Trump & Putin’s Alaska Date, Gay Marriage Challenged, and Guest Co-Host Rachel Maddow

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Kara Swisher: In case you're interested, a report from WeWork, every white woman in America is doing a skincare line. Cara, that's the one thing we haven't done together yet. I know. Let's launch a skincare line for people who don't care about skincare.

Kara Swisher: Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. Welcome back to Scott Free August. This is possibly the most badass day of Scott Free August. My co-host and I are the Al Pacino and Robert De Niro of Lesbian Journalists, respected, feared, and often confused for one another because of our hair, our fantastic haircuts, let me just say. Welcome to the host of MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, Rachel Maddow.

Rachel Maddow: Oh, Kara, I'm so glad. And when we made that decision to go bulk at the barbershop where we would always go two for one, I just think it was great for both of us. I mean, we were both 24. Who could have foreseen that it would have been the start of our paths in life?

Kara Swisher: Right. And we often dress like each other too. And people are always like, "Are you Rachel Maddow?" No, I'm not tall enough.

Rachel Maddow: People don't know Rachel's quite tall. That's the thing. That's the secret. That helps us twin in a way that will help us ultimately commit great crimes.

Kara Swisher: That is correct. Because we will be the alibi for one another. We should do crimes. Should we solve crimes or do crimes?

Rachel Maddow: Both.

Kara Swisher: Yes.

Rachel Maddow: Yes, Kara. Yes. Yes. All the things.

Kara Swisher: We have so much to talk about. This is so good. Everybody, let me just say, we're going to gay it up for you here a little bit, but we have a lot to talk about. But how is it going on your show? You're back to once a week. Is that correct?

Rachel Maddow: Yes. So I'm once a week, Monday nights on MSNBC. And then I spend every other day of the week working on stuff that people can't see yet. And so it seems like I'm doing nothing, but actually I'm working harder than I've ever worked in my life.

Kara Swisher: So you're not lazy?

Rachel Maddow: I'm not lazy. No.

Kara Swisher: So can I just ask, I'm just curious, how do you plan that day? Would you do it on Sunday? I was trying to think, when do you plan it and how do you decide? Because it's the one day. You're like Jon Stewart does the same thing, the one day, both Monday.

Rachel Maddow: I read all week. And then Sunday is a full bore, like 10 or 12 hour workday when I'm reading intensively and prepping and making decisions, including about guests and stuff, although I don't like to pre-plan guests before the day of the show if I don't have to.

Kara Swisher: Right, because you want it to be fresh.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah, because I'm not trying to do a week in review. I'm trying to do a good, "Here's your Monday newscast." And so I'm never great at lining up the big guest for the big get interview weeks in advance. I just don't do that. But I read all day and then Monday I work all day. And it's kind of not that different from when I was... the prep time is not that different from when I was doing five days a week. It's just that my whole Sunday is dedicated as well.

Kara Swisher: You went from one day a week to five during the first hundred days of the presidency. Do you feel like you need to come back and do more? I know a lot of your viewers think that.

Rachel Maddow: I mean, I think doing the hundred days was the right thing to do. I think a lot changed in our country very rapidly over those first hundred days and I was glad to be there every day for it. I also think it was MSNBC kind of signaling to the audience like, "Hey, this is not a normal presidential transition. This is potentially if this is going to be a transition from one kind of government and one kind of country into another, we need to cover it in a way that is not pretending that this is normal." And so I like the instinct of the company to ask me to come back and do that to signal that this is a special sort of time. I think it was correct. But I don't want to do five days a week, and I won't. And they don't want me to. They moved on. They have gotten more people.

Kara Swisher: But do you ever feel like, "Oh my God, something happens and I got to get in there"?

Rachel Maddow: Oh, yeah, for sure. And I'm a guest on other people's shows. And if it ever tips over into special coverage, I'm able to come back at any time and lead that stuff. So I just think it was hard to arrive at the system that we're in. We had to iterate a bunch of different attempts at it before we arrived at this. But I think we're in the right place. I think this is stable and sustainable. And this is going to be what it's going to be like for the foreseeable future.

Kara Swisher: Right. Now, may I ask you, are you excited about your spinoff of Versant? What a great name. Versant. Talk to your doctor about it. Results may vary. You could have a rash.

Rachel Maddow: In terms of the practical impact of it, it's been all kind of upside so far.

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Rachel Maddow: I mean, we're hiring. What other news organization is hiring tons of reporters and correspondents and editors? And we're standing up this whole news gathering operation, which was funded as part of the spin. And in the end, once that is stood up, we will no longer have to compete with NBC News' properties for the product of the news gathering organization, which we otherwise had to. I mean, if we're all covering the same outbreak of war or whatever it is, if we're competing with Nightly and the Today Show and Meet the Press and it's the NBC News news gathering organization, we're always going to get whatever's left over. In this case, we can apply our own instincts, our own queries, our own priorities to getting stuff that we need from reporters and correspondents. And so it's going to be better once that's all stood up. It has to be.

Kara Swisher: I like the cut of your jib here because half the people... I like that expression. I like to say it a lot. What is a jib?

Rachel Maddow: I like the cut of your jib. I didn't even know I had a jib.

Kara Swisher: Everyone has a jib, Rachel. It's a sailing metaphor. A jib. Do you ever sail?

Rachel Maddow: No, obviously you don't. A jib. It's a jib. I'm more of a rowboat type.

Kara Swisher: I like rowboats too. When I was in, I went out with someone and they bought me a rowboat once and we called it a relation dinghy. But it was not a relationship. Anyway, thank you. I'm here all week.

Kara Swisher: One of the things I think is exciting, actually, I've been doing a few shows on the podcast about what works in media now versus the whole doom, the doomness of it. And I had Oliver Darcy on, I had Katie Drummond from Wired, I had a bunch of different people on it. And the whole idea was that things are working, like whether it's Mehdi Hassan, even on the right, whether you like her or not, Megyn Kelly, there's all this exciting kind of stuff. And one of the MSNBC people either split into two groups, people who are sort of "this is the end" kind of thing, or "this is an opportunity to be entrepreneurial," which I think you're talking about, right? And it's an opportunity to make things people want.

Rachel Maddow: It's, A, first of all, we make a ton of money. Second of all, we're spinning off with a huge standalone, newly built news gathering organization that is designed specifically for our purposes and nothing else. We have an incredibly loyal, very large audience. And we're universally platformed on a device called the television, which Americans use despite media reports to the contrary. And so I just feel like I'm super, super happy to see, in particular, the success of some of the people you just described. Like, Wired has just been killing it. Oliver Darcy doing his status media stuff is great. It's better than anybody else who's doing the media beat from any of the legacy news organizations.

Kara Swisher: Absolutely. That's because he's not just writing down what the bigs say.

Rachel Maddow: Exactly. And that is forcing, I actually think it's forcing media reporting in legacy news organizations to kind of up their game a little bit because he's so scrappy and good at it. And I think there's a lot that's positive. The business side of it is a challenge for everybody, but it's also unique to everybody. And MSNBC on that side has a bunch of unique advantages. We're in a spin that is very well-funded. Once it's going to be public shares eventually when Versant does that, that means that's going to sort of lock into a system where there's several years where they can't do anything dramatic like sell us or anything like that. But right now we make a lot of money.

Kara Swisher: Your Elon time is not yet.

Rachel Maddow: No. We make a lot of money. We have a big audience. And we're growing substantively in terms of what we can offer the audience. I just think that's nothing to sneeze at, and I'm excited to see how it develops.

Kara Swisher: Good, because I think that's a good attitude. I think if you sit around and doom-scroll about your industry, it's just not true. There's all kinds of entrepreneurial stuff, and it gives you the opportunity if you pull away from bigger organizations. You have to make stuff people want. Anyway, speaking of—

Rachel Maddow: Wait, wait, wait, before we move on from that. You yourself are a media mogul, Kara Swisher.

Kara Swisher: I am. That's what I call myself.

Rachel Maddow: But do you feel like you've figured out what makes the most sense for you in terms of owning stuff and multi-platforms and the kind of partnerships that you have?

