The Rachel Maddow Show
Trump fills administration with 'big team of losers' that voters have already rejected
Tue, 11 Feb 2025
Rachel Maddow runs through a surprisingly lengthy list of people Donald Trump has chosen to work in his administration who had previously lost elections. Being rejected by voters did not disqualify them from serving in representative government, as far as Trump is concerned.
Chapter 1: Who is Rod Blagojevich and why is he controversial?
I told my nephew Alex he just turned 26 today. I called him for his birthday, and I said, it's too bad you're not four years older, because I could have given you a U.S. Senate seat for your birthday. You know what I mean? I've got this thing, and it's f***ing golden. And I'm just not giving it up for f***ing nothing. I'm not going to do it.
I'm not going to give it up for f***ing nothing. It's f***ing golden. Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich tried to sell Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat. He tried to use that Senate seat appointment essentially to extort things from all sorts of people, all sorts of ways he thought he should get paid. for making that eventual appointment.
He wanted a six-figure job for himself after his governorship. He wanted his wife put on corporate boards for another six-figure payout. He wanted big campaign donations. He demanded a cabinet position for himself in Obama's new government. Or better yet, he wanted to be an ambassador. He really liked the idea of being an ambassador. Rod Blagojevich, as I mentioned, did a lot of this on tape.
He was eventually charged with trying to shake down a Chicago newspaper and a Chicago children's hospital. He was charged with trying to shake down people who had contracts with the government for kickback campaign contributions. He was charged with lying to the FBI and he was charged with trying to sell that Senate seat. Ultimately, Rod Blagojevich was convicted and he got 14 years in prison.
But you know what? he might yet get to be ambassador to something. It might yet work. It just took a while and a long stint in prison in the meantime. Because today, President Donald Trump said he is going to pardon Rod Blagojevich. In confirming the pardon today, President Trump denied widespread reports that he's also going to name Rod Blagojevich ambassador to Serbia,
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Chapter 2: How has Donald Trump used pardons in his administration?
When Trump was asked about that today, he said, no, he doesn't think he's gonna name him ambassador to Serbia, now at least, quote, but I would. He's now cleaner than anyone in this room. He's now cleaner. Yeah, because you just cleaned him. Would Donald Trump really pardon a felon and then name that person to be an ambassador? Yes, yes, he would. Jared Kushner's dad, Charles, he was a felon.
Trump pardoned him already and then named him ambassador to France. Hey, Paris, here's your felon. Glad you're one of our most important allies in the world. And, you know, maybe Rod Blagojevich will be on his way to Belgrade as ambassador if he did. That really would be effing golden, right?
I mean, took him a while to cash in on this extortion plot, but he got there in the end with an assist from Donald Trump. Blagojevich and Charles Kushner, of course, would make a great sort of nucleus of the diplomatic core for Donald Trump, perhaps alongside New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
You may recall that New York City's unctuous mayor, Eric Adams, was indicted in September for allegedly taking foreign campaign donations and bribes, including from the government of Turkey. Mayor Adams denies the allegations, but he then spent campaign season and since sucking up to Donald Trump in the most public and humiliating ways possible. Now, tonight, Trump's Justice Department
has ordered the supposedly so independent federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, main justice, Trump's appointees there, have ordered SDNY that they must drop the charges against Eric Adams. Now, I mean, SDNY has some decisions to make, even if they do drop these charges. It seems pretty clear that New York City is not interested in having Eric Adams around anymore.
I do not think that he will be reelected. But hey, maybe he could be Trump's new ambassador to Turkey. He's already got like half their stuff. He could be like, I'm moving into the embassy, but actually, can I just put a return label on all this stuff you shipped me? Again, he denies those allegations. I want to show you something here. See if you can spot the pattern here. A few days ago,
Donald Trump appointed a new spokesperson for the Defense Department. His name is Sean Parnell. If that name sounds at all familiar, it's because the last thing he did in politics was fail in his effort to win a U.S. Senate seat from Pennsylvania.
