On Monday, Rachel Maddow had a bleak assessment about America’s future should Donald Trump be elected president again. America, she said, is “in a radically fragile place when it comes to what exactly is for sale in our country and from our government.”
What inspired Maddow’s commentary is the recent, very curious change of heart Donald Trump had about Bud Light and TikTok, which she demonstrated, at least in the case of the beer company, appears to be the direct result of what amounts to bribery.
For those who forgot, in 2023, Bud Light briefly partnered with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney for an extremely anodyne Instagram promotion. Conservative activists immediately stoked a transphobic freak out about it, and Mulvaney was subjected to intense and vicious harassment on social media.
Mulvaney later said the company basically cut her loose and let her endure the death threats and similar without any support. Meanwhile right wingers turned the beer, a staple of events and pastimes generally coded as “conservative,” into a culture war target, and eventually the executive who approved the partnership with Mulvaney was forced out.
“Under the course of just over a year, Bud Light was transformed from a normal American thing you don’t think much about into something very, very bad, something they would shoot on sight,” Maddow explained, noting that Trump himself was a huge promoter of this particular campaign.
But then, Maddow noted, “Donald Trump did a total 180. Out of the blue, he decided unilaterally to call off the right wing jeremiad against Bud Light. He told all his followers to start drinking bud lying again. Quote, ‘Anheuser-Busch is a great American brand that deserves a second chance.’”
Then Maddow identified what almost certainly caused this massive change of mind, starting on Feb. 6, the day Trump announced it.
“At 9:47 a.m., the lobbyist for Anheuser-Busch announces a $10,000 a plate fundraiser for Trump, 9:47 a.m. That same day at 3:30 p.m., Trump announces that he has changed his mind on Bud Light and conservatives should all drink Bud Light again,” Maddow said.
“All Anheuser-Busch had to do was announce they were going to do the fundraiser to get Trump to do what they wanted, to get Trump to call off what had been a years-long conservative culture war top line issue,” Maddow said. “That’s apparently what it took to end the great right-wing Bud Light freakout of 2023 and 2024. One fundraiser.”
Maddow then looked at Trump’s equally strange change of heart on TikTok. For those in need of a quick catch up, Trump tried to ban TikTok when he was president. Now, there is a bipartisan bill in the works with massive congressional support — and Biden has already said he’ll sign — that if passed would effectively ban TikTok in America unless it is sold to a company without ties to Beijing.
Trump however now opponses this bill and has said positive things about TikTok. Maddow tied this to a recent meeting between Trump and Jeff Yass, an American billionaire with a 13% stake in TikTok’s parent company Bytedance.
“So follow the bouncing coin, if you will. Step one, take very aggressive, very public position against foreign a company,” Maddow said. “Step two, notice nearby man who has $33 billion 15 percent stake in that company. Step three, need money desperately. Step four, announce new stance very much in favor of the same foreign company you used to oppose while blinking one’s eyelashes at the man you just noticed.”
“Step five — cha-ching, cash in,” Maddow quipped.
Maddow tied all this to Trump’s clear financial problems, as exemplified by the fact he had to get a bond from an unnamed lender in order to cover the $91 million required to appeal the judgment in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case. and that’s on top of the more than $400 million Trump has been fined after being found guilty of business fraud.
So he desperately needs money, I mean, right now,” Maddow said. “And he needs that money so urgently, right now, while he is openly changing his publicly held, long held supposedly heartfelt policy position — positions in ways that appear to be just straight-up responsiveness to financial incentives.”
“No matter how you think of Trump, no matter whether you support him or not, no matter whether you care about politics or not, it puts us, the American people, in a radically fragile place when it comes to what exactly is for sale in our country and from our government,” Maddow said as the concluded the commentary.
“I mean, Bud Light and TikTok seem to have figured out very early on where exactly you insert the coins to receive your prize. But if anything is for sale, right, if everything is for sale, what makes you think it’s going to stop with thin beer and Chinese social media apps? Everything must go. Everything’s for sale. Anybody who can pay can get what they want. And you wonder why guys like this always want to undermine the rule of law.”
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