By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 10, 2025 ~
Donald Trump
Last Thursday, while taking questions from the press in the Oval Office (where the 59-Pulitzer Prize winning Associated Press is still banned by Donald Trump) the President called out by name two MSNBC news program hosts that he said “should be forced to resign.” The journalists are Nicolle Wallace and Rachel Maddow, both of whom have doggedly connected the dots for their viewers on Trump’s grifting and unsavory alignment with his largest campaign donors and with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s attack on these two specific journalists followed a more general attack on the MSNBC cable network on February 18 during a Sean Hannity interview. Five days later, Joy Reid, another MSNBC program host – and one of Trump’s worst critics – learned that her program had been abruptly cancelled. (See our report: News Host Joy Reid Raises Threat of Trump Selling U.S. to Putin; Ten Days Later Her Show Is Cancelled.)
We have been monitoring the evening news reporting at MSNBC since our report on the cancellation of the Joy Reid program. If Trump expected his attacks to silence his on-air critics at the network, he has failed. The program hosts have, instead, doubled down.
This past Friday evening, after showing scenes of protests across the United States against Trump, Maddow said this:
“The latest Reuters-Ipsos polling shows that while Americans did approve of Trump on foreign policy by two points in January – 39 to 37 [percent], they now disapprove of Trump on foreign policy by 13 points, 50 to 37 percent. When Americans are asked whether they personally sympathize more with Ukraine or Russia, 56 percent of Americans say Ukraine, 3 percent say Russia. 3 percent! Trump is in lonely territory here.”
The Maddow program is followed on MSNBC by a news program hosted by Lawrence O’Donnell at 10 p.m. On Friday evenings, standing in for O’Donnell is another MSNBC host, Ali Velshi. Last Friday, Velshi spared no mercy on the Trump-Elon Musk administration, stating this:
“We’ve entered the Trump-Musk funhouse. Nothing is as it seems. Things are deliberately distorted, deliberately absurd, deliberately untrustworthy, and that is by design.
“It’s to keep you disoriented as the world as we know it is smashed and reshaped.
“Our task is to try to find the exit; to not be put off course by the wavy mirrors showing us a fake reality.
“So we’re going to talk later about how Elon Musk is on the ballot in Wisconsin in an election coming up in three weeks. [Figuratively, that is.]
“Voters still have the last word in America. So we’ll see what they say.
“There’s a Governor’s race in Virginia, a state seriously impacted by Musk’s DOGE chainsaw.
“Donald Trump is a 78-year old man with a bottomless need for attention and a tortured relationship with facts.
“Elon Musk is the richest man on earth — wealth created in no small part thanks to your taxpayer dollars – who is a freak. He reportedly has 14 kids with 4 different women; wants to colonize Mars; admits to using drugs on the regular, and claims to be running multiple companies and the U.S. government simultaneously while posting 1000 times a week on social media.
“He’s not a normal person. And while Americans can tolerate that in a tech tycoon, they didn’t vote for that guy to be president. Which is kind of what he is now.”
For more background on Musk’s drug use, see our report: The U.S. Government Is Plowing Billions into SpaceX, Overlooking Drug Use, Sex Parties, and Elon Musk’s Coziness with Putin.
Trump is attempting to replace capitalism with corporate fascism/authoritarianism while juggling the tricky task of keeping his disparate benefactors happy with his performance and trying to silence any media that fails to fall in line.
Most of Trump’s benefactors are 1 percenters, like Trump himself. They can’t be too happy this morning. At 7:37 a.m., Dow futures were down over 400 points.