Mr. Parnell dropped out of the Republican primary after a judge took away custody of his children and ruled that Mr. Parnell had been violent and abusive toward the children and his wife. of dropping her off on an interstate on the side of the road when she was six months pregnant and telling her to get an abortion. She accused him of choking and strangling her.
He denies the allegations, but that all came out during the campaign. And after the judge's ruling in that case, Mr. Parnell dropped out of the Republican primary and he thus failed to win that U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania. That is the last thing that Sean Parnell did in public life. That's the last thing he did in politics. Now Donald Trump has named him spokesman for the Pentagon.
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Chapter 3: Why does Trump appoint candidates who lost elections?
Lori Chavez de Riemer lost her House seat in 2024 in Oregon. Trump named her to run the U.S. Labor Department. Brandon Williams lost his House seat in 2024 in New York. Trump named him to run the National Nuclear Security Administration. God help us all. Lee Zeldin lost his race for New York governor. Trump named him to run the EPA.
Caroline Leavitt lost her campaign for a congressional seat in New Hampshire. Trump named her White House press secretary. The only thing wrestling executive Linda McMahon ever did in politics was lose two consecutive U.S. Senate races in Connecticut. Trump named her secretary of education. The last thing Tulsi Gabbard ever did in politics was disastrously lose a presidential run in 2020.
Trump has named her director of national intelligence, which is like a horse walks into a bar joke without a horse or a bar. The only thing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ever did in politics was run and then quit a presidential campaign this year. Now he's Trump's nominee to lead Health and Human Services. Who is Harmeet Dhillon? Harmeet Dhillon lost a race for Republican Party chair this year.
Then Trump named her to lead the Justice Department Civil Rights Division. Sam Brown lost a Nevada Senate race this year. Trump has put him at the VA. Dave Weldon lost a race for state legislator in Florida. Trump has now named him to lead the CDC race. Dan Bishop lost the attorney general's race in North Carolina this past year. Trump has made him the number two official at OMB.
Bo Hines just lost a congressional race in North Carolina. So Trump put him on his new crypto board. Joe Kent has lost two consecutive races for Congress in Washington state. Trump just named him head of the National Counterterrorism Center. You noticing a theme here? I mean, I could go on, but are you noticing a theme?
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of appointing election losers?
I mean, people keep saying no one elected Elon Musk, and that is definitely true. But, you know, at least in his case, he didn't try. He didn't run for something and have the people resoundingly say, no, we don't want you. We'd prefer someone else and not you. And so you will lose this race.
But in this second term, they really are stuffing the whole administration with people who have not just once upon a time lost an election here or there. All politicians at some point usually lose something. Now, this is like the last thing you did was lose a thing.
They almost seem to be going out of their way to find people for whom the last thing they did in politics, the last thing they did in public life was ask the public to approve of them. And the public said, no, we do not want you. It's almost as if they are going out of their way to say, oh, you, the people are saying no. We say that doesn't matter because you may not want us.
You may not want this. You may not want us. But this is who and what you're getting and you're stuck with it. Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote her famous, brilliant book about Abraham Lincoln building his brave, capable government out of a team of rivals. With Trump, it's like a big team of losers, people who the American people explicitly do not want.
People who just had the opportunity to be voted into office by the American people, and the American people said definitively, no, don't want you. And so Trump is saying, well, that's who you're getting, and you'll like it. How many of these folks can I find? So there's a lot going on, like there is every day now. Tonight, more tragic news. Tonight, yet another fatal plane crash.
We are three weeks into this new administration. And as of today, we've had just in that three-week period, we've had the deadliest fatal plane crash in more than 20 years. The midair collision over the Potomac River in Washington that killed 67 people. That was followed a couple days later by the crash that killed seven people and injured 24 more people on the ground in Philadelphia.
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Chapter 5: What recent aviation incidents have occurred under Trump?
That was followed by a plane catching fire on the runway in Houston, forcing all the passengers to evacuate downstairs in slides. That was followed by the crash between a plane and a tug at the airport at Chicago O'Hare, critically injuring an airport worker. That was followed by this Japan airplane's
slicing into the wing of a Delta plane at SeaTac that was followed by another deadly crash at the end of last week. Ten people dead in a Bering air crash in Alaska, just outside of Nome, Alaska. And now, today, another fatal crash as a small jet slid off the runway at the airport in Scottsdale, Arizona and smashed into another jet. One person is dead. Three are injured.
