MSNBC’s ReidOut host Joy Reid was in rare form on Tuesday following a day off as, after she argued Fox News hosts want their “fans” to “die,” she spent two segments decrying Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) as “Maserati Joe” for “showing open contempt for” his constituents based on the fact that he “killed” the Build Back Better agenda, “the most transformative legislation of the 21st century.”
Reid twice teased Manchin as her pick for The Absolute Worst, saying he was the epitome of “bad faith” causing “bad outcomes for the people you’re supported to represent.” In other words, Manchin is a betrayal to his fellow West Virginians in the way racial minorities betray their skin color if they vote Republican.
She started the first of two screeds by touting a video lampooning Manchin’s life and wealth as an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and dubbing him “Maserati Manchin,” who’s also “a multimillionaire coal baron” and “would fit right in” with the real show.
“He’s been on the side of special interests the entire time, and made it clear yesterday that he was always negotiating in bad faith and never planned to vote for Build Back Better,” she added.
After hearing soundbites from a local radio interview Manchin did on Monday, Reid said he went “full J.D. Vance, showing open contempt for the people he’s supposedly doing such a bang-up job representing” and that he dared to suggest the child tax credit could be abused.
Reid used that possibility to scoff at Manchin as having behaved like the late Ronald Reagan purposefully starving poor people and showing zero desire to improve the Mountaineer State’s bottom-tier ranking in areas like education and health care (click “expand”):
Well, geez, Mr. Manchin in the yacht, just go ahead and call your constituents welfare queens, a la Ronald Reagan, and get on with it. There’s actually data, by the way, that shows that nine in 10 Americans use their child tax credit on necessities, like food and shelter and education. On top of all that, Manchin has raised the concern that people would abuse paid leave time and use it to go hunting. This is somebody who has claimed that D.C. doesn’t understand West Virginians, but here he is reducing them to a stereotype. But what’s really sad is how much Build Back Better would have helped West Virginia, a state that, despite Manchin’s leadership and all that power, is not exactly in the best shape. West Virginia ranks 50th, 50th in infrastructure, 48th in economy, 47th in health care, and 45th in education. As of 2019, West Virginia had the highest rate of drug overdose deaths in the entire country.
And, according to the Associated Press, one in five children in West Virginia live in poverty, and 93 percent of children qualify for the child tax credit payments. The White House also points out that the bill would have provided access to child care for 94,000 children, expand rental assistance for 83,000 renters in that state who are rent-burdened, and expand health insurance to more than 30,000 people in West Virginia, not to mention the climate change provisions that would create jobs. But the coal lobbyists didn’t want that.
Teasing segment two about “how Maserati Manchin misrepresents his state,” Reid bestowed him with her Absolute Worst due to “his bad faith, fake negotiating and obstruction of a bill that would truly help his constituents.”
Continuing to do the White House’s bidding to bully Manchin that could result in him switching parties, Reid ruled the senator doesn’t want kids to be “lift[ed]...out of poverty,” “polluted communities” to be “clean[ed] up,” or assist parents in “tak[ing] care of their kids.”
Speaking to panelist Molly Jong-Fast, Reid suggested Manchin doesn’t know what’s best for West Virginians (and arguably vice versa since they elect him), lamenting he’s “a coal baron, whose family’s in the coal biz, whose daughter was in the expensive EpiPen biz, who’s rich and has a yacht and a Maserati, basically saying, the poors are lazy.”
She also took the chance to re-up the Reagan analogy, claiming he doesn’t believe poor West Virginians should have “help” or “money” even if it’s for a fund dedicated to those suffering from black lung since more government assistance would “make them lazier.”
Further flashing her amateur mind-reading abilities, Reid said Manchin “bad faith lied” to the White House that “he was negotiating” and argued that the senior Senator iss the person responsible for improving the state’s well-being (click “expand”):
REID: Molly, this is the challenge I have. I’m going to put the stats back up. Infrastructure, the state ranks last, economy 48th, health care 47th, education 45th. You know whose job it is to turn that stuff around and to explain to people, here’s how I’m going to do it, how I’m going to make your life better? Well, that would be Joe Manchin, Joe Manchin, who claimed, oh, I’m for this. He came out and said, I will put my name on this. Oh, I just want it to be $1.6 trillion, instead of 1.7, and essentially bad faith lied, even making the White House think he was negotiating. He wasn’t. It’s his job with his power to turn these statistics around. And he seems damn determined not to do that. Your thoughts?
JONG-FAST: Yeah, I don’t think he cares too much about the people of West Virginia.
REID: Clearly.
JONG-FAST: But I also don’t — right? And I don’t think — and, again, the coal stuff, the portfolio, he makes money on, I mean, who even — I don’t think that senators and congresspeople should own stocks, period. Like, they’re making the law. They shouldn’t also be able to profit off it. It’s insane. But I also think he hasn’t been — we — Democrats have not been good enough at messaging to people, what’s in this bill can change your life.
Having said Manchin doesn’t care about his voters, Jong-Fast added that he’s “taking away things from his people that they desperately need,” which is “so upsetting to me, as a person just to see all this poverty and the thing is that government can help these people.”
Closing out the show, Reid ruled the Mountaineer State to be “an oligarchy” since “[i]t’s a state with one billionaire” in Governor Jim Justice (R), Manchin, and “everybody else is either poor or...struggling.”
Though it’s unclear whether she knew Manchin had already been the state’s governor, Reid predicted its next officeholder would be Manchin on his way to become the state’s other billionaire.
Reid’s venom against Manchin was made possible thanks to the endorsement of advertisers such as AT&T, Gold Bond, Liberty Mutual, and Lincoln. Follow the links to see their contact information at the MRC’s Conservatives Fight Back page.
To see the relevant MSNBC transcript from December 21, click here.