Kara Swisher: Well, Rachel, if I were advised, I helped Dave Jorgensen leave the Washington Post because he's the one who makes all those videos. And he also was on the podcast because he's different. He's doing videos and trying to create a video-oriented, TikTok-oriented media company. Yes, I feel much better. As I often say, I was a terrible employee. I was like, "You fucking idiot" all the time. And I was tired of saying that to people, especially a certain kind of guy, right? It was often a guy, sometimes a woman. And I just was like, "I'll make what I'll make. And if people want to eat it, they can eat it." And then I get to make all the decisions. I also own everything. If I were you, I would own everything. You do own a lot of your stuff, Rachel, but I would own like everything I make. And that way I can make decisions. And then you partner with people. In my case, it's Fox Media. But over time, for example, in Pivot, Scott and I have gotten a bigger piece of the pie because it's our pie, right? But it's great to have partners that help you do things like advertising and distribution and producing that you may not want to do or they can do better. And so it creates a really great ecosystem where everyone's interests are aligned. And when you own it, you can make decisions that are both temporally specific and specific in terms of equity and all that other stuff and control as needed. But you can enter and leave those partnerships while you still own everything.

Rachel Maddow: Right.

Kara Swisher: And that's what I'm advising everybody. Like everyone who... when they wrote that very nice piece in the New York Times about me, which was a little too nice, Rachel, I'll be honest with you.

Rachel Maddow: It was a big one. You're the backlash to your own profile?

Kara Swisher: Myself. I'm like, "Come on. You couldn't find one bad thing?" I'll give you a list of people that don't like me. But they're always blind quotes, so they're not any good.

Rachel Maddow: You know I would say one of the things that was important in that piece was getting people inspired.

Kara Swisher: But one of the reporters came to me and said, who lovely Ben Mullen, and he said, "You know I heard you being paid to advise people to leave media." Like I get a fee. I was like, "If I got a fee, I'd be so fucking rich." I have like people call me right now on my telephone. I have seven people who want to leave media and want to try something. And so what I try to do is the ones I think are going to be good. I say, "Here's what it takes, like a Jim Acosta or whoever. You got to be entrepreneurial. You've got to work harder than you did because it's all for you, right?" And I think that's the hard part. And some people who come to me, I'm like, "Yeah, you should stay where you are. You should stay where you are."

Rachel Maddow: You're giving people the Rosetta Stone here to interpret your advice in future.

Kara Swisher: I know, but it's only a few people. But I just was with Dina Brown and she's done amazing stuff at her Substack and I think her writing is better. Paul Krugman, I think, has really come alive. He's suddenly really great. There's all kinds of people. And I think once you find your voice, if it's really good, people will buy it. And media is not all one thing.

Rachel Maddow: I mean, I have a production company now, in addition to being an employee at MSNBC. But at that production company, I'm not doing cable news. At that production company, I'm doing documentaries, scripted shows. Actually, podcasts are all through MSNBC. So it's the documentaries, scripted shows. I'm producing a play with them, some other stuff, feature films. But it's all different. So my employee status is podcasts and TV shows at MSNBC, which is all the stuff for which I'm still best known. Everything else that I'm doing, I'm very low on the learning curve and I'm figuring out how to do it. And I don't know if I will succeed at any of those things, but I'm trying. But I'm doing that on my own steam.

Kara Swisher: Which one do you like better?

Rachel Maddow: I like them both. I'm better at one than I am at the other.

Kara Swisher: Right. You're used to it.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah. But I like working at something that I'm not great at and learning. So that's what I'm... The problem is that I can't... Once you're better at something, it's easier to turn it on and off, to compartmentalize. "Now I'm working. Now I'm not." When you're not good at something, there's the constant panic about failure, which means you work 24 hours a day, which means your girlfriend gets mad at you.

Kara Swisher: Wait a minute. I've heard that. I have that issue with my wife, too. Speaking of Hollywood, I just want to note the New York Times just called my all-time favorite movie, Roadhouse, the best bad movie. I don't know if you know that.

Rachel Maddow: Oh wow. No.

Kara Swisher: My all favorite. Movie Roadhouse. It was Patrick Swayze, not the Jake Gyllenhaal. That was pathetic. Jake Gyllenhaal is the remake. The remake. And in the Patrick Swayze version, was there also a lot of shirtlessness?

Rachel Maddow: Yes, of course, obviously. He did Tai Chi in the shirtlessness. Are you kidding? And it was mostly him, by the way. It was not the ladies. There was a lot of shirtless ladies also, but he was the prime piece of beefcake there going on. And I love that movie largely because of the lines, like, "We can do this the hard way or the easy way," just stuff like that.

Kara Swisher: I say that a lot, and no one would say it. It's profound. It's a deep thing. People go, "Look, where's that in the Bible?" I love Patrick Swayze. He's such a great fire that I don't understand it myself.

Rachel Maddow: Have you ever seen the amazingly crazy Stars TV show called Hightown, which is about drugs in Provincetown?

Kara Swisher: Yes, the lesbian. Hello.

Rachel Maddow: Yes. So what about in the pimp, the terrible, like evil shirtless pimp character, Swayze? And there's no reason in the entire... There's a lot of things about Hightown that are inexplicable. But one of them is that why is the pimp shirtless? Like the pimp is shirtless at night, the pimp is shirtless during the day. I'm convinced the pimp is always shirtless because he is Swayze. Because that is his name. Patrick Swayze.

Kara Swisher: You're right. Yes. Yeah. It's a meta. Yes. Yeah, Tom Cruise always takes his shirt off, too. There's several actors. But in Patrick Swayze's case, I see the point. I get the point. I understand why there's no shirt. Let me ask you a question. Do you have a best bad movie or show you like lately?

Rachel Maddow: I like Hightown, I gotta say. Hightown. Yeah, you know, I'm a real old lesbian who doesn't see a lot of movies and stuff. Like my favorite movie is Suddenly, which is an assassination movie starring Frank Sinatra that all takes place in one room and really ought to have been a play.

Kara Swisher: What? Yeah. Frank Sinatra? Going back to Frank Sinatra?

Rachel Maddow: Yes. Like that's my era. I love Patton. I love Lawrence of Arabia. Like I'm a lot older than I seem. I was born 74 years old.

Kara Swisher: Excellent. From the beginning.

Rachel Maddow: From the beginning. I came out nearsighted. I was 37.

Kara Swisher: Interesting.

Rachel Maddow: I was like, "Here's how we're going to do things." But 37 and real bossy.

Kara Swisher: So Suddenly, I'm going to watch that now.

Rachel Maddow: It's good. It's really good. I like political thrillers is kind of my thing. I like psychological thriller stuff. And it's great. It really good. Frank Sinatra actually did some... I loved him in the first Manchurian Candidate.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, he's great. That's a creepy movie. Angela Lansbury so good in that movie.

Rachel Maddow: Oh, God, she's fantastic. She's so good. I love an evil, like a totally villainous to the core pretty lady.

Kara Swisher: Pretty lady. She is. Julie Andrews should be a villain. Has she played a villain? That's sort of in that genre. Oh, hello, Julie Andrews fans of the Pivot audience. Tell us what Julie Andrews ever did. I'm sure she's listening very closely right now. Although I do have a lot of weird celebrity fans, which is strange. I'm sure you have a million of them. They love the Rachel Maddow. Let me give you one recommendation, which I mention to every show. See Hunting Wives, please, on Netflix. Do yourself a favor.

Rachel Maddow: Oh, this is a new reality series?

Kara Swisher: No, it is not. It is a series, Malin Ackerman and Brittany Snow star. And it is about MAGA ladies in Texas, who shoot a lot of guns. And they're very Christian and very MAGA and Trumpy, and they dress up in what you'd imagine Texas ladies would dress up in, and they're all lesbians. Suddenly they take this turn into lesbian, and you're like, but then they do it too much. You're like, "Stop with the lesbian. There's way too much." And then there's murder. It's not you just like reading a lesbian vibe into it. They actually in the show.

