'They spelled it out in crayon!' MSNBC's Rachel Maddow stunned as NYT blows up Trump plan
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow took to her show’s opening monologue on Friday to vent her frustrations with President Donald Trump’s claimed ignorance over reports that tech billionaire Elon Musk was to receive a Pentagon briefing on top-secret U.S.-China war plans.
The scuttled briefing was revealed by The New York Times Thursday night, which the primetime host pointed out was explained “in even more simple terms than you might expect from a regular newspaper on a regular story.”
“They spelled it out basically in crayon!” Maddow told viewers, seemingly exasperated by the latest development in the two-month-old administration. “They made it so painfully simple what was wrong with this plan, that maybe the White House even couldn't fail to understand it.”
She went on to read an excerpt from the Times’ “shocking report,” before adding: “And here's where they switch to crayon: ‘if a foreign country was to learn how the U.S. planned to fight a war against them, that country could reinforce its defenses and address its weaknesses, making U.S. war plans far less likely to succeed against that foreign adversary.’”
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Sure enough, Maddow said, the president took notice of the planned briefing for his top campaign donor and head of the Department of Government Efficiency – “he didn’t know about it, he just heard about it in the New York Times,” Maddow proclaimed.
The primetime MSNBC host continued to blast both Trump and Musk, who she called “arguably more thoroughly and uncritically in bed with the Chinese government than any other businessperson who calls him or herself an American.”
The ordeal left Maddow with a closing message: “If you have a war plan with a foreign country, don't show that plan to the foreign country just in case you ever have to go to war with them,” she said sarcastically. “Because it will mean your war plan won't work. Get it? Do you guys get it? Do you want me to say it more slowly? I mean, the Times might as well have put it in all caps on a single page with a picture menu, right?”
She also used the opportunity to laud the journalists who broke the exclusive story that she credited with stopping Musk’s planned briefing.
“When journalists find out something is happening in the government and that thing is plainly indefensible, sometimes that makes the government stop trying to do that thing,” she concluded Friday. “That’s why it's a good thing to have journalism.”