MSNBC’s Maddow Rips Trump Nominees to Shreds in Brutal Commentary on ‘Classless and Tacky Transition’

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow tore President-elect Donald Trump and his nominees to shreds in an absolutely brutal commentary on the “classless and tacky” transition so far.

The confirmation process for Trump Cabinet nominees kicked off this week with the Senate Armed Services Committee’s hearing for Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth Tuesday. Despite some initial resistance, most, if not all, of Trump’s nominees appear poised to be confirmed.

On Monday night’s edition of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, with just days to go before Trump’s inauguration, Maddow took viewers through a series of reminders of what the transition has been like, and who Trump’s nominees are — “just randomly picked off the TV”:

I just want to — I’m going to speak a little bit bluntly this evening, and I hope you will understand where this is coming from. But I think it is worth being blunt about the fact that it would be hard to run a presidential transition that could be worse than the last one.

The last presidential transition was the worst one in American history by a long mile. The last one included the outgoing president inciting his followers to riot and storm the Capitol to try to keep him in power. That’s a bad transition, right?

I mean, the last inauguration had to have thousands of National Guard troops on hand to protect the proceedings from the threat of more violence from his followers. At the last presidential transition, the outgoing president didn’t even show up for his successor’s swearing-in. That’s a bad transition. The last transition Donald Trump was part of was the worst presidential transition in the history of the country.

And given how disastrously he performed in that last transition, I mean, you have to just assume that this one inherently will be better. It has to be, right? But I think it is worth being blunt about the fact that it might be close, because this too is a terrible, terrible presidential transition.

And I think it ought to be more central to the way that we are talking about what’s going on in politics and in our country and in government at this moment, because this is the transition where the president-elect, right, throughout the presidential transition period has continued to sell his junk, right, his self-branded watches and sneakers and Bibles.

He put out a new Inauguration Day edition of his special branded Bible. He’s still selling boots. Now he’s selling Trump boots, and his new crypto whatever it is, and his commemorative coins, and his commemorative guitars. He’s selling this stuff while he is the president-elect.

Nothing like that has ever happened before. Nothing that classless and tacky has ever happened to the U.S. presidency before. This is the transition where he said at a press conference that it might have been Hezbollah that did the January 6 attack. Really, Hezbollah did it?

He also said at that same press conference that he’s going to pardon the people who did the January 6 attack. Well, I’m sure Hezbollah will be delighted. This is the transition where he made unprovoked threats to seize territory from three other nations, three other nations with whom we are allied. And that is, of course, inexplicable to those countries. It’s inexplicable to most Americans.

But it’s also, equally, very exciting to the dictators of Russia and China, who actually have been either seizing territory from other countries or planning to. And now, whether or not Trump actually follows through on these weird threats, those two dictators will have Trump’s words during the transition to throw back at the United States of America, if the U.S. ever again bothers to object to big countries like theirs stomping on small countries and seizing their land, right?

Welcome back to the 19th century. Sorry, no, there’s no penicillin.

This is the presidential transition where the president-elect officially became a 34-times convicted felon 10 days before he was sworn in. This is the presidential transition when that same president-elect named a convicted felon, one of his relatives, to be ambassador to France.

This is the transition where he picked his son’s ex-girlfriend to be ambassador to Greece, and he insisted that his other son’s wife should be made a U.S. senator, until that effort embarrassingly collapsed. This is the transition where he picked his son-in-law’s college roommate to be the hostages envoy for the United States.

That same son-in-law then announced that he’d received another $1.5 billion from government-controlled funds in Qatar and Abu Dhabi, on top of the billions of dollars he already got from government-controlled funds in Saudi Arabia, because you know how Republicans are very sensitive to the ethics of any presidential son doing any kind of international business.

This is the transition where the president-elect appears to have just randomly picked people off the TV for almost every imaginable government job. He picked a syndicated daytime TV doctor to run Medicare, the one who says your horoscope is very important to understanding your health. Like, literally, what’s your sign, baby? That determines your health.

He picked FOX News contributors or FOX News hosts or their relatives for secretary of transportation, national security adviser, FDA commissioner, counterterrorism director, ambassador to Israel, surgeon general, ambassador to the Dominican Republic, border czar, Ukraine envoy and, did I mention, defense secretary.

All of those people, he just picked off the TV. He just picked them off of FOX News. He tried to pick someone for attorney general who was actively under investigation for statutory rape and prostitution. And that one had to collapse, because of course it did, but not before he and the vice president-elect went so far out on a limb for that guy that they made multiple Republican senators publicly promise to vote for that guy, despite the statutory rape and prostitution investigation and all the rest of it.

Those Republican senators, are they going to get their dignity or their political capital back? If so, is there like a window where they check in for that? This is a shambolic presidential transition. It is a ridiculously bad, poorly run presidential transition, which ought to be the subject of some discussion in our country.

It is not going well. And while the president-elect has already had to withdraw that disastrous attorney general nomination, and he had to withdraw his nomination for someone to run the DA as well — that one lasted like three days — and then they had to take back whatever that effort was to try to make his daughter-in-law a senator, again, whatever that effort was, while all of those falling rocks have already fallen onto the proverbial road here, now we’re one week out from the end of the transition.

We’re one week out from the inauguration. And, in this last week, we are about to enter into the part of this very poorly run transition where the confirmation hearings are going to start, and, specifically, where the confirmation hearings are apparently going to start falling apart.

Watch above via MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show.