Rachel Maddow on Monday night took a moment to examine the state of the Republican Party — first through the lens of the presumed 2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, and second through the lens of other leaders within the party.
Using Arkansas governor and former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders as a case study, the MSNBC host of “The Rachel Maddow Show” determined that “they haven’t exactly been cleaning up on big, political-winning issues just in the current news cycle.”
Maddow took particular issue with Huckabee Sanders’ efforts to end school desegregation settlements and minimize the restrictions of child labor laws in her state.
“Don’t worry, Republicans are in control in Arkansas, and they’re on both those big problems,” Maddow said sarcastically.
Beginning her segment Monday night, Maddow gave a brief recap of how Trumpism has influenced the GOP, looking back to the party’s stuttered, underwhelming wins in the midterm elections up through the historic 15 rounds of voting it took for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to eventually claim the title.
“Just looking at how Republicans have done in elections in the era of Donald Trump, having Donald Trump as their standard bearer of their party has been bad for them. It has not been good for them as a party,” Maddow said. “And maybe it’s not fair to only judge them by what their standard bearer has been able to achieve politically. Of course, there are lots of states that are under Republican control. Aside from Donald Trump, how’s it going politically in terms of the national political image for the Republican Party when you look at what’s going on in states run by Republicans? Well, they haven’t exactly been cleaning up on big, political-winning issues just in the current news cycle.”
That’s when Maddow started digging into GOP leadership nationwide, pulling up a Wall Street Journal headline on Huckabee Sanders that read, “Arkansas Seeks to End School Desegregation Settlements.”
“Arkansas? School desegregation? Why does that ring a bell?” Maddow posed rhetorically. “Literally the state of the Little Rock Nine, the state where federal troops had to be used to desegregate the schools by force years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that said segregation was illegal, that state under Republican leadership from Sarah Huckabee Sanders, now that state is deciding that they’re going to get rid of desegregation orders for all their schools — because surely that’s never been a problem in Arkansas!”
Throwing in some more emphasis on the ways that Huckabee Sanders risks turning back the clock on the rights of her constituents, Maddow then called out the recent moves made against the state’s child labor laws in an effort to make it easier to employ children.
“Who among us in America has not laid awake at night worrying that the big problems, the big problems we need bold leadership to address in this country are the fact that schools can’t be segregated anymore and, ‘Ooh boy do I hate that there are child labor laws,’” Maddow mocked. “Don’t worry, Republicans are in control in Arkansas and they’re on both those big problems.”
Watch the full “Rachel Maddow Show” segment in the video above.