Rachel Maddow: Oh, no, my friend. Go get it. No. It's moving towards softcore porn in a way that's really good. I actually was like, "You need to stop. We need some more plot here. Stop making out, you two." And Malin Ackerman dives into the role. Dives into the role.

Kara Swisher: So when Scott did his last episode of Pivot before Scott Free August, his advice to you and your co-hosts while he was away was that he wanted a lot more lesbian content.

Rachel Maddow: There we go.

Kara Swisher: And now here you are. Here you are. We've done it. You're bringing me new lesbian content I didn't have.

Rachel Maddow: I'm just telling you. Just text me after you watch it, all right? Trust me on this one.

Kara Swisher: All right. Now we're getting to serious stuff because Trump is having quite a week with his federal takeover of D.C., a review of the Smithsonian and a meeting with Putin. First, I am a huge fan of your work on the 30s and 40s, all the stuff you've done. I just re-listened to Prequel, which I adore, and all the characters. And I assume that's what you're making movies about because there's so many great characters there. We've been hearing Trump using this "America First" line for years, but it's coming into play more than ever in his second term, as if it's fresh and new. He slapped the label on foreign policy, trade, immigration. He told The Atlantic a few months ago that "America First" means whatever he says it does. He said that he was the one that developed it. Obviously, not so. In both Ultra, your podcast, which you've been on talking about this, and in your book, Prequel, you talk a lot about this and the deep, deep roots of what's happening now in the U.S., which we have forgotten about in a lot of ways. So talk a little bit about the backstory and this rhetoric at this moment in time.

Rachel Maddow: So the America First Committee was a real thing. It only existed for about 15 months, but it was 15 really important months. It was from, I think, September of 1940 until December of '41, Pearl Harbor. But they formed, it was one of the largest anti-war organizations ever in the U.S., and they formed to basically try to block FDR from affording any assistance to Britain when Britain was fending off a Nazi invasion. And their basic idea, at least their public-facing idea, was that we were impregnable, we were protected by our oceans, nobody was ever going to attack us, and who cares if the Nazis took all of Europe? Europe kind of sucks anyway, it doesn't matter to us. We shouldn't give money to them, and if we give any money to them, they're going to plow under every fourth American boy. It'll get us into the war and we don't want to be in another war after World War I. That was the public facing line. The problem the America First Committee had is that even as they were huge and they had all these really respectable people associated with them, it was founded by the guy who was the heir to the Quaker Oats fortune, they kept slipping into kind of liking the Nazis and blaming everything on the Jews. And the American public eventually came to see that, especially when Charles Lindbergh, who was the most famous man in America not named Roosevelt, when Lindbergh became their spokesman and started flat out saying, "This is just the Jews trying to get us into the war and the Jews are the big problem in the world." So the America First Committee has a short, very pungent history. And then what the idea of America First became after that is even worse. After the America First Committee disbanded following Pearl Harbor, we then later got other iterations of that concept, like the America First Party, which in 1944 campaigned explicitly on the promise of deporting and or sterilizing all Jews in America.

Kara Swisher: So that's the history of America First. And there were senators that put these things forth, the forced sterilization of Jews, of blacks, of things like that. The insidious nature of it, even if it wasn't called America First, was the thing I was thinking of, is the idea that, first of all, there was Nazi infiltration in our country very significantly through Congress and also throughout media and everything else. But it was much more insidious, America First, in a lot of ways because there are all things attached to it.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah. I mean, that phrase, "plowing under every fourth American boy," that originated in Berlin in Goebbels' office. And then it made its way into the speeches of an anti-FDR, America First American politician. And one of the huge things that Ultra and Prequel are about is this huge multimillion dollar at the time, which makes it in 1940s dollars, multimillion dollar secret Nazi propaganda effort that was shunted through Congress. They used the congressional franking privilege to mail out millions of pieces of Nazi propaganda to American homes using members of the Senate and members of Congress who were on the Nazi payroll in the lead up to World War II. And it's a forgotten history, I think, because of World War II. It seems to overshadow everything that went before. But we had a big Nazi sympathizing and American fascist movement here in this country.

Kara Swisher: But continued after the war through McCarthy, which is what the second season of Ultra is about, correct? I mean, it didn't stop.

Rachel Maddow: Right.

Kara Swisher: So this never stopped. This is one of the things that I took away from your book is that so much as, you know, it begins with Gogol's, who was, I think they had stolen some ideas from us and Jim Crow or borrowed or whatever and thought that was a great thing. And then they put it back here and continued. That's the lost history part. I mean, the biggest figure, there's two figures in your books that I think are so... McCarthy gets all the attention, right? Always, because he's such a tragic and horrible figure. But two people I thought was Lawrence Dennis and O. John Rogge. Two opposites, though similar. Lawrence Dennis was considered to be the intellectual godfather of American fascism and was like... he was so similar.

Rachel Maddow: His life, while meanwhile articulating the beautiful fascist American future, right? The Nazis, when you say that they got ideas from Jim Crow, the Nazis used... they actually sent an agent to the University of Arkansas Law School to study Jim Crow, the legal, the liminal legal world.

Kara Swisher: Right, how to set it up.

Rachel Maddow: How to set it up. And then they used it as the basis for the Nuremberg Laws, the idea of second-class citizenship based on racial purity. So that's on the sort of on the dark side. And then O. John Rogge was a wunderkind prosecutor who brought sedition charges against Dennis and against these American fascists who were both working with the Nazis and trying to undermine the American war effort. And he was all but destroyed for having done it, including being fired in the Justice Department for having had the temerity to name the members of Congress who were involved in this scheme. And write a report that got lost, really, to history for 25 years.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, that's right. And then it didn't matter by then because everyone had moved on, right?

Rachel Maddow: Yeah, they didn't publish it until the 60s.

Kara Swisher: I got to tell you, the resonance to today, that prequel particularly has stuck with me so hard because it feels like there's so many links to today. How do you... and one of the things, you have these heroes like O. John Rogge or Leon Lewis in Los Angeles, Leon Lewis, right, in Los Angeles, who also did all this sort of secret spy work against these people, against these fascists and militias and things like that. Who is that today? And could you link them to what's happening now?

Rachel Maddow: I don't think there's any... you sound like you're... is there a problem?

Rachel Maddow: Yes, there's a noisy... yeah, but go ahead. A noisy man.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, sorry. I just saw you kill him with your eyes. It was amazing. I'll stop doing that.

Rachel Maddow: I don't think there are exact parallels, but I do think that there are sort of inspirational currents. So one story that hasn't had a lot of attention that I've sort of been watching percolate recently is that there's been a lot of stealing from armories and military bases. That's been happening recently. That was something that happened in the lead up to World War II as well, as violent fascist groups like the Silver Shirts and the Christian Front and others not only recruited from the military and from the National Guard, but also used essentially insider threat people inside the military to steal U.S. military weapons for use in what they hoped would be a violent overthrow of the U.S. government. So that happened. That's happening now, very sort of quietly. It's only getting a little bit of attention.

That was in part what led Leon Lewis, who was a World War I veteran, to get other World War I veterans, German-American World War I veterans, to go infiltrate those groups to figure out what was happening. They could not get law enforcement interested in it because these guys proclaimed themselves to be anti-communists. And so therefore, law enforcement liked the idea of them. They couldn't get law enforcement interested, so they pursued it and pursued it and pursued it themselves. They publicized their findings. They ultimately went to U.S. Navy intelligence, which was willing to prosecute them in part because it was military facilities that were being burgled in order to get these guys their weapons. So that sort of intrepidity by a self-styled civilian spy... I don't know that we've got that sort of singular hero right now. But when I see people who are building apps and building online networks to watch what ICE is doing and to monitor effectively the secret police operations that we've got going right now, I see some of those same instincts sort of in the American character.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. You were saying they aren't the same. I mean, right now, for example, Trump says he's looking to extend the 30-day federal takeover of Washington, D.C.'s police and could bypass Congress declaring a national emergency. I guess he could decide what a national emergency is. His comments come as National Guard troops arrive in D.C. with 800 guards and 500 federal agents set to be deployed in total. They're often in places that are very loud, although they're over on 14th Street where they're being pummeled with sandwiches.

