'Rachel Maddow Show' back daily to tackle Trump round 2

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Gary LevinUSA TODAY

MSNBC fans are about to get a bigger dose of its marquee host: For the first 100 days of Trump's second presidency, "The Rachel Maddow Show," will revert to its former five-night-a-week schedule.

In an exclusive interview with USA TODAY, Maddow discusses her expanded schedule and her plan to cover his second term: "We're already seeing the freneticism of the Trump news cycle taking over, even during the transition," she says. And she's learned from the first term to be "ready to adapt" and focus not on his words but his actions, or what the "chaos is concealing."

Maddow's show has aired only on Mondays (9 EST/PST) since April 2022, and "Alex Wagner Tonight" has filled the time slot on other weeknights since August of that year. Wagner will now travel the country to report "Trumpland: The First 100 Days" segments, to air across the network's schedule until May 1, when the current lineup is scheduled to resume.

The request came from MSNBC chief Rashida Jones, Maddow says, adding Wagner "has been itching to get out there in the country and to cover what's coming and the impact of what Trump is going to do in the second term on the ground, from a front-line perspective." But MSNBC's prime-time ratings are also down 58% since the election, a sharper drop than typical post-election ratings dips, and Maddow's Monday audience (2.3 million viewers in 2024) is significantly larger than Wagner's (1.3 million).

Maddow, who has launched four podcasts, released another book and a documentary since moving to a weekly schedule, also spoke about the "very intense news cycle" she's expecting from the start of a second Trump presidency and how Trump's "shambolic" transition back to power makes news avoidance unwise.

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(This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity).

Question: What's it going to be like covering Trump in 2025 vs. 2017? Have you learned any lessons from his first administration?

Answer: In the first Trump term, one of the things that we learned was this idea of watching what they do, not what they say. Trump is a real master of shifting the news cycle toward himself and away from himself as best suits his purposes, simply by saying really transgressive and shocking things all the time. And that's almost impossible not to cover.

And you do have to cover it to a certain extent, particularly when the person saying these things is the president of the United States. But you can't ever lose sight of what that chaos is concealing, that the actions of the president, the actions of the administration are often much more consequential than whatever crazy thing he's recently said that's driven everybody in the news cycle to go write a million similar stories about it. So that watch what they do, not what they say, thing, I'm really trying to operationalize that. It's one thing to threaten Canada at a news conference; it's another thing to have millions of people in this country taking action to try to protect people in their mixed-status families from being rounded up and put in camps, which he is promising to do and to deport millions of people. So not all the news is going to happen at a podium.

The other thing that we've learned is to be ready to adapt. Things are going to change. We're already seeing the freneticism of the Trump news cycle taking over, even during the transition. We're seeing the unpredictable cadence of the way news breaks as opposed to a more competent rational administration. So we'll see; we're trying to be ready for anything, and that's part of why we're making this change for the first 100 days.

Post-election ratings always go down for cable news, but anecdotally there seems to be an exhaustion factor about Trump news. Do you agree, and if so, is it understandable, unhealthy, or both?

This is something, as you say, that we see after every election. Whichever side wins or loses, you see people just want to opt out and have other parts of their life take up the space that absorbing the news and politics was previously taking up. It's definitely understandable. To the extent that it is not just about the normal cycles of exhaustion and renewal of attention, we are entering a time when a lot of people are going to reengage. Everybody sort of implicitly knows that pretending something isn't happening does not ensure that the thing doesn't actually happen; there's a sort of head-in-the-sand wish casting that's happening with a lot of people checking out of the news, thinking "If I don't hear about it, if I don't look at it, then maybe it's not happening." But people know that's not actually the way to stop it from happening. If this shambolic transition is anything to go on, the second Trump term is going to affect a lot of Americans, and they're going to want to pay attention.

How is the media's role in fact-checking disinformation affected by recent decisions by Facebook and Instagram to remove those guardrails?

There are social media platforms that are now saying they're no longer going to do any sort of moderation to try to prevent the deliberate dissemination of dangerous disinformation. At the journalistic level, you are seeing once again news organizations that are committed to the truth having to make really hard, really specific in-the-moment decisions about how much to correct and point out the falsity of statements by people who should be speaking from an authoritative position; people like the president, other elected officials and nominees. Our job is to do journalistically sound work that is based in the truth and to make that fact-based journalism and commentary true, to make it accountable, to correct mistakes when we make them and to be transparent about our sourcing so that you know why it is that you can trust us, and to make sure that people can find that information in as many places as possible.

Trump has long attacked the press as the enemy, and at the same time, the media has faced unprecedented business pressures from the decline of linear television. News anchors are being let go, and your own network is being spun off from NBC into a new company later this year. How do you deal with that?

I'm (more) concerned about the future of journalism, broadly. But as long as I have been in the cable news world, I've been told "this is the last year." And eventually, I'm sure it will be over. But as long as we're still here, our job is pretty clear: Follow the facts, don't be intimidated, tell true stories, help people understand the world. And I'm going to keep doing that, and I know MSNBC is committed to that as a company, and none of that changes. The business pressures are certainly there, and the political pressures are there and are very threatening and very anti-democratic, in a small "d" kind of way. But Americans broadly know that we need a free press. We don't need just state TV; we don't need to have the government control the media, as happens in authoritarian countries. You want a free and independent and even oppositional press if you want a healthy country, and I think the country recognizes that. All of us in the business recognize that. And part of the way we're going to fight for that is by trying to be as successful as we can and try to serve the needs of our audience as best as we can. That's part of why this 100-days plan is smart. And I'm really energized and really excited about it.

Could your schedule switch be longer than 100 days, or is that just a hard stop?

That is a hard stop. When Rashida asked me to do this, that was the discussion. That's what Alex wants, too. The thing about the 9 p.m. chair is that it's really a full-time job and with what Alex is planning on doing ‒ field reporting across the country and I think potentially overseas ‒ and doing that while I'm holding the seat for her for 100 days, that's a good horizon for us, but on April 30 we will go back to our existing schedule.

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