The Rachel Maddow Show
Maddow: To block Trump's agenda, help Republican politicians find their spines
Thu, 20 Feb 2025
Rachel Maddow emphasizes the importance of resistance by Republican legislators to Donald Trump's agenda, and points out that the unpopularity of Trump's actions may help that resistance politically, but also some senators, like Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, have enough expertise in their chosen field to know how destructive Trump and his Cabinet are, and may be vulnerable to pressure on those issues.
Chapter 1: Why is Governor J.B. Pritzker concerned about democracy?
Let's do something different. Want some inspiration? I know this is like not typically the way that we start things, but I don't know. Complain, go ahead. Send me your complaints. Governor J.B. Pritzker is the governor of Illinois. He gave his state of the state speech today. And I'm going to show you some of it. I'm sure you about three minutes of it.
And I know this is a little bit of a weird thing to put at the top of a national newscast. But I just you know what? I think this is really something and I think you should watch it. This is from the end of his state of the state today. Check it out.
As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois, once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided that they wanted to march there.
The leaders of that march knew that the images of swastika-clad young men goose-stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population, so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps. The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly, but I know the history intimately and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here's what I've learned. The root that tears apart your house's foundation begins as a seed, a seed of distrust and hate and blame. The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn't arrive overnight.
It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame. I'm watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now.
After we've discriminated against, deported, or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities, once we've ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends, after that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face, what comes next?
All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don't want to repeat history, then for God's sake, in this moment, we better be strong enough to learn from it. My oath is to the constitution of our state and of our country. We don't have kings in America, and I don't intend to bend the knee to one.
If you think I'm overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this. It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. And all I'm saying is that when the five alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.
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Chapter 2: How is Kathy Hochul responding to Trump's actions in New York?
Another big state Democratic governor today, Kathy Hochul of New York, gave a shorter, more pugnacious version of kind of that same message today after Trump ordered the end to a popular congestion pricing program in New York City. And in so doing, he proclaimed himself the king.
He posted online a picture of himself in a crown with the phrase, long live the king, under a message about his action toward New York City. Here was New York Governor Kathy Hochul's response.
At 1.01 p.m. today, the US Department of Transportation emailed us a letter from Secretary Duffy announcing their attempt to end the congestion pricing program in the state of New York. At 1.58 p.m., President Donald Trump tweeted, long live the king. I'm here to say, New York hasn't labored under a king in over 250 years. And we are not. We sure as hell are not gonna start now.
The streets of this city where battles were fought, we stood up to a king and we won then. In case you don't know New Yorkers, when we're in a fight, we do not back down, not now, not ever.
At one point in her remarks today, Governor Hochul pulled out this photo that Trump had posted online of himself today, showing himself in a crown as a king. She held up a printout of that and said, the next time you're stuck in traffic, think of this. She then took questions from the press.
Is this marking a new era of your approach to the Trump administration? Or should we expect to see more resistance from you to things that he's doing? Or are you still going to continue your strategy of trying to find middle ground and maybe not poking the bear?
I think the bear has been poked.
The bear has been poked. Let me give you one more. And this is from a piece posted at The Nation tonight by the founders of Indivisible. We've talked to these founders on this show before. We've focused a lot on their organizing activities. They're a big grassroots national organizing group that has seen a record number of new chapters form in these last four weeks.
turning out people to make calls and show up at congressional and Senate offices to protest, to demand town halls from their elected representatives to attend those town halls, to pressure Democrats to fight harder and more quickly and more comprehensively against what Trump is doing, to try to persuade and shame Republicans into standing up against Trump at all.
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Chapter 3: What strategies are Democrats using to oppose Trump's agenda?
At The Nation, the Indivisible co-founders wrote today that Democratic members of Congress and senators should start pushing harder, specifically against the Republicans they serve with. Quote, "...break the norms around congressional collegiality. It's typically considered rude for one member of Congress to confront another in public, but these aren't typical times."
