On Thursday it came out that disgraced former President Donald Trump has been indicted again, this time by the federal government on still-unknown charges related to his handling of classified documents. Of course over on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow had to weigh in.
But Maddow wasn’t surprised by any of it. The indictment, she told Lawrence O’Donnell during Thursday’s episode of “The Last Word” was “an inevitability.”
“What is surprising is that we put that person in the white house,” she said.
Prior to that, Maddow spoke of the difficult place this news puts the United States in. “You don’t want to be that kind of country if you don’t have to, right? You don’t want to be a kind of country where one of the things that happens is your former leaders go to jail. It just introduces all of this other stuff to your politics that would be better not to have to deal with,” she told O’Donnell.
“The problem is not that we brought somebody forward in our American national politics who’s being treated this way. The problem is that we brought somebody forward in our national politics with these kind of criminal liabilities,” Maddow continued.
Maddow then noted the myriad legal problems Trump had even before he became president, like the lawsuit over his fraudulent Trump University, and the settlement he had to pay over a fraudulent charity. Then she got into how those business-related legal problems continued well into his presidency.
“His business has been criminally convicted as a fraud. His CFO just got out of Riker’s. His campaign served time in federal prison as a fraud. His campaign manager is awaiting trial,” she said.
“With a person with that kind of track record, are we surprised that the person at the middle of all that has been indicted? No. It is not surprising. What is surprising is that we put that person in the white house,” Maddow added.
There’s more, and you can watch the whole clip here.
