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This Is the Moment Rachel Maddow Has Been Waiting For
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/magazine/rachel-maddow-trump.html
How the MSNBC host staked her show on Trump — and won the largest and most obsessive audience of her career.
Rachel Maddow was trying to get to work. She only had to get from the glass door of her doctor’s office to the tinted-windowed S.U.V. that was idling at the curb, waiting to spirit her to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, but there was a hitch. Maddow had torn three ligaments in her left ankle — fishing accident — and one of those ligaments ripped off a piece of her bone, so now she was lumbering toward the sidewalk, her foot strapped into a boot, her lanky body bent over crutches that creaked and boomed with every hit to the sidewalk. In Manhattan, this had the effect of a kind of ritualistic drumbeat, alerting every liberal within earshot to her presence.
A woman with a graying ponytail suddenly wriggled into Maddow’s path. “Rachel,” she said, extending her phone to secure a selfie for a friend in Oregon who watches her show every single night and was going to bug out when she saw this. Maddow smiled for the camera as a man in long shorts planted himself 20 feet away, holding his own phone up horizontally to film the scene. When he saw Maddow see him, he smiled and waved slowly, as if he were a proud relative capturing a milestone. Farther down the block, a woman screamed something incomprehensible in her direction. As Maddow finally neared the curb, a woman with silver hair and chunky glasses materialized at her side and said with blasé familiarity: “I don’t know what happened to you, but I just want to say I love you. Keep up the good work. Can I give you a hug?”
Maddow balanced on her good foot. She spread her crutches out to accommodate the stranger’s embrace. “What’s your name?” Maddow asked brightly, as if she had hobbled out expressly for the purposes of saying hello. “Emily,” she said. She made a perfunctory gesture toward the silent bald man next to her. “This is Ed, my ex-husband.”
“Big fan of yours,” Ed said, and he went in for a handshake, which Maddow was eager to meet until she discovered, midreach, that her ankle could not make the pivot to a second greeter. “Whoa,” Maddow said. “No twisting! Sorry!”
<snip>
At 8:57 on Sept. 23, the night before Representative Nancy Pelosi would call for an impeachment inquiry into Trump, Maddow limped out onto her show’s cavernous soundstage in Adidas sneakers and a black velvet blazer. She dumped her crutches, slid into her anchor chair and used the three minutes before she went on the air to scan a document and type silently into a computer hidden in her desktop. She wore a resting frown. Then, at precisely 9, she looked up into the camera lens, inhaled sharply and, suddenly animated, burst out: “What a time to be alive, right?”
She leaned familiarly toward the lens and put a bright spin on the latest Trump scandal that was swiftly coming into view. “You will always be able to look back at this time in your life and say: ‘You know, I was alive during that presidency. I remember how crazy it was,’?” she said. Then she segued into her signature move: a 25-minute soliloquy on the convoluted schemes swirling around the Trump-Ukraine incident, burrowing into a dense network of connections among Paul Manafort, Senator Mitch McConnell, Rudy Giuliani, the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, the Ukrainian natural-gas billionaire Dmitry V. Firtash and the former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. By the time she cut to her first commercial break, she had zoomed out so far that Trump’s July 25 phone call with the president of Ukraine appeared to be just one little pushpin on a map of vast global corruption.
</snip>
How the MSNBC host staked her show on Trump — and won the largest and most obsessive audience of her career.
Rachel Maddow was trying to get to work. She only had to get from the glass door of her doctor’s office to the tinted-windowed S.U.V. that was idling at the curb, waiting to spirit her to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, but there was a hitch. Maddow had torn three ligaments in her left ankle — fishing accident — and one of those ligaments ripped off a piece of her bone, so now she was lumbering toward the sidewalk, her foot strapped into a boot, her lanky body bent over crutches that creaked and boomed with every hit to the sidewalk. In Manhattan, this had the effect of a kind of ritualistic drumbeat, alerting every liberal within earshot to her presence.
A woman with a graying ponytail suddenly wriggled into Maddow’s path. “Rachel,” she said, extending her phone to secure a selfie for a friend in Oregon who watches her show every single night and was going to bug out when she saw this. Maddow smiled for the camera as a man in long shorts planted himself 20 feet away, holding his own phone up horizontally to film the scene. When he saw Maddow see him, he smiled and waved slowly, as if he were a proud relative capturing a milestone. Farther down the block, a woman screamed something incomprehensible in her direction. As Maddow finally neared the curb, a woman with silver hair and chunky glasses materialized at her side and said with blasé familiarity: “I don’t know what happened to you, but I just want to say I love you. Keep up the good work. Can I give you a hug?”
Maddow balanced on her good foot. She spread her crutches out to accommodate the stranger’s embrace. “What’s your name?” Maddow asked brightly, as if she had hobbled out expressly for the purposes of saying hello. “Emily,” she said. She made a perfunctory gesture toward the silent bald man next to her. “This is Ed, my ex-husband.”
“Big fan of yours,” Ed said, and he went in for a handshake, which Maddow was eager to meet until she discovered, midreach, that her ankle could not make the pivot to a second greeter. “Whoa,” Maddow said. “No twisting! Sorry!”
<snip>
At 8:57 on Sept. 23, the night before Representative Nancy Pelosi would call for an impeachment inquiry into Trump, Maddow limped out onto her show’s cavernous soundstage in Adidas sneakers and a black velvet blazer. She dumped her crutches, slid into her anchor chair and used the three minutes before she went on the air to scan a document and type silently into a computer hidden in her desktop. She wore a resting frown. Then, at precisely 9, she looked up into the camera lens, inhaled sharply and, suddenly animated, burst out: “What a time to be alive, right?”
She leaned familiarly toward the lens and put a bright spin on the latest Trump scandal that was swiftly coming into view. “You will always be able to look back at this time in your life and say: ‘You know, I was alive during that presidency. I remember how crazy it was,’?” she said. Then she segued into her signature move: a 25-minute soliloquy on the convoluted schemes swirling around the Trump-Ukraine incident, burrowing into a dense network of connections among Paul Manafort, Senator Mitch McConnell, Rudy Giuliani, the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, the Ukrainian natural-gas billionaire Dmitry V. Firtash and the former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. By the time she cut to her first commercial break, she had zoomed out so far that Trump’s July 25 phone call with the president of Ukraine appeared to be just one little pushpin on a map of vast global corruption.
</snip>
...a day in the life of a hero.
53 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
I just thank God every day, that we have her to keep us sane.
Every night, sometime after her show has aired, the hubby and I fire up the DVR, and very often have a glass of wine in our hands when we do it. These days it's even champagne!
She's truly a national treasure.
They are both so damn good, sometimes it's really hard for me to decide which one I like better.
and it was EXCELLENT. DU'ers ROCK!!