We'll be watching for more news on that as it develops this evening. But again, that crash is in Scottsdale. And this is the fourth fatal aviation incident in the United States in three weeks. One midair collision, two single airplane crashes, and now two planes smashing into one another just off an airport runway. When's the last time we had four fatal aviation incidents in three weeks?
The administration's explanation thus far has been to blame diversity somehow and also to say, well, you know, we'll take care of it. We'll have the cost cutters who work for the president's top campaign donor get to work in getting into the aviation system. None of the kids who work for Elon Musk have any aviation experience or safety experience or any experience whatsoever.
doing anything like this, except there is that one kid working for Musk who appears to have been pretty deeply involved in working in and around criminal hacking and extortion groups. So at least there's that. So there's a lot going on. There's a lot going on every day.
But so as to not get too overwhelmed with the pace of things, with the, I think what we're all experiencing as this torrent of bad news. I do think it's possible to recognize that not everything sort of fits in the same bucket. Not all of these things are the same, right? So in one category, I would put bad outcomes, right? Plane crashes, bird flu jumping species and sparking new outbreaks.
American farmers having been told by the government that if they install new fencing and dig a new well and upgrade their electrical, the government will subsidize that, will reimburse them for doing that. Now that those American farmers have spent that money, the Trump administration has decided they're not in fact paying them for it. So now those farmers are potentially going to go bankrupt.
Right. The shuttering of programs that prevent the spread of multidrug resistant tuberculosis, programs that stop famines, programs that test cancer drugs and all the rest. All of these things are are bad outcomes. I mean, I would even say like Charles Kushner, that's a bad outcome. Right. Having a convicted felon as the ambassador to one of our most important allies, that itself is bad.
Rod Blagojevich, that's bad. Pardoning politicians for profound and proven corruption. That's just a bad outcome on its face. So that's one category. So there's a second category, which is self-dealing and abusive office.
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Chapter 6: How is Trump's administration affecting federal programs?
It's not just self-dealing and corruption. It's a third category that poses the risk of what I would call autocratic breakthrough. That's like the political science term for it. It's not just something turning out bad. It's not just you doing things in a way that is corrupt or for your own self rather than for the people you're supposed to be serving.
It is breaking systems so that you can't be stopped. It's when they do things with their power that aren't just bad, that aren't just corrupt or self-dealing. They are designed to change the government and the country and the system so they can never be removed from power. So opposition to them becomes impossible or illegal or dangerous. So it doesn't matter what we want or what we don't want.
It doesn't matter what we intend to vote for or vote against. They're staying anyway, and they'll do what they want regardless of how the rest of the country feels about it. That's autocratic breakthrough. And in that category, there's stuff to watch. The attacks on the media are not important because you have to like the media.
They're important because without the media, the public's not gonna know things the government doesn't want them to know. The attacks on the inspectors general, on the oversight agencies, they're not necessarily important because you have to love the inspectors general on the oversight agencies. But again, it's a categorical change.
In taking out the inspectors general and the oversight agencies, these guys are protecting themselves from being investigated or being stopped by those watchdogs, but they're also preventing the public from knowing about whatever malfeasance may be going on.
And in that category, the autocratic breakthrough category, the changing the system so we can't be removed from office so that we can act without regard for what the American people want or say or do, In that category, the big kahuna is the attack on the courts. You may have seen the headline tonight. We had a federal judge block the big cuts they just imposed on scientific and medical research.
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Chapter 7: What is the concept of 'autocratic breakthrough'?
The amount of scientific and medical research funding and the way that funding is structured is set up by law. And to cut it unilaterally is to violate that law. So those scientific and medical research cuts have been blocked tonight by a federal judge.
We've also had a federal judge block the resign or else threats against millions of federal workers that are trying to induce them into quitting their jobs. That has been blocked by a federal judge. We've had a federal judge block the Elon Musk improper access to the Treasury's payment system. That has been blocked by a federal judge.
