Rachel Maddow didn’t waste a moment following President Donald Trump‘s joint address to Congress on Tuesday night. As footage of the president shaking hands and walking out of the Hall of the House of Representatives played, the “Rachel Maddow Show” host immediately gave a minutes-long monologue disputing several of Trump’s comments.
“We did not have prepared remarks from the president, which is unusual,” Maddow began. “White House [administrations] usually distribute prepared remarks, so we don’t know what was digression from those remarks and what was ad-lib.” The MSNBC anchor then turned her attention to refuting several of the president’s specific claims.
“For the record, the worst inflation in this country was in 1980. For the record, the economy that he was left by President Biden was not a catastrophe. It was literally the best economy in the world,” Maddow noted.
“For the record, Social Security is not paying benefits in large numbers to 300-year-old people or 250-year-old people or 200-year-old people or 150-year-old people. In fact, the idea [that] Social Security is a bastion of massive fraud and overpayment is completely false,” she continued, dismissing a popular claim made by both Trump and Elon Musk.
Regarding Trump’s remarks about the aid America has sent to Ukraine, Maddow explained, “The president flat-out lied about U.S. versus European spending to support what used to be our allies in Ukraine. The U.S. has committed about $125 billion to Ukraine’s defense. Europe has committed about $259 billion.”
“For the record, and this is disgusting, the president made a spectacle out of praising a young man who [has] thus far survived pediatric cancer, as if the president had something to do with that,” Maddow added, referencing Trump’s swearing in of a young boy named DJ as an honorary member of the Secret Service. “This was in the midst of him praising DOGE. DOGE cuts, among other things, have cut off funding for ongoing research into pediatric cancer.”
“For the record, I will note that Donald Trump did admit in his remarks today explicitly that Elon Musk is the Head of DOGE,” Maddow additionally pointed out. “While that comes as no surprise to anybody who’s been following the facts of this matter — that will end up in court because that is directly contrary to what the administration has overtly sworn to a federal judge about the leadership of DOGE.” Maddow then ended her rant by broadening her focus again to encompass both Trump and Musk.
“I should also note, and this doesn’t have to be for the record, I’ll just note it for our own experience tonight that at that point in the speech when the president talked about how we will no longer be ruled by unelected bureaucrats, Democrats in the chamber pointed and laughed at Elon Musk, unelected bureaucrat,” she observed. “That’s not even scratching the surface of the things that need to be fact-checked there. That’s literally what was off the top of my head.”
You can watch the full MSNBC segment in the video, above.
