Rachel Maddow didn’t hold back in her deconstruction and takedown of President Donald Trump’s appointed team of officials Monday night, calling his administration “a big team of losers.”
“See if you can spot a pattern here,” the MSNBC host began, before going on to list for several minutes straight multiple newly appointed members of Trump’s presidential cabinet, all of whom happen to be public officials who lost their most recent political campaigns. Maddow began with new chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, a politician who dropped out of a Pennsylvania Senate race in 2021 after a judge awarded his estranged wife sole custody of their children and determined that Parnell had been abusive to her.
Maddow then went on to list Mehmet Oz, Kelly Loeffler, David Perdue, Doug Collins, Herschel Walker, Kari Lake, Brandon Williams, Linda McMahon and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., among others, all figures who have recently lost major political campaigns and yet been appointed to new positions within the Trump administration.
“The last thing Tulsi Gabbard ever did in politics was disastrously lose a presidential run in 2020. Trump has named her Director of National Intelligence,” Maddow noted, “which is like a-horse-walks-into-a-bar joke without a horse or a bar.”
You can watch the full “Rachel Maddow Show” segment below.
“I could go on, but are you noticing a theme?” Maddow rhetorically asked. “People keep saying no one elected Elon Musk, and that is definitely true. But at least in his case, he didn’t try. He didn’t run for something and have the people resoundingly say, ‘No, we don’t want you. We’d prefer someone else and not you.’”
Maddow didn’t just take aim at the losing records of so many Trump appointees, but also the administration’s seeming disregard for the public’s opinions about said officials. “They almost seem to be going out of their way to find people for whom the last thing they did in politics, the last thing they did in public life, was ask the public to approve of them and the public said, ‘No. We don’t want you,’” Maddow observed. “It’s almost as if they’re going out of their way to say, ‘Oh, the people are saying no, [but] we say that doesn’t matter because you may not want us, you may not want this, but this is who and what you’re getting.’”
The MSNBC host pointed out that Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday is celebrated this week, famously built his “brave, capable government out of a team of rivals.” Trump has taken the opposite approach. “It’s like a big team of losers,” Maddow said. “People who the American people explicitly do not want. People who just had the opportunity to be voted into office by the American people and the American people said definitively, ‘No, we don’t want you.’ And so Trump is saying, ‘Well, that’s who you’re getting, and you’ll like it.’”
Watch the “Rachel Maddow Show” segment in the video above.
