trump while his ‘possible criminal conduct’ was under investigation by federal prosecutors,” Maddow said, incredulously. “Good times.”
For the other three new appointees in Maddow’s crosshairs, the MSNBC host explained that Republican senator of Florida Rubio “once memorably cast dispersions on the size of Donald Trump’s genitals while in a presidential debate,” Florida Congressman Walz has argued that Trump is not responsible for the Jan. 6 insurrection on the Capitol and Homan is making the media rounds promising “the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”
Watch her full “Rachel Maddow Show” segment in the video above.