We've had a federal judge block their efforts to send three Venezuelan men to Guantanamo. We had a federal judge block the release of the names of FBI agents who worked on January 6th cases. We've had three different judges block the effort to overturn birthright citizenship, the American principle enshrined in the Constitution that says if you're born here, you're American.
We have had two federal judges now block the government funding halt. We have had a federal judge block the shutdown of USAID and the order that everybody at USAID has to be fired or put on leave. We've had judges stop thing after thing after thing. that they've been trying to do. And all of those losses in court, I mean, we're only three weeks into the administration.
How have they lost in court this many times already? Well, it's because they're doing a lot of things all at once that seem, at least at first glance, to be quite illegal. And so judges are stopping them from doing these things as fast as lawsuits can be filed. But the important thing here is the response to these court orders. Because in, for example, the funding halt case,
where the judges are saying, you cannot halt these funds, these funds have to go ahead. In the USAID case, where the judge says, you cannot shut USAID and put the whole staff on leave, you have to reverse that. In those cases already, we have had the new administration lose in court. And we have also had the new administration appear to defy those court orders.
In both cases, the plaintiffs have gone back to court in those cases saying, Your Honor, your ruling is not being obeyed. They're still doing what you ordered them not to do. And that has bad consequences, true, right, directly. There's a reason these cases were brought in the first place, which is you can't do this illegal thing. And also, if you do this thing, it causes harm.
So the fact that they're defying the court orders directly has bad consequences. USAID still being shut has bad consequences. Those funding halts still have bad consequences. But categorically, the most important thing here is their willingness to defy the courts because that is the ultimate autocratic breakthrough.
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Chapter 8: How are the courts responding to Trump's policies?
A declaration that the rule of law does not apply to them, that it cannot constrain anything they want to do, that is worse than any one outcome, right? That is a forever decision. That means nothing anyone else wants and no court ever rules against will ever again have any impact on what our government wants to do to us. That is a category of its own. That is the key to autocratic breakthrough.
And that is where we find ourselves on the precipice looking over the edge tonight. Elizabeth Warren joins us next. Stay with us. Amid everything, did you notice the little announcement that the Trump administration has ordered a halt to all federal funding for electric vehicle chargers across the United States? EV charging stations.
You might think that would be a problem for Trump's billionaire co-president, his largest campaign donor, Elon Musk, who runs the electric car company Tesla. But you know what? There's a reason he's not complaining. Quite the contrary. And it's because Elon Musk's company, Tesla, already has the biggest private charging network in the country, bigger than all of his competitors.
So as he posted on his social media site last year, quote, take away the subsidies. It will only help Tesla. Well, now Donald Trump has done just that, leaving Tesla unchallenged as the largest EV charging network in the country with no one really having any chance to catch up to them. Then there's one of Musk's other companies, SpaceX, a huge government contractor.
Back in December, the New York Times reported that the Defense Department's inspector general had opened a review into SpaceX for potentially violating rules about keeping sensitive government secrets out of the hands of our foreign adversaries. Elon Musk's own foreign travel and his contacts with foreign governments had reportedly not been disclosed regularly to the U.S.
government, which not only impeded his own security clearance, but also reportedly led, in part at least, to this inspector general's security review of potential national security risks surrounding his companies and specifically him. Well, when Donald Trump took office, he fired that inspector general conducting that review. along with 17 other inspectors general across the government.
Then there's Elon Musk's social media company, formerly known as Twitter. When Elon Musk took over that company, one of his goals was to turn it into a digital payment company. He wanted everybody to start using Twitter the way they used Zelle or Venmo to send money electronically. Starting this year, he announced a big new plan to do that.
But, you know, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the government regulator that makes sure credit card companies and banks can't charge you junk fees or unnecessarily hike up your interest rates and screw you over that way. The CFPB also regulates the kinds of digital money transfers that Elon Musk now wants to do at Twitter.
And as Lever News points out today, the CFPB has just been finalizing new rules for that kind of payment system. When over the weekend, they got shut down. Musk and the Trump administration shut the CFPB down entirely.
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