MSNBC host Rachel Maddow warned Americans on Monday not to become too distracted by the crass drama of Donald Trump’s incoming regime.
“There is a way to look upon the oligarch-ization of the American government as drama, as a kind of theater of greed, and maybe there'll be some good stories there,” Maddow said, later adding, “But for most of us, what's more important than what they do for themselves is what it does to everyone else.”
Maddow highlighted Elon Musk, co-chair of a planned advisory commission on slashing the federal budget. His car company, Tesla, has been under federal investigation due to a high number of crashes from cars using its automated driving system. However, now Trump’s transition team has recommended scrapping the crash-reporting requirement, which is key to monitoring the safety of those driving systems.
“I mean, they can't just say, well, you know, ‘This guy paid for the presidential election,’” Maddow says. “You can’t really just say that, ‘Hey, you kids getting off school buses, watch yourself. Unless and until you can start paying for your own president, you're fair game on the side of the road.’”
There is also investment banker Howard Lutnick, Trump's nominee to be commerce secretary. Lutnick is also co-chair of the Trump transition team and a big cryptocurrency backer. His brokerage firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, manages the assets of shady crypto outfit Tether, according to The Wall Street Journal.
And as Maddow explained, Tether has “[a]lleged links to the terrorist group Hamas, Russian arms dealers, the North Korean nuclear weapons program, Mexican drug cartels, and, for good measure, Chinese manufacturers of chemicals used to make fentanyl. So maybe car crashes aren’t your thing. Are any of those things any of your concerns?”
She points to the ill-advised nominations of Donald Trump Jr.’s (maybe former) fiancee Kimberly Guilfoyle and son-in-law’s felon father, Charles Kushner, to ambassadorships.
“It can sound like interesting drama to watch, right? Like ‘Succession’ style,” Maddow said. “Really rich people fighting and maneuvering among themselves to see who comes out on top, to see who gets to control what piece of the pie.”
Maddow then interviewed Timothy Snyder, a Yale University professor who has written books about the rise of oligarchies around the world.
Snyder says the Democratic Party needs to look forward and resist Trump’s oligarchy by offering up alternatives on how the government can work for the American people. There needs to be coordinated messaging by Democratic lawmakers “whose job it is to talk to the press every day. Not just about what's wrong, but actually about, hey, what the government could do,” Snyder said.
“It’s that lack of imagination, when things get terrible, we're going to think, okay, terrible, let's have less terrible, but we should be thinking about, ‘Hey, we actually have great people in this country, and we could have had a much better version of all of this, and we can get to that.’”
