Rachel Maddow sees Americans’ active resistance as key to overcoming Donald Trump’s strongman game

Rachel Maddow doesn’t sugarcoat fascism. As President Donald Trump’s second term barrels forward — defined by secret deportations, domestic military zones, and sweeping data seizures — Maddow is documenting resistance, not just unraveling.

“The character of the opposition to Trump is the most important story in the country,” Maddow told The Advocate in a lengthy interview. That opposition, she argues, lives in the pulpit sermons of faith leaders like Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, in the silence surrounding gay asylum-seekers like Andry Hernández Romero, and in the stories we choose to tell and repeat.

For the first 100 days of Trump’s return to power, Maddow resumed her nightly MSNBC slot at 9 Eastern, anchoring The Rachel Maddow Show five nights a week. After April 30, she returned to her regular Monday prime-time broadcasts. In those 100 days, she conducted high-profile interviews with Maryland U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen live from El Salvador, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly — each confronting the Trump administration’s policies on foreign relations, democratic norms, and due process. However, she spent much of her nightly hour focusing on highlighting both large and small protests in American communities.

Why the protests matter

Maddow told The Advocate that the protests happening across the country are the most important story of the Trump era so far. “The opposition to him is the most important thing,” she said. “Because I think that what Trump is trying to do is really obvious. He really is trying to essentially overthrow the U.S. government and the U.S. Constitution and institute a strongman, authoritarian form of government where all power is personalized, and the courts and the Congress don’t matter, and he just rules effectively as dictator.”

She said the real question isn’t what Trump intends but whether he will succeed. And the answer, she argued, lies in the “streets and in the courts and in the Congress and in the states and everywhere else people are taking action of various kinds to stop him.”

Maddow criticized mainstream coverage that focuses narrowly on the effectiveness of individual legal or legislative tactics. “More than any one individual tactic,” she said, “it is the combination of all of these tactics all at once” that determines whether democracy holds. The protests, she emphasized, “are an instrumentally really important part of what’s going to happen.”

She cited the breadth and persistence of protests in all 50 states during Trump’s first months back in office — even in deeply conservative districts. “Even Republican members of Congress in reliably Republican districts and states are getting pressure from their own constituents about things that Trump is doing that are indefensible,” she said.

Beyond strategic value, Maddow thinks the protests are revealing. “Not just instrumentally, just diagnostically, those protests show you where the heart of the American people is.” She added, “There’s never been anybody who’s failed this badly with the American people broadly speaking in his first hundred days in office. But you can also look at a street corner in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and tell that same thing.”

Maddow’s resistance isn’t about outrage. She sees her work as being about memory. “I want this story that you’ve just learned from me to become your own,” she said. Whether on her show, in her books, or across her award-winning podcast empire, Maddow’s goal is to make the truth sticky.

This ethos was shaped by her time in ACT UP and deepened through academic work on HIV and incarceration.

“When I was doing AIDS activism well before I was ever in media, my sort of area of focus or specialty was HIV in prisons,” she said. “And in order to try to be the best advocate that I could, in order to try to tell the best stories, which is a lot of what advocacy is, in order to do that, I ended up really immersing myself in the history of prison reform, pre-AIDS, pre-HIV, going back to, you know, the Quakers, going back all the way to the 18th century.”

That led to her Ph.D.

“My doctoral dissertation was on the kind of pre-history of the AIDS activist movement in the radical politics of California in the 1970s and ’80s, leading up to the outbreak of what we would come to know as AIDS.”

That’s why, she said, she always has to start at the beginning of an issue, and that’s how she approaches explaining things to her audience.

“That’s the specific way in which my brain is broken.”

Her storytelling doesn’t just describe injustice—it builds cognitive armor against it.