Rachel Maddow: That guy.

Kara Swisher: That's got to be a game. A felony for hurling the sandwich.

Rachel Maddow: I know. Hurling. I love it. I'm like, I would... I feel like I wish I had done that.

Kara Swisher: D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is calling all of this an authoritarian push, although she initially said the city could benefit from it. She's being a little bit quiet about it. U.S. Attorney for D.C., Jeanine Pirro, she of the box of wine, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that she's working to overturn some local laws so juvenile offenders would be prosecuted. I just, you know, a lot of the stuff you wrote about was implicit. It was quietly being done. And although the Silver Shirts, they appeared, all these people appeared in Madison Square Garden. They had all kinds of rallies. It was very explicit, but nothing like... it wasn't the government doing this. Now he's also focusing his attention on D.C.'s landscaping, saying we need to redo the grass with the finest grasses. I agree with that. I'm going to agree. We have shitty grass. I think America can actually come together around the idea of fine grass.

Rachel Maddow: Fine grass, yeah.

Kara Swisher: So talk to me a little bit about what's happening here, because this is explicit. In the time you were writing about it, the government itself wasn't doing things like that, or was in a way in certain areas like concentration camps and things like that for the Japanese.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah, I mean, fascist groups in the United States before World War II wanted an authoritarian takeover of our country in which there would not be the American system of government anymore. There would be a strong man leader who would run things at his own whim with autocratic capabilities and would serve the white Gentile population above all else and kick everybody else out of the country. That's what fascist groups before World War II wanted in this country, which is why they wanted us to either not fight the Nazis or to fight with the Nazis rather than to go over there and fight them. And they didn't like democracy explicitly. They talked about it. They thought democracy was decadent and it was a way for...

Kara Swisher: Liberals and women.

Rachel Maddow: Women and, well, minorities of any kind to have any say. These are folks who don't believe in sharing power with people different than them. They think that they should be able to have a say on their own terms of what happens not only in government, but in everything. And so now, in our generation, in our time, we have an elected authoritarian leader who doesn't just want to control the executive branch. He wants to control universities, their curriculum and their admissions and their student discipline policies. He wants to decide what economists work at what banks. He wants to control businesses. He wants to control the Smithsonian. He wants to control high school sports. He wants to control the legal profession. He wants to control what's on television and what's in the news. And guess what? This is what they were after.

This is a president who does not see bounds on the presidency set by democratic processes, but he also doesn't see bounds on the presidency set by what counts as government. He wants to autocratically rule the country in every aspect of the country, both to shut down the possibility of criticizing or opposing him, but also because he believes that he should run everything. He should be handing out the Kennedy Center honors, and he should be administering the police force of Washington, D.C., and he should be choosing the CEO of Intel, and he should be setting the recipe for Coke. And that's what they were after. And that's what we have.

Kara Swisher: And do you find this to be... are you more alarmed by any part of it, or is it part of the same idea? And for people who don't know, the White House plans to review the Smithsonian Museum exhibitions, materials, and operations for America's 250th anniversary next year. The administration sent a letter to the Smithsonian this week explaining how the museum content is in line with Trump's "restoring truth and sanity to American history" executive order. And recently the National Museum of American History removed a placard that mentioned Trump's two impeachments, which has since been replaced. Is there one thing... this is like a cornucopia of stuff for you to focus on. What do you look at, what do you think is the thing that troubles you the most, or is it in whole? Is it the takeover of the city or the attempted takeover of the city, or is it the museum? I assume it's all of it, but is there something you find most disturbing?

Rachel Maddow: Well, it's all of a piece in the sense that I guess I have two answers to this question. One is that what Trump is doing is so textbook. There's not anything that's very surprising about what he's doing. And we now know who he is and what his intentions are. It's not like there's going to be a big reveal. "Oh, he has authoritarian inclinations for our country." Like, we now know who he is. He is Viktor Orbán. He is Vladimir Putin. He is Duterte. He is Berlusconi. Pick your poison. They all do the same thing, right? We're only lucky that Trump isn't taking his shirt off in photos.

Kara Swisher: [Laughs]

Rachel Maddow: But so to me... sorry, I just put that image right in your head, didn't I?

Kara Swisher: You did. I just totally saw his chest. It's sad. Anyway. Swayze. I take this shit from Swayze, but not from this guy.

Rachel Maddow: But because he's predictable, because he is playing to type and it's a very knowable thing, I feel like there's only so much value in focusing on every new thing he does. It's predictable what he's going to do. We know what this is. It makes me more interested in the question of the country's durability and how we're responding and the strength of our institutions in standing up to it. So that's one thing. But the thing I'm most worried about is the military stuff.

Kara Swisher: The military, meaning the takeover of the city or?

Rachel Maddow: Well, I mean, he's using the military to project force inward, domestically, everywhere. Immigration enforcement doesn't just look militarized. They're integrating with the military. They're building these immigrant prison camps with no due process. And a prison with no due process is a camp. They're building them on military bases. They've got hundreds of miles of territory in Arizona and New Mexico, in Texas, they're calling military zones where they're giving U.S. active duty troops the authority to stop and search and arrest people on U.S. soil. He threw himself a military parade for his own birthday. They're using military flights, incredibly expensive military flights, inexplicably, for deportation flights. We've just found out that they're considering building a new rapid reaction force where they've got 600 troops on one-hour standby, 24 hours a day, to go deploy into American cities. They put the National Guard and the U.S. Marines in L.A., and now they've got the National Guard and he's threatening active duty troops in D.C. I mean, he is reimagining the use of the U.S. military as his own Praetorian Guard, facing his critics and facing his citizens and normalizing. He's already, in this many months, normalized the presence of American troops in American cities with us at the end of their guns.

Kara Swisher: Right. And when I think of any country I go to where there's troops on the streets, I'm always like, "I'd like to get out of this country." It makes you feel... I just interviewed Jason Stanley, who you know from Yale, who left this country. He's written about propaganda and fascism. I'm sure you know him well. And one of the things he said is it's sort of a kind of a cloddish playbook of a fascist. And I was like, "Well, does it matter if he's clownish and cartoonish if he's effective in some way?" Do you find all this effective?

Rachel Maddow: Well, he's doing it, right? I mean, the thing that makes him effective is not any genius on his part or even any ambition or speed on his part. The thing that makes him effective is the cowardice and collapse of American institutions that should be saying no to him. That's the problem.

Kara Swisher: Do you see any heroes emerging?

Rachel Maddow: Yes. The heroes that are emerging are emerging from not the leadership class, but the people. I mean, the fact that there's protests against Trump on every day of the week in every state in the country is important to me.

Kara Swisher: You feature that on your show quite a bit.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah. And I'm doing that not because I think that's what everybody's talking about and I want to get in on that conversation. I recognize that it's not getting a ton of attention, but I do think that shows you that the people in this country... you look at the opinion polls and you look at the ongoing protests, especially the small protests in red states and stuff against him, and you realize that nobody's into this.

Kara Swisher: Or individuals, when someone's taking someone away, they start filming. I find those really powerful. Like some lady coming out of yoga, suddenly saying, "What the fuck are you doing to this man?"

Rachel Maddow: Yes, exactly. That instinct in the American people is really healthy and is unafraid and is uncowed and is repulsed by this. And that's why Trump has such terrible approval ratings. He's upside down even with men, even with the way he's dropped with young people. It's a stunning drop. And that, to me, is very important. The crisis that we've got in our country is a crisis of elite cowardice. The law firms, the universities, the politicians, and the business leaders in particular.

Kara Swisher: Were they ever courageous, Rachel? I mean, I would make the argument they weren't. They're saying that universities were woke. I'm like, "Have you met a university president before this all happened?" They hated those professors. Law firms hated those pro bono people on their staff. I don't know, I just never thought they were particularly courageous.

Rachel Maddow: But they're big, prestigious institutions with a lot of capital and a lot of connections and a lot of money and a lot of people who have a lot of room to maneuver without ever putting themselves in real danger. And those are the people that are failing us. And I actually think that if we're going to protest and try to put steel in the spines of people and try to appeal to conscience, which is what nonviolent direct action does, some of that protest should probably be usefully, strategically directed at the institutions that are failing, not just at Trump.

