I was one of those people who believed Rachel Maddow. I sat glued to her show every night. I even patrolled Trump’s entire Twitter feed to find the exact moment when he was “turned” by the Russians.
I saw it all play out in my head. The hapless Trump in Moscow, the beauty pageant, the room with a hidden camera, the prostitutes, the embarrassing sex acts all designed as “kompromat,” a word middle-aged white women like me suddenly threw around like we were Valerie Plame.
Rachel Maddow sounded so sincere, so intelligent, so concerned for the welfare of the country. She was an integral part of the Obama coalition in the early days. We couldn’t separate them. They stood for the America we helped build and the one Trump threatened.
I read every book on Putin I could find. I had long conversations with my friends about the danger of having a Russian asset in the White House. I believed Adam Schiff, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and, yes, Rachel Maddow.
Yet, no one stopped to think what all of that whipped-up hysteria, that fear, that rage would do to people who might think voting isn’t enough to save the country. More would have to be done. What if it all landed in the lizard brain of a Gen-X Travis Bickle, who was prepared to lay down his life to save Ukraine?
The media will attempt to paint alleged Trump assassin Ryan Routh as a madman. They might even say he was a Trump supporter or his ideology was unknown. But that isn’t exactly true.
Routh’s motive might be hiding in plain sight. Take out Trump because Trump might stop the United States from the inevitable hot war with Russia. Routh, like all Democrats and establishment Republicans, wants war with Russia. They want to take out Putin like they want to take out Trump. They see them as one and the same.
Why isn’t this the moment we put it all together, all of the last ten years? The framing of the Trump campaign by the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton that he was in the pocket of Putin. The obsession with Trump and Russia by Adam Schiff, not to mention others, who sold that lie to Americans every day Trump was in office.
But no one sold it harder than Rachel Maddow. She was the one with all of the secrets, the one we couldn’t stop watching. She was on the trail to out Trump and bring him down. We believed that. She seemed to believe it too.
So what I’m wondering in the wake of the second Trump assassination attempt is what Rachel Maddow is thinking right about now. Did she think for one second that it might have been dangerous to wage a witch hunt campaign that Trump was a Russian asset?
A scroll of Rachel Maddow videos on YouTube tells the tale. There is no other voice in cable news more hysteria-inducing than hers. Because her sincerity is hard to dismiss, she never sounds like she’s lying or that she would be doing all of this just for money.
And yet, how can we not see the actions of Ryan Routh somehow inspired by her insistence on Trump’s involvement with Putin’s Russia or that he is a dangerous dictator who must be stopped by any means necessary?
This should be the moment of reckoning for the Russiagate conspiracy theorists if nothing else. A man who drank the Kool-Aid allegedly got himself a long gun and waited 12 hours for Trump so he could do what all of them seem to be encouraging people like him to do - take matters into their own hands.
But what does Rachel Maddow think? Did she have any moment of self-reflection where she realized she might have gone too far? Here is a video from an old Megyn Kelly episode:
Ryan Routh wasn’t some unhinged lunatic living in a cabin in the mountains. He looks like your average Democrat on X. These are do-gooders at heart, people who sincerely believe they and they alone can save the world.
You’d think, given these horrific events, that the Democrats and the press would calm things down. But they haven’t. They have an election to win. The last thing they want to do is humanize Trump now when Harris is ahead in the polls.
They have nothing else to sell except that Trump’s words are dangerous, and Trump’s supporters are dangerous, except the evidence points in exactly the opposite direction.
Here is Rep. Andrew Clyde:
Trump might have said, “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats,” to quote the popular TikTok meme, and maybe it was irresponsible. But it’s equally irresponsible to lie that the now-debunked bomb threats in Springfield were Trump’s fault because it’s not true and continues the campaign to dehumanize Trump supporters.
But it’s too juicy of an opportunity for Democrats. They will have to run with the lie that the bomb threats were real and it’s all Trump’s fault. Here is Harris at the National Association for Black Journalists:
Now Harris will add the bomb threat lie to the “bloodbath” lie to the “dictator from day one” lie to the “fine people on both sides” lie to the “losers and suckers” lie. Not to mention saying Trump ordered an “armed mob to attack the Capitol.” That wasn’t true, just as it wasn’t true when she said January 6th was on par with 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, events where more than 6,000 people were killed.
