The Rachel Maddow Show
Maddow: Trump admin shows folly of blind obedience to someone who doesn't know what they're doing
Fri, 21 Mar 2025
Rachel Maddow reports on the ridiculous, bungled spectacle of the Trump administration's release of unredacted documents related to the JFK assassination. Donald Trump appears to have thoughtlessly announced the release of the documents, and the sycophants who serve him followed his order to the letter, apparently without thinking about what they were doing. The result was the unredacted publishing of the social security numbers of people who were involved in the investigation, including many people who are still alive, like Trump's own lawyer, Joe diGenova.
What led to the unredacted release of JFK documents?
Thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. Are you ready for this one? These geniuses. You know, if you are gonna have somebody who consolidates the whole 250-year-old tripartite system of checks and balances that we got from the founding fathers in this country, if you're gonna have someone who says, You know, there are parts of the Constitution that must be terminated.
If you're going to have somebody who calls himself a king and who says elections don't count unless he wins them, if you're going to have an overthrow of the Constitutional Republic in favor of all power consolidated in one man who says term limits don't apply to him and Congress and the courts don't constrain him and all the rest of it, if you're going to do it,
If you are going to abolish the American form of government in favor of an autocratic and unopposed rule by one man, he better be good at it. Am I right? You know, he better be compas mentis. On the ball. If you're going to, like, overthrow 250 years of who we are as a country to instead just be like, let's say you.
Like, if we're just going to have it be that one dude, you just hope that dude is... with it, right? Or instead, you could have what we have. On Monday this week, President Donald Trump went to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., where he has recently fired the entire board and appointed himself as the new chairman.
While skulking around that national cultural treasure on Monday, where he now personally intends to choose awardees, so get ready for a lot of, you know, kid rock and children's choirs who sing songs about the greatness of Donald Trump—
While he was skulking around the halls of the Kennedy Center on Monday, President Trump on Monday announced, surprise, that the very next day he would be releasing all files related to the investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. All files on this subject with no redactions would be released the next day on Tuesday.
And so, because he said so, and what else is government other than just whatever Donald Trump says, because he said so, the National Archives on Tuesday, in fact, posted online over 60,000 pages of government documents on this subject. So he says it on Monday, they posted this stuff on Tuesday. Now, It's Friday Eve now, right? It's Thursday night.
For all the conspiracy theories and drama that we as a country have built up around the JFK assassination in the past 60-plus years, ask yourself this. Over the last couple of days, have you, like, heard anything in the news? Have you seen any big headlines about the amazing revelations in these documents?
Have you seen news stories about how, wow, these new documents finally shed new light on the assassination or that some previously unknown fact about it has been revealed and this changes everything? Have you seen any news stories like that? No, no, no, you have not. And that is because the documents that genius Donald Trump insisted on Monday had to be released on Tuesday.
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