Kara Swisher: One of the things Jason was saying is one of the things that civil rights things work is those people became empathetic given the visuals of civil rights, right? The hoses and everything else. And he was wondering if the immigration raids will make everyone else who is comfortable angry enough, or empathetic really enough, in a lot of ways, if you think about it.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah, but you need to see not just the rage, you need to see people standing up against them. So what you remembered about that woman in the yoga clothes in the parking lot there yelling at those guys was not just what was happening to those guys that had inspired her to action. It was seeing her be courageous and outraged and not afraid that stuck with her.

Kara Swisher: Right. Even the sandwich guy, all joking aside, when he did that, I'm like, "Oh, dear." And then I thought, "Well, good for him." And I was talking about it with my wife and saying, "What should I do now? Should I go throw a sandwich? Should I get myself a...?"

Rachel Maddow: They're in front of Tate. That's the best part. They're just like, grab their sandwich and throw it at them.

Kara Swisher: But what is the action you take, I think, is a lot of people are trying to figure out of those people who become empathetic to what's happening.

Rachel Maddow: I mean, I don't think the sandwiches deserve this. I think sandwiches deserve to be treated with respect.

Kara Swisher: They do.

Rachel Maddow: Like, I'm sure that guy, that was probably a meatball sub, with exactly the right kind of cheese and just the right... he probably had that scooped out, which took a lot of extra work.

Kara Swisher: It was so soft and wiggly.

Rachel Maddow: I'm sorry, you shouldn't attack police, let me just say.

Kara Swisher: No, no. Pivot does not encourage attacking police. But if you insist, a sandwich is probably the best.

Rachel Maddow: No, no throwing anything at anybody. No throwing sandwiches. Rachel and I do not recommend throwing sandwiches, though.

Kara Swisher: If only for the sake of the sandwich.

Rachel Maddow: Only for the sake of the sandwich. But that's like... let me have a bite.

I mean, we've got one of the things that's different between now and what Americans were facing in the 30s and 40s is that we have the example of the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s to show the apogee, the moral apogee of what it means to take incredibly difficult action against incredibly violent entrenched opponents and to win on the strength of your moral case. And that's a moral cornerstone of our country. And we would be remiss to not learn from that in this moment. I mean, there's not going to be a civil war in this country. There's not going to be a violent confrontation. I mean, all Trump wants is for somebody to throw another sandwich or do something that they can consider to be a crime and use as a provocation. Nonviolent direct action gets the goods always. And it's our American inheritance. And it's the thing that will ultimately push them back.

Kara Swisher: Ultimately, it would. Or time, and also time. Let's go to a quick break. We come back: Trump's warning to Putin ahead of their Alaska getaway.

[AD BREAK]

Kara Swisher: Rachel, we're back. President Trump and Vladimir Putin are about to meet in Alaska, and Trump is warning that Russia will face, quote, "very severe consequences" if Putin doesn't agree to stop the war in Ukraine. The White House downplayed expectations for the summit earlier this week, describing it as a listening exercise. He said, talking about "feeling people out," which was relatively creepy in the F-team. Feeling people up? Out? Feeling out.

Rachel Maddow: Feeling, feeling.

Kara Swisher: He might feel them up. That's grotesque. Trump also... you've already gotten like lots of pictures in my head, and I don't appreciate it. Trump also spoke with European leaders and Ukraine's President Zelensky ahead of the summit. European leaders asked Trump not to strike a unilateral peace deal, so gave him some key points of negotiations. Zelensky said he warned Trump that Putin was bluffing on pursuing peace, obviously. He's called this meeting Putin's personal victory. What are you looking for? I just had David Remnick on the last episode, and he said, you know, as long as he doesn't fuck up or give anything away right away, it'll be a victory. Like, if he has a second meeting. And he's been talking that way recently. I mean, this is all just so embarrassing. You know what I mean? Jimmy Fallon had that very good line where he was like, "Oh, listening and exercise, two of Trump's favorite things."

Rachel Maddow: He is funny. Do you remember the red line, Obama and the red line with Syria? This was like 2012, I think it was. Obama gave a speech where he described Bashar al-Assad potentially using chemical weapons as a red line, that that's how the United States would treat it. And then in 2013, Assad absolutely did that. And Obama responded by saying, "All right, I'm going to Congress to get authorization for the use of military force against Syria." And Congress debated it a little bit, and then it kind of looked like it wasn't going to pass, and then they didn't do it. They did not pass the authorization for the use of military force. That went down in political commentary, common wisdom, as like Obama was such a wuss, he blew it on that red line thing, that was such an embarrassment. First of all, Obama didn't do anything wrong there. He went to Congress for an authorization for the use of military force, which is how it works in our system. And it was Congress that blew it. But that supposed failure, which wasn't a failure at all by Obama, 12, 13 years later, people still talk about that as like a nadir, a terrible thing about the Obama administration.

Well, meanwhile, here's Trump. Wasn't it going to be like if by Friday the war wasn't over? It was going to be the end of days for Putin and there was going to be sanctions. Ooh, and there was going to be tariffs. Oh, that's the worst thing in the world. It was going to be all of this terrible stuff. And instead, what does Putin get? Putin gets a trip to Alaska. Go visit the former Russian empire and a one-on-one meeting. Trump will fly as far as you're flying to come have a one-on-one man-to-man summit with you, the first time that you've been in this country except for the U.N. since 2007. And we get to talk about the war in Ukraine without Ukraine here. I mean, talk about a red line moment. I'm just worried that we don't end up in the post-press conference with Trump in his lap.

Kara Swisher: Or giving away Alaska.

Rachel Maddow: Or like delicately touching his hair, or cupping his face, spooning him.

Kara Swisher: What would you consider a success? Is there no success here? It's already given away.

Rachel Maddow: The success here would be if the U.S. government arrived at this summit, which has been put together on, what, four days' notice?

Kara Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Rachel Maddow: A bilateral summit between the American and Russian president. If we arrived at this meeting and then somebody opened a door from a supply closet and Volodymyr Zelensky walked out and sat down and Trump said, "You guys talk, I'll be right outside this door." That would be a victory, right?

Kara Swisher: I'd give him the Nobel Peace Prize for that.

Rachel Maddow: Well, I don't know that they allow us to vote. But I mean, Trump is... the right word here is lickspittle. He is so afraid of Vladimir Putin. He will do absolutely anything. I mean, we've got a 35 percent tariff on Canada and Russia has what percent tariff? Right. Russia is mysteriously missing from the whole tariffs on even uninhabited islands that only have penguins, but not Russia. And the way the media responds to Trump as if his word is his bond, right? "Oh, Trump is explaining that he now has a new feeling about Putin and he's very upset with Putin. Oh, he's very disappointed. And he's really changed his tune. I think he's soured on Putin." Really? Watch what he does, not what he says. He's literally in the man's pants.

Kara Swisher: Right, right. And there's no distance here. There's no distance between them. So you think just the fact that he's flying there is just... it's already given away.

Rachel Maddow: This is something that no American president has done in 18 years. In many countries in the world, if Vladimir Putin stepped foot on their soil, he'd be arrested and dragged off to The Hague. This is an abject humiliation for the United States of America and for the U.S. presidency that we will be reading about for 75 years.

Kara Swisher: So what is the best thing that could come out of this? Short of Zelensky popping out of the supply closet?

Rachel Maddow: Right.

Kara Swisher: What did the janitor say when he jumped out of the supply closet?

Rachel Maddow: What?

Kara Swisher: Supplies! Sorry.

Rachel Maddow: [Laughs] Oh, my God.

Kara Swisher: What is that? That's not even a dad joke. That's a bad dad joke. That's a stepdad joke.

Rachel Maddow: Anything good? Anything? No. I mean, what the Ukrainians say is nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine. And so if this is being negotiated, this would be like if you were getting a divorce and the person from whom you're getting a divorce is going through the court proceedings without you. How do you think your side of the divorce is going? You think you're going to get your alimony? You think you're going to get your custody agreement? No. There's nothing good about this.