Harris was allowed to lie freely during the debate, but the moderators said nothing.
Here is Byron Donalds calling them out:
But no lie has been bigger than the lie that Trump colluded with Russia. It was a bad sign that so many of us so easily went along with it, that we checked our rational brains at the door. The New York Times admitted they got the story wrong, but few others have. They just moved on to the next thing while Adam Schiff still insists the story is true.
Today would be a good day for Rachel Maddow to come clean. She could apologize to her viewers for pushing what turned out to be yet another fabricated hoax to win an election.
None of them could stop the hate train even to take a breath and ask themselves, how did we get here? How did some dude living in a pineapple shack in Hawaii with his special lady friend get to the point where he believed he had to finish the job that Thomas Matthew Crooks could not?
It’s not a coincidence that his passion was fighting and dying in Ukraine. It can’t be. Will we ever get those answers? Will anyone even ask? How many more of them might be out there? Will Rachel Maddow say anything to deflate the lie that Trump is Putin’s stooge?
And why did so many Americans simply shrug it off? Has the ongoing dehumanization campaign worked so well that they are numb to the shock of having a president almost assassinated on live television? And then almost shot again? A president who the previous administration has already framed as a Russian spy, impeached twice, indicted four times, who might be sentenced to jail, whose businesses might be destroyed.
It really has become like watching Russell Crowe in Gladiator. Are you not entertained?
How can Americans vote to keep them in power when we’ve seen the dangerous precedents they’ve already set?
They do not want an America that is more free. They want an America that is safer, and by that, they mean to silence dissent, to shut people up, to censor information.
RFJ, Jr. responds.
These people live in fear of imaginary ghosts and goblins they have invented. Now we see the fruits of their labor - their fear has transformed into the potential for real-world violence.
It isn’t just the Gen-X Travis Bickle. It’s also the young man who packed up a gun and traveled to DC to shoot Justice Kavanaugh or the crazed Bernie Sanders supporter who shot up a Congressional baseball game.
These acts of violence are driven by fear, fear the media has stoked for years with no consequences. It’s this kind of indifferent response that led to the Manson murders in 1969 when a group of hippies thought it would be funny to take drugs and go on a stabbing spree.
In the film Network, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky envisions a future where the live assassination of Howard Beale is just another item on our television screens, that we have become numb to real human suffering because we’re always looking for the next sensation.
But now, it’s even worse than that. When the media narrative dumps so much hate and fear on the American public, it puts a price on Trump’s head. It’s not for money but for status inside utopia. Who will be the one who saves the country and the world from the axis of evil that is Trump and Putin?
No movement can survive if its survival depends on the other half of America not existing anymore. That seems to be why more and more people are being drawn in by the alliance of Trump and RFK, Jr., depicted in this ad by Nicole Shanahan.
We’re living through something never before tried in all of human history - more people connected than ever before at a time when there are more people alive than ever before.
But by all accounts, we seem to have lost something we desperately need as a species: our collective humanity. That is why it was such a shock to see Chris Cuomo apologize to Trump, to have empathy and sympathy for the sworn enemy of the establishment.
For so many on the Left Trump hate is the drug that no longer gets them high. So they need more of it until they can’t control the dose and take too much.
Just the idea that someone tried to kill a former president should have been a much bigger deal. But it was just another day of a fast-moving news cycle that couldn’t slow down even if it wanted to.
I walked away from my party in 2020. I saw how much power we had and I saw how we abused that power. When I discovered that nothing the media told me about Trump and MAGA was true, I knew there was no turning back. It was to live in truth or live in lies.
Now I know what Trump supporters have always known: that Trump is made of tough stuff. That’s why he’s the leader of the real resistance. That he’s still standing, still fight fight fighting gives millions of hopeless people a reason to hang on one more day. And that is what a real leader looks like.
Here is a song written by Jon Kahn on X for Trump.
Rachel Maddow and the Madman