The MSNBC host says that Trump’s authoritarian message is timeless. “You can sell [it] to people who are in great need of relief,” she says. “But you can also sell it to billionaires.”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

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Rachel Maddow on the Fascist Threat in America, Then and Now

NOV 4, 202422 MIN
The New Yorker Radio Hour

Rachel Maddow on the Fascist Threat in America, Then and Now

NOV 4, 202422 MIN

Description

It made news when the retired general John Kelly, Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, said that the former President fit the definition of a fascist. The MSNBC host Rachel Maddow could hardly be blamed if she said, I told you so. Maddow’s podcast “Ultra” and her book “Prequel” detail the history of Nazi and far-right movements in America in the twentieth century—and the people who fought them. “When we talk about making America great again and we talk about the threat of an authoritarian takeover in the United States in the form of Trumpism, it is not something foreign,” Maddow explained to David Remnick last week at The New Yorker Festival. “It is something that’s coming from a fascist place that is a recurring, ebbing, and flowing tide that we’ve faced in multiple generations.”