I will also say that Trump always, always, after he talks to Putin—although now he admits he talks to Putin without telling anybody that he's doing so—every time we know he talks to Putin, he comes out after those discussions and starts parroting a new Russian lie.

Kara Swisher: Just like "we're going to plow the boys under," right? Where it went from Goebbels to senators, U.S. senators.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah. Things he's saying. He repeats any... he's absolutely, he will just parrot whatever Putin tells him to say, which he has done. I mean, back to Helsinki, back to the very beginning.

Kara Swisher: Which was a disaster.

Rachel Maddow: And he also adopts whatever position was last presented to him. And so in this case, he'll adopt whatever Putin says.

Kara Swisher: Have you ever thought of calling him on the phone yourself, Rachel? There is a cell phone that he answers.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah. I did speak to him on the phone once during the 2016 campaign, which was funny. I was trying to get an interview with him. This is early in the primary process. And they had gone through this whole big, like, swearing me to secrecy thing that in order to get the interview, I needed to call him personally. And even the fact of the call had to be off the record. And they made us like swear there was no listening, there was no recording device, and then like going through all this rigmarole. And so then I have, I call... I get the appointed time. I get on the phone with him. I asked him to do the interview. And at the end of my conversation with him, he goes, "Well, you can air this. This was nice." I was like, first of all, this is off the record. I didn't tape it. I can tell you now, I agreed to it being off the record, but because he said that, I can now tell you, Kara Swisher, today, that he said it was... I was allowed to air it. And I was like, "My dude, are you aware when you were in the media versus when you were having a phone..."

Kara Swisher: No, he doesn't care. If it goes well, he wants it out there, right? If it's a very good call and stuff like that. So you're not expecting anything here. It's already a rollover.

Rachel Maddow: No, this is a bad thing. The meeting itself is a bad thing. Vladimir Putin being invited to the United States of America to meet one-on-one with the American president is all I need to know. And that's a bad thing. There's nothing substantively that's going to come out of this meeting except for Trump getting more of his instructions, right?

Kara Swisher: I think he's going to get back to Alaska. I'm telling you. We're going to lose Alaska. They're going to trade Sarah Palin and something else. You know, you can see Russia from her porch. Anyway, let's bring that one back.

I'm going to move on to something totally different. The U.S. Supreme Court has officially been asked to overturn the 2015 decision that granted equal marriage rights to same-sex couples. If you remember Kim Davis—heinous Kim Davis is what I call her—the former Kentucky county clerk who was jailed for six days in 2015 for refusing to issue marriage licenses to a gay couple. She's filed an appeal in July for the compensation she was ordered to pay that couple. Davis is taking her case to the court on the grounds that Obergefell v. Hodges, which established marriage equality, was wrongly decided and infringes on her First Amendment rights. Davis has been unsuccessfully appealing the order for years to lower courts. She's the only one withstanding to do this from what I understand. I did predict an attack on marriage equality back in January. Let's listen to a clip.

[CLIP PLAYS]

Kara Swisher: And that's all they're doing is a naked grab for overturning the gay marriage Supreme Court decision like they overturned Roe v. Wade. And it's very vulnerable to... Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said it should be reconsidered. So we'll see. It's theater. It's theater, but they're going to try to do this. They're trying to get a case up there that will make it happen. Are you concerned about this at all?

Rachel Maddow: Well, on this, I'm sort of of two minds about the decision. I feel like I agree with your prediction from January that they want to overturn. At least there are parts of the court that want to overturn it. I mean, remember Obergefell was a 5-4 decision and now, yeah, and now the court is 6-3 in the direction that had been in the minority. And so I think they want to. But I also feel like the sort of legal common wisdom on this case, as I understand it, I'm not a lawyer, but the legal common wisdom is that this is not the case.

Rachel Maddow: That while Kim Davis is appealing to the Supreme Court her illegal actions in denying a marriage license because she says God told her to, she is in appealing that part of her case, she is also asking the court to overturn Obergefell. And this just doesn't seem like legally the right vehicle to do that. The court also doesn't have to take up any of this. And even if they did take up the Kim Davis part of it, they don't have to address the Obergefell request in it at all.

Rachel Maddow: So I think, yes, the anti-gay movement in this country senses it's got the wind in its sails. They've got a newly reactionary Republican Party on these issues that's getting really demagogic on these issues. And they think that they've got victories ahead. I just don't think this is the case by which they're going to do it.

Rachel Maddow: That said, I mean, they've been doing all sorts of stuff that isn't warranted or necessitated by the material that's being put before them. That's the whole shadow docket idea. So there's a pretty radical court. I don't really want to stand here on two feet and say it's not going to happen. But it would be a weird way for them to do it if they were going to.

Kara Swisher: Weird way for them to do it. Well, I think they go through trans people and then to gay. Like, ultimately, marriage really chapped their ass. They really did, a lot of these people. And I think that was the problem. But still, more than two-thirds of the country is in favor of same-sex marriage, which is a reversal from what it was when they decided it.

Rachel Maddow: Right. But still, look at abortion, gun control, all that stuff. The 80% rule on so much stuff. There's so much stuff that has 80% of people for it and it doesn't matter.

Kara Swisher: That's part of the reason they don't like democracy, is because they actually don't have the people with them on this stuff on which they're making some of the worst, the largest advances, at least.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah, I'm not getting gay married again. That's all I have to say. Anyway, good luck taking away my marriage.

Kara Swisher: Honestly, it's so ridiculous. It's such a waste of time. All right, Rachel, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about what the women of the right are up to.

[AD BREAK]

Kara Swisher: Rachel, we're back with a quick update of the women on the right. Let's start with Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller, former employee of Elon Musk. She launched her own podcast, the Katie Miller Podcast, and kicking it off with a J.D. Vance interview. That charmer. Let's listen to some of the hard-hitting journalism happening over there.

[CLIP PLAYS]

Katie Miller: If you could only eat one condiment for the rest of your life, what would it be?

J.D. Vance: One condiment? Yeah. Does barbecue sauce count?

Katie Miller: Yeah.

J.D. Vance: Okay, barbecue sauce.

Katie Miller: Not mayonnaise?

J.D. Vance: No. Now mayonnaise is like in low doses is good, but it's kind of, like I had a buddy who used to eat french fries with mayonnaise, I thought that was disgusting.

Katie Miller: That's the only thing my husband eats?

J.D. Vance: No. No. Now, mayonnaise is like in low doses is good, but it's kind of like I had a buddy who used to eat French fries with mayonnaise. I thought that was disgusting.

Katie Miller: It's the only thing my husband eats. With French fries or like period?

J.D. Vance: Period.

Katie Miller: Okay. Wow.

J.D. Vance: Yeah. He's only a mayonnaise guy.

Katie Miller: Okay. I learned something about Steve and I didn't know.

[END CLIP]

Kara Swisher: Oh, God.

Rachel Maddow: Oh, Kara. Why did you put that in my head?

Kara Swisher: Because you put naked Donald Trump in my head. Oh, my God. I don't want to think about mayonnaise at all, and I don't want to think about Stephen Miller at all.

Rachel Maddow: Now Stephen Miller and mayonnaise are the same thing when they're on.

Kara Swisher: Oh, my God. What's your favorite condiment?

Rachel Maddow: Oh, God. Whatever the opposite of this moment is is my favorite thing.

Kara Swisher: Oh, my God. Is she going to steal our thunder? Good God. So why does Katie Miller have a podcast? There you go. That's the question. I think that's rhetorical. What was Katie Miller doing for Elon Musk?

Rachel Maddow: I don't know. Wasn't she working?

Kara Swisher: She was. She was working for PR, presumably. There were other comments about their relationship, but I don't know. Allegedly. Was she working for Tesla or for Doge?

Rachel Maddow: Him personally.

Kara Swisher: No, she worked for Doge. Remember, she was the Doge lady. And then when he was knocked out, she went with him. And that was the big, like, what's happened here? And because obviously Miller is the most significant player in that administration at this point. And then she's left. She stopped doing stuff for him. She had to get out because she knows where her mayonnaise is buttered.

