This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 13 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
It would be hard to run a presidential transition that could be worse than the last one. That transition included the outgoing president, Donald Trump, encouraging his followers to march on the Capitol to try to keep him in power.
This is the presidential transition when the president-elect officially became a 34-times convicted felon 10 days before he was sworn in.
The last inauguration had to have thousands of National Guard troops on hand to protect the proceedings from the threat of more violence from Trump’s followers. The outgoing president also didn’t even bother to show up for his successor’s swearing-in.
To be blunt, the last transition was the worst presidential transition in the history of the country — by a mile. Given how disastrously Trump performed during the last transition, you may have assumed this one would be better. But it looks like it’s going to be close.
During this transition, the president-elect has continued to sell his self-branded watches, sneakers and Bibles — including the new Inauguration Day edition. He’s also selling boots, commemorative coins and guitars.
Over the last few weeks, Trump has made unprovoked threats to seize territory from three countries — which is inexplicable to most Americans but very exciting to the dictators of both Russia and China, who have been seizing territory from other countries (or planning to), and now — whether or not Trump follows through on these weird threats — have Trump’s words to throw back at us.
This is the presidential transition when the president-elect officially became a 34-times convicted felon 10 days before he was sworn in, and then named another convicted felon, one of his relatives, to be ambassador to France. He also picked his son’s ex-girlfriend to be ambassador to Greece and reportedly lobbied for his other son’s wife to be made a U.S. senator … until that collapsed.
He picked his son-in-law’s friend to be his special envoy for hostage affairs. The same son-in-law then announced that his firm received another $1.5 billion from government-controlled funds in Qatar and Abu Dhabi, on top of the billions he already got from Saudi Arabia.
This is the transition when the president-elect appears to have just randomly picked people off the TV for almost every imaginable senior government job. He chose a syndicated daytime TV doctor to run Medicare. He’s picked Fox News contributors or hosts or their relatives for roles like 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 defense secretary.
This is a shambolic, ridiculously bad transition. It is not going well. And now, with less than one week until Trump’s inauguration, we’re entering the part of this very poorly run transition where the confirmation hearings start falling apart.