The complicity of congressional Republicans in the trashing of our democracy cries out for the kind of loud and frequent confrontation that will cause members of the Washington Post editorial board to clutch their pearls.
For those Republicans who refuse to face their constituents, Democrats should travel to their districts or states in order to publicize the real costs of MAGA appeasement to working families in those places. Quote, get creative and give protesters and activists a morally righteous conflict to rally around.
Every time one of us, a family member, a community organizer, a representative, a senator, takes a step forward in this fight, a thousand pairs of eyes watch and learn. Courage is contagious. Take that step and steel yourself with the knowledge that you are the defender of a 250-year experiment in self-governance, a real-life pluralistic democracy, imperfect as it is, striving to be more perfect.
Our predecessors deposed a brain-addled king. They crushed the violent insurrectionists of a slave-holding confederacy. They forced the robber barons to contend with workers and unions. They kicked the Nazis' asses throughout Europe. They broke the back of the Southern segregationist political bloc. They fought back against the terrorizing forces at Stonewall.
We have planted ourselves in stubborn opposition to monomaniacal fascists of one form or another for a quarter of a millennium. no entitled reality TV has been, backed by an addle-brained billionaire who cheats at video games, is going to roll over us now. Need some inspiration? 30 days into this new administration.
The radical nature of what's going on is waking something up in the braver politicians among us and in the activists as well. It is thus far not waking anything up, at least that we can tell, among Republicans in high elected office. And while that might sound like the dumbest Captain Obvious observation in the world,
It's one that I'm going to keep making because it is really, really crucially important to the outcome of this lightning speed authoritarian collapse that Trump is trying to force in Washington. I mean, not any one thing is going to do everything, right? Democrats getting big and getting smart in opposition, like we're seeing from governors, and that's going to matter.
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Chapter 4: Why is Senator Bill Cassidy's stance on vaccines significant?
Regular people broadly standing up and saying no and protesting and organizing and making it as hard as possible for him to keep doing what he's doing, that matters. The survival of the press so people know what he's doing, that matters.
But the closest you're going to get to stopping it at the source, to stopping, for example, the destruction of the American legal system, to stopping the destruction of our health system and the basic services that keep people alive and that keep the country functioning, the hardest leverage that can be applied against him at the source is what hypothetically would come from Republicans.
And I know, cynically, you may never expect to get that. But strategically, you cannot stop trying to get it because of its crucial importance. And I'm just going to give you one example here, just one case study. Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy. I always think of him as having kind of an unforgettable name, but a very memorable haircut.
He always looked to me like an otherwise healthy person who has just been gently electrocuted. But Senator Bill Cassidy is a senator. He's also a physician. He's a gastroenterologist. He got into the Senate in a campaign in 2014 that largely focused on his role as a doctor.
He was best known, including in that campaign, not just for being a good doctor for his individual patients, but for having championed in his home state of Louisiana, having championed a new free vaccination program for Louisiana school kids. Specifically, hepatitis B vaccination. And he frequently told this important, heartbreaking story about what he called his worst day as a doctor.
Senator Bill Cassidy, as a doctor, had an 18-year-old patient who had contracted hepatitis B. And as an 18-year-old, her health crashed. He had to scramble to have her airlifted to Shreveport, Louisiana, to get an emergency liver transplant.
He said in one interview with the Washington Post, quote, I was sitting there thinking, if we had vaccinated this girl with a $50 vaccine, we could have saved a $250,000 operation and a lifetime of $50,000 a year medical bills. And that was just one interview that he did about this case. But he's given a ton of interviews about this case. He talks about it all the time.
He talked about it for years. He still talks about it. He relayed that story again in his opening statement in the confirmation hearings that he oversaw for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. Senator Bill Cassidy is now chairman of the Health Committee in the Senate. And he explains his calling to public service
by telling that story of his personal experience with that patient, that tragedy of his young patient nearly losing her life for having not had a Hep B vaccination when she was little. That caused him to create a really important program that vaccinated tens of thousands of kids in his state.
