MSNBC host Rachel Maddow announced Monday she is returning to her five-day-a-week nightly program for President-elect Donald Trump’s first 100 days in the White House.
Maddow, who currently hosts “The Rachel Maddow Show” on Monday nights, will be reverting to a full week of primetime programming for the beginning of Trump’s second presidency, she told USA Today in a Monday interview. She said the media is already witnessing the “freneticism of the Trump news cycle” emerging during the transition period and needs to be “ready to adapt.”
“We’re already seeing the freneticism of the Trump news cycle taking over, even during the transition … so, we’re trying to be ready for anything, and that’s part of why we’re making this change for the first 100 days,” Maddow said.
MSNBC’s ratings plummeted by 53% immediately following Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, according to The New York Times. The network’s primetime ratings are currently down 58% since the election, a sharper decline than most post-election ratings nosedives.
The longtime host noted that Trump’s upcoming presidency in recent days will make people want to “re-engage” with the news and the political realm after taking a break following the election.
“This is something, as you say, that we see after every election,” Maddow told USA Today. “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 re-engage.”
Maddow’s program raked in an average of 2.3 million viewers in 2024, though she lost 43% of her total audience between Jan. 1, 2024, and the election. By December, her show only averaged 1.4 million viewers.
Maddow said MSNBC chief Rashida Jones asked her to expand her coverage in the early days of Trump’s term, adding that host Alex Wagner to travel the country and “cover what’s coming” in the upcoming administration from a “front-line perspective,” according to USA Today. Wagner covers the 9 p.m. time slot Tuesdays through Fridays, though her show’s ratings lag behind Maddow’s with an average viewership of 1.3 million.
Trump’s first week-and-a-half in office during his first term allowed MSNBC and CNN to witness 7% and 5% jumps in comparison to their average the year before, The New York Times reported in January 2017. During the early days of the president-elect’s first term, both networks constantly revolved their Trump coverage around the now-debunked reports that the then-president colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential election cycle.
Maddow immediately began pushing the debunked Russia claims during MSNBC’s 2024 election night coverage, claiming that the U.S.’ “traditional allies” likely would stop sharing intelligence with the country due to Trump’s victory.
“Intelligence sharing between America and our traditional allies is likely going to end. The whole five eyes thing is likely going to end,” Maddow claimed. “If you’ve got America switching sides in the Ukraine-Russia war to instead support Russia or to become neutral, which means in this case would be to support Russia … If you’ve got ongoing secret communications even out of government between the Republican nominee and the person who funded his campaign and led his ground game, right?”
“Both of whom are communicating with the Russian government without reporting that information to the U.S. government, and on top of that, you’ve got reporting from the New York Times that they’re considering once there is a second Trump administration, if it happens, to stop performing background checks before giving people security clearance, meaning giving classified information to anyone,” Maddow continued.
The network’s ratings suffered after Trump left office in January 2021, with CNN’s primetime audience dropping 45% and MSNBC’s dipping to 26%, The Washington Post reported.
Featured Image Credit: Terry Ballard from Merrick, New York, USA