One early sign of that resistance? Bishop Budde’s sermon at the National Prayer Service one day after Trump took office and issued executive orders attacking immigrants, transgender and nonbinary people. “It captured the attention of everybody in the country,” Maddow said. Budde used her moment to call directly on Trump to show mercy to LGBTQ+ people and immigrant families. On her second appearance, Budde sat in front of stacks of letters from strangers — Americans who had been moved by her courage. “That was my first sign that the opposition to Trump is already there and really motivated.”

But perhaps no story has left a deeper mark than Andry Hernández Romero’s. The 31-year-old gay Venezuelan asylum-seeker was secretly deported to El Salvador’s CECOT mega torture prison without a hearing under Trump’s reinterpretation of the Alien Enemies Act. Maddow broke the news when Romero’s lawyer revealed his name and shared the story of the makeup artist.

Maddow said this kind of extremism fails when people can see the human cost. “All over the country,” she said, “in instances where the person who’s being abused or oppressed or treated unjustly or treated illegally by the administration is a knowable person — an identifiable person for whom we have a name, and in some cases a photo and biographical information — you are seeing the American people, to a greater or lesser extent, stand up and say, I don’t want you treating that person that way.”

She emphasized that due process is more than a legal formality. “It’s the iron substructure of the rule of law,” Maddow said. “It’s the basis for every legal thing, every governed thing, every bit of fairness in the world.” The tactic of denying due process to people the administration labels as undeserving — “bad people,” as she put it — is “as old as dirt,” and yet, she said, “people are seeing through it.”

“The place where it most acutely defies what the administration is trying to do are places like with Andry and with others where we know who they are,” she said. “That’s the lesson of all activism that I’ve ever been part of and that I have ever studied, which is that people respond to other human beings. People who would oppress us try to make sure that we never see the people being oppressed as human beings.”

Another tactic she’s tracking is surveillance. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE — unfettered access to millions of Americans’ Social Security data, reversing lower court rulings that warned against the breach. “We don’t know what the plan is for the data theft that they have pulled off,” Maddow said the day before the ruling. “It is terrifying.”

Although her interview with The Advocate took place hours before Trump and Musk had an epic falling-out online, Maddow had been following the deterioration of Musk’s alliance with Trump, noting how quickly praise had curdled into vitriol. Still, the policies Musk helped initiate remain in motion. The Supreme Court’s unsigned ruling allows DOGE to collect and use data from millions of Americans — retirees, veterans, disabled people — with virtually no oversight. For queer Americans relying on disability or retirement benefits, the prospect of politically motivated data mining is chilling. A second ruling blocked watchdog group CREW from accessing DOGE’s internal records.

She also warned about the normalization of military force on U.S. soil. “Everything done to immigrants is something they want to do to citizens,” she said. “That’s worth watching.”

For Maddow, Social Security represents a pressure point. “Messing with Social Security is messing with millions of people’s lives,” she said. She encouraged community vigilance: “Now is the time to make connections with those folks. Be the person they can call if something goes wrong.”

Maddow remains a cultural force. Despite only anchoring once a week, her reach continues to grow. Her latest book, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, debuted at number. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list. The paperback edition, released in May, is fueling a second national conversation about 20th-century American fascism — and its echoes today.

She’s producing a play, a scripted series, a documentary, a docuseries, two feature films, and another book. Her MSNBC Films documentaryFrom Russia With Lev, which aired in September, drew 2.2 million viewers and became MSNBC’s most-watched documentary in four years. It is now Emmy-nominated.

Maddow has also become a podcast powerhouse. She’s the voice behind four hit podcasts: Bag Man, Ultra, Déjà News, and Ultra S2. Bag Man, about Spiro Agnew, is being adapted into a feature film by Ben Stiller. Ultra, which documents a failed fascist coup in the 1940s, is being developed into a movie by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, with a script by Tony Kushner.

She jokes that she’s a “media bottleneck” — a single person funneling dozens of ideas into reality.

What’s next? More stories, more investigations, more attention to detail. Maddow’s philosophy of resistance is not about breaking news cycles. It’s about long-term narrative change — arming people with facts and framing so they can fight back.