MSNBC pundit Rachel Maddow joined Seth Meyers on his late night show during the last days of December when many Americans were busy celebrating the holidays. Maddow discussed the current plight of America known as “Donald Trump.” She expounded upon the dilemma of Trump’s conflict of interest given he will still directly/indirectly maintain his own financial interests with his chubby little fingers, and how that could ultimately affect Americans. We’ve heard a lot of this before, but Maddow digs deep and makes her case in layman’s terms.
Here is an excerpt from the show. Maddow starts off explaining why it’s so hard for us to grasp much of what is happening when it comes to this president-elect, because what we are seeing is so unprecedented.
We’ve never had a president in the modern era that did not show us his tax returns — never had a president that had active financial interests where could make decisions as president that would enrich himself. I think that we’re going to have to get used to the fact that Donald Trump fans like that he’s a business man, and like that he’s made himself very rich, and maybe they’re expecting that he’s going to make decision that are going to enrich himself better.
In making her point, the subject of Trump’s ridiculous obsession with windmill comes up, and Maddow explains why it’s more than just a silly phobia.
He’s very afraid of windmills. They terrify him. There are windmills that are going to be near his golf course in Scotland. So, he doesn’t like the windmills, he can’t stop talking about the windmills. He’s fixated on them. While talking to British politicians after he won the presidency, he brought up the windmills to them. It was like, ‘Thank you for the congratulations. You know, we really shouldn’t have those windmills by my golf course.’
That’s hilarious if you think about it as just his phobia. But now that he’s going to be president, this seems weird, but Scotland could come to him, the UK could come to him and say, ‘Listen Donald, we don’t really care about the windmills, and you think that’s a very bad thing for your business (so) we’ll get rid of the windmills if you’ll do this thing for our country, which the United States does not want to do - it’s not good for the country, but we want that from you as president and we’ll give you this private benefit instead.’
That kind of transitional stuff is already a problem. The guy/company who’s building his Trump Towers in Turkey — the president of Turkey just arrested an executive of that company. That’s a very important business project for Donald Trump. Turkey can now come and say, ‘You want [us] to let that executive out of prison? Do a little something for us, in terms of U.S. policy.’
So, it puts him in a position of choosing himself over the interest of the United States of America. And whether or not you care if he’s going rich off all of our backs, the fact that he’s going to be in a position where he can leverage the country against his own interest is not good.
Struggling for a positive take, Maddow adds that much of what we know may change because of Trump and create negative challenges to many Americans—which might be the very thing we need to unify us.