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Chapter 5: What is the controversy surrounding Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s confirmation?
Many of them for diseases that weren't even casually contagious, like ridiculous diseases that are on that, like hepatitis B. Why would you give, you get the hepatitis B from, you know, from sharing needles or from like going to a really seasoned prostitute or from, uh, From, you know, sort of compulsive homosexual behavior.
Compulsive homosexual behavior or going to a really well-seasoned prostitute. That's the only way you get hepatitis B. He intones on Joe Rogan's podcast, which is not at all true. And that's okay. You can believe stuff that's not true. You can say anything you want on a podcast, knock yourself out.
But in a working political system, you probably don't then get confirmed as health secretary in the United States government. If the chairman of the health committee in the Senate that has to confirm you actually does know what he's talking about on this issue because he's a gastroenterologist who's devoted his life as a public servant to the cause of hep B vaccination saving young people's lives.
Senator Bill Cassidy nevertheless ate up that pile and cast his vote for Bobby Kennedy to be health secretary in the United States. He said that he'd had conversations with Kennedy that assured him that Kennedy wasn't essentially as crazy on this issue of vaccines as he seemed. He also, though, in the confirmation process, got an explicit assurance from Kennedy that
that if he were confirmed as health secretary, he wouldn't try to change the vaccine schedule for American kids. Well, now Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been sworn in as health secretary, and in his first full day on the job, wouldn't you know it, he confirmed that he definitely is going to look into that vaccine schedule, saying, quote, nothing's going to be off limits.
He said he wouldn't, but right away, he's doing it. Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana hasn't been brave yet. He does not feel inspired by calls to man the barricades to stand up for democracy. Honestly, he just does not appear to be inspired along these lines like some other Americans may be. But he does chair the health committee in the United States Senate.
And he did just vote to confirm someone who says that his physician's knowledge about vaccines is ridiculous. Because, what, Kennedy's sure that Bill Cassidy's 18-year-old patient must have gotten the hepatitis B from compulsive homosexual behavior or contact with a really well-seasoned prostitute?
Senator Bill Cassidy really did just vote to confirm someone who appears to have lied right to his face. under oath in the confirmation process on saying he wouldn't revisit the kids' vaccine schedule, something that Bill Cassidy has effectively worked on his whole life. So will Bill Cassidy get brave on this? can't afford to give up on that prospect as a country.
I should also mention that right now in this country, separate and apart from confirmation of anybody to anything, we have an active and apparently exploding measles outbreak in West Texas, which has now apparently crossed the border into New Mexico, an outbreak that appears to have been caused by people not getting the measles vaccine, the MMR vaccine.
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Chapter 6: How has Trump's foreign policy shifted U.S. alliances?
Do you think that Putin can be trusted in these negotiations?
No. Putin is a war criminal and should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed. Vladimir Putin has violated every tenet of international law and should be indicted and prosecuted in jail, possibly executed.
How big of a blunder was it for Hegseth to take out the NATO-Ukraine issue off the table?
Well, you know, I made a statement about that. And let me just say, Secretary Hegseth and I spoke while he was in Poland and I was in Munich. And I think to the extent that his subsequent statement was somewhat of a walk back, that was a favorable development.
And do you have any concerns after being there about the stability of the NATO alliance, given what the U.S. is doing with Russia?
The NATO alliance is very important. We've been drawn into two bloody wars. Massive. killing conflagrations in the last 100 years. I think the best way for a European general war to be avoided that would eventually cause us to become involved is to ensure that the rule of law that's been observed for 70 years in Europe be enforced and protected. That's why we have NATO.
That's why the European Union exists.
So thank you very much. And at that, he walks away at that point.
But you see that there's a foundation here for real leverage to stop what Trump is doing, or at least to try to stop it. I mean, he talks there about what his conversation with Secretary Hegseth might have caused. I think to the extent that his subsequent statement after we spoke was somewhat of a walkback, that was a favorable development. Senator Wicker talked to Pete Hegseth.
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