WHEN THE BELL TOLLS

Rachel Maddow Says It’s Time for Trump ‘Crimes’ to Be Prosecuted

Trump now faces a hostile Congress.

MS NOW host Rachel Maddow has called for prosecutions after Donald Trump and the GOP’s crushing midterm defeat.

The president now has to suffer through his final two years in the White House with a Democratic Congress, after a blue wave destroyed his party’s majorities in both chambers.

Maddow called for greater accountability in Trump’s final chapter and even proposed prosecutions. Congressional Democrats were widely expected to launch various investigations into Trump and his orbit if they won Tuesday’s election.

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“Those things aren’t just like, wow, that sure got dirty. That smells bad. People don’t like it,” she said during MS NOW’s election coverage.

“No, those things must be answered. In the same way, on January 6, when I sat in our studio on January 6, 2021, and we watched that guy carrying the podium across the chamber. And I looked at it and I thought, ‘oh, this means a lot of things about that guy and what’s happening in this room and Donald Trump and the future of our republic. But you know what? What I see when I look at that? I see a crime. And that needs to be prosecuted as a crime.’

“Political violence is violence, which is illegal. Corruption is illegal. Conflicts of interest are illegal. Nepotism is illegal. And all of this stuff will be pursued so that it doesn’t become de facto the law of the land and the way that we conduct ourselves as a country moving forward.”

Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection, which saw his supporters storm the Capitol after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

Ahead of the election, voters deemed “corruption” a top issue.

It was the second-biggest issue for voters in a Harris poll for the Guardian in late October, and the top issue for respondents to a CNBC All-America Economic Survey a week earlier.

The GOP’s collapse has largely been blamed on the 80-year-old. The elections became a referendum on him, which spelled trouble for the party as his approval ratings sank into the 30s, and he pushed ahead with his unpopular war with Iran.

Behind closed doors, Republicans have already started to point the finger at him.

“There was a point earlier this year where we really felt like we could defy history,” an unnamed GOP lawmaker told Politico ahead of the election. “And then Trump bombed Iran. And it was just one thing after another.”

Those words matched up with an 11th-hour Daily Mail/Ipsos poll on Tuesday, which found that 55 percent of registered voters thought he’d hurt GOP candidates’ chances.

Trump stumped for several key candidates, including Ken Paxton in Texas and Darline Graham in South Carolina. Both were handed crushing defeats.

It was a pattern Maddow pointed to ahead of the election.

“Whatever president is in the White House, there’s always a backlash against the president’s party in the midterms,” she told Seth Meyers on his Late Night show in September.

“And so smart presidents, humble presidents will say to members of their own party, ‘Hey, I know you got a tough race. I know I’m not popular in your district. It’s OK if you want to diss me a little bit. It’s OK if you want to distance yourself. I know you love me. It’s fine. Do what you need to do. We need to get you re-elected.’”

“Can you imagine Trump saying, ‘Let’s not make this about me; feel free to diss me?’” Maddow said. “We’ve got this situation on the one hand, a very normal situation where the president’s unpopular and members of his party are trying to figure out how to get re-elected.

“And on the other hand, we’ve got this impossible situation where he’s not just unpopular: he is the least popular president at this point in his presidency of any president in modern history.”

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Harry ThompsonNews Reporter

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