Rachel Maddow: I'm going to sue. I'm going to sue. I've been irreparably damaged. I want a temporary restraining order from any more mayonnaise talk out of you.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, she has a podcast. Everyone has a podcast. There's all these ladies of the right that are now pushing. There's this whole movement of ladies of the right. She's like, we need to be heard. I'm like, you need not to be heard. You've been heard enough.

Rachel Maddow: I love the idea. Just the idea of ladies of the right is also great because the whole Lord of the Rings thing was so weird. But I think that if we could change the acronym so it was ladies of the right rather than Lord of the Rings. Name all our companies after that.

Kara Swisher: They're getting into podcasting and some are more successful. Like I said, Megyn Kelly is very popular. But there's a whole movement of these people. They feel like, oh, I got a microphone. I can say whatever I want.

Rachel Maddow: It is a movement of people. It's not specific to them though. I feel like everybody, like every homeowners association and PTA has a podcast now too.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, that's true. It's the blog of today. Remember when everybody had a blog? Yeah, it's the blog of today that everybody has a microphone.

Rachel Maddow: Well, she's sort of a house organ for these people. They can come on and say adorable things, and it'll get, so to speak, eaten up like mayonnaise.

Kara Swisher: Did you listen to more of the podcast than the mayonnaise clip? Does she have an appealing...

Rachel Maddow: No, it was literally, that was the highlight of it. The mayonnaise was the highlight. It was sort of like, so what do you do for fun? Like it was painful.

Rachel Maddow: Do you remember in the first term, first Trump term, when he appointed Jared to a job at the White House? And it was like, Jared's in charge of Middle East peace. Jared's in charge of this, Jared's in charge of COVID. He's in charge. And as he was accruing all of these jobs and more jobs and more jobs, Jared Kushner was starting to really loom as maybe this is the person who's actually kind of running the federal government.

Rachel Maddow: And then it occurred to a collective mindset at some point that nobody had ever actually heard from Jared. And then they rolled him out and they had him do a White House press briefing. And everybody's thinking Jared Kushner is the man. He's the Sith Lord here. And he walks up to the microphone and he says, "Hello, everybody." He was like, open his mouth, and it was like, oh, no. All illusions have gone.

Rachel Maddow: There's something about his presentation, in particular his voice, that was like, oh, yeah, I don't have to worry about this guy. I felt the same way about Ron DeSantis and his much-heralded presidential campaign. It was real. On paper, it looks fantastic, and then he walks up to the microphone.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, looks and sound. Well, do you remember, what's his name? Howard Dean had the same problem, right? Like, there is an element of looks and presentation that matters to people.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah, although with Howard Dean, I think that was a little bit of a—it was the scream, right? It was the scream. And it was just like a weird pickup. It was a weird pickup thing. But he didn't otherwise speak like a weirdo.

Kara Swisher: No, not at all. I think that he got mummified. He got—Democrats were scared of him because he was—

Rachel Maddow: Mummified is doing pretty well.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, well, Howard Dean was for a while, too, but Democrats got all scared because he actually had class analysis.

Rachel Maddow: Right, that's true. That's a fair point. So you're not worried about Katie Miller taking a show from you, right?

Kara Swisher: Oh, no. Yeah. You still haven't answered the condiment issue.

Rachel Maddow: The weird thing about me and condiments is that I put mustard on my eggs.

Kara Swisher: Oh, that's okay.

Rachel Maddow: I like things with vinegar in them and mustard has vinegar in it. And so when I get a bacon, egg and cheese, I put mustard and hot sauce on it.

Kara Swisher: That's acceptable. And by the way, many people in Belgium eat mayonnaise with, many people in Europe eat mayonnaise with fries.

Rachel Maddow: There aren't that many people in Belgium, though.

Kara Swisher: Well, and yes, they enjoy their mayonnaise. And we're not going to get into aioli.

Kara Swisher: All right. Some more ladies of the right. Laura Loomer and Marjorie Taylor Greene are beefing. In the last week, Laura Loomer claimed that the Trump White House can't stand Marjorie Taylor Greene in a deposition, a lawsuit against Bill Maher. By the way, please go read that whole deposition. It's one wacky thing after the next. Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested Laura Loomer was bankrolled by Israeli intelligence. And Loomer called MTG a rabid dog and a lying fake Christian whore. I don't think we could do any better than that. What is happening?

Rachel Maddow: I think a bigger question is on the right, what happens post-Trump? Because there will be eventually a post-Trump unless they weekend at Bernie's this guy. What happens? Because there seems to be so many fishers in this gang of incompetence and malcontents.

Rachel Maddow: I've done a lot of work in the past few years on the far right in American modern history and what they've done and who they are and how they network with mainstream and elected right-wingers. And they're good at it. Let's just be clear.

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Rachel Maddow: And it's always been much more seamless between the far right and the center right than it is between the far left and the mainstream left. But one of the things that has limited the ascendance and the power and the sustainability of the very far right in the past is that they're all crooks and mean girls. And they steal from each other and get in fistfights and set each other's houses on fire and sleep with each other's wives and husbands. And there's so much infighting that they can't keep it together for more than a single generation ever.

Rachel Maddow: And that's true in everything from the American Nazi Party where George Lincoln Rockwell was assassinated by one of his own people, to the Liberty Lobby which was a Holocaust denial organization that was very integrated with the elected right in the Reagan era where they descended into incredible fistfights and smashing each other over the head with iron bars. There's all this stuff. And it always goes that way.

Rachel Maddow: And right now, we do have, with an authoritarian in the White House, we do have greater and more scary, more powerful integration between the very far right and the right than we've ever had before. But it doesn't expunge that dynamic, which I think always exists on the far right, which is "Your Israeli intelligence." "No, your Israeli intelligence." "And you're a whore."

Kara Swisher: A lying, fake Christian whore. That's the name of my band. But go ahead.

Rachel Maddow: Actually, the name of my band is Pregnant Women Smoking, but go ahead.

Kara Swisher: I would buy merch from either. So you feel like a crack-up is inevitable in that regard, without the organizing glue of Donald Trump?

Rachel Maddow: I just feel like the constant cracking up. I feel like constant warring and cracking up. And they're polygraphing each other in the defense secretary's office. And they're all the same people. They're all on the same side. And Bannon is out there denouncing, Bannon and Musk or they're going to kill each other. And these guys are fractious by nature because they're conspiratorial and purist and they're not awesome when it comes to rational argument and compromise. And so they're always denouncing and beating one another to death. And I don't think that will change. And I think that's to all of our benefit.

Kara Swisher: Right. And I hope they never change. Right, because they will continue to do so. I agree with you. I'm always like, the minute Trump leaves the picture, it degenerates really rather quickly.

Rachel Maddow: The conspiratorial right is inherently fractious. And that's part of why they're a bad bet for governance, because they're constantly skizzing against each other.

Kara Swisher: They're like the tech-bros by nature, right? And they're shit-stirrers and breakers of things. They're sort of like toddlers, almost like the tech-bros. But you know what I call tech-bros now? Technically broken. I keep repeating that until it catches on. You can use it anytime, Rachel. Please, you'll popularize it, if you will. Technically broken.

Kara Swisher: All right, Rachel, one more quick break, and we will be back for our last segment on predictions.

[AD BREAK]

Kara Swisher: Okay, Rachel, let's hear a prediction. I can make one too, but I would like you to.

Rachel Maddow: Do you want, you go first.

Kara Swisher: Well, I'm living for two things. I think Gavin Newsom's done very well with his tweeting of Trump fake, mimicking Trump, which is really great. But I'm really enjoying the AI boys fighting. Elon Musk and Sam Altman are going at it again. Musk alleged that Apple engaged in antitrust violations, making it impossible for AI companies other than OpenAI to reach the top of the App Store. Musk says xAI will take immediate legal action. Altman responded to a claim saying, "This is a remarkable claim, given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn't like."

