The irony was impossible to miss on Tuesday’s edition of CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow joined the eponymous host to declare on one hand that the worst predictions about President Donald Trump have come true, but also that he and Republicans seek to get rid of elections.
Colbert was actually the first to suggest Republicans want to eliminate elections, although his evidence was quite underwhelming:
So, one of the things that's interesting to me is that there's such gross and obvious incompetence and disregard for our institutions, touching third rails like Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, this is not the behavior of people -- because Republicans haven't stood up en masse resist what Donald Trump has done. A few people here or there. This is not the behavior of people who seem like they believe they have to answer to voters in 18 months. That worries me. Not that they are not worried, but that they don't think that they should be worried because maybe they don't have to worry about an election at all.
Republicans are not doing entitlement reform, but even if they were, disagreeing with Stephen Colbert on that subject would not mean that Republicans think there shouldn’t be elections.
Maddow, however, thought Colbert was on to something, “Yeah, and yes, that is the thing to worry about, and I mean, I feel like for as heartened as I am about the American people literally protesting every single day against what Trump and the Republicans are doing and so much more resistance than anyone told us to expect, I think it's also true that the people who warned us about how bad this was going to be, the people who were really hysterical, like, really, the doomsayers, they were all right about how bad this is, and what we are experiencing is not just somebody who's fighting against the Democratic Party, he's fighting against the democratic process.”
She continued:
He doesn't think there should be elections and they are consolidating power, they're disempowering Congress, ignoring Congress, defunding agencies or closing agencies. That's Congress's job, that's not the president's job. When they are defying court orders, that's them saying the courts don't have authority over the president, that's consolidating all the power in one man, that's authoritarianism, and that's what you do when you don’t ever want to have an election because you want to stay in power for life, and that is what they are trying.
Putting aside the fact that disempowering Congress has been progressives' thing for over a century and the administration acknowledges Congress is the one that needs to formally shutter the Department of Education, for all the talk both about and from Trump on 2028 and the 22nd Amendment, Trump recently dismissed the idea of running again in 2028. In his Meet the Press interview and said that “ideally” he would hand things off to another Republican. That doesn’t sound like a man trying to get rid of elections or someone who has proved his most hysterical critics right.
Here is a transcript for the May 6-taped show:
CBS The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
5/7/2025
12:17 AM ET
STEPHEN COLBERT: So, one of the things that's interesting to me is that there's such gross and obvious incompetence and disregard for our institutions, touching third rails like Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, this is not the behavior of people -- because Republicans haven't stood up en masse resist what Donald Trump has done. A few people here or there. This is not the behavior of people who seem like they believe they have to answer to voters in 18 months.
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah.
COLBERT: That worries me.
MADDOW: Yeah.
COLBERT: Not that they are not worried, but that they don't think that they should be worried because maybe they don't have to worry about an election at all.
MADDOW: Yeah, and yes, that is the thing to worry, about and I mean, I feel like for as heartened as I am about the American people literally protesting every single day against what Trump and the Republicans are doing and so much more resistance than anyone told us to expect, I think it's also true that the people who warned us about how bad this was going to be, the people who were really hysterical, like, really, the doomsayers, they were all right about how bad this is, and what we are experiencing is not just somebody who's fighting against the Democratic Party, he's fighting against the democratic process.
He doesn't think there should be elections and they are consolidating power, they're disempowering Congress, ignoring Congress, defunding agencies or closing agencies. That's Congress's job, that's not the president's job. When they are defying court orders, that's them saying the courts don't have authority over the president, that's consolidating all the power in one man, that's authoritarianism, and that's what you do when you don’t ever want to have an election because you want to stay in power for life, and that is what they are trying.
All the worst predictions about what he’d be like are true, but the best hopes for how much the American people would stand up against it have not even matched a fraction of how much people are standing and how much people are saying no. There's never, in the history of this country, been an American president who's been this unpopular at 100 days in. The American public understand, no, are just saying no. No, no, no.