Kara Swisher: And Musk responded saying, you had three million responses to this, and I have many more followers, and I didn't have nearly as many. And Sam Altman delivered the fantastic, and only gay people can do this, slap, which was "skill issues." I predict this war is going to get worse, because I think that Elon will do anything. There is a weird anger that he has towards Sam Altman, who he used to be aligned with. They did OpenAI together and he will not rest until he is somehow sullied. You can have your opinions about Sam Altman all you want, or any of these tech people, but this is going to get, I think, worse. As Grok continues to crater, a founder just left, and so Elon's going to focus his attention away from Trump, although I do think he did start the Epstein thing, and continue to go at anything that has to do with OpenAI and try to kill it.

Rachel Maddow: Does Musk have stick-to-itiveness problems, though?

Kara Swisher: Does he? Yeah, absolutely. He is like a, what's a bird, a hummingbird? He flits. He flits, he flots.

Rachel Maddow: There's a song. What is that? Oh, it's in Sound of Music. It's a Sound of Music song. It goes back to Julie Andrews, the villainess.

Kara Swisher: I was just going to say. We're back to Julie Andrews. No, the villainess in that is my favorite character of all time, the Baroness.

Rachel Maddow: Oh.

Kara Swisher: The Baroness. Remember her? The Baroness.

Rachel Maddow: Susan watches The Sound of Music like three times a year.

Kara Swisher: As she should.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah. As she should. I go get on the exercise bike.

Kara Swisher: Do you? I can't handle it. It's such a brilliant thing.

Rachel Maddow: It is, but three times a year, really?

Kara Swisher: There's an idea that it's anti-gay because all the Germans are gay coding and all the Austrians are like hikers or something like that. I just heard that. I'm like, what are you talking about? Rolf is just an asshole. He's not gay.

Rachel Maddow: Oh, for goodness sake. Also, there can be gay assholes. It happens.

Kara Swisher: I agree. Oh, hello. Nazis had a whole division of them. They did get killed, as you know, as a studier of the Nazis. They did kill Ernst Röhm and his band of gays before they got into power. Anyway, on that note.

Rachel Maddow: They didn't call them the band of gays.

Kara Swisher: The band of gays. Mean gays. It sounded better in the German.

Rachel Maddow: I know. There's way more mean gays than you realize.

Kara Swisher: Okay. Let's hear a prediction from you.

Rachel Maddow: Okay. I have a couple of things that are just like a heads up in terms of things that I think are going to get more important.

Kara Swisher: OK.

Rachel Maddow: One is the U.S. attorneys scandal. So this started in Albany, Northern District of New York, and then New Jersey with Alina Habba, and then in California and then in Las Vegas. Trump is, it would appear to be illegally installing U.S. attorneys. And U.S. attorneys doesn't sound like that big a deal, but these are the people who prosecute federal crimes in these states and districts. And there's a real question as to whether or not it's possible to have federal law enforcement legally in any of these states where he effectively illegally installed these U.S. attorneys. So this is a slow burn story but it's going to become a bigger one because he's trying something that isn't working and it's going to result in a confrontation with the courts and with federal district judges. Which it has in New Jersey. It has already. And that's just going to break one way or the other. And it's just worth watching there because that could be an important constitutional moment.

Rachel Maddow: I would say it's also really worth watching Trump's threat that he wants to redo the census. And again, census sounds boring, but there is a universe in which Trump is worried that he's going to lose the House in the midterms in 2026. And so he says, OK, we need a new census because actually the last census, I'm nullifying it because it had immigrants in it and therefore it doesn't count. Therefore, all the congressional districts nationwide that were set by that last census, those are no longer in effect. Therefore, we cannot have the 2026 midterm elections the way we're supposed to because those congressional districts are illegal and we'll have to delay it.

Rachel Maddow: I mean, it's a sort of doomsday scenario in terms of the technical part of our democracy and continuing to have elections. But that census part of it is a key piece. So those are worth watching.

Kara Swisher: Paying attention to. Of course it's going for the census.

Rachel Maddow: It's going for the census, but it's a way to go for elections.

Kara Swisher: Right, right. Over, under on 50-50, 40-30, what is that?

Rachel Maddow: No, I mean, I think that they've floated the "let's have a new census" thing in part to see what the reaction to it is. And people have treated it like that's weird or that's like a technically infeasible thing. Hey, guess what? He doesn't actually want a new census.

Kara Swisher: Yes. He just wants to slow it down.

Rachel Maddow: That's a very good point. It's not to get a new census. Don't assume any good faith on the part of these arguments. The takeover of D.C. is not about crime. The attempt to nullify the census is not about the equality of the census. All of these things are all about what everything he does is for, which is to accrue more power and to make it more dangerous and difficult to oppose him or criticize him. And slow down the possibly inevitable, which is his defeat.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. And so that one potentially positive thing to look for is that I do think the mRNA funding decision has to be reversed. I think that that was a mistake. I think RFK Jr. blew it in terms of the announcing the cutoff of mRNA vaccine funding. mRNA technology would be like us opting out of penicillin. I mean it just doesn't make sense. Which we just did.

Rachel Maddow: Right. Right. Did you see that thing the Washington Post, which is the new house organ for carcinosis from the Trump administration? The opinion section ran a piece by why we tabled mRNA. And we tabled mRNA funding because the American people, for some reason, have suspicions and they don't trust mRNAs, says, right. We just appoint, Trump just put a guy in the health department who says that Wi-Fi gives you leaky brain, says that HIV doesn't cause AIDS and that COVID was genetically engineered to spare the Jews.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I wonder why people have weird ideas about vaccine technologies.

Rachel Maddow: There you go.

Kara Swisher: So I actually think the mRNA decision is bad enough. And that pushback in the Washington Post is part of the reason. I think, actually, that they are going to have to reverse it.

Rachel Maddow: Oh, no, the Post didn't push back. They published a positive piece by the guy who did it.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, the op-ed.

Rachel Maddow: But that op-ed was so weak. If that's the argument for why you're doing it, they feel the need to make the argument. The argument is risible.

Kara Swisher: That's a fair point. And it's such important technology. The Post also had an editorial. It's such a heinous public. David and I talked about it this week. But saying that, hey, maybe D.C. needs more crime fighting. I nearly walked over there and slapped them. I just was like, I need to now go down there and slap them at this point. Turns out having a billionaire running stuff doesn't make it good. Technically broken, Rachel.

Rachel Maddow: I think actually your prediction was going to be that you were going to the UFC fight at the White House.

Kara Swisher: Oh, well, I was wrong.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah, I don't know.

Kara Swisher: Not unless they're going to use me as a prop like a chair.

Rachel Maddow: Oh, yeah, yeah. They're breaking a chair over somebody's head.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, you'd be a great UFC fighter. You'd be a great wrestler.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah, yeah. Remember, I'm taller than people expect.

Kara Swisher: That's true.

Rachel Maddow: I'm noodley. I'm going to slam the shit out of people, I think.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, I really appreciate you doing this. I've gotten to know you a little bit. I think you're a wonderful person, but you are doing God's work, I think. And I think people don't realize how funny you are and everything else and how substantive you are. Please read her books, all of them. They have changed my life in a lot of ways. I read stuff I didn't know, and I'm a very big student of history, both ultras. Is there another season of Ultra coming?

Rachel Maddow: There is a new podcast coming. It is not a season of Ultra, but for fans of Ultra, you will find a lot that you like.

Kara Swisher: Great. That's really good stuff. I didn't know, and I knew a lot of stuff. And Prequel is a wonderful book. Everybody read it. That's the part of, I love your show, but that stuff I just adore. I think it's amazing. Kara Swisher, I'm very thankful for you. Thank you very much.

Rachel Maddow: Thank you. I'm going to read us out. We want to hear from you. Send us your questions about business, tech, or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT. Okay, that's the show. Thanks for listening to Pivot. Be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We'll be back next week. Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Zoe Marcus, Taylor Griffin, and Kevin Oliver. Ernie Enderdot engineered this episode. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Make sure to follow Pivot on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com slash pod. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.

Kara Swisher: And Rachel, a jar of mayonnaise is on the way.

Rachel Maddow: Thanks, Kara